Editing East Village, Manhattan (section)

====19th century====
{{See also|Little Germany, Manhattan}}
[[File:Little Germany House.jpg|thumb|200px|Former German-American Shooting Society Clubhouse at 12 [[8th Street / St. Mark's Place (Manhattan)|St Mark's Place]] (1885), part of [[Little Germany, Manhattan|Little Germany]]]]

By the middle of the 19th century, many of the wealthy had continued to move further northward to the [[Upper West Side]] and the [[Upper East Side]].<ref name="Dolkart 2012">{{cite book | last=Dolkart | first=Andrew | title=Biography of a Tenement House: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street | publisher=Center for American Places at Columbia College | year=2012 | isbn=978-1-935195-29-0 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OcuBtwAACAAJ | access-date=September 30, 2019 }}</ref>{{rp|10}} Some wealthy families remained, and one observer noted in the 1880s that these families "look[ed] down with disdain upon the parvenus of Fifth avenue".{{sfn|Lockwood,|1972|p=199}} In general, though, the wealthy population of the neighborhood started to decline as many moved northward. Immigrants from modern-day Ireland, Germany, and Austria moved into the rowhouses and manors.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|pp=15–16}}

The population of Manhattan's 17th ward{{snd}}which includes the western part of the East Village and Lower East Side{{snd}}grew from 18,000 in 1840 to over 43,000 by 1850 and to 73,000 persons in 1860, becoming the city's most highly populated ward at that time.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|pp=15–16}}<ref name="Nadel 1990">{{Cite book |first=Stanley |last=Nadel |title=Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–80 |location=Urbana |publisher=University of Illinois Press |year=1990 |isbn=0-252-01677-7 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/littlegermanyeth0000nade }}</ref>{{rp|29, 32}} As a result of the [[Panic of 1837]], the city had experienced less construction in the previous years, and so there was a dearth of units available for immigrants, resulting in the subdivision of many houses in lower Manhattan.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|pp=15–16}}{{sfn|Burrows|Wallace|1999|p=746}}

Another solution was brand-new "tenant houses", or [[tenement]]s, within the East Side.<ref name="Dolkart 2012"/>{{rp|14–15}} Clusters of these buildings were constructed by the [[Astor family]] and [[Stephen Whitney]].{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|p=17}} The developers rarely involved themselves with the daily operations of the tenements, instead subcontracting landlords (many of them immigrants or their children) to run each building.{{sfn|Burrows|Wallace|1999|pp=448–449, 788}} Numerous tenements were erected, typically with footprints of {{convert|25|by|25|ft}}, before regulatory legislation was passed in the 1860s.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|p=17}}

To address concerns about unsafe and unsanitary conditions, a second set of laws was passed in 1879, requiring each room to have windows, resulting in the creation of air shafts between each building. Subsequent tenements built to the law's specifications were referred to as [[Old Law Tenement]]s.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|p=21}}<ref name="Riis 1971"/> Reform movements, such as the one started by [[Jacob Riis]]'s 1890 book ''[[How the Other Half Lives]]'', continued to attempt to alleviate the problems of the area through [[settlement house]]s, such as the [[Henry Street Settlement]], and other welfare and service agencies.<ref name=encnyc />{{rp|769–770}}

Because most of the new immigrants were German speakers, the East Village and the Lower East Side collectively became known as "[[Little Germany, Manhattan|Little Germany]]" ({{langx|de|links=no|Kleindeutschland}}).<ref name="Nadel 1990"/>{{rp|29}}{{sfn|Burrows|Wallace|1999|p=745}}<ref name="Haberstroh"/><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/a-short-walking-tour-of-new-yorks-lower-east-side-1572853/?no-ist|title=A Short Walking Tour of New York's Lower East Side|author=Susan Spano|work=Smithsonian|access-date=March 29, 2016}}</ref> The neighborhood had the third largest urban population of Germans outside of [[Vienna]] and [[Berlin]]. It was America's first foreign language neighborhood; hundreds of political, social, sports and recreational clubs were set up during this period.{{sfn|Burrows|Wallace|1999|p=745}} Numerous churches were built in the neighborhood, of which many are still extant.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|p=21}} In addition, Little Germany also had its own library on Second Avenue,<ref name="Haberstroh"/> now the [[New York Public Library]]'s Ottendorfer branch.<ref name="NYPL Ottendorfer"/> However, the community started to decline after the sinking of the ''[[SS General Slocum|General Slocum]]'' on June 15, 1904, in which more than a thousand German-Americans died.<ref name="Haberstroh">{{cite web | last=Haberstroh | first=Richard | title=Kleindeutschland: Little Germany in the Lower East Side | website=LESPI-NY | url=http://www.lespi-nyc.org/history/kleindeutschland-little-germany-in-the-lower-east-side.html | access-date=September 30, 2019 | archive-date=September 30, 2019 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190930214505/http://www.lespi-nyc.org/history/kleindeutschland-little-germany-in-the-lower-east-side.html | url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=R. T. |last=O'Donnell |year=2003 |title=Ship ablaze: The tragedy of the steamboat General Slocum |publisher=Broadway Books |location=New York |isbn=0-7679-0905-4 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/shipablazetraged00odon }}</ref>

The Germans who moved out of the area were replaced by immigrants of many different nationalities.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|p=22}} This included groups of Italians and Eastern European Jews, as well as Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, each of whom settled in relatively homogeneous enclaves.<ref name=encnyc/>{{rp|769–770}} In ''How the Other Half Lives'' Riis wrote: "A map of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow."<ref name="Riis 1971">{{cite book | last=Riis | first=Jacob | title=How the other half lives : studies among the tenements of New York | publisher=Dover | location=New York | year=1971 | isbn=978-0-486-22012-3 | oclc=139827 }}</ref>{{rp|20}}

One of the first groups to populate the former Little Germany were [[Yiddish]]-speaking [[Ashkenazi Jews]], who first settled south of Houston Street before moving northward.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|p=23}} The [[Roman Catholic]] [[Polish people|Poles]] as well as the [[Protestant]] [[Hungarians]] would also have a significant impact in the East Side, erecting houses of worship next to each other along 7th Street at the turn of the 20th century. American-born New Yorkers would build other churches and community institutions, including the Olivet Memorial Church at 59 East 2nd Street (built 1891), the Middle Collegiate Church at 112 Second Avenue (built 1891–1892), and the Society of the Music School Settlement, now [[Third Street Music School Settlement]], at 53–55 East 3rd Street (converted 1903–1904).{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|pp=24–25}}

By the 1890s tenements were being designed in the ornate [[Queen Anne architecture in the United States|Queen Anne]] and [[Romanesque Revival architecture|Romanesque Revival]] styles. Tenements built in the later part of the decade were built in the [[Renaissance Revival architecture|Renaissance Revival]] style.{{sfn|Brazee et al.|2012|pp=26–27}} At the time, the area was increasingly being identified as part of the Lower East Side.<ref>{{cite book | last1=Sanders | first1=R. | last2=Gillon | first2=E.V. | title=The Lower East Side: A Guide to Its Jewish Past with 99 New Photographs | publisher=Dover Publications | series=Dover books on New York City | year=1979 | isbn=978-0-486-23871-5 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Epqr_te4DBsC | access-date=September 1, 2019 | page=13}}</ref>