Part 4

I will at this point simply allude to special nuisances. New York has within the narrow limits of its present occupied area of about eight square miles, in addition to its one million of people, and all its commercial and manufacturing establishments, a vast number of special nuisances, which are, to a greater or less degree, detrimental to its public health. There are nearly 200 slaughter-houses, many of which are in the most densely populated districts. To these places droves of cattle, hogs, and sheep are constantly driven, rendering the streets filthy in the extreme, and from them flow blood and refuse of the most disgusting character.

In certain populous sections are fat-boiling, entrails-cleansing, and tripe-curing establishments, which poison the air for squares around with their stifling emanations. To these must be added hundreds of uncleaned stables, immense manure heaps, etc., etc. But I shall not dwell further on these subjects, and the evidence regarding them.

[Sidenote: Cellar Population--Dens of Death]

I pass from the consideration of the external to the internal domiciliary conditions. The poorer classes of New York are found living either in cellars or in tenement houses. It is estimated by the City Inspector that 18,000 persons live in cellars. This is also about the estimate of the police. The apartments of these people are not the light and airy basement rooms of the better class houses, but their homes are, in the worst sense, cellars. These dark, damp and dreary abodes are seldom penetrated by a ray of sunlight, or enlivened by a breath of fresh air. I will quote several descriptions from these reports. In the Fourth Ward many of these cellars are below tide water. Says the Inspector of that district:

“This submarine region is not only excessively damp, but is liable to sudden inroads from the sea. At high tide the water often wells up through the floors, submerging them to a considerable depth. In very many cases the vaults of privies are situated on the same or a higher level, and their contents frequently ooze through the walls into the occupied apartments beside them. Fully one-fourth of these subterranean domiciles are pervaded by a most offensive odor from this source, and rendered exceedingly unwholesome as human habitations. These are the places in which we most frequently meet with typhoid fever and dysentery during the summer months. I estimate the amount of sickness of all kinds affecting the residents of basements and cellars, compared with that occurring among an equal number of the inhabitants of floors above ground, as being about a ratio of 3 to 2.”

The Inspector of the Fifteenth Ward reports: “In a dark and damp cellar, about 18 feet square and 7 feet high, lived a family of seven persons; within the past year two have died of typhus, two of smallpox, and one has been sent to the hospital with erysipelas. The tops of the windows of this abode are below the level of the surface, and in the court near are several privies and a rear tenant-house. Yet this occurred but a short distance from the very heart of the city.”

The Inspector of the Ninth Ward writes: “At Nos. --, --, -- and -- Hammond Street, and also at No. -- Washington Street, are inhabited cellars, the ceilings of which are below the level of the street, inaccessible to the rays of the sun, and always damp and dismal. Three of them are flooded at every heavy rain, and require to be baled out. They are let at a somewhat smaller rent than is asked for apartments on an upper floor, and are rented by those to whom poverty leaves no choice. They are rarely vacant.”

The Inspector of the Seventeenth Ward states that: “In 17 squares 55 houses contain 246 persons living in cellars entirely underground. As a matter of course such cellars are unhealthy dwelling apartments. Stanton Place has some of these miserable cellar-apartments, in which diseases have been generated. These cellars are entirely subterranean, dark and damp.”

[Sidenote: 496 Persons Under Ground]

The Inspector of the Sixth Ward says: “There has been some improvement within the last few years--the cellar population having been perceptibly decreased, yet 496 persons still live in damp and unwholesome quarters under ground. In some of them water was discovered trickling down the walls, the source of which was sometimes traced to the courts and alleys, and sometimes to the soakage from the water-closets. The noxious effluvia always present in these basements are of a sickening character. Many of the cellars are occupied by two or three families; a number are also occupied as lodging-houses, accommodating from twenty to thirty lodgers. One, near the corner of Elm and Worth streets, is now fifteen or sixteen feet below the level of the street (the street having been raised ten feet). The lodging-house keeper complained to the Inspector that her business had fallen off some since the street was raised. As might be expected, the sickness rate is very high; rheumatic disease, fevers, strumous diseases, cholera infantum, etc., etc., running riot among the population. Indeed, in nearly every basement disease of some kind has been found peculiarly prevalent and fatal.”

Another Inspector says: “At No. -- West Sixteenth Street, two families, in which are thirteen persons, occupy the basement. It is so dark that ordinary type can be seen with difficulty. In the other case the people were healthy before entering the basement; since, however, they have been ill; the mother has phthisis. Of twenty-four cellars, note of which has been made, four only were in good sanitary condition. The rest were more or less filthy, some indescribably so. One contained urine, bones, and soakage from the privy.”

The Inspector of the Eighteenth Ward writes: “There are a few cellars so dark that one cannot see to read in them, unless by artificial light, except for a few hours in the day, by sitting close to the window; and there are many basement rooms into whose gloomy recesses not a single direct ray from the sun ever shone. The latter are, as a rule, by half their depth below the level of the street. Dark and damp, with very little chance for circulation of air, it would be difficult to imagine a human being more completely beyond reach of sanitary provisions. And when we consider that four large families often crowd this subterranean floor, no words are needed to show their condition deplorable. That a generally impaired vitality is promoted by living in this unnatural way, ‘a nameless, ever new disease,’ there can be no question; that these people will be especially prone to whatever form of prevailing sickness may be about in the community, no one can doubt; but whether there is any specific cause involved, capable of producing definite forms of disease, is more difficult to determine.”

[Sidenote: A Visit to the Cave-Dwellers]

An Inspector thus describes a visit to one of these subterranean abodes: “We enter a room whose low ceiling is blackened with smoke, and its walls discolored with damp. In front, opening on a narrow area covered with green mould, two small windows, their tops scarcely level with the court-yard, afford at noonday a twilight illumination to the apartment. Through their broken panes they admit the damp air laden with effluvia, which constitutes the vital atmosphere inhaled by all who are immured in this dismal abode. A door at the back of this room communicates with another which is entirely dark, and has but this one opening. Both rooms together have an area of about eighteen feet square.

“The father of the family, a day laborer, is absent. The mother, a wrinkled crone at thirty, sits rocking in her arms an infant whose pasty and pallid features tell that decay and death are usurping the place of health and life. Two older children are in the street, which is their only playground, and the only place where they can go to breathe an atmosphere that is even comparatively pure. A fourth child, emaciated to a skeleton, and with that ghastly and unearthly look which marasmus impresses on its victims, has reared his feeble frame on a rickety chair against the window sill, and is striving to get a glimpse of the smiling heavens, whose light is so seldom permitted to gladden its longing eyes. Its youth has battled nobly against the terrible morbid and devitalizing agents which have oppressed its childish life--the poisonous air, the darkness, and the damp; but the battle is nearly over--it is easy to decide where the victory will be.”

But I need not multiply the evidences that 18,000 people, men, women, and children (a goodly-sized town), are to-day living in our city in a condition the most destructive to health, happiness, and morals that could possibly be devised. As you look into these abodes of wretchedness, filth and disease, the inmates manifest the same lethargic habits as animals, burrowing in the ground. They are, indeed, half narcotized by the constant inhalation of the emanations of their own bodies, and by a prolonged absence of light and fresh air. Here we never find sound health, while the constant sickness rate ranges from 75 to 90 per cent.

[Sidenote: Tenant-House Population]

Now, as to the second condition under which we find the laboring classes. It is estimated by the police that the tenant-house population of New York reaches the enormous figure of 500,000 or about half of the total number of inhabitants. The great and striking fact in regard to the domiciliary condition of the tenant-house class is overcrowding and deficient sunlight and fresh air. The landlord of the poor tenant-house has two principal motives--first, to pack as many people as he can in a given space, and second, to make as few improvements and repairs as possible.

The tenant-houses are of two classes, viz., the front and the rear. The latter is closely allied to the cellar; being shut out from air and sunlight, it is generally damp, gloomy, and filthy. The space between the front and rear house, familiarly called the “well hole,” contains the privy and cesspool, the emanations from which are closely confined to this space, and slowly but constantly pervade with their disgusting odors all the rooms and recesses.

The tenant-house has frequently been described by sensation writers, with all its miseries, its diseases and its deaths. But no pen nor pencil can sketch the living reality. It is only by personal inspection that one can learn to what depths of social and physical degradation human beings can descend. Said a committee appointed by your body to investigate the condition of the tenant-houses of New York:

“Sitting together upon the same broken box, lying together upon the same dirty straw, covered by the same filthy shreds, vieing with each other in the utterance of foul obscenities, you have a picture of the mass of corruption and squalid misery gathered inside the walls of that unventilated building in Mission Place. In that single house there was that which made the soul sicken and turn in horror from the sight. Vice, with its pretentious brow, and wretchedness, with hollow cheek and sunken, glazed eye, were there; hunger and lust stood side by side, petit larceny and cold-blooded murder were holding converse.”

[Sidenote: Cat Alley]

The inspectors describe more or less minutely a large number of tenant-houses, and also of groups:

“‘Cat Alley’ is the local designation of a group of dilapidated tenant-houses in an alley on Cannon Street. The alley is unpaved, and is excessively filthy. The privy is a small and broken-down structure, covering only a part of the vault, which is now full almost to overflowing. The inhabitants are degraded, both physically and socially. In several of the domiciles, at the time of our last inspection, there was neither bedstead nor table. Twelve of these families were found in a wretched condition, and all the children we saw were covered with dirt, and presented the intensest aspects of scrofulous disease; their sore eyes, encrusted heads, and dehumanizing appearance, told the story of want and neglect, and of greater evils to come.

“Five small houses, two and a half stories in height, including the basements, each containing apartments for six families, front on an alley called Rivington Place. This alley is always in a filthy condition. The houses on it are small and overcrowded. The 30 families that reside in these five houses have no other water supply than that which two hydrants furnish in the exterior courtyard; while for this population of nearly 200 persons, of all ages, there are but two privy vaults, and, at the time of the last inspection of the quarters, these vaults were filled nearly to the surface. In the year 1849, 42 individuals died here in three weeks of cholera, and not one recovered that was taken sick. The reasons are plain: they have no ventilation, and the houses being double, the exhalations from one apartment are inhaled by the other.

“At No. -- West Twenty-fifth Street, a wretched tenement of two apartments, the rooms occupied by one family. The sitting-room is about 10×12 feet, and the bedroom about 5×12, without a single window or air hole. These rooms were occupied in the hot month of July by a colored female, having pulmonary consumption, and her two children. Here she died, shortly after we made the inspection of her domicilium; having no money nor friends, a Christian burial was denied her for four days, although the neighbors acquainted the police of the fact, and they the Health Warden.”

[Sidenote: Rag Pickers Row]

“Rag Pickers Row” is thus described: “The houses are of wood, two stories, with attic and basement. The attic rooms are used to deposit the filthy rags and bones as they are taken from gutters and slaughter-houses. The yards are filled with dirty rags hung up to dry, sending forth their stench to all the neighborhood, and are exceedingly nauseous, operating upon me as an emetic. The tenants are all Germans of the lowest order, having no national nor personal pride; they are exceedingly filthy in person, and their bed-clothes are as dirty as the floors they walk on; their food is of the poorest quality, and their feet and heads, and doubtless their whole bodies, are anasarcous, suffering from what they call rheumatism, but which is in reality a prostrate nervous system, the result of foul air and inadequate supply of nutritious food. They have a peculiar taste for the association of dogs and cats, there being about 50 of the former and 30 of the latter. The whole number of apartments is 32, occupied by 28 families, number 120 in all, 60 adults and 60 children. The yards are all small, and the sinks running over with filth.”

[Sidenote: Tenant-House Degeneration]

Says a visitor in the Eighth Ward: “The instances are many in which one or more families, of from three to seven or more members, of all ages and both sexes, are congregated in a single and often contracted apartment. Here they eat, drink, sleep, work, dress and undress, without the possibility of that privacy which an innate modesty imperatively demands. In sickness and in health it is the same.

“What is the consequence? The sense of shame--the greatest, surest safeguard of virtue, except the grace of God--is gradually blunted, ruined, and finally destroyed. New scenes are witnessed and participated in, with a countenance of brass, the very thought of which, once, would have filled the sensitive heart of modesty with pain, and covered its cheek with burning blushes. The mind of one thus brought in daily and nightly contact with such scenes must become greatly debased, and its fall, before the assaults of vice, rendered almost certain.”

Another writes: “These houses seem to be always open to newcomers, and, in some way or other, they can accommodate them. I have found three families, of men, women, and children, in one room; there they lived and there they slept. Can any one doubt that there must be a rapid declension of morals in both parents and children, or that a bar is here opposed to moral and religious instruction, or that this state of things is consequent on the circumstances and condition of life?”

I could give you many details of other tenant-houses, the reputation of which is a reproach to any city in the civilized world. Such is “Gotham Court,” “Rotten Row,” “The Great Eastern,” “Sebastopol,” “Quality Row,” “Bummer’s Retreat,” etc. Speaking of the tenant-house, the Rev. Dr. Muhlenburg says:

“‘Their homes!’ that cold and damp cellar, about as tenantable as your coal vault! Do you call that a home for the distressed body, crowded in one corner there, swollen with the pains of rheumatism? Or that close apartment, heated or stifling in preparing the evening meal, on the shattered stove--that suffocating room, where you would not stop within for a moment--is that the home which you think so favorable for the worn asthmatic, catching every breath as if the last? Ask any clergyman, he will tell you with how little satisfaction he makes his visits among the poor, when they are laboring among disease; how he never has the heart to speak of comfort for the soul, when discomforts of the body call so loudly for relief, and for which the scanty aid he can minister seems akin to mockery!”

[Sidenote: The Rioters]

Mr. N. P. Willis who witnessed the “draft” riots thus truthfully and graphically describes the inmates of tenant-houses:

“The high brick blocks and closely packed houses where the mobs originated, seemed to be literally hives of sickness and vice. It was wonderful to see, and difficult to believe, that so much misery, disease and wretchedness can be huddled together and hidden by high walls, unvisited and unthought of, so near our own abodes. Lewd, but pale and sickly young women, scarce decent in their ragged attire, were impudent and scattered everywhere in the crowd. But what numbers of these poorer classes are deformed--what numbers are made hideous by self-neglect and infirmity! Alas! human faces look so hideous with hope and self-respect all gone! And female forms and features are made so frightful by sin, squalor, and debasement! To walk the streets as we walked them, in those hours of conflagration and riot, was like witnessing the day of judgment, with every wicked thing revealed, every sin and sorrow blazingly glared upon, every hidden abomination laid bare before hell’s expectant fire? The elements of popular discord are gathered in these wretchedly constructed tenement houses, where poverty, disease, and crime find an abode. Here disease in its most loathsome forms propagates itself. Unholy passions rule in the domestic circle. Everything, within and without, tends to physical and moral degradation.”

[Sidenote: Tenant-House Rot]

Such, Mr. Chairman, is the external and internal sanitary condition of the homes of 500,000 people in the City of New York to-day, as revealed by this inspection. It requires no extraordinary amount of medical knowledge to determine the physical condition of this immense population, living under such circumstances. Even though no devastating epidemic is found ravaging the tenant-house, yet the first sight of the wretched inmates convinces you that diseases far more destructive to health and happiness, because creating no alarm, are wasting the vital energies, and slowly but surely consuming the very tissues of the body.

Here infantile life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary. Here youth is ugly with loathsome diseases and the deformities which follow physical degeneracy. Here the decrepitude of old age is found at thirty. The poor themselves have a very expressive term for the slow process of decay which they suffer, viz.: “Tenant-house Rot.” The great majority are, indeed, undergoing a slow decomposition--a true eremacausis, as the chemists term it. And with this physical degeneration we find mental and moral deterioration. The frequent expression of the poor, “We have no sickness, thank God,” is uttered by those whose sunken eyes, pale cheeks, and colorless lips speak more eloquently than words, of the unseen agencies which are sapping the fountains of health. Vice, crime, drunkenness, lust, disease, and death, here hold sway, in spite of the most powerful moral and religious influences.

Religious teachers and Bible readers are beginning to give this class over as past all remedy, until their physical condition is improved. Their intellects are so blunted and their perceptions so perverted by the noxious atmosphere which they breathe, and the all-pervading filth in which they live, move, and have their being, that they are not susceptible to moral or religious influences. In London, some of the city missionaries have entirely abandoned the tenant-house class. There is, undoubtedly, a depraved physical condition which explains the moral deterioration of these people, and which can never be overcome until we surround them with the conditions of sound health. A child growing up in this pestilential atmosphere becomes vicious and brutal, not from any natural depravity, but because it is mentally incapable of the perceptions of truth. Most truly does the Inspector of the Fourth Ward say:

[Sidenote: Tenant-House Cachexy]

“There is a tenant-house cachexy well-known to such medical men as have a practical acquaintance with these abodes; nor does it affect alone the physical condition of their inmates. It has its moral prototype in an ochlesis of vice--a contagious depravity, to whose malign influence the youthful survivors of the terrible physical evils to which their infancy is exposed, are sure to succumb. We often find in persons of less than middle age, who have long occupied such confined and filthy premises, a morbid condition of the system unknown elsewhere. The eye becomes bleared, the senses blunted, the limbs shrunken and tremulous, the secretions exceedingly offensive. There is a state of premature decay.

“In this condition of life the ties of nature seem to be unloosed. Maternal instinct and filial affection seem to participate in the general decay of soul and body. A kind Providence, whose hand is visible even here, mercifully provides that the almost inevitable decay and death which man’s criminal neglect entails on the offspring of the unfortunate who dwell in these dreary mansions, shall elicit comparatively feeble pangs of parental anguish. To the physical and moral degradation, the blight of these miserable abodes, where decay reigns supreme over habitation and inhabitant alike, may be plainly traced much of the immorality and crime which prevail among us. The established truth, that, as the corporeal frame deteriorates, man’s spiritual nature is liable also to degenerate, receives its apt illustration here.”

[Sidenote: Prevailing Diseases]