By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
New York’s philanthropists had been concerned about the city’s substandard housing for decades. In 1843, concerned citizens established the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) to advocate against disease and crime in the city’s slums. In 1864 the Council of Hygiene—a group of New York sanitary reformers—determined to take concrete action to alleviate the situation. The Council enlisted sympathetic physicians to inspect all of New York City’s housing for conditions affecting the spread of disease and mortality. They published a Report of the physicians’ findings in 1865. The Report described New York’s tenements as “nests of fever infection, and the poisoned abodes of physical decay.” Within their walls, “a worse than Spartan fate” awaited “all children,” with “cholera infantum, convulsions, scrofula, and marasmus hover[ing] with ghoul-like fiendishness….” This public health nightmare, they asserted, threatened not only those who had always been poor, but also a “great body of the former middle class,” who were “rapidly becoming absorbed into and allied with the poor tenant-houses class, and experiencing the [same] lamentable evils….”
Based on the “personal scrutiny” of professionals who “almost simultaneously” investigated “every neighborhood,” the report was “an aggregation of statements and a digest of facts and conclusions,” with “tables, maps, charts, plates, and plans.” It was widely viewed as a groundbreaking piece of work that, with its lack of “hearsay” and “misrepresentation,” “no legislature or government” had yet “been able to produce.”
The Council used its findings to lobby for housing and health reform legislation. Their efforts gained widespread support when an outbreak of cholera in Europe panicked the city’s residents. In 1866, the City passed a law establishing a New York area Metropolitan Board of Health. After further investigation, the legislature enacted the Tenement House Law of 1867, which gave the Board of Health authority to regulate tenement conditions.
Unfortunately the new legislation proved far from adequate. By the late 1870s overcrowding, intensified by an influx of destitute European immigrants, exacerbated the city’s sanitary problems and contributed to the spread of disease. What were formerly the “spacious chambers of …old [single family] residences,” initially “built with a view to comfort, room, and health” were often “cut up” into much smaller spaces. In many cases, what had once been “a single floor of one of these old mansions” now housed “four families…huddled together in their cramped hutches like rabbits.”
Another housing law, passed in 1879, expanded the scope of the Board of Health, placing them in control of plumbing and draining issues in tenements. The same year, architect James E. Ware came up with an idea that reformers thought would help to make “the tenement more comfortable and less dangerous to human life and morals.” His buildings included airshafts, to let in more light and air. Ware’s plans “were generally adopted and greatly improved the old tenements.” However, since the airshafts soon became repositories for garbage, waste and bilge water, “the evil was only partially mitigated and the overcrowding of the poor in these buildings continued….”
The tenements that Ware designed were called “double-decker” dumbbells, because the front and rear buildings were joined together by narrow, inadequately-vented shafts. Described as “great prison-like structures of brick…with narrow doors and windows, cramped passages and rickety stairs,” they were “built through from one street to the other with a … narrow building connecting them….” The “narrow courtyard…in the middle,” “a damp, foul-smelling place, [was] supposed to do duty as an airshaft….” The buildings were “death traps” in the case of fire.
In 1884, Felix Adler, founder and head of the Society for Ethical Culture, gave a series of lectures on the poor state of tenement housing in New York. The same year, the state legislature established the Drexel Commission to study and report on tenement housing. Adler served on this commission. Jacob Riis, a young immigrant journalist, attended and reported on Adler’s lectures and the work of the Commission.
Unfortunately, while the Commission’s Report publicized the plight of the poor, it resulted in only insignificant amendments to the housing code. Some of these were later nullified by the state Supreme Court. Jacob Riis was undaunted by the setbacks. He had found his life’s work. As a journalist and a “muckraker,” he continued to publicize the living conditions of the poor and worked to improve life in the slums.
By the late 1880s, Riis had found a perfect weapon for his cause—the newly invented method of flash photography. Haunting the dark hallways, apartments and alleyways of the slums, Riis took realistic and heart-wrenching photographs of tenement inhabitants—including innocent children—and began to publish the pictures in magazines. In 1890 he compiled them into a book called How the Other Half Lives.
The situations depicted in the book’s photos had never before been seen—much less imagined—by most Americans. Publication of the book made Riis famous, and from then on he was acknowledged and consulted as an expert on housing and other problems facing the urban poor.
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Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016