where people worked hard and endured hardships in
order to improve their own and their children’s lot.
Observing the immigrants’ attachment to “for-
eign” values and institutions, numbers of “natives”
accused the newcomers of resisting Americanization
and blamed them for urban problems. The immi-
grants were involved in these problems, but the rapid-
ity of urban expansion explains the troubles associated
with city life far more fully than the high percentage
of foreigners.
Teeming Tenements
The cities were suffering from growing pains. Sewer
and water facilities frequently could not keep pace with
skyrocketing needs. By the 1890s the tremendous
growth of Chicago had put such a strain on its sanita-
tion system that the Chicago River had become virtu-
ally an open sewer, and the city’s drinking water
contained such a high concentration of germ-killing
chemicals that it tasted like creosote. In the 1880s all
the sewers of Baltimore emptied into the sluggish Back
Basin, and according to the journalist H. L. Mencken,
every summer the city smelled “like a billion polecats.”
Fire protection became less and less adequate, garbage
piled up in the streets faster than it could be carted
away, and the streets themselves crumbled beneath the
pounding of heavy traffic. Urban growth proceeded
with such speed that new streets were laid out more
rapidly than they could be paved. Chicago had more
than 1,400 miles of dirt streets in 1890.
People poured into the great cities faster than
housing could be built to accommodate them. The
influx into areas already densely packed in the 1840s
became unbearable as rising property values and the
absence of zoning laws conspired to make builders
use every possible foot of space, squeezing out light
and air ruthlessly in order to wedge in a few addi-
tional family units.
Substandard living quarters aggravated other
evils such as disease and the disintegration of family
life, with its attendant mental anguish, crime, and
juvenile delinquency. The bloody New York City
riots of 1863, though sparked by dislike of the Civil
War draft and of blacks, reflected the bitterness and
frustration of thousands jammed together amid filth
and threatened by disease. A citizens’ committee
seeking to discover the causes of the riots expressed
its amazement after visiting the slums “that so much
misery, disease, and wretchedness can be huddled
together and hidden... unvisited and unthought of,
so near our own abodes.”
New York City created a Metropolitan Health
Board in 1866, and a state tenement house law the fol-
lowing year made a feeble beginning at regulating city
housing. Another law in 1879 placed a limit on the
percentage of lot space that could be covered by new
construction and established minimal standards of
plumbing and ventilation. The magazine Plumber and
Sanitary Engineersponsored a contest to pick the best
design for a tenementthat met these specifications. The
winner of the competition was James E. Ware, whose
plan for a “dumbbell” apartment house managed to
crowd from twenty-four to thirty-two four-room apart-
ments on a plot of ground only 25 by 100 feet.
Despite these efforts in 1890 more than 1.4 mil-
lion persons were living on Manhattan Island, and in
some sections the population density exceeded 900 per-
sons per acre. Jacob Riis, a reporter, captured the hor-
ror of the crowded warrens in his classic study of life in
the slums,How the Other Half Lives(1890):
Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you
might stumble.... Here where the hall turns and
dives into utter darkness is... a flight of stairs. You
can feel your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes!
What would you have? All the fresh air that enters
these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever
slamming.... The sinks are in the hallway, that all
the tenants may have access—and all be poisoned
alike by their summer stenches.... Here is a door.
Listen! That short, hacking cough, that tiny, help-
less wail—what do they mean?... The child is
dying of measles. With half a chance it might have
lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.Teeming Tenements 497Impoverished immigrant families, like the one in this 1889 Jacob Riis
photograph, often lived in tiny windowless rooms in crowded
tenement districts. Riis devised a “flash bulb” for indoor
photographs in poorly illuminated rooms like this one.
Source: Jacob A. Riis, In Poverty Gap: An English Coal-Heaver's Home. Courtesy of
Museum of the City of New York.