The Gateway of Nations, Immigration and New York State

Between eighteen ninety-two and nineteen fifty-four, approximately twelve million immigrants entered the United States through the federal station on Ellis Island in New York Harbor. It was not the only entry point, and for earlier waves, many Irish fleeing the Great Famine and Germans arriving in the eighteen forties and fifties, the port of New York processed later arrivals at Castle Garden at the southern tip of Manhattan rather than Ellis Island, once that depot opened in eighteen fifty-five. But across the whole arc of the great migration era, New York Harbor was where the largest share of the world's movement toward America funneled through.

What they found on the other side of the narrows was not a welcome without conditions. New York City's Lower East Side became the most densely populated place on earth in the years around nineteen hundred, a square mile of tenements housing Italians from Sicily and Calabria, Ashkenazi Jews from the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Eastern Europe, Chinese workers who had built the western railroads and faced exclusion laws nearly everywhere else, Puerto Ricans after American colonial control of the island began in eighteen ninety-eight. The conditions were genuinely terrible, cholera, tuberculosis, twelve-hour workdays in the garment factories, children sleeping in shifts in apartments designed for four people and housing twelve.

And out of those conditions came the labor movement, the settlement house movement, Lillian Wald established her nurses' settlement on the Lower East Side in eighteen ninety-three, moving to its permanent home on Henry Street in eighteen ninety-five, and a political culture that would eventually produce the New Deal. It also produced the dominant cultural form of twentieth century America: Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and vaudeville and ultimately jazz and rock and roll, shaped by what happened when every musical tradition from Eastern Europe and West Africa and the Caribbean and Southern Italy was crammed into adjacent blocks and forced to share the same street corners. New York was never a melting pot, exactly.

The metaphor implies the original ingredients dissolve. What happened was more like a pressure cooker: intense heat, sustained pressure, and something new that could not have been predicted from the parts. The state its people built became one of the largest economies on earth, the anchor of American finance, and the singular proof that the proposition of mass immigration could work.