Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [733]
The mobilization helped keep New York’s death toll under five hundred—one-tenth the fatalities of 1849, despite a one-third increase in population since then—while Cincinnati lost twelve hundred, St. Louis thirty-five hundred. New York had erected a milestone in the history of public health, but it was clear to reformers that securing their victory would require systematic attention to the city’s built environment as well.
HOUSING
The war had exacerbated the city’s housing crisis. New construction had limped badly while immigrants continued to pour in (over 150,000 in 1863 alone). With peace, demobilized veterans swarmed back home, and steamers disgorged ever greater numbers of newcomers. The 1865 report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health demonstrated just how crowded the tenement districts were. Out of New York’s seven-hundred-thousand-plus residents, 495,592 individuals were tenanted in 15,309 multifamily dwellings, an average of roughly seven families per building. Many of these five-or six-story tenements had each floor carved into eighteen rooms, organized like compartments on a train, hence the expression “railroad flats.” Only two of these tiny rooms got direct sunlight (if the facade faced south), and interior cubbyholes were without ventilation, unless an extravagant builder included air shafts. Thousands more tenants were crammed into the back buildings landlords continued to insert behind tenements, often jammed up against their rear wall. In the Fourth Ward, the population density reached 290,000 per square mile.
Things got rapidly worse. In 1867 the legislature authorized another investigation. Again, statistics were amassed. Fifty-two percent of Manhattan’s tenements were “in a condition detrimental to the health and dangerous to the lives of the occupants.” Their deficiencies included insufficient ventilation, absence of light, lack of fire escapes, and terrible drainage. (When the tide came in, a basement in a filled-in swampland area could fill to a depth of twelve inches, high enough “to keep the children of the occupants in bed until ebb-tide.”)
With rotten conditions came rising rents, which jumped 50 to 100 percent within a year after Appomattox, feeding a profit stream that flowed upward to the great propertied families from whom many slumlords leased their lands. Priced out of even tenement housing, the very poorest drifted to uptown shantytowns or, like Jacob Riis, a young and unemployed Danish immigrant, slept in doorways.
In March 1865 Germans near Tompkins Square held a mass meeting and called on the legislature to regulate rents; a year later they renewed their demands. The Council of Hygiene and Public Health called for strict public regulation of tenements. Radical Republicans supported imposition of minimum standards. The conservative Republican Times and Democratic World agreed, with the latter’s editor, stunned by the investigations, declaring that “of all the diabolical, horrid, atrocious, fiendish, and even hellish systems of money-making ever invented by the mind of man, the tenement-house system of this city, is the most horrible.”
In 1866 Albany enlarged New York’s Department of Buildings, giving it a full-time staff, and established standards for municipal construction, creating the nation’s first comprehensive building code. In 1867 the legislature passed the Tenement House Law, New York’s first regulation of working-class housing. Modeled in key respects on London’s 1848 Lodging-House Act, the act limited the number of persons permitted to reside in a given amount of space. It required that every room in new buildings have ventilation and that transoms be installed in older ones. It decreed the installation of fire escapes and the provision of one