Forgotten Lower East Side Walking Tour
May 31 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Lower East Side History Project
The “Forgotten Lower East Side” walking tour goes off the beaten path, exploring districts and aspects of our neighborhood most excursions overlook. Sure, we’ll discuss the tenements and immigrant experience in detail, but we’ll go beyond the familiar narrative and cover a thousand years of important history; from Native Americans to modern-day gentrification.
Utilizing generations of insight, rare maps, photos, documents, articles and oral histories not found elsewhere, LESHP digs deep into the neighborhood’s forgotten history.
Visited on tour:
- Sites of Native American villages and trails
- The notorious Five Points, former Irish and African enclave
- Former Italian immigrant/tenement district
- Chinatown
- Historic churches, theaters, restaurants, shops
- Popular landmarks and sites of interest
Discussed on tour:
- European colonization
- British occupation and the Revolutionary War
- Evolution of NYC from farmland to center of international trade & commerce
- Truth about the movie, “Gangs of New York”
- How the Lower East Side evolved into a renown tenement district
- Various ethnic populations and influences
- Tenement life
- Changes presently affecting the Lower East Side and New York City
- And much more!