Publishers Noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
I first visited Seward Park on the Lower East Side in 2020, looking for a newspaper box that served as the single distribution point for a publication then much in demand among New York’s writing set: the Drunken Canal. On arrival, I found the newspaper box empty—and my attention drawn instead to a ten-story terra-cotta building presiding over the park. A double-height entry arch declared the tower a public building, and the word Forward emblazoned on one side appeared to claim the neighborhood as its own.
More than half a million people lived on New York’s Lower East Side in 1910 (over five times its current population), of whom about 400,000 were Yiddish-speaking Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe, many working in the sweatshops of New York’s garment industry. In 1890 Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, with photos of the packed, windowless tenements that made such an extraordinary population density possible. That same year, seeking to organize these masses into America’…