"Scattered to the Four Winds" A Look at the Spatial Assimilation of Immigrant Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians into New Jersey Suburbs

Myles D Zhang, University of Michigan: College of Architecture / Urban Planning

At each historical moment, different immigrant groups arrived in the American City: 1840s Irish, 1870s Germans, Italians and Jews in the 1900s, and finally Black families during the Great Migration. Each, in turn, required different lengths of time to assimilate into mainstream American and suburban culture. Some groups, like immigrants of German and English ancestry, rapidly assimilated into urban culture. Within a generation, they migrated from dense tenement districts in the inner city to outlying and wealthier suburbs. Other groups like Italians and Jews found fewer pathways. Facing employment discrimination and more limited social mobility, the urban tenement enclaves they inhabited survived well into the 1950s. This paper uses business listings in the city directory over ten-year intervals to examine assimilation patterns of different immigrant groups. Before the 1910 census, geocoded census records are prohibitively difficult to create for Newark. The number of records and massive transformations of the urban form over a century make a building level spatial reconstruction difficult. Instead, this paper charts the spatial distribution of immigrant businesses based on addresses and names in city directories from the 1850s through 1950s. The distribution of Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish businesses (identified as ethnic by the family name of business owner) is a historical proxy in each decade to measure the spatial distribution of these respective communities, as well as the degree to which these ethnic-owned businesses were alternatively concentrated or distributed across the metro area. What kinds of ethnic neighborhoods overlapped in 20th-century Newark? What kinds of ethnic neighborhoods were more likely to be adjacent to, or interwoven between, neighborhoods of Black-owned businesses? How did the spatial distribution of ethnic businesses across the metro region mirror the spatial assimilation of these immigrants into mainstream American culture? Newark is examined as an "average" city in the American Northeast.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 107. Inequality and Segregation in US Cities