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Housing
Contents
Apartment Houses > Before
the Tenement Housing Options in the 1860s > Tenements
> Public Housing > Housing
Abandonment > Gentrification
> Homelessness > Immigrant
Housing today > Housekeeping
in the Tenements > Rent, Wages and
the Cost of Living
Before the Tenement Housing Options
Of the possible housing options available to
the working-class and poor in New York City during the 1860s, the
cellar dwelling stood as the both the most widespread and the most
dangerous. Overcrowded and unsanitary, lacking adequate light and
ventilation, and prone to filling with gases from primitive sewers
or seepage from privies, cellars provided a hospitable environment
for the spread of diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, and yellow
fever. Indeed, the terrible cholera epidemic of 1849 reportedly
originated in a cellar on Baxter Street near the Five Points.1
Improvements in sanitation intended to better living conditions
instead worked to the disadvantage of the working-class and poor.
While the introduction of pure Croton Water vastly enhanced sanitation
for the middle and upper classes, conditions worsened for poor families
living in cellar dwellings. As individual wells were replaced by
Croton, water tables in the city rose, flooding the cellars. As
some of the worst housing in the city, cellar dwellings raised the
ire of concerned reformers. As early as 1859, the number of cellar
dwellings began to decline, having been reduced by 9,000 since 1850.
In most areas of the city, the cellar was gradually replaced by
the purpose-built tenement, thereby eliminating some of the worst
housing available to working-class and poor families.2
The "rookery," a term that predates "tenement"
and held different meaning, was as treacherous as the cellar. Rookeries
were usually buildings not designed to house more than one family
but haphazardly reinhabitated at tenement densities by subdividing
shared rooms. Many were formerly single-family houses built of wood-frame
construction in the era before inexpensive brick. With the large-scale
construction of purpose-built tenements after mid-century, rookeries
too began to gradually disappear. Popular objects of reform prone
to burning or falling down, the most notorious rookeries in New
York were located in the Five Points neighborhood .Consisting of
a cluster of wooden buildings, the Five Points was one of the city's
worst slums.3
Many of the city's working-class and poor neighborhoods contained
both wood and brick structures with extensive back building. These
back buildings or "rear" tenements stood as some of the
worst housing available at mid-century. Tenement lots were often
built up in several stages. Early eighteenth-century single-family
homes were altered or replaced with apartments. Then, the front
half of the lot was developed with five-or six-story tenements.
The rear tenements were soon surrounded on three sides by other
tenements and thus became the darkest and dingiest of all. In order
to access a rear tenement, one would have to pass through the building
fronting the street.4
During the 19th century, New York City had large squatter settlements.
Considered temporary and illegitimate, squatter housing rarely raised
concern among municipal authorities and reformers. It is for this
reason that squatter settlements are not well documented. Nonetheless,
during the second half of the 19th century, large areas of Manhattan
above 57th Street were home to "shantytowns." Surveying
these settlements in 1864, the New York Times commented that "there
is a population of 20,000 on this island that pay neither rent for
the dwellings they occupy, nor municipal taxes as holders of real
estate. They comprise that portion of the population known as squatters."5
Before 1857, the practice of squatting flourished within Central
Park. However, Frederick Law Olmstead, appointed commissioner of
Central Park in 1857, forcefully removed over 300 squatter shacks
in the park. In 1865, the Citizen's Association Council of Hygiene
reported that by 1867 the East Side of Manhattan north of 40th Street
contained approximately 3,286 one-or-two family houses, 1, 061 tenements,
and 1,016 squatter shacks. Most of the squatters were concentrated
east of the recently completed Central Park. On the west side above
50th Street, there stood approximately 516 one-or-two family houses,
1,760 tenements, and 865 squatter shacks. During the 1870s and 1880s,
as the east side became permanently urbanized, squatting became
limited to the area west of Central Park, where speculators held
out the longest. 6
The 1865 report by the Citizens' Association Council of Hygiene
described the squatter's shack as follows:
The shanty is the cheapest and simplest
domicile constructed in civilized communities. The typical shanty
is built from rough boards, which form the floor, the sides,
and the roof. It is either built on the ground, or but little
raised above it. It is from six to ten feet high, and its ground
area varies much in different cases; but it is always of moderate
extent. It contains no fireplace or chimney, but a stovepipe,
the pipe from which passes through a hole in the roof. It has
from one to three or four windows, with single sash, each containing
from four to six panes of small size. Some shanties have but
one room; others have an additional small apartment used as
a bedroom. The better shanties are lathed and plastered. It
is evident that, to the occupants of the shanty, domiciliary
and personal cleanliness is almost impossible. In one small
room are found the family, chairs, usually dirty and broken,
cooking utensils, stove, often a bed, a dog or a cat, and sometimes
more or less poultry. On the outside, by the door, in many cases
are pigs and goats, and additional poultry. There is no sink
or drainage, and the slops are thrown upon the ground. The water
used is sometimes Croton, which is brought to the shanties in
pails, usually from one of the avenues. In other places, where
the Croton hydrants are too far away, and the ground is marshy,
the water is obtained from holes dug a little below the surface.
This water usually has a roiled appearance, and unpleasant flavor.
Shanties are usually built promiscuously over the ground, without
the least regard to order.7
Throughout the 1870s, much of the Upper West
Side between Central Park and the Hudson River remained undeveloped.
Municipal improvements including streets, sewers, and water mains
had yet to reach most of the area, with much of the land sparsely
settled with shacks surrounded by small gardens and little villages
such as Shantyhill at West 79th Street. By 1885, permanent urbanization
worked to create a mixed landscape in which shacks and new rowhouses
stood on adjacent lots. Less than ten years later, the West Side
was completely remade in a massive transition, as rowhouses and
squatter shacks were rapidly replaced by dumbbell tenements and
upper class homes.8
1 Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling
Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Quoted in Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City,
54.
8 Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City.
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