Every nation has symbols —specific objects that, values or traditions which make that country unique. The United States has many such symbols: the bald eagle, the Liberty Bell, Uncle Sam, and the American flag, but the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor stands out above all as a symbol of freedom and opportunity. The statue was the symbol off in the distance that many immigrants were elated to see after weeks aboard a ship with their one way ticket to America. The sonnet by Emma Lazarus, engraved on a plaque mounted within the statue’s pedestal welcomes the “tired…poor…[and] huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” That is exactly who journeyed to begin a new life in America. But what awaited them in the streets of New York City was a life of toil and discrimination. This can best be seen in the homes inhabited by these immigrants.
Dilapidated, overcrowded, and haphazard housing was one of the myriad of problems that accompanied rapid industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the final decades of the nineteenth century. America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a desired destination for many Europeans looking for freedom, change, and opportunity. Although every major city in America felt the strain of a rapidly growing population, New York City had particular difficulty adapting to the sudden influx of immigrants. Decades of public indifference allowed for substandard conditions of the tenements in New York’s Lower East Side to worsen considerably. Progressives such as Jacob Riis, Theodore Roosevelt and Lawrence Veiller called for sweeping reforms and pressed for increased government regulations. While new laws were enacted, they proved to be only a limited success as the residents of this neighborhood continued to struggle.
Looking at Manhattan today, it is difficult to picture it as the semi rural city it once was in the beginning years of the nineteenth century. The opening of the Erie Canal in the 1825 greatly helped with the development of and transformation of New York City and its economy. Prior to the canal’s opening, ports such as New Orleans and Philadelphia outranked New York. The canal linked the waters of Lake Erie in the west to the Hudson River in the east providing a connection from the City and the Atlantic to the west. Serving as an access point to the west for both settlement and commercial purposes, the City became the country’s center for commercial capital and the primary port of entry for European immigrants. This new immigrant population provided the unskilled labor force and allowed for the expansion of the city’s economy. The flood of immigrants beginning in the 1830’s brought mainly Irish and Germans to America.
These new immigrants were desperate for work and shelter. Many were poor and illiterate making them less likely to refuse even the most dangerous jobs for low wages. Most likely to acquire work in the lower wards, these populations gravitated towards the southern tip of Manhattan where the shipping, mercantile and wholesale trades were located. The Lower East Side became the first stop these immigrants would make in entering mainstream America. It seemed natural to live near job opportunities, but this would lead to the beginning of housing troubles in New York City. In the 1820’s the Lower East Side was considered a fashionable residential neighborhood. By the 1830’s the area just north (known as the East Village) was the city’s most prestigious residential area. But by the 1840’s wealthy New Yorkers began moving further north and in the next two decades a large wave of immigrants entered New York City with nowhere to go. The population of the city in 1850 was 515,547. During the next ten years the population of the city grew to 813,669, an increase of 57.8%. The large amount of new immigrants created a divide within the city. Neighborhoods became sharply divided based on ethnicity. Immigrants fell to the lowest ranks of society and were therefore left to endure the ills of society with little relief or government assistance.
The substandard living conditions in New York City were the result of poor city planning in which the city blocks were divided into narrow lots with individual ownership. When New York’s affluent population moved out of the Lower East Side, they left behind their single family row homes. These houses were then converted into multi-family homes to accommodate the growing population of poor immigrants. The single family homes were built on 25 x 100 foot lots which was a generous size for one family. This size soon became a problem because there were not enough homes for all the new families and families could not afford to purchase or rent a whole house for themselves. So developers and landlords took control of the buildings and with little regulation or concern for construction standards converted the homes into tenements. The floors in these homes were partitioned, often into four separate apartments to optimize income for landlords. In 1862, the superintendent of buildings for the city described tenements as housing in which “the greatest amount of profit is sought to be realized from the least amount of space, with little regard for the health, comfort, or protection of the lives of the tenants.” The homes often had little to no space between neighboring buildings and one window per apartment that created dark, airless homes and unsanitary water and sewage conditions.
