Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [589]
Immigrants arriving at the new Emigrant Landing Depot, formerly Castle Garden. From Frank Leslie’s Illutraied Newspaper, December 29, 1855. Here some seven million immigrants, mostly Irish and German, would enter the United States over the next thirty-five years. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Nowhere, however, would the torrent of immigrants have greater impact than in New York City itself. The new arrivals would transform every aspect of life in the metropolis—its patterns of work, housing, religion, politics, and gender—and nowhere would the impact be more dramatic than in the arena of class relationships. Some of the better-off immigrants filtered or fought their way into the city’s upper and middling ranks, but the overwhelming mass of them piled into the laboring classes, ousting or overbearing their predecessors in almost every trade. By the late 1850s New York’s predominantly Anglo-Protestant middle and upper classes would confront a reconstituted working class of which better than three-fourths were foreigners.
IMMIGRANTS AT WORK
New York’s had long been a niche economy, its sectors colonized by competing social groups. Newcomers broke into (or were repulsed from) particular occupations depending on the skills and resources they brought with them and the degree of resistance or encouragement they faced from those already entrenched.
Bourgeois occupations remained relatively open to new arrivals, particular those with access to foreign capital or commodities. These included Gustav Schwab, who represented North German Lloyd, a steamship line that began direct service from Bremen to New York; Bavarian emigré Joseph Seligman, who in 1846 opened a successful drygoods importing house; and B. Westermann and Company, who distributed German books, pamphlets, and periodicals to the rapidly growing German-American market. By 1855 fully 25 percent of New York’s top ten thousand taxpayers hailed from foreign countries.
Fewer lawyers, pharmacists, ministers, and teachers migrated—the professional and clerical middle class remained 85 percent native born—but there were openings for people to service their respective ethnic communities. German journalists and editors found work at the many papers that sprang up to serve the German-language community. Twenty-eight appeared between 1850 and 1852 alone, including the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, published by Oswald Ottendorfer of Moravia, who had fought on the barricades of Vienna in 1848: by 1860 it claimed the largest circulation of any German paper in the world. German doctors were in great demand to staff the Ward’s Island establishment, and by the mid-1850s they constituted an estimated one-third of New York’s physicians. Abraham Jacobi, who arrived shortly after being released from prison for his role in the Revolution of 1848, was readily accepted by his American counterparts and began a lengthy career promoting the new field of pediatrics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The shopkeeping portion of the city’s middle class, by contrast, was completely transformed, in considerable measure because the immigrants’ arrival coincided with, and further exacerbated, a breakdown of New York’s public market system. Guided by the new laissez-faire mentality, the municipality allowed existing markets to deteriorate—apart from Washington Market, which was so lucrative the city replaced it with a larger one—and refused to build new ones in the emerging uptown areas (the farthest north the system reached was roth Street).
This nonexpansion policy created a vacuum, which thousands of small retailers—chiefly immigrants—rushed to fill. Many started as peddlers: