An editor at Scribner’s publishing house who had heard one of Riis’s church lectures soon approached him about converting it into an illustrated article. “How the Other Half Lives” appeared in the December 1889 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, illustrated mostly with drawings based on Riis’s photos, but also with nine “halftones,” a relatively new process for reproducing photographs in the print media. Some of the halftones look more like drawings than photographs. But others, including an image of homeless children sleeping on the streets and another of children praying at the Five Points House of Industry, are quite vivid and moving.13
Both “Flashes From the Slums” and “How the Other Half Lives” are landmarks in the history of photojournalism. Never before had photographs played such a central role in the telling of a news story. In fact, the photos were the story. Ever since, journalists have used photos not merely to add color or variety to news reporting, but to document their allegations.
Riis considered these articles an integral part of his “battle with the slum.” So he was surprised when, despite their publication, city officials did nothing to clean up Mulberry Bend. Many New Yorkers, including Riis, had assumed that the Bend would be the first site to benefit from the Small Parks Act. Yet in 1890, three years after that act became law, Mulberry Bend stood untouched. “Whether it was that it had been bad so long that people thought it could not be otherwise,” Riis later wrote, “or because the Five Points [intersection] had taken all the reform the Sixth Ward had coming to it, or because, by a sort of tacit consent, the whole matter was left to me as the recognized Mulberry Bend crank—whichever it was, this last was the practical turn it took. I was left to fight it out by myself.”14
Riis soon got the break he had been waiting for. A publisher who read the Scribner’s article asked him to expand it into a book. He wrote the entire manuscript late at night after his family had gone to bed, completing it in just a few months. “I had had it in me so long that it burst out at last with a rush,” he later explained. In November 1890, How the Other Half Lives appeared.15
In twenty-five short chapters, Riis surveyed the variety of tenement evils that had frustrated reformers for decades. Five Points was featured prominently, especially in chapters on the Bend, stale-beer dives, basement lodging houses, and Chinatown. His thesis, reiterated for years in his police reporting, was that the tenements themselves were the source of the slum problem, incubating disease and crime and perpetuating poverty. He blamed the situation in part on the landlords, who charged exorbitant rents, did little to maintain their buildings, and refused to build better ones. He also blamed the city’s political bosses, who did not want to anger powerful property owners by insisting on effective enforcement of the existing laws. But Riis also charged that the immigrants were themselves an obstacle to reform, taking in too many boarders, allowing filth to accumulate in tenement yards, and refusing to demand better housing. “This is true particularly of the poorest” immigrants, he argued. “They are shiftless, destructive and stupid; in a word, they are what the tenements have made them. It is a dreary old truth that those who would fight for the poor must fight the poor to do it.”16
Riis did not demand new laws, insisting that “the law has done what it could.” All he asked was enforcement of the existing statutes. True, property owners could charge lower rents, place agents on the premises full time to make repairs and clean common spaces, and replace their dilapidated buildings with well-ventilated, light-filled “model tenements.” But overall, Riis argued, “the landlord has done his share.”17
The main obstacle to tenement reform, Riis believed, was an apathetic public. “The law needs a much stronger and readier backing of a thoroughly enlightened public sentiment to make it as effective as it might be made,” he declared. Noting that a landlord would always try to avoid spending money to improve his property, Riis argued that “nothing short of the strongest pressure will avail to convince him that these individual rights are to be surrendered for the clear benefit of the whole.” The tenements threatened not merely impoverished immigrants, Riis concluded, but every American through the crime, disease, and political unrest that the newcomers might spread if conditions were not immediately improved.18
How the Other Half Lives quickly became a sensation. The poet James Russell Lowell found it hard to sleep after reading its chilling accounts of decrepit tenements and their destitute inhabitants. Reviewers called it “thrilling,” “harrowing,” “startling,” “a book of immense, shuddering interest,” and “a saddening, terrifying book.” Many commentators noted the importance of Riis’s photos. “His book is literally a photograph,” wrote one, while another praised Riis for looking at the tenements “with the unerring eye of the ‘Kodak.’ His own camera, not the imagination of a draughtsman, has furnished the illustrations.”19
The book was not merely an exposé but also a call to arms. No human being, wrote the Chicago Tribune, could “read it without an instant and unappeasable desire to do something.” Soon after its publication, a thirty-two-year-old civil service commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt stopped by Riis’s office at police headquarters hoping to meet the author. Finding Riis away from his desk, Roosevelt left his card and scribbled a note on the back saying that he had read Riis’s book and “come to help.” As Luc Sante has noted,
very few works of social criticism have ever had an effect as immediate, concrete, and measurable as How the Other Half Lives. The worst of the rookeries he describes were torn down. New laws were passed and old ones enforced to ensure minimal standards of hygiene and comfort in multiple-family dwellings. . . . [Homeless shelters] were established; public bathhouses were built. New schools whose design incorporated playgrounds went up one by one. The settlement-house movement was born and flourished. At length, and not without grave difficulties, child-labor laws were enacted, eventually on a national level.
Virtually every tenement problem Riis identified in his book was ameliorated to some extent because of the demands for change inspired by How the Other Half Lives.20
The notoriety Riis brought to Mulberry Bend made its demise inevitable. With the publication of How the Other Half Lives, the pressure to tear it down became too strong to resist. New Yorkers wrote letters to newspapers asking why the plan to build a park there was not progressing. Mulberry Bend property owners did not seriously fight to save their buildings, only for the highest possible compensation.21
After squabbling with property owners for two years over assessments and compensation, the city finally set the purchase price at $1.5 million and acquired the lots in the summer of 1894. But the Small Parks Act limited the expenditure to $1 million and the process ground to a halt once more as officials debated how they could legally exceed that sum. Once they cleared that hurdle (by issuing bonds to cover the purchase until the state could appropriate additional funds), demolition began, and was completed in early July 1895.22
Even then, the city did not begin work on the park. The huge empty lot became a favorite place for the city’s cartmen to leave their hand trucks when not in use. At the end of 1895, several neighborhood children were crushed when they rode one of these carts into one of the cellar holes left amidst the rubble. Fed up with the endless string of delays, Riis filed a complaint against the city for maintaining a nuisance. City workers finally began constructing the park in the summer of 1896. Grand opening festivities took place on June 15, 1897.23
Ironically, Riis was not invited. He attended anyway, and got a lump in his throat as it sunk in that his many years of effort had finally borne fruit. Even a policeman chasing him off the grass did not spoil the moment. “The whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle with this dark spot,” he later wrote. If reformers could succeed in having “the wickedest of American slums” torn down and replaced by a park, Riis believed, then there was no doubt that the “battle with the slum” could be won.24
According to Riis, quality of life in the neighborhood improved i
mmediately. Five years later, the murder rate in the Sixth Ward had plummeted, and it had not been exported to other parts of the city, where the rate remained flat. “The whole neighborhood has taken a change, and decidedly for the better,” a policeman told Riis. The 2,643 residents of the Bend who were displaced when their tenements were razed also improved their lives, said Riis in The Battle with the Slum, immediately finding housing in cleaner and safer neighborhoods.* Riis argued that the clearing of Mulberry Bend was such an unmitigated success that it paved the way for other radical improvements in city life. “Every other reform in New York,” Riis insisted, could be traced to the successful reformation of Mulberry Bend.25
A year after the tenements had been torn down, the Times reported that slumming parties no longer found the neighborhood particularly exciting. Five Points “is now a quiet, peaceable little breathing spot,” stated a survey of the metropolis in 1899. “The squalor and misery and wretchedness of former times had vanished with the old-time buildings,” agreed another writer. Visitors to the Bend saw no evidence of the “plague-spot of old.” Even those intimately familiar with the neighborhood concurred with this assessment. “The Five Points no longer lies deep in the shadow of sin as it once did,” announced the Children’s Aid Society in 1907. Its annual report spoke of “the historical Five Points” as if the neighborhood itself was a thing of the past.26
“THE NEW YORK APPROACH”
Five Points was, for all intents and purposes, destroyed with the Bend. All the most notorious tenement complexes in the neighborhood—the Old Brewery, Cow Bay, Bottle Alley, and Bandits’ Roost—were now mere memories, replaced by charitable institutions and open space. The stale-beer dives were mostly gone too, as were nearly all of the prostitutes. Other districts were by that point more crowded than Five Points, more crime-ridden, more dilapidated. The disease rate in the neighborhood dropped. By 1900, New Yorkers no longer associated Five Points with any of the vices or maladies that had once made it famous the world over.27
Subsequent urban renewal projects reshaped the Sixth Ward still further. Two years after the Bend was razed, the city tore down many tenements on Elm Street (two blocks west of the Bend) in order to widen it for use as a major north/south thoroughfare, rechristened Lafayette Street. In the first years of the twentieth century, the southern end of the ward was completely demolished to make room for the city’s new municipal building. By about 1920, most of the tenements and factories between Baxter and Centre Streets had been knocked down to make room for courthouses and state offices. Nearly every Five Points tenement that stood east of Mulberry Street one hundred twenty years ago still stands there today, but not a single building west of Mulberry and south of Bayard remains.28
The destruction of Mulberry Bend was not the first instance of “urban renewal” in American history. Bostonians had razed an entire Irish neighborhood, squalid Fort Hill, as part of a redevelopment plan implemented in the late 1860s. But in New York, the clearing of Mulberry Bend began a whirlwind of tenement destruction that, by World War II, had leveled huge swaths of the Lower East Side and many of the city’s other notorious tenement complexes, and replaced them with huge public housing projects that in some cases became almost as frightful as the rookeries. New Yorkers became so enamored of tearing down old tenement districts that one historian has referred to it as “the New York approach.”29
The razing of the worst tenements through such urban renewal programs and the enactment of stricter regulatory laws are generally credited with bringing an end to the privations of the tenement system. From 1867 to 1901, New York enacted a series of increasingly stringent tenement laws that mandated better ventilation and sanitation, improved maintenance, and indoor plumbing. But to what extent did regulation really contribute to the demise of the tenement menace? Despite the stipulations that each room have a window and that stairwells have better lighting, stench continued to overpower tenement residents, and the promised improvements in ventilation never materialized. Lewis Hines’s photographs from the years after the enactment of the 1901 legislation reveal crowding just as awful as Jacob Riis had found in the late 1880s and nearly as bad as that which antebellum investigators had uncovered in Cow Bay and the Old Brewery.
Heat also continued to afflict tenement dwellers as well. Filthy hallway toilets replaced filthy outhouses. Tragic fires continued to kill tenement dwellers, despite laws that required the use of “fireproof” materials. Disease also ravaged immigrant slums well into the twentieth century. Scientific advances pinpointing the causes of illness, rather than regulations outlawing tenement crowding and mandating the installation of indoor plumbing, finally brought the tenement death rate under control. Legislation could not eradicate the crime, prostitution, or overcrowding that continued to plague tenement neighborhoods in the first decades of the twentieth century.30
Cheap mass transit did not provide relief, either. Elevated trains began operating after the Civil War, and subways were introduced in the early twentieth century. Still, the tenements of Five Points, the Lower East Side, and other immigrant enclaves in Manhattan remained virtually as crowded as ever.
Nor was landlord greed the source of the tenement problem, as two Civil War–era cases clearly demonstrate. In 1850, a “benevolent Quaker” gentleman named Silas Wood built a “model” tenement in the Fourth Ward just east of the Five Points. Wood hoped to prove that a landlord could reap a reasonable profit while providing a wholesome environment for his tenants. He charged only enough rent to bring in a modest return on his investment and hired as his agent a compassionate neighborhood resident he could count on to treat the tenants fairly. Despite these efforts, the overcrowded building soon became far worse than any other in the neighborhood. In fact, with the razing of the Old Brewery, Wood’s tenement, known as Gotham Court, became the single most infamous tenement in postbellum New York.31
The case of Gotham Court was not an isolated one. In 1855, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor constructed its own model tenement half a block north of Five Points, running from Elizabeth to Mott Street just north of Canal. The AICP’s structure, known as the “Big Flat,” boasted indoor plumbing, a separate, assigned toilet for every family, and reasonable rents. The Times declared a year after its opening that it was the “best constructed tenant-house in the City of New-York.” Yet within a decade of its construction, the Big Flat had become a den of thieves and a concentration of misery nearly as notorious as Gotham Court.32
What then finally brought an end to the miserable tenement conditions that afflicted New York and other large cities for so much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The only answer left seems to be the end of mass immigration itself. Only in the years after Congress severely restricted immigration did the conditions associated with tenement life—filth, overcrowding, and disease—truly begin to subside. The end of mass immigration dried up the supply of new arrivals who, especially when they lodged in someone else’s apartment, exacerbated tenement crowding and overtaxed building facilities. The end of unrestricted immigration also enabled those immigrants already in the United States to find steady, higher-paying work, as they had fewer new arrivals to compete with. After immigration restriction, those tenement dwellers who had adapted to the necessities of urban life were not immediately replaced by newcomers unschooled in these lessons of hygiene and fire safety.
I do not mean to imply that individual immigrants or even any ethnic, racial, or national group should be blamed for the miseries of nineteenth-century tenement life. They had no way of knowing that methods of sanitation that had sufficed in rural Europe or Asia might spread cholera or typhus in an urban setting. Nor could they be blamed for taking in lodgers or sharing apartments with friends and relatives in order to feed hungry family members back home or finance their emigration. The huge number of immigrants pouring into New York, their desperation both to find cheap housing and to save money, and their difficulty adapting to the sanitary requirements o
f an urban setting all contributed to the inevitability of the tenement conditions found in Five Points. Property owners and sub-landlords may have exacerbated these problems through their greed and prejudice, their failure to maintain buildings, and their toleration of nuisances that brought them greater profits. But life in the tenements for most newly arrived, destitute, and unskilled immigrants would have been miserable no matter what landlords, reformers, and government officials imbued with nineteenth-century notions of laissez-faire might have attempted.
“DOWN THERE IN CHINATOWN”
Mulberry Street remained a center of Italian immigrant life for many years, but most Italians moved north above Canal Street and spread out across Mott and Elizabeth Streets as well. The portion of Little Italy south of Canal became the fringe of the community rather than its core.33
Meanwhile, Chinatown was transformed at the turn of the century into an entertainment zone. The two restaurants that heralded this change were the Port Arthur at 7–9 Mott Street and the Chinese Delmonico’s on Pell, both of which opened in 1897. These cavernous new halls were luxuriously appointed, decorated with lanterns and dragons, and trimmed with teakwood, mother-of-pearl, and mosaic floors. Mayor William L. Strong himself attended the grand opening of the Chinese Delmonico’s, an indication that Chinatown was no longer solely associated with opium dens and gambling parlors.
In the first years of the twentieth century, Chinatown also became renowned for its saloons and nightclubs. The teenaged Harry and Al Jolson helped launch their vaudeville careers there by “busking,” traveling from saloon to saloon singing and dancing in return for the nickels and dimes tossed by the patrons. Harry later became a singing waiter at Callahan’s dance hall at the corner of Chatham Square and Doyers Street. The teenaged Irving Berlin appeared there as well. He soon became a singing waiter at the Pelham Club, a saloon and nightclub at 12 Pell Street popularly known as “Nigger Mike Saulter’s” after its swarthy Jewish proprietor. Another aspiring performer, Jimmy Durante, played ragtime piano at the nearby Chatham Club. Patrons danced far into the night at these dives. “At three o’clock in the morning down there in Chinatown, it was like Broadway and Forty-second Street,” Durante recalled.34
Five Points Page 51
