This is a scene from a photo taken circa 1905, soon later turned into a vintage hand tinted/colored postcard, of the Jewish Lower East Side in Manhattan, from the northwest corner of the intersection of Orchard Street and Hester, looking south down Orchard.  At this time, it the neighborhood was a bustling center of the Jewish Immigrant experience, deemed the “Jewish Quarter” or “Ghetto” (a more descriptive than derogatory term for that era).   This was at the heart of of one of America’s most famous immigrant neighborhoods, the area is now designated a historic district.  These postcards were disseminated throughout America and Europe, to share perspectives of the gateway for the American Jewish immigrant experience, that was famous from a time when immigration policy and this neighborhood were front page news, and now reflect the people and culture from this seminal time.   The back of the postcard reads:

“THE GHETTO, NEW YORK CITY.”

The Ghetto, also known as “Judea,” covers a large section of the East Side between Third Avenue and the river from Chatham Square to 10th Street.  It consists of 6 and 7 story tenement houses, crowded to their eaves with humanity.  A certain square mile of this section is sad to contain a quarter of a million people.  The narrow streets all through the Ghetto are thronged with pushcart vendors, who del in fruits and food stuffs of every description.

From the Library of Congress website:

“The capital of Jewish America at the turn of the 20th century was New York’s Lower East Side. This densely packed district of tenements, factories, and docklands had long been a starting point for recent immigrants, and hundreds of thousands of the new arrivals from Eastern Europe settled there on arrival. By this time, most American cities had sizable Jewish neighborhoods, most notably Chicago’s West Side. But for size, crowds, and overall energy, none could compete with the Lower East Side.

When a new Jewish immigrant first set foot on the Lower East Side, he or she stepped into a Jewish world. The earliest Eastern European Jews to settle there had quickly established synagogues, mutual-aid societies, libraries, and stores. Every major institution, from the bank to the grocery store to the social club to the neighborhood bookmaker, was Jewish-owned or Jewish-run, and everyone a Jewish immigrant might speak to during daily business would likely be Jewish. Even the owners of the garment factories and department stores where many immigrants worked were Jewish. For a new Jewish immigrant in a strange country, this immersion in a familiar world, around people who shared a common language, faith, and background, could be profoundly reassuring.

For all the comfort that this shared heritage brought, however, the Lower East Side was still a very difficult place to live–and a crowded one. By the year 1900, the district was packed with more than 700 people per acre, making it the most crowded neighborhood on the planet…”

I am “half Jewish”—my father is Jewish, my mother is Southern Baptist, but my sister has changed her name from “Michele” to “Chaya Rivka” and has her bat mitzvah, and I feel personally proudly and culturally Jewish.  After I graduated my college friend and I moved to NYC and lived at 45 Orchard Street, just a couple doors up (and about 85 years after!) this scene.  Her family joked “you just moved into a neighborhood we spent generations getting out of!” and it was exciting for us to get back in touch with our own heritage.  Although the apartments in the area had been largely taken over by the expanding immigrants from China and “Chinatown”, the shopkeepers, landlords, and bustling sidewalk vendors (especially on Sundays!) were Jewish, and we loved being part of the milieu.  My ancestor Julius Weis, like so many of these immigrants, was from Germany, but immigrated earlier in 1837 to Louisiana, where he spent many years as a pushcart peddler, before forming his own dry goods and clothing store.

This image has long been on my “bucket list” to paint, and so proud and honored to have been commissioned to create this work for the Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara.  I feel my job as an artist, who often paints from photos, is how it’s “not like the photo” is what is “me” about it, and I wanted to both meditate upon the image to get back in touch with my own roots, but also bring the scene to life both in my mind’s eye while painting, and ultimately, to make a history painting for the viewer.

This is part of the “My American Dream” body of work that I have been creating since 2000, of the scenes, icons, family, and landscapes (and sometimes abstract “iconscopes”) of the America that my husband Andrew Madrid and feel is still “great” and to be cherished, to be a integrated married gay couple in a culture that appreciates and supports our lifestyle, in a progressive nation that truly believes in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all of its people, and for the preservation of our green planet and environment for future generations to behold and inhabit lovingly.

Like many Americans, Jews were largely first an immigrant population, escaping the subjugation to come to the United States and to make the most of their new world.  Since the 1800’s, many first arrived at Ellis Island to settle in the Lower East Side.  While life was undoubtedly hard, I wanted to bring out in this painting the more positive and exuberant life of the individuals in a bustle of a neighborhood that I participated in myself almost a century later.  What I saw, and hoped to bring to life and contemporize here, were a proud and industrious people that were thriving and building, self-empowered with agency, with friends and family making their place forward into the world, where although times were touch, the streets were “paved with gold” as they were building their future for themselves and for their families for generations to come.