Your city's "Lower East Side"

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by eschaton

My father's family was from Queens, and to a large extent German (both of his parents were half-German).

All his cousins/their children have long since decamped to Nassau County however.

exactly. that's the same as my non-jewish german-american friends and co-workers stories. the post-slocum community dispersed out there.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

but after slocum many nyc germans were dead, the community destroyed and dispersed

according to wikipedia, residents of "little germany" had already been disperseing themselves uptown for some time prior to the disaster.

The neighborhood of Little Germany, which had been in decline for some time before the disaster as residents moved uptown,  almost disappeared afterward. With the trauma and arguments that followed the tragedy and the loss of many prominent settlers, most of the Lutheran Germans remaining in the Lower East Side eventually moved uptown. The church whose congregation chartered the ship for the fateful voyage was converted to a synagogue in 1940 after the area was settled by Jewish residents.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

according to wikipedia, former residents of "little germany" had already been disperseing themselves uptown for some time prior to the disaster.


source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum

yes of course, and that was affected by slocum too, but for this thread we were talking about the les, which as noted all but disappeared afterward. i see even the church who charted the boat became a synagogue for new immigrants. ironic, but unsurprizing and fitting.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

for this thread we were talking about the les, which as noted all but disappeared afterward.

yes, specific to the LES, the slocum disaster was the final death-knell for the the german community there, but it's not like the hundreds of thousands of other people of german ancestry in NYC all stopped being "german" after the tragedy.

it was the wars that forced "german-american" as a thing into hiding.

and as you pointed out earlier, due to their phyical appearance vis-à-vis japanese-americans, "german-american" largely melted into plain old "american".

[Crawford]

Myrtle Ave. in Glendale and Middle Village (both in Queens) still has some German butchers, bakers and restaurants. Local Catholic and Lutheran churches still have German language mass.

[mrnyc]

^ yep and you should have also googled about steinway village and kreischerville in staten island. the latter is where they made the locally famous yellowish bricks, the best examples of which are around columbia and on stockholm street in queens. well worth checking out in person.

there are still a couple old german restaurants around in staten and the haunted kriescher mansion is near one of them, killmeyers.


https://ny.curbed.com/2016/6/29/1205...nd-nyc-history

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

yes, specific to the LES, the slocum disaster was the final death-knell for the the german community there, but it's not like the hundreds of thousands of other people of german ancestry in NYC all stopped being "german" after the tragedy.

it was the wars that forced "german-american" as a thing into hiding.

and as you pointed out earlier, due to their phyical appearance vis-à-vis japanese-americans, "german-american" largely melted into plain old "american".

yes, the broader german sentiment during wartimes became a thing, albeit by that time unrelated to the les and nowhere near what japanese-americans faced with being rounded up and incarcated for a time.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Myrtle Ave. in Glendale and Middle Village (both in Queens) still has some German butchers, bakers and restaurants. Local Catholic and Lutheran churches still have German language mass.

that's pretty amazing.

i live in lincoln square, which has the last vestiges of "german chicago" left in the city, and while there's still a couple german bakeries/restaurants hanging on, along with DANK haus (chicago's german-american cultural center & museum), the old german catholic parish, St. Matthias, was recently closed by the archdiocese and merged in with the nearby, non-national, Queen of Angels parish.

i did a quick google search and couldn't find a german language mass being offered anywhere in chicagoland.

[Chisouthside]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbdlQetym4

[eschaton]

My grandmother actually sent my friggin father into school in lederhosen occasionally in the 1950s, much to his eternal embarrassment (I mean, he's dead now, but I presume the embarrassment is eternal).

[mrnyc]

funny enough and to bring this back on topic, the main post-slocum german dispora neighborhood for nyc, ridgewood, is now said to be one of the world’s current top hip neighborhoods. which is very fitting for gen z because it has an appealing classic urban residential look to it and is tidy whitey. quite the opposite of the former derelict war zone les hip era. the kids got soft!

[edale]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

i did a quick google search and couldn't find a german language mass being offered anywhere in chicagoland.

Wow, that really surprises me! I'm not German, but I attended a German mass at Old St. Mary's church in Cincinnati (OTR) several years ago, and thought it was pretty neat. I assumed Chicago would have just about one of everything.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by edale

Wow, that really surprises me! I'm not German, but I attended a German mass at Old St. Mary's church in Cincinnati (OTR) several years ago, and thought it was pretty neat. I assumed Chicago would have just about one of everything.

i dug a little deeper, and St. Alphonsus over in Lakeview does a "german-ish" mass once a month.

from their website:

On the first Sunday of the month, the 9 AM Mass will feature some of the prayers and a reading in German.

source: https://www.stalphonsuschicago.org/



but at least we still have several parishes that do polish masses every sunday.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Myrtle Ave. in Glendale and Middle Village (both in Queens) still has some German butchers, bakers and restaurants. Local Catholic and Lutheran churches still have German language mass.

Queens was the most "German borough" in the early 20th century. Prior to WWII, Queens was a "generation behind" NYC demographically. Still more German/Irish than Jewish/Italian. I think most of the growth of Queens in the 1940s and 1950s was made up of Jews moving to a semi-suburban environment. And it was central and eastern Queens (which grew significantly after WWII) where the Jewish population was, while western Queens was already built up (and non-Jewish).

[Crawford]

Yes, a lot of the early Jewish flight from the Bronx was actually to Queens. In the 1960's, when the Concourse Jewish neighborhoods really started fraying, a lot of the younger, more educated cohorts moved to Queens neighborhoods, especially along Queens Blvd. (Rego Park, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens). Others moved further out, into semi-suburban Northeast Queens.

Of course many other Jews headed north, into Westchester.

[Docere]

The Jewish population in Queens surpassed that of the Bronx in the 1960s.

Jewish population, 1940

Bronx 538,000 38.6%
Brooklyn 857,000 31.8%
Queens 115,000 8.9%

Jewish population, 1957

Bronx 493,000 34.6%
Brooklyn 854,000 32.8%
Queens 423,000 24%

Jewish population, 1970

Bronx 143,000 9.7%
Brooklyn 514,000 19.8%
Queens 379,000 19.1%

[Docere]

In 1940, Germans were still the most common "foreign stock" in Queens (i.e. 1st/2nd generation), outnumbering Italians. And of course the third generation would have been quite large already in the case of German Americans, while Italians were still overwhelmingly first/second generation (third generation from Ellis Island wave were mostly born during the Baby Boom).

Queens, 1940

German 165,232 12.8%
Italian 152,171 11.7%

[CaliNative]

Originally Posted by Crawford

There was some postwar German immigration to the U.S. and Canada. Especially true for German refugees from Eastern Europe.

There's also a German Jewish refugee community in far Upper Manhattan (Hudson Heights). It's still around, to an extent, though obviously aging.

Lou Gehrig, German-American, grew up in Hudson Heights, and often went to dinner with his mom and pop both before and after his marriage when he was a famous baseball star. In fact, I think he continued to live with his parents before his marriage. Hudson Heights wasn't very far from Yankee Stadium, just across the river in the Bronx, so it was convenient. Babe Ruth, who enjoyed Ma Gehrig's German cooking (pickled eels was a favorite), was a frequent dinner guest until Mama Gehrig said something that angered Ruth's wife Claire, and this started the Ruth-Gehrig feud. Supposedly Ma Gehrig, a pushy and opinionated woman, suggested that Claire treated and dressed her own daughter better than Ruth's daughter from his first marriage, and Clare walked out, followed by Babe and his daughters. Ruth and Gehrig didn't reconcile and speak again until after he was diagnosed with ALS ("Lou Gehrig's Disease") that paralyzed and killed him. They embraced on Lou Gehrig Day in 1939 at Yankee Stadium. Ruth himself would die only 8 years later of throat and sinus cancer. Ruth and family also lived in a luxury high rise apartment not far from upper Central Park and Columbia U. (which Gehrig attended) not far from Hudson Heights.

[streetscaper]

Interesting, I've lived in lil' old Hudson Heights for the past 12 years and I never knew Lou Gehrig was from here.

[Crawford]

Dr. Ruth still lives in Hudson Heights. And she's a German Jewish refugee, part of the post-WW2 influx. There's still a small community in some of those nice prewar buildings.

[Investing In Chicago]

Originally Posted by streetscaper

Interesting, I've lived in lil' old Hudson Heights for the past 12 years and I never knew Lou Gehrig was from here.

I grew up in Washington Heights, and I always thought of Lou Gehrig as a Washington Heights guy, never really put much thought into where exactly he grew up (like which block/building), but I guess he is more Washington Heights adjacent.