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elegant five- or six-story buildings on the north end of Tompkins Square (now Der Weisse Garten) that developers had hoped would house the native upper classes were sliced and diced into crowded rooming houses. But in Little Germany, the cumulative market power of even poorly paid laborers and artisans was so great that tenement construction became profitable. Some of the new three- to five-story buildings, especially along Avenues A through D, were solid brick structures. Many, however, were, as former mayor Hone put it, “so slightly built that they could not stand alone, and, like drunken men, require the support of each other to keep them from falling.” Many were in insalubrious locations, stuffed into back lots, nearly flush with the walls of existing houses and privies. Most were stripped-down, amenity-free versions of the row houses developers were raising for the middle and upper classes elsewhere around town. Most lacked “modern improvements,” apart from stoves, and were seldom linked up with water or sewer mains: working people used bedpans and privies long after the respectable classes had switched to water closets.

Tenement areas were intensely crowded. A tenement twenty-five feet wide and seventy feet deep might have twenty-four two-room apartments, each with a ten-by-tenfoot “parlor,” facing street or yard, and a windowless interior eight-by-ten-foot room, big enough for a bed. Such buildings would house a minimum of twenty-four families (plus boarders), but often more—one all-black tenement contained forty families—and when they were organized as boardinghouses for sailors and laborers, densities shot up higher still. Such crowding magnified the dangers of fire and disease, and indeed mortality rates began climbing sharply in the working-class wards.

Given these alternatives, large numbers of immigrants preferred to squat in shantytowns on the periphery of the city. At Dutch Hill, a promontory at 40th Street and First Avenue overlooking Turtle Bay (now the United Nations), Germans and Irish lived in log cabins and recycled railroad cars, the men laboring in nearby quarries, the women and children gathering rags and bones. Farther north lay Harlem—a “third or fourth-rate country village,” the Board of Aldermen called it in 1838, whose lands were worn out after centuries of use, and whose marshes reeked so badly they could “knock the breath out of a mule!” Yet Harlem was also full of lovely hills, woods, brooks, and meadows with river views, and the land was cheap or free. Irish families built one-and two-story frame houses around 125th Street in the 1850s or squatted on mud flats at the river’s edge in cottages pieced together from bits of wood, twigs, barrel staves, old pipes, and tin cans hammered flat. Many raised animals for local markets—geese, cows, horses, goats and such a profusion of hogs that the area around 125th Street was known as Pig’s Alley.

Along the west side, after the Hudson River Railroad opened along Eleventh Avenue in 1851, many threw up shanties in vacant lots between 37th and 50th (the future Hell’s Kitchen). Here they raised pigs and goats, scavenged for food and firewood, hired out as day laborers, and found jobs in the industrializing area. Further north, so many Irish families planted themselves in the African-American community of Seneca Village (bounded by 82nd and 86th streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues) that by 1855 they constituted a third of it. One of the first to arrive was Pat Plunkitt, an Irish immigrant laborer whose wife, Sara, gave birth to George Washington Plunkitt, later a political luminary. Another was an itinerant veterinarian named Croker, who plied his trade among the area’s animals and sired little Richard, the future boss of Tammany Hall.

By mid-century, unable to find adequate housing in the city, thousands of immigrants were crowding into shantytowns scattered around upper Manhattan, safely outside the municipal fire limits. (© Museum of the City of New York)

Many immigrants simply bedded down in the streets. One 1850 account reported that “six