“THE MOST SICKENING AND PESTILENTIAL STENCHES”
In the dozen or so years after 1845, when immigrants poured into Five Points, landlords quickened the pace of new construction, replacing more and more of the two- to three-story wooden tenements with four- to fivestory brick buildings. Five Pointers might have been expected to applaud the change. But while reformers believed that brick tenements were an improvement, many of the buildings turned out to be just as miserable to live in.
Because brick tenements were so big (both taller and deeper than previous tenements), they tended to be very dark inside, especially in the hallways above the first floor. Either to save money or out of fear of starting a fire, landlords almost never provided gas lighting. Little light made its way up from the front door because in order to maximize living space, architects designed these buildings with extremely steep staircases. “No cave or dungeon was ever darker,” complained one charitable worker about the stairway in a lower Mulberry Street tenement in 1867. A newspaper reporter encountered similar conditions climbing the stairs of a Baxter Street tenement in the 1890s, noting that “it was necessary to grope our way to the top by lighting matches on every landing.” An antebellum investigative committee found these same conditions in both brick and wooden tenements, stating that “not only were the stairways crooked and inordinately steep, but they were so dark that faces could not be distinguished.” Treacherously dark hallways were a consistent complaint of Five Points reformers and residents alike.25
The dark, steep stairways became more of an issue as tenements grew taller, for by the 1850s few landlords built front tenements of less than five stories. The thought of carrying young children, groceries, or pails of water up three, four, or even five flights of these steep, dark stairs filled many a housewife with dread. Some older women, especially those with bad backs or arthritic knees, rarely left their apartments for fear of falling, and stories of neighbors injuring themselves in stairway spills were a staple of tenement gossip.26
Curiously, the tallest tenement in nineteenth-century Five Points was apparently the very first New York building built specifically to serve as a tenement. This seven-story building, which still stands at 65 Mott Street, is a living monument to the evils of the tenement system. Historians have generally cited a building erected on the Lower East Side in 1833 by iron manufacturer James P. Allaire as the city’s first designed tenement, basing this assertion on the late-nineteenth-century reminiscences of New Yorker Charles Haswell. But the building at 65 Mott almost certainly predates Allaire’s structure by nearly a decade. According to an 1879 article in the building trades journal Plumber and Sanitary Engineer, 65 Mott Street “has been occupied some fifty-five years.” This would date the building’s construction to 1824. Its seven stories—a height then unprecedented for a dwelling place—dwarfed the surrounding two-story wooden homes and must have made quite a spectacle when it was first built. Even in the 1880s, half a century after its construction, the Times complained that the tenement “stands out like a wart growing on the top of a festering sore. It is the crowning glory of tenement-houses.” Behind it stood a five-story rear tenement, meaning that at least thirty-four and probably thirty-six two-room apartments had been crowded onto this 2,450-square-foot property. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, no other landlord in Five Points had the nerve to squeeze so many families into so small a space. And like the other tall tenements in Five Points, their hallways were steeped in pitch black darkness even on the sunniest days.27
Just as infamous as Five Points’ dark passageways were the layers of dirt that begrimed so many of its tenements. Describing a building on Little Water Street, a state investigative committee found that “the floors were covered with dirt, which had lain so long that, with occasional slops of water and continued treading on, it had the appearance of the greasy refuse of a woolen mill. There were sluggish, yellow drops pending from the low ceilings, and a dank, green slime upon the walls.” The city inspector stated that the typical Five Points tenement contained walls “with the plaster broken off in many places, exposing the lath and beams, and leaving openings for the escape from within of the effluvia of vermin, dead and alive.” Where the walls remained intact, they were “smeared with the blood of unmentionable insects, and dirt of all indescribable colours.”28
Five Points tenements became so dirty in part because their residents invariably tracked in filth from the neighborhood’s foul streets. New York streets were reputed to be the dirtiest in antebellum America. For decades citizens had thrown their garbage into the gutters, hoping that scavenging pigs would eat the mess or that rain would wash it away. Homeowners were supposed to sweep garbage into piles for the city to cart away, but the carts never came. As a result, street traffic mashed this household refuse together with the droppings of horses and other animals to create an inches-thick sheet of putrefying muck, which when it rained or snowed became particularly vile. Only when city fathers feared an outbreak of cholera in 1832 did the city properly clean its streets for the first time. When workers chopped and scraped the sludge off, revealing the paved streets below, an old woman who had lived in New York all her life purportedly asked: “‘Where in the world did all those [paving] stones come from? . . . I never knew that the streets were covered with stones before.’”29
Although the city subsequently created a street-cleaning department, it did little to improve Five Points’ thoroughfares. Because the district was so crowded, the garbage overwhelmed the new system. “The Sixth Ward can claim the preeminence of being the dirtiest Ward of the dirtiest City in the world,” claimed one writer in 1848, citing Baxter and Worth Streets as the worst in the district. When the Tribune compiled a list of New York’s filthiest thoroughfares two years later, it included virtually every block in the Five Points neighborhood. Not surprisingly, Baxter and Mulberry Streets, the most densely populated in the district, were the worst. “The latter street, from Canal to Chatham st., is a continual depository of garbage,” noted the Tribune on a Tuesday in 1865, “and although it was cleaned on Friday, hundreds of loads have accumulated since that time, and the stench arising therefore is intolerable.” According to another investigative report, “in the winter the filth and garbage, etc., accumulate in the streets, to the depth sometimes of two or three feet. The garbage boxes are a perpetual source of nuisance in the streets, filth and offal being thrown all around them, pools of filthy water in many instances remaining in the gutters.” From this “decaying vegetable matter, and filth of every conceivable kind” emanated “the most sickening and pestilential stenches.” These last two reports detailed conditions at the end of the Civil War when Five Points thoroughfares were much cleaner than they had been in the 1830s and ’40s. One can hardly imagine how the streets had looked and smelled in those antebellum decades.30
With so much dirt and grime encrusting their neighborhood streets, Five Points tenement dwellers inevitably dragged much of that mess into their homes on shoes and clothes. Because Five Pointers did not usually own much clothing, they often had to wear their dirty clothes for quite some time. Clothing could not be washed on a whim since it might take days to dry. “Hard wash-days”—typically Mondays—provided some of the most unpleasant memories for tenement housewives such as those in Five Points. Mothers bribed children with candy money on wash day to keep them out of the house so they could devote their full attention and the entire space of the apartment to the arduous task at hand. They first made numerous trips up and down the stairs to haul water up from the yard. Then they heated the water on the stove and set to work scrubbing.
Drying the wash was actually the most dreaded task. There were many options, all involving some risk. The advantage of living on a low floor (with fewer flights of stairs to climb) became a disadvantage on wash day, because when hanging your laundry out to dry, “someone else might put out a red wash or a blue wash above it, and it drips down and makes you do your wash all over again.” Similarly, “the women up over you sh
ake their bedclothes and rugs over your clothes,” complained one lower-level tenement dweller of the dust and dirt that would drop onto her briefly clean clothing.31
Though this was meant to be a humorous image, Five Points streets were often this dirty, especially in the pre–Civil War years. Street sweeping was hard work, but the jobs were much sought after, and were usually given as rewards to those who toiled faithfully for neighborhood political leaders. The “S.C.D.” on this Irishman’s hat stands for Street Cleaning Department. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 2, 1879): 372. Collection of the Library of Congress.
The perils of line drying applied to just half the tenement dwellers, because only those in apartments facing the yard had access to the clotheslines. “Those who live in the back have lines,” testified an envious tenement resident before an investigative committee, “a luxury which can only be truly appreciated by those who must carry every bit of their wash up three or four flights of stairs to the roof, and on particularly cold winter days, it is almost enough to make people determine to wear their clothing longer.” Roof drying avoided some of the problems of line drying, but it carried its own risks. If you hung your clothes on the roof, complained one tenement housewife, “you must watch them or they disappear. Only people who live in the back have pulleys, and even then one sheet and tablecloth fill the line.” For some, roof drying was not an option. One housewife could not bring her clothes to the roof because climbing the stairs “makes my heart beat so.” Children could be detailed to stand guard over the family’s drying clothing, but they often abandoned their posts due to cold and boredom.32
Even if a housewife miraculously managed to cleanse the family wardrobe, the bodies underneath that clothing were bathed so rarely that they must have smelled awful anyway. No one in antebellum America bathed frequently. But tenement dwellers such as those in Five Points did so least of all, not out of any cultural aversion to cleanliness but because they had no access to bathing facilities. Tubs were not a standard tenement feature. They were expensive, and even if one could afford a tub, where would it fit? Those who did own tubs generally stored coal in them, limiting bathing to those days when the coal supply was nearly exhausted. Finally, drawing a bath was a laborious task, as water had to be hauled up from the yard, a bucket at a time, and then heated (again in small quantities) on the stove. This made bathing expensive as well, because coal was dear to a tenement family.
No matter how clean their clothes, bodies, or apartments might have been, the horrid stenches emanating from their backyards—and especially from the outhouses located there—would have made apartment life in Five Points an olfactory nightmare. There were essentially three types of toilet facilities in antebellum tenement yards. The most modern and sophisticated connected the outdoor toilets directly to sewer lines, flushing sewage directly and immediately away from the tenement yard. But very few Five Points tenements could boast such toilets by the Civil War, in part because few streets in the neighborhood were connected to the sewers. In 1857, only one-quarter of the city had sewer lines, and few of these were located in Five Points. Even in 1865, the only streets in Five Points with sewer lines were Centre, Pearl, and Worth, as well as Mott and Mulberry above Bayard. But just because a street had a sewer did not mean that landlords necessarily connected their buildings to it. Legislation enacted in 1867 required new buildings to tap into sewer lines, but did not require the same of existing structures. Few of the old wooden tenements on Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets would have been connected in the Civil War period.
Instead, most buildings had either cesspools or “school sinks.” A cesspool in theory had to be emptied periodically. Judging by the complaints of tenants, such cleanings were rare. A school sink, in contrast, was a kind of cesspool connected to the sewers. Sewage collected below the commodes in a trough, which someone had to empty periodically by opening a sluice gate to the sewer lines. Property agents did not perform this task—which was nearly as unpleasant as emptying a cesspool—as frequently as necessary. In addition, the connection between the trough and the sewer line often became clogged. Raw sewage thus often sat festering in the backyards of the tenements for weeks or months at a time.33
The wooden outhouses above these pits were incredibly dirty, in part because their roofs and walls admitted too many of nature’s elements, and in part because they were overused and undercleaned. The wooden seats were often rotting away. “To look at the abominable water-closets that exist almost every where” in Five Points, lamented one of the few publications willing to broach this delicate subject, “and then imagine that women and children are compelled to resort to them, is almost too much for human endurance.” Tenants usually blamed one another for the mess, and were thus unwilling to clean the stalls. As a result, many resorted to chamber pots, which could be emptied into the outhouse when convenient, or out the window into the yard when it was dark.34
The yards in which these outhouses sat were thus revolting masses of mud, excrement, and garbage. Trash littered the yards both because it was stored there until put on the street, and also because tenants tossed it from their windows. They did so sometimes out of laziness, sometimes because it was too cold or rainy to go outside, and sometimes to avoid “climbing the dark stairs and running the risk of breaking one’s legs,” admitted one early-twentieth-century tenement dweller. “In some cases it is almost a necessity to throw it out, the premium on space is so high in their tiny kitchens . . . and just enough room to turn about.” The combination of decaying and rotting animal and vegetable matter littering the yards attracted all sorts of vermin. In an attempt to cover up this filth, landlords often laid wooden boards over the ground in the yards, but the stench and effluvia still percolated up from beneath them. In one yard, for example, the boards when pressed yielded “even in dry weather, a thick greenish fluid.” Not surprisingly, the Sixth Ward’s sanitary inspector found that only 24 of the ward’s 609 tenements were in “good sanitary condition” in 1865.35
Even if sewage made its way out of the tenement yard and into the sewer system, its odor continued to foul the neighborhood. Sewage was supposed to run through culverts under the street, but they were open to the air through grates at intersections. In addition, the Sixth Ward’s culverts were “often choked up on account of the large amount of filth and garbage thrown into the gutters, and which is carried down the sewers.” A mixture of sewage, trash, and “filthy water” might “stand several days before an outlet is cleared for it . . . in this pestilential locality.” Even when the culverts were not blocked, the sewage did not flow very well, especially in low-lying areas such as Five Points. Early New York sewers were really “one elongated cesspool,” insisted an 1859 report, “throwing out its noxious gases . . . at every opening on the corners of the streets, to fill and surround the dwellings and be inhaled with every breath.” Every antebellum New York neighborhood was dirty by modern standards, but Five Points was the dirtiest. Newcomers never failed to comment upon the revolting smells of the neighborhood and the stench of its worst tenements.36
“THE LITTLE ONES CRIED AND CRIED FROM COLD”
The constant noise of tenement life probably bothered neighborhood residents just as much as the smells. The thin interior walls in both wooden and brick buildings blocked few sounds. The combination of wood floors and little carpeting meant that virtually no movement from above could escape the attention of those below. Children shouting, spouses fighting, and babies wailing all contributed to the cacophony, often making sleep impossible. A newspaper editor listed noise complaints as one of the most frequent causes of fights between tenement families. Street noise plagued those in the front apartments, while in the rear the sound from neighbors in buildings facing them (usually only twenty-five feet or less away) also caused distress. Windows that would not close properly as well as loose or missing panes exacerbated the problem, as did the universal practice of leaving apartment doors open for ventilation.37
Extremes of heat and
cold—not outside but within the tenements—also afflicted Five Pointers. Immigrants from the temperate British Isles, especially those from Ireland, had never experienced freezing winters or sweltering, humid summers in their native lands. In the older buildings, cold posed the most serious problem. The exterior walls of wooden tenements were not insulated, and cold winds whistled relentlessly through their cracks, as well as through broken or improperly hung windows. Residents frequently lacked the fuel to heat these homes adequately. In Ireland, even the poorest peasant could usually find free turf to warm his cabin and cook his food. In New York, the Irish had to buy fuel (usually coal by the 1840s) to heat their stoves, and coal was expensive. As a result, tenement children were usually expected to scavenge for coal. The Irish-American journalist Owen Kildare remembered that as a destitute child in the Fourth Ward (just east of Five Points), his stepparents ordered him to find or steal ten pieces of coal each day. When scavenging failed to produce an adequate supply, desperately poor Five Pointers resorted to burning their doors, furniture, and bedding, especially on bitterly cold days and nights.38
Yet few froze to death. Neighbors usually intervened before suffering could turn fatal. “The kindness of these poor people to each other,” commented the journal of a Five Points charitable group, “is frequently astonishing, but must be witnessed to be appreciated.” Neighbors might bring cases of hardship to the attention of the Five Points Mission or the Five Points House of Industry after their establishment in the early 1850s. A House of Industry publication described an incident in which its missionaries found on Worth Street “a woman and five children in a room without a fire, and for the last two days they had had no food save a morsel given them by a neighbor almost as poor as themselves. . . . What little furniture they possessed had been burned for fuel, and when this last resource was gone, the little ones cried and cried from cold.” Someone did freeze to death on Baxter Street in the winter of 1860–61, but such cases were rare. As a result, the Tribune could boast in 1864 that the woman who had “perished with cold and was eaten of rats on Mulberry-street is forgotten long ago.” Nonetheless, the cold kept many a Five Pointer awake at night, made others sick, and was a source of constant worry for those of limited means.39
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