The City That Was

by Stephen Smith

For example, it is estimated that there are three contiguous blocks of tenant-houses which contain a larger population than Fifth Avenue; or, again, if Fifth Avenue had front and rear tenant-houses as densely packed as tenant-houses generally are, there would be a population of 100,000 on that single avenue. A single tenant-court in the Fourth Ward is arranged for the packing of 1,000 persons.

GOTHAM COURT, CHERRY STREET, 1865—LONGITUDINAL ELEVATION

Arranged for the Packing of 1,000 Persons

SECTION OF CITY 240 BY 150 FEET, OCCUPIED BY 111 FAMILIES, AND BY STABLES, SOAP FACTORY, AND TANYARD

A resident of the same Ward reports that: “On a piece of ground 240 feet by 150, there are 20 tenant-houses, occupied by 111 families, 5 stables, a large soap and candle factory, and a tan-yard, the receptacle of green hides. The filth and stench of this locality are beyond any power of description.” In general, it may be stated that the average number of families to a house among the poor is 7, or about 35 persons.

It is necessary also to make a single explanation, to render more apparent the bearing of the facts developed. For the purposes of sanitary inquiry, the causes of disease are divided into those which are inevitable, and those Avoidable and
Inevitable Disease which are avoidable or removable, and hence it follows that diseases and deaths are divided into those which are inevitable and those which are preventable. For example: Of unavoidable causes of disease, we have vicissitudes of weather, accidents, old age, physical degenerations, etc.

Of avoidable or removable causes of disease we have those conditions around or within our dwellings or places of business or resort, errors in our mode of living, etc., which vitiate health, or rather tend to diseases, and yet which can be removed or changed by human agency. For example, a country residence may be most favorably located for health, and yet decaying vegetable matter in the cellar, or a cesspool so situated as to allow the gaseous emanations to be diffused through the house, will expose all the inmates to fevers, diarrhoea and dysentery.

These would be preventable diseases, and all the deaths therefrom would be preventable, and hence unnecessary deaths. In like manner in cities, all diseases and deaths due to causes which human agencies can remove are preventable. And it is a melancholy fact that fifty per cent of the mortality of cities is estimated to be due to such causes, and is hence unnecessary.