The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, July 1884, No. 10

by Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle; Chautauqua Institution

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.