PLAN SHOWING REAR TENANT-HOUSES, NEAR A STABLE, IN THE SEVENTEENTH WARD, 1865
The tenant-houses are of two classes, viz., the front and the rear. The latter is closely allied to the cellar; being shut out from air and sunlight, it is generally damp, gloomy, and filthy. The space between the front and rear house, familiarly called the “well hole,” contains the privy and cesspool, the emanations from which are closely confined to this space, and slowly but constantly pervade with their disgusting odors all the rooms and recesses.
The tenant-house has frequently been described by sensation writers, with all its miseries, its diseases and its deaths. But no pen nor pencil can sketch the living reality. It is only by personal inspection that one can learn to what depths of social and physical degradation human beings can descend. Said a committee appointed by your body to investigate the condition of the tenant-houses of New York:
“Sitting together upon the same broken box, lying together upon the same dirty straw, covered by the same filthy shreds, vieing with each other in the utterance of foul obscenities, you have a picture of the mass of corruption and squalid misery gathered inside the walls of that unventilated building in Mission Place. In that single house there was that which made the soul sicken and turn in horror from the sight. Vice, with its pretentious brow, and wretchedness, with hollow cheek and sunken, glazed eye, were there; hunger and lust stood side by side, petit larceny and cold-blooded murder were holding converse.”
The inspectors describe more or less minutely a large number of tenant-houses, and also of groups:
“‘Cat Alley’ is the local designation of a group of dilapidated tenant-houses in an alley on Cannon Street. The alley is unpaved, and is Cat
Alley excessively filthy. The privy is a small and broken-down structure, covering only a part of the vault, which is now full almost to overflowing. The inhabitants are degraded, both physically and socially. In several of the domiciles, at the time of our last inspection, there was neither bedstead nor table. Twelve of these families were found in a wretched condition, and all the children we saw were covered with dirt, and presented the intensest aspects of scrofulous disease; their sore eyes, encrusted heads, and dehumanizing appearance, told the story of want and neglect, and of greater evils to come.
“Five small houses, two and a half stories in height, including the basements, each containing apartments for six families, front on an alley called Rivington Place. This alley is always in a filthy condition. The houses on it are small and overcrowded. The 30 families that reside in these five houses have no other water supply than that which two hydrants furnish in the exterior courtyard; while for this population of nearly 200 persons, of all ages, there are but two privy vaults, and, at the time of the last inspection of the quarters, these vaults were filled nearly to the surface. In the year 1849, 42 individuals died here in three weeks of cholera, and not one recovered that was taken sick. The reasons are plain: they have no ventilation, and the houses being double, the exhalations from one apartment are inhaled by the other.
THE FILTHY ALLEY CALLED RIVINGTON PLACE, 1865, IN THE REAR OF NUMBERS 316 AND 318 RIVINGTON STREET