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New York City has the largest population of Italian Americans in the United States as well as North America, many of whom inhabit ethnic enclaves in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. New York is home to the third largest Italian population outside of Italy, behind Buenos Aires, Argentina (first) and São Paulo, Brazil (second). Over 2.6 million [1] Italians and Italian-Americans live in the greater New York metro area, with about 800,000 living within one of the five New York City boroughs. This makes Italian Americans the largest ethnic group in the New York metro area.
Fiorello La Guardia was mayor of New York City 1934-1946 as a Republican. A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw La Guardia ranked as the best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993. [2]
The first Italian to reside in New York was Pietro Cesare Alberti, [3] a Venetian seaman who, in 1635, settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam that would eventually become New York. A small wave of Protestants, known as Waldensians, who were of French and northern Italian heritage (specifically Piedmontese), occurred during the 17th century, with the majority coming between 1654 and 1663. [4] A 1671 Dutch record indicates that, in 1656 alone, the Duchy of Savoy near Turin, Italy, had exiled 300 Waldensians due to their Protestant faith.
The largest wave of Italian immigration to the United States took place in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Between 1820 and 1978, 5.3 million Italians immigrated to the United States, including over two million between 1900 and 1910. However, most planned a short stay to make money, and about half returned to Italy.
The Italians who arrived in large numbers from 1880 to 1914 were poor peasants with few skills. According to Samuel Baily, three in four worked in manual labor jobs, such as construction, transportation, factory work, or domestic service, during both the years 1880 and 1905. These jobs were mostly unskilled or semi-skilled. The remaining 25% consisted mainly of low-income white-collar workers like peddlers and barbers, along with shopkeepers running neighborhood grocery stores. Only 2%, held professional status, primarily musicians and music teachers. [5]
In terms of job searching, newly arrived Italians typically signed up with a "padrone". For a fee this Italian businessman found jobs and negotiated wages. [6] The Italians earned well below average rates. Their weekly earnings in manufacturing and mining (for the entire national economy) in 1909 came to $9.61, compared to $13.63 for German immigrants and $11.06 for Poles. A goal of returning to Italy in two years with $200 thus meant saving $2 a week. [7]
The first New York neighborhood to be settled by large numbers of Italian immigrants – primarily from Southern Italy (mostly from Sicily) – was East Harlem, which became the first part of the city to be known as "Little Italy". The area, which lies east of Lexington Avenue between 96th and 116th Streets and east of Madison Avenue between 116th and 125th Streets, featured people from different regions of Italy on each cross street, as immigrants from each area chose to live in close proximity to each other. [8]
"Italian Harlem" approached its peak in the 1930s, with over 100,000 Italian-Americans living in its crowded, run-down apartment buildings. [9] The 1930 census showed that 81 percent of the population of Italian Harlem consisted of first- or second- generation Italian Americans. This was somewhat less than the concentration of Italian Americans in the Lower East Side’s Little Italy with 88 percent; Italian Harlem’s total population, however, was three times that of Little Italy. [10] Remnants of the neighborhood's Italian heritage are kept alive by the Giglio Society of East Harlem. Every year on the second weekend of August, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is celebrated and the "Dancing of the Giglio" is performed for thousands of visitors.
After World War II, the original Italian settlements such as East Harlem declined as Italian Americans moved to the North Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn's southern tier. The geographic shift coincided with a new wave of Italian immigration. An estimated 129,000 to 150,000 Italian immigrants entered New York City between 1945 and 1973. Bypassing Manhattan, they settled in Italian American neighborhoods in the outer boroughs and helped reinvigorate Italian culture and community institutions. With the influx of postwar immigrants, Bensonhurst became the largest Italian community in New York City, with 150,000 Italian Americans in the 1980 census. [11]
The best-known "Little Italy" in Manhattan is the area currently called that, which centers around Mulberry Street. This settlement, however, is rapidly becoming part of the adjacent Chinatown as the older Italian residents die and their children move elsewhere. As of the 2000 census, 692,739 New Yorkers reported Italian ancestry, making them the largest European ethnic group in the city. [12] In 2011, the American Community Survey found there were 49,075 persons of Italian birth in New York. [13]
The Italian international private school La Scuola d'Italia Guglielmo Marconi, serving grades Pre-Kindergarten through 12, is located in Manhattan. It is the sole bilingual English-Italian day school in North America. Despite the large Italian American population, the vast majority of bilingual day schools in North America are French speaking. [14]
The Consulate-General of Italy in New York is located in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [15]
The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, founded in 1979 and located in Midtown Manhattan, is an academic institute that studies matters pertaining to the history of Italians in the United States.
The Italian American Museum is located in Manhattan's Little Italy. Located in a former bank, Banca Stabile, its current building had a "soft opening" in September 2008, [16] and a formal opening in October. [17]
Columbus Day and the San Gennaro Festival are celebrated in New York. [17]
Brooklyn is a borough of New York City. Located on the westernmost end of Long Island, it is coextensive with Kings County in the U.S. state of New York. With 2,736,074 residents as of the 2020 United States census, Kings County is the most populous of the five boroughs of New York City and the most populous county in the State of New York. The population density of Brooklyn was 37,339.9 inhabitants per square mile (14,417.0/km2) in 2022, making it the second-most-densely-populated county in the United States, behind Manhattan, and it had the ninth-highest population of any county nationwide. Were Brooklyn still an independent city, it would be the fourth most populous in the U.S. after the rest of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Little Italy is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City, known for its Italian population. It is bounded on the west by Tribeca and Soho, on the south by Chinatown, on the east by the Bowery and Lower East Side, and on the north by Nolita.
Little Italy is the catch-all name for an ethnic enclave populated primarily by Italians or people of Italian ancestry, usually in an urban neighborhood. The concept of "Little Italy" holds many different aspects of the Italian culture. There are shops selling Italian goods as well as Italian restaurants lining the streets. A "Little Italy" strives essentially to have a version of the country of Italy placed in the middle of a large non-Italian city. This sort of enclave is often the result of periods of Italian immigration, during which people of the same culture settled or were ostracized and segregated together in certain areas. As cities modernized and grew, these areas became known for their ethnic associations, and ethnic neighborhoods like "Little Italy" blossomed, becoming the areas they are today.
East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City, north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers to the east and north. Despite its name, it is generally not considered to be a part of Harlem proper, but it is one of the neighborhoods included in Greater Harlem.
New York City is a large and ethnically diverse metropolis. It is the largest city in the United States with a long history of international immigration. The New York region continues to be by far the leading metropolitan gateway for legal immigrants admitted into the United States. The city is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. by both population and urban area. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York City is one of the world's most populous megacities.
Bangladeshi Americans are American citizens with Bangladeshi origin or descent. Bangladeshi Americans are predominantly Bengali Americans and are usually Bengali speaking Muslims with roots in Bangladesh. Since the early 1970s, Bangladeshi immigrants have arrived in significant numbers to become one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the U.S. New York City is home to two-thirds of the Bangladeshi American population. Meanwhile, Paterson, New Jersey; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Monroe Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey are also home to notable Bangladeshi communities.
The Irish community is one of New York City's major and important ethnic groups, and has been a significant proportion of the city's population since the waves of immigration in the late 19th century.
The boroughs of New York City are the five major governmental districts that compose New York City. The boroughs are the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough is coextensive with a respective county of the State of New York: The Bronx is Bronx County, Brooklyn is Kings County, Manhattan is New York County, Queens is Queens County, and Staten Island is Richmond County.
MTA Regional Bus Operations operates local and express buses serving New York City in the United States out of 29 bus depots. These depots are located in all five boroughs of the city, plus one located in nearby Yonkers in Westchester County. 21 of these depots serve MTA New York City Transit (NYCT)'s bus operations, while the remaining eight serve the MTA Bus Company These facilities perform regular maintenance, cleaning, and painting of buses, as well as collection of revenue from bus fareboxes. Several of these depots were once car barns for streetcars, while others were built much later and have only served buses.
Since its founding in 1625 by Dutch traders as New Amsterdam, New York City has been a major destination for immigrants of many nationalities who have formed ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods dominated by one ethnicity. Freed African American slaves also moved to New York City in the Great Migration and the later Second Great Migration and formed ethnic enclaves. These neighborhoods are set apart from the main city by differences such as food, goods for sale, or even language. Ethnic enclaves provide inhabitants security in work and social opportunities, but limit economic opportunities, do not encourage the development of English speaking, and keep immigrants in their own culture.
The first Brooklyn Chinatown, was originally established in the Sunset Park area of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It is one of the largest and fastest growing ethnic Chinese enclaves outside of Asia, as well as within New York City itself. Because this Chinatown is rapidly evolving into an enclave predominantly of Fuzhou immigrants from Fujian Province in China, it is now increasingly common to refer to it as the Little Fuzhou or Fuzhou Town of the Western Hemisphere; as well as the largest Fuzhou enclave of New York City.
The racial and ethnic history of New York City has varied widely; from its sale to the Dutch by Native American residents, to the modern multi-cultural period.
Founded in the 17th century as a Dutch outpost, Harlem developed into a farming village, a revolutionary battlefield, a resort town, a commuter town, a center of African-American culture, a ghetto, and a gentrified neighborhood.
The following is an alphabetical list of articles related to New York City. New York City is a city in the United States state of New York.
Mexican Americans, as of 2004, were New York's fastest growing ethnic group, with 186,000 immigrants as of 2013; they were also the third largest Hispanic group in New York City, after Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Close to 80% of New York Mexicans were born outside the United States, and more than 60% of Mexican New Yorkers reside in Brooklyn and Queens.