We made it out alive!
Here’s to a mirthful 2021!
Today’s Miserable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Here’s another glimpse of 19th century tenement life to prove that the Good Old Days Were Horrible! – DeSpair
Most tenement buildings in 19th century New York were little more than two-room flats with a kitchen and a single bedroom. Few people could really have been said to live “in” their tenement. Crowded, noisy, and filled with the stench of garbage, cooking, and stopped-up drains, most residents sought refuge on their fire escapes, front steps, or the roof – the “tar beach.” Tenements also housed various kinds of industry, with people working in their rooms sewing clothes, taking in washing, or rolling cigars, adding to the noise, crowding, smell, and generally unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Wash lines hung between the buildings, with anything white soon turned gray by the ever-present soot, ash, and dust in the air. These lines also carried messages and small bundles between buildings. With the constant noise and putrid smell of the tenements, many residents simply kept their windows closed, some even going so far as to nail them shut, depriving them of any hope of a whiff of “fresh” air.
The East River was an important source of relief and diversion to children on hot summer days. Every street on the Lower East Side ended at a pier all the way up to the East Forties. Yet as one of the busiest waterways in the United States, drowning was common, as was waterborne disease. Pathogenic microorganisms found easy prey among the poorly nourished tenement children. During summer heat waves the resultant vomiting and diarrhea could prove fatal; “summer complaint” was often listed as cause of death among children.
The river was a nuisance for most New Yorkers. It refused to stay within its banks and frequently seeped into the basements of the poorest nearby tenements. Residents told stories of floating furniture and invading armies of rats at high tide. Even those lucky enough to live on higher floors – although their risk from fires was greater – were still forced to live with the constant smell of decaying fish.
With the tenements nearly uninhabitable, especially during a heat wave, when the temperature inside their apartments rose to 120 degrees, the entire population of the tenement districts crowded into the streets outside. With tens of thousands of horses plying the streets, manure and urine filled the gutters. The few garbage cans overflowed. For those not from the tenement district, the foul stench could be overpowering. New York streets during the summers were filled with hundreds of thousands of people, some peddling their wares, some selling fruit, some selling old scraps of clothes (the “rag pickers”), some gossiping and some just hoping to catch the faintest breeze in the brick and asphalt valleys of the Lower East Side. So many people filled the streets in front of the tenements that it was hard to imagine that all of them could fit back inside at night.
Crowded Lower East Side streets.
In 1890 Jacob Riis had described life in the tenements during New York summers:
With the first hot night in June police dispatches, that record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and window-sills while asleep, announce that the time of greatest suffering among the poor is at hand. It is in hot weather, when life indoors is well-nigh unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the small rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all restraint. Then a strange and picturesque life moves upon the flat roofs. In the day and early evening mothers air their babies there, the boys fly their kites from the house-tops, undismayed by police regulations, and the young men and girls court and pass the growler. In the stifling July nights, when the big barracks are like fiery furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men and women lie in restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep. Then every truck in the street, every crowded fire-escape, becomes a bedroom, infinitely preferable to any the house affords.
Riis took note of the horrible toll the heat took on the youngest residents of the slums. “Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones.” While black streamers marked the deaths of adults, white ribbons marked the deaths of children. “When the white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odds.”
Jacob Riis photo of a toddler playing in a tenement.
Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town
Stay tuned for the debut album from my new band, “Summer Complaint”.
Morbid Trinket Du Jour!
If your New Year’s Resolution is to ease your feverish brain with some tried-and-true stress-reduction techniques, then why not do a little coloring? (Thanks to C. M. Adams for the suggestion.)
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