Bluejake

In 1997 I did a semester in Spain. Columbia didn't do one that fit my schedule, so I took it through NYU. One night, out in Salamanca, I got into a huge argument with an NYU girl about what constituted the true borders of the Lower East Side. I argued that historically LES included everything east of Bowery, from 14th Street south to East Broadway and beyond. She argued that LES had long since been sectioned down to the area between Houston and Delancey, east from Bowery to the water- everything else was the East Village, or Chinatown, or somewhere else. I still think she was wrong, but because I've already done a lot of work in the East Village and Chinatown, for the next week or so I'm going to focus on the area she identified as the true heart of modern-day LES.

manhattan