TENEMENT HOUSE LIFE IN NEW YORK.
By GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.
New York City, which is the soul and center of a series of cities which may be called the Metropolitan District, has not far from a million and a half of people, nearly all of whom reside upon an island of rocky formation, surrounded by deep water. Within recent years a district to the north of the island has been annexed to the city, and city protection and privileges partly extended to it, and new parks have just been legalized there, but little that has yet been done in the outlying districts and cities has been effectual to thin out the population of the great central city, whose inhabitants are gathered from all races.
The island of New York extends over thirteen miles along the North River, and it is densely built up as far as 70th Street, on that river, and on the East River it is almost solidly built up to Harlem, which is six or seven miles from the point of the city at the Battery. The middle of the island, to the extent of nine hundred acres, is occupied by the Central Park and other parks, and broad driveways or boulevards take up considerable of the unoccupied or partially occupied portion, so that the time is admitted to be near at hand when all this island will be covered with houses. The character of these houses is already indicated by the tall flats, apartment houses, or tenement houses which are rising, apparently in the country parts, out of the green fields, and some of these are six, seven and eight stories high. Extensive apartment houses, in which the floors are rented or sold, are also being constructed in the vicinity of the park, sometimes to the height of nine, ten and even twelve stories.
It would therefore appear that the future residence of the New Yorker is to be some kind of a tenement structure after the fashion prevailing on the continent of Europe. For some of these costly tenements the rent is as high as six thousand to eight thousand dollars per annum. The cheapest tenements on New York island probably cost twenty dollars a month. Although a bridge has been built at enormous expense to connect New York and Brooklyn, it is a mere convenience, and has exercised no influence on the general character of New York island. While Brooklyn is growing, Harlem relatively is growing faster, at the northern end of New York island. The elevated railroads, of which there are four parallel to each other up and down the length of the island as far as the park, and three the whole length of the island, or to Harlem River, have rather exercised a recalling influence to the city from the suburbs, and the tendency is to extend New York across the Harlem River rather than across the Hudson or the East rivers and the bay, which are often embarrassed by fog, ice, and storm.
The New York manufactures have so expanded that the operatives do not go from the city to the country parts to do a day’s labor, but come from the country parts into New York to earn a living. The protective tariff has transferred the foreign commerce of New York to foreign nations, while it has made New York City our largest manufacturing city. These manufactories compressed on that small island necessarily partake of the tenement house character, and it has been necessary for the legislature to pass laws prohibiting the making of cigars in the tenement houses where the people live. A few years ago I was requested to visit some of these cigar tenements in the vicinity of Tompkins Square, and further uptown, and I found an extraordinary condition of things which has not yet been checked by legislation, because after the prohibitory law was passed it was found to be defective in phraseology, and has to be reënacted. In these tenements could be seen a whole family, men, women and children, living and working their tobacco, and at the same time cooking, sleeping, eating and entertaining, with the tobacco spread over the floor to be dried at night, the children walking on it, and the vapors of the tobacco filling the lungs of the sleepers. In the morning the man got up and began to cut, trim and fill cigars, and put them on the bench before him, and there he sat all day, for at least six days in the week, seldom going out to let the rooms be aired, and some of these buildings, from four to six stories high, were nothing but pigeon cases of such tobacco tenements.
It is to be doubted whether the law can reach such cases, because detection would always involve an intrusion into the living apartments of families, and would make in time such hostility that the law itself would have to be repealed. As in Lyons, France, and in Belgium, where the silk weavers, the lace makers, etc., take their work home, there is no doubt a tendency in New York City to live and toil on the same premises. The population of New York is made up from most of the laboring nations, and each of these brings its own habits, and expects to exercise them freely in this free country. The vices of European laboring society have been imported with the virtues. The city electing its officials by suffrage modifies its usages and government in the direction of these new elements, and the foreigner soon picks up from his demagogues and the small newspapers published in his own language aggressive ideas, which some think are rapidly becoming a great defensive system, some day to plague the metropolis.
Whatever we native Americans think about the foreign methods of living in New York, those methods are as natural to the immigrants as it is for us to occupy a whole house. Indeed, the American in such cities as New York is becoming of necessity the imitator of the foreigner, because the rent of a whole establishment on that cramped island is out of the reach of any but the well employed and independently prosperous.
As this article may come to eyes which have never seen the great city, I will convey to you some slight notion of the structure of New York island. This island is made of gneiss rock, or hard granite, which apparently extended in ribs or ridges, sometimes depressed, sometimes high, and in places like islands, and between these ridges and islands sand and gravel have been deposited, so that when you come to lay out a street, to lay pipes under the street, or to excavate for a house, you may strike solid rock, or you may find quicksand, and therefore the cost of building on the island is greater than almost anywhere on the globe. Probably the steam drills employed to blast on New York island exceed in number all the steam drills in the entire United States. Most of our cities are built on clay or sandy soil, and a cellar can be excavated in two or three days, whereas I have seen building lots in New York, only a hundred feet by twenty to twenty-five feet wide, which took months, or indeed a whole building season, to get the rock out, and when the cellar is excavated it is like a great trough or hole made in solid stone. Naturally, a man who has been at such expense to start his house looks into the air for his recompense. With that solid foundation in the stone he has procured from the cellar he begins to build a tower instead of a house, and to let it out in floors, and for each of these floors he expects to receive higher rent than is elsewhere paid for a large and complete house.
A friend of mine who recently failed disastrously, showed me one of these new flat houses he had put up. It was three lots broad, each lot one hundred feet deep, making a front of seventy-five feet. Each of these lots he held to be worth $30,000, making $90,000 for the situation, though it was not on a fashionable street, but rather up a side street. He then raised one upon another seven apartments on each side of the entrance, and over the entrance were six bachelor apartments, each consisting of only one room, a bed alcove, and a bath closet. Consequently, there would be in such a building twenty tenants, of whom fourteen would be families. These fourteen paid from $1,800 to $1,300 apiece. Each had the same number of rooms, in the same space, the rents only being modified by the position of the floor. The lower floors of course rented higher than the upper floors. Generally speaking, each living place consisted of a parlor and a side room, either library or sitting room, a bath room, and a servant’s bath also, about three bed rooms, beside a servant’s bed room, a dining room, a kitchen, pantries and wardrobes. The only economy in such living lies in the reduction of the number of servants, and in the less expense of furnishing. The proprietor has to keep an engineer, an assistant engineer, a porter and assistant, and perhaps a housekeeper, and of course a watchman. Elevators front and rear accommodate the landlords and the servants. Such a building, exclusive of the ground, probably cost $150,000, and therefore it would be hard work to make ten per cent. upon it after paying salaries, taxes, etc. The bachelor apartments rented from $50 to $30 per month.
Now this stylish apartment house looks out at the rear upon a series of common tenement houses, where in old brick or frame buildings a dense mass of people look out of the back windows on their more aristocratic neighbors. These latter houses perhaps have a pole erected in the back yard which is as high as the house, and from every floor proceed to this pole clothes lines, attached there by pulleys, and whatever is washed is affixed to the line and run out by the pulley to dry. Most of the people in these back apartments live in one room, or at most in two, and there the good man arises in the morning, takes his early breakfast and goes out with his truck or dray, or hies him off to work and does not return again till night. The wife arises and sends the children off to school, and then she proceeds to wash or iron, or do other work, cooking her meals meantime, and supplying the children at noon, and the old man at night. Perhaps in that room or two live half a dozen people. They may even have a sub-tenant. There must be more or less exposure, more or less bad air, more or less indifference to the decencies of life, and yet it is surprising, on the whole, how much cleaner and better these people live than might be expected. This to some extent arises from the happy construction of the blocks in the new or uptown quarter of New York. Many of our American cities have deep blocks and alleys, or inferior streets, running up between them. The ground is too precious in New York to be sacrificed in such lanes, so the back yards touch each other, and the houses are built high stooped, the basement being the first story, and through the basement hall the slops, ashes, etc., are carried to the front street and there left for the scavenger and the ash-man to come and remove them. Consequently, each of these uptown blocks is one great court, open to the sun and to the sky. New York streets across town are only two hundred feet apart, and therefore the lots are of uniform depth.
The old Dutch city and its English successor in the lower part of the island covered a triangular space not a mile long, and about a mile wide. In the course of time Broadway was opened right up the center of this triangle, and streets called East Broadway and West Broadway were thrown in a course generally parallel to the two rivers, and the attempt was continued to make a more or less rectangular city, and finally, at the distance of more than two miles up, a real rectangular metropolis was secured by opening broad avenues, of which there are about twelve lengthwise of the whole island, and these are crossed by streets running in number up to 220th, and in the course of time in the annexed portion they will run to something like 300th Street. Although the city is thus expanded, business and population are very tenacious of the old and crowded situations. As it is impossible to draw the money and finance out of Wall Street, so it is next to impossible to alter the situation of the market houses, the railroad freight depots, the express offices, the steamboat piers, the ferries, and even the manufactories. As an immense portion of what is manufactured in New York is not sold to the people of the city, but for export, it remains a consideration to manufacture, prepare and pack goods down in the dense, lance-shaped point of the island. Consequently business, tenements, folly, manufactories, everything grow denser as you go down town, and the east side of the city is especially given up to the Germanic races. At that point there is a protuberance of the city into the East River, overlapping the city of Brooklyn, and the avenues here are not numbered, but being to the east of First Avenue they take the names of Avenues A, B, C and D.
Here you find the tenement houses in their glory. Grand Street is the great artery of that side of the town.
Fifty years ago there were but 200,000 inhabitants on this island; thirty-five years ago there were but 500,000; twenty-five years ago there were but 800,000 people; fifteen years ago there were 950,000. By the census of 1880 the population of the island was put down at over 1,200,000. It will not be far wrong to call it in general terms a million and a half. But the stable population of New York bears no comparison with its transient and daily population. It is immediately surrounded by two millions more of people who depend upon the city, and who can leave it at all hours of the night by ferries. It is the resort of sixty per cent. of all the ocean vessels in the country, with their crews. It contains the offices of nearly every corporation in the United States, all of which, after they have attained a certain stability or prominence, keep a commission house or branch office on New York island.
The morals of New York City are therefore to a great extent beyond the reach of mere administration, and have to be lenient according to the temptation and the concourse. Marriage itself is subordinate in such a hive, to society and necessity. The American elements of the population generally adhere to their traditions and decencies, but there is a native American generation in New York, begotten of foreign parents, which knows no other country than this, but is as different from Americans of the old time as we differ from the American Indians. From this secondary growth New York derives most of its mechanical, laboring, and artisan class. These, like their forefathers, adhere to the tenement house method of life. They do not understand the necessity of a whole house, which has to be furnished, cleaned and warmed, when they spend so much of the day and night elsewhere, either at work or pleasure. So does the American element, which goes from the country to New York, content itself with a room. As for the poor, as their families increase they have no resort but the tenement house.
The latest history of New York City says that 500,000 people in New York, or more than one-third, live in tenement houses, and that the densest blocks in London do not compare, in the number of inhabitants, with the same space in the dense quarters of New York. A single block is referred to on Avenue B, which has fifty-two tenement houses, the population of them amounting to nearly 2,400 persons. One single house in New York is said to have 1,500 inhabitants, and often a house with twenty-five feet front accommodates 100 souls. Of course height is the great point to give such area. If you enter New York and walk toward the east side through the streets which run so close together, but which are all happily of fair width, and all straight, you will see row after row of red brick houses, generally built to the height of five or six stories. In themselves they are rather neat to look at, except for the signs of population at every window, where on a hot and steaming day everybody seems to press to get the air. You can see the baby at the breast, the hunchback elder child, the man rolling cigars, the Chinaman washing, the woman running her sewing machine, the musician practicing on the bugle, the dentist, perhaps, filling teeth in a tenement house at modest rates to suit. You may also see some quiet old German smoking his pipe and reading science, unaware that anything is much worse than it generally is in the world. These houses have a common entrance below, sometimes in the middle, generally at the side. Through this entrance pours in and out the population going above; the stairways are generally narrow, the steps worn almost through, sometimes loungers and children are playing in the halls, and our fastidious habits are much shocked at the necessary familiarity engendered.
Yet it is to be remembered that as one’s day is, so is his strength, even in the matter of smells, and while there are tenement evils there are also tenement house virtues. The close sociability engenders another species of Christianity. The policeman is near at hand to correct any evils. While the summers are dreadfully hot, the winters are also long and cold, and the two things most needed in a tenement house are coal and sunlight.
The tenement house laws have been made at Albany by the landlords of these houses, many of whom are rapacious and merciless. Not a single day is given by law, I understand, to a tenant who does not pay the rent. The landlord is permitted to put his agent or constable in any apartment and set the things on the sidewalk, whatever may be the disaster or the disease within. Many of these tenement houses have been built up by the sales of liquor and beer, and probably the majority of our Irish saloon-keepers project a corner in which they do business into a tenement house above, and they both provide the rum and collect the rent. Possibly the men above stairs drink away their wages in the saloon below, while the women work at something to keep the rent up.
In some cases, especially among the more rural Irish, the shanty in the suburbs is substituted for tenement house life. As you walk along some of the newly filled streets, composed of great rocks which have been blasted in one spot to fill up another spot, you will look down into a former meadow, now a mere hole surrounded by four dungeon walls of stone, and there you will see three or four shanties pitched together on suffrance, made of old boards taken out of some fence or from dry goods boxes. Unaware of anybody being about, you can sit there and hear the whole domestic menage going on; see Patrick, very drunk, sociably quarreling with his wife, who is not far behind him in her potations. They perhaps keep a cow somewhere down there under the planks, and this cow is being milked more or less all the time, and if the milk can not be sold it helps to support the life of the squatters.
Again, you will go into some far quarter of this island, many miles from the business centers, and to your surprise you will there find another species of tenement house, showing that this system of herding together and economizing room is the fate of this city at least. There seems to be no future for the tenement house system. The laws passed by our state legislature with reference to this city are more apt to be in favor of the tenement house proprietor than of the tenant. The tenants hardly know where the legislature is, while the tenement house owner is informed by his lawyer or lobbyist of what is going on. As far as philanthropy goes, it despairs of accomplishing anything in the midst of such a dense population. Of course, when things become outrageous, the police report them to the Board of Health, or the tenants take the law into their own hands.
This gregarious life leads to great independence of character among the women; the average survivor of the tenement house is no puny, frightened creature, but a very active animal, ready to scratch, retort, appeal to law, and loves and marries as she wishes. There is some natural deviation from virtue, as from cleanliness, yet the recuperative principle in women, as in men, is at least redeeming, and it is to be doubted whether the vices in the tenement houses exceed those in the fashionable streets.
It is believed here that the worst class of people New York possesses are the Bohemians from northern Austria. This degraded race was at one time, or until the emperors destroyed it politically, the repository of most of the vices of Europe. Among the Bohemians you find the domestic virtues at the lowest ebb, and socialism at its lewdest. A manufacturer was recently telling me of two Bohemians in his employment who grew weary of their wives, and without any other marriage, and without quarrel, they agreed, men and women, to change partners, and continue to live and work together. At a recent strike of cigar makers in this city, a working woman who stripped tobacco was set upon by three men and knocked down because she preferred to take lower wages rather than keep idle and support some of the demagogue patrols.
New York, however, has no such dens to-day as it had forty years ago, when the Five Points was in the height of its orgies. Through that old swampy quarter of the city broad streets have been cut, and manufactories have been established. I have my doubts whether, at this moment, the worst features of New York’s population are not to be found in some of the rougher suburbs off the island. The draft riots of 1863 assisted the peace and order of New York by bringing about a collision between the very bad elements and the law. The police, who are generally hated by the vicious as the visible representatives of the law, received from that moment a degree of discipline which has ever since been kept up, and the militia regiments of New York City have been provided with large armories, and are in a fair state of discipline.
Of course, in such a rank soil as this island, the gentler virtues do not grow, but my observation of some rural districts, many hundred miles from this city, is that they are far below the tenement house quarter in intelligence, and not above it in morals. The matter of virtue is to a large extent involved in the race; it will take a long time to debauch, utterly, people descended from the British and Germanic races. Fortunately, we have not had much immigration from the south of Europe, but the Italian quarter is attracting some attention, as possibly the worst we possess. The Chinese in New York are self-reliant, and a good many of them have shown a decided bias to be Christianized. I lived near a church, two or three years ago, where I one day observed a large number of Chinese, and glancing up at the church I saw that it was a Baptist one. On inquiry I found that a Chinaman who attended the Sunday-school of that church had been murdered by some semi-American roughs, and his classmates had come to pay the last honors to him. Like Americans, they came in cabs, and came filing out of that church quiet, uncomplaining, injured specimens of our common brotherhood.
Legally, a tenement house in New York is one house occupied by more than three families living independently of each other, and doing their cooking on the premises. All tenement houses are compelled to have fire-escapes built outside of the house, of iron. There is one quarter of New York City where 300,000 persons are said to live on a square mile. Observers now say that not one-third, but one-half of the population of New York City lives on the tenement house plan.
A superficial observer here would think that the greatest misery on the globe was to be found in this tenement house quarter, yet I think that much of this sympathy will be thrown away, because in the large majority of cases the people who live under this system would not exchange it for any other.
