Ethnic-Religious Geography: Where the Communities Actually Were

The Map Was Stable

Across the thirteen years from 1989 to 2001, most of the ethnic-religious map of New York City did not move. Communities that had cohered in the postwar decades held their blocks through the period with a fidelity that the city’s reputation for reinvention obscured. Individual families moved out; the second generation dispersed to the suburbs; demographic edges softened at the margins. But the institutional anchors — the synagogues and day schools, the mosques and churches, the butchers and bakeries, the ethnic press in a dozen languages — stayed where they had been built, because institutions require investment and investment produces inertia. Through the 1990s, for most of the communities on this map, the pressure to leave was not yet overwhelming.¹

The Hasidic belt running through Brooklyn was the most visually distinct portion of this stable geography. Lubavitcher Hasidim in Crown Heights, west of Kingston Avenue, were headquartered at 770 Eastern Parkway — the brick Tudor-Gothic building that served as the global center of Chabad-Lubavitch and drew pilgrims, emissaries, and visitors from every country where the movement had planted itself. To the north and west, in South Williamsburg south of Division Avenue, the Satmar were the dominant community; their relationship to the Lubavitchers was one of theological rivalry conducted across a shared geography, the two great factions of postwar Hasidism maintaining their distinct institutional lives within a few miles of each other. In Borough Park and Midwood, the Bobover, Belzer, Ger, Vizhnitz, and smaller courts had built their own schools, butchers, and prayer houses, the distinctions between them invisible to outsiders and load-bearing to everyone inside. On Shabbos and high holidays, the shtreimel and bekishe — the wide fur hat and long black satin coat of the married Hasidic man — were the period’s most legible religious-clothing signature in the outer-borough street picture.

The Modern Orthodox map was less dramatic and more dispersed. Lincoln Square Synagogue on Amsterdam Avenue and the Jewish Center on West 86th Street anchored the Upper West Side; Riverdale in the Bronx held a second concentration; Kew Gardens Hills in Queens a third; parts of Flatbush and Midwood overlapped with the Hasidic belt to the south. In the office — on the editorial floors of magazines, in the law firms and accounting practices — the Modern Orthodox were present in the small way: kippot on men, hair-coverings on married women, otherwise dressed for the office. The day school calendar governed their leave requests.

The Reform and secular Jewish communities of Manhattan — the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Park Slope — were the cultural and demographic anchor of postwar Jewish New York, and by this period largely indistinguishable on the street from any other secular New Yorker. The magazine’s editorial floor drew from this community more heavily than from any other.

Caribbean Brooklyn was one of the stable map’s largest sectors. West Indian communities — Trinidadian, Jamaican, Guyanese, Barbadian — had built their institutional infrastructure east of Utica Avenue in Crown Heights, and throughout East Flatbush, Flatbush, and Canarsie, since the 1960s. Haitian Flatbush, by the late 1980s the largest Haitian community in the United States, extended east into Cambria Heights and Queens Village. The annual West Indian American Day Carnival on Eastern Parkway — Labor Day Monday, roughly two million people — was the visible annual marker of communities that otherwise conducted their lives below the level of the mainstream press.²

The Puerto Rican map held at its anchors. East Harlem — El Barrio — and the South Bronx (Mott Haven, Hunts Point, Longwood) were the post-1950s cultural centers, their churches and social clubs and bodegas the institutional fabric of a community that had arrived through internal migration rather than the 1965 reform. The Puerto Rican Day Parade up Fifth Avenue each June was the second great annual street event, smaller than the West Indian Carnival but moving through the commercial center of the city.

West 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues — Koreatown — operated in the compressed vertical mode: restaurants, karaoke, travel agencies stacked on multiple floors of narrow commercial buildings where the ground floor was retail and the upper floors were everything else. The residential Korean community was in Flushing, Bayside, and Fort Lee; 32nd Street was a working block, not a neighborhood. The Indian commercial strip around 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, and the South Indian and Pakistani cluster on Lexington between 27th and 30th — Curry Hill — anchored larger residential communities that spread through the surrounding blocks.

Stability across thirteen years is itself the argument. The map that an attentive walker would have read in 2001 was not identical to the map of 1989, but it was closer to identical than the city’s reputation for relentless transformation would suggest. Two corners of the map enlarged into national-scale capitals — Brighton Beach and Washington Heights. One corridor assembled itself largely from new arrivals — 116th Street. The rest held.

What Was New

The Soviet Jewish wave was the decade’s most consequential single-community arrival. Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay had been Jewish for a generation before the first post-Soviet immigrants arrived, but the community that formed in the early 1990s was distinct in language, cultural memory, and geographic density from anything the neighborhood had previously seen. Brighton Beach was the largest Soviet-Jewish concentration outside the former Soviet Union — the Lautenberg Amendment arrivals accelerated sharply after the 1989 collapse, and once the community reached critical mass on the avenue, chain migration did the rest.³ By mid-decade Brighton Beach was operating in two scripts, Cyrillic above the B/Q elevated tracks and Latin on the pharmacy and bakery signage below, and the boardwalk in summer was dense with the Russian-speaking elderly. A second post-Soviet cluster formed in Forest Hills and Rego Park, where Bukharian Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan built their own synagogues and jewelry trade.

The West African corridor along 116th Street was assembled on a different architecture: not a single arriving nationality but a Sufi trade network. The Mouride brotherhood — a Sufi Muslim order founded in Senegal in 1883 by Cheikh Amadou Bamba, with its annual Magal pilgrimage centered on Touba — organized commercial networks that extended from Dakar to Harlem through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Senegalese, Malian, Ivorian, and Guinean arrivals concentrated along 116th Street between Lenox Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, anchored by Mouride-network trade and by the Masjid Aqsa at 130 West 113th Street as the religious center of the corridor. In 1994, the city closed the African vendor market that had operated on 125th Street and relocated it to a fenced lot at 116th and Fifth Avenue; the closure was contested and the relocation imperfect, but it had the effect of formalizing the corridor, concentrating the commercial life of the community into a single block where it became visible from the street as a distinct geography.⁴

The Fujianese arrivals represented the third distinct pattern of the decade: the same destination block, a different community. East Broadway and the lower Bowery had been Chinese for a century — the southern extension of Chinatown’s commercial spine. But the community arriving along East Broadway from the late 1980s onward was not Cantonese. It was Fujianese: from the coastal counties of Fujian Province, speaking Fuzhounese rather than Cantonese, organized by different tongs and clan associations, carrying different regional foods and different religious practices. The Golden Venture, a freighter run aground at Rockaway Beach in June 1993 with nearly three hundred Fujianese migrants aboard who had paid snakehead-network fees for the passage, was the moment the scale of this migration became visible from Midtown. But it had been underway for years before the ship ran aground, and it continued for years after.⁵

The three waves arrived on three different pathways into three quite specific corridors. Brighton Beach Avenue had been Jewish for a generation; 116th had been a Black Muslim corridor since Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 sited itself at 102 West 116th in the 1950s; East Broadway had been Chinese for a century. The new arrivals settled where the prior infrastructure had made space. The blocks were not assigned by the city; they were claimed by the logic of chain migration and the availability of commercial real estate that the prior community had already organized.

What Was Thinning

Manhattan’s Little Italy had completed most of its thinning before 1989. By the late 1990s, the Italian-American presence on Mulberry Street was concentrated into a few blocks between Canal and Broome — the Feast of San Gennaro the principal annual event, the restaurant-and-bakery strip now operating primarily as a tourist attraction. The aging-and-out-migration to Staten Island and New Jersey that had been underway for two decades was complete; the storefront names remained Italian, but the residents behind them had mostly left.

Hell’s Kitchen, the stretch of the West Side between 34th and 59th from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson, had been Irish-American working class through the postwar decades — the Westies’ territory in the 1970s and early 1980s, the church of St. Raphael and the union halls and the flat-roofed bars on Tenth Avenue. By 1989 it was already thinning under commercial pressure and rising rents; by 2001 the Irish presence was residual. The newer Irish arrivals — visa-lottery immigrants and undocumented workers arriving through the mid-1980s and into the 1990s — were routing instead to Woodside and Sunnyside in Queens, where the housing stock was cheaper and the social infrastructure for the new wave was being built. The older Irish-American community in Bay Ridge and Inwood held but did not grow.

Polish Greenpoint was the sharpest example of a community under pressure from the late 1990s onward. The largest Polish neighborhood in the United States in 1989 — the Polish bakeries and butchers along Manhattan Avenue, the church of St. Stanislaus Kostka on Driggs Avenue, the Polish-language press, the social clubs of the immigrant and second-generation communities — had absorbed successive waves of Solidarity-era and post-1989 Polish arrivals and maintained its institutional density through the early 1990s. By the late 1990s, the Williamsburg Northside was displacing eastward into Greenpoint under the pressure of rents that the artists-and-then-money wave had pushed north along the waterfront. The displacement was slow and was barely visible in the institutional map by 2001; the bakeries were still there, the church was still full. But the rents along Manhattan Avenue were already moving.

The eastward shift of Chinatown was a succession rather than a displacement — the two communities living on adjacent blocks, each organizing its own institutions, each barely legible to the other. The historic Cantonese center on Mott, Mulberry, Pell, Bayard, and Doyers held its language and its civic associations and its tongs through the decade; the merchants on Mott Street who had been there since the 1940s were still there in 2001. East Broadway and the lower Bowery, a few blocks east, had by mid-decade completed a transformation: Fuzhounese rather than Cantonese was the language of the sidewalk, the dialect spoken on the bus, the language on the restaurant menus. Flushing, meanwhile, had grown into a third Chinese commercial center of a different character — Mandarin and Taiwanese-anchored, with Northern Chinese arrivals layered in by mid-decade, operating at a scale that by 2001 rivaled the Mott Street corridor in commercial activity and exceeded it in residential population. A third Chinatown was assembling at Sunset Park in Brooklyn — working-class Cantonese and Fujianese both, built on the bones of the Norwegian and Puerto Rican communities that had preceded it.

Loisaida — Alphabet City’s Puerto Rican corridor — contracted throughout the period under the double pressure of rising rents and the East Village’s arts-and-clubs displacement. The social clubs and casita gardens and bodegas that marked the community’s presence survived; by 2001 they were ringed by a population that was younger, whiter, and had arrived within the decade. Los Sures, the Williamsburg Southside, was under comparable pressure from the late 1990s as the artists-and-then-money movement pushed south from the Northside. In both cases the institutional fabric outlasted the demographics; the community shrank from the edges inward.

The pattern across all the thinning communities was structural. The communities losing ground were almost all European in origin — Italian, Irish, Polish — or were the products of the internal postwar Puerto Rican migration rather than the post-1965 immigration reform. The communities arriving or holding were almost all non-European. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which had eliminated the national-origin quotas that had governed American immigration since 1924, had been compounding its demographic effects for thirty-five years, and by 2001 those effects were visible on the map of the city’s ethnic-religious geography as clearly as they were anywhere in the United States.⁶

Where the Map Grew

Washington Heights north of 155th Street was the most dramatic single-neighborhood transformation of the period. By 1990 it was already the largest Dominican neighborhood in the United States — a designation that reflected both the scale of Dominican immigration through the 1980s and the specific housing stock of the Heights: the large prewar apartment buildings with reasonable rents, the proximity to the George Washington Bridge for the livery-cab economy, the concentration of parish churches and social clubs that the prior Irish and Jewish communities had built and which the Dominican community had absorbed.⁷ Through the decade the neighborhood’s Dominican identity deepened: the bodegas and colmados, the livery bases on the side streets, the remittance storefronts and the public phones in the back of the corner store, the Spanish-language mass at the Church of the Incarnation. The neighborhood operated in Spanish first across the period; English was the language of the school and the police precinct, not of the street. By 2001 Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan, had been drawn into the same orbit, and secondary Dominican concentrations in Corona, the South Bronx, and Bushwick were large enough to have their own institutional infrastructure rather than relying on Washington Heights as a center.⁸

Each of the growth poles shared a structural characteristic that distinguished them from the stable cores. The stable cores were communities where the immigrant language was institutional — the synagogue, the day school, the ethnic newspaper — but where the street outside was in English by 2001. In Washington Heights and in Flushing, the immigrant language was the language of public space itself: the unmarked language, the language a child heard in the bodega before she heard English in kindergarten, the language on the hand-lettered specials board in the window of the colmado. This was a different kind of presence in the city. It was not preservation. It was a first language.

Also drawn on: Sue Fishkoff, The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch, Schocken Books, 2003.