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An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side
PublicAffairs
April 2011
On Sale: March 22, 2011
352 pages
ISBN: 1586487124
EAN: 9781586487126
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
When Katharine Greider was told to leave her house or risk
it falling down on top of her and her family, it spurred an
investigation that began with contractors' diagnoses and
lawsuits, then veered into archaeology and urban history,
before settling into the saltwater grasses of the marsh that
fatefully once sat beneath the site of Number 239 East 7th
Street. During the journey, Greider examines how people balance the
need for permanence with the urge to migrate, and how the
home is the resting place for ancestral ghosts. The land on
which Number 239 was built has a history as long as
America's own. It provisioned the earliest European settlers
who needed fodder for their cattle; it became a spoil of war
handed from the king's servant to the revolutionary victor;
it was at the heart of nineteenth-century Kleinedeutschland
and of the revolutionary Jewish Lower East Side. America's
immigrant waves have all passed through 7th Street. In one
small house is written the history of a young country and
the much longer story of humankind and the places they came
to call home.
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