The tenement-house, such as it is, is the original of the
apartment-house, which perpetuates some of its most characteristic
features on a scale and in material undreamed of in the simple philosophy
of the inventor of the tenement-house. The worst of these features is
the want of light and air, but as much more space and as many more rooms
are conceded as the tenant will pay for. The apartment-house, however,
soars to heights that the tenement-house never half reached, and is
sometimes ten stories high. It is built fireproof, very often, and is
generally equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makes
one level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which have
departed less from the tenement-house original, have no elevators, but
the street door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by the
tenant's latch-key or by the janitor having charge of the whole building.
In the finer houses there is a page whose sole duty it is to open and
shut this door, and who is usually brass-buttoned to one blinding effect
of livery with the elevator-boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found,
the elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where he
is not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, for
each apartment, and you ring up the occupant and talk to him as many
stories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulge
their pride will not live in this sort of apartment-house, and the
rents in them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort are
vulgarly fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaic
pavement, marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinet
wood-work. But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in the
things that are common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeeping
are of all degrees of perfection, and, except for the want of light and
air, life in them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heated
throughout with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimes
lighted with both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will,
though of course at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair of
architecture, for no style has yet been invented which enables the artist
to characterize them with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulks
they deform the whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out of
scale, and making it impossible for future edifices to assimilate
themselves to the intruder.
There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is no
street or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to be
found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others
follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western
avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded.
In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannot
see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed in
them. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of an
uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and I
believe the physicians really attribute something of the growing
prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves from
the rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarring
of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening in
one of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks last
spring (you can get them out of season for any length of time), and as
the weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we had
the full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had become
accustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give you
any notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat as
if I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst every
sentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speech
which we use so much at home I never should have known what my friend was
saying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made
the mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the
plutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it,
bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.
Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such
things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are
inhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot season
when the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people who
must dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure to
get out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I could
not endure for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in sickness
it must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with a dying
child in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her husband
to catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a train of five or six
cars goes roaring by the open window! What horror! What profanation!