Dear Alan,

This area was the most densely populated in the entire world around 1900.
It was populated with a variety of immigrants, who came in waves. Between
1880 and the start of WWI it was a very large wave of Eastern European
Jewish immigrants. This area is known as the Lower East Side, although
Spring St. today is just inside of what is known of SoHo. The immigrants
lived in four or five story tenement buildings and there is a wonderful
tenement museum that shows a lot about how they lived. There are also many
books written about the history of NY, the history of immigration, and the
history of Jewish immigration and the Jewish experience on the Lower East
side circa 1900. The Museum has a wonderful bookstore.

You can probably find out a lot more about your family by looking them up in
the US Federal Census records for 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920 and soon to be
available 1930. >from the information >from the census records, you can order
vital records >from the NYC Municipal Archives. The Archives also has old
NYC Address books. Websites: the National Archives, which has branches in
major US cities where the census record are found (the Mormon Libraries may
have them too): www.NARA.gov and the Municipal Archives, which will do
research for you by mail: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doris/home.html

Good luck
Anita springer