Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [734]
Clearing Out a “Dive, “Harpers Weekly, July 12, 1873. Basement dwellers often clashed with the Board of Health’s Sanitary Inspectors, who were empowered to throw them out and dispose of their possessions. (Library of Congress)
Most landlords, builders, and real estate companies soon discovered, however, that the Tenement House Law was loosely worded and loophole-ridden. A fire escape “or some other means of egress” was required—a wooden ladder might do. Cesspools were forbidden—except where unavoidable. Ventilation for a dark inner room could be provided by a window to an outer one. “Tenements” were legally defined as buildings with more than three families, though many of the worst ones contained only that number.
Despite these obvious concessions to real estate interests, the law was a remarkable stride forward. Reformers had made private housing a matter of public concern and authorized government intervention to protect tenant health and welfare. The Metropolitan Board of Health pursued its duties vigorously, suing scores of city landlords for code violations in over three thousand units in 1868 alone, and in succeeding years managed to cut the cellar-dweller population in half. Slowly, dilapidated wooden housing gave way to new brick tenements constructed under the reformed building codes.
CITY BUILDING
“Generally the public works that have heretofore been carried out on this island have been conceived on too narrow and limited a scale,” said Andrew Haswell Green in 1865, “We need not go off the Island,” he amplified a year later, “to see lamentable results of the want of largeness of ideas in the attempts that have been made to provide for the growing wants of a great people,” If “the planning of a city” were to be “done with any degree of foresight,” Green insisted in 1867, it was imperative to transfer authority to “some body with comprehensive powers.” The body he had in mind was his own Central Park Commission, and the powers he had in mind were Haussmannesque—nothing less than authority to plan and oversee the expansion of all city services into northern Manhattan, and even Westchester.
Suggestions from Andrew Haswell Green commanded respect among New York’s landed wealthy, for he had long since proven his devotion to their larger interests. Since 1844 the former wholesale clerk had been a partner in Samuel Tilden’s law firm, where he worked closely with the eminent corporate attorney then urging consolidation on the railroad industry. Green himself offered investment advice and management services to owners of New York’s great estates. He won their trust with his expertise, his pious Protestantism (a legacy of his Massachusetts upbringing), his extreme frugality (bordering on miserliness), and his pugnacious conviction that government should rest with the propertied, not the politicians. He himself had entered politics as an anti-Wood Democrat, been appointed by state Republicans to the Central Park Commission in 1857, and served ever since with distinction.
Though he shared many of the values of the reformers, professionals, and journalists then debating the proper “arrangement and management” of cities in periodicals like the Journal of Social Science, Green approached city building as a businessman rather than an intellectual. Well aware that property owners balked at infringements of their prerogatives, Green argued that comprehensive and orderly development would enhance the value of their property.
This approach resonated among members of the organized real estate “industry” that was now emerging in New York City. Businessmen concerned with property and its purveyance formed trade journals, like the Real Estate Record and Builders