More from Manhattan's Lower East Side: Trees, Vacant Lots, and the World's Best Donuts
Unless I just haven't been paying attention--which is possible, as my head's usually somewhere in outer space when I'm a pedestrian--I've never once noticed a tree on a Manhattan street before. That streak was broken when I walked down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, just north of Delancey Street.
The Williamsburg Bridge, the modern icon of gentrification, pokes through the view of lower-income housing.
Delancey Street, which seems like a superhighway in comparison to the Lower East Side's narrow, almost quaint side streets. As much as parts of the neighborhood have yuppie-fied, streets like Clinton Street and Orchard Street (pictured below) still feel like a time warp back to the tenement times of the 1890s.
This tenement, 97 Orchard Street, was turned into a museum--a concept that is incredibly strange to older people who once lived in buildings just like it. (Fun fact: I was once a tour guide at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.)
Not a museum, but very much a functioning store, is Guss' Pickles, which has weathered the myriad changes in the neighborhood (albeit in various locations, including, at one point, in the Tenement Museum's basement) since 1910.
The eggplant store, however, was not so lucky.
Oh, but now we're getting into the good stuff. The Doughnut Plant sells what must be the world's most expensive donuts, but if you're going to spend $8.50 on two donuts and a lemonade anywhere, do it here. Each donut is the size of two donuts, and some of the flavors are eye-popping. The peanut butter and jelly donut was a bit unusual, but the coconut cream donut could best be described as, um, orgasmic.
And in honor of Earth Day, I made sure to place my trash in the Buick-sized trash can. One must be pretty conceited to have their name put on a garbage can. Nice work, Councilman Alan Gerson.