A modern day 'Bowery Boy'

Eric Ferrara has got to love the Lower Eastside.

First, his roots are here. He's a fourth generation native New Yorkers, and a true product of the Lower East Side melting pot: his ancestors arrived in New York City from Sicily (1880s), Ukraine (1909), Russia (1917) and Naples (1910s).

Second, he founded the Lower Eastside History Project, an award-winning center for research, information, and tours of the LES. And if that weren't enough, he also founded the East Village Visitors' Center and the Museum of the American Gangster.

Then, there's his books. The most recent is "The Bowery: A History of Grit, Graft, and Grandeur" -

"...celebrated as a haven of counterculture, entertainment and theater and denigrated as New York's "Skid Row. Home to bums, bohemians, criminals, artists, performers and the rich and poor alike, the Bowery has attracted the most diverse population of any place in all of New York City's history."

Yes, if you want to dig a little deeper into an amazing time in New York's not-too-distant past - Eric's the guide you want. Check out upcoming events on the LESHP website!!

'Monk Eastman'

By 1900, Eastman and his gang had laid claim to all of the Lower Eastside.

An excerpt from Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York"

".. He began life with a bullet-shaped head, and during his turbulent career acquired a broken nose and a pair of cauliflower ears.. He had heavily veined sagging jowls and a short bull neck, plentifully scarred, as were his cheeks. ... He accentuated his ferocious and unusual appearance be affecting a derby hat several sizes too small, which perched precariously atop his shock of bristly, unruly hair.

He could generally be found strutting about his kingdom very indifferently dressed, or lounging at his ease in the Chrystie street rendezvous without shirt, collar, or coat.

His hobby was cats and pigeons. Monk Eastman is said to have owned, at one time, more than a hundred cats and five hundred pigeons, and although they were offered for sale at his Broome Street pet shop, it was seldom he could be induced to part with any of them.

He sometimes went abroad, on peaceful missions, with a cat under each arm, while several others trailed along in his wake. He also had a great blue pigeon which he had tamed, and which perched on his shoulder as he walked.

"I like de kits and boids," Eastman used to say. "I'll beat up any guy dat gets gay wit' a kit or boid in my neck of de woods."

Timothy D. Sullivan - a legend erased by time

"I believe in liberality. I never ask a hungry man about his past. I feed him, not because he is good, but because he needs food." - Tim Sullivan

Isn't it remarkable that a man who embodied everything, both good and bad, of the Lower East Side, could have vanished from our collective memory so quickly?

Sullivan was full of contradictions. He was generous, a powerful ally to immigrants and women, a model kid who came out of the slums and worked his way up to position and power. He was also the colleague of gangsters, a receiver of graft, a compulsive gambler, the ultimate political insider.

He never lost an election.

I think he must have had such charisma it could have knocked you over.

The New York Times did a profile of him in 2009. The current perspective on Tim Sullivan is primarily as criminal. But, Tammany, and Tim personally won the fervent loyalty of many working people - people who preferred Tim's brand of politics to anything that the uptown Protestant reformers had to offer.

Complexity often gets erased by time. But then, history is never a single story.

The Bowery Wars - Part 1

"I am a thorough New Yorker and have no narrow prejudices." - Timothy D. Sullivan, congressman and leader of Tammany Hall

We're getting ready to open a new music-theater piece - THE BOWERY WARS - Part 1 of a two part epic about the Lower East Side circa 1903. We will be performing it outdoors in the streets. For more info, check our website: www.downtownart.org

THE BOWERY WARS is set in the fall of 1903, when Tammany Hall's disgraced Democrats battled to retake City Hall, and the violence between The Eastmans and the Five Pointers over control of the Bowery exploded into the worst gun battle New York had ever seen. It raged over six hours and involved over 100 gangsters, but not a single arrest was made, not a single witness would come forward.

Featured historical characters include Big Tim Sullivan and Charlie Murphy of Tammany Hall; Big Bill Devery, former Chief of Police; Monk Eastman and his wife Margaret; and Paul Kelly, leader of the Five Points gang.

In the coming weeks, I will post excerpts and quotes that either appear in our piece or have been a source of inspiration.

Excerpt from 'The Waistmakers' Opera'

Triangle Factory Fire remembrance

Today we are remembering how one hundred years ago a fire broke out in a factory a few blocks to our west. How 146 workers died in that fire.

We are not a people who spend much time thinking about the past. We are a busy people, a forward looking people. So why does this tragedy still haunt us?

Across the street, at 77 East 4th Street, Rosie Friedman lived. She came from Bialystock in Poland when she was 14, part of a flood of Eastern European Jews hoping to leave violence and discrimination behind, hoping for something better in America. She came alone to live with her aunt and uncle here, to find a job and send money home to her family. In her uncle’s tiny apartment, there were also two boarders, five people in a one bedroom apartment, and like many immigrant teens, its likely she would have slept on the kitchen table or on a mat on the kitchen floor. There were some compensations to her life here – the Manhattan Lyceum, next door, offered concerts and lectures, as did Cooper Union and the Educational Alliance. There were dance halls, picture shows, there were young people everywhere. But most of her waking hours, she was a worker. Six days a week she was a worker at the Triangle Factory. Until, at the age of 18, she died in the fire.

Why does her death hurt us still? What is it about the Triangle Factory fire that makes it more than a horror story?

I think that the fire woke us up to to see that a great injustice was taking place. We had been lulled somehow into thinking that the conditions of factory workers were ‘normal.’ That the way the factories were managed by their owners was ‘normal.’ That things were hard for immigrants, but that this was ‘normal.’ It took the photos of Jacob Riis, it took the work of the Settlement Houses, of the newborn unions, and, finally, it took the Triangle Fire to show us that things were not ‘normal’, that in fact, things were not right and they must be, had to be changed. To show us that we as a people had a responsibility to our younger, poorer, less Americanized brothers and sisters - a responsibility which couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be walked away from.

So much was wrong. For Rosie, as a woman, an immigrant, a Jew, a worker, a young person... so much was wrong. Could we really be asking people to put their lives at risk for a job in a factory? What happened on the road to success that had hardened the Triangle bosses, men who had once been sweatshop workers themselves, hardened them so that they fought bitterly against the workers at every step – so that they routinely locked the fire escape doors because they feared their young employees would steal scraps of fabric from their business.

We remember the Triangle Factory Fire. We remember the trapped girls that chose to leap nine stories to their deaths rather than burn. We remember them because we know, that day, we failed them. We have responsibilities to each other, to justice, to fairness, and those responsibilities include that we look at our world closely, and that we question all that seems ‘normal’, because what history teaches us over and over again is that what seems ‘normal’ may in fact, be very, very wrong.

learning and doing

Five years ago we began a writing project at DTA. The past two years, the project has been a close circle and the emphasis has shifted away from time spent producing work, to time spent writing and editing. Week after week, for the past five months, we’ve gotten together. Writers will share what they’ve written and then we go around the circle, letting them know what we respond to, where we’re confused, asking them questions, enjoying the camraderie and support of this small group.

The Writers Project is not an academic exercise. No one learns how to write a play; they write plays anyway. In any case, I wouldn’t be able to teach them how to write a play because I’ve never learned. To teach them, I would have to go back and familiarize myself with all the terms used in a playwriting class, take some lessons on structure, conflict, building character, begin to articulate my own thinking in those terms..... and I might do that someday, but in the meantime, these writers are here and they’re ready to write.

I backed into playwriting – rather similarly to how I backed into directing, designing, choreographing, writing lyrics – all intimidated me but necessity arrived. Fifteen years ago, either I wrote a play or I would have to turn away a fantastic group of 16 girls and find a lot more boys instead. That rubbed me the wrong way, so my first play was born, painfully, created for an all-female cast. Afterwards, it would often seem that each year I would think of the kind of material I wanted to work on with the company ... then be unable to find it.. and, reluctantly, would haul myself back to my computer to write it. I don’t think it was until I had a dozen plays under my belt that I could manage to refer to myself as a playwright. I still have the feeling of being a fraud when I say it now. And I would also say that it’s taken me fifteen years to actually want to sit down and write. Nothing would have happened before if it hadn’t been all those deadlines, the weekly dread of going into a rehearsal where the cast was waiting for the next scene and letting them down. Deadlines and necessity shaped me as a writer.

Learning by doing is a nice phrase. It hardly suggests the terror that can be involved. The chutzpah needed. To start doing something when you don’t know how – to try to figure out how to get better at it while you’re in the middle of doing it – to know that your efforts are going to be publicly scrutinized and evaluated at the end – people have nightmares about this stuff. Yet it’s the practice of being creative. And somehow your infatuation with the idea of writing a whole play, creating a piece of music, of seeing an idea all the way through to its completion... that infatuation or love or ambition or foolishness has to be strong enough to override your natural self-protective instincts. You don’t know how to do something and you do it anyway.

Downtown Art is basically founded on that principle. I direct, write, design and I’ve never had any training in doing those things. Mike composes and plays gorgeous music; he’s never had a class in either. Our company does things they’ve never done before, and we coach them to the best of our ability out of everything we’ve learned from walking down the same path. Our hope is that their own individual voice – their inner GPS – will hang in there and get stronger, smarter, through the process of doing. Then, one day, when they actually are taught how to write a play they will have the sense to pick and choose from the teaching on offer – to select anything that helps them move forward as original creators, and reject anything that muffles or mutes their own unique sensibility.