A CHILD S FUNERAL IN THE ITALIAN QUARTER OF NEW YORK Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, July 18,1891 the frequency with which foreign tongues are heard on the street have fostered the impression that New York is more cosmopolitan, more international in personality, than any other American city. But this is nothing new. As early as the 1840s, the Irish and German immigrants who were streaming into the New York port gave rise to the claim that New York was the least "American" of the nation's cities; and, later, as newcomers from Italy, Russia, and many other parts of southern and eastern Europe multiplied the ethnic variety of the city's population, it was often asked, "Is New York America, at all?'" Writers who described the city in the later nineteenth century liked to point out that New York had a larger Irish population than Dublin and that it was the second largest German city in the world. One British traveler reported: "An Irishman landing there cries, 'Be dad! it's fur all the wurrld loike Corrk!' A German exclaims, 'Ganz wie Berlin'; the Chicagoan bluntly asks, 85 [Domingo F. Sarmiento,] A Sarmiento Anthology, tr. from the Spanish by Stuart E. Grummon (Princeton: 1948), 229. 415