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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Print Collection > MOVING UPTOWN Section VI (Urban woes)Urban Woes Although the city was growing and prospering, there were many who did not share in the wealth and the optimism. By the 1850s, the Daily Tribune observed that "underneath this gay varnish of wealth, luxury and prosperity, there is an abyss of poverty and destitution, whence issue ominous though subdued moanings of discontent and misery." As early as 1829, the Five Points area (the intersection of Mulberry,
Anthony [now Worth], Cross [now Park], Orange [now Baxter], and Little
Water [no longer exists]), approximately at what is now Foley Square, was
considered "the most dangerous place in the city." Located on a marshy
landfill on the site of Collect Pond, miserable, overcrowded, and filthy
buildings bred disease (one-third of all the cholera cases in the 1832
outbreak occurred here) and crime. The slums spread beyond the Sixth Ward
near Mulberry Bend, and during the 1840s and 1850s moved north past Grand
Street on to Delancey, Rivington, Stanton, past Houston, and into the numbered
streets around Tompkins Square. In 1857 the Herald predicted, "the
destiny of all the east side of the island seems to be as an abiding place
for the poor." Charles Parsons (American, 1821–1910)
In 1852, the Ladies Home Missionary Society purchased the Old Brewery
and replaced it with the Five Points Mission –a chapel and parsonage,
school house, a bathing room, and dwellings for poor families. But before
the Old Brewery was demolished, the Society offered tours of the squalid
building. These tours and an increasing number of newspaper exposés
on tenement conditions provided middle-class citizens with vivid evidence
of the terrible poverty that existed in New York. Anonymous Housing was an ongoing problem in the mid-19th century. Walt Whitman complained that "nothing" was being built in New York "between a palatial mansion and a dilapidated hovel," and the Times in 1865 reported, "New York furnishes the worst place of residence of any city in America." Between 1820 and 1860, the population of lower Manhattan had changed considerably as the number of European immigrants quadrupled. Large numbers of primarily Irish and German immigrants arrived to join free blacks who lived mostly in the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Wards. Most settled not far from the docks where they arrived, and close to where they worked in the shipyards, abbatoirs, factories, textile and tobacco industries. Work had to be close to home; on a salary of $1.75 a week, a standard wage, even a 12 1/2 cent carfare was expensive. To accommodate the flood of new citizens, private homes, churches and breweries south of Canal Street were being converted to low-rent, multiple residences (rookeries) –dark, cramped, airless apartments –which served as models for the tenements which followed. In the 1830s and 1840s, large tenement neighborhoods grew up in the area between Fulton Street and Corlear's Hook on the Lower East Side as well as in the Five Points District. Landlords not only crowded more than one family into a single room, they also rented out cellars (in 1850, nearly 19,000 people lived below street level), and built buildings in the yards behind buildings Some of the conditions existing in the Five Points District were addressed by the first Tenement Home Law (1867), which required that buildings be equipped with fire ladders, that there be a privy for every 20 tenants, and that there be connections between inside rooms and those that received outside air. In spite of the neighborhood's terrible poverty and reputation, artifacts
of domestic life –tea sets, pins and thimbles, and fabric swatches –uncovered
recently during construction of a new federal courthouse on Foley Square,
suggest that many of the area's residents clearly were hard-working citizens.
. Mesier's Lithography (Peter A. and Edward S. Mesier; American lithographic
firm, active first half of the 19th century)
James Smillie (American, b. Scotland, 1807–1885) Although New York was slow to acknowledge poverty and other social ills, the city provided some services for the ill and unfortunate, and maintained a penal system. Whether hospital, almshouse, or jail (and often these organizations were housed together), the institutions were usually located away from the rest of the community, relegated to an area north of the city or to an island off of Manhattan. Bloomingdale Insane Asylum of New York Hospital was opened on Broadway and 116th Street in 1821 (earlier the mentally ill had been treated at New York Hospital at Anthony [now Duane] and Catharine [now Worth] streets), guided by new European practices of enlightened "moral treatment." When this facility became overcrowded, the poor patients were sent to Bellevue, and later to a mental hospital on Blackwell's Island (1839). As real estate interests developed the Upper West Side in the 1880s,
pressure was exerted on the governors of New York Hospital to relocate
the Asylum. In 1894, the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum moved to White Plains.
The site of the asylum is now part of Columbia University. Anonymous
The New York School for the Deaf and other less "genteel" institutions,
including hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons, and almshouses, usually
were located on the fringes of the community; in 1829, the area around
the present Rockefeller Center was well north of the city. By 1856, as
the population expanded north (and real estate values skyrocketed), the
Deaf and Dumb Asylum relocated to Washington Heights; Columbia College
moved from Park Place to 50th Street in 1857. Anonymous In 1794, the city purchased a building on 26th Street and First Avenue
to house victims of epidemics, and 150 acres (from 23rd to 28th streets,
from the East River to Second Avenue) were set aside in 1811 for an almshouse,
Bellevue Establishment. In 1825, the hospital served mostly epidemic victims,
but also accommodated the poor, criminals, and the mentally ill. By mid-century,
conditions in the institution were so deplorable that the hospital separated
from the almshouse, and was reorganized solely as a hospital. "ER" [artist unidentified] The city set up the first publicly financed almshouse as early as 1736,
and in 1832 established an Alms House Department, which was guided by the
belief that problems of health, housing, and unemployment were caused by
moral deficiencies, and could be redressed by hard work, thrift, and temperance.
Bellevue included a large almshouse, and about mid-century, Blackwell's
Island (later Welfare Island, now Roosevelt Island) became the site of
an almshouse and workhouse, at about the same time as almshouses were established
in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Commissioners complained that these
facilities were strained by the numbers of immigrants; between 1854 and
1860, about 86 percent of the almshouse population was foreign-born.
Ward's Island Buildings, N.Y. 1860 George Hayward (American, b. England, about 1800; active 1834–72) Wards Island, at the northern end of the East River, housed a hospital
for destitute immigrants, an immigration station, and the City Asylum (later
to become Manhattan State Hospital and then the Manhattan Psychiatric Center),
and in 1850 was the site of a home for juvenile delinquents. George Hayward (American, b. England, about 1800; active 1834–72) In 1799, against local protest, the State of New York moved the quarantine station for passengers and seamen with contagious diseases from Governors Island to the northeastern shore of Staten Island. When the station was to be expanded in 1857 and 1858, and again local objections were ignored, Staten Islanders burned the entire facility to the ground. Staten Island also accommodated a number of less controversial institutions: Sailors' Snug Harbor and Seamen's Retreat, Mariners' Family Home, and the Society for Seamen's Children. |
