Lower East Side tour: History, Heritage, and the Cutting Edge

The Lower East Side is New York's (and the nation's) great immigrant neighborhood, most notably the gateway for Jews from Eastern Europe. (Some 80% of American Jews can trace their heritage to the Lower East Side.) A visit to the neighborhood shows that some of that heritage remains, in religious institutions, social service agencies, labor monuments, and retail stores. At the same time, the Lower East Side has changed significantly, rebounding from decades of decline, as artists, designers, and performers moved in, pushing the artistic envelope. Meanwhile, Chinatown has been encroaching steadily. A walk around the Lower East Side reveals the neighborhood in its complexity and contradiction.

Your guide's grandparents lived and worked on the Lower East Side. He was taken to the neighborhood as a child by his parents. (He took music lessons; they went shopping.) As an adult, he has wandered, dined, partied, and performed on the Lower East Side. He has even been mistaken for a drug dealer there.

Tour Description (pre-booked groups only)

Our Lower East Side tour is based on the same principle behind our Brooklyn tours: we cover a lot of ground, sometimes using public transportation to save time. With a small group, we can hop on two buses and thus see much more of the neighborhood than most other tours. With a larger group, we can walk fast and still see a lot. We also aim to acknowledge the Lower East Side old and new, rather than simply fall back on nostalgia.

There are numerous Lower East Side tours out there. We wouldn't claim to be the "best"--but this tour is probably the most nimble and eclectic. (If you don't want a private tour with me, check the Tenement Museum for their larger group tours of the neighborhood.) So, if we specialize in Brooklyn, why did we start tours of the Lower East Side? Well, we wuz asked. Also, there's a thematic connection to Williamsburg (across the Williamsburg Bridge from the Lower East Side), where we also give tours.

Our tour includes: a visit to Kossar's Bialys, the New York's famed bialy bakery (and right next to the city's best doughnut shop, the Doughnut Plant, also worth a stop) and visits to one or more candy stores, notably the gloriously-named Economy Candy. We could eat lunch at Katz's Deli, where that memorable scene in "When Harry Met Sally" was filmed.

But the tour isn't just about food. We will go into the Eldridge Street Synagogue (extra charge, depending on the time spent), the first great synagogue built by Eastern European Jews. We will see several other synagogues converted from churches, see Buddhist temples that were once synagogues, and pass some functioning churches that long predate Jewish immigration.

We'll view the building that once housed the Jewish Daily Forward, the Educational Alliance that still educates and assimilates immigrants, and the housing built by the activist garment workers union. We'll see the performance spaces, galleries, restaurants, and nightclubs of the "new" Lower East Side. With time, we might spy a still-functioning matzah factory and the nouvelle restaurants that have sprung up around the corner.

We recommend that, after the tour, participants proceed to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum for a guided group tour ($10) of a preserved tenement in the afternoon. (Or you can go to the Tenement Museum another time.) We can get tickets for you on the day of the tour, but it's always safer to buy them ahead of time. (Next door to the Tenement Museum, by the way, is Il Laboratorio del Gelato.)

Tour dates: The Eldridge Street Synagogue is open Sunday-Thursday 10-4. If you wish, we could do the tour on Friday, as well, but not Saturday.

Cost: negotiable based on size of group and time available. We've done some very fun, nimble tours for small groups, using buses to help traverse the neighborhood.

To reiterate: this tour is only available to pre-booked groups; it is not scheduled as an 'open' public tour.