Emigrant Savings Bank and Its Manhattan Mortgage Loans circa 1850 - 1910

Kurt Schlichting, Fairfield University

The New York Public Library’s Digital Humanities initiative includes an online digital archive of over 7,842 mortgages by the Emigrant Savings Bank (ESB) from 1850 to 1910. Founded in 1850 by members of the Irish Emigrant Society, the bank served the needs of the Famine Irish immigrants to New York and those that followed. The mortgages total $ 208,945,418 – a huge investment in New York real estate. Of the 500 largest loans, 24% were to build Catholic Churches and 18% to Catholic religious orders for orphanages, schools, and seminaries. Fordham, St. Francis, St. John’s and Manhattan Catholic colleges all obtained mortgages from the ESB. These mortgages enabled the Catholic immigrant community to build an institutional structure in the face of virulent anti-Catholicism. A sample of residential property loans have been geocoded onto HGIS maps, at the building and City block level with 1880 and 1900 Census data added. The ethnic makeup of the ESB financed buildings and the City block can be compared to the neighborhood and City to measure the degree to which the ESB residential mortgages served the Irish immigrant community. Were the ESB financed building owner-occupied or were the mortgages used for real-estate investment in tenements? Were the residents of ESB financed buildings Irish immigrants? The NYPL crowd-sourced the building of the database from the digitized ESB “Loan Books” in the Library’s manuscript archives. Each loan includes a map of a city block with hand-drawn building footprint. Loan information includes address, borrower, amount of loan and a building appraisal is hand written. Many of addresses are difficult to read and are not standardized: number and street name read “corner of 1st Avenue btw 10th and 11th.” The crowd-sourced addresses need significant work before geocoding, which illustrates the challenges of crowd-sourced, hand written historic records.

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 Presented in Session 134. Urban Economics