This book tells about life on the Lower East Side of New York City from 1870 to 1913. People had been coming to New York City from other countries since the 1600s. But in the middle of the 1800s, millions of people from Italy and Eastern Europe came to the city to live and set up businesses. Most of them were Jewish. People who came from other countries wanted to be near people like them. On the Lower East Side, they found a place where other people spoke their language, worshiped the same way, and ate familiar foods. We have illustrated the book with photographs of people and places in New York City from this time period. We have also included artists' ideas of how people lived in in the late 1800s and early 1900s.