Once a melting pot of New York immigration, southeast Manhattan is trendy today. Art galleries and fashion shops thrive there without killing the soul of the neighborhood.
Who said that Manhattan wasn’t what he was anymore? Answer: the trendy people who, driven out by exorbitant rents, have moved to Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River. According to them, the heart of New York is, at best, a “vast mall” and, at worst, a vulgar “amusement park for tourists”. So let them come for a walk in the Lower East Side, the hype district of the moment! Much more than Chelsea (too expensive), in the Village (unaffordable), in the Meatpacking District (too bling-bling) or in Little Italy (a trap, indeed), it is “here that it happens”.
At first, nothing was noticed, except the absence of green spaces and the low height of the buildings, whose brick facades are streaked with emergency stairs. No monuments, no department stores or head offices, no known brand. Just an atmosphere, a feeling, a neighborhood vibe that has disappeared almost everywhere in Manhattan. “Everyone is friendly [“sympa”], I know all my neighbors, we say hello, we help each other, explains Georgia Fenwick, whose chic thrift store, with a photo of Brigitte Bardot on the wall, is a delight for fashionistas. Here we take the time to live: no rush as in Wall Street or in Midtown. The people who come have taste and a sartorial “eye”. They dare. Each is unique and exists individually. ”
Supattattooed mannequins, hipsters embagousés, over-cool skateboarders, young artists with piercings, fashionistas in Ray-Ban, sexy waitresses constitute the new fauna of this district rock’n’roll and trendy which has been the crucible of New York immigration since the 19th century, as Martin Scorsese told on screen (Gangs of New York) and Sergio Leone (Once upon a time in America).
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To blend in with the Lower East Side, you better have a look and attitude
The Lower East Side is defined as much by its fauna, which rarely exceeds the canonical age of 40, as by the variety of its businesses: fashion accessory shops, prominent art galleries, pop up stores (pop-up stores) of all kinds, renowned tattoo artists, sex toy stores and even crowded restaurants, such as the very fashionable Beauty & Essex (fusion cuisine), Schiller’s Liquor Bar (American brewery) or Russ & Daughters Appetizers (new Jewish cuisine) -Yorkese). Without forgetting the hybrid coffee-shops, a big trend of the moment. They serve organic espressos and coffee with milk, of course, but while also offering something else for sale: depending on one’s specialty, coffee and surfboards, coffee and printed t-shirts, coffee and abstract paintings.
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To blend in with the scenery of the Lower East Side, or “LES”, you better have a look and an attitude. Everyone wants to live up to the somewhat trashy reputation of the neighborhood, cradle of the punk movement, around 1975. “It all started with the Ramones at CBGB’s, the legendary nightclub that was a few blocks from here, before that the movement continues in London with the Sex Pistols“, recalls, nostalgic for a time he did not know, Chuck Guarino, whose store of customized leather jackets is in perfect harmony with his very studied punk-rocker look.
Fifteen years ago, the reputation of the Lower East Side was appalling. The elders remember it: “In the 1990s, taxis did not venture into this area infested with drug dealers and junkies stoned with crack”, says for example, in his workshop, the artist Linda Griggs, whose current work consists in juxtaposing pornographic images found on the Internet and testimonies of young women who tell their “first time”. But, during the terms of mayors Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001) and Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013), the Lower East Side defeated its demons. Unimaginable previously: today, during the day, you can even walk in the low-rent housing estates located on the outskirts, on the banks of the East River, where many disadvantaged Latinos and African-Americans live.
A serious competitor in the Chelsea district
About ten years ago, art galleries and fashion people set their sights on “LES”, seduced by its low rents and its streets lined with old-fashioned shops: old-fashioned tailors, retouchers, underwear stores for grandmothers, grocery stores run by Puerto Ricans or the legendary Katz’s Delicatessen, a New York Jewish canteen founded in 1888 mentioned in all tourist guides. “No less than 100 galleries are installed here today, which makes the Lower East Side a serious competitor of the Chelsea district”, welcomes Natalie Raben, spokesperson for LES Business Improvement District, a non-profit organization dedicated to commercial revitalization, heritage preservation and the setting up of festivals in the neighborhood.
During a guided tour organized by the Tenement Museum, the speaker talks about the various waves of immigration that have followed one another here.
Natan Dvir / Polaris for L’Express
In recent years, Orchard Street, a north-south oriented axis, has established itself as a new frontier of the fashion, with hyper-pointed brands like Alexander Olch (ties, bow ties and pouches for stylish men, at n ° 14), Billykirk (bags and luggage for metrosexuals trendy, at 16), Project n ° 8 (multi-brand concept store, at 38) or even Pilgrim (high-end vintage ready-to-wear frequented by many celebrities, at 70). Not to mention, across the street, the Fat Radish at 17, a table popular with models like Dree Hemingway, Ernest’s granddaughter. Finally, at n ° 82, the very select spa of Christine Chin sees the parade of glossy beauties: Christy Turlington, Gisele Bündchen, Penelope Cruz, Zoe Saldana … “Even Karl Lagerfeld loves the Lower East Side, where, in 2010, he shot the advertising campaign for Chanel.”
The Latino population has grown from 37% to 25% in ten years
A sort of state of grace hangs over Orchard Street, Ludlow Street, Clinton Street and Rivington Street these days, the most iconic and bustling streets of the Lower East Side. “The balance is almost perfect between the young hipsters and the old people of the neighborhood,” said Eyal Tov, the co-owner of Shapiro’s, a very popular restaurant, which established itself ten years ago in the neighborhood where his mother, a hippie, had. lived in the 1960s. There is a good mix between the elders of the district and the youngest, designers, artists or creatives aged 20 to 30 years who bring a new breath, an energy, a life style.”
But, in a New York in the process of accelerated gentrification, this beautiful harmony seems fragile. “All this will last another two to three years, even five at the most”, prognosis, a tad pessimistic, Georgia Fenwick, installed in the sofa of her store. In fact, rents are rising steadily. And the traditional small businesses cannot keep up. Some go to the other side of the bridge, to Brooklyn. Sign of the times: the proportion of the Latino population has increased from 37% to 25% in ten years. More annoying: the weekend, the “bridge and tunnel people” (the people of the bridges and tunnels), that is to say the well-to-do commuters who take these routes to storm Manhattan, arrive with nothing else, says a young hipster, than “their behavior noisy”.
Focus on small businesses rather than supermarkets
Five hotels have recently opened or are about to do so. On Delancey Street, which leads straight to pont Williamsburg and step over theEast River, a large car park will make way in 2015 for a real estate mega-construction site, comprising nine apartment buildings with 1,000 apartments in all (some are intended for people with modest incomes). An Andy-Warhol Museum, an annex to the existing one in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will also open. “At first, the promoters wanted to bet everything on luxury,” says Jan Hanvik, director of the Clemente-Soto-Vélez cultural center, which houses the largest concentration of artist workshops in the heart of the Lower East Side. In discussions with local stakeholders, they agreed to focus on small businesses rather than supermarkets. In addition, the Andy-Warhol museum is committed to training people from the neighborhood without a diploma in order to hire them. people are starting to realize that there is something precious to be preserved here. ”
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At the corner of Delancey Street and Orchard Street, the Tenement Museum (literally: the building museum) is dedicated to it. It is arguably one of the most interesting and little-known museums in New York. Housed in a building preserved in its original form since 1935, it offers guided tours of the tiny apartments where, in an insane promiscuity, immigrants once lived. “If the museum ofEllis Island is devoted to the arrival of foreigners in the United States, explains the director, Morris Vogel, who is a historian, we, we tell their social history, what they did next, once they entered the United States: their life everyday, the difficulties with language, raising their children, their hard work and, ultimately, how they changed the country. ”
The Tenement Museum also organizes tours of the neighborhood, including in French. In front of an old tavern, an abandoned cinema, an old synagogue, the lecturer recalls the successive waves of immigrants arriving on the Lower East Side: first the Germans, after the revolution of 1848, then the Jews, fleeing persecutions in the Tsarist Empire, from 1880. But also the Italians (who founded Little Italy, a stone’s throw from here), the Chinese, in the 1950s (Chinatown is across Allen Street) or Puerto Ricans. “Lower East Side, insists Vogel, is a concentrate of American history.”
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