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By Root 7876 0

were far better in the newer tenements of Yorkville or Harlem, if one had the cash for a horsecar commute downtown or found a job in the factories, stoneyards, or gas tanks moving north along the East River. But sleazy conditions crept uptown too, as speculators threw up rookeries on the damp and low-lying streets leading from First Avenue down to the waterfront. The area’s many vacant lots were used as garbage dumps, through which poor women and children scavenged, and stables from near and far dropped their loads at colossal manure heaps. Conditions on the far West Side were no better. The immigrant residential areas abutting the railyards, factories, and the stinking Manhattan Gas Works at 18th and Tenth were so bad that their upper reaches, around the west 30s and 40s, became known as Hell’s Kitchen (the name borrowed from an old Corlear’s Hook dive or perhaps a local gang).

Other workers fled Manhattan for Brooklyn. Conditions were marginally better in the factory-warehouse districts along the Red Hook waterfront and around the Gowanus Canal, and considerably so in the growing downtowns of Brooklyn proper, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint and in the upper stretches (around Myrtle Avenue) of Bushwick and Bedford. Other laborers settled on the new urban frontiers: the bluecollar, oil-worker town of Hunter’s Point (soon Long Island City), the company town of Steinway, or industrial villages like College Point, Woodhaven, and Mott Haven in the Bronx. In 1869 the German Cabinetmakers Association of New York cooperatively purchased five East Astoria farms, covering ninety-one acres; in 1870 they opened a hotel and a shooting gallery that within two years had blossomed into Scheutzen Park, a seven-acre grove complete with woodland, shooting galleries, and dancing pavilions.

Working women had special problems finding housing. Those who entered service were provided for, of course, though the “new conveniences” seldom reached the topfloor servants’ quarters, whose inhabitants still washed weekly in a tub in the kitchen. Clothing workers continued to pool their low wages and rent a garret or tenement room. But the ranks of single laboring women had grown greatly in the backwash of civil war, a function of mass widowhood, economic dislocation, and a dearth of marriageable men. And many boardinghouses—the chief mainstay of single men—refused to accept single women.

Middle-class reformers made some efforts on their behalf. The Female Christian Home and Ladies Christian Association (later the YWCA) founded a Young Woman’s Home to promote the “temporal moral and religious welfare of women, particularly of young women dependent on their own exertions for support.” The Five Points House of Industry, aided by the state, remodeled the old six-story tenement on Elizabeth Street, built in 1855 by the AICP as a “Workmen’s Home,” and renamed it the Home for Working Women. It provided its five hundred boarders and employees with six dormitories, a large dining room, parlors with donated pianos and organs, a sewing room, and a library with daily papers, but it required character references to enter and attendance at prayers to stay.

These initiatives served as models for A. T. Stewart, who wanted to repay his debt to the women who had made his fortune (and perhaps encourage his current employees to remain unmarried longer, and help expand his fortune farther). Stewart built a magnificent hotel for working women of good character on Fourth and 32nd. Its sumptuous apartments, for a thousand women, put it on a par with the city’s top hotels, and Stewart planned to rent them at an affordable $2.50 a week for room and board. But Stewart died in 1876, and his executors upped the charges to seven dollars—knocking out seamstresses and dry-goods clerks but accommodating teachers, bookkeepers, and governesses. When it still continued to lose money, it was shut down altogether after a scant two months of philanthropic life and reopened as a luxury hotel.

COLORED QUARTERS

Relations between working-class blacks and whites did not improve in the decade