APARTMENT HOUSES RISE AND TWEED FALLS  
Not long before the war New York’s manners were provincial, and not long afterwards the city felt itself one of the world’s great centers. In twenty years, 1850–70, the population grew from a half million to a million. Such large groups were enriched by war contracts, the rise of real estate, and the nation-wide business expansion that the increase in luxury struck every observer. A Four Hundred was taking shape, rich shops were arising, the opera was growing more and more gilded; in 1868, said the Evening Post, the receipts of the score of theaters reached $3,165,000. The Post that year listed ten of the richest men in order—Wm. B. Astor, believed to be worth $75,000,000; A. T. Stewart, Wm. C. Rhinelander, Peter and Robert Goelet, James Lenox, Peter Lorillard, John D. Wolfe, M. M. Hendricks, Rufus M. Lord, and C. V. S. Roosevelt. Their wealth, it told them, had become so great that if they tried they could accomplish enormous benefits for New York—they could sweep away the debasing tenement house system, or shatter the Tammany Ring; and the people believed that public services were the best if not the only justification for such wealth.
The growth in population emphasized the desirability of many diverse improvements. At the beginning of 1867 the Evening Post was demanding a great art gallery, such as we now have in the Metropolitan Museum, and pointing to European collections as models, while later the same year it urged a zoological garden like London’s, there being as yet none in all America. It and the Tribune together in 1871 asked for a single large public library. There were several small ones—the Astor, the Mercantile, the Society Library, and the unfinished Lenox Library—but none was “public” in the sense that it circulated365 books free, while the city would obviously benefit from the union of some of the larger collections. Having been the first to propose Central Park, Bryant applauded the creation of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, for which ground was broken in 1866. Theodore Thomas, who had begun to organize his orchestra early in the war, and immediately afterwards had opened his “summer night” concerts, issued a call through the newspaper for a supporting fund of $20,000. In several editorials in the spring of 1868, the first entitled “Can a City Be Planned?”, the Evening Post suggested that a board of engineers be named to lay out a city plan, determining which areas should be used for retail trade, manufactures, and residence. It was an Age of Innocence in many ways—people wondered at the first concrete sidewalk, laid from Park Row to Murray Street in 1868; they were just learning the use of safe deposit vaults, and elevators were curiosities; but it was an age of progress.
The problem which most pressed upon New York after Appomattox, as after the World War, was housing. Building had stopped during the conflict, and its resumption was slow, but Manhattan had kept on growing at the rate of 30,000 people a year. In the winter of 1866–7 the Evening Post pronounced New York the most costly place of residence on earth. “Houses are so scarce that landlords see tenants running around, like pigs in the land of Cockaigne, with knives and forks in their backs, begging to be eaten; it is a favor to get a decent house at a preposterous rent—at almost any sum, in fact; and we know of families living comfortably in Europe from the rent of a house on one of the favorite avenues.” That spring a great open-air mass meeting was held in protest, and petitions were sent the Legislature for a law basing rents upon the assessed valuation. Those of moderate means suffered more than the rich or the poor tenement dwellers. “Bank clerks, bookkeepers, and salesmen are compelled to go to New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island, or Westchester to secure attractive and comfortable homes,” said the Post. “New York is practically366 losing the best part of its population.” The practice of sub-letting parts of single houses waxed common.
From this demand for housing there arose an unprecedented real estate boom. Thousands of homes were placed on the market at high prices, and land auctions took place daily. The Evening Post reported that lots in Manhattan and Brooklyn were eagerly bought at unheard-of rates. The neighborhoods of Central and Prospect Parks had become popular for residences, while merchants were purchasing sites for stores on union Square and Fifth Avenue. Lots that fronted upon what is now Central Park West had sold in 1850 for a few hundred dollars apiece, and in 1860 for from $2,000 to $3,000, but in 1867 they were bringing from $8,000 to $15,000. High up on the East Side, at 91st Street, lots now sold at $3,000. When Bay Ridge Terrace was created in 1868 the journal commented upon the rapid growth of that fine part of Brooklyn, which it had already noted to be spreading eastward rapidly. Brownsville and East New York before the war had been quiet farming communities, but now the former had a hundred houses, and the latter had grown with a rush to 5,000 souls.
The northward march of business, causing the demolition of hundreds of old residences, increased the need for new residential construction. When Ex-Mayor Opdyke’s house on Fifth Avenue near Sixteenth Street was sold to James A. Hearn & Son in 1867 for $105,000, and a milliner established herself on the Avenue at Twenty-second Street, the Evening Post devoted an editorial to the transformation. It predicted that all Fifth Avenue to Twenty-third Street would soon be engrossed by business, the new Fifth Avenue Hotel having given the movement impetus. Higher up, residential property had reached amazing prices. A brownstone house at Thirtieth Street had just been purchased for $114,000, while P. T. Barnum had bought one at the corner of Thirty-ninth for $80,000. A fine light brownstone mansion on the corner of Fortieth, building for W. H. Vanderbilt, would cost at least $80,000, the stable and lot included. At Forty-third367 Street a wealthy Jewish congregation was building a synagogue at an outlay of fully $700,000, while ten blocks farther up, where St. Thomas’s was about to be erected, $100,000 had been offered and refused for a plot 100 by 125 feet. Seven houses with brownstone fronts had just been finished on the west side of the Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, and were so finely furnished that the front doors had cost $700 each, and the staircases $4,000.
The most serious aspect of the housing shortage was that as yet respectable New Yorkers knew but two modes of residence: one must either take a full single house, or consent to a dismal boarding house. The apartment building was known only to travelers in Europe, and was mistrusted as not being adapted to American individualism.
The possibility of utilizing the multiple-unit type of housing, however, was unceasingly expounded by the Evening Post from the time peace returned, for the editors had lived in the “Continental flat” abroad. An early editorial (Feb. 6, 1866) was called “How to Gain Room.”
It has been suggested frequently that tenement houses scientifically built would be profitable in New York, and a great boon to the working people. But they would be no less an advantage to the wealthier classes, and we wonder that the attempt has not been made first in the best part of town, and with houses calculated to accommodate families of the wealthier citizens, at a somewhat more moderate rent than is attainable now.
Many a family which now occupies a whole house uptown would be content to rent a floor, suitably fitted up after the manner of the houses of Paris and other European cities. Such an arrangement would spare the women of the family the endless and often painful toil of going up and downstairs, from the kitchen to the top of a three-storied house, three or four times a day. It would be far more convenient, and the rents might well make a considerable saving.
The inertia of New Yorkers was to blame, the Post said a little later. “Such a thing as hiring a suite of rooms368 and having meals sent in from a restaurant at a fixed and moderate charge is, we believe, almost if not quite unknown here. As for the ‘flats’ in which thousands of families conveniently and comfortably keep house in France and Germany, they require an arrangement of house architecture not known to our builders.” In the summer of 1867, when the congestion was at its worst, the editors gave publicity to the design of an architect for an apartment house for the “middling classes.” Upon two ordinary city lots, 20 by 100 feet, he proposed erecting a four-story building, containing eight distinct suites of rooms, all as completely isolated from each other as though they were detached houses. There was to be a central stairs, each landing giving entrance to two homes; but every visitor would have to ring below for admission precisely as at the front door of any other houses. Each suite was to contain a parlor, dining room, four bedrooms, bath, and kitchen. For some time the newspaper carried on a veritable crusade.
When the first apartment house was ready, in 1870, one designed by Richard M. Hunt and erected at 142 East Eighteenth Street, the Evening Post rejoiced in it as the harbinger of a new housing era. It was said to be better than most of those in Paris, though the Post thought it lacking in light and ventilation. Each of the sixteen suites had six rooms and a bath, and rents ranged from $1,500 on the lower floors to $1,080 on the upper—G. P. Putnam, the publisher, and others of means lived in it. There was no elevator, but a dumbwaiter enabled the tenants to bring coal up from the basement. The close of 1870 saw the new movement in full swing, with eight houses built or building, and a strong demand for more.
An apartment house on Forty-eighth Street boasted a porter, who lighted the halls, removed garbage, and sent up fuel; the rents were only $40 to $75 a month. A block of flats overlooking Central Park from the east at Sixty-eighth Street gave each tenant eight rooms and a bath, elevator service, black walnut floors, and his own369 kitchen range and hot water heater for $75 to $150. The most pretentious house, however, was building at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. It was costing a round million, and was to be 125 feet high. “Each suite will have ten rooms, four closets, and eight washbowls,” announced the Evening Post, and rents were to run from $2,000 to $3,000 a year. The journal advised builders to install elevators, and charge as much for the upper as for lower floors.
For several years a marked prejudice against flats persisted. Most New Yorkers believed that in this land of democratic sociability it would be impossible to isolate the apartments and obtain privacy, and that they would soon sink to the level of tenements. The Post did its share in ridiculing these fears, and in pointing out the ugliness of the monotonous blocks of brownstone houses. It denied the common remark, “No house is big enough for two families.” But as it later said, one of the cardinal reasons for the rapid dissipation of the prejudice and popular success of the apartment houses was the building, in the first instance, of costly structures as pioneers in the movement.
By 1874 it thought that the new houses “may now be considered almost perfect.” The Haight Building, at Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, offered thirty flats at $2,000 to $3,000 a year each, with an elevator, an internal telegraph, and a restaurant. Among the notables living here were Henry M. Field, the traveler; Col. W. C. Church, editor of the Galaxy; Prof. Youmans, founder of the Popular Science Monthly, and the Spanish Consul. But the last word in luxury was an apartment building in Fifty-sixth Street, where “the whole house is warmed by steam, and hot water is supplied to all the tenants at the expense of the owner.” The paper’s prediction that ten-story houses with elevators would be more popular than smaller buildings had been completely justified.
Even before the rise of the apartment house came the first sharp attacks upon tenement evils. New York City had no lack of this particular kind of multiple-family370 dwelling, for in 1864 they numbered 15,511, and housed 486,000 persons. They were far from being what we mean by tenements to-day: not until about 1879 was the first tenement house of the now familiar type, five, six, or more stories high, erected. The earlier buildings were comparatively low barracks, many of them converted mansions, shops, and stables, and others “rear houses” in the back yards of old mansions; all without airshafts, and with no complete provision for separating families. The Evening Post fitly called them “The Modern Upas,” for they breathed upon the city the poisons of cholera, typhus, smallpox, and crime. As early as April, 1860, six years before the first legislative inquiry into the housing of the poor, the editors had called shocked attention to police records showing that some 18,000 New Yorkers were veritable troglodytes, dwellers in cellars. It spoke out at the same time against the horrible congestion of the slums. One “rear house” on Mulberry Street had 222 persons huddled together; in Cow Bay, one of the colored quarters, one house held 230 persons; while the notorious Old Brewery at Five Points had sheltered 215 people before it burned. In the Sixth Ward, surrounding the Five Points, sixty-three small structures housed 4,721 persons.
An indignant editorial attack upon the deplorable tenement-house conditions appeared in the Evening Post six months after Lee’s surrender, inspired by a report of the Citizens’ Association. Half the people of New York lived in tenements, and on the East Side they were packed in at the rate of 220,000 to the square mile. The Post estimated that more than 25,000 dwelt in unfit cellars, shanties, or stable-lofts. Of the 15,000 tenements, almost 4,000 had no connection with the sewers. One in three was a perpetual “fever nest,” in which typhus was endemic, while not one in fifteen was what a tenement house ought to be. A single “fever nest” on East Seventeenth Street, almost within a stone’s throw of the Mayor’s home, had sent thirty-five typhus patients during 1864 to the municipal fever hospital, while nearly371 a hundred more had been treated in the building. The public, repeated the Post early in 1867, was astonished to awake from the war to the vast extent of the tenement system, the immense numbers inhabiting such places, and the horrid evils of filthiness, immorality, and sickness engendered by them. “No man has a right to establish a nest of fever and vice in the city,” it said, arguing for new laws and a government agency to regulate the construction and use of tenements.
Simultaneously, the newspaper kept up its old complaints, dating from Coleman’s day, of the lack of due sanitary regulations and activity. Slaughter-houses continued to abound, there being twenty-three in the northern half of the Twentieth Ward alone, some of them draining blood and other refuse for long distances through open sewers. In Forty-sixth Street on the East Side, a single neighborhood was blessed with one slaughter-house, six tripe, three sausage, and two bone-boiling establishments, and in the summer was almost uninhabitable (Sept. 2, 1865). A little later the Post took notice of the nastiness of the harbor. Many sewers emptied into the slips and under the piers, and there being no movement of the water, the sewage decayed until it had to be dredged out. These facts help explain an editorial of 1866 defining the typhus area block by block. It extended in irregular strips from the Battery up the West Side to Cortlandt Street, and up the East Side to Thirty-sixth. Smallpox was endemic throughout a rectangle bounded by Broadway, the Bowery, Chambers, and Bleecker, and in so many additional spots in the lower part of the city that a man could hardly get to his work downtown without crossing infected areas.
In the spring of 1867 the Legislature hesitatingly passed the first act to regulate the erection and management of tenements. Though it was, as the Evening Post said, “much less stringent and particular” than the English laws on which it was modeled, it placed important powers in the city Board of Health organized shortly before, for which the Post had also struggled. All tenants372 of cellars were required to vacate them unless they could obtain special permits, and within two years the Post was rejoicing over a drastic order for the cutting of 46,000 windows in interior rooms. Of course this legislation was only a beginning. In 1878–79 we find the Evening Post vigorously agitating for its extension, and publishing articles upon “The Homes of the Poor” which give a horrifying picture of Mulberry Court and other slum sections. Half of the city’s 125,000 children lived in tenements, and nine-tenths of the deaths among children occurred there. In May, 1878, the “Evening Post Fresh-Air Fund” was founded for the purpose of sending slum children to country homes for summer rest and recreation. The business office collected and disbursed the money raised by almost daily appeals in the newspaper, and the Rev. Willard Parsons took charge of the work of finding farmers to take the children, and of transporting them. Some years later the Tribune took over the Fresh-Air Fund, and still maintains it. In 1879, after a mass-meeting upon the tenement problem at Cooper union, addressed among others by Parke Godwin, then editor of the Evening Post, new regulatory legislation was passed at Albany.
Every one saw that evils in housing could not be corrected without expanding the city’s area, and in the decade after the Civil War the city press paid little more attention to them than to the twin perplexity of transportation. The first talk of a subway had been heard in the early fifties, and was thin talk indeed, although the London underground railway dates from 1853. The Evening Post used to boast that it had been the first journal to propose a steam subway, Bryant having brought the idea home from England. But the real solution of the transit problem, for a period which had no electric traction, lay in the elevated railways which Col. Robert L. Stevens had suggested as long before as 1831. The need grew more and more urgent. When the war ended, transportation was furnished by the horse railways and by eight omnibus companies. The horse-cars were slowly driving373 the buses out of business, the great Consolidated Company, which operated a half-dozen lines, having gone bankrupt in 1864; but there remained 250 of the vehicles, or enough to impede other traffic seriously. The capital invested in them was $1,600,000, for each had six $200 horses, while wages and stabling costs had risen fast.
To find room for the growing population, and to ease the streets of their intolerable burden—these were the two chief arguments for rapid transit. As the Evening Post said in the closing days of 1864, the most desirable parts of the island, the sections abreast of and above Central Park, were largely given up to pigs, ducks, shanty-squatters, and filth. A railroad under Broadway, it thought, would soon change all that. “When a merchant can go to Central Park in fifteen minutes he will not hesitate to live in Seventieth or Eightieth Street; and a resident of One Hundredth Street could reach the business section of the city as quickly by the underground railway as those who live in Twentieth Street do now.” Better live in Yonkers than Harlem, it remarked later. As for the streets, it declared in 1866: “Broadway is simply intolerable to the man who is in a hurry; he must creep along with the crowd, no matter how cold it is; he crosses the street at the risk of his life; and when he journeys up and down in an omnibus, he wonders at the skill with which a wheeled vehicle is made so perfectly uncomfortable.”
A multitude of suggestions for better transit had been brought forward by this time. Some men proposed one or several subways; the Evening Post modestly thought that five were needed, several beginning at the Battery and the rest at Canal Street, and all running to the Harlem. Others favored elevated roads mounted on single pillars in the streets, and still others called for such roads running over the housetops. Sunken railways in the middle of certain streets were proposed, and one powerful intellect devised a scheme for two railways, one on each side of Broadway, running “through the cellars”! To lessen the traffic congestion in Broadway, a college374 professor suggested that the city buy the ground floor of all buildings for a space ten or twelve feet deep on each side, and form an arcade there for foot passengers, yielding the entire street to vehicles. Another professor thought that horses should be banished altogether, and the freight and passenger traffic in Broadway restricted to steam trains. To all the plans objections were made, and were frequently as wonderful in their way. Thus Engineer Craven of the Croton Board demonstrated at length in February, 1866, that no subway could ever be built, because it would interfere with the water supply; and even the Post called his argument “a knockdown blow.”
In the spring of 1867 the Evening Post was regarding hopefully two schemes before the Legislature, one for a “three-tier railroad” (subway, surface, and elevated), and one for a metropolitan underground line. In 1868 the Legislature actually authorized a steam subway from City Hall to Forty-second Street, the incorporators of which included such substantial men as William B. Ogden, William E. Dodge, and Henry W. Slocum, but the enterprise did nothing more than demonstrate the immediate impracticability of the plan. Three years later the Post had swung to the sensible view that an elevated would be better than a subway, for it had been shown that the latter would cost $30,000,000, and no one was ready to invest. Elevated construction had then already begun, and when Bryant died in 1878 there were four lines.
Subordinate to the two main subjects of housing and transit, a great variety of comments upon city affairs can be found in the post-bellum columns of the newspaper. One of the most frequent topics of editorial complaint in the years 1866–68 was the dirty and broken condition of the streets, which New York was paying a former Tammany Judge, James R. Whiting, $500,000 a year to neglect. Just before the war the Post had contended energetically for the introduction of sweeping machines, and now it objected to the contract system. Some city officer, it held, should be responsible. It anticipated Col.375 George F. Waring when it suggested that the city might well “engage an army officer used to drilling and handling a large number of men and accustomed to discipline, and put the streets in his charge, with a simple injunction to keep them clean, constantly, under all circumstances.” Early in the seventies we find the paper defending Henry Bergh, founder of the S. P. C. A., against journals which attacked his efforts to protect dumb animals as fanatical; applauding (February, 1873) the first stirrings of the movement to unite New York and Brooklyn under one government; and raising an agonized outcry over the postoffice which Mullet, the supervising architect of the Treasury, was building at City Hall Park.
That greater city toward which public-spirited men then looked was sketched in an editorial of 1867 entitled “New York in 19—.” The Evening Post hoped that before the twentieth century was far advanced Central Park would be really central, and the upper part of the island as populous as the lower. Brooklyn would have been united governmentally with New York, and physically by several bridges thrown across the East River. There should be a great railway station in the heart of the city, near the chief hotels, and freight stations only on its borders. Retail trade would be scattered, and “the Stewarts of that day will be found on broad, clean cross streets near the Central Park”; while spacious markets would have supplanted “the filthy sheds” in which provisions were then sold. “The streets of New York will be no longer rough and dirty; they will be covered with a smooth pavement like that ... now laid on a part of Nassau Street or covered with asphaltum, like some of the pavements of Paris.” Whoever wrote the editorial might to-day call this much of the prophecy fairly realized. But he went on to picture an adequate system of tenements, comfortable, sanitary, and cheap, managed by public-spirited corporations; a rapid transit system sufficient for all needs; and a shore line equipped with fine piers and basins, modern warehouses, and the best376 loading and unloading apparatus—all of which still belongs to a Utopian vision.
II
 
The most important municipal questions, however, arose from Tammany politics; and the city which was so sluggish and blundering in sheltering itself and transporting itself was more so in governing itself. The history of the most memorable years of New York’s administration was condensed by the Evening Post in the seventies into a short municipal epic:
In eighteen hundred and seventy
The Charter was purchased by W. M. T.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-one
The Tweed Ring’s stealing had all been done.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-two
The amount of the stealing the people knew.
By eighteen hundred and seventy-three
Most of the thieves had decided to flee.
In eighteen hundred and seventy-four
Tweed was allowed his freedom no more.
This epic starts, as it should, in medias res. An enormous amount of stealing had been done before 1870, and the disclosures of the summer of 1871 were by no means so une............