5. Castle Garden Gave Birth to the Yiddish Word: Kesselgarten

Immigrants arriving to the Castle Garden immigrant depot. Image via Wikimedia: Public Domain

Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews who settled in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pronounced Castle Garden as “Kesselgarten.”

The word would eventually come to serve as a generic Yiddish term for a noisy, confusing or chaotic situation, or where a “babel” of languages were spoken — this, of course, was in reference to the many languages spoken by the arriving immigrants from around the world.