The most serious aspect of the housing shortage was that as yet respectable New Yorkers knew but two modes of residence: one must either take a full single house, or consent to a dismal boarding house. The apartment building was known only to travelers in Europe, and was mistrusted as not being adapted to American individualism.
The possibility of utilizing the multiple-unit type of housing, however, was unceasingly expounded by the Evening Post from the time peace returned, for the editors had lived in the “Continental flat” abroad. An early editorial (Feb. 6, 1866) was called “How to Gain Room.”
It has been suggested frequently that tenement houses scientifically built would be profitable in New York, and a great boon to the working people. But they would be no less an advantage to the wealthier classes, and we wonder that the attempt has not been made first in the best part of town, and with houses calculated to accommodate families of the wealthier citizens, at a somewhat more moderate rent than is attainable now.
Many a family which now occupies a whole house uptown would be content to rent a floor, suitably fitted up after the manner of the houses of Paris and other European cities. Such an arrangement would spare the women of the family the endless and often painful toil of going up and downstairs, from the kitchen to the top of a three-storied house, three or four times a day. It would be far more convenient, and the rents might well make a considerable saving.
The inertia of New Yorkers was to blame, the Post said a little later. “Such a thing as hiring a suite of rooms and having meals sent in from a restaurant at a fixed and moderate charge is, we believe, almost if not quite unknown here. As for the ‘flats’ in which thousands of families conveniently and comfortably keep house in France and Germany, they require an arrangement of house architecture not known to our builders.” In the summer of 1867, when the congestion was at its worst, the editors gave publicity to the design of an architect for an apartment house for the “middling classes.” Upon two ordinary city lots, 20 by 100 feet, he proposed erecting a four-story building, containing eight distinct suites of rooms, all as completely isolated from each other as though they were detached houses. There was to be a central stairs, each landing giving entrance to two homes; but every visitor would have to ring below for admission precisely as at the front door of any other houses. Each suite was to contain a parlor, dining room, four bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. For some time the newspaper carried on a veritable crusade.
When the first apartment house was ready, in 1870, one designed by Richard M. Hunt and erected at 142 East Eighteenth Street, the Evening Post rejoiced in it as the harbinger of a new housing era. It was said to be better than most of those in Paris, though the Post thought it lacking in light and ventilation. Each of the sixteen suites had six rooms and a bath, and rents ranged from $1,500 on the lower floors to $1,080 on the upper—G. P. Putnam, the publisher, and others of means lived in it. There was no elevator, but a dumbwaiter enabled the tenants to bring coal up from the basement. The close of 1870 saw the new movement in full swing, with eight houses built or building, and a strong demand for more.
An apartment house on Forty-eighth Street boasted a porter, who lighted the halls, removed garbage, and sent up fuel; the rents were only $40 to $75 a month. A block of flats overlooking Central Park from the east at Sixty-eighth Street gave each tenant eight rooms and a bath, elevator service, black walnut floors, and his own kitchen range and hot water heater for $75 to $150. The most pretentious house, however, was building at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was costing a round million, and was to be 125 feet high. “Each suite will have ten rooms, four closets, and eight washbowls,” announced the Evening Post, and rents were to run from $2,000 to $3,000 a year. The journal advised builders to install elevators, and charge as much for the upper as for lower floors.
For several years a marked prejudice against flats persisted. Most New Yorkers believed that in this land of democratic sociability it would be impossible to isolate the apartments and obtain privacy, and that they would soon sink to the level of tenements. The Post did its share in ridiculing these fears, and in pointing out the ugliness of the monotonous blocks of brownstone houses. It denied the common remark, “No house is big enough for two families.” But as it later said, one of the cardinal reasons for the rapid dissipation of the prejudice and popular success of the apartment houses was the building, in the first instance, of costly structures as pioneers in the movement.
By 1874 it thought that the new houses “may now be considered almost perfect.” The Haight Building, at Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, offered thirty flats at $2,000 to $3,000 a year each, with an elevator, an internal telegraph, and a restaurant. Among the notables living here were Henry M. Field, the traveler; Col. W. C. Church, editor of the Galaxy; Prof. Youmans, founder of the Popular Science Monthly, and the Spanish Consul. But the last word in luxury was an apartment building in Fifty-sixth Street, where “the whole house is warmed by steam, and hot water is supplied to all the tenants at the expense of the owner.” The paper’s prediction that ten-story houses with elevators would be more popular than smaller buildings had been completely justified.
Even before the rise of the apartment house came the first sharp attacks upon tenement evils. New York City had no lack of this particular kind of multiple-family dwelling, for in 1864 they numbered 15,511, and housed 486,000 persons. They were far from being what we mean by tenements to-day: not until about 1879 was the first tenement house of the now familiar type, five, six, or more stories high, erected. The earlier buildings were comparatively low barracks, many of them converted mansions, shops, and stables, and others “rear houses” in the back yards of old mansions; all without airshafts, and with no complete provision for separating families. The Evening Post fitly called them “The Modern Upas,” for they breathed upon the city the poisons of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and crime. As early as April, 1860, six years before the first legislative inquiry into the housing of the poor, the editors had called shocked attention to police records showing that some 18,000 New Yorkers were veritable troglodytes, dwellers in cellars. It spoke out at the same time against the horrible congestion of the slums. One “rear house” on Mulberry Street had 222 persons huddled together; in Cow Bay, one of the colored quarters, one house held 230 persons; while the notorious Old Brewery at Five Points had sheltered 215 people before it burned. In the Sixth Ward, surrounding the Five Points, sixty-three small structures housed 4,721 persons.
An indignant editorial attack upon the deplorable tenement-house conditions appeared in the Evening Post six months after Lee’s surrender, inspired by a report of the Citizens’ Association. Half the people of New York lived in tenements, and on the East Side they were packed in at the rate of 220,000 to the square mile. The Post estimated that more than 25,000 dwelt in unfit cellars, shanties, or stable-lofts. Of the 15,000 tenements, almost 4,000 had no connection with the sewers. One in three was a perpetual “fever nest,” in which typhus was endemic, while not one in fifteen was what a tenement house ought to be. A single “fever nest” on East Seventeenth Street, almost within a stone’s throw of the Mayor’s home, had sent thirty-five typhus patients during 1864 to the municipal fever hospital, while nearly a hundred more had been treated in the building. The public, repeated the Post early in 1867, was astonished to awake from the war to the vast extent of the tenement system, the immense numbers inhabiting such places, and the horrid evils of filthiness, immorality, and sickness engendered by them. “No man has a right to establish a nest of fever and vice in the city,” it said, arguing for new laws and a government agency to regulate the construction and use of tenements.