Delancey Street is one of the main thoroughfares of Manhattan's Lower East Side, running east from the Bowery to connect to the Williamsburg Bridge and Brooklyn. It is an eight-lane, median-divided street.
Businesses range from delis to check-cashing stores to bars. Delancey Street has long been known for its discount and bargain clothing stores. Famous establishments include the Bowery Ballroom, built in 1929, Ratner's kosher restaurant (now closed), and the Essex Street Market, which was built by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to avoid pushcart congestion on the neighborhood's narrow streets. Until the middle 20th century, Delancey Street was a main shopping street in the predominantly Jewish Lower East Side. As of 2009, the neighborhood around Delancey is a mix of young professionals and artists along with working-class African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Chinese. Gentrification has brought more upscale retail and nightlife establishments.
Delancey Street is named after James DeLancey, Sr., whose farm was located in what is now the Lower East Side.
The IND Sixth Avenue Line and BMT Nassau Street Line of the New York City Subway stop at Delancey Street – Essex Street (F J M Z trains), and the Nassau Street trains also stop at Bowery (J Z trains). The M9, M14, and M15 NYCTA buses stop on Delancey Street. The Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, beneath Delancey and Essex Streets, was a station and balloon loop for streetcars crossing the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn. In 2011, a proposal was presented to create Delancey Underground, an underground public park in which natural light would be directed using fiber optics to create a setting in which trees and grass could be grown indoors.
Famous quotes containing the word street:
“The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)