Back in the 1980s, New York’s Lower East Side was the premiere shopping destination for the fashionable who loved a good bargain. Customers could pick up the latest leather or fur, knowing that haggling over prices with vendors was simply de rigeur.
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Long before 9/11 put an end to the local garment manufacturing business, many residents were employed at local factories, which handled 70 per cent of all women’s garments made in the city. The neighbourhood, home to the city’s immigrant communities for more than a century, was densely packed with a distinctive mix of Eastern European, Black, Puerto Rican, and Chinese residents.
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The area offered a snapshot of multiculturalism at its height, revealing how diverse populations could peacefully co-exist in the everyday world. At the same time, the neighbourhood suffered at the hands of bureaucrats, who instituted policies like housing inequity and “benign neglect” to create generational cycles of poverty. Despite, or perhaps because of the challenges, the neighbourhood had long been a hotspot for radicalism with reformers, organisers and activists leading the way.
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