In a city as large and diverse as New York, the neighborhood becomes the locus of power. Clara Lemlich Shavelson understood this, and used it to her advantage. The density of neighborhoods, and the tendency for people to live near others with similar backgrounds can be worked to the organizer’s advantage. After she left union and suffrage organizing, Shavelson’s organizing was conducted in along two interconnected lines—location and identity. With her eye always on the end goals, Shavelson leveraged these two aspects of life in New York City to great effect.

The built environment of a populous city like New York, residential and mixed-use neighborhoods are extremely dense, filled with multi-story multi-family buildings. This was beneficial for Shavelson in that she had an immediate audience. Standing on a box on street corners in Brownsville and later in Brighton Beach, Shavelson could speak directly to a large number of her neighbors daily. The density of the city also made the tenant strikes against landlords and the food protests against local butchers and markets possible. Neighbors could mobilize quickly to come to the aid of a family or entire building being evicted, or of women being arrested, or to shame their neighbors who were buying food when they should be boycotting.

Beyond the physical environment of the city, the forces that led people to live near others with similar backgrounds proved to be important. Most of the people Shavelson lived near, in both Brownsville and Brighton Beach, were people with the same backgrounds–immigrants, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking. It was the women, the mothers and wives and homemakers of this population that Shavelson chose to focus on as the impetus for her organizing. These women, whose primary responsibility was to care for their families and maintain their homes, could understand and relate to the content of Shavelson’s speeches, for she was one of them–a Jewish immigrant mother whose husband’s wages didn’t go as far as it used to. For Shavelson, it was the fact of their womanhood, not their immigrant status, that was a root cause of their oppression.

On a local level, the built environment of the city and people living in identity-based groups played a large part in Shavelson’s ability to organize people to action. It was also possible to utilize cross-neighborhood or city-wide platforms, primarily newspapers, to spread the word and to connect to actions happening in other neighborhoods. This had the effect of making these seemingly disparate and hyper-local actions visible and powerful on the city-wide level.

Whether in the creation of political reading groups, or saving entire buildings of people from eviction, or in city government action on food prices, the organizing and activism by Shavelson and others produced results that impacted the fabric of the city at different levels.

Shavelson’s commitment to radical change were fostered and abetted by the forces at work in the city. She really believed that change, radical change, was possible and that it was only possible through collective action. The collective actions she engaged in were made possible in part by the nature of the city; the built environment, the density and physical closeness of people and buildings, and the ways in which people with similar backgrounds or heritages or identities tend to live in proximity to each other.