Hello class! Welcome to the San Telmo/LES page!
San Telmo is among the smallest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, occupying roughly eight square blocks just south of the capital’s political heart – the Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada. It is also among the city’s least densely populated neighborhoods, made up of narrow, often ornate 19th and early 20th century two to five story buildings, stretching deep inside the neighborhood’s blocks and opening into beautiful, dimly lit courtyards. Once densely packed, first by the city’s elite and later, as these left for more spacious suburbs, by immigrants working in the nearby ports of Puerto Madero and La Boca, San Telmo gradually grew desolate and derelict as disease, upward mobility, and migration from the city center to the city’s outskirts decimated its population. Only recently have some of the once-abandoned buildings undergone renovations under a state sponsored, 1990s urban renewal program aimed at turning the neighborhood into an artistic hub, which helped spur rapid gentrification. Today, San Telmo has gained a reputation as a vibrant artistic and artisanal barrio frequented by porteños and tourists alike. It boasts a buzzing night life, a world-renowned open-air antique fair on Sundays, and a “gay-friendly” status in an otherwise very Catholic country. A growing population of artists market their work in local galleries and showcase it in the nearby Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, once the site of a cigarette factory at the geographic center of the neighborhood. At the same time, San Telmo retains some of its gritty and historic edge, reflected in part in the street art and graffiti on its buildings’ facades, in its many narrow and cobblestoned streets and centuries-old churches, as well as on the many still run-down buildings that pepper the area, some of which have been squatted by new migrants who have turned them into both homes and improvised commercial spaces selling everything from antiques to tourist trinkets to street food from the buildings’ tall, narrow doorways.
(To jump to the LES: Loisaida, click here; To jump to the LES: Chinatown, click here)
History of San Telmo
San Telmo’s transformation over the past two decades is just one of many the neighborhood has undergone in its long history, which stretches back to 1536 when the area – named after Saint Pedro González Telmo – became the first Spanish settlement in what would be Argentina. At the time, its location at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata made it an ideal site for the development of a port from which valuable silver taken from the newly conquered Peru, after winding its way down the river to Buenos Aires, would amass before eventually sailing up the Atlantic to Spain. Unlike their colonies in Peru, Mexico, and Central America, where advanced, centralized, populous civilizations – once brutally conquered – provided the Spanish with a ready supply of labor to extract mineral riches, the absence of major indigenous populations in the area around what became Buenos Aires meant that labor would come from elsewhere, mainly Africa. In the eighteenth century especially, a “rather harsh slave regime” in Buenos Aires had San Telmo at its center: “Branding of slaves was common,” and “slave auctions throughout the city, including auctions in large slave markets in Lezama Park” in the heart of San Telmo, took place as late as 1813 while slavery itself would not be abolished in Argentina until 1861. Today, “a house in San Telmo that had been a warehouse for slaves about to be sold in nearby Lezama Park [has become] a center for instruction of Afro-American arts, Candomblé and capoeira among others.”
After Argentina declared independence from Spain in 1816, and as the new nation struggled to find its footing in the mid and late 19th century, San Telmo experienced a series of major demographic changes that corresponded with key cultural and political shifts nationally. Long the “residential center for the colonial and vice-regal upper classes,” San Telmo even more than other older barrios like Piedad and Concepción concentrated much of the city’s wealth. But “as the wealthy moved to the more healthful northern suburbs,” their former colonial mansions “were subdivided into rooms and rented out at eight times the cost of comparable housing in Paris or London,” writes historian Judith Evans: “The certainty of profits soon led to the construction of housing specifically for rentals.” Most of these new and renovated rentals at highly inflated rates went to house “the thousands of immigrants – Spanish, Italian, Russian, and East European – who began arriving in Argentina in the 1880s.” It was an effort by porteño elites to promote “immigration as a means of progress,” targeting “civilized” Europeans in order, they hoped, to counteract the barbarism –represented by the vast, fertile pampas where cattle and wheat grew plentiful, and their “backwards” populations of mixed European and indigenous peoples– that lurked just outside the capital. And yet these new immigrants created a politics and culture of their own, much different from and often in conflict with what elites had hoped for or anticipated. For instance in the now renamed conventillos –subdivided former mansions and new tenement housing in places like San Telmo– migrants from both abroad and the interior converged to create a distinct working class identity. In the tenements’ courtyards and patios, they staged and watched sainetes (popular one-act plays) that “reflected not only the prototypes –later to become stereotypes– of the working classes of Buenos Aires but also their daily dramas of assimilation, acculturation, poverty, and political development.” Other forms of cultural expression that would deeply inform porteño life – notably tango – also first arose in these spaces.
As population density increased with successive waves of migrants through the turn of the century, rents continued to rise even as living conditions deteriorated. Between the 1885 and 1914 various epidemics gripped now working-class neighborhoods like San Telmo as “crowded living conditions and an insanitary working environment increased the poor’s susceptibility to tuberculosis.” In the 1910s yellow fever, too, generated a sanitary crisis in San Telmo that belied the image of Buenos Aires as the “Paris of South America” studiously crafted by porteño elites in the planning and architecture of areas of the city removed from the city center, which they increasingly left to its fate. Meanwhile, as Buenos Aires grew into a residential, financial, and administrative hub rather than an industrial center, new ports, factories, and jobs opened in Berisso and La Plata, 40 miles south of the city, drawing workers away from insalubrious, expensive, and packed barrios like San Telmo. By the mid-twentieth century, San Telmo’s once-teeming streets lay largely deserted, its once packed buildings more and more dilapidated. “In fact,” writes the founder of what would become San Telmo’s world-famous antiques market, “there had been ordinances that called for the demolition of the entire area. We were saved by that national constant: a lack of money. As the project was too large, it didn’t happen.”
In 1970, after opening Buenos Aires’s first museum dedicated to the city’s history two years earlier, its curator undertook to salvage the capital’s oldest neighborhood by creating a weekly, open-air antiques market he hoped would generate renewed interest in San Telmo. While at first consisting of
just 30 stands, the feria – or fair – quickly grew into a miles-long market of over 270 stalls winding through San Telmo’s streets; now, 10,000 people visit the fair each Sunday. Still, even as the Feria brought new commerce to San Telmo, the neighborhood’s economic situation remained precarious, with over 18 percent of its residents reporting unmet basic needs in 1991 while continuing out-migration shrunk the population by over 7 percent through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the 1980s also witnessed generalized squatting of abandoned buildings by low-income families in search of housing. In 1992, the Buenos Aires city government declared San Telmo an “historic preservation zone,” pumping money into revamping area buildings, offering low rate mortgages and tax breaks for owners of buildings marked as patrimony, and providing free consultations to “improve facades.” These measures spurred a process of gentrification led by “artists and professionals who made use of the lower property values during the period when that valuation was appreciated by only a small group of people.” By 2004, reported a city government study, “the area [was] made up of a great variety of social groups. Both residents and renters have different cultural and socio-economic levels. A wide spectrum that ranges from high level state officials, entrepreneurs, professionals, public and private sector administrators, merchants, and formal and informal laborers may be found.” Together, these measures and changes meant that “Little by little, property values rose here more than in other areas,” according to one real estate agent, to the point that as of 2010 property values averaged US$500/sq ft in apartments selling for between 60 and 120 thousand USD.
Politics in San Telmo
San Telmo’s gentrification over the past twenty years both reflects and has generated political struggles over space and its use – especially around housing – that hearken to the neighborhood’s 
turn of the twentieth century transformation into a working class district. At the time, the new immigrant laborers who packed San Telmo’s conventillos (tenements) developed cultural expressions like the sainete that “dramatized the political struggle over tenement housing as well as the personal struggle that went on within the tenement’s walls.” As residents mobilized for better rents and living conditions, they used spaces like courtyards to create performance art that was ‘public’ both in terms of its visibility and in terms of its creation of a common, collective identity. Writes Judith Evans, “Through its conversion of shared spaces, common struggles and familiar personae into comedy and drama, the sainete became the pre-eminent form of popular culture in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires.” In turn, collective identities as workers and tenants forged through sainetes were a springboard for collective action, for instance through the creation of the anarchist-inspired National Association of Tenants in the late 1910s which revealed “a willingness on the part of the working class to threaten direct action in order to pressure the government to act.” Eventually successful in pushing a liberal administration to pass a 1921 law freezing rents and halting evictions, the movement nevertheless dissipated after a conservative government overturned the law in the mid 1920s, after a military dictatorship installed in 1930 barred all union and labor organizing activity for over a decade, and after more and more workers left areas like San Telmo for better opportunities further south.
Still, legacies of organization and mobilization around tenant rights remain alive in San Telmo, especially as the neighborhood has gentrified. Higher rents and property values, as well as the area’s
designation as an historic preservation zone, have put increased pressure on San Telmo’s low income and squatter residents who face similar threats of eviction as did their predecessors a century ago, in turn generating tensions that even the city government acknowledged in 2004 might become potentially explosive: “On one hand private investment is concentrated in areas capable of generating rents and quick investments; on the other hand the low income population often occupies buildings with high patrimonial value but do not have the capacity to keep them in good condition. This context permits foretelling that the current positive climate of tolerance could transform into a scenario of social conflict.” And in fact it has. Since the 1990s a succession of city governments have implemented neoliberal policies aimed at spurring private investment and cutting spending by curtailing social spending and investment. For populations in San Telmo and elsewhere already living in precarious conditions, these policies have led to a routinization and disciplining of informal labor practices, not their incorporation into formal labor with access to rights and benefits.
And yet in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse, when private and national banks failed and a succession of governments were ousted under pressure from nationwide street protests demanding an end to over a decade of neoliberal policies, low income residents in San Telmo as in many other parts of Buenos Aires and Argentina organized into popular assemblies to safeguard their interests locally and nationally. In San Telmo, groups like the Movimiento de Ocupantes (Squatters Movement, affiliated with the Argentine Worker’s Union, the nation’s largest labor union), the Plaza 
Dorrego and San Telmo Assembly, and others organized to seek permanent housing status and to stem gentrification in the neighborhood, which actually accelerated after the 2001 crisis when the dollar was highly valued against the local peso, making it cheaper for tourists and others to buy property in San Telmo. Though their achievements have been minor in scope, the groups proved successful in securing legal titles for several area properties, which they have proceeded to turn into autonomous community spaces and cooperatives to provide housing and cultural outlets to area residents. One notable case is that of the 19th century PADELAI building – a former children’s refuge – which was squatted in the 1980s, forcibly cleared in 2003, and then re-occupied in 2009 after plans to turn the space into a cultural center fell through in the wake of the global financial crisis. Today area groups remain at odds with the city government, and with each other, as to how best to use the space, highlighting fissures and fault lines in local political organizing. All told, as the neighborhood continues to gentrify, its prior and current history of organizing and mobilization suggest that class-based struggles between and among residents will continue to inform San Telmo’s political life.
San Telmo Culture
In Lonely Planet’s Buenos Aires Encounter guidebook, San Telmo is considered a color “neighborhood in flux.” The chapter about the Buenos Aires area is filled with traditional parrillas, cafes, museums, antique shops and tango clubs. If you take a bus to the edge of San Telmo, you’ll notice a constant stream of people getting on and off. After passing Tribunales, an important stop in an area where government buildings are crowded with life, the bus starts to quiet down. When you get off the bus a few blocks from Independencia, one of the main thoroughfares of San Telmo, there are four people left on the bus. Walking around the area on a weekday, you even notice few people on the smaller streets of the neighborhood, but walk into any café, and you’ll always find it full of tourists, residents, hipsters and blue collar workers. In the whole neighborhood, Defensa is the most frequently populated street in the area, and on Sundays, it turns into a fair of epic proportions. In a Travel + Leisure overview of San Telmo, they even say “on Sundays, it feels like the entire population of Buenos Aires flocks to the San Telmo neighborhood, home to a network of antiques centers that seems to stretch for miles.” Since its start in 1970, this weekly interruption from the everyday of the neighborhood welcomes tourists and Buenos Aires residents alike. With such a large influx of people in a weekly basis, the neighborhood has changed drastically from its historic roots.
In the past ten years alone, artists have taken to the area like never before. Now, one can find galleries and studios next to restaurants, pharmacies, and grocery stores. “Un poco por intuición, y porque hasta hace poco los alquileres eran más accesibles que en otras zonas de la cuidad como los distintos Palermos, estos galeristas apostaron por este barrio que vive ahora un cambio notable.” In addition to more accessible studio and gallery space, San Telmo’s museums already draw artists and patrons to the area, making the area even more appealing to artist-types. Buenos Aires’ Museum of Modern Art, or the MAMBA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) are located in San Telmo. These museums house works of many prominent contemporary and popular Argentina artists, such as Marta Minujin, Antonio Berni, Raquel Forner and Emilio Pettoruti. While the MACBA was inaugurated in 2012, the MAMBA has had residence in the area since 1956. The neighborhood is also the home of the National Historical Museum, and since 1897, has told the turbulent history of Argentina through thousands of regalia and historical documents, as well as famous paintings by Cándido López, Prilidiano Pueyrredón and many more.
With this already prominent artistic presence, artists have begun to see the area as one of experimentation and growth. Through the mixing of historic and modern, “nuevos espacios que nacen con la idea de promover a los artistas más jóvenes y a la experimentación definen, así, un nuevo circuito cultural, integrado por unas 30 galerías y centros difusores del arte.” Street art fits into this mix perfectly. The cobblestone streets remind one of Parisian neighborhoods and squares, and the European architecture takes you back in time. But on every street, the old, almost-crumbling buildings and the metal storefront shutters are teeming with big, colorful block-letter tags and murals. Just as the residents of the area are changing, so to comes the invasion of creative, nostalgic, and sometimes political street art.
According to Buenos Aires Ciudad Mapa Interactivo: 5 cultural centers, at least 8 libraries/archives, 9 universities (art, film), 5 private schools, 15 public schools (more public than private), 1 center for health and community action, 1 free wifi zone (from the government), very few banks/ATMs, No employment office, 1 police station, trees are concentrated along edge of neighborhood and in parks.♦
Unlike San Telmo, Loisada is an informal urban space with no set boundaries. What this means is that while San Telmo is a formally recognized, legally defined neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Loisada is constantly, geographically changing and having its boundaries contested. For instance although Loisada is approximately outlined by Houston St to the South, 14th Street to the North, 3rd Avenue to the West, and Avenue D to the East the entire portion of Loisada from Avenue A to Avenue D is also referred to as Alphabet City. Because of the constant contestation over boundaries I believe that the name Loisda is politically charged and meant to hold on to the Latin@ heritage in the neighborhood. While this is a noble goal that has deep political repercussions – for instance the hypothetical slogan keep Loisada Latin@ could function as a rallying call against gentrification – the name Loisada can also be problematic if it blinds people from the ongoing struggles in the neighborhood and erases the history of the neighborhood. When our assumptions about certain areas are divorced from their longer history, our understanding of the areas can be quite shallow and lack the significant analysis required to really understand how these areas assert their autonomy or are used or even manipulated by popular movements and politicians – keep Loisada Latin@ can also pitt working class families of different ethnicities against one another and enable gentrification to be swept in.
(To jump to the LES: Chinatown, click here)
Although Loisada is known for being predominantly Latin@ the population is quickly diversifying ethnically and economically, with rent prices having quadrupled in the past decade.[1] More recently, Avenue C has begun to hold more and more new and shiny apartment buildings alongside its tenement buildings, telling one part of its ongoing story of gentrification physically. According to The New York Times’s 2010 census data, the majority of Loisaida has seen an influx of white residents, with certain parts of the neighborhood having a white majority population.[2] The majority of the Latin@ population lies between Avenue D and the waterfront, with pockets in the middle of the neighborhood along Avenue C, otherwise known as Loisaida Avenue. The majority of Loisaida has seen an 10-20% difference in population demographics, while the pockets between Avenue D and the waterfront have seen close to 0% change, but have seen an increase in population between 2000 and 2010.[3] This suggests that while other residents have been moving into Loisaida, the community living there has been moving and occupying new space in light of not being able to afford the increased expense of living in certain areas of Loisaida.
What ever number of different things Loisada may represent for people, it without a doubt represents a history of gentrification in which the poor are often hidden. For instance Christopher Mele states, while describing his residence in Loisada in 1980 in his book Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City:
“Back in the 1980’s [there were the] poor Puerto Rican families who had managed to maintain a tight-knit community called Loisada in the wake of severe economic decline a decade earlier [, but there were also] graphic designers, feature writes, and service industry workers who paid exorbitant rents for renovated apartments. To them Avenue B and the adjacent avenues were known as Alphabet City – a relatively recent invention that represented a “rejuvenation” of a landscape scarred by abandonment, arson poverty and a rampant illicit drug economy… The characterization of the Lower East Side – as unique, culturally diverse, exhilarating, and frightening – has figured predominantly in neighborhood struggles over residential changes and displacement since the nineteenth century. ([1] )”
This description of Loisaida is important because Mele argues that contemporary gentrification is dependent upon this idealization of poverty as attractive almost as if it was the new, cool and hip grungy gritty authentic spot to be: .“In short the contemporary redevelopment of the Lower East Side is premised on the symbolic inclusion of the characteristics long associated with the Lower East Side – among others, continual political activism, the working-class struggle for survival and the presence of marginalized subcultures and the avant-garde” (VIII) . Nevertheless today’s gentrification efforts stand in direct contradiction to previous “developments” of the Lower East Side and Loisada. “Looking to the past we see these same characteristics took on a different kind of relevance to prior episodes of development. With few exceptions, the real estate industry and state actors defined their purpose, plans and ambitions to transform the Lower East Side in opposition to prevailing presentations of the neighborhood as a marginal, inferior and threatening space…Past Negation of cultural, social, and political differences contrast sharply with their present symbolic inclusion” (VIII-IX). You might consider revising grammar: the prose is not clear and there are some grammatical or syntactical errors.
Moreover, representative of these different historical phases of gentrification in the area from 14th Street to Houston Street and Avenue D – Union Square (14 H.D.U.) are four different names for various time periods. . Although names like Loisada or Alphabet City may be used to designate sub-areas of the larger segment from 14 H. & D. to U.,each different name also has its own cultural political weight, and people often refer to them in ways not meant to strictly adhere to geography. [2] Lower East Side for instance refers to the old working class industrial area during the Gilded Age and includes carved out neighborhoods for different migrant ethnic groups such as Little Italy. Likewise Loisada refers to not only to Latin@ 14 H.D.U. along avenue, but also the community willing to weather [3] the disaster of the 1970’s and 1980’s[4] . Loisada also has strong ties to housing justice organizing[5] . When Latin@s use the name Loisada such a choice can also be said to designate some sort of Latin@ pride. Although significantly rarer when non-Latin@s use the term Loisada the choice represents an attempt to verbally note the marginalization of the community, and emphasis the human right to housing over the commodity value of the new and trendy place to live. What is most important here though is that like the East Village, Loisada has no definitive borders and represents a spillover effect. Unlike Alphabet City, Loisada is not limited to the Alphabetical Avenues. Conversely Alphabet City refers to the same geographic area as Loisada but is limited to Avenues A-D. Alphabet City also has connection to the arts scene but with a semi-whimsical name to to conceal the flagrant abuse of the human rights of the Loisada community. Finally the East Village is associated with an earlier hippy movement antithetical to notions of industrialism and working class roots (XI[6] ).
14 H.D.U. history of gentrification whether as an open or hidden assault on the poor, and its history of multiculturalism makes it very difficult to understand. On one hand census data becomes untrustworthy due to its overemphasis of certain trends and underemphasis of other trends (XI) and the areas multiculturalism can be used to divide and conquer the poor and dispossessed especially through the appeal to “tough on crime politics[7] ”. However on the other hand this same multicultural [what? “multicultural” is an adjective: your are missing a noun] creates several different close-knit communities and inspire ethno-nationalism which can fuel resistance movements as exemplified by the 1907 rent strike[8] . What is really key to understanding the political opportunities and setbacks in 14 H.D.U. though is to understand how the history of the area shapes the culture, and how progressives and reactionaries try to both further shape and use that culture for their own mobilizations.
Loisaida’s cultural background is heavily embedded in its history as a home to immigrants of different backgrounds, including German, Polish, and Jewish origin. However most prominent, preserved, and expressed culturally to this day is the Puerto Rican culture in the neighborhood, whose migration to the area began in the 1950s when the US declared Puerto Rico a “protectorate” of the States. [4]
Given Loisaida’s long and diverse immigrant history, filled with ethnicities spanning several continents, the neighborhood as a community has committed itself to preserving past cultural havens and pieces, specifically its Puerto Rican roots and culture. One such example is the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe, founded in light of the Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) cultural movement in the 1970s, which is considered to be a pillar for the preservation of Latino culture in the gentrifying neighborhood. The name Loisaida itself was first coined at the Nuyorican Cafe by poet Bittman “Bimbo” Rivas, one of the many who put their efforts into founding and initially preserving the cafe. [5]
The cafe itself tells the story of the evolving cultural dynamic of the neighborhood. Originally founded in the basement of college professor Miguel Algarín , the Nuyorican cafe was meant to serve as a physical location where the Nuyorican Movement could have a stronger presence in the neighborhood, and gain more visibility. The cafe itself had become, then, a hub for Puerto Rican art, music, literature, and overall culture. From 1973, when the cafe was founded, to now, the venue has gone from being a hub for members of the Nuyorican movement to embracing diversity and becoming a multicultural, multimedia venue for artists today.[6]
While initiatives like the Nuyorican movement can keep the historically Puerto Rican roots of Loisaida alive, the neighborhood is no stranger to the effects of gentrification. Online rent marketplace Air bnb markets Alphabet City as a neighborhood that “Epitomizes shabby chic,” and one that “has steadily evolved since the early 20th century, and now overflows with trendy bars and stylish restaurants.” [7] The neighborhood indeed has “steadily evolved” from Loisaida to Alphabet City, seeing Puerto Rican housing projects turned into pricey real estate surrounded by new art galleries and other spaces [what type of other spaces?] that tell the story of a new era to Loisaida of big companies infiltrating the neighborhood; a new era that is not always so supportive of Loisaida’s attempts to preserve its cultural past and present.
One such incident occurred in 2014, when celebrated street artist Antonio “Chico” Garcia was denied by company RCN to paint a mural in Loisaida celebrating fifteen of the unsung heroes of the community who, “fought for the community,” as Chico says.[8] These heroes included Rivas, previously mentioned, amongst others. The mural, meant to also serve as a community project, was denied by RCN, the company that owned the building with the wall upon which Garcia would paint on. Garcia had painted murals on the wall previously, however RCN did not approve of Garcia’s politically charged statements, specifically his publicly expressed support for Barack Obama during the 2008 election. Furthermore, RCN had outside group Green Villian come in and paint a mural that RCN approved of– that is, a mural of funky and unique letters A, B, C, and D, commemorating and playing on Loisaida’s other name, Alphabet City. While the general response was slightly positive and mostly indifferent, Loisaida’s community took RCN’s backing the Green Villain project to be inconsiderate and unsupportive of the community, and felt that they had strangers taking claim of a space that belonged to the neighborhood, not RCN.
The cases of Garcia is just one example of the many struggles between Loisaida artists and corporations now embedded in the neighborhood. Artists have attempted to create projects in Loisaida that celebrate its cultural past, however have been denied due to many reasons, including the idea that any “graffiti” on the walls can make the company seem unprofessional, or the fear that seemingly politically charged messages can create controversy, as in the struggle between RCN and Garcia.
Despite the other processes, Loisaida continues to this day to host events and exhibitions throughout its walls and venues that keep its cultural past alive. The Annual Loisaida Festival does exactly that, by hosting local artists and businesses to spread awareness, celebrate and educate its inhabitants, both Latino and non-Latino, of its cultural past.[9] Through the festival, amongst other measures, and the vibrant community that continues to produces and celebrate its Puerto Rican past, Loisaida is able to keep its culture very much a part of living history rather than past.
Although its boundaries are difficult to precisely identify, the Lower East Side of New York City generally refers to the rather large southeastern portion of Manhattan. The very existence of, and, more importantly, the collective linguistic and ideological recognition of the term ‘Lower East Side’ is rather misleading because it implies an absolutely defined place with a comprehensive, legible, and linear narrative. To understand the Lower East Side as a place with a singular and fixed nature, though, is to significantly reduce and grossly misinterpret the character of this multifaceted area. The Lower East Side comprises an array of different neighborhoods, such as the East Village and Alphabet City, with distinct histories, compositions, and demeanors. In order to better understand this fragmented and deeply complex history, it is necessary to examine the evolution of the various entities of the Lower East Side and how its present form negotiates with its rich . In Selling the Lower East Side, Christopher Mele provides some insight into the nature of physical space and its implications for both the people and structures within an environment. Mele argues that space is entirely malleable and that a sense of place is formed from “people’s subjective perceptions of their environments,”[1] implying that space is value-neutral without human imperative. The purpose to which space is devoted is driven by human initiative, and these motions are ever fluctuating, as is evidenced by the changes brought by the influx of various groups of people to the Lower East Side over time.
The first sizable group of people to settle in the Lower East Side were Germans, though their influence is arguably lesser than that of other groups because most residents quickly moved to more affluent neighborhoods in northern Manhattan. Beginning in 1870, Jewish populations from eastern Europe settled in New York, forming small communities modeled after their respective countries of origin. Besides forming these tight-knit nationality-based groups, the establishment of Jewish institutions, such as learning centers and synagogues, was an important means of maintaining their traditional conventions and lifestyle. Though some of these structures still exist, many have been repurposed to suit the needs and values of whichever demographic is most prevalent in the area at the moment, which inevitably causes an erasure of its past usage. Today, the Lower East Side is comprised largely of Chinese immigrants and, consequently, institutions and businesses that reflect Chinese culture . Additionally, it seems that more and more young people, such as college students and/or recent graduates, have also migrated to the Lower East Side. Mele’s reflections about the pliability and mobility of space are especially salient when considered within the framework of the ever-changing face of this neighborhood.
The New York Public Library’s neighborhood guide describes the Lower East Side as historically marked by “constant change,”[2] suggesting its very impermanence as integral to its particular ethos . Due to its very fluidity and dynamism, the Lower East Side boasts a richly adorned cultural history. Especially since the mid-nineteenth century, the Lower East Side has attracted all types of demographics and has consequently undergone tremendous change that seems to be in association with whichever ethnic group dominates its population at the moment. Due to the various, and sometimes radically different, groups of people that immigrated en masse to New York City in a relatively short span of time, a multiplicity of different cultural practices, values, and norms pervade the Lower East Side. These separate facets within the burgeoning cultural milieu of the Lower East Side have not always seamlessly aligned with one another, however, which has generated a neighborhood abundant with both relics of the past but correspondingly the selective silencing of certain parts of its history. These remnants of the neighborhood’s history uniquely classify the Lower East Side as both historical because they exist, and unhistorical because they are only fragments of an entire history .
So how does a neighborhood like the Lower East Side, once “a notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary slum,” What are the repercussions of this dramatic transformation? The evolution of this now-trendy neighborhood is neither as natural nor as simple as tour guides and written histories seem to suggest. The lack of a homogenous neighborhood texture creates an eerie sense of discord between past and present that can be felt on any given street on the Lower East Side. If you span the few blocks on Orchard Street between Houston and Grand, for instance, you encounter a converted nineteenth-century tenement building, an up-and-coming contemporary art gallery, and even a gourmet popcorn boutique. Also, indicate architect and opening year of the New Museum’s new building.. The intermingling of old and new, of squalor and privilege, exudes from each city block and complicates the dense fabric of the Lower East Side. The relocation of the New Museum to Lower Manhattan has gradually encouraged the establishment of a plethora of small gallery spaces on the Lower East Side, so much so that the neighborhood now boasts an art scene to rival Chelsea’s. In addition to institutions designated for art exhibition, there is an impressive amount and variety of street art on the Lower East Side as well that may be a reflection of the current state of the neighborhood.
Although most of the street art that we encountered on the Lower East Side was not explicitly political, there were several examples of art that were clearly meant to provide political commentary. Most notably, we came across a satirical stencil of Uncle Sam in a fenced construction zone on Houston, a list of the names “Eric Garner” and “Mike Brown” spray painted on a building facade on Stanton, and two stenciled figures, one black and one white, embracing, also on Houston. Besides these examples, however, most of the graffiti that we saw was seemingly playful in nature. Play, though, is not necessarily something to be taken lightly or perceived as apolitical. Some of the most important , such as military dictatorships in both Argentina and Brazil, invoked the seemingly benign language of play to demonstrate transgression from the rigid status quo. Since we have no knowledge of the street art that may have existed during the aforementioned times of mass immigration and widespread social unrest, it is difficult to assess whether or not graffiti was used as a vehicle of communication or expression then. Though we cannot definitively determine whether or not the more playful graffiti is, in fact, political in nature, we interpreted the street art we encountered as perhaps an expression of the younger, increasingly liberal population that seems to have flocked to the Lower East Side in recent years.
If you walk into an area called Chinatown in the Lower East Side of New York City, you may find yourself staring at something and wondering “What is that?” In fact, when Chinese tourist groups from China come to visit Manhattan’s Chinatown, they often ask exactly the same question “What is that?” Loosely bound by Kenmare and Delancey streets on the north, Chamber street on the south, Allen street on the east, and Broadway on the west, the Chinatown today is one of the largest Asian communities in the U.S. It is impossible to narrate Chinatown without telling the stories of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Where did the Chinese living in Manhattan’s Chinatown come from? This seemingly easy question can be traced back to 1800s when Chinese traders and sailors began trickling into the United States .
During the mid-19th century, significant numbers of Chinese arrived in the U.S., attracted by the “Gold Mountain” California during the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s and brought by labor brokers to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Most of them arrived in the west coast, expecting to spend a few years working and earning enough money to return to China. As the gold mines began yielding less and the railroad neared completion, the broad availability of cheap and willing Chinese labor in such industries as cigar-rolling and textiles became a source of tension for white laborers, who deemed the Chinese laborers as a threat to their livelihoods. Mob violence and rampant discrimination in the west drove the Chinese immigrants to the East Coast cities in search of better employment opportunities. Despite the Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration, the community and geography of Manhattan’s Chinatown grew. Early businesses for the Chinese included hand laundries and restaurants. Chinatown started on Mott, Park (now Mosco), Pell, and Doyers Streets, east of the notorious Five Points slums and served as an ethnic enclave as a result of both racial discrimination and self-segregation. Unlike many ethnic ghettos of immigrants, Chinatown was largely self-supporting, with an internal structure of governing associations and businesses which supplied jobs, economic aid, social service, and protection. In just a decade, the Chinese population in New York City was up to 2,000 residents from merely 200 in 1870. In 1900, the U.S. Census reported 7,028 Chinese males in residence, but only 142 Chinese women, because the Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of the wives and children of Chinese laborers living in the United States. This significant gender inequality remained present until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 .
Fast forward to 1965, when the immigration quotas were repealed, the immigrant community of Chinatown had grown and the census of 1980 indicated that New York Chinatown was the largest Chinese American settlement in the U.S. In the 1990s, Chinese people began to move into some parts of the western Lower East Side, which 50 years earlier was populated by Eastern European Jews and 20 years earlier was occupied by Hispanics.
By 2007, the wave of gentrification began to spread from SoHo to Chinatown, an area previously known for its crowded tenements and primarily Chinese residents. While some projects targeted the Chinese community to provide low-income housing, the development of premium housing increased Chinatown’s economic and cultural diversity.[5] The rising prices of Manhattan real estate and high rents have also been affecting Chinatown, pushing poorer Chinese immigrants out to other Chinatowns in New York City, including the Flushing Chinatown and Elmhurst Chinatown in Queens, the Brooklyn Chinatown and its satellite Chinatowns in Brooklyn on Avenue U and in Bensonhurst , as well as to East Harlem in Upper Manhattan. Many apartments, particularly in the Lower East Side and Little Italy, which used to be affordable to new Chinese immigrants, have been renovated and then sold or rented at much higher prices. Building owners, many of them established Chinese-Americans, often find it in their best interest to terminate leases of lower-income residents with stabilized rents as property values rise. By 2009 many newer Chinese immigrants settled along East Broadway instead of the historic core west of Bowery. In addition, Mandarin began to eclipse Cantonese as the predominant Chinese language in New York’s Chinatown. The New York Times claims that the Flushing Chinatown, also an ethnic enclave formed during the anti-Chinese violence and discrimination, now rivals Manhattan’s Chinatown in terms of being a cultural center for Chinese-speaking New Yorkers’ politics and trade.[6]
It is clear that despite rapid transformation undergoing in Manhattan’s Chinatown, many of the scenes happening there are still mirroring those that happened decades ago in specific southern regions of China. Therefore, when Chinese tourists come to visit the Chinatown, many find it somewhat familiar but strange at the same time because Chinatown has roots from southern Chinese communities but doesn’t resemble China after its dramatic economic development in the past 20 years .
NOTES
San Telmo
1 A study by the Buenos Aires city government conducted ahead of Argentina’s bicentennial found that as of 2010 there were 1336 buildings in San Telmo, 58% consisting of two stories, and only 8% of over 10-stories. In addition, 83% of residential buildings in the area were multifamily homes, while 14% were single family residences, “reflecting the neighborhood’s low population density” according to the study. JL Ciero et al, “Barrios Bicentenarios,” La Nación, 22 May 2010. Accessed 21 March 2015, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1267296-barrios-bicentenarios.
2 According to the daily La Nación in a 2010 profile of the neighborhood, “experts agree that tourism arrived in [San Telmo] some 20 years ago and generated a physical transformation that helped burnish its commercial profile. Currently, there are 1200 shops and 215 galleries in the neighborhood.” Ibid.
3 Nick Rider, “Ancient meets modern in boutique barrio,” The Independent, 7 December 2014; “Buenos Aires’s historic San Telmo district to be ‘gay friendly,’” EFE News Services, 17 November 2004.
4 JL Ciero et al.
5 Candomblé is an Afro-descended religion developed by slaves mainly in South America and parts of the Caribbean. Capoeira is a form of dance or martial art, also developed by African slaves and today, like Candomblé, widely practiced throughout the Americas. Robert J. Cottrol, “Beyond Invisibility: Afro-Argentines in their Nation’s Culture and Memory,” Latin American Research Review 42 no. 1 (February 2007): 144, 156.
6 A recent study of property values and banking and commercial returns in 1830s Buenos Aires found that wealth in San Telmo was highly concentrated in a few households, generating inequality (GINI coefficient) rates of between 0.75 to 0.79, among the highest in Buenos Aires. San Telmo was therefore both among the wealthiest and most unequal of Buenos Aires’s neighborhoods. Tomás Guzmán, “El Plano de una Ciudad Desigual: La distribución espacial de la riqueza en la ciudad de Buenos Aires en 1839,” Quinto Sol 16, no. 1 (Jan-June 2012): 21.
7 Judith Evans, “Setting the Stage for Struggle: Popular Theater in Buenos Aires, 1890-1914,” Radical History Review 21 (Fall 1979): 50, 49.
8 Juan Bautista Alberdi, “Immigration as a Means of Progress,” in Graciela Montaldo and Gabriela Nouzeilles, eds. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke U Press, 2002: 95-101.
9 Evans, 49.
10 Simon Collier, “The Birth of Tango,” in Graciela Montaldo and Gabriela Nouzeilles, eds. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke U Press, 2002: 196-202.
11 Vera Blinn Reber, “Blood, Coughs, and Fever: Tuberculosis and the Working Class of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1885-1915,” Social History of Medicine 12, no. 1 (1999): 73.
12 James Scobie, “The Paris of South America,” in Graciela Montaldo and Gabriela Nouzeilles, eds. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke U Press, 2002: 170-181; see also Adrian Gorelick, “A Metropolis in the Pampas: Buenos Aires, 1890-1940,” in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005: 151-153.
13 José Maria Peña, “Orígenes y Fundamentos: Objetivos, Historia, y Vida de un Lugar Encantador,” Historia de la Feria, accessed 22 March 2015, http://www.feriadesantelmo.com/historia.htm.
14 Ibid.
15 Cristina Beatriz Malfa, “Intervención en barrios patrimoniales: Plan the manejo del casco histórico de Buenos Aires, San Telmo-Monserrat y su entorno,” Patrimonio Urbano Internacional (Nov 2004): 33-34.
16 Malfa, 33.
17 JL Cierto et al. For comparison, according to the real estate site www.trulia.com, the median price per square foot in Bushwick was US$200 in 2015, $1000 in Williamsburg, US$600 in East Harlem, US$800 in the LES/Loisaida, and US$1000 in the LES/Chinatown. “Brooklyn Market Trends,” accessed 22 March 2015, http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Brooklyn-New_York/market-trends/
18 Evans, 49-50.
19 James Baer, “Buenos Aires: Housing Reform and the Decline of the Liberal State in Argentina,” in Ronn Pineo and James Baer, eds. Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870-1930 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998): 144.
20 Malfa, 34.
21 Carolina Ana Sternberg, “From ‘cartoneros’ to ‘recolectores urbanos’: The changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies in neoliberal Buenos Aires,” GeoForum 48 (2013): 187-195.
22 Maria Carla Rodríguez and Maria Mercedes di Virgilio, “Ciudad de Buenos Aires: Políticas urbanas neoliberales, transformaciones socio-territoriales y hábitat popular,” Revista de Direito da Cidade 6, no. 2 (2014): 337-338.
23 Bridget Gleeson, “San Telmo,” Buenos Aires Encounter. Footscray: Lonely Planet, 2011.
24 “Things to Do in San Telmo,” Travel + Leisure. Time Inc. Affluent Media Group, 2015.
25 “Historia De La Feria,” Feria De San Pedro Telmo. Buenos Aires Ciudad, n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
26 “San Telmo En Ebullición,” La Nacion, 28 May 2008. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
27 Laura Casanovas, “San Telmo Les Da Cada Vez Más Espacio a Las Galerías De Arte,” La Nacion, 24 Mar. 2008. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
LES: Loisaida
[1] Pekarchik, Karin. “Alphabet City: The ABCs of Gentrification.” Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 10 June 2001. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. <http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2001-06-10/alphabet-city-the-abcs-of-gentrification>.
[2] “Mapping America: Every City, Every Block.” The New York Times. 13 Dec. 2010. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. <http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map>.
[3] “Mapping America: Every City, Every Block.” The New York Times. 13 Dec. 2010. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. <http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map>.
[4] “Puerto Rico Profile – Overview.” BBC News. 28 Jan. 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-17139243>.
[5] Nuyorican Poets Café Founded (1973) | Term Pape… – Credo Reference – Credo Reference. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/abctermlath/nuyorican_poets_café_founded_1973
[6] Home – Nuyorican Poets Cafe. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://www.nuyorican.org/nuyorican-poets-cafe
[7] Alphabet City, New York Guide – Airbnb Neighborhoods. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2015, from https://www.airbnb.com/locations/new-york/alphabet-city
[8] Ferguson, S. (2014, November 27). Chico loses Loisaida wall to New Jersey upstart. Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://thevillager.com/2014/11/27/chico-loses-loisaida-wall-to-new-jersey-upstart/
[9] The Loisaida Festival. (2014, May 25). Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://loisaida.org/loisaida-festival/
LES: Chinatown
[1] Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), 12.
[2] “The Lower East Side – New York Public Library,” http://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/lowereastsideguide-final_0.pdf.
[3] “Lower East Side Guide: The Best of the Neighborhood,” Time Out New York, December 30, 2014.
[4] “Lower East Side Guide: The Best of the Neighborhood,” Time Out New York, December 30, 2014.
[5] Toy, Vivian S. “Luxury Condos Arrive in Chinatown.” The New York Times. September 17, 2006.
[6] Semple, Kirk. “In Chinatown, Sound of the Future Is Mandarin.” The New York Times. October 21, 2009.