Posted on 06/09/2013 5:20:57 PM PDT by oblomov
On an old building at 12 St. Marks Place, hovering above the sushi counters and tattoo parlors, is an inscription chiseled in the stone facade: Deutsch-Amerikanische Schützen Gesellschaft. It marks the location of the German-American Shooting Society clubhouse, long defunct, and is a rare vestige of the German immigrant community that dominated the East Village and the Lower East Side for much of the 19th century.
Known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, the community had German saloons and social clubs, German theaters and churches, German stores and workshops, and, of course, tens of thousands of German residents.
Little Germany is long gone — the clubhouse now houses a Yoga to the People studio — and other European enclaves that once defined immigrant life in New York City have also faded or disappeared altogether.
But in their place, a welter of immigrant neighborhoods have formed, populated by newcomers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. This shift was triggered by the passage of immigration reform legislation in 1965, which opened the door to greater numbers of non-Europeans and changed the ethnic composition of the United States.
Since 1970, the number of foreign-born New Yorkers has more than doubled, to about three million, or 37 percent of the city’s total population, according to the Census Bureau. About 32 percent of the city’s immigrants today came from Latin America, 26 percent from Asia, 20 percent from non-Hispanic Caribbean nations, 17 percent from Europe and 4 percent from Africa.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Little Guyana used to be right off the Van Wyck in Jamaica, Queens - just before you got to JFK. Great place to go for curry if you work working around the airport.
I grew up in a small town which in 1960 had nearly 70% with Scottish background.
Still there were enough Germans that they held a Schutzenfest every year. BTW I have no idea how to spell that.
South Ozone Park around Lefferets Blvd between Atlantic and Libert Aves. I ran the summer day camp at the South Queens Boys Club for a couple of summers back when the Guyanans were just starting to move in.
T-H-A-T
Now I am really confused.
There are dashes between each letter and all letters are capitals?
1. The A train doesn’t go to the Guyanan neighborhood.
2. Nobody prefers the outer boroughs. The rents in Manhattan are so high that even white people with corporate jobs can’t afford to live there.
Well played!
There are a lot of Dominicans in Washington Heights and Inwood.
Below 110th Street, I agree (my wife and I live on the UWS).
I would imagine that, after the US entered WWI that they started to hide those signs and started drinking Miller, not Pabst or Budweiser, for sure!
I live on the UWS too - what do Dominicans have to do with people from Guyana?
Nothing. Your comment #2 suggested that recent immigrants don’t come to Manhattan because of cost. They do, but not in the expensive parts of the borough. Washington Heights has about the same cost of living as Corona or Ozone Park, and Inwood is probably cheaper. But I wouldn’t want to live there...
It’s so far uptown it might as well be a borough.
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