Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [469]
From the pleasure gardens to the blooming new gentry preserves, from Vanderbilt’s mansion to the rising village of Harlem, from one side of the harbor to the other, the sound of hammers and saws was everywhere as the rail and realty boom shifted into hyperdrive. But the feverish “good times,” hailed so exuberantly by those who underwrote the construction and investment boom, were experienced quite differently by many other New Yorkers.
35
Filth, Fever, Water, Fire
The 1830s boom improved living conditions for many working people, notably the two-fifths of the city’s artisans who worked in the building trades, erecting the thousand-plus structures going up each year. The street contractors, stonecutters, and yard owners who paved, curbed, and guttered the city’s roadways, as well as many of the cartmen who hauled commodities over them, could aspire to the comfortable housing going up above Houston and below 14th Street. Some entrepreneurial contractors, especially those who invested in land, rocketed to the ranks of the wealthy.
But the majority of the working class saw their living standards deteriorate, partly because of boom-fostered inflation—especially the rapidly rising rents exacted by those the City Inspector (in 1835) called “mercenary landlords”—but primarily because constructing housing for poor people wasn’t profitable. Some speculative developers did erect three-story brick structures, partition each floor into four rooms, and rent out each of six two-room “apartments” to one or more families. In 1833 industrialist James Allaire raised Manhattan’s first “tenement” house on Water Street near his foundry: a four-story, sixty-foot-deep, barracks-style building for his workforce.
On the whole, however, speculative builders—especially those operating on thin credit margins—had little incentive to house the poor. Nor did established landlords have reason to replace their rundown, two-story, brick-fronted wooden houses with better structures. Given the tremendous housing shortage and most workers’ continued need to live within walking distance of their jobsites, landlords harvested tremendous rents just by packing people into preexisting buildings. Indeed, the more they reduced maintenance and let their properties deteriorate, the more the city reduced their tax assessments, thus boosting their profits.
As ever more people crammed into ever more dilapidated quarters, the consequences of crowding became blatantly apparent—to both eye and nose. New York, it was widely agreed, was the filthiest urban center in the United States; Boston and Philadelphia gleamed by comparison. This dubious distinction, ultimately rooted in the perverse dynamics of the housing market’s response to immigration, was exacerbated by the city government’s hands-off approach to the increasing production of garbage.
Since the turn of the century the Common Council had had ample authority from the state to oversee sanitary conditions, but the aldermen had made infrequent or incompetent use of their power. Municipal collecting remained lackadaisical at best. Great heaps of mud, garbage, and animal excrement piled up in the streets, forming a stinking mash labeled “Corporation Pudding” by a disgusted citizenry. To this base were added the noxious by-products of slaughterhouses, tanneries, dyers, distilleries, glue works, bone boilers, and stables, which had once been banished to the periphery but had now been overtaken by rapid expansion and were back in town. Roving herds of scavenging pigs made some inroads on the resulting accumulation, but what goes in must come out, and the porkers added their own contributions to the vile stew.
So did humans, albeit more indirectly. Excrement was still stored in privy-vaults—temporary