Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [631]
The legislators, however, were no more prepared than Griscom or the AICP to ask tough questions about the larger economic order that gave rise to the slums. The mismatch between rising rents and falling wages was not on the table. Nor was the premise that housing had to be provided as a commodity: the land reformers’ notion of government-underwritten urban homesteads was literally unthinkable. They did, however, recommend passage of regulatory housing laws, and their work led to the drafting of the state’s first housing code.
Drafting, but not adoption: the prospect of regulation raised an enormous hue and cry from builders and owners, forcing the legislature to retreat, and another decade would pass before it summoned the nerve to try again. Housing was left to market forces—with the predictable result that the thirty-four blocks along Fifth Avenue between Washington Square and 42nd Street housed a mere four hundred families in virtually agoraphobic comfort (twelve families per block) while on the East Side seven hundred families jammed themselves into one tenement block.
When added to inaction on the garbage and sewage fronts, the result (said a legislative committee) was that “death is making an alarming inroad upon [our] population.” Cholera raced through the tenements again in 1852. Typhus, an immigrant disease of dirt and overcrowding, grew endemic, then turned epidemic in 1852. Deaths from consumption (tuberculosis) soared in the black and immigrant communities. Between 1845 and 1854 the city wide mortality rate hovered at an all-time high of forty deaths per thousand city residents, and the gap between bourgeois and working-class districts widened dramatically: in 1855 the Sixth Ward had the highest death rate in New York. The flood of corpses manifested itself in a grisly version of the law of supply and demand. With the number of unclaimed bodies growing faster than medical schools’ need for cadavers, their prices dropped accordingly. Corpses had cost twenty-five dollars in the early 1800s, but in 1848 a certain Dr. Reese was selling bodies of dead patients as a sideline at five dollars apiece.
The infant mortality figures were particularly horrifying. Pulmonary diseases drove the rate to a record high of 166 per thousand between 1850 and 1854, with the casualties (the AICP noted) “chiefly amongst the children of the poor, in the most filthy parts of the city.” Between 1850 and 1860 more than half of those under the age of five died each year—seven of every ten under the age of two—figures equal to the worst of the English factory districts.
By 1856 more New Yorkers were dying each year than were being born. Without the continuing torrent of immigration, said the city inspector, “the city would in a few years be depopulated.”
“LUNGS OF THE CITY”
In the end, only one environmentalist enterprise succeeded fully, though its public health component would constitute a small part of a project that for a wide variety of other reasons enlisted the backing of some very powerful New Yorkers.
In October 1848, only months after the revolution in the streets of Paris, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing proposed the creation in New York of a mammoth (five-hundred-acre) People’s Park. Until then Downing had concentrated on providing country gentlemen with picturesque retreats and editing the Horticulturist. But the European upheavals alarmed him. They seemed to herald similar convulsions in a New York that, to his dismay as an old-school republican, had been dividing up into social classes that no longer comingled one with the other as they once had. New York desperately needed a place where classes could regain comity. Parks, he thought, would facilitate interactions no longer available on the street. Such social intercourse, Downing believed, would, as reformers wished, uplift the lower orders. “Every laborer is a possible gentleman,”