Since the only constant in big cities is change, a place like New York is an instant anxiety-provoker for inhabitants who have an ambivalent attitude towards change.

I was thinking about this the last couple of days when wandering around Manhattan's East Village area, where something called the International Fringe Festival was taking place. No less than 180 productions, none of them like anything you'd ever see on Broadway, were playing in far-flung rooms that may or may not have been air-conditioned. (One place called Paradise was such a sweat-box during the hot wave we were having that it begged a name change: Hell.)

At the end of the 1800s, the Lower East Side was the area through which thousands of emigrants passed on coming to America. Over the decades, the populations have changed. Jews got much of the press for having settled there, but Irish and Chinese also spent various amounts of time in tenements lining the narrow streets. During the second half of the last century, so many Hispanics moved into the neighborhood that the Lower East Side became Loisaida.

Now, however, the area is like everywhere else in Manhattan: it's being gentrified. For the time being, people paying $2400 a month for two-bedroom apartments are living cheek-by-jowl with people paying a good deal less. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with improving these mean blocks. On the contrary, there's something appealing about boutiques opened by new designers or art galleries showing local talent. At the same time, however, it's dismaying to see ethnic touches that lent so much personality to the community disappearing.

For a long time, one of the main thoroughfares has been Orchard Street, where merchants have sold items like apparel, and sheets and towels are greatly discounted. Prominent among them has been Fine & Klein, where ladies' handbags are the attraction. When I looked for it, fearing the worst, I was glad to discover the best. Fine & Klein is still where it seems always to have been. Its days, like the days of just about everything in New York, are undoubtedly numbered. But for now it goes on, immutable.

Also by David Finkle:
Coffee house blues
The Zen of jay-walking