You probably know that Saturday Night Live comic Michael Che grew up on the Lower East Side. He doesn’t live in the neighborhood anymore, but apparently found himself at Katz’s Deli the other night. Che definitely had some things to get off his chest:
Che lived in the Alfred E. Smith Houses and attended P.S. 42. He’s never been shy about discussing the old neighborhood.
In a 2014 interview with the Village Voice, he said, “I’d never want to pay a lot of money to live on the Lower East Side because it’s a ghetto. It’s like the first ghetto in New York… A Lot of these old buildings, people paying $3000 a month, were like some poor Jewish family, you know they fit seven in there, in this one bedroom tenement, and now it’s some girl from Seattle, (her) loft studio. It’s kind of sad but that’s the way it is.”
Then there was this piece from 2013 in which Che visited a Lower East Side bodega for a riff on gentrification.
