Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [5]
In the eyes of many New Yorkers the unemployment problem was exacerbated by the arrival of thousands of immigrants. Starting around 1890, millions of citizens of southeastern European countries—Italians, Hungarians, Russian Jews—left their homes and made their way to the United States. Two-thirds of the new arrivals would pass through Ellis Island, the new immigrant reception center established off the southern tip of Manhattan in 1892. By 1897 about 1.5 million immigrants had been screened at the center. While many of the new arrivals moved on to other cities, or even returned home, thousands settled in New York.
This was the beginning of one of the largest demographic shifts in world history. Between 1890 and 1900 Greater New York added about 1 million persons to its population. By 1900 over a third of New Yorkers—nearly 1.3 million—were foreign-born, and 84 percent of the city’s white heads of families were either of foreign birth or the children of immigrants.
The new arrivals and the city’s poor packed into the ill-maintained tenements of lower Manhattan. There, ten people might share a single interior room without access to light or fresh air. The toilet often consisted of little more than a single latrine out back used by as many as two hundred people. To climb a dark staircase one risked stepping on playing children or becoming the victim of faceless attackers. In 1890 Jacob Riis had documented the plight of the tenement dwellers in his How the Other Half Lives, taking haunting photos that lit the darkest corners of the Bowery with the new technology of flash photography. Homeless children and exhausted laborers renting a place on the floor for a nickel stared back at the camera.
The conditions on the Lower East Side became unbearable during the summer. To avoid the stifling tenement air, the inhabitants stayed outdoors on doorsteps and roofs, even sleeping there at night, hoping to catch the faintest breeze. In summers, families would keep ice stocked not only to prevent food from spoiling but also to bring down overheated body temperatures. The economic crisis of 1896 had made matters worse, as laboring families were so impoverished they could not afford to purchase ice.
Work in the home compounded the squalor. Tenement rooms doubled as places of work for cigar makers and other pieceworkers, including children. When in the 1880s a bill had come before the New York State Assembly forbidding the manufacture of cigars in tenements, labor leader Samuel Gompers had taken a young assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt on a tour of the Lower East Side. Roosevelt had not believed the horror stories about the tenements, and Gompers meant to educate the wealthy brownstone Republican. Accompanied by Gompers, Roosevelt came into contact with the city’s poor for the first time, and years later he remembered:
There were one, two, or three room apartments, and the work went on day and night in the eating, living, and sleeping rooms—sometimes in one room. I have always remembered one room in which two families were living. On my inquiry as to who the third adult male was I was told that he was a boarder with one of the families. There were several children, three men, and two women in this room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food. The men, women, and children in this room worked by day and far on into the evening, and they slept and ate there.
Tenement dwellers daily faced a precarious economic situation. New York’s Lower East Side was dominated by the expanding needle trade, one of the fastest-growing sectors