New York City guide : 1939's chinatown and east side

NEW YORK CITY GUIDE: 1939’s CHINATOWN and LOWER EAST SIDE

Though the Bowery Mission is still around today, there aren’t too many remnants left of New York’s Depression-era Lower East Side. It was a place full of pawnshops, beer saloons, flophouses and Jesus-saves welfare institutions. Masses of people lived on top of each other in slums. But in the hard times, a unique city culture — made up of small business owners, activists and students — was created. The neighborhood was the melting pot of the city.

With A/G coming to the Downtown Literary Festival on April 14 at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe — located at 126 Crosby Street — take the WPA time machine to 1939’s Chinatown and Lower East Side and see the neighborhood’s past.

Guide Note: Follow the link to download or print the complete New York City Guide: 1939’s Chinatown and Lower East Side. Right-click or cmd-click the map above for a large version to use as your guide. The following passages are excerpted from the NYC Guide.

- CHINATOWN -

New York’s Chinatown is trying to live down a myth; a myth kept alive by the sight-seeing companies that pile tourists into Chinatown busses, transport them to prepared points of interest, and frequently prime them with tales of mystery and crime. The truth is (and the policemen on the beat will verify it) that no safer district is to be found in New York City. Yet guides have been known to warn tourists to “hold hands while walking through the narrow streets.”

Historians differ as to the identity of the first Chinese resident of New York City. Some say it was Quimbo Appo, who came to San Francisco in 1844 and arrived here a few years later; others state it was Ah Ken, a Cantonese merchant who made his home on Mott Street in 1858. Still others contend it was Lou Hoy Sing, a sailor who shook off his wanderlust and settled in New York in 1862. (He married an Irish lass who bore him two stalwart sons, one of whom became a policeman and the other a truck driver.)

1939 TOUR

SEE MAP INSERT. “Tongs,” the Chinese equivalent of American fraternal societies, ruled the quarter with iron discipline and fought each other with hired gunmen.

The headquarters of the (#79) HIP SING TONG are situated appropriately near the corner of Pell and Doyers Streets, for just beyond is the (#78) BLOODY ANGLE, the bend in Doyers Street where henchmen of this tong fought the powerful (#75) ON LEONG TONG in the early 1900s. The Hip Sings, led by Mock Duck, a gambler, battled the On Leongs, captained by Tom Lee, for control of the lucrative gambling and opium rackets.

- LOWER EAST SIDE and THE BOWERY-

The dramatic, intensely human story of the Lower East Side is a familiar chapter in the epic of America; a host of writers some seeking out the Lower East Side and others originating there have described its people. Here have dwelt the people whose hands built the city’s elevateds, subways, tubes, bridges, and skyscrapers. Its two square miles of tenements and crowded streets magnify all the problems and conflicts of big-city life. Crowded, noisy, squalid in many of its aspects, no other section of the city is more typical of New York.

The Bowery

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