Little Germany

Little Germany, known in German as Kleindeutschland and Deutschländle and called Dutchtown by contemporary non-Germans, was a German immigrant neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. The neighborhood's ethnic cohesion began to decline in the late 19th century from the population dynamics of non-German immigrants settling in the area, and the loss of second-generation families to other German-American communities. The decline was exacerbated in 1904, when the General Slocum disaster wiped out the social core of the neighborhood. 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...