Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [890]
MANHATTAN COLONIA
From the beginning of the Civil War until 1880, Italian immigration to the United States had never exceeded thirty-five hundred a year, predominantly from the northern provinces. Then, from 1881 to 1890, the average annual figure jumped to over thirty thousand. In the succeeding decade, Italians poured in at an annual average rate of sixty-five thousand, becoming the most numerous ethnic group entering the United States.
Not all Italians who landed at Castle Garden or, later, Ellis Island stayed in New York. But enough did to transform it into the Italo-American capital of the United States. In 1850 there had been a grand total of 833 Italians in the metropolis. By 1880 the figure had climbed to twenty thousand (of whom twelve thousand were foreign born). By 1900, after two decades of immigration and local reproduction, there would be a quarter-million Italian Americans living in New York City.
Residence meant something different for Italians than it did for Jews. Many young Italian men thought of themselves as migrant workers, perched here only temporarily. Many planned to and did return to Italy once they had saved enough to set themselves up with a farm; others retreated across the Atlantic for a breather—or permanently—when faced with economic adversity. Altogether during these decades perhaps fortythree of every hundred immigrants went back, becoming known, to those who had never left, as Americani.
Even while in-country, their primary mission of making money quickly led them to consider New York more home base than home. They moved about the country to wherever the jobs were, with their precise destinations arranged by padroni, the Italian equivalent of the Jewish garment contractors. The padroni packaged up gangs of Italian laborers in New York (and sometimes in Italy itself) and supplied them to corporate employers around the country, in mines, agriculture, railroads, and construction sites. During the winter, or in hard times, thousands of these seasonal laborers would either return to Italy or camp out in New York City.
Others never left the metropolis, where a substantial and growing number of jobs were available. Transplanted peasants avoided factory jobs, considering them physically confining, socially unrespectable, and personally demeaning, but they flocked to hard physical labor on the city’s docks, roads, rapid transit lines, aqueducts, and building sites.
This invasion of New York’s labor market met with mixed reactions from established workers. In the building trades the Italian takeover of casual day labor work (their share zoomed from 15 percent in 1883 to 75 percent in 1893) was accepted by Irish and German immigrants and their sons, who were busy consolidating their hold on the more highly skilled crafts of carpentering, plastering, and masonry. In public works, too, older immigrants gave ground with relative grace, abandoning such unskilled and unpleasant jobs as garbage scow trimming, ditch digging, snow shoveling, excavation, sewer laying, and hod carrying—until by 1890 perhaps 90 percent of the laborers employed by the Department of Public Works were Italian. Certain “service” jobs were also rapidly Italianized. By 1894 the great majority of barbers and streetcorner fruit vendors were Italians, as were 97 percent of the bootblacks—the latter job, like organ grinder assistant, reserved for children.
Other job niches were hotly contested. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, resolved to crack the Irish monopoly on longshore jobs, dock bosses began hiring Italians—especially during strikes—to take over the more menial work. The Italians were prepared to scab because they were transients, with little stake in transforming