Jewish New York
The census never asked about religion. Birthplace and the Yiddish language still trace a century of Jewish New York.
The Lower East Side, 1910
The census has never asked about religion, so no map can count Jewish New Yorkers directly. But in 1910 more than 220,000 people with roots in the Russian Empire lived on the Lower East Side, and historians agree most of them were Jewish.
Brownsville, 1930
New subway lines carried families out to Brooklyn and the Bronx. In Brownsville, nine in ten people mapped in 1930 had Eastern European roots.
The Grand Concourse, 1930
In the Bronx, the apartment houses along the Grand Concourse were a step up from the tenements. Two in three people mapped here had Eastern European roots.
Yiddish, 1970
In 1970 about one in fourteen New Yorkers named Yiddish as their mother tongue, more than half a million people. The brighter the amber, the larger the share who grew up speaking it: Midwood, Borough Park, Williamsburg and parts of Queens and the Bronx.
Yiddish, 2010
Forty years later the Yiddish map had narrowed to Hasidic Brooklyn. In Williamsburg about a third of residents spoke Yiddish at home, in Borough Park about a quarter.
Williamsburg today
Many Williamsburg families trace their roots to Satmar, a town once in Hungary and now in Romania. Hungarian is one of the largest ancestries here, about 11,500 people. For Little Odessa, see the story on Brighton Beach.
Where New York Came From: a map of NYC immigration and ancestry, 1910 to today