Formerly the New-Yorker lived in one of three different ways: in private
houses, or boarding-houses, or hotels; there were few restaurants or
public tables outside of the hotels, and those who had lodgings and took
their meals at eating-houses were but a small proportion of the whole
number. The old classification still holds in a measure, but within the
last thirty years, or ever since the Civil War, when the enormous
commercial expansion of the country began, several different ways of
living have been opened. The first and most noticeable of these is
housekeeping in flats, or apartments of three or four rooms or more, on
the same floor, as in all the countries of Europe except England; though
the flat is now making itself known in London, too. Before the war, the
New-Yorker who kept house did so in a separate house, three or four
stories in height, with a street door of its own. Its pattern within was
fixed by long usage, and seldom varied; without, it was of brown-stone
before, and brick behind, with an open space there for drying clothes,
which was sometimes gardened or planted with trees and vines. The rear of
the city blocks which these houses formed was more attractive than the
front, as you may still see in the vast succession of monotonous
cross-streets not yet invaded by poverty or business; and often the
perspective of these rears is picturesque and pleasing. But with the
sudden growth of the population when peace came, and through the
acquaintance the hordes of American tourists had made with European
fashions of living, it became easy, or at least simple, to divide the
floors of many of these private dwellings into apartments, each with its
own kitchen and all the apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then
had the street entrance and the stairways in common, and they had in
common the cellar and the furnace for heating; they had in common the
disadvantage of being badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark,
cramped, and uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses,
and they were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers
of them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in
conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and
subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had
been changed.
But the apartment as the New-Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the same
time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New York
work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they still
live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were called
tenement-houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is commonly
packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where they eat and
sleep, without the amenities and often without the decencies of life, and
of course without light and air. The buildings in case of fire are
death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent
means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders,
giving that festive air to their façades which I have already noted. The
bare and dirty entries and staircases are really ramifications of the
filthy streets without, and each tenement opens upon a landing as if it
opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents extorted from the inmates is
sometimes a hundred per cent., and is nearly always cruelly out of
proportion to the value of the houses, not to speak of the wretched
shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid the family in arrears is
set with all its poor household gear upon the sidewalk, in a pitiless
indifference to the season and the weather, which you could not realize
without seeing it, and which is incredible even of plutocratic nature. Of
course, landlordism, which you have read so much of, is at its worst
in the case of the tenement-houses. But you must understand that
comparatively few people in New York own the roofs that shelter them. By
far the greater number live, however they live, in houses owned by
others, by a class who prosper and grow rich, or richer, simply by owning
the roofs over other men's heads. The landlords have, of course, no human
relation with their tenants, and really no business relations, for all
the affairs between them are transacted by agents. Some have the
reputation of being better than others; but they all live, or expect to
live, without work, on their rents. They are very much respected for it;
the rents are considered a just return from the money invested. You must
try to conceive of this as an actual fact, and not merely as a
statistical statement. I know it will not be easy for you; it is not easy
for me, though I have it constantly before my face.