In this photograph, Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940) masterfully captures the vibrant life, dynamism, and exuberant spirit of the Lower East Side in 1912. Its atmosphere calls to mind the bustling market days in the Jewish towns in Eastern Europe, while the skyline of tenement houses and the pedestrians dressed in their Sunday best place the viewer in New York’s “Jewish quarter of East Side.”
The photograph offers a fascinating view down a long, unnamed busy street somewhere at the heart of the Lower East Side’s Jewish neighborhood. A seemingly endless row of shops lines both sides of the street, punctuated with pushcarts moving in different directions or stationed in the middle of the street, loaded with an array of wares ready to tempt some new Americans on a beautiful warm Sunday.
Hine indeed reveals the American life in the making, in the midst of the Lower East Side.
Reprinted from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs from the New York Public Library.
