An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930

Abstract

The immigrant residential enclaves in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century are often portrayed in literature and remembered in the popular imagination as places where newcomers lived, worked, socialized, and worshipped with those from the same home country, region, or ethnic group. Yet as Shirley J. Yee reminds us, to leave the narrative at that is to miss part of the story. In this highly readable book, she explores the relationships that developed across ethnic lines in lower Manhattan neighborhoods during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a range of social and economic contexts from shops and tenements to schools, missions, saloons, and settlement houses. Some of these interethnic and interracial relations were fleeting and superficial; others were of greater consequence. They emerged, she notes, out of necessity—conducting business, finding employment, caring for the sick, burying the dead—as much as out of personal desire.