We came here for the candy, but now we’re deep in gooey Lower East Side lore.

Like much of the neighborhood, this short block was once a bustling shopping district for clothes and is now more of a nightlife and trendspotting corridor. The sidewalk shed is gross, but the overall mix of undistinguished low-rise tenements, early 20th century holdouts, and a touch of modernity is nice.

The highlight here is Economy Candy, but there’s a lot here besides the sweet stuff.

I have to mention that the corner of Rivington and Ludlow is honored for the Beastie Boys, who used a photo of the storefront across the street as the cover of “Paul’s Boutique.” We’ll get to that block one day but I have to share this large scan of the record’s inset. (Our block is located between the Brother’s Fashions and Spitzer’s Corner Store.)

And Here’s a bonus photo looking west from the corner in 1929. (These photos were taken in January + March 2026.)

Streetview

Economy Candy | 1937

Do you like candy? Oh, you love candy? Then welcome to Economy Candy.

In a nutshell (they sell nuts, too), this little store has been described as a retro time capsule crowded with tourists and locals picking through the Japanese Kit Kats, candy cigarettes, bulk bins, and everything else.

This article tells you basically what you need to know about the colorful candytopia: it started out as a shoe and hat repair shop on the corner of Essex Street with a little outdoor candy pushcart, then leaned fully into sweets during the Great Depression. Candy is dandy when you only have a dime to spare.

At some point, the shop moved a few storefronts west to its current home. But it stayed in the family, passing from Morris “Moishe” Cohen ultimately down to his grandson Mitchell, who quit his finance job to run the sugar shop.

The store’s roots are tied up with hard economic times, and there’s still a relationship with the broader economy. In 2009, during the Great Recession, the New York Times found shoppers looking for an “affordable escape” among the bins of Tootsie Rolls and Bit-O-Honeys. And last year amid Trump’s doomsday tariffs, reporters tabulated the added costs trickling down to Pistachio Snickers bars from India and passion fruit mousse Snickers from Portugal. Even Snickers bars assembled in Texas depend on chocolate from Guyana, sugar from Brazil, and packaging from Canada.

There’s plenty more out there about Economy Candy, but I think you should at least click on this short video of the owners chatting on The View. I wasn’t expecting the video to start like that or the reveal 24 seconds in, and neither are you.

On your way out, remember to brush.

131 Essex Street | 1920

Here’s a little office building that early on seems to house many immigrant Jewish businesses. It was also the original home to Economy Candy, as this old photo shows. In 2023, the city even named the corner for the store’s founder.

In 1971, renowned street photographer Helen Levitt snapped these older fellas enjoying some watermelon here on the corner. Today, you’ll instead find a burger at Gotham Burger Social Club, where “the patty crunches, the cheese melts, the onions ooze, and the bun dissolves like a county fair cotton candy on a hot day,” according to Eater.

With all of the construction sheds everywhere, it’s silly to invest in a pull-up bar.

The Hotel on Rivington | 2005

If anything was going to signal the sundowning of the bohemian 90s and the gentrification of the 2000s, it was going to be this glassy, green luxe transplant standing 22 floors above the old tenements of the Lower East Side.

It was originally started as stucco apartments, the building’s architects, Grzywinski + Pons wrote¹. But when the plan changed instead to a hotel, they opened up the building with floor-to-ceiling windows and a “pixelated glass mosaic of varying opacities and zinc cladding.” The point was the “interactive nature of the building with the city”:

“For example, if a guest chooses to shower and simultaneously enjoy arguably the best views of Manhattan, he or she chooses to exhibit his or herself to the city. Of course, the more modest can enjoy a private bathing experience by simply pulling a curtain.”

When it opened in 2005, the hotel (THoR) arrived with many flourishes and amenities, not least was "Superintendent of Luminous Detail” Nemo Librizzi who programmed the music, curated the library, and selected the DVD collection (it was 2005). A New York Times profile from this era is a fun read, especially the hammock and hash exchange at the end.

The hotel has been a revolving door of lounges, clubs, and restaurants. In 2015, The Awl caught up with a pre-Fyre Festival Billy McFarland, who’d said he was paying “tens of thousands a month” to host his Magnises events here at the penthouse. Using what Fortune called an “Amex Black Card for the man-bun set” members could link their existing credit card with the exclusive card and get access to parties and things like that.

But some people do come here to sleep. One mattress enthusiast gave the bed a B+ and sprung for the Nightcap package of mushroom chocolates, non-alcoholic rosé, a candle, and a silk eye mask.

In 2007, two thieves were arrested after sneaking behind the reception desk, stealing keys to the safe, and leaving with $50,000. But the starkest crime that appeared here goes back to the Civil War Draft Riots—one of the darkest periods in New York City. The house that was standing here at the time was destroyed, according to this 1888 newspaper account:

A Mrs. Miller, of No. 107 Rivington street, had harbored a German girl for immoral purposes, as supposed, and the case against her had failed in the courts; the girl's father and his friends, concluding that the reign of law was suspended, organized a little mob of their own and destroyed the house.

Witnesses saw a man with boards in his hands, but he was acquitted when others failed to appear in court.

By 1926, the site became the 582-seat Ruby Theater, which you can see here.

Esther Apartments | 1891

The Society of Architectural Historians gave this brick bruiser at the corner of Ludlow the attention it deserves.

When this was built, it was a notable upgrade from some of the dimly lit tenements in the neighborhood, with flush toilets (at least one per floor), spacious parlors, and windows looking out to the street. The exterior took advantage of industrial advances for ornamental faces, Moorish arches, and elements of brick expressionism in the cornice, which is neat.

This was all the brilliance of the German-trained Peter Herter, whose apartments in New York emphasized energetic facades and ostentatious cornices that were sprouting in Berlin, Kyiv, and Lodz, according to Zachary Violette at Urban Omnibus.

A 1930 renovation dubbed it the Esther Apartments with stylized faux-Hebrew lettering on the Ludlow Street entrance, presumably to appeal to the heavily Jewish population here.

The corner bar is Pretty Ricky’s with a retro neon sign.

So just a reminder, if a building has both a neon sign and weird faces, that’s gonna be a yes from me, dawg.

113 Rivington Street / El Castillo de Jagua | 1900 or so

This little building is home to El Castillo de Jagua, a long-running Dominican restaurant with a greasy-spoon feel. In 2024, food critic Robert Sietsema gave a nod to the Mangu con todo here, a combination platter of eggs, fried salami, fried Dominican cheese, and a plantain mash.

I sprung for the $2 black coffee to go, which was good too.

A century ago, this was a restaurant called Green's. (The following details are from newspaper articles from that time, notably this from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.)

Around 4 a.m. in May 1925, a 35-year-old gambler and newsstand owner named Charles Rosenhaus walked up to Green’s to get something to eat.²

This wasn’t a calm moment on the Lower East Side. A simmering gang feud was starting to boil over with previous murders of figures like “Johnny Spanish” and “Kid Dropper.” Another gang leader had been killed three months earlier. So Rosenhaus was strapped with a .38 in his pocket.

But before Rosenhaus reached the door, a man stepped up and shot him in the abdomen at close range, just missing his holstered gun.

A crowd rushed out and pulled the victim into Green’s—with the lit cigarette still in his mouth—but he was already dead. When the police arrived to call for witnesses, the paper reported, they “found all of them adhering to the unwritten law of the East Side, ‘mind your own business,’ and little could be learned concerning the shooting.”

This was an escalation in what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the Rivington Street Newsdealers’ War, though it was probably more about gambling than moving newsprint.

His partner Albert Meyer—part owner of a cabaret, boxing manager, and stakeholder in a pool hall—likely witnessed Rosenhaus’s murder from across the street, and was himself shot dead less than three weeks later, while he ate lunch a few blocks away.

By July, police were trying to get ahead of any tit-for-tat violence by sweeping up three dozen people and charging them with a range of crimes. “I shall cooperate to the fullest with the police in their attempts to rid the city of suspicious characters," the local magistrate said, according to the New York Times. "The best way to deal with the criminal is to give him a speedy trial when he falls into the clutches of the law."

Two men were charged with the murder of Rosenhaus, but they were later released and it’s unclear if the case was ever solved.

This block is like three feet long and I’m hitting 2,000 words. And I’m just as tired of the candy puns as you are. There’s a cool old building at 132 Ludlow, but no good photos came of it. We’ll be back.

What’s Good: Lots of goodies here in such a short stretch.

What’s Not: Every block in the Lower East Side is great to an extent, but some are lesser than others. This is one of those.

Block Rating: 8/10