Travels in the 2nd half

The Lower East Side ( see map ) has been the home to immigrants for over 100 years. In the late 1800's it was it's population was primarily Jewish, In the 1950's the population shifted to mostly Puerto Rican and then Dominican. Then in the 80's and 90's Chinatown expanded into its boundaries. Today it is another neighborhood undergoing gentrification. The Lower East Side (LES) was the first U.S. home to many Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants between the 1880's and the 1950's. It was an area of tenements and slums when  Jacob Riis  launched a photo essay campaign to push government to do something about the conditions there. http://healthandsociety.com/_uploads/W_LES_400px.jpg  During the urban renewal drive of the 1950's and 1960's most of the tenements were replaced with modern apartment buildings and projects. http://storiesaboveny.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/image8.jpg One interesting architectural result of the drive to clea...

I had the chance to walk around Greenwich Village (see map)  for the first time in several years. I know that this is going to sound like a "grandpa is complaining about change again" blog, but I was really disappointed in what I found. Let me start by saying that I was a teenager in the 1970's. I spent a lot of time wandering around The Village. I loved that there was an edge to it. West 8th street had a great mix of head shops, record stores, stores that specialized in really good band tee-shirts and posters. It was a place where 20 drama club nerds could end up after a successful show and dinner in Chinatown, sitting in Washington Square Park with a jug of wine, not worried about being hassled by the police. There were inexpensive restaurants and bars. There was the 8th street Playhouse: ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com Home to the "Midnight Cult Classics", especially Rocky Horror Picture Show! Yes, it was edgy and seedy!  That was the whole po...

Whether you live in NYC or are coming to visit, the northern tip of Manhattan is a fascinating place to visit for history, geology and food. Marble Hill Today the neighborhood of Marble sits in the boro of The Bronx, just across the Broadway Bridge from Manhattan (see map) , but that wasn't always true. www.forgotton-ny.com For most of its history Marble Hill was a physical part of the island of Manhattan. It was separated from the Bronx by a river called the Spuytan Duyvil by the Dutch settlers.  Marble Hill was the home to quarries that provided much of the marble for the early buildings in NYC. Then the Erie Canal opened and the Hudson river became the major route for food and freight to and from the Great Lakes. Engineers looked for a way to shorten that route and decided to carve up the northern tip of Manhattan. Using the quarries that were already there  they opened up larger shipping channel to the Harlem River and thus Marble Hill became physically attached ...