<\/p>\n\n\n\n The conditions on the Lower East Side became unbearable during the summer. To avoid the stifling tenement air, the inhabitants stayed outdoors on doorsteps and roofs, even sleeping there at night, hoping to catch the faintest breeze. In summers, families would keep ice stocked not only to prevent food from spoiling but also to bring down overheated body temperatures. The economic crisis of 1896 had made matters worse, as laboring families were so impoverished they could not afford to purchase ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Work in the home compounded the squalor. Tenement rooms doubled as places of work for cigar makers and other pieceworkers, including children. When in the 1880s a bill had come before the New York State Assembly forbidding the manufacture of cigars in tenements, labor leader Samuel Gompers had taken a young assemblyman named Theodore Roosevelt on a tour of the Lower East Side. Roosevelt had not believed the horror stories about the tenements, and Gompers meant to educate the wealthy brownstone Republican. Accompanied by Gompers, Roosevelt came into contact with the city’s poor for the first time, and years later he remembered:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were one, two, or three room apartments, and the work went on day and night in the eating, living, and sleeping rooms – sometimes in one room. I have always remembered one room in which two families were living. On my inquiry as to who the third adult male was I was told that he was a boarder with one of the families. There were several children, three men, and two women in this room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food. The men, women, and children in this room worked by day and far on into the evening, and they slept and ate there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Bohemian Cigarmakers at work in their Tenement<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Tenement dwellers daily faced a precarious economic situation. New York’s Lower East Side was dominated by the expanding needle trade, one of the fastest-growing sectors of New York manufacturing. The vast majority of the contractors had their shops below Fourteenth Street, within easy walking distance of the tenements. In 1890, before the slump, 10,000 garment firms had employed around 236,000 workers. In early 1896 the tailors of New York went on strike for more pay against the wealthier contractors who filled orders for the large clothing companies. In good times a tailor might have made $12 or $15 a week, but during the depression he was often lucky to receive only half a week’s work. Now 20,000 tailors, all members of the Brotherhood of Tailors union, were out of work. This meant that about 100,000 residents of the tenements clustered around the intersection of Hester and Essex Streets were without means of support. A reporter walking along Hester Street at night found “at least half of the population of that street seeking sleep on the fire escapes, the stairways or the doorsteps. In most cases, fighting for air, they had carried their blankets and mattresses from their dens, but often I found men and women scantily clothed sleeping, or trying in vain to sleep, upon bare wood or iron, glad of the fresh air – fresh only by comparison with the evil atmosphere of their living rooms.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The strike had left the tailors in a desperate situation. Local grocers and merchants stopped extending credit to the strikers. Thousands were forced to sustain themselves with “bad fruit, questionable meat, and stale bread,” one New York paper noted. Bad air and bad food combined to make many sick, though they were unable to afford a doctor. Esther Greenhaum lived in a tenement on Essex Street and had fallen very ill. Her husband, a striking tailor, failed to return home, apparently ashamed he could not provide for his wife. [How thoughtful of him. – DeSpair<\/em>] Not wanting to ask her neighbors for help, Esther suffered in her room quietly until she cried out in pain. Hearing this, a neighbor summoned a doctor, who asked if Esther could pay his fee. “Yes,” the neighbor woman lied, “she will pay,” knowing that this was the only way to lure the doctor to the tenement. When Esther could not pay, the doctor became enraged. The neighbor cut him off, saying, “God will pay. No one else can.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you ever find yourself bored in New York City, do not neglect to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum<\/a>, which brilliantly documents the hard lives of immigrants in the tenement blocks. Highly recommended!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lissa <\/strong>writes to let me know of a lovely Morbid Trinket:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “If anyone is attending school, has morbid offspring, or would just like a really cool journal, check this out.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/e70185a3-7e1f-43cd-8608-a98abdb1b971-300x230.jpg\")
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“‘Let’s move to America,’ he said. ‘Land of Opportunity,’ he said.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Morbid Trinket Du Jour!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/e90a273c-6d29-41f3-b86d-94029bc4480a-227x300.jpg\")
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