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 has been devoted to Lower East Side walking tours.

If Grand and Delancey streets were the major commercial thoroughfares of the old Jewish East Side, if the crowded tenement blocks of Orchard or Hester provided the neighborhood’s most characteristic images, then East Broadway, which begins at Chatham Square, was the brain of the neighborhood.

At the northeast corner of East Broadway and Essex Street is Straus Square. Straus Park at Broadway and 106th Street commemorates Nathan Straus’s brother Isidor and sister-in-law Ida, who perished on the Titanic in 1912.

But here, Nathan receives his due. Nathan and Isidor purchased Macy’s department store when it was on Sixth Avenue at 14th Street, and in 1902 moved it uptown to 34th Street.

Nathan Straus was one of the notable New York philanthropists of his time, and no man did more to bring pasteurized milk to poor children; he operated 297 milk distribution depots in 30 cities. He died in 1931.

Across East Broadway, at the southeast corner of Rutgers Street (which changes its name to Essex Street on the other side of East Broadway) is the site of the Garden Cafeteria, a legendary meeting place for the local intelligentsia. Leon Trotsky is said to have dined at the Garden, which was also a favorite of the venerable Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Cafeteria closed in 1983 and was replaced by a Chinese restaurant, Wing Shoon.

Between Rutgers and Jefferson streets rises the former Forward Building from 1912, designed by George A. Boehm. Now condominiums, the building housed the Yiddish newspaper founded by Abraham Cahan in 1897 — as well as the Workmen’s Circle, or Arbeter Ring, then a socialist-oriented benevolent society providing new immigrants with social and communal services. Singer, as well as the writers Shalom Aleichem, Scholem Asch, and Cahan (who was also a major novelist), count among the Yiddish paper’s outstanding contributors. Its most popular feature during the years of Eastern European Jewish immigration was the column called “Bintel Brief,” or “bundle of letters,” which dispensed advice to those newly arrived and understandably bewildered. The Forward moved to East 33rd Street in 1974.

Across the street, Seward Park, a little more than three acres, received what is said to be the first municipally funded playground in the country in 1903. It resulted from the efforts of the Outdoor Recreation League, led by social activists Lillian Wald, of Henry Street Settlement, and Charles Stover. The playground movement at that time amounted practically to a political ideology, which held that playgrounds and open spaces were necessary for both the physical and the moral well-being of children.

Seward Park shares a square block (bounded by East Broadway and Clinton, Grand, and Essex streets) with the Seward Park Co-ops, a large and meticulously maintained housing project from 1960, designed by Herman Jessor. Many of the co-ops’ occupants are Orthodox Jews who are part of an Orthodox revival taking place in the neighborhood. The best building on East Broadway is the Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library, nestled between the park and the co-ops.

Designed by Babb, Cook & Welch and built in 1909, the beautiful, compact Beaux-Arts structure once had an al fresco rooftop reading room. This was said to be the most heavily used branch library in the city, a testament to the importance the local immigrants placed upon education.

At the southeast corner of East Broadway and Jefferson Street stands the Educational Alliance, built in 1899 and designed by Brunner & Tryon, the architects of Congregation Shearith Israel on Central Park West at 70th Street. Like Henry Street Settlement and University Settlement, Educational Alliance was and is one of the Lower East Side’s major settlement houses. It was created by already settled New York City Jews, most of them of German background, to aid in the assimilation of the Eastern European Jews then flooding into the city. Immigrants went to the Educational Alliance to learn English and to prepare for the citizenship test.

It’s humbling to think that those who came not knowing a word of English learned more from these citizenship classes about American history and government than most native-born Americans know today. The Educational Alliance also offered courses in Jewish history, and offered religious services for those who could not afford synagogue membership. It thus provided a model for how the immigrant could at once assimilate, and become American, while not eschewing his heritage. The art classes were also legendary: Jacob Epstein, Mark Rothko, and Louise Nevelson are just three of the many well-known artists who received early training at the settlement house.

Across the street rises the Art Deco Bialystoker Home for the Aged, from 1930. Its style is anomalous in these parts, because the Art Deco era was not one of much building activity in the Lower East Side.

As the neighborhood, around this time, began to depopulate, its former residents moved to freshly built places — Inwood and Brighton Beach and the Grand Concourse — where the Art Deco style symbolized success in America. When the 144-year-old Bialystok Mutual Aid Society built this nursing home, it was as though to import a touch of the outer boroughs to brighten the outlooks of the aged residents.