Bluejake

I moved to the Lower East Side on January 2, 2000- about a hundred years since my family lived there the first time. Of course, I had always felt a connection to the area- when I was a kid, my father was doing a lot of pro bono work with Asian Americans for Equality, trying to get quality low-income housing in Chinatown. We used to go down there every so often for meetings, and these big once-a-year banquets. For the last three or four years, I've been exploring Chinatown and LES block by block, trying to get a perfect sense of it in my mind. Over the next four or five days, I'd like to show you what I've found. [Related: RK Chin's amazing Chinatown site, paper on why ghettos exist, history of Chinatown, Little Italy tenements, some good information about AAFE and its fight for tenant's rights in Chinatown.]

manhattan