by Ed O'Donnell
Life in Kleindeutschland is almost the same as in the Old Country….There is not a single business which is not run by Germans. Not only the shoemakers, tailors, barbers, physicians, grocers, and innkeepers are German, but the pastors and priests as well. There is even a German lending library where one can get all kinds of German books. The resident of Kleindeutschland need not even know English in order to make a living, which is a considerable attraction to the immigrant.
It was in this setting that St. Mark’s was established in late 1847. Its first pastor, Rev. August H. M. Held, rented a new but unoccupied church building on East Sixth Street beginning in the summer of 1848. The congregation grew steadily in number, with Held baptizing 525 babies and marrying 300 couples in 1858 alone. The parish also opened a school and established a burial ground out in Queens. In 1857, as a sign of increased numbers and the rising prosperity of the German community, the congre gation purchased the church for eight thousand dollars, making the last mortgage payment fourteen years later in 1871. In that same year, Rev. Hermann Raegener took over for Reverend Held. Under his leadership, St. Mark’s grew to become one of the leading churches in Little Germany.
By 1880, with Raegener’s health beginning to wane, the congregation agreed to hire Haas as its first assistant pastor. Haas adapted well to his new surroundings and responsibilities. At first he boarded at the house of Reverend Raegener and family at 110 East Seventh Street. But in 1882, only two years after his arrival and still rather young at twenty-eight years old, Haas was named pastor of St. Mark’s. The promotion, and his subsequent marriage to Anna Hansen, an immigrant from Holland, prompted him to move one block east to 64 East Seventh Street. Eventually they were joined by Anna’s mother, Elizabeth Hansen, and George’s sister, Emma, an organist at St. Mark’s. George and Anna had two children: George, born in 1888, and Gertrude, born in 1892.
Even before the arrival of Haas, St. Mark’s had become far more than a mere gathering place for weekly religious services. Like most mid- nineteenth-century churches of all denominations, especially those servicing poor immigrant communities, St. Mark’s developed into an all-purpose provider of programs and services for its members.
As pastor, Haas continued this effort and expanded it, a job made easier by the growing prosperity of Little Germany’s residents. By the 1890s, St. Mark’s was sponsoring religious societies like the Luther League, choral groups, Bible study classes for adults, and Sunday school for the children. The church also sponsored the Young Men’s Beneficiary Association, commonly known as a “burial society,” which collected monthly fees and provided members with death benefits and covered funeral expenses. The Ladies Aid Society, first established in 1868, raised money for the poor of the church and local community. The church’s outreach efforts became so vast and multifaceted, it eventually established a newsletter called the St. Mark’s Monthly to keep members apprised. Through it all, St. Mark’s never lost sight of its religious mission. By the turn of the century it had been the scene of some 20,000 baptisms, 9,500 marriages, and 4,000 confirmations.
The congregation’s rising prosperity also enabled it to upgrade their humble edifice. By the mid-1890s they’d raised $5,000 to add a council room to the church and install memorial windows, $2,500 to purchase an uptown church on East 71st Street in Yorkville, $22,000 for a parsonage, and $5,000 for a new organ. By the time of its jubilee celebration in 1897, St. Mark’s was no longer a poor immigrant congregation, but rather a well- established German-American one. That it was more properly considered German-American rather than German was made clear in a telling decision in 1893 to offer services in English on Sunday evenings.
It was through this combined ministration to the spiritual, emotional, social, and practical needs of its members that Haas made St. Mark’s a central fixture in the lives of his congregation. It bound people together through culture, faith, and experience and helped them negotiate the difficult adjustment from Old World to New and to withstand the stresses and strains of fast-paced urban life.
But the very prosperity that enabled St. Mark’s to flourish financially and to offer more and more services to its congregation ultimately hurt the parish. Simply put, despite the emotional and cultural ties people had to Little Germany and St. Mark’s, the lure of a better life uptown or in Brooklyn, one with steam heat and elevators, not to mention good schools and safer, cleaner streets, and shortened commutes, beckoned ceaselessly. It was a force akin to the one that had compelled them or their parents to leave Germany for the United States years earlier and involved a similar, bitter choice between leaving the familiar and traditional for the new and more comfortable. For many German families the choice was made easier by the fact that the emerging neighborhood of Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was nearly as German in character as Little Germany. The exodus of families that became noticeable in the 1880s quickened in the 1890s and showed no signs of abatement in 1904.
George Haas proved the ideal pastor for a church undergoing this slow hemorrhage of its membership in the midst of a disintegrating larger German enclave. He possessed all the administrative, spiritual, and oratorical skills necessary to sustain his parish in these difficult times. Yet the greatest thing he provided his people amid all this change was a vivid symbol of stability. Hass had arrived in 1880, at precisely the moment the exodus from Little Germany began; twenty-four years later he was still there. In fact, Haas had barely moved at all in his tenure at St. Mark’s. His only two addresses since he moved to New York, 110 East Seventh Street and 64 East Seventh Street, were separated by less than a thousand yards. His sole place of work, St. Mark’s, was but one block away at 323 East Sixth Street.
Haas’s devotion and loyalty to his parish was not for lack of options. In fact, his reputation as a scholar, administrator, and eloquent homilist had brought him a constant flow of offers of higher salary and lighter duties from uptown churches, not to mention letters from seminaries and colleges seeking a professor of German and theology. Just days earlier, Haas had been offered a position on the faculty at Wagner College in Rochester. But to this and many other offers Hass gave the same reply. No, thanks—he was quite happy just where he was. A dutiful shepherd, he refused to abandon his flock—at least until it abandoned him first. And who knew? There was always the possibility that German immigration might pick up once again, filling the old neighborhood and its churches with a new generation of German residents in need of experienced leadership and guidance. Reverend George C. F. Haas, it seemed, would stay so long as he was needed.
That Haas felt at home and content in his small ethnic parish was due not merely to his even temperament and strong faith. There was another, larger factor at work. For Americans of German ancestry had, by 1904, finally come to feel at home in America. For evidence, one needed only look to an event held the previous day.
Monday, June 13, had seen the streets of Little Germany filled with thousands of spectators on hand to observe the annual Schuetzen Bund parade. The Schuetzen Bund was a German-American shooting club that originated in Germany. In America it served as both a fraternal society and a club for shooting enthusiasts. They held local shooting contests (schuetzenfests) and social events throughout the year and frequently marched in Fourth of July parades and the like. But once a year in June the Schuetzen Bund held a weeklong national schuetzenfest that attracted marksmen from Schuetzen Bunds all over the nation. The actual shooting contests took place in Schuetzen Park in Union, New Jersey, but the grand parade was held in New York.
This year’s Schuetzen Bund parade and scheutzenfest were certainly the most impressive yet. Some three thousand marksmen “in their many brilliant uniforms,” according to one press account, marched in the parade from St. Mark’s Place, through the streets in and around Little Germany, to Union Square. At their head was a force of mounted trumpeters and kettle drummers in traditional German costumes. It wasn’t nearly as large an exhibition of ethnic pride as the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, but it no
netheless commanded the attention and respect of many New Yorkers beyond Little Germany, including Mayor McClellan, who sat on the reviewing stand at Union Square. Baron Speck von Sternburg, the German ambassador, was due to arrive on Thursday to observe the shooting contest for the grand prize.
That thousands of German immigrants and German-Americans could parade through the streets of New York bearing rifles and draw only crowds of admirers—including the mayor—indicated just how far Reverend Haas and his fellow Germans had come in America. Not many years earlier such displays of martial prowess and ethnic chauvinism would have been cause for alarm, for native-born Americans had long regarded Germans, as they did all immigrant groups, with suspicion and fear. Germans were denounced for, among other things, their refusal to learn English, their fondness for beer, and their devotion to socialism. But in 1904, Americans of German heritage enjoyed a rising tide of pro-German sentiment that seemed to portend the final eradication of centuries of anti-German prejudice.
Indeed, turn-of-the-century America was nothing short of infatuated with German culture. Most American colleges mandated the study of the German language, the literary works of Goethe, and the philosophical treatises of Kant, while orchestras across the country provided season after season of programs devoted to Beethoven, Brahms, Handel, Mozart, and Strauss. Upper-crust Americans were especially taken with the works of Wagner. The staging of his Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera House in January 1904 brought sellout crowds and effusive praise from reviewers. “It is in every way,” wrote the Times’s reviewer, “the most remarkable production that has ever been made upon the lyric stage in this country.”
Having been born in 1854, the year of the anti-immigrant Know- Nothing insurgency, Reverend Haas was particularly aware of how far he and his fellow Germans had come in America. They had been coming to the shores of America for centuries, but now they could say they finally had arrived. After decades of struggle and uncertainty, they now enjoyed both prosperity and respect. Americans had come not just to tolerate German culture but to revere it. Nothing, it seemed, absolutely nothing, could set them back.
THE PROGRAM
Despite the pressures to leave Little Germany, the pull of the old neighborhood, especially St. Mark’s, remained strong. Many former residents who’d moved to Brooklyn, Yorkville, or New Jersey jumped at every opportunity to come back, whether for a wedding, the scheutzenfest, or some other special occasion.
Without question, by 1904 one event loomed above all others as the single best excuse for returning to St. Mark’s—the annual excursion held to celebrate the completion of the Sunday school year. Reverend Haas had originated the idea back in 1888 when he was still relatively new to his job as pastor. Like so many of his innovations, the idea of celebrating the close of the Sunday school year with a daylong outing proved immensely popular with his parishioners. At first the event was little more than a large picnic in a nearby park. But over time it developed into a substantial affair involving a chartered steamboat and an entire day at a recreation ground along the banks of Long Island or the Hudson River. As the excursion evolved from an innovation to a beloved tradition, it became for many participants a kind of annual celebration of St. Mark’s and its resiliency over the decades. Not surprisingly, given the number of people who moved away each year, it also became a kind of annual reunion of St. Mark’s families past and present.
This year’s excursion—the seventeenth annual—would be the biggest ever. Mary Abendschein had seen to that. Like many an unmarried woman in her mid-thirties, Mary spent much of her free time involved in church activities. Back in early 1904 she’d been named chairwoman of the excursion committee, and she’d spent the better part of five months working tirelessly to ensure yet another successful event.
Apart from handling all manner of small details, Mary’s ultimate responsibility was fundraising. Even if they sold every available seat on the steamboat, the revenue would not come close to covering all the expenses. So it fell to Mary to raise several hundred dollars in donations from local businesses to cover the difference between ticket receipts and the total cost of the excursion. To encourage donations, she produced a handsome program for the event that included the day’s schedule of events and pages of advertisements from sponsoring businesses.
Some proprietors no doubt saw the opportunity to advertise in the excursion program as a way to reach potential customers. For most, however, it was an expression of support and thanks to St. Mark’s and its pastor, Reverend Haas. In many ways it was a recognition of the fact that they shared a common destiny. So long as St. Mark’s persisted, their shops and offices would continue to have customers and clients.
So beginning in April, as the weather began to warm up, Mary began her canvass of Little Germany. It was considerably smaller in 1904 compared to its heyday in the 1880s when Reverend Haas first arrived. A neighborhood that had once stretched from Division Street north to 14th Street and from the Bowery to the East River—an area of some four hundred blocks—had shrunk to a one-hundred-block area north-south from Houston to 14th Streets and east of Second Avenue to the East River. From a population high of 60,000 Germans in 1880, Little Germany now held fewer than 12,000. Crowding in on all sides were the newest immigrants, mainly Italians and Eastern European Jews.
This, of course, made Mary’s job easier in that she had less ground to cover. More important, she had several things going for her when she ap proached each merchant. Unlike a typical door-to-door solicitor, most of them knew her from the neighborhood or church. Certainly they all knew Reverend Haas, the man whose parish she represented. Soliciting sponsors for the annual trip would be, in effect, a referendum on his leadership, and the results surprised no one.
In the weeks leading up to the actual outing, the indefatigable Mary Abendschein made the rounds, first securing commitments, then verifying ad copy, and finally collecting payment and going over final page proofs. By early June it was abundantly clear that her efforts had not been in vain. The program was the biggest yet, running twenty pages and including more than one hundred ads from saloon owner Peter J. Fickbohm at 91 Avenue D, to undertaker Philip Wagner on Second Avenue, to delicatessen owner Eugene Ansel of 103 East Fourth Street. Countless more businesses, unable to afford an ad in the program, did their part by purchasing tickets that they planned to hand out to favored customers, or perhaps to a family in the neighborhood unable to afford the cost.
By June 14, the seventeenth annual St. Mark’s excursion was now fully planned and fully funded. The picnic grounds of Locust Grove on Long Island Sound were reserved as well as the “commodious steamer,” according to the program, General Slocum, chartered at a cost of $350. Professor George Maurer and his band had been hired and a program of German and American favorites agreed upon. All the necessary supplies of food and drink had been ordered and volunteers found to deliver them to the steamer the evening before the event. Two off-duty New York City policemen had been hired to accompany the throng to ensure everyone’s safety.
Only one worry remained. What if it rained? That would be a disaster.
ESCAPE
Mary Abendschein’s success in selling ads and more than fifteen hundred tickets for the St. Mark’s excursion reflected not only the devotion of the congregants to their parish, but also their desire to get away. For as long as anyone could remember, New Yorkers were of two minds when it came to their city. On the one hand, they loved it as a place of splendor, wonder, and optimism. Immigrants thousands of miles away heard its siren call and sacrificed everything to get there. Entrepreneurs came from the hinterland and abroad to tap into its phenomenal business opportunities. Entertainers flocked to its stages with the understanding that success in New York meant fame and fortune. Still others were attracted by its fast pace, openness, and cosmopolitan culture. New York left such an impression on its residents that many could hardly imagine living anywhere else.
Yet those very same qualities that made the city so appealing also had t
he power to repulse on occasion. The incessant competition, from the struggle for customers in the marketplace to the fight to secure a seat on the trolley, left them weary. So too did the pollution, the noise, the jostle. Above all, there was the rapid pace of life. Everything in the city seemed to move faster in 1904, and not just those things propelled by steam. The trademark rapid-fire conversational style of New Yorkers, noted by visitors as early as the mid-eighteenth century, got faster. It also covered more ground thanks to the rapid spread of the telephone. “Telephone before making sales calls,” advised an advertisement in that morning’s issue of the Sun. “You may save an hour or a half day. You know the value of your time.”
The hurried pace of Gotham’s pedestrians likewise sped up, facilitated by newly paved streets and stone sidewalks. So too did popular music, especially the type called “ragtime” that shocked the prim and proper with its rollicking animal beat and racy words. Recreation increased in velocity as an ever-growing number of enthusiasts took to bicycles and competed with evening strollers for the pathways in parks. Even the use of tobacco sped up with the growing popularity of the cigarette. At the turn of the century, while the rest of the nation stuck to their cigars, snuff, and plug tobacco, New Yorkers consumed upward of a quarter of all the “coffin nails” sold in America. Soon, an article that morning in the Globe and Commercial Advertiser predicted, voting would be sped up. A new voting machine recently perfected promised to “usher in an era of quick voting when results of elections will be known at once instead of sometimes days afterward.”
This high-speed lifestyle of turn-of-the-century New York was most noticeable to the newcomer. “One must keep moving,” wrote one shocked Hungarian visitor, “rest is not understood…. The impulses toward motion govern every one; so much so that if they sit down their chairs must have rockers.” For the countless new immigrants then settling in the city, the speed of modern life was not a mere curiosity, but a new reality they had to adjust to if they hoped to succeed. “I came to understand that it was not the land of fun,” remembered Michael Gold of his immigrant upbringing in turn-of-the-century New York. “It was a Land of Hurry-Up.”