Talk:Lower East Side

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Contents

[edit] Schools and Education

Tribeca and Battery Park mention schools in their neighborhood articles, why not this one? NEST+M, one of the top K-12 school is located there, and less than two blocks away is Bard High School Early College, one of the most sought after non-specialzed school. Maybe even more sought after as over half of next years ninth grade class was accepted to a specialized school, but opted for Bard instead. Schools are important to every neighborhood and should be recognized as such. I would be willing to incorperate it, but I'm relatively new, and do not want to break any of the rules... Ladybug413 23:43, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Current borders

Considering that Houston St is now more commonly considered to be the northern boundary of the LES, not just by realtors, but also by the local media, I think it should be noted that the 14th St/Broadway borders are, at beast, disputed, and the Houston/Bowery borders are more widely recognized. I realize that would require some heavy rewriting since much of the article covers areas above Houston Street, but right now, this article is more about East Village than about the current LES. Ytny

I've taken the liberty of removing the following, and creating a new section about borders, which includes info on current and historical borders:
While the exact boundaries of the neighborhood are open to debate, it today refers to the area of Manhattan south of East 14th Street; north of Fulton Street and Franklin Street; east of Pearl Street and Broadway; and west of the East River.[1]
The problem with the above was that it directly contradicted information elsewhere in the article, and given that the encyclopedia cited was published in 1995, it seemed inappropriate to use as a source for today's boundaries.
Also, the following sources all list E. Houston St, not E. 14th St as the northern border:
And the Lower East Side BID operates south of Houston, though it further restricts its operations to Orchard and surrounding blocks. 24.215.233.72 12:46, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

You can't re-write history. The boundaries have not changed. The concept of the East Village is too abstract. The encyclopedia citation is from 1995 and that's too out of date? The only reason I can think of people wanting to rename the area is because of the jealousy of people living in Greewich village and bigotry - they did not want to associated with the types of people living in the Lower East Side.

[edit] Messy and/or irrelevant pieces of information

Two pieces of text I have changed:

"Alphabet City around Tompkins Square Park was once known as Little Germany."

I'm not sure why that's relevant here. I've removed it. If it's relevant, please do put it back, but be sure to specify it's relevance to LES in the article! And the second piece:

"Chinatown borders the Lower East Side on the south and the west up to roughly Broome Street, NoLIta on the east from Broome Street to East Houston Street, and the East Village on the north."

Frankly, this piece reads like a big mess of street names, neighborhoods and cardinal directions, and I'm not sure which parts of it are relevant for the Lower East Side. I've changed it. RagingR2 01:23, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

_____

The ethnic demographic information is misleading, and should be clarified. Traditionally, the neighborhood was ghettoized, with different immigrant groups largely located between specific blocks. The article currently overlooks sizeable German (hence the General Slocum monument) and Italian (Venieros, DeRoberti's) populations, and describes a strong Puerto Rican community (Nuyorican Poets Cafe, etc) by the vague term "Latin American." There's a lot of information on the vibrant Jewish culture, which is great. But without specifics on the other ethnic groups, readers don't have a concept of the neighborhood's diversity.

[edit] "not really famous for it's subway convenience"?

I removed the following sentence since it does not reflect the facts, is not informative, and unencyclopedic in style: "The Lower East Side, just as the East Village, is not really famous for it's subway convenience so many residents take the bus to the subway."

Obviously no neighborhood is actually "really famous" for "it's (sic) subway convenience", and LES is not particularly noteworthy for being inconvenient either, with five subway stations within its boundaries. The eastern end of the neighborhood isn't well served, but that pretty much goes for the entire East Side and "many residents take the bus to the subway" can describe any neighborhood in New York City. Ytny 02:53, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sheldon Silver

I have removed this from the Immigrant Neighborhood section as it appears to be a non-sequitur, a random mention of Sheldon Silver in a place where there doesn't need to be a mention of Sheldon Silver, and also not particularly correct:

  • Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, may tell people that he lives between Madison and Fifth, but he really means Madison and Fifth Streets, as he resides on the Lower East Side.

Apart from the not-very-relevant location of Mr. Silver's residence on the Lower East Side, Fifth Street and Madison are nowhere near each other, which makes the joke a bit broad. - Corporal Tunnel 14:49, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External links

The external links list seems a bit unwieldy and contains links of dubious relevance notability. And upon closer inspection, the majority of the links don't actually have anything to do with the modern day LES. Both the size and the scope of the section seems counter to WP:EL.

I propose removing the following links:

East Village/Bowery/Alphabet City links

Not LES-specific

Commercial Site

Not relevant to neighborhood per se


The following links could also be cut, in my opinion:


Which leaves the following three links:

All of the above are reasonably useful for understanding the neighborhood and/or come from authoritative sources, and we end up with a reasonably sized external links list. Thoughts? Ytny 11:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Agreed --DavidShankBone 17:23, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
I've gone ahead and made the change per consensus lack of opposition interest. I've also not included ELs to the Tenement Museum or the B.I.D. since the former would be redundant with the article in "See also" and the latter because I'm not sure how notable or informative it is. Ytny 15:58, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Second Avenue Deli??

The Second Avenue Deli was in the East Village, not the Lower East Side. I recommend removing references to aforementioned establishment from this article --216.73.249.246 18:39, 28 June 2007 (UTC) The Second Avenue Deli original location was in the Lower East Side. Are you trying to re-write history?