German New York
Breweries, Yorkville and a community that faded into the city.
Brewery town, 1910
In 1910 about 600,000 New Yorkers had roots in Germany. In Bushwick and Ridgewood, home to a row of breweries, nearly six in ten people mapped were German.
Yorkville, 1910
Uptown, the Upper East Side around Yorkville was home to about 49,000 people of German stock and 52,000 from Austria-Hungary. Many had come from Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side, which emptied after the General Slocum disaster of 1904.
Neighbors move in, 1930
In 1930 Germans were still four in ten people mapped in Bushwick and Ridgewood, but Italians, at 22%, were moving in alongside them.
Everywhere and nowhere, today
Today about 250,000 New Yorkers report German ancestry, but there is no German neighborhood left. They are spread thinly across the whole city, most visibly in Queens and on Staten Island.
Where New York Came From: a map of NYC immigration and ancestry, 1910 to today
All stories
- Harlem and the Great Migration
- From Italian Harlem to El Barrio
- Brooklyn's Nordic waterfront
- Finns, Lithuanians and Estonians
- New York's three Chinatowns
- The Lower East Side
- Jewish New York
- Little Odessa
- Redlining's long shadow
- Italian New York
- Washington Heights and Dominican New York
- German New York
- A century in seven stops