Yorkville (Manhattan)

Neighborhood in Manhattan

Part of Yorkville on east 86th Street between Second and Third Avenues

Yorkville is a neighborhood in New York City on the Upper East Side of Manhattan .

location

Yorkville borders the East River to the east, Third Avenue to the west, and 96th Street to the north. The southern limit is 79th Street for most, 72nd Street for some, and 59th Street for some.

history

The area's development from a remote suburb to a central Manhattan neighborhood began in the 1860s. The elevated railway on Third Avenue, built in 1878, opened up the area and at the same time acted as a border between the petty-bourgeois and medium-sized Yorkville and the more upscale parts of the Upper East Side to the west and Central Park .

From 1880, Yorkville became the preferred residential area for immigrants of German origin . The district took on the role of a " small Germany " from the area around Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side . The trend towards emigration from the poorer housing conditions there to Yorkville was in full swing around 1900. The final impetus for establishing Yorkville as the center of German residents in Manhattan was the sinking of the steamer General Slocum on the East River in 1904 . Among the more than 1,000 dead were many members of the German-Lutheran St. Mark's Church, the social backbone of the old "Little Germany". Many survivors left the old quarter after the accident.

The center of Yorkville developed on 86th Street, one of the large two-lane east-west streets in Manhattan, which was nicknamed "German Broadway". German churches, theaters, clubs and restaurants gave the residents a piece of old home. In 1890, around 80,000 German-born New Yorkers lived in the blocks south of 86th Street. However, Yorkville was never as German as the area around Tompkins Square had been before. On the one hand, the resident population of Yorkville also included a large number of other nations, namely immigrants from Hungary and Bohemia, but also from Ireland. On the other hand, immigration from Germany fell sharply at the end of the 19th century, so there was no steady influx that made it possible for the Italian quarters of New York to maintain its own identity for a long time. After all, when the USA entered the war in 1917, the First World War meant that “German” was linked to the country and the language of the enemy, which meant that immigrants of German origin increased the pressure to assimilate . In addition, the general trend towards moving to the suburbs reduced the population in Manhattan; As early as 1930, most German families were living in the Queens district.

The emigration of German refugees during the Nazi era only brought some of its old character back to Yorkville temporarily. Many emigrants from Germany and Austria were looking for a place to stay in the area between Lexington Avenue and East End Aventue, roughly from 76th Street to 86th Street, and the neighborhood was nicknamed "Cincinnati" because it happened that acquaintances met each other had lost sight of the escape and emigration, met again with the surprised exclamation: “ Are you not the woman Schmid from Frankfurt ?!” The dismantling of the elevated railway on Third Avenue in the mid-1950s removed the “natural” border of the Quarters, multi-storey apartment buildings destroyed the closed look of the old block development.

German traces in Yorkville

76th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues

Today in Yorkville there is little reminiscent of a German quarter. Carl Schurz Park is located on the East River at 86th Street, named after one of the most successful German immigrants, the Rhenish "1848" revolutionary and later US Senator Carl Schurz . There are still a few shops and pubs that advertise German products and of which the Schaller & Weber delicatessen on Second Avenue is the best known. In the German Ev. Lutheran Zion St. Mark's Church on 84th Street is still held in German, as is the Catholic St. Joseph's, Yorkville, on 87th Street (where Pope Benedict XVI held an ecumenical prayer time during his visit to the United States in April 2008). The Steubenparade , held since 1957 as a festive procession of German-born Americans, leads from Fifth Avenue up to 86th Street and the German Goethe-Institut also had its New York office in the Goethe-Haus (New York) at 83rd Street until 2009 . The Kolping House of the Catholic Kolping Society New York is located on 88th Street .

Sons and Daughters of Yorkville

Henry Miller (1891–1980), American writer
Marx Brothers (American comedian troupe)

literature

Ric Burns / James Sanders / Lisa Ades: New York. The illustrated history from 1609 to today, Munich 2002
Agnes Bretting: "Little Germanies" in New York, in: G. Moltmann (Ed.), From Germany to America (Volume 5), Stuttgart 1992