The first mass rent strike in New York City took place in the Lower East Side in the spring of 1904, spreading to 2,000 families across 800 tenements and lasting nearly a month.

Most buildings were crowded multifamily tenements that were shabbily built, were fire traps and often lacked proper sanitation services.

[4] In 1902, housewives on the Lower East Side organized a community boycott of kosher butchers in response to a price increase.

[1] The strike relied on organizing tactics learned from the kosher boycott and contemporary papers such as The Daily Forward explicitly drew connections between the two events.

[3] The United Hebrew Trades, the Workmen's circle, and other local unions formed the New York Protective Rent Association (NYPRA), modeled on landsmanshaft, Jewish fraternal and mutual aid societies,[3] in early April 1904.

[6] The assembly elected socialist Sam Katz as temporary chairman and Bertha Liebson, then 17 years old, as treasurer due to her canvassing of the Lower East Side for financial support for the strike.

[7][8] The lead organizers planned to overwhelm the municipal courts with eviction cases and force them to dismiss them en masse.

[7] The NYPRA contained approximately 1,000 members but fell under internal divisions between being explicitly socialist or focused on the single issue of tenancy.