Hester Street,
Lower East Side
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library
The Sophians left the oppression of Russia and like the hordes of Jewish emigres of the time, the family found shelter in New York’s Lower East Side tenements.
1900
The 1900 Census documents that the Sophian family lived at 252 Henry Street. All of the family lived together at the time, Morris, Delia, Meyer, Jennie, Rosie, Harry, Abraham, and the smallest, their American-born sister, Gussie. New York City Municipal Birth Records note that Gussie was born on August 13, 1893, to Tillie Pergamentshich and Morris Sophion, both from Russia. From research to date, we believe that they lived in this neighborhood from arrival in 1891, and did not escape until sometime between 1900 and 1905.
[Side note: We all have heard tales of immigrants’ names being changed by immigration record keepers who did not understand their foreign names. Regarding our research, we found many of the records relating to the Sophian and Felix families have the same or similar spelling. It is clear, however, that Harry and Abraham’s mother’s name was nearly inscrutable to many English-speaking recorders—whether census takers, and the record-makers for birth, marriage, and death certificates. In the census records, her first name was variously recorded as Dora, Delia. But in birth, marriage, and death records that indicate maiden family names, she has been recorded as Tillie Bergamishczig, Tillie Pargomeschuk, Tillie Porganischik, and Matilda Peggermat.]
They found housing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Jewish ghetto. It and other immigrant neighborhoods of lower Manhattan were legendary for their sordid, over-crowded, and disease-filled conditions. These apartments were so appalling, they spawned a cottage industry of social reformers who championed minimally healthful living conditions. The activists and government health workers found hundreds and thousands of apartments with no sanitary plumbing, no running water, soot-spewing coal stoves for cooking and heat that compromised breathing and blackened everything from walls to belongings, very long narrow apartments with little light or air ventilation excepting for narrow windows in the front room, and crowding so severe that as many as 12 adults shared sleeping space just 13 feet across. The conditions fostered disease, and produced an infant mortality rate of one in ten. It’s remarkable that Gussie was born and survived!
Jacob Riis in his seminal work, How the Other Half Lives, detailed the blight in the immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan. Lillian Wald famously founded what is considered the first social service organization, Henry Street Settlement. She built the settlement house just a couple blocks from where the Sophians lived.
Photos from the turn of the century—housed at the, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and the Library of Congress—document the conditions of the Lower East Side streets. The website, allthingsinteresting.com, has pages devoted to New-York-Immigrant-photos and to Tenement-New York-photos-facts. They provide a quick snapshot of the base poverty, dangerous and unhealthful living conditions.
Chicken Market, 55 Hester Street, Manhattan, February 11, 1937, Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991), Brooklyn Museum; Two women & man in front of outhouses; one woman getting water, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library; Man in kitchen—bedroom with dishes, clothes, irons (1904), Irma and Paul Milstein Division, New York Public Library; Life on the Lower East Side, corner Pitt and Rivington Streets, North, New York City, ca. 1915, Underwood & Underwood, Publishers, Library of Congress.