Gregory Heller

The East Side must look for its regeneration to an influx of a population much higher in the economic scale. It must no longer lose its people who prosper. It must put on a white collar.—Loula Lasker, 1928 (Abu-Lughod, 1994, p. 102)

Many complex forces have worked together to transform New York City’s Lower East Side from the immigrant port-of-entry and low-income housing district it once was into the trendy and gentrified neighborhood it has become. This paper will analyze some of the forces that began to take effect just before the stock market crash of 1929, and those that continue to have an impact today. Traditionally, many sociologists, urban anthropologists, and economists such as Peter D. Salins, Raymond Vernon, Peter Marcuse, and John Mollenkopf have explained the forces behind this transition with economic models and theories of consumer sovereignty. Authors and politicians from former Mayor Edward I. Koch to Rudolph Giuliani have offered other benign explanations for the process that has almost completely changed the social and economic characteristics of the Lower East Side. A minority of academics, including Janet Abu-Lughod and Neil Smith along with local activists such as Frank Morales, have hinted at other, more insidious explanations for the displacement of poor and minority residents from the district.

In the 1970s, while abandonment ravished the Lower East Side, a young population of counter-culture artists and musicians began to move into the northern portion of the district, beginning a process of “social� gentrification. This segment grew then gave way to wealthier and more mainstream young urban professions (or so-called “yuppies�) in the 1980s, although the counter-culture atmosphere and its residents continued to thrive. In the 1990s, students and professionals were the dominant new arrivals, which perpetuated the economic gentrification of the earlier decade. The racial make up of this group is diverse, but anecdotal evidence suggests a considerable presence of white residents. Accurate data is illusive due to the transient nature of recent residents. Both artists and young professionals have actively gentrified the district, displacing the earlier residents.

The history of redevelopment in the Lower East Side has been a 70 year struggle between area residents and the local, state and even federal governments. Even as the ethnic and demographic composition of the area has changed, each new resident group has actively resisted the efforts of government and the real estate industry to “improve� the area. The tale of this resident-resistance movement is told here, using their perspective and voice to examine the question: What is the ulterior motive, if any, for the displacement of the poor and minorities from the Lower East Side district? Who stood to benefit from the displacement and redevelopment that has occurred? Did the government, at any level, assist in the process to achieve goals of social control, rather than social improvement?