The lower East Side

The lower east side of Manhattan was a place that immigrants lived when they first came to America through Ellis Island. The houses that immigrants lived in were tenements. These tenements were unsafe and dirty. The tenements were crowded and freezing during the winter and very hot in the summer. Some immigrants slept in alleys and doorways. Immigrants couldn't stay clean because their tenements had no running water and no washing machines.(was washing machines even invented yet?) Many people couldn't afford nice places and just needed any place to lie down for a couple of hours before they go back to work. Landlords knew that these people needed a place to stay so they took advantage of the immigrants by making them pay high rent when the immigrants did not have a lot of money.

Immigrants worked in factories that were dark, dirty, and dangerous.
They got many diseases such as tuberculosis from working and living in unsanitary conditions. Immigrant children usually started work at the age of six of seven. One job that children had was selling newspapers. These children were called newsies. The newsies worked for pennies. Parents wanted their children to receive an education but they did not have enough money to go to school.

Many immigrant children did not have toys to play with so they played in the streets and alleys. These children pick pocketed people and often worked in pairs when pick pocketing. One game they played was called stick ball. For this game they used a wooden stick to hit a ball but if they could not afford a ball they used a wooden block for a ball.

New York City laws said that children had to stay in school until the age of fourteen. Immigrant children had a hard time in school. Their hands and clothes were checked everyday if they were not clean they would get punished. Teachers made fun of students. The teachers had no idea how life was like living in tenements.

New forms of transportation made it possible for immigrants to escape the lower east side. The new forms of transportation were the ferries and the subway. Immigrants could save enough money to take a ferry of a train to escape the lower east side.

In the lower east side immigrants spread their culture and learned to enjoy foods of other cultures. Newspapers started to write about life in the lower east side. Immigrants could go to settlement houses to learn new skills such as learning how to play an instrument. In these settlement houses they could receive medical care from diseases they had.



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