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By Root 7969 0

Irish women hawked vegetables from streetcorner stands, Germans purveyed small manufactured goods, and Italians sold fruit and flowers. Increasingly, however, Irish, Polish Jews, and arrivals from the mercantile regions of the lower Rhine valley opened independent corner grocery stores. By the mid-1850s the grocery business was dominated by Germans, some of whom had come with capital from the old country, others of whom worked their way up from peddling. Many in turn purchased their supplies from immigrant German farmers who commenced market gardening along the Brooklyn shore from Williamsburgh to Astoria, on well-tilled farms in Flatbush, and even in the pastures, meadows, and woodlands of upper Manhattan. Germans also made substantial inroads as butchers, tobacconists, and newsstand dealers, and by 1855 there were fifteen hundred German bakers, including nine Jewish bakers who could prepare matzohs for Passover.

Immigrants moved into the dry-goods trade as well. Long-bearded Jews, recently arrived from Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Posen, opened used clothing stores along Chatham and Baxter Streets, creating a bazaar-like atmosphere where haggling was the rule. The Irish ran secondhand shops too but dealt more in iron, brass, and copper: by 1855 224 of the city’s 245 junk dealers were immigrants. Successful secondhand clothiers often moved on to establish their own dry-goods stores. By the end of the 1850s German-Jewish shops lined Houston, Division, Bowery, Grand, and lower Broadway. Irish clothiers were fewer in number (eighty-one out of the city’s 403 in 1855) but did very well indeed. By the 1850s Patrick Rogers of County Tyrone, who arrived in 1836 as a half-trained tailor, was running a prosperous men’s clothing store at Nassau and Fulton, with a retail salesroom and a wholesale warehouse that dealt with merchants across the United States. And Charles Knox, a genius at self-promotion, rose from a basement contracting business to being New York’s best-known hatter, personally fitting out rich Manhattanites with new silk toppers and purveying his goods to the nation.

This cluster of second-hand clothing shops along Chatham street reflected the movement of new immigrants—in this instance German Jews—into small-scale retailing during the 1850s. (© Museum of the City of New York)

Dealing alcohol was another route to middle-class status. Irish constituents of Tammany Hall found it particularly easy to get a liquor license from the Board of Aldermen. Many opened porter houses for day laborers, cartmen, and sailors, while others started taverns frequented by skilled artisans, clerks, and tradesmen. Germans specialized in beer halls and wine gardens. Most of these were “lokals,” lively family venues whose regulars came from particular neighborhoods, trades, vereins (organizations), or old country regions, but some were mammoth enterprises. The Deutsches Volksgarten, Atlantic Gardens, and Lindenmuller’s Odeon could seat twelve to seventeen hundred in frescoed halls, and the Concordia and Germania included meeting halls, bars, ballrooms, billiard rooms, and bowling alleys. Liquor flowed as well in half a dozen German-owned hotels, most famously Eugen Lievre’s Shakespeare on Duane Street, rendezvous for literati, freethinkers, and socialists. According to Police Chief Matsell, fifty-five hundred establishments were licensed to sell liquor in 1855.

For all these entrepreneurial successes, the great majority of immigrants wound up in the manual labor force. Indeed they became the manual labor force: by 1855, only twenty-four thousand native-born whites (17 percent) were doing artisanal or unskilled labor, and a significant proportion of these were clustered in a handful of occupations, notably building and printing.

Immigrants dominated some trades by virtue of special skills. German brewers brought a new product with them. New Yorkers were accustomed to English top-fermented ales, porters, and stouts, which tended to spoil in the hot American summers. Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer, immigrants from Prussia, brought