Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [380]
Within such working-class neighborhoods, the families of small masters, journeymen, and laborers lived in housing far different from the spacious abodes rising along Bond Street. Some speculative builders did raise modest but decent worker residences along streets carved out of the old De Lancey estate—many of them, including Eldridge, Ludlow, Forsyth, and Chrystie, named for military and naval heroes of the late war—or along ist to 6th streets, the newly opened first fruits of the grid, which ran down to the East River.
However, with low incomes and expensive transportation tethering working people downtown, it proved equally profitable to exploit the captive market by cramming renters into preexisting spaces. In these aging structures, conditions varied from decent to squalid, but even at their best, the coal stoves, gas lights, iceboxes, and other improvements on display in the residences of the uptown gentry were unheard of. People made do with candles and oil lamps or scavenged winter wood along upper Manhattan’s roadsides. Few households had a sufficient number of privies. Many laborers relied on cheap ceramic chamber pots from England, except for the very poor, who, in the phrase of the day, were “without a pot to piss in.” Better-off families might have bedsteads or display clocks and prints on the wall. The poorest lived together in a single room, furnished with little more than a straw mattress, a few cast-off chairs, and a sawed-off barrel top for a table.
The plebeian quarters grew steadily more crowded, and the Sixth Ward’s Five Points became the most densely packed neighborhood in the city. Its two- and threestory buildings, designed originally as one-family houses, housed an average of thirteen people as early as 1819, and by some estimates, building density doubled by the early 1830s. On Mulberry Street, homes with thirty-five occupants were not unknown; 122 Anthony housed eighty-three residents; 10 Hester Street contained 103; later in the decade, a brewery erected back in 1797 on the shores of the Fresh Water was transformed into a boardinghouse (known to all as the Old Brewery) that housed several hundred people. The mushrooming number of tenants in the area became overwhelmingly evident each Moving Day—by 1820 a scene of utter pandemonium, with thousands of people relocating at once, clogging the streets with wagons full of household possessions. It looked, Mrs. Trollope observed, as if the population were “flying from the plague.”
WOMEN AT WOHK
Within working-class neighborhoods, in further contrast to the more “refined” parts of town, women’s labor was deemed indispensable. Given the declining fortunes of proletarianized males, and employer calculations of a “living wage” that implicitly included the value of women’s unpaid domestic labor, many families were unable to make ends meet without the contributions of wives and children. A skilled wife whittled down the family’s cash expenditures. She hauled in water and firewood, lugged out waste and garbage, washed, mended, and made clothes, tended the sick, and raised the children, passing on values of hard work, honesty, loyalty to family, and neighborliness.
Laboring women did not dress up and pay each other formal parlor visits—they had no parlors—but they socialized through open windows and dropped in at one another’s kitchens, children in tow, to exchange gossip and information. Neighbors intervened in quarrels, sat up with sick infants, swapped news of market bargains, and helped out in crises (removing goods and furniture in case of fire, or rallying to block evictions). They also bickered and brawled in