The History of Lower East Side Housing & Knickerbocker Village

Recorded on Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Find all upcoming programs and events at www.eldridgest....
Learn little-known housing history of the Lower East Side, such as how the Knickerbocker Village projects came about due to an ambitious, eccentric millionaire and his secret builders’ club where participants swore oaths of silence!
Since the Colonial period of Dutch New Amsterdam, the Lower East Side has seen a variety of homes to meet the needs of its ever-changing immigrant population and the demands of a growing metropolis. From farm estates to row houses, and tenements to housing projects like Knickerbocker Village, we will explore the evolution of housing on the Lower East Side, the tricks of the Roaring Twenties real estate market, and what “affordable” housing meant in the past and today.
Join Scott Brevda of the Museum at Eldridge Street and Andrew Fairweather of the Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library for this deep dive into our neighborhood’s dynamic housing history.
This program was organized in partnership between the Museum at Eldridge Street and the Seward Park Library branch of The New York Public Library (NYPL).
Learn more about the Museum at Eldridge Street at www.eldridgest....
Learn more about the Seward Park Library at www.nypl.org/a....

[@RobertaFierro-mc1ub]

Ill.never forget EldridgeStreet in 1978..unbelievable

[@dbellel]

Hey Scott Brevda, KV people Eddie Cantor, Ira Gershwin and Boss Tweed!! Not even close geographically. You could have said Jimmy Durante who lived at 80 Catherine Street about 30 years before where 16 Monroe was later constructed. Here, to name a few are, novelists Leonard Michaels, Evan Hunter (Sal Lombino), Mark Toby (Courtship of Eddie's father) and literary scholars: Edmund L. Epstein and Heinz Norden, Mazie Gordon, aka "The Queen of the Bowery," opera singer Judith Raskin, actors Nehemiah Persoff and Hayden Rorke, screenwriters Harry Essex, Justus Addis and Paddy Chayefsky (very briefly), musicians Milton Okun, Ted Paley and Milton Rumshinsky, poet Henry Zolinsky, songwriter Joseph Darion (Man of La Mancha), artists Harold Baumbach and Joseph Solman, photographer Rebecca Lepkoff, Harry Liebowitz, the coach of the LMRC little league team, Nancy Bueller, the most beautiful girl who ever attended PS 177, Harvard economist Martin Weitzman, philosopher Morton White, Harry Hom Dow, who in 1929 became the first Asian-American admitted to practice law in Massachusetts, mobsters Socks Lanza, Richard Cantarella, Lefty Ruggiero and Anthony Mirra, politicians Duke Viggiano, Assemblyman John Lamula, Judge Leonard Sandler, Judge Pat Piccariello and Judge Vincent Lupiano, former members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and later OSS agents in WW2 Milton Felsen (later the film producer of Saturday Night Fever), Gerald Cook, Harry Milton and Irving Goff (he supposedly saved Hemiongway's life in Spain). And of course, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their sons Michael and Robert Meeropol