Antebellum Philadelphia possessed no racial or ethnic ghettos

Evidence

If the area was diverse economically, it was even more so ethnically. To those accustomed to the hyper-segregated twentieth-century city, it is difficult to imagine that there was no such thing as a ghetto. Over three-fifths of Philadelphia County’s 1830 black population of fifteen thousand lived in the Cedar, Locust, New Market, and Pine Wards of Philadelphia and the adjacent townships of Moyamensing and Southwark, and yet no ward was even one-third black. … The Irish were even more spread out than the Negroes. They began in the 1830s to increase substantially in the city’s population, and by 1850 were concentrated in seven clusters throughout the city. These clusters were not ghettos; only five percent of the Irish immigrants lived in areas in which the majority were immigrants. Even in Moyamensing, where the concentration of immigrants was highest, the Irish represented only forty-five percent of the population. Although the figures lack precision, it seems clear that, from the beginning, Irish lived among native-born Americans, German immigrants, and Afro-Americans. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 456