Aliens, Activists, and Tuberculosis Windows

Italians and other immigrants in 100 years of New York City history

All photos mine.

Cari amici,

I’m back from a trip to New York City, a place that, for me, evokes thoughts of immigration. Most of my family emigrated from Italy during the Great Migration at the turn of the 20th century, and though they didn’t stay in New York very long, I always picture them there, arriving at Ellis Island, gazing at the tall buildings and crowded streets in amazement, wondering if life in America would be like the stories they’d heard. (The answer, in most cases, was no.) This time, thanks to a Tenement Museum tour and a walk through Little Italy (and Nolita and the northern fringes of Chinatown, both formerly Italian turf), my visit included an informal fact-finding experience about immigrant life.

A caveat: this piece delivers a layperson’s sketchy grasp of complex immigration issues, oversimplified due to a lack of in-depth research, and far from definitive. Meaning, don’t quote me, and do go off and google books and other resources on your own. My goal is simply to share with you some of the shadows that lurk in America’s history of immigration and, hopefully, to encourage you to learn more.

Tenements and activism

The Tenement Museum occupies two buildings, at 97 and 103 Orchard St. in the Lower  East Side (LES), that house apartments occupied by immigrants from the 1860s until the 1980s. The tours illuminate not only the physical environment but also the relationships within the immigrant community and the social and political structures that affected them.

Around 1898, at the same time that the five boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx incorporated into NYC, a new wave of immigrants arrived, transforming the LES neighborhood then known as Little Germany into one in which Russian Jews predominated. The tour we took, “Under One Roof,” describes the lives of the Rogarshevskys, a Russian Jewish family who immigrated to New York in the late 1800s, and their neighbors the Baldizzis, Italians who arrived in the 1920s. By the time the Baldizzis moved into 97 Orchard St., the widowed Mrs. Rogarshevsky was the building’s super; Mr. Baldizzi, a carpenter and clearly a good neighbor, used to help her maintain the building.

Both apartments we saw were tiny, each with one bedroom, a kitchen, and a parlor. (Bathrooms were down the hall, one per floor.) The parents slept in the bedroom while the children and other family members, and sometimes even boarders, slept in a twin bed or cot jammed into the kitchen, or in the parlor on a makeshift bed cobbled together from a sofa and some dining chairs.

The bedroom was always an interior room (at first windowless and later, due to health department laws, with a window that opened onto an air shaft), while the parlor had an exterior window. Two other types of windows allowed air and light into the interior rooms: transoms over the doors, and what’s called a “tuberculosis window,” usually placed between parlor and kitchen, mandated by law in the belief that air flow and light would reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

A tuberculosis window and a transom over the door, at the Tenement Museum.

Some of these small parlors doubled as shops where artisans like Mr. Rogarshevsky, a tailor, worked. Not for long, though. As sweatshops sprang up, “older” men, including Mr. Rogarshevsky (probably then in his 30s or 40s), found themselves out of work. They couldn’t adapt to the new technology (like sewing machines and other factory gizmos) that was making them obsolete. Their daughters could, though, and these girls and young women—desirable employees due to their ability to learn new skills and their willingness to work for pennies—enslaved themselves to long hours, poor working conditions, and sometimes dangerous tasks in a desperate attempt to help feed their families.

The Rogarshevsky apartment, authentically restored at the Tenement Museum.

The rise of the sweatshops fired up labor organizers and some of the women themselves, who protested the low wages and dangerous conditions. (As the descendant of a bunch of lefty stonecutters in the politically charged town of Barre, Vermont, in the early years of the labor movement, I can relate.) One of the exploited young women was Clara Lemlich, a young Russian Jewish woman who became a lifelong organizer. At a labor meeting at New York’s Cooper Union in 1909, she stood, insisting that she be allowed to speak, and demanded a strike.

“I am one of those who suffers from the abuses described here, and I move that we go on a general strike.”

To the surprise of almost everyone, between thirty and forty thousand young women garment workers—predominantly Jewish immigrants—walked off their jobs over the next few weeks. It was a bitter, only partially successful strike. It galvanized the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and set off a wave of women’s strikes between 1909 and 1915 that spread from New York to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Michigan. But it also set the stage for tragedy when union negotiators failed to advance the young women’s demand for safer working conditions. That lapse would come back to haunt the union on March 25, 1911, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women.

Infuriatingly, it wasn’t only flames that kept many of the Triangle victims from escaping the fire—employers routinely locked the doors to prevent any possibility of theft.

Little Italy, the LES, and the Immigration Act of 1924

Little Italy lies due west of the Tenement Museum and the LES, just north of Chinatown. Now covering only three blocks on Mulberry St. north of Canal, the neighborhood used to be much larger; in fact, in 1910, when my paternal grandfather arrived in New York, Little Italy was home to 10,000 Italians. According to Wikipedia, at the turn of the 20th century 90 percent of the inhabitants of the Fourteenth Ward (which, absent any conclusive information I could find, apparently consisted of or included Little Italy) were Italian or of Italian descent. Even so, it was never the largest Italian neighborhood; that honor goes to East Harlem.

Mulberry St. at Broome.

Back in the LES, home to many Italians, things were changing. According to our guide at the Tenement Museum, the area began depopulating after the Immigration Act of 1924, which “limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia.”

It also discriminated against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. But America’s ugly attitude toward immigrants began long before that—in 1790, Congress allowed only “white people” to gain citizenship through naturalization; in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act became law; in 1917 another act required testing of immigrants’ understanding of English, effectively limiting entry to most foreigners. When the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act) removed all quotas on immigration, the number of Italian immigrants jumped from 5,363 in 1965 (before the quotas were abolished) to 19,759 in 1970.

Little Italy began to shrink in earnest as Chinatown grew after 1965, due to the influx of Chinese residents who arrived after the quota system was nixed. But an exodus had already begun—after World War II, Italians began to move out of Manhattan to Brooklyn, Long Island, New Jersey, and Staten Island (the U.S. county with the most Italian Americans). By 2010 the American Community Survey (an annual survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau) found that none of Little Italy’s inhabitants had been born in Italy and only 5 percent identified as Italian American.

Alien Registration Act of 1940

Quotas and racial discrimination weren’t the only challenges immigrants faced.  The Alien Registration Act of 1940 (aka the Smith Act), enacted on June 28, 1940, made attempting the violent overthrow of the US government, or belonging to a group or society that endorsed such ideas, a criminal offense. Obviously the targets were proponents of socialism and communism, who were, by and large, immigrants; those convicted (or maybe only accused?) were deported. With war approaching, President Roosevelt transferred the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice—a clear message that resident aliens were considered a security threat.

The Smith Act also required all non-citizens ages 14 and older to register as aliens and be fingerprinted—more than 4.7 million by January 1941. After the U.S. declared war in 1941, federal authorities used data gathered from alien registrations to identify citizens of enemy nations and take 2,971 of them into custody by the end of the year. Obviously anyone who could petition for naturalization did so, but those who had come to America illegally after the Immigration Act of 1924 weren’t eligible. Still, where there’s a will there’s a way—our Tenement Museum guide said that some undocumented people would travel to Canada, get a visa to reenter the U.S. legally, then return and apply for citizenship.

Italians on the street

Visas and citizenship aside, there’s always tourism. When I was in New York in August of 2022, I couldn’t believe how often I heard Italian being spoken on the streets; it seemed like every fourth tourist was Italian. Not this time. But there was at least one Italian woman in my hotel, and she made me laugh.

It was my last day there, and a fire alarm had brought four or five of us into the hallway to gape and wonder if we should be grabbing our valuables and making a run for it. Then a disembodied voice announced that it seemed to be a false alarm and we should wait for another announcement.

“What did they say?” The voice, speaking Italian, belonged to a grouchy-looking nonna in a housedress. I answered her in Italian, explaining what was happening, and she looked not in the least bit surprised that of the four or five people there in the hallway, one spoke her language. No “oh, you speak Italian, thank goodness!” or “what a surprise!”; instead she complained that this was the third fire alarm she’d experienced in an American hotel. I commiserated, then asked her where she was from (Rome) and told her I live in Perugia (no comment).

After I gave her a final reassuring tutto a posto, she went back into her room, leaving me smiling. She reminded me of American tourists, expecting English to be spoken wherever they go. Who knows, maybe she’s been lucky enough to find Italian speakers on all of her journeys. Anyway, I hope she had a great time in New York. I hope she ate bagels and knishes and hot dogs and BLTs and black-and-whites, visited the Met or MOMA, gazed over the city from atop the Empire State Building. I hope she walked through Little Italy and Nolita and the LES to see where the people who left her country landed. And I hope she learned, like I did, something about Italians in America.

Tante belle cose. Alla prossima—

Cheryl

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Book of the week:

(seen in the Tenement Museum bookstore and regrettably not purchased)

• Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America by Thomas J. Ferraro

P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order it from your local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!