On October 19, 1885, the S.S. Eider approached Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and the Narrows, twelve days after it had departed Bremen, Germany. As the four-hundred-and-thirty-foot vessel navigated through New York Harbor, it would have passed Bedloe’s Island, on the port side, where an enormous pedestal was under construction. The Statue of Liberty was nearby, in crates, not yet assembled. Like so much of America, she was a work in progress.

Workers pose next to the foundation they were constructing to use as the base for the Statue of Liberty, on Bedloe’s Island, New York City. Illustration by Hulton Archive / Getty

On deck, a sixteen-year-old boy was carrying the hopes of his family, back home in Germany. The Drumpfs had long before simplified their name to Trump, and they were shedding the superfluities of Europe in other ways, too. Friedrich, the young man on board, had trained as a barber’s apprentice, but saw little reason to stay in the small town of Kallstadt, in the Palatinate, where his prospects were limited. He harbored higher aspirations.

For Trump, as for most immigrants to New York at the time, the point where he would disembark was Castle Garden, at the foot of Manhattan. Ellis Island would not open its doors until 1892. Castle Garden was neither a castle nor a garden but an old fort, built at the Battery. Its original purpose was to repulse the British, who appeared likely to invade again, when the fort was built, on the eve of the War of 1812. But, as the city grew, priorities shifted, developers sniffed around, and suddenly the old fort was welcoming foreigners instead of defending against them. Castle Garden was repurposed as a beer garden, a musical theatre, and, finally, as the Emigrant Landing Depot, where immigrants were processed by the State of New York before they would begin new lives.

“In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden,” (oil on panel) by Charles Frederic Ulrich, 1884.

From 1820 to 1892, eleven million new arrivals, today the ancestors of an estimated hundred million Americans, came through this multi-purpose structure, America’s first immigration facility. The building, renamed Castle Clinton, still stands near the boats that take tourists toward the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The babel of foreign languages spoken by tourists visiting it bears a rough sonic similarity to those around Castle Garden in 1885. In German/Yiddish slang, kesselgarten became a word to describe a chaotic situation with a lot of people speaking at once.

A photograph of Castle Gardens and the Statue of Liberty, taken between 1880 and 1897. Photograph by William Henry Jackson / Library of Congress

On the day he was admitted, Friedrich Trump was duly questioned by the authorities, and his information, including his last name, which would be written in ever-larger letters by his progeny, entered into a ledger. The name was carefully transcribed as Trumpf, although the barber’s apprentice would soon shear off the “F.”

After being processed, Friedrich presumably met his sister Katherine, who had come to America before him, and was married to a clerk named Friedrich Schuster. She would have known about the Eider’s approach from the telegraph wires already stretching under the Atlantic, and the reports of shipping that made up the back sections of newspapers.

On the day the S.S. Eider arrived, New York’s many newspapers advertised their headlines to passersby. The Times tried to cloak its news with a veneer of respectability, but the sounds of the street could still be heard through the newsprint. In Ohio, Democrats were decrying “technical and stupid blunders” in a local election. In Terre Haute, Indiana, a “bold real estate operator” was “dodging the law officers and leaving heavy debts behind him.” In Elmira, New York, a “rich farmer” was swindled by two “wealthy appearing men” who purported to be building a mill.

The next day’s Times offered a “very superior extra size mansion,” on Murray Hill. Farther uptown, at Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, was a property whose developer claimed, falsely, that it was “the most magnificently furnished and decorated apartment house in the United States.” It was an era of extreme inequality. Before there was an income tax, there was little reason to conceal wealth, and the one per cent did not. Cornelius Vanderbilt II was living in the largest private residence ever seen in Manhattan, a chateau built as if it sat alongside the Loire, instead of Fifth Avenue. It held a hundred and thirty rooms, including a Moorish smoking room, and took up an entire block at Fifth and Fifty-seventh. Bergdorf Goodman now occupies the site, just north of the Trump Tower. A monument to conspicuous consumption, it was filled with an endless catalogue of objects purchased simply because the Vanderbilts could buy them. An architectural critic called their two monumental houses “the thingiest edifices in New York.”

Vanderbilt Mansion, shown around 1901. Photograph by the Library of Congress

In their mansion, on March 26, 1883, Alva and William K. Vanderbilt held the legendary Fancy Dress Ball. Twelve hundred friends were invited to a masquerade, and each costume was more outrageous than the one before. (One socialite, Kate Fearing Strong, known to her friends as Puss, came with a dead cat, stuffed, on her head, and the tails of other dead cats trailing from her dress.)

Miss Kate Fearing Strong (later Mrs. Arthur Welman), photographed in 1883. Photograph courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

These were the self-appointed arbiters of good taste in America. Another attendee, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, came as “Electric Light,” in a pose that eerily mirrored the soon-to-be-assembled Statue of Liberty, but entirely missed the point.

What was a barber’s apprentice to make of these elaborate hairdos and powdered wigs? Trump’s sister lived in a very different New York from the Vanderbilts’. According to Gwenda Blair’s 2001 book, “The Trumps,” Friedrich moved in with Katherine and Fred Schuster, at 76 Forsyth Street, in what is now Chinatown, a modest structure that is the first of all the Trump Palaces, Parcs, Plazas, Casinos, Hotels, and other edifices to follow.

Forsyth Street was a crowded place in those days. In 1900, reformers built a scale model of the block bounded by Canal, Chrystie, Bayard and Forsyth streets, to expose the conditions of daily existence there.

“Model of Block on Lower East Side,” from the Tenement House Exhibition of 1900. Photograph Courtesy Columbia University Libraries

According to the exhibit text that accompanied the model, the thirty-nine tenement houses inside this block—not the worst in the neighborhood but merely “typical”—contained six hundred and five apartments that housed twenty-seven hundred and eighty-one people. There were only two hundred and sixty-four water closets, and not one bath on the entire block. Only forty apartments had hot water.

In 1885, the same year that Friedrich Trump arrived, another immigrant who had entered New York through Castle Garden, in June, 1870, was wandering the same streets. The son of a Danish schoolteacher, Jacob Riis was on his way to finding his own method of exposing overcrowding. In a couple of years, he would discover a new technique of using magnesium to create flashes of light for photographic purposes, making it possible to give the public a glimpse of the dark basements that slum dwellers crowded into. Prowling the streets just to the west of Forsyth, near the angle where Mulberry changed its course, Riis documented an alley known as the Bandit’s Roost.

“Bandits' Roost,” by Jacob Riis (1849-1914), taken in 1890. Photograph by Universal History Archive / UIG via Getty Images

What comes through in all of his photographs, as in the tenement reports that followed, was the sheer density of humanity packed into these structures. In photo after photo, there are sequences of people—those in the foreground and then, farther back, others peering meekly out of the darkness, and likely others behind them. Riis loved the interstices—the alleys with no names, the rickety wooden structures hidden behind large buildings, and all the people with no fixed abode. When one contemplates the numbing grandiosity of the modern Trump structures, with their massive square footage, their high ceilings, their mirrors to make everything seem even larger, it is almost as if there is a vestigial memory of a time when the Lower East Side was the most crowded place on the planet.

Forsyth Street was changing. In 1885, it was the southern tip of Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, the sprawling neighborhood of German speakers that dominated the East Village, as well as the Lower East Side. Throughout the nineteenth century, huge numbers of German refugees and job seekers had arrived, to the point where this stretch of Lower Manhattan was the third-largest German-speaking city in the world, after Berlin and Vienna. New York’s German newspaper, the Staats-Zeitung, circulated freely, and a wide range of health clinics, libraries, mutual-aid societies, and insurance companies softened the harshness of this strange new land.