City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York Hardcover – October 18, 2016

Historian Tyler Anbinder has built an excellent body of work on 19th Century immigrant history. Over the last two decades, he has published important books on the old Irish neighborhood of Five Points which is today’s Chinatown and the politics of the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s. His publication of City of Dreams: The 400 Year Epic History of Immigrant New York cements his standing as one of the leading historians of the immigrant experience.City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York by Tyler Anbinder published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 771 pages (2016)This massive book must be read by anyone who loves New York City and wants to know how it got to be the way it is. Based on years of research, it provides an intimate look into the lives of men and women from distant shores who came in pursuit of their own American Dream. Newly arrived, these immigrants not only had to learn how to cope with America, but also how to come to terms with the dozens of cultures they encountered in every borough of their new city.Anbinder begins his book by quoting an early 20th Century immigrant on the transformative power of immigrant New York: “Hating one another, loving one another, agreeing and disagreeing in a hundred different languages, a hundred different dialects, a hundred different religions. Crowding one another, and fusing against their wills slowly with one another.” The impressive thing about immigrant New York is not the predictable conflict and strains, but the fact that people so seemingly different could so often come together and fuse families, politics, and cultures.While America is a nation of immigrants, it is also a nation of immigrant-haters. This hatred manifested itself in the area before “New York” even existed. In 1654, the Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant spoke out against Jewish refugees from Brazil settling in New Amsterdam. He argued that they stole jobs from the Dutch, that they would need to be supported by the government because of their poverty, and that they were a “deceitful race— such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.”The city’s Dutch Reformed minister Johannes Megapolensis agreed that the Jews should be excluded, saying, “We have here Papists [Catholics], Mennonites and Lutherans among the Dutch; also many Puritans or Independents, and many Atheists and various other servants of Baal among the English. It would create a still greater confusion, if the obstinate and immovable Jews came to settle here.” In other words, the minister was saying that the city, with only a few thousand inhabitants, was already a pretty diverse place.Fortunately, the Jews were given refuge, though more for commercial reasons than out of a sense of humanity. This experience would set a pattern for later history: New York often did the right thing by immigrants, though not always for the best reasons.Immigrants helped build the Dutch and later English city, but immigrants would always be suspect to some. In 1741, white New Yorkers became suspicious that black slaves were setting a series of fires in the city as a political protest. It appears that several slaves did, in fact, set fires as acts of revenge against masters who had mistreated them. The prosecutor decided that blacks would only have taken such actions as a result of a plot by the Pope to attack the city. White New Yorkers, mostly Irish immigrants, were arrested along with the blacks. Thirty blacks were executed as were four whites suspected of being Catholics.A generation later, the Irish would form the backbone of the revolutionary mobs in the city, according to no less an authority than Ben Franklin. A British officer in the army that captured New York wrote that “the chief strength of the rebel army at present consists of natives of Europe, particularly Irishmen:— many of their regiments are composed principally of these men.” The Irish were not the only revolutionists. The author shows the centrality of immigrants like Alexander Hamilton to the patriot cause.Tyler Anbinder does a good job recalling the stories of the immigrants who made it big in post-Revolutionary New York. Men like Jacob Astor of Walldorf, Germany. Astor started out as a young immigrant “baker’s boy,” became a kingpin in the fur trade, invested his profits in Manhattan land, and became the city’s biggest real estate developer. In modern dollars, his fortune was bigger than that of Bill Gates. But Anbinder’s biggest contribution is in disclosing the lives of the previously unknown poor and struggling immigrants whose descendants now populate this country.The 19th Century saw New York’s rise as the entrepôt of immigrants. By 1830, New York had four times as many immigrants as Philadelphia and five times as many as Boston. The city was already multicultural and multilingual, with business was conducted in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish in the different parts of the city. James Fenimore Cooper observed that the cities immigrants came from “all the countries of christendom.”As the number of immigrants grew, so did opposition to their arrival. Resentment against immigrants built steadily in the 1830s and 1840s. Much of the negative feelings were focused on the Irish, who seemed unwilling to spend their lives thanking the native-born for giving them the opportunity to slave for them. In many cases, the source of resentment was in the Irish acting “too American.” Anbinder writes that, “Any attempt to reprimand an Irish employee, it was said, would be met with “We’re all equal here!” and a threat to quit. Irish “servant girls” in particular, were notorious for resigning on the slightest provocation. As a result, many employers would not hire them. Some even tried to insert “No Irish need apply” into want ads.Even without the nativists and bigots, life was hard for the newly arrived immigrant. Anbinder’s book does a magnificent job of bringing the reader to the docks along South Street where disembarking immigrants in the 1850s were met by “runners,” sharks who momentarily befriended immigrants in order to rob them or con them. An investigative committee reported on this danger, saying that “We find the German preying upon the German— the Irish upon the Irish— the English upon the English.” Immigrant communities each set up their own immigrant aid societies to try to protect newcomers from the old country from becoming prey to these thieves.Anbinder devotes a substantial part of City of Dreams to New York during the Civil War Era. From the huge influx of Irish and German immigrants during the thirteen years before the war to the recruiting of immigrant regiments, the Draft Riots, and the Post-War world created by the conflict, this is the best account that I have ever read of the ways immigrants experienced the war in the city.The book also forces the reader to re-examine old beliefs. For example, we often hear that American women in the “Victorian Age” rarely worked outside the home. That might have been true of the native-born, but more than a third of Irish women worked for pay by the time of the Civil War. Immigrant women, German, Irish, or Jewish, also defied American conventions by starting their own businesses, taking in entertainments without a chaperone, and controlling their own money. Out of necessity and desire, immigrant women were pioneering changes in gender roles 160 years ago.The city’s immigrant population went through tremendous changes after the 1880s. Irish immigration declined, even as the children of the Famine Irish rose in power, wealth, and prominence. New streams of immigrants from all parts of the world filled the docks.Anbinder reminds us that in spite of growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the early 1900s, the city was incredibly diverse. There were Syrian and Lebanese enclaves south of where the Freedom Tower is now, and neighborhoods that were distinctly Afro-Caribbean, Armenian, Bulgarian, Chinese, “Croatian, Czech, French, German, ‘Gipsy,’ Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Jewish, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scandinavian, Scotch, Serb, Slovak, Slovene, and Spanish.” While the immigrants changed, the neighborhoods they inhabited sometimes stayed the same. What had once been the Irish Five Points became Chinatown 50 years later and Little Germany became the Jewish Lower East Side. The Lower East Side of the Jews was the most densely populated neighborhood in the world.When the famed reporter Nellie Bly wrote about her visit to the Jewish Lower East Side, she presented a harrowing picture says Anbinder:[D]angerous pitch-black hallways and stairwells, unbearable noise, “vile stench,” and stifling heat. “Oh, the smell of it!” Bly exclaimed upon opening the door of her third-floor apartment. “It seemed to me that more than a million kinds of smell rushed out to embrace me in strong, if unseen, arms.” A good portion of the stench came from the tenement inhabitants themselves. Lower East Siders bathed just a few times a year because only 8 percent of them had bathtubs. Bly also discovered that with 3,500 people living on her block, there was no escaping “the constant sound of voices which rose in one unbroken buzz from the street,” all day and all night. That noise, plus the endless cacophony of crying babies, stairwell traffic, and other loud sounds produced inside her own building, made it impossible for Bly to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time.When Italians immigrated by the hundreds of thousands in the early 20th Century, overcrowding only increased. Today SoHo and the West Village are fashionable neighborhoods, but 100 years ago they were Italian enclaves nearly as crowded as the Lower East Side. Anbinder describes the scene: “Rather than take in a boarder or two as the Irish had done to help make ends meet, Italians tended to share their apartments with an entire second family. In the district’s typical three-room apartments, one family might occupy one room while the boarding family slept in the second. The third room— the kitchen— would be used by both. In some three- and four-room apartments, three families might share the space.”City of Dreams, although a history, is not locked in the past. It fully covers the new immigration sparked by the repeal of the racist national origins quotas in 1965. This removed the prohibitions on immigration from Asia and turned the most diverse city in the world into the first truly multicultural one. South Asian, Chinese, Korean, Muslim, and African immigrants have joined immigrants from throughout Latin America as the new immigrant pioneers of the emerging New York City.In his conclusion, Anbinder dispels the myths of a one-time “Golden Age” of immigrant, whom today’s immigrants cannot live up to. He reminds us that while today’s immigrants study English and civics to become citizens, “From 1820 to 1920…when the immigrant ancestors of most of today’s native-born Americans arrived in the United States, an immigrant could become a citizen without knowing a single word of English or answering a single question about American history or government.” While modern immigrants begin participating in American life almost from the time they arrive here, the old immigrants often spent decades in isolated ethnic enclaves. Anbinder says that “When pundits complain that today’s immigrants don’t assimilate like those from the past, they are harking back to a golden era that never actually existed.”The one criticism I have of the book is that it misses the story of cross-ethnic immigrant cooperation. Groups like the New York Immigration Coalition (of which I am Past-Chairperson) have worked to create a unifying agenda for immigrants regardless of their country of origin. Immigrant organizations no longer work in isolation from one another. They now work together, rally together, and move forward together.That said, City of Dreams is the must-have book on immigrant New York this year. It is one of the best books on immigration that I have ever read.

In this history of Immigrant New York City, the author narrates the many peoples who have made NYC home. Starting with the Dutch then the English, Scots, Germans, Irish, Italians, Jewish peoples of Eastern Europe, to the Chinese, Caribbean and Latin American arrivals coming today, Arbinder weaves an engrossing story of immigration. He however never really shows how immigrants assimilated into the fabric of NYC of the time. How did the Dutch and English become Americans? How did the Italians and Jews become Americans? This is not a history that lets you know that. It is actually a history of first generation immigration to NYC. And that's fine. Though I wish it was also a history of assimilation and provided the statistics relevant to that discussion.The last chapter attempts to thread the debate between nativism and globalism that seems to have engulfed both major political parties in the US and that is affecting the rest of the world too. The chapter shows the author sides with the globalism argument. It will be interesting to see how the debate progresses when automation continues to mean fewer entry level jobs are available. Will immigrants still come to NYC then? Yes, but probably not in the same numbers that they did previously.Lastly, this is a good book, but it is way more thoroughly researched for the period before the 1920s than for the period after.

This is a gripping history of one of the most famous cities in the world. Anbinder begins his account with the arrival of the vessel ‘Nevada’ in 1861, bringing new immigrants including Annie Moore her two younger brothers. The story of Annie Moore and how she was finally given recognition as an early immigrant to New York – in 1965. A commemorative statue of the siblings now stands on the docks at Cobh. Anbinder then turned back to the time before New York was New York, that is, when she was New Amsterdam. The Dutch had been there before the English, but in 1664, Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch Director-General handed over the city to the British who were backed by massive and frightening warships and an army Stuyvesant could not match. Perhaps as an indication of the charm of New York even in those days, is the fact that years after the surrender and Stuyvesant had gone home to Holland, he requested and was given leave to return to live in Manhattan. The history of New York is fascinating, exciting, and dynamic, but with a great deal of poverty, hardship, and despair. These stories are told in detail and the misery of the immigrants described in moving accounts. The early immigrants from China were particularly destitute, having paid exorbitant sums of money to gain their passage to America, they found themselves working in poor conditions and living in even poorer ones where even the air was bad – and all for paltry wages. Their descendants made good, and the Chinese and other Asian immigrants prospered and lived happily in New York – until 9/11. The Irish and German immigration reached a climax in the chapter ‘Uprising’ which ended in riots from the protests and lynching by pro-slavery sections of New York. That followed the role New York played in, first, the war of Independence, and then the Civil War. Anbinder describes how the attack on the twin towers affected New York immigrants. They were singled out for collective blame in the mistaken belief that the attackers were immigrants – none of them were. The concluding chapter, ‘Today’ is thought-provoking in the author’s measured assessment of the history of immigration into New York, and the careful peep into the future of New York. I will admit one tiny spoiler (the rest is best enjoyed by the reader first hand): ‘One final prediction: immigrants from all over the world will continue to make New York their destination.’

The book captured the amazing story of virtually all of the immigrant groups that have come to New York over the centuries. It illustrates their struggles, conflicts but also their achievements and ultimately makes one optimistic that the City will continue to evolve successfully in future years.

This is a must-read for anybody interested in New York City, and its history and sociology. The book has a whopping 570 reading pages, and it is all fascinating! lt tells about the history of immigration to the City from the earliest Dutch period of Nieuw Amsterdam, founded at its present site in 1625, to the present, all in great detail. New York City really is a city of dreams, for immigrants from many countries, and has been for almost four centuries now. lt also tells about major events concerning immigrants in the past, and about the hatred directed against newcomers from specific countries or regions in various periods. At times, it was the lrish who never could do right; but on the other hand, while it is often said that immigrants, and certainly their descendants, lose all their petty ethnic- and religion-based hatreds when immigrating to America (the exception, today, being Muslims, who never lose their visceral hatred for the whole world), the lrish retained their loathing of all things British. At other times it was the ltalians, or the Germans, or the Jews, or the Chinese. The history of the Statue of Liberty is given in detail. An additional bonus is that the author, a Jew whose ancestors arrived from the Russian Empire, gives frequent anecdotes about his own relatives, which gives the book a personal touch that is lacking in many books. Unfortunately, the book, by the author's own admission, gives short shrift to the less-numerous immigrant groups, such as non-Jewish Poles and other Slavs, Romanians, Scandinavians, Greeks and Japanese.The few errors include page 299, where it says that the "Stars and Bars" was "the first Confederate [B]attle [F]lag," whereas, in fact, the Stars and Bars was the first official National Flag of the Confederacy (the "X"-shaped flag, today deemed "politically incorrect" by the liberals, was the Battle Flag); page 470, which says that Far Rockaway is in Brooklyn, while in fact, it is in Queens; page 493, where it says that "[t]he governments of [Francisco] Franco, [Benito] Mussolini, and [Adolf] Hitler were all ... anti-Semitic," while, in fact, it would be unfair to group Franco with these others - thousands of persecuted French Jews found refuge in fascist-controlled Spain, and Franco gave Spain's Jews equal rights in 1968; and page 540, where Guyana, which is on the South American Atlantic coast, is incorrectly said to be a "non-Hispanic Caribbean" nation.lmmigration really is very different today from that of old times. Then, it was quite easy to immigrate; and the overwhelming majority of those who came were non-conversant in English. But today, education is very different from that of then, and there really is no reason to admit non-English speakers, or individuals lacking important skills that are in demand in America.Unfortunately, on pages 568-569, the author succumbs to the temptation of satisfying liberal potential critics, by extolling the alleged compatibility of Muslims with modern American society, implying that there is no difference between today's lslamic terrorism and many Americans' erstwhile paranoia about immigrants from various countries. This is very unfair to the many people, Americans and others, who have been the victims of the Muslims' great love for humanity, this reviewer included. Sad.Nevertheless, this is a worthy and enjoyable read! Go for it!

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