City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

By Tyler Anbinder

This sweeping history of New York’s millions of immigrants, both famous and forgotten, is “told brilliantly [and] unforgettably” (The Boston Globe).

Written by an acclaimed historian and including maps and photos, this is the story of the peoples who have come to New York for four centuries: an American story of millions of immigrants, hundreds of languages, and one great city.

Growing from Peter Minuit’s tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million immigrants today, the city has always been a magnet for transplants from around the globe. City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, who condoned the murder of American industrialists as a means of aiding downtrodden workers; Dominican immigrant Oscar de la Renta, who dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama; and so many more. Over ten years in the making, Tyler Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs. In so many ways, today’s immigrants are just like those who came to America in centuries past—and their stories have never before been told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit.

“Anbinder is a master at taking a history with which many readers will be familiar—tenement houses, temperance societies, slums—and making it new, strange, and heartbreakingly vivid. The stories of individuals, including those of the entrepreneurial Steinway brothers and the tragic poet Pasquale D’Angelo, are undeniably compelling, but it’s Anbinder’s stunning image of New York as a true city of immigrants that captures the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544103856

Tyler Anbinder

Tyler Anbinder is a professor of history at George Washington University. His first book, Nativism and Slavery, was also a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Arlington, VA.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Tyler Anbinder

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-544-10465-5

ISBN 978-1-328-74551-4 (pbk.)

The author wishes to thank Guernica Editions for permission to reprint Pascal D’Angelo’s poem Omnis Sum.

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photograph © Tegra Stone Nuess/Getty Images

eISBN 978-0-544-10385-6

v3.0917

Version 04112023

An earlier version of chapter 10 previously appeared in Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith, Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2015), and is reproduced here in revised form with permission of the University of Virginia Press.

To Lisa, Maya, and Celia, with all my love

Maps

Prologue

AS MIDNIGHT DREW NEAR on New Year’s Eve 1891, New Yorkers thronged lower Broadway. Its watering holes had been packed for hours, with revelers throwing back shots of whiskey, hot toddies, and eggnog as they prepared to brave the cold for the traditional outdoor countdown. It seemed as if every city resident, young and old, man and woman, native and newcomer, was out in the streets blowing a fish horn, the favorite New Year’s noisemaker of the era. In the final minutes before midnight, thousands surged out of the bars, brownstones, and tenements of lower Manhattan toward two traditional spots where New Yorkers had been celebrating this occasion for generations.

The largest crowd squeezed into City Hall Park, the nine-acre triangle of land that lies just east of Broadway and south of Chambers Street. Flags floated over the City Hall, wrote a New York Times reporter who was there that night, and small boys festooned the bare limbs of the trees; calcium lights shed a glare upon the crowd, and people pushed and jostled and tooted horns and gave each other good greeting. When the hands of the City Hall clock both reached twelve, a band positioned on the front steps struck up Hail, Columbia. Momentarily the fish-horn orchestra was dumb, noted the Times correspondent, as the crowd paid its respects to what was then considered the American national song. (Only in 1931, by which point Hail, Columbia had fallen out of favor, did Congress designate The Star-Spangled Banner as the United States’ first national anthem.) The moment the band concluded the patriotic tune, the crowd burst forth with redoubled fury. Men shouted, the band played, the elevated and bridge locomotives shrieked their welcome, and red lights were burned.

Barely a half mile to the south, thousands more gathered around Trinity Church, at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, to partake of another New York tradition—hearing Trinity’s famous bells ring in the New Year. Yet the horn-blowing of the multitude around the church was so deafening that it was impossible to hear even the sounding of the hour of 12 by the ‘Great Tom,’ the mammoth of the chime of bells. On a normal night Great Tom could be heard as far away as Long Island and New Jersey. But on this occasion, the bell master’s selection of peals, triplets, roulades, carols, and the like was completely drowned out by the din of the jubilant, drunken, raucous revelers.¹

The Nevada, the ship that carried Annie Moore and her brothers to New York in December 1891.

At the stroke of midnight a mile farther south, seventeen-year-old Annie Moore was probably in her bunk in the aft starboard steerage compartment of the S.S. Nevada, which lay at anchor in New York Harbor off the southern tip of Manhattan. Somewhere close by were Annie’s younger brothers, fifteen-year-old Anthony and twelve-year-old Philip. The three Moores, all natives of the city of Cork, were coming to New York to join their parents, Matthew and Julia, and their older siblings, twenty-one-year-old Mary and nineteen-year-old Cornelius, who had ventured to America four years earlier and were living in lower Manhattan at 32 Monroe Street, a few blocks from the waterfront, just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.²

The Nevada was no luxury liner. It was an exceedingly low and narrow vessel, 346 feet long but only 43 feet wide at its broadest point, with one short exhaust funnel amidships and a mast fore and aft just in case the engines gave out. The ship had been plying the route from Liverpool to New York via Queens­town, County Cork, since 1869, just as steamships had begun to outnumber sailing ships on transatlantic crossings. The Nevada certainly was a sturdy ship; when it collided with the Romano in 1884, it was the other vessel that sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. But by 1891 it had clearly seen better days. The ship’s steerage compartments had once overflowed with English, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants, sometimes a thousand or more on a single voyage. On this journey, however, it held only 127 passengers, most of them impoverished Russian Jews fleeing discrimination and persecution in tsarist Russia. It took the Nevada eleven days to chug its way from Ireland to New York, while other ships could make the voyage in six. In 1891 the Nevada was a ship for those who could afford no better. Five years later, its owners would sell it for scrap.³

The Nevada had arrived in New York Harbor too late on the thirty-first for its passengers to be processed by immigration officials, so Annie and her shipmates were forced to spend New Year’s Eve aboard the steamer. The twenty or so first- and second-class passengers, with private or semiprivate cabins, probably celebrated the occasion slurping New York’s famous oysters and sipping champagne with the captain in the ship’s elegant (albeit dated) dining salon. The remaining 107 passengers would have been confined either to the small portion of deck where they were allowed to take fresh air or to their fetid, airless steerage quarters in the bowels of the ship.⁴

For the immigrants on the Nevada who, like Annie, would be reuniting in New York with parents, spouses, and other loved ones after years of separation, this last night of waiting, just yards from their destination, must have been excruciating. Add to this anticipation the excitement of New Year’s Eve and the din of the celebrations all around them in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and we can assume that Annie, Anthony, and Philip probably got very little sleep.⁵

Another person who had reason to sleep restlessly that night was Colonel John B. Weber. The forty-nine-year-old Buffalo native had always brimmed with ambition. Enlisting in the Union army as a private at age eighteen, he achieved the rank of colonel two days before his twenty-first birthday, making him the youngest colonel, North or South, in the entire Civil War. Nor was he lacking in idealism, for the command he chose upon his promotion was one many other Union officers refused—the supervision of a regiment of African American troops drawn from the emancipated slaves of Louisiana. Weber, who as an infantryman had survived some of the bloodiest fighting of the war at Malvern Hill outside Richmond, saw little combat with his black troops, who were stationed in Texas, far from the main theaters of war. At the conclusion of the conflict, Weber entered politics back in Buffalo, serving two terms in Congress. After he lost his bid for a third term in 1888, a political patron secured Weber an appointment as the first federal superintendent of immigration for the port of New York.⁶

Weber’s new post was created in the spring of 1890, a moment when responsibility for the processing of immigrants was in flux. In the first two centuries after New York City was founded, immigrants underwent no inspection whatsoever. They did not need passports or any other documents to gain entry into or establish residence in the British colonies or the young United States. Around the time of the American Revolution, doctors began boarding immigrant ships a few miles from the city to inspect the passengers for signs of smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, and (beginning in the nineteenth century) cholera. Sick immigrants, or in some cases everyone on board, would be quarantined on Staten Island, five miles south of Manhattan, until they were either no longer contagious or dead. But other than this fairly cursory medical inspection, immigrants had to meet no requirements of any kind; they simply walked off their ships and onto the streets of New York to begin their new lives in America.

In 1855 New York’s commissioners of emigration, whose main jobs to this point had been to run the quarantine and oversee the care of indigent immigrants, decided to create an immigrant reception station at the southern tip of Manhattan in Castle Garden, a cavernous indoor arena built within the surviving walls of a post-Revolutionary fortification known as Castle Clinton. They did so not out of a desire to better inspect the newcomers and thereby protect Americans from them. Rather, the Castle Garden immigration center was founded to protect the immigrants from Americans. Each arriving ship would be met at the docks by a swarm of immigrant runners, men who would besiege the dazed and bewildered newcomers, grab their luggage, and lead them to boardinghouses whose owners typically gouged them, then held their luggage hostage if the newcomers refused to pay. The commissioners of emigration could not regulate the runners at a hundred different docks all over town, so they made Castle Garden into an immigration depot, hoping that if all the runners had to congregate in a single place, the police could better supervise them and the immigrants could be warned to resist their lures and promises.

By 1890, however, Castle Garden was no longer large enough to hold the thousands of immigrants who arrived in New York each day. In this era, each transatlantic vessel might hold a thousand passengers or more, and while on average five ships arrived per day, it was not unheard of for ten ships to enter the harbor in a twenty-four-hour period, especially during immigration’s high season from April to June. Many immigrants remained in Castle Garden overnight or longer, waiting to be met by loved ones and stretching the facility’s capacity to the breaking point.

The need to replace Castle Garden increased as the United States began to modify its open-door policy. In 1875 the first immigration restrictions in American history banned the landing of convicts, prostitutes, and Chinese contract laborers (those who signed labor agreements before they arrived in the United States and could ascertain the prevailing wages). Seven years later, idiots, the insane, those likely to become a public charge, all contract laborers, and all Chinese laborers were added to the list of illegal immigrants. By the time Annie Moore arrived in New York, Congress had also barred paupers, polygamists, and those with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases as well. As the restrictions multiplied, federal authorities began to doubt that the state’s immigration inspectors were up to the task. Every worker at Castle Garden, from the commissioners of emigration right down to the baggage handlers, had received his job as a favor to some politico. Furthermore, the board of commissioners that ran Castle Garden had become dysfunctional by the late 1880s as a result of feuding within its ranks.⁷

And so it was in April 1890 that Weber, a resident of Buffalo who admitted that he knew nothing about immigrants, took control of immigration policy enforcement at the American port that received more of the newcomers than all the others combined. Immediately he began the search for a new location for the inspection of immigrants, and a month later Ellis Island, then serving as the navy’s New York gunpowder storage facility, was selected. It took only eighteen months to triple the size of the island with landfill and construct the proper facilities. Weber soon announced that the Ellis Island immigrant inspection station would open on January 1, 1892. While construction progressed, Weber spent several months crisscrossing eastern Europe to investigate the immigration problem at the behest of President Benjamin Harrison.⁸

Just after dawn on New Year’s Day, Weber boarded a small ferry at the southern end of Manhattan. Skies were cloudy, the temperature was in the low thirties, and the wind, though light on shore, blew briskly over the water. The launch arrived at Ellis Island around 8:00 a.m., at which point Weber began to scrutinize the hulking new facility one last time to insure that that the inspectors, translators, railroad ticket agents, baggage handlers, commissary workers, doctors, and nurses knew their assignments. The mammoth main building, three stories of Georgia pine measuring 400 feet long and 165 feet wide, with turrets at each corner, could easily accommodate as many as fifteen thousand immigrants per day, Weber assured the press. Around 10:30, when the colonel was satisfied that all the employees as well as invited dignitaries and newspaper reporters were ready, he ordered the flags to be dipped three times, the prearranged signal that the transport carrying the first boatload of immigrants should proceed to Ellis Island.⁹

An hour or so earlier, a ferry festooned in red, white, and blue bunting had tied up alongside the Nevada. Annie and the other steerage passengers clambered aboard while sailors brought the immigrants’ trunks, bags, and bundles onto the ferry. The reason why their transport was so festively decorated soon spread among the passengers: of the three immigrant ships that had spent the night anchored in New York Harbor, theirs had been chosen to be the first proc­essed at New York’s new immigrant landing station.

The original Ellis Island immigration depot. After fire destroyed this wooden structure in 1897, it was replaced by the iconic brick reception buildings that we associate with Ellis Island today.

Had the ladies and gentlemen who occupied the Nevada’s first- and second-class cabins been aboard the ferry, Weber undoubtedly would have granted them the honor of disembarking first. But immigration officials had already processed the cabin passengers on board the Nevada. Once the small ferry with Annie and the other steerage passengers cast off, a pilot steered the Nevada up the Hudson to Pier 38, just south of Houston Street on the west side of Manhattan, where these travelers could disembark at their leisure. Only steerage passengers ever set foot on Ellis Island.¹⁰

Exactly how seventeen-year-old Annie Moore, whom the Times described as a little rosy-cheeked Irish girl, came to be at the front of the line waiting to descend the gangplank onto Ellis Island is not clear. According to one newspaper account, an Italian at the head of the queue gave Annie his place when he saw her in tears, seemingly overcome by the emotions of the moment. In contrast, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World (not a paper renowned for high journalistic standards) wrote that a big German with a shawl rolled thirty or forty times around his neck had one foot on the gang plank. He was about to earn fame as the first foreigner to set foot on Ellis Island when one Mike Tierney (apparently a sailor on the ferry) shouted Ladies first! while simultaneously pulling the German back and pushing young Annie forward. Most press accounts mention indecision at the top of the gangplank, suggesting that the identity of the first immigrant to land was one detail that Weber did not dictate.¹¹

In any event, little Annie walked down the ramp first. Weber and other dignitaries immediately hustled her and her brothers inside the vast wooden edifice to a tall lectern-like desk, where an official recorded her name, age, occupation, last place of residence, and intended destination in the United States, which she listed as her parents’ home on Monroe Street. Colonel Weber then made a short speech welcoming her to the United States and handed her a glistening $10 gold coin. Father Callahan of the Mission of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary (an organization that provided assistance to young female Catholic immigrants) then blessed her and gave her a silver coin, while another bystander supplemented the gift with a five dollar gold piece. With her brothers in tow, Annie then hurried along to the local waiting-room, where she found her parents, and in less than half an hour from the time she landed she was on her way to the city to spend the rest of New Year’s Day.¹²

Over the next sixty-two years, 15 million immigrants followed in Annie Moore’s footsteps through the inspection rooms of Ellis Island to begin their new lives in America. Annie was quickly forgotten.

Her name did not appear again in the columns of the Times until 1965, when she was mentioned in a story on a presidential proclamation declaring the abandoned, crumbling Ellis Island complex a national shrine and part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Twelve years later, in an article on the ghosts of Ellis Island, Times reporter Francis X. Clines invoked Annie’s name once again. If she is still alive, she is 100 years old, he noted. If she is dead, there is regret none of us can hear her colleen’s story of what happened after Ellis Island.¹³

Regret that stories such as Moore’s seemed lost to history had grown more widespread at the time Clines toured the remains of Ellis Island, where, as he reported in his story, plans were already under way to restore the facility and turn it into a museum of the American immigration experience. The impetus to create such a museum gained momentum from the phenomenal success of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a book describing the author’s efforts to trace his family history back to Africa, which attracted huge audiences both in print and as a television miniseries. Equally important was the white ethnic revival of the same period. Ever since World War I, Americans had been encouraged to downplay their ethnic heritage and think of themselves as 100 percent American. But that imperative waned in the 1970s, perhaps owing to a thaw in the Cold War, and Americans once again began to more visibly take pride in their ethnic backgrounds and immigrant origins. The opening of the Ellis Island Museum in 1990 was the culmination of these larger trends.¹⁴

The organizers of the Ellis Island restoration and museum put out a call for the descendants of Annie Moore to come forward. It was answered by ­Margaret O’Connell Middleton, a seventy-two-year-old resident of Tucson, who reported that her mother, Annie Moore, had moved, after her arrival at Ellis Island, to Hill County, Texas. There she married a descendant of the famed Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell and started a family. Annie and her children relocated to New Mexico after her husband died, Middleton reported, but on returning to Texas to visit a sick brother in 1923, Moore was run down and killed by a Fort Worth streetcar.¹⁵

At a ceremony in 1988 marking the kickoff of fund-raising for a family history center in the restored Ellis Island complex, Mrs. Middleton presented a $10 bill to the restoration committee in honor of the $10 gold piece Colonel Weber had given Annie almost one hundred years earlier. Middleton’s family members were also on hand in Cobh (as the Irish had renamed Queenstown) in February 1993, when a bronze statue of Annie and her brothers was unveiled near the spot where they had boarded the Nevada, and at Ellis Island a few months later when a statue of Annie was dedicated there. Soon, the story of how Annie Moore had sought opportunity in the West, like so many immigrants before her, filled American history textbooks.¹⁶

In the fall of 1993, I took my students from the University of Wyoming on a tour of immigration history sites in New York City. On our visit to Ellis Island, we stopped at the new statue of Annie and I told the students the story of her Irish roots and tragic death in Texas. I continued to visit Ellis Island and Annie’s statue regularly with my students even after I moved to take a teaching position in Washington, D.C.

Annie Moore and her brothers commemorated in a statue that sits by the docks at Cobh (formerly Queenstown), ten miles southeast of the city of Cork. Large ships taking passengers from Cork to North America departed from Queenstown rather than from Cork itself.

One evening in 2004, after many class trips and many lectures to my students about Annie Moore, I was having dinner in Washington with the family of my twelve-year-old son’s best friend. His parents, Jackie Judd (a former ABC News correspondent) and Michael Shulman, an investment adviser, asked me about my work. I mentioned my book project on the history of immigrant life in New York City.

Shulman asked if I knew who the first immigrant was to land on Ellis Island.

Annie Moore, of course, I said.

Do you know what happened to her?

She was killed by a streetcar in Texas, I replied.

No, he said. That’s what the history books say, but it’s not true. The real Annie Moore was my great-aunt. She never left New York City.

I was a bit incredulous, but he impressed me with his certitude. He was confident that the truth would eventually come out.

It did not take long. Several years before that dinner, a genealogist named Megan Smolenyak, working on a historical documentary about immigration to be aired on PBS, had decided to check Margaret O’Connell Middleton’s story as part of her research on Annie Moore. The genealogist was shocked to discover that while Middleton’s mother was indeed named Annie Moore, census records indicated that she had been born in Illinois, not Cork. Census documents are often inaccurate, but every kind of original source the genealogist could find indicated that Middleton’s mother was Illinois-born and could not possibly be the Ellis Island Annie. Smolenyak tried to use those same census records to find out what had happened to the immigrant Annie Moore, but she did not succeed before the documentary was completed. As a result, the story of Annie Moore was left out, and Smolenyak moved on to other assignments.

Her failure to track down the real Annie gnawed at Smolenyak, as it would any good genealogist. In the summer of 2006 she offered a $1,000 reward to the online genealogical community for anyone who could discover the fate of the Ellis Island Annie and her descendants.

Young women who later marry are a genealogist’s nightmare, because if one does not know their married name, they can be lost forever. So the researchers who took up the challenge focused their attention on Annie’s brothers. In a couple of weeks, followers of Smolenyak’s blog found evidence that a Philip Moore who had lived in Brooklyn in the mid-twentieth century was the Philip who had accompanied Annie on the Nevada. Other records showed that this Philip had a daughter, Anna, who married a man named Shulman, and that among their children was a son named Michael. After several false starts, Smolenyak dialed the phone number of the Michael Shulman with whom I had had dinner. As soon as I said ‘Annie Moore,’ he knew instantly: ‘That’s us,’ she said, describing the call. I think they’re very happy to be found. Just six weeks after Smolenyak posted the challenge on her blog, the mystery of what had happened to the real Annie Moore had been solved.¹⁷

The real Annie’s story after she left Ellis Island was a bit less dramatic than that of Texas Annie but no less interesting, and was far more revealing about the typical life of an Ellis Island immigrant. Like the preponderance of those processed at Ellis Island, Annie settled in New York, and like many, she stayed there her entire life. Also like thousands of scared and misinformed newcomers, Annie lied during her brief Ellis Island interview. She told officials that it was her fifteenth birthday; in fact, little Annie was seventeen and a half.

Annie, Anthony, and Philip moved in with their parents and probably their older brother and sister in a tiny apartment in a five-story sliver of a building on Monroe Street. Annie’s father was likely at that point a laborer on the docks, the occupation the census recorded for him eight years later in 1900. Money must have been tight, for soon the family had moved out of the somewhat respectable Seventh Ward and into the adjoining Fourth Ward, the most run-down waterfront district on the East River, full of brothels, sailors’ boardinghouses, squalid tenements, and rowdy saloons.

It was probably the move to the Fourth Ward that led Annie to meet her future husband, Augustus Joseph Schayer, known to his friends and family as Gus. Schayer’s father, Simon, was a German immigrant from Baden who owned a bakery at 5 Batavia Street, a couple of blocks from where the Moores lived. Simon’s claim to fame was that he had invented the macaroon—or to be precise, the modern, filled version. This was apparently no idle boast. He patented his creation in 1885.

It was impossible for an immigrant entrepreneur in the Fourth Ward to protect a patent, and as a result, Simon never did parlay his confectionery innovation into riches. This fact, of course, had a significant impact on Simon’s children and their opportunities. His son Gus married Annie in 1895, when he was nineteen and she was twenty, but theirs was never a secure or comfortable life. Annie bore eleven children over the next twenty years, only five of whom survived to adulthood. Infant mortality was common in those days, especially in neighborhoods like the Fourth Ward waterfront, but losing more than half one’s children was uncommon even for that era. The maladies listed on the death certificates of her offspring convey not merely their causes of death but a sense of the pain Annie must have felt as each tiny life faded away—exhaustion w/tubercular pneumonia, diphtheria and broncho-pneumonia, haemophilia, . . . bleeding from mouth continuously, enterocolitis for 24 days, chronic valvular disease, and perhaps saddest of all m[a]rasmus, a condition in which an infant cannot put on weight and starves to death. These ailments accompanied a life of poverty in dilapidated tenements with poor ventilation, terrible sanitation, and inadequate medical care. Annie’s mother was always nearby to help (Annie and Gus never lived more than three or four blocks from their parents), but even so, the unrelenting march of disease and death must have been hard for Annie to bear.¹⁸

When Annie’s brother Anthony died at age twenty-one in the Bronx, he was initially buried in the city’s potter’s field, the resting place for those who could not afford a burial plot. Annie’s father, Matthew, succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver in 1907 at age fifty-five in the House of Relief, the ward for the indigent in New York Hospital. In January 1909, when Annie’s fifty-four-year-old mother, Julia, became ill with chills and fever, Annie and Gus sent her to the city almshouse for medical care. She recovered, but a decade later, suffering from senile psychosis (what today we would call Alzheimer’s disease), she was again brought by her family to an institution for the poor, the state hospital on Wards Island, where she spent the last seven years of her life until she died, at age seventy, in 1927.¹⁹

Even so, Annie and Gus were not the poorest of the poor. Gus’s income from work as a salesman at the Fulton Street Market must have been decent, at least some of the time. They managed to buy a family plot at Calvary Cemetery in Brooklyn, where they buried their children, albeit without headstones. They could also afford to purchase the occasional family photo. We know that Annie was not lacking for food, either; by her forties she was quite obese. That excess weight must have contributed to her death from heart failure at age forty-nine, in 1924. According to family lore, when she passed away, her casket was too big to be carried down the narrow staircase and had to be taken out a window instead.²⁰

Annie Moore at about age thirty with one of her eleven children. Only five survived to adulthood.

It is a shame that Annie did not survive into her sixties to enjoy some of the good luck that finally came her family’s way. In 1938 Gus inherited $3,000 from a mysterious benefactress named Anna Kientsch. At the time, that sum would have conveyed the economic status of a $200,000 bequest today. But Gus does not seem to have spent much of his inheritance on himself. He continued to live in the old neighborhood at 90 Oliver Street, in the same tenement where he and Annie had raised their kids.²¹

It is also a shame that Annie did not live long enough to see her clan turn into an almost archetypal New York immigrant family, intermarrying with other transplants from around the globe. Annie’s marriage to a German American was considered a mixed marriage in its day, especially since Gus’s father, Simon, was probably Jewish. Today, the descendants of Annie and her brothers include representatives from all the other leading New York City immigrant groups—Italians, eastern European Jews, Chinese, and Dominicans. Annie and her brothers, the first immigrants to pass through Ellis Island, truly became prototypical New Yorkers, with lives and families inextricably linked to the New York immigrant experience.

One last mystery surrounds the story of Annie Moore. Colonel Weber, it turns out, did not preside over Ellis Island for very long. When Benjamin Harrison lost his reelection bid to Grover Cleveland eleven months after Ellis Island opened, Weber was forced to make way for an appointee of the new administration. A century later, when the Ellis Island Museum opened, Weber’s descendants donated to its archives a few dozen photos dating from his brief tenure as immigration commissioner. Shulman and Smolenyak are convinced that one of them, depicting a girl and two younger boys set apart from a crowd of immigrants, is a photo of Annie and her brothers at Ellis Island on January 1, 1892.

Archivists at Ellis Island insist that this photo cannot be the Moores. It is, they contend, a photo of immigrants at the Barge Office, a facility at the eastern edge of Battery Park used to process immigrants from the time Castle Garden closed in 1890 until Ellis Island opened in 1892. But Smolenyak notes that the unusual support beams in the background of the photo precisely match those used in the original Ellis Island building. She has offered a $1,000 reward, as yet unclaimed, to anyone who can prove that this photo does not depict the famous trio. Shulman says that the girl in the picture is the spitting image of his mother, while I was struck by the uncanny resemblance that the older boy in the photo bears to Shulman’s twin sons, Anthony and Philip. It is hard to imagine, however, that the younger boy in this photograph could be twelve, Philip Moore’s true age, even accounting for malnutrition in Ireland. Yet the ship’s first officer thought that Philip was only nine and that Annie was thirteen, and the Times referred to her as little Annie. If Shulman and Smolenyak are ever proved right, then someday this photo may become one of the iconic images of American history.²²

Some of Annie Moore’s descendants are convinced that she and her brothers Anthony and Philip are the subjects of this photo, which was donated to the Ellis Island archives by the family of Colonel John B. Weber, the first superintendent of immigration at Ellis Island.

The story of Annie Moore is a microcosm of the New York—and American—immigrant saga. Families are separated and sometimes reunited. Unrealistic expectations clash with harsh reality. There are tragic deaths and miraculous tales of survival and success. Loved ones are lost, and sometimes found. There are lies and heartache. Hating one another, loving one another, agreeing and disagreeing in a hundred different languages, a hundred different dialects, a hundred different religions. Crowding one another, and fusing against their wills slowly with one another, is how one immigrant described the New York experience a century ago, a characterization that has pretty much held true for four hundred years.²³

More than anything else, the immigrants come with dreams—dreams that hunger might become a thing of the past, dreams that restrictions and discrimination might be replaced by rights, and dreams that poverty might be traded for security and opportunity, if not for oneself, then at least for one’s children or grandchildren. These dreams characterized the New York immigrant story from the arrival of the city’s first Dutch settlers through the heyday of Five Points, the Lower East Side, and Little Italy. Those same dreams dominate the lives of New York’s newest immigrants, whether they are Chinese or Guyanese, Jamaican or Dominican, Mexican or Ghanaian. The story of immigrant New York is truly a story of dreams.

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City of Dreams attempts to tell the story of New York’s immigrants from the founding of the city nearly four hundred years ago to the present day. In order to do justice to the immigrants’ compelling life stories yet still cover the entirety of the city’s colorful history, I have chosen to focus the narrative on the largest immigrant groups of each era. City of Dreams therefore pays particular attention to the Dutch, the English, and the Scots in the pre-Revolutionary years, Irish and German immigrants in the nineteenth century, Italians and eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century, and immigrants from China and the Caribbean in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a result, some very visible immigrant groups, such as Greeks and Indians, that never ranked among the most populous foreign-born populations in the city are not addressed to the extent that some readers might hope or expect. I also decided to concentrate on the eras in which immigration to New York was heaviest and on events that were especially important in shaping the city’s history and Americans’ perceptions of its immigrants. As a result, I allot much more space to the 1770s, 1860s, and 1910s than I do to the early part of the nineteenth century or the middle of the twentieth.

I also devote fewer chapters to recent immigration than I do to earlier large influxes of newcomers. As a historian, I especially value the perspective that hindsight offers, and we are still too close to the most recent immigration to be able to determine which trends and events are defining and which will soon be forgotten. There is also very little existing historical literature on the most recent immigrants for me to rely upon to write their story. Few of their scrapbooks, diaries, and photos have made their way from their grandchildren’s attics to archives and historical societies. Social scientists are studying today’s immigrants, but their data-heavy, theoretically oriented publications lack the compelling personal narratives that make New York’s immigration history so rich and rewarding. I was able to use press coverage to supply some of their stories, but in the end I decided that journalism could take me only so far. Otherwise, City of Dreams would have just as many chapters on today’s newcomers as it does on those of the great waves of immigration of the past. But I am comforted in the knowledge that a generation from now, historians will be able to document the sagas of New York’s newest immigrants with the nuance and detail that their stories so richly deserve.

1

Settlement

PETER MINUIT WAS FURIOUS. It was springtime, 1632, and he had a colony to run, which he directed from a spot—Manhattan Island—that he had personally chosen and bought from the wilden, or Indians, known to the Dutch as the Canarsie. He should have been there now organizing fur-trading expeditions up the great river that Henry Hudson had discovered only a few years earlier, directing the planting of a new crop, policing the port of New Amsterdam for smugglers, adjudicating disputes between quarreling settlers, and writing letters trying to induce more Europeans to immigrate to the fledgling colony—his colony.

But instead, the forty-three-year-old Minuit was under arrest, in Plymouth, England, of all places, charged with theft of property from England’s King Charles. The five thousand beaver pelts in the hold of his ship Unity rightfully belonged to Charles, insisted his captors, because Minuit’s settlement sat on a continent that Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto had claimed for England in the sixteenth century. Besides, the person who discovered Manhattan, Hudson, was himself an Englishman, further confirming England’s sovereignty over the territory. Never mind that Hudson’s voyages in his ship, Half Moon, were sponsored by Dutch merchants.

Minuit, of course, contended that New Amsterdam was Dutch. If an Italian in the employ of England could claim territory for the English, then an Englishman hired by the Dutch could surely claim it for the Netherlands. But the English would not listen to reason. They retorted that even if Hudson had claimed Manhattan for the Dutch, that claim was null and void because Manhattan lay in the northern portion of the English colony of Virginia, established several years before Hudson’s voyage to North America. The Dutch minister to the Court of St. James’s understood that Minuit and his ship were merely pawns in a much larger North American chess game. England could not afford to ruin its amicable relationship with the Netherlands over animal pelts when both nations faced a much more menacing threat from Spain. Yet while the Dutch minister worked confidently but patiently over the course of a month to negotiate the release of the vessel and its passengers, Minuit remained under lock and key in Plymouth. His prospects for regaining the directorship of the colony of New Netherland—already in doubt before he had set sail—diminished with each passing day.¹

Minuit’s journey from obscurity to international incident had been a circuitous one. He had been born in about 1589 in Wesel, a town in the Rhine River valley in the western German duchy of Kleve near the Dutch border. Minuit’s parents were Walloons, French-speaking members of the Dutch Reformed Church who originated in the predominantly Catholic region that is now southern Belgium. This district belonged, in theory, to the Netherlands, but Spain had occupied it for more than fifty years. Wallonia had become less tolerant of Protestants under the Spanish Inquisition, and approximately 150,000 Walloons fled the resulting persecution and settled in England, Holland, and the far western German states such as Kleve.²

Young Minuit overflowed with ambition. In 1613 he married Gerdruudt Raets, daughter of the mayor of Kleve’s capital. Soon they moved to the prosperous central Dutch city of Utrecht, where Minuit learned diamond cutting. Yet the gem trade did not satisfy him. He yearned for something more exciting, more lucrative. Learning that some Walloons had volunteered to serve as the first immigrants to a Dutch colony in North America, Minuit asked to make the journey too. He did not, however, want to commit to living in the wilderness for six years, like the expedition’s typical colonists. Nor did he desire employment with the Geoctroyeerde West Indische Compagnie (Dutch West India Company, henceforth WIC), the group financing the expedition. Minuit merely wished to serve as an expedition volunteer who would aid the organ­izers of the colonization effort in exchange for the opportunity to scout out North American trading opportunities. Having found only thirty or so Walloons initially willing to settle in New Netherland, the WIC agreed to take Minuit too. After all, if Indians attacked or a fire broke out, another able-bodied soul would be welcome, no matter his ulterior motives.³

It appears that Minuit arrived in New Amsterdam with the colony’s provisional director, Willem Verhulst, in the spring of 1625, about nine months after those thirty original Walloons had begun the arduous work of constructing a colony from scratch in the wilderness thousands of miles from home. The instructions given to Verhulst by the WIC refer to Minuit as a volunteer who would explore trading opportunities with the Indians near Fort Orange, modern-day Albany. Three months later, when the WIC sent further directives to Verhulst, it named Minuit to the colony’s governing council. Minuit returned to Europe in 1625, but he apparently relished his elevated status in the fledgling colony and arranged to go back there, leaving Holland and his family in January 1626 and arriving in New Amsterdam, most likely via a Dutch possession in the Caribbean, on the fourth of May.⁴

Minuit must have been shocked by what he found upon disembarking in New York Harbor that second time. The very colonists Verhulst was supposed to direct had placed him under arrest. Precisely why the settlers turned on Verhulst is not clear. Some claimed he had misappropriated funds, others that he had cheated the Indians, putting the colonists at risk of attack. Indians had recently ransacked Fort Orange, and the immigrants may have blamed Verhulst. One gets the sense that the colonists simply found him insufferable. So, on account of the bad conduct of Verhulst, wrote one immigrant in 1626, the colony’s council voted upon Minuit’s return to make him their new director.⁵

Minuit believed that Verhulst’s approach to operating the colony had been completely misguided. Following WIC instructions, Verhulst had divided his tiny contingent of colonists among far-flung settlements that stretched from Cape May to Trenton on what the Dutch called the South River (what we call the Delaware), from New Amsterdam to Albany on what the Dutch labeled the North River (the Hudson), and even farther north and east up the waterway the Dutch called the Fresh River (the Connecticut). The WIC had envisaged the South River settlements as the most important, but Minuit correctly foresaw New Amsterdam as the key trading hub, and reallocated most of the company’s resources there. Minuit also decided, probably for defensive purposes, to concentrate most of the WIC’s settlers in one place, so he ordered the bulk of the colonists stationed in other places to relocate to New Amsterdam. Finally, while Verhulst had followed WIC orders and made one of New York Harbor’s smaller islands, Nut Island (now Governors Island), the headquarters of WIC operations at the mouth of the Hudson, Minuit countermanded that directive, too, and moved the settlement to the much larger island the natives called Mannahatta.⁶

Unlike Nut Island, Mannahatta was inhabited by Indians, so the move there raised the question of how the wilden would react. If land that the Dutch wanted to occupy was inhabited by some Indians, wrote the WIC leadership, these should not be driven away by force or threats, but should be persuaded by kind words or otherwise by giving them something, to let us live amongst them. WIC instructions dictated that such transactions should be codified in a contract, signed by the Indians in their manner, since such contracts upon other occasions may be very useful to the Company.⁷

Thus originated the famous transaction popularly known as the purchase of Manhattan Island. It is likely that despite the language barrier, both the Indians and the Dutch initially understood it as a long-term agreement to share the island, because for decades afterward Indians continued to live on Manhattan Island and the Dutch made no efforts to evict them. Nonetheless, when the Dutch government’s representative in the WIC’s governing body wrote from Amsterdam to his superiors in The Hague to describe the arrival of a ship from New Amsterdam, he stated that the settlers have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders. Minuit did not pay cash but instead gave the Indians trade goods—axes, kettles, awls, duffel cloth, and the like. The idea that the Indians bartered Manhattan for beads is a myth, though it is possible that wampum, the Indians’ currency made of strung precious seashells, was part of the transaction. The WIC must have been pleased with the deal, for while the company had instructed Verhulst to find a piece of arable land at least two thousand acres in size, Minuit had won the right to settle an island ten times larger. Yet the best feature of Manhattan, Minuit recognized, was its location. Manhattan stood at the mouth of the Hudson and several other rivers, an early twentieth-century historian noted, like a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world.⁸

Minuit worked to solidify the Dutch presence on Manhattan Island. At the southernmost tip, which was perfectly positioned to catch the breeze coming off the harbor, Minuit oversaw the construction of two windmills: one for grinding grain, the other for sawing lumber. These would dominate the southern Manhattan skyline for decades. Minuit also strove to improve the other major structure in the young settlement—the fort. The colonists had skimped on the defensive structure, substituting sod walls for stone, so Minuit ordered it rebuilt. The immigrants, seeing that New Amsterdam would be a more important outpost than originally envisioned, soon began, in the words of their first pastor, Jonas Michaëlius, to build sturdy new houses in place of the huts and hovels in which up until now they have not so much lived as lodged. It seemed that New Amsterdam finally had a leader who could make the settlement a success.⁹

But while New Amsterdam continued to expand under Minuit, it did not turn a profit for the WIC. The immigrants sent thousands of beaver pelts back to Amsterdam each year, but the proceeds did not bring in enough to compensate the company for the cost of maintaining fortified settlements, paying the dozens of employees living in the colony, subsidizing the shipping of food and people to North America, and transporting furs back to Europe. Minuit argued that the colony would become more profitable if the WIC invested more in it by financing the emigration of additional colonists, but company officials claimed they could find few Dutchmen willing to risk their lives in the wilds of North America.

The directors started to lose faith in Minuit, in part because of the red ink, and in part because Michaëlius had begun to undermine him by sending reports critical of Minuit’s conduct back to company headquarters. Minuit might seem energetic and capable on the surface, wrote the minister, but in fact he was a slippery man, who under the treacherous mark of honesty is a compound of all iniquity and wickedness. He could deceive WIC officials because he is accustomed to the lies, of which he is full, and to the imprecations and most awful execrations. Furthermore, although Minuit was a married man, wrote Michaëlius, he is not free from fornication . . . and deems no one worthy of his favor and protection, who is not of the same kidney as he is. Minuit denied the charges, insisting that Michaëlius was the liar, but the WIC directors, not knowing whom to believe and realizing that such a feud could not be allowed to continue, recalled them both at the end of 1631 for an investigation. Together, the two men, along with other leaders of the colony, boarded the ironically named Unity, filled with the year’s bounty of furs and timber, and sailed for Amsterdam.¹⁰

Winter was not the ideal time of year to cross the Atlantic. Passengers struggled to stay warm on the windswept wooden vessel, icebergs were a constant menace, and while hurricane season might be over, winter storms at sea were nearly as brutal. The Unity had made it almost all the way across the Atlantic when just such a storm struck. Rather than risk losing his ship, the captain decided to seek shelter in the southwest English port of Plymouth. Minuit expected the Dutch ship to be welcomed by the English; after all, the two Protestant nations were allies against their powerful common enemy, Catholic Spain. But when the English learned that the Unity had sailed from a certain island named Manathans in North America, authorities in Plymouth arrested Minuit and Michaëlius, insisting that the Unity’s hold contained English property taken from English territory without permission. Minuit must have told his captors that the goods originated in territory he had purchased from the Indians, but the English contended that the natives had no right to sell land that already belonged to England.¹¹

After they had remained in English custody in Plymouth for more than a month, the Dutch envoy to England finally negotiated the release of the men, their ship, and their cargo. England and the Netherlands could not afford a prolonged diplomatic crisis. But the English had made their point: they laid claim to all of North America, including New Amsterdam, which even Michaëlius recognized would eventually be the key and principal stronghold of the country.¹²

When Minuit finally reached WIC headquarters on the third of May, 1632, the tulips were fading as rapidly as his prospects for reclaiming the directorship of New Netherland. After a perfunctory hearing, the company officials dismissed Minuit, citing as the cause, of all things, his failure to induce more Dutchmen to settle in New Amsterdam. Minuit could only console himself with the knowledge that they had fired Michaëlius too. But Minuit would have at least a modicum of revenge. After several years of underemployment, he agreed to lead a Swedish expedition aimed at seizing part of New Netherland in the name of Christina, Sweden’s eleven-year-old queen. Minuit, with two ships and fewer than one hundred men, planned to take control of the South River, which he knew would be lightly guarded because he himself had ordered the transfer to New Amsterdam of most of the Dutch colonists previously stationed there. Minuit’s plan succeeded. In the spring of 1638 the colony of New Sweden, encompassing the Delaware River valley as far north as the future cities of Trenton and Philadelphia, was born. It would remain a thorn in the side of the Dutch and English for nearly twenty years. Yet once again Minuit did not get a chance to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Ever on the lookout for the deal of a lifetime, he died in a Caribbean hurricane in August 1638. He had sailed there hoping to buy tobacco that he could resell at a steep markup in Europe, whose inhabitants had developed an insatiable demand for North America’s vile weed.¹³

It might seem surprising that the Dutchmen who formed the WIC would risk so much hard-earned money on a highly risky fur-trading venture thousands of miles from home on a continent that Europeans barely knew and in territory over which the Dutch had, at best, a tenuous hold. After all, the Dutch merchants on whose behalf Minuit operated could have contented themselves with the wealth they already had. The early seventeenth century was the Netherlands’ Golden Age, one that gave birth to Rembrandt and Vermeer, the microscope, and one of the wealthiest societies the world had ever known. In this country there is no-one who cannot live with ease according to his rank, Venetian ambassador Girolamo Trevisano reported enviously to his government. Nobody begs, and those who want to give alms, would not know to whom. Dutch prosperity resulted in part from the fact that Dutch merchants (like those who started the West India Company) dominated many of Europe’s most important trade routes. Before refrigeration, salt for food preservation was a highly prized commodity, and the Dutch in this period played the leading role in Europe’s lucrative salt trade. In an era when the European diet was dominated by bland boiled foods, spices were likewise exceedingly valuable, far more so than today. Dutch merchants virtually monopolized the era’s spice trade with Asia. As a result, the Dutch enjoyed the highest standard of living in Europe.¹⁴

It was the desire to preserve their status as the merchant princes of the Continent that accidentally led the Dutch to found New Amsterdam. When Columbus discovered America in 1492, he had been seeking not a new continent but rather a more direct route to the spice dealers of Asia. More than a century later, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Portuguese, and Spaniards, all hoping to break the Dutch stranglehold on this commerce with Asia, still sought a shortcut to the mercantile centers of the Orient that would allow them to circumvent Dutch middlemen. If one of them found it, the lucrative Dutch spice trade might quickly collapse. So the Dutch decided that they had to find the new route first.

Pecuniary interests were not their sole motivation. By the time the Dutch founded New Amsterdam, they had been fighting for their independence from Spain for sixty years. Spain still occupied some Dutch-speaking provinces in what would eventually become Belgium. Spain’s ouster could only be financed with profits from the spice trade. Thus, the very survival of the Dutch nation was at stake in this battle to preserve the Dutch trading advantage with Asia.¹⁵

The leaders of the Dutch Republic were not thrilled when Hudson failed to find a shorter route to Asia. But when Dutch fur dealers learned that Hudson had discovered a wilderness full of skins and peltries from beavers, otters, foxes, and other animals, they were elated. The Dutch fur industry had long been dependent on the French colony in what is now Quebec for their raw materials. They could not wait to exploit Hudson’s discoveries to secure animal pelts without the markups imposed by French middlemen. These Dutch fur merchants secured permission from the Dutch government to trade in the area Hudson had explored and immediately began sending ships there.¹⁶

The fur traders did not attempt to settle Manhattan or any other part of what they called New Netherland. Typically, they sailed inland looking for Indians with furs to barter, loaded their ships with the Indians’ pelts, and then returned immediately to Europe. The Dutch government eventually decided that it wanted more from New Netherland than animal skins, for while it was not yet clear what else North America could offer the Dutch, the fact that their rivals Spain, France, and England were all establishing more permanent outposts on the continent suggested that perhaps they ought to do the same. So when the Dutch fur traders’ patent to do business in New Netherland expired in 1618, the Dutch government declined to renew it. Instead, it created the West India Company, modeled on the wildly successful Dutch East India Company which monopolized the spice trade in Asia. The new company’s investors would be the only Dutch merchants permitted to buy and sell goods in North America, South America, and on the west coast of Africa. Its employees would have near total authority to govern, administer justice, and make treaties with natives in territories where it operated.¹⁷

The WIC made its first forays into colonization in the winter of 1623–24. Initially, Manhattan and its immediate environs were not a priority for the company. Instead, the WIC gambled the bulk of its start-up capital on an audacious attempt to invade and occupy the Brazilian port of São Salvador de Bahia and thereby gain control of southeast Brazil’s sugar trade. The company assembled a squadron of twenty-six warships carrying 3,300 men for the invasion, to this day the largest-ever privately financed invasion flotilla.¹⁸

At the end of January 1624, as the WIC squadron was hurtling toward Brazil, the company dispatched a single sailing vessel (aptly named New Netherland) to North America to set up the company’s trading outpost there. The ship was commanded by Cornelis Mey, a seasoned Dutch captain who had made several previous trips to North America. Whereas European ships that had come to this part of North America in the past had carried only sailors or others suited for the business of exploration, the New Netherland was the first vessel to bring immigrants, people who planned to live in this fledgling colony on a long-term basis.

WIC leaders instructed Mey to set up his base of operations on the southernmost of the rivers Hudson had explored, the modern-day Delaware. Company officials chose this location in the belief that the climate in what is now southern New Jersey would be similar to that in Spain’s tropical settlement in Florida. Mey installed an outpost on the north bank of the Delaware Bay (the town there now, Cape May, is named for him) and then set out to fulfill his orders to revive the fur trade on the river now known as the Hudson. When Mey arrived at the mouth of the Hudson, he found a French ship already in the harbor. Its captain told Mey that he intended to plant the French flag there and claim it for France. But Mey, with his yacht of two guns, chased the Frenchmen off the Hudson. It was the last time that France would try to intrude on the Dutch possession.¹⁹

Having disposed of the French threat, Mey did not establish a stronghold at the mouth of the Hudson, as one might expect. The key to the fur trade, Mey and the WIC believed, lay one hundred miles up the North River, where plentiful pelts awaited Dutch traders. Mey therefore shipped most of his colonists up the river to establish a fortress and settlement on the site of present-day Albany. Others were sent to what is now the Connecticut River, with only a handful of settlers left in New York Harbor on Nut Island. Those settlers used Manhattan Island, a few hundred yards across the bay, to pasture their cattle. It was Minuit, two years later, who had the good sense to put the cattle on Nut Island and the people on Manhattan, launching its history as a magnet for immigrants.²⁰

Manhattan seemed to hold an almost limitless bounty for these settlers. We were much gratified on arriving in this country, one wrote in 1624. We found beautiful rivers, bubbling fountains flowing down into the valleys; basins of running waters in the flatlands, agreeable fruits in the woods, such as strawberries, pigeon berries, walnuts, and also . . . wild grapes. Another noted that there grows an abundance of chestnuts, plums, hazelnuts, large walnuts of several sorts, and blueberries. The nut trees would feed the settlers, the firs and pines would bring a handsome profit in Europe as timber and ships’ masts, and the acorns from the tall oaks would fatten their pigs. Until their livestock were established, the colonists could feast on abundant deer, waterfowl, and seafood. There is considerable fish in the rivers, the immigrants reported. They thought the abundance of shellfish especially impressive, and particularly enjoyed the mussels, clams, and oysters, fine for stewing and frying. As each one fills a big spoon, they make a good bite. Other than missing the beef and pork to which they were accustomed,

Reviews for City of Dreams

[yukon92 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very detailed and informative history of immigration in New York.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book tells the story of how immigration has shaped, and is still shaping, New York City. On the one hand, it provides a highly detailed analysis of immigration over the past two centuries -- who came, where they came from, and how they lived. On the other, it provides an enlightening new view of the history of New York. It's also, with immigration as much of an issue as it is now, an important reminder that immigration has been an issue for centuries, and that the nativist response rises and then retreats, as one immigrant group after another becomes "native". The book is engagingly written, and avoids getting drowned in the mass of numbers on which it is based. It is also meticulously researched, but is not at all laborious to read. Indeed, "City of Dreams" is an engrossing story, and an enjoyable read.

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

History professor Anbinder, himself a native of New York, traces the waves of immigrants that have built NYC into the behemoth it is today. From Peter Minuit and his deal with the Native Americans to today, the author follows wave after wave of immigrants and how they shaped the city. From the Puritans and fur traders to huge waves of German and Irish immigrants to the Italians, eastern Europeans, Asians, former slaves, South and Central American, and West Indies, all the big movements of people are here. It’s a fascinating read; every wave of people came over hoping for more opportunity and a new life. Nearly all faced prejudice of the already ensconced people, horrible living conditions, and endless hard work. They bore this steadfastly, all in the hope that their children would have better lives than they had. This is not your boring history book. Anbinder frequently uses personal accounts to bring vivid life to the past. While this is a massive book- nearly 600 pages with another 100 of end notes, bibliography, appendices, and index- it was as gripping as a well-written novel. Here’s the Irish fleeing the famine, arriving as stick figures. Here are the people trying to take advantage of new immigrants. There were some parts that were less interesting to me- the section on the Civil War, for instance, because I never find war interesting- even those I read every word of. That is a first for me; I tend to skip the bits about fighting. Every wave of immigrants seemed to follow the same routine: take the first jobs they could get, always the things natives (and previous immigrants) had risen above. They work 7 days a week (except for the Jews, who mostly didn’t work on the Sabbath). They live in cramped quarters. As soon as they can save the money, they start a business of their own. They also send amazing amounts of money back to their home countries, whether it be to support parents or to bring over other family members. They become citizens as fast as possible most of the time, unless they are hoping to make enough money to have a business in their home country. They almost always dislike the next wave of immigrants, feeling that next wave has a criminal element to it. Humans have remained the same for the 400 year span of NYC; they are filled with prejudice. Excellent book; should be required reading. It’ll enlighten a lot of folks who want to build a wall.