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A Bite of the Big Apple: Sightseeing in New York From a Worker's Viewpoint
With its lines of limousines outside theaters, boutiques stocked with $400 jeans, celebrity nightclubs with snooty doormen who won’t let you in and one-bedroom apartments that sell for a million bucks, there’s no question that New York City caters to a high-society crowd.
But under the surface glitter, New York is a worker’s city, a union town rich with immigrant and labor history. It’s the most unionized large city in America, with nearly one-quarter of its workforce organized, including 50,000 CWA members.
As the city bounces back from the drop in tourism that followed the Sept. 11 tragedy, lots of families are visiting New York for the first time. If you’re headed to the Big Apple, we have some sightseeing ideas that will give you a feel for New York’s labor history and the lives of the city’s poor and working-class immigrants.
The Lower East Side
The Lower East Side has traditionally been the first home of millions of immigrants to New York. Free black Africans were among its earliest settlers. White abolitionists opened schools for their children — one known school was located at 125 Rivington Street — and fought to free slaves in other parts of the city. New York State officially outlawed slavery in 1827.
The biggest waves of immigration started in the mid-1800s. As black families moved northwest toward Greenwich Village, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing oppression and the potato famine crowded into rotting, abandoned buildings in the Lower East Side. Crime and sickness were pervasive.
Italian, Chinese, German and Jewish immigrants from all of Europe soon followed. Today you’ll still hear scores of languages and dialects, and find a tempting variety of ethnic food, as you wander the narrow streets of Chinatown, Little Italy and the rest of the Lower East Side below Houston Street. Hint: That’s HOUSE-ton, as in “house and home,” not HUE-ston like the Texas city.
In the late 1800s, New York began to build tenements to house immigrants, five- and six-story buildings crammed with small, dark, nearly airless apartments often shared by three generations of family members. (Read more about tenements in this month’s Kids’ Corner)
Many men found work as construction workers and laborers, but others joined women in miserable sweatshops, churning out clothing for 12 to 15 hours a day for mere pennies.
Courageous workers began to organize unions to protest the conditions and pitiful pay. In 1909, teenagers and young women in the newly formed International Ladies Garment Workers Union launched an historic strike, staying on the picket line for 14 weeks in spite of being roughed up by company thugs and arrested by police.
The strikers won only small concessions but their bravery galvanized the city’s labor movement. The next year, men in the Cloakmakers Union struck for two months, leading to more improvements for sweatshop workers.
But tragedy struck the following year when 146 workers, mostly young women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Trapped by locked doors as smoke and heat smothered them, some jumped to their deaths through windows while managers made it to safety. Although the building is gone, a plaque remembering the victims is placed at the site at Washington Place and Greene Street, just east of Washington Square Park.
The fire gave further rise to the union movement, making labor a powerful force in New York City and throughout the country. On Sept. 5, 1882, more than 20,000 workers marched up Broadway to Union Square in what became the country’s first Labor Day parade.
Although Union Square has been a popular site of labor activity over the years and the early home of many labor union offices, that’s not how it came by its name. It’s called Union Square simply because it’s located at the union of Broadway and Bowery.
The Empire State Building
The 102-story tower, now, sadly, New York’s tallest building, is on most visitors’ must-see list. But few stop to think about the incredible feat of the men who built it, and the great risks they took.
The Empire State Building, on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets, was built during the Depression and went up with stunning speed. Work started March 17, 1930 and was finished just one year and 45 days later. More than 3,000 construction workers were employed — putting in 7 million man-hours — and during peak times they built one floor every day.
In May 1930, the 1,046-foot Chrysler Building was finished at 42nd Street. Empire State Building owner John Jakob Raskob was determined to make his tower taller.
And he did. Including its antenna at the top, the Empire State Building is 1,454 feet high. The main observation deck is on the 86th floor, but even that’s a few feet higher than the 77-story Chrysler Building.
The Empire State Building weighs 365,000 tons, has a 60,000-ton steel frame, 6,500 windows, 73 elevators and 70 miles of water pipes. It cost $41 million to build, including the land.
The men who secured the building’s iron and steel framework took enormous risks. The New York Public Library has a collection of photographs of the workers in perilous positions that you can view online at www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hinex/empire/empire.html. They were taken by Lewis Hines, who was famous for his photographs of child labor in the early 20th century. To get the shots, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 feet above Fifth Avenue.
You can visit the observation deck from 9:30 a.m. until midnight, though the last elevators go up at 11:15 p.m. For more information, go to www.esbnyc.com.
Theater District
Times Square, the home of Broadway theater, looks a bit like Las Vegas now, without the casinos. Among the neon, giant TV screens, chain stores and massive hotels are lots of police officers who generally keep away the more “colorful” elements of the famed neighborhood. Still, you’ll find plenty of sidewalk entrepreneurs hawking $10 “Rolexes” and designer handbags.
Tucked among the new and renovated buildings are 38 Broadway theaters that employ a strictly union workforce. From actors to stagehands and musicians, all theater employees are union members, many covered by the Actors’ Equity Association.
Fed up with being exploited by producers, actors formed the association in New York in 1913. Actors then had to buy or create their own costumes, dressing rooms were filthy, wages were low and there was no pay at all for the weeks of rehearsal time. Some actors worked in New York, but most were sent on tours. They performed up to 10 times a week, 52 weeks a year with no holidays off — in fact they were often paid only half their salary for a holiday show, even though the houses were packed.
Actors always worried about a show closing. Managers who decided a show wasn’t doing well were known to leave in the middle of a performance, absconding with the box office monies and stranding the actors.
The members of the newly formed Actors’ Equity Association called for paid transportation for tours, a limit on unpaid rehearsals, two weeks’ notice for termination, funds for costumes and other improvements.
Negotiations dragged on for six years. Finally, the actors went on strike, backed by the American Federation of Labor. The cast of a Broadway hit called “Lightnin’” first refused to perform, and 12 other casts followed. The strike lasted 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays, prevented the opening of 16 others and cost theater owners millions of dollars, finally leading them to sign a five-year contract with the union.
Theater owners have more than made up for those losses. These days it costs up to $100 a seat to see a Broadway show. You can snag half-price tickets for many shows — no, not “The Producers” — by standing in line at the TKTS discount ticket booths in Times Square at 46th street or at the Bowling Green Plaza near the tip of Manhattan. But many shows offer discount coupons you can take straight to the box office and avoid a long wait. Look for coupons at the NYC & Company tourist center on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets.
By the way, “Broadway” in theater doesn’t refer to the street but to houses with 500 seats or more in the Broadway district, from 41st to 54th streets between 6th and 9th avenues. Off-Broadway theaters, located throughout the city, seat 100 to 499 people. Off-Off-Broadway refers to theaters with 99 or fewer seats.
Central Park
When you’ve grown weary of the city’s jam-packed sidewalks and noisy streets, take a break in Central Park.
At 843 acres, Central Park is 6 percent of Manhattan. It was the first public landscaped park in the United States and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t thrilled the city created it. But that wasn’t always so.
At the time the city acquired the land in 1853, about 1,600 of the city’s poorest residents were living in a shantytown there. They included Irish pig farmers and German gardeners. In addition, an African-American community with three churches and a school was thriving on the west side of the parkland. All were forced to leave. Those who owned land were compensated with $700 each, but, even then, that was considered well below their property value.
Thousands of immigrants helped build the park, working 10 hours a day for $1 to $1.50 a day. The first completed part of the park opened to visitors in 1858.
Central Park’s perimeter is six miles, from 59th to 110 streets between Fifth and Eighth avenues. It has 58 miles of trails, seven bodies of water, 26,000 trees, seven miles of benches, 275 species of birds, a zoo, a carousel, baseball fields and whimsical children’s playgrounds.
It’s impossible to do justice to all there is to see and do in New York in a single book, let alone a newspaper article. But we hope we’ve given you some ideas.
To get the most out of your trip, you might consider a walking tour. Big Onion (www.bigonion.com) and Joyce Gold’s History Tours (www.nyctours.com) are among companies that offer guided walking tours. Also, many books detail self-guided tours. “The Lower East Side Remembered & Revisited” is especially comprehensive.
There’s no shortage of web sites about New York City, but a good one to start with is the New York City & Company’s. It’s at www.nycvisit.com. Click on “visitors” for neighborhood maps, sightseeing highlights, hints about free tours and discounts, tips about getting tickets to TV shows and much more.
But under the surface glitter, New York is a worker’s city, a union town rich with immigrant and labor history. It’s the most unionized large city in America, with nearly one-quarter of its workforce organized, including 50,000 CWA members.
As the city bounces back from the drop in tourism that followed the Sept. 11 tragedy, lots of families are visiting New York for the first time. If you’re headed to the Big Apple, we have some sightseeing ideas that will give you a feel for New York’s labor history and the lives of the city’s poor and working-class immigrants.
The Lower East Side
The Lower East Side has traditionally been the first home of millions of immigrants to New York. Free black Africans were among its earliest settlers. White abolitionists opened schools for their children — one known school was located at 125 Rivington Street — and fought to free slaves in other parts of the city. New York State officially outlawed slavery in 1827.
The biggest waves of immigration started in the mid-1800s. As black families moved northwest toward Greenwich Village, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing oppression and the potato famine crowded into rotting, abandoned buildings in the Lower East Side. Crime and sickness were pervasive.
Italian, Chinese, German and Jewish immigrants from all of Europe soon followed. Today you’ll still hear scores of languages and dialects, and find a tempting variety of ethnic food, as you wander the narrow streets of Chinatown, Little Italy and the rest of the Lower East Side below Houston Street. Hint: That’s HOUSE-ton, as in “house and home,” not HUE-ston like the Texas city.
In the late 1800s, New York began to build tenements to house immigrants, five- and six-story buildings crammed with small, dark, nearly airless apartments often shared by three generations of family members. (Read more about tenements in this month’s Kids’ Corner)
Many men found work as construction workers and laborers, but others joined women in miserable sweatshops, churning out clothing for 12 to 15 hours a day for mere pennies.
Courageous workers began to organize unions to protest the conditions and pitiful pay. In 1909, teenagers and young women in the newly formed International Ladies Garment Workers Union launched an historic strike, staying on the picket line for 14 weeks in spite of being roughed up by company thugs and arrested by police.
The strikers won only small concessions but their bravery galvanized the city’s labor movement. The next year, men in the Cloakmakers Union struck for two months, leading to more improvements for sweatshop workers.
But tragedy struck the following year when 146 workers, mostly young women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Trapped by locked doors as smoke and heat smothered them, some jumped to their deaths through windows while managers made it to safety. Although the building is gone, a plaque remembering the victims is placed at the site at Washington Place and Greene Street, just east of Washington Square Park.
The fire gave further rise to the union movement, making labor a powerful force in New York City and throughout the country. On Sept. 5, 1882, more than 20,000 workers marched up Broadway to Union Square in what became the country’s first Labor Day parade.
Although Union Square has been a popular site of labor activity over the years and the early home of many labor union offices, that’s not how it came by its name. It’s called Union Square simply because it’s located at the union of Broadway and Bowery.
The Empire State Building
The 102-story tower, now, sadly, New York’s tallest building, is on most visitors’ must-see list. But few stop to think about the incredible feat of the men who built it, and the great risks they took.
The Empire State Building, on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets, was built during the Depression and went up with stunning speed. Work started March 17, 1930 and was finished just one year and 45 days later. More than 3,000 construction workers were employed — putting in 7 million man-hours — and during peak times they built one floor every day.
In May 1930, the 1,046-foot Chrysler Building was finished at 42nd Street. Empire State Building owner John Jakob Raskob was determined to make his tower taller.
And he did. Including its antenna at the top, the Empire State Building is 1,454 feet high. The main observation deck is on the 86th floor, but even that’s a few feet higher than the 77-story Chrysler Building.
The Empire State Building weighs 365,000 tons, has a 60,000-ton steel frame, 6,500 windows, 73 elevators and 70 miles of water pipes. It cost $41 million to build, including the land.
The men who secured the building’s iron and steel framework took enormous risks. The New York Public Library has a collection of photographs of the workers in perilous positions that you can view online at www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hinex/empire/empire.html. They were taken by Lewis Hines, who was famous for his photographs of child labor in the early 20th century. To get the shots, Hine was swung out in a specially designed basket 1,000 feet above Fifth Avenue.
You can visit the observation deck from 9:30 a.m. until midnight, though the last elevators go up at 11:15 p.m. For more information, go to www.esbnyc.com.
Theater District
Times Square, the home of Broadway theater, looks a bit like Las Vegas now, without the casinos. Among the neon, giant TV screens, chain stores and massive hotels are lots of police officers who generally keep away the more “colorful” elements of the famed neighborhood. Still, you’ll find plenty of sidewalk entrepreneurs hawking $10 “Rolexes” and designer handbags.
Tucked among the new and renovated buildings are 38 Broadway theaters that employ a strictly union workforce. From actors to stagehands and musicians, all theater employees are union members, many covered by the Actors’ Equity Association.
Fed up with being exploited by producers, actors formed the association in New York in 1913. Actors then had to buy or create their own costumes, dressing rooms were filthy, wages were low and there was no pay at all for the weeks of rehearsal time. Some actors worked in New York, but most were sent on tours. They performed up to 10 times a week, 52 weeks a year with no holidays off — in fact they were often paid only half their salary for a holiday show, even though the houses were packed.
Actors always worried about a show closing. Managers who decided a show wasn’t doing well were known to leave in the middle of a performance, absconding with the box office monies and stranding the actors.
The members of the newly formed Actors’ Equity Association called for paid transportation for tours, a limit on unpaid rehearsals, two weeks’ notice for termination, funds for costumes and other improvements.
Negotiations dragged on for six years. Finally, the actors went on strike, backed by the American Federation of Labor. The cast of a Broadway hit called “Lightnin’” first refused to perform, and 12 other casts followed. The strike lasted 30 days, spread to eight cities, closed 37 plays, prevented the opening of 16 others and cost theater owners millions of dollars, finally leading them to sign a five-year contract with the union.
Theater owners have more than made up for those losses. These days it costs up to $100 a seat to see a Broadway show. You can snag half-price tickets for many shows — no, not “The Producers” — by standing in line at the TKTS discount ticket booths in Times Square at 46th street or at the Bowling Green Plaza near the tip of Manhattan. But many shows offer discount coupons you can take straight to the box office and avoid a long wait. Look for coupons at the NYC & Company tourist center on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets.
By the way, “Broadway” in theater doesn’t refer to the street but to houses with 500 seats or more in the Broadway district, from 41st to 54th streets between 6th and 9th avenues. Off-Broadway theaters, located throughout the city, seat 100 to 499 people. Off-Off-Broadway refers to theaters with 99 or fewer seats.
Central Park
When you’ve grown weary of the city’s jam-packed sidewalks and noisy streets, take a break in Central Park.
At 843 acres, Central Park is 6 percent of Manhattan. It was the first public landscaped park in the United States and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t thrilled the city created it. But that wasn’t always so.
At the time the city acquired the land in 1853, about 1,600 of the city’s poorest residents were living in a shantytown there. They included Irish pig farmers and German gardeners. In addition, an African-American community with three churches and a school was thriving on the west side of the parkland. All were forced to leave. Those who owned land were compensated with $700 each, but, even then, that was considered well below their property value.
Thousands of immigrants helped build the park, working 10 hours a day for $1 to $1.50 a day. The first completed part of the park opened to visitors in 1858.
Central Park’s perimeter is six miles, from 59th to 110 streets between Fifth and Eighth avenues. It has 58 miles of trails, seven bodies of water, 26,000 trees, seven miles of benches, 275 species of birds, a zoo, a carousel, baseball fields and whimsical children’s playgrounds.
It’s impossible to do justice to all there is to see and do in New York in a single book, let alone a newspaper article. But we hope we’ve given you some ideas.
To get the most out of your trip, you might consider a walking tour. Big Onion (www.bigonion.com) and Joyce Gold’s History Tours (www.nyctours.com) are among companies that offer guided walking tours. Also, many books detail self-guided tours. “The Lower East Side Remembered & Revisited” is especially comprehensive.
There’s no shortage of web sites about New York City, but a good one to start with is the New York City & Company’s. It’s at www.nycvisit.com. Click on “visitors” for neighborhood maps, sightseeing highlights, hints about free tours and discounts, tips about getting tickets to TV shows and much more.