The Census: Reading Between the Lines

As expressed here, untaxed citizens of Native American Indian nations (“Indians”) were not counted, and they are not included on the federal census from 1790-1840. “Other persons” refers to the population of enslaved people. While the institution of slavery prevailed throughout the United States, the population of enslaved people was greater in southern states. In order to establish representational equity and to preserve the Union, members of the Convention reached the Three-Fifths Compromise- an equation that counted every five enslaved people as three individuals.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is written into the Constitution but was made obsolete after the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, abolishing slavery in the United States. Thus, the 1870 Census is the first to fully count formerly enslaved people.

97 Orchard Street in 1870

The 1870 Census also had to be conducted twice! Before our modern era of self-completion and online forms, enumerators had to go to people’s homes and ask them questions directly. However, in large cities like New York, enumerators were accused of ‘curb-stoning’– essentially, doing their work by observing from the sidewalk instead of entering buildings. Rather than interview and count each person living in the tenement districts, many just counted the number of floors and windows on each building and entered their estimated count for the residence. This incompetence, coupled with a distrust of federal authorities, and corruption, resulted in a census that was riddled with errors and met with significant challenges. This census had to be completed again, which gave slightly different results for 97 Orchard Street.

Comparison between the first 1870 census enumeration and the recount

Enumerated in June and again in December, the 1870 census of 97 Orchard paints a common picture of tenement life in this predominantly German-speaking immigrant neighborhood called Kleindeutschland or “Little Germany.” With families whose roots lay in places like Bavaria, Baden, and Prussia, there existed an interesting degree of diversity within the building.

What do we learn from this?  The neighborhood is more diverse than the name “Little Germany” suggests, and even the German residents are from places that were considered different nations. This census is how we begin to determine that people from 20 different nations lived in the building over its history.

97 Orchard Street in 1880

Natalie Gumpertz lived at 97 Orchard long enough to appear on the 1870 and 1880 census enumerations. Herself an immigrant from Prussia, Natalie might have established strong connections to her neighbors. While the census doesn’t tell us anything about relationships between households in a tenement building–who were friends, who got on each others’ nerves–we can learn some basic patterns that help us understand who the building’s communities were.

97 Orchard Street households headed by women

By 1880, Natalie joined another community–one made up of widowed, abandoned, or single women with children. At 97 Orchard Street, there are seven households headed by widowed women. This census data shows us a lesser-known but common story: many husbands never returned home from the Civil War, and in the years following the economic crisis of 1873, many husbands abandoned their homes and families. Like Natalie, half of these widows are working for wages. Natalie is listed as a dressmaker, and one of her widowed neighbors is also employed making clothes. Overall, 37% of the women living in 97 Orchard are recorded as working for wages. These patterns help us begin to understand of the community of working women in the building, and allow us to see how places like the building’s rear yard and the nearby market would serve as important hubs of support.

Neighborhood Change

The 1900 census signified a major shift in a neighborhood defined by its ethnic makeup. The 1900 census marks the transition from Kleindeutschland or Little Germany to the ‘Jewish Lower East Side.’

We see this shift represented in the ethnic makeup of 97 Orchard Street residents. German immigrants like the Gumpertz family, who called its tenements home during the mid-19th century, had by its end moved to other mainly German neighborhoods like Yorkville in upper Manhattan. The newest residents of the area were arriving in New York from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and were predominantly Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews.

97 Orchard Street in 1900

Between 1880 and 1924, two and a half million Jews entered the United States, many of them settling on the Lower East Side for some period of time. This made the Lower East Side the largest Jewish city in the world.  This population transition from a mainly German neighborhood to a Jewish one happened slowly, but is seen clearly when we compare census records. Neighborhood change like this is sometimes called ‘ethnic succession,’ and happens for many reasons—including changes in migration patterns, community development, and availability and price of housing.

How has your area changed over time? 

The Crowds

By the turn of the 20th century, the Lower East Side was also rapidly becoming more crowded, some even recognizing it as the densest neighborhood in the world!

The Family Economy

The 1900 census also tells us how vital the garment industry was to the residents of 97 Orchard– nearly 60% or six out of ten wage-earning residents of the building worked in the garment industry by 1900.

By 1900, enumerators were collecting more information, helping to answer important questions about the residents of 97 Orchard Street.

What were their family structures like? What kind of occupations did married women have? What were the differences between the parents and the children? What are the differences between older and younger children in the family?

What roles did each play in the family economy?

Many details in the census underline the importance of children’s wages to the family economy.

Once families united in New York, teenage children often went out to work. Their added income proved essential to the household. The 1900 census data records 20 families living in 97 Orchard. Two of those households have no children, and of the remaining households, nearly 75% of the families have children working for wages. Three families living in 97 Orchard at the time of the 1900 census illustrate the ways in which teenage children contributed to the family economy: The Reigers, Goldbergs, and Lustgarten.

Eldest children Joseph and Fanny had married and moved out of 97 Orchard Street, but the younger siblings lived with the Lustgartens: 20-year old Bertha worked as a dressmaker, 19-year old Rosa was a “trained nurse,” and 18-year old William studied law. The family’s basement apartment was also home to a boarder, 21-year-old Russian-born dressmaker Pauline Rudolph. It is likely that even their wage-earning jobs or their studies didn’t prevent them from being called in to help in the shop on a regular basis.

In 1910, when the US Census Bureau visited 97 Orchard Street, enumerator Meyer Rosenberg counted 10 fewer residents than in 1900. While the Lower East Side and its tenements remained densely populated, the 1901 Tenement House Act and the change of apartments to commercial spaces throughout the neighborhood reduced the available residential space in buildings like 97 Orchard, where the number of apartments decreased from 22 to 18.

97 Orchard in 1910

In 1910, the Census Bureau went to great lengths to identify immigrants and the children of immigrants from Eastern European countries like Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania, as Jewish. Jewish elected officials and powerful Jewish Americans protested, believing that identifying religion in the Census might result in increased anti-Semitism throughout the nation. Despite these objections, government officials who wanted to restrict immigration of particular “national” racial and ethnic groups worked to find another way to get the same answers.

Instead of asking about religion, the Census asked Americans about their Nationality or ’Mother Tongue,’ and the nationality of their parents. Thus, the Rogarshveskys answered that they hailed from Russia and their mother tongue was Yiddish. The majority of their neighbors answered similarly.

Work in New York’s garment industry was often seasonal, and Abraham reported being unemployed for 13 weeks during the previous year. Either way, his income alone would not have been enough to support the family.

Like most Jewish immigrants, the children—especially the oldest—entered the workforce to make the family economy work. By 1910, Ida (17) worked as a joiner in a paper box factory, Bessie (16) was a sewing machine operator, and the oldest son, Morris (15), worked as a shipping clerk.

The Citizenship Question

In the 1910 Census, the federal government also asked about citizenship and immigration status. Few residents of 97 Orchard Street in 1910 had become naturalized citizens but several, including Abraham Rogarshevsky, had begun the process. Abraham is listed in the Citizenship column as “Pa,” meaning “With Papers,” which indicated that he had taken the first step and submitted his petition to naturalize.

Additional questions on this census aimed to understand how issues like infant and child mortality affected the population. In 1900 and 1910, each adult woman was asked how many children had been born to them and how many were still living. Some mothers at 97 Orchard Street had all of their children still alive, but the majority had experienced one or more losses in their family.

In 1930, the people of 97 Orchard Street were interviewed by a Census enumerator for the last time. Within five years, new housing laws in New York would prove too expensive to comply with for many tenement landlords. Moses Helpern, who owned 97 Orchard Street during this period of the building’s history, decided to close the building to residents in 1935.

97 Orchard Street in 1930

How could that be? 

Much of the reason can be traced to the impact of restrictive immigration law. Enacted 11 years earlier, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act instituted the nation’s first comprehensive restriction law targeting Europeans. In addition to setting numerical limits on immigration, it enacted ‘national origins’ quotas based on that favored some immigrants over others based on pseudo-scientific theories about race as it was understood by white ‘nativists’ who wanted to restrict immigration. The law restricted Southern and Eastern European immigrants and favored Northern and Western European immigrants.

Among the long-term consequences of the 1924 quota law was the depopulation of the Lower East Side. Immigrant families found work, improved their finances and moved away to other areas of New York City such as Brooklyn and the Bronx, and with immigration all but frozen, many apartments remained vacant. With less than half of its apartments occupied in 1935, 97 Orchard landlord Helpern decided that it would be in his best interest to close the property as a residence rather than pay to make it compliant with the 1929 Multiple Dwellings Act. With the exception of Fannie Rosenthal (formerly Rogarshevsky; the family had changed its surname during the 1920s), whose husband Abraham had died from tuberculosis in 1918 and was then employed as the building’s ‘janitress’, all of the tenants were evicted.

Nevertheless, the 1930 enumeration of 97 Orchard Street has interesting stories to tell us. For the first time, Americans were asked if they had a radio in their home (and therefore able to receive mass news and entertainment broadcast across the country). Only one family in 97 Orchard, the Rosenthals, owned a radio. Residents were also asked how much money per month they paid in rent. Here, the rent averaged to $15 per month.

97 Orchard Street in 1930

The 1930 Census at 97 Orchard Street also finds the first recorded all-male household in the building, where English-born elevator operators Jim Muzzi and John Sultha shared the $20 in rent they paid per month. Within five years, however, they had moved on.

How we fill out the census has a critical impact on where we live – from how much money our schools get, to how many senators we have representing our district. More than just data, the census is an invaluable resource for the government and historians alike.

For the Tenement Museum, while the census can’t tell us about the emotional lives of the people we study, it is often our starting place for learning about the families in our buildings and the character of the neighborhood.

Interested in more on the census? Watch a past Tenement Talk on the 2020 Census, featuring experts discussing the challenges and strategies in counting hard-to-reach communities and immigrants.

For Further Exploration: 

• See our census records transcribed on our Teacher Resources page. 
• Explore census records from your area on your preferred records database (like Ancestry.com) 
• Read history from the Census Bureau’s website and see how questions change over time. 
• Read What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans