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Article: Alea's children: the avant-garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970. (Lower East Side Retrospective)
- Article from:
- African American Review
- Article date:
- December 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 African American Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A century ago the area known as New York's Lower East Aside was among the most depressed neighborhoods in the city. As Milton Meltzer has noted, it had the distinction of being "the most crowded slum district in the city, and probably in the world," with an 1890 population density of 37 persons per dwelling (73-75)-half a million people in a tight comer of Manhattan.
Strangely enough, the Lower East Side is also a central location of a great deal of American popular culture. A steady flow of creative works have emanated from the tenements at the edge of the Big Apple.
The avant-garde movement of the Lower East Side in the early 1960s--when it turned, for ...