Manhattan’s Lower East Side is a topic of special interest right now. Preservation groups are working to get the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate a Lower East Side Historic District. Immigration, the great historical theme of the Lower East Side, has emerged as a major issue among the 2008 presidential contenders, making it incumbent upon us all to understand the role of immigration in America’s past; and that means understanding the Lower East Side. Finally, while the Lower East Side continues to be, as it has been for more than 200 years, an immigrant neighborhood, it has also, in the last decade, become a fashionable neighborhood of costly dwellings and upscale shopping and dining. The shift is emblematic of dramatic changes in the social geography of New York City in recent years. I will devote my January “Abroad in New York” columns to different Lower East Side walking tours.

The best place to begin a tour of the neighborhood is the intersection of Delancey and Orchard streets. To the east, at 105 Norfolk St., rises the chic architect Bernard Tschumi’s 17-story luxury apartment building named Blue (2006), the symbol of the new Lower East Side. Head south, though, to 97 Orchard St. There, the tenement building that has been transformed into the Lower East Side Tenement Museum rose in the 1860s as part of the first generation of purpose-built tenements, the multiple-family dwellings constructed for the very poor during the first of three great waves of immigration that completely altered the city’s demographic profile. This wave consisted of Irish and Germans. Orchard Street was part of “Kleindeutschland,” or Little Germany, the densely populated and insular section home to German Catholics and Lutherans; around 1860, nearly 20% of New Yorkers had come from Germany. A tailor named Lucas Glockner built 97 Orchard many years before legislation meaningfully mandated minimum standards of amenity in the city’s multiple-family dwellings. The building had no indoor plumbing, though its backyard privies did connect to the city sewer system. Contrary to our image of 19th-century slumlords, Glockner and his family resided in 97 Orchard, indicating that it was far from the worst housing its era produced.

By the end of the 19th century the area had been engulfed by participants in the second great wave of immigration, namely Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. (The neighborhood’s third wave of immigration, which I will discuss in next week’s column, comprised Asians and Latin Americans, among other groups.) The Tenement House Survey of 1903 found that in the block bounded by Delancey, Orchard, Broome, and Allen streets — a little more than two acres — lived 2,223 people. That computes to the equivalent of about 700,000 people a square mile at a time when Manhattan had an overall density of 80,000 a square mile. (Today, it is about 65,000 a square mile.) This block was likely the most congested not just in New York, but in America. For all the dismal conditions, though, it’s good to remember that, as the historian Moses Rischin put it in his classic “The Promised City” (1962), “For many a rising immigrant family in this period of swift change, it was judged to be a ten-year trek from Hester Street [two blocks south of Broome] to Lexington Avenue” in the much nicer Upper East Side Yorkville district. The poor families that had to endure the Lower East Side’s harsh conditions were not, from decade to decade, the same poor families, but different ones in succession, mainly the city’s most recent immigrants.

That’s why everything changed in 1924, when the National Origins Act severely restricted immigration. The population of the Lower East Side — and of Manhattan — declined. In the 1930 census, Brooklyn overtook Manhattan as the city’s most populous borough. As early as 1925, according to the architectural historian Andrew Dolkart in his excellent “Biography of a Tenement House in New York City” (2006), half the apartments in 97 Orchard were empty. From 1935 to 1988 (when the Lower East Side Tenement Museum took it over), 97 Orchard stood shuttered. (Visit tenement.org to find out more about the museum.)

Walk south one block to Grand Street. At the southwest corner, extending to Allen Street, a pair of cast-iron façades once belonged to a department store called Ridley’s, founded in the 1870s when Grand was a major shopping street. Ridley’s closed in 1901. Lord & Taylor, four blocks away at Grand and Chrystie streets, remained until 1902. Grand Street lost some of its centrality when the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903, making Delancey the area’s principal crosstown thoroughfare. At the next street, Hester, note Public School 42, at the northeast corner, built in 1899 from a typically lovely design by the city’s public school architect C.B.J. Snyder. Note the elegant way the street names are inscribed in the building’s corners. Hester Street was famous in the Jewish immigrant era for its pushcarts selling all manner of foods and merchandise. In the 1930s, Mayor La Guardia, who loathed disordered streets, banned pushcarts and relocated vendors to city-run indoor markets such as the one nearby at Broome and Essex streets.

Continue to Canal Street. At the southwest corner stands one of the area’s monumental edifices: the former Jarmulovsky Bank, designed by the prestigious architects Rouse & Goldstone and built in 1912. Sender Jarmulovsky was a pushcart peddler who prospered and in the 1870s became a neighborhood banker. The 1912 building measured his success, though in 1914 the bank’s rumored insolvency caused a run that closed it. At the northeast corner of the intersection stands a stately tenement house — 47 Orchard St. — ornamented with terra-cotta Stars of David. This was built in 1887 and designed by Francis and Peter Herter, who at about the same time designed the Eldridge Street Synagogue, nearby between Division and Canal streets. (The Herters should not be confused with the famous Gilded Age decorators of the same surname.) We realize looking at 47 Orchard that not all tenements were created equal. Some, such as this, were obviously for better-off tenants. Also, the ornamentation was clearly meant to appeal to prospective tenants, meaning that there was some fluidity in the housing market at the time. Both are surprising thoughts in a part of Manhattan that yields surprises at every turn.