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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
Rent, Wages and the Cost of Living
1870s
A tenement apartment like those in 97 Orchard
Street (three-rooms) probably rented for about $8 to $15 per month
in the 1870s. Of course there were tenements which rented rooms
for much less - particularly the dreaded rear tenements and rookeries
(single family homes converted into multi-family dwellings) - and
some that were a bit more expensive. That may sound cheap today,
but considering that after the Panic of 1873 unskilled laborers
(street workers, for example) only earned about $1.75 for a ten-hour
day, and only when they found work, rent was quite expensive in
New York City in the 1870s.
Much of the 1870s was a time of severe unemployment, so any generalizations
about wages can be somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, they can also
be helpful. Tailors, the most common occupation among German New
Yorkers, earned about $2.26 for a day's work in 1874. But their
wages continued to drop as the depression wore on, so that the family
wage of some tailors had dropped to $8-$9 for a six-day, 60 hour
week by the early 1880s. Shoemakers, the second most common occupation
in Little Germany, earned about $2.36 a day in 1874, but their wages
also dropped over the decade. Some of the best paid members of the
working class were probably the foreman working for the parks department.
They earned about $4.50 for an eight-hour day, short for the time.
Skilled worker in the building trades also received higher-than-average
working-class wages.
These day rates don't tell the whole story, however. The decrease
in wages during the 1873-79 depression was alleviated somewhat by
the drop in prices caused by deflation. Nevertheless, employment
was precarious for most of the nineteenth century and there was
no publicly sponsored unemployment compensation to fall back on.
Most work remained seasonal until the twentieth century. Tailors,
masons, and unskilled laborers usually could only count on about
five to seven months of work. The winter shut down most of the building
trades from November to March. Even garment production was slack
between June and September, and again from December to April. Furthermore,
day laborers could not count on daily work even in season.
Families could supplement their income by taking in boarders, or
the women and children could take in homework. A boarder could bring
in $3-$4 additional income a week with relatively little extra effort
or expense. Homework could add to this, but the labor- intensive
nature of housekeeping in tenements set limits on just how much
more work a family could do.
In addition to rent, a family had to pay for food, fuel, and other
household items, and perhaps some amusement or entertainment. The
table below gives an example of what a family might have paid for
various items in 1874. The family consists of two adults and one
child. Expenses were weekly, though some weekly figures are based
on annual costs. This family is not meant to be "average."
Rather the table demonstrates how much it cost to have an adequate
diet and at least a bit of entertainment, education, etc. Depending
on their skills, a working-class family might achieve this lifestyle
with a reasonable work-week and still have surplus cash for savings
and other expenses. But many working families would have had to
work 10-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week, just to survive. The table
does not, it should be noted, include the cost of furniture and
other household items or and medical expenses which might have been
necessary.
During the time that 97 Orchard Street was active as a residence,
the cost of rent decreased as one ascended to the upper floors of
the building because of the increased burden of carrying water,
food, or any number of things up several flights of steep stairs.
In addition, midnight trips to the backyard toilet facilities were
all the more tiresome the higher one lived in the building.
Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class
in New York, 1845-1880 (Chicago, 1990); Edward Young, Labor
in America: Rates of Wages and Cost of Subsistence in the United
States and British North America in the Year 1874 (Washington,
D.C., 1875);
1890s
6 rolls bread - 5¢
1 lb. fish - 8¢
15 potatoes - 10¢
3 lb. Oatmeal - 10¢
6 eggs - 13¢
? lb. tea - 18¢
2 lbs. chops or a steak - 20¢
1900 - average annual income for a man: $591, woman: $254
1902 - 3-room apartment: $10-12 per month
1907 - monthly disbursements for food: $20-22; clothing $90; fuel
and light $35
In 1899 there were in the tenth ward: 140 groceries, 3 grocery stands,
131 butcher shops, 10 sausage stores, 2 meat markets, 36 bakeries,
9 bread stands, 2 matzo stores, 14 butter and egg stores, 62 candy
stores, 24 candy stands, 1 cheese store, 7 coffee shops, 5 tea shops,
10 delicatessens, 9 fish stores, 7 herring stands, 7 fruit stores,
21 fruit stands, 16 milk stores, 20 soda water stands, 11 vegetable
stores, 13 wine shops, 15 grape wine shops, and 10 confectioners.
Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures in
New York's Lower East Side. Moses Rischin, The Promised City.
1930s
The average rent on the Lower East Side in 1930 was $6 a month per
room. Thus, a three-room apartment in 97 Orchard Street might have
rented for about $18 per month, little more than it did in the 1870s*
There were, however more than 10,000 people at the time living in
rear tenements who paid as little as $2 a month per room.
In addition to some of the lowest rents in Manhattan, the Lower
East Side had the lowest per capita income of any neighborhood in
New York in 1930 -- $1,358 annually (or $24.25 per week). The annual
per capita income on the Upper West Side, in contrast was $8,702.
Just as in the 1870s, however, generalizations about income during
the Great Depression can be misleading.
A family earning $1,358 annually ($113 monthly) would have had no
real problem spending $18 - $24 per month on rent, but during the
Great Depression few families on the Lower East Side actually earned
this amount. More than a million New Yorkers were on some form of
relief in 1932, one of the worst years of the Depression. Studies
of Jews living on the Lower East Side as late as 1939 found two-thirds
of them on some form of public relief and one-third on home relief.
Those on relief received only $13 a month for rent, quite a bit
less than the average rent on the Lower East Side. Unskilled workers
who found work with federal programs such as the Works Project Administration
could earn no more than $55 a month. Even professional and technical
workers for the WPA, the highest paid WPA workers, could earn no
more than $94 a month - just enough for a small family to get by
without too much belt tightening. But federal work projects were
hardly stable sources of employment and many families on the Lower
East Side continued to face sporadic earnings despite the new role
of the state in President Roosevelt's "New Deal."
Two significant improvements did, however, take place in the lives
of workers during the 1930s. One was an across-the-board reduction
in the length of the work week. This was imposed, where all else
failed, by the federal government. The standard work week in 1914
was about 55 hours. Some welfare capitalist employers shortened
their work weeks during the 1920s, but it wasn't until government
intervention during the Depression that the 40-hour work week finally
became standard. And finally, it was during the 1930s that the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO) also with government support,
succeeded in unionizing a wide variety of industries across the
nation. The ascendancy of the CIO contributed to better working
conditions and fairer pay for America's workers in the years to
come.
Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and
Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930 (Albany, 1984);
Joseph Platzker, Research Studies of Community Problems (New
York 1935); Suzanne Wasserman, "'The Good Old Days of Poverty':
The Battle of the Fate of New York City's Lower East Side during
the Depression" (Ph.D diss. New York University, 1990); Daniel
J. Ahearn, The Wages of Farm and Factory Laborers, 1914-1944
(New York 1945); Francis Haas, "The Wages and Hours of American
Labor," Social Action Series No.3 (New York 1937).
See also: Panic of 1873; Great
Depression (1930s).
Table III: Expenditures of a Working Family in New York City, 1874
| Item Cost |
($)
|
| Flour & Bread |
.84
|
| Meats |
2.82
|
| Butter |
.50
|
| Lard |
.08
|
| Cheese |
.22
|
| Sugar & Molasses |
.34
|
| Milk |
.49
|
| Coffee |
.19
|
| Tea |
.25
|
| Fish |
.15
|
| Soap, starch, salt, pepper, vinegar |
.40
|
| Eggs |
.25
|
| Vegetables |
1.00
|
| Fruits |
.28
|
| Fuel |
1.00
|
| Oil & other light sources |
.06
|
| Beer & tobacco |
.50
|
| Rent |
3.60
|
| Educational & religious material |
.15
|
| Clothing |
1.79
|
| TOTAL |
$14.91
|
Source: Edward Young, Labor in America:
Rates of Wages and Cost of Subsistence in the United States and
British North America in the year 1874 (Washington, DC, 1875)
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