Flesh and Blood So Cheap

by Albert Marrin

  Chicago built the first skyscrapers, achieving the stunning height of ten stories, about 110 feet. Yet Manhattan, ever short on space, quickly took the lead in skyscraper construction. By 1913, it had the tallest building on earth, the fifty-five-story Woolworth Building. When seen from a ship’s deck, Manhattan’s skyline amazed English novelist H. G. Wells. “The skyscrapers, that are the New Yorker’s perpetual boast and pride … stand out, in a clustering group [to form] the strangest crown that a city ever wore.”3

  The teeming streets of the Lower East Side, 1907. (picture credit 2.6)

  Manhattan construction workers, two hundred feet above the ground on the skeleton of a skyscraper, in 1907. (picture credit 2.7)

  The Woolworth Building under construction, circa 1910. Notice the steel framework. (picture credit 2.8)

  Skyscrapers were both tall and convenient, thanks to other inventions. Elevators sped passengers to the top floor within seconds. Telephones allowed people to speak to each other from anywhere in the city. In the early 1900s, telephone wires were not buried in the ground, but hung in metallic “cobwebs” from lines of wooden poles placed along the streets. An English visitor, W. G. Marshall, marveled at New York’s “perfect maze of telephone and telegraph wires crossing and recrossing each other.… The sky, indeed, is blackened by them, and it is as if you were looking through the meshes of a net.”4

  Old-time cities were “walking cities”—that is, small enough to allow a healthy person to walk anywhere in about an hour. Ferries and wooden bridges allowed one to cross streams and narrow rivers. Those who could afford them rode horses or went about in horse-drawn buggies. Horse-drawn “omnibuses” carried ordinary folks for a penny or two; horse-drawn wagons hauled goods from place to place. Horses, however, left behind tons of manure each day, more than sanitation workers could clear away. Things got so bad that women in the wealthy Beekman Hill section of Manhattan complained about a manure pile twenty-five feet high. When it rained, streams of liquefied manure turned streets into gooey, evil-smelling swamps. In dry weather, the wind blew the filth, turned to fine dust, into people’s faces, homes, and food. Dozens died each year from inhaling poisonous “street dust.”5

  As cities grew, they built modern transportation systems. Again, New York took the lead. In 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened. Then the world’s longest bridge, it stretched more than a mile across the East River, connecting the town (later borough) of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Gradually, electrified “street cars” replaced horses and horse-drawn vehicles. So did automobiles.

  The Brooklyn Bridge, looking from Brooklyn toward Manhattan, showing the 1901 skyline. (picture credit 2.9)

  A 1909 illustration depicting the brand-new New York City subway, which opened in 1904. (picture credit 2.10)

  Starting in the 1870s, elevated railways made mass transit a reality, and a bargain at five cents a ride. Riding was an adventure. “The tracks are lifted to a height of thirty feet (in some places higher) upon iron pillars,” wrote W. G. Marshall. “As you sit in a car on the ‘L’ and are being whirled along, you can put your head out of [the] window and salute a friend who is walking on the street pavement below. In some places, where the streets are narrow, the railway is built right over the sidewalks … close up against the walls of the houses.” At night, the trains seemed to run “at full speed on nothing through the air.” In 1904, New York opened its first underground rail line, or “subway.”6

  Rich folk did not ride the subway. When they went about town, it was in luxurious carriages and the most expensive automobiles, like royalty. The wealthy felt entitled to everything they had, because God supposedly made them “better” than ordinary folk. Showing off their wealth proved their superiority, making others give them the respect they claimed to deserve.

  A sumptuous banquet in New York City, circa 1900. Note the wreaths in the guests’ hair. (picture credit 2.11)

  New York’s wealthiest lived on “Millionaires’ Row,” a row of mansions along Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park. For example, Andrew Carnegie’s home had eighty rooms on four floors. The steel baron, however, also gave generously to charity. Too many others spent fortunes on nonsense. Some gathered on horseback in elegant dining rooms with crystal chandeliers and thick carpets. For hours, they stuffed themselves with lobster, guzzled champagne, and, after dessert, smoked cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar bills. Others gave “dog dinners” at which their pets wore gold collars and ate the best cuts of steak. Immigrants lived more simply.7

  The Easter Parade along Fifth Avenue, 1906, where the wealthy could see and be seen. (picture credit 2.12)

  The World of the Greenhorn

  Immigrants often passed through New York, bound for other places where they had relatives and friends. Most Italians and Russian Jews, however, chose to stay in the city, in neighborhoods with people like themselves. There, at least, “greenhorns” (unseasoned newcomers) could feel comfortable speaking their native language and practicing familiar customs. Italians headed for Little Italy, near the southern end of Manhattan Island, around Mulberry Street. Russian Jews settled in the adjoining district, the Lower East Side, bordering the East River.

  New York City had been founded at the southern end of Manhattan. Over the years, it spread northward, toward Washington Square and beyond, as well-to-do families sought more space and privacy. Yet their old houses still had value. To meet the rising demand for immigrant housing, landlords cut these into tiny apartments. Sometimes, they rented cellars or built another house, little more than a shack, in the backyard. Thus, greenhorns crowded into districts never intended to house such large numbers. Every building, an English visitor wrote, “seemed to sweat humanity at every window and door.”8

  To make things worse, in the 1880s landlords built “dumbbell” tenements. Five or six stories high, these took their name from an indentation on each side; viewed from above, the indentations made them look like weight lifters’ dumbbells. The idea was to create an air shaft, or passage for letting fresh air in, between tenements built up against each other. This meant that only one room on the tenement’s narrowest side had direct light from the street. A child once described her home as “a place so dark it seemed as if there weren’t no sky.” Air shafts also became huge garbage cans for household trash and rats.9

  (picture credit 2.13)

  Adjoining dumbbell tenements. Note the air shaft between them. (picture credit 2.14)

  Designed to house as many people as possible, the dumbbell tenement had four apartments on a floor. Each had three or four rooms, the largest just ten by eleven feet. As many as seven people might live in such a room. A four-room apartment rented for twelve dollars a month; a three-room apartment cost eight dollars. Those costs may seem small by today’s standards. In the early 1900s, however, they took a large bite out of workers’ wages, often more than half. If you missed one or two rent payments, the landlord would evict you—that is, have his movers put all your belongings out on the sidewalk. There they lay until you found another place to live, or thieves stole them, or rain ruined them.

  Tenement hallways had toilets (two per floor) and a water faucet. Apartments had no showers, so adults washed with a sponge dipped in a basin of water from the faucet. Mothers bathed small children in a basin or the kitchen sink. You never knew what to expect when you turned a faucet handle. “Once,” said Rose Halpern, of Stanton Street, “I was washing my hands in the sink and a rat dropped right into my hands.”10

  A floor plan of a dumbbell tenement. (picture credit 2.15)

  Lack of toilets forced residents to relieve themselves wherever they could. “In the evening,” said an official report, “every [parked] wagon becomes a private and public lavatory, and the odor and stench … is perfectly horrible.” Many did not bother to leave their apartment. An old-timer recalled: “Every apartment had chamber pots. You used to crap in the pot instead of going downstairs.… They used to throw the stuff out the windows. You’d get nailed with it. That was very common.”
11

  Only the lucky few had beds of their own. With space so limited, children slept two or three, even four to a bed. Often their parents took in boarders, men or women, relatives or strangers, to share the rent. Boarders slept wherever they could stretch out. Some slept in the kitchen on two chairs with boards laid across. Come morning, they had to remove the boards so others could walk into the kitchen or to the hallway toilets. Other boarders might sleep on a straw-filled sack on the floor, on the bare floor, or, in warm weather, on the fire escape. “In summertime,” a social worker reported, “the children sleep on the steps and on covered chicken coops along the sidewalk; for inside the rooms are too often small and stifling.”12

  Tenements’ narrow stairways and wooden stairs made them firetraps. In 1890, pioneer photographer Jacob Riis set out to document immigrant life. Using the newly invented flash powder, Riis went into tenements, basements, and alleys at night. The result was How the Other Half Lives, a classic picture-and-word study of immigrant life in New York. Riis described a typical tenement fire:

  A fire panic at night in a tenement … is a horror that has few parallels in human experience. I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in a First Avenue tenement. It was in the middle of the night. The fire had swept up with a sudden fury from a restaurant on the street floor, cutting off escape. Men and women threw themselves from the windows, or were carried down senseless by the firemen.… A half-grown girl with a baby in her arms walked among the dead and dying with a stunned, vacant look, singing in a low scared voice to the child. One of the doctors … patted the cheek of the baby soothingly. It was cold. The baby had been smothered with its father and mother; but the girl, her sister, did not know it. Her reason had fled.13

  A child getting a bath in a tenement home. (picture credit 2.16)

  Not everything was so bleak and miserable. Immigrants, fleeing cramped apartments, spent much of their time in the streets. Outdoors, the air fairly crackled with human energy. Everybody seemed in a hurry. “I never saw so many people on the streets, shouting, going in all directions,” a visitor wrote. Apart from the street signs, written in English, greenhorns might imagine themselves back in the old country.14

  An illustration of New Yorkers coping with a heat wave. (picture credit 2.17)

  (picture credit 2.18)

  JACOB RIIS,

  Photojournalist

  Jacob Riis created what we call today photojournalism. A Danish immigrant, he lived hand to mouth for a few years, then became a reporter for the New York Evening Sun. Riis had a tiny office on Mulberry Street. No mulberries grew on Mulberry Street anymore, for it lay in the heart of Little Italy. From his office, Riis set out to explore the city’s dark side with his camera. Until the 1880s, it was impossible to take pictures at night or in poorly lit places, like tenement hallways and apartments. A German invention called flash powder, ignited by an electric battery, lit up a space for an instant, allowing the photographer to take his picture. Riis’s “pictures of Gotham’s crime and misery by night and day” became the basis of a lecture called “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.” The photographer-reporter expanded the lecture into a book, How the Other Half Lives, a powerful document reformers used to arouse public opinion to the need for reform of living conditions in tenements.

  This photograph by Jacob Riis shows a rear view of tenements on Roosevelt Street, circa 1895. Lines were strung between buildings for hanging clothing since there were no mechanical dryers. (picture credit 2.19)

  Depending on the neighborhood, most shop signs were in Italian or Yiddish. People shopped and gossiped, argued and courted in their native language. “In the doorways, and on the steps of the staircases, on little wooden and straw stools almost in the middle of the street, women … nurse their young, sew … untangle and arrange one another’s hair.” On rooftops, weather permitting, they air-dried their hair after washing it.15

  Immigrants complained of hardships, not boredom. There was always something to do after work. Readers might spend hours poring over newspapers printed in their native language. These not only reported events in the old country, but gave advice about getting along in the new one. The Jewish Daily Forward, for example, had a famous column, the “Bintel Brief,” Yiddish for “Bundle of Letters.” This answered readers’ questions on every subject with common sense and humor. For example, a young man writes that he loves a woman, but a shtetl superstition keeps him from marrying her. “She has a dimple in her chin, and it is said that people who have this lose their first husband or wife.” The editor’s reply: “The trouble is not that the girl has a dimple in her chin but that some people have a screw loose in their heads.”16

  Note the Yiddish sign in the background. In the foreground, tenants have been evicted. (picture credit 2.20)

  The crowds at Coney Island, a day of entertainment for many New Yorkers. (picture credit 2.21)

  Despite hardships, Little Italy and the Lower East Side enjoyed a rich cultural life. Each neighborhood had many small restaurants and social clubs where people could gather and socialize. In Little Italy, traveling theater companies staged performances about everyday life. Italians laughed at comedies like Pasquale, You’re a Pig, and wept as poor Giovanni learned that his mother had died in Sicily. As in the old country, street puppeteers entertained children and adults with age-old tales of fair maidens rescued from evil bandits by gallant knights in shining armor. At the end of each show, viewers showed their appreciation by putting a few pennies on a plate passed around by a puppeteer. If Italians managed to save a little money or got lucky in the lottery, they might splurge on a real treat—a ticket for standing room at the famous Metropolitan Opera.

  The Yiddish theater was the crown jewel of Lower East Side entertainment. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Second Avenue had become the Yiddish Broadway. The place blazed with lights. Wherever you turned, you saw colorful posters advertising current shows and coming attractions. There was something to appeal to everyone’s taste. Plays like King Solomon, or the Love of the Song of Songs and Solomon’s Judgement had Bible themes. There were historical plays like Bar Kokhba, about the hero of a revolt against the Romans, and plays about work life, such as Anna the Finisher, whose heroine was a garment worker. Yiddish translations of classic plays by William Shakespeare—Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear—drew large audiences. Theatergoers roared at the antics of shtetl characters like Tevye the Milkman and cried at the fate of kin during a pogrom. As an actor recited a letter to his mother in Russia, “the whole audience found it impossible to hold back the tears.” Sometimes, the audience got into the act. When a singer gave out with “Amerika ist ein frei land”—“America is a free country”—the audience sang the phrase over and over. Yiddish actors were celebrities, like latter-day rock stars. When the famous Jacob Adler went out for a stroll, crowds followed him, “their faces shining with adoration and enchantment and awe.”17

  A poster for the play King Solomon, performed in the Yiddish theater. (picture credit 2.22)

  Movies were equally popular with native-born Americans and immigrants. New York, not Hollywood, was the first capital of the American film industry. Until the 1920s, more films were made in the “Empire City” than anywhere else in the world. Immigrant neighborhoods had many movie theaters, or nickelodeons, so called because of the five-cent admission charge. Owners put up posters with catchy come-ons:

  If you are tired of life, go to the movies,

  If you are sick of troubles rife, go to the picture show,

  You will forget your unpaid bills, rheumatism and other ills,

  If you stow your pills and go to the picture show.18

  Lend Me Your Words

  Immigrants influenced their adopted country in many ways. Among these was their impact on American English, or the English language as spoken in the United States. This was to be expected. For close contact between communities that speak different languages often leads to the adoption of loanwords�
�that is, words taken over by speakers of one language from a different language.

  Certain words contributed by Italian immigrants have become common in American English. Among these are balcony, broccoli, buffoon, casino, espresso, confetti, duo, graffiti, inferno, extravaganza, pasta, macaroni, spaghetti, pizza, mustache, soprano, studio, solo, zucchini, umbrella (“little shadow”), and, of course, opera, meaning “the work,” as in a musical performance, and cello, a stringed musical instrument.

  Some familiar Yiddish loanwords are chutzpah (shameless nerve), kibitz (offer unwanted advice), kvetch (whine, complain), lox (smoked salmon), klutz (clumsy person), schlock (cheap, shoddy), schnook (stupid person), glitch (a technical problem, a snag), glitz (flashiness), schmooze (chat), spiel (argument meant to persuade), meshuga (crazy), schmeer (smear).

  Translations of Yiddish phrases passed into American slang. Among the most familiar are “Get lost,” “You should live so long,” “All right already,” “It shouldn’t happen to a dog,” “Okay by me,” “He knows from nothing,” and “I need that like a hole in the head.”

  Although movies were silent, they helped greenhorns become Americanized. Their brief subtitles introduced them to the English language in a written form that followed the action on the screen. Before the age of air-conditioning, however, theaters and nickelodeons stood empty during the blazing summer months. On weekends, as many as a half-million people flocked to Coney Island, in Brooklyn, to cool off at the seashore. Often they arrived before sunrise and stayed until late at night. More than one married couple first met “on the seashore, by the beautiful sea.”