Made In America - Bill Bryson [91]
Most of the millions of lower-class immigrants settled in the four square miles that were the Lower East Side, often in conditions of appalling squalor, with as many as twenty-five people sharing a single windowless room. As early as the 1860s, three-quarters of New York City’s population – more than 1.2 million people – were packed into just 37,000 tenements. By the end of the century the population density of the Lower East Side was greater than in the slums of Bombay.11 In an effort to improve conditions, a law was passed in 1869 requiring that every bedroom have a window. The result was the air-shaft. Though a commendable notion in principle, air-shafts turned out to be a natural receptacle for garbage and household slop, and thus became conduits of even greater filth and pestilence.
Crime, prostitution, begging, disease and almost every other indicator of social deprivation existed at levels that are all but inconceivable now. (Murder, however, was the exception to this rule; the rate is ten times higher today.) A study of Irish immigrants to Boston around mid-century found that on average they survived for just fourteen years in America. In 1888 the infant death rate in the Italian quarter was 325 per 1,000. That is, one-third of all babies did not survive their first year.12
Gangs with names like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits and Bowery B’hoys roamed the streets, robbing and mugging (an Americanism dating from 1863; also sometimes called yoking) with something approaching impunity. Although New York had had a police force since 1845, by the second half of the nineteenth century it was thoroughly corrupt and ineffectual. Typical of the breed was Chief Inspector Alexander ‘Clubber’ Williams, who was brought up on charges no fewer than 358 times, but was never dismissed or even apparently disciplined. Such was his gift for corruption that by the time of his retirement he had accumulated a yacht, a house in Connecticut and savings of $300,000.13
Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that many immigrants fled back to Europe. At one point, for every 100 Italians who arrived in New York each year, 73 left. Perhaps as many as one third of all immigrants eventually returned to their native soil.14
None the less, the trend was relentlessly upward. The pattern was for one immigrant group to settle in an enclave and then disperse after a generation or so, with a new concentration of immigrants taking its place. Thus when the Irish abandoned their traditional stronghold of the Five Points area, their place was taken immediately by Italians. The old German neighbourhoods were taken over by Russian and Polish Jews. But there were finer gradations than this, particularly among the Italians. Natives of Genoa tended to accumulate along Baxter Street, while Elizabeth Street housed a large community of Sicilians. Calabrians congregated in the neighbourhood known as Mulberry Bend. Alpine Italians – those from areas like Ticino in Switzerland and the Tyrol near Austria – were almost invariably to be found on Sixty-ninth Street.
Immigrant groups had their own theatres, newspapers, libraries, schools, clubs, stores, taverns and places of worship. Germans alone could choose between 133 German-language newspapers by 1850, some of them, like the New York Staats-Zeitung and the Cincinnati Volksblatt, nearly as large and influential as their English-language counterparts.15 Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers could in 1935 choose from a dozen daily newspapers, one of which, the Jewish Daily Forward, had a circulation of 125,000. Even Norwegians had forty papers