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Whatever Happened to Jack Kirby's Downtown New York City Birthplace?

Jack Kirby was born on August 28^th, 1917 in a tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York City. His birth name was Jacob Kurtzberg. His parents were Jewish Austrians and his father worked at a garment factory as many immigrants did to put bread on the table. Jacob would anglicize his name to "Jack Kirby" when he entered the job market as a comics artist and illustrator at the age of 19 in 1936. He wanted to get out of the neighbourhood, away from the poverty, the crime and the violence as soon as he had a chance.

Kirby drew a semiautobiographical short story called "Street Code" in 1983 that was published in Argosy in 1990 as one of his last works. He took from his memories of the squalor and violence of the Lower East Side he grew up in.

As he told Gary Groth in a 1983 interview from the Comics Journal, "I hated the place because I… Well, it was the atmosphere itself. It was the way people behaved. I got sick of chasing people all over rooftops and having them chase me over rooftops. I knew that there was something better."

Once Kirby moved out of the Lower East Side, he did not want to come back, not even to visit.

The address of Kirby's birthplace was 147 Essex Street, and I wondered what happened to it. On a brisk winter afternoon, I decided to head downtown to take a look.

Short answer: it's still there.

I looked it up. It's still the same building Kirby was born in. 147 Essex was built in 1900 and hasn't been demolished to make way for a condominium or fancy overpriced hotel as many buildings on the Lower East Side have been in the last ten years. The five-story walk-up has been renovated several times and probably changed ownership a few times in the last 100 years or so.

Now painted a pretty red and nestled between another renovated tenement building on its left with a Chinese tea shop on the ground floor, 147 is home to Lazar Air conditioning and Heating, with a modern condominium on its right.

The Lower East Side can still be a tough neighbourhood, but nowhere as tough or chaotic as Kirby's time. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, the area was so dangerous that it was considered a no-go zone after 7pm. The Lower East, the East Village and Alphabet City were drugs-ridden, crime-ridden and full of homeless people, but also a place of cheap rent so many members of New York's artistic community lived here for a long time. That began to change in the 1980s when gentrification began to transform Downtown New York. Gentrification only began to hit the Lower East side south of Houston Street in the early 2000s and now it's truly transforming the neighbourhood with condominums, hipster bars, hotels, boutique restaurants, art galleries, a Trader Joe's opening, and the new Essex Crossing shopping and apartment complex scheduled to launch in 2019.

Kirby continued to draw on his memories of the Lower East Side in his most famous work for Marvel Comics. The Yancy Street Gang was a reference to Delancey Street and the street gangs he used to be part of during his youth. In fact, Downtown New York plays a crucial part in the history of American comic books – many of the most renowned artists were the children of immigrants who grew up there and formed gangs to protect themselves from the others. By the time they grew up and became professional artists in the comics industry in the 1930s and 1940s, they already knew each other from the times they ran around beating each other up on the Lower East Side.

147 Essex Street is right smack in the middle of what locals currently call Hell Square, a nine-block party zone bordered by East Houston Street, Allan Street, Delancey Street and Essex Street. The zone is filled with hipster bars, boutique restaurants and clubs, drawing in hipsters, tourists and partygoers from out of town, resulting in a sharp rise in muggings, rapes and violent assaults at night. The high number of bars and liquor licenses granted in the area have directly contributed to the rise in crime. Many of the perpetrators are muggers and gang members from outside the neighbourhood, usually from the Bronx or Brooklyn and drinkers in the Bridge & Tunnel Crowd.

This just goes to show that in many ways, the Lower East Side hasn't changed that much, but it's probably nowhere as hellish or depraved as Jack Kirby's time from 100 years ago.

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