Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [881]
63
The New Immigrants
Between 1865 and 1873 over two hundred thousand migrants had arrived in New York City each year. The depression pummeled these numbers downward—in 1877 only sixty-three thousand immigrants passed through Castle Garden—but with the return of prosperity the influx soon set new records.
The old state-run system for processing newcomers buckled, and in 1890 the new federal Bureau of Immigration took over the task. The bureau, surveying the harbor for a site to replace the overburdened Castle Garden, settled on Ellis Island, newly swollen with landfill, and on January 1, 1892, the new immigration station began screening steerage passengers. First- and second-class arrivees were handled onboard ship and allowed to disembark directly on Manhattan. That first year, 445,987 passed through Ellis. By 1897 some 1,500,000 had threaded their way through examinations designed to weed out criminals, lunatics, and potential paupers.
The great bulk of new immigration came from old sources, with German migration actually reaching its peak in the 1880s. Farmers and farm laborers came from Germany’s north and east, uprooted by the ongoing commercialization of agriculture and declining wheat prices. Artisans undercut by factory production left towns and villages, found industrial centers in Silesia and the Ruhr valley as yet unable to accommodate them, and crossed the Atlantic in force (some fleeing the antisocialist laws).
In the 1880s 1,445,181 Germans arrived, constituting 27.5 percent of the total incoming migrant stream, and of these, fifty-five thousand stayed in New York City, a figure that doubled in the 1890s. The German-born population rose steadily from 119,964 (in 1860) to 151,203 (in 1870), 163,482 (in 1880), and 210,723 (in 1890), before leaping to its peak (in 1900) at 324,224.
Collectively—and German unification made provincial groups more conscious of their commonalities—German New York stood third behind Berlin and Vienna as a German-speaking metropolis. Kleindeutschland continued to bulk large as a cultural community—so many lived within its German universe that assimilation proceeded quite slowly—but its spatial boundaries shifted. Kleindeutschland proper shrank to a truncated parallelogram bounded by 14th, Grand, Broadway, and the East River. Secondgeneration Germans continued their uptown exodus to the East Side (between Central Park and the river) and to Brooklyn (especially Williamsburg), where over one-third the German population lived.
Irish emigration was rekindled too, as agricultural depression in the late 1870s raised the specter of another famine. Emerald Isle reinforcements kept the combined Irish-born population of New York and Brooklyn hovering above the quarter-million mark, rising slightly from 260,450 in 1860 to 275,156 in 1890 (an estimated seventy thousand of them Gaelic speakers). While this represented a decline in natal Irish people as a percentage of the total population—from 24 percent to 12 percent—New Yorkers of Irish extraction constituted some 40 percent of the city in the mid-1880s, 5 percent more than the second-ranked German Americans. The metropolitan area thus retained a pronounced Irish flavor, with the heaviest concentrations in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen (between 34th and 57th streets, Ninth and Twelfth avenues) and in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard and Red Hook areas.
Not all newcomers came through Castle Garden or Ellis Island. African Americans continued to leave the South—over eighty thousand departed between 1870 and 1890, over a hundred thousand in the 1890s alone—and the small but steady influx began to replenish both New York’s and Brooklyn’s black communities. Still, the two cities had just 60,666 African Americans resident in 1900—less than 2 percent of the total population. In addition, there were 3,552 foreign-born blacks on hand in 1900, most of them recently arrived from the West Indies, the largest such settlement in the United States. The Tenderloin and San Juan Hill in the west 60s hosted the majority of black Manhattanites.
Despite obvious