building operators and speculators soon emerged, however, especially in the Lower East Side were tenement structures were designed and constructed to maximise returns on the twenty-five by one hundred foot lots.14
Rapid industrialisation in the latter half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a new influx of immigrants who crowded into poorly built tenements that had been hastily erected and were packed to capacity. By 1861, 50 per cent or 401,376 inhabitants of the city lived in 12,374 tenements. Tens of thousands more lived in ‘rookeries’, shacks and informal squatter settlements on pockets of ground that were either too rocky or too swampy for commercial development.15 An 1867 report by the Citizen’s Association Council of Hygiene pointed out that, in 1865, the East Side of Manhattan north of 40th Street contained approximately 1,016 squatter shacks, and that ‘the tenant-houses of the city as a whole’ were becoming ‘rapidly and perilously aggregated’.16 Another 1867 article in the New York Times reported that ‘from the Hudson to the East River one can behold at least twenty-five different settlements, some located blocks apart from others, but each bearing a striking resemblance to the sister colony in point of dirt’. The largest was ‘Dutch Hill’, ‘a conglomeration of hovels’ that clustered around 41st Street near the East River. There were similar settlements dotted between Fourth and Tenth Avenues as well on the west side of town between 55th and 62nd Streets. As early as 1825, an African American settlement known as ‘Seneca Village’ had been established on purchased land that stretched from 81st to 89th Street. The only community of African American property owners in nineteenth-century Manhattan, the settlement was finally cleared in the 1850s to make way for Central Park.17
Beyond Manhattan, there were also a series of ‘shantytowns’ in Brooklyn. Many were located on the wasteland and mudflats adjacent to the docks, including a ‘desolate’ settlement at Red Hook near the Gowanus Canal on ‘an open space of land sunken so far below the city level that all attempts at sewerage have failed’.18 Others were located nearby including ‘Tinkersville’, ‘Phoenix Park’, ‘Slab City’, ‘Smokey Hollow’ and ‘Darby’s Patch’.19
While New York’s ‘shanty dwellers’ were widely impugned as ‘squatters’, they often paid some form of ground rent for their land. The majority were poor migrants employed as manual labourers and factory workers. In Brooklyn, a group of German labourers were living in a ‘row of shanties’ along Van Brunt Street as early as 1846. Another group of African American workers set up an informal settlement in Brooklyn known as ‘Crow Hill’. Many commuted to Manhattan where they worked as domestic servants and in the Fulton and Washington Markets.20 Other shantytown residents worked within a wider informal economy. Some residents maintained gardens and raised livestock for sale. Offal boiling and piggeries were also popular businesses. As a retrospective history of squatting in the New York Times published in 1880 concluded, the early population of the city’s shantytowns was made up of ‘rag-pickers, pea-nut vendors, street-peddlers, knife-grinders, labourers, idlers, and vagrants’.21
The shantytown and squatter settlements of mid-nineteenth-century New York were nevertheless seen as an obstacle to the further development of the city as a modern metropolis. For city officials, they posed a threat to public health and safety as sites of poverty, pestilence and criminality. In the eyes of the mainstream press, they represented a precarious form of urban existence – a primitive anachronism – that hovered on the edges of ‘civilised modern life’. Shantytowns were unsurprisingly portrayed as ‘plague-spots’ and their residents as ‘strangers’: foreign, un-American and, in many cases, inhuman.22
Such nativist characterisations provided a justification for the repossession of land occupied by squatters and the demolition of their homes. Shanty dwellers were not the dangerous and degenerate characters portrayed in the mainstream press, however. They were, in most cases, labourers and entrepreneurs who ‘took possession of the urban landscape and molded it to their needs’.23 The self-built (and often informal) communities they created spoke to a ‘kind of independent life’: makeshift and precarious on the one hand; resilient and resourceful on the other.24 These were complex and extended communities, a ‘landscape of schoolhouses and chapels, work sites and fenced-in yards, pasturage and piggeries’.25
And yet, these communities were anathema to the gridded regularity of the nineteenth-century American city. ‘The opening of thoroughfares up town,’ one reporter concluded,
Will raze the squatter’s huts, and destroy that somewhat unenviable individuality which distinguishes the tenants. By seeking a shelter in tenement houses, the squatter will lose, it is true, the privilege of considering himself the monarch of all he [sic] surveys, but his descendants will be afforded some insight in the customs of civilised humanity, and the health and appearance of the metropolis will be benefitted.26
Despite fierce resistance, the majority were finally forced out as they gave way to a rapidly expanding city in the 1880s and 1890s. As they disappeared, the everyday experiences of their occupants – the popular working-class culture they produced and nurtured, the experiences of displacement and migration they brought with them – found a new home on New York’s musical theatre stage. One of the most popular plays of the 1880s was Edward Harrigan’s Squatter Sovereignty, a full-length musical comedy which premiered in 1882 at the Theatre Comique on Broadway and ran for over 160 performances.27
If mid-nineteenth-century shantytowns were a source of fear and anxiety for New York’s middle class, they also brought the city’s poor system of tenement housing into sharper focus. Lawmakers were unwilling to legitimise the feudal model that had been practised in the Hudson Valley. They readily transferred, however, the legal aspects of landlord-tenant obligation to New York’s growing urban environment. This was, primarily, a possession–rent relationship in which a landlord turned over ‘possession’ in exchange for rent.28 The contractual aspects of this relationship were nevertheless overlooked, at the expense of tenants who had little legal redress when faced with poor living conditions, especially as landlords were not required to maintain the interiors of their apartments. As one expert on the subject therefore concluded, ‘for landlords to be held liable there had to be statutes regulating tenement housing, and between 1867 and 1900, these laws either did not exist, or they were weak, unenforced, and largely ignored by landlords, inspectors and the courts alike’.29
By the late nineteenth century, New York’s weak landlordtenant laws had combined with an emerging system of leasing and subleasing to produce the severe overcrowding and dangerously unsafe living conditions that was documented by a group of pioneering photographers that included Jacob Riis.30 These developments were challenged by housing advocates and progressive reformers, though there was little sustained opposition from tenants until the early twentieth century. It was working class immigrant (and mainly Jewish) housewives on the city’s Lower East Side who overturned decades of acquiescence and passivity and were ultimately responsible for the city’s first large-scale tenant mobilisation. Following a successful boycott of local kosher butchers in 1902, a series of strikes were organised in 1904 by East Side women in protest against crippling rent hikes. The women transformed their own neighbourhood into a staging ground for the emergence of ‘tenant unions’ (including the New York Rent Protective Association, or NYRPA) that withheld rents and blocked evictions and provided small sums of money to recently displaced tenants. They also formed alliances with neighbourhood socialists who soon seized the reins of the protest.31
Despite their efforts, Lower East Side residents were unsuccessful in assembling an infrastructure and institutional base from which they could organise future strikes and other tenant-based activism. While threatened evictions may have failed to materialise and, in some cases, landlords were even forced to roll back rent to pre-strike levels, the fissures within tenant groups prevented them from building on their victories and, if anything, contributed to their rapid dissolution.32 Within a year landlords were once again raising rents, and by the end of 1907
