CHAPTER I.
GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.
The first
tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a
generation passed before the writing 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 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. 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, 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." 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 rôle, 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
reckless 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."
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 up 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.
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 from 1 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-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.[3] 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
cellar that contained eight or ten loads of
manure; or "one room 12 Ã- 12 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.
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 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.
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 house-room 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 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[5] 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."
CHAPTER II.
THE AWAKENING.
The dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowledge of the
harvest field that awaited the
plague in New York's slums, pricked the conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the war. A citizens' movement resulted in the
organization of a Board of Health and the
adoption of the "Tenement-House Act" of 1867, the first step toward
remedial legislation. A thorough
canvass of the tenements had been begun already in the previous year; but the cholera first, and next a
scourge of small-pox, delayed the work, while emphasizing the need of it, so that it was 1869 before it got fairly under way and began to tell. The dark bedroom fell under the
ban first. In that year the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows in
interior rooms, chiefly for
ventilation-for little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The saw had a job all that summer; by early fall nearly all the orders had been carried out. Not without
opposition; obstacles were thrown in the way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw in every order to
repair or clean up only an
item of added expense to
diminish their income from the
rent; on the other side by the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a
generation of
unavailing protest, to the
level of their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there. The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a
proletariat ready and able to
avenge the wrongs of their crowds. Already it taxed the city
heavily for the support of its jails and charities. The basis of
opposition, curiously enough, was the same at both extremes; owner and
tenant alike considered
official interference an
infringement of personal rights, and a
hardship. It took long years of weary
labor to make good the claim of the sunlight to such corners of the dens as it could reach at all. Not until five years after did the department succeed at last in ousting the "cave-dwellers" and closing some five hundred and fifty cellars south of Houston Street, many of them below tide-water, that had been used as living apartments. In many instances the police had to drag the tenants out by force.
The work went on; but the need of it only grew with the
effort. The Sanitarians were following up an
evil that grew faster than they went; like a fire, it could only be headed off, not chased, with success. Official reports, read in the churches in 1879, characterized the younger criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and unhealthy, overcrowded lodgings, brought up in "an atmosphere of actual darkness, moral and physical." This after the saw had been busy in the dark corners ten years! "If we could see the air breathed by these poor creatures in their tenements," said a well-known physician, "it would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters." Little improvement was apparent despite all that had been done. "The new tenements, that have been recently built, have been usually as badly planned as the old, with dark and unhealthy rooms, often over wet cellars, where
extreme overcrowding is permitted," was the
verdict of one authority. These are the houses that to-day
perpetuate the worst traditions of the past, and they are counted by thousands. The Five Points had been cleansed, as far as the immediate
neighborhood was concerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing it in foulness not a stone's throw away, and new centres of
corruption were continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever
vigilance was
relaxed for ever so short a time. It is one of the curses of the
tenement-house system that the worst houses
exercise a levelling influence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a schoolroom will spoil the whole class. It is one of the ways the
evil that was "the
result of forgetfulness of the poor," as the Council of Hygiene mildly put it, has of avenging itself.
The determined
effort to head it off by laying a strong hand upon the
tenement builders that has been the chief business of the Health Board of
recent years, dates from this period. The
era of the air-shaft has not solved the problem of housing the poor, but it has made good use of limited opportunities. Over the new houses
sanitary law exercises full control. But the old remain. They cannot be summarily torn down, though in
extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. The
outrageous overcrowding, too, remains. It is characteristic of the tenements. Poverty, their
badge and
typical condition, invites-compels it. All efforts to
abate it
result only in
temporary relief. As long as they exist it will exist with them. And the tenements will exist in New York forever.
To-day, what is a
tenement? The law defines it as a house "occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the
premises; or by more than two families on a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, etc." That is the legal meaning, and includes flats and apartment-houses, with which we have nothing to do. In its narrower sense the
typical tenement was thus described when last arraigned before the bar of public justice: "It is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street,
frequently with a
store on the first floor which, when used for the sale of liquor, has a side opening for the benefit of the inmates and to
evade the Sunday law; four families
occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve feet by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of the house, and no direct through
ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories, high with two families on a floor." The picture is nearly as true to-day as ten years ago, and will be for a long time to come. The dim light admitted by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tenements are still "good
property," and the
poverty of the poor man his destruction. A
barrack down town where he has to live because he is poor brings in a third more
rent than a
decent flat house in Harlem. The statement once made a sensation that between seventy and eighty children had been found in one
tenement. It no longer excites even passing attention, when the
sanitary police
report counting 101 adults and 91 children in a Crosby Street house, one of twins, built together. The children in the other, if I am not
mistaken, numbered 89, a total of 180 for two tenements! Or when a midnight
inspection in Mulberry Street unearths a hundred and fifty "lodgers" sleeping on
filthy floors in two buildings. Spite of brown-stone trimmings, plate-glass and
mosaic vestibule floors, the water does not rise in summer to the second story, while the beer flows unchecked to the all-night picnics on the roof. The
saloon with the side-door and the
landlord divide the
prosperity of the place between them, and the
tenant, in
sullen submission, foots the bills.
Where are the tenements of to-day? Say rather: where are they not? In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward slums and the Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the Annexed District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their
restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold within their
clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their
mercy in the day of mob-rule and
wrath. The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are
tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the
mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its
population. When another
generation shall have doubled the
census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held
captive by
poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter
mockery, what will the
harvest be?