The book commences with a history of the construction of NYC’s tenements. Perhaps not surprisingly, the story of tenements begins as mansions for the wealthy cut and chopped into rooms for the poor. The whole long, sad, sordid history began in the wake of the War of 1812, an influx of new immigrants and what is likely the first example of rich flight to the suburbs. Of course, this is before suburbs existed, but the basic context is the same. Needless to say, the drive for low-cost housing capable of spurring great profits for the owners eventually created the invisible hand of capitalism which smashed clear through any concept of putting the well-being of residents ahead of the search for ways to squeeze every last penny of profit from the enterprise.
In 1867, The Tenement-House Act was passed in an attempt to improve ventilation, but was naturally met with either opposition or just plain avoidance by housing owners. Meanwhile, tenement housing neighborhoods already experiencing the ill effects of bad health were now also becoming hotbeds for criminal activities. The notorious Gangs of New York got their start in these neighborhoods shortly before the Civil War and began a recurring historical motif of ebb and flow, but never quite going away entirely. The connection is clearly established by the author that inhuman living conditions combined with the general lack of compassion by the building owners directly stimulated the rise of crime in the neighborhoods.
The demographics of tenements housing is likely not surprising: they were not exactly overflowing with those of a lighter complexion who paid no tithes to the Pope and spoke English as their native language. The tenement neighborhood were teeming with Russians and Chinese, Jews and Catholics, Finns and Arabs and an ever-increasing population of blacks as a result of the Great Migration from the south to the north following the end of Reconstruction. While the neighborhoods were an example of the famous melting pot in theory, in practice…not so much. The West Side was mainly dominated by the Irish and the East Side by the Germans. As each new wave of migrants from one particular region or country swept in, they replaced whichever group was next to the bottom in the hierarchy. At the bottom, of course, was the first wave of immigrants who by all rights should have been at the top of the ladder, but in addition to the injury of not even wanting to come to America was the insult of then continually providing the foundation for the social order over which all newcomers walked. African-Americans were the original migrant population that changed the WASP social order, but even the Italians who came in very late could feel free to look down upon them. Segregation by culture resulted in regional neighborhoods with unfortunate names like Chinatown and Jewtown.
Towards the middle of the text, the attention turns from the differentiations in ethnicity to a collective unit representing a cross-section of the system. “The Problem of the Children” stems primarily from sheer volume. The stereotype of the enormous Catholic family sharing tiny living quarters in America stems from tenement life in New York because such a large percentage of new immigrants upon arriving in New York simply never left. To give an idea of just what kind of pressure this placed upon the system, at one point the counts 128 kids among 40 families living in one tenement. The terrible nadir of these living conditions is “baby-farming” in which people make money adopting babies in a cash transaction and then feeding them sour milk until they die so that a quack doctor won’t spot the murder.
In addition to crime and overcrowding, another fact of life which makes living in the tenements unbearable is always plentiful supply of alcohol which even those living in the most poverty-stricken of conditions somehow seem to find money for. The final equation in the perfect square storm here is, of course, that other industry which never experiences a downturn and for which capital outlay seems never to run dry: prostitution.
The historical account of how upscale housing for the wealthy became overcrowded slums for poor immigrants at the mercy of the rich landlords on one end and the gangs at the other end eventually coalesces into a social indictment of those at the top failing in their moral charge to watch out for those at the bottom. The conclusion that the author makes about why the denizens of the tenement naturally turn to crime, alcohol, killing their children and selling their bodies is a simple case of economic calculus: when two-plus-two equal hopelessness and the consequences of hopelessness are seen as innate character flaws by the more fortunate classes, the final is generational impoverishment. People who came to America as young immigrants filled with hope eventually become old before their time watching in misery as their grandchildren prepare to raise their children in exactly the same conditions.
The final chapters provide an overview of what steps have been taken to improve conditions with an appeal made by the author to the conscience of his readers to raise the level of those improvements over the course of the next twenty years.
