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Lower East Side
Contents
Development as an Immigrant Neighborhood >
The Immigrants > The
Physical Landscape > Continuity
and Change following World War II > Gangs
on the Lower East Side > Orchard
Street Shopping: From Pushcars to Discount Clothing to Fashion Boutiques
The Immigrants
The American character of the East Side, as it was called before
it was the Lower East Side, disintegrated in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Irish and German immigration soared beginning in the late
1840s and the new comers settled near the old immigrants in the
Five Points District. By 1870 German immigrants had created a Kleindeutschland,
or "Little Germany," north and east of Five Points on
the Lower East Side (see also: Germans).
More than 170,000 German immigrants lived here in the 1870s. If
the Lower East Side had been a city of its own, it would have been
the fifth largest German-speaking city in the world.
As Kleindeutschland spread across four entire wards (10th, 11th,
13th, and 17th) Little Italies were also beginning to sprout nearby.
The number of Italians arriving in New York rose from 12,000 in
1880 to nearly 400,000 in 1920 (see also: Italians). Many of them
settled along Mott, Mulberry, and Elizabeth streets in what is today
called "Little Italy." A small Chinese community was also
established here about this time in response to deepening anti-Chinese
sentiment on the West Coast. It grew slowly, but was estimated to
number about 40,000 by 1940.
By the turn of the century Kleindeutschland had become the Jewish
Lower East Side (see also: Jews).
Eastern European Jews began coming to America in significant numbers
after 1880. Practically all of them first settled on the Lower East
Side. In 1890 an estimated 135,000 Jews lived in the neighborhood;
by 1915 there were about 322,000, constituting nearly 60 percent
of the area's population. They and the Italians were the last major
immigrant groups to arrive in America before European immigration
slowed to a trickle under the Johnson-Reed act of 1924. The Act
curtailed immigration to the United States by setting quotas favoring
immigrants from northern and Western Europe over those from the
east and south.
With the liberalization of immigration in 1965, immigrants began
coming to the Lower East Side once again, but this time mostly from
the Caribbean Basin and East Asia. Of the documented immigrants
living on the Lower East Side today, 62 percent are from China,
14 percent from the Dominican Republic, and 2 percent from the Philippines.
Bangladesh and Ecuador are also sources for many of today's immigrants.
In addition some 37,000 Puerto Ricans live in the neighborhood,
though they are not classified as immigrants.
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