Immigration in the 1880s

In addition to the technological advances that drove the city's economic development and changed the way New Yorkers traveled, lived, and worked, new immigrants changed the face of New York City. After 1880 the most intensive period of immigration in American history began. Immigration to the United States from Germany, which had been fairly steady through the middle of the nineteenth century, reached its highpoint in the 1880s, when 1.5 million Germans came–of these, however, only 55,000 stayed in New York City. The Irish-born population of New York City remained fairly constant between 1860-1880, hovering between 260,000 and 275,000. In 1885, 40 percent of the city's population was of Irish descent, and 35 percent were of German descent. As immigration from Western and Northern Europe began to decline, a new wave of immigration, beginning in the 1880s, signaled a growing shift in the city's demographic makeup.

Increasingly after 1880, eastern and southern European immigrants flooded into New York City. German Jews had come to the United States earlier in the century, settling largely in New York and Philadelphia. But the Jewish immigration after the 1870s was different: German Jews tended to work in middle class trades, while the subsequent wave of Jewish immigration brought mostly working-class Jews. Seventy thousand Eastern European Jews came to the United States in the 1870s; this number nearly tripled to 200,000 during the 1880s as Jews in the Pale of Settlement (parts of present day Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania) fled anti-Semitic pogroms and government oppression. The vast majority of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States settled in New York City, on the Lower East Side. Immigration from Italy similarly grew to over 30,000 annually in the 1880s, a ten-fold increase from levels of previous decades. While Italian immigration to the United States was more dispersed than Jewish immigration, a great many Italians settled in New York City, also predominantly on the Lower East Side. While there were fewer than one thousand Italians in the city in 1850, by 1880 twenty-thousand Italians lived in New York City; their numbers would increase more than twelve times by 1900. Germans, Eastern European Jews, and Italians dominated immigration to New York City during the 1880s, but other groups established a significant presence as well: a small enclave of Chinese, mostly men, settled in lower Manhattan, working as laundry workers and cigar rollers. And the city's longstanding African-American population began to increase as well as southern migrants came north looking for work on the docks and in the manufacturing sector, settling along Manhattan's west side and in Brooklyn. By 1888, the roughly 1,500,000 citizens who lived and worked in New York City hailed from increasingly diverse ethnic and national backgrounds.

As the second to last weekend of the winter of 1888 began, New Yorkers went about their various pursuits unaware of the developing storm a thousand miles to the west. A few enjoyed a weekend break from their offices in the financial district, while many prepared for another day of work before a Sunday reprieve, and still others trudged along with no such break in sight. Whatever their situation, New Yorkers had little clue what their world would look like when they awoke on Monday morning, March 12, 1888.