Young Russian immigrants, some of the Workers Circle’s earliest Yiddish cultural organizers, used to gather on tenement rooftops in New York City after their grueling work days were over to discuss politics, philosophy, and more. 

Excerpt from A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York by Tony Michels (p. 38-39) 

“On warm evenings clusters of young intellectuals could be found on the Lower East Side’s tenement rooftops. The future Socialist Party leader Morris Hillquit (who came to New York in 1886) used to gather with friends on the rooftop of a Cherry Street tenement, which he describes in the third person:

They felt unhappy and forlorn in their workshops, but at night on the roofs they again lived in a congenial atmosphere. Once more they were students among students, forgetting the miseries of their hard and toilsone lives and enjoying the pleasures of freedom and companionship with the abandon and enthusiasm of youth… It was a slice of old Russian life that was thus transported to Cherry Street by the uprooted young immigrants… Most of their evenings were spent in discussion. And what discussion! There was not a mooted question in science, philosophy, or politics that was not aired in the ardent, impassioned, and tumultuous debate…”