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THE first tenement New York knew bore the mark
of Cain from its birth, though a generation
passed before the waiting was deciphered. It
was the "rear house," infamous ever
after in our city's history. There had been
tenant-houses before, but they were not built
for the purpose. Nothing would probably have
shocked their original owners more than the
idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd;
for they were the decorous homes of the old
Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy of Manhattan
in the early days. It was the stir and bustle
of trade, together with the tremendous immigration
that followed |
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upon the war of 1812 that dislodged
them. In thirty-five years the city of less
than a hundred thousand came to harbor half
a million souls, for whom homes had to be found.
It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold
depravities, came into the world. It was destined
to survive the old houses. In their new role,
says the old report, eloquent in its indignant
denunciation of "evils more destructive
than wars," "they were not intended
to last. Rents were fixed high
enough to cover damage and abuse from this class, from
whom nothing was expected, and the most was made of
them while they lasted. Neatness, order, cleanliness,
were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house
system, as it spread its localities from year to year;
while redress slovenliness, discontent, privation, and
ignorance were left to work out their invariable results,
until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house
dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable
hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted
roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars."
Yet so illogical is human greed that, at a later day,
when called to account, "the proprietors frequently
urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse
for the condition of their property, utterly losing
sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those
habits which was the real evil, and that for this they
themselves were alone responsible." |
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Within the memory of
men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved
from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out of
town to be easily reached. Now the old residents
followed his example; but they moved in a different
direction and for a different reason. Their comfortable
dwellings in the once fashionable streets along
the East River front fell into the hands of real-estate
agents and boarding-house keepers; and here, says
the report to the Legislature of 1857, when the
evils engendered had excited just alarm, "in
its beginning, the tenant-house became a real
blessing to that class of industrious poor whose
small earnings limited their expenses, and whose
employment in workshops, stores, or about the
warehouses and thoroughfares, render a near residence
of much importance." Not for long, however.
As business increased, and the city grew with
rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became
the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors,
and the stamp was set upon the old houses, |
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suddenly
become valuable, which the best thought and effort
of a later age has vainly struggled to efface.
Their "large rooms were
partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the
rate of rent being lower in proportion to space
or height from the street; and they soon became
filled from cellar to garret with a class of
tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in
morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself."
Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate,
and in the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher
grew his tulips or early cabbages a rear house was
built, generally of wood, two stories high at first.
Presently it was carried lop another story, and another.
Where two families had lived ten moved in. The front
house followed suit, if the brick walls were strong
enough. The question was not always asked, judging
from complaints made by a contemporary witness, that
the old buildings were "often carried up to a
great height without regard to the strength of the
foundation walls." It was rent the owner was
after; nothing was said in the contract about either
the safety or the comfort of the tenants. The garden
gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges. The shell-paved
walk had become an alley; what the rear house had
left of the garden, a "court" Plenty such
are yet to be found in the Fourth Ward, with here
and there one of the original rear tenements. |
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Worse was to follow.
It was "soon perceived by estate owners and
agents of property that a greater percentage of
profits could be realized by the conversion of
houses and blocks into barracks, and dividing
their space into smaller proportions capable of
containing human life within four walls. . . .
Blocks were rented of real estate owners, or 'purchased
on time,' or taken in charge at a percentage,
and held for under-letting." With the appearance
of the middleman, wholly irresponsible, and utterly
reckless and unrestrained, began the era of tenement
building which turned out such blocks as Gotham
Court, where, in one cholera epidemic that scarcely
touched the clean wards, the tenants died at the
rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand
of population; which forced the general mortality
of the city up front l in 41.83 in 1815, to 1
in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom from
epidemic disease, and which wrung from the early
organizers of the Health Department this wail:
"There are numerous examples of tenement-houses
in which are lodged several hundred people that
have a pro rata allotment of
ground area scarcely equal to two-square yards
upon the city lot, court-yards and all included."
The tenement- |
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house population had swelled to half
a million souls by that time, and on the East
Side, in what is still the most densely populated
district in all the world, China not excluded,
it was packed at the rate of 290,000 to the square
mile, a state of affairs wholly unexampled. The
utmost cupidity of other lands and other days
had never contrived to herd much more than half
that number within the same space. The greatest
crowding of Old London was at the rate of 175,816.
Swine roamed the streets and gutters as their
principal scavengers.[1]
The death of a child in a tenement was registered
at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as "plainly
due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated
apartment," and the Senators, who had come
down from Albany to find out what was the matter
with New York, reported that "there are annually
cut off from the population by disease and death
enough human beings to people a city, and enough
human labor to sustain it." And yet experts
had testified that, as compared with uptown, rents
were from twenty-five to thirty per cent. higher
in the worst slums of the lower wards, with such
accommodations as were enjoyed, for instance,
by a "family with boarders" in Cedar
Street, who fed hogs in the Stellar that contained
eight or ten loads of manure; or "one room
12 x 19 with five families living in it, comprising
twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds,
without partition, screen, chair, or table."
The rate of rent has been successfully maintained
to the present day, though the hog at least has
been eliminated. |
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Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that
these were evils of a day that is happily past
and may safely be forgotten, let me mention here
three very recent instances of tenement-house
life that came under my notice. One was the burning
of a rear house in Mott Street, from appearances
one of the original tenant-houses that made their
owners rich. The fire made homeless ten families,
who had paid an average of $5 a month for their
mean little cubby-holes. The owner himself told
me that it was fully insured for
$800, though it brought him in $600 a year rent.
He evidently considered himself especially entitled
to be pitied for losing such valuable property.
Another was the case of a hard-working family
of man and wife, young people from the old country,
who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement
because they were "tired." There was
no other explanation, and none was needed when
I |
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stood in the room in which they had lived. It
was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single
window so far out on the roof that it seemed not
to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room
enough to turn around in they had been compelled
to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance.
There were four such rooms in that attic,
and together they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant
part of Brooklyn. The third instance was that of a colored
family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear
rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars
and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small
that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by
placing the camera outside the open door. Three short
steps across either way would have measured its full
extent. |
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There was just one
excuse for the early tenement house builders,
and their successors may plead it with nearly
as good right for what it is worth. "Such,"
says an official report, "is the lack of
houseroom in the city that any kind of tenement
can be immediately crowded with lodgers, if there
is space offered." Thousands were living
in cellars. There were three hundred underground
lodging-houses in the city when the Health Department
was organized. Some fifteen years before that
the old Baptist Church in Mulberry Street, just
off Chatham Street, had been sold, and the rear
half of the frame structure had been converted
into tenements that with their swarming population
became the scandal even of that reckless age.
The wretched pile harbored no less than forty
families, and the annual rate of deaths to the
population was officially stated to be 75 in 1,000.
These tenements were an extreme type of very |
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many,
for the big barracks had by this time spread east
and west and far up the island into the sparsely
settled wards. Whether or not the title was clear
to the land upon which they were built was of
less account than that the rents were collected.
If there were damages to pay, the tenant had to
foot them. Cases were "very frequent when
property was in litigation, and two or three different
parties were collecting rents." Of course
under such circumstances "no repairs were
ever made." The climax had been reached. The situation was summed up
by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition
of the Poor in these words: "Crazy old buildings,
crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements,
leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables [3] converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter
brutes, are habitations of thousands of our fellow-beings
in this wealthy, Christian city." "The city,"
says its historian, Mrs. Martha Lamb, commenting on
the era of aqueduct building between 1835 and 1845,
"was a general asylum for vagrants." Young
vagabonds, the natural offspring of such "home"
conditions, overran the streets. Juvenile crime increased
fearfully year by year. The Children's Aid Society and
kindred philanthropic organizations were yet unborn,
but in the city directory was to be found the address
of the "American Society for the Promotion of Education
in Africa." |
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Go to Chapter 2 |
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[1] It was not until the winter
of 1867 that owners of swine were prohibited by ordinance
from letting them run at large in the built-up portions
of the city.
[2] This "unventilated and
fever-breeding structure" the year after it was
built was picked out by the Council of Hygiene, then
just organized, and presented to the Citizens' Association
of New York as a specimen "multiple domicile"
in a desirable street, with the following comment:
"Here are twelve living-rooms and twenty-one
bedrooms, and only six of the latter have any provision
or possibility for the admission of light and air,
excepting through the family sitting- and living-room;
being utterly dark, close, and unventilated. The living-rooms
are but 10 x 12 feet; the bedrooms 6 x 7 feet."
[3] "A lot 50x 60, contained
twenty stables, rented for dwellings at $15 a year
each; cost of the whole $600." |
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