Lower East Side Historic District (Boundary Increase)

This expansion of the Lower East Side Historic District adds all or part of 11 blocks south of the original boundary in Manhattan. It holds 108 newly contributing buildings, mainly five- and six-story tenements mixed with three- and four-story early-19th-century houses that were raised and converted as the area changed. The land was once part of the Rutgers family estate, and the blocks were laid out before the 1811 street grid, which gives them a different orientation from the rest of Manhattan. The architecture ranges from Federal and Greek Revival to Italianate, Queen Anne, Neo-Grec and Beaux-Arts. All Saints Church, attributed to John Heath, dates from 1827-9. Two Depression-era housing complexes, Amalgamated Dwellings (1930) and Vladeck Houses (1939-40), show the shift toward cooperative and public housing. The area is significant because much of the southern Lower East Side was cleared in the 1930s and later, leaving these blocks as the surviving record of the neighborhood's immigrant history and its affordable housing.