Statement from Dr. Elissa Sampson, urban geographer.
Howard Brandstein’s unparalleled commitment to Lower East Side/Loisaida contemporary and erstwhile communities can be seen in many ways. Among other things, he has worked to ensure that Jewish immigrant history is visible in the adaptive reuse of a historic immigrant synagogue that in 1978 he helped turn into the Sixth Street Community Center. Its importance cannot be overstated: without visible resort to the past, we are impoverished in envisioning how immigrants and migrants fought for their rights then, and can now.
Howard has respectfully restored the building’s historic features in ways that have resonance today, including through the addition of murals that memorialize Clara Lemlich, the leader of the nation’s first female immigrant garment workers strike, the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000. This series of murals also introduces viewers to the neighborhood burning down in the 1960s-1970s and to a local history of fighting enslavement and fighting for Black and Latino/a rights. Keeping the building tied to its antecedents in opening it up to broader adaptive reuse, moors community in place.
Howard’s open commitment to the neighborhood can be seen more broadly in the early urban homesteading of vacant buildings that he organized to provide affordable housing as well as in the community land trust that he developed in collaboration with Lower East Side Catholic parishes. More recently, he organized the emergency response at Sixth Street Community Center to provide food, clothing and other essentials to the neighborhood after Hurricane Sandy, and then responded to the pandemic by partnering with mutual aid groups to provide thousands of meals to those in need.
The purpose of boards is to exercise governance intelligently and to fund raise; this one has to ensure that they stick to that original historic mission and in doing so, don’t erase history or the people who embody it.
–Dr. Elissa Sampson
Research Associate and Lecturer, Cornell University
Forthcoming volume, Cornell University Press:
From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954