Ludlow Street

Good evening friends I'm Solomon Bulenrinsky,
I came here all the way from Ludlow Street...

My route is right through Ludlow to the Bowery,
And from the Bowery down to Avenue A.

In these opening lines of the song The Sheeny Glazier, Solomon Bulenrinsky, the Jewish character played by Frank Bush, announces that his home is on Ludlow Street in the heart of New York's Lower East Side. The route he describes, to the Bowery and down to Avenue A, cuts though that neighborhood, which at the end of the nineteenth century was a ghetto for poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. With over half a million Jews living in within a radius of a few blocks, this neighborhood was one of the most densely populated in the world.

These lines would resonate strongly for the audience at the Union Square Theatre, for whom the character was making a local reference. The theatre was on 14th Street, then considered the northern boundary of the Lower East Side. (At that time, the Lower East Side encompassed what is now regarded as the East Village.) For many of the Jewish spectators, Solomon was singing about the very path they had just traveled to the theatre.

Click here for historical accounts of the Lower East Side at the end of the nineteeth century.