A History of New York in 27 Buildings

by Sam Roberts

  As the League of Nations assembly convened for the last time in Geneva, the Security Council would hold its 24th through 356th meetings at Hunter College, then, to the relief of students and administrators, vacate the campus in August, just in time for classes to resume that September. In 1968, Hunter itself moved back to Manhattan, and the Bronx campus became Lehman College of the City University of New York (named for Herbert H. Lehman, the former governor and U.S. senator, who served as the first director-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). The Old Gym, as it is now called, houses counseling and tutoring offices. Years later, Brian Urquhart, a former undersecretary-general, described New York as “the U.N.’s great blessing.” Except for illegal parking and traffic congestion, nowadays the feeling is largely mutual. City officials estimate that the organization’s presence generates some twenty-five thousand jobs and nearly four billion dollars in economic output. “New York is a grand, hard, gritty place where no one underestimates their own importance or overestimates anyone else’s,” Urquhart said. “In other places, diplomats are themselves the biggest fish in the little pond, but in New York they have to swim around like all the other fish, and no one will fail to criticize them if they deserve it.”

  At that first Security Council session, U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes recalled that New York had been America’s first capital and drew a parallel between the first Congress in 1789 and the first meeting of the United Nations in its full incarnation in 1946. He neglected to mention that the Bronx, too, had briefly been the nation’s capital, not exactly the way Lewis Morris had hoped, but, arguably, long enough to establish bragging rights. In October 1797, rather than proceed from Boston to Philadelphia (where a smallpox epidemic was raging and two-thirds of the population had fled the interim capital city), John and Abigail Adams spent a month with their daughter and her family at her farmhouse (now a parking lot for a sex store) in Eastchester. Adams conducted the nation’s business there until the epidemic subsided. That short episode has largely been lost to history, but James Lyons remained convinced that his borough’s 1946 role in forging global peace would never be forgotten. “History will record,” he said, “that the Bronx was the first capital of the world.”

  Its global glory faded, Hunter College moved back to Manhattan, but the campus returned to its original mission as part of City University. (George Samoladas)

  That same day, a fifty-three-year-old carpenter was immortalized as a citizen of the world. As the inaugural Security Council session began in the Bronx on March 25, 1946, the eleven members discovered that they had already been preempted by Paul Antonio, a Greek immigrant who lived with his wife and two daughters in upper Manhattan. In a final site check of the council chamber, UN staffers found this note, which remains in the archives: “May I, who have had the privilege of fabricating this ballot box, cast the first vote? May God be with every member of the United Nations Organization, and through your noble efforts bring lasting peace to us all—all over the world.”

  25

  FIRST HOUSES

  The name First Houses was derivative, but the concept was original after decrepit tenements proved beyond repair: let the public pay for public housing. (New York Times, 1936)

  When 97 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side was completed in 1864, the law required few amenities. The 325-square-foot apartments with twenty-three rooms lacked toilets, showers, baths, and any running water at all, hot or cold. Privies in the backyard sufficed. Fireplaces provided heat. Only one room in each apartment was ventilated—although an 1867 law required that all rooms receive direct light and air, No. 97 was grandfathered in. In 1901, when more than 111 tenants were living in the building, a tougher law dictated renovations to add toilets on each floor and air shafts, but the building still was not wired for electricity until 1924. Instead of sinking an air shaft for ventilation, the landlord cut holes in the interior partition walls and installed windows between apartments. Sometime by 1935, when the building owner decided that further upgrades would be too expensive, the apartments were deemed to be noncompliant and were condemned by the city.

  Later that same year, the city intervened again, just a few blocks away, this time to add apartments in what was then the most congested neighborhood on the planet. These buildings, dedicated on a blustery December day on the southwest corner of Avenue A and Third Street, would herald the most ambitious public housing program in America.

  “A great constitutional lawyer two years ago told me that it would be a cold day when the government builds houses,” Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia said sardonically, referring to the Supreme Court’s rejection of New Deal legislation. “Well, he was right that time—the first time a constitutional lawyer has been right in the past three years.”

  More than four thousand families had applied for the 122 apartments in the complex of eight four- and five-story red-brick buildings. Today, they don’t seem the least bit special, but in 1935, at the height of the Depression, the aptly named First Houses was the first public housing project undertaken in the city’s history—and the first public, low-income housing project in the nation.

  The earliest housing regulations in New York, in the seventeenth century, largely concerned potential risks to safety and sanitation. Those regulations required landlords to comply with upgraded health standards. (The city’s legal right to do so was upheld in court in the late nineteenth century, after Trinity Church challenged a two-hundred-dollar fine for failing to provide Croton water to several houses it owned on Charlton Street.) By 1900, though, it was estimated that more than two million New Yorkers were crammed into eighty thousand tenements. Later, in the early twentieth century, government hoped to relieve overcrowding by granting tax abatements and other incentives to spur construction of more affordable housing. But it wasn’t until the early 1930s, when the economic and political agendas dovetailed, that housing became a public responsibility, and New York State passed legislation empowering municipalities to establish housing authorities to clear slums and replace them with accommodations for low-income tenants.

  La Guardia, though nominally a Republican, defied conventional partisan politics and managed to tap into New Deal revenue streams and private philanthropy to help subsidize the proposed groundbreaking housing project on the Lower East Side. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided materials. The federal Works Progress Administration furnished workers on relief (which vexed the construction workers’ unions, since their members weren’t hired). Most of the apartments were built on property owned by Vincent Astor (who inherited it from his grandfather, John Jacob Astor)—with the Depression raging, he was grateful to get rid of the land, even at a bargain price of half the assessed valuation. The newly minted New York City Housing Authority sold tax-free sixty-six-year bonds to buy the Astor property and would, over the next eight decades, provide apartments for millions of New Yorkers, including the families of Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs; Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks; and the actress Whoopi Goldberg.

  Despite its tax-exempt status, the First Houses project went way over budget. The reason was familiar to any landlord: the city had hoped to rehabilitate the existing tenements, which, like 97 Orchard, had been refitted decades earlier to conform to the 1901 law. But most of the buildings were not only unfit for habitation; they were beyond repair. Moreover, the city’s innovative—but ill-conceived—slum clearance strategy of razing every third tenement to provide air and light left the remaining ones too unstable to be remodeled. Instead, five of the eight houses had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Also, the oak floors, brass light fixtures, gas stoves, pink and black bathrooms, and landscaped courtyard contributed to making the budget for First Houses about three times higher than that for any of the other public housing projects that the city would build before World War II.

  While Vincent Astor was delighted to jettison his holdings and, with them, his disrepute as a slumlord, another
property owner, Andrew Muller (who also held tenements slated for rehabilitation in the First Houses project), was less obliging. He rejected the city’s compensation offer and sued, going so far as to challenge the fledgling Housing Authority’s legal right to appropriate his property, even with compensation. In March 1936, the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled in favor of the city. The court affirmed the city’s proper exercise of eminent domain because the slum clearance project was for the public benefit and beyond the scope of private enterprise. The court was emphatic. “Legislation merely restrictive in its nature has failed because the evil inheres not so much in this or that individual structure as in the character of a whole neighborhood of dilapidated and unsanitary structures,” the judges wrote. Invoking the legal term for “against a person’s consent,” the court added: “To eliminate the inherent evil and to provide housing facilities at low cost—the two things necessarily go together—require large scale operations which can be carried out only where there is power to deal in invitum with the occasional greedy owner seeking excessive profit by holding out.”

  With the legal, labor, and logistical delays finally surmounted, First Houses was formally dedicated on December 3, 1935. The ceremony, which was broadcast nationally on the radio, drew a shivering crowd of more than three thousand in temperatures that hovered around freezing and were chilled even more by a stiff wind. “These are the first dwellings,” Governor Herbert H. Lehman said, “which are predicated upon the philosophy that sunshine, space and air are minimum housing requirements to which every American is entitled, no matter how small his income.” President Roosevelt sent a congratulatory telegram. Cutting a white ribbon to inaugurate the project, Eleanor Roosevelt, as if inoculating her husband’s administration against accusations of bleeding-heart socialism, pointedly said, “The question is, will the tenants do their part to make this experiment successful.” She also expressed the hope that private capital would eventually flow into affordable housing.

  Mayor La Guardia voiced no such illusions the following July, when the federal government formally handed over the maintenance of the project to the Housing Authority. “I don’t object to private ownership,” he declared with characteristic bombast, “but if private capital cannot build cheerful houses with windows and enough space for sunshine and air at low rentals they should not complain when the government does it.” In congratulating his Housing Authority board members by name (Louis H. Pink, Mary K. Simkhovitch, Rev. E. Roberts Moore, and B. Charney Vladeck), the mayor also couldn’t resist reminding New Yorkers of the singular government he had created: “Where can you find a housing board to equal it?” he asked. “An idealist on housing, a social worker, a Catholic priest, and a Socialist.”

  Langdon Post, who formerly ran the city’s Tenement House Department, headed the authority. He had managed to finesse three hundred thousand dollars—one-third the cost of the project—from Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program that employed mostly unskilled men on public buildings and roads. “Some of the newspapers call this boondoggling,” the mayor declared. “Well, I don’t make any apologies for boondoggling if this is it.” First Houses did, indeed, involve a bit of bureaucratic flimflam—in more ways than one. Following the precept that rules are made to be broken, Post cleverly diverted money intended to boost employment to build housing, fulfilling both goals simultaneously. (“The housing program, like so many others, developed backwards out of a search for places to spend money,” Thomas Kessner wrote in his biography of La Guardia. “The goal was jobs, not houses.”)

  From the outside, as Nicholas Dagen Bloom wrote in Public Housing That Worked, First Houses was designed to “look inexpensive.” The Times praised the apartments because they were “walkups, somewhat barrack-like in appearance.” Lewis Mumford groused that the project represented “ ‘slum replacement’ with a vengeance—it simply replaces an old slum with a new slum.”

  To the first tenants, though, First Houses was the Promised Land. Three-quarters of the new occupants had moved from apartments that had no bathrooms and no heat. “Imagine,” one tenant was quoted as saying, “a toilet right in the apartment where you can lock the door!” Another, standing in her sun-drenched living room, exclaimed: “I never knew what color my furniture was before; I never saw it except by electric light.” Given the tenants’ former living conditions, though, skeptics wondered aloud how long the amenities at their new homes would last. “Whether First Houses does become ‘just another slum’ depends in a large measure, as Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out in her dedication speech, on its occupants,” May Lumsden, who was in charge of choosing them, wrote later in Survey Graphic magazine. Because they were garment workers, taxi drivers, barbers, and the like who had to meet financial requirements, by the end of the first year, not one was behind in their weekly rent bill and none was on relief. About a third were native-born Americans and, most of the rest were either Russian, Polish, or Austrian.

  “The very finest types were selected,” Lumsden explained. “The management officials often had to harden their hearts and stuff their ears. They had to devise a system whose mathematical impartiality would protect them against the eloquence of sad-eyed mothers, the whisperings of politicians and their own human sympathies.” (More than three thousand were marooned on the waiting list.) Before they moved in, tenants had to relinquish their clothes, towels, bedding, and furniture to be fumigated by the city. They were required to agree in writing to “conditions of tenancy,” which included not using nails in the walls (an exception was made for Jewish tenants who wanted to install mezuzahs on their doorposts). All of the project’s first occupants were white—ostensibly because the pool of qualified applicants was limited to people who already lived in the neighborhood. (Racial discrimination that contributed to overcrowded housing was one cause of the Harlem riots earlier in 1935. First Houses was followed by the Harlem River House Project and housing for sixteen hundred families in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, both of which accepted tenants of color.)

  There had been one other “project” on the Lower East Side, Knickerbocker Houses on Monroe Street, but it was built privately for middle-income tenants by the Fred F. French Company and the average monthly rent, $12.50 a room, was beyond the reach of Depression-era low-income families in the neighborhood. First Houses was aimed at tenants who could afford an average of $6.05 a month, which would constitute no more than between 20 and 25 percent of their family income. The first tenants accepted at First Houses had an average monthly income of about ninety-two dollars. Among them was Frank LiCausi, a twenty-two-year-old struggling to survive the Depression on his twenty-dollar-a-week salary as a clerk for the city’s social services department. The son of Italian immigrants, he moved into a $4.40-a-week one-bedroom apartment with a private bathroom and hot water in First Houses with his wife and two-year-old daughter in December 1935. He was still living there sixty years later.

  First Houses was supposed to have been a model for public housing, but its cost, largely because of the showy amenities and the unanticipated expenses of rebuilding, transformed it into an exception instead. By the twenty-first century, the project was showing its age, but it had endured longer because of its modest scale and superior construction, and because, to some degree, public housing became a victim of its own success. Tenants like LiCausi didn’t want to leave. Also, the tenant selection process became less and less rigorous as the city’s affordable housing crisis became more acute, and the pressure intensified to place more people who were collecting some form of public assistance or were classified as homeless into apartments that had previously been reserved for working people moving on up.

  At last count, nearly four hundred thousand New Yorkers legally occupied 176,000 public housing apartments in more than 325 developments (if the Housing Authority constituted a separate city, it would have a bigger population than New Orleans or Cleveland). In more than half the families living in Housing Authority apartments, neither pa
rent was working, and fewer than half the new tenants placed in public housing were working families. More than one in ten households were collecting welfare payments. Three in ten were behind on their rent. On average, existing tenants had resided in public housing for more than two decades.

  While Eleanor Roosevelt and others placed the onus for public housing’s success on the tenants, May Lumsden acknowledged that “in the last analysis it is management that will make or ruin this early effort in government-owned housing. The New York City Housing Authority,” she wrote, “in its role of landlord, has a difficult course to steer; it must keep rents low, but it must also meet expenses; it must keep First Houses attractive, but it mustn’t be an interfering busybody among the tenants.” With all the Housing Authority’s flaws, the years of neglect, the backlog of vital renovations and rudimentary repairs, the bureaucracy, the crime, the inattention to tenant concerns, and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tacit agreement to place the failed system in federal receivership with virtually nothing to show for it in return, still, more than 250,000 families remain on the waiting list for one of the Authority’s apartments.

  In 1935, when the first tenants occupied First Houses, seven blocks away 97 Orchard Street epitomized the cheapest and worst of the Lower East Side tenements. There were few formal leases then, so it is difficult to calculate a standard rent—it was often flexible depending on variables like how many children a tenant had, or her ability to pay that month—but it can be assumed that the rent for an apartment there with minimal air and light, no central heating, and no private flush toilet was probably about the same as the new occupants of First Houses were paying.