Alphabet City, Manhattan - Early History

Early History

Until the early 19th century, much of what is now Alphabet City was an extensive salt marsh, a type of wetland that was part of the East River ecosystem. The wetland was drained, and a patch of the river bed reclaimed, by real estate developers in the early 19th century.

Like many other neighborhoods on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Alphabet City became home to a succession of immigrant groups over the years. By the 1840s and 1850s, much of present-day Alphabet City had become known as "Kleindeutschland" or "Little Germany"; in the mid-19th century, many claimed New York to be the third-largest German-speaking city in the world after Berlin and Vienna, with most of those German speakers residing in and around Alphabet City. Moreover, Kleindeutschland is considered to have been the second substantial non-Anglophone urban ethnic enclave in United States history, after Philadelphia's Germantown.

By the 1880s, most Germans were moving out of Kleindeutschland and relocating Uptown, to the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side. Eastern Europeans replaced Germans as the dominant ethnic group in Alphabet City during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, the area was considered part of the Lower East Side, and it became home to Eastern European Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants. It consisted of tenement housing with no running water, and the primary bathing location for residents in the northern half of the area was the Asser Levy bath house located on 23rd Street and Avenue C, north of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. During this time, it was also the red light district of Manhattan and one of the worst slums in the city.