This slice of East Broadway is a dash of Chinatown and Lower East Side, and if we’re doing micro-neighborhoods then let’s add Dimes Square and Two Bridges to the mix too.

There are some buildings on the south side, but it’s defined mostly by the southern edge of Seward Park and a pedestrian triangle at the end of Canal Street, known as Straus Square. (If you’d never heard of this, that’s ok. Neither had I.)

But in the early 20th century, this block—then called Rutgers Square—was the center of the action for the emerging Jewish immigrant population. One man recounted in Tony Michels’s book “A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York”, that he lived the life of a typical Lower East Side renter: “I ate gefilte fish on Fridays, worked on Saturdays, went to the Jewish theaters on Sundays, and attended socialist meetings at Rutgers Square during the rest of the days.”

Here, union rallies were packed, the first city-built playground would be built, and the publishers of Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers on East Broadway competed for readers and influence.

Here, it seemed the seeds for a better, more just world would be sown from the tenements.

Walkers of the world unite and take a stroll with me. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Last time I covered a really short block on the Lower East Side, it ended up wayyy too long. We’re doing that again!

These photos were taken in March. And take a look at the streetview.

Jewish Daily Forward Building | 1912

A couple of blocks away, the bankers were going to build the first skyscraper over the Lower East Side, so the socialists at the Jewish Daily Forward needed to answer the capitalist intrusion in kind.

"Some of the enthusiastic members of the Forward Association, spurred on by the erection of Yarmalofsky's twelve-story bank building on Canal–they did not relish the idea of a capitalist symbol rising so high on the East Side–came forward with a bold plan to erect… a ten-story edifice to tower over the surrounding tenements," wrote labor historian Melech Epstein.

By 1912, the radical newspaper had become one of the most important Yiddish institutions in New York since its founding in 1897, and it needed a bigger home. So the Forward answered with this ornate 10-story office building that also held space for printing presses and an auditorium.

The building that founding editor Abraham Cahan would later call a “temple of the workers’ religion,” rose with white terra cotta, ornate columns, and solid brickwork. Reliefs of socialists like Karl Marx and Engels would look out and for a time the roof held one of the largest Yiddish signs in the world.

This building “acted as a social condenser for New York’s Jewish socialist community, leasing office space to unions and mutual aid organizations and hosting rallies and speeches in its auditorium,” writes Nicholas Kemper in the New York Review of Architecture.

But, Kemper writes, “As the Forward’s community learned English and assimilated into American society, leaving the sweatshops of lower Manhattan and the Yiddish language behind, its circulation shrank.”

The newspaper, now simply The Forward, thrived for many years and eventually launched an English-language edition and lives exclusively online.²

After the paper moved to Midtown, 175 East Broadway was bought in 1974 by the Lau family and became partially a church and bible factory, while the socialist faces were temporarily covered with Chinese characters. After a failed plan to turn the building to lofts, it was sold and converted to condos in 2004, where culturati like America Ferrera, Spike Jonze, and Tatum O’Neal lived.

Last year, apartment 10B in the workers’ temple sold for $7.5 million.

Seward Park

In 1899 muckraker Jacob Riis described the spot pre-dating the park as Thieves’ Alley, “where the police clubbed the Jewish cloakmakers a few years ago for the offense of gathering to assert their rights to ‘being men, live the life of men…’”

In fact, the playground here was the first one built by a city government—and supposedly some 20,000 children swarmed the opening ceremony in 1903. (Which sounds crazy.) There was also a cool looking pavilion which was ultimately torn down in the 1930s, during subway construction.

This is one of the forgotten Manhattan parks, but it’s pretty nice. The park has a series of bee houses and pollinator gardens, which were barren on the winter day these photos were taken, but decorated with some colorful garden-accented portraits.

Straus Square (formerly Rutgers Square)

On a February morning in 1917, hundreds of women here—many of them mothers holding children—met here to protest soaring food prices and call for bread.

This was part of a broader wave of food protests across the city as wartime inflation sent prices sharply upward. According to Eric Ferrara, the price of food nearly tripled to $59 a month in less than a year, so organized mobs of women targeted pushcart vendors by throwing rocks, pouring kerosene over merchandise, and attacking customers who didn’t honor a boycott.

On February 20, several hundred members of the Mothers’ Anti-High Price League gathered at the Forward Building auditorium, then spilled into Rutgers Square. (There’s even a photo.) From there, they marched toward City Hall to plead to the mayor for help³. A newspaper account from the time described women holding babies, “their faces showing the pinch of hunger in their arms.

“We are starving—our children are starving,” Ida Harris, President of the Mothers' Vigilance Committee, told an officer who asked the crowd to disperse. “But we don't want any riot. We want to soften the hearts of the millionaires who are getting richer because of the high prices. We are not an organization. We haven't got any politics. We are just mothers, and we want food for our children. Won't you give us food?"

An officer arrested activist “Sweet Marie” Ganz after hearing her address a group of women in Yiddish “and her words seemed to be exciting them,” the Times wrote.

So how did the tensions ultimately end? Well, the city did intervene somewhat by buying produce in bulk and leaning on wholesalers to restrain their prices, according to some of these accounts. More importantly, as World War I began, it became effectively illegal and unpatriotic to protest, especially if you were a foreign-born socialist. That’ll do it!

In 1931, it was renamed for Nathan Straus, co-founder of Macy’s. He was lionized as a mensch for work selling pasteurized milk nearby, a feat which is credited for saving countless young kids.¹

A fountain that was here was moved into Seward Park, and a 12-foot-tall war memorial was dedicated here in 1953.

169 East Broadway

This was a workaday office tenement that housed lots of newspapers and offices central to the neighborhood. In 1909, readers could write to The Yiddish Stage newspaper here to get your copy of “Dos Pintele Yid” (a song translated as The Essence of a Jew). It was also home to Hadoar, “the only Hebrew Daily in America.” And a kosher dairy restaurant once apparently advised “true experts” to dine there because “when you eat by us, you won’t worry about getting married and will avoid taking on trouble. We mean the best for you.”

All well and good. But if you do want a little trouble, head downstairs to 169 Bar.

The dive bar is loosely New Orleans-meets-the-tropics, with a seedy past. It was nicknamed the Bloody Bucket starting in the 50s, based on the bar fights, the New York Times wrote in a profile. Soon, Chinatown gangsters frequented the bar and owner Charles Hanson described it as “almost an open drug market to the point where the police just stopped showing up.”

Some articles also often cite that in 1910, a server was stabbed in the heart over a dispute over soup he’d served. (I need to hear a bit more about what kind of soup we’re talking here before I take sides in that dispute.)

But I think it’s calmed down somewhat, and it’s known more for the funky decorations and a place to hear Lesley Gore tunes while chowing down some jumbo coconut shrimp or a leopard-print pool table, an oyster bar, and other memorable tchotchkes.

And just look at that sign!

At one point, the bar owner and bartenders also lived upstairs, turning the building into an extension of the 169, according to a 2016 New York Times article. “It used to be this quiet neighborhood bar, then the Village Voice named it the best dive bar in New York City and it was all over,” one of the residents said.

It may be all over for real. The owner, the daughter of one of the notable bartenders in the 1950s, declined to renew the lease, Page Six reported in March. Hanson said he’s been operating without a lease, but that he’s trademarked the name: “so if I go, it goes.”

Anyway, no pictures inside since I didn’t stop in. Too early.

Rice Noodle Cart

For a nosh at this food cart, I asked to have what the people in front of me ordered, which was this:

Curry fish ball noodles with some sesame seeds and red stuff poured on top. Excellent.

There’s so much we didn’t cover here: Mission Chinese used to be here. People liked that. The Garden Cafe was also in the spot where Wu’s Wonton King is. People liked that too. But trying to squeeze in too much more in here would make us decadent capitalists.

If you want more, there’s this episode of the Bowery Boys which covers Seward Park and this exuberantly overwritten 1950 essay about the Jewish culture that grew up in this neighborhood.

Anyway, find more stuff at bytheblock.net and email me at [email protected]

What’s Good: The history! The curry fish balls!

What’s Not: This block was dominated by the tension between the visions rooted in social justice, and the accelerating forces of capital. I think we know who won this one.

Block Rating: 8/10