Tenement Housing, Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York City, 1912

This tenement block is 260 to 268 Elizabeth Street, a street in Manhattan, New York City. This area was mostly populated by Italian immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The tenement block itself is still in use as of 2013. This urban street scene, obtained by US sociologist and photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940), dates from March 1912. Hine was a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), documenting working and living conditions for children, and campaigning against child labour and poverty in the United Sates.

Pastrami, pickles, bagels with cream cheese, smoked lox salmon, pumpernickel and rye breads! Many of the food we traditionally associate today with New York can be traced to a particular period in time, and a very distinct neighborhood - the iconic Lower East Side of the late 19th century.

This was once one of the mostly densely populated places on the planet, packed with hundreds of thousands of immigrants, living in teeming, overcrowded and often squalid tenements. Vast communities of Irish and Germans were followed by Eastern European and Russian Jews, fleeing persecution. They brought their own distinct culture, language, and especially food.

Today, most of the old Lower East Side had disappeared, gentrified out of existence. But dotted around this once iconic neighborhood, some of the original traces have still survived, in some cases, over a hundred years.