A Walking Tour of the Lower East Side

Life on the Lower East Side (LES) has never just been about assimilating. It has also been about negotiating identity within one's own group, within New York, and with one's neighbors.

For 150 years, the LES has served as Manhattan's primary port-of-entry neighborhood - first Germans and Irish, then Italians and Eastern European Jews a century ago, and today Latinos, Chinese, Vietnamese, and a people from hundred other nations.

The walking tour will show you the historic LES of pushcarts, crowded tenements (300,000 people to a square mile), and a synagogue on every block, and the vibrant LES of today, with immigrants from diverse backgrounds mixed in with one another, shopping at stores like the Hispanic Chinese Grocery. What's more, in the last five years, a new LES has arisen in the midst of the immigrants. LES: a neighborhood of boutiques and bistros, of galleries and off-off-(off-)Broadway theaters.

The 105-minute tour will start and finish at NYU's Kimmel Center.