After visiting the LES Tenement Museum, I found it very interesting to learn that such houses used to house those who were well-off. I suppose it makes sense, though, if you look at the rooms in the LES Tenement Museum and try to imagine them without the partitions. Before they tried to cram entire families into a single room, the entire building probably would have been nice for one family. Obviously, though, using these buildings as they began to do for the large pouring of immigrants was profitable and was one way to house them. I was disgusted to read about the owner who blamed the tenants for the conditions that the building ended up in, but to be honest it’s not that different from owners today. I thought that made it much worse, that you could connect what happened back then to nowadays and still see similarities in the worse ways. A lot of what Riis wrote about in the late 1800s, Foner talks about in one way or another (and connects to more modern conditions) and we saw and heard with our own eyes and ears when we visited the LES Tenement Museum. Because he was writing when a lot of it was happening, it’s interesting to see a slightly different point of view, without as much of the hindsight.

I was surprised to learn that the tenements that house immigrants were once the homes of aristocrats. The birth of tenements began when the need for cheap residential housing by the industrious poor arose. It was the greed of the wealthy and their exploitation of the necessities of the poor that resulted in the dilapidation of tenement buildings. Thus, the large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones with no regards to ventilation. It is sad that this was the cause of most of the children’s death, as they simply died of suffocation due to bad air quality.

I found it ridiculous that the tenement owners blamed the unsanitary conditions on the people living there, claiming that their dirty ways were at fault. The proprietors were “utterly losing sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were alone responsible” (Riis 9). Furthermore, I was flabbergasted at the fact that a tenement owner felt that he was “especially entitled to be pitied” for losing his building to a fire (Riis 11). I don’t think he even considered that the ten families that his building provided a home to were now on the streets with essentially nothing since all of their valuables were burned in the fire. These families are the true victims of the fire.

I was shocked to learn of a couple that committed suicide because they “were tired.” They lived in an attic with one window, a space where the residents could barely move. Furthermore, they paid a five dollars for this cramped up room. Their idea of America and the pursuit of the American dream were shattered. Who could blame them, their living conditions were deplorable and most of their income was probably going towards rent.

I was intrigued that both owners and tenants “considered official interference an infringement of personal rights, and a hardship” (Riis 16). Some tenants were losing their homes due to the new laws. There were instances were the police had to drag the tenants out by force. Usually, one would expect the tenants to be for reform, not against it. It is because of the loss of their homes that these tenants felt that the government was being intrusive.

-Anissa Daimally

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