some myths & facts about European ethnic neighborhoods of the early 20th century
“Migration and industrial development also segregated the ‘new’ European immigrant groups, of course, but recent studies have made it clear that immigrant enclaves in the early twentieth century were in no way comparable to the black ghetto that formed in most northern cities by 1940. To be sure, certain neighborhoods could be identified as ‘Italian,’ ‘Polish,’ or ‘Jewish’; but these ethnic enclaves differed from black ghettos in three fundamental ways.
First, unlike black ghettos, immigrant enclaves were never homogeneous and always contained a wide variety of nationalities, even if they were publicly associated with a particular national origin group. In Chicago’s ‘Magyar district’ of 1901, for example, twenty-two different ethnic groups were present and only 37% of all family heads were Magyar (26% were Polish). Similarly, an 1893 color-coded block map of Chicago’s West Side prepared by the U.S. Department of Labor showed the location of European ethnic groups using eighteen separate colors. The result was a huge rainbow in which no block contained a single color. The average number of colors per block was eight, and four out of five lots within blocks were mixed. In none of the ‘Little Italys’ identified on the map was there an all-Italian block.
The myth of the immigrant ghetto was perpetuated by Ernest Burgess, a founder of the ‘Chicago School’ of urban sociology. In 1933 he published a well-known map showing the spatial location [of] Chicago’s various immigrant groups. On it, he identified specific German, Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Swedish, and Czech ‘ghettos.’ A closer examination of these data by Thomas Philpott, however, revealed that Burgess’s immigrant ‘ghettos’ were more fictive than real. The average number of nationalities per ghetto was twenty-two, ranging from twenty in ostensibly Italian and Czech neighborhoods to twenty-five in areas that were theoretically Irish, German, and Swedish. In none of these ‘ghettos’ did the ghettoized group constitute even a bare majority of the population, with the sole exception of Poles, who comprised 54% of their enclave. In areas that Burgess identified as being part of the black ghetto, however, blacks comprised 82% of the population.
A second crucial distinction is that most European ethnics did not live in immigrant ‘ghettos,’ as ethnically diluted as they were. Burgess’s Irish ghetto contained only 3% of Chicago’s Irish population, and only 50% of the city’s Italian[s] lived in the ‘Little Italys’ he identified. Only among Poles did a majority, 61%, live in neighborhoods that were identified as being part of the Polish enclave. In contrast, 93% of Chicago’s black population lived within the black ghetto....
The last difference between immigrant enclaves and black ghettos is that whereas ghettos became a permanent fixture of black residential life, ethnic enclaves proved to be a fleeting, transitory stage in the process of immigrant assimilation. The degree of segregation and spatial isolation among European ethnic groups fell steadily after 1910, as native-born children of immigrants experienced less segregation than their parents and as spatial isolation decreased progressively with socioeconomic advancement. For European immigrants, enclaves were places of absorption, adaptation, and adjustment to American society. They served as springboards for broader mobility in society, whereas blacks were trapped behind an increasingly impermeable color line.” - from American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton