1) Urge Albany to pass new rent laws before the end of the session June 22
2) Town Hall on the future of Chinatown, June 1
Urge Albany to pass new rent laws before the end of the session June 22
The key phone numbers are:
Gov. Paterson: 212-681-4580
Majority Leader Smith- 212-298-55-85
Housing Committee Chair Espada-518-455-3395
Phone numbers for other holdouts -- if you know anyone in these districts, ask them to call to urge their state senator to vote for the ten bills now before the Senate:
Jeffrey Klein(D) -1-800-718-2039 -34th Distict Bronx/Westchester
(ThrogsNeck, Weschester Sq. Morris Park, Pelham Parkway,
Eastchester-Bronx, New Rochelle, Mount Vernon, Eastchester-Westchester,
North Riverdale, Woodlawn, Norwood, Belmont Park
Carl Kruger(D)-718-743-8610-27th District Brooklyn(Midwood,
Gravesend, Flatlands, Sheepshead Bay, Ocen Parkway, Mapleton)
Martin Golden(R)-718-238-6044- 22nd District Brooklyn ( Bayridge,
Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Gravesend, Ocean Parkway South,
Sheepshead Bay, Gerritson Beach)
Martin Malave Dilan(D)-718-573-1726-17th District Booklyn
(Williamsberg, East Williamsberg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Clinton Hill,
Wyckoff Heights, Broadway Junction, Highland Park, Cypress Hills)
Diane Savino (D) 718-333-0311- 23rd Distict Brooklyn/Staten Island
(Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Coney Island, Grasmere, Rosebank, Grymes Hill,
Clifton, Stapleton, New Brighton, Livingston, Port Richmond)
Craig Johnson(D)-516-746-5923 7th District Nassau County( Great Neck,
Port Washington, Floral Park, Bellrose, Mineola, Carle Place
Chinatown Town Hall flyer:
TOWN HALL: The Future of Chinatown
Hosted by the Chinatown Working Group
Monday, June 1
6:30 p.m.
PS 124
40 Division street
Between Bowery and Manhattan Bridge
Translator will be available.
(Please see attached flyers in English and Chinese.)
The Chinatown Working Group Town Hall will cover a number issues regarding the future of Chinatown including jobs, affordable housing, traffic, parking, parks, funding schools and concerns about history and culture. Help decide the future of Chinatown!
The Chinatown Working Group is a newly formed democratic and open community-based planning initiative on the future of Chinatown. Our goal is to support the community's residents, workers, businesses and visitors. Chinatown Working Group's members are Chinatown's stakeholders -- LIKE YOU!
English Flyer: http://www.chinatownworkinggroup.org/cwg%20town%20hall%20flyer%20EnglishJune1.pdf
Chinese Flyer: http://www.chinatownworkinggroup.org/cwg%20town%20hall%20flyer%20ChineseJune%201.pdf
CWG Web Site: http://www.chinatownworkinggroup.org
Sunday, May 31, 2009
New arrivals: Italians and Jews
In the 1880's the neighborhood underwent a sweeping transformation. Italians filled the tenements of Five Points while Eastern European Jews swept over the wards east of the Bowery. The slums expanded all the way up to 14th Street and new slums emerged in Harlem. Violence took on a new shape and a new role reflective of the new immigrant cultures.
Unlike previous immigrant groups, the Italians maintained a close connection with the home country. It was common for Italian men to spend only a few years in the New World before returning to the Old with a bit of good American cash. Where the Germans, here for the long haul, built union halls and social halls to protect and promote their community, the Italians established no-interest "banks" where immigrants could store their money temporarily for the purchase of a return ticket home, one of the staple services these "banks" offered.
This close tie to southern Italy and Sicily extended to the extortionist societies of both regions. The Neapolitan Camorro, Sicilian La Cosa Nostra and the Black Hand were not neighborhood gangs so much as hermetic gangster rings that preyed on their own people. Economic abuse of Italians by Italians pervaded the character of their slum existence. The padrone lorded over the Italian children with Dickensian brutality, dictating their labor and collecting their earnings. The Black Hand had no compunction about attempting to extort from even the most famous national heros: Enrico Caruso, the greatest living opera singer of his day, a symbol of Italian pride, received the paper notes stamped with a black-ink hand demanding $15,000, a fortune at the turn of the century. Whether this model of internal violence reflected a fear of outside authority, alienation from their new home or merely the convenience of the nearest and most familiar target, the gangsters of the prohibition era seem to have preserved it in their motto, "we kill only each other" which prevented the mob from rubbing out its non-Italian political enemies. The worst violence of the Mafia has always been reserved for Italians, often for its own members.
Jewish immigration was even more transformative. Following the anarchist assassination of Csar Alexander, blamed on Jews, pogroms spread through Russia and the Ukraine, spurring a mass exodus of unprecedented numbers. Poverty in close quarters breeds gangs and the Jews were no exception. At the turn of the century half the prisoners in Sing Sing were Jews. The German Jews, who had migrated long before during the German immigration of the 1820's and who had long since assimilated into American life, were so alarmed at this new face of Jewishness -- it cost them their welcome at the city's elite clubs and socials -- that they embarked on a crusade to educate these new arrivals, eradicate their slum language, Yiddish, and assimilate them into mainstream middle-class society. Their program succeeded in identifying Jewishness with education and the professions, and in nearly exterminating the only uniquely Jewish literary language.
The Jewish and Italian gangs clashed on the Bowery not over politics but over illegal rackets. The earlier battle between American-born and immigrant labor gave way to turf battles between two equally recent arrivals. They fought over every enterprise available to them, perhaps the biggest and most available, the unions, with their sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers all members. Gangsters infiltrated the unions turning the already violent labor movement into a criminal racket replete with gang warfare. By the time Prohibition rolled in, the scene was set for rampant murder.
Our image of the gangster today benefits from decades of prohibition-era costume dramas and latter-day mafia soap operas both fictional and real. It's the image of a blunt and arrogant suit, surrounded by minions, for whom no problem is so complex that it cannot be simply and effectively -- and permanently – solved: for whom conflict resolution is a bullet through the head. The Prohibition gang member was a gangster – a criminal who kills to maintain personal control in a kill-or-be-killed underworld. The bootleggers were engaged in crimes for personal profit, not political battles for the benefit of a party and a class interest. The gangster was an extortionist who thrived by subjugation. His proximity to murder lends him a mystique at once deplored and envied, admired but feared. One observer, watching Lucky Luciano stand motionless in the midst of a gunfight, called it "the coolest thing I ever saw." He meant cool-nerved, but one can hear, in his admiration of the outlaw, the modern sense of "cool" emerging. But that admiration had its limit. Outmaneuvering, outwitting and generally out-suckering the law, the gangster might be cheered as a working class hero, but he was never a working class leader. Gangs and politics had parted ways.
Despite the pervasive presence of criminality in the slums, the ghetto was far from a depressed neighborhood. The most densely populated two square miles on the face of the earth, it was overflowing with culture and politics. At a time when New York was still a colonial backwater, its elites deeply conservative, the slums were a hotbed of the avant-garde, the recent immigrant arrivals from Europe bringing new European ideas and new European culture. It was a world center of anarchism, with the great Johan Most and Justus Schwab and their protégé, Emma Goldberg speaking and demonstrating in the streets and in the union halls, writing and plotting in their apartments and prison cells.
Culture was irrepressible. Yiddish Theater, Lincoln Steffens pronounced, surpassed Broadway. All the radical new plays of Europe were eagerly mounted in Yiddish. Oscar Wilde's Salomé too risqué for conservative Protestant Broadway, became Bessie Tomaschevsky's signature role. The first American school of painting, the Ashcan School, found a home in the free anarchist "Modern School," with George Bellows and Edward Hopper's teacher Robert Henri on the faculty, Man Ray and John Sloan attending as students.
Next: Last
Unlike previous immigrant groups, the Italians maintained a close connection with the home country. It was common for Italian men to spend only a few years in the New World before returning to the Old with a bit of good American cash. Where the Germans, here for the long haul, built union halls and social halls to protect and promote their community, the Italians established no-interest "banks" where immigrants could store their money temporarily for the purchase of a return ticket home, one of the staple services these "banks" offered.
This close tie to southern Italy and Sicily extended to the extortionist societies of both regions. The Neapolitan Camorro, Sicilian La Cosa Nostra and the Black Hand were not neighborhood gangs so much as hermetic gangster rings that preyed on their own people. Economic abuse of Italians by Italians pervaded the character of their slum existence. The padrone lorded over the Italian children with Dickensian brutality, dictating their labor and collecting their earnings. The Black Hand had no compunction about attempting to extort from even the most famous national heros: Enrico Caruso, the greatest living opera singer of his day, a symbol of Italian pride, received the paper notes stamped with a black-ink hand demanding $15,000, a fortune at the turn of the century. Whether this model of internal violence reflected a fear of outside authority, alienation from their new home or merely the convenience of the nearest and most familiar target, the gangsters of the prohibition era seem to have preserved it in their motto, "we kill only each other" which prevented the mob from rubbing out its non-Italian political enemies. The worst violence of the Mafia has always been reserved for Italians, often for its own members.
Jewish immigration was even more transformative. Following the anarchist assassination of Csar Alexander, blamed on Jews, pogroms spread through Russia and the Ukraine, spurring a mass exodus of unprecedented numbers. Poverty in close quarters breeds gangs and the Jews were no exception. At the turn of the century half the prisoners in Sing Sing were Jews. The German Jews, who had migrated long before during the German immigration of the 1820's and who had long since assimilated into American life, were so alarmed at this new face of Jewishness -- it cost them their welcome at the city's elite clubs and socials -- that they embarked on a crusade to educate these new arrivals, eradicate their slum language, Yiddish, and assimilate them into mainstream middle-class society. Their program succeeded in identifying Jewishness with education and the professions, and in nearly exterminating the only uniquely Jewish literary language.
The Jewish and Italian gangs clashed on the Bowery not over politics but over illegal rackets. The earlier battle between American-born and immigrant labor gave way to turf battles between two equally recent arrivals. They fought over every enterprise available to them, perhaps the biggest and most available, the unions, with their sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers all members. Gangsters infiltrated the unions turning the already violent labor movement into a criminal racket replete with gang warfare. By the time Prohibition rolled in, the scene was set for rampant murder.
Our image of the gangster today benefits from decades of prohibition-era costume dramas and latter-day mafia soap operas both fictional and real. It's the image of a blunt and arrogant suit, surrounded by minions, for whom no problem is so complex that it cannot be simply and effectively -- and permanently – solved: for whom conflict resolution is a bullet through the head. The Prohibition gang member was a gangster – a criminal who kills to maintain personal control in a kill-or-be-killed underworld. The bootleggers were engaged in crimes for personal profit, not political battles for the benefit of a party and a class interest. The gangster was an extortionist who thrived by subjugation. His proximity to murder lends him a mystique at once deplored and envied, admired but feared. One observer, watching Lucky Luciano stand motionless in the midst of a gunfight, called it "the coolest thing I ever saw." He meant cool-nerved, but one can hear, in his admiration of the outlaw, the modern sense of "cool" emerging. But that admiration had its limit. Outmaneuvering, outwitting and generally out-suckering the law, the gangster might be cheered as a working class hero, but he was never a working class leader. Gangs and politics had parted ways.
Despite the pervasive presence of criminality in the slums, the ghetto was far from a depressed neighborhood. The most densely populated two square miles on the face of the earth, it was overflowing with culture and politics. At a time when New York was still a colonial backwater, its elites deeply conservative, the slums were a hotbed of the avant-garde, the recent immigrant arrivals from Europe bringing new European ideas and new European culture. It was a world center of anarchism, with the great Johan Most and Justus Schwab and their protégé, Emma Goldberg speaking and demonstrating in the streets and in the union halls, writing and plotting in their apartments and prison cells.
Culture was irrepressible. Yiddish Theater, Lincoln Steffens pronounced, surpassed Broadway. All the radical new plays of Europe were eagerly mounted in Yiddish. Oscar Wilde's Salomé too risqué for conservative Protestant Broadway, became Bessie Tomaschevsky's signature role. The first American school of painting, the Ashcan School, found a home in the free anarchist "Modern School," with George Bellows and Edward Hopper's teacher Robert Henri on the faculty, Man Ray and John Sloan attending as students.
Next: Last
Friday, May 29, 2009
A PSA -- New affordable housing available
Applications are available for 197 affordable apartments under construction in the Chelsea/Clinton/Midtown area of CB4 and 73 affordable apartments in Fort Greene Brooklyn. Details below.
*** Applications are available for 78 affordable, studio, 1- and 2-bedroom apartments under construction at 312 Eleventh Avenue. Rents for these units will range from $449 to $740. To be eligible, applicants must have incomes between $19,920 and $38,400 depending on family size and the unit requested. Applications will be selected by lottery. Current and eligible residents of Community Board 4 will receive preference for 50 percent of the units. Applications may requested by mailing a postcard to:
312 Eleventh Avenue Apartments
303 Park Avenue South
PMB 1047
New York, NY 10010
Applications may also be downloaded at www.phippsny.org/housing_app.html. Completed applications must be returned by regular mail only (no priority, certified, registered, express or overnight mail will be accepted) to a post office box number that will be listed with the application, and must be postmarked by June 14, 2009. For more information, visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/downloads/pdf/chelsea-area-manhattan.pdf.
*** Applications are available for 119 affordable, studio, 1- and 2-bedroom apartments under construction at 320 West 38th Street. Rents for these units will range from $383 to $631. To be eligible, applicants must have incomes between $17,294 and $38,400 depending on family size and the unit requested. Applications will be selected by lottery. Current and eligible residents of Community Board 4 will receive preference for 50 percent of the units. Applications may requested by mailing a postcard to:
38th Street West Towers
One Penn Plaza
Box 6108
New York, NY 10119
Completed applications must be returned by regular mail only (no priority, certified, registered, express or overnight mail will be accepted) to a post office box number that will be listed with the application, and must be postmarked by June 19, 2009. For more information, visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/downloads/pdf/38th-Street-West-Towers.pdf.
***DOWNTOWN GREENE APARTMENTS is pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for 73 affordable housing rental apartments now under construction at 80 Dekalb Avenue in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Rents from $489 to $803 for incomes between $17,259 and $38,400.
Applicants will be required to meet income and additional criteria. Completed Applications must be returned by Regular Mail ONLY (no priority, certified, registered, express or overnight mail will be accepted) to a post office box number, or its equivalent, that will be listed in the application, and must be postmarked by July 5, 2009. Applications postmarked after July 5, 2009 will be set aside for possible future consideration. Applications will be selected by lottery; applicants who submit more than one application will be disqualified. Preference will be given to New York City residents. Current and eligible residents of Brooklyn Community Board #2 will receive preference for 50% of the units.
No Broker’s Fee or Application Fee Should Be Paid At Anytime in Connection With These Applications.
To request an application, mail a post card to:
DOWNTOWN GREENE APARTMENTS
303 Park Avenue South
PMB 1122
New York, New York 10010
OR
(Why regular mail only? Seems like a convenient way to 'lose' an application. -- RH)
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Attempted reform and revolution (more slum history)
Despite its curiosity and color, conservative Republicans still deplored the slums, blaming poverty on the slumdwellers themselves, while progressive Republicans tried their best to reform the poor, as if Catholicism were a disease and Protestantism its cure. The Children's Aid Society even cooked up a plan to wean the children away from their Catholic parents, sending them as unpaid labor to the age of eighteen in the Midwest, where the agrarian economy was starved for cheap labor and, equally important, there were no Catholics. It was a great success, from the reformers' point of view, and set forth a persuasive argument against the eugenicist insistence that the poor were doomed by nature. Stealing children from their parents seems barbaric today, but by 19th century standards, it was radically progressive: simply taking the child out of the slum will suffice to take the slum out of the child. Having completed their service to the frontier economy, the children were freed to pursue their lives, often achieving success. Today, New York City, under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws, sends its unwanted slum youth into permanent, life-long incarceration upstate, where the depressed economy depends on prisons. What success is theirs remains behind thick walls, steel bars and slamming doors. Not all change is progress.
From the 1840's on, the battle raged between the Protestant industrialist owners of the city and the immigrant – and largely Catholic – working class gangs. The immigrant cause advanced with the election of Tammany Hall Democrat and working class champion Fernando Wood, only to see the jealous Republicans, in control of the state government, undermine him from Albany. In 1857, while Wood was impressing both the downtrodden in the slums and wealthy progressive reformers with his programs to fight poverty and provide respectable employment – eighty years ahead of the New Deal – Albany conspired to shorten his mayoral term and replace his entire police force with a new one of their own. Standing firm on his city support and refusing to disband his municipal police, Wood forced a riot between the two police forces on the steps of City Hall. The military intervened to issue the mayor a summons at bayonette point and arrest him for inciting the riot.
The rest of the summer saw these two police forces engaging and subverting each other, turning the city into a lawless battleground. Tension broke into mass violence on July 4th, always a testy moment in the sweltering heat of midsummer New York. Responding to an incident in a bar on the Bowery, the city's busy commercial entertainment district, police and Protestant gangs attempted a full-scale assault on the Five Points, the Irish residential quarter, where the gangs and their families lived. Entering at Bayard Street, they attempted to push through the center of the neighborhood. Pelted by brickbats thrown from the rooftops, the invading Protestants were held at a stand-off. They piled up makeshift barricades out of carts and barrels, and brought out their firearms. By the time the military arrived the next evening, at least twelve were dead (perhaps many more dead had been carted away by family and neighbors), and both sides had exhausted themselves. The Times called the invasion a riot and blamed it on the Irish.
Worse riots were on their way. When, during the Civil War, Lincoln imposed a draft and allowed the wealthy to evade it for a fee (intending both to assuage the rich and raise funds for the war effort), the bitterly oppressed New York working class revolted. The draft riots of 1863 unleashed a fury of retribution expressing, especially among the long-abused Irish, decades of rage, lashing out in all directions. Four days of rioting, looting, lynching and arson shoved the mirror close to the city's face.
Towards the end of the century, political clout shifted from within the residential wards to the Bowery itself, lined now with flophouses, burlesque 'concert' halls, saloons, gambling parlors, beer halls, restaurants, pool rooms, theaters and sensational curiosity museums cheek by jowl with prosperous immigrant banks and insurance companies, radical labor union halls and early Marxist workingmen's associations. In its bars Tammany sachems rubbed elbows with their working-class support while unions organized in Bowery halls for the eight-hour day. The gangs fought over turf.
Following the Panic of 1873, the suppression of workmen's rights in the Gilded Age and reactionary fears of a rising immigrant labor force in New York, Bowery culture and business suffered. The erection of the elevated train, the "El," in 1878, casting the entire street into the shadows, sealed its prospects. The street declined. Meanwhile, the neighborhood to its east, known as the Lower East Side, became the new immigrant slum as millions of Jews and Italians filed into its tenements. Their gangs now took the place of the old Irish and Protestant gangs as they fought over control of illegal rackets. Legitimate political control of the city now belonged to the Irish, the underworld to the new immigrants, and the role of the gang evolved closer to the Prohibition-era bootlegger and racketeer we know so well.
Next: Italians and Jews
From the 1840's on, the battle raged between the Protestant industrialist owners of the city and the immigrant – and largely Catholic – working class gangs. The immigrant cause advanced with the election of Tammany Hall Democrat and working class champion Fernando Wood, only to see the jealous Republicans, in control of the state government, undermine him from Albany. In 1857, while Wood was impressing both the downtrodden in the slums and wealthy progressive reformers with his programs to fight poverty and provide respectable employment – eighty years ahead of the New Deal – Albany conspired to shorten his mayoral term and replace his entire police force with a new one of their own. Standing firm on his city support and refusing to disband his municipal police, Wood forced a riot between the two police forces on the steps of City Hall. The military intervened to issue the mayor a summons at bayonette point and arrest him for inciting the riot.
The rest of the summer saw these two police forces engaging and subverting each other, turning the city into a lawless battleground. Tension broke into mass violence on July 4th, always a testy moment in the sweltering heat of midsummer New York. Responding to an incident in a bar on the Bowery, the city's busy commercial entertainment district, police and Protestant gangs attempted a full-scale assault on the Five Points, the Irish residential quarter, where the gangs and their families lived. Entering at Bayard Street, they attempted to push through the center of the neighborhood. Pelted by brickbats thrown from the rooftops, the invading Protestants were held at a stand-off. They piled up makeshift barricades out of carts and barrels, and brought out their firearms. By the time the military arrived the next evening, at least twelve were dead (perhaps many more dead had been carted away by family and neighbors), and both sides had exhausted themselves. The Times called the invasion a riot and blamed it on the Irish.
Worse riots were on their way. When, during the Civil War, Lincoln imposed a draft and allowed the wealthy to evade it for a fee (intending both to assuage the rich and raise funds for the war effort), the bitterly oppressed New York working class revolted. The draft riots of 1863 unleashed a fury of retribution expressing, especially among the long-abused Irish, decades of rage, lashing out in all directions. Four days of rioting, looting, lynching and arson shoved the mirror close to the city's face.
Towards the end of the century, political clout shifted from within the residential wards to the Bowery itself, lined now with flophouses, burlesque 'concert' halls, saloons, gambling parlors, beer halls, restaurants, pool rooms, theaters and sensational curiosity museums cheek by jowl with prosperous immigrant banks and insurance companies, radical labor union halls and early Marxist workingmen's associations. In its bars Tammany sachems rubbed elbows with their working-class support while unions organized in Bowery halls for the eight-hour day. The gangs fought over turf.
Following the Panic of 1873, the suppression of workmen's rights in the Gilded Age and reactionary fears of a rising immigrant labor force in New York, Bowery culture and business suffered. The erection of the elevated train, the "El," in 1878, casting the entire street into the shadows, sealed its prospects. The street declined. Meanwhile, the neighborhood to its east, known as the Lower East Side, became the new immigrant slum as millions of Jews and Italians filed into its tenements. Their gangs now took the place of the old Irish and Protestant gangs as they fought over control of illegal rackets. Legitimate political control of the city now belonged to the Irish, the underworld to the new immigrants, and the role of the gang evolved closer to the Prohibition-era bootlegger and racketeer we know so well.
Next: Italians and Jews
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I'm making a list
of Bloomberg's moves to help developers ignore, violate or avoid the law, starting with
1) the stealth development rule that allows illegal developments (details here),
2) curtailing public review of private developments (more here),
3) planning a charter revision that will allow developers to bypass community boards, eliminate the borough presidents and the public advocate and generally downsize government (article here -- this one he seems to be keeping on the back burner until he gets re-elected),
4) failure to collect fines for Department of Building and Environmental Control Board violations.
Want to add to the list?
Susannah B. Troy and Phil De Paulo both point out that illegal developments have been the cause of several Fire Department fatalities. The city doesn't even review all architectural plans anymore. It's collusion between development and government. And who is government supposed to serve?
1) the stealth development rule that allows illegal developments (details here),
2) curtailing public review of private developments (more here),
3) planning a charter revision that will allow developers to bypass community boards, eliminate the borough presidents and the public advocate and generally downsize government (article here -- this one he seems to be keeping on the back burner until he gets re-elected),
4) failure to collect fines for Department of Building and Environmental Control Board violations.
Want to add to the list?
Susannah B. Troy and Phil De Paulo both point out that illegal developments have been the cause of several Fire Department fatalities. The city doesn't even review all architectural plans anymore. It's collusion between development and government. And who is government supposed to serve?
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Entertainment in the slums (more LES history)
The other center of working class social life was the theater. The wealthy had their parlor pianos; the working class had theater. The halls built to house the stages were immense, holding thousands. The Bowery Theater was built for 3,500. No other indoor spaces in the city could accommodate such crowds. Theater took the place of the town gathering, an alternative to the town hall; the gangs flocked to the theaters and rallied there. At a time when life was far more social than we, sitting in front of our computers, can imagine, the theater was the bonfire that drew all around it.
Theater was so popular that even the abandoned slum children formed their own theater on a little strip of Orange Street (now Baxter Street) just south of Little Anthony Street (now Worth Street), today covered by a pristine post-Modern courthouse. It was no mean entertainment. Eventually one of the city's hottest tickets, it was visited by the Grand Duke of Moscovy on his American tour, and called thereafter "The Grand Duke Theater." Legendary performers of early vaudeville got their start at the Grand Duke. Harrigan and Hart, fathers of the American musical, held annual benefits there.
Theater back then had little in common with theater today. You didn't buy your ticket to sit in your seat attentively, waiting until the end of the first act to applaud. Theater was a form of self-expression for the audience every bit as much as for the actors. Catcalls, cheers, jeers, howling, booing, jumping onto the stage, sometimes crowding onto the stage -- even fights and riots -- were all a part of the evening. Peanut shells or rotten food were thrown onto the stage and the actors, often drunk themselves, played to the audience for cheers. The noise and mayhem must have been thrilling and frightening, with such large, unwieldy crowds stirred up into excitement and often anger. No wonder some of New York's most violent riots occurred in, at or around theaters.
Nor was the stage the only focus of attention in the theater. In the recesses of the uppermost balconies, the prostitutes plied their trade. Theater owners encouraged whorehouses to open nearby – good for business. The intertwining of the red light district and the theater district is no coincidence. It's all entertainment for the evening in a male-oriented society; the owners and purveyors of popular distractions aimed to please.
For the wealthy, the Five Points itself became an entertainment, a curiosity. The slum was so shockingly poor and the people so far from the dignified standards of propriety, that the genteel were given to junkets in among the slum dwellers to see for themselves "how the other half lives," the phrase reformer John Griscom coined in describing Five Points in the 1840's. No one had ever before seen or imagined such sordid loathsomeness, such moral abandon, such anarchic criminality, such filth, and perhaps most disturbing of all, such uninhibited racial mixing. White women could be seen in the arms of black men in the African quarter, a little alley known as Cow Bay between Centre and Orange (today's Baxter) Streets where the Lefkowitz office building now stands. Although slums are typically self-segregating, and Five Points was no exception – there were streets divided between the counties in Ireland from which the immigrants came – there is also mixing around the margins of slum society. In Five Points it was Irish with African, Chinese with Irish, later Jew with Italian, leaving the erect Protestant elites to choose their careful unions amongst each other, while still allowing themselves the occasional titillating thrill of peeking at the slum.
The neighborhood's renown as a human freak show was not merely local. Five Points was known throughout the country; word had even spread abroad. Guidebooks devoted whole sections to its dangers and dark crimes, its unsavory natives and to the noxious place itself, with titles like "The Nether Side," "Sunshine and Shadow," "Lights and Shadows," and "The Dark Side."
From afar and abroad, the great and famous, expected by their audience and fans to pass judgment on this extraordinary American city -- overflowing with wealth and holding the financial and industrial reigns of power in shipping and railroads and trading and banking, this metropolis so important to the country and so bluntly different from it -- the great and famous could not fail to take in the slum on their tours of New York. Davy Crocket came to visit – the country boy was appalled – and Charles Dickens, more familiar with desperate slums in London, came to compare. Dickens, whose literary responses leaned towards the colorful extremes of denunciation or enthusiasm, found fare for both in Five Points. His response to the slum dwellers is damning. He imagines that the pigs in the slum must wonder "why their masters walk upright" and "talk instead of grunting." But he also visited Almack's Dance Hall on Orange (Baxter) Street near Bayard, roughly where the Columbus Park pavilion now stands. There he saw the greatest dancer of his time, William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, who invented a dance so fast, wild and electric that, as Dickens writes, it brought "new brightness in the very candles." It was tap dance.
Next: Attempted reform and revolution
Theater was so popular that even the abandoned slum children formed their own theater on a little strip of Orange Street (now Baxter Street) just south of Little Anthony Street (now Worth Street), today covered by a pristine post-Modern courthouse. It was no mean entertainment. Eventually one of the city's hottest tickets, it was visited by the Grand Duke of Moscovy on his American tour, and called thereafter "The Grand Duke Theater." Legendary performers of early vaudeville got their start at the Grand Duke. Harrigan and Hart, fathers of the American musical, held annual benefits there.
Theater back then had little in common with theater today. You didn't buy your ticket to sit in your seat attentively, waiting until the end of the first act to applaud. Theater was a form of self-expression for the audience every bit as much as for the actors. Catcalls, cheers, jeers, howling, booing, jumping onto the stage, sometimes crowding onto the stage -- even fights and riots -- were all a part of the evening. Peanut shells or rotten food were thrown onto the stage and the actors, often drunk themselves, played to the audience for cheers. The noise and mayhem must have been thrilling and frightening, with such large, unwieldy crowds stirred up into excitement and often anger. No wonder some of New York's most violent riots occurred in, at or around theaters.
Nor was the stage the only focus of attention in the theater. In the recesses of the uppermost balconies, the prostitutes plied their trade. Theater owners encouraged whorehouses to open nearby – good for business. The intertwining of the red light district and the theater district is no coincidence. It's all entertainment for the evening in a male-oriented society; the owners and purveyors of popular distractions aimed to please.
For the wealthy, the Five Points itself became an entertainment, a curiosity. The slum was so shockingly poor and the people so far from the dignified standards of propriety, that the genteel were given to junkets in among the slum dwellers to see for themselves "how the other half lives," the phrase reformer John Griscom coined in describing Five Points in the 1840's. No one had ever before seen or imagined such sordid loathsomeness, such moral abandon, such anarchic criminality, such filth, and perhaps most disturbing of all, such uninhibited racial mixing. White women could be seen in the arms of black men in the African quarter, a little alley known as Cow Bay between Centre and Orange (today's Baxter) Streets where the Lefkowitz office building now stands. Although slums are typically self-segregating, and Five Points was no exception – there were streets divided between the counties in Ireland from which the immigrants came – there is also mixing around the margins of slum society. In Five Points it was Irish with African, Chinese with Irish, later Jew with Italian, leaving the erect Protestant elites to choose their careful unions amongst each other, while still allowing themselves the occasional titillating thrill of peeking at the slum.
The neighborhood's renown as a human freak show was not merely local. Five Points was known throughout the country; word had even spread abroad. Guidebooks devoted whole sections to its dangers and dark crimes, its unsavory natives and to the noxious place itself, with titles like "The Nether Side," "Sunshine and Shadow," "Lights and Shadows," and "The Dark Side."
From afar and abroad, the great and famous, expected by their audience and fans to pass judgment on this extraordinary American city -- overflowing with wealth and holding the financial and industrial reigns of power in shipping and railroads and trading and banking, this metropolis so important to the country and so bluntly different from it -- the great and famous could not fail to take in the slum on their tours of New York. Davy Crocket came to visit – the country boy was appalled – and Charles Dickens, more familiar with desperate slums in London, came to compare. Dickens, whose literary responses leaned towards the colorful extremes of denunciation or enthusiasm, found fare for both in Five Points. His response to the slum dwellers is damning. He imagines that the pigs in the slum must wonder "why their masters walk upright" and "talk instead of grunting." But he also visited Almack's Dance Hall on Orange (Baxter) Street near Bayard, roughly where the Columbus Park pavilion now stands. There he saw the greatest dancer of his time, William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, who invented a dance so fast, wild and electric that, as Dickens writes, it brought "new brightness in the very candles." It was tap dance.
Next: Attempted reform and revolution
Friday, May 22, 2009
End of public review?
The NYC.Gov questionnaire on Environmental Review ("environment" here includes all impacts of a development on communities and includes public review) invites developers to provide reasons for dismantling ("streamlining") the review process. Once again, I urge you to go to the NYC.Gov Environmental Review questionnaire and explain why public review is important and should be strengthened.
Here's what I posted on the questionnaire (for an explanation of Environmental Review see the post below)
In answer to the question, "What contributes to the length and cost of the environmental review?":
What contributes to the length and cost of the environmental review is the government's essential responsibility to protect the public good, the indispensable need for public oversight, the public's need for protection from harmful development, and the responsibility of government to ensure that the public is not only protected, but informed and empowered against private interests that are not concerned at all with the public good or with sound urban planning.
In answer to the question, "How can City agencies communicate more effectively with the public concerning public hearings and meetings?" (the only well-meaning question there):
Community Boards and the city administration should provide the means for local organizing, with neighborhood websites and street-by-street blogs devoted to community issues where local residents and business owners can read press releases and post on issues of concern.
Community Boards should be required to publicize hearings at least one month in advance.
Developers should be required to post their building plans on the construction site as soon as they apply for plan approval.
And in answer to the question, "We want to know where you see opportunities for improvement. Which aspects of the process are successful and could be used as models to improve more problematic areas? Why?":
1) Including alternatives in the review enhances the value of the process and takes best advantage of resources. More alternatives should be included to afford the process greater flexibility and allow better planning directions and ideas a chance to be considered.
2) The independent research firm that conducts the reviews should be assessed and vetted by independent public interest urban planning groups including The Municipal Arts Society and the Historic Districts Council.
Currently, zoning EIS's have the uniform look of a rubber stamp for DCP. a) The independence of the public review must be ensured. It should not respond to developers' needs, but to the public's needs. b) The objectivity of the process must be protected. The Environmental Review must not become a rubber stamp for development.
3) The comprehensiveness, detail and thoroughness of the Review must be ensured and expanded. All aspects of impact on the community and surrounding communities must be carefully and objectively assessed by an independent party.
4) Public hearings and public outreach must be expanded.
5) Means of informing and educating the public must be enhanced.
Here's what I posted on the questionnaire (for an explanation of Environmental Review see the post below)
In answer to the question, "What contributes to the length and cost of the environmental review?":
What contributes to the length and cost of the environmental review is the government's essential responsibility to protect the public good, the indispensable need for public oversight, the public's need for protection from harmful development, and the responsibility of government to ensure that the public is not only protected, but informed and empowered against private interests that are not concerned at all with the public good or with sound urban planning.
In answer to the question, "How can City agencies communicate more effectively with the public concerning public hearings and meetings?" (the only well-meaning question there):
Community Boards and the city administration should provide the means for local organizing, with neighborhood websites and street-by-street blogs devoted to community issues where local residents and business owners can read press releases and post on issues of concern.
Community Boards should be required to publicize hearings at least one month in advance.
Developers should be required to post their building plans on the construction site as soon as they apply for plan approval.
And in answer to the question, "We want to know where you see opportunities for improvement. Which aspects of the process are successful and could be used as models to improve more problematic areas? Why?":
1) Including alternatives in the review enhances the value of the process and takes best advantage of resources. More alternatives should be included to afford the process greater flexibility and allow better planning directions and ideas a chance to be considered.
2) The independent research firm that conducts the reviews should be assessed and vetted by independent public interest urban planning groups including The Municipal Arts Society and the Historic Districts Council.
Currently, zoning EIS's have the uniform look of a rubber stamp for DCP. a) The independence of the public review must be ensured. It should not respond to developers' needs, but to the public's needs. b) The objectivity of the process must be protected. The Environmental Review must not become a rubber stamp for development.
3) The comprehensiveness, detail and thoroughness of the Review must be ensured and expanded. All aspects of impact on the community and surrounding communities must be carefully and objectively assessed by an independent party.
4) Public hearings and public outreach must be expanded.
5) Means of informing and educating the public must be enhanced.
East Broadway and Allen/Pike Street are still closed, a week after the fire at the Hong Kong Market. The building next door to the fire has already been demolished and 107 is in process of being torn down. 105, 103 and 99 will be assessed for demolition next, according to councilmember Gerson's office. Meanwhile the businesses on that cordoned-off block are dying and there appears to be no effort to shore-up these buildings to save them. 109 and 107 were small 150-year-old 4-story row houses. But 105, 103 and 99 are much younger 6-story buildings with many more units in them. In what other neighborhood would land be cleared with so little interest in protecting residents and small businesses?
The end of public review?
The mayor is planning to undermine government regulation and the public voice yet again.
The public's most powerful protection against destructive development is called the "Environmental Review" process. It's not about ecology. It's intended to be a public assessment of the impact of a proposed development on the entire community -- on population density, traffic, housing, services... And it includes crucial public hearings.
Developers hate this process. It's an obstacle in their way. They prefer to avoid public review or eliminate it entirely. And now the mayor wants to help them. Take a look.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2009/environmental_questionnaire.html
The mayor's Economic Development Corporation is seeking to "streamline" the process to "reduce the costs and delays" specifically for "property owners." The questionnaire is designed as a first step towards making it easier for developers to bypass Environmental Review.
Note the wording of the first topic: Topic 1 - Obstacles and Roadblocks
"We are interested in understanding the obstacles and roadblocks that may be experienced by applicants for projects subject to environmental review...."
I urge you to go to the questionnaire and explain why public review is important and should be strengthened. Let the EDC know that
1) The independence of the public review must be ensured. It should not respond to developers' needs, but to the public's needs.
2) The objectivity of the process must be protected. The Environmental Review must not become a rubber stamp for development.
3) The comprehensiveness, detail and thoroughness of the Review must be ensured and expanded. All aspects of impact on the community and surrounding communities must be carefully and objectively assessed by an independent party.
4) Public hearings and public outreach must be expanded.
5) Means of informing the public must be enhanced.
Remember that this is the same mayor who came up with a plan to restrict legal challenges to illegal developments. Without public review, residents and small businesses have no protection against development, against demolition, bulldozing, eviction, gentrification. It's giving the entire city over to developers whose interest is not the public good. It undermines government regulation and public oversight of destructive private interests. It's taking the city away from the public and handing it over to the few who just want to make a killing off your city and your lives.
The public's most powerful protection against destructive development is called the "Environmental Review" process. It's not about ecology. It's intended to be a public assessment of the impact of a proposed development on the entire community -- on population density, traffic, housing, services... And it includes crucial public hearings.
Developers hate this process. It's an obstacle in their way. They prefer to avoid public review or eliminate it entirely. And now the mayor wants to help them. Take a look.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2009/environmental_questionnaire.html
The mayor's Economic Development Corporation is seeking to "streamline" the process to "reduce the costs and delays" specifically for "property owners." The questionnaire is designed as a first step towards making it easier for developers to bypass Environmental Review.
Note the wording of the first topic: Topic 1 - Obstacles and Roadblocks
"We are interested in understanding the obstacles and roadblocks that may be experienced by applicants for projects subject to environmental review...."
I urge you to go to the questionnaire and explain why public review is important and should be strengthened. Let the EDC know that
1) The independence of the public review must be ensured. It should not respond to developers' needs, but to the public's needs.
2) The objectivity of the process must be protected. The Environmental Review must not become a rubber stamp for development.
3) The comprehensiveness, detail and thoroughness of the Review must be ensured and expanded. All aspects of impact on the community and surrounding communities must be carefully and objectively assessed by an independent party.
4) Public hearings and public outreach must be expanded.
5) Means of informing the public must be enhanced.
Remember that this is the same mayor who came up with a plan to restrict legal challenges to illegal developments. Without public review, residents and small businesses have no protection against development, against demolition, bulldozing, eviction, gentrification. It's giving the entire city over to developers whose interest is not the public good. It undermines government regulation and public oversight of destructive private interests. It's taking the city away from the public and handing it over to the few who just want to make a killing off your city and your lives.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
The Five Points (more history of the slums)
No place on earth perhaps has had so bad a reputation as Five Points. Considered both unreformable and unworthy of reform, it was razed to the ground in the mid 1890's, and, as if eliminating it were not enough, all the streets leading into it were renamed over the years erasing every evidence of its existence from the map of New York. Today, finding the site of Five Points requires either a bit of preparatory research or a good tour guide.
The neighborhood got off to an inauspicious start. It was first an undesirable marshy spread to the east of Manhattan's largest lake, called by the Dutch the Kulch and bastardized by the British as The Collect. Today Foley Square and Collect Pond Park cover the lake site. You can still see the water's outline: nothing tall is built where the lake was; the municipal skyscrapers, defining its solid-ground shoreline, stand hovering over the empty square.
The British name was unwittingly prescient. The lake, originally 60 feet deep, rife with fish – it was a favorite Dutch recreation area – began to collect waste as tanneries and slaughterhouses sprouted around its shores. It grew so polluted that it was used as a local dumping ground with garbage, according to at least one account, rising fifteen feet above the water level.
The exaggerations of the contemporary appalled aside, the putrid mess became an issue for the city, not because it was unsanitary, stinking and infested with vermin, but because it drove surrounding real estate values down, real estate being a matter of genuine municipal concern in a city owned and run by its landed gentry. Digging a canal to drain it (today's Canal Street), did nothing to quell the aquifers that fed the lake, and so a nearby hill, New York's Bunker Hill which rose over Broome Street, was shoveled into the watery pit, creating a landfill, though not what you could call dry land. It was more marsh.
Undaunted by the challenge of constructing over waterlogged land, real estate speculators, among them John Jacob Astor, wealthiest man in America, bought pieces of this worthless swamp for a song, renting it out to contractors who built ramshackle shacks there, not for themselves to live in – who would choose to live in muck and slime – but for those who could not choose to live elsewhere, the greenhorn immigrants clambering off the boats with not a penny in their pockets.
The immigrants were perfectly suited both to fill the shacks and work the factories, enriching both landlord and industrialist. They should surely have been welcomed for all the wealth they brought their superiors, but they were despised instead, as if keeping them in penury were easier to conscience if it were viewed as a sort of punishment and just desert. The German immigrants were deplored -- and feared -- as dangerous revolutionaries, the Catholic Irish reviled as subhuman brawlers. Newspaper cartoons – the news industry was Protestant-run -- consistently draw the Irish with simian features.
Rents, you'd think, would have to have been cheap, since these immigrants earned so little. Such an assumption woefully underestimates the robust vigor of irrepressible American entrepreneurial spirit. Rents outcharged the immigrants far beyond their capacity to pay. It was up to the renter to take in boarders -- whole families of boarders, and, if there was a tiny windowless closet of a backroom, as many as would fit who had a penny to pay. It is a tribute to this great American spirit that a once empty, worthless swampy dump could be transformed into a rich source of regular revenue, nevermind that it was dense, diseased and desperate beyond anything anyone had ever seen or imagined.
Exploitative real estate in the slums was so lucrative that the shacks were built with upper stories to expand rental space. Thus was the multiple dwelling conceived, profit being the mother of invention. Tenements couldn't be built high enough. At the time, the standard of housing elsewhere in the city was the town house. All the wealthy lived in them and the artisans too, along with their apprentices. Apartments wouldn't come along until the French made them fashionable later in the century. Boarding houses there were, but the tenement apartment belonged to the slum, considered unfit for any but alien laborers below the level of social inclusion. They were built taller than the standard townhouse, almost twice as tall, among the tallest structures in the city. The oldest tenement still standing, on Mott Street, is no less than seven stories tall, and no elevator. In an age without the mechanical lift, well-heeled businessmen would not consider climbing more than a few flights of stairs. The great business establishments and the great businessmen's great mansions were broad and expansive, not tall. But no thought was given to immigrants living even seven stories up, taking those flights several times a day, since without refrigeration, merely eating required a trip downstairs to the street carts.
This was the context of immigrant life: housing without running water or toilet facilities – the toilet was a ditch in the back yard – no sewage system, streets piled with garbage, pigs the immigrants couldn't afford to feed running wild in the streets alongside the thousands of abandoned children the immigrants also couldn't afford to feed, and the prostitutes, prostitutes walking the streets, prostitutes waiting in the doorways, prostitutes reclining on the steps, prostitutes everywhere. It was estimated that a third of the female population of New York in 1840 was or had been engaged in prostitution. And no surprise: a seamstress might earn between one and two dollars a week, working sixteen hours a day seven days a week; a prostitute could earn nearly twice that in a day. Every second or third house in Five Points had an accommodation for prostitution of some kind. Nearly every building on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange housed a bordello.
If prostitution was nearly everywhere, alcohol was absolutely everywhere. Every building had an accommodation for whiskey. All the early renditions of Five Points show groceries, a euphemism for groggeries, in every house. Whiskey was the cheapest drink on the street, cheaper than tea, cheaper than coffee. Drunkenness was a genuine and pervasive problem for the slums, contributing to child abandonment as well as compelling children to runaway, no longer able to endure the abuses of irascible parents unhinged by liquor. This backdrop of whiskey pouring into every corner of the neighborhood softens the image of the temperance movement. Teetotalers might have been extreme, but they were responding to a genuine reality.
The saloon became one of the two centers of social life in the slum. The saloon owner, a man of the people, though a few steps above in income, became the local leader, trusted, respected and relied-upon. He was equally connected to a powerful industry, liquor, and to a broad constituency, the neighborhood. He could hide a local gang member in trouble with the law; he could help him out with a small loan in a pinch. The slum invested its political strength in the saloon owner and the list of saloon-owner power brokers in New York is a long one.
The collusion of politics, saloons and gangs was evident from the beginning. Political ringleaders, like theatrical impresarios, staged gang riots as today's activists stage demonstrations. The source of their influence was not in the low-level offices they occasionally held, alderman or district leader. They typically operated out of a saloon, the center of gang activity.
To appreciate the influence of the saloon owner, just walk over to New York's civic center. Surrounded by the palaces of municipal authority and splendid marble courthouses lies Foley Square, named after "Big Tom" Foley, a saloon owner. Big Tom's greatest gift to New York was promoting his protégé Al Smith, New York's greatest governor, through the ranks of Tammany Hall into Albany. It is a testament to the power of the saloon that while the impressive civic center square bears Foley's name, the monument to the great Al Smith is shunted far to the east on Oliver Street amidst a nondescript affordable housing project, the Al Smith Houses, built over what was once the worst slum complex in the city, Gotham Court. Scarcely a New Yorker has not walked through the saloon-keeper's square; scarcely a New Yorker knows where to find Al.
The political influence of this gang-and-saloon working class cannot easily be overestimated. Tyler Anbinder, in his study, The Five Points, describes the old caucus method in New York's primaries: candidates appeared at the party hall with their gang of choice; they fought; whoever was left conscious after the brawl took the nomination, all possible objectors having fallen silent for the evening. Candidates employed gangs to scour the graveyards for the newly inscribed tombstones of the recently interred: they would be the voters in the next election. In one election in the Tenth Ward, there were no fewer than 2,000 more voters than living inhabitants. Sly critics liked to say that Fernando Wood, the controversial Democratic mayor and champion of the working class and Irish, was elected by the unanimous vote of the dead. Repeat voting was another familiar scam. There was little risk of being caught: the polls themselves were guarded by the gangs. Wood, running for a second term, gave his police a furlough on election day, advising them not to visit the polls except to vote, and promptly drew out his Irish gangs to keep out Protestant Republican voters.
Politics was a central concern among the gangs. The gang member of old New York may have been violent, but he wasn't a criminal, or, just as important, didn't imagine himself a criminal. The gang was a kind of social-civic organ. Gangs of the mid-19th century share fighting bravado and territorial pride with our contemporary notion of a gang, but little else. New York's volunteer fire departments were filled by local gang members, intent on demonstrating in as heroic and masculine way as possible the mettle of their civic virtue, their protective dedication to their own community and their indispensability to the city's welfare. They dressed up proudly too, in flashy outfits with ostentations hair-dos – permanent locks drawn forward around the cheek bones and held in place with soap, "soaplocks." They imagined themselves young men-about-town (though their bright-hued gear drew frowns of disapprobation from the rich, dignified and colorless). They were proud of themselves, of their ethics, their civic devotion, of their brotherhood. When they went to the theater they cheered the character of Mose, gang member, fireman, defender of the innocent and helpless from the predatory rich, nemesis of thieves and lowlifes. Mose, the noble working man hero, was their self-identity.
In the case of the Five Points gangs, these were Irish Catholic immigrants anxious to prove themselves every bit as American as the native-born Protestants who hated them, who hated their presence and who hated their damaging effect on wages, on the decline of skilled labor and workplace conditions. The Protestant gangs formed their own party – the Know-Nothings – while the Irish stood behind Tammany Hall's Democratic machine. It is the remarkable legacy of the gangs of New York that a city entirely owned by industrialists and landlords whose wealth and power drove a nation, became a working class Democratic town.
Next: Entertainment and politics
The neighborhood got off to an inauspicious start. It was first an undesirable marshy spread to the east of Manhattan's largest lake, called by the Dutch the Kulch and bastardized by the British as The Collect. Today Foley Square and Collect Pond Park cover the lake site. You can still see the water's outline: nothing tall is built where the lake was; the municipal skyscrapers, defining its solid-ground shoreline, stand hovering over the empty square.
The British name was unwittingly prescient. The lake, originally 60 feet deep, rife with fish – it was a favorite Dutch recreation area – began to collect waste as tanneries and slaughterhouses sprouted around its shores. It grew so polluted that it was used as a local dumping ground with garbage, according to at least one account, rising fifteen feet above the water level.
The exaggerations of the contemporary appalled aside, the putrid mess became an issue for the city, not because it was unsanitary, stinking and infested with vermin, but because it drove surrounding real estate values down, real estate being a matter of genuine municipal concern in a city owned and run by its landed gentry. Digging a canal to drain it (today's Canal Street), did nothing to quell the aquifers that fed the lake, and so a nearby hill, New York's Bunker Hill which rose over Broome Street, was shoveled into the watery pit, creating a landfill, though not what you could call dry land. It was more marsh.
Undaunted by the challenge of constructing over waterlogged land, real estate speculators, among them John Jacob Astor, wealthiest man in America, bought pieces of this worthless swamp for a song, renting it out to contractors who built ramshackle shacks there, not for themselves to live in – who would choose to live in muck and slime – but for those who could not choose to live elsewhere, the greenhorn immigrants clambering off the boats with not a penny in their pockets.
The immigrants were perfectly suited both to fill the shacks and work the factories, enriching both landlord and industrialist. They should surely have been welcomed for all the wealth they brought their superiors, but they were despised instead, as if keeping them in penury were easier to conscience if it were viewed as a sort of punishment and just desert. The German immigrants were deplored -- and feared -- as dangerous revolutionaries, the Catholic Irish reviled as subhuman brawlers. Newspaper cartoons – the news industry was Protestant-run -- consistently draw the Irish with simian features.
Rents, you'd think, would have to have been cheap, since these immigrants earned so little. Such an assumption woefully underestimates the robust vigor of irrepressible American entrepreneurial spirit. Rents outcharged the immigrants far beyond their capacity to pay. It was up to the renter to take in boarders -- whole families of boarders, and, if there was a tiny windowless closet of a backroom, as many as would fit who had a penny to pay. It is a tribute to this great American spirit that a once empty, worthless swampy dump could be transformed into a rich source of regular revenue, nevermind that it was dense, diseased and desperate beyond anything anyone had ever seen or imagined.
Exploitative real estate in the slums was so lucrative that the shacks were built with upper stories to expand rental space. Thus was the multiple dwelling conceived, profit being the mother of invention. Tenements couldn't be built high enough. At the time, the standard of housing elsewhere in the city was the town house. All the wealthy lived in them and the artisans too, along with their apprentices. Apartments wouldn't come along until the French made them fashionable later in the century. Boarding houses there were, but the tenement apartment belonged to the slum, considered unfit for any but alien laborers below the level of social inclusion. They were built taller than the standard townhouse, almost twice as tall, among the tallest structures in the city. The oldest tenement still standing, on Mott Street, is no less than seven stories tall, and no elevator. In an age without the mechanical lift, well-heeled businessmen would not consider climbing more than a few flights of stairs. The great business establishments and the great businessmen's great mansions were broad and expansive, not tall. But no thought was given to immigrants living even seven stories up, taking those flights several times a day, since without refrigeration, merely eating required a trip downstairs to the street carts.
This was the context of immigrant life: housing without running water or toilet facilities – the toilet was a ditch in the back yard – no sewage system, streets piled with garbage, pigs the immigrants couldn't afford to feed running wild in the streets alongside the thousands of abandoned children the immigrants also couldn't afford to feed, and the prostitutes, prostitutes walking the streets, prostitutes waiting in the doorways, prostitutes reclining on the steps, prostitutes everywhere. It was estimated that a third of the female population of New York in 1840 was or had been engaged in prostitution. And no surprise: a seamstress might earn between one and two dollars a week, working sixteen hours a day seven days a week; a prostitute could earn nearly twice that in a day. Every second or third house in Five Points had an accommodation for prostitution of some kind. Nearly every building on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange housed a bordello.
If prostitution was nearly everywhere, alcohol was absolutely everywhere. Every building had an accommodation for whiskey. All the early renditions of Five Points show groceries, a euphemism for groggeries, in every house. Whiskey was the cheapest drink on the street, cheaper than tea, cheaper than coffee. Drunkenness was a genuine and pervasive problem for the slums, contributing to child abandonment as well as compelling children to runaway, no longer able to endure the abuses of irascible parents unhinged by liquor. This backdrop of whiskey pouring into every corner of the neighborhood softens the image of the temperance movement. Teetotalers might have been extreme, but they were responding to a genuine reality.
The saloon became one of the two centers of social life in the slum. The saloon owner, a man of the people, though a few steps above in income, became the local leader, trusted, respected and relied-upon. He was equally connected to a powerful industry, liquor, and to a broad constituency, the neighborhood. He could hide a local gang member in trouble with the law; he could help him out with a small loan in a pinch. The slum invested its political strength in the saloon owner and the list of saloon-owner power brokers in New York is a long one.
The collusion of politics, saloons and gangs was evident from the beginning. Political ringleaders, like theatrical impresarios, staged gang riots as today's activists stage demonstrations. The source of their influence was not in the low-level offices they occasionally held, alderman or district leader. They typically operated out of a saloon, the center of gang activity.
To appreciate the influence of the saloon owner, just walk over to New York's civic center. Surrounded by the palaces of municipal authority and splendid marble courthouses lies Foley Square, named after "Big Tom" Foley, a saloon owner. Big Tom's greatest gift to New York was promoting his protégé Al Smith, New York's greatest governor, through the ranks of Tammany Hall into Albany. It is a testament to the power of the saloon that while the impressive civic center square bears Foley's name, the monument to the great Al Smith is shunted far to the east on Oliver Street amidst a nondescript affordable housing project, the Al Smith Houses, built over what was once the worst slum complex in the city, Gotham Court. Scarcely a New Yorker has not walked through the saloon-keeper's square; scarcely a New Yorker knows where to find Al.
The political influence of this gang-and-saloon working class cannot easily be overestimated. Tyler Anbinder, in his study, The Five Points, describes the old caucus method in New York's primaries: candidates appeared at the party hall with their gang of choice; they fought; whoever was left conscious after the brawl took the nomination, all possible objectors having fallen silent for the evening. Candidates employed gangs to scour the graveyards for the newly inscribed tombstones of the recently interred: they would be the voters in the next election. In one election in the Tenth Ward, there were no fewer than 2,000 more voters than living inhabitants. Sly critics liked to say that Fernando Wood, the controversial Democratic mayor and champion of the working class and Irish, was elected by the unanimous vote of the dead. Repeat voting was another familiar scam. There was little risk of being caught: the polls themselves were guarded by the gangs. Wood, running for a second term, gave his police a furlough on election day, advising them not to visit the polls except to vote, and promptly drew out his Irish gangs to keep out Protestant Republican voters.
Politics was a central concern among the gangs. The gang member of old New York may have been violent, but he wasn't a criminal, or, just as important, didn't imagine himself a criminal. The gang was a kind of social-civic organ. Gangs of the mid-19th century share fighting bravado and territorial pride with our contemporary notion of a gang, but little else. New York's volunteer fire departments were filled by local gang members, intent on demonstrating in as heroic and masculine way as possible the mettle of their civic virtue, their protective dedication to their own community and their indispensability to the city's welfare. They dressed up proudly too, in flashy outfits with ostentations hair-dos – permanent locks drawn forward around the cheek bones and held in place with soap, "soaplocks." They imagined themselves young men-about-town (though their bright-hued gear drew frowns of disapprobation from the rich, dignified and colorless). They were proud of themselves, of their ethics, their civic devotion, of their brotherhood. When they went to the theater they cheered the character of Mose, gang member, fireman, defender of the innocent and helpless from the predatory rich, nemesis of thieves and lowlifes. Mose, the noble working man hero, was their self-identity.
In the case of the Five Points gangs, these were Irish Catholic immigrants anxious to prove themselves every bit as American as the native-born Protestants who hated them, who hated their presence and who hated their damaging effect on wages, on the decline of skilled labor and workplace conditions. The Protestant gangs formed their own party – the Know-Nothings – while the Irish stood behind Tammany Hall's Democratic machine. It is the remarkable legacy of the gangs of New York that a city entirely owned by industrialists and landlords whose wealth and power drove a nation, became a working class Democratic town.
Next: Entertainment and politics
Monday, May 18, 2009
A brief history of the slums
(-- Dont forget to sign the petition to save the Bowery --)
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html
I was asked to write an introduction to a book on LES history which will be coming out soon. Unfortunately, after it was all written, the publisher asked us to cut out several thousand words, so now there's a published intro and a longer unpublished one.
While waiting for the Chinatown Working Group's June 1 Town Hall, I thought I'd serialize the original introduction here. It's a romp through the history of Manhattan from the perspective of its slums, a rich and surprising story, with great significance for the history of the city, the nation and, in fact, the world: the New Deal welfare state emerged from the slums of New York, and the welfare state has become the foundation of industrialized nations the world over.
If you've read the standard texts, Anbinder, Burroughs & Wallace, Riis, Sante and Shorto, you'll recognize many of the details. It's an intro essay designed to entertain, not a piece of original research. The book itself, by Eric Ferrara, contains a wealth of original research which cannot be found all compiled together anywhere else. Gangsters Murderers and Weirdos of the Lower East Side, coming soon.
So here's the opening section of the original intro:
"I can lick any man in the House" thumped a braying John Morrissey, twice holder of the American bare-knuckles boxing championship, Dead Rabbits gang leader and the man who, after losing a humiliating fight to him, ordered Bill the Butcher murdered.
The "House" he mentions was not a local saloon. It was the United States House of Representatives, a gang to which Morrissey -- boxer, gangster, murderer -- had been elected, not once, but twice.
Politics was a violent affair back in the mid 19th century, especially in New York, which was a violent place. The country was expanding into lawless frontiers and fighting over them in the hills and fields and in the halls of Congress. The country was itself a kind of frontier, learning to define its laws and learning to abuse and subvert them once defined. Even more astonishing than the scale of 19th century corruption – government is always corrupt on the largest possible scale -- was its acceptability. In his half-serious distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft, as if graft itself were no wrong, only lying about it, Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt offers a blunt clue: "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em…What's dishonest about that?" Politics was unabashedly criminal, and unabashed criminals became politicians. In New York, it was not uncommon for candidates to rise from the ranks of the gangs.
"The history of the gangs of New York has never been written. Could it ever be told with a tolerable degree of accuracy, it would make a thrilling chapter in the history of Manhattan. It would be a tale of bold and lawless deeds, of affiliation with more or less corrupt public officials, of protection … and of the evolution of some of the abler members of the ruffian class into "honest" gamblers, high-class sports, or even influential politicians." The New York Times, 1912
The relationship of the 19th century gangs to the city's politics reflects the broad history of post-Revolutionary New York and its emergence in the 20th century, after a hundred years of struggle, as a progressive vanguard for the nation. Early19th century New York was a world in rapid transition towards industrialization, succumbing to the depressed wages and social instability that industrialization brings. Pre-Revolutionary New York had been a wealthy port with a stable, if uneven, social fabric of lavishly aristocratic landowners surrounded by modest artisans and "mechanics," the highly skilled laborers who, through the traditional artisanal guild systems, regulated prices and wages. It wasn't always smooth, but it was a kind of communal society -- albeit with an extravagant top end --tacitly governed by a communal ethic, with a grousing recognition from the heights that no part of an integral society could be entirely neglected.
When industrialization arrived, it marched over Manhattan with little regard for its quaint integrity. Industrialists quickly saw the advantage of unskilled labor over these high-cost craft masters supporting their live-in apprentices. Industry needed a limitless source of such labor to replace the artisan and drive wages down. That source was handily offered by the tens of thousands of impoverished and desperate immigrants flooding the New York port in search of a start at the very bottom. And that's exactly what those immigrants got, although the bottom had dropped much lower than anyone had ever thought possible.
This was a perfect marriage of convenience for industry, the well-appointed groom, although it did little for the underpaid immigrant labor force wedded to him, less for the jilted out-of-work artisans. For society as a whole it was a disastrous union, unstable and antagonistic from the start, eventually ripping apart that precarious communal social balance, finally throwing the city's politics into confusion of spite, brutality and rapine.
In a true oligarchy, labor has little recourse against wealth in power: wealth rules. But in a democracy, the industrialist is not the only card sharp looking for a good game. Politicians play too, and often deal. Their game, moreover, is indispensable to the industrialist. The government builds infrastructure – like the Erie Canal -- that can send young industries into boomtime. The politicians are suitably positioned to speculate on the future they are themselves creating, and take a kickback as well. There's not quite as much money in politics as industry, but there's plenty. All the politician needs is a limitless source of voting support.
And so New York became a battleground between wealth and political power; on the one side the industrialist, intent on immiserating the immigrant to keep wages low, and on the other side, the political clout of the sheer numbers of immigrants cultivating their local favorites as candidates.
Wealth had created its own worst enemy, a vast working class. Industrialization, without intending it, had pushed New York into political transformation. It played out at first in Tammany Hall graft and deadly riots, but eventually gave us a successful labor movement and the New Deal. It all started with the gangs and the gangs all started with Five Points.
Next: The Five Points
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html
I was asked to write an introduction to a book on LES history which will be coming out soon. Unfortunately, after it was all written, the publisher asked us to cut out several thousand words, so now there's a published intro and a longer unpublished one.
While waiting for the Chinatown Working Group's June 1 Town Hall, I thought I'd serialize the original introduction here. It's a romp through the history of Manhattan from the perspective of its slums, a rich and surprising story, with great significance for the history of the city, the nation and, in fact, the world: the New Deal welfare state emerged from the slums of New York, and the welfare state has become the foundation of industrialized nations the world over.
If you've read the standard texts, Anbinder, Burroughs & Wallace, Riis, Sante and Shorto, you'll recognize many of the details. It's an intro essay designed to entertain, not a piece of original research. The book itself, by Eric Ferrara, contains a wealth of original research which cannot be found all compiled together anywhere else. Gangsters Murderers and Weirdos of the Lower East Side, coming soon.
So here's the opening section of the original intro:
"I can lick any man in the House" thumped a braying John Morrissey, twice holder of the American bare-knuckles boxing championship, Dead Rabbits gang leader and the man who, after losing a humiliating fight to him, ordered Bill the Butcher murdered.
The "House" he mentions was not a local saloon. It was the United States House of Representatives, a gang to which Morrissey -- boxer, gangster, murderer -- had been elected, not once, but twice.
Politics was a violent affair back in the mid 19th century, especially in New York, which was a violent place. The country was expanding into lawless frontiers and fighting over them in the hills and fields and in the halls of Congress. The country was itself a kind of frontier, learning to define its laws and learning to abuse and subvert them once defined. Even more astonishing than the scale of 19th century corruption – government is always corrupt on the largest possible scale -- was its acceptability. In his half-serious distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft, as if graft itself were no wrong, only lying about it, Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt offers a blunt clue: "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em…What's dishonest about that?" Politics was unabashedly criminal, and unabashed criminals became politicians. In New York, it was not uncommon for candidates to rise from the ranks of the gangs.
"The history of the gangs of New York has never been written. Could it ever be told with a tolerable degree of accuracy, it would make a thrilling chapter in the history of Manhattan. It would be a tale of bold and lawless deeds, of affiliation with more or less corrupt public officials, of protection … and of the evolution of some of the abler members of the ruffian class into "honest" gamblers, high-class sports, or even influential politicians." The New York Times, 1912
The relationship of the 19th century gangs to the city's politics reflects the broad history of post-Revolutionary New York and its emergence in the 20th century, after a hundred years of struggle, as a progressive vanguard for the nation. Early19th century New York was a world in rapid transition towards industrialization, succumbing to the depressed wages and social instability that industrialization brings. Pre-Revolutionary New York had been a wealthy port with a stable, if uneven, social fabric of lavishly aristocratic landowners surrounded by modest artisans and "mechanics," the highly skilled laborers who, through the traditional artisanal guild systems, regulated prices and wages. It wasn't always smooth, but it was a kind of communal society -- albeit with an extravagant top end --tacitly governed by a communal ethic, with a grousing recognition from the heights that no part of an integral society could be entirely neglected.
When industrialization arrived, it marched over Manhattan with little regard for its quaint integrity. Industrialists quickly saw the advantage of unskilled labor over these high-cost craft masters supporting their live-in apprentices. Industry needed a limitless source of such labor to replace the artisan and drive wages down. That source was handily offered by the tens of thousands of impoverished and desperate immigrants flooding the New York port in search of a start at the very bottom. And that's exactly what those immigrants got, although the bottom had dropped much lower than anyone had ever thought possible.
This was a perfect marriage of convenience for industry, the well-appointed groom, although it did little for the underpaid immigrant labor force wedded to him, less for the jilted out-of-work artisans. For society as a whole it was a disastrous union, unstable and antagonistic from the start, eventually ripping apart that precarious communal social balance, finally throwing the city's politics into confusion of spite, brutality and rapine.
In a true oligarchy, labor has little recourse against wealth in power: wealth rules. But in a democracy, the industrialist is not the only card sharp looking for a good game. Politicians play too, and often deal. Their game, moreover, is indispensable to the industrialist. The government builds infrastructure – like the Erie Canal -- that can send young industries into boomtime. The politicians are suitably positioned to speculate on the future they are themselves creating, and take a kickback as well. There's not quite as much money in politics as industry, but there's plenty. All the politician needs is a limitless source of voting support.
And so New York became a battleground between wealth and political power; on the one side the industrialist, intent on immiserating the immigrant to keep wages low, and on the other side, the political clout of the sheer numbers of immigrants cultivating their local favorites as candidates.
Wealth had created its own worst enemy, a vast working class. Industrialization, without intending it, had pushed New York into political transformation. It played out at first in Tammany Hall graft and deadly riots, but eventually gave us a successful labor movement and the New Deal. It all started with the gangs and the gangs all started with Five Points.
Next: The Five Points
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The Bowery
Every Thursday at 2, the East Village Visitors Center will be offering a tour of the Bowery.
Although the street has come to have a reputation as New York's skid row, it was once the liveliest and most important street in the city, the Broadway of the 19th century. New York's entertainment, commerce, politics and crime mingled there along the whorehouses, theaters, curiosity museums, hotels and Tammany Hall saloons. Gangs fought over the Bowery, New York's first fortune tellers arranged secret liaisons there, the city's transvestites lifted their skirts for gay patrons there. Back further in the 18th century, it was the city's first free African village. The oldest surviving brick building in New York stands on the Bowery. And even at the nadir of its fortunes in the 1960s when its commercial buildings were all but abandoned, it housed hundreds of artists at home among the marginals and derelicts.
The Bowery is not just the oldest thoroughfare in New York or just an odd and resonant place-name deeply entrenched in our city's collective myth and lore, not just Whitman's haunt and Crane's, Foster's and Burroughs', not just the birthplace of New York's original theater traditions of minstrelsy and Jim Crow, Irish Mose and Yiddish Shmendrick, vaudeville and burlesque. It's not just the turf of the B'hoys and the gangs, shoulder-hitters and Tammany pols who ran New York from their saloons, nor just the skid row of flophouses, whorehouses and dives. Along with its colorful and influential past, the Bowery is also the single most architecturally and historically diverse street in the city, comprising buildings from nearly every decade between 1780 and 2000, residential and commercial: warehouse by flophouse, bank by union hall, theater by tenement and townhouse and whorehouse and saloon. It is an indispensable resource of two centuries of American architectural design as well as a repository of social, economic, political, immigrant, labor, underground, criminal, deviant, marginal, counter-cultural, literary, musical, dramatic and artistic history.
The legacy of the Bowery is long. The pre-1830 town houses at 135, 141, 151 and 173, among the oldest structures in New York, offer a rare glimpse of early post-Revolutionary New York. Klein Deutschland survives in the Germania Fire Insurance building, German meeting halls like Stouben House, and the Germania Bank's several locations. Labor unions met in halls all along the Bowery and labor history was made at 263, the Journeyman Bakers' International Union, which organized in 1869 one of the largest union demonstrations the city had seen.
There were political halls -- Horace Greeley delivered a powerful speech in support of U.S.Grant's candidacy at a 17th Ward Republican meeting at 327 in 1868 – and political saloons: Farley's, at 133, poured ale to Tammany from 1885 until 1915. There were curiosity "museums" (Worth's at 101), burlesque "concert halls" (197) and notorious gangster dives (Geoghegan's, 105), all of which still stand; only the theaters, once the Bowery's hallmark, are gone, some of the greatest only recently demolished.
The turn-of-the-century decline towards skid row, hideaway of the destitute, the criminal and the estranged, is reflected in the missions, Salvation Army and the Bowery Mission still operating, and the flophouses, slowing disappearing. Yet despite its decline, the Bowery still boasts old buildings of dignity, grace and beauty in every American style: Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, Neo-Grec, Romanesque, Renaissance Revival, Queen Ann, Beaux Arts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and even rarities unique to the Bowery that defy category.
This rich fabric cannot be replaced or reproduced. Until recently it survived largely through neglect. Renewed interest in the Bowery, far from protecting its treasures and its unique context, threatens to erase them forever, replacing them with a single new, uniformly twenty-first century ahistorical context.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
The cultural strength of immigration
I don't know of any successful anti-gentrification policy measure. Turning Greenwich Village into a historic district saved the buildings from demolition, but didn't save the neighborhood from gentrification. Zoning might help Chinatown if it could bring locally-hiring manufacturing jobs into the neighborhood.
Affordable housing construction has been a success in Chinatown. Unfortunately, the city's current affordable housing programs bring more luxury housing than affordable housing, and very little of the affordable housing is low-income affordable.
One organic social factor has prevented gentrification of several New York communities. Neighborhoods that continue to receive new working-class immigrants and retain them tend to keep their cultural character and resist gentrification. Chinatown has that in its favor.
But many local residents and business owners have interests that do not prioritize new immigrant needs.
The issues before the Working Group are both complex and difficult, and I haven't seen them fully hashed out. The CWG principles are all well-intentioned, but there has been no definitive analysis explaining how to get from principle to practice.
Hunter College's Urban Studies Department is producing a study of Chinatown which I hope will address these issues and conflicts. The consequences of policies need to be fleshed out clearly on paper so that all parties know what is at stake. Right now the teams seem too splintered and narrowly focused. It might be helpful for an outside, disinterested academic institution to consider the consequences of each possible policy decision.
Affordable housing construction has been a success in Chinatown. Unfortunately, the city's current affordable housing programs bring more luxury housing than affordable housing, and very little of the affordable housing is low-income affordable.
One organic social factor has prevented gentrification of several New York communities. Neighborhoods that continue to receive new working-class immigrants and retain them tend to keep their cultural character and resist gentrification. Chinatown has that in its favor.
But many local residents and business owners have interests that do not prioritize new immigrant needs.
The issues before the Working Group are both complex and difficult, and I haven't seen them fully hashed out. The CWG principles are all well-intentioned, but there has been no definitive analysis explaining how to get from principle to practice.
Hunter College's Urban Studies Department is producing a study of Chinatown which I hope will address these issues and conflicts. The consequences of policies need to be fleshed out clearly on paper so that all parties know what is at stake. Right now the teams seem too splintered and narrowly focused. It might be helpful for an outside, disinterested academic institution to consider the consequences of each possible policy decision.
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