I could give you many details of other tenant-houses, the reputation of which is a reproach to any city in the civilized world. Such is “Gotham Court,” “Rotten Row,” “The Great Eastern,” “Sebastopol,” “Quality Row,” “Bummer’s Retreat,” etc. Speaking of the tenant-house, the Rev. Dr. Muhlenburg says:
“‘Their homes!’ that cold and damp cellar, about as tenantable as your coal vault! Do you call that a home for the distressed body, crowded in one corner there, swollen with the pains of rheumatism? Or that close apartment, heated or stifling in preparing the evening meal, on the shattered stove—that suffocating room, where you would not stop within for a moment—is that the home which you think so favorable for the worn asthmatic, catching every breath as if the last? Ask any clergyman, he will tell you with how little satisfaction he makes his visits among the poor, when they are laboring among disease; how he never has the heart to speak of comfort for the soul, when discomforts of the body call so loudly for relief, and for which the scanty aid he can minister seems akin to mockery!”
“THE GREAT EASTERN,” NUMBER 115 EAST 37TH STREET, 1865
Mr. N. P. Willis who witnessed the “draft” riots thus truthfully and graphically describes the inmates of tenant-houses:
“The high brick blocks and closely packed houses where the mobs originated, seemed to be literally hives of sickness and vice. The
Rioters It was wonderful to see, and difficult to believe, that so much misery, disease and wretchedness can be huddled together and hidden by high walls, unvisited and unthought of, so near our own abodes. Lewd, but pale and sickly young women, scarce decent in their ragged attire, were impudent and scattered everywhere in the crowd. But what numbers of these poorer classes are deformed—what numbers are made hideous by self-neglect and infirmity! Alas! human faces look so hideous with hope and self-respect all gone! And female forms and features are made so frightful by sin, squalor, and debasement! To walk the streets as we walked them, in those hours of conflagration and riot, was like witnessing the day of judgment, with every wicked thing revealed, every sin and sorrow blazingly glared upon, every hidden abomination laid bare before hell’s expectant fire? The elements of popular discord are gathered in these wretchedly constructed tenement houses, where poverty, disease, and crime find an abode. Here disease in its most loathsome forms propagates itself. Unholy passions rule in the domestic circle. Everything, within and without, tends to physical and moral degradation.”
Such, Mr. Chairman, is the external and internal sanitary condition of the homes of 500,000 people in the City of New York to-day, as revealed by this inspection. It requires no extraordinary amount of medical knowledge to determine the physical condition Tenant-House
Rot of this immense population, living under such circumstances. Even though no devastating epidemic is found ravaging the tenant-house, yet the first sight of the wretched inmates convinces you that diseases far more destructive to health and happiness, because creating no alarm, are wasting the vital energies, and slowly but surely consuming the very tissues of the body.
Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary. Here youth is ugly with loathsome diseases and the deformities which follow physical degeneracy. Here the decrepitude of old age is found at thirty. The poor themselves have a very expressive term for the slow process of decay which they suffer, viz.: “Tenant-house Rot.” The great majority are, indeed, undergoing a slow decomposition—a true eremacausis, as the chemists term it. And with this physical degeneration we find mental and moral deterioration. The frequent expression of the poor, “We have no sickness, thank God,” is uttered by those whose sunken eyes, pale cheeks, and colorless lips speak more eloquently than words, of the unseen agencies which are sapping the fountains of health. Vice, crime, drunkenness, lust, disease, and death, here hold sway, in spite of the most powerful moral and religious influences.
Religious teachers and Bible readers are beginning to give this class over as past all remedy, until their physical condition is improved. Their intellects are so blunted and their perceptions so perverted by the noxious atmosphere which they breathe, and the all-pervading filth in which they live, move, and have their being, that they are not susceptible to moral or religious influences. In London, some of the city missionaries have entirely abandoned the tenant-house class. There is, undoubtedly, a depraved physical condition which explains the moral deterioration of these people, and which can never be overcome until we surround them with the conditions of sound health. A child growing up in this pestilential atmosphere becomes vicious and brutal, not from any natural depravity, but because it is mentally incapable of the perceptions of truth. Most truly does the Inspector of the Fourth Ward say:
“There is a tenant-house cachexy well-known to such medical men as have a practical acquaintance with these abodes; nor does it affect alone the physical condition of their inmates. It has its moral prototype in an ochlesis of vice—a contagious Tenant-House
Cachexy depravity, to whose malign influence the youthful survivors of the terrible physical evils to which their infancy is exposed, are sure to succumb. We often find in persons of less than middle age, who have long occupied such confined and filthy premises, a morbid condition of the system unknown elsewhere. The eye becomes bleared, the senses blunted, the limbs shrunken and tremulous, the secretions exceedingly offensive. There is a state of premature decay.