In this week’s readings in Five Points, I saw one specific story that reminded me of a modern day problem for the lower classes. In the chapter, Anbinder describes how an elevated railway was constructed on the Bowery in 1878. He points out that the new rail served its purpose in the sense that it provided passengers with a faster trip through the city. However, the railway also posed significant problems, specifically severe darkness and noise that drove the Bowery’s saloons and dance halls towards shutting down. This story could be compared to modern day situations in which the government constructs something for the benefits of certain members of society, while discounting the effect it could have on other groups of society. For example, when the new Yankee Stadium was built, the design of the stadium was made with patrons in mind, but did not take into consideration the neighboring residents who were losing their parks and businesses to large parking garages. Similarly, when the city searched for a new design that could be uniformly applied to all of the new tenements, it tried to fix some pressing problems in slums. Yet, by consulting outsiders for this design, it failed to discover the problems that the tenement dwellers actually wanted fixed. As a result, many problems that existed in the old tenements continued to persist in the new ones.
Anbinder explains in great detail how the new innovations in the tenements actually made some chronic problems even worse. For example, the invention of the airshaft intensified the infuriating noise levels and horrible smells. In the old tenements, it was easy to hear noise from neighboring apartments, but now noises from one flat would echo through the airshafts into every other flat. People even threw garbage into the airshaft, which made the smells virtually impossible to live with. Furthermore, the aspects of the tenements that the city claimed to have fixed failed to improve tenement life. For example, each flat in the dumbbell tenements was required to have a fire escape per a new wave of state tenement laws. However, the fire escapes were basically useless. Not only were they built in the back of buildings where the smoke and fire would travel to, but people also began to use them as part of living space to compensate for the claustrophobic and overcrowded conditions. So if a person were to attempt to use the fire escape, a bathtub or even a sleeping platform would hinder their mad dash to safety.
We see from this example that the city did not consider the difficulties that most profoundly affected the residents of tenements. As a result, tenement conditions in Five Points did not improve, and in some cases, it became even worse.
