By GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.
New York City, which is the soul and center of a series of cities which
may be called the Metropolitan District, has not far from a million and
a half of people, nearly all of whom reside upon an island of rocky
formation, surrounded by deep water. Within recent years a district
to the north of the island has been annexed to the city, and city
protection and privileges partly extended to it, and new parks have just
been legalized there, but little that has yet been done in the outlying
districts and cities has been effectual to thin out the population of the
great central city, whose inhabitants are gathered from all races.
The island of New York extends over thirteen miles along the North River,
and it is densely built up as far as 70th Street, on that river, and on
the East River it is almost solidly built up to Harlem, which is six
or seven miles from the point of the city at the Battery. The middle
of the island, to the extent of nine hundred acres, is occupied by the
Central Park and other parks, and broad driveways or boulevards take up
considerable of the unoccupied or partially occupied portion, so that the
time is admitted to be near at hand when all this island will be covered
with houses. The character of these houses is already indicated by the
tall flats, apartment houses, or tenement houses which are rising,
apparently in the country parts, out of the green fields, and some of
these are six, seven and eight stories high. Extensive apartment houses,
in which the floors are rented or sold, are also being constructed in
the vicinity of the park, sometimes to the height of nine, ten and even
twelve stories.
It would therefore appear that the future residence of the New Yorker is
to be some kind of a tenement structure after the fashion prevailing on
the continent of Europe. For some of these costly tenements the rent is
as high as six thousand to eight thousand dollars per annum. The cheapest
tenements on New York island probably cost twenty dollars a month.
Although a bridge has been built at enormous expense to connect New York
and Brooklyn, it is a mere convenience, and has exercised no influence
on the general character of New York island. While Brooklyn is growing,
Harlem relatively is growing faster, at the northern end of New York
island. The elevated railroads, of which there are four parallel to each
other up and down the length of the island as far as the park, and three
the whole length of the island, or to Harlem River, have rather exercised
a recalling influence to the city from the suburbs, and the tendency is
to extend New York across the Harlem River rather than across the Hudson
or the East rivers and the bay, which are often embarrassed by fog, ice,
and storm.
The New York manufactures have so expanded that the operatives do not go
from the city to the country parts to do a day’s labor, but come from
the country parts into New York to earn a living. The protective tariff
has transferred the foreign commerce of New York to foreign nations,
while it has made New York City our largest manufacturing city. These
manufactories compressed on that small island necessarily partake of the
tenement house character, and it has been necessary for the legislature
to pass laws prohibiting the making of cigars in the tenement houses
where the people live. A few years ago I was requested to visit some of
these cigar tenements in the vicinity of Tompkins Square, and further
uptown, and I found an extraordinary condition of things which has not
yet been checked by legislation, because after the prohibitory law
was passed it was found to be defective in phraseology, and has to be
reënacted. In these tenements could be seen a whole family, men, women
and children, living and working their tobacco, and at the same time
cooking, sleeping, eating and entertaining, with the tobacco spread over
the floor to be dried at night, the children walking on it, and the
vapors of the tobacco filling the lungs of the sleepers. In the morning
the man got up and began to cut, trim and fill cigars, and put them on
the bench before him, and there he sat all day, for at least six days in
the week, seldom going out to let the rooms be aired, and some of these
buildings, from four to six stories high, were nothing but pigeon cases
of such tobacco tenements.
It is to be doubted whether the law can reach such cases, because
detection would always involve an intrusion into the living apartments
of families, and would make in time such hostility that the law itself
would have to be repealed. As in Lyons, France, and in Belgium, where the
silk weavers, the lace makers, etc., take their work home, there is no
doubt a tendency in New York City to live and toil on the same premises.
The population of New York is made up from most of the laboring nations,
and each of these brings its own habits, and expects to exercise them
freely in this free country. The vices of European laboring society
have been imported with the virtues. The city electing its officials by
suffrage modifies its usages and government in the direction of these new
elements, and the foreigner soon picks up from his demagogues and the
small newspapers published in his own language aggressive ideas, which
some think are rapidly becoming a great defensive system, some day to
plague the metropolis.
Whatever we native Americans think about the foreign methods of living
in New York, those methods are as natural to the immigrants as it is for
us to occupy a whole house. Indeed, the American in such cities as New
York is becoming of necessity the imitator of the foreigner, because the
rent of a whole establishment on that cramped island is out of the reach
of any but the well employed and independently prosperous.
As this article may come to eyes which have never seen the great city,
I will convey to you some slight notion of the structure of New York
island. This island is made of gneiss rock, or hard granite, which
apparently extended in ribs or ridges, sometimes depressed, sometimes
high, and in places like islands, and between these ridges and islands
sand and gravel have been deposited, so that when you come to lay out a
street, to lay pipes under the street, or to excavate for a house, you
may strike solid rock, or you may find quicksand, and therefore the cost
of building on the island is greater than almost anywhere on the globe.
Probably the steam drills employed to blast on New York island exceed
in number all the steam drills in the entire United States. Most of our
cities are built on clay or sandy soil, and a cellar can be excavated in
two or three days, whereas I have seen building lots in New York, only a
hundred feet by twenty to twenty-five feet wide, which took months, or
indeed a whole building season, to get the rock out, and when the cellar
is excavated it is like a great trough or hole made in solid stone.
Naturally, a man who has been at such expense to start his house looks
into the air for his recompense. With that solid foundation in the stone
he has procured from the cellar he begins to build a tower instead of
a house, and to let it out in floors, and for each of these floors he
expects to receive higher rent than is elsewhere paid for a large and
complete house.
A friend of mine who recently failed disastrously, showed me one of
these new flat houses he had put up. It was three lots broad, each
lot one hundred feet deep, making a front of seventy-five feet. Each
of these lots he held to be worth $30,000, making $90,000 for the
situation, though it was not on a fashionable street, but rather up a
side street. He then raised one upon another seven apartments on each
side of the entrance, and over the entrance were six bachelor apartments,
each consisting of only one room, a bed alcove, and a bath closet.
Consequently, there would be in such a building twenty tenants, of whom
fourteen would be families. These fourteen paid from $1,800 to $1,300
apiece. Each had the same number of rooms, in the same space, the rents
only being modified by the position of the floor. The lower floors of
course rented higher than the upper floors. Generally speaking, each
living place consisted of a parlor and a side room, either library or
sitting room, a bath room, and a servant’s bath also, about three bed
rooms, beside a servant’s bed room, a dining room, a kitchen, pantries
and wardrobes. The only economy in such living lies in the reduction
of the number of servants, and in the less expense of furnishing. The
proprietor has to keep an engineer, an assistant engineer, a porter and
assistant, and perhaps a housekeeper, and of course a watchman. Elevators
front and rear accommodate the landlords and the servants. Such a
building, exclusive of the ground, probably cost $150,000, and therefore
it would be hard work to make ten per cent. upon it after paying
salaries, taxes, etc. The bachelor apartments rented from $50 to $30 per
month.
Now this stylish apartment house looks out at the rear upon a series of
common tenement houses, where in old brick or frame buildings a dense
mass of people look out of the back windows on their more aristocratic
neighbors. These latter houses perhaps have a pole erected in the back
yard which is as high as the house, and from every floor proceed to this
pole clothes lines, attached there by pulleys, and whatever is washed is
affixed to the line and run out by the pulley to dry. Most of the people
in these back apartments live in one room, or at most in two, and there
the good man arises in the morning, takes his early breakfast and goes
out with his truck or dray, or hies him off to work and does not return
again till night. The wife arises and sends the children off to school,
and then she proceeds to wash or iron, or do other work, cooking her
meals meantime, and supplying the children at noon, and the old man at
night. Perhaps in that room or two live half a dozen people. They may
even have a sub-tenant. There must be more or less exposure, more or less
bad air, more or less indifference to the decencies of life, and yet it
is surprising, on the whole, how much cleaner and better these people
live than might be expected. This to some extent arises from the happy
construction of the blocks in the new or uptown quarter of New York.
Many of our American cities have deep blocks and alleys, or inferior
streets, running up between them. The ground is too precious in New York
to be sacrificed in such lanes, so the back yards touch each other, and
the houses are built high stooped, the basement being the first story,
and through the basement hall the slops, ashes, etc., are carried to the
front street and there left for the scavenger and the ash-man to come
and remove them. Consequently, each of these uptown blocks is one great
court, open to the sun and to the sky. New York streets across town are
only two hundred feet apart, and therefore the lots are of uniform depth.
The old Dutch city and its English successor in the lower part of the
island covered a triangular space not a mile long, and about a mile
wide. In the course of time Broadway was opened right up the center of
this triangle, and streets called East Broadway and West Broadway were
thrown in a course generally parallel to the two rivers, and the attempt
was continued to make a more or less rectangular city, and finally, at
the distance of more than two miles up, a real rectangular metropolis
was secured by opening broad avenues, of which there are about twelve
lengthwise of the whole island, and these are crossed by streets running
in number up to 220th, and in the course of time in the annexed portion
they will run to something like 300th Street. Although the city is thus
expanded, business and population are very tenacious of the old and
crowded situations. As it is impossible to draw the money and finance
out of Wall Street, so it is next to impossible to alter the situation
of the market houses, the railroad freight depots, the express offices,
the steamboat piers, the ferries, and even the manufactories. As an
immense portion of what is manufactured in New York is not sold to
the people of the city, but for export, it remains a consideration to
manufacture, prepare and pack goods down in the dense, lance-shaped point
of the island. Consequently business, tenements, folly, manufactories,
everything grow denser as you go down town, and the east side of the city
is especially given up to the Germanic races. At that point there is a
protuberance of the city into the East River, overlapping the city of
Brooklyn, and the avenues here are not numbered, but being to the east of
First Avenue they take the names of Avenues A, B, C and D.
Here you find the tenement houses in their glory. Grand Street is the
great artery of that side of the town.
Fifty years ago there were but 200,000 inhabitants on this island;
thirty-five years ago there were but 500,000; twenty-five years ago
there were but 800,000 people; fifteen years ago there were 950,000. By
the census of 1880 the population of the island was put down at over
1,200,000. It will not be far wrong to call it in general terms a million
and a half. But the stable population of New York bears no comparison
with its transient and daily population. It is immediately surrounded
by two millions more of people who depend upon the city, and who can
leave it at all hours of the night by ferries. It is the resort of sixty
per cent. of all the ocean vessels in the country, with their crews. It
contains the offices of nearly every corporation in the United States,
all of which, after they have attained a certain stability or prominence,
keep a commission house or branch office on New York island.
The morals of New York City are therefore to a great extent beyond the
reach of mere administration, and have to be lenient according to the
temptation and the concourse. Marriage itself is subordinate in such a
hive, to society and necessity. The American elements of the population
generally adhere to their traditions and decencies, but there is a native
American generation in New York, begotten of foreign parents, which knows
no other country than this, but is as different from Americans of the old
time as we differ from the American Indians. From this secondary growth
New York derives most of its mechanical, laboring, and artisan class.
These, like their forefathers, adhere to the tenement house method of
life. They do not understand the necessity of a whole house, which has
to be furnished, cleaned and warmed, when they spend so much of the day
and night elsewhere, either at work or pleasure. So does the American
element, which goes from the country to New York, content itself with a
room. As for the poor, as their families increase they have no resort but
the tenement house.
The latest history of New York City says that 500,000 people in New York,
or more than one-third, live in tenement houses, and that the densest
blocks in London do not compare, in the number of inhabitants, with the
same space in the dense quarters of New York. A single block is referred
to on Avenue B, which has fifty-two tenement houses, the population of
them amounting to nearly 2,400 persons. One single house in New York
is said to have 1,500 inhabitants, and often a house with twenty-five
feet front accommodates 100 souls. Of course height is the great point
to give such area. If you enter New York and walk toward the east side
through the streets which run so close together, but which are all
happily of fair width, and all straight, you will see row after row of
red brick houses, generally built to the height of five or six stories.
In themselves they are rather neat to look at, except for the signs of
population at every window, where on a hot and steaming day everybody
seems to press to get the air. You can see the baby at the breast, the
hunchback elder child, the man rolling cigars, the Chinaman washing, the
woman running her sewing machine, the musician practicing on the bugle,
the dentist, perhaps, filling teeth in a tenement house at modest rates
to suit. You may also see some quiet old German smoking his pipe and
reading science, unaware that anything is much worse than it generally
is in the world. These houses have a common entrance below, sometimes in
the middle, generally at the side. Through this entrance pours in and
out the population going above; the stairways are generally narrow, the
steps worn almost through, sometimes loungers and children are playing in
the halls, and our fastidious habits are much shocked at the necessary
familiarity engendered.
Yet it is to be remembered that as one’s day is, so is his strength,
even in the matter of smells, and while there are tenement evils there
are also tenement house virtues. The close sociability engenders another
species of Christianity. The policeman is near at hand to correct any
evils. While the summers are dreadfully hot, the winters are also long
and cold, and the two things most needed in a tenement house are coal and
sunlight.
The tenement house laws have been made at Albany by the landlords of
these houses, many of whom are rapacious and merciless. Not a single day
is given by law, I understand, to a tenant who does not pay the rent.
The landlord is permitted to put his agent or constable in any apartment
and set the things on the sidewalk, whatever may be the disaster or the
disease within. Many of these tenement houses have been built up by
the sales of liquor and beer, and probably the majority of our Irish
saloon-keepers project a corner in which they do business into a tenement
house above, and they both provide the rum and collect the rent. Possibly
the men above stairs drink away their wages in the saloon below, while
the women work at something to keep the rent up.
In some cases, especially among the more rural Irish, the shanty in the
suburbs is substituted for tenement house life. As you walk along some
of the newly filled streets, composed of great rocks which have been
blasted in one spot to fill up another spot, you will look down into
a former meadow, now a mere hole surrounded by four dungeon walls of
stone, and there you will see three or four shanties pitched together
on suffrance, made of old boards taken out of some fence or from dry
goods boxes. Unaware of anybody being about, you can sit there and hear
the whole domestic menage going on; see Patrick, very drunk, sociably
quarreling with his wife, who is not far behind him in her potations.
They perhaps keep a cow somewhere down there under the planks, and this
cow is being milked more or less all the time, and if the milk can not be
sold it helps to support the life of the squatters.
Again, you will go into some far quarter of this island, many miles from
the business centers, and to your surprise you will there find another
species of tenement house, showing that this system of herding together
and economizing room is the fate of this city at least. There seems to
be no future for the tenement house system. The laws passed by our state
legislature with reference to this city are more apt to be in favor of
the tenement house proprietor than of the tenant. The tenants hardly know
where the legislature is, while the tenement house owner is informed
by his lawyer or lobbyist of what is going on. As far as philanthropy
goes, it despairs of accomplishing anything in the midst of such a dense
population. Of course, when things become outrageous, the police report
them to the Board of Health, or the tenants take the law into their own
hands.
This gregarious life leads to great independence of character among the
women; the average survivor of the tenement house is no puny, frightened
creature, but a very active animal, ready to scratch, retort, appeal to
law, and loves and marries as she wishes. There is some natural deviation
from virtue, as from cleanliness, yet the recuperative principle in
women, as in men, is at least redeeming, and it is to be doubted whether
the vices in the tenement houses exceed those in the fashionable streets.
It is believed here that the worst class of people New York possesses
are the Bohemians from northern Austria. This degraded race was at one
time, or until the emperors destroyed it politically, the repository of
most of the vices of Europe. Among the Bohemians you find the domestic
virtues at the lowest ebb, and socialism at its lewdest. A manufacturer
was recently telling me of two Bohemians in his employment who grew weary
of their wives, and without any other marriage, and without quarrel,
they agreed, men and women, to change partners, and continue to live
and work together. At a recent strike of cigar makers in this city, a
working woman who stripped tobacco was set upon by three men and knocked
down because she preferred to take lower wages rather than keep idle and
support some of the demagogue patrols.
New York, however, has no such dens to-day as it had forty years ago,
when the Five Points was in the height of its orgies. Through that old
swampy quarter of the city broad streets have been cut, and manufactories
have been established. I have my doubts whether, at this moment, the
worst features of New York’s population are not to be found in some of
the rougher suburbs off the island. The draft riots of 1863 assisted
the peace and order of New York by bringing about a collision between
the very bad elements and the law. The police, who are generally hated
by the vicious as the visible representatives of the law, received from
that moment a degree of discipline which has ever since been kept up,
and the militia regiments of New York City have been provided with large
armories, and are in a fair state of discipline.
Of course, in such a rank soil as this island, the gentler virtues do
not grow, but my observation of some rural districts, many hundred miles
from this city, is that they are far below the tenement house quarter
in intelligence, and not above it in morals. The matter of virtue is
to a large extent involved in the race; it will take a long time to
debauch, utterly, people descended from the British and Germanic races.
Fortunately, we have not had much immigration from the south of Europe,
but the Italian quarter is attracting some attention, as possibly the
worst we possess. The Chinese in New York are self-reliant, and a good
many of them have shown a decided bias to be Christianized. I lived near
a church, two or three years ago, where I one day observed a large number
of Chinese, and glancing up at the church I saw that it was a Baptist
one. On inquiry I found that a Chinaman who attended the Sunday-school
of that church had been murdered by some semi-American roughs, and his
classmates had come to pay the last honors to him. Like Americans, they
came in cabs, and came filing out of that church quiet, uncomplaining,
injured specimens of our common brotherhood.
Legally, a tenement house in New York is one house occupied by more
than three families living independently of each other, and doing their
cooking on the premises. All tenement houses are compelled to have
fire-escapes built outside of the house, of iron. There is one quarter of
New York City where 300,000 persons are said to live on a square mile.
Observers now say that not one-third, but one-half of the population of
New York City lives on the tenement house plan.
A superficial observer here would think that the greatest misery on the
globe was to be found in this tenement house quarter, yet I think that
much of this sympathy will be thrown away, because in the large majority
of cases the people who live under this system would not exchange it for
any other.