You know a situation is bad if you cringe reading about it. Learning about the extent of the unsanitary, inadequate, and horrible tenement life was definitely cringe-worthy. At some points, it was difficult to continue reading, because I felt such empathy for the immigrants of late 1800s and early 1900s. Additionally, knowing that members of my family lived in tenements and suffered through those conditions made the readings even harder to stomach. Understandably, today we are conditioned to a much greater standard of living, but the tenement lifestyle was still subpar at the time.
One interesting aspect of the tenement life was the sheer number of people living in tenements. Foner writes that by 1910, there were 2,331,542 people living in Manhattan. In fact, “more people lived on this small twenty-three-square mile island at the turn of the century than in any of the thirty-three of the nation’s forty-six states.” In 1910, one-sixth of that population lived below 14th street. This number of people in such a small swath of land, on eighty-second of Manhattan, is hard to imagine. The overcrowding must have been unbearable.
Besides the enormous amount of people squished together, there were also issues with the actual tenement buildings themselves. Both Foner and Ambinder describe the different tenements like the notorious rear tenements, “dumbbell” tenements, and wooden tenements. The lack of air circulation, sunlight, running water, windows, and steam were major problems. Today, a major issue is when the WIFI takes longer than one minute to connect. It’s amazing how fast technology has evolved and how our necessities or desires have changed.
An issue that I had not previously known about was the smell associated with the tenements. There were a few main aspects of tenement life that contributed to the awful smells: the lack of frequent bathing, the horrible outhouse conditions, the mud and animal droppings tracked into the apartment, and the terrible air circulation. One city inspector described the smell as “effluvia of vermin, dead and alive.” Foner writes about the “urine drenched passageways.” Usually smell is used to describe locations in a cursory way, but in the tenements the smells were overwhelming and a major part of the immigrant experience.
Both Foner and Ambinder did an excellent job at making the immigrant experience in tenements feel real to me by appealing to both my visual and olfactory senses. Trying to imagine the crowds of people huddled together without the basic necessities of modern day, coupled with the smells of the Lower East Side and Five Points was made easy for the reader in these two chapters. Both chapters led me to empathize greatly with the plight of the late 1800s and early 1900s immigrants who suffered greatly to get a chance to live the American Dream.
