Big Apple History . Coming to America . Little Germany


	German Immigrants headed for New York board a steamer in Hamburg, Germany.

German immigrants were better off than the Irish, but not by much. Many had useful craft skills, most were educated, and some came with enough money to start businesses.

Protestant and Catholic -- with a few Jews mixed in -- they fled Germany for many reasons. Some were peasants who lost their land or craftsmen who could not compete with new factories. After a failed revolution in 1848, the would-be revolutionaries fled political persecution. Over 800,000 passed through New York in the 1850s alone. Many settled in the northeast corner of the city, an area soon called Kleindeutschland, or "Little Germany."


A German band in New York.

Some German immigrants joined the Irish and in working the city's docks, streets, factories, and construction sites. Others worked in crafts; more than half the city's bakers and cabinet-makers were German immigrants.

With their skills, education, and political beliefs, German immigrants often led the struggle for trade unions and government free of favoritism. Others became active in the politics of their own neighborhoods. They founded self-help schools, German-language libraries, orchestras, and community centers.

Top illustration: Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Illustration at bottom: "German Band," from HARPER'S WEEKLY, April 26, 1876, courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.