Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [594]
SETTLING IN
People had marveled at the almost overnight construction of uppertendom’s fashionable quartier, but they were boggled by the emergence of a huge German metropolis within their precincts. If Manhattan’s Germans had set up their own city in 1855, it would have been the fourth largest urban agglomeration in the United States—third largest if joined by Brooklyn’s Germans. New York City had become one of the three capitals of the German-speaking world, outranked only by Berlin and Vienna.
Roughly half these newcomers were crowded into a mammoth ethnic enclave known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany). The phenomenon was new to New York, new to the United States. Never before had tens of thousands of foreigners, to whom the English language and American ways were virtually unknown, congregated in such close quarters.
At first, the nucleus of Kleindeutschland lay within a five-block span between Canal Street and Rivington Street. The cobbled or unpaved north-south arteries of Elizabeth, Bowery, Chrystie, Forsyth, and Eldridge were lined with two- to four-story buildings (many of wood) behind which, reached by a maze of alleyways, lay internal courtyards crowded with industrial workshops. From this initial base camp, immigrants pushed north above Houston toward 14th Street in the 1840s and 1850s and east from Third Avenue, through the alphabet avenues, down toward the East River shore, which grew dense with breweries, coalyards, factories, shipyards, and slaughterhouses.
To outsiders Kleindeutschland, with its wealth of German shops, seemed a uniformly Teutonic mass, but the area was far from homogeneous. Quite apart from the admixture of Irish, English, and older American residents, the “German” residents in fact hailed from very different cultural and linguistic regions. “Germany,” after all, was a patchwork of thirty states, and on close inspection Kleindeutschlanders dissolved into a welter of Plattdeutsche and Hessians, Bavarians and Prussians. They were fragmented and spatially sorted along religious lines too. German Jews, for example, concentrated at first in the area bounded by Grand, Stanton, Ludlow, and Pitt. It was here, on Norfolk Street between Rivington and Delancey, that Anshe Chesed built its synagogue in 1849. In the 1850s Jews pressed north with their fellow Germans.
The remainder of the new Germans headed for the urban frontier and formed villages composed substantially of countrymen, much as did their peers who settled in Argentina and Chile. In Manhattan, Yorkville was the leading outer enclave. Between 76th and 100th streets—north of the fire district—cheap wooden housing was available. It was also possible to find work close by or to commute downtown by horsecar. In Brooklyn, Germans constituted two-thirds of the population of Williamsburgh as early as 1847, and Bush wick became known as Dutchtown, from a phonetic rendering of “Deutsch.” Those without local jobs in the tailoring shops or shipyards could float to work, reading their Long Island Zeitung, on steam ferries that arrived every five minutes at Kleindeutschland’s Grand Street. Up in Westchester, Gouverneur Morris II—his ancient manor lands now profitably accessible from Manhattan via the New York and Harlem Rail Road—began to sell off parcels to Germans, among others, and they flocked to villages like Morrisania, Mott Haven, Port Morris, and Melrose.
In Queens, College Point emerged as an industrial town that might well have been transplanted from Germany’s Ruhr region. After Conrad Poppenhusen’s Hamburg vat dyeing business was destroyed by fire, he moved his family to Williamsburgh in 1843 and began manufacturing whalebone brushes, combs, and corset stays. Just as whaling declined in the early 1850s, Poppenhusen learned that Charles Goodyear had figured out how to transform natural rubber into a whalebone substitute.