THE AWAKENING.
The dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowledge of the
harvest field that awaited the plague in New York's slums, pricked the
conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the
war. A citizens' movement resulted in the organization of a Board of
Health and the adoption of the "Tenement-House Act" of 1867, the first
step toward remedial legislation. A thorough canvass of the tenements
had been begun already in the previous year; but the cholera first,
and next a scourge of small-pox, delayed the work, while emphasizing
the need of it, so that it was 1869 before it got fairly under way and
began to tell. The dark bedroom fell under the ban first. In that year
the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows
in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation--for little or no light was
to be had from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The saw
had a job all that summer; by early fall nearly all the orders had
been carried out. Not without opposition; obstacles were thrown in the
way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements,
who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added
expense to diminish their income from the rent; on the other side by
the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing
protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content
to remain there. The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat
ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds. Already it taxed
the city heavily for the support of its jails and charities. The basis
of opposition, curiously enough, was the same at both extremes; owner
and tenant alike considered official interference an infringement of
personal rights, and a hardship. It took long years of weary labor to
make good the claim of the sunlight to such corners of the dens as
it could reach at all. Not until five years after did the department
succeed at last in ousting the "cave-dwellers" and closing some five
hundred and fifty cellars south of Houston Street, many of them below
tide-water, that had been used as living apartments. In many instances
the police had to drag the tenants out by force.
The work went on; but the need of it only grew with the effort. The
Sanitarians were following up an evil that grew faster than they went;
like a fire, it could only be headed off, not chased, with success.
Official reports, read in the churches in 1879, characterized the
younger criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and
unhealthy, overcrowded lodgings, brought up in "an atmosphere of actual
darkness, moral and physical." This after the saw had been busy in the
dark corners ten years! "If we could see the air breathed by these
poor creatures in their tenements," said a well-known physician, "it
would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters." Little
improvement was apparent despite all that had been done. "The new
tenements, that have been recently built, have been usually as badly
planned as the old, with dark and unhealthy rooms, often over wet
cellars, where extreme overcrowding is permitted," was the verdict
of one authority. These are the houses that to-day perpetuate the
worst traditions of the past, and they are counted by thousands. The
Five Points had been cleansed, as far as the immediate neighborhood
was concerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing it in
foulness not a stone's throw away, and new centres of corruption were
continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever vigilance
was relaxed for ever so short a time. It is one of the curses of the
tenement-house system that the worst houses exercise a levelling
influence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a schoolroom will
spoil the whole class. It is one of the ways the evil that was "the
result of forgetfulness of the poor," as the Council of Hygiene mildly
put it, has of avenging itself.
The determined effort to head it off by laying a strong hand upon the
tenement builders that has been the chief business of the Health Board
of recent years, dates from this period. The era of the air-shaft has
not solved the problem of housing the poor, but it has made good use of
limited opportunities. Over the new houses sanitary law exercises full
control. But the old remain. They cannot be summarily torn down, though
in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. The outrageous
overcrowding, too, remains. It is characteristic of the tenements.
Poverty, their badge and typical condition, invites--compels it. All
efforts to abate it result only in temporary relief. As long as they
exist it will exist with them. And the tenements will exist in New York
forever.
[Illustration: TENEMENT OF THE OLD STYLE.]
[Illustration: BIRTH OF THE AIR-SHAFT.]
To-day, what is a tenement? The law defines it as a house "occupied by
three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking
on the premises; or by more than two families on a floor, so living
and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways,
yards, etc." That is the legal meaning, and includes flats and
apartment-houses, with which we have nothing to do. In its narrower
sense the typical tenement was thus described when last arraigned
before the bar of public justice: "It is generally a brick building
from four to six stories high on the street, frequently with a store
on the first floor which, when used for the sale of liquor, has a
side opening for the benefit of the inmates and to evade the Sunday
law; four families occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of
one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve
feet by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of
the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family
being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently the rear of
the lot is occupied by another building of three stories, high with
two families on a floor." The picture is nearly as true to-day as ten
years ago, and will be for a long time to come. The dim light admitted
by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tenements are
still "good property," and the poverty of the poor man his destruction.
A barrack down town where he _has to live_ because he is poor brings
in a third more rent than a decent flat house in Harlem. The statement
once made a sensation that between seventy and eighty children had been
found in one tenement. It no longer excites even passing attention,
when the sanitary police report counting 101 adults and 91 children in
a Crosby Street house, one of twins, built together. The children in
the other, if I am not mistaken, numbered 89, a total of 180 for two
tenements! Or when a midnight inspection in Mulberry Street unearths a
hundred and fifty "lodgers" sleeping on filthy floors in two buildings.
Spite of brown-stone trimmings, plate-glass and mosaic vestibule
floors, the water does not rise in summer to the second story, while
the beer flows unchecked to the all-night picnics on the roof. The
saloon with the side-door and the landlord divide the prosperity of the
place between them, and the tenant, in sullen submission, foots the
bills.
Where are the tenements of to-day? Say rather: where are they not?
In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward slums and the
Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the
Annexed District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards,
wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both
rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and
filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold
within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them
at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. The bullet-proof
shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the
Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of
the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring
three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have
doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held
captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery,
what will the harvest be?