Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [952]
Gould himself rejected such efforts as “bad principle and worse policy.” The state should set standards below which no housing could fall but leave its provision to market forces. Chairman Gilder agreed that municipal housing initiatives would be an “unjustifiable interference with private enterprise,” as did Jacob Riis, who was also squarely in the entrepreneurial tradition. Gilder did embrace a policy of reform through demolition, urging that bad buildings, especially rear tenements, be destroyed, thus creating open spaces for neighborhood parks. Felix Adler counterargued that the committee was focusing too much on destruction and not enough on building new housing, without which slum clearance would amount to depriving poor people of desperately needed shelter. In addition, the value of new parks would be swiftly neutralized by crowding spawned by new tenements.
Gilder’s approach dominated the committee’s report of January 1895, as well as the Tenement House Act of 1895, passed to implement its proposals. The new law increased the Board of Health’s power to vacate and demolish and streamlined the process for implementing condemnation orders. When the board actually attempted a campaign against rear tenements, however, landlords and developers challenged its new powers and won court decisions affirming that renters had no right to light and air.
Demolition too made little headway. The 1895 law authorized the razing of tenements and the issuance of three million dollars in bonds toward building parks and playgrounds in their stead. But only in the case of Mulberry Bend—thanks to Jacob Riis’s impassioned and persistent denunciation of it as “the foul core of New York’s slums”—did Mayor Strong order buildings vacated and destroyed (their owners were paid a total of $1.5 million). Even then it took two more years of Riis’s nudging before Columbus Park opened on the site.
Mayor Strong did put the Building Department in charge of a professional architect, Stevenson Constable, who began subjecting plans of builders and contractors to thorough examination before issuing permits. Under Tammany, the department had been a plum for party faithful, as building tradesmen routinely paid inspectors bribes to get around vexing requirements. Constable, like Waring, demanded inspectors don uniforms, stay out of saloons during working hours, and crack down on slipshod construction methods. Wrathful builders, architects, and contractors managed to bog down the campaign, and the results proved negligible.
Public approaches floundered in part because housing reformers, pursuant to their analysis and inclinations, put most of their energy into private programs. Made aware, from the limited follow-up to model housing initiatives like those of White and Adler, that small builders were unlikely ever to house the poor and laboring classes, many in the Strong administration believed that corporate philanthropy was the answer. Concentrated capital could work on the grand scale required and could afford to settle for moderate profits.
In 1896, accordingly, an independent Committee on Improved Housing was set up—with Richard Watson Gilder as chair—to sponsor an architectural competition for structures covering large lots (two hundred by four hundred feet, rather than the tiny twenty-five by a hundred specified in the dumbbell competition). Then a City and Suburban Homes Company was established to provide wage-earners with “improved, wholesome homes at current rates.” It counted among its directors and officers both leading housing activists (such as Gould, Gilder, Riis, Adler, White, and Rainsford) and wealthy philanthropists (among them Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Isaac N. Seligman, Darius Ogden Mills, and the brothers W. Bayard Cutting and Robert Fulton Cutting), and received additional financial support from the Astor, Low, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Schiff families.
City and Suburban