The Epic of New York City (70 page)

“Meet me at the Waldorf” became a byword among New York's elite during the Gay Nineties and long afterward. The hyphenated hotel continued to function at that location until 1929, when it was torn down to make way for the Empire State Building.

Chapter 33

I
N THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
New York grew faster than any other big city in the world because immigrants washed upon its shores in ever-increasing numbers. Now, however, there came a change in the ethnic nature of the influx. Before 1883 about 85 percent of the immigrants were from northern and western Europe. After that, a flood of foreigners began arriving from central and southern Europe.

In the 1880's more than twice as many aliens landed as had arrived in any two previous consecutive decades. In 1861 only 91,918 reached America, but 669,431 were admitted in 1881. Most of the aliens came through New York. They were fleeing from exploitation and from political and religious persecution.

In 1880 New York City had 80,000 Jews, most of them of German extraction. Then, in 1881, Czar Alexander III began persecuting Russian Jews by forbidding them to acquire land, establishing Jewish quotas in schools and universities, and instituting cruel pogroms. Terror-stricken Jews poured out of the Russian empire, their exodus becoming the greatest since the departure of the Jews from Egypt.

Between 1881 and 1910 a total of 1,562,000 Jews came to America. A majority remained in New York, and a majority of this majority settled in the Lower East Side, converting it into the world's largest Jewish community. By 1910 there were 1,252,000 Jews living there. Irishmen and Germans hastily left for other parts of the city, leaving New York's oldest dwellings to the newcomers. Walt Whitman did not share in the general scorn for the Russian Jews. In a letter written to his Russian translator in 1881, Whitman remarked on the amazing similarity between Russians and Americans.

It was not anti-Semitic Christians who first slandered Jews with the derogatory term “kikes.” New York's long-established German Jews, noting that the names of many Russian Jews ended with
ki,
began calling them kikis, which gradually changed to kikes. Hoping to escape this embarrassing distinction and obtain credit from German businessmen, some Russians took German names. Efforts were made to exclude Jews from good jobs and neighborhoods, from clubs and schools. Many Lower East Side Jews became peddlers because little capital was needed to get into this line of work. Pushcarts were thickest on Hester Street, the chief market center on the Lower East Side. Jews were so fond of the theater they said their diet was “bread smeared with theater.” The first Yiddish play in America was staged in New York in 1882. Second Ave. became the Jewish Rialto.

As a result of centuries of political oppression, most Jews were liberals, and many were Socialists. They spent so much time quarreling about different radical doctrines that the Irish easily maintained control of Tammany Hall. However, the Irish were slow to move out of the ranks of unskilled labor, whereas the Jews were quick to become first small merchants and then professional men.

Tammany Hall was reluctant to take Jews into its inner circle, but it did help the masses of Jewish immigrants. Seeking to maintain its reputation as the friend of the poor, Tammany gave the underprivileged of all faiths coal in winter, ice in summer, food on holidays, and favors the year around. In return, Tammany expected the
votes of those whom it helped. Local Republicans tended to ignore the foreign-born and the poor.

Unlike the prodigal Irish, the Jews saved their money. According to an immigrant guidebook of that era, a Jew who earned fifty cents a day spent only ten cents for coffee and bagels and saved the other forty cents. But it wasn't long before Jews wanted to live as well as the older New Yorkers in better parts of the city. Jews could not be kept out of schools, so intense was their passion for education. Teachers and public officials alike were astonished by the intellectual zest of Jewish children. Police Commissioner William McAdoo cried, “Think of it! Herbert Spencer preferred to a fairy story by girls and boys!”

Like other immigrant groups, Jews made a rich contribution to the political and artistic life of New York and the nation. The year 1891 marked the arrival of Morris and Rose Gershovitz, born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Morris soon shortened his name to Gershvin. He is remembered today only because of his son, George Gershwin, the composer and pianist. In 1893 a frail Russian rabbi, Moses Baline, settled on the Lower East Side with his wife, Leah, and their children. One of their sons was four-year-old Isador Baline, commonly known as Izzy. The Izzy Baline of that day became Irving Berlin, another renowned composer. The Lower East Side also produced sculptors Jo Davidson and Jacob Epstein.

William Sulzer was a Christian and a Democratic politician who went out of his way to help the Jews. After serving nine terms in Congress, he became governor of New York State. Undeniably beloved by Jews, Sulzer is said to have shouted during a political campaign, “Every night a hundred million Jews in Russia kneel to pray for William Sulzer!” A heckler called out: “Jews don't
kneel
when they pray!” According to the story, Sulzer fixed his heckler with penetrating eyes and retorted, “They do when they pray for William Sulzer!”

Italian immigration into New York and the rest of America has been called modern history's greatest and most sustained movement of population from a single country. The first Italian to settle here was a Venetian craftsman, named Peter Caesar Alberti, who took up residence in Brooklyn in 1635. Twenty years later an Italian, named Mathys Capito, became a clerk in the New York municipal bookkeeping office. Many Italians fought for this country during the American Revolution. In 1806 Lorenzo Da Ponte, the author of many
Mozart librettos, emigrated to New York. Staten Island became a refuge for politicians exiled from Italy. Foremost among these, perhaps, was Giuseppe Garibaldi. After living from 1850 to 1854 on Staten Island, where he worked as a candlemaker, he went back to his native land to try to unify it.

In 1880 more than 12,000 native Italians lived in New York. Most congregated in Mulberry Bend, located on Mulberry Street between Bayard and Park streets, two blocks west of the Bowery. This slum area became known as Little Italy. A majority of the early Italian immigrants had been born in northern Italy. Beginning in the 1880's, however, the bulk of Italian immigrants arrived from southern Italy and from Sicily. Unskilled and illiterate peasants for the most part, they were regarded with disdain by northern Italians. Among the Sicilian newcomers were members of the dreaded Mafia, which had a long history of preying on helpless and ignorant peasants. They began terrorizing New York's transplanted Italians.

No ethnic or religious group, however, has held a monopoly on vice in New York. The city has known Irish gangsters, Jewish gangsters, Chinese gangsters, and Italian gangsters.

In 1880 Achille Luigi Carlo LaGuardia brought his bride to New York. They were the parents of Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who was born on December 11, 1882, in a tenement at 7 Varick Street in the Italian section of Greenwich Village. Fiorello LaGuardia became the first Italian-American to overthrow Irish-dominated Tammany Hall, and he finished his spectacular career as the greatest mayor in the history of New York City. At the time of his birth Greenwich Village was occupied mainly by the Irish and Negroes. As more Italians moved into the Village, the Negroes began to move out, gathering in an area just west of Columbus Circle in mid-Manhattan and on the Upper East Side. The year of LaGuardia's birth, Eamon De Valera was born here. De Valera, who became president of the Republic of Ireland, was the son of a Spanish father and an Irish mother. He was delivered on October 14, 1882, in the Nursery and Child's Hospital, at Lexington Avenue and East Fifty-first Street. The year 1882 also marked the birth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Hyde Park, New York.

Southern Italians were clannish. Despite the fact that they had shown enough spirit to emigrate to the New World, their outlook on life continued to be that of villagers. Intensely suspicious, they regarded everyone outside their own family as
forestieri,
or strangers.
Differences in customs and dialects, together with centuries-old prejudices, separated Abruzzese, Calabrians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Pied-montese, Sicilians, Turinese, and miscellaneous others. Members of each group huddled near one another in their new homes here.

Most Italian men arrived without their women, for they had no intention of staying. They hoped to make a fortune and then to return to their native villages. As a result of this wish to go home, their fear of strangers, their lack of skills, and their illiteracy, Italians were slow in becoming Americanized.

Jews were also somewhat clannish and didn't want their children to marry outside the group, but they considered their offspring to be the equal of anyone else. The Italians lacked this confidence and pride in their children. Stunted in outlook, many Italians fell victim to the very kind of exploitation which had caused them to leave their homeland. Just as some vicious Irishmen had preyed on later-arriving Irishmen, so did Italians fall into the hands of their own greedy people. A stereotype of the day was the padrone, an Italian straw boss who took charge of fellow immigrants when they arrived, found them jobs and apartments, acted as their brokers, and profited handsomely from each transaction. Many padroni wound up as wealthy men, but the masses of Italians went on working as common laborers.

Because Irish workmen predominated in the building trades, Italians at first found it difficult to break into this field. The backwardness of Italian immigrants enabled employers to play them off against other workers by using them as strikebreakers. As a result, they were sneered at as dagos. The word “dago,” a corruption of the Spanish proper name Diego, is the equivalent of Jack or Jim. Another derogatory nickname applied to Italians was guinea. Originally this word was confined to Portuguese exploring for gold along the part of western Africa then known as Guinea. Because southern Italians, like the Portuguese, tended to be dark-skinned, the insulting term “guinea” was applied to them.

The first Chinese known to have visited New York was Punqua Wingchong, who figured in John Jacob Astor's hoax against the Jefferson administration. He arrived in 1807 and left in 1808. Historians differ about the first Chinese who lived here. Some say that it was Quimbo Appo, who landed in San Francisco in 1844 and arrived in New York a few years later. Others declare that it was Ah Ken, a Cantonese merchant who appeared in 1858, opened a cigar store on Park Row, and made his home on Mott Street. Another
contender was a Chinese sailor, called Lou Hoy Sing, who settled in New York in 1862 and married an Irish colleen, who bore him two sons. Wah Kee appeared in 1868 and established a fruitshop, at 13 Pell Street, which served as a blind for the gambling den and opium dive he ran secretly above this shop. In 1872 there were 12 Chinese in the Mott Street district, and in 1880 they numbered 700. From then on they arrived in New York by droves, although more settled in California than on the eastern seaboard.

New York became a haven for almost all nationalities—Hungarians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Poles, Bohemians, Rumanians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Turks, Austrians, Arabs, Lebanese, Spaniards, Albanians, Syrians, and others. The so-called melting pot never really dissolved their different identities. The process of assimilation resulted in something like vegetable soup. Although the ingredients retained their separate forms and flavor, they went well together. This was the way that liberals viewed immigration. Conservatives felt differently. As the tide of aliens rose, conservatives grew apprehensive and ultimately took alarm. Something of the spirit of the Know-Nothing era developed as Anglo-Saxons excitedly told one another that this immigration threatened the identity and character of the nation. Pride in ancestry dies hard. On December 23, 1894, the Society of Mayflower Descendants was organized in New York by descendants of the Pilgrims “to preserve their memory, their records, their history, and all facts relating to them, their ancestors, and their posterity.”