Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [384]
Bishop Connolly also presided over the Church’s expansion into Brooklyn. In 1823 St. James Church, at the corner of Jay and Chapel streets, became the first Roman Catholic edifice in a community exclusively Protestant for two centuries. In that same year, Connolly invited Félix Varela y Morales to New York to begin a pastoral ministry among the Irish. They liked the Havana-born priest, an advocate of self-government and the abolition of slavery in Cuba, who published a bristling political magazine, El Haberno, and smuggled it down to Havana. Varela visited the sick and poor at all hours and purchased an old Episcopal church at Ann Street near the Five Points as a base of operations. By the time Connolly died in 1825, New York had thirty-five thousand Catholics, the great bulk of them poor Irish immigrants, and Gaelic working people dominated St. Patrick’s. The Irish had begun to be possessive of the ethnically mixed St. Peter’s too. When the Rev. John Dubois was installed as New York’s new bishop, Irish parishioners angrily opposed the move, stirring irate French Catholics to describe their Irish confreres as “an ignorant and savage lot.”
The House of Israel in New York City also fissured along ethnic, theological, class, and spatial lines. As of 1817 most of the city’s four hundred Jews still lived by the Battery, and Shearith Israel on Mill Street was the only synagogue in town. There was talk of relocating farther north: the edifice was showing its age; some wealthy members, including copper manufacturer Harmon Hendricks, had moved uptown, a long Sabbath walk away; and commercial development was making the area less desirable. Nevertheless, in 1818 the community rebuilt and enlarged the synagogue on its original site.
During the 1820s, however, Jews definitively migrated uptown, sorting themselves out geographically on class lines. The richer families generally stayed west of Broadway, the modestly well off settled between Broadway and the Bowery, and the poorest repaired to Centre, White, and Pearl streets, in or near the Five Points. When German immigration picked up—7,729 Germans arrived in the United States in the 1820s, and 152,454 in the 1830s—it included (beginning in the late 1820s) a substantial number of Jews. As most of these were working class or poor, they too headed for the laboring quarters.
The Germans, along with Jewish migrants of Polish, Dutch, and English descent, were accustomed to Ashkenazic rites, but the established city Jews who ran Shearith Israel insisted on Sephardic ritual, alienating newcomers. The Mill Street temple was also far away, overcrowded, and required a payment of two shillings (for charity) before one could read from the Torah. In 1825, after protesting the latter practice (at the same time poorer Protestants and Catholics were attacking pew rents), the Ashkenazim split away from the parent body. Forming a new congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, they purchased a church on Elm Street, close to where less affluent Jews had settled, and adopted Ashkenazic ritual. In 1828 another split produced Anshe Chesed; more secessions followed as national groups sought their own synagogues. Finally, in 1833, the old Mill Street synagogue was sold off, and Shearith Israel erected an imposing gas-lit edifice on Crosby Street; its consecration in 1834 was attended by the mayor, several Christian clergymen, and many “of the most distinguished gentlemen of the city.”
In working-class Protestant ranks, the Methodist and Baptist “mechanick preachers” of the turn of