The Cooper Union has been located at Bowery and East 7th Street since 1859, when it was created as both a school and a community center: a site of public programming, meetings of local organizations, and a publicly accessible reading room stocked with newspapers in a plethora of languages. Over the years The Cooper Union became more of a college, dedicating the bulk of campus space to activities leading to degrees. Still, due to early embeddedness with the local community, plus the many decades that the college buildings have been a fixture of the neighborhood, The Cooper Union Library and Archives have together accumulated many resources on the Lower East Side - a name which has encompassed neighborhoods also known as the East Village, Alphabet City, Loisaida, and The Bowery.
This guide focuses specifically on information resources related to the history of the Lower East Side that you can access through The Cooper Union Library. For more resources related to Lower East Side history, we recommend searching the archives of the New York Public Library and The New York Historical. Information and experiences related to neighborhood history can also be found via Village Preservation, the Tenement Museum, the Bowery Alliance, and Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.
...and many more!
The Cable (Cooper Union Yearbook) 1979, p. 34; Trash & Vaudeville in its original location at 4 St. Marks near 3rd Avenue
