Mobile Mentschen
Mapping the Geographic Mobility of the Jewish Community of Binghamton, NY.
Mapping the Geographic Mobility of the Jewish Community of Binghamton, NY.
Binghamton, New York, nestled among the hills of the Southern Tier region 175 miles Northwest of New York City, is a fascinating location in which to study Jewish migration. German-Jews settled in the city decades before their Russian and Eastern European co-religionists filled shtetls along the East Coast and more than a century before Jews left those cities en masse to shape, and be shaped by, suburbia.
The maps that I have created tell a story of a small-city Jewish community whose migratory patterns differed from urban and suburban communities in some ways and resembled them in others. Between 1855 and 1900, Jews arrived in this industrial center, often owning or working in small stores or peddling to the growing local workforce.
As you can see in this map, in the last decade of the19th Century, the majority of Jewish homes and businesses were located in what is now considered downtown. The preponderance of Jewish residences and businesses on the Southern end of the city, on and along Susquehanna Street fits perfectly with the analysis of Gerald Smith, former Broome County Historian. In Smith's 2017 article, "Susquehanna Street Area was Binghamton's Melting Pot," Smith portrays that neighborhood as the historic destination for new arrivals in town. The area housed the Irish in the 1840's, the Germans, including the first Jews in the region, in the 1850's, and in later decades, Italians and African Americans. Since, as Smith describes, this neighborhood was the "poor section" of town, the noticeable presence of Jews in this area during the 19th Century is a sign that the Jews of Binghamton at that time were economic outsiders or, at least, beginners.
The red dots represent addresses of Jewish homes or businesses 1885-1900. Names were gathered from the "Roll of Members of Congregation Sons of Israel", found in the Temple Israel Centennial Album as well as from Dr. Lance Sussman's, Beyond the Catskills: Jewish Life in Binghamton, NY. 1850-1975. More demographic information was available in a Masters Thesis written by Paul Resnick titled, "Early History of Binghamton's Jewish Community, 1855-1900."
These sources provided valuable but limited information. Few of the names came with addresses. However, with the Ancestry database and Newspapers.com as my aides, very few addresses escaped my grasp.
The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries brought Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia to America's shores and stores. While many of these people settled primarily in urban neighborhoods on the East Coast, some did make their way to smaller towns like Binghamton, enlivening and enriching the German-Jewish community. However, a peaceful coexistence belied a split and, at times, conflicting community. In the first few decades of the 20th Century, as the Eastern European Jews occupied lower socio-economic rungs that their German Jewish neighbors occupied decades earlier, the latter made themselves as supportive and welcoming as was needed, but not much further.
During the first half of the 20th Century, Jewish businesses thrived, offering the owners' families the opportunity for social mobility. Reflecting the national trend, Jewish young men and women in Binghamton disproportionately became educated and brought the next generation into the educated professional class.
This map displays the locations of Jewish residents between 1948-1952. Evident are the near-total desertion of the downtown area by the Jewish community and the prevalence of Jews in the West Side and South Side. Through the lens of Gerald Smith's research describing the Susquehanna St. area remaining the poor part of town, it would seem as though Binghamton's Jews had "made it" by this time.
Time spent in the archive rooms of Temple Concord and Temple Israel yielded the data necessary to create these maps. Temple Israel members in 1948 (purple centers) and Temple Concord members in 1952 (blue centers) together formed the majority of the Jewish population of Binghamton. What is missing is information on the membership of Beth David Synagogue whose records at the time are unavailable. I am currently working to salvage data from that side of the community to enrich this map.
This base map, titled "Residential Security Map," adds a pertinent visual element and a deeper context to the Jewish migration. Created by the Appraisal Department of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in 1934, this map and many like it from cities around the country are made public by a website called Mapping Inequality. Simply put, residents in yellow areas would have needed to make a very strong case if they wanted a loan for a mortgage or to refinance. Residents in the red areas could not get these loans at all. This literal example of redlining, combined with the use of restrictive covenants in deeds, succeeded in Binghamton and around the country in segregating African Americans and other "undesirables" from white neighborhoods.
I received mixed messages from this map. One yellow area north of Main Street gives an explanation for its low status as, "some infiltration of Jews." Perhaps the families that lived in that area were especially public or vocal about their Judaism, or perhaps they ran a junk dealership out of their backyard, upsetting neighbors, because clearly, there is little correlation between Jewish residences and lower "level" areas. Indeed, something that stands out on this map is the location of the majority of Jewish residences in blue and green areas. To iterate an earlier point, clearly, by 1950, Jews in Binghamton were neither economic beginners nor were they kept physically from affluent neighborhoods.
The Jewish community of Binghamton experienced a period of salient growth by 1975. Two neighborhoods in Vestal, on the southern side of the Susquehanna River, were not even built in 1950 but, as we can see, were home to many Jews by the mid-1970's. The fact that these Jews were not leaving dense and thriving ethnic neighborhoods distinguishes this small-town migration from the post-war urban withdrawal that Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon discuss in The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions. However, there are similarities that may be instructional. Discussing Boston, Levine and Harmon write that many Jewish families who could afford to, left their urban Jewish enclaves for the Suburbs in the 1950's and 60's as African Americans were moving in. A level of acceptance of Jews among the mainstream white community was a requisite for this migration. As Matthew Frye Jacobson writes in Roots Too, White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, white racial strength did not decrease after WWII. It actually increased, but more people were included within it. In this case, it is not that the white community stopped keeping out undesirables. It is that Jews became less undesirable in white eyes.
Both push and pull factors can be discerned in Jewish migration at this time. In his 2007 book, White Flight: Atlanta and the making of Conservatism, Kevin Kruse describes suburbanization as the greatest triumph of segregationists, leaving the black and poor communities to fend for themselves without the taxes and support of the middle class. This small-town Jewish migration does not seem fit that model because there was never a large African American population in Binghamton. The other ethnics were white ethnics, so racism was not a primary factor pushing Binghamton's Jews out of a polluted and dangerous downtown.
This case more strongly resembles the lesson that Robert O. Self illuminated in his 2007 American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Moving out of the city was a multi-layered decision to pursue economic and social opportunities in cleaner environments for less money. One of these opportunities, according to Self, was the ability to be involved in the creation a new type of space. Whatever the internal intentions and considerations, for Binghamton's Jews, a strong pull factor was the desire to follow in the literal and behavioral footsteps of the middle-class white community who were leaving the city for suburbs whenever they could.
An interesting feature of the community becomes visible in this map. The green stars represent Jewish businesses. In Johnson City, toward the Northwest of this map, and downtown, there are more Jewish businesses than residences. While the markets in those areas were important for Jewish economic success, they were not top choices for places to live.
Both the addresses of the residences and the names of the businesses were taken from a Jewish community phone book created by the Temple Israel Sisterhood in 1975. I copied the data from the Temple Israel archive.
Jewish Residences in Binghamton in 1890, 1950, 1975
Heat Maps of the Jewish Residences in Binghamton in 1890, 1950, 1975
Works Cited:
Levine, Hillel; Harmon, Lawrence. The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions. (Free Press, New York, 1992.) 4, 138.)
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. (Harvard University Press, 2008.)
White Flight: Atlanta and the making of Conservatism, Kevin Kruse
Resnick, Paul. "Early History of Binghamton's Jewish Community, 1855-1900."
Smith, Gerald, "Susquehanna St. Was Binghamton's Melting Pot." Press Connects. Feb. 23, 2017. Susquehanna Street area was Binghamton's melting pot (pressconnects.com)
Sussman, Lance. Beyond the Catskills: Jewish Life in Binghamton, New York. 1850-1975. (State University of New York at Binghamton. 1989.)
Temple Israel Centennial Album: 1886-1986
1855 Broome County Map. A.O. gallup & Co,
1934 Home Owners Loan Corporation. courtesy of Mapping Inequality. Mapping Inequality (richmond.edu)