Big Apple History . Coming to America . The First Wave of Immigrants


	Irish immigrants approach New York.

Big things were happening in Europe during the mid-1800s. In Germany, a revolution failed. In Ireland, the potato famine was wreaking havoc. Across the rest of the continent, the economy was changing. Big landowners pushed peasants off their land. New factories made craftsmen obsolete. Where would the unwanted, sometimes starving millions go?

Thousands of miles across the Atlantic lay a new country filled with promise. America offered land, jobs, opportunity, freedom, and new homes for millions of desperate Europeans. New York City was this glittering dream of a countries front door.

Immigrants, of course, were nothing new to New York. Since its founding in 1624 as a Dutch colony, the city attracted people from around the world: Dutch merchants, English craftsmen, Portuguese Jews, enslaved Africans. One early visitor counted more than 18 languages on a walk up Broadway.

But this latest wave of immigrants was different. So many were coming, and they were coming so fast. Between 1847 and 1860, more than 2.5 million immigrants flowed through the city. Most headed elsewhere. But hundreds of thousands stayed in New York, changing the city forever.

The immigrants settled in separate neighborhoods. They built their own churches and opened businesses that sold goods they brought with them from the "old country." Some formed gangs to protect themselves from people of other nationalities.

Big changes brought big fears to people already living in New York. Although these people were also the children and grandchildren of immigrants, the sight of large groups of new immigrants moving into established neightborhoods caused New Yorkers to panic. Newspapers called the new immigrants "vagabonds" and "criminals." The city created its first professional police department.

Slowly, the new immigrants and the city began to adjust to each other. The government turned Castle Clinton, an old fort just off southern Manhattan, into an immigrant station. Here, newcomers could be processed quickly and safely. Both native citizens and recent immigrants founded "benevolent societies," which helped new immigrants with jobs and housing.

Like immigrants before and since, the newcomers and especially their American-born children began the slow process of assimilation, finding ways to fit into a new society and to unify as Americans. Of course, this process is always complicated by the understandable desire to hold onto the traditions of the Old World.

Illustration: "Irish Immigrants on Ship, 'Queenstown,'" from HARPER'S WEEKLY, May, 1874, courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.