Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [36]
Accompanying a doctor, Campbell explored one of the rear tenements on Slaughter Alley off Roosevelt Street. She described entering the front room “of tolerable size, but intolerable dirt, where four little children sat on the floor eating bread and molasses.” With the doctor she then entered a dark inner bedroom, which had a “heavy, oppressive smell . . . a fog of human exhalations.”
The doctor had come to see a woman in the last stages of consumption—tuberculosis—by 1896 the most common disease among New York’s poor. They found her propped up in bed to make breathing easier, “a deep red spot on each cheek, and her frame the merest skeleton.” Back in the larger front room Campbell noted an old mattress in the corner serving as the bed for the four children, a few chairs, and “a closet, whose open door showed some broken crockery and one or two cooking utensils.”
“Smells, filth, degradation, and misery,” Campbell recounted, “old and young crowded together; evil, coarse, and suffering faces; tattered, faded, old clothes; dirty shops; drinking saloons right and left—these things are scarcely lacking in any quarter, and are plentiful in many.”
For progressives, reformers, and mission workers like Campbell and Riis, the lack of running water in people’s homes was a constant concern. While Theodore Roosevelt’s boyhood home in Gramercy Park could boast piped-in water as early as the 1850s, even by 1896 most New Yorkers would have still viewed this as almost unimaginable luxury. Alleyway “hydrants” were the source of water for most tenements, requiring tenants to carry fresh water up stairs and dirty water back down—if they didn’t throw it onto the street from an open window. A recent law had mandated interior sinks in hallways for newer tenements, but even these were usually filthy, rarely cleaned, and stopped-up.
Without reliable water sources, keeping clean was a difficult ordeal. The Tenement House Committee of 1894 had found that of the over quarter million tenement occupants whose living conditions were examined by its staff, only 306 had access to bathtubs in their homes. Unlike many other American and European cities, New York maintained no public bathhouses. Its citizens relied instead on free “floating baths,” large wooden frames placed in the rivers to form pools. This was only an option during the summer, and even then was far from convenient for most of the working poor, requiring a walk of as much as a mile to the river in some cases. Still, the floating baths afforded some relief during the heat wave.
For those who could not make the trip to a floating bath, or had no fire escape on which to sit during the heat wave, the tenement roof offered the only respite from the suffocating heat. “One may see on any summer night many a roof crowded with restless and uneasy tenants seeking relief from the sickening heat of their airless quarters,” Campbell noted. “If one climbs the stairs of any of these wretched tenement-houses on a warm summer night, the whole population seems to have sought the roof, and lies upon it in every uncomfortable attitude—men, women, and children huddled together, and all alike moaning in troubled sleep.”
This was not just a matter of seeking comfort. With the extreme heat and poor air circulation inside their apartments, and with thousands already suffering from lung problems like bronchitis and tuberculosis, finding even a small space on a roof on which to spend the night could mean the difference between life and death. Airshafts were often piled high with garbage, and opening a window admitted only air rank with the smells of cooking.
Down at street level, many tenement dwellers tried to sleep on their doorsteps, on a garbage bin, in an empty cart, or even in an out-of-the-way spot on the street or in an alley. Yet the searing asphalt that continued to radiate heat throughout the night and baked the steaming garbage and horse excrement made these