Initially, I found it very hard to believe that the tenement houses at the turn of the last century used to be the residence of the old Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy of Manhattan in the early days. When I went into the tenement apartments, nothing inside of them mirrored affluent life. If such was the previous residence of prominent people, when did everything go terribly wrong?

However, once I continued on reading everything started to make more sense. It seems as though, through greed, owners partitioned large rooms into several smaller ones. As a result, there was no regard to light or ventilation. Then, sadly enough although such a reality was deplorable, it was more true to the nature of tenement life.

When I read that an owner mentioned in the reading felt as though he should be pitied for losing one of his tenement properties due to a fire, I was just like, “Are you kidding me.” Just because he would be losing six hundred dollars per year in rent as a result, such didn’t mean anything to me. All of the people he had cramped into the tenement would no longer have a place of residence. They essentially lost everything. Subsequently, they are the only ones who should be pitied. Then, when one considers that the same property the owner deemed so valuable was most likely unkempt, this only showed that in hindsight he really didn’t appreciate his property as he tried to allude to once it was gone.

Lastly, when I read that a hard-working family of young people from the old country had taken poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because they were “tired,” it only hit home harder how difficult life was back then for immigrants. When you considered that they lived in a room in the attic that had a “sloping ceiling and a single window so far out the roof that it seems not to belong to the place at all,” how can one disagree with their actions.

-Ashley Haynes