Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [312]
As the Fresh Water was filled in, streets and housing crept out across the boggy terrain, followed by grocers, tavern keepers, glue factories, slaughterhouses, and turpentine distilleries. As early as 1798 it was remarked that the area was “generally full of poor and dirty people.” By 1810, though the area was but a scant few blocks from the nearly completed City Hall, it had become a slum known as the Five Points, named for the intersection of five streets: Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth), Cross (now Park), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water (now gone). The Five Points housed the city’s poorest residents, including the greatest percentage of those receiving public assistance in the form of outdoor relief. For years the neighborhood remained a notorious breeding ground for disease and a source of hefty profits for local landlords.
The emergence of the Five Points slum was only the most tangible sign of the rise of a class of permanent tenants in New York City. Around the city, master artisan householders were rejecting the paternalistic practice of providing year-round room and board to apprentices and journeymen. Instead, just as they hired and fired wage-workers according to seasonal demand, they now rented out household space (along with the domestic services provided by their wives) to boarders on a cash basis.
In an increasingly competitive economy such rental income could well provide the margin that smaller masters needed to preserve their own independence. For the more entrepreneurially inclined, profiting from real estate could become an end in itself. Some masters subdivided their houses into apartments, rented them out to lodgers, and then moved their own families to separate domestic quarters.
Some members of the new tenant class found liberty in mobility. They were free to move when and where they wished, just as they had an unfettered right to sell their skills to the highest bidder. But with housing a commodity rather than a customary right, purchasers could get only what they could pay for. For the majority—the 60 percent who worked in capitalizing trades and faced declining wages—this meant a steady erosion of living standards. Some journeymen formed their own “trade” houses, pooling the incomes of four or five skilled workers and crowding into a single residence. But most had to settle for one- or two-room apartments, wooden rear houses, or, in the case of illpaid laborers and mariners, boardinghouses that squeezed four to six men in a room.
Mobility did increase, but less out of choice than coercion. In a tight, impersonal, and utterly unregulated housing market, where landlords pressed to maximize returns, tenants outbid by competitive renters were compelled to move. The resulting dislocations—voluntary and involuntary—were apparent every year on the first of May, the date on which, by Dutch tradition, all New York City leases expired simultaneously. Of no great consequence in more settled times, Moving Day now became an ever more frenetic aifair. Especially in neighborhoods composed primarily of propertyless renters, thousands packed their belongings, hired a cartman (if they could find one), and moved to new quarters. As one commentator noted in 1799, the people “of this city are seized, on the first of May, by a sort of madness, that will not let them rest till they have changed their dwelling.”
TURMOIL IN THE TRADES
For New York journeymen, the degradation of housing in the city was only one element of the crisis they faced after the turn of the century. As capitalist relations of production penetrated one trade after another,