Jerome Myers is well known to enthusiasts of early 20th-century American painting for his sympathetic depictions of Manhattan’s Lower East Side immigrant neighborhoods. During a career that spanned almost 50 years, he recorded the daily activities and special rituals of those who, having recently arrived in the United States, congregated in communities that fostered the culture, religion, and traditions of their homelands. Myers was particularly drawn to the animation, energy, and color of ethnic neighborhoods’ kaleidoscopic marketplaces. Life on the East Side depicts an open-air market in the Jewish quarter of the Lower East Side. Vendors’ mobile carts and freestanding stalls display comestibles to an assembly of predominantly female customers. The impression is of a pleasant scene of neighborhood life captured spontaneously by a serendipitous observer. Myers’s brushwork is loose, which gives the feeling of perfunctory or speedy application, and the perspective is slightly off in a casual, unstudied way. He painted similar scenes in Paris but observed that when immigrants “merge here with New York, something happens that gives vibrancy I didn’t get in any other place.”
Between 1881 and 1910, more than 1.5 million Jews immigrated to the United States, many settling in the Lower East Side. Here, they formed the world’s largest Jewish community, which stretched from the Bowery to the East River between Division and Houston Streets. Writing in 1915, Lillian Wald, nurse, social worker, and author, remembered how two decades earlier the East Side aroused a “vague and alarming picture of something strange and alien: a vast crowded area, a foreign city within our own for whose condition we had no concern.” Gradually, artists, social workers, and authors explored and publicized the East Side’s densely packed foreign communities, and this formerly ignored region of the city became a subject of fascination, debate, and anxiety.
Some argued that it posed a threat to Americans’ physical well-being and the nation’s social health; the WPA Guide to New York City, for instance, characterized the “crowded, noisy, squalid” neighborhood as a “slum” and a “ghetto.” Prevalent early 20th-century visual and literary descriptions of the Lower East Side reinforced this impression. They tended to focus on overpopulated and ramshackle tenement buildings; crisscrossing laundry lines; narrow streets and alleyways; and dense crowds of the malnourished, dirty, and even criminal inhabitants (see, for instance, George Bellows’s Forty-two Kids or Cliff Dwellers [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] George Bellows, Cliff Dwellers, 1913, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund). But Myers offered a more romantic view. As he noted in his autobiography: “My love was my witness in recording these earnest, simple lives, these visions of the slums clothed in dignity, never to me mere slums but the habitations of a people who were rich in spirit and effort.”
Open-air markets such as the one in Life on the East Side were regarded as both picturesque and alarming. Myers saw encapsulated in their barter, gossip, and humor the “symphonic freedom” of New York’s East Side, a favorable view reflected in the painting. Unlike George Luks’s Street Scene (Hester Street) [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] George Luks, Street Scene (Hester Street), 1905, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 40.339, for example, which also depicts a teeming open-air market in the Jewish quarter, Life on the East Side allows the viewer to easily access the market: the urban square is spacious, the pavement opens invitingly from the center of the canvas’s lower edge, and an expanse of pale sky is visible overhead. Luks’s congested bottleneck of an avenue, by contrast, is overwhelming, claustrophobic, and virtually impenetrable; it is more a mob scene than a place to go shopping.
Many declared such open-air markets a “menace to sanitation,” and they were earmarked for eradication in the 1930s. Their relocation to more hygienic indoor venues was part of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s aggressive campaign to sanitize, revitalize, and modernize the Lower East Side. Myers acknowledged that “daily existence” for East Side immigrants “mingles the old and the new,” but Life on the East Side, with its quaint pushcarts, old-fashioned costumes, and idyllic mood, indicates a resistance to, if not an outright rejection of, modernization in favor of tradition. Indeed, Myers’s market reads as a village-like enclave surrounded on all sides by an ominous and intrusively modern New York City. In the background looms Manhattan’s skyline, an emblem of Machine Age technological progress. In fact, the year Myers painted Life on the East Side witnessed the completion of the Empire State Building, which surpassed the Chrysler Building as the world’s tallest skyscraper.
The idea that Myers’s market might be read as a besieged refuge or beleaguered sanctuary is underscored by the expression on the face of the old man standing just to the right of center. His bright white hair and beard form an arresting halo against the drab palette of the architectural background above his stooped, black-clad shoulders. His gaze is direct and hovers somewhere between keen suspicion and outright confrontation. Striking a distinctly disquieting note in the ostensibly harmonious scene, his full-frontal posture acts as a barrier blocking easy passage into the scene; we viewers are apparently not as welcome in the protective confines of the market as we might initially have thought.
Life on the East Side subtly testifies to the threat of disruption to which these tight-knit communities—financially poor, perhaps, but culturally and spiritually rich, in Myers’s assessment—were subjected during the 1930s. Myers appears to have been conflicted about the systematic eradication of colorful scenes of urban immigrant life like the open-air marketplaces when he wrote in his 1940 autobiography, “It is not for me to say that conditions are not better in the beautified and sanitary New York of today.” His conclusion, “To me the human drama seems to have been diluted, to have become thin and respectable,” voices a nostalgic lament visualized in subtly melancholic paintings like Life on the East Side.
Adam Greenhalgh
August 17, 2018
