Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [886]
Immigrant Jews accepted such conditions partly because the sweatshop environment was culturally compatible. They were not (always) forced to labor on the Sabbath; they could work with landsmen (fellow countrymen); they could keep their households intact—the family that sweated together stayed together. But mainly they had no choice in the matter. Many were unskilled, in poor health, and locked in competition with one another. Each day at eight A.M. the unemployed shaped up at the corner of Hester and Ludlow streets; the din of negotiating gave it the name of the Khazzer Mark (pig market).
THE LOWER EAST SIDE
As newcomers poured in, Kleindeutschland morphed into the Lower East Side. The original Jewish quarter rapidly expanded outward from its core near the Canal, Hester, and Grand Street job markets. It spread west to the Bowery, east and south toward the river and warehouse districts, still Irish strongholds, and north to Delancey and beyond, pushing the remaining Germans ahead of it into the now shrunken “Dutchtown” that ran from Houston to 14th Street.
Within this terrain, ethnic subdivision was the rule. So many Russians clustered around the Canal to Grand Street core that by 1890, the old Tenth Ward, once predom-’ inantly German, was 70 percent Russian Jewish. Galicians roosted from Grand up to Houston; Hungarians occupied blocks north of Houston and east of Avenue B.
Inside this new if unofficial Pale, density soared as landlords subdivided old row houses into five or six apartments and stuffed in tenants. One house at Essex and York, split into sixteen apartments, warehoused two hundred. Bathrooms were scarce, coal and wood remained the main sources of fuel, kerosene provided lighting, and blocks of ice furnished refrigeration. More spacious five- or six-story tenements went up to house the slightly more affluent, offering reasonably adequate plumbing, heating, and ventilation. But their higher rents forced tenants to take in boarders, and soon these structures too were packed. By 1890 the Tenth Ward had 524 people per acre, the highest density in the city. Within ten years the figure would rise to seven hundred per acre, a rate that topped Bombay’s as highest in the world.
Jews stayed packed like herrings in a barrel in part because they couldn’t afford to commute. When job opportunities did open up in more hospitable surroundings, some moved out with alacrity. In the 1880s one such destination was Brownsville, in a faroff and still undeveloped section of Brooklyn. The little village of one- and two-family houses lay at the outlying end of Vaux and Olmsted’s Eastern Parkway, where it ran into Pitkin Avenue. Here, just west of the orchards and farm fields beyond Rockaway Avenue, a Jewish real estate agent invested in local lots in the mid-1880s, persuaded some cloakmakers to set up shop, and began constructing rows of frame houses for workers (a hundred dollars down, ten dollars a month). By 1892 a Jewish community of four thousand Russians and Poles, complete with synagogues and fraternal organizations, had taken root.
Other newcomers followed trails blazed by Germans and headed to Williamsburg, to Yorkville (where cigar factories provided work), and to Harlem, where by 1890 thirteen hundred Russian and Polish Jews had settled into the Irish-German neighborhood west of Third Avenue. But in such outposts they would remain minorities, whereas the Lower East Side was emerging as a world the Jews had remade for themselves.
Concentration had its benefits. It guaranteed ethnic predominance and cultural familiarity. The streets were packed with landsmen, the stores emblazoned with Yiddish signs, the backyards stocked with chickens—it might have been Odessa. Street and cafe grapevines provided information about