Abstract
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, New York was thought to be a homeless city populated by unmoored (domestic and international) migrants. Anxious commentators thought the city to have overturned life as they knew it. For them, a Babelian cacophony arose from the streets, decades before towers glowered down on the mutually incomprehensible sounds. Five-story tenement walk-ups enclosed in darkness, staleness—holding light and air at bay. Journalists wrote of these throngs as spilling out from the stale, dank air of their semiprivate enclosures. Though kitchens—with roughhewn tables and stoves for warming coffee, food, and people—provided a small locus for gathering, domestic life was thought to spill forth from tenements to flow into fire escapes, streaming onto sidewalks to join among the cart peddlers and surging into the streets. These middle-class commentators’ discomfort with these overcrowded cities led many to hope for Haussmann-like1 reconstruction to run roughshod over poverty to rationalize the tenement quarters of the modern city.
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Notes
Geographer and urban analyst David Harvey talks about the contradictory impacts of industrializing the city—the rationalization of certain bureaucratic structures, while also unleashing the chaotic problems of unemployment, inadequate housing, and ethnic and class factionalism, which arise from the overaccumulation of labor in cities. For a discussion of the urbanization of capital, see David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), especially 17–34.
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 302.
According to Jacob Riis, “The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery what will the harvest be?” Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 20. Because my project is a study of the discourse on homelessness, I am not concerned with attempting to determine the seeming accuracy of Riis’s numbers. Rather, I want to look at how the city, its life, and its problems were being thought about and discussed.
Colleen McDannell, who has undertaken several studies of the Christian home, describes its central importance as a social institution: During the nineteenth century, good family life was seen as the means by which the nation and its religion were maintained. Americans believed the home to be the nursery of both patriotism and piety. Home life taught the mutual dependence and reciprocal responsibility of each citizen. By connecting the individual to the community at large, the family instilled notions of morality, order, stability, education, purity, refinement, and discipline. Although the church also played an important role in creating good Christians, the Victorian preoccupation with the family saw home life as the more crucial purveyor of ethics and piety. Colleen McDannell, “Parlor Piety: The Home as Sacred Space in Protestant America,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 164.
“In most great cities there are districts in which the families are few in comparison with the number of individuals. Such districts are commonly the haunts of criminals, and even the value of the property is usually lowered as the result. In such places there are houses but not homes, dwellings but not families.” John Hall, A Christian Home: How to Make and How to Maintain It (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1883), 11–12.
In particular, the Draft Riot of 1863 and the Tompkins Square Riot of 1877 (also Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886) exacerbated anxieties. I argue that these earlier riots (and the Paris Commune) become markers of lingering dangers. In the 1880s and 1890s, they are discussed with great alarm not as history but as possible futures. Volunteer Special’s The Volcano Under the City (pseudonymously published in 1886 by William Stoddard—formerly one of President Lincoln’s personal secretaries) argues that the potential for urban explosion continues to lurk under the city. Jacob Riis calls for social change to avert another Tompkins Square incident. Later in 1916, large vagrant populations are cited as a source of a New York threat much like the extensive vagrant involvement in the French Revolution. See Volunteer Special, The Volcano under the City (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1887);
and Frank Laubach, Why There Are Vagrants, a Study Based upon a Examination of One Hundred Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916). Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives, Battle with the Slum, and The Peril and Preservation of the Home also repeatedly cites these riots as possible urban futures.
For instance, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
Ferenc M. Szasz and Ralph F. Bogardus, “The Camera and the American Social Conscience,” New York History 55, no. 4 (1974): 422.
See Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1872), 97. Riis was certainly familiar with this text. He alludes to it in How the Other Half Lives as well as numerous magazine articles and books. Riis, Other Half, 197.
For discussions of these texts and their influence on Riis, see Louise Ware, Jacob A. Riis, Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938), 49;
and James B. Lane, Jacob A. Riis and the American City (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 52–53.
Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 272.
For a similar point, see also Lewis E Fried, Makers of the City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 21.
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 794.
For this point, see Terence Young, “Modern Urban Parks,” Geographical Review 85, no. 4 (October 1995), 535–51.
For instance, see Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1914).
See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
Karl Marx calls these the catchphrases of the old society. They were the slogan for the conservative alliance formed between Catholic and monarchist elements in 1848 France; this group was sometimes called the Party of Order. See Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings Volume II, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 155. Louis Bonaparte and his reactionary program of order (i.e., Haussmannization) were lauded by Jacob Riis as a model for how to respond to the problems of urbanization.
Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the Poor (New York: Garrett Press, 1970), 65.
Riis, Children, 56. See also Riis Children, 18–19. The value of cleanliness was so important that New York reformers set up associations (e.g., the Citizens Council on Hygiene) for the sole purpose of ensuring that the value and methods of hygiene were taught to and implemented by the poor. For discussions of these, see Jacob A. Riis, Peril, 71; or Jacob A. Riis, The Battle with the Slum (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 19, 81.
Ibid. Much of the anxiety about the Five Points area stemmed from the midcentury rapid demographic changes. In the decade from 1846 to 1855, nearly a half dozen Protestant churches shuttered their doors to be replaced by two Catholic parishes and several Jewish congregations in the surrounding area. Methodist minister Lewis Pease established projects to develop job skills among the immigrant poor and to address issues of poverty. However, the more evangelically inclined Missionary Society backing the ventures wanted emphasis on proselytizing among the Catholics. Pease turned to wealthier Episcopalian backers to sponsor his social ministry. See Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 241ff.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 12–13.
Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 434.
Stephanie Golden, The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 126ff.
Ibid., 191. This nether half, I argue, invokes the diabolic connections of wandering. Not only does he use a term that conveys an explicit reference to the lowest levels of existence and evokes ideas of the netherworld, but also he claims that the nether half hides its deformity—a probable reference to a cloven foot. Diabolic connections to wandering are long lived. For instance, see Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972). In Chapter 2, we shall see that the diabolical underpinnings of both the idea of wandering and anti-Semitism remain latent within this discourse on homelessness.
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© 2014 Philip Webb
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Webb, P. (2014). The Fin-de-Siècle Homeless City. In: Homeless Lives in American Cities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405647_2
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