Rivington Street is a street in the

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

borough A borough is an administrative division in various English-speaking countries. In principle, the term ''borough'' designates a self-governing walled town, although in practice, official use of the term varies widely. History In the Middle A ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, which runs across the Lower East Side neighborhood, between the

Bowery The Bowery () is a street and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north.Jackson, Kenneth L. ...

and

Pitt Street Pitt Street is a major street in the Sydney central business district in New South Wales, Australia. The street runs through the entire city centre from Circular Quay in the north to Waterloo, although today's street is in two disjointed sect ...

, with a break between Chrystie and Forsyth for

Sara D. Roosevelt Park Sara Delano Roosevelt Park is a park in the Lower East Side of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The park, named after Sara Roosevelt (1854–1941), the mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stretches north–south along seven blo ...

. Vehicular traffic runs west on this

one-way street One-way traffic (or uni-directional traffic) is traffic that moves in a single direction. A one-way street is a street either facilitating only one-way traffic, or designed to direct vehicles to move in one direction. One-way streets typical ...

. It is named after

James Rivington James Rivington (1724 – July 4, 1802) was an English-born American journalist who published a Loyalist newspaper in the American colonies called ''Rivington's Gazette''. He was driven out of New York by the Sons of Liberty, but was very like ...

, who under cover of writing one of the most infamous Loyalist newspapers in the American colonies, secretly ran a spy ring that supplied

George Washington George Washington (February 22, 1732, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of ...

with information. Early in the 20th century, the street was the home of many Italian and Jewish immigrants, hence the birthplace of many second generation Italian and Jewish Americans.

George Burns George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum; January 20, 1896March 9, 1996) was an American comedian, actor, writer, and singer, and one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, radio, film and television. His arched eyebr ...

lived there for a time.

Points of interest

The site of the second African burial ground in New York lies between Rivington and

Stanton Street Stanton Street is a west-to-east street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, in the neighborhood of the Lower East Side. The street begins at the Bowery in the west and runs east to a dead end past Pitt Street, adjacent to Hamilton Fish P ...

s, now a playground in the Sara D. Roosevelt Park. The M'Finda Kalunga community garden is also at this location. Several functioning synagogues remain on Rivington Street, a reminder of the large

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

ish immigrant population that once inhabited the Lower East Side. The synagogue of the

First Roumanian-American Congregation The First Roumanian-American Congregation, also known as Congregation Shaarey Shomayim ( he, שַׁעֲרֵי שָׁמַיִם, "Gates of Heaven"), or the Roumanishe Shul (Yiddish language, Yiddish for "Romanian synagogue"), was an Orthodox Judai ...

existed from about 1860 until 2006. The Rivington Street municipal bath was located on Rivington Street from 1900 to 1975. In the early 1980s, Rivington Street between Essex and Bowery earned notoriety as a "drug supermarket" famous for "having the best drugs in the city." Rivington Street is a cross street to the Lower East Side's main thoroughfares. It has, in recent years, become part of an area known as "Hell Square"; there is a high saturation of restaurants and bars along the street. Notable establishments on Rivington Street include the University Settlement House (the first

settlement house The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and s ...

in New York), the Rivington Street Settlement house (established 1889), the social center called ABC No Rio, and the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center, and the newly constructed 21-story Hotel on Rivington.

In popular culture

Rivington Street was used for the cover to the Beastie Boys' album ''

Paul's Boutique ''Paul's Boutique'' is the second studio album by American hip hop group Beastie Boys, released on July 25, 1989, by Capitol Records. Produced by the Dust Brothers, the album is composed almost entirely from samples, and was recorded over two ...

''. The Rivington School art movement was named after an abandoned public school building located on Rivington Street. In 1979,

Genya Ravan Genya Ravan, a.k.a. Goldie (born Genyusha Zelkovicz; April 19, 1940) is an American rock singer and music producer. She was lead singer of The Escorts, Goldie and the Gingerbreads, and Ten Wheel Drive. Life and career Childhood Ravan was bo ...

wrote and recorded her autobiographical song "202 Rivington Street", the address being where her family settled after their escape from the Holocaust in 1947. Like much of her work, including "Jerry's Pigeons" from her 1978 album ''Urban Desire'', the ballad contains numerous references to neighborhood landmarks, including Pitt Street Park. "Laundry on strings hanging from iron bars with nowhere to escape" - From "202 Rivington Street" by Genya Ravan (1979): "Oh darlin, the New York City Jammed my Brain, all I get from this city is heat and my heaters don't care".

D.W. Griffith David Wark Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was an American film director. Considered one of the most influential figures in the history of the motion picture, he pioneered many aspects of film editing and expanded the art of the na ...

's 1910 film In the Ghetto begins in Rivington Street. There are authentic sequences of the Rivington Street markets in that film, corresponding with the photography of George Grantham Bain in the inset above. The novel ''Rivington Street'' by Meredith Tax tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family from Russia's life on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. In

Moyshe Nadir Yitzchak Rayz (1885, Narayiv – 1943, Woodstock), better known by his pen name Moyshe Nadir (Yiddish: משה נאדיר ; also transliterated "Moishe") was an American Yiddish language writer and satirist. Rayz was born in the town of Narayiv, in ...

's 1932 Yiddish poem, "Rivington Strit" (Rivington Street), the poet meets an old Jewish peddler who extemporizes a poetic history of the area. In the movie ''

A Hatful of Rain ''A Hatful of Rain'' is a 1957 American drama film about a young married man with a secret morphine addiction, based on a 1955 Broadway play of the same name.What Makes Sammy Run?'', the protagonist Sammy Glick turns out to have lived on Rivington Street at the beginning of his career, then named "Samuel Glickstein", when he is hired as a copy boy by ''The New York Record''. The street is described by the narrator as one of a conglomerate of "jumbled ghetto streets" into which millions of Jews are crowded.

Lady Gaga Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta ( ; born March 28, 1986), known professionally as Lady Gaga, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. She is known for her image reinventions and musical versatility. Gaga began performing as a teenag ...

makes mention of The Rivington Rebels, a group of local area partiers, in her 2011 studio album '' Born This Way''. The lyrics, from the track "Heavy Metal Lover", are as follows, "Dirty pearls and a patch for all The Rivington Rebels. Let's raise hell in the streets, drink beer, and get into trouble." In Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Rivington Street is revealed to be the location of Jacob's bakery.

References

External links

Rivington Street: New York Songlines

- photographs of all storefronts on Rivington St.

Hoodlow
{{coord, 40, 43, 10.86, N, 73, 59, 13.82, W, region:US, display=title Streets in Manhattan Lower East Side