The Consolidated New York City was created in 1898. In 1874, New York City annexed the western Bronx from Westchester County. In 1894, a vote was taken in New York, Westchester, the City of Brooklyn, and the towns of Queens and Richmond on a proposal to combine New York City with Brooklyn, the eastern Bronx, part of Queens County, and all of Richmond County into a “Greater New York.” The proposal received overwhelming support. In 1895, New York City annexed the “eastern Bronx” (which consisted of portions of Westchester, Eastchester, and Pelham). In 1898, the City of Brooklyn, Long Island City, and the towns and villages of western Queens and all of Richmond were replaced by the Boroughs of Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens (Queens County), and Richmond (Richmond County). Kings, Queens, and Richmond counties, combined with Manhattan and Bronx County formed a Consolidated New York [4][a].

 

The Greater New York was the second largest city in the world, dwarfed only by London, and was the most populous city in the United States by an incredible margin.  In 1910, New York’s population was 4,766,883, while Chicago, the second most populous American city, only had a population of 2,185,283. In fact, New York City had more people than Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, the next three largest American cities, combined [5].  The men who organized the Hudson-Fulton Parade sensed the need to assert New York City’s position a cosmopolitan center, on par with London and Paris. They hoped that the Parade would lead to the recognition of New York as one of the world’s greatest cities.

New York City’s massive population was largely the result of immigration. Aliens made up 40% of New York City’s total population, and in 1910 the foreign born population was nearly 2 million ^[6].  Eighty four percent of white heads of household were born outside the United States or had parents that were born outside the United States ^[7].  The immigrant population in America came from a vast array of countries, although Eastern European Jews, Italians, Germans, and Irish were the most numerous. During the early twentieth century, Russian Jews and southern Italians flooded into New York City. Due to their massive numbers, immigrants were a vital part of New York City’s fabric in 1909. However, manyNew Yorkers felt that the immigrants, particularly the Jewish and Italian newcomers, did not mesh with the cloth. 

 

As one may expect, population congestion was a substantial problem in New York City. For most of the nineteenth century, trade was limited to lower Manhattan, and the lower wards of the city became overcrowded with bodies.  The creation of the five- borough city sought to spread the population and alleviate the congestion. However, in 1909, the Brooklyn Bridge and the lines of transportation served to distribute the population of New York City within Manhattan. Rather than dispersing the population among the boroughs of the Consolidated New York, the Brooklyn Bridge brought greater numbers of people into Manhattan, where the most employment opportunities were to be found. The subway system mostly served Manhattan; lines that connected Manhattan to the other boroughs were just being built. Transportation to Queens and Richmond still depended on unreliable ferries. In 1910, nearly 50% of the city’s population lived in Manhattan, and its population density was five times greater than any of the other boroughs.

Congestion could be seen as an economic and a social problem. Economically, it was the result of concentration of factories and industries within Manhattan, and the consequent concentration of population in Manhattan. It was also the result of the high cost of land, low wages, and speculation, in a phrase “protected privilege and exploitation” ^[9].

Socially, some attributed congestion to “the so-called gregariousness of certain classes of people,” namely poor aliens, who were seen as boisterous creatures that enjoyed living closely together in crowded spaces ^[10]. Immigrants of common ethnic backgrounds crowded into little homogenous colonies like Kleindeutchland, and later Little Italy, the Jewish quarter, and Chinatown. The Italians and the Eastern European Jews, who flooded into New York from the late 1880s and until 1920, were “ghettoized.” For example, 75% of New York City’s population with parents born in Russia or Poland, lived in three wards of the Lower East Side of Manhattan ^[11].  In Industrial Causes of Congestion in New York Edward Ewing Pratt writes:

The tendency for people to group themselves together in a strange land is most natural. The newly arrived immigrant seeks his friends or relatives – if he has none, he seeks companionship where he can be understood and where he can understand. From this little nationality group, he makes his start in the struggle of the New World. ^[12]

While the formation of immigrant neighborhoods may have been natural, Anglo-Saxons and older-stock immigrants viewed them apprehensively. They believed that the colonies were detrimental to assimilation. By preserving the culture of the old country, immigrants were shunning American culture. Instead of shedding their ethnic peculiarities, they were maintaining them.

It is interesting to note that other cities, for example Chicago, had large alien populations and were not nearly as congested as New York City.  Perhaps New York City was so crowded because of its reputation as a cosmopolis where a man “could getmore pleasure, excitement, moreeducation than he can anywhere else” ^[12] .The Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909 sought to assert New York City’s position as a “cosmopolis,” a world city. A cosmopolis implies a multiplicity of cultures. TheIrish, the Germans, the Jews, and the Italians contributedto the cosmopolitan nature of the city by bringing their unique foods, celebrations, traditions, and languages.  At the same time, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration was meant to blur ethnic distinctions and unite the foreigners and the established New Yorkers into a cohesive New York City.

Endnotes