But there was also a deep political undercurrent running through the tenements, beer halls, and cafes of the Lower East Side, long known as a hotbed of radicalism. Eastern European Jewish socialists, German communists, and Italian anarchists broke bread with American trade unionists and Irish republicans, sharing ideologies and building solidarity across language and ethnic lines. Here, amid the squalor and the shared struggles, the working classes began to dream of something better than the short, cruel lives to which they’d been consigned.
