John Sloan (1871-1951) had a unique talent for captivating the spirit of Manhattan’s daily life and his paintings have kept a contemporary quality, if only for their inspiring compassion.
Ever since arriving from his native Philadelphia in Greenwich Village, he used his studio on the eleventh floor of a building at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street as an observation post from where he could watch the city’s “social theater.”
The artist was drawn to painting the spectacle of tenement rooftops where people performed daily activities, relaxed or socialized. He captured images of a woman hanging her laundry, another reading the Sunday paper, a man training his pigeons or a couple sunbathing.
Roofs meant freedom. In Lower Manhattan they offered escape from the suffocating confines of tenement living. Sloan brought dignity to an environment that had been singled out by social reformers as a stain upon civilized life.
The Tenement Era
Contemporary New York took shape in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when miles upon miles of tenements and modest apartments sprang up from the Lower East Side through the outer boroughs to house working people in a rapidly expanding city.
Early experiments in purpose-built housing by making more efficient use of available space increased density. New buildings filled the open yards of existing structures. Rear tenements were erected behind older red brick row houses, providing one or sometimes two living units on each floor.
A tenement is a (run-down) type of building, divided into small separate apartments that were rented out. Tenements started out as subdivided single-family homes meant for workers and immigrants with minimum standards of sanitation or comfort. The buildings were characterized by overcrowding.
The origin of the Anglo-French term “tenement” has little to do with slums or poverty. According to Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology it dates back to 1303 and referred to the leasing of land or buildings.
At some time before 1400, it came to mean a leased dwelling place. Tenement in the sense of a “house broken up into apartments” typically located in poor districts, was first recorded in American-English by 1858.
As Manhattan’s population boomed in the first half of the nineteenth century and demand for houses outstripped supply, unscrupulous builders began constructing substandard multi-family dwellings that lacked basic amenities such as natural light or fresh air. Between 1820 and 1850 large of numbers of tenements were constructed in a rush.
A “vernacular landscape” is a socio-cultural environment shaped by people through their occupancy, offering an insight into the relationship between communities and their surroundings. Embedded in these spaces are lived experiences in addition to inherited attitudes.
Tenements make up much of Manhattan’s fabric. As these buildings were intimately tied to patterns of mass migration, they tell a story about diverse cultural outlooks that forged the cosmopolitan nature of the metropolis.
Immigrant families occupied cramped apartments in buildings that were firetraps with shoddy plumbing in dark and dank conditions. By the end of the Civil War, “tenement” had become a current term for those Manhattan dwellings that were associated with unsafe and unsanitary settings.
The term kept that negative connotation until 1929 when the Multiple Dwelling Law was passed stressing that the “establishment and maintenance of proper housing standards requiring sufficient light, air, sanitation and protection from fire hazards are essential to the public welfare.”
The Weeks Tenement
Mott Street is thought to have been named after Joseph Mott, a former butcher who ran a tavern at what is now 143rd and 8th Avenue which served as headquarters for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. The family name goes back to Adam de la Motte who had arrived from England in 1635.
It was at 65 Mott Street that Manhattan’s first tenement was built in about 1824 (the construction date has been contested) with an unprecedented height of seven stories that dwarfed the surrounding wooden two-story homes.
The building had a ground-level storefront and four units on each of the upper levels. Each unit consisted of two rooms: a combined kitchen and living room with two windows facing the street or rear and a small windowless bedroom. Sanitary arrangements were earthen privies in the back “yard.” It became Manhattan’s typical working-class home.
The builder of the property was Jacob Weeks who was raised in the same street where his father (a Quaker immigrant from England) ran a grocery store.
Once the Lower East Side began to attract large numbers of European immigrants, the Weeks family followed the northward movement of Manhattan’s wealthier inhabitants, relocating in the 1840s to a Greek Revival styled townhouse near Gramercy Park.
Jacob Weeks thrived as an entrepreneur and property developer. By 1880 he was living in a five-story house on 58th Street and 5th Avenue where he was a neighbor to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Yet the family continued to own and financially milk the Mott Street tenement until the early twentieth century.
Tenements were unsafe dwellings mirroring an era in which immigrants were exploited as their wages provided for little better than squalor.
The dire destitution was exposed by reformers such as the Danish-born photographer Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Published in 1890, his book How the Other Half Lives (subtitled Studies among the Tenements of New York) caused an outcry and led to an investigation.
The Tenement House Act of 1901 called for reforms and led to the creation of New York’s Tenement House Department which issued annual reports from 1902 onward.
Ironically, the Riis images hit the nation at a time that the very streetscapes he had captured were being modified from within the communities themselves.
Immigrant Builders
From the 1867 Tenement House Act onward, New York’s authorities passed various laws mandating the improvement of tenements. During the 1880s, the “slums” were being replaced by scores of new buildings with better amenities. These properties were not just inhabited by immigrants, but they initiated their design and construction as well.
These builders were small-scale entrepreneurs and recent immigrants (some of them were trained in their home nation). Italians, Germans and Russian Jews brought with them their own concepts of urban living.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of tenement builders and architects were members of a multi-cultural immigrant community.
With ideas that were shaped in Berlin, Naples, Vilnius or Kyiv, their designs spoke to the aspirations and memories of Manhattan’s growing immigrant working classes. They would transform the city’s housing stock.
Seeking to take control of their own destiny, the drive for improved living conditions came from within the immigrant community itself.
Campaigners may have been encouraged by the intervention of reformers, but they expressed cultural priorities of their own. Their prime concerns were often at variance with, if not opposed to, current notions of taste and domesticity.
Reformers who dominated the American discourse on the social environment, regarded multi-family housing a symptom of misery, a state of affairs to be eradicated, not elaborated or improved upon.
Steeped in European urbanism, immigrant builders had inherited a fundamentally different view of city planning. A clash between “luxury belief” and social reality was inevitable.
Herter Brothers
Immigrant architects began developing the advanced types of multi-family housing they were familiar with. Moving to the city of New York in the early 1880s, Bonn-born brothers Peter, Henry and Francis Herter were educated at Berlin’s prestigious “Bauakademie” (Building Academy) where they were introduced to new structural methods and decorative techniques (particularly the use of iron and terra cotta), whilst employing loosely classical styles and forms.
Former students of the academy brought about an elaborate mode of building to the streets of Central Europe that reflected a tradition of urban architecture with memories of Renaissance Italy. Large properties built to house economically diverse residents were dubbed “rental palaces.” These were closely identified with Berlin.
The German metropolis was said to be the world’s largest tenement city, rivaled in scale only by New York. In these long and narrow buildings of flats, wealthy residents occupied the largest street-facing apartments, whilst more modest accommodations were reached through a series of courtyards.
The facades were rich with idiosyncratic and multi-cultural details rendered in stucco. These types of ornamentation came to define the built cityscape of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Herter Brothers transported their concept of housing to Manhattan. In an 1892 essay, Peter Herter described the housing he found on the Lower East Side as gloomy in appearance and beneath the dignity of communities that had settled there.
The Herter brothers made it their mission to accommodate rising demands. With the streets of European cities as a reference point, they appropriated strategies of enlargement and made those apartments available to a wider audience.
Henry Herter was the oldest of the brothers and the first to reach New York City. He soon began experimenting with elaborate facade treatments. Shortly after his arrival he worked on behalf of developer Solomon Jacobs, also a German immigrant.
Adapting to new means of production, he crafted his decorative elements with industrially produced and affordable materials such as cast iron, terracotta or stamped sheet metal. To the delight of tenants, he and fellow developers introduced profuse quantities of ornament to break the monotony of standardized building.
Tenement buildings designed by the Herter brothers offered larger and brighter rooms than had been the case previously. The richly-decorated building at 375 Broome Street remains nearly unaltered to this day.
Erected around 1890, the brothers used red brick, limestone and terra cotta to produce an extraordinary front of the building.
Reformers & Progressivists
The vast majority of decorated tenements were occupied and built by first- or second-generation immigrants. Their appearance distressed architects, reformers and many observers.
This elite circle described these erections as crude and vulgar monstrosities, the products of a “skin-builder.” The term circulated at the time and indicated the design of an attractive facade that disguised inadequate or flimsy construction.
Progressivism was a multi-faceted effort by educated Americans to reform their country’s socio-economic politics. Reformers referred to a “slum landscape” as a site of unmitigated squalor in a set of visual images aimed at shocking their suburban audiences.
They were reluctant to acknowledge decorated tenements at all or else treat them as bogus buildings. These images soon turned into stereotyped notions that were repeated time and again.
In March 1901 Udo Joseph Keppler published a cartoon in the magazine Puck entitled “The Tenement – A Menace to All” which displayed a summary of social problems associated with tenements.
The illustration (inspired by literary Naturalism which focused on the uglier aspects of urban life) shows the “spirits” of alcoholism, opium addiction, prostitution, crime and gambling as well as the figure of Death issuing from a tenement house.
Progressivists wanted to tear these “evil” buildings down. A central goal of urban reform activists was the elimination of tenements.
It is here that Jacob Riis and fellow reformers clashed with the interests of people who occupied these much improved apartments thanks to the intervention of immigrant architects and builders.
They failed to appreciate the forward steps that had been made in the quality of life in former “slum” areas. For tenants, these buildings meant more than a reminder of their past. They were a manifestation of the ability to shape their immigrant identity and that of their communities.
Dynamic stages in history have one ingredient in common: they are receptive to outside influences and open to newcomers. The “other” is welcomed, not demonized.
Not chained by conventional rules and regulations or hampered by local traditions, the migrant’s “oblique” perspective unleashes a liberating spirit. Creativity thrives on difference and boundaries are there to be crossed. Alternative views and novel conceptual combinations make for a richer culture.
How does society stifle a vibrant culture? By blocking immigration.
Illustrations, from above: John Sloan’s “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair,” 1912 (Addison Gallery of American Art); Cigar Rollers Tenement; 65 Mott Street, Manhattan’s first tenement (ca. 1824); 375 Broome Street, designed by the Herter Brothers about 1890; and Udo Joseph Keppler’s “The Tenement – A Menace to All,” published in Puck, March 20, 1901 (Cartoon Library, Ohio State University).
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