The Synagogue That Used to be a Church
On the Neighborhood that Drowned.
The history of New York can be read in the history of its neighborhoods.1 To know the history of the Lower East Side in particular is to understand how much of the growth of New York2 was built by immigrants. Maybe because of a certain degree of recency bias or maybe because of which communities hung around the longest or maybe just because of pop culture,3 we tend to think of the Lower East Side as it was in the twentieth century, but before it was split into the East Village4 and the cultural legacy that carries, before New York had Chinatown and Loisaida, before it was Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side,5 it was Kleindeutschland.
“Kleindeutschland“ is German for “Little Germany.”6 It’s also half of a pretty big question amongst German-speakers in the first half of the nineteenth century: if Germany should be comprised of the 39 states that hung out under the umbrella of a German confederation7 or if Germany should be one vast nation of all the German-language speakers.8 This brings up two points of importance:9 one, there is not a Germany as we know it yet and two, the German language can be an organizing principle. The US is often spoken of as a young nation state, but it’s older than Germany.10 Before 1871, there was not a Germany, there was a Prussia, a Bavaria, a Saxony,11 a Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha,12 the Free Cities of Hamburg and Bremen, and a variety of principalities and kingdoms. The other thing to note is how much language served as a unifier. That might sound like a gimme, but speaking the same language doesn’t always mean you’re on the same page. But our Kleindeutschland is far from the Black Forest and the actual Deutschland, klein or groß, so let’s cross that ocean as we get to it.
German13 immigration began slowly in the earlier part of the nineteenth century and then sped up quickly. The reasons varied but they’re all going to sound familiar. The Napoleonic Wars had put national identity in places like Italy and Germany on a fast track14 but wars don’t make life easier.15 The 1840s saw the soon-to-be Germany hit with a potato rot. There was a revolution in 1848 that didn’t go well which meant people fleeing for political reasons. Those who depended on trade struggled against competition from British goods. There were also changing practicalities: steamboats made travel easier, some cities were importing goods like tobacco and it just made economic sense to be sending full boats back to the US rather than empty ones. And once some people were settled, they wrote home offering the promise that those who came after wouldn’t face a wholly unfamiliar crowd. There was also the timeless reason of emigrating to escape sectarian violence, and German Jews moved to America in hopes of if not greener pastures then at least less bloody ones. You know: all the reasons every American who’s descended from immigrants talks about with pride.16
Crossing east to west meant coming through New York, which meant arriving through an island off the tip of lower Manhattan. No, not that one: Castle Clinton. Castle Clinton had been built in 1807 as the Southwest Battery on an artificial island just off lower Manhattan17 as a defense for New York against the re-escalating tension with the British. By 1817, the fort was still showroom new and the Special Relationship between the US and England was officially underway, so the Southwest Battery was rechristened Castle Clinton in honor of New York mayor and governor DeWitt “Very Tall Guy” Clinton and it was handed over to the city, where it served as an entertainment venue and restaurant as the Castle Garden.18 In 1831, it was dedicated to its new primary purpose: processing the immigrants arriving on American shores through its greatest natural harbor.19 By 1855, landfill connected Castle Clinton to the Battery.20 Castle Clinton received new Americans through 1891, when the city, country, and immigration levels meant we had outgrown it and Ellis Island was opened in 1892 on what had been known as Gull Island under the Lenape and Little Oyster Island under the Dutch.21 Castle Clinton then enjoyed a retirement as a theater and an aquarium and object of Robert Moses’ spite, having been the first American soil 8 million people set foot on.
And how (Ger)many people are we talking about? Between 1843 and 1869, around 1.5 million Germanic immigrants arrived, especially from the southern and western regions. 1869 – 1879 saw about a million immigrants, largely from the north.22 That was enough to make New York the 5th largest German-speaking city in the world, which is saying something because New York was just under a third German and it’s not like the rest of New York was rushing23 to sprechen sie Deutsch: Kleindeutschland was the 5th largest German city in the world, a small slice of a small island, and it continued to grow. From 1880 through the end of the century, just under two million more German immigrants came in, with 250,000 coming in 1882 alone.24 New York now was home to the third largest German speaking population in the world25 and the Lower East Side was 70% German. That New York was metaphorically medaling in the German-language finals is significant beyond the bragging rights because Kleindeutschland wasn’t organized by state of origin, or even religion: it was a community bound by language.
Well, not just language: there also seemed to be pretty broad support for beer and gyms.26 By the 1880 Census, just over 80% of all breweries in America were German owned, and there was a proportionate number of beer halls to go with them. These were social spaces as much as drinking spaces, but that didn’t stop Harper’s Weekly in 1859 from beginning to publicly wring their hands at German-American drinking. But it’s basically always going to be “these immigrants drink too much” or “I don’t like the food these immigrants make” and without that early concern trolling, I imagine the ink-making industry would have crashed.
Building a community meant building.27 The tenement at 97 Orchard28 was built by Prussian immigrant Lucas Glockner in 1863, planned as housing for other German immigrants. The building ended up being both party and witness to almost everyone who came through the Lower East Side and is now the Tenement Museum and you should absolutely go. Early and often!
Scheffel Hall was built in 1895 on 3rd between 17th and 18th as a beer hall, loosely inspired by the architecture of the Heidelberg Castle. It would later be used by the German-American Athletic Club, then in the 1930s it was a rathskeller, a basement restaurant.29 It’s a bit north of Kleindeutschland but still: very German.
Also popping up all over were gyms and clubs. You might have thought this kind of bracing physical activity would mean German immigrants would get a break, since middle-class reformers would insist on this same kind of regimented exercise for later immigrants in order for them to be real and healthy Americans, but that would be incorrect: there has in fact never been a correct way to be an immigrant in the present tense: you can only be right in hindsight and there’s someone else arriving to be more incorrect than you were.30
If you’re looking to get the measure of the culture of Kleindeutschland, it should be noted there were over 80 mutual aid groups, which is an impressive amount of support, especially from a community still building itself.
Buildings aren’t mutual aid or charity,31 but the you can track the infrastructure constructed by the residents of Kleindeutschland as they served changing communities in New York over the next century and beyond. 74th East 4th Street was built in 1873 as a home for the Aschenbrödel Verein, or the Cinderella Club, a social club and benevolent society for musicians that had been founded in 1860. They moved uptown to Yorkville on the Upper East Side in 1892 and the space was taken over by the Schillerbund Gesangverein, a singing club. They followed the Aschenbrödel Verein uptown in 1897 and the building was a rental hall until 1961, when Ellen Stewart founded La Mama E.T.C., as foundational an institution to the East Village as any verein or bund had been to Kleindeutschland.
Originally built as row houses in the 1830s, 66 E 4th was renovated into The New York Turnverein, a left-leaning gymnastic club in 1871.32 In 1882, it served as the venue for The Witch, the first Yiddish-language play performance in the US. The Turnverein moved uptown to 85th and Lex in 1898 and the building became the Manhattan Lyceum, a rental theater. Emma Goldman spoke there in 1908. In 1925, it became the Ukrainian Labor Club. In 1956, it became ABC Stage City, where Jerry Orbach got his first film credit, a 1958 movie called Cop Hater starring Robert Loggia, which is a little bit of an ironic start for an actor who spent so long on Law & Order, but that’s acting for you. In 1974, it became the Annex of LaMama.
Four blocks north of LaMama is 12 St. Marks Place, built in 1888/1889 in German Renaissance Revival style to be home to the Deutscher Amerikanische Schutzengesellschaft, the German American Shooting Society. It became the St. Marks Community Center in 1920, and then a Ukrainian community center, then a yoga studio. It’s now a gallery and bookstore. It’s actually a fairly recent addition to St. Marks, but the owner wanted to visually honor the New York he first knew, so you’d be in good company for thinking it dates back to the 1980’s.33
Half a block up from St. Marks on Second Avenue are two buildings commissioned by Anna Ottendorfer in 1883. Anna Ottendorfer, when she was still Anna Behr, emigrated from Bavaria in 1837 when she was 2234 and didn’t have much more to her name than a brother already in the states. She married a printer named Jacob Uhl the following year and in 1845, they purchased the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, a popular monthly paper that they turned into a popular daily paper. She served as a co-manager and sometimes journalist until Uhl died in 1852 and she ran it on her own.35 If you’re wondering where the name Ottendorfer comes into play, Oswald Ottendorfer came on as editor for the Staats-Zeitung in 1858 and they married in 1859. She did not retire from the paper, and they did well enough that when some of the well-to-do Germans already ensconced uptown started soliciting to build German Hospital and Dispensary of the City of New York,36 the Ottendorfers gave more in the nineteenth century than someone making minimum wage earns in a year now. Anna Ottendorfer did not want her philanthropy to be confined to Yorkville, however, so in 1883, she commissioned a dispensary at 137 Second Ave. The portico has ornate busts of various medical-related All Stars: Galen, Asklepius, Hippocrates, and scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Christph Wilhem Hufeland, among others.
I don’t know if Anna and Oswald Ottendorfer were just the kind of couple that did everything together or they got a two-for-one deal on red brick and terracotta, but Oswald Ottendorfer had a matching building constructed as a library next door at 135 Second Avenue. Anna Ottendorfer died in 1884, and Oswald followed in 1900. The library Oswald Ottendorfer had sponsored at 135 Second became the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library in 1901.
The dispensary moved uptown to the hospital in 1905 and the two buildings were taken over by a different organization hoping to serve the poor of Kleindeutschland, the Deutsche Poliklinik. It became the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in the era of Liberty Cabbage after World War I, and that was decided to be definitely, completely permanent after World War II. It became the Cabrini Stuyvesant Polyclinic when it linked up with the Cabrini Medical Center in the 1970’s. In 2008, the building was sold to a British consulting firm with extraneous punctuation in its name. From 2019, it was a location for The Wing, the women’s club and high-status third space, but they girlbossed too close to the sun and the building was put back up for sale in 2023 with a 22 million asking price. The listing isn’t up any longer but if you have either information on what’s taking the space or 22 million you’d like to invest in historical real estate, do let me know.
Four blocks south and half a block east of the Ottendorfer twofer, empty lots along East 6th between First and Second were bought by the German Lutheran Church in 1846 for what was to become The Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Mark, with some financial floating from a nearby congregation of St. Matthews. To be clear, the name is not connected to St. Marks Place, which we’ve been pointing at, short of the saint being the same.37 The building was done by 1848, and St. Mark’s had it free and clear by 1857, as the growing German population filled its pews as well as its neighborhood. The congregation flourished enough to be able to purchase the house that was built in 1889 directly behind the church on East 7th as a parsonage, and by 1897 the congregation had around 700 members with 700 kids in Sunday school. It was a growing community hub in a growing community.
Now, if you’ve spent a decent amount of time38 around the Lower East Side,39 you may be reflecting on the lower-than-now-expected amount of German signage and wondering why this global German city seems to have receded like the tide,40 even if you know some of these buildings. There’s a few reasons. German beer halls and breweries, like the Irish-owned saloons, were hit hard by Prohibition.41 Some of it was just the rhythm of the city: immigrants arrived, and those that stayed in New York tended to stay in the Lower East Side, but then they moved on: you can see the shift up42 to Yorkville already. A lot of this history was also deliberately erased in the wake of World War I, since being the mark of the most recent Big Bad is bad for both business and morale. But the page had turned on Kleindeutschland long before Archduke Franz Ferdinand took a wrong turn, and the beginning of the end is a guy named Henry Warner Slocum from outside a small town in Central New York named Delphia Falls.
To be fair, Henry Slocum is not a villain of this story, but to be less fair Slocum is the kind of Union general-turned-politician who really benefits from George B. McClellan petulantly stomping around, guaranteeing the bottom spot in any comparison is taken.43 He was a man with the notable mustache and hangdog expression of a discount Sam Elliot. He was born in 182744 about 25 miles outside of Syracuse. He had trained as a teacher, went to a military academy, got married, passed the bar, and then joined the Union army. He fought under McClellan and Hooker,45 and arrived so unfashionably late to the Battle of Gettysburg he earned the nickname “Slow Come.”46 After the war, he settled in Brooklyn and became active in politics as a Democrat, though he’d been an abolitionist and Republican initially. He served in Congress for a term and then got the kind of appointments that one could only get with the favor of the local political machine,47 in this case, we’re talking Tammany. He died in 189448 of pneumonia and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery. His legacy includes a time as the youngest general in the Union army, founding a railroad company in Brooklyn, and being the namesake for the PS General Slocum.49
And so we come to the broken promise of a pretty summer’s day. On Wednesday, June 15th, 1904, the congregation of St. Mark’s gathered a few minutes walk south and east of the church,50 at the Third Street Pier, for their seventeenth annual picnic day trip. It was not the full congregation: it being the middle of the work week meant this was more an excursion for the women and children of the church. By 1904, that was up to about 1,300 people,51 and St. Mark’s had chartered the PS General Slocum for $35052 for the ride up the East River to Locust Grove, Long Island.53 The General Slocum was what was known as a sidewheel steamboat, so it was engine powered and also had a huge paddlewheel on its side. If I say “Mark Twain boat,” whatever you’re picturing is about the right image. It was owned by the Knickerbocker Steamboat company, had a max capacity of 2,500 passengers and had been used as an excursion rental since its kickoff in 1891. It had been impressive-looking though was not impressively maintained, but picnics are supposed to be a picnic, a literal walk in the park. Departure had been planned for 8 AM, but it was around 9:40 when the ship actually left shore.54
By 10 AM, when the ship was north of Yorkville and between Wards Island and Queens, a fire broke out in the hold by the bow.55 It was small at first but when the crew opened the hatch to check what was causing the smoke risking to the deck, the oxygen made it worse. It was ten minutes before the captain was told, and by his account, by then it was too late. The firehoses on deck were decayed and leaky and no one was really trained in safety anyway.56 When the fire grew strong enough to reach the passenger decks, there was panic and a stampede to reach the stern, and any safety equipment anyone could reach, though it was worse than useless. Many of the life vests were also rotted past use and others were so shoddily made they had been lined with iron to appear to contain enough cork. The lifeboats were effectively decoration: the locks on the wiring that held them in place were painted over. The captain, William Van Schaick, decided to push hard to try to make it to land before the ship was burned out from under their feet, going full speed towards North Brother Island off the Bronx.57 The engine fed the fire and by the time the General Slocum made it shore at 10:20 AM, forty minutes after the band at the Third Street Pier had played its last song for the departing revelers, over 1,000 were dead, burned to death before they even had a chance to escape or dragged down under the river by heavy clothes and faulty lifejackets. The bodies continued to wash ashore for days after. There was a great deal of uproar and hubbub, naturally, and many calls for investigation which lead to many calls for reforming the corruption that let such wanton negligence fester, but in the end only the captain faced prison, and he was paroled early and then granted a presidential pardon by Taft.
1,02058 is an odd kind of number to process: we know it’s a lot intellectually but with each digit it gets harder and harder to make any kind of emotional sense of so we just nod somberly and shunt it to the footnotes of history to collect dust, a sad thing but what does it matter. Do you know 1,020 people? Do you have 1,020 Facebook friends? Or 1,020 Instagram mutuals? How wide a circle would you have to draw around your life to reach 1,020 people? What would a loss like that do your community? Imagine your building, your block, your street. Imagine the sound of children: their laughter, their shouts, their play, their crying, their feet running through the halls.59 Now imagine its absence. Maybe you hear crying from a neighbor’s apartment or on the street, but all the noise you take for granted gone into a void. 1,020 meant 600 families, which meant close to 600 men went to work on a sunny Wednesday and just never saw their wives or children again. Every single member of St. Mark’s knew someone who died and the streets were impassable from the funeral processions for day after day.
St. Mark’s continued on for a time but the move uptown accelerated as everyone tried to outrun their ghosts, and in 1939 it closed its doors with around 50 congregants, becoming absorbed by Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Yorkville, on 85th between First and Second. The building was taken over the next year by the Community Synagogue, which is what it remains now.
It hasn’t changed much, though the brick is painted red and the trim white and a plaque was put up in 2004 to commemorate the centennial. The sinking of the General Slocum was the worst disaster in New York history until 9/11, though it was left rather in the historical wake of the Titanic. At a speech in 1999, one survivor observed that, “The Titanic had a great many famous people on it. This was just a family picnic.”
There’s usually a fluidity to neighborhoods: communities overlapping and swapping ingredients, neighbors intermingling and intermarrying, one group bleeding into another. To see such a hard stop is jarring, like a song cutting off when you expect it to fade into the next track. We read history in chapters but it is rarely made that way, with sharp lines separating one moment from another. We are, after all, made more to bend than break.60 But sometimes moving on from tragedy means really moving on. But what was built in Kleindeutschland remained for the new Americans coming in and taking the neighborhood as their own: the tenements built for Germans became home to Eastern Europeans and Italians, to Puerto Ricans, and Chinese-Americans. The gyms and clubs became cultural institutions treasured for decades. And you can still get a soft pretzel with mustard on a lot of corners.61 A lot of the residents of Kleindeutschland left to escape the ghosts but that’s what remains of that iteration of the neighborhood on the sidewalks after so much was replaced and erased, a kind of haunted city: the signs in German carved above the English signs installed over the door. There’s a fluidity to neighborhoods, and so to New York, that just doesn’t lend itself well to hard outs: there will always be an echo of what was62 just around the corner, out of reach.
As this is being published the week of Thanksgiving, I would like to say I am extremely thankful to be sharing an original piece of art by Mary Hawkins. Mary Hawkins is an art director, animator and designer based in NYC whose focus is typography-driven motion graphics. Her work can be seen here: maryhawkins.com
To be fair, that’s true of a lot of cities but it’s not really my place to speak for them.
And by extension, the United States.
I can’t be the only one who watched part of Godfather II in history class as a kid, right?
That would be a branding invention of the 1980s to get more in rent.
I don’t know why there isn’t a Yiddish-scented nickname. And now “Borscht Belt” is taken, so what can you do?
Sometimes you just want a neighborhood name that does what it says on the tin, you know?
That’s Kleindeutschland, or in this instance “Lesser Germany.”
That’s the Großdeutschland solution, or Greater Germany.
Efficiency!
And Italy, which united from a series of city states in this same time as well but that’s not on today’s agenda.
They pair well with Anglos.
A big name for anyone interested in the genealogy of Queen Victoria.
Not like the passport, but a shorthand: if I start listing every city state, this newsletter will never end and you’re busy, popular people with things to do.
Nothing unites like a common enemy.
Wars also mean a draft, which means people fleeing the draft.
And then half of them immediately heel turn abruptly into xenophobia without a trace of irony, an American pastime to rival baseball.
To the south and west, as you may have gleaned from its uninspiring name.
Jenny “Swedish Nightingale” Lind made her American debut there in 1850.
Brag.
So, Castle Clinton was being united with Manhattan just before Wilhelm I was named Kaiser of a united Germany.
Because sometimes we used to be a country that responded to an overburdened immigration system by expanding it.
I know 1 million is less than 1.5 million but that’s a shorter period. Math!
1882 bears the distinction of being the year Rose Schneiderman was born, but I’m pretty sure that’s unrelated to German immigration rates. I just take any excuse I can to say that Rose Schneiderman existed and was great.
Prussian?
Who do you think we beat out? It had to be Munich, right? And Cologne?
I was with them for the first part.
And buildings.
It’s just another way of saying apartment, but that would, like the Lower East Side, also get a re-brand, also because it was inextricably tied up with images of immigrants. Honestly, probably the same images.
We, uh, we’re going to come back another day to the 1930’s because that’s a very different vibe.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Especially not at market rate in New York.
The people were left leaning, not the gymnastics.
It’s me. I’m the company.
Ich weiß nicht, wie es dir geht, aber ich fühle mich wie 22?
She also raised their six children. You know that meme about how the strong, majestic wolf was turned into the pug? I absolutely feel like the pug to Ann Ottendorfer’s ancestral wolf.
Or as we know it: Lenox Hill.
That’s named after St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, on 10th and Second. It was built in 1795 and is Episcopal, and also the host of a lot of community and arts events.
Or an indecent amount of time: I don’t judge.
The broader, old school definition.
Congrats, I guess, Munich: you’re back to Top 3.
That is not a coincidence: that’s full tilt Feature Not a Bug territory.
Sometimes up as in literally to the north, sometimes up as in gaining social power, sometimes just out.
Ugh. McClellan.
So, Castle Clinton was still Castle Garden and German immigration was still more of a trickle than a wave.
And then fought Hooker, calling for his dismissal after the loss at Chancellorsville.
Because he was slow to come to the battlefield with his troops. Get your mind out of the gutter: this is a family newsletter. Literally. I’m related to a decent number of the people reading this. Hi, guys! Thanks for reading.
Including on the committee overseeing the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, where he made Washington Roebling pretty miserable.
Two years after Ellis Island opened.
NB the PS stands for Paddle Steamer, not Post Script.
Let’s call it 10 minutes for adults, but certainly longer with kids in tow.
Around 150 were men and all the other passengers women and children of all ages.
That’s close to $10,000 now, which is presumably why this was a once-a-year treat.
I don’t know, man. Maybe don’t have groves named after biblical plagues? Not the issue here but just to be safe.
The story is two families had premonitions the night before and disembarked at the last minute, which is very dramatic and Ye Olde Final Destination, but if the premonition was the night before, why show up at all? I’m not trying to pick a fight: survivor’s guilt is hard.
That is the front. I looked it up so I could use it correctly.
We’re seven years before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which was the inciting incident for a lot of fire safety regulations still keeping us safe today.
North Brother Island would be best known as the quarantine prison of “Typhoid” Mary Mallon, but she’s still two years away from sickening a family in Oyster Bay via peach ice cream and poor hand-washing knowledge.
Some estimates say 1,021.
Or on your ceiling, depending on your upstairs neighbor.
Like reeds and skyscrapers.
Technically the Dutch were the first people to bring pretzel technology to these shores, but the Germans added mustard and that makes it art.
Or what could have been.
Amazing piece! I love the way you related the history of the neighborhood and the immigrant community to the synagogue today.