Little Germany, Manhattan

Coordinates: 40°43′34″N 73°58′53″W / 40.72611°N 73.98139°W / 40.72611; -73.98139
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

40°43′34″N 73°58′53″W / 40.72611°N 73.98139°W / 40.72611; -73.98139

NYC Landmarks were designed by William Schickel
and built during 1883–1884.

Little Germany, known in

General Slocum
disaster decimated the social core of the population with the loss of more than 1,000 lives.

Growth

St Mark's Place
(1885) with inscription Einigkeit macht stark ("Unity strengthens") designed by William C. Frohne

Beginning in the 1840s, large numbers of

Godfrey Gunther
as mayor in 1863.

At the time, Germans tended to cluster more than other immigrants, such as the Irish, and in fact those from particular German states preferred to live together.

Rhine River, which was subject to the King of Bavaria), the largest group of German immigrants in the city by 1860, were distributed evenly in each German ward except the Prussian Tenth. Aside from the small group of Hanoverians, who had a strong sense of self-segregation forming their own "Little Hanover" in the Thirteenth Ward, the Bavarians displayed the strongest regional bias, mainly toward Prussians: at all times the most distinctive characteristic of their settlement pattern remained that they would be found wherever the Prussians were fewest.[5]

In 1845, Little Germany was already the largest German-American neighborhood in New York; by 1855, its German population had more than quadrupled, displacing the American-born workers who had first moved into the neighborhood's new housing,

beer gardens, sport clubs, libraries, choirs
, shooting clubs, German theatres, German schools, German churches, and German synagogues. A large number of factories and small workshops operated in the neighborhood, initially in the interiors of blocks, reached by alleyways. There were major commercial streets including department stores. Stanley Nadel quotes a description of the neighborhood at its peak in the 1870s:

At the beginning of the '70s, after a decade of continuously rising immigration, Kleindeutschland was in its fullest bloom. Kleindeutschland, called Dutchtown by the Irish, consisted of 400 blocks formed by some six avenues and nearly forty streets. Tompkins Square formed pretty much the center. Avenue B, occasionally called the German Broadway, was the commercial artery. Each basement was a workshop, every first floor was a store, and the partially roofed sidewalks were markets for goods of all sorts. Avenue A was the street for beer halls, oyster saloons and groceries. The Bowery was the western border (anything further west was totally foreign), but it was also the amusement and loafing district. There all the artistic treats, from classical drama to puppet comedies, were available.[9]

General Slocum disaster

Firefighters working to extinguish the General Slocum
The former St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church has been a synagogue since 1940
Main article: PS General Slocum

On June 15, 1904,

General Slocum, was chartered for a cruise on the East River to a picnic site on Long Island, and over 1,300 passengers, mostly women and children, participated in the event. Shortly after departing, a fire started in a storage compartment in the forward section. Although the ship was equipped with lifeboats and preservers
, both were in disrepair. The inadequacy of the safety equipment, compounded with the poor leadership of Captain William Van Schaick, caused an estimated 1,021 passengers to die by fire or drowning.

Although only one percent of Little Germany's population was killed by the disaster, those lost were members of the most established families, the social foundation of Little Germany's community, and the extent of the disaster had enormous repercussions on the St Mark's parish. The disaster as well as the accelerated exodus that was already well underway and the future anti-German sentiment that would occur during World War I would lead Kleindeutschland to extinction. Some bereaved parents, spouses, children, and friends committed suicide.[10] To further complicate matters, the desire to find a culprit, conflicting public opinion, and family quarrels among survivors about the distribution of money from a relief fund led the culture of Little Germany to turn sour. The final indignity was the jury's refusal to find Captain Van Schaick guilty of manslaughter; one of the only things he was ever punished for was lack of safety-preparedness, which was sufficient for him to receive a ten-year prison sentence.[11]

Decline

The General Slocum disaster was perhaps the final blow in hastening the end of Little Germany, but for decades before that event, the neighborhood had been contracting in size, both in population and in area. Near the end of the 19th century, between 1870 and 1900, second-generation German-Americans began to leave the old neighborhood to resettle in Brooklyn, in particular in Williamsburg, and farther uptown on the East Side of Manhattan, in Yorkville. At the same time, the press of new mass immigration into the city of not only Germans – whose numbers peaked in the 1880s – and Irish, but also large numbers of Russian and Yiddish speaking Eastern European Jews and Italians from the south of that country caused Little Germany to contract, so that rather than taking up a large portion of the East Side below 23rd Street, it was eventually bounded by 14th Street on the north, Grand Street on the south, Broadway on the west, and the East River on the east.[12] As well, the new mix of immigrants coming in changed the character of the area, so that what had been Kleindeutschland began to transform into the Lower East Side.[13] The Slocum disaster accelerated the process, as in its wake, much of the remaining German population moved, to Yorkville and elsewhere.[14][15]

See also

  • Yorkville, another historically German neighborhood in Manhattan
  • List of named ethnic enclaves in North American cities
  • Washington Heights, Manhattan, home of the historical German-Jewish neighborhood of "Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson"
  • Lower East Side, the neighborhood in which Little Germany was located

References

Notes

  1. ^ Nadel, p. 29, and note 6, p. 182, on the use of "Dutch" to mean "German"
  2. ^ Burrows and Wallace, p.745
  3. ^ Nadel, pp.148,
  4. ^ Nadel, pp. 29, 37-39.
  5. ^ Nadel, pp. 37.
  6. ^ Nadel, pp. 29, 32.
  7. ^ Nadel, p. 29 and Map 2, p. 30.
  8. ^ Nadel, p. 35.
  9. ^ Lohr, Otto (1913), "Das New York Deutschtum der Vergangenheit", in Spengler, Otto (ed.), Das Deutsche Element der Stadt New York, New York: Steiger, p. 12, in Nadel, p. 36.
  10. ISBN 0-7679-0905-4
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1-4165-8997-6
  12. ^ Burrows & Wallace, pp. 1111, 1115, 1117
  13. ^ Burrows & Wallace, p. 1117
  14. New York Times
    , retrieved November 20, 2007, The disaster helped accelerate the flight of Germans from the Lower East Side to Yorkville and other neighborhoods, although there were other motivations as well. 'The very dense old housing on the Lower East Side was no longer attractive to upwardly mobile Germans,' said Dr. John Logan, director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the State University of New York at Albany.
  15. ^ Strausbaugh, John (September 14, 2007), "Paths of Resistance in the East Village", New York Times, retrieved December 29, 2007, On June 15, 1904, about 1,200 people from St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church (323 Sixth Street, between First and Second Avenues, the site of the Community Synagogue since 1940) died when the steamship the General Slocum, taking them on a day trip up the East River, burned. It was the deadliest disaster in the city before Sept. 11, 2001. It traumatized the community and hastened residents' flight to uptown areas like Yorkville.
Bibliography

External links

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