Our Background

Our 5 years of painstaking efforts in preserving 100 Orchard Street, the Blue Moon Hotel, are unprecedented. Although they received no funding or grants, it is akin to a public works project, directed at honoring an architect of note, Julius Bokel who built the first German Baptist Church in NYC. The Hotel is a poster child for study in preservation and honoring NYC history. The Hotel has been recognized as One in a Hundred and Fifty to Check In The Western Hemisphere amongst other prestigious award has merited over forty articles NYT, LAT, International Tribune, Bloomberg, Toronto Star etc. The greater good of the project is it   has the capacity to encourageothers not to trample on our urban ruins. The Blue Moon Hotel now functions as a hotel for visits to NYC, a world cultural and financial center is located in this venerated community. The Blue Moon Hotel center instructs art, English, social studies & literature, nutrition, cooking, culture, wellness, with the rich community history, of several centuries, assists students , seniors and has been successful with helping some of the most challenged members of the community . 

It should be emphasized NYS discontinued funding for art instruction, in City schools about 30 years ago, as discussed by Robert Sternberg in an article about Education in the American Scholar now finds our community center intending and partially now, filling the void. We will instruct lower east side and NYC community public school youth and seniors, art and culinary skills which can afford work opportunities, to adolescents of the community as they reach adulthood.  giving these invaluable marketable skills. Post Covid many local seniors are still isolated and there is a remnant of holocaust survivors who need to share time with others and engage in life affirming activities. 

Our community center is located in the historical Lower East Side of the world city, New York City that is gorgeous mosaic imbued, with an abundance of culture, language and finance. The centering of finance and culture established in the twentieth century in New York City enhanced its world city level.

The Blue Moon hotel has long proven its dedication to the betterment of society, serving the community in the most altruistic way possible. We have provided a seven-and-a-half-year space for the Elderidge Street Congregation displaced by a public works project gratis. Our preservation and culinary programs for formerly incarcerated, recovering addicts, inner-cityyouth, helping the homeless all were done gratis.  We are prepared to instruct cooking, nutrition, history and art skills to eager individuals.  This center is both to respect and develop the lives of impoverished young people and enrich seniors with community socialization in the lower eastside community. The community history is reinforced by walking tours and trips.  The walking tours are centered around the Jewish and Italian history, that this community of such rich resources allows adolescents to grow and thrive while seniors are respected and enriched. 

We run a self-start family business that has done much for the community. Despite the communal and economic benefits provided, the Blue Moon Hotel was forcibly shut down and bypassed on pandemic programs, PPP including and subsequent programs. The hotel was closed for 18 months.  At a time when NYC businesses are disappearing the Blue Moon has pressed forward with a cafe and on-site bakery, a kosher cafe/restaurant (in a community that’s been bereft of a kosher restaurant for 5 years) and on-site bakery with the hope of triple training and hiring of local employees.  

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Our Mission

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The Blue Moon Hotel’s Lower East Side Renaissance will train NYC youth in Culinary Arts, Ethics, Culture, and History. Hospitality, and Marketing to help at-risk NYC youth and marginalized individuals of civil society gain confidence and skills for lifegoals. It is also to add to the enrichment of NYC seniors to be respected and indulged often left with limited socialization We encourage a positive outlook, to cause consistency in demeanor, which will help those in need to gain a stronger footing, in their daily lives and the workforce. 

Our community efforts include working with Seniors  are to provide events, entertainment, food while influencing cultural and historic revitalization of the community institutions, historic buildings and houses of worship of the Lower East Side and NYC.  There exists in higher education institutions less emphasis in the humanities and art. 

This was emphasized with an end to reiterate of NY state education funding for the arts thirty years ago in NYC public school education funding which is particularly problematic, for gifted artists in minority communities whom with proper guidance, will thrive as artists due to natural strengths in these expressive creations. Higher education is also phasing out the humanities with a bigger emphasis on skills for employment or STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses. The deemphasized humanities and arts favor the get rich quick schemes in technology and engineering as more important than community and work maintaining a historical perspective important for all backgrounds.  

Your generous contributions will go to the operating expenses of  the Lower East Side Renaissance Corp to maintain this apt community niche of education, culture and historical continuity, for youths, often marginalized and even at risk as latch key youth prone to street life and for seniors to enjoy their golden years.

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Neighborhood history and culture

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The Lower Eastside is a considerate amalgam mostly of Jewish, Italian, Asian and Hispanic persons including many immigrants and others now climate change migrants. Our goal is to remember the immigrant eras of the 1850s, 1880s, 1903 to1915 and the 1930s. 1903 to 1915 were essential to the survival of the Jewish community of Russia. Over two million Russian Jewish refugees escaped to America from 1881 to 1915 through conscientious and exhaustive efforts of financer Jacob Schiff and shipping executive Albert Ballin who helped to rescue millions from the certain deaths of anti-Semitic pogroms, military conscriptions, and revolutionary government change of Russia. 

The Russian Jews mostly traveled then to Hamburg, Bremen, and central Europe ports by train. Initial train travelers then boarded ships to New York with the first destinations after deboarding at Ellis Island, usually the Lower Eastside and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Many Russian Jews remained in the Lower Eastside and started their journey to the boroughs in Williamsburg now consisting mostly of Holocaust survivors from Hungry and Rumania . 

Our community wealth also includes Italians, Hispanics and Asians now each with a history and story of importance to be shared. It is the humanities on the wane in the advanced educational institutions in our technological gadgetry age that we want to maintain and ensure enrichment for the community and for the seniors whose golden years should be enhanced by right and by practice.

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