Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [595]
Germans also flocked to satellite cities in New Jersey. Between 1840 and 1860 Newark’s population soared from seventeen thousand to seventy-two thousand, Jersey City grew from three thousand to thirty thousand, and Hoboken boomed as well. Substantial percentages of these new urbanites were German (and Irish) immigrants— 40 percent in the case of Jersey City—attracted to the manufacturing establishments of Essex and Hudson counties.
Irish immigrants were less densely concentrated. Their only counterpart to imposing Kleindeutschland was the dilapidated stronghold of the Five Points. Here Hibernians clustered by kin and county—a clutch of Corkonians on Mulberry Street, a cluster of Kerryonians on Baxter. But while the Sixth Ward was more Irish than ever, most African Americans having departed, it remained home to Germans, Italians, Chinese, some remaining blacks, and a multinational assortment of sailors.
Rather than joining their compatriots, most incoming Irishmen settled wherever they could find work. As this was usually on far-flung construction projects, their communities were dispersed throughout the metropolitan region. In the Bronx, Irish laborers who built the Croton High Bridge settled in Highbridge; those who worked on the New York and Harlem opted for villages along its path—Melrose, Morrisania, Tremont; and those driving the Hudson River Railroad into the northwestern Bronx gravitated to Kingsbridge. In Queens, those building turnpikes and draining meadows were drawn to Astoria’s “Irishtown,” whose local byways bore names like Emerald or Shamrock Street. In Brooklyn, “Irish Town” referred chiefly to the substantial enclave around the Navy Yard, but there were others. Brooklyn Irish laid out Bedford’s streets and horsecar lines, then stayed on as residents (immigrants constituted 70 percent of Bedford’s population in 1855, and three-fourths of these were Irish). Red Hook housed the Irishmen who built and worked its docks, brickyards, distilleries, warehouses, and factories. By 1855, out of Brooklyn’s total population of 205,250, roughly a hundred thousand were foreign born (47 percent compared to Manhattan’s 51 percent), and of these fifty-seven thousand were Irish, twenty-six thousand German, and eighteen thousand English.
The diversity of immigrant settlements was matched by the variety of housing conditions. While some immigrants’ dwellings were quite substantial, certainly superior to those they had just fled, overall the standard of working-class accommodations in New York City went into steep decline. The 1837-43 depression had virtually halted new construction, so the vast numbers of newcomers were rolling into a seriously understocked city. Propertied New Yorkers responded to the sudden and intensive demand for shelter either by cramming newcomers into existing housing or by building a new kind of structure, the “tenant house” or tenement, designed specifically as a multifamily worker dwelling.
In lower Manhattan, especially around the Five Points, cramming was the strategy of choice. Landlords converted frame houses built for single artisan families into rabbitwarrened boardinghouses, jammed renters in, then jammed some more into sheds and stables. By 1850 an estimated twenty-nine thousand people, most of them Irish, had become unwilling troglodytes, living in cellars, often with two or three families sharing a single soggy space. The Five Points’ Old Brewery alone housed hundreds of poor Irish and blacks.
Kleindeutschland too was carved up and stuffed full: the