Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [34]
Tenements not only bred and fostered crime, they were the very headquarters and clubhouses of New York’s criminal element. For contemporary observers among New York’s “better” classes, the term “den of thieves” might have been designed for the tenement house. The dark, twisting passages and numberless small rooms led many writers to describe tenements as warrens, lairs, or rookeries. These references to the feral, animalistic character of the tenements’ inhabitants reflected the fears and prejudices of the middle and upper classes.
For Americans with Victorian sentiments, tales of families with young girls letting the second bedroom to strange men, or of several members of a single family sharing the same bed, fed the impression that tenements were dens of sin and wickedness. The tenements themselves were often used as brothels as well as safe havens for criminals of all sorts. “The various ‘gangs’ that have infested the city and given the police force no end of trouble for many years,” Knox wrote, “are found in the densely populated districts. The tenement-houses afford them excellent hiding-places, and from them the gangs are recruited when a police raid has temporarily decreased their ranks and sent many of them to penal institutions.”
In fact during Roosevelt’s reign as police commissioner several of these gangs had been arrested while working in or preying on the tenements. During the summer of 1895 a ring of counterfeiters that for eight years had been putting out fake dollar coins was finally caught. Seven men and one woman, all members of the Horse Market Gang, were arrested working out of a tenement that acted as a counterfeiting factory, complete with molds, ladles, chemicals, plating apparatus, copper, tin, antimony, and about two hundred phony dollars. Police and Secret Service agents estimated that the gang was responsible for putting out four hundred counterfeit dollars per week. Another gang had been caught after terrorizing New York with a string of fires set in tenements to bilk insurance companies. In August 1896, several members of the gang were still on trial for murder, after one of the fires they set at a tenement on Suffolk Street killed a four-year-old girl.
With the central airshaft in many tenements allowing even the smallest fire to spread quickly between floors, a fire intended to destroy only a business or personal belongings could very easily consume an entire building and its inhabitants. On that day, August 5, the seventy residents of a tenement on Fifty-Sixth Street were considering moving out of their building because the night before, the second fire in a week had been set by an unknown person, who had soaked the wood with kerosene. Attempts to flee via the fire escape had been hindered by the boxes and barrels stored there. “My youngest child is only six weeks old,” Mrs. John Lyons told a reporter, “but she has already passed through two fires. There are few infants with such a record.” The arsonist was never caught.
Most tenements were little more than two-room flats with a kitchen and a single bedroom. Few people could really have been said to live “in” their tenement. Crowded, noisy, and filled with the stench of garbage, cooking, and stopped-up drains, most residents sought refuge on their fire escapes, front steps, or the roof—the “tar beach.” Tenements also housed various kinds of industry, with people working in their rooms sewing clothes, taking in washing, or rolling cigars, adding to the noise, crowding, smell, and generally unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Wash lines hung between the buildings, with anything white soon turned gray by the ever-present soot, ash, and dust in the air. These lines also carried messages and small bundles between buildings. With the constant noise and putrid smell of the tenements, many residents simply kept their windows closed, some even going so far as to nail them shut, depriving them of any hope of a whiff of “fresh” air.
The East River was