Orchard Street once ran through the most densely populated neighborhood on earth. The Lower East Side received the largest wave of Jewish immigration in American history between 1880 and 1924, as more than two million Jews fled persecution in Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe and crowded into the tenement blocks around Orchard, Delancey, and Hester Streets. At its peak, Orchard Street was lined with pushcarts from morning to night, vendors selling pickles, clothing, and hardware in a compressed open-air market.
The streets were so crowded you could barely move on a Sunday morning. The Tenement Museum a block from here preserves several apartments in a building at 97 Orchard Street that housed 7,000 immigrants from twenty countries between 1863 and 1935. Out of this neighborhood came some of the most important figures in American entertainment, law, politics, and labor organizing.
The street market tradition barely survives today, but on Sunday mornings Orchard Street closes to traffic and a small echo of the old pushcart market returns.