ethnic neighborhoods

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe"--Provided by publisher.

Traces the history of the nineteenth-century New York neighborhood known as Five Points where poverty, riots, political scams, and alcoholism combined with the rich cultures of arriving immigrants and gave rise to such characters as Boss Tweed and the Bowery B'hoys.

Marta Moreno Vega chronicles the experiences she had while growing up in East Harlem during the 1950s and 60s, focusing on the way her life was influenced by mambo and merengue music.