The Lower East Side

No sector of Manhattan captivated Shahn more than the Lower East Side, which he first explored as an adolescent while apprenticing at a lithography shop on Beekman Street. Immigrants of diverse nationalities inhabited this impoverished area, providing the city with a continual supply of cheap labor, as described by the Federal Writers’ Project:

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 typical of New York. . . . From its dark tenements, generations of American workers of many different national origins . . . have emerged.

The Lower East Side dominated Shahn’s photographic repertoire during the early to mid-1930s. Continually drawn to the human dimension of this blighted district, he created intimate portraits of residents in Little Italy, resolute middle-age women, Jewish children, Orchard Street merchants, Bowery down-and-outers, and men gathered in Seward Park and on the South Street piers. His compelling photographs of the indigence plaguing the region contrasted with the dramatic vistas of the city’s downtown skyscrapers. Indeed, Shahn’s representations of the Lower East Side’s living theater number among the most discerning of the era.

Untitled (Lower East Side, New York City), 1932-35  Fogg Art Museum, Gift of Bernarda Bryson Shahn