City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

1 Neighborhood Networks

11 In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American visitors to New York knew to stop by Chatham Street, a commercial district just to the northeast of City Hall, at the base of the Bowery. So characteristic of New York with its commercial hustle and bustle, Chatham Street’s ramshackle storefronts and frenzied merchants almost begged for inclusion in travel accounts . In their colorful depictions, pants and shirts hanging off signs and rustling in the wind seemed designed to ensnare unwary passersby; once so detained, the hapless marks were susceptible to the “gentle” yet persistent enticements of “natty, blackbearded, fiercely mustached” Jewish merchants, who had a beguiling way of selling a fellow clothes that did not fit. The accounts’ descriptions of the flapping layers of fabric, the waist-length beards, and the devious mannerisms not so subtly marked these businessmen as ethically and even racially suspect. One observer declared that a “Yankee shopkeeper” would have no hope of succeeding on Chatham Street; his presence was a “physical impossibility.” Yet another observer suggested that P. T. Barnum create a museum or circus out of the activity there. Jewish writers, too, often preferred to dissociate themselves from the area; Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s memoirs summarily dismissed Jewish Chatham as “a disgrace.”1 Indeed, Wise’s distaste for Chatham Street was indicative of his dislike of New York in general when he arrived in 1846 from Radnitz, Bohemia. Wise surveyed Broadway all the way to Canal Street, reporting, “The whole city appeared to me like a large shop where every one buys or sells, cheats or is cheated. I had never before seen a city so bare of all art and of every trace of good taste; likewise I had never witnessed anywhere such rushing, C H A P T E R 1 Neighborhood Networks 12 ■ e m e r g i n g m e t r o p o l i s hurrying, chasing, running.”2 Chatham Street thus exemplified a business current that pulsed through all of Manhattan. A contemporary observer, Cornelius Mathews, disparaged Chatham commerce but suggested that this very competitive spirit was after all part and parcel of New York’s history and future and that the terrain itself inspired a competitive spirit among its inhabitants: “This street, reader, was in the old times of this Island, a warpath of Manhattan Indians to the west; civilization hath not affected it greatly. The old red men scalped their enemies, the Chatham Clo’men skin theirs. So little difference have two-hundred years in changing the character of mankind!”3 Whether or not one accepts Mathews’s suggestion that Chatham Street’s soil fostered this fierce competitive drive, his account leaves no doubt that Jews’ commercial ambitions had made them a highly visible part of New York life. While Cornelius Mathews returned home and Isaac Mayer Wise journeyed on to Albany and then Cincinnati, those who were most engaged with the Chatham Square street scene remained to live and work there. The clothing business was not a literary curiosity for them but rather the means through which they could stitch together a new life in America. From the mid-1820s to the 1880s, the area around Chatham Street, especially the south side, remained a touchstone for immigrant Jews arriving in New York. There they found housing, work, and community. Although many of these Jews moved on to other neighborhoods to the east and north within a few years, a continuous influx of immigrants maintained a constant Jewish presence. Those who settled learned to navigate the neighborhood. Jewish residents of Chatham Street interacted with its diverse populations yet also created sites of Jewish interest. The twists and turns of Mott, Mulberry, and Orange Streets introduced them to a vast array of New Yorkers—Irish carpenters, African American laborers, and German brewers—as well as to Henry L. Goldberg, who in 1852 is listed in the New York City directory as a “scriber of the Pentateuchs” at 63 Mott Street. Unflustered by flapping merchandise or peddlers’ entreaties, Jewish immigrants soon learned that the handsome three-story New York Dispensary on the corner of Centre and White not only offered medical attention but also housed temporarily several congregations, including Shearith Israel, Anshe Chesed, Shaarey Zedek, and Beth Israel.4 A Bayard Street tenement’s staircase led to Gittel Natelson, who sold wigs to married Jewish women and arranged matches for those yet unmarried.5 Jews discovered that a saloon’s...