Lower East Side

The Lower East Side is where most of immigrant New York landed, and the neighborhood still wears it. Tenements with fire escapes stacked to the roof, synagogues next to bars, and street names people’s great-grandparents wrote home from.

Start with the food, because it is the best argument for the neighborhood. Katz’s Delicatessen has been carving pastrami since 1888 and remains one of the great meals in America. Russ and Daughters, an appetizing shop since 1914, does smoked fish, and a bagel there is better than the arguments about it. Essex Market has been the neighborhood’s pantry, in one building or another, since the 1940s. Kiki’s on Division Street takes no reservations and pours cheap house wine to a line that has not shortened in a decade.

At night it gets serious about drinking. Attaboy has no menu and no sign: you tell them what you like and they build it. Double Chicken Please has spent years on the world’s best bar lists with cocktails that taste like food. The Ten Bells has been pouring natural wine by candlelight for almost twenty years.

The green space here is small and hard-won, which is the story of the neighborhood. Seward Park opened in 1903 as the first municipally built playground in the country, and it is still a local park rather than a destination. Sara D. Roosevelt Park runs a long thin strip up to Houston with courts and gardens along it. On the water, East River Park is being rebuilt higher to hold back floods, and large sections have reopened, including the amphitheater and the walk to the Corlears Hook ferry. Check what is open before you plan around it.

For the history, the Tenement Museum is the one museum in New York we would send everyone to. You go through preserved apartments with a guide, learning about the actual families who lived in them. Book ahead, because the tours are small and fill. Afterward, Metrograph on Ludlow shows real film prints with a restaurant upstairs.