This lesson discusses chain migration and the formation of ethnic neighborhoods, using NYC’s first large ethnic neighborhood, Kleindeutschland, as an example. Before the introduction of mass transit, people lived close to the places where they worked. German immigrants, many of them skilled laborers, settled close to the city’s manufacturing district near the East River, below 14^th Street. Students will use directional skills to draw the boundaries of the neighborhood on the map provided. The rise and fall of Kleindeutschland as a coherent ethnic neighborhood shows how City neighborhoods form, grow and change over time. The piano puzzle will familiarize students with some of the German words that have been absorbed into our daily language and how immigration plays a role in cultural change.

The 1862 photograph on the second page shows the family about ten years after the second letter was written. The Steinway family, including Henry and Charles and their wives, are standing in front of their homes near their large new factory. Students are asked to judge whether they think it was worth it for them to come to this country. This is an exercise in seeing what a photograph can tell us about people in a particular time and place. What objects in the picture might serve as symbols of their social and economic status 150 years ago? Students should also consider whether economic success is necessarily a proper indicator of whether or not an emigrant made the right decision to leave, considering such factors as access to education and freedom from oppression. In 1865, three years after the picture was taken, Charles died of typhoid fever and Henry died of tuberculosis. This can serve as a springboard for the discussion of 19^th century health care before the discovery of germ theory and inventions of modern medicine, such as x-rays and antibiotics. The lesson ends with an exercise in letter writing, inviting students to play the role of an immigrant writing to a relative back home.