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LESPI

  • July 15: LES Historic District* Walking Tour

    Walking Tour of Proposed LES Historic District

    Sunday, July 15
    2:00 – 3:00 pm

    Meet at the corner of Hester & Forsyth

    We’ve received a special invitation from LESPI board member (and GSD member) Helena Andreyko:

    The Lower East Side Preservation Initiative (LESPI) was honored to receive the support of the Grand Street Democrats for the proposed historic district on the LES, and is delighted to invite members of GSD for a free tour of the proposed district, Sunday, July 15, 2:00 pm.

    Our tenement buildings have been home to waves of immigrants for generations and were once the center of one of the most vital and bustling centers of commerce in the City. Their facades reflect an era of intricate design and construction that would never be replicated today, but whose intricate features are rarely noticed by pedestrians hurriedly passing by.

    Please join Richard Moses, President of LESPI, for a one hour tour as he points out buildings and the beautiful features that make our neighborhood special and worthy of historic designation.

    The tour is free but we request an RSVP below.

    *Proposed Historic District (so far).

  • GSD supports Lower East Side Historic District

    Preliminary Proposed Lower East Side Historic District.
    At our regular meeting on February 8, Grand Street Democrats voted to support the designation of an historic district on the lower east side. The proposed district encompasses historically intact buildings south of Delancey Street between Forsyth and Essex Streets (including many of the buildings around the Tenement Museum).

    The area has been defined by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, a group of local preservationists who were instrumental in getting parts of the East Village designated as historic districts.

    If you want to support this initiative individually, please add your name to the petition for a lower east side historic district.

    Sign the petition for LES historic district

     
    The text of our letter to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission is below.

    Meenakshi Srinivasan, Chair
    NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
    1 Centre Street, 9th Floor
    New York, NY 10007

    Chair Srinivasan,

    Manhattan’s Lower East Side is recognized as America’s iconic immigrant neighborhood with unsurpassed architectural, historical, and cultural significance to our city, state, and nation. Its great variety of age-old tenements, institutional, and commercial buildings not only enrich the streets with architecture based on human scale and beautifully crafted ornament, but have given the community and its residents a cohesive and stable environment with a strongly identifiable sense of history and place.

    The only way to effectively preserve the historic streetscapes of this vital neighborhood is through New York City historic district designation. Therefore, we call upon the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark, without delay, the historically intact areas of the Lower East Side south of Delancey Street, as proposed by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative and Friends of the Lower East Side.

    Grand Street Democrats is a local club of active Lower East Side residents. We have a keen interest in honoring the unique history of our neighborhood while preserving the area’s opportunity to continue to grow and thrive. Please let us know if there is anything more we can do to assist the LPC in this matter.

    Regards,
    Jeremy Sherber, President
    Grand Street Democrats