Page 96 - A History of the World in 25 Cities

Life in
Many immigrants to New York ended
up living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, creating communities such as ‘Little Italy’
and ‘Chinatown’. Poorer families often lived, ate and slept together in just one room, in a kind of high-rise apartment
block known as a tenement building.
During the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the southern states also came to New York City, looking for better job opportunities. Many went to live in Harlem, and the jazz and blues music they brought with them became wildly popular, so that the 1920s became known as the ‘Jazz Age’.
The 1920s were a time of excitement and glamour in New York – for some people at least. Businesses were making a lot of people very rich at a time when New York had more people living in it than any other city in the world.
Business owners had more money than ever before, and new inventions such as electric lifts and concrete and metal- framed buildings meant that more and more skyscrapers were built. Two buildings raced to the top of Manhattan’s skyline in the 1920s. The Chrysler building, finished in 1930, was the world’s tallest building . . . until the following year. The Empire State Building, which was completed in 1931, remained the world’s tallest building for 40 years!
By the 1930s, immigrants had been arriving in New York for
over 300 years. The first were the Dutch, who arrived in the 1600s when a tribe of 20,000
Native American Lenape people hunted and farmed
in the region. They were gradually forced out, first by the European
settlers and finally by the government. Many Lenape
people now live in Oklahoma.
92