In the 1990’s, TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and S-x in the City brought a little town on the eastern seaboard to prominence: New Yawk City! Today and this month Vernacular Valentine will honor the Big Apple and our fallen service men and women by starting a new series: New Yawk: The Beautiful Dreamer!
New York has many different vernacular styles; some are unique to certain Boroughs and neighborhoods. Narrowing it down to one style is as difficult as picking your favorite feline from the Tony Award winning musical Cats. However, my favorite Cat is Rum-Tum-Tiger and my favorite New York Vernacular Building is the Tenement!
Tenements are the dominant building type on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Lower East Side has been the historical first stop for immigrants to New York. At the turn of the century, this was the densest place in the world with over 250,000 people per square mile. Multiple families were packed into rooms like the pepperoni on an authentic New Yawk pizza. The rooms were so crowded that people took shifts sleeping in beds. It is in these rooms that several New Yawk delicacies were born. Pastrami was invented when a young cobbler left a piece of raw beef sitting on the counter. In the morning the heat and sweat from all the people in the tiny room had cured the beef, turning it into a wonderful sandwich filler and an authentic taste of New Yawk! The pickle was invented in 1901 on Delancy Street, when a cucumber was dropped into a toilet and left for several months.
Today a group of tenements have been turned into a museum "where some overly tall bitch from ohio who just moved to the city to eat gelato gives you a tour of jewish life at the turn of the century."
Let’s roll New Yawk!
New York has many different vernacular styles; some are unique to certain Boroughs and neighborhoods. Narrowing it down to one style is as difficult as picking your favorite feline from the Tony Award winning musical Cats. However, my favorite Cat is Rum-Tum-Tiger and my favorite New York Vernacular Building is the Tenement!
Tenements are the dominant building type on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Lower East Side has been the historical first stop for immigrants to New York. At the turn of the century, this was the densest place in the world with over 250,000 people per square mile. Multiple families were packed into rooms like the pepperoni on an authentic New Yawk pizza. The rooms were so crowded that people took shifts sleeping in beds. It is in these rooms that several New Yawk delicacies were born. Pastrami was invented when a young cobbler left a piece of raw beef sitting on the counter. In the morning the heat and sweat from all the people in the tiny room had cured the beef, turning it into a wonderful sandwich filler and an authentic taste of New Yawk! The pickle was invented in 1901 on Delancy Street, when a cucumber was dropped into a toilet and left for several months.
Today a group of tenements have been turned into a museum "where some overly tall bitch from ohio who just moved to the city to eat gelato gives you a tour of jewish life at the turn of the century."
Let’s roll New Yawk!
1 comments:
in researching the history of the sandwich, i came across the first recorded sandwich: one of matzoh, charoset (to remind us of the mortar spread between those bricks), and horseradish. this sandwich was first recorded by rabbi Hillel the Elder in the first century B.C. that's how jews make whoopie.
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