Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [931]
In 1884 Adler called for revision of the badly flawed 1879 Tenement House Law. This piece of legislation had emerged from an 1878 architectural competition to design a tenement, twenty-five by one hundred feet, that would maximize both investor profits and tenant satisfaction. The judges (who included Dr. Potter) awarded first prize to James Ware’s “dumbbell” design. Ware’s wasp-waisted building had front and rear wings, connected by a narrow hall containing the stairways, an arrangement that allowed light to filter dimly into the stairwell through airshafts on either side.
As the 1879 housing legislation required that every tenement bedroom have a window opening directly onto a street, a yard, or an acceptable substitute—like the airshaft of the Ware design—the law quickly made the dumbbell tenement a terrible reality for hundreds of thousands of tenants. Landlords packed four families into each of the five or six floors, with each family (plus boarders) squashed into a three-or four-room apartment, the “bedrooms” of which measured seven by eight and a half feet. The airshafts—noisy with the quarrels of twenty-plus families and noisome from the cooking odors of twenty-plus kitchens—-became garbage dumps and firetraps, which shot flames up from one story to the next.
In his 1884 lecture “The Helping Hand of Government,” Adler called for state intervention against such substandard housing. As workers could not build tenements for themselves, “the law of morality and common decency binds the Government to see to it that these houses shall not prove fatal to the lives and morality of the inmates.” If houses were overcrowded, the state “must compel a reduction of the number of inmates, enforce renovation at the expense of the landlord, and where that is no longer possible, must dismantle the houses and remove them from existence.”
Adler nevertheless believed that the private market could provide affordable and decent housing for working people, if philanthropic investors would agree to settle for profit margins lower than the market rate. Here he followed Brooklyn housing reformer Alfred Tredway White, who in 1877-79 had erected the low-rent Home Buildings and Tower Buildings along Hicks and Baltic streets using plans similar to Sir Sidney Waterlow’s 1863 Industrial Dwellings Company of London: blocks of sunlit, well-ventilated apartments with a courtyard in the center.
White hoped his limited dividend project had demonstrated that private capital could solve the housing crisis, and Adler’s 1885 effort—he helped found the Tenement House Building Company of New York—was intended to spur the model housing movement along. The company restricted profits to 4 percent and constructed six tenements on Cherry Street. When the 108 two- or three-room apartments opened in December 1887, many Russian Jews were attracted by the moderate rents, as well as the separate toilets for each two apartments, nine free baths, kindergarten room, roof playground, common laundry room, and superintendent.
Neither these nor other model tenements that followed, however, would usher in a new housing order, as these investment schemes failed to challenge the basic economic arrangements shaping land use in New York City. Inflated land costs remained high, and the small capitalists who dominated the building industry were not able or willing to settle for 4 or 5 percent when they could get a 15 percent rate of return. The dumbbells would continue to constitute the overwhelming majority of new working-class housing; by 1900 there would be 13,600 of them below 14th Street, twenty-eight thousand above.
SUPPING SORROW WITH THE POOR
In 1886 Stan ton Coit, an Episcopalian turned Ethical Culturalist, spent three months in England living at the recently founded Toynbee Hall, which he soon decided was an exemplary application of Adler’s creed-into-deed philosophy. Since the 1870s a stream of wealthy young Oxford men had been residing in London