Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [37]
TENEMENTS WERE A BY-PRODUCT of New York’s rapid growth, first appearing in 1833. As the population of New York doubled between 1845 and 1860, the mostly Irish immigrants sought cheap and immediate housing. Despite the cholera epidemics of the 1830s and 1840s that ravaged the occupants of the tenement districts, an 1857 report by the New York State Legislature called the early tenement a “blessing” as it afforded a cheap solution to New York’s chronic need for housing for new immigrants.
But things soon changed. Owners of large houses downtown quickly understood the profit to be made partitioning their large rooms into apartments for multiple families, “without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street.” These new tenements, the legislature’s report continued, “soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident of habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.”
With so many people living in buildings originally built for a single family, owners did not expect their property to last very long. To compensate, they fixed the rents high enough to cover the damage. What ensued was a cycle of disrepair and tenant slovenliness, with each condition reinforcing the other. Owners pocketed healthy profits without directing money back into their property, while dissatisfied tenants, already living amid dilapidation, did little to preserve or improve the condition of their homes. Later, as tenement horrors came to light, owners blamed the tenants themselves for the poor state of repair. “Neatness, order, cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system,” the legislature’s report claimed, “while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results.”
The city faced a vast and growing web of tenements “containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath mouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars.” Tenements were a profitable business. And as immigrants continued to arrive, back gardens continued to be dug up, and owners pioneered the concept of the rear tenement, whose apartments would be completely cut off from the street, from air, and from light. Faced with a vast increase of these breeding grounds of both crime and disease, official New York was forced into action.
The various laws enacted between 1867 and 1895 reflected growing concerns in cities about health, sanitation, disease, morals, fire, and crime. Yet they also illustrated the slapdash manner in which tenement reform was enacted. Airshafts were mandated, but not their size. Tenement laws reflected the concerns of the day, such as the 1895 prohibition against boiling fat in tenement cellars, a source of many fires. Loopholes were common. Fire escapes were required only if there were not some other means of egress provided. Thus a rickety wooden ladder might fulfill the letter of the law. A window to the outside normally required for hallways might be overlooked if there were some other means of affording light and ventilation. City officials were often given wide latitude in deciding such cases, yet even here the very oversight of the tenements frequently changed hands. At first the new Board of Health was made responsible for tenements in 1867. Simultaneously, however, responsibility for building laws rested with the Department of Buildings. Conflict between the jurisdiction of the two were inevitable. Was airshaft construction a “building” or “health” concern? The 1879 act sought to solve this problem by transferring most oversight to the Building Department,