WHERE THE NEGRO LIVES
It is thirty-five years since, in his Symphony, Sidney Lanier told of
"The poor
That stand by the inward opening door
Trade's hand doth tighten evermore,
And sigh their monstrous foul air sigh
For the outside hills of liberty."
Were Lanier writing this today, we should wonder whether New York's
crowded tenements had not served as inspiration for his figure. The
island of Manhattan, about eight miles long by two miles wide, with an
additional slender triangle of five miles at the north end, in 1905,
housed two million one hundred and twelve thousand people. These men and
women and children were not scattered uniformly throughout the island,
but were placed in selected corners, one thousand to the acre, while a
mile or so away large comfortable homes held families of two or three.
This was Manhattan's condition in 1905, and with each succeeding year
more congestion takes place, and more pressure is felt upon the inward
opening door.[1]
The Negro with the rest of the poor of New York has his part in this
excessive overcrowding. The slaver in which he made his entrance to this
land provided in floor space six feet by one-foot-four for a man, five
feet by one-foot-four for a woman, and four feet by one-foot-four for a
child.[2] This outdoes any overcrowding New York can produce, but an
ever increasing cost in food and rent is bringing into her interior
bedrooms a mass of humanity approximating that of the slaver's ship.
These new-comers, however, are not unwilling occupants, since unlike the
slaves they may spend their day and much of their night amid an ocean of
changing and exciting incidents. If you are young and strong, you care
less where you sleep than where you may spend your waking hours.
From among the millions of New York's poor, can we pick out the Negroes
in their tenements? This is not so difficult a task as it would have
proved fifty years ago when the colored were scattered throughout the
city; today we find them confined to fairly definite quarters. A black
face on the lower East Side is viewed with astonishment, while on the
middle West Side it is no more noticeable than it would be in Atlanta or
New Orleans. Roughly we may count five Negro neighborhoods in Manhattan:
Greenwich Village, the middle West Side, San Juan Hill, the upper East,
and the upper West sides. Brooklyn has a large Negro population, but it
is more widely distributed and less easily located than that of
Manhattan.
Of the five Manhattan neighborhoods the oldest is Greenwich Village,
according to Janvier once the most attractive part of New York, where
the streets "have a tendency to sidle away from each other and to take
sudden and unreasonable turns." Here one finds such fascinating names as
Minetta Lane and Carmine and Cornelia Streets. These and neighboring
thoroughfares grow daily more grimy, however, and no longer merit
Janvier's praise for cleanliness, moral and physical. The picturesque,
friendly old houses are giving way to factories with high, monotonous
fronts, where foreigners work who crowd the ward and destroy its former
American aspect.
Among the old time aristocracy bearing Knickerbocker names there are a
few colored people who delight in talking of the fine families and past
wealth of old Greenwich Village. Scornful of the gibberish-speaking
Italians, they sigh, too, at their own race as they see it, for the
ambitious Negro has moved uptown, leaving this section largely to
widowed and deserted women and degenerates. The once handsome houses,
altered to accommodate many families, are rotten and unwholesome, while
the newer tenements of West Third Street are darkened by the elevated
road, and shelter vice that knows no race. Altogether, this is not a
neighborhood to attract the new-comer. Here alone in New York I have
found the majority of the adults northern born, men and women who,
unsuccessful in their struggle with city life, have been left behind in
these old forgotten streets.[3]
The second section, north of the first, lies between West Fourteenth and
West Fifty-ninth Streets, and Sixth Avenue and the Hudson River. In 1880
this was the centre of the Negro population, but business has entered
some of the streets, the Pennsylvania Railroad has scooped out acres for
its terminal, and while the colored houses do not diminish in number,
they show no decided increase. No one street is given over to the Negro,
but a row of two or three or six or even eight tenements shelter the
black man. The shelter afforded is poorer than that given the white
resident whose dwelling touches the black, the rents are a little
higher, and the landlord fails to pay attention to ragged paper, or to a
ceiling which scatters plaster flakes upon the floor. In the Thirties
there are rear tenements reached by narrow alley-ways. Crimes are
committed by black neighbor against black neighbor, and the entrance to
the rear yard offers a tempting place for a girl to linger at night. A
rear tenement is New York's only approach to the alley of cities farther
south.
There are startling and happy surprises in all tenement neighborhoods,
and I recall turning one afternoon from a dark yard into a large
beautiful room. Muslin curtains concealed the windows, the brass bed was
covered with a thick white counterpane, and on either side of the
fireplace, where coal burned brightly in an open grate, were two rare
engravings. It was a workroom, and the mistress of the house, steady,
capable, and very black, was at her ironing-board. By her sat the
colored mammy of the story book rocking lazily in her chair. She
explained to me that her daughter had found her down south, two years
ago, and brought her to this northern home, where she had nothing to do,
for her daughter could make fifty dollars a month. This home picture was
made lastingly memorable by the younger woman's telling me softly as she
went with me to the door, "I was sold from my mother, down in Georgia,
when I was two years old. I ain't sure she's my mother. _She_ thinks so;
but I can't ever be sure."
Homes beautiful both in appearance and in spirit can rarely occur where
people must dwell in great poverty, but there are many efforts at
attractive family life on these streets. A few of the blocks are orderly
and quiet. Thirty-seventh Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, is
largely given over to the colored and is rough and noisy. Here and down
by the river at Hell's Kitchen the rioting in 1900 between the Irish and
the Negro took place. Men are ready for a fight today, and the children
see much of hard drinking and quick blows.
"The poorer the family, the lower is the quarter in which it must live,
and the more enviable appears the fortune of the anti-social class."[4]
A vicious world dwells in these streets and makes notorious this section
of New York. For this is a part of the Tenderloin district, and at
night, after the children's cries have ceased, and the fathers and
mothers who have worked hard during the day have put out their lights,
the automobiles rush swiftly past, bearing the men of the "superior
race." Temptation is continuous, and the child that grows up pure in
thought and deed does so in spite of his surroundings.
Before reaching West Fifty-ninth Street, the beginning of our third
district, we come upon a Negro block at West Fifty-third Street. When
years ago the elevated railroad was erected on this fashionable street,
white people began to sell out and rent to Negroes; and today you find
here three colored hotels, the colored Young Men's and Young Women's
Christian Associations, the offices of many colored doctors and lawyers,
and three large beautiful colored churches. The din of the elevated
drowns alike the doctor's voice and his patient's, the client's and the
preacher's.
From Fifty-ninth Street, walking north on Tenth Avenue, we begin to
ascend a hill that grows in steepness until we reach Sixty-second
Street. The avenue is lined with small stores kept by Italians and
Germans, but to the left the streets, sloping rapidly to the Hudson
River, are filled with tenements, huge double deckers, built to within
ten feet of the rear of the twenty-five foot lot, accommodating four
families on each of the five floors. We can count four hundred and
seventy-nine homes on one side of the street alone!
This is our third district, San Juan Hill, so called by an on-looker who
saw the policemen charging up during one of the once common race fights.
It is a bit of Africa, as Negroid in aspect as any district you are
likely to visit in the South. A large majority of its residents are
Southerners and West Indians, and it presents an interesting study of
the Negro poor in a large northern city. The block on Sixtieth Street
has some white residents, but the blocks on Sixty-first, Sixty-second,
and Sixty-third are given over entirely to colored. On the square made
by the north side of Sixty-first, the south side of Sixty-second
Streets, and Tenth and West End Avenues, 5.4 acres, the state census of
1905 showed 6173 inhabitants.[5] All but a few of these must have been
Negroes, as the avenue sides of the block, occupied by whites, are short
and with low houses. It is the long line of five-story tenements,
running eight hundred feet down the two streets, that brings up the
enumeration. The dwellings on Sixty-first and Sixty-second Streets are
human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings.
Bedrooms open into air shafts that admit no fresh breezes, only foul
air carrying too often the germs of disease.
The people on the hill are known for their rough behavior, their
readiness to fight, their coarse talk. Vice is abroad, not in insidious
form as in the more well-to-do neighborhood farther north, but open and
cheap. Boys play at craps unmolested, gambling is prevalent, and Negro
loafers hang about the street corners and largely support the Tenth
Avenue saloons.
But San Juan Hill has many respectable families, and within the past
five years it has taken a decided turn for the better. The improvement
has been chiefly upon Sixty-third Street where two model tenements, one
holding one hundred, the other one hundred and sixty-one families, have
been opened under the management of the City and Suburban Homes Company,
the larger one having been erected by Mr. Henry Phipps. Planning for a
four per cent return on their investment, these landlords have rented
only to respectable families, and their rule has changed the character
of the block.[6] Old houses have been remodelled to compete with the
newer dwellings, street rows have ceased, and the police captain of the
district, we are told, now counts this as one of the peaceful and
law-abiding blocks of the city. When its other blocks show a like
improvement, San Juan Hill will no longer merit its belligerent name.
The lower East Side of Manhattan, a many-storied mass of tenements and
workshops, where immigrants labor and sleep in their tiny crowded rooms,
was once a fashionable American district. At that time Negroes dwelt
near the whites as barbers, caterers, and coachmen, as laundresses and
waiting-maids. But with the removal of the people whom they served, the
colored men and women left also, and it is difficult to find an African
face among the hundreds of thousands of Europeans south of Fourteenth
Street. On Pell Street, in the Chinese quarter, there used to be two
colored families on friendly terms with their neighbors, who, however,
went uptown for their pleasures and their church.
It is not until we reach Third Avenue and Forty-third Street that we
come to the East Side Negro tenement. From this point, such houses run,
a straggling line, chiefly between Second and Third Avenues, to
the Bronx where the more well-to-do among the colored live. At
Ninety-seventh Street, and on up to One Hundredth Street, dark faces are
numerous. About six hundred and fifty Negro families live on these four
streets and around the corner on Third Avenue. Occasionally they live in
houses occupied by Jews or Italians. Above this section there are a
number of Negro tenements in the One Hundred and Thirties, between
Madison and Fifth Avenues--almost a West Side neighborhood, since it
adjoins the large colored quarter to the west of Fifth Avenue. On the
whole, the East Side is not often sought by the colored as a place of
residence. Their important churches are in another part of the city, and
every New Yorker knows the difficulty in making a way across Central
Park. Yet, the neighborhood is not uncivil to them, and one rarely reads
here of race friction. Doubtless this is in part owing to the smallness
of the population, all of Manhattan east of Fifth Avenue containing but
fourteen per cent of the apartments occupied by colored in the city; but
it is partly, too, that Jews and Italians prove less belligerent
tenement neighbors than Irish.
Five years ago, those of us who were interested in the Negro poor
continually heard of their difficulty in securing a place to live. Not
only were they unable to rent in neighborhoods suitable for respectable
men and women, but dispossession, caused perhaps by the inroad of
business, meant a despairing hunt for any home at all. People clung to
miserable dwellings, where no improvements had been made for years,
thankful to have a roof to shelter them. Yet all the time new-law
tenements were being built, and Gentile and Jew were leaving their
former apartments in haste to get into these more attractive dwellings.
At length the Negro got his chance; not a very good one, but something
better than New York had yet offered him--a chance to follow into the
houses left vacant by the white tenants. Owing in part to the energy of
Negro real estate agents, in part to rapid building operations,
desirable streets, near the subway and the elevated railroad, were
thrown open to the colored. This Negro quarter, the last we have to note
and the newest, has been created in the past eight years. When the
Tenement House Department tabulated the 1900 census figures for the
Borough of Manhattan, and showed the nationalities and races on each
block, it found only 300 colored families in a neighborhood that today
accommodates 4473 colored families.[7] This large increase is on six
streets, West Ninety-ninth, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, West One
Hundred and Nineteenth, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and West One
Hundred and Thirty-third to One Hundred and Thirty-sixth Streets,
between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, with a few houses between Seventh and
Eighth, and on Lenox Avenues. There are colored tenements north and
south of this; and while these figures are correct today,[8] they may
be wrong tomorrow, for new tenements are continually given over to the
Negro people. Moreover, on all of these streets are colored boarding and
lodging houses, crowded with humanity. Houses today fall into the hands
of the Negro as a child's blocks, placed on end, tumble when a push is
given to the first in the line. The New York _Times_, in August, 1905,
gives a graphic account of the entrance of the colored tenant on West
Ninety-ninth Street. Two houses had been opened for a short time to
Negroes when the other house-owners capitulated, and the colored influx
came: "The street was so choked with vehicles Saturday that some of the
drivers had to wait with their teams around the corners for an
opportunity to get into it. A constant stream of furniture trucks loaded
with the household effects of a new colony of colored people who are
invading the choice locality is pouring into the street. Another equally
long procession, moving in the other direction, is carrying away the
household goods of the whites from their homes of years." The movement
is not always so swift as this, but it is continuous.
This last colored neighborhood perhaps ought not to be spoken of as
belonging to the poor; not to Lanier's poor whose door pressed so
tighteningly inward. Here are homes where it is possible, with
sufficient money, to live in privacy, and with the comforts of steam
heat and a private bath. But rents are high, and if money is scarce, the
apartment must be crowded and privacy lost. Moreover, vice has made its
way into these newly acquired streets. The sporting class will always
pay more and demand fewer improvements than the workers, and, unable to
protect himself, the respectable tenant finds his children forced to
live in close propinquity to viciousness. Each of these new streets has
this objectionable element in its population, for while some agents
make earnest efforts to keep the property they handle respectable, they
find the owner wants money more than respectability.
In our walk up and down Manhattan, turning aside and searching for
Negro-tenanted streets, we ought to see one thing with clearness--that
the majority of the colored population live on a comparatively few
blocks. This is a new and important feature of their New York life, and
in certain parts of the city it develops a color problem, for while you
seem an inappreciable quantity when you constitute two per cent of the
population in the borough, you are of importance when you form one
hundred per cent of the population of your street. This congestion is
accompanied by a segregation of the race. The dwellers in these
tenements are largely new-comers, men and women from the South and the
West Indies,[9] seeking the North for greater freedom and for economic
opportunity. Like any other strangers they are glad to make their home
among familiar faces, and they settle in the already crowded places on
the West Side. Freedom to live on the East Side next door to a Bohemian
family may be very well, but sociability is better. The housewife who
timidly hangs her clothes on the roof her first Monday morning in New
York is pleased to find the next line swinging with the laundry of a
Richmond acquaintance, who instructs her in the perplexing housekeeping
devices of her flat. No chattering foreigner could do that. And while to
be welcome in a white church is inspiring, to find the girl you knew at
home, in the next pew to you, is still more delightful when you have
arrived, tired and homesick, at the great city of New York. So the
colored working people, like the Italians and Jews and other
nationalities, have their quarter in which they live very much by
themselves, paying little attention to their white neighbors. If the
white people of the city have forced this upon them, they have easily
accepted it. Should this two per cent of the population be compelled to
distribute itself mathematically over the city, each ward and street
having its correct quota, it would evince dissatisfaction. This is not
true of the well-to-do element, but of the mass of the Negro workers
whose homes we have been visiting. Loving sociability, these new-comers
to the city--and it is in the most segregated districts that the greater
number of southern and British born Negroes are found--keep to their own
streets and live to themselves. If they occupy all the sidewalk as they
talk over important matters in front of their church, the outsider
passing should recognize that he is an intruder and take to the curb. He
would leave the sidewalk entirely were he on Hester Street or Mulberry
Bend. New-comers to New York usually segregate, and the Negro is no
exception.
While congestion and segregation seem important to us as we look at
these colored quarters, I suspect that the matter most pertinent to the
Negro new-comer is, not where he will live nor how he will live, but
whether he will be able to live in New York at all, whether he can meet
the landlord's agent the day he comes to the door. For New York rents
have mounted upwards as have her tenements. The Phipps model houses,
built especially to benefit the poor, charge twenty-five dollars a month
for four tiny rooms and bath; and while this is a little more than the
dark old time rooms would bring, it takes about all of the twenty-five
dollars you make running an elevator, to get a flat in New York. What
wonder that, once secured, it is overrun with lodgers, or that, if
privacy is maintained, there is not enough money left to feed and clothe
the growing household. The once familiar song of the colored comedian
still rings true in New York:
"Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown,
What you gwine ter do when de rent comes roun'?"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Harold M. Finley in _Federation_, May, 1908.
[2] Thomas Clarkson, "History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade," p.
378.
[3] Place of birth of 1036 New York Negro tenement dwellers. These
figures were obtained chiefly from personal visits:
========================================================================
| Totals | East | Greenwich | Middle | San | Upper
| | Side | Village | West | Juan | West
| | | | Side | Hill | Side
---------------------+--------+------+-----------+--------+------+------
New England | 18 | 1 | 4 | 7 | 5 | 1
West | 11 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 4 | 1
New York | 157 | 6 | 47 | 42 | 55 | 7
New Jersey | 18 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 9 | 1
Pennsylvania | 19 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 12 | 1
Maryland | 37 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 27 | 3
District of Columbia | 26 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 16 | 4
Virginia | 375 | 8 | 15 | 71 | 244 | 37
Carolinas | 217 | 6 | 16 | 64 | 127 | 4
Gulf States | 65 | 0 | 2 | 23 | 39 | 1
Canada | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0
West Indies | 87 | 1 | 6 | 13 | 67 | 0
Europe | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 0
---------------------+--------+------+-----------+--------+------+------
| 1036 | 25 | 100 | 243 | 608 | 60
========================================================================
[4] S. N. Patten, "New Basis of Civilization," p. 52.
[5] Some doubt is cast upon this figure. The New York Health Department
in an enumeration of its own, in 1905, found a population of 3833. There
is no question, however, of the great congestion of this block and the
one north and south of it. The erection of new tenements has gone on
rapidly since 1905, sweeping away the children's playgrounds, and making
this one of the most crowded centres of New York.
[6] Too much cannot be said of the beneficial effect of good housing in
a colored neighborhood, when under such able management as the City and
Suburban Homes Company. Decent homes under competent management are
absolutely necessary to an improvement in the Negro quarters of
Manhattan and of Brooklyn as well. I can speak with some authority of
the good done by the Phipps houses on West Sixty-third Street, as I
lived, for eight months, the only white tenant in the one hundred and
sixty-one apartments. Church and philanthropy had done and are doing
excellent work on these blocks, but a sudden and marked improvement came
from good housing, from the building of clean, healthful homes for
law-abiding people.
[7] The Tenement House Department tabulated the number of Negro
families living in tenements on these streets. I have counted the number
of flats rented to colored people.
[8] July 15, 1910.
[9] The yearly arrivals of "African blacks" at the port of New York,
secured from the Immigration Commissioner, are as follows: 1902-03, 110;
1903-04, 547; 1904-05, 1189; 1905-06, 1757; 1906-07, 2054; 1907-08,
1820; 1908-09, 2119. The year runs from July 1 to June 30.