Finding · May 28, 2026 · Census analysis
The 1940 federal census records 6,886 people across all of Windsor Place. Just under a third of them were immigrants, and almost all of those came in one of two waves. The first is the Eastern European Jewish wave (Russia, Poland, Austria, Lithuania, Romania). The second is the Italian wave. Each one reads cleanly off the page in surnames, in housing concentration, and most of all in occupations.
1,315 Windsor Place residents in 1940 were born in the Pale of Settlement: 891 in Russia, 261 in Poland, 127 in Austria, plus Lithuania, Romania, and Latvia. They had 625 heads of household — 98 of them women — with median age 50, meaning most arrived in childhood between 1880 and 1910, before the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 closed the door.
Their occupational footprint is precise: the top eight Jewish-wave occupations are Operator (79), Salesman (63), Proprietor (32), Painter (26), Tailor (22), Bookkeeper (21), Cutter (19), Presser (19). Needle (Operator, Tailor, Cutter, Presser), shop (Proprietor, Salesman, Owner), and counter (Bookkeeper, Clerk). Brooklyn's garment-industry satellites — the shops on Flatbush and Court — staffed themselves from Windsor Place.
610 Windsor Place residents in 1940 were born in Italy. They had 310 heads of household with median age 51 — same generation profile as the Jewish wave, same childhood-arrival pattern, but a different occupational world entirely.
The top eight Italian-wave occupations are Laborer (50), Operator (34), Finisher (12), Plasterer (11), Carpenter (7), Mechanic (6), Tailor (5), Painter (4). The construction trades: the unskilled labor that poured Brooklyn's foundations, the skilled finish work that closed out its buildings, the workshops that supplied its hardware.
One Windsor Place address appears at the top of both lists: 47 Windsor Place. The 1940 census records 104 Pale-born residents and 27 Italian-born residents at that address — together, more than 130 immigrants living under one roof. By 1950 the building had reorganized into a three-Head-of-household configuration (Crosby, Driscoll, Hands), all Irish-or-NY-born; the Italian and Jewish families had moved on or assimilated into the U.S.-born line. The arc of that single brownstone across thirty years is the subject of a separate essay.
The high counts at 47 also reflect that it was the largest multi-family building on the block at the time — a tenement-style configuration rather than the single-family brownstones common elsewhere on Windsor Place. The concentration is real; whether it should be read as Windsor Place's most diverse address or simply its most densely populated one is the kind of question the dwelling- number column on the original NARA scan would answer.
The 1940 figures rest on an OCR pipeline (Gemini 2.5 Flash with a Gemini 2.5 Pro quality-review pass) that we believe is high-quality but has not been hand-audited at the surname level. Some surnames are almost certainly mis-spelled by the OCR; a few sheets had repeated enumerator hands or faded ink that the model could not reliably read. The headline figures (1,315 Pale-born, 610 Italian-born) are robust to ±5% but the exact surname-by-surname counts should be treated as approximate.
“Pale-of-Settlement” is a simplification: not every Russian-born or Polish-born resident was Jewish. Polish Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and other non-Jewish Eastern European immigrants also settled in Brooklyn. The occupational signature (garment trades + small retail) is highly suggestive but not proof; the surname patterns (Cohen, Goldberg, Kaplan, Horowitz, Shapiro, Rabinowitz, Goldstein) are strongly indicative of Jewish identity for this specific cohort.
Sources: 1940 US Census Population Schedule, Brooklyn Borough Kings County, EDs 24-2727 / 24-1664 / surrounding (NARA T627 via DPLA mediaMaster). OCR via Gemini 2.5 Flash with QC re-pass via Gemini 2.5 Pro. Data files at research/census-1940-windsor-residents.json, research/italian-wave.json, research/jewish-wave.json.