The most recommended books set in the Lower East Side

Audacity is based on the life of Jewish immigrant Clara Lemlich, who fought for female workers’ rights in New York factories in the early 20th century. I found this verse novel gripping from its very first pages. 

YA readers today will definitely identify with the young woman at the story’s core—especially those who are familiar with the historical backdrop. Despite the difficulties the protagonist faces, her story is filled with hope and is told in beautifully-written verse.

No graphic novel has ever blown me away like Unterzakhn (which means “underthings” in Yiddish). The story takes place in the early 1900s on the Lower East Side of New York, and the black-and-white bold strokes illustrate the bleakness of the lives of the new immigrants. Twin sisters find themselves taking roaringly divergent paths: one works in a whorehouse before becoming a star of the stage; the other assists the “lady-doctor,” from whom she learns about birth control and abortion. With strong feminist themes, I found it impossible not to root for both sisters. This is the only graphic novel whose ending made me cry.

My copy of this book has so many dog-eared pages and “!”s scrawled in the margins that it’s almost ridiculous. This is the story of how, in the 1960s, New York City and the RAND Corporation used algorithmic modeling to decide where to locate fire stations in the city. It was pretty much a disaster: because of the choices the modelers made about what to measure and how to measure it, they ended up cutting services to many of the poorest neighborhoods in NYC. Joe Flood is a journalist, and it shows—this book is stunning in how it combines the stories of human beings with crystal-clear accounts of the technical decisions made by the computing “whiz kids.”

This collection of short stories is really about how sexual desire and social ambition can lead to all sorts of compromising and bizarre situations. I originally was drawn to it because I’d loved the film Secretary based on one of the short stories in the collection. I related to it because it is nearly all from a young female P.O.V – a kind of potpourri of trying to make it in NY in the 1980s. It's the perfect illustration of how powerful short story as a form can be in terms encapsulate an event, mood, and era – It also showed me how fictionalized memoir can be a good source of material and that if the book is really well-observed it never dates. 

This book examines the social control of Jewish immigrant youth in New York City through the use of supervised playgrounds that drew the children from street life to organized games and activities.

Sports taught rules and regulations, a WASP sense of morality and middle class values, and competition, which served as the basis for the capitalist economy. Sport served as an opiate for the masses, altering traditional work and leisure patterns, effecting a new social order, while it desecrated the Jewish Sabbath for some in the process of assimilation.

Newberry Honor book winner Gail Carson Levine beautifully captures the life of eleven-year-old Dave, a troublemaking orphan in 1926, and his time in New York’s Hebrew Home for Boys.

When I years ago read this book to my son, who was abut Dave’s age, both of us became enthralled with not only the vivid description of the sometimes tough and rigid orphanage in the Lower East Side, but also Dave’s late-night adventures into the beautiful music and among the kind strangers and leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

Loosely based on her father’s time in New York’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum, Levine opens a window and lets us hear the Yiddish sounds and lets us peak into the early twentieth-century world of Jewish orphanages, while also celebrating the boisterous joys of friendship with unlikely partners.

In 1951, Sydney Taylor invented the memorable Brenners—papa, mama, five sisters, and baby brother—a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in turn-of-the-century New York. Taylor’s words and Helen John’s illustrations in this book, the first in a series, set the scene. A calendar in the parlor announced that it was 1912. Tenements lined city streets. When I read these novels as a child, I did not yet know that they were closely based on Taylor’s own life. When the entire series was republished in 2014, I quipped: I became a Jewish historian because of these books. 

Richard Price’s propulsive plots revolve around crime, but the novels are always about something much bigger, and Lush Life merges many of his favorite themes into one masterpiece: ambition and compromise, race and class, gentrification and crime, the push-and-pull of a city’s progressive leanings against reactionary forces for law and order and property values. Price’s city is constructed on a bedrock of conflict between those who’ve come to New York struggling to create art, those who were born here struggling to get by, and the cops struggling to hold the middle, in a spectacular kaleidoscope of a downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, of hipsters and gangsters, housing projects and trendy restaurants, all these subcultures clashing in one microcosm of urban life.

One of the most creative premises I’ve encountered in a long time: After leaving the Velvet Underground but before starting his solo career, Lou Reed spends a year working for his father’s accounting firm and gets wrapped up in a murder mystery.

Lyrics, characters, and situations from throughout Lou Reed’s entire catalog set the stage and add another layer to the story for fans of music and mystery alike. It’s the exact type of music-based fiction/non-fiction hybrid sub-genre I love but have trouble finding examples of.

This is the book that launched a thousand essays about gentrification in urban neighborhoods and reinvented the term “revanchism” for use in critical geography.

From the French noun revanche, revanchism refers to a policy or movement focused on reacquiring a nation's lost territory. The Revanchist City as it became known after Smith’s book, describes city residents under siege by their own city governments.

Starting with a description of the battles over who could use Tompkins Square Park in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 90s, and moving on to other case studies (some global), Smith shows how cities are transformed into zones of international capital investment and class privilege through neoliberal policies enacted at the municipal level.