Edward Lawrence Rehm, born in 1884, the youngest of the Rehm children, was by all evidence an industrious lad. He secured his first employment at age 15 as a clerk for The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the progressive university in today’s East Village where Abraham Lincoln had spoken several decades before. At the corner of Third Avenue and East 8 th Street, Cooper Union sat on the edge of Kleindeutschland, still vibrant at the turn of the century.

The changing neighborhood in the garment district came to Matthew Rehm’s door when the building on 27th St. was demolished for new loft construction in the late 1890s. The family first moved to a building nearby on Ninth Ave., but then by 1905, with the oldest son married, the family was residing in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, years before the original Yankee Stadium would be built nearby. That same year, Matte Rehm, after 40 years in the country, was naturalized as a United States citizen.

This was the neighborhood where the Rehm family grew up in the 1870s and 80s, not in Little Germany but in the Tenderloin district, at 242 27th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues (smack in the middle of today’s Fashion Institute of Technology campus) and later also at 346 Ninth Avenue at 29th St.

Their children, in order, were William J. Rehm (1871), Joseph Matthew Rehm (1877), Pauline E. Rehm (1879), and after a five-year gap, Edward Lawrence Rehm (1884). Eliza was 42 when Edward was born.

Matthew the apprentice German tailor arrived into a chaotically growing New York garment industry. The American Civil War, which had boosted the industry with the manufacturing of uniforms, had just ended. The demand for ready-to-wear clothing was surging.

While German immigrants were present in New Amsterdam since its earliest times, the mass transatlantic migration of the mid-nineteenth century brought a huge wave of new arrivals. The city’s German population reached a peak of three-quarters of a million in 1900. A vibrant German neighborhood full of tenements and beer halls—Kleindeutschland or Little Germanydeveloped in the 1840s east of the Bowery in what is now the East Village.

I have identified the ship manifest documenting Mathew’s arrival in New York aboard the SS Laura on August 25, 1865. It was hard to find because the manifest lists his first name as Martin, not any variant of Matthew, such as Matte, as he was known familiarly. At first I chalked up the discrepancy to clerical error, but later I found he was sometimes listed as Martin in New York directories.

The Rehm family continues to own and manage REHM Kies- & Betonwerk (Gravel and Concrete Plant) GmbH & Co., the gravel and concrete business in Lottstetten and nearby Rüdingen. Three Rehm siblings—Urban, Markus and Luciaare the co-directors, and several of their children are executives in the family business.