Figure 3.1. Two plans illustrating typical uses 3 0 0 for the cellar; one was the privy (left], the other Rich and Poor was the dwelling for the poor. 0 • 0 • Ill 0 • 0 p the cellar was replaced by the tenement, which at least eliminated the most sub• terranean aspect of housing affliction for the poor. The "rookery," a term which also predated "tenement" and held different meaning, was as notorious as the cellar. Rookeries were not "designed" to be ten• HE second half of the nineteenth century in New York City saw ements. They usually were discarded buildings haphazardly reinhabited at ten• technological innovation in the form and production of housing ement densities. Many were formerly single-family houses built of wood frame which was unique in world history. By 1885 new building tech. construction in the days before inexpensive brick. Like the cellars, rookeries be• nology had brought changes in the form of housing which had gan to disappear after mid-century. They were also popular objects of reform. been unimagined only two decades earlier. The steel skeleton They tended to burn or fall down easily. The most notorious rookeries in the city frame, the elevator, electricity, and modern sanitation had cre- T were located in the vicinity of Mulberry Bend and the adjacent Five Points, where ated the high-rise New York apartment house. With this momentous development Worth, Park, and Baxter streets intersected (figure 3.2).4 The Five Points con• came a period of the greatest inequity between the housing of the rich and the sisted of a cluster of wooden buildings. Mulberry Bend, one of the city's worst poor that New York City has known. The upper class immediately embraced the slums, contained both wood and brick structures, with extensive back building. new technology and its offspring; the lower class could not afford it, and continued Slum clearance proposals for the area dated from 1829, when the Common Coun• to live in their cellars, rookeries, and squatter shacks, sometimes in the shadow cil contemplated ridding the city of that "place of great disorder and crime.:" Yet of the high-rise palaces. it took the city sixy-seven years to realize that mandate. The descriptions of its Of the possible housing options for the poor, the cellar dwelling was the most horrors are remarkably consistent over that long period. ubiquitous and the most hazardous (figure 3.1). The cellar was inevitably the In 1842 Charles Dickens, visiting the Five Points, wrote about it in his Amer- nexus between the poor and disease. Overcrowded, filthy, airless, wet, dark, and ican Notes: frequently filled with gases from primitive sewers or with effluent from the school sinks, cellars were the breeding ground for cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis. What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of The great cholera epidemic of 1849 originated in a cellar on Baxter Street near leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. Five Points. It was described by the visiting physician William P. Buell: "At my What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread! A first visit, on the 16th of May, five human beings, one man and four women, lay miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that upon the floor in different stages of cholera. There was nothing under them but which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it, sits a man: his elbows on his mud and filth, and nothing over them but a few mats of the filthiest description. knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. "What ails that man?" asks the foremost Civilization and a great city could scarcely afford a parallel to the scene."! officer. "Fever," he sullenly replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of Municipal advancements in sanitation sometimes worked to the disadvantage a fevered brain, in such a place as this!6 of the poor. The Croton Aqueduct for example, brought pure water into upper• The Tenement House Committee of 1884 devoted special consideration to class homes, heralding vast sanitation improvements at that level. Yet conditions Mulberry Bend and the Five Points, finally recommending that it be razed. The worsened in the cellar dwellings. As individual wells were replaced by the Croton, co . 2 ~1ttee revealed that of the 659 deaths recorded for Mulberry Bend in the water tables in the city rose, flooding the cellars. The cellars represented the pr~vious three years, 65 percent were children under five years of age.7 Such worst housing conditions in the city, and became a favorite target of early re• offi~ial statistics were amplified by the housing reformers. Jacob Riis devoted an formers. The number of cellar dwellings began to decline as early as 1859, when entire chapter of How the Other Half Lives to Mulberry Bend, and it was due in only 20,000 cellar dwellings were reported, 9,000 less than in 1850.3 Gradually RICH AND POOR 51 50 RICH AND POOR Figure 3.2. Mulberry Bend, said to have been Figure 3.3. Photo taken by Jacob Riis of Bottle the most notorious slum in New York City Alley, one of the interior courtyards of Mulberry throughout most of the nineteenth century. Bend which was inhabited by rag-and-bone pickers, the poorest of the poor; published in 1890 in How the Other Half Lives. BAYARD II large part to his efforts that the slum was finally razed. By the time of Riis, Mulberry Bend had passed from the Irish to the Italians, who made some surface changes: it became "more like some town in Southern Italy than a Street in New York-all but the houses; they are still the same old tenements of the unromantic type."8 Riis described "Bottle Alley"(figure 3.3), within the interior maze of the bend, as "a fair specimen of its kind . look at any of these houses, everywhere the same piles of rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper, all of which sani• tary police flatter themselves they have banished to the dumps and the ware• houses." Another reformer, Allen Forman, expresses the more conservative side of public opinion which clearly placed the blame on the victims: "By all odds the most vicious, ignorant and degraded of all immigrants who come to our shores are the Italian inhabitants of Mulberry Bend and the surrounding tenements . an eddy in the life of the city where the scum collects, where the very offscouring of all humanity seem to find a lodgment.l"? After innumerable delays, the city finally acquired possession of Mulberry Bend and began demolition in 1894. By 1896 Columbus Park covered the site. It was one of the first slum clearance proj• ects on a modern scale in New York City." ter settlements were not well documented. It is possible to establish, however, As a type, the squatter's shack appears to have been less perilous to its in• that throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century, large areas habitants than the cellar or the rookery. New York City had large squatter set• of Manhattan above 57th Street were covered with "shantytowns." In 1864 the tlements, a condition typical of large urban areas in developing countries. In New New York Times estimated that "there is a population of 20,000 on this island York squatter housing was considered illegitimate and temporary, rarely coming that pay neither rent for the dwellings they occupy, nor municipal taxes as hold• under the same legislative scrutiny as cellars and rookeries. Therefore, the squat- ers of real estate. They comprise that portion of the population know as squat- 52 RICH AND POOR RICH AND POOR 53 12 Figure 3.4. Depictions of squatters living in ters." The Times deplored the "hundreds, or ... thousands [of squatters) Wh have grown rich on the exempt system."13 Their figure of twenty-thousand w 0 Central Park in 1857 who were removed in the undoubtedly conservative, especially with the extended definition of squattinas same year as the landscaping of the park was to include the widespread pra~tice of land s~ecu_lators who char~ed "rent" t 14 be gun. "squatters" while they held their land for the inevitable boom. This "rent" cov, ered the original cost of the land and yearly taxes, assuring clear profit for th speculator. The family who "leased" the land and built their shack on it had n~ rights whatsoever when the time came for the landowner to build. The report published by the Council of Hygiene in 1865 gives some infor. mation about the extent of squatting on the Upper East and West Sides by that date. The Upper East Side had yielded to permanent urbanization sooner than the West Side, and attracted a more affluent population. By 1867 the East Side of Manhattan north of 40th Street contained 3,286 one- or two-family houses 1,061 tenements, and 1,016 squatter shacks. Most of the squatters were concen'. trated to the east of Central Park. On the West Side, above 50th Street, there were only 516 one- and two-family houses, 1,760 tenements, and 865 squatter is almost'impossible. In one small room are found the family, chairs, usually dirty Figure 3.5. Egbert Viele. The first plan for 15 shacks. Over the next two decades this pattern shifted, with squatting confined and broken, cooking utensils, stove, often a bed, a dog or cat, and sometimes more Central Park proposed in 1856, but replaced by to the area west of Central Park, where land speculators held out the longest.