Sylvester Kränzchen

New York City, 
1887

New York was, after Berlin and Vienna, the third largest German-populated city in the world during the late nineteenth century. It was filled with German clubs, theaters, libraries, schools, churches, and synagogues, along with many restaurants, beer halls, and delicatessens. In fact, there were about six hundred German delicatessens in New York, most of them on the East Side.1 

Potatoes à la Santa Claus

New York City
Christmas, 1881

In 1874, half of all hotel residents in New York City were boarders; houses were simply too expensive for most people. However, it was at about this time that a new idea arrived from Paris called the “French flat” and it began to solve the housing problem. After the first one was built on Eighteenth Street, apartment buildings (as they came to be called) began popping up all over the city, especially on the outskirts of town above Forty-second Street.

God Bless America

Sun Luck
New York City, ca. 1956

One day in the mid-1950s, when celebrity publicist Gary Stevens walked into Sun Luck, a Chinese restaurant on West 49th Street, the manager asked him whether he knew a man sitting at a table who frequented the place about three times a week; was he perhaps a big Seventh Avenue manufacturer? Stevens looked over and recognized Irving Berlin having dinner with one of his daughters. Seeing that they were almost finished, Stevens walked over to say hello and related the manager’s theory. Berlin put his glasses down on the table and said, “Gary, that’s very funny. Most people think I look like an accountant.”1, 2

Liberty Pudding

Ellis Island, 
1923

...“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—Emma Lazarus, 1883

The Statue of Liberty, officially named “Liberty Enlightening the World,” was created to commemorate our alliance with France during the American Revolution. Over the years this iconic symbol of freedom also came to represent the willingness of the United States to open its doors to immigrants. There were a number of good reasons why this idea came about.