The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.

I choose to be American, I choose to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I choose to have Puerto Rican/Jewish neighbors, and I choose to maintain my Chinese identity.

When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.