by Yori Yanover

Historian Joyce Mendelsohn with her new book (and shopping bag)

read through Joyce Mendelsohn’s newly updated and revised The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited the way I imagine one reads through their unauthorized biography. Let’s face it, I was fishing for little inaccuracies, for tiny guffaws, to gratify my jealous proprietary impulses.

I caught a few, most of which, to be fair, stemmed from the fact that this update stops in April, 2009. So the Young Israel Synagogue’s disastrously halted conversion into luxury condominiums is still celebrated innocently; and the Lulav and Esrog market on Essex and Canal Streets is still described as large and colorful (it was down to two tables and meager offerings this year).

But having thus shown off my local patriotic vigilance, I have to admit that I loved the revised work, and, compared to, say, the sheer incompetence of the New York Times’ report on co-op Shabbes elevators, Joyce Mendelsohn stands out as a beacon of familiarity with her subject matter. Mendelsohn’s knowledge of history is impeccable, and her ability to nudge the details of local events into the larger context of national and even world history is inspiring. Doing this within the format of brief, tour-guide entries is brilliant. Take a look, for instance, at her successful treatment of the different settlement houses, where she intertwines the social with the political against the background of history.

The challenge of dividing the book into five distinct tours, enabling the reader to follow the text while avoiding bikes and baby carriages on the actual streets, proves elusive, as Ms. Mendelsohn herself willingly admits. The tour dedicated to the Jewish LES is invaded time and again by sneaky Buddhists and Catholics; the culture track is detoured by several synagogues – because you simply can’t walk any of our streets and keep things in logical order.

Indeed, I suspect that had Mendelsohn enforced a stricter adherence to the themes of her tours, we would have lost much of the color and grandeur of the sexiest neighborhood on the planet.

Obviously, this book is just as enjoyable if you never take it out for a test walk. So leave it on the coffee table for the occasional leaf-through, flip it open anywhere, lean back and take in Mendelsohn’s calm tone, rich in detail but almost judgment-free (I particularly reveled at her classy restraint in describing the Blue building – and using an old photograph of Ratner’s instead of the azure monstrosity that replaced it).

Paul Margolis’s accompanying photographs blend successfully with the period images, to the point where I had to check the credit occasionally, to be sure which was which.

The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited: History and Guide to a Legendary New York Neighborhood (Paperback), Columbia University Press, 2009, 312 pages, $18.95.