The nineteenth-century layers
New England Yankees platted the town, but the canal filled it. Irish laborers who dug the Erie stayed to work it.1 Welsh families made the Utica area the publishing center of Welsh America — the national Welsh newspaper Y Drych was published here for a full century, from 1861 to 1960.23 Germans built breweries and churches; by the 1880s, Italian immigrants were turning East Utica into the neighborhood that still flavors the whole city (see Food with a history), while Polish families concentrated in West Utica's mill blocks, and Lebanese and Syrian newcomers — peddlers first, grocers soon after — built one of upstate's notable Arab-American communities.5
Each group's institutions — parishes, clubs, bakeries, funeral homes — mapped the city. Plenty of them are still on the same corners.
The refugee city
When the mills left, the pattern held. A resettlement agency established in Utica in 1979 — today simply The Center — began bringing refugees to a city with cheap housing and empty pews:4 Vietnamese and Soviet families, then more than 4,500 Bosnians in the 1990s, then Karen and other Burmese communities, Somalis, Sudanese, Congolese, and more. In 2008 the Bosnian community bought a shuttered Methodist church on Court Street from the city and spent four years turning it into a mosque — steeple, minaret and all.5
In 2005 the UN refugee agency's magazine put Utica on its cover as "the town that loves refugees,"6 and by the late 2010s national reporting was putting refugees and their children at roughly a quarter of the city's population — credited by local officials with stemming decades of decline.7 The exact share is an estimate; the effect on the streets, schools and storefronts is not.