History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

When the new arrivals flooded into New York, the fashionable German-type synagogues moved uptown on Manhattan. The refugees crowded into the Lower East Side, into one and a half square miles bounded by the Bowery, Third Avenue, Catherine Street, 14th Street and the East River. Here, by 1910, 540,000 Jews were crammed into what were called Dumbbell Tenements, their shape determined by a 1879 municipal regulation which required airshafts. They were five to eight storeys high, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep, each floor with fourteen rooms, only one of which got any light. The heart of New York Jewry was the ultra-dense Tenth Ward, where 74,401 people lived in 1,196 tenements spread over forty-six blocks (1893). This meant a density of 701.9 people an acre. Here too was the source of the ‘needle trades’, in which most of the immigrants were employed, cutting and sewing ready-made clothes, working a seventy-hour week, twelve to a tiny room. Already by 1888 234 out of 241 New York clothing firms were Jewish; by 1913 it was New York’s biggest industry, 16,552 factories, nearly all Jewish, employing 312,245 people.