The following paper will explore the tenement slum situation of late 19th century New York City. Unscrupulous landowners had converted their houses into tiny apartments for rent, and then had left the poor tenants to do as they may, which led to overcrowding of the rooms as the tenants took on boarders to reduce rents they could not afford. This housing structure caused the tenement situation by creating a living environment that could have no other outcome other than the slum conditions that prevailed. The upper classes of New York City soon associated the slum tenements with their inhabitants, unable to see the larger picture of how the slum conditions began, and these associations reinforced their already preconceived racial prejudices they had formed against the newly arrived Southeastern European immigrants. The tenement slum situation was allowed to take place, and continue for the many years that it did, because the only people that had the power to change the horrid conditions were ignorant and prejudiced against the non-native born populations streaming into their city.
The Tenements
The tenement slum houses of New York City were created in the mid to late 19th century, when the wealthier citizenry discovered that the city’s growing industries had begun to attract a mass of poor immigrants who would be in need of shelter (Riis, 1890). These wealthy landowners came up with a scheme in which they could extract exorbitant rents from their old houses once they subdivided their once spacious apartments into a multitude of smaller spaces (Riis, 1890).
As the new tenement owners were expecting to house the poorer of New York City’s residents, the living spaces were created with little regard for the attractiveness or livability of them, whether from want of sunlight, airflow, or washing facilities (Riis, 1890). Rents were charged higher than normal for similar sized apartments, but this did not repel the poor, as the tenements became quickly known as places that were without rules or managerial supervision, and as such tenants began to subsidize their rent by sharing rooms with multiple boarders (Riis, 1890). This practice, which quickly led to overcrowding, was taken up by many families who could not afford the rents on the meager wages found throughout the city for the masses of unskilled immigrant labour (Husband & O’Loughlin, 2004).
The poor working-classes of immigrants had little choice in their accommodations, as the city was experiencing a housing shortage that was unable to keep up with the mass of immigration flooding into New York City at the close of the nineteenth century (Claghorn, 1903). The tenements were wrung for all their worth, while the tenants were left to do as they please in the structuring of their lives inside living spacesthat lacked the facilities to provide for the hordes that would fill them far past their capacity (Riis, 1890). The tenement structures were often poorly built and investments in their upkeep were held back by their owners, all of which made for a dangerous and decrepit living environment (Riis, 1890).
The tenements, with their often poor ventilation, often kept tenants - adults and children alike - in the streets until late at night during the summer when the rooms inside were too hot (Riis, 1895). Due to the overcrowding, lack of washing facilities, and no sanitation services, the streets and rooms of the tenements were impossible to keep clean; and because the rooms were shared by many, there was nearly always a lack of privacy, and as such men, women, and children of both sexes were forced to endure living situations that were viewed by the wealthier social classes as immodest behavior (Riis, 1895). Because of these conditions, the youth were being corrupted and families were being placed in a highly tense and unhealthy environment (Riis, 1895).
The tenement slums were described as reeking “with incest and murder” (Riis, 1902, chapter 2, paragraph 3). There were not enough schools to provide for the countless children of the tenements, and so children were often brought to shops to work alongside their parents rather than roam the streets, a sight that further degraded the working classes in the eyes of the upper classes (Riis, 1902). New York City’s politicians’ excuse for the lack of schools was simply that tax rates must be kept in check, this despite the fact that jails seemed to have no trouble finding funds for their creation (Riis, 1902).
The tenements were places where disease ran rampant and could not be isolated due to the masses of people who lived in such densely housed living arrangements (Huntington, 1887). The slum tenements were described as being utterly devoid of all beauty or good, a place where noble intentions were corrupted into acts of vice, a setting where even the sky was stained with the filth from the factories in which many of the tenement dwellers toiled and were situated near (Huntington, 1887).
Huntington (1887) acknowledged that the slums contained many noble men and women who were only changed into the base creatures that pervaded the tenements because there was no room for any pure effort or thought. Any goodness of character would be corrupted and trampled by the forces of vice and decrepitude that were inescapable in the tenement environs (Huntington, 1887).
The Tenants
Many of the immigrants who lived inside the tenements were thought to be Europeans who had little religion brought over with them, and who’s very ideas as to life were of a standard wholly below that of native born, middle-class Americans (Lubove, 1962).
The wealthy citizens of American cities often viewed the working-class labourers from Southeastern Europe as ignorant and violent in their protests of working conditions, and that the foreign immigrants did not respect them and their rightfully earned superior material comforts (Lubove, 1962). The wealthy viewed this new immigrant working-class as being irresponsible and reckless, and that envy was the cause of their violent strikes against a higher class of citizenry that was simply more successful in their pursuits (Lubove, 1962). These rebellious immigrants wanted nothing more than to disrupt the established society in American cities (Lubove, 1962).
It was with these sentiments that the tenements and their working-class immigrant populations were seen as belonging to an altogether separate species of human by many of the upper classes (Lubove, 1962). The citizens of the tenement slums were not simply in need of better housing the upper classes felt, but that they were in need of American middle-class morality and manners (Lubove, 1962).
Various ethnic stereotypes were associated with the recent inflow of immigrants from Southeast Europe (Claghorn, 1903). Two of the most popular ethnicities to be associated with the slums tenements were of Italian and Jewish ancestry (Claghorn, 1903). These two groups were thought by the upper classes to be poor, of unhygienic habits, and predisposed to excessively cramped living spaces (Claghorn, 1903).
Even those who did not show outright prejudices held beliefs that due to the many ethnicities contained within the tenements, that no collective force could be found for the betterment of their living situations, because they could not speak in the same tongue or share the same thoughts (Huntington, 1887).
Ignorance of the Upper Class
Through the writing of Alice Rollins (1888) we are able to see the possible attitudes and false assumptions of the wealthier classes of New York City’s citizenry in regards to the working-class immigrants housed in the tenements. One assumption made by Rollins was that residents of the slum tenements paid enough in rent that they could live in better housing, but because they were “wedded to filth and misery” the European immigrants chose to live in slum conditions (1888).
Rollins (1888) was unable to make the connection between her own observation that the rooms rented in slum tenements were often shared by many, up to 45 people by her count, and so the rents paid for these tenements were much lower than the advertised rents she assumed they paid. And so it is that these poor tenement dwellers would not in fact be able to afford better housing, which as Rollins (1888) also pointed out would have janitors on duty to guard against overcrowding of the apartments.
Not all upper class native-born Americans were set against the new immigrants, thought of their situation as hopeless, or were ignorant of the situation that befell them. The problems encountered by the new immigrants were viewed by Jacob Riis as the responsibility of a country that while welcoming their labour, was unwilling to pay the costs that came with the settling the new workforce into their prosperous, growing cities (Riis, 1895). Riis believed that schools could and should be the mechanism which absorbed and helped transform the new immigrants into prosperous Americans, and that laws should prohibit absentee landlords from allowing slum conditions to come about in their tenements (Riis, 1895). By allowing the tenement problem to exist, the wealthier citizenry were part of the problem, and the responsibility to change the horrific living arrangements lied with them because they had the power to do something about it. Riis (1895) suggested that to combat the prevalence of slum conditions, new schools needed to be erected, the worst tenements should be torn down, and the current regulations during that period needed to be upheld in their intended entirety.
Conclusion
As immigrants flooded into New York City at the closing of the 19th century, they were met with little option but to seek shelter in the masses of tenement housing that was created by unscrupulous landowners to take advantage of their vulnerable positions. The tenements were designed in such a way that no other outcome could be possible than slum conditions and moral degeneracy among the masses of people forced upon one another in a jungle of human depredation. The upper classes of society were ignorant to the entirety of the circumstances that had created the tenement slums, and had taken to advancing their preconceived racial prejudices in their associating the new immigrant populations with the slums, and that the two were inextricably linked.
No comments:
Post a Comment