Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana said in The Life of Reason (1905), “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Other writers and politicians have expressed the same sentiment, and likewise framed it in the negative; “those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it” is what most people say now. It’s interesting to consider why the aphorism was never framed in the affirmative, like, “We study the past so we might live better in the future.”
I’ve always known making sense of New York’s built environment in this way was important, seeing development from a holistic point of view, how everything was connected at the 35,000 foot view; but I also knew it wasn’t very relevant to people’s lives. I didn’t think much about what the first post or posts would be after 15 years, I assumed they’d be about the Five Points, the Gilded Age, or the sewer system or something. Then last year I decided to tell the whole story right out of the gate in just a few posts; basically the blueprint for building the city.
The first four posts looked at the three uptown-moving waves of development and redevelopment that ran from City Hall to Central Park: residential neighborhoods, followed by upper and middle class shops and theaters, and finally blue and white collar factories and offices (live, play and work, in that order). Each wave was overrun and overran the next through the middle of the island. The whole program traces back to City Hall beginning in the 1830s when fine blocks of homes, followed by prestigious hotels, shops and theaters, and then early skyscrapers were, for all practical purposes, “launched” uptown one after another, decades apart, up Broadway from City Hall.
The area around City Hall was a spectacular, centrally located isolated patch of high ground that, for its elevation and location, was in the middle of everywhere but convenient to nothing. It was an ancient Lenape camp ground and became a repository of civic buildings in Colonial days. By 1800 the neighborhood had the finest residential blocks in the city, and City Hall itself was completed in 1811. New York’s first societies, clubs, and cultural institutions were housed in buildings on the grounds, and in the course of a few decades the area transitioned into a fashionable cosmopolitan center of fine hotels, theaters, shops, museums, societies and clubs.
After 30 years living across from City Hall, John Jacob Astor and his family left for quieter spaces a mile or so up Broadway in the early 1830s, and settled the two finest high ground sites beyond the developed city: Houston Street at the top of Broadway, where Astor himself lived, and Astor Place (Colonnade Row, aka La Grange), where his children and grandchildren lived, an even more pleasant high ground situation. Astor replaced the downtown family home (and those of his neighbors) with Astor House (1836), the finest hotel in the country.
John Jacob Astor lived the last 10 years of his long life looking out over the city from his perch between Prince and Houston Streets, across from Niblo’s Garden, a popular place of amusement, and just where Broadway plateaus after climbing up from Canal Street and enters today’s NoHo. Back then, St. Thomas Episcopal Church stood at the top of the hill on the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston, where the Cable Building stands today. Two-hundred years ago, where Broadway flattens out beyond Houston Street led to a band of suburban, residential developments stretching from Greenwich Village to Tompkins Square Park, and from Houston Street to 14th Street; the finest residential sections were designated Places (like St. Mark’s Place), most all are gone today.
Astor passed away in his home at the crest of Broadway in 1848, and in the mid-1850s the finest shops and hotels around City Hall “departed” for the very neighborhood Astor himself settled 20 years earlier. Further up, the Academy of Music opened on 14th Street near Union Square, beyond the developed Village blocks, and was the first major uptown-moving institution on “the grid.” (The Astor Opera House and accompanying riots are necessarily given short shrift here.)
About the same time the city’s finest shops, theaters and hotels were relocating up Broadway, in the other three directions from City Hall, the city developed in different ways, differently. Development in the other three directions came in the form of the needs of business, and more precisely, the business of shipping: financing, labor and storage; that is, banks, tenements and warehouses; today’s Financial District, the Lower East Side, and Tribeca.
The South Street Seaport is New York’s oldest extant business district with full blocks of brick store-and-loft buildings and countinghouses from the 1810s and earlier. As the economic engine of the early economy, working class residential (tenement), and money-management (especially banking) districts, developed nearby; a wholesale market on Pearl Street, a shipyard to the north, and piers on the shoreline have all but vanished today. With the widening of Dey and Cortlandt Streets in the early 1850s, store-and-loft buildings crossed Broadway, sealing Tribeca’s fate for the next 80 years; this, while bank and tenement districts continued to grow in situ on the other two sides of City Hall.
Banks, tenements and warehouses did move uptown: banks went up Broadway and Fifth Ave; tenements, in the periphery; and warehouse and factory buildings occupied shoreline blocks. What downtown districts didn’t do, unlike the uptown leapfrogging “city,” was uproot, and leave behind where they came from. And just as the uptown-leapfrogging “city” overran earlier residential neighborhoods, downtown banks, tenements, and warehouse buildings overtook earlier Georgian, Federal and Greek Revival homes and neighborhoods throughout the land apron stretching from City Hall to the East River, The Battery, and the Hudson. The three downtown districts are comprised of two layers of development (an earlier home, and then either a finance-related building, tenement or warehouse), while the blocks between City Hall and Central Park, especially along Broadway and Fifth avenue, are comprised of three layers of development.
The city’s growth and expansion unfolded like a differential equation, a complex process initiated with the first two, of New York’s four, iconic mass immigrant waves: the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-51, and the German “48ers.” (The 1849 California gold rush was also impacting the economy at the same time.) The city had virtually no zoning laws and developers built whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted. Beginning in the 1850s, and for nearly a century after, with each business cycle a “city” of shops and theaters leapfrogged uptown, while downtown growth progressed block-by-block in the form of tenements, banks, and warehouses in the other directions from City Hall. There were exceptions for sure, tenements were built in Tribeca, and warehouses were in the Lower East Side, but the preponderance of history was the reverse. The built environment unfolded in a great land differentiation in the four ordinal directions from City Hall, algorithmically divined by the super-positioning of two realms of power: the wants and needs of property owners and their ever-revolving door of clientele.
A brief description of Tribeca, the Lower East Side, and the Financial District.
Tribeca
Before the 1950s, Tribeca was commonly called the Lower West Side. Most all of it owned by Trinity Church from early on, there was little good high ground west of Broadway below Canal Street, where wooden homes were rarely replaced with brick ones. St. John’s Park (1803), an early Federal-era residential development built on a manicured park, was far afield on a rare patch of high ground; otherwise most of Tribeca (the TRIangle BElow CAnal) was a marshy wetland called Lispenard’s Meadow. The most substantially developed blocks were around Broadway, City Hall and Chambers Street; long time institutional neighborhood super-block super-structures were Columbia University and New York Hospital; American Express started operations at Jay and Hudson Streets in the heart of Tribeca, like so much else, in the 1850s.
With the widening of Dey and Cortlandt Streets in 1851, Tribeca’s commercial transformation into a district of warehouses commenced. Murray and Warren Streets were the first full-blocks redeveloped into cast-iron store-and-loft buildings in the mid-1850s. Year-by-year development followed blocks west of Broadway uptown: Chambers, Reade, Duane and Worth Streets, until the mid-1860s when a burst of construction between Leonard and Canal Streets came alongside Vanderbilt’s new St. John’s Freight Terminal (1866), on the former site of St. John’s Park. Columbia relocated uptown, and the hospital, its grounds encumbered by commerce, moved up to 15th Street; American Express thrived in the blocks to the west. Large warehouses and factories filled blocks leading to the Hudson River over the following decades. The shoreline handled the chaos of shipping lines and the stevedores, and the immense Washington Market grew nearby the site of the World Trade Center.
As store and loft buildings and wholesale textile markets expanded into blocks of larger warehouses for breaking bulk and trans-shipments, and more wholesale markets, on the other side of City Hall tenements grew taller.
Lower East Side
Here’s a link to a 2010 post that discusses the earlier geography of the Lower East Side.
No one’s sure where the first purpose-built tenement went up in the 1820s, but it was almost surely in or nearby today’s Lower East Side; the oldest known surviving tenement is 65 Mott Street (1824). Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives) described how the first brick tenements were godsends for the residents, lifting them from the damp, miasmatic cellars of shanties and decrepit houses. Tenement construction took off after the 1850s with the massive influx of Irish and German immigration, and when earlier Georgian and Federal homes that had been converted for earlier immigrants decades before began to deteriorate.
By its 1867 definition, a tenement is a situation where more than two families are living and cooking independently on a floor. Given standard lot sizes of 25 x 100, it assumed an over-crowded and working class lifestyle in a time when respectable families lived in homes, and individuals lived in boardinghouses (shared-living in a converted home), or stayed short- or long-term in hotels or apartment-hotels, where a long-term lease might include an 8 room suite, but no kitchen. Kitchens in single family homes were in the basement and in the back (and the domain of servants). Though having one’s bedroom on the same floor as other rooms was the greatest social obstacle to “apartment living” for people of status and means, kitchens, in a time before refrigeration, were simply unthinkable in close quarters.
Tenements were built on 25 x 100 lots because that as the basic building block of the city; as well, it was soon realized tenement housing on larger footprints yielded less of a return. Three or more families living per floor with separate kitchens, stacked atop each other on a 25 x 100 footprint, only meant poverty at that time. The New York tenement did not evolve from any other existing form, nor did it evolve into any other form; it had a beginning and an end.
The typical tenement was a commercial-residential hybrid form expressly built for the working class. A saloon or grocer typically occupied the ground floor, and apartments with a few windowless rooms above. Except for the prevalence of windowless rooms, the tenement situation was not unlike a flat, which had been around since proprietors lived above their stores. Families in flats were fewer to a floor, making a few windowless rooms more like over-sized closets instead of main living spaces; and residents in flats might have their own plumbing. Flats existed alongside tenements in the Lower east Side and were virtually indistinguishable from the outside, except of having locked doors and working doorbells. While “flats” evolved into French flats, flats were razed alongside scores of tenements in the 20th century in the Lower East Side.
It’s not clear who was the first absentee landlord to build tracts of unmanaged tenement housing; one could pick from a list of prominent New York families. Even with that, people we might think today would have a sense of the situation, did not; Quakers, philanthropists and missionaries fell short in fundamental ways in honest efforts to aid and assist the worst off of the newly arriving immigrants. Missionaries often focused too hard on the soul and not the physical destitution, and model tenements in one way or another fell short when it came to either sewage, light or ventilation. There were no laws, and little overall understanding of health or hygiene. The real problem, however, was the non-stop volume of people; model tenements built in the 1850s were housing twice as many as originally intended by the 1870s. Earlier shortcomings almost didn’t matter.
New York’s iconic population growth is often described as exponential, and given the sheer scale and magnitude of growth, it could have been. But if 120 years of growth from 33,000 to 2.4 million was exponential, the explosive pace of change over time would have likely caused the built environment history to unfold very differently. It was a geometric progression, and it was front loaded. It works to consider history in 30-year chunks. Beginning in 1790 (33,000), the population quadrupled over the first 30 years to 1820 (125,000), then quadrupled again over the next 30 years to 1850 (515,000) (after which Madison Square is settled as a brownstone residential neighborhood). With exponential growth, the rate would accelerate after this point, when in fact, the population “merely” doubles over the next 30 years to 1880 (1.3 million) (but at a number so high it’s not like anyone noticed the slower pace). Exponential and geometric progressions can both get to very large numbers. The new rate of growth held steady for the next 30 years and the population doubled again by 1910 (2.3 million). For nearly a century people poured in and out of the Lower East Side in an ongoing unfolding human history event that warranted Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty of Liberty (as seen through Emma Larzarus’ eyes), and a museum (the Tenement Museum) that receives 250,000 visitors a year. It’s existentially fascinating there exists such a museum at all.
Relatively speaking, the first half was a greater shock to the system than the second half, and the city adjusted evolving into a tenement-building machine. Within a short time, immigrants themselves were the builders and landlords to their own people and others. Tenements were built in uptown districts since the horsecar lines of the 1850s, but the Lower East Side saw a century of chronic tenement construction; a tenement district of tenement districts, often of intolerable densities. The worst case may have been the Eastern European Jews; poorer than other groups and arriving as entire families, they did not return home (at a rate of .03%), and were accustomed to the overcrowded conditions of the shtetl and the pale such that multiple families often occupied a single room.
Legislation in 1879 and 1901 were a race between laws regulating airshafts between the buildings to get ventilation and sunlight to dark, inner rooms, and the developers’ constant drive to build as much square footage as possible to rent out. The result is a rudimentary taxonomy of tenement-types: Pre-law, Old Law, and New Law. In the end, the developers won as the solution would be to tear the buildings down.
To different extents, different groups recreated, reinvented, and/or assimilated old cultures into new American lives through the medium of the tenement. And working class and slum conditions did not mean middle class lives weren’t being lived in the tenements, some families had pianos, if little space for one. Regardless, as the “city” moved uptown, poverty didn’t move, and the Lower East Side remained an expanding portal of general struggle and survival, generationally growing as different peoples sorted in and out in a uniquely human chaos. The Lower East Side was an incubator and landing pad for many groups, the largest were the Irish, Germans, Italians and Eastern European Jews. Whether they came as whole or partial families, or alone; whether they intended to stay or return home, or do whatever it took to get out; whether they were destitute, poor, or middle class; whether they lived in cellars over sinking landfill, or on upper floors; whether disease, alcoholism, prostitution, or gambling touched on, or infused the buildings and blocks where they lived; whether they assimilated or passed through with their cultures, values and traditions in tact, or somewhere in between. These were the threads of an invisible human tapestry woven through a built environment of a much more knowable, uniform, often dehumanizing history.
Two geographically coincident histories, opposite sides of the same “social coin,” speak to the outright failure of tenement housing: the history of American gangs, and the origins of self-help groups. The Ancient Order of the Hibernians (1836), B’nai Brith (1843), The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (1883), and Sons of Italy (1905) are global, multi-million dollar ethnic self-help groups and all were founded within a short walk of each other in the Lower East Side (B’nai Brith was founded a year earlier in San Francisco). Then too, from the headquarters of the Forty Thieves in the 1820s (now roughly 500 Pearl Street and the reputed site of the first American gang), to the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street of late-20th century mafia lore, is a 1/2 mile walk and covers 200 years of “gangland” history. Other associations calling the area home through time were: various Five Points gangs (the Dead Rabbits, Chichesters, Plug Uglies…), the Bowery Boys, Whyos, Paul Kelly’s Five Points Gang, the Eastmans, the Black Hand, and a good part of 20th century Mafia history.
The black community was a significant part of the early Five Points neighborhood. The black population was disproportionately large during the slave trade, and dwindled within the city’s growing numbers until the Draft Riots of 1863, when many were driven from the city. The story of the rise of the black community though Manhattan neighborhood by neighborhood, often by church congregation, in smaller numbers but at the vanguard of other working class communities, to Harlem, followed by the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, is integral, singular and inspirational in New York City history. It’s reasonable to consider people are walking around Harlem today with bloodlines that trace to the Dutch days.
Reports in the 1840s of rampant deaths in the black community in the cellars of the Five Points from typhoid and other maladies spread by way of lectures and meeting halls in society settings. The riotous and lurid conditions of the Five Points were a tourist attraction long before Charles Dicken’s visit in 1842 supercharged curiosity on the international level. Involvement by philanthropists, Quakers and missionaries in the 1850s met with limited success, as noted. In 1867 the first laws were passed that defined the tenement as a building type, and cellar dwelling was addressed, 20 years after the initial reports of the dire situation. Tenements grew taller and airshafts grew wider, and fifty years later people regularly fell from fire escapes and rooftops sleeping on hot summer nights in overcrowded buildings.
Charles Loring Brace started the Children’s Aid Society in 1853, and operated the Orphan Trains from 1854-1929. The trains began running after the Irish and German waves, and continued for 75 years through the Italian and Jewish waves. Estimates are 2,000-3,000 a year, between 150,000 – 300,000 children, were sent out west on trains to futures that are essentially black holes in the historical record. It was a voluntary program for children of little agency. Agents accompanied children through the process, and by all accounts no child went unwillingly. It was part of the agents job, however, to ensure siblings had no way to contact each other at the end of the process. And the process was a cross-country whistle-stop tour of small towns where children were adopted to families and farms through local vetting in an auction-like setting with a stage or public auditorium. A documentary years later told the story of a few of them, and many fared well. There was, though, nothing in place to follow up on a program that ran for decades before and after the Gilded Age.
The last of the three downtown districts, Wall Street, had the least amount of space to work with, and buildings had no where to go up; luckily they had the money to do just that.
The Financial District
To the extent this post seeks to put City Hall at the epicenter of development, Wall Street and the Financial District are very well-known in history, so just a few salient points. The Financial District could be considered everything below City Hall, though the blocks between City Hall and Wall Street are sometimes considered the Insurance District. Wall Street, a short, single block in early history, has grown to subsume all of the island below City Hall, and the first half of city history going back to the Dutch. The tip of Manhattan is a catch-bin of architectural history with buildings of every technology, and nearly every style and use from Georgian homes to Art Deco and Modern skyscrapers.
Wall Street was a fine residential block in the days of the Founding Fathers. New York’s first bank, the Bank of New York, was started by Alexander Hamilton (a Federalist, think upper class) in 1784 and moved a few times within the blocks of old New Amsterdam. Aaron Burr (a Democrat-republican, think working class) started the Manhattan Bank in 1799, after which both banks were on Wall Street. The Tontine Coffee House at the corner of Wall and Water Streets held highly caffeinated auctions for commodities in the hulls of nearby ships. Shenanigans led to a splinter group of traders to break off and start the New York Stock Exchange further down the street; the Bank of New York was one of their first customers. Homes on Wall Street converted to brokerages and insurance firms; the last residential holdout survived until the 1850s.
The first “office” building, where the accounting portion and record keeping of the countinghouse were housed away from machinery, materials and the labor of “work,” was next to Trinity Church, and for a coal company. The business of lower Manhattan was shipping lines, ticket offices, and freight forwarders, and were gradually subsumed by the businesses of business, and national and multinational companies headquartered in lower Manhattan (and later departed for Rockefeller Center). The white collar office building, and tower, would be the built environment legacy of the Financial District.
New York had nine buildings that were the tallest in the world, three were around City Hall (Wall Street had one); Newspaper Row was centered on City Hall util it was “launched” uptown from City Hall; and the Brooklyn Bridge would turn the neighborhood into a major transit hub when it opened in 1883. City Hall was an epicenter of New York City’s growth and development; in every direction the city developed in different ways, differently.
One last post should conclude the special relaunch series.