97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement Read Online Free PDF

structures, “rear tenements,” as they were known, which provided New Yorkers with some of the worst housing in the city. Closer to the river, the rear tenements were replaced by factories (most were for furniture), and past them, the shipyards. Beyond lay the wharves, visible only as a thicket of ship’s masts. Facing north, the grid opened slightly, the blocks were longer and the avenues wider. The buildings were newer and taller. Tompkins Square (Germans called it the Weisse Garten —the “white garden”) was among the few open spaces in the city grid. Nearing the river, the landscape turned more industrial, the tenements replaced by lumberyards, slaughterhouses, and breweries. To the south, toward the narrow tip of Manhattan, lay the Five Points, a maze of skinny passageways and tottering wooden houses. Just beyond it rose the domed cupola of City Hall. To the west of Orchard Street stretched an unbroken string of saloons, restaurants, theaters, and beer halls, some large enough to accommodate a crowd of three thousand. This was the Bowery, New York’s main entertainment district. Beyond it, Broadway, the city’s widest street, sliced the island neatly down the middle.
    The view from 97 Orchard embraced roughly four city wards, a geographic designation dating back to 1686, when New York’s British governor divided Lower Manhattan into six political districts, each one responsible for electing an alderman to sit on the Common Council, the city’s main governing body. As the city expanded northward, new wards were created, so by 1860 it had twenty-two. From the roof of 97 Orchard, the view encompassed the tenth ward (home to the Bowery), the seventeenth ward surrounding Tompkins Square, and the eleventh and thirteenth wards covering the industrial blocks along the river. Those same four wards made up Kleindeutschland , “Little Germany,” the focus of our present story and the center of German life in New York.
    The residents of Kleindeutschland were largely urban people. They had emigrated from cities in Germany and knew how to manage in one. (Immigrants from the German countryside generally passed through New York on their way to Missouri, Illinois, or Wisconsin, wide-open states where land was cheap and they could start farms.) New York Germans, by contrast, earned their living as merchants or trades people. Many were tailors, like Mr. Glockner, but they were also bakers, brewers, printers, and carpenters. Despite their shared roots, however, the residents of “Dutch-town,” as it was sometimes called, were divided into small enclaves, a pattern that mirrored the cultural landscape of nineteenth-century Germany.
    Maps of central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century show Der Deutsche Bund , “the German League,” a confederation of thirty-nine small and large states. The people who made up that sprawling political body, however, were bound together in much smaller groups. Nineteenth-century Germans identified themselves as Bavarians or Hessians or Saxons. Their loyalties were regional, cemented by cultural forces like religion and language. Depending largely on where he lived, a German could be Catholic or Jewish or Lutheran or Calvinist. Germans spoke a variety of local dialects that were often unintelligible to outsiders. And each region had developed its own food traditions that the immigrants carried with them to New York.
    Very broadly speaking, the culinary breakdown looked something like this: Germans from southern states like Swabia, Baden, and Bavaria depended on dumplings and noodles, a class of foods which the Germans called Mehlspeisen (roughly, “flour foods”), as their main source of calories. Northerners, meanwhile, relied more on potatoes, beans, and pulses like split peas and lentils. Where northerners tended to use pork fat as a cooking medium, southerners used butter. Where northerners consumed large amounts of saltwater fish, southerners ate freshwater species like pike and carp.