Big Apple History . New York Living . The Young Americans


	Playground on New York's East Side, 1906

Everything seemed to be upside down for newly arrived immigrants on New York's Lower East Side. People lived on top of each other, instead of side-by-side, time was told by a clock not the sun, and perhaps strangest of all, children often acted like parents, and parents acted like children.

Like immigrant kids everywhere, most children of the Lower East Side adjusted to their new life a lot faster than their folks. Their young brains soaked up English at school, and their young legs took them out of the neighborhood. They translated documents for their parents and acted as interpreters when government officials came around. Some even taught their parents at night the lessons they had learned in class that day.

With these changes came problems. Many immigrant parents worried that their children were becoming too American too fast and forgetting the old ways. "[W]e went into the living room ... [and] saw a large Christmas tree," a Jewish immigrant mother wrote of a visit to her son's house, "[M]y husband gave me a signal that we were leaving immediately."

Illustration: Courtesy of Culver Pictures.