The Lower East Side has been the arrival point for successive waves of immigrants since the 1840s, when Irish fleeing the Famine settled alongside earlier German Jewish arrivals. By 1900 the neighbourhood was the most densely populated place on earth, its six-storey tenements housing Ukrainian, Romanian, Hungarian and Russian Jewish families in two- and three-room apartments. Orchard Street was then — and remains now in much diminished form — the great outdoor market, a place where pushcart vendors sold everything from pickles to piecework fabrics. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street is one of the best history museums in the city, giving precisely restored tours through the apartments of specific families who lived there between 1863 and 1935.
The neighbourhood transformed again from the late 1990s, when bars and music venues opened to take advantage of the cheap rents, and a generation of young New Yorkers discovered that the L train from Williamsburg stopped at Delancey. The bar and nightlife scene is now one of the most concentrated in Manhattan, particularly along Ludlow Street and Orchard Street south of Delancey. The Jewish delis and appetising shops that survived — Russ & Daughters on Houston Street, opened in 1914, is the outstanding example — coexist with ramen joints, cocktail bars and hotel rooftops. Katz's Delicatessen on East Houston, opened in 1888, remains both a genuine institution and a tourist magnet for the scene from When Harry Met Sally.