“Tenement conditions, 1840-1842 Second Avenue, c. 1910.”

The Yorkville neighborhood of the Upper East Side was home to working class immigrant communities from Europe, most notably Germany. In the first decade of the 1900s, and especially following the General Slocum steamboat disaster (which killed over 1000 community members), German immigrant families began to move from “Kleindeutschland” on the Lower East Side to Yorkville.