And this is where it all began – if we are ever tempted to feel that our lives are not comfortable enough. How miraculous that the vast majority of immigrants survived this, kept their families together, and made a contented new life for themselves – in the New World.

One of our obsessions is that we are creating an epidemic of loneliness by having online shopping, closing libraries, reducing bus services – and so on. The families on the Lower East Side may have been very poor but at least they weren’t lonely.

This week on the Post was inspired by the catalogue of a 1960s exhibition:The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life 1870-1924 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Of all the extraordinary photographs, this was the most memorable: Woman and Children in the Kitchen 1915 by Jessie Tarbox Beals. It should haunt us all day today as we go about our comfortable lives.

George Luks (1867-1933) painted Hester Street in 1905. ‘Hester Street had become home to a recently arrived population of Eastern European Jews and the site of a daily open-air market where thousands shopped for their necessities. It was a scene from which New Yorkers accustomed to genteel shops and formal public etiquette would have recoiled.’ (here).

Sometimes it seems important to be removed from one’s comfort zone and made to confront something completely different: so this week on the Post turn of the (last) century images of Hester Street in New York. This was inspired by this unmissable video of the boat arriving and immigrants starting life in the New World: six minutes in there is  footage of the Hester Street fish market. This photograph of the street, looking West from Essex Street, is available as a print.

Finally: every time we go to Paris we make a pilgrimage to the spot where Emma Smith wrote The Far Cry. And, famously, was photographed by Robert Doisneau without her knowing.

And then, for more battery recharging, it was the rue Cherche-Midi: first Poilâne.