The Unexpected Legacy of the Tenement

When cholera invaded Manhattan in June of 1832, it feasted on the most impoverished nooks and crannies of the city. At the same time, the well-to-do escaped nearly unscathed. Many within high society showed little mercy for those who sat in harm’s way. John Pintard, a co-founder of the New York Historical Society and a one-time Secretary of Commerce for New York City made his feelings clear in letters to his daughter, “At present [cholera] is almost exclusively confined to the lower classes of intemperate dissolute and filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations.” He continued, “Those sickened must be cured or die off, & being cheifly of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] despatch the sooner the malady will cease.”¹

In particular, cholera deaths in 1832 fell most heavily on the notorious Five Points slum. Today, the United States District Courthouse, near the intersection of Baxter and Worth Streets, sits at the center of the former Five Points neighborhood.² But in the nineteenth century, this neighborhood was filled with dilapidated tenement housing. Many homes consisted of a single small room without windows and they often contained an entire family or sometimes up to a dozen workmen. For the most part, these dwellings lacked sanitation other than outhouses or a pot in the corner of the room.

That cholera targeted Five Points was ironic. Just a few decades earlier, this area was home to the most bucolic setting in all of Manhattan. The forty-eight-acre Collect Pond provided a source of fresh water for the city and wealthy Manhattanites would picnic along its banks. Next to the Collect Pond sat Bayard Mount, which rose 110 feet into the air and offered views that spanned the width of Manhattan. But history quickly changed the pond. Breweries, tanneries, and other forms of industry arrived to take advantage of the water source. Soon the pond became a polluted mess and a horrid stench filled the air. A canal was dug to drain it. Then Bayard Hill was leveled; its rock and soil plowed into the former pond.³

Developers moved in to take advantage of the new land. Atop the former pond, they built a high-end residential area and named it Paradise Square. It quickly became anything but paradise. The underground spring that fed the former pond continued to pass water through the polluted soil and into the canal. The city covered the canal to minimize its stench, thereby creating Canal Street which still exists today. The smell, however, was the least of the problems.

The soil of Paradise Square was continually muddy, and the pristine homes began to sink. The streets became bog pits. The wealthy moved out. Seeing their investment collapse, the developers made the best of it. They subdivided the homes and former industrial buildings into tiny apartments. Many lacked exterior light. Almost none had proper sanitation. In these wet and damp conditions, it was no wonder cholera spread so wildly. It wasn’t the fault of the people who lived there as Pintard had claimed; instead, it was their housing situation that allowed this horrendous waterborne disease to spread so easily. The 1832 cholera outbreak wouldn’t be the last time the city tenements faced an epidemic.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, New York became a destination for immigrants. In 1800, Manhattan contained only 60,000 people. By mid-century, it grew to over 500,000. By 1900, 1.8 million people lived in Manhattan. Developers responded with an explosion of cheap housing designed specifically for immigrants. Often these buildings contained four to five floors with a shop at street level. Gotham Court was one such early tenement. It was a frequent setting of the writing of journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis. Through his writing and photography, Riis brought notice to the plight of tenement dwellers and the dangerous conditions within tenement houses. Gotham Court sat at 38 Cherry Street, just up the street from George Washington’s eighteenth-century presidential mansion. Built in 1851, each Gotham Court apartment contained just two rooms and 264 square feet of living space.⁴

Similar to the 1830s, tenement dwellers were continually blamed for disease throughout the city. Reformers called for additional safe housing and New York responded with a series of tenement acts. The first main act, passed in 1867, required a window in every room and a fire escape⁵. Developers would often satisfy the requirement by simply placing a window between two interior rooms, leading reformers to tighten the restrictions even further.

The next major iteration occurred in 1879 when a new law required that the windows open to a source of fresh air and light and also required interior privies in each building.⁶ This iteration brought forth the iconic “dumbbell” style tenement, so named because developers met the requirement with a narrow airshaft between buildings that created the shape of a dumbbell when seen from above.

Finally, to create even more ventilation and sanitation, the 1901 Tenement Act required windows to open onto a large courtyard, a street, or a backyard, and each apartment required a toilet.⁷ This final iteration created buildings referred to as new law as opposed to old law tenements.

Despite these reforms, the tenements, and particularly the Lower East Side tenements, couldn’t shake their reputation as bastions of infectious disease. As Jacob Riis wrote in the introduction to How the Other Half Lives in 1890, “… in the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to the rich and poor alike.”⁸ Even today many still hold this view of life in nineteenth-century Lower East Side tenements. New research that I have conducted with fellow economist Jason Barr suggests this view is incorrect.⁹

Infectious disease mortality rates ran high across Manhattan. On average about 1.7% of the population died from infectious disease every year in late nineteenth-century Manhattan. Of course, rates varied across the city. Due to the port and poor sanitation, neighborhoods on the southern tip of Manhattan had the most disease. Old tenement areas like the sixth ward, which included Five Points, also contained elevated risk. These areas carried a quarter to a half percent extra risk of death from infectious disease.¹⁰ Contrary to Riis’ claim of danger, the Lower East Side neighborhoods were less risky than the city average by a similar magnitude.

What curbed the spread of disease in the Lower East Side neighborhoods? Obviously, it wasn’t population density. Packing more people into neighborhoods allows infectious disease to spread more easily and, in the late nineteenth century, the Lower East Side was the densest area in the world. Environmental factors like better drainage, differences in poverty and wealth, and the presence of more recent immigrants didn’t significantly influence disease deaths either. Instead, it turns out that neighborhoods containing the largest volume of new buildings were the safest from infectious disease.

Manhattan experienced a building boom as it recovered from a nationwide depression that began in 1873. At this time tenements were constructed in a fairly uniform pattern across all of lower Manhattan up to Central Park. In the 1880s, spurred by faster transportation from the expansion of elevated railways, along with the newly forming Midtown business district, tenements began moving northward.¹¹ Simultaneously, tenement construction slowed in lower Manhattan, excepting Lower East Side neighborhoods. Relative to the 1880 population, the safest Lower East Side neighborhoods built 257 square-feet of new tenements per person compared to only 93 square-feet in the most dangerous neighborhoods.¹² The improved ventilation and sanitation of these new buildings limited the spread of disease and death on the Lower East Side.

The riskier neighborhoods also contained more rear tenements. Rear tenements were typically ramshackle dwellings built onto the back of more traditional tenements. These were the worst form of housing in the city and an indicator of older housing stock. As of the 1900 census, almost one-quarter of the tenements in the neighborhood surrounding Five-Points consisted of rear tenements. In contrast, the Lower East Side neighborhoods contained less than ten percent of their housing in these dangerous, ramshackle dwellings.¹³

Within this story is an irony of great proportion. Immigrants were continuously blamed for infectious disease outbreaks in nineteenth-century New York. But the tenements that were built to house these immigrants helped curb the spread of disease, making the city less dangerous. Moreover, this process continued into the twentieth century; older housing was routinely demolished to make room for new housing, as a 1929 report to Franklin D. Roosevelt (then Governor of the State of New York) makes clear.¹⁴ The report reads:

Manhattan’s huge influx of new immigrants created enormous demand for new housing. Without this increase in demand, Manhattan likely would have continued to house a sizable percentage of its population in an older disease-prone housing stock. In this sense, immigration made New York City a safer city for everyone, new and old, rich and poor, alike.