The End of the Immigrant Era
Between
1910 and 1940, the area's population dropped 60%.
As thousands of new
immigrant arrived on the Lower East Side in the first
decades of the twentieth century, thousands of
existing residents departed to the new working class
and lower middle class neighborhoods in upper
Manhattan and the city's outer boroughs. In the past,
the Irish had left the Lower East Side to form
communities on Manhattan’s west side; the
Germans, too, moved north to the Upper East Side.
This pattern was broken after 1910 when the movement
to new neighborhoods began to outpace the number of
immigrants arriving.
The
building of the subway -- which offered inexpensive
mass transportation -- also made the east side's
advantage of walking to work less important. Most
importantly, new immigration laws passed in 1924
dramatically lowered the number of immigrants
entering the United States (and, hence, the Lower
East Side). Density levels on the Lower East Side
declined from 867 persons per acre in 1910 to 536 in
1925. In 1928, the vacancy rate for east side
tenements was estimated at 14% and by 1930 it
increased to 20%.
Links (click to follow)
Click here to read more about
immigration in the early 1900s.
Click here to read about NYC subways.
Click here to read about turn-of-the-century
immigration and settlement houses.
Images
(click to enlarge)
 Here is a diagram
detailing industrial dispersal.
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 More industrial
dispersal.
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 Here is an interesting
diagram detailing the residences of
industrial workers.
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 Even more industrial
dispersal.
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Location
of tobacco plants in 1900 and 1922.
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Dispersal
of printing plants in New York (as a whole)
and the Lower East Side.
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A
final example of industrial dispersal.
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