The rich history of life in the 19th- and early 20th-century immigrant communities of Germans, Italians, Irish, Jews, and many more who settled in our neighborhoods is well known. But the story of how they got there in the first place, not so much. Join us and take a trip alongside these intrepid people who started their journeys in far-off villages of Europe and Russia, and experience the numerous obstacles they had to overcome to reach the shores of Greenwich Village and the East Village. Before ever reaching the ship that would carry them across the Atlantic, immigrants would have already taken numerous trains, ferries, and crossed multiple borders to just reach their port of embarkation; and the journey wasn’t quite finished when they disembarked from the ship in New York.

Then, when they finally arrived, what happened? We will also explore how those who decided to stay in the Village began their transitions from newcomer to New Yorker by examining the long-forgotten institutions and organizations that aided these migrants in and around our neighborhoods.

Our neighborhoods offer a unique microcosm of the numerous overlapping, side-by-side, interconnected, and hamlet-like immigrant communities that existed across New York and the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. While a multitude of languages, customs, religions, and ways of life jostled with one another, one of the things that all these immigrants had in common was the journey that they had undertaken to reach their new home.

William Roka is the Director of Programs at Village Preservation. He is also an independent historian and writer. His research has focused on the history of travel and ocean liners in the early 20th century and has presented at conferences in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, and across the United States.