Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

by William Dean Howells

  III

  The tenement-house, such as it is, is the original of theapartment-house, which perpetuates some of its most characteristicfeatures on a scale and in material undreamed of in the simple philosophyof the inventor of the tenement-house. The worst of these features isthe want of light and air, but as much more space and as many more roomsare conceded as the tenant will pay for. The apartment-house, however,soars to heights that the tenement-house never half reached, and issometimes ten stories high. It is built fireproof, very often, and isgenerally equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makesone level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which havedeparted less from the tenement-house original, have no elevators, butthe street door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by thetenant's latch-key or by the janitor having charge of the whole building.In the finer houses there is a page whose sole duty it is to open andshut this door, and who is usually brass-buttoned to one blinding effectof livery with the elevator-boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found,the elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where heis not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, foreach apartment, and you ring up the occupant and talk to him as manystories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulgetheir pride will not live in this sort of apartment-house, and therents in them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort arevulgarly fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaicpavement, marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinetwood-work. But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in thethings that are common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeepingare of all degrees of perfection, and, except for the want of light andair, life in them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heatedthroughout with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimeslighted with both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will,though of course at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair ofarchitecture, for no style has yet been invented which enables the artistto characterize them with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulksthey deform the whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out ofscale, and making it impossible for future edifices to assimilatethemselves to the intruder.

  There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is nostreet or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to befound on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but othersfollow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and westernavenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded.In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannotsee that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed inthem. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of anuproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and Ibelieve the physicians really attribute something of the growingprevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves fromthe rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarringof the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening inone of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks lastspring (you can get them out of season for any length of time), and asthe weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we hadthe full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had becomeaccustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give youany notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat asif I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst everysentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speechwhich we use so much at home I never should have known what my friend wassaying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and madethe mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is theplutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it,bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.

  Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as suchthings go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they areinhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot seasonwhen the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people whomust dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure toget out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I couldnot endure for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in sicknessit must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with a dyingchild in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her husbandto catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a train of five or sixcars goes roaring by the open window! What horror! What profanation!