Lower East Side tenement skyline
— — the city that wasn't built tall.
Not only on a wall.
“Five and six stories, brick on brick, fire escape after fire escape. The Lower East Side held more people per acre than anywhere in the world by 1900, when its tenement blocks ran from Houston Street south to Division and east to the river. The skyline never grew. The buildings did not have to. The neighborhood absorbed every wave that came through Ellis Island.
Lower East Side tenement skyline, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Lower East Side runs from Houston Street south to about Canal or Division, and east from the Bowery to the East River. It is part of Manhattan Community Board 3 and now sits beside the East Village, Chinatown, and Two Bridges. For most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the densest urban neighborhood on earth: the 1900 census counted roughly 700 people per acre in the Tenth Ward. The skyline reads low against the rest of Manhattan because the buildings rarely exceeded six stories.
The defining building type is the Old Law tenement, codified by the New York State legislature in 1879. The Old Law required a narrow air shaft between buildings, producing the characteristic dumbbell floor plan and the courtyards that still mark the blocks. The New Tenement House Act of 1901 ended the Old Law, but most surviving Lower East Side buildings predate it. The Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street preserves an 1863 building intact: same plaster, same gaslight runs, same five-story walk-up. Cast-iron fire escapes were added retroactively after the 1860s.
Between 1880 and 1924 the Lower East Side received successive waves of European immigration: Eastern European Jews fleeing the Russian Pale, southern Italians, Greeks, and Hungarians. Hester Street was the Yiddish pushcart market; Mulberry Street ran Italian. The Immigration Act of 1924 ended most of the inflow. The neighborhood emptied through the postwar decades, was rezoned, gentrified, and re-immigrated by Chinese and Latin American newcomers. Today the buildings still hold the floor plans they were drawn in, but the languages on the storefronts change every twenty years.