Summary

A young Rebecca Lepkoff, camera in hand, navigated the streets of the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, before the Alfred E. Smith housing project largely demolished and forever changed its character. She captured the lives and times of a vibrant, close-knit, and functional multiethnic community. Through her lens, she documented street scenesa woman stopping in front of a tenement to share some news, a fruit seller peddling her wares, a woman hanging laundry on a clothesline. Stoops, rooftops, fire escapes, and sidewalks in front of candy stores and delis were the preferred social and recreational locales. In the absence of playgrounds, children improvised outdoor play areas and congregated Saturday afternoons in front of the Loew's Canal.

Life on the Lower East Side , the first monograph of Lepkoff's works, highlights the lost neighborhood between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges from the Bowery to the East River. With over 170 beautifully reproduced duotone photographs and essays by Peter Dans and Suzanne Wasserman, the book reveals the dynamic community of Italians, Irish, Jews, Greeks, Spaniards, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans. Lepkoff's images uncover a forgotten time and place and reveal how the Lower East Side has both stayed thesame and changed forever.

Choice Review

This is an impressive collection of photographs depicting life amid the slum conditions and abject poverty of New York City's Lower East Side. The neighborhood is rich in culture with people from all over the world seeking their American dream. Lepkoff photographed from 1937 to 1950 a vibrant multiethnic community neighborhood including Italians, Germans, Poles, African Americans, and the Irish. The pictures depict a working-class neighborhood of people going about their daily chores, children playing, friends visiting on the stoop (a New York tradition), and multigenerational families enjoying one anothers' company. The book is divided into three sections, with the segment titled "Plates" showcasing the vast majority of the photographs. The photographs offer a brief history of an era long gone, but their predominant themes remain today. The book succeeds, in part, by telling a pictorial history of the Lower East Side and reminding viewers of the inevitable change that takes place in communities. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates; faculty. J. Foreman Arkansas State University