(1885) with inscription '''' ("Unity strengthens") designed by William C. Frohne Beginning in the 1840s, large numbers of
German immigrants entering the
United States provided a constant population influx for Little Germany. In the 1850s alone, 800,000 Germans passed through New York. By 1855 New York had the third largest German population of any city in the world, outranked only by
Berlin and
Vienna. The German immigrants differed from others in that they usually were educated and had marketable skills in crafts. More than half of the era's
bakers and
cabinet makers were Germans or of German origin, and many Germans also worked in the construction business. Educated Germans such as Joseph Wedemeyer,
Oswald Ottendorfer and
Friedrich Sorge were important players in the creation and growth of
trade unions, and many Germans and their
Vereine (German American clubs) were also often politically active. Oswald Ottendorfer who was the owner-editor of the
Staats-Zeitung, New York's largest German-language newspaper, was among the wealthiest and most socially prominent German-Americans in the city. He also became the undisputed leader of the newly important German Democracy, which would help
Fernando Wood recapture the mayor's office in 1861 and elect
Godfrey Gunther as mayor in 1863. At the time, Germans tended to cluster more than other immigrants, such as the Irish, and in fact those from particular German states preferred to live together. This choice of living in wards with those from the same region was perhaps the most distinct and overlooked feature of . For instance the
Prussians, who by 1880 accounted for nearly one-third of the city's German-born population, were most heavily concentrated in the city's Tenth Ward. Germans from
Hessen-Nassau tended to live in the Thirteenth Ward in the 1860s and in the ensuing decades moved northward to the borders of the Eleventh and Seventeenth Wards. Germans from
Baden by the 1880s tended to favor living in the Thirteenth Ward, and
Württembergers began by the 1860s to migrate northward into the Seventeenth Ward. The
Bavarians (including Palatines from the
Palatinate region of western Germany on the
Rhine River, which was subject to the King of Bavaria), the largest group of German immigrants in the city by 1860, were distributed evenly in each German ward except the Prussian Tenth. Aside from the small group of
Hanoverians, who had a strong sense of self-segregation forming their own "Little Hanover" in the Thirteenth Ward, the Bavarians displayed the strongest regional bias, mainly toward Prussians: at all times the most distinctive characteristic of their settlement pattern remained that they would be found wherever the Prussians were fewest. In 1845, Little Germany was already the largest German-American neighborhood in New York; by 1855, its German population had more than quadrupled, displacing the American-born workers who had first moved into the neighborhood's new housing, and at the beginning of the 20th century, it was home to almost 50,000 people. From a core in the riverside 11th Ward, it expanded to encompass most of the 10th, 13th, and 17th Wards, the same area that later became known as the Jewish Lower East Side.
Tompkins Square Park, in what is now known as
Alphabet City, was an important public space that the Germans called the
Weisse Garten. There were
beer gardens, sport clubs,
libraries,
choirs, shooting clubs, German theatres, German schools, German churches, and German synagogues. A large number of factories and small workshops operated in the neighborhood, initially in the interiors of blocks, reached by alleyways. There were major commercial streets including department stores. Stanley Nadel quotes a description of the neighborhood at its peak in the 1870s: ==
General Slocum disaster==