Preservation groups are now working to get the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate a Lower East Side Historic District. Each of the January “Abroad in New York” columns is dedicated to a Lower East Side walking tour.

We left off our Orchard Street walk of two weeks ago at the Jarmulovsky Bank, at Canal Street. Just past the bank is Division Street, so named for marking the border between the 18th-century farms of the de Lancey and Rutgers families. Orchard Street, by the way, was named for the orchards of the de Lancey farm. The de Lanceys also lent their name to Delancey Street, and to James (for James de Lancey) and Oliver (for Oliver de Lancey) streets, reminding us that this Huguenot family was the richest family of the Colonial city, its equivalent of the later Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers. In addition to owning much of the present-day Lower East Side, the de Lanceys owned much of what are now Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side, where Broadway was once called the Bloomingdale Road; it was so named not after the department store but after the de Lanceys’ “uptown” farm.

Walk west on Division one block to Allen Street. Allen is one of those Manhattan thoroughfares, such as Houston Street, with an oddly truncated appearance. There are no building fronts on the east side of Allen, the result of a 1932 street widening, prior to which the roadbed was only 50 feet wide. In addition, the Second Avenue elevated railway ran above Allen Street — plunging it into that film noir shadowiness that contributed to its once having been a notorious den of prostitution. Ground was broken for the Second Avenue El in 1879, right at this corner of Division and Allen. The El began operation in the following year, and ran until 1942. When the train line was dismantled, New Yorkers widely presumed that a Second Avenue subway would soon replace it, but are still waiting for that to happen. The structure on the northwest corner of Division and Allen is the former Manhattan Railway Company electrical substation, built around 1892, which powered the trains.

Continue one block farther on Division to Eldridge Street, and turn right. In terms of congestion and the frenetic bustle of the street, the block of Eldridge between Division and Canal strikes many observers as the unreconstructed Lower East Side. The most evident difference between the street now and 100 years ago, when it was Eastern European Jewish, is that it, and much of the neighborhood, is populated by Chinese and other Asian immigrants. This swath of Eldridge Street has become part of the city’s ever-expanding Chinatown.

Manhattan’s original Chinatown began to take shape in the middle of the 19th century around Pell and Doyers streets, on the south side of the massive Confucius Plaza apartment complex, built in 1976 on the large block bounded by Canal and Division streets and the Manhattan Bridge and the Bowery. (Confucius Plaza’s architects’ names evoke the neighborhood’s history: Horowitz & Chun.) At first, New York’s Chinese residents were mainly sailors involved in the China trade. Exclusionary laws kept the number of Chinese relatively small, and business opportunities for Chinese restricted. In the 1890s, Manhattan’s compact Chinatown became known for restaurants. Chinatown grew exponentially following the Immigration Act of 1965, which removed racial barriers to immigration and led directly to the third of our three great waves of immigration in New York: The first was that dominated by Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s; the second comprised Eastern European Jews and southern Italians between 1890 and 1920, and the third, which is ongoing, began around 1970 with a large influx of Asians, South Americans, and others, and caused Manhattan’s Chinatown to incorporate much of the Lower East Side.

Eldridge retains its old-law tenement streetscape and thronged sidewalks that make it seem like something — save for the Asian faces — out of a 1930s movie. “Oldlaw tenement” refers to the tenement design mandated by the 1879 Tenement House Act. By that time, the city had filled with tenements that sought to maximize their owners’ profits by squeezing the largest number of people onto a given site, which was usually the standard row-house lot; one such example can be seen at 97 Orchard St., now the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The consequent lack of light and air in apartments, in addition to other factors, led reformers to seek laws mandating minimal amenities in tenement buildings. One provision of the 1879 law was that buildings had to be built with the shallow side indentations, generally not visible from the street, called airshafts, the purpose of which was to allow some light and air into interior rooms. When looked at from above, tenement houses resembled exercise dumbbells, hence the nickname “dumbbell tenement.” (We call them “old law” because a newer, much further-reaching tenement reform law came in 1901, resulting in “new-law tenements.”) A good example of an old-law tenement is 19 Eldridge, on the west side of the street. This was the 1892 birthplace of Isidor Iskiwitch, who as Eddie Cantor would live in the luxurious San Remo on Central Park, a few miles yet a world away from Eldridge Street.

Eldridge Street’s great landmark is, as no one with eyes to see need be told, the synagogue of Congregation K’hal Adath Jeshurun, from 1886–87 and popularly known as Eldridge Street Synagogue. Back on Orchard Street, we encounter the banker Sender Jarmulovsky. He helped to finance the synagogue’s construction. We also meet the architects Peter and Francis Herter, who designed the tenement house at 47 Orchard. They also designed Eldridge Street Synagogue, in a flamboyantly eclectic, though predominately Moorish, style for a congregation that numbered 4,000 in 1900. In 1933, however, services ceased in the sanctuary, which was closed off due to the neighborhood’s declining Jewish population. Services went on in the basement whenever a minyan, or 10 worshippers traditionally required for a prayer service, could be formed. In 1971, Gerard R. Wolfe, the pioneering New York tour guide, unsealed the sanctuary and was the first man to view it in 38 years. A long-running preservation and restoration saga ensued, and now the synagogue has gloriously re-opened as a museum — a story that deserves, and will get, its own column.