by Lily Brett (translated from published German)
After living in SoHo for twenty-five years, my husband and I moved. We moved to the Lower East Side. I was nervous about making the move. A lot of things make me nervous. No-one would ever mistake me for a Zen priest.
Although the SoHo we left was a far cry from the SoHo we moved into and I had never envisaged myself living across the road from Chanel and around the corner from Tiffany and Co., I dreaded moving. But we had to move. And we did.
My husband is a friendly type. He embraces people, literally. He will throw his arms around someone he has only just met. If he was a Labrador, he would be licking everyone. My husband fell in love with the Lower East Side on our first day there. I wasn’t surprised by how much he loved the neighborhood. He feels at home in most places. And falls in love easily. With places, I have to add. Not with other women.
What really shocked me was how much I loved the neighborhood. Except for the day I met my husband, I have never instantly fallen head over heels in love. And here I was in love with the Lower East Side. Wildly in love.
The Lower East Side, particularly the lower end of the Lower East side, is one of the last mostly undiscovered areas of Manhattan. I am stunned at how many seasoned New Yorkers know nothing about this part of Manhattan. New Yorkers who pride themselves on knowing everything about this city, and are intrepid explorers of new restaurants, new art galleries and new areas, look bewildered when I talk about how much I love the Lower East Side.
New York City is the most populous city in the US and the most culturally diverse. We have Irish, Italian, German, Russian, Jewish, Puerto Rican and Chinese people. We have the largest African American community in the country and the largest Asian Indian population in the western hemisphere. We have the biggest Asian population in America and people from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, Mexico, Ecuador, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia and El Salvador. The city is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. And that is part of what makes New York so special.
We all mix with each other in many parts of our daily lives, but we, on the whole, lack this diversity when it comes to where we live. This is not true on the Lower East Side. The Lower East side is multi-cultural. It is also multi-generational and socio-economically diverse. The diversity is evident on the streets. We have people from all walks of life. We have poor people, rich people, old people and young people. We come in many colors and in all shapes and sizes. We pray to different Gods or no God at all.
No-one rushes, people laugh in the street, walk at a normal pace and talk to each other. It all feels so normal. Yet it is never boring. The area has a vibrancy, a vitality, a quirkiness, a sense of calm and comparatively little traffic.
I love the edgy look of some of the streets. The graffiti, the food stalls, the un-renovated and unvarnished old buildings, stores and warehouses. The edginess goes along with an anti-establishment air. You can see the edginess in the hipsters who live in the area and in the signs. The sign on the door of Cheeky Sandwiches, on Orchard Street reads: “Hours: Kinda Early to Kinda Late (for now)”.
That sort of edginess contains possibilities. Possibilities of change. Signs of change are evident every day. A new art gallery seems to open every week. There are so many art galleries. Many of them are housed in unorthodox spaces. Rawson Projects and Regina Rex on Madison Street are in the basement of a tenement house with its signature exterior fire escape and slightly run down facade. Ramiken Crucible is at the end of an alleyway behind a liquor shop, on Grand Street.
Endless Editions, on Henry Street, which has an eclectic and interesting range of projects, publishes art books, conducts online workshops and exhibits art. Their exhibition space is in a basement with doors that lift up and open directly on to the sidewalk. The entrance is down a rusted, perilous -looking spiral staircase. It is the staircase of my nightmares. I can’t even look down it without getting vertigo. Luckily, not everyone feels that way. The gallery seems to get a lot of visitors.
The galleries on the Lower East Side feel part of the neighborhood, part of the community. They don’t have the chill of too many of the large, impersonal Chelsea galleries. They are not separated and removed from the life around them. They are part of the life-force.
Caroline Tilleard of the Cuevas Tilleard Projects, on Henry Street, was very clear about the gallery she and her partner, Anne Maria Cuevas, opened in 2014. “We wanted to create a less formal gallery atmosphere and one that really championed the young artist in a very friendly way,” she said. “The Lower East Side is where all the young galleries are. We didn’t want that kind of very austere and intimidating Chelsea gallery. We wanted to be a place where you could come and meet the artist. We get a lot of artists coming in to see what their peers are doing. When we have a big opening, we always have a dinner in the gallery and invite young collectors or people who have talked about art with us but who haven’t yet bought anything and they sit and have dinner with the artist. It makes for a really nice atmosphere.”
The local restaurants and cafes reflect the same sense of belonging to the community. The area is full of restaurants and cafes, many of them innovative and highly regarded. They range from the expensive and extraordinary Mission Chinese, on Grand Street to the modest and authentic Spanish, El Castillon, on Madison Street and the very cheap and very small Lam Zhou, on East Broadway. At Lam Zhou I have watched dough being twisted and flung into fresh noodles and hundreds of dumplings being made at a small table. It is always mesmerizing.
My favorite restaurant in New York is Les Enfants de Boheme, on Henry Street. As soon as I step into Les Enfants de Boheme, I feel happy and I feel at home. Stefan Jonot, the owner, has a theory about spaces. He says that spaces attract the people they are meant to attract. If that is true then it explains why I eat at Les Enfants de Boheme. Regularly.
The food is wonderful and the atmosphere is local, low-key and high IQ. All the staff speak several languages and have other lives. Michelange is a documentary film-maker, a hypnotherapist and a waiter. I have heard him discussing the origin of the word ‘collaboration’ and the belief that for artists the reward has to be inherent in the making of the art and not in any expectation of being financially rewarded. And I have seen him distraught if a customer’s favorite item is not on the menu that day.
On the Lower East Side we talk to each other about how lucky we are to be living in the area. I was talking to Ray Griffiths a jeweler who has a studio on Fifth Avenue has lived on the Lower East Side for fourteen years. “The area feels like Manhattan in the 1950’s” he said. “There are families who have lived here for fifty, seventy, a hundred years. I am close to the waterfront. I can run and down the East River which I love. On a hot summer’s night at 1am you can see old guys playing checkers and cards in the park.”
The park is Seward Park. It occupies over three acres. There is always something going on in Seward Park. There are T’ai Chi classes, children playing, people working, people working out, students studying, musicians practicing.
The mix of the old and the young, the newly-arrived and the long established and the mix of languages spoken is what I love most about the area. Last week I was in my local supermarket. I often get lost in supermarkets. I have no sense of direction. Anyone who asks me for directions is in trouble. I like to be helpful. I have sent hundreds of tourists in the wrong direction.
My local supermarket is mostly staffed by Spanish speakers. I was looking for bread. I asked a woman who was loading shelves where I could find bread. She nodded, ran off and returned with a trolley full of chicken parts. They were on special. “Bread?” I said. She dropped the chicken thighs she was holding and grabbed some chicken breasts. I shook my head. She offered me chicken wings. Lots of them. By then I think I was looking pained. She dug further down into the cart of chicken parts and offered me ten chicken legs for three dollars.
I walked home with my chicken legs. I passed seven enormous, round packets of noodles just sitting on the sidewalk. I was tempted to take some home. They would have been a perfect accompaniment to the chicken legs. But the packets were too big. Besides which I have not stolen anything since I was arrested for shoplifting when I was ten.
I stopped at a small ninety-nine cent bargain store and bought a copy of Learn Spanish in Sixteen Easy Lessons.
