Germania Fire Insurance Building

— 357 Bowery —

You are standing in front of one of the best-preserved reminders of Kleindeutschland - "Little Germany" - once the most prominent German-American neighborhood in America. Fleeing economic and political instability, Germans began immigrating here in the 1840s, and by 1855 New York contained the third largest urban population of Germans in the world.
By 1870, Little Germany covered much of the present-day East Village and Lower East Side, with the Bowery the hub of its commercial and social life, including the beautiful Germania Bank building and the popular Atlantic Garden beer hall (see 190 and 50 Bowery). That same year, the Germania Fire Insurance Company opened a branch here to capitalize on property owners' need for safeguards against an urban threat that had decimated large sections of the city. The building's architect was Carl Pfeiffer, a native of Germany who later designed the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
After the 1904 General Slocum disaster, in which a fire on an excursion steamer killed over one thousand people, most of them women and children, Germans began leaving Kleindeutschland for other areas. Once a centerpiece of Bowery immigrant life, the Germania Fire Insurance Building was declared a NYC landmark in 2010.
- David Freeland, author of Automats, Taxi Dances



& Vaudeville

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