Five Points
Page 14
“SO GREAT AN AMOUNT OF WORK FOR SO LITTLE MONEY”
It is very difficult to re-create the employment experiences of Five Points laborers and tradesmen. The tiny number of workingmen and -women who wrote extant memoirs and diaries did not hail from Five Points. But contemporary descriptions of the most widely followed neighborhood occupations do exist.
Tailoring, for example, was a family affair, most of the work being done in the tailor’s tenement home. “Before we had sewing machines,” recalled one immigrant garment worker decades later, “we worked piece-work with our wives, and very often our children. . . . We worked at home in our rooms. We had to buy fuel to heat the irons for pressing, and light in winter.” Men did the most difficult work, such as sewing buttonholes and cutting the fabric, while wives and children completed tasks requiring less experience and training. Some Sixth Ward boardinghouse keepers subcontracted garment work from clothing manufacturers and then farmed it out to their tenants at a profit. Others came from outside the neighborhood to work in small clothing manufactories there. Mulberry Street was the headquarters for the neighborhood’s needleworkers; 47 percent of them lived there during the early 1850s. In fact, a full third of the neighborhood’s tailors lived on just one of Five Points’ twenty blocks—Mulberry between Park and Bayard.24
The increasing tendency during the late antebellum period to farm out needlework to those who could toil at home, cooped up for long hours in sweltering apartments, led observers by 1850 to refer to such home workers as “sweaters” or “sweated labor.” One such worker described “the miseries of New-York tailors” in a letter to the New York Tribune, stating that most in his trade were “half-paid” and “half-starved.” Discussing immigrant weavers, who lived in circumstances similar to those of the tailors, the Tribune noted that miserable wages “compel them to exercise the most rigid economy and self-denial; and those who are burdened with large families find it tight squeezing to keep the pot boiling.”25
Because there were so many tailors in Five Points, the Journeymen Tailors’ Protective Union held its weekly conclaves at the Sixth Ward Hotel—making it one of the city’s few labor organizations to meet there. The tailors organized their union in mid-1850, calling a citywide general strike for higher wages in July. According to the Herald, they succeeded in winning “the moderate advance” they sought, though not every employer was willing to abide by the new rates. In Five Points, an angry mob of tailors attacked a needleworker taking garments from a Jewish clothing dealer on Chatham Street because he refused to accept the new pay scale. The tailors tried to take the unmade coats from the union buster, and police reinforcements were needed to subdue the irate mob. In subsequent years, the union was successful in organizing periodic strikes against individual employers, such as one who in 1853 refused to pay the “standard wages on California goods.” None of the tailors’ union officers were Five Points residents (though its longtime secretary, Joseph Mathers, lived just across Chatham Square at 5 Dover Street), and it is impossible to determine how many neighborhood residents joined the organization. Nonetheless, so strongly did New Yorkers associate the garment trade with Five Points and vicinity that after its demise, labor leaders referred to the defunct union as “the old Sixth Ward Society.”26
After tailoring, the next most popular skilled trade with Five Pointers was shoemaking. Like tailors, Five Points shoemakers were terribly underpaid. “There is no class of mechanics in New York who average so great an amount of work for so little money as the journeymen shoemakers,” observed the New York Tribune. They “are the worst paid and live the least like . . . men who have spent years in learning trades.” Most observers cited the competition of ready-made shoes and boots from New England as the cause of the shoemakers’ woes. Like the tailors, the shoemakers tried to organize to improve their pay. Although the Boot and Shoemakers’ Association met uptown, one of its subsidiary societies, the leather crimpers’ union, met in Five Points at 9 Elizabeth Street. As long as hundreds of desperately impoverished immigrant tailors and cobblers continued to pour into New York, their unions would have little power to improve their wages significantly. By 1855, the foreign-born constituted 96 percent of both New York’s 12,600 tailors and its 6,700 shoemakers.27
Tailoring and shoemaking were the skilled trades employing more New Yorkers than any other. Yet the third most popular skilled trade in Five Points—window glazing—was practiced by very few New Yorkers. Jews, mostly Polish natives, constituted more than 90 percent of Five Points’ glaziers. Many Russian Jews, who began coming to New York soon after their Polish counterparts, spent time in London before continuing on to America, often learning the glazier’s trade there. Some of Five Points’ Polish Jews also resided in England before sailing for New York, but other Polish Jews must have learned the craft in Manhattan. Glaziers did not have shops, but instead walked the streets crying “Glass put in!” in order to drum up business. Wandering Jewish glaziers were a common sight all over pre–Civil War New York, and many of them lived in Five Points.28
Glaziers operated very much like peddlers, another favorite Five Points occupation. Although the stereotype of the period associated Jews with this trade, Irish peddlers actually outnumbered Jewish ones in the neighborhood. By the 1850s, the peddler was a ubiquitous sight in the city, hawking anything that would bring a profit, including “suspenders, fiddle-strings, razor-strops, buttons, thread, dumb watches, pinchbeck jewelry, and pocketbooks.” Ethnic specialization existed even among peddlers. African Americans sold buttermilk and straw for bedding. The Irish peddled seafood, crying, “Fresh sha-a-d!” or, “My clams I want to sell to-day; the best of clams from Rock-away.” Some peddlers earned surprisingly good incomes. James Churchill, a Mayo native who had immigrated to New York in 1850 and lived on Baxter Street at the Five Points intersection, opened a bank account in 1852 with $90 and in a year had increased his savings to $160 (roughly $2,600 today). Those who enjoyed less success sometimes ventured out into the countryside with their wares. Jews who chose this strategy returned to their families only for Passover, Hanukkah, and the Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur High Holidays. Although peddlers enjoyed a modicum of independence, constant rejection by potential customers, harassment by children on the street, and miles of trudging through all sorts of weather made their lives especially hard.29
It was said that the aspiration of every peddler was to save enough money to open his own second-hand clothing store. Many of the neighborhood’s peddlers specialized in old clothes, which they bought from indigent Five Pointers (especially those with a recently deceased family member) and resold to other district residents too poor to buy new garments. With enough success selling clothes door to door, many peddlers were able to settle down to ply their trade from storefronts. Given the number of second-hand stores and junk shops in Five Points, there must have been dozens of successful peddlers in the neighborhood. In 1850, nearly half of the hundred or so lots on Orange Street below Canal held a second-hand or junk shop. Below the Five Points intersection, Jews owned 80 percent of the Orange Street second-hand stores. Above it, more than 75 percent of the proprietors had obviously Irish surnames.30
Many of these dealers were notorious as “fences,” those who bought stolen goods. Their shops “are generally second-hand stores and pawnbrokers’ shops combined, where a little money is lent on a good deal, and where anything is purchased without the asking of impertinent questions,” reported one journalistic exposé. “These shops are of course kept entirely by Jews,” asserted another, “and are situated in a row, in Orange street, near the Points.” George Washington Appo, a professional thief, remembered that just after the Civil War “at No. 141/2 Baxter St., was a second hand clothing store owned by a man named Cohen who was a ‘fence’ and where all the crooks used to get rid of their stolen goods.” The New York Evening Post in 1854 accused second-hand dealer Mayer Rosenthal of 6 Mulberry of fencing half the stolen calico, muslin, shawls, silk, and thread in New York. There were Irish fence
s as well. One named Grady posed as a peddler, carrying his purloined property in a box suspended from his shoulders. When possible, fences altered stolen goods to make identification more difficult, relining coats and melting down jewelry.31
In contrast to peddlers and second-hand dealers, almost nothing is known about the work lives of Five Points’ largest single occupational group: its menial day laborers. Construction work probably provided most of the employment for day laborers, who comprised four in every ten male Five Points workers. Menial laborers could dig foundations, carry heavy hods full of bricks and mortar to masons, and haul away work-related debris. Municipal projects employed many laborers, especially for the digging of sewer lines and the paving of streets with cobblestones. When outdoor work slowed a bit in midsummer, a laborer might find a job along the waterfront, loading or unloading sacks and crates from the hundreds of ships that arrived and departed each week. Laborers’ work was often very dangerous; newspapers overflowed with reports of hod carriers falling from ladders, longshoremen crushed by falling cargo, and laborers buried by the collapsing walls of unfinished buildings.
As dangerous as a laborer’s work might be, his greatest fear was probably not death but unemployment. On days too cold or wet to work, the laborer did not get paid, because “a storm stops his work and wages.” Some might find steady employment at a single construction site; others had to look for a position each day. Sudden sickness or a job-related injury could also throw one out of work at any time. Employers would not hold a laborer’s position for him while he recuperated. Even in perfect health, observed the Tribune, only “an energetic and lucky man . . . can make more than two hundred and fifty days’ work as an out-door laborer in the course of a year, while the larger number will not average two hundred.” During recessions, many laborers could not secure more than one or two days of paid work per week. Unemployment could wreak havoc on family finances, because laborers had to fall back on summer savings to get by during the lean winter months. “A month’s idleness, or a fortnight’s sickness, and what misery!” observed an Irish journalist. Increasing the laborers’ typical wage of a dollar a day would have helped, but given the vast numbers of impoverished laborers, they had little bargaining leverage. The Laborers’ Union Benevolent Association concentrated its efforts on sickness and death benefits. In return for a two-dollar initiation fee and 121/2 cents monthly dues, members in 1850 received two dollars per week when too sick to work and fifteen dollars for burial. The organization was not particularly popular, however, with no more than one in eight New York laborers joining. The laborer’s life was one of the hardest, most dangerous, and most financially precarious in Five Points.32
One might imagine that the Irish would resent the extent to which they were forced to toil as laborers, but at least one Five Pointer found the Irish concentration in manual labor both natural and appropriate. “What a laughable sight it would be to see a German Jew or Dutchman mount a ladder with a hod of brick or mortar to a five- or six-story house,” wrote Michael Coogan of Mulberry Street to the editor of the Irish-American in 1853. “No, they follow pursuits more congenial to their taste and capacity. One takes to his bag, basket and crook, rag-picking and bone-gathering; the other to glazing, peddling, and swopping old clothes.” Given what they had been paid in Ireland, argued Coogan, Irish Americans should be happy to work as laborers in New York.
Finding themselves frequently unemployed, Irish-born laborers in New York responded as they often had in Ireland—they tramped into the countryside looking for work. Just as Lansdowne’s poor tenants had walked hundreds of miles in search of employment in the autumn and early winter, New York’s laborers sometimes ventured to the South during slow winter months hoping to find construction work there. Others went to upstate New York or even the Midwest looking for canal or railroad jobs. These workers suffered great hardships living in labor camps, and the families they left behind in Five Points endured equally severe burdens. Often, money left to support the family ran out before the worker returned. On Mulberry Street in an attic garret, a charity worker found a woman whose “husband had gone to the country in search of work, six months before, since which time she had heard nothing from him. How she had managed to live, we could not imagine. . . . There were four children, one an infant at the breast,” all dressed “in rags.” They would have starved but for meals provided by the Five Points House of Industry. A “Mrs. B.” on Mulberry Street had a fifteen-month-old and a newborn baby. Her unemployed husband had left six months earlier looking for work outside New York, but she had heard nothing from him since and the money he left had run out, leaving her totally destitute. A Five Pointer whose sailor husband had not been heard from in nearly a year likewise appeared at the door of the Five Points Mission one day with three children who were “nearly naked. . . . To pay her rent, she had sold and pawned her furniture till nearly every article was gone; to get bread she had parted with her clothing and her children’s clothing, till they were altogether in the deepest distress.” Some of these missing men had undoubtedly died of disease or work-related injuries. Margaret Connor, for example, was left with a two-year-old son to care for when her husband drowned in 1855 while working for the Erie Railroad. But others had simply abandoned their families.33
“THE MOST APPALLING SCENES OF DESTITUTION”
Abandoned women had to find work to support their families; many became seamstresses. “There are none who are more poorly paid for their work, or who suffer more privation and hardship” than seamstresses, wrote a New York Herald reporter in 1853. In order to document his assertion, the journalist went to Five Points, where he ventured into a decrepit rear tenement on Mulberry Street to interview a shirt sewer, the lowest-paid type of needleworker. The mistress of the house, a widow, had supported herself and her children this way for seven years. She earned four cents per shirt, she explained to the reporter, and “some days, by working from seven in the morning till twelve at night, I have made five shirts.” Working at that furious pace, the most she had ever earned in a week was a dollar.
One could not support a family on such a pittance. This seamstress supplemented her income by renting most of her tiny two-room apartment to three boarders, who paid $4 of her $4.50 rent. Her nineteen-year-old daughter had recently moved out to work as a domestic servant, and some of her salary helped support her mother and younger siblings. Sometimes, this seamstress got “washing and scrubbing to do, and then I make more than I could at the shirts.” She was also lucky to have a relatively generous employer. Although many garment industry contractors were renowned for their heartlessness, her employer was “very good to me, and when I am in want of a dollar [he] always advances it to me.”
Even after supplementing her income by these various means, the seamstress and her children led a very difficult life. Of the few possessions in her spare apartment—“four chairs, a rickety table, a looking glass, some cups, saucers, plates, a pot and a kettle, [and] a few other kitchen utensils”—many belonged to the lodgers. They could not afford beds, so they slept on the floor. Sometimes, all she could afford to feed her family was bread and molasses, though “on Sundays we generally get a piece of meat, and live more comfortably than on any other day.”
About half the women in Five Points who did paid work had jobs in the garment trades. Not all seamstresses were as impoverished as this Mulberry Street shirt sewer, but such conditions were not uncommon. In the 1850s, in fact, what the Tribune called “the wretchedness of needlewomen” became something of a cause célèbre in New York. Newspaper exposés documented their pathetic lives, reformers held meetings to organize relief for them, and charitable organizations chronicled their struggles to support themselves and their families. Some female garment workers toiled merely to supplement the incomes of husbands, fathers, or brothers. But the hundreds who had no choice but to support either themselves or whole families with the needle, said the Times, inevitably led lives of “misery, degradation, and wretchedness.”34
Not all Five Points seamstresses were widows. Mary Twomey, also a Lansdowne immigrant, did needlework to supplement the income of her peddler husband, Cornelius. Others were single women who needed to earn money but did not want to become domestic servants, who were constantly on duty and worked virtually every day of the year. In contrast, noted the Tribune, a seamstress “enjoys considerable personal independence as to hours, locations, &c.” Others took to needlework because, having once lived in better circumstances, “they cannot bring themselves quite down to kitchen-work in the basements of those who . . . were yesterday their equals . . . so they shrink into a garret and stitch, stitch, until they wear out or starve out and are taken to the hospital, the poor-house or the grave.”36