Immigrant Ethnic Enclaves
Above: Immigrants entering the
new world.
Residential
communities on the Lower East Side were shaped by
flows of ethnic and religious groups from across
Europe. Immigrants combined elements from their
homeland's cultural and religious practices with the
economic and social realities of living in New York
City. Over six decades, the blocks north of Houston
Street housed Irish, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and
Italians along with Russian, German and Polish Jews
and a handful of other ethnic and religious groups.
Irish immigrants had settled first. In the 1860s, the
Irish had begun to be replaced by German immigrants,
forming Kleindeutschland (Little Germany.)
Italians established an enclave in the north end of
the neighborhood near 12th Street and First Avenue.
| In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Jews, bursted out of the
overcrowded warrens of the southern Lower
East Side and settled in the northern tier.
Within these ethnic enclaves further
subcommunities existed, each defined by
homeland region, religious preferences, and
class distinctions. |
 Photograph by Robert
McFarland.
|
Links
(click
to follow)
Click here for the hypertext version of Jacob Riis'
How The Other Half Lives.
Read an excerpt from Kathy
Peiss' Cheap Amusements.
Here is information about Lower East Side
ethnic enclaves.
Images
(click to enlarge)
 City scene: Turn of the
Century.
|
 Lower East Side
recreation
|
 Entering the Promised
Land
|
 art
by Zagat
|
art by Zagat
|
 |
____________________________________
The book upon which this
web site is based,
Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
directly through 
or order through 
Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
|
