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[Indiana Jones]

The Italians in New York

The first Italians to come to New York were educated, politically and culturally aware, and from the North. They included a friend of Jefferson, a collaborator with Mozart, and founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the first New York opera company. They were a cultivated elite who captured the fancy of society New York. Italians came to settle in the city in significant numbers only during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. They were poor peasants from the South, who with a pick and shovel built the infrastructure of New York City. Despite adverse conditions, poverty, and illness, gained acceptance from their neighbors. Later generations of Italian New Yorkers created close-knit communities that are still true to their roots and traditions. In an era when Italian have gained fame and success in every form of endeavor, new Italian immigrants are arriving to live the American dream. Today, an Italian-American holds the top government office in New York City (1990s).


History

Columbus may have discovered America but Giovanni da Verrazano, an aristocratic Tuscan, was the first to land in New York. He admired the natural harbor and appreciated the native hospitality, but he did not claim it for his sponsor, Francis I, King of France.

The real Italian presence in America began with the American Revolution. Filippo Mazzei played an important role in the fight for liberty. He was a friend of Jefferson, and his political thought influenced the Declaration of Independence. The British military authorities in New York jailed this revolutionary firebrand and he was forced to escape to France, where he wrote the first history of the American Republic.

Throughout the nineteenth century New York attracted Italy's own revolutionaries and political liberals. Lorenzo da Ponte was one of the first. He arrived in 1805 to begin a new life at the age of fifty-six. This Renaissance man had already been a priest, a revolutionary conspirator, and had written librettos for Mozart. Da Ponte was appointed as the first professor of Italian at Columbia University and was instrumental in founding the Italian Opera House.

Giuseppe Avezzana was one of the leaders in the failed Piedmontese uprising. This soldier of the Italian Revolution found a safe haven in New York before he joined Mazzini and Garibaldi in an attempt to capture Rome. During his New York exile, he ran a successful wholesale business on Pearl Street.

In 1835 an amnesty released twenty Italian freedom fighters from the dungeons of the Austrian Empire. New Yorkers warmly received the exiles and most decided to say. Though they were a small group, they gained prominence in the business and cultural life of the city. Felice Forest became a professor at Columbia, a leading cultural commentator, and finally consul to Genoa. His friend, Louis Tinelli, made a fortune as a pioneer in the silk industry and bankrolled Italian freedom.

The year 1848 was a time of promise for the Italian revolution, but by 1849 the forces of reaction had triumphed and another generation of disappointed Italians sought asylum in New York. Giuseppe Garibaldi, the famed man on a white horse and leader of the Red Shirts, was forced to contemplate the defeat of his Roman republic in Rosebank, Staten Island.

Italians living in New York before the Civil War were not all notable men of action but man had talent to spare. Italian musicians and opera singers entertained in society drawing rooms, while the works of Italian painters and fine cabinetmakers filled the best New York salons. The portrait painter Joseph Fagnani, who painted the crown heads of Europe, made a fortune in America doing touched-up likenesses of New York's Four Hundred.

A small population of Italian barbers, bakers, tailors, and organ grinders were also struggling to make a living in the city. They lived in a northern Italian colony near the notorious Collect. New York's Italian elite provided them with a night school and a library to improve their English and learn about Italian culture.

New York Italians, rich and poor, mainly hailed from the northern region of Liguria. This New York community was large enough to support its own newspaper, L'Eco d'Italia, first published by G.P. Secchi de Casali in 1849. They were patriotic enough to form the Italian Guard as part of the New York Militia under the command of that veteran of the Italian revolution, Marquis de Sant'Angelo.

Public-spirited Italian New Yorkers made an impact in the Civil War far out of proportion to their numbers. They formed their own volunteer Italian legion, staffed with crack Italian officers. A second New York Italian regiment, the Garibaldi Guards, was led by the Italian silk industry millionaire Lieutenant Colonel Louis Tinelli, but was not completely manned by Italians.

The city's brashest and most flamboyant Civil War hero was also Italian. Count Luigi Palma di Cesnola was a courageous cavalryman with a hair-trigger temper who was resented by his superiors but commanded the loyalty of the enlisted men. He always led the charges of his unit, the Fourth Cavalry, into battle. In a skirmish at Aldie he was nearly killed and captured, but he lived to fight another day, leading the Fourth in a critical battle near Malverne Hill. Twenty years later he would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. In the meantime, he made his mark as a diplomat, amateur archaeologist, art collector, and the director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the Gilded Age of the 1870s Italian immigration increased at a rapid rate. Whether from northern or southern Italy, these immigrants were poorer and less educated than earlier arrivals. Artists and artisans were succeeded by pick-and-shovel laborers. Some Italian civic leaders, like the newspaper publisher Secchi de Casoli, actively discouraged these immigrants from coming. They believed that these lower-class Italians would damaged the Italian image.

Italians, especially from the poorer south, had no choice but to emigrate. Conditions in Italy were steadily become impossible. Both the taxes and the population were rising while the soil eroded and the crops failed. Earthquakes and other natural disasters made things even worse. Southern Italians left their villages unwillingly. Even though they planned to return, leaving was an admission of failure.

New York's streets of gold were sometimes a shock. The urban squalor of Mulberry Bend was very different from the poor Mezzogiorno (south), even if the house in the old country had a dirt floor and no chimney. The decaying buildings of the Bend were damp and airless with forty families packed into five old wood-frame houses. The yards and alleys never saw the sunlight.

Despite the scrub brush and soapsuds, these slums were breeding places for disease. One neighborhood where Italians were dying from tuberculosis was called "lung block." The new arrivals had to deal with this unfamiliar and intimidating urban environment, usually without any English or even basic literacy. Sometimes they were also exploited by a labor boss called a "padrone" who used his superior knowledge of all things American to overwork and underpay them.

These contadini (peasants) brought a code and a communal feeling that outweighed their cultural disadvantages. They moved in with famility and friends, duplicating supportive village ties in the New World. The streets of New York's Little Italy were reassuringly divided according to extended families, villages, and regions.

Southern Italians had the security of custom and social institutions in this alien city. They helped each other find work and shelter. Their sense of family honor enabled them to sacrifice for others in time of need. In the changing world of New York's urban jungle, Italian family relationships were stable. Divorce was rare and grown children took care of their parents.

A generation of southern Italians built New York's subways and streets and sewer system. They dug the tunnels and ditches, poured the concrete, and laid the pipe. It was backbreaking labor making a modern city. Their children would have the luxury of joining skilled trades or getting an education and becoming professionals. Italian immigrants were workers; they weren't interested in politics that smacked of Old World deceit and intimidation.

The Italians were comfortable in a world of personal face-to-face relationships; mutual aid societies and village associations were usually local groups, an extension of the vertical villages where families and paesani lived. The padrone who hired the southern Italian laborer and acted as the go-between with the bosses may have taken a big percentage of the wages, but his face was similar and he spoke the same dialect.

Southern Italians were handicapped by a lack of English and little education but they weren't the narrow suspicious immigrants of the tabloid stereotypes. They learned quickly to help one another as a group. As early as 1883 Manhattan Italians joined groups from Brooklyn and Hoboken and Newark to raise money for the victims of the earthquake at Ischia. A year later a larger New York-New Jersey confederation raised fund funds for the city's Italian poor.

The Society of Italian Immigrants was formed in 1901, bringing together American progressives, the Italian community, and the Italian government to deal with the underlying causes of Italian-American poverty. Though Italian welfare groups weren't on the scaled of other immigrant nationalities. Italians weren't on the public rolls or dependent on public charities.

Gino C. Speranza, as secretary of the Society for Italian Immigrants, urged the construction of a building to lodge new arrivals. In 1908 the Society's spacious five-story building provided clean rooms and Italian cooking at a fair charge. Dr. Antonio Stella, a pioneer in public health, investigated the health problems of Italians New Yorkers with the aid and support of the Italian government. His findings led to the establishment of a clinic in the city in 1910.

Italian New Yorkers, though more concerned with work than international politics, patriotically supported America and their Italian homeland in World War I. Some Italian reservists even crossed the sea to rejoin their units. New York's Little Italy was the scene of many rallies and parades, American bond drives and collections for the Italian Red Cross.

Two hundred thousand Italian-born Americans were now settled in the five boroughs of Manhattan. The majority were Manhattanites, while a quarter were Brooklyn paesani; the remainder were spread spread throughout the other three boroughs. Counting second-generation Italian Americans in the city, they were 420,000 strong.

Italians were starting to come of age politically. They lost their distrust of American politics fostered by Old World feudalism. Tammany took note and began to back Italian political leaders and candidates. Michael Rofrano was Tammany's eyes and ears in the Lower East Side's Italian districts. In 1912 sixty thousand Italians in East Harlem elected the first Italian, Salvatore Cotillo, to the state assembly. He would become one of many Italian state supreme court judges.

It was a freewheeling independent Republican at odds with the Tammany machine who finally put Italians on New York's political map. His name was Fiorello La Guardia* and though he was not the typical immigrant Italian, he reflected Little Italy's hopes and aspirations.

La Guardia's family came from northern Italy and his mother was a Triestina of Jewish descent. He was born in New York City, brought up in Arizona, and raised in the Episcopalian faith. He developed his strong social conscience while working as an interpreter on Ellis Island. In 1916 he became the first Italian American to be elected to Congress, serving his Italian East Harlem district for a decade, with time off to earn medals in World War I.

In 1933 La Guardia became the ninety-ninth mayor in New York's history. In his twelve years in office he won the support of New Yorkers from every ethnic group interested in good government and reform. The flamboyant "Little Flower" was always in the public eye, whether smashing slot machines with an ax, fighting a tenement fire, or reading the funnies on the radio. He saved the city with a "No more free lunch" philosophy, but by the end of his watch he could take credit for sixty new parks and a vastly expanded public housing system.

While La Guardia was making his name in politics, Generoso Pope was becoming the most powerful Italian businessman in the city. He came to New York with ten dollars in his pocket and in less than twenty years was the city's first Italian millionaire. Pope owned Il Progresso, the most popular Italian-American newspaper, and sat on the board of banks, but he made his millions supplying sand and gravel for the city's big construction projects such as the New York subway.

New York's Italians had their own Italian sport heroes. In 1936 Joe DiMaggio took over center field for the New York Yankees. A figure of grace and power, the image of the Yankee Clipper, he won the Most Valuable Player award three times and his record for hitting safely in fifty-six games is still considered unassailable. Having a DiMaggio in the local limelight made Italian immigrants feel less alienated. He was an inspiration for Italians to excel.

Though the city's Italians were making great strides, they were still objects of prejudice, employment discrimination, and immigration restrictions. Italian New Yorkers responded to this bigotry with a renewed sense of pride in their ethnic identity. They proclaimed an Italian identity that transcended their village and region. They joined the Sons of Italy en masse and supported the city's Italian prominenti in erecting statues to Italian national heroes like Garibaldi.

Though Mussolini appealed to Italians' pride in their past, he eventually alienated Italian New Yorkers with his foreign adventurers; when war came they enthusiastically rallied behind the Stars and Stripes. Former Mussolini supporters like Generoso Pope disavowed the dictator, admitting the error of their ways. The New York Italian community mobilized to buy forty-nine million dollars' worth of war bonds.

World War II disrupted traditional Italian-American life. Italian women left their insulated communities to work in war industries and began to question customary roles and traditions. Italian men came back from the war with new American dreams. For some it was time to move out of the neighborhood and get a white-collar education on the G.I. Bill. Postwar prosperity had its own momentum and Italian New Yorkers became upwardly mobile.

In politics Italians Democrats didn't have to petition Tammany. They were Tammany. Carmine De Sapio became the Manhattan leader in 1949. From the start he cut the Party's connections to organized crime and wiped out obvious patronage abuses. De Sapio had style and intelligence, and Bronx leader Ed Flynn said he was the "first Tammany man since Murphy I can sit with and not have to talk out of the side of my mouth."

In 1949 there was a three-way race for mayor involving four Italians. There was the Regular Democrat Ferdinand Pecora, the independent renegade Democrat Vincent Impelliteri, the Republican Edward Corsi, and the notorious radical Vito Marcantonio. Impelliteri ran on his record as a crusading prosecutor and as one who refused to take orders from Tammany. "Impy," as he was known, won handily.

Italian communities were closer than other ethnics; transplanted Italian villages shared traditions and a common history. Yet despite a determination to preserve their neighborhoods, the demolition ball and the siren song of the suburbs led to an exodus from the Italian inner-city enclaves.

The sixties were a time of change. Families were smaller and the Italian husband was no longer the unquestioned patriarch. The grandchildren of Italian laborers were moving up. There were Italians in the staid merchant banks of Wall Street and even on the boards of the stock exchange. Ralph De Nunzio was director of the Dreyfus Offshore Trust and served as vice-chairman of the board of the New York Stock Exchange.

The world of New York media was their oyster. Grace Mirabella was the New York fashion phenomenon who edited Vogue, and Gay Talese pioneering "new journalism" at the New York Times. Jerry Della Femina made people laugh in Madison Avenue's most imaginative ads and founded an agency that would advise presidents.

Though Italians were very visible and in positions of high status and authority, they were routinely categorized as criminals and part of an international Italian crime conspiracy. Exposes about the Mafia sold papers and political crusades against the Mafia got people elected to office. In too many instances Italians were depicted in films and television as gangster heavies or ignorant buffoons.

On June 29, 1970, over fifty thousand Italian Americans came to New York's Columbus Circle to celebrate Italian-American Unity Day. Everywhere there were Italian flags and green, white, and red bunting and big buttons with catchy Italian pride slogans. Italian New Yorkers who had never attended a rally in their lives were here to express pride and anger. Some of the speeches were emotional harangues, but there was a real sense of warm Italian togetherness.

In the era of black power, many thought the time had also come for Italian ethnic affirmation. Italian groups like the Sons of Italy organized letter-writing campaigns and boycotts. In the universities there were calls for Italian studies along with black and Puerto Rican studies. Taking a leaf from other activists ethnics, Italians formed groups like the Americans of Italian Descent (AID) to fight group defamation and the Italian American Civil Rights League to aggressively pursue "Italian Power." A new generation of Italian New York politicians, including future vice-presidential candidate Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, made Italian-American rights a national issue.

In the 1990s New York is a city of one million Italian Americans. They can point to Italian-American Senator Alfonse D'Amato and to Peter Vallone, the very influential leader of the city council. Italian-American judges and district attorneys are commonplace. The Italian community knows it has arrived. In 1993 it added Mayor Rudy Giuliani to its list of notables.

* Fiorello LaGuardia was of Apulian (in Southern Italy) paternal origin though his mother was Triestine Jewish from Northern Italy.

The Irish


The Irish of New York started out Protestant, but once they were joined by significant numbers of poor uneducated Irish Catholics, they decided it was more "society" to be called Scotch-Irish, and the New York Irish became the Catholic Irish. The Irish are New York's prototypical rags-to-riches story. They came with the clothes on their back and starvation gnawing at their bellies, and in a generation they were running the city. They were the cops, the firemen, and the mayors or the Tammany powers behind the throne. Nowadays the American-born Irish are as likely to be financiers and businessmen as they are policemen and firemen. But the story of Irish immigrants isn't over. There is a whole new group of Irish immigrants as eloquent and independent as the last batch who are fighting different battles and creating their own success stories.


History

The first Irishman to set foot on what would become New York was John Coleman, an able-bodied crewman aboard Henry Hudson's Half Moon. Coleman lost his life in a dispute with the Native Americans and became the first Irishman - and white man - to be buried on Coney Island.

The Irish played an important part in New York from the time it became the property of King Charles II in 1664. Governor Thomas Dongan, a Catholic and Irish nobleman of Limerick, gave New York its first city charter. In his charter, which was later rescinded, he recognized liberties that were later included in the Bill of Rights.

Both Protestant and Catholic Irish gained positions of prominence in commerce and government in colonial New York. Despite their wealth and power, these Irish still welcomed the American Revolution and the opportunity to strike back at unfair British rule. Even Sir Henry Clinton, a loyalist to the core, had to admit that the Irish were the best soldiers on either side. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the city's Irish were taking sides in the political battles between another Clinton heading the Federalists and a new political organization called Tammany Hall.

The American Revolution inspired another revolution on the Emerald Isle. The British were able to crush this uprising, which created the first generation of Irish political refugees. They were intellectual men of action who brought their knowledge and abilities to the city. Thomas Addis Emmet was one of the leading conspirators in the failed 1798 revolution. He escaped to New York to became a power in city politics and an ardent backer of Jefferson. In 1812 he became the attorney general of New York.

The city's early Celtic population was very lace curtain - merchants and professionals and capable craftsmen. They had a newspaper called The Shamrock and their Society of St. Patrick rivaled the English St. Andrew's Society. They were divided by religion and united by their Irish identity. Their charitable organizations benefited both Protestants and Catholics. In 1826 New York's united Irish community was large enough to swing the city to Andrew Jackson in a presidential election.

The city's "carriage-and-four" Irish were soon joined by the Irish poor, who were attracted by stories of full larders and meat every day and fat pay envelopes. These Irish tenants were tired of a homeland where they weren't allowed to hold property or practice their own religion. They were tired of the brutal tax collectors and soldiers and the humiliating privileges of an alien nobility. Rural Ireland was ready to emigrate.

The Irish population rise translated into more political power. They went from being barred from Tammany Hall to nominating the first Irish Catholic, Patrick Mackay, to the state assembly. In 1817 the bias against the Irish continued, and outraged Celts broke into the Tammany wigwam to protest the organization's refusal to support the Irish leader Thomas A. Emmet for Congress. New York's passage of a law guaranteeing universal white suffrage meant that Tammany politicians like the president-to-be Martin Van Buren courted the Irish-Catholic electorate.

These New York Irish built the Erie Canal, which made New York the commercial power it is today and ushered in a golden age. In 1841 Irish-Catholic notables like Bishop John Hughes and Congressman Thomas McKeon formed the Irish Emigrant Society under the auspices of the Catholic Church. In New York it was official - Irish and Catholic were one and the same. Over the years the Society stopped the abuse of immigrants and provided services for poor Irish New Yorkers.

Before the biggest Irish famine in 1845 (there were five Irish potato famines between 1817 and 1848), Irish peasants were squatters on their own inheritance. They rented lands that their families had farmed for generations from foreign landlords who extorted large sums for the privilege. The only way the Irish farmers could meet this bill was by planting crops for the British export market and depending on a potato kitchen garden for survival.

The blight that left the potatoes black and rotting in 1845 set in motion a cycle of starvation and death. While freighters were leaving Irish ports for Liverpool packed with produce, human skeletons in the countryside were scavenging for grass and eating dirt. The moderate pace of Irish emigration to New York became a stampede.

Whether Irish emigrants raised the fare from a government anxious to get rid of them or from a New York charity, the ordeal was far from over. Ocean travel was still risky and traveling in "Irish berths" below the freight in steerage had its own dangers.

There was the strain of the endless din in dark cramped spaces. Sudden violence was common under decks and there were cases of unprotected women being attacked. If the weather wasn't right the usual eight-week voyage could become a six-month agony. Sometimes provisions were short or spoiled and there was another famine on board. Disease ran rampant in these airless areas. Many Irish died from cholera or typhus before the "coffin ships" reached shore. For some Irish, steerage turned out to be not so different from a slave ship.

The Irishman from "the old sod" was a familiar figure, with his brimless caubeen, knee britches, flowing cape, and big buckled shoes, clattering down the gangplank at New York Harbor. Before local and federal governments overhauled the immigration process, these naive newcomers were fair game for con men called "shoulder hitters," who sold them counterfeit train tickets, overcharged them for storing or carting their luggage, and steered them to crooked boardinghouses. The unwary Irishman often wound up living in a glorified grog shop on Greenwich Street, where the only thing for free was a plate of loose tobacco. Fast-talking landlords stripped them of their savings and possessions in a few days.

Irish immigrants crowded forty to a cellar in decaying Five Points housing and squatted in shanty towns in the wastes of Harlem. They even lived in "dugouts" under the floorboards of cellars, and when they went out to look for work there was the standard "no Irish need apply" in the ads in the newspaper.

Though uneducated, they quickly adapted their rural skills to the urban landscape. They used pure brawn as stevedores and porters, while their knowledge of horses helped them progress from grooms to cabmen and carters. The Irishman who had dug the potato cellars now dug foundations for city buildings. Eventually they proved themselves in the building trades, first as hod carriers, then as bricklayers and masons. Irish women used their domestic skills as housemaids and laundresses and took in sewing.

The Irish-famine immigrants were mistrusted for their Catholicism and disdained for their poverty. The Herald political cartoonist, caricatured the Irish as apes. The hardworking Irish were lumped together with the violent Irish in the Five Points gangs. The Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s pledged to get rid of the Irish and Catholic menace. The Irish fought back, organizing themselves to disrupt Know-Nothing rallies and defeat them at the polls. Their participation in Democratic politics, like their church, became a way of life.

In 1855 Fernando Wood was elected mayor, with Irish voters deciding the outcome. By 1860 one out of every four New Yorkers was Irish. During Wood's administration the immigration station at Castle Garden was opened, allowing new immigrants from Ireland to enter the country unmolested. Representatives of the Irish Immigration Society helped them contact their families and find employment. Representatives of Tammany did some hiring and led the new immigrants off to be naturalized so they could vote in the next election.

In Wood's era, Irish Catholics received permission to build St. Patrick's Cathedral. This impressive sanctuary made it clear that Catholicism was one of the city's major religions and that the governing Catholic hierarchy was Irish. The ancient Order of Hibernians was formed at this time to defend the Church and keep alive traditions like the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

In New York the Irish, who were basically a rural people, faced choices they never encountered in their villages. Sometimes their passions got out of hand. In July 1863 a group of Irish joined Native Americans in a protest against the Civil War draft that turned into one of New York's worst riots.

In the year of the riots there were tensions between the Irish, who were divided on abolition, and New York's established black community. The Irish had no conception of Southern slavery but cheap black labor was a direct threat. Blacks had recently been used to break a bitter Irish longshoremen's strike and bad feeling was running high.

The immediate cause for the riot was the injustice of a new law that allowed the rich to be exempted from the Union draft for a three-hundred dollar fee. It was hot, and perhaps agent provocateurs were at work. For three days the New York mob was out of control. Blacks were lynched and the Colored Orphan's Asylum was gutted. But the Irish also saved the day. Archbishop Hughes calmed the mob with words and the Irish policemen enforced the peace with guns and nightsticks.

The Irish were of one mind where the Union was concerned and rallied to the colors. Thousands enrolled in the city's militias when the Civil War broke out. Flamboyant Irish fighters went into battle with shamrocks and harps, lots of bravado, and gaudy uniforms. Irish soldiers wore Turkish fezzes and red firemen's shirts to the battle of Bull Run. The honor roll of New York's daring Irish forces included the sixty-ninth Regiment, the thirty-seventh Regiment, and the Tammany Regiment, led by officers with names like Meagher, Corcoran, and Shields.

After the war Irish immigrants returned to New York as American heroes. They were no longer outsiders; they were the core of the city's uniformed professionals - police and firefighters. Michael Kerwin, who fought for Irish freedom as well as the Union, became police commissioner. The Irish were more than foot soldiers of the Democratic Party; they were also ward leaders and precinct captains. Honest John Kelly represented his Irish neighborhood in Congress.

New York's Irish were organized labor's rank and file and leaders. They used the talent for organization that they revealed in politics to unionize construction workers and stevedores, the skilled and the unskilled. They were past masters of the fine art of negotiation. The Irish labor leader Peter J. McGuire went national, helping to found the American Federation of Labor, and earned the right to be known as the "Father of Labor Day."

In 1871 Boss Tweed, the city's most flagrant grafter, has his comeuppance and Honest John Kelly became the first Irishman to head Tammany. Honest John was a boxer and an actor and a volunteer fireman. He also invented the Tammany machine, the chain of command from block captain to district leader, which won elections. He initiated the Irish political succession, which was only broken by Carmine De Sapio in the 1950s.

Richard Croker was Kelly's political heir and was also a former volunteer fireman and prizefighter. He made a fortune as coroner and parlayed himself into a position as head of a finance committee that didn't keep any books. Croker had champagne tastes and retired to an estate in Ireland to raise racing horses.

Charles Francis Murphy succeeded Boss Croker in 1902. He was a ball player and the proprietor of four taverns that doubled as Tammany political clubs. He ruled Tammany for twenty-two years and kept politics out of the police department, the schools , and the judiciary. When Murphy died city politicians lamented that "the brains of Tammany lie in the Calvary Cemetery."

When William R. Grace, the millionaire founder of Grace Lines, was elected mayor of New York in 1880, the majority of Irish were still struggling to make ends meet as laborers and maids and living in run-down tenements in neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen. Some of the kids strayed, breaking and entering into the West Side railroad yards and drifting into gangs like the Knuckle Dusters and the Dead Rabbits. While Irish politicians controlled Tammany, Irish thugs controlled the rackets on the West Side.

The Irish were also joining the ranks of the respectable super-rich. Thomas E. Murray was one of the first of the Irish tycoons. He started out as lamplighter in Albany, but this Irish Edison had a real scientific genius and was soon earning patents for circuits, switches, and dynamos. While garnering wealth for his inventions he managed the Brooklyn Edison Company. Murray died just months before the stock market crash, leaving an estate worth well over ten million.

Murray's daughter Anna married a man with as much energy and wit as her father. James Francis McDonnell was a canny Wall Street trader who had started the high-flying firm of McDonnell & Byrne. He vowed he would make a million before he married and another million for each of his fourteen children. He kept his word. The McDonnells knew they had arrived when they joined dynasties with the Fords and it was Henry II who converted.

Although the Irish are rarely associated with "trade," before Gristede and D'Agostino became household words in New York, a Butler from Kilkenny had a lock on the grocery business. All his stores, which at one point numbered 1,100, were painted green and his fortune in green amounted to thirty million in pre-Depression dollars. Butler loved the racetrack and eventually bought his own in Yonkers. In lieu of allowances, the "squire" gave his children tips on the races.

In 1916 New York Irish rich and poor backed the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. When the rebellion failed and the British executed the uprising's gallant leaders, the Irish community held demonstrations and special masses were said in the churches. Despite their feelings against Britain, loyal Irish New Yorkers volunteered for the forces in World War I and the Fighting Sixty-ninth, under the command of "Wild Bill" Donovan, was one of the first units to see action in Europe. In the peace following World War I, Ireland at last became Eire, the Irish Free State.

While New York's personable Roaring Twenties' Irish Mayor Jimmy Walker was making headlines with Broadway showgirls, another Irish New York, Al Smith, fought the good fight for the presidency of the United States. Eventually both left public life but the New York tradition of Irish officeholders and Irish political kingmakers continued.

The new Irish politicians followed their Irish constituents to suburban Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. The last Irish mayor was a Brooklynite named O'Dwyer. He went from walking a beat in Brooklyn to the Brooklyn District Attorney's office and took off time from city government during World War II to be a general. In 1974 a former Brooklyn congressman named Hugh Carey became the governor of the state. An intelligent and effective negotiator, he was instrumental in saving the state and city from bankruptcy.

Ed Flynn of the Bronx became the city's first Democratic political leader after the death of Charles Francis Murphy and he gained national political stature advising President Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. In 1960 history was repeated when Bronx Democratic leader Charles C. Buckley helped propel John F. Kennedy (for a time a resident of the Bronx) into the presidency.

Patrick Moynihan, a New York Irishman who went from the slums of Hell's Kitchen to a professorship at Harvard, was a member in good standing of Kennedy's inner-circle Camelot. After the assassination of the great Irish hope he divided his time between academia and appointive politics. He ultimately ran for elective office and became New York's Democratic senator through the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. His rise reflected the success of the New York Irish community, which was now overwhelmingly white collar and professional.

Despite Irish political power the new immigration law of 1965 severely limited Irish access to the country at a time of high unemployment and economic stagnation in Ireland. In the words of one New York Irish immigration activist, it was "immigration or die."

Many, if not most, lived under the constant strain of being an "illegal," without the proper documents and the rights that come with being a resident or a citizen. They were forced to work "off the books" and were afraid to contact government agencies even in emergencies. In 1986 many Irish became Americans through a special amnesty that was part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. In 1990 continued Irish-American activism and lobbying resulted in a law sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy and Brooklyn Congressman Charles Schumer which granted sixteen thousand extra entry visas to Irish applicants through a visa lottery. Four years later, this process was repeated.

With eighteen percent unemployment in Ireland, and with the young being the hardest hit, Irish emigration continues unabated (1990s). The best estimates put the number of undocumented Irish entering New York every year at twenty thousand. The new Irish are fresh out of school and single. Though more educated than an earlier generation of immigrants, due to their immigration status, they often must settle for jobs as bartenders, laborers, or nannies.

The new Irish still manage to thrive. They are raising families and building neighborhoods. The latest Irish immigrants are keeping alive old traditions and creating new cultural forms. Irish music, rock and folk, is alive and well in a lively new pub scene from the Bronx to Brooklyn. Irish sports are also on a roll, with Irish football and hurling in venues like Paddy's Field and Gaelic Park.

[Indiana Jones]

The Dutch

The Dutch and the British were the city's originators, founding colonies that set the cosmopolitan and mercantile tone of New York City. Although they were soon superseded by other ethnics with different styles, their influence endures.

The Dutch were the first ethnics to take Manhattan. Henry Hudson, the intrepid English captain of the Half Moon, claimed it for the Netherlands in 1609. At the time the friendly locals called it Manna-Hata, the Island of Hills; Hudson and his crew were more dazzled by the Indian women smoking pipes than they were by the landscapes. Four years later Adriaen Block returned to the island and took a look at some of the outlying boroughs, including Staten Island. After losing his ship, the Tiger, to fire, the Indians helped him build another, the Onrust (restless), and he continued his voyage, collecting valued beaver pelts and their precious oil, considered a cure for dizziness, rheumatism, and trembling.

Watching the Spanish and Portuguese get rich on their empires, the Dutch decided to make a profit on their more northerly possessions. The economic future of the island, renamed New Amsterdam, and the whole of New Netherlands became the responsibility of the Dutch West India Company and the Heeren XIX (19 Lord Directors). Like some future rulers of the Big Apple, greed affected their judgment.

At first New Amsterdam was a stopover on the way to fur trading settlements up the Hudson River. In 1625 William Verhulst laid the foundations for a permanent settlement with six farms and the site for a fort. In no time bark houses gave way to stone and the outlines of modern Pearl Street, Beaver Street, and Whitehall Street began to take shape. As an afterthought, Peter Minuit purchased the Big Apple for sixty guilders' (twenty-four dollars') worth of goods. He was more generous in apportioning land to the colony's privileged elite, the patroons, and was eventually recalled for favoritism.

Wouter Van Twiller was the next governor to gain notoriety. He was a callow and inexperienced twenty-seven year old with a weakness for the bottle. When he took office in 1633 New Amsterdam was prospering. Before long he and his corrupt cronies were squandering the company's surplus on private revels and claiming the choice real estate for themselves. At loggerheads with New Amsterdam's pastor, Everardus Bogardus, and the sheriff, Lubbertus van Dincklage, his recall was inevitable.

Van Twiller's replacement was a very different personality, incompetent in his own inimitable way. Governor Willem Kieft, who took office in 1638, was a high-handed autocrat with little use for moderation or basic honesty. His attempts to ride roughshod over the Native Americans, who far outnumbered the Dutch, resulted in bloody Indian wars that depopulated parts of the Dutch possession and turned New Amsterdam into an armed camp. Kieft crushed the colonists with taxes yet emptied the treasury fighting senseless wars. Petitions to the Company and a remonstrance to the Hague resulted in yet another governor's recall.

Peter Stuyvesant was the last of this rogue's gallery of Dutch governors. He took charge of the Dutch Colony in 1647 and stayed on to the bitter end. Although his personality was no more attractive than any of his predecessors, old "Wooden Leg" had a certain stiff-necked honesty, martial skills, and administrative ability. He ruled for seventeen years, longer than anyone in the history of colonial New Amsterdam and New York.

During his term of office he worked hard to overcome the effects of mismanagement and restore order and prosperity. He organized a primitive police force, appointed fire marshals, and established strict laws against fighting and reckless carriage driving. He captured the Swedish colony in present-day Delaware and negotiated a lasting peace with the Native Americans and a fair treaty with British settlers in New England.

Stuyvesant was quick to anger and had a penchant for feuds. At different times he had disputes with the colony's Jews, Quakers, his own Dutch Reformed Church, the business community, and even the administration of the Dutch West India Company itself. His general intolerance and high-handed approach to government led to company restrictions on his power and the appointment of an advisory council in New Amsterdam.

Finally, in 1664 all his efforts and outbursts came to naught when Colonel Richard Nicolls handed him an ultimatum from the British Crown. Stuyvesant would have defended New Amsterdam against the British, but he had no backing from Dutch settlers, who welcomed the liberals British peace terms.


The British

Nicolls' lenient peace terms made surrender very easy for the Dutch. In essence, the Dutch were promised the rights of free Englishmen and, at least for a time, could still ship their tobacco and furs back to Holland. Governor Nicolls was a tolerant man with his own coterie of Dutch advisers, but he had no problem expropriating the Dutch West India Company.

His successor, Colonel Francis Lovelace, was impressed with a city comprised of ethnics that had the "breeding of courts." He saw possibilities everywhere and worked to expand the colony. Lovelace improved transp0rtation and communications, opening a road between New York and Harlem and improving ferry service from Spuyten Duyvil on the Harlem River. This dynamo even attempted to rebuild the colony's defenses, but it was too little too late.

The Netherlands retook New York in 1673 and the local Dutch threw up their hands and declared their neutrality. The new Dutch authorities didn't have time to do more than rename the city New Orange and blow up Fort Amsterdam before their government gave New Orange back to the English in the Treaty of Westminster.

Tensions continued in the city between the Dutch and British; there were problems in the courts and friction on the city watch. Governor Thomas Dongan, New York's first Catholic governor, took a conciliatory approach, and with the approval of King James II, issued the Dongan Charter of Liberties in 1686, which guaranteed certain rights and provided for greater self-government. The city was divided into six wards, with a mayor, an alderman, and a city recorder.

Most of the British governors who succeeded Dongan thought the public office was an easy way to line their own pockets. Governor Montgomery took big bribes from members of the city council seeking to enlarge their powers, and Cosby, who followed him, extorted extra income from his predecessor and suspended the judiciary. Their actions led to the kind of conflict and protest that triggered the American Revolution.

Even in colonial days New York was a "business first" kind of place. During the French and Indian War, from 1756 to 1763, New York became America's second largest city, trading furs and guns with the enemy. Before the Revolution New York's main disagreements with Britain involved commercial interference as well as abstract issues like freedom and the rights of man. It was an import duty on tea that led to New York's own "tea party" on April 22, 1774, in which twenty-two crates of tea were dumped into Manhattan Bay by New Yorkers masquerading as Mohawks.

While Manhattan radicals were holding congresses to form a militia and defend the city against the British in 1775, the British governor, Tryon, was organizing sympathetic loyalists in Queens. When the revolutionaries stopped talking and started shooting and the statue of George III in Bowling Green was converted into 42,088 bullets, thousands of New Yorkers sought the protection of the British army. New York Tories were everywhere; England was their motherland and New York in most of its essentials was an English city.


The Norwegians

Norwegians like to think that they were the first people to visit America, with the Norseman Leif Erikson arriving from Vinland more than a century before that Johnny-come-lately, Columbus. While that is not undisputed fact, it is clear that Norwegians were among the first peoples to settle in the United States. A Norwegian named Sand was even supposed to have been Peter Minuit's interpreter when he negotiated for Manhattan. Early New Amsterdam had its share of Norwegian sailors and carpenters and a Norseman named Arent Andriessen supervised the Dutch colony's first shipyard.

In 1825 the sloop Restauration was the first Norwegian ship carrying Norwegian passengers to reach New York. The ship was smaller than the Mayflower and not made for transatlantic travel, but the brave Quakers on board risked their lives in their quest for religious freedom. It turned out that their ship violated New York law by carrying too many passengers, but a generous New Yorker came to their rescue by putting up a bond and successfully petitioning President Adams to waive their three-thousand-dollar fine. The landing of the Restauration is still commemorated by Norwegian Americans on October 9.

A scattering of Norwegians settled on the New York waterfront in the 1830s and 1840s. Even in that early era it was said that you could draw a crowd of Norwegians by going to the harbor and shouting the Norwegian salutation, "Svedisker Norveisk Mand." It was a seafaring community with many temporary New Yorkers, but people were starting to put down roots. One, Fredrik Wang, ran a popular tavern frequented by the Norwegian community.

The numbers of Norwegians emigrating to New York became significant in the middle of the nineteenth century. In no time they were the largest group of Scandinavians to settle in the city. Many were responding to the unemployment brought about by the change from sailing ships to steam ships. They were hard hit by the cuts in crew size and the closing of shipyards. Many simply jumped ship in the New World for the higher wages and work opportunities.

The Agder region, on the south coast of Norway, lost a large portion of its maritime population during this period. It was commonplace to have American ships entirely manned by Norwegians. These newcomers to the city received practical support and spiritual assistance from Norwegian missions representing a whole variety of Christian denominations.

By the turn of the century, an increasing Norwegian population was putting down roots in Brooklyn, first in Park Slope and later in Bay Ridge. It was the largest urban concentration of Norwegians in the United States. Along its tree-lined streets, there were Scandinavian-style bakeries, groceries, and restaurants. Norwegian was spoken in the bars and boardinghouses, and Norwegian resounded from the church pulpits.

As in the past, these urban Norwegians were primarily involved in maritime employment. They worked the coastal and transatlantic ships, tugs, and barges and even crewed on luxury yachts. They were involved in the construction of docks and ships and provisioned ships as chandlers. Thousands of Norwegians went to work in the new shipyards of Staten Island and eventually called "the Island" home.

These highly skilled Norwegian workers had strong sense of their own value and were highly independent. They were avid supporters of unions and at one time sixty percent of all Norwegian laborers in the metropolitan area belonged to labor organizations. For many Norwegians the union too the place of the Norwegian church and national fraternal organizations.

New York's Norwegians were enthusiastic joiners. They were members of local churches and missions. They formed village associations called bygdelags and Norwegian lodges. In 1905 the Det Norske Nationalforbund became the umbrella organization for Norwegian groups in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In less than a decade the Norwegians of greater New York boasted forty separate organizations.

The most successful aggregation was the Norwegian Club, which acted as a forum for important figures from Norway and the Norwegian-American community. The Norwegian newspaper, Nordisk Tidende, stood at the center of New York's Little Norway. Editors like Carl Souland and Andreas Nilssen Rygg emphasized their common cultural and historical ties. The paper promoted community-wide events like the Norwegian May Festival and campaigned for Norwegian charities like the Norwegians Lutheran Home and Hospital.

The city's loyal Norwegians showed the colors in 1917, volunteering for service in World War I with New York's 308th Infantry. The Sons of Norway were at the forefront of Libery Bond rallies; Norwegian New Yorkers pledged six million dollars in 1918. While fighting for their adopted country, they were avenging the deaths of two thousand Norwegian seamen who perished in the North Atlantic as a result of Germany's unrestricted U-boat warfare.

In New York's postwar building boom, Norwegian workers and businessmen made the transition from shipbuilding to housing and public works construction. Many became successful carpenters and contractors. Seafaring Norwegians worked on skyscrapers as riggers, using their knowledge of rope and tackle to hoist huge steel beams. Norwegian engineers from the country's prestigious technical institutes, innovators like Ole Singstad, Olaf Hoff, and Hans Rude Jacobsen, supervized the construction of the city's most important bridges and tunnels.

In 1925 New York recognized the contributions of the Norwegian community with the dedication of Leif Erikson Square on the centennial celebration of the land ing of the first Norwegian immigrant ship, the Restauration. Little Norway was coming of age, with a population of 109,000, including 55,000 native born, but its ties to its homeland were still strong.

The Nazi invasion of Norway mobilized the whole Norwegian community. They donated food and clothing and raised funds for the Norwegian Red Cross and provided jobs and shelter for Norwegian refugees. After the Allied victory generous Norwegian New Yorkers aided in the reconstruction of Norway. The total community involvement kept Norwegian Bay Ridge together long after similar ethnic neighborhoods disappeared.


Danes

Two of the first ships sent by the Dutch to explore the waters around New Amsterdam Harbor and the Hudson River were commanded by Danish captains named Block and Christiansen. Block lost his ship in a fire but built another one with the help of friendly Native Americans and made his own early version of the Circle Line Tour, discovering Block Island in the process. He sailed back to Holland with Christiansen, carrying a cache of valuable beaver pelts. Their voyages encouraged Dutch commercial investment and colonization.

In 1636 the first Danish family went to live in New Amsterdam. Like later generations of Danish New Yorkers, the Jansens quickly assimilated to the dominant culture and took the Dutch name Van Breestede. They were followed by a Thomsen, who became a Van Ripen, and an Andriessen, who switched to Van Buskirk.

The next two Danes to arrive in 1639 did more than change their names. Jonas Bronck became one of the largest landholders, buying five hundred acres from the Native Americans for odds and ends, including two rifles, a barrel of cider, and six gold coins. He was a successful tobacco planter and when duty called, helped Governor Kieft negotiate peace with the Native Americans. At a time when drinking and brawling were favorite pastimes, he collected the colony's largest library. His former lands are now a part of the borough bearing his name, the Bronx.

Bronck's friend and fellow Dane, Jochem Pietersen Kuyter, gained titled to four hundred acres in Harlem, but he became famous for his battles with the local Dutch officials. As a member of the Board of Twelve Men, he petitioned the authorities in Holland and was instrumental in the recall of Governor Kieft.

Danes readily adapted to the colony under British rule. They learned English and educated their children in English schools. Unlike their experience under the Dutch, they were free to establish their own Lutheran church, which was built on Broadway and Rector Street in 1704. Life was so comfortable in Anglo-Saxon New York that they gradually discarded their distinct identity.

Danish emigration to the city in the era of the young Republic was a succession of isolated individuals. Danes may have helped found New York's first Scandinavian Society in 1844, but they remained a negligible part of the organization and the community.

In 1863 Prussia's devastating defeat of Denmark resulted in a loss of forty percent of its territory. The war, combined with industrial decline and the rising population on scarce rural lands, led to increased emigration. Between 1867 and 1914 three hundred thousand Danes crossed the ocean.

New York City was primarily a place for Danes to get their bearings and maybe make some money prior to the big push into the Midwest. Only a small group of sailors, artisans, and service workers stayed. Danish female domestics were always in demand and made up a large segment of this ethnic population. The Dania Club, which was organized in Scandinavian Brooklyn in 1886, provided some of these Danes with a social outlet as well as health insurance and other services.

By the turn of the century the Danish influx changed to mainly middle-class professionals and business people. These self-assured Danes did not need the company of their fellow countrymen to ease their transition to an unfamiliar society. They did have a tendency to cluster around other Scandinavian groups, and if possible attended Danish denominational churches in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their sense of Danish identity came primarily from the Danish newspaper Nordlyset and organizations like the Danish American Historical Society, which emphasized their unique heritage.

Though few in numbers, Danes made their mark in the city. Jacob Riis, the muckraking journalist, stirred the social conscience of a nation with his words and pictures. He came to New York in 1870 with only forty dollars in his pocket and a strong sense of justice. By the end of the decade, he was leading New York journalist and social critic and a spokesman for the settlement-home movement. His series in the Evening Star, which graphically detailed the suffering and squalor of the city's immigrant populations, led to the enactment of New York housing laws. Theodore Roosevelt once referred to him as "the best American I have ever known."

Niels Poulson made his reputation as one of Brooklyn's leading businessmen in the early part of this (20th) century. As head of the Hecla Iron Works, he was responsible for the ornamental flourishes of such New York landmarks as Grand Central Station and the original Penn Station. This public-spirited Scandinavian left a fortune, which today still funds scholarships and Danish cultural exhibitions.

Swedes

Swedes in the seventeenth century was exhausted by military adventures and on the decline. Gone were Gustavus Adolphus's dreams of a gilded empire. Some Swedes hoped to recoup their futures in the New World. A colony was established in Delaware and Swedes even schemed with Peter Minuit to take over Dutch New Amsterdam; there were a few scattered Swedes in the Dutch colony at that time. A party of Swedish pioneers helped clear Harlem for farmland and Mons Pietersen, a Swedish surveyor, laid out the village of Harlem.

There were only one hundred Swedes in New York in the 1830s but twenty-two of them got together in 1836 to found an organization called the Swedish Society. It was the first Scandinavian mutual-aid society in the New World and only the second in the whole world. The members were merchants and manufacturers with a real sense of community spirit. In 1837 Swedish Brooklynites formed the first Swedish congregation. Swedish Immanuel Methodist. In addition, there was already the Bethel Ship Mission, which ministered to Swedish seamen in the Port of New York.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Swedes were primed for mass emigration. There was a scarcity of fertile arable land and too much political privilege. Swedes doing their military service resented the highhanded treatment they received from young aristocratic officers. Thousands of men, women, and children set off for America, with the first stopover at New York. Swedish emigrants went on the cheap, spending twelve to fifteen dollars on steerage in freighters carrying Swedish iron ore. After docking in New York a few hardy Swedes, usually of the seafaring variety, opted to stay.

In 1850 the Swedish population in the city was only five hundred, but it didn't stop Anders Gustaf Obom from starting the first Swedish newspaper, which ran on and off from 1851 to 1853. Despite their small numbers, Swedish Americans rallied around the Union colors. They held an officers' ball on April 26, 1861, in which Swedish woman presented Swedish volunteers with a silk Swedish flag. The Swedish regiment had a full military review on May 25 at Astor House.

Captain John Ericson, a member in good standing of the Swedish Society, made the largest Swedish contribution to the Union effort by developing and building the first ironclad warship to run on steam, the Monitor. His state-of-the-art steamships, which were constructed at the Greenpoint docks, gave the Union the edge in the battle at sea.

Sweden was in trouble in the 1890s with labor unrest, declining wages, and rising populations in the cities. Swedish emigrants to America at this juncture were mostly from urban backgrounds. Some had even participated in the mammoth three-hundred-thousand-strong general strike which nearly crippled Stockholm.

This wave of Swedes headed for New York or one of the big Swedish strongholds, like Chicago or Minneapolis. The Swedish Aid Society of New York was formed in 1891 to help these working-class immigrants. In only fifteen years it placed twenty thousand Swedes in new jobs; only eighty-three returned to Sweden.

Swedish workingmen moved to Hamilton Avenue in South Brooklyn or settled in the Swedish section of Sunset Park, along Buttermilk Channel and Upper Bay behind the Bushwick Terminal. They were initially ships' carpenters, seamen, and longshoreman. Under the supervision of the Swedish engineer Carl J. Mellin, they did pioneering work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the early 1900s.

In 1912 Swedish-born New Yorkers numbered over thirty-five thousand. That year the city's biggest parade was held in their honor to celebrate the Swedish victory in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. It was a time of real ethnic pride as the yellow and blue Swedish flag preceded the victorious Swedish athletes up the avenue. All of Swedish New York turned out, marching with their associations and organizations, wearing blue and yellow sashes or the folk costume of their country. Ernie Hjertberg was the hero of the day; he not only coached the champion Swedish track team, but was a former trainer at the New York Athletic Club.

Swedish professionals were also drawn to this city of opportunity. In 1888 the American Society of Swedish Engineers was established its members went on to change the New York skyline. David L. Lindquist was responsible for the new elevators that made the Empire State Building a reality. Gustave A. Sandblom perfected skyscraper steelwork in innovative buildings like New York Life. Werner Nygren made high-rise buildings habitable with heating and ventilation systems for buildings as diverse as the Woolworth Building and Macy's. John A. Johnson cut his teeth as housing contractor for Swedes in Bay Ridge and went on to be the leading contractor for the 1939 World's Fair.

Public-spirited Swedes got involved in government service. Emil F. Johnson, an analytical chemist from Stockholm, was a city public health inspector from 1895 to 1915 and established a system for ensuring safe milk. Arthur W. Wallander worked his way from being a patrolman on the beat to becoming the first Swedish police commissioner under Mayor La Guardia and a leading fighter against police corruption. Thomas Hoving, a second-generation Swedish American, served as a very popular parks commissioner under the Lindsay administration and created imaginative events that brought the people back to the parks. In 1977 Joanna Lindlof, a devoted teacher of Swedish descent, became the first woman on New York's Board of Education.

[Indiana Jones]

The African Americans

Manhattan's eleven original Africans were carried over as chattels on a Dutch merchant ship in 1626. These "Angolans" had greater freedom than the slaves in British colonies; they were legally entitled to hold property and marry and had the right of free movement. Their children could not be take from them.

An African slave in early New Amsterdam was not considered very different from a white indentured servant. They were "allowed" to keep their African identity and were not stigmatized by color. In 1644 the original slaves petitioned the Dutch West India Company for their freedom and it was granted. The same year, however, the Dutch legally authorized the slave trade in the colony.

Jansz Van Salee was one black in New Amsterdam who didn't have to petition for his freedom. He was the buccaneering son of a Dutchman who set sail for the Ottoman sultan. He married a Dutch woman named Griet Reyniers and they established a homestead in the present Gravesend. The descendants of their four daughters are in the New York social register. (I'm not 100% sure about this. --me)

Most African slaves in New Amsterdam were the property of the Dutch West India Company or belonged to high officials like Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who had forty on his Bouerie estate. The ordinary Dutch citizenry were not generally comfortable with black slavery and often helped runaway slaves. Even slave holders as a rule offered slaves "half freedom." Slaves were released from their bond on the condition that they performed agreed-upon labor at agreed-upon times.

Slavery was far stricter under the British, who took the colony in 1664. Slaves had neither legal rights nor property. The families of slaves could be broken up with impunity. Slaves who protested or resisted were subject to public whipping and worse. The British viewed slavery as a business; it was a source of high profits and a high priority. The number of African-American slaves more than tripled from 1664 to 1746.

In a city with a limited population, slaves were permitted to develop skills as craftsmen, coopers and carpenters, glaziers, and goldsmiths. They also learned household skills like spinning, weaving, and cooking. They were considered the equal of their white equivalents and hired out in competition with free labor.

Although the slave's movements and rights of assembly were restricted by law, these bondsmen and women routinely disobeyed curfews and socialized in forbidden "tippling houses." There were open gatherings where slaves formed relationships and established a sense of community. The most disaffected joined gangs of runaway slaves that prowled the waterfront.

A slave insurrection, with buildings set afire and ambushed colonists, took place in 1712. The aftermath was white panic and black persecution, complete with public burnings. A botched burglary, accusations of arson, and false confessions led to the public execution of innocent slaves twenty years later. A white woman named Mary Burton was the first false witness to ignite an orgy of false recrimination and brutality on the scale of the Salem witch trial.

The Revolution disrupted the slave system in New York. Redcoats and Revolutionaries urged slaves to join their forces, holding out the promise of freedom. Blacks worked in the British army's arsenal and served with loyalist irregulars. Thousands joined the rebel militias and as a group were specially cited for bravery. Christopher Greene's black regiment fought with great distinction in the bloody battle of Points Bridge.

The New York Assembly freed the city's slave soldiers in 1781. Four years later, the city's leading citizens formed the New York Manumission Society to work for the eradication of slavery. John Jay was the society's first president and his successor, Alexander Hamilton, whose ancestors from Jamaica might have been African (?), was the leading intellectual light of independence.

Samuel Fraunces was a leading member of the free black community of this era. His tavern on 54 Pearl Street attracted New York's first citizens and was the site of George Washington's emotional farewell dinner for his officers. The city's principal businessmen met in the tavern's long room to organize the first chamber of commerce.

In 1799 slavery in New York was on its way to legal extinction; a law was passed freeing all children born to slaves after July 4, 1799. Males were to be freed at age twenty-eight and females at age twenty-five. In 1817 every slave born before July 4, 1799 was technically freed. Nevertheless, many New York City slaves were illegally transferred to Southern slave holders during the time it took for the law to go into effect.

Black liberation did not mean equality in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1821, New York's African Americans were the target of a restrictive property requirement that made it almost impossible for them to vote. Black citizens were also denied access to "public transport" and had to pay special licensing fees even for the right to be a carter.

Newly freed blacks were no longer in demand as skilled craftsmen. White workers in the city made certain that they were limited to service and menial jobs. Black men now donned the uniforms of coachmen, porters, barbers, or waiters, while women were cooks, maids, and laundresses.

Often blacks were forced to settle for inferior housing in crime-ridden neighborhoods. They lived in the damp vermin-infested cellars and the leaky garrets of Five Points. White churches restricted them to the galleries or barred them altogether. Public places like the New York Zoological Institute refused to admit blacks. To top it all off, African-American New Yorkers were prey to petty harassment, public humiliation, and assaults.

Blacks vented their anger at these abuses in the pages of the city's first African-American newspaper, Freedom's Journal. The city's blacks countered some forms of discrimination by founding their own institutions. They started their own religious denominations, training eloquent clergy and building handsome churches. Thomas Paul in 1809 was the first in a long line of eloquent activist clergymen at the helm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. The Reverend Paul Williams, of the pioneering African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, became one of New York's leading abolitionists.

While black churches were a bulwark for black unity and morale, these activist churches were also a prime target for racist mobs. In July of 1834, in the aftermath of hard-fought city elections, blacks attending an abolitionist meeting at the Chatham Square Chapel were attacked by a proslavery gang. In the course of the next three days, a raging mob of twenty thousand touched black and white churches that vocally supported abolition.

African Americans did not rely completely on religious organizations and churches for social support and stability. They formed their own labor groups and insurance societies. The first mutual aid society was established by black sailors in 1810. Later there was an American League of Black Laborers, and in 1839 a special association for ship's cooks and stewards. The African Dorcas Society was the first black group to help the infirm and indigent.

Deprived of education as slaves, blacks were very aware of the importance of education. They worked closely with socially-conscious white New Yorkers to develop black schools through the New York Society for the Promotion of Education and the New York Phoenix Society. They launched successful literacy programs.

Despite economic and social barriers, blacks were able to make their mark in the early New York. James McCune Smith became a respected physician with a prestigious degree from the University of Glasgow. Thomas Downings operated one of the most popular oyster bars catering to the men of the Stock Exchange. In the 1830s Thomas M. Jackson was the caterer to New York high society. Ira Eldridge even became one of the leading actors of this era, learning to perform Shakespeare on the stage of New York's Free African Theater.

New York's African Americans were influential figures in the antislavery movement. Samuel Ringold Ward, known as the "Black Daniel Webster," inspired many to join the cause of abolition with his fiery rhetoric. He became such a threat to the proslavery establishment that he was forced to flee to England. Frederick Douglass conveyed through his own slavery experience the physical brutality, psychic pain, and humiliation of bondage. He was instrumental in building abolitionist sentiment in the North.

New York's entrance into the Civil War on the Northern side did not immediately improve conditions for the city's blacks. Ever the scapegoat, the vulnerable black community of 12,472 became the target for the city's proslavery Democrats and the nation's first disgruntled draftees. In the 1863 Draft Riots, immigrant and native-born Americans lynched blacks, burned down a black orphanage, and chased the whole black population out of their Cherry Street neighborhood.

By the end of the War Between the States, a resurgent black population had gone beyond Lower Manhattan to West Side neighborhoods. They spread out from the twenties to the fifties, in the low-rent Tenderloin, where violence and vice made normal life very difficult. Black New Yorkers, who were city dwellers from colonial times, were able to cope but they were now joined by more impressionable blacks from the rural South.

Eventually the black elite began to relocate to the brownstones of Brooklyn. These successful lawyers, doctors, and businessmen even had their own version of high society. They called themselves the Society of the Sons of New York. Members had to be accomplished and black, and this exclusive group barred Southern blacks and West Indians.

In 1900 black New York was over sixty thousand strong and rapidly growing. Incidents between ethnic whites and blacks were on the rise and a pre-community relations police force added to the friction. On August 15, 1900, a knifing led to black and white mob confrontations with police participating as white partisans. For a month roving bands of white toughs considered blacks fair game.

There were fair-minded white New Yorkers like Mary White Ovington, who worked with the black educator W.E.B. DuBois and others to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Other interracial groups were formed in the city to help create opportunities for blacks, which were consolidated into the National Urban League in 1911.

In ten years fifty thousand black New Yorkers made the move from the Tenderloin to the wide, tree-lined streets of Harlem. They paid high rents for the privilege of decent housing. Overcrowding was inevitable. By the Depression there were two hundred thousand blacks competing for space in Harlem. Although it was the most deprived section of the city, it received the barest minimum of government services. It had only one playground and new school construction was zero.

Mayor La Guardia's heart was in the right place and he was genuinely disturbed by black poverty and illiteracy, but he did little to improve the black New Yorker's situation. Black areas did not benefit from his major construction programs which changed the face of the city.

He did increase the number of African-American municipal government appointments and raised the status of their positions. In his administration, Hubert Delaney became tax commissioner and Jane Bolin became a judge. He hired Gertrude Ayer to be the first black principal of a city public school.

The Depression devastated African-American New York, resulting in a fifty percent unemployment rate. Black self-help was their only option in an indifferent city. Father Divine's Kingdom provided cheap meals and lodging and opened dry-goods stores and cleaners that employed blacks. Though his divinity was doubtful, he supplied hope. At the same time many conventional black churches followed the example of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem by offering free meals, shelter, food baskets, and clothes.

Black New York went off to war in 1941 in a segregated force. While their units received commendations, it was clear that they were more isolated and segregated than German prisoners of war. On the homefront in 1943, Harlem was burning. On a hot August night wartime resentments and high rents and employment discrimination led to looting and gunshots. At the end there were five dead and whole city blocks destroyed.

A year later, with the creation of a Harlem congressional district, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a young city councilman and minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, became Harlem's national representative. The election of Mayor William O'Dwyer in 1946 led to many citywide black political appointments. J. Raymond Jones, the Harlem Democratic leader, became a housing commissioner and Rev. John M. Coleman of Brooklyn became the first black to sit on the board of education. In 1953 blacks had another first, with Hulan Jack elected borough president of Manhattan.

At the same time that blacks were entering New York's political mainstream, they were joining New York's sports teams and becoming genuine sports heroes. Jackie Robinson was the first African-American player to break the "color line" on the Brooklyn Dodger's ball team. Soon the Giant's Willie Mays was competing with a white Mickey Mantle for the title of the best all-around player in baseball.

Between 1940 and 1960 one and a half million white New Yorkers left the city. The black population, which had previously been concentrated in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem, spread out through the other boroughs into Morrisania, the Bronx, central Brooklyn, and southern Queens. Black New Yorkers established new power bases and centers of influence.

In 1963 the civil rights movement in the South was changing attitudes throughout the country. Martin Luther King had made the elimination of Jim Crow a moral crusade. There was an effort to wipe out the effects of bigotry, North and South. In Harlem HARYOU-Act was founded and funded by the federal government to create black pride and break down the cycle of dependency.

Government programs were inadequate to meet the needs of a deprived community. Racial tensions came to a head in the long hot summer of 1964, and there was a reputation of the Harlem riots. Raised black expectations were not being fulfilled and despair was rampant. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 led to more riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. A city looking for racial justice elected the fusion candidate John V. Lindsay as mayor. Black New York votes were crucial to his election.

The Lindsay years were a time of racial confrontation. The black community of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn struggled with the white teachers' union for control over their children's future, and white parents in Canarsie blocked African-American children from being bused continual charges of white police brutality. It was the age of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers.

It was also the age of Shirley Chisolm, a dynamic African-American congresswoman from Brooklyn who was nominated at the Democratic convention for president, and Percy Sutton, an eloquent Harlem politician who many people believed would be the next mayor. In another arena, the writer Claude Browne stirred white audiences with his ghetto memoir Manchild in the Promised Land.

In 1977 the city was racially divided over a scattered-site public housing project in Forest Hills, and Edward Koch beat out Harlem assemblyman Herman Farrel and Mario Cuomo for mayor. Though Koch couldn't win any popularity contests in the African-American community he made some ground-breaking African-American appointments, including Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward and Board of Education Chancellor Richard Green.

David M. Denkins, who had been a popular Manhattan borough president, brought African Americans to the pinnacle of city power when he was elected mayor in 1990. He continued the tradition of having an African American as police commissioner by appointing Dr. Lee Brown. Though he was a one-term mayor, his reelection was closely contested and he left office with the positive regard of most New Yorkers.

While African Americans gained power and stature on the political front they also excelled in other callings in a city synonymous with capitalist competition. Reginald Lewis, who died in 1993, was an ambitious African American with the business acumen that enabled him to build the billion-dollar Beatrice Corporation. The late African-American New Yorker, J. Bruce Llewelyn, built a broadcasting, bottling, and retailing empire with annual sales of over 262 million dollars. Young musical entrepreneurs Andre Harrel and Russel Simmons have made fortunes selling rap and hip hip music to mainstream audiences.

African Americans also succeeded in the fast-lane field of communications. Ed Lewis (Essence) and Earl Graves (Black Enterprise) became publishing tycoons by promoting African-American success. Sam Chisolm (Mingo Group) and Caroline Jones established advertising agencies with annual multimillion dollar billings. Brent Staples and Bob Herbert climbed to the top of the journalist ladder with by-lines in the New York Times. Pierce Sutton founded a broadcasting empire which includes WBLS-FM and WLIB-AM.

In 1990 a forgotten burial ground for African-American slaves was discovered at a government building site between Duane and Elk Streets near the downtown Civic Center. African-American New Yorkers closed ranks to defend this hallowed ground and preserve the remains of their ancestors. Construction was halted. On November 23, 1993, the remains of four hundred victims of oppression, who had died before the century of emancipation, were finally laid to rest. A special ceremony, complete with gospel singers, colonial funeral dirges, funeral orations, and an African libation ritual, paid tribute to the deceased.

The "Arabs"


New York's Arab community is a rich microcosm of the whole Arab world, representing many nations and religious affiliations united by a common Arab language and culture. Arab New York encompasses the traditions of Muslim and Maronite, Yemenite and Syrian. It is the Lebanese and Palestinian fresh from the barricades and the engineer or doctor from Egypt or Iraq. In New York's most recent American Ethnic Parade the Arab contingent represented twenty-two nations from North Africa to the Near East and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. While the Syrians and Lebanese have far outnumbered other Arab immigrant groups in the past and are still the most influential segment of the Arab community, the latest Palestinian arrivals have infused the community with a new sense of Arab identity. Recent African arrivals from the Sudan and Somalia have reinforced the Arab and Islamic belief in one god and one human family, providing another occasion for legendary Arab hospitality.


History

The first Arabs to make the long journey to New York had only a vague sense of nationality but if put to it, they considered themselves Syrian, whether they came from the wealthy Melkite quarters of Damascus, the mountain strongholds of the Lebanese Shuf, or holy Jerusalem. The overwhelming majority were Christians, who for more than a millennium of Muslim rule had maintained their religious identity.

They were devoted Eastern Rite Catholics of the Maronite or Melkite Communion or Syrian Orthodox. There were significant minorities of Muslims and the Druse of Lebanon, who subscribed to many Islamic beliefs and had their own esoteric holy books. All of these groups shared a deep loyalty to family, a feeling of tribe that positively influenced their overall behavior and a strict ethical code.

The situation of Syrian Christians and, to a lesser extent, their Muslim neighbors changed with the fortunes of the Ottoman regime. One moment Christians were the privileged intermediaries of the spice route and the next they were infidels squeezed by a heavy head tax. Rich or poor, they were at times vulnerable to the petty persecution of the authorities, but generally, in line with the prescriptions of the Koran, they were treated with respect as a "protected" people.

In 1860 the competition for scarce land in Lebanon led to the massacre of thousands of Maronites and Melkites by a Druse army. The Western powers reacted immediately to the violence by pressuring the Turkish sultan to institute a more autonomous regime in Lebanon under a Christian administrator. This new government, under the sponsorship of the European powers, ushered in a period of economic growth and the expansion of Western culture from 1861 to 1915.

In some areas of Lebanon and Syria agriculture had become too dependent on cash crops and foreign imports and large landholders were able to enlarge their holdings at the expense of small farmers. In an atmosphere of rising expectations immigration became the solution for economic problems.

Following in the footsteps of their adventurous Phoenician ancestors, Syrian Lebanese set their sights on the New World. An advance group of merchants from Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem journeyed to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and sent back glowing reports of commercial success. The response was immediate and overwhelming; young Arab men, eager to make their fortunes and serve their families, crossed a continent.

This first wave of Arab emigrants were mostly Christian. They were helped at every juncture of their journey from Cyprus to Marseilles to Liverpool by local Syrian-Lebanese communities. In New York at Ellis Island, Najib Arbeely, the Immigration Bureau's Arab interpreter, was a one-man information service. He assisted Arab newcomers in contacting their families or their religious communities and counseled the uninitiated about employment opportunities.

After the Syrian-Lebanese emigrants disembarked at the Battery, it was only a short walk to the Arab hubbub and bazaar on Washington Street. They were warmly welcomed by relatives or friends from their villages. The new arrivals, who often thought their stays would be temporary, were anxious to get started. They intended to work hard, spend little, save some dollars, and return home to buy land or finance a business.

In the formative years of Little Syria the inhabitants were mainly male. They lived together in bachelor boardinghouses, saving on expenses and sharing the cooking and cleaning. They helped one another find jobs or get into business and exchanged precious bits of information about home, family, and friends.

Once they had some scraps of English and a handle on American customs, the majority took up the peddler's pack. Though peddling was the preserve of Greeks, Jews, and Armenians in their homeland, more than ninety percent of these mainly agrarian Arabs were peddlers prior to World War I.

New York was known as the "Mother of Peddling Communities." Local Syrian merchants provided the goods, usually local handicrafts or imports from the Mideast. At first the peddlers sold crosses from the Cedars of Lebanon and rosaries from the Holy Land, but later they advanced to such exotica as silk handkerchiefs, embroidered kimonos, and lace shawls. These Arab peddlers traveled alone or in pairs and scrupulously avoided competing with one another.

For Arab New Yorkers, peddling proved to be the quickest path to cultural assimilation and material success. Peddlers traveling cross-country had a crash course in things American and the American language. They were able to develop their entrepreneurial skills and powers of persuasion on farm people in rural backwaters while earning the necessary to advance in business.

Many Syrian Lebanese left their ancestral lands for freedoms and survival. In the decade preceding World War I almost one-quarter of the population deserted the rugged country of Mount Lebanon. Caring and devoted Arab New Yorkers were not cut off from their homeland and many returned regularly to help build and rebuild churches and hospitals. They supported poor family members and assisted others in emigrating. Many Christian Arab women now joined their husbands and fathers in the city.

New York City became the unofficial capital of the Syrian-Lebanese community. Washington Street was a Levantine market with animated vendors selling exotic spices, Oriental rugs, and gold bracelets. There were tables gorgeously inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scimitars of Damascus steel. In the cafes men in fezzes drank tiny cups of Turkish coffee and sat on cushions, smoking hookahs and playing backgammon.

Hundreds of Syrian men, women, and children filled apartments between Washington and Greenwich Streets and Rector and Carlisle Streets. Merchants established Middle Eastern import and export houses and entrepreneurs opened small garment factories specializing in silk embroidery. Some of the more successful Arab businessmen like Saleem Malouk were even able to move uptown to Fifth Avenue mansions and become patrons of the arts.

The New York casbah became the model for all Arabic-American communities. It had three churches and six newspapers and organized the first Arabic-American Association in the country, which assisted Arabs in learning English and getting an education.

Arab success was no accident. Syrian Lebanese were impelled to succeed by a need to win honor and status for themselves and their families. The American get-rich-quick ethic agreed with Arab values like generosity, hospitality, and munificence. Coming from a society where people were frequently jockeying for position, the Syrian Lebanese were prepared to compete for the rewards of wealth. They were determined to work hard and sacrifice for the source of their identity, the family.

But the Arab people who kept classical learning alive during the Dark Ages had interests beyond mere money. The earliest leader of the Arab intellectual community was Dr. Joseph Arbeely, who reached New York in 1881. He had been involved in a translation of the Bible into Arabic and recognized the importance of the Arab linguistic heritage.

His sons founded the city's first Arabic newspaper and laid the foundation for the whole Arab press in America. The two most powerful organs in this highly sectarian community were Al-Hoda, which represented the Maronite point of view, and Murrat-ul-Garb, which was the voice of the Orthodox. In 1910 Al-Bayan (The News) began publication; it was concerned with issues involving the Muslim and Druse communities.

New York was the center for an experimental Syrian literary movement, which was creating Arabic equivalents for modern Western forms like free verse. Kahlil Gibran, the renowned author of The Prophet, was the leader of Al-Rabitur al-Qalamiyya (The Pen League), a circle that included writers like the Arab Walt Whitman, Ameen Rihani, who wrote with Whitmanseque energy and verve. The Pen League attacked literary status quo and encouraged the publication of new Arabic writing.

Arab men and women increasingly dressed American and their actions were no longer strictly limited by parental authority. Women without scarves (even Christian women wore scarves in their villages as a matter of modesty) were even involved in the world of work outside the home. Syrian Lebanese married Americans and immigrants from European countries and some gradually lost their Arab identity.

In 1905 there was pitched battle in the narrow streets of Little Syria between traditionalists and the forces of Americanization. Five people were injured in the fifteen-minute "pistol-knife" fray that embarrassed the whole Syrian-Lebanese community. Najeeb Malouf and Syrian Orthodox Bishop Hawaweeny tried unsuccessfully to mediate the dispute.

The New York Arabic community was able to unite in the face of old-fashioned American bigotry. In January of 1909 a Lebanese named Costa George Najour was refused citizenship on the basis of the Asian exclusionary rule and Arabs were officially declared nonwhite. Arab New York and the local Arab press went into action, raising over a thousand dollars to appeal the case and Najour was finally vindicated and granted citizenship.

Following World War I and the years of accumulating capital, the Arab peddler was replaced by the Arab store owner. The community gained a new stability, which was not even threatened by the movement of Syrian Lebanese from the old Little Syrian near the Battery to a new ethnic enclave in Brooklyn. Arabs increasingly went retail, opening dry-goods stores, grocery stores, and fruit and vegetable stands.

While some Arab New Yorkers eagerly assimilated, there was a reawakening of cultural identity in the New York Arab community. The Maronite Arabs began to view themselves as a special people, the descendants of Phoenician empire builders. This Lebanese national pride was encouraged by a new political entity in post-World War I Middle East. The Maronites believed that the Greater Lebanon Mandate, which was controlled by the French, was their own nation.

After another world war the whole map of the Middle East changed again and the city's Arabs could now point with pride to the state of Lebanon. The majority could trace their bloodlines back to the mountaineers of this new land. They also found it easy to identify with such a cosmopolitan country, with its long-standing French-Maronites connection. Soon it became the rule to add the Lebanese national identification to the names of local organizations. The notion of Lebanese nationality was so pervasive that even New Yorkers of Syrian Christian descent referred to themselves as Lebanese.

The Celler-Hart Immigration Act of 1965 opened the doors of New York to Arabs from different geographical areas and segments of society. New immigration quotas based on professional skills instead of race or national origin enabled educated elites throughout the Arab world and many more Muslims to immigrate to the city. Engineers and physicians from Egypt and Iraq found employment and economic opportunity; many had previously studied in the United States. Like the early Syrian-Lebanese peddlers, they also took American brides.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War increased the flow of Palestinian refugees, who had been emigrating to New York in significant numbers since the end of the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. They were very different from other recent arrivals. The Palestinians were politicized and really committed to their Arab identity.

Many Arab New Yorkers rallied around these refugees, believing the time had come to assert their ethnic pride. Arab-American university graduates convened in 1968 to map a strategy to improve the Arab image. New York's Arab churches and organizations inaugurated classes in Arabic language and culture. The Eastern Federation of American Syrian Lebanese Clubs even sought a voice in American foreign policy. Arabs from Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Palestine were united and committed to a Pan-Arabic identity.

In the 1980s there was an increase of rural emigrants from Yemen, Egypt, the Sudan, and Somalia. They were joined by Palestinian refugees from Lebanon, and later from Kuwait, who were often the victims of events beyond their control. Unfortunately, these new Arab immigrants did not always have access to the community support systems that had aided another generation of Arab emigrants. They were also subject to prejudice and unthinking stereotypes which stamped them as fanatics and terrorists.

Still, these new Americans, through a combination of perseverance, a strong sense of duty, and supportive extended families, are beginning to establish themselves in this competitive metropolis. Many put in long hours as cab or delivery drivers, while others operate small businesses such as grocery stores, newsstands, and delicatessens. In Brooklyn alone there are one thousand Arab American store owners.

Although the census declares that there are only 51,770 Arabs living in New York, it is apparent that the real figure is much higher. The Arab presence in New York, as revealed in school enrollments, the increasing number of mosques and Eastern Rite churches, and the rise in Arab business ownership, indicates a population closer to two hundred thousand! Without a doubt the burgeoning Arab community will be playing a more prominent role in New York in years to come.

[Indiana Jones]

Finns

Finns settled in New Amsterdam in the 1630s and 1640s. They were farmers and mechanics, few in number, and hardly distinguishable from their Scandinavian neighbors. Two hundred years later Finnish "true-believers" passed through the city as part of a Protestant revival group formed around Lars Levi Laestadius.

Mostly Finnish seamen populated New York before the mass migrations of the 1890s. They generally jumped Scandinavian ships to draw superior American wages. In the War Between the States Finnish New Yorkers were actively recruited by the Union navy.

The Finns of the "great migration" were reluctant emigrants. Mainly tenant farmers and landless laborers from the agricultural region of Vaasa Oulu, one-third of the males were forced off the land by overpopulation and the expansion of large farms. By 1900 Finnish emigrants were also responding to the increasingly reactionary policies of their Russian sovereigns, who sought to substitute the Russian language for Finnish and who had instituted military conscription.

Determined Finns worked their way from Helsinki to Stockholm and endured the dangers of steerage from Liverpool to New York. At first they didn't have the help of a Finnish colony overseas or the support of their people at home. For their trouble and struggle they were often the targets of self-righteous clergymen and reporters. They were attacked as traitors and weaklings without scruples or character. The Lutheran Church even refused, at least at first, to accept their overseas marriages as binding.

The Finns of New York were hardly the deserters depicted in the popular Finnish press. They were serious and conscientious. Individually and as a community Finns weighed their every action. They would not abandon one another or their national traditions. Though they had no organizational experience in their native land, they were soon banding together in mutual aid societies and lodges.

From the time the immigrant Finns disembarked at Ellis Island in the early part of the twentieth century, they were met by community representatives. There were Finnish-speaking clergymen who provided spiritual support and assisted Finns in contacting the local Finnish communities in Sunset Park. Enterprising Finnish women operated six employment agencies at the immigration station to help newcomers find jobs as domestics. Finnish community representatives also directed emigrants to cooperative boardinghouses where they new immigrants could share cooking, cleaning, and expenses with their compatriots.

In New York Finnish maids were in great demand and women even outnumbered men in the early days of Little Finland. Finnish women were the backbone of Finnish Lutheran and Congregational churches; they formed church societies and played a key part in fund raising. They worked to preserve Finnish culture through their own groups and as auxiliaries of men's organizations like the Knights of Kaleva.

Finnish males followed the example of other Scandinavians and became carpenters and riggers on the city's big construction projects. In the 1890s these Finnish laborers formed socialist societies and workers' leagues like Imatra Society. The Finns of this time were radical and committed, actively working for left-wing candidates like Eugene Debs, participating in strikes, and demonstrating against anti-union companies and rightist candidates. Later they would be at the forefront of the movement for cooperative stores and housing, which would take the profit away from the middleman capitalist and hand it to the consumer.

Finns from all walks of life joined the Knights of Kaleva, named in honor of the Finnish national epic, the Kaleva. As knights, Finns could celebrate their cultural identity and keep up Finnish traditions. The lodge also combined medical assistance and burial insurance with plain old Finnish fellowship. Local Finn halls in Sunset Park and Harlem provided the whole Finnish community with spirited expressions of ethnic pride. There were dramatic readings of the Kaleva, folk-song festivals, and regular appearances of Finnish dance companies.

The New York Finnish community was candid about drinking and its problems. They were very active in the Temperance Union movement and there were many separate Finnish temperance organizations throughout the city sponsored by Congregationalist and Lutheran churches and socialist groups. They had a full social program to compete with community-wide events where alcohol was served.

The ties between Finns and their native country remained strong, with almost a third of the community accumulating a nest egg and actually returning home. Some of the socially concerned left New York to participate in experimental socialist communities in Soviet Karelia.

Finnish New York suffered from these defections and was even more hard-hit by immigration quotas that put an end to a vital foreign-language culture. Between 1925 and 1929 only 471 Finns a year could enter the whole country; this figure was only raised to 566 a year until the big changes in the immigration law. Despite this enforced cultural isolation and the pressures of assimilation, Finns had a real bond with the young Finnish republic, which was gamely struggling against the Soviet colossus. Finns were particularly proud of their country's gallant defense against the Soviets in 1939 and the fact that they were the first nation to repay their debt to America after the Marshall Plan ended.


Czechs

Augustine Herman, an experienced surveyor and merchant, was the first Czech to make his mark in the New World. He came over to New Amsterdam in 1643 as an agent for Amsterdam's largest commercial organization, Gabry and Company. While taking care of business, Herman served as an adviser of Governor Stuyvesant and was involved in delicate border negotiations with the British colonies. He made his fortune surveying Maryland for Lord Baltimore, for which he received twenty thousand acres of prime land. In honor of his home region he called his estate New Bohemia, which he planted with tobacco.

Frederick Philipse was another talented Czech merchant. He arrived in the colony in 1647. He was enough a wheeler-dealer in colonial real estate to create the Philips dynasty. His granddaughter was so grand she refused the proposal of George Washington. Though early Czech New Yorkers were outstanding successes, by the late 1840s there were only five hundred Bohemians in the whole city.

The failure of the 1848 uprising in Bohemia led Czechs to seek freedom in New York. These first political exiles were plodding intellectuals and expert craftsmen who shared a fierce belief in something they called "free thought." While they had a tendency to be opinionated, the men and women of 1848 laid the foundations for the New York Czech community's spirited intellectual, social, and cultural life.

In 1848 Czech organizational life got off to a flying start with a group named after the revolutionary society Slovanska Linda. This group did not last long, but it did provide a model for future groups with its library and amateur Czech theatricals and choral society. Two years later Czech "Forty-eighters" launched the first mutual aid society Ceska Spolecnost.

Finally, in 1854 the Czech Slavonic Benevolent Society (CSPS) was organized in the city and is still going strong. Many branches of the organization followed and they all embraced such advanced causes as abolition and women's rights, but it wasn't until 1897 that the CSPS actually admitted women as equal members.

In a tradition dating back to religious dissenters like Jan Hus, Czech liberal Forty-eighters dismissed the conventional dogmas of church and state and favored both political and social freedoms. In 1865 Czech New Yorkers with liberated beliefs opened their own free school in New York, called Svobodna Skola, with sixty-five pupils. In 1907 these outspoken Czech free thinkers organized Svaz Svobodomslnych (Free Thought), a secular equivalent of a church, with humanistic weddings and funerals.

Czech New Yorkers believed in a strong body as well as a sound mind. They formed gymnast societies called Sokols where physical training and discipline were combined with a program of character development and Czech nationalism. One Czech American compared the Sokol code with the rigor, honor, and discipline associated with Japanese samurai. In 1878 the National Sokol Union joined together thirteen groups in New York. That year the first gymnastic festival took place with Sokols from around the country competing. In a 1933 Sokol Slet 2,556 gymnasts participated.

In the 1870s the Hapsburg Empire loosened restrictions on Czech travel and this, coupled with a failure of the sugar beet crop, triggered a mass movement of Czech peasants to New York City. They were very different from their sophisticated forebears, and at least at the beginning only identified with their extended families, villages, and Bohemian or Moravian region.

Newly arrived peasant families did piecework in cramped tenement workshops, rolling cigars and sewing garments at breakneck speed for as much as eighteen hours at a clip. The closeness of Czech families and the self-reliance of their children helped them to work as an efficient economic unit. Jacob Riis, in his expose of immigrant life published in the 1870s, called How the Other Half Lives, marveled at the strength and equanimity of these working Czech families.

New York Czechs rivaled the Germans as metal workers and competed with the Jews in the needle trades, but they were most heavily involved in making cigars and manufacturing pearl buttons. By the turn of the century more than ninety percent of Czech New Yorkers were rolling cigars and more than half the pearl buttons in the United States were made by Czechs in the city. The efforts of these indefatigable workers paid off and they were able to leave the deteriorating Lower East Side for model tenements in what would become Czech Yorkville.

Although Czechs never voted as a block, Czech workingmen were socially conscious and politically committed. As early as 1870 the Delnicky Klub was established for industrial workers. In 1872 the Czech trade unionists formed a section of the Socialist Labor Party of New York, and in 1893 Czech labor, which refused to socialize with its class enemies, started its own Sokol, which came to be called the "Red Sokol."

But New York's Czechs were not all high-minded thinking and intellectual controversy. The industrious and thrifty Czechs liked to sing and dance and raise a glass of pilsner even if the city's Puritans upbraided them for doing it on Sunday. The city's Czechs were very musical; one third of Czech professionals in the early 1900s proved the Czech proverb co cech to muzikant, if he's Czech he's a musician. All the major conservatories in Manhattan had Czech teachers. Even the famous Czech composer of The New World Symphony, Antonin Dvorak, directed the National Conservatory of Music in New York between 1892 and 1895. The superb musician and composer Rudolph Friml was the toast of New York in the 1920s, acclaimed for his operetta, The Vagabond King.

World War I brought Czech New Yorkers together. On May 15, 1916, the Red Sokol and the more conservative Blue Sokol symbolically marched together out of Fort Slocum after eighty-four members of the New York groups enlisted. New York Czechs backed the exiled leader Thomas Masaryk, who was married to a Brooklyn woman and had lectured many times to local Czech audiences. In 1918 Masaryk met with President Wilson and the terms for Czech independence were hammered out before the Versailles Peace Conference.

Immigration restrictions after World War I and a trend toward assimilation had impeded the development of Czech communal life. It became more and more diffuse and less self-aware. The economic depression was another blow, closing the city's most important Czech ethnic institutions. Czechs did not have the resources or organizations in place to help their homeland when the Munich Agreement became a prelude to a full-scale Nazi invasion.

Just when it looked like Czechoslovakia would regain its independence after World War II, Stalinists, with the backing of the USSR, staged a coup. The machinations of Czech communists led to a new generation of Czech Forty-eighters in New York, who were victims of left-wing rather than reactionary tyranny. They were more conservative than other generations of Czech immigrants and stridently anticommunist. While developing their own Czech organizational base, they were able to enter the American occupational mainstream with their skills as professionals and craftsmen. Czech culture flourished again in the city, with groups like the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences.

Twenty years later the Forty-eighters were joined in New York by the Sixty-eighters, as Alexander Dubcek's democratic reforms and the hopes of the "Prague spring" were crushed by Soviet tanks and armies. The new refugees were more left-wing than their predecessors and less liable to identify with hard-core anticommunist causes.

Many were socialist intellectuals or progressive party apparatchiks. They were distrusted by the new conservative Czech establishment, who viewed them as lacking real conviction, or even unreconstructed Communists. Despite the rift in the Czech community, the refugees from 1968 added to Czech cultural renewal. Josef Skvornecky, a leader in the group, started an experimental Czech publishing house in New York.

In 1989 the Marxist Czechoslovakian regime was overthrown by spontaneous demonstrations of the people, the nonviolent "Velvet" Revolution. In a stunning reversal, Vaclav Havel, the nation's leading dissident and a renowned playwright, became president. Local Czechs were thrilled with the turn of events and many returned "home" to provide advice and direction.



Germans

Germans are America's largest ethnic group. Before the twentieth century they were consistently New York's second ethnic group. Two world wars with Germany destroyed the community's identity, and today the Germans are also the city's invisible ethnics.

German refugees from the Thirty Years' War were among the first settlers of New Amsterdam. Hans Kierstede, a native of Saxony, was New Amsterdam's first physician, and Ulrich Lupolt was sheriff of New Amsterdam during the early Indian wars. Even after the British took over in 1664, Jacob Leisler of Frankfort Am Main was a spokesman for the interests of the Dutch minority and led a New York revolution.

In the eighteenth century German immigrants from the Palatinate entered New York as "redemptionists"; they were sold to the highest bidder in a market near City Hall to pay the cost of their passage. They were in great demand for their industry, honesty, and skills. Unlike the English, they rarely ran away.

Peter Zenger was one Palatine immigrant who distinguished himself in eighteenth-century New York. Starting as a printer's apprentice, he was soon publishing his own newspaper. In 1734 he had temerity to attack in print the high-handed and dishonest British governor Cosby. Four editions of his paper were consigned to the public hangman and he was sent to jail. His legal vindication set the precedent for press freedom in the city.

The British recruited Germans to put down the American rebellion of 1776. These Hessians, who were dragooned into service, didn't have any real loyalties, and in areas with large German populations, the unwilling soldiers defected to the enemy. Many of the Hessians who occupied New York during the war stayed on to become citizens of the Republic.

The dedicated Germans fighting on the Revolutionary side included a genuine military genius from Prussia, Baron Von Steuben. The Baron's claims to rank and privilege may have been exaggerated, but he knew how to train and organize an army and win battles. Von Steuben continued to take an active part in American public life after the Revolution and was a prominent figure in New York German organizations and society.

In the early years of the Republic a German named John Jacob Astor from Waldorf became the city's first millionaire. He started out as a butcher's assistant, but quickly learned there was more money in fur than in meat. His trading posts extended to the Oregon territory. Like Donald Trump, another fabulously wealthy New Yorker of German ancestry, he made his fortune in investing in New York real estate and the city's first luxury hotels were Astor's.

The defeat of a German revolution in 1848 led to an influx of German political refugees. They were intellectuals and free thinkers who contributed to the overall intellectual life of the city. Franz Lieber taught international law at Columbia University and Carl Schurz championed reform as editor of the very liberal New York Evening Post.

German intellectuals were intent on preserving German culture in America's largest city. By the end of the 1850s they had established fifty German schools, ten book stores, four daily newspapers, and a German theater. They had also formed local turnerverein (gymnastic societies), which contributed physical education with progressive politics.

But the "Forty-eighters" were more than thinkers; they were also men of action. They took their abolition seriously and six thousand German political exiles were among the first to volunteer for the city's militias to fight in the War Between the States. Germans filled the ranks of ten New York regiments. The versatile Carl Schurz led German-American armies along with that other outstanding German, Franz Lieber. Both were generals.

The immigrants of Forty-eight were followed by emigrants from Germany's own potato famine. This emigration wave also included rural Germans dispossessed from large estates and urban Germans who were casualties of the Industrial Revolution. The new Germans were more expansive than the political refugees. They enjoyed the camaraderie of the volunteer fire house and the culture of the German beer garden. They preferred marching bands to concert halls.

The established German community organized the German-American Society to aid new German arrivals, and joined forces with the Irish to create the Board of Commissioners to oversee emigration. Frederich Kapp was the leading German spokesman on the board and helped found the Castle Garden Emigration Station to safeguard German emigrants from fraud and exploitation. By 1860 New York's German-born community numbered over one hundred thousand.

In the boom following the Civil War, New York industry beat the bushes for talented German craftsmen and artisans. Germans went to work making elegant furniture and cabinets and fine musical instruments. They rolled cigars, baked bread, and brewed beer. When they got tired of working for someone else, Germans started their own factories, workshops, and retail businesses.

There are many German success stories, such as Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, who came to New York from Brunswick with his four sons. He was an Old World master who crafted concert pianos with the quality of a Stradivarius violin. In New York Steinweg became Steinway and concert pianos became big business. In 1872 William Steinway and his workers left the piano workshop in Manhattan for a four-hundred-acre company town on Bowery Bay near Astoria. The Steinway industrial community had its own park, library, ball field, schools, and row housing.

In the Gilded Age New York had more German-American breweries than St. Louis and Milwaukee combined. The Rupperts were the leading brewing family and the first to promote sports with their beer. In 1923 Jacob Ruppert built Yankee Stadium in the Bronx with a short right wall so another German by the name of Babe Ruth could hit more home runs.

New York's Germans were great music lovers and many joined glee clubs and choirs. They belonged to classical music signing groups like the Liederkranz, which was started in 1847, and the Arion, which was formed after the Liederkranz first admitted women. The Liederkranz choral was world renowned and even commissioned a work by Richard Wagner for the 1876 presidential inauguration. German singing groups periodically gathered to entertain one another and compete for prizes. One sangerfeste in 1900 in Brooklyn involved six thousand singers and 774 groups.

Germans were great joiners. German New Yorkers enjoyed one another's company in every kind of group, from shooting clubs to church sodalities to amateur drama societies. Holidays, profane and religious, were a time when the ordinarily restrained Germans could let go. They observed the Sabbath with lighthearted picnics and outings, shocking some of their prim Protestant neighbors.

German immigrants originally resided in the Lower East Side's Kleine Deutschland, but there were also pockets of Germans on Dutch Hill on 40th Street and First Avenue and in Hell's Kitchen. German society, families like the Rhinelanders and Schermerhorns, had staked out Yorkville as early as the 1830s and by the 1890s wealthy German brewers built mansions in the German reserve. Brooklyn also had a substantial German community in Williamsburg and Bushwick. It was a typical German mix of tobacconists, tailors, lithographers, and brewers. After the tragic sinking of the excursion ship the General Slocum in 1904, when over one thousand residents of Kleine Deutschland drowned, the ethnic map of the city changed; thousands of inconsolable working-class Germans deserted Kleine Deutschland for Yorkville.

No one doubted the loyalty and patriotism of German New Yorkers in 1901 - more than ninety percent had their first citizenship papers - but European power politics and propaganda changed that positive image. The industrious Teuton became the bestial Hun overnight, as Germany invaded neutral countries and German U-boats threatened shipping at the start of World War I.

Even before America entered the war, a German newspaper publisher was ordered by the New York mayor to remove the German flag from outside his office. In Brooklyn government authorities decreed that the name of Hamburg Avenue be changed to Wilson Avenue. German schools and cultural organizations were vandalized and members were harassed. In July of 1916 the whole German community became suspect when a ship carrying British war munitions blew up in New York Harbor.

After war was declared German participation in Liberty Bond drives and even service in the trenches in France didn't change the anti-German attitude on the home front. Germans were practically forced to deny their heritage. Some Germans anglicized their names and in self-defense started their own Americanization programs.

German Americans withstood this period of prejudice to become trend setters in the Roaring Twenties. They were the showmen, the creators of glamour and glitter. The great Florenz Ziegfield was the toast of Broadway and cafe society. His Ziegfield Follies was the musical event of the season and his showgirls were the Twenties ideal.

In the years of the Great Depression, New York became a center for Nazi propaganda and German New Yorkers were prime targets. Fritz Kuhn and his Nazi Bund recruited in the streets of Yorkville. Although claiming to have a following of 250,000 German Americans, the FBI estimated it was closer to 6,500. Most German New Yorkers weren't interested in Hitler's message of hate and some German groups like the German Workers Club demonstrated against these Nazi bigots.

While a small minority of German-American extremists were making a lot of noise in Yorkville, a German New Yorker was making history in the U.S. Senate. Born in Germany, Robert Wagner made his way from the state assembly to the U.S. Senate to become one of the key legislators in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The Act, which bears his name, finally gave the working man the right to organize and bargain collectively without fear of retaliation.

German New Yorkers didn't wait to be drafted after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. They served in both theaters of the war and a disproportionate number were commissioned officers. German Americans like Donald Roebling, the great-grandson of Brooklyn Bridge builder John Roebling, used their scientific ability to devise "miracle weapons" such as the amphibious tank.

In the postwar prosperity a second-generation Wagner, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., became mayor of New York. Calm and low key, Wagner went about thoroughly rebuilding the city. He knocked down the Third Avenue El, redeveloped the West Side around Columbus Circle, and built over a hundred thousand units of medium-income housing. New York's master builder and reform mayor also went about dismantling Tammany's political machine.

In the 1950s a new breed of German emigrated to New York seeking opportunity. Thousands of technicians and scientists came to the city in the first stages of a postwar "brain drain." As the German economy improved in the 1960s and even began to outperform the U.S. economy in the 1970s, the only Germans who came to New York were employed by German banks and international corporations.

[Indiana Jones]

Poles

Daniel Litscho was the first Pole to gain prominence when New York was still New Amsterdam. During the administration of Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant, he attained the rank of lieutenant in the tiny Dutch colonial militia and participated in military expeditions against the Swedes and maverick Patroons. Litscho was also a popular innkeeper with taverns on Pearl Street and Wall Street.

Captain Marcin Krygier also served in the Dutch militia under Peter Stuyvesant. He was elected three times to the prestigious office of deputy burgomaster of New Amsterdam. Krygier commanded the fort that defended the city; it was named in his honor for the great Polish monarch, John Casimir.

Litscho and Marcin Krygier made such a powerful impression on the stolid Dutch governor that he urged the Dutch West India Company to recruit more Polish colonists. Dr. Alexander Curtius was brought to New Amsterdam to start the first high school. Governor Stuyvesant praised this Polish educator for his skill and diligence until he embarrassed the tight-fisted governor by demanding the agreed-upon salary.

The American Revolution brought Polish freedom fighters to the forefront of the American experience. They had been deprived of their ancestral lands and ancestral rights by the joint action of Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1795. They believed in the rights of man and were ready to strike a blow for freedom in the New World.

Casimir Pulaski was promoted to brigadier general over four American colonels, even without any knowledge of English. He was admired for his bravery and envied for his command of cavalry tactics. He died courageously in battle, charging the Redcoat cavalry.

Thaddeus Kosciuszko joined the Revolutionary forces as an engineer with the rank of colonel. From the beginning General Washington recognized Kosciuszko's importance and placed him under his direct command. He played a major role in the preparations of military fortifications for West Point and Saratoga. On October 13, 1783, the debt owed by the young Republic was recognized and Congress granted Kosciuszko the rank of brigadier general.

The Pulaski Skyway and the Kosciuszko Bridge are two New York monuments to these Polish heroes. New York's Polish community and organizations revere both of these leaders, and the Pulaski Day Parade is the principal celebration of Polish New Yorkers.

In the 1830s New Yorkers were concerned about Russian and Austrian persecution of Poles. The New York City Council was the first official body in the United States to declare support for the Polish uprising of 1831. Forming a committee in Clinton Hall chaired by Columbia President William A. Duer, New Yorkers pledged to support Polish freedom.

New Yorkers were the first to offer asylum to the outnumbered Polish freedom fighters. In 1834, 234 Polish exiles arrived at the Port of New York on Austrian ships. They were welcomed with speeches by city luminaries like the writer James Fenimore Cooper. Albert Gallatin, a former secretary of the treasury, organized a committee to aid the proud refugees, who were soon contributing members of New York society.

Despite their lack of English, these extraordinary Poles gained prominence in many fields. Samuel Brilliantowski and Robert Thomain became successful physicians, and a pioneer woman in medicine, Marie Zakrzewska, founded the New York Infirmary. In the arts Eustachy Wysznski became a leading painter and his compatriot Adam Kurek joined the brass section of the New York Italian Opera and became a recognized composer.

These Polish patriots laid the foundations of Polish communal and cultural life in the city and the county as a whole. In 1842 Ludwik Jezykowicz, a staunch Polish cleric, chaired the Association of Poles in America. In the same year Paul Sobolewski and Eustachy Wysznski founded the first Polish periodical, Poland, Historical, Literacy, Monumental and Picturesque. The Polish Slavonian Literacy Association was established in 1846. The Polish community launched the newspaper Echoz Polski at the time of the Civil War.

Politically conscious Poles rallied to the Union cause and eagerly enrolled in the city's Garibaldi Guards and the Fourth Cavalry. The Polish military man Alexander Raszewski organized the Thirty-first New York Infantry; Joseph Smolenski led a cavalry regiment.

Wladimir Kryzanowski was a Civil War hero on the scale of Pulaski. He volunteered only two days after war was declared and in no time made colonel and took over the Fifty-eighth Regiment. He was cited numerous times for bravery and was specifically singled out for his exploits during the Battle of Bull Run. President Lincoln nominated him for the rank of brigadier general. After the war he made a career of government service, finally retiring to New York City to use his influence on behalf of a new influx of Polish immigrants.

The immigrant Poles of the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth were very different from their aristocratic forebears. They were peasants with a reverence for the land and had little understanding of geopolitics. Still, they had the strength of character to stand firm against Russian and German efforts to undermine their Polish language and customs. They guarded their Polish identity, but Polish pride by itself could not deal with the problems of starvation and disease and the threat of military conscription. Poles were forced to leave for America.

Polish peasant life centered around the family, the church, and the ancestral village. In America the Polish community revolved around the family, the church, and the neighborhood. Many Poles came to New York with the firm intention of returning to their ancestral villages after they had earned enough money to buy land and a house. Whether they returned or not, they still passionately believed in the Polish proverb that "a man without land is a man without legs."

The Poles who came to New York in steerage were not accorded the same cordial welcome as the freedom fighters. Like other peasant immigrants, they faced prejudice and discrimination. They had no choice but to accept some of the harshest menial work in the city. The tough Poles cleaned the stills in the Brooklyn refineries, removing solid residue in Sahara-like heat. They labored in Brooklyn's iron foundries, inhaling noxious fumes and handling scalding buckets of molten iron.

Polish labor, despite its Old World conservatism, demanded its rights. Poles were active in the wave of strikes that erupted in Brooklyn plants in 1907, 1910, and 1917. Independent Polish workers picketed a Brooklyn sugar refinery when they were forced to work on Easter Sunday and walked out of a Bayonne factory where a foreman made slurs about their nationality. Some militant Poles joined radical groups and were deported during the "Red Scare" of the twenties.

America's enterprise society inspired Polish Americans. They opened all kinds of businesses, from big-city banks to local dry-goods store. For these Polish Americans it wasn't "business as usual." Polish merchants cultivated a close, almost paternal, relationship with their customers and community. They performed extra services like translating papers and documents and even helped customers find jobs. Polish businessmen put their profits back into the community.

While the Polish immigrants weathered trials and triumphed through determined effort, they never lost sight of their conquered motherland. In New York and Brooklyn they belonged to patriotic Falcon Societies, where they prepared themselves for the national struggle. They practiced gymnastics and fencing and discussed strategies for independence. Polish New Yorkers representing every strand of opinion from radical to monarchist formed coalitions, calling upon the world to grant Poland self-determination.

At the start of World War I Ignatz Jan Paderewski, one of the world's leading concert pianists, became the spokesman of the Polish freedom movement in an impassioned concert tour that combined Chopin and politics. He galvanized national support and helped convince an undecided President Wilson to embrace Polish freedom.

New York's staunch Polish community went even further, with young men volunteering for action and joining a fighting force under the command of the Polish coalition leader, Jozef Haller. Haller's "Blue Army" even recruited soldiers for the American army in 1917. By the end of the war a higher proportion of Poles died on European battlefields than any other American ethnic group.

Stunned by the horrors of battle and depressed by postwar political wrangling, returning Poles were eager to get back into ordinary American life. Many had given up the idea of returning to settle permanently in Poland. They had become New Yorkers. Later they were disappointed and angry at restrictive immigration laws that barred their families and friends from joining them.

New York's Poles were very conscious of their Polish identity. In their own communities on the Lower East Side, in Williamsburg, and Greenpoint, Poles celebrated their identity and homeland in dance groups, glee clubs, and Polish societies. In their parochial schools overseen by Polish nuns, second- and third-generation Polish Americans learned the rudiments of the Polish language and the basics of Polish culture.

High Polish art from theater to concert music also thrived in the city. Stephen Mizwa, a Polish-born Harvard-educated academic, founded the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York in 1925 to encourage Polish creativity and Polish studies. He hoped that his organization would foster American cultural links with a resurgent Poland. At the local level, first- and second-generation Polish Americans formed fine arts clubs.

New York's Poles needed more than cultural pride to cope with the human tragedies brought on by the economic depression of the 1930s. The closeness of the community and Poles' willingness to help one another, providing credit and even shelter for those in need, kept neighborhoods afloat. In the political arena, they supported Roosevelt's relief and welfare measures and voted the Democratic ticket, though they received little in patronage for their efforts.

As prosperity returned, the concerns of Polish New Yorkers shifted to Eastern Europe, where Nazi threats against Poland were realized in a devastating Panzer invasion. Nowy Swiat, New York's leading Polish newspaper, mobilized the metropolitan area's Polish population, who brought bonds, gave blood, and participation in newspaper and scrap-iron drives.

The newspaper's publisher, Maximilian Wegrzynek, organized the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (KNAPP) to fight against Soviet involvement and for the liberation of Poland. Later his group joined with others in a united front, the Polish American Congress, to defend Poland from Soviet domination.

World War II and the Yalta Agreement, which gave the USSR de facto control over Poland, increased the number of Poles seeking refuge in New York. There were intellectual emigres like Oscar Halecki, who established the prestigious Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in the City in 1941. There were members of Poland's defeated government like the exiled minister of education, Waclaw Jedrzejewicz, who became the executive director for the Josef Pilsudski Institute of America, established in New York in 1943.

The majority of new Polish immigrants were displaced or DP's, and veterans of special Polish army units and groups of partisans. They came in family units with the intention of making a new life in America. The lobbying efforts of KNAPP and the passage of legislative acts and presidential directives made their entry possible. They brought new life and flavor to the Polonias of New York.

The General Black was the first ship to land in New York with this precious human cargo in 1948. The Polish refugees of World War II called themselves the Black Generals in honor of this special ship. They included such notables as Dr. Zbigniew Brezinski, who went from Columbia's halls of ivy and the chairmanship of the Trilateral Commission to become President Jimmy Carter's chief foreign policy adviser and chairman of the National Security Council.

While Polish New Yorkers went from success to success and made the leap from blue-collar responsibility to white-collar affluence, they did not and have not forgotten their homeland. They continually sent food, medicine, and money to help their people struggling under a tyranny and incompetence of a Soviet satellite regime. Polish New Yorkers even provided direct support for the labor and political movement Solidarnosc and its charismatic leader Lech Walesa. They also raised money to help maintain Polish Roman Catholic institutions.

Even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Poland became more democratic and open to free enterprise. The country was buoyed by a new sense of purpose and Polish New Yorkers not only cheered from the sidelines, but also became an important source of investment and economic expertise. As Soviet troops left and the whole Communist state apparatus was dismantled, the former dissident labor leader Lech Walesa, whose picture had prominent place in many Polish-American homes, became president of a free Poland.

In the wake of economic dislocation and unemployment caused by the transition to capitalism, many Poles have taken advantage of lifted travel restrictions to come to America. Some settled legally and others overstayed their tourist visas to seek out New York economic opportunities. As in the past, Poles elected to take the most hazardous jobs, such as asbestos removal, to make a life for themselves and their families in this fiercely competitive city. This new generation of Polish immigrants is rejuvenating the Polonias of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Manhattan, and Maspeth.



The Jews have played an important part in the city from the days when it was called New Amsterdam. The earliest arrivals were refugees from the Brazilian Inquisition. Throughout the eighteenth century New York Jews were primarily Sephardic and descended from the Jews of Spain and Portugal. They were succeeded by German Jews, who became the affluent and culturally sophisticated "Our Crowd." The largest group came from Eastern Europe, escaping pogroms and poverty at the end of the nineteenth century. Today, there is a new generation of Russian Jews making New York their home side by side with their Jewish counterparts from the volatile Middle East.

History

In September of 1654 the St. Charles landed in New Amsterdam with twenty-three Jewish passengers who had been rescued from Spanish pirates. The Jews were Sephardic, of Spanish and Portuguese descent. They could trace their ancestry back to Jewish nobility of the "golden age" before the Inquisition.

These grandees of Iberia were an elite, leaders in the arts, sciences, and finance. Again they were fleeing the auto-da-fe, this time from Brazil, which the Portuguese had recaptured from the tolerant Dutch. New York's first Jews arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. In retrospect these refugees would have the stature of Jewish pilgrims.

Governor Peter Stuyvesant was eager to rid the Dutch colony of these heretics, who he feared would "infect and trouble this new colony." Stuyvesant requested the support of his superiors at the Dutch West India Company, but Dutch tolerance and the influence of Jewish stockholders in the Company saved the day. The Jews would stay. They had the Company's protection.

The Jews were granted a charter of settlement by the Dutch West India Company in April 1655, recognizing their loyalty to the Netherlands and upholding their basic rights. Stuyvesant was forced to yield, but he continued to attempt to restrict their participation in the life of the Dutch colony.

Stuyvesant tried to bar Jewish religious worship, but the Company took the Jews' side and backed their right to have services in their own homes. In 1655 New Amsterdam's twenty-three Jews founded a congregation they called Shearith Israel, the Remnant of Israel. Shortly afterward they were permitted to have their own Jewish cemetery just outside the city walls.

Individual Jews tried to secure the full privileges of citizenship. Asser Levy, the proprietor of a popular tavern, refused to pay the "Jewish tax" which exempted him from guard duty. He recognized his duty to protect his community and challenged the governor and the Dutch West India Company to revoke the tax and the exemption.

Another Levy named Moses became the first Jew to hold public office after the colony came under British rule. This wealthy merchant was well known for his philanthropies and was one of seven Jews to contribute to the construction of the Trinity Church steeple.

New York's Jews played a prominent part in the life of British New York. They were leading shopkeepers and major traders who financed their own merchant fleet. They contributed to public subscriptions and joined philanthropic campaigns. Jewish businessmen even had their own "great country seats." Yet the Jews didn't feel fully accepted until they were allowed their own public house of worship. They built Temple Shearith Israel in 1728 on the site of an old mill in the heart of what today is the financial district.

In the era of the American Revolution Jewish New Yorkers had an almost religious regard for freedom. They associated it with their own celebration of the Passover and liberation from the Egyptian Pharaoh. When the Redcoat armies occupied New York, Rabbi Gershom Mendez Sexias, the spiritual leader of Shearith Israel and an American patriot, escaped with most of his congregation to free Philadelphia.

Haym Solomon was a member in good standing of Shearith Israel and the "Banker of the Revolution." He helped provision the New York militia under the command of Philip Schuyler. Later he became involved in a plot to burn British ships in New York Harbor and imprisoned as an American spy. After his release by the British, Solomon arranged the financing that enabled the Revolutionary Army to continue its fight.

At the time of George Washington's presidential inauguration, the Jews of New York and their fellow Jews in other communities took the opportunity to declare their loyalty to the new government in an open letter. Washington replied with a ringing defense of religious freedom and pledge to the "stock of Abraham."

In the New York of the Republic Jews were contributing members of society. Mordechai Manuel Noah was a successful playwright and journalist, a prominent Mason, and a major in the state militia. Noah was not afraid to run for office and at various times served as sheriff and judge of the New York Court of Sessions. He was appointed to such important offices as surveyor of the Port of New York and consul of Tunis.

Uriah Philips Levy made millions in New York real estate, but that was secondary to his commitment to the U.S. Navy. Despite the anti-Semitism of ranking officers, he rose from cabin boy to commodore and saw combat in the War of 1812. This Jewish New Yorker is credited with abolishing corporal punishment in the Navy. At the end of his career he used his vast wealth to renew a run-down Monticello, creating a national shrine for his hero, Thomas Jefferson.

By the time the first Ashkenazi (German) Jews came to New York in the 1830s, Sephardic Jews could count themselves among the city's banking and business establishment. Socially they held themselves aloof in a small aristocratic circle of Baruchs, Lazaruses, Nathans, Hendrickses, and Cardozos. They valued reserve and thought of themselves as high minded and cultivated. The German Jews, with their queer accents and aggressive manners, were definitely not their crowd.

Judge Albert Cardozo disappointed this exclusive Sephardic set when he resigned from the New York Supreme Court bench after rumors of playing favorites. He awarded the majority of lucrative refereeships to members of Boss Tweed's family. His son, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, was shocked by the loss of family honor. He dedicated his life to regaining that honor and in the process became a respected a legal scholar and a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

The German Jews were too busy creating dynasties to be overly concerned by the chilly Sephardic welcome. The Seligmans started out as peddlers in cotton country, but soon opened a string of dry-goods stores from New Orleans to New York. The headquarters of their small retail empire in 1846 was 5 Williams Street, very near the stock exchange, where these future merchant bankers would make history.

Joseph Seligman, the oldest of seven brothers and three sisters, was the patriarch of the clan that would earn the title of the "American Rothschilds." His first speculations were in the gold market and he got out fast enough to make a fortune and avoid the panic of 1857. Seligman liked the company of men in power and was an intimate of President Lincoln. He got into international finance by bankrolling the Union cause with bond sales in Europe.

Three thousand New York Jews joined New York regiments to fight for the Union. The Jews had their own Brigadier General Philip Jochimsen, who led the Fifty-ninth New York Volunteers, and a Jewish enlisted man, Benjamin Levy, received the Congressional Medal of Honor. A Jewish Brooklynite, Colonel Leopold Levy, died a hero's death at Chancellorsville.

The Lehman brothers, unlike the Seligmans, did their peddling from a horse and wagon. They opened a dry-goods store in Mobile, Alabama, which became the center of their cotton empire. After the Civil War, they set themselves up in New York, trading in communities and becoming the biggest cotton brokers in the country. By the turn of the century they were branching out into investment banking.

The Seligmans were the first of the German-Jewish merchant bankers to recognize the profits in railroad investment, but they were soon upstaged by Kuhn, Loeb, and Company, and their rising star, Jacob Schiff. This imperious German, with a streak of old-fashioned Jewish piety, held his own with J.P. Morgan and robber barons like Hill and Harriman. He was on the board of directors of some of the nation's most important railroads.

Some German Jews stuck to retailing. Lazarus and Isidore Strauss started in glassware and crockery at R.H. Macy & Company and quickly became the proprietors of the two biggest department stores (Macy's and Abraham & Strauss) in the city. New York's Jewish-owned department stores also included Gimbel's, Altman's, and in Bloomingdale's.

Despite their accomplishments and their devotion to charitable causes, the German Jews were victims of social discrimination. Joseph Seligman, himself a member of the prestigious Union League Club, was refused accommodation in the fashionable Grand Hotel in Saratoga. By the end of the nineteenth century, this form of social restriction had spread. Jews were excluded from fashionable Coney Island and Manhattan Beach and were forbidden to ride the Long Island Railroad.

"Our Crowd" retreated into itself. It became more insular and laid more emphasis on its German heritage. They spoke German among themselves and sent their children to a New York school modeled on a German "gymnasium." They embraced German Reform Judaism and worshiped at Temple Emanu-El, the image of a progressive German synagogue.

New York's German Jews socialized with New York's German Jews. They were members of the Harmonie Club and their children prepped at Sachs Collegiate. They occupied mansions on Fifth Avenue and competed for the services of the same French chefs. Though as rich as the robber barons, the German-Jewish style was effortlessly sophisticated and calculatedly low key.

As the first Russian-Jewish waves crowded into Grand Street, the last of the great German-Jewish dynasties made their fortunes. Adolph Lewinsohn and his brothers used a loophole in the law to import cheap copper and profitably export low-grade copper ore. By the 1890s they controlled most of the country's copper and merged with the Rockefeller interests.

In 1881 German Jews spoke out against the persecution of the fellow Jews in Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. They hated the pogroms but they also believed that the Russian Jews were backward "Orientals."

Though they were ambivalent about the Russian newcomers, Jewish New York mobilized to help them. They formed the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society to help them find shelter and jobs. They established as employment office in the Castle Garden immigrant station, and a restaurant and boarding house in Greenwich Village. There was also a temporary shelter in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The Russian-Jewish emigrants settled at first on the Lower East Side. They were peddlers, did piecework on sewing machines, and rolled cigars. There were Russian-Jewish furriers and Jews who only studied the Torah, the sacred books. They all endured together the damp disintegrating tenements, the dirt and disease, and the rotting garbage on the street.

Jewish uptown met Jewish downtown in the Lower East Side Settlement Houses. Social work pioneers like Lillian Wald helped immigrants adapt to this strange new world with health and educational programs. Often the German or Sephardic Jews who worked with the Russian immigrants (like Emma Lazarus of Statue of Liberty fame) came away from the experience with a strengthened sense of Jewish identity.

In 1896 Jews joined the ranks of the city's most important opinion makes when Adolph Ochs bought the bankrupt New York Times. He was interested in objectivity where the news was concerned and keeping personal views to the editorial page. Dorothy Schiff, the granddaughter of the investment banker, was the next Jew to publish a New York newspaper, the New York Post. Her unspoken policy was to combine liberal politics and Broadway gossip.

By 1905 studies showed the Jewish "greenhorns" were moving out of the sweatshops and wearing white collars. Jewish children were reared to strive and surpass their parents. They became professionals, retailers, salespersons, and clerical workers. They were also improving themselves by moving out of lower Manhattan and Brownsville into Yorkville, Harlem, and Williamsburg.

Russian Jews were still the backbone of union militants in the city. From 1909 to 194 garment-worker unions organized waves of strikes, including the first general strike in the needle trades. Uptown Jews led by the millionaire investment banker Jacob Schiff intervened. Sweatshops were eliminated and labor leaders like Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky won the right to collective bargaining.

The political activist Jews of New York elected the socialist Meyer London to Congress in 1910, 1916, and 1920. Morris Hillquit, the militant socialists' antiwar candidate for mayor, ran a remarkably close race in 1917. At the same time Jewish party regulars like Belle Moskowitz and Joseph Proskauer were advising the future presidential candidate, Governor Al Smith.

New York Jews from the Fifth Avenue and Delancey Street ghettos were singing Irving Berlin's "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" when they went off to war in 1917. Their fighting force was the Seventy-seventh Division, which held the line at Meuse-Argonne. A Jewish Gumpertz and Kaufman were Medal of Honor winners.

While the war took many Jews out of the ghetto, others used their special talents to take Broadway and Madison Square Garden by storm. The Marx Brothers, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, George Burns, and Eddie Cantor were headliners in vaudeville and in Broadway reviews. Benny Leonard and Barney Ross became world boxing champions.

When private colleges had restrictive quotas, City College became the New York Jews' stepping stone for success. The financier and adviser of presidents, Bernard Baruch, was a City College graduate, and the discoverer of the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, also received his first degree from City. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter went to City College and the literary critic Alfred Kazin did his earliest writing for the college literary magazine.

In the years following World War I New York's older Jewish families were heavily involved in public service. Herbert H. Lehman deserted his family's Wall Street offices for the political hustings. He became the governor of New York, a U.S. senator, and a member of the War Refugee Board. Another member of the German-Jewish elite, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was secretary of the treasury for Franklin Roosevelt.

The lives of Russian Jews continued to improve as they moved out in greater numbers to the suburban Bronx and Brooklyn. Their modern housing came equipped with refrigerators and gas ranges! The Chanins, Brickens, and Backers who cut their teeth on this residential construction eventually changed the skyline of Manhattan with structures like the Chrysler and Woolworth Buildings and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

In the depression, New York Jews struggled like other New Yorkers just to find a job. College graduates took whatever they could get even if it was blue-collar work. Despite their personal concerns, Jewish New Yorker followed the rise of Nazism in Europe, and through organizations like the American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress they tried to help their threatened co-religionists.

Though restrictive immigration laws worked against them, some Jewish refugees from Nazism landed safely in Manhattan. They were mostly intellectuals and artists who settled in the city's Upper West Side and Greenwich Village. They included the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and the social critic Hannah Arendt. In the 1930s the New School of Social Research was transformed into the University in Exile with a faculty of German political refugees.

Jewish New Yorkers campaigned to aid Britain and enter the war against the Axis powers. They joined the armed forces in record numbers once war was declared. A West Point graduate from Brooklyn, Colonel Mickey Marcus, served on the American general staff and was in the thick of it on D-Day. America won the war, but in the midst of the euphoria of victory Jews came face to face with the horror of the Holocaust.

Jewish soldiers came back to the city to resume their lives with new hopes and expectations. They took advantage of the GI Bill to complete their education and train for new careers. They came prepared for the postwar boom. At the same time the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies helped Jewish displaced persons from Europe settle in New York, as they would later help Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union.

In this new era of affluence Jews voted for more mainstream candidates. A liberal Jewish Republican, Jacob Javits, succeeded Herbert Lehman as senator. In the 1970s, the first Jewish mayor to govern New York was the decidedly middle-of-the-road Democrat Abe Beam. The controversies over Jewish teachers in Ocean-Hill, Brownsville, and the friction between Jews and minorities in Canarsie changed the nature of the Jewish electorate.

Ed Koch was good enough to be the Jewish mayor of the city for twelve years. He seemed to delight in his Jewish identity and was an outspoken supporter of Zionist causes. He was the city's chief administrative officer during the austerity of the budget crunch and also led New York in a time of physical growth and expansion.

While a Jew no longer holds the office of mayor in the nineties. David Garth, a Jewish political consultant, was instrumental in mayor Giuliani's election, and a young Jewish woman, a power in the liberal party named Fran Reiter, became his deputy mayor. A traditional consumer-conscious Jewish liberal named Mark Green became the City's public advocate while Alan Havesi, a progressive, became city controller.

[Indiana Jones]

Haitians

The Haitians are the boat people of the Western Hemisphere - risking it all in a leaky twenty-five-foot craft to escape oppression and want, twenty or thirty people to a boat sharing hunger and thirst under the blazing sun for the seven-hundred-mile trip to Miami. In Haiti they committed the crime of questioning the violence of the Tonton Macoute and their military masters or they merely had something that someone in power desired. Maybe they spoke out for political freedom or human rights and came under the scrutiny of death squads. Like the Vietnamese they chose survival.

Haitians have been coming to New York since the 1790s, when French colonists and Creoles from San Domingue (the original name of Haiti - post-Columbus --me) fled the slave rebellion. James Audubon, the naturalist, was among their number. Creoles in colorful West Indian prints were a familiar sight on the streets of New York in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Haitian businessmen and professionals came to New York in the early years of the twentieth century to escape the country's political upheavals. Many of the city's five hundred Haitians were supporters of Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa campaign.

Following the American occupation of Haiti in 1934 a number of Haitians followed the American marines back to the States and settled in New York. At the same time Haitians in the Columbia University student-exchange programs decided to remain in the city. After World War II Haitians came to New York as live-in servants.

The mass emigration of Haitians began with the election of Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) in 1958. This supposedly simple country doctor and man of the people spawned a reign of terror in the process of picking clean his country's treasury.

The first to leave were the wealthy mulatto elite, who were against Pap Doc while he still represented himself as a black poplulist reformer. Trained and well educated, they could fit right into New York while they hatched a succession of unsuccessful coups and invasions. They were followed in the 1960s by a black middle class that couldn't live with the violence and economic insecurity of what one critic called the Duvalier "kleptocracy."

The first documented case of poor refugees fleeing Duvalier's brutality on the high seas occurred in 1963, but the wholesale flight of the boat people didn't commence until the 1970s. Though they landed on the coast of Florida, most continued the journey to New York.

At the beginning this outpouring of people was spontaneous, friends and relatives pooling their resources for a future in the States. By 1980 Haitian fast-buck artists with ties to the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier were promoting these dangerous boat trips along with promises of employment in America. The kickbacks were supposed to go all the way to the presidential palace.

Between 1977 and 1981 Haiti inundated the coast of Florida with sixty thousand refugees. The Reagan administration reacted by emphasizing the distinction between political and economic refugees, categorizing most Haitians as the latter. Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to intercept the Haitians at sea and send them back to their individual destinies. In the next ten years only twenty-eight of the 22,716 Haitians encountered by the Coast Guard were granted asylum.

While the first emigrants of the Duvalier reign were managerial types, technicians, and professionals, the most recent arrivals are unskilled and semiskilled: laborers, factory workers, and domestics. Some have been forced to accept the jobs of last resort because of their immigration status.

Haitian immigrants in contemporary New York follow many of the same patterns as earlier immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe. They band together in the same areas of the city with people from the same village or quarter. Despite the availability of city welfare, Haitians help one another through fraternities, associations, and credit groups. Group solidarity is also maintained through the Haitian newspaper Haiti-Observateur.

Though the Duvalier regime was finally deposed, conditions in Haiti did not measurably improve. An alliance of military strongmen and the affluent Francophile elite of Petionville ran the show, with police and loose bands of local thugs as their enforcers. Finally, international pressures and a charismatic priest, Jean-Bertand Aristide, forced free elections. Aristide won but was quickly deposed in 1991.

The military took control and there were reprisals against the supporters of Aristide. Death squads came in the night. The regime of Raul Cedras, with his civilian puppets, ruled by fear. A disappointed and desperate people resumed their flight to the United States, with New York or Miami as their ultimate destination. In Septemeber of 1994 the American army occupied Haiti without firing a shot, with the intention of eliminating official terror and returning Aristide to the office of president. (not sure about this --me) His regime for the present, is a source of stability and justice (1996).


Dominicans

The first Dominicans landed in New York at the end of the eighteenth century. Both whites and mulattoes, they fled a slave insurrection from what is today the capital, Santo Domingo. The U.S. Congress donated fifteen thousand dollars for their relief.

In the nineteenth century the Dominican Republic was conquered and reconquered by Haiti and Spain. America took its turn in 1916 and ruled the Dominican Republic for eight years in defense of Standard Brands and the American Fruit Company. When the American marines left in 1924 their Dominican dependents joined them in the States. Some Dominicans drifted into the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of New York City.

Dominican emigration to New York was stopped short when the military strongman Trujillo took over in 1930. The only Dominicans who traveled to New York were polo-playing playboys like Rubirosa or intellectual exiles like Professor Galindez.

Dominicans only started coming to New York in any significant numbers when Trujillo was assassinated in 1961 and exit visas were no longer the privilege of the few. Though a rising population and economic expectations spurred emigration, others were responding to the country's political instability, which led to another American invasion in 1965. Between 1960 and 1980 the numbers of Dominicans coming to New York doubled.

The first-wave Dominicans were mainly people who qualified for occupational immigration quotas. They were high-level professionals - doctors, engineers, and accountants - and skilled labor - tailors and machinists. They moved into neighborhoods like Washington Heights which had Spanish-speaking Cubans with similar backgrounds and apartments with extra-large rooms.

The Dominicans who settled in New York bought over other family members and gradually Dominicans began to form their own colonies on the Lower East Side, in Washington Heights, and in Corona, Queens. Still most Dominicans were barred from emigrating to New York.

The second-wave Dominicans had more determination and will than qualifications, though they were above the Dominican average when it came to education and income. In New York, Dominicans worked as superintendents or did manual work in factories and often held down two jobs at once; they were intent on saving money to open a business or invest in land.

These Dominican pioneers had a solid sense of family and a strong Catholic heritage. Their pride was personal and national. Often they left behind villages populated by the aged and very young. They would not send for their sons and daughters until they were really established.

For poor Dominicans, coming to New York was and still is an obsession. Tourist visas are more valuable than gold. There is a steady traffic of small vessels plying the harbors of Florida and Puerto Rico, which will assist these American dreamers for a price. Sometimes these extralegal emigration routes end in tragedy. On September 5, 1980, twenty-two Dominicans illegally heading for the "promised land" drowned in the ballast tanks of a Panamanian cargo ship while hiding from port police.

Dominican immigration to New York really took off in the 1980s, reaching a rate of twenty thousand per year. Dominicans followed other Hispanic populations to the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn's Williamsburg, and Sunset Park, Corona, and Jackson Heights in Queens. The total of Dominicans, documented and undocumented, is estimated to be above four hundred thousand.

The most recent immigrants, men and women, work in the service sector, as custodians, kitchen help, and truck drivers. Others are employed in low-level unskilled factory work. Women often do piece work at home sewing or assembling simple products. The stress of making a living and surviving in this pressure-cooker city has taken its toll on the Dominican family. Parents have separated and children have fallen prey to the streets.

Though Dominicans consider New York their home and most don't seriously think of leaving, they are highly involved in the life of their homeland. They campaign fiercely for their favorite Dominican candidates and vote with absentee ballots in important elections. Dominican candidates or their representatives even make political appearances in Dominican neighborhoods in New York, pressing the flesh like local pols.

The Dominicans who have made it to New York have come of age. In Washington Heights in Manhattan they have their own Broadway, on Broadway from 155th Street to Dyckman Street. This Dominican scene is too self-confident and bright-lights big-city to be a ghetto. Dominican New York swings to a meringue beat that is more lighthearted than any other colonia in the city.


Puerto Ricans

Puerto Ricans may be known as the "airplane immigrants," but they were in New York as early as 1838, forming their own trade associations and social circles. They were merchants and planters in the sugar and coffee trades. These Caribbean islanders were temporary New Yorkers in town to do business and educate their children.

Some Puerto Ricans were political and plotted in New York against their Spanish sovereigns. They spent their time writing manifestos and trying to organize skilled Puerto Rican workers. Dr. Jose Julio Henna, a society doctor, was the spokesman for the independistas and twice testified on Puerto Rican affairs before the U.S. Senate and House.

By the time the Spaniards go around to giving Puerto Rico autonomy, the Americans were shopping around for their own territories. In a war trumped up by the Hearst papers, the United States remembered the Maine and made the hemisphere safe under the Monroe Doctrine. In 1900 Puerto Rico was placed under an American military government.

Puerto Rico was a poor country with a plantation economy. American food companies controlled the islanders' destiny. As the prices of coffee and sugar declined, Puerto Rican laborers lost their jobs. Many jibaros (peasants) moved to the cities or hired out as contract labor on other Caribbean islands.

Small-scale local industry could not compete with American imports and Puerto Rican companies went out of business. Even the country's efficient cigar-making industry went into a sharp decline. The Puerto Rican unemployment problem was so desperate that many were ready to leave for the mainland.

While the Puerto Rican economy was depressed, New York was tooling up for the First World War. Puerto Ricans found plenty of work in the city with the war blocking European emigration. They had the additional advantage of the Jones Act of 1917, which gave Puerto Ricans the rights of American citizens and allowed them to settle freely in the United States. Their position in the labor market was further solidified in 1920 by legislation that restricted European immigration.

Puerto Ricans were a mainstay of New York's light and service industries. As Jews and Italians left lower-level garmet industry jobs, Puerto Ricans took their places. They were also a mainstay of the hotel and restaurant service sector. On the island Puerto Ricans were recruited by New York City plants producing items from pencils to biscuits.

Spanish-speaking doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and retailers offered their services to the newcomers, easing the transition to the fast-paced metropolis. The Hispanic professionals provided leadership and advice. Spanish-speaking newspapers like La Pensa carried the news from home and made Puerto Ricans aware of local issues. New York's Puerto Rican entrepreneurs accounted for over 350 businesses in 1920, often providing familiar foods and goods.

Puerto Rican barrios began to honeycomb Brooklyn and Manhattan. There were Puerto Rican cigar makers in Chelsea and the Lower East Side and San Juan stevedores on the Red Hook waterfront. In the 1920s Puerto Ricans moved into the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn to work in the hemp factories and sugar refineries.

In no time neighborhoods had a Puerto Rican flavor, with bodegas offering papaya and chaiote (a root vegetable) and botanicas selling amulets and statues. Puerto Rican restaurants cooked down-home comidas criollas (creole food), mafongo (mashed plantains), and gandules (pigeon peas) with Caribbean root vegetables. The barbershops and boardinghouses had a warm relaxed Boriqua feeling.

The majority of New York Puerto Ricans settled in El Barrio itself: East Harlem between 97th Street and 125th Street, an island in Manhattan bound by black Harlem in the north and west and Italians and Jewish Harlem in the east. It was the center of Puerto Rican cultural and community life. When Puerto Ricans thought about coming to New York they dreamed about El Barrio.

In 1930 economic depression interrupted the progress of the thriving Puerto Rican community in New York. The competition for even menial jobs became fierce. It was hard to find work - even washing dishes - and many a regretful Puerto Rican drifted back to the island. Just when things started to get better in the New York job market, World War II put a temporary hold on further Puerto Rican migration to the city.

Peace and the collapse of the sugar economy opened the floodgates of Puerto Rican migration. The airplane provided Puerto Ricans with cheap and easy access to New York. A new life was eight hours and seventy-five dollars away. By the 1950s one out of every six islanders was leaving and the majority were going to New York. Six hundred thousand made the trip in one decade.

These latest Puerto Rican New Yorkers were even less prepared for the city than their predecessors, the so-called perfumados (the sweet-smelling ones) who were now starting to enjoy the fruits of the American dream. Most of the newcomers had no experience and only one in ten had graduated from high school. They were at a disadvantage in an era when jobs for unskilled labor were rapidly disappearing.

While the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York continued, the island was going through its own economic recovery. When Luis Munoz Marin, leader of the Popular Democratic Party, became the first popularly elected governor of the Puerto Rican Commonwealth, attention shifted from the statehood-independence controversy to the issue of economic development.

The benefits of tax incentives and cheap surplus labor combined with the appeal of a government Marshall Plan called Operation Bootstrap to attract American industry and investment to Puerto Rico. Three hundred new factories meant the country went from creating six hundred new jobs to forty-eight thousand new jobs in a single year; but it couldn't halt the momentum of migration and thousands continued to come to New York.

Soon Puerto Ricans overflowed the borders of the Manhattan and Brooklyn barrios into the Bronx. They crossed the Harlem River to compete with other minorities for scarce housing space in Hunt's Point and Mott Haven. By 1950 sixty thousand Puerto Ricans were creating their own neighborhoods in a Bronx vacated by Jews, Irish, and Italians.

The time had come for Puerto Ricans to fight their own political battles. In 1953 Felipe Torres, a protege of the regular Democratic organization, was elected to the state assembly. When he became a family court judge in 1961, his son Frank ran against entrenched Irish Democratic power for his seat and won the Fourth District by fifty-two votes.

Puerto Ricans had their biggest political base in the Bronx and in the protest era of the 1960s they found their leader in a self-made man from Caguas. Herman Badillo was an orphan who earned a CPA while setting pins in a bowling alley and put himself through law school washing dishes.

After a stint as the city's first Puerto Rican commissioner, Herman Badillo became the first Puerto Rican borough president in 1965 and went on to capture a congressional seat in 1970, the first Puerto Rican to do so. Badillo aspired to become the first New York City mayor of Puerto Rican descent byt was never able to win the Democratic nomination. However, he has not given up his commitment to public service and was an assistant mayor in the Koch administration, and most recently in 1994 became an assistant mayor in the Giuliani administration.

Today, Puerto Ricans make up some of the largest ethnic groups in the city with a population of 897,000. The largest concentration of Puerto Ricans, numbering 350,000, is in the borough of the Bronx.

Their political standard bearer and Bronx borough president is Fernando Ferrer. He has initiated and supported programs that have helped to rebuild the Bronx and is considered a strong potential Puerto Rican whom he appointed to the Board of Education, has charted her own political course as an assistant mayor in the Giuliani administration.

Congressman Jose Serrano is another Bronx Puerto Rican politician with clout. As head of the Hispanic caucus in the House of Representatives, he has played a key role in lining up votes for important bills including those important to this own constituents, like Puerto Rico's "936" tax break for labor-intensive businesses.

[Indiana Jones]

The Greeks


New York's first Greek consul general, John Botassi, claimed Columbus was a Byzantine nobleman named Dispatsos. Although this was never substantiated, there is documentation that at least one sailor in Columbus' crew, John Griego, was Greek. The consul general, when not creating history or moonlighting as the representative for the Ralli Brothers Import and Export Company, did his best to discourage fellow countrymen from settling in already overcrowded New York in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Despite official warnings, Christos Tsakonas came to New York in 1873. Convinced that New York was the land of opportunity, he went back to Greece two years later with the purpose of bringing out five compatriots. For his efforts this first Greek immigrant to New York has been called the "Columbus of Sparta" in local annals.

But Greek immigration to New York and the whole United States grew slowly, despite the pressure of Greece of an increasing population dependent on a relatively small amount of cultivatable land. Immigration finally took off when Greek agriculture was devastated by the decline of its chief cash crop, the humble currant. In twenty years one-fifth to one-quarter of the Greek labor force emigrated. This large-scale flight began in Sparta and swept through neighboring Arcadia and the whole Peloponnese before becoming a mass movement in central Greece, Crete, and the islands.

Fighting in the Balkans and the revolutionary activity in the Ottoman Empire spurred Greek-speaking populations in Constantinople and Anatolia to follow. Greek emigration was also encouraged by the exertions of enterprising Greek steamship agents who canvassed customers from Alexandria to Constantinople.

The majority of Greek arrivals to America, who came from rural areas, gravitated to the cities. They preferred the urban feeling of being close to people. The farms in America were too spread out from one another for the gregarious Greeks. Most of these Greek immigrants were male - ninety-five percent were men in the peak years between 1899 and 1910 - but they quickly returned to bring back other members of their family and get married. The first Greek New Yorkers settled in the south Bronx between 14th and 15th Streets; later they went to live in lower Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen, and Washington Heights.

The earliest generation of Greek New Yorkers came as padrone labor; they were indentured for an indefinite period, usually three or four months, to a boss from the old country who provided the passage and show money to meet immigration requirements. The boss, with his knowledge of English and American ways, had a good deal of control over the new immigrant. In Greece, land was mortgaged as a guarantee that the new New Yorker would not renege on this debt. There were many abuses under the system, with some very young or very naive immigrants working years for a padrone for practically nothing.

Greeks fresh off the boat usually found work as dishwashers, flower sellers, or bootblacks. Dishwashing was dirty, low-paying, backbreaking work, but it was the first rung on the ladder to owning your own restaurant. In New York Greek involvement in the restaurant business led to the saying, "If two Greeks meet, they start a restaurant." Greeks were also active in the wholesale and retail flower business, and the new immigrant often wound up peddling flowers on the street that were not good enough to be sold in stores. Shining shoes was considered by Greeks to be demeaning work even if the owner of the shoe stand was a fellow countryman, and it was very hard work with a fifteen-hour day.

In 1894 the first daily newspaper in Greek, the Atlantis, was started in New York by Solon Vlastos. Although it defended the interests of the Greek-American workingman and fought the abuses of the padrone system, it was Royalist and conservative in its outlook toward Greek national politics. Atlantis didn't have any competition until 1915, when Demetrios Callimachos launched Ethnikos Kiryx (National Herald), a newspaper that was anti-Royalist and which supported the pan-Hellenic policies of the Greek Republic leader, Venizelos. Now the political debates that raged in New York's kafeneia (Greek coffee houses) were out on the newsstands.

The rivalry between the Royalists and the Republicans reflected regional differences between Greeks, which eventually split the local community. There were separate social organizations and even separate churches representing the two points of view. World War I made this separation even more volatile, with Venizelos backing the Allies and King Constantine calling for neutrality.

Ultimately Greek Americans laid aside past political affiliations to pull together for their adopted country. The Greek community sold over ten million dollars in U.S. War Bonds and over sixty thousand Greeks served in the American army in World War I. Greek New Yorkers faced another sort of political problem after the war, resulting from a wave of anti-foreign sentiment. Greek Americans were the victims of unprovoked attacks and calculated business boycotts. In 1921 the Johnson Act was passed, which reduced Greek immigration to one hundred a year.

Greeks responded to this bigotry by strengthening both their American and Greek identities. They formed the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) in New York in 1922. Its purpose was to promote Americanization, English language education, and American values. The American Progressive Association (APA), which was established in New York the next year, took the opposite tack, preserving the Greek language and Greek customs among first- and second-generation Greek Americans.

Both of these approaches proved successful. Greek New Yorkers made the leap from blue collar to white collar in one generation. Greeks now have one of the highest percentages of professionals, which includes doctors, lawyers, and engineers, of any immigrant group, and while they have acquired affluence and social prestige, they have kept their ties with their ethnic past. In New York alone there are sixty associations dedicated to the traditions of particular Greek villages, islands, or regions. New York's eleven Greek day schools make sure that the special Greek identity continues into the future.

In 1965 a new immigration act was passed, altering the restrictive ethnic quotas. At the forefront of the movement to change the old law were old-line Greek organizations like AHEPA and APA, Greek-American politicians like Paul Sarbanes and John Brademas, and successful businessmen like Tom Pappas and Spyros Skouras. The new law ushered in a new wave of Greek immigration, which is still continuing. The new immigrants, whether Athenian professionals or dispossessed Cypriots, have revitalized New York's established Greek community. It has created a new sense of national pride in second- and third-generation Greek New Yorkers.

In 1974 conflicts in Cyprus and the de facto partition of the island led to a Greek Cypriot exodus. One of their prime destinations was New York. Many left with just the clothes on their backs and required special social services. Groups like the Hellenic American Neighborhood Action Committee were formed to cope with the immigrants' problems. They were instrumental in implementing bilingual education programs and speeding up the delivery of conventional aid and supplementary benefits. They acted as a liaison between the non-English speaking immigrants and the city government.

In the nineties the tide of Greek immigration continues. Economic hardship and a lack of vocational and professional opportunities led to a new generation of Greeks crossing the sea to New York. They come from half-empty villages in the North and South, and from overcrowded Athens. They are the dispossessed of Cyprus and the recently liberated Greek minority population of Albania. Like the archetypal Homeric Greek Ulysses, most intend to return to their own Ithaca which gave them life.



Ukrainians


Ukrainians are characterized by a deep loyalty to their homeland. Even centuries of foreign domination have not destroyed their sense of national identity. Their forebears brought Christianity to the eastern steppes and governed democratically during Europe's dark ages; the Kievan Republic was a legendary center of culture and learning. For Ukrainians New Yorkers it is still a sacred inheritance.

The first modern Ukrainians to land in New York sailed with the Russian fleet between 1862 and 1863. Some of these anonymous sailors jumped ship, never to return, while others went back to relate the wonders of the city to wide-eyed peasants. New York seemed like a dream to these people who were denied their land, language, and religion.

An adventurous clergyman named Ahapius Honcharenko took an unscheduled sabbatical from his religious studies in Athens and arrived in New York in 1865. After traveling throughout the country, supporting himself by teaching Greek, he settled for a time in lower Manhattan in the heart of what would become the Ukrainian community.

In the 1870s, despite government efforts to prevent them from leaving, Ukrainians crossed a continent and an ocean, settling mainly in the mining and industrial areas of the Northeast and the Midwest and the urban area of Manhattan. The majority - Ruthenians, Carpatho-Russyns, and Galicians - were from the western part of the nation. At the outset, most wanted to return to the Ukraine to buy land and begin a family.

The bribes of steamship agents and rural poverty forced Russian government authorities to open the way to mass emigration. Families mortgaged their lands and pawned their possessions to pay the passage. Young men who were eager to avoid lifetime military service deserted their villages and the women followed. Between 1877 and 1899 hundreds of thousands were America bound.

In New York the mainly male population lived four to six to a room in boardinghouses in the Lower East Side between the German and Jewish enclaves. They energetically set to work to pay their passage and relieve the burdens of the people they left behind. They were barbers, bricklayers, tailors, and day laborers. The women who joined them took jobs as domestics and cleaned offices at night.

Ukrainian New Yorkers established a whole network of organizations in the city. Some were connected to Greek Catholic or Orthodox Ukrainian churches like the St. Raphael Ukrainian Immigration Society, which helped Ukrainian New Yorkers find jobs and shelter. Regional associations like the Lemko Brotherhood Society provided a place where people from the same area could socialize and also offered health and burial insurance. Ukrainians generally refused public relief; the Ukrainian National Association aided the sick and the needy. Women's groups, such as the Ukrainian Women's League preserved Ukrainian traditions and folk arts.

In 1917 the Tsarist state was overthrown and at last, after centuries, the Ukrainians won independence. They declared a free Ukraine on January 22, 1918, but its existence was brief. Russia and Poland quickly carved it up according to the terms of a 1921 treaty. New York's Ukrainian community followed closely the misfortunes of their country and offered support. Local Ukrainian groups demonstrated for Ukrainian freedom and protested deportations and state-sponsored famine and murder.

By 1919 New York was the site of the largest metropolitan Ukrainian community. It was split between the Lower East Side from Third to Sixth Streets and the Upper East Side in the vicinity of 72nd Street. The Ukrainian community on the Lower East Side even sent one of its own, Stephen Jarema, to the New York State Assembly. There was also a scattering of Ukrainians in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

During World War II Ukrainian freedom fighters were the victims of Nazi and Soviet brutality. There were even mass Ukrainian executions after the German surrender. New York's Ukrainian population raise money and mobilized themselves politically to save thousands of Ukrainian displaced persons.

In 1948 the Ukrainian Resettlement Center was established in the city. Ukrainian newcomers who were processed through the center were highly qualified academics, clergy, professionals, and intellectuals. They added new luster to the New York Ukrainian cultural community.

Ukrainian New Yorkers were given official recognition by the state and city government in 1955. The occasion was the anniversary of Ukrainian independence, which had been declared on January 22 in 1918. In his proclamation Governor Averell Harriman commended Ukrainian New Yorkers as being a "proud and freedom-loving people" while Mayor Robert F. Wagner praised "their matchless faith and courage." For the first time in the history of the city, the Ukrainian flag flew about City Hall.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union and a plebiscite in the Ukraine, that same flag is now flying over their new republic. The people of New York's Little Ukraine are happy about their homeland's new independence, though they may have reservations about some of its current leaders. This change has sparked a cultural renewal in the city and a new wave of Ukrainian patriotic pride.

Hungarians

The Magyar man on horseback, Colonel Michael Kovat, trained the cavalry force that finally defeated the English. This hero of the American Revolution died while leading a cavalry charge at Charleston. Though he wasn't a New Yorker, the Hungarians of the city have honored him with a statue.

There's also a statue in the city dedicated to Louis Kossuth, the leader of 1848 Magyar revolution, who spent his exile in New York. He was the first Hungarian to attract New York's attention. Between 1851 and 1852 the Hungarian hero was acclaimed and admired and generally treated like a matinee idol. Meanwhile, Kossuth spread the message of a free and democratic Hungary, and tried to drum up donations to continue his fight.

He was feted by the city's commercial establishment and intellectual elite, but later fickle New York attacked him for his liberal views and his refusal to take positions regarding American politics. He left New York confused by the city's "celebrity treatment" and disappointed by its lack of support for continuing his campaign against the Hapsburg Empire.

Many fellow Hungarians, veterans of the 1848 battles, stayed behind in the city, forming New York's first Hungarian community. These men of Forty-eight were writers and thinkers. In 1853 Karoly Kornis started Magyar Szamuzottek (Hungarian Exile's News), the first Hungarian American newspaper. The New York Hungarian Society, which was founded in 1865 after some false starts was more than a mutual benefit society; it offered a platform to Hungarians for the free exchange of ideas.

Hungarian New Yorkers put their revolutionary fervor to work for the Union cause. These fighters of 1848 fought for the Union in 1861. They filled half the places in New York's famed "Garibaldi Guard" and were an important element in the city's "Black Rifles." Hungarians made up a disproportionate share of the Union officer corps, with two major generals and five brigadier generals. Joseph Pulitzer, the future publisher of the New York Sun, also was an officer for the Northern side.

While the first wave of Hungarian immigrants, from 18500 to 1870, were political exiles and adventurers, the next wave, from 1880 to 1914, were economic emigrants. They were mostly single men: landless peasants, unskilled industrial workers, and day laborers. They were poor men with simple needs who wanted money to feed their families overseas and to later return and buy land and homes in their native villages.

The Hungarian peasant was not afraid to make sacrifices to save for the future. Hungarians lived collectively, at times twenty or forty-five men in a New York boardinghouse, four to ten to a room. The boardinghouse collective appointed a married man to be their burdos gazda and oversee paying the rent, and handling the accounts, while his wife slaved at the cooking, cleaning, and washing.

New York's Hungarians averaged $8.70 a week for the most hazardous work. They were frequently underpaid even by the standards of the time, but they were in the habit of taking orders from authority. In their closed world the New York pittance was a Hungarian fortune. Even the worst New York workplaces had a freedom and informality that the Hungarian newcomers welcomed.

Despite the difficulties of work and boardinghouse living, Hungarians enjoyed an active community life. In New York City alone there were seventy-eight associations. The Hungarian Sick Benefit Society was started in 1884 to help Hungarian workers in medical emergencies. The First Hungarian Self-Culture Society of New York, started in 1888, offered the Hungarian workingman a program for self-improvement, including lectures, literary readings, and plays. Politically active Hungarian New Yorkers joined the American Hungarian Federation to promote Hungarian freedom.

Hungarian culture flourished in choirs, traveling theaters, and literary societies. While New York and Brooklyn had lodges and associations for Hungarians from different geographical areas, local branches of national groups like the Verhovay and Rakoczi Aid Societies united Hungarians from all around America. Newspapers like New York's Amerikai Magyar Nepszava (American Hungarian People's Voice), first published in 1899, also created a sense of group solidarity.

The destiny of New York's Hungarians was also shaped by events across the sea. Patriotic Hungarians supported Hungary in the propaganda battle prior to World War I and backed up their words by enlisting in the Hungarian army in 1914. But America entered the war on the other side, allied with France and England. New York Hungarians did not know how to deal with their divided loyalties.

Hungarians bought American War Bonds and became part of an industrial war effort that shed Hungarian blood. Surrounded by a city in a patriotic all-American war-fever, the New York Hungarian community in its Yorkville enclave felt cut off and resentful. In the peace that was supposed to end all wars, their nation lost more than seventy percent of its territory and more than sixty percent of its population.

By the end of the war Hungarian community leaders were preaching the gospel of Americanization. The future was in the United States, they said. Life became more settled for the Hungarians; they opened shops and sent for their wives. The boardinghouse became a thing of the past, and New York's Hungarian neighborhood in Yorkville began to thrive.

Still, Hungarian New Yorkers retained their ethnic pride. In 1928 the community erected a statue of Louis Kossuth to the applause of five hundred Hungarian dignitaries and officials from Hungary. In 1931 two brave Hungarian-American aviators displayed the Hungarian colors in a Lindbergh-like flight from New York to Budapest in a one-engine plane named Justice for Hungary.

Hungarian political refugees who came to New York between the wars were a genuine source of pride. The urbane playwright Ferenc Molnar took literary New York by storm and the innovative composer Bela Bartok was hailed by the city's music critics. Hungarian physicists Leo Sziliard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller were among the great scientific minds of the age; they worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the atom bomb.

Hungarian New Yorkers had less ambivalent feelings when World War II again put them on the opposite side of America and her allies. They saw Hungary as an unwilling hostage of Hitler, and their loyalty to America was absolute. After the war was won, Hungarian New Yorkers set about helping Hungarian victims of the war and aiding refugees in resettlement.

The first group to enter New York was called the Forty-fivers. They were displaced persons, Hungarian royal soldiers, and politicians fleeing the relentless Soviet army. These men of the old order often had a hard time adjusting to a new land.

The Forty-fivers were soon joined by the Forty-seveners. They were liberals of a Western stripe who were forced out of the Hungarian government by the Stalinist dictator, Matyas Rakosi. They became a significant part of New York's Hungarian community.

In 1956, Hungarians rebelled against authoritarian Stalinist rule and Russian tanks rumbled through the streets of Budapest. Outgunned Hungarians fought valiantly, but the freedom fighters, like earlier Hungarian revolutionaries were forced into New York exile. The Fifty-sixers joined forces with earlier refugee groups to form a new political organization to represent the Hungarian community, but the real voice of these politically committed exiles was the Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation, started by General Bela K. Kiraly, a former leader of the Hungarian National Guard.

New York's Hungarians have hopes for Hungary in a new era of Magyar freedom. They have been heartened by Hungary's open society and free enterprise system. With its first free elections in the 1990s, Hungary has become a true parliamentary democracy. Many members of New York's small but culturally active emigre community have even returned to their homeland. Successful Hungarian New Yorkers like financier George Soros and restaurateur George Lang have returned to Hungary to rebuild its institutions and economy.

[Indiana Jones]

Cubans

Cuban political refugees have been coming to New York since the middle of the nineteenth century. Cubans were the largest Latin group in the city before Puerto Rico became an American protectorate. They were intellectuals committed to the American ideal of freedom and a Latin American ideal of culture.

In the nineteenth century, New York Cubans established a Spanish-language daily and thirty-four different magazines. The great Cuban novelist Cirilo Villaverde edited a newspaper in New York and Jose Marti, the George Washington of Cuba, founded two magazines before his death in 1895.

Most of the Cubans who came to New York were white and well-educated. Many were trained professionals who were quickly absorbed into the life of the city. Their children simply disappeared into mainstream American life.

Between 1867 and 1878 another strata of Cuban immigrants came to New York. These were skilled workers who were making a political statement by boycotting the Spanish-controlled tobacco industry. In New York they found freedom and better wages.

Cuban cigar rollers brought to New York one of their unique Cuban institutions - the factory reader. These highly literate workers paid a trained actor to read plays, novels, and poetry to them while they worked. Some of these factory readers joined the Cuban Theater Company in New York.

When Cuba gained independence in 1898 Cuban immigrants to New York slowed, though it did not stop. In the 1950s, during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Cuban political exiles returned to New York. By 1959 there were fifteen thousand Cubans on the Upper West Side.

In 1960, when it became clear that Castro would remake Cuba in the image of the Soviet East, Cubans left in the thousands. The first Cubans to come to New York in the 1960s were society Cubans, businessmen, and Cubans from the military. They were white and well connected, but between 1960 and 1962, when flights from Cuba were stopped, there was a second wave of lower-middle-class and blue-collar Cubans.

While well-heeled Cubans could live lavishly outside of a Cuban barrio in New York, lower-level Cubans who settled in New York's Upper West Side and Queens sought the support of their fellow countrymen. In Washington Heights and Jackson Heights they established small enclaves. Between 1965 and 1972 the Cuban airlift was renewed and thousands more came to the city.

In 1979 the Mariel boat lift brought more Cubans to the New York metropolitan area. The majority of these Cubans were true political refugees and went to the large Little Havana in New Jersey (Union City, West New York, and Weehawken) rather than New York City. There are still small pockets of Cubans in the city, but their presence is mainly commercial.

It is the Cubans who run Channel 41, New York's Hispanic TV station, the Spanish-language press, and many of the radio stations. Cubans head Hispanic advertising agencies and Hispanic food companies. They are the entrepreneurs of the Hispanic community.

In 1994, there was a short replay of Mariel, with Cubans landing on these shores by way of an improvised boat and raft lift. The Clinton administration negotiated a new immigration agreement with Castro. While most of these Cuban arrivals headed for the greener pastures of Union City and Miami, some ended up in Washington Heights, Jackson Heights, and Sunset Park. The current government policy is to turn back Cubans attempting to enter the U.S.






Chinese


In the early part of the eighteenth century the Chinese emperor forbid emigration under the penalty of death. Later, in the early part of the nineteenth century, the Imperial government lifted its restrictions in the era of the Chinese "open door" policy, enabling the poor rural populations of South China to cross the Pacific to California in time for the Gold Rush.

Caught between rural poverty and an expanding population, and pressed by the high taxes of an arbitrary imperial government, the southern Chinese were forced to emigrate. They didn't intend to settle in the American West or a northeastern Chinatown; they just wanted to support their families and have enough left over to buy land in their ancestral villages.

During the time the Chinese were building the western section of the transcontinental railroad and working the mines of the Far West, Chinese were a novelty in New York. The Chinese sailor who jumped ship or the Chinese acrobat on the New York stage were objects of wide-eyed wonder. Crowds collected around a Chinese junk that landed in New York harbor. P.T. Barnum literally put Chinese on display in the carnival sideshow he called the American museum.

Public opinion on the West Coast abruptly changed toward the Chinese in the 1870s. The Chinese, who were viewed as model workers and model citizens, were now the "Yellow Menace." Demagogues East and West called for the abrogation of the Burlingame Act of 1868, which gave Chinese the right to work and live in America.

Anti-Chinese sentiment in the West led to restrictive local legislation; Chinese were forced out of jobs and off the land. They were physically attacked and their homes and businesses burned. Finally, the federal government responded by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of Chinese workers.

Chinese went east in search of work (frequently limited to laundries) and the solace of a closed Chinese community. In New York a "China Town" grew up in the garrets and cellars of Lower Manhattan. The neighborhood was self-sufficient; people worked in their own restaurants, curio shops, laundries, and garment workshops. They consciously refused to compete with the white population of the city. They were suspicious of Anglo-Saxon justice and made their own agreements and settled their own disputes.

In 1890 New York's three thousand Chinese existed outside the usual channels of city government and society. They were isolated by their language, an alien culture, and discrimination. The federal government's restrictive immigration and naturalization policies created a mainly male community, where families could never be reunited.

It was an uneventful existence, with many single men crowded into small rooms. The literate read histories and novels and threw the I Ching. Others gambled at f'an t'an, mah jong, or bok-a-bou in back rooms hidden behind restaurants and stores. Over endless cups of tea, they talked about homes and villages they would never see again. The money they sent overseas kept their families alive and paved the streets and built many schools in Kwangtung and Fukien.

The bachelor society of Chinatown depended on a network of organizations to provide the lost world of family and place for these "birds of passage" who could no longer fly home. Family associations, district associations, and secret societies were the main sources of community.

Family associations like the Lees and Wangs helped the elderly and unemployed and provided credit. District associations were also involved in community welfare, working with people from particular geographical areas of China. They also were the key organizers of traditional Chinese observances like the Moon Festival and Chinese New Year.

The secret societies in China offered some recourse to the all-encompassing state and a position in the world for the dispossessed. In New York the Tongs had an unsavory reputation for criminal activity, but they did supply the isolated people of Chinatown with traditional distractions like gambling, which was legal in their own country. In 1933 they signed a truce in the consul general's office, putting an end to the periodic clashes.

While Chinese laborers were forbidden to enter the United States, merchants were not barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act, and many ordinary Chinese presented themselves as merchants to the immigration authorities in order to enter the country. Chinese also falsely came into the country as the children of Chinese who were conceived during an overseas visit.

Despite stories spread by the tabloid press about Chinese hatchetmen and white slavery, the Chinese community was generally safer and stable by the 1920s. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) in the city brought together many disparate elements in the community and created unity in a hostile world. The Confucian concept of harmony reigned.

Even Tongs that competed for Chinatown spoils now donned the mantle of respectable merchant associations, the On Leung and Hip Sing, and sat on the board of the CCBA together.

The whole complex CCBA organization was recognized in 1940 to meet the challenges of a wartime situation. The officials of the CCBA represented commercial, family, and governmental Chinese interests. They were mostly from Toishan, one of ninety-eight Kwangtung districts, but they maintained a fair distribution of power by alternating the chairmanship with other groups.

In this same era, other types of organizations were formed to deal directly with the occidental world. The Chinese-American Citizens Alliance took legal action against discriminatory legislation, while the Chinese Laundry Association fought whisper campaigns against businesses. The National Chinese Welfare Council lobbied against the deportation of Chinese aliens.

Although in 1880 only three percent of Chinese were east of the Rockies, by 1940 it was up to forty percent, and the second largest concentration of Chinese was in New York. There was also a new element in New York's Chinatown, a class of Chinese professionals - engineers and scientists - who were stranded in the country by the surprise Japanese invasion of China in 1917.

They became the foundation for a new Chinese middle class. These high-achieving Chinese first became a statistic in 1940, when it was reported that the Chinese changed and bigotry subsided. In 1943 discriminatory laws were lifted and Chinese GI brides were eligible to become naturalized. After the war the eight thousand Chinese who wore the uniform of a country that didn't recognize their right to be citizens were granted permanent citizenship.

The Chinese were no longer regarded by the government as innately alien to American values and were allowed modest immigration quotas between 1945 and 1960. The Chinese who came to New York on these quotas were mainly middle class and professional, and many had close ties to the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan. While this elite entered New York legally, thousands of undocumented Chinese were smuggled into the city to work in restaurant kitchens and garment sweatshops.

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished the old national origins quotas and Chinese immigrants for the first time in eighty-five years were put on par with other groups entering the country. Chinese from all levels of society, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, flocked to New York.

The new immigrants differed from their Chinatown forebears; they were urban Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan, who may have originally come from northern China and Shanghai. The newcomers came with families and were committed to staying in the country. They were Westernized Chinese prepared to follow the American dream.

These Chinese were no longer willing to live passively outside the mainstream. They became involved in the "War on Poverty" and worked with the Chinatown Planning Council to get funds for employment, housing, legal aid, and education programs. They protested against the war in Vietnam and even staged their own Mao-style cultural revolution to protest the community's conservative leadership.

In 1974 Chinatown activists had their greatest victory. They organized protests against a city building project in their own neighborhood that did not have one Chinese worker on the rolls. They closed down the Confucius Plaza site until the unions promised to hire forty Asian Americans.

Young Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, who could not cope with the New York educational system and confronted unemployment and dead-end jobs, joined gangs like the Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons. They became involved in local protection rackets, and Chinese gang violence was again on the front pages of New York's tabloids.

Despite the publicity, gang membership remained minuscule. The real story of Chinese youth in the community had been about merit scholarships and awards for excellence in science and math. It has been about the high number of Chinese students who every year won slots in New York's elite schools like the Bronx High School of Science.

The 1980 census estimated the Chinese population in New York to be just over 150,000. This included eighty thousand Chinese in Chinatown and the rest spread-out through downtown Brooklyn and Sunset Park, and the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, Flushing, and Elmhurst. By 1990 the number of documented Chinese had risen to 250,000, many of the new arrivals coming in response to the Tiananmen Square authoritarian crackdown in 1989. The daunting prospect of a People's Republic of Hong Kong had also fueled emigration.

The official immigration figures do not include a large undocumented population. Many of these FOB (fresh off the boat) Chinese are forced to work off the cost of their illegal passage in Chinatown's restaurants, laundries, and small garment factories. Some of these desperate immigrants are caught in situations not so different from the indentured servitude of their forebearers.

Meanwhile, American-born Chinese are on the ascent. They are entering professions and moving into ethnically mixed middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. For these suburban Chinese, Chinatown is a place to go on a weekend outing. These new self-confident Chinese Americans are following in the footsteps of award-winning architect I.M. Pei and Wall Street wizard Gerald Tsai. They are writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, film directors like Wayne Wang, and business tycoons like computer pioneer An Wang. New York's Chinese Americans are also aspiring to become multimillionaires, like Sherman Eng, who runs the Chinatown garment district and Harold Ha, whose precious jewelry factories produce glittering profits.