domiciliary conditions. The poorer classes of New York are found living
either in cellars or in tenement houses. It is estimated by the City
Inspector that 18,000 persons live in cellars. This is also about the
estimate of the police. The apartments of these people are not the
light and airy basement rooms of the better class houses, but their
homes are, in the worst sense, cellars. These dark, damp and dreary
abodes are seldom penetrated by a ray of sunlight, or enlivened by
a breath of fresh air. I will quote several descriptions from these
reports. In the Fourth Ward many of these cellars are below tide water.
Says the Inspector of that district:
“This submarine region is not only excessively damp, but is liable
to sudden inroads from the sea. At high tide the water often wells up
through the floors, submerging them to a considerable depth. In very
many cases the vaults of privies are situated on the same or a higher
level, and their contents frequently ooze through the walls into the
occupied apartments beside them. Fully one-fourth of these subterranean
domiciles are pervaded by a most offensive odor from this source,
and rendered exceedingly unwholesome as human habitations. These are
the places in which we most frequently meet with typhoid fever and
dysentery during the summer months. I estimate the amount of sickness
of all kinds affecting the residents of basements and cellars, compared
with that occurring among an equal number of the inhabitants of floors
above ground, as being about a ratio of 3 to 2.”
The Inspector of the Fifteenth Ward reports: “In a dark and damp
cellar, about 18 feet square and 7 feet high, lived a family of seven
persons; within the past year two have died of typhus, two of smallpox,
and one has been sent to the hospital with erysipelas. The tops of
the windows of this abode are below the level of the surface, and in
the court near are several privies and a rear tenant-house. Yet this
occurred but a short distance from the very heart of the city.”
[Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTIONAL VIEW OF ROOKERY BETWEEN BROADWAY
AND BOWERY, 1865
_In its dark, damp cellar, 18 feet square by 7 high, lived 7 persons_
L, LIVING ROOM; D, DORMITORY]
The Inspector of the Ninth Ward writes: “At Nos. --, --, -- and --
Hammond Street, and also at No. -- Washington Street, are inhabited
cellars, the ceilings of which are below the level of the street,
inaccessible to the rays of the sun, and always damp and dismal. Three
of them are flooded at every heavy rain, and require to be baled out.
They are let at a somewhat smaller rent than is asked for apartments
on an upper floor, and are rented by those to whom poverty leaves no
choice. They are rarely vacant.”
The Inspector of the Seventeenth Ward states that: “In 17 squares 55
houses contain 246 persons living in cellars entirely underground. As
a matter of course such cellars are unhealthy dwelling apartments.
Stanton Place has some of these miserable cellar-apartments, in which
diseases have been generated. These cellars are entirely subterranean,
dark and damp.”
[Sidenote: 496 Persons Under Ground]
The Inspector of the Sixth Ward says: “There has been some
improvement within the last few years--the cellar population having
been perceptibly decreased, yet 496 persons still live in damp and
unwholesome quarters under ground. In some of them water was discovered
trickling down the walls, the source of which was sometimes traced
to the courts and alleys, and sometimes to the soakage from the
water-closets. The noxious effluvia always present in these basements
are of a sickening character. Many of the cellars are occupied by
two or three families; a number are also occupied as lodging-houses,
accommodating from twenty to thirty lodgers. One, near the corner
of Elm and Worth streets, is now fifteen or sixteen feet below the
level of the street (the street having been raised ten feet). The
lodging-house keeper complained to the Inspector that her business had
fallen off some since the street was raised. As might be expected,
the sickness rate is very high; rheumatic disease, fevers, strumous
diseases, cholera infantum, etc., etc., running riot among the
population. Indeed, in nearly every basement disease of some kind has
been found peculiarly prevalent and fatal.”
[Illustration: PLAN OF CELLAR IN THE SIXTEENTH WARD, 1865, OCCUPIED BY
TWO FAMILIES, EACH WITH A DARK LIVING-ROOM, AND A DARK, DAMP DORMITORY]
Another Inspector says: “At No. -- West Sixteenth Street, two families,
in which are thirteen persons, occupy the basement. It is so dark
that ordinary type can be seen with difficulty. In the other case the
people were healthy before entering the basement; since, however, they
have been ill; the mother has phthisis. Of twenty-four cellars, note
of which has been made, four only were in good sanitary condition. The
rest were more or less filthy, some indescribably so. One contained
urine, bones, and soakage from the privy.”
The Inspector of the Eighteenth Ward writes: “There are a few cellars
so dark that one cannot see to read in them, unless by artificial
light, except for a few hours in the day, by sitting close to the
window; and there are many basement rooms into whose gloomy recesses
not a single direct ray from the sun ever shone. The latter are, as a
rule, by half their depth below the level of the street. Dark and damp,
with very little chance for circulation of air, it would be difficult
to imagine a human being more completely beyond reach of sanitary
provisions. And when we consider that four large families often crowd
this subterranean floor, no words are needed to show their condition
deplorable. That a generally impaired vitality is promoted by living
in this unnatural way, ‘a nameless, ever new disease,’ there can be no
question; that these people will be especially prone to whatever form
of prevailing sickness may be about in the community, no one can doubt;
but whether there is any specific cause involved, capable of producing
definite forms of disease, is more difficult to determine.”
[Sidenote: A Visit to the Cave-Dwellers]
An Inspector thus describes a visit to one of these subterranean
abodes: “We enter a room whose low ceiling is blackened with smoke,
and its walls discolored with damp. In front, opening on a narrow area
covered with green mould, two small windows, their tops scarcely level
with the court-yard, afford at noonday a twilight illumination to the
apartment. Through their broken panes they admit the damp air laden
with effluvia, which constitutes the vital atmosphere inhaled by all
who are immured in this dismal abode. A door at the back of this room
communicates with another which is entirely dark, and has but this one
opening. Both rooms together have an area of about eighteen feet square.
“The father of the family, a day laborer, is absent. The mother, a
wrinkled crone at thirty, sits rocking in her arms an infant whose
pasty and pallid features tell that decay and death are usurping the
place of health and life. Two older children are in the street, which
is their only playground, and the only place where they can go to
breathe an atmosphere that is even comparatively pure. A fourth child,
emaciated to a skeleton, and with that ghastly and unearthly look which
marasmus impresses on its victims, has reared his feeble frame on a
rickety chair against the window sill, and is striving to get a glimpse
of the smiling heavens, whose light is so seldom permitted to gladden
its longing eyes. Its youth has battled nobly against the terrible
morbid and devitalizing agents which have oppressed its childish
life--the poisonous air, the darkness, and the damp; but the battle is
nearly over--it is easy to decide where the victory will be.”
But I need not multiply the evidences that 18,000 people, men,
women, and children (a goodly-sized town), are to-day living in our
city in a condition the most destructive to health, happiness, and
morals that could possibly be devised. As you look into these abodes
of wretchedness, filth and disease, the inmates manifest the same
lethargic habits as animals, burrowing in the ground. They are, indeed,
half narcotized by the constant inhalation of the emanations of their
own bodies, and by a prolonged absence of light and fresh air. Here we
never find sound health, while the constant sickness rate ranges from
75 to 90 per cent.
[Sidenote: Tenant-House Population]
Now, as to the second condition under which we find the laboring
classes. It is estimated by the police that the tenant-house population
of New York reaches the enormous figure of 500,000 or about half of the
total number of inhabitants. The great and striking fact in regard to
the domiciliary condition of the tenant-house class is overcrowding
and deficient sunlight and fresh air. The landlord of the poor
tenant-house has two principal motives--first, to pack as many people
as he can in a given space, and second, to make as few improvements and
repairs as possible.
[Illustration: 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.”
[Sidenote: Cat Alley]
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 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.
[Illustration: THE FILTHY ALLEY CALLED RIVINGTON PLACE, 1865, IN THE
REAR OF NUMBERS 316 AND 318 RIVINGTON STREET]
“At No. -- West Twenty-fifth Street, a wretched tenement of two
apartments, the rooms occupied by one family. The sitting-room is about
10×12 feet, and the bedroom about 5×12, without a single window or air
hole. These rooms were occupied in the hot month of July by a colored
female, having pulmonary consumption, and her two children. Here she
died, shortly after we made the inspection of her domicilium; having
no money nor friends, a Christian burial was denied her for four days,
although the neighbors acquainted the police of the fact, and they the
Health Warden.”
[Sidenote: Rag Pickers Row]
“Rag Pickers Row” is thus described: “The houses are of wood, two
stories, with attic and basement. The attic rooms are used to
deposit the filthy rags and bones as they are taken from gutters and
slaughter-houses. The yards are filled with dirty rags hung up to dry,
sending forth their stench to all the neighborhood, and are exceedingly
nauseous, operating upon me as an emetic. The tenants are all Germans
of the lowest order, having no national nor personal pride; they are
exceedingly filthy in person, and their bed-clothes are as dirty as
the floors they walk on; their food is of the poorest quality, and
their feet and heads, and doubtless their whole bodies, are anasarcous,
suffering from what they call rheumatism, but which is in reality a
prostrate nervous system, the result of foul air and inadequate supply
of nutritious food. They have a peculiar taste for the association of
dogs and cats, there being about 50 of the former and 30 of the latter.
The whole number of apartments is 32, occupied by 28 families, number
120 in all, 60 adults and 60 children. The yards are all small, and the
sinks running over with filth.”
[Sidenote: Tenant-House Degeneration]
Says a visitor in the Eighth Ward: “The instances are many in which
one or more families, of from three to seven or more members, of all
ages and both sexes, are congregated in a single and often contracted
apartment. Here they eat, drink, sleep, work, dress and undress,
without the possibility of that privacy which an innate modesty
imperatively demands. In sickness and in health it is the same.
“What is the consequence? The sense of shame--the greatest, surest
safeguard of virtue, except the grace of God--is gradually blunted,
ruined, and finally destroyed. New scenes are witnessed and
participated in, with a countenance of brass, the very thought of
which, once, would have filled the sensitive heart of modesty with
pain, and covered its cheek with burning blushes. The mind of one thus
brought in daily and nightly contact with such scenes must become
greatly debased, and its fall, before the assaults of vice, rendered
almost certain.”
[Illustration: GOTHAM COURT, ON CHERRY STREET, 1865]
[Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTIONAL ELEVATION OF THE GOTHAM COURT
ROOKERY
C, CELLAR; P, PRIVY; S, SEWER]
Another writes: “These houses seem to be always open to newcomers, and,
in some way or other, they can accommodate them. I have found three
families, of men, women, and children, in one room; there they lived
and there they slept. Can any one doubt that there must be a rapid
declension of morals in both parents and children, or that a bar is
here opposed to moral and religious instruction, or that this state of
things is consequent on the circumstances and condition of life?”
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!”
[Illustration: “THE GREAT EASTERN,” NUMBER 115 EAST 37TH STREET, 1865]
[Sidenote: The Rioters]
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. 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.”
[Sidenote: Tenant-House Rot]
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 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:
[Sidenote: Tenant-House Cachexy]
“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 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.
“In this condition of life the ties of nature seem to be unloosed.
Maternal instinct and filial affection seem to participate in the
general decay of soul and body. A kind Providence, whose hand is
visible even here, mercifully provides that the almost inevitable
decay and death which man’s criminal neglect entails on the offspring
of the unfortunate who dwell in these dreary mansions, shall elicit
comparatively feeble pangs of parental anguish. To the physical and
moral degradation, the blight of these miserable abodes, where decay
reigns supreme over habitation and inhabitant alike, may be plainly
traced much of the immorality and crime which prevail among us. The
established truth, that, as the corporeal frame deteriorates, man’s
spiritual nature is liable also to degenerate, receives its apt
illustration here.”
[Sidenote: Prevailing Diseases]
But, sir, acute diseases, and those frequently of the most destructive
character, prevail at all seasons among the tenant-house population,
and generally with fearful fatality. Although the last summer and
autumn were unusually healthy, these records show the prevalence of a
vast amount of diseases among the poor of New York. These diseases are
of a kind that always originate in or are aggravated by the crowding
of families in unventilated apartments, want of sunlight and pure air,
house and street filth, etc.
First Ward: The diseases prevalent in this district the past season
have been principally typhus, measles, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera
morbus, cholera infantum, and marasmus. Diarrhoeal diseases are most
prevalent in those insalubrious quarters already described, and at
a season when the exciting causes are at their greatest stage of
development and activity.
Second and Third Wards: Typhus fever made its appearance in
tenant-houses, and in two or three instances spread through all the
families immediately exposed. At one place the disease attacked
successively every member of the family immediately exposed, but was
prevented from spreading further by free ventilation.
Fifth Ward: The slips, in consequence of receiving the sewerage of the
district and surrounding parts of the city, are generally foul and
the undoubted source of much sickness. Smallpox has prevailed more
extensively than for many years back. Typhus and typhoid fevers have
been prevalent over the whole district.