The eating places are patronized by connoisseurs from everywhere, who relish European dishes.
There are theatres in Second Avenue presenting drama, musicals, revues and vaudeville, in Yiddish, where world-famed artists appear.
Second Avenue is as brightly lighted with neons as Broadway, and its shops display wares as costly as those on Fifth Avenue.
The people who patronize this gay way are imbued with the traditions of the old lands. Here, there is little whiskey drinking; wines and beer are preferred, along with a leisurely dinner, and pinochle afterward.
Vice does not thrive here, because the young blades seek it elsewhere. They find their legitimate amusement uptown, too, leaving the lower East Side almost entirely to the old folks, who are too set in their ways to want or appreciate the hurried pleasures of the Americans.
As these lines are being typed, at the corner of Henry and Pike Streets, in the very core of what once was the most famous American ghetto, lies the collapsed remains of a five-story synagogue.
It just gave up, after a hundred years of service, and tumbled into rubble.
The amazingly significant feature of this incident is that, though it happened on a Saturday afternoon, nobody was injured. The building, though still actively functioning, was empty.
This, on the Jewish day of rest and worship, gives you an idea of how time has changed the ways of that section of Manhattan into which poured the millions fleeing the pogroms, the Cossacks and the other European elements of outrage which made New York the largest Jewish population center in the world.
From the numbered streets beginning with First, down to the old commercial district, and from the Bowery to the East River, about 600,000 Jews, nine-tenths of them European refugees, lived for generations in squalor, dirt and congestion. Most of them followed devoutly their orthodox faith and rituals. No razor ever touched a male face. Girls from the marriageable age onward never exposed their hair, but hid it under wigs. All activities ceased Friday at sundown, after which, until dark on Saturday, no Jew could carry anything in his pockets--money, watch, keys, even a handkerchief. No Jew could light a fire or a candle or a lamp. For heat and illumination, Gentiles were hired and paid to strike the matches.