Abstract
These two works of architectural history make substantial contributions to understanding the lived experiences of ordinary people in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Generally, if people know anything about working people in these years, they might think of factories, sharecropping, organized labor struggles, or Jacob Riis’s photographs (more on those later). But we know very little about how people lived, day-to-day, especially their homes, and how their residences changed during this time. It turns out they changed quite a bit.
Without this knowledge, we lose sight of actual people’s lives, and it becomes harder to really understand the past and what it meant to live there. The home, whether single-family or in an apartment building, is essential to a person’s life. Too often, researchers and authors have focused their attention on the wealthy and their extravagance, but these subjects have only ever been a tiny fraction of the population. While we might learn about cutting-edge construction techniques or the most advanced technology of the day, such as air conditioning and a steel frame in Andrew Carnegie’s Fifth Avenue mansion constructed during the overlap of these two volumes, working-class and poor people are rendered invisible. We are left to imagine their living conditions, frequently assuming bleakness and misery. Sometimes that was true, but Thomas C. Hubka and Zachary J. Violette demonstrate that this was not the case for large numbers of the working class.
These volumes are complementary, especially in the sense that How the Working-Class Home Became Modern focuses primarily on detached and semidetached homes in smaller American cities in the northern half of the country, while The Decorated Tenement explores, well, tenements. Both scholars are determined to correct historical narratives about the development of housing and fill in profound gaps in our knowledge of how working Americans, especially European immigrants, lived. Given his repeated references to Hubka’s body of scholarship, it is clear that Violette has taken much inspiration from his work. However, Violette’s book is not merely an urban counterpart to Hubka’s. They are fundamentally different projects, with Hubka more interested in description and documentation, while Violette has a clear agenda and several strong arguments.
The overarching goal of The Decorated Tenement is to redeem the much-maligned structure. This is a bold project and one that initially surprised me. In my own work, also focused on New York City, but about a half-century later, the tenement is nothing but a horror, synonymous with squalor and deprivation. The tenements that were so common in Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s had long outlived their usefulness, transformed into symbols of segregation, malign neglect, and racialized poverty. In my years of research, I have never encountered anyone, in any capacity, who defended the tenement or proposed rehabilitation. By then, these structures were nothing but rat-infested, falling-down travesties that failed to provide the people corralled into them even a modicum of decency. Residents, activists, and politicians all called for their demolition.
I must confess, I expected The Decorated Tenement to document the interior design of tenement apartments, which did not much excite me. I was totally wrong. Violette’s book is an in-depth journey into a particular type of tenement, designated as such for the ornamentation on its exterior. Rather than simply collecting examples of such buildings, or recalling their construction, he tells a compelling story of neighborhood change, primarily in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with infrequent forays into the North and West Ends of Boston. The nineteenth century was a time of enormous population growth in the United States, with European immigration a great contributor. New York City, for example, was a city of about sixty thousand in 1800 and grew to nearly three and a half million residents a hundred years later. Beginning in the middle of that century, as immigration really picked up, the city’s population was anywhere from a third to nearly half people who had been born in another country.
The most pressing issue was where these people would live, in a city not intended to hold millions. The existing housing stock was severely inadequate, and around the time these new Americans began arriving, in the 1850s, Violette shows that American-born elites had no interest in building homes for the working class, which most of these immigrants were, even if they had not been in their homelands. Enterprising and capable immigrant builders and architects “helped mitigate the squalor of the antebellum slums with new, commodious, and, to many, attractive buildings, responsive to the desires of new populations there” (p. 16). These builders, many of them amateurs, had recently arrived from Germany, Russia, or Austria. They saw opportunities in the decaying, ancient wooden structures from the time of the American Revolution. They bought the properties, demolished the structures, and due to pre-existing lot sizes, typically built a twenty-five-foot-wide tenement on them.
As the builders were often the same generation as their prospective residents and had deep cultural familiarity, they erected residences that served these new Americans’ needs and desires. While we look at pictures of tenement life and layouts of the buildings today and recoil, Violette explains that the life tenement dwellers left behind was one that was profoundly lived on the street, so things like ample light, airflow, and privacy were of less importance. Street-facing apartments were the most coveted. Rather than forcing helpless residents to exist in substandard conditions, builders and architects gave residents what they wanted and what was familiar to them. To this point, it was not uncommon for builders to occupy their own tenements, living in the same conditions as tenants. Violette really challenges what I suspect are common feelings of pity for those who lived in these tenements, at least when they were new, which is the period that interests him.
Architects and builders also wanted to appeal to tenants’ aesthetic senses while providing them aspirational adornment. Early tenements, Violette explains, were “uniformly austere . . . reflecting the notion that industry and simplicity were chief virtues of the working class” (p. 90). For native builders, working people, particularly immigrants, were undeserving of any kind of decoration. They should be happy to have a roof and walls. There is a pronounced class dynamic here, which Violette is excellent at analyzing and explaining. The middle class and upper class saw themselves as entitled to exterior ornamentation, as they had somehow earned it. A building’s appearance, then, designated who was inside.
Crucially, it is not necessarily the condition or size of the tenement that indicated its status, but what was around the exterior doorways and windows, or what ran along the roofline. Immigrant builders challenged this idea, or perhaps paid it no mind, and began erecting tenements that easily matched middle-class visual sensibilities and soon exceeded them, leading critics and reformers to denounce the buildings as gaudy facades that concealed the depravity and shoddy workmanship contained within. As Violette argues, much of this reprobation was in fact resentment toward people further down the socioeconomic ladder daring to challenge entrenched class norms, effectively scrambling longstanding ways to organize, arrange, and mark people.
And, as Violette explains, elite taste was not passively accepted and emulated through the use of cheap, imitative materials, as critics suggested. Instead, these forms were selectively embraced, modified, emphasized, and embellished. These were deliberate choices responding to distinctive strains of working-class and immigrant taste. (p. 176)
Native-born white elites and their Anglocentric perspectives could or would not see the tenements and their decorations for what they were. Builders drew inspiration from local built environments, but also were importing ideas and standards from continental Europe. These late-nineteenth-century decorated tenements in the Lower East Side, and to a much lesser extent, the North and West Ends of Boston, were portmanteaus of design, a new form of architecture. Here, Violette puts himself in line with Andrew Heinze, Nan Enstad, Elizabeth Ewen, Kathy Peiss, and Lizabeth Cohen and their ideas of working-class taste. He, however, applies their theoretical concepts regarding material culture to architecture and construction.
These immigrant builders, landlords, and tenants all clashed fantastically with the reformers of the day, who wanted tenements simply gone, perceiving them, honestly or otherwise, to be nothing but warrens of filth, disease, and degeneracy. Violette convincingly portrays Gilded Age housing reformers as prejudiced, cultural elitists working to impose their values and desires on lower-class immigrants, who were largely uninterested in the “improvements” that the reformers offered. They were unwilling to understand that many tenement residents, at least for a time, and certainly when they were new, were happy and eager to call them home.
While Violette has convinced me that the Protestant reformers generally looked down on the often Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and deplored their culture, he essentially dismisses their criticism of the sturdiness of the buildings out of hand. For example, we see that critics attacked highly decorated tenements as concealing the low quality of materials and construction to be found inside, but he does not show or even say that it was not true, rather implying that the critics were wrong. There are examples found within of builders who used high-quality materials and put real care and thought into the interiors, with photographs to back it up, but was that most tenements? This is never clear.
Violette reserves his greatest contempt for Jacob Riis, the renowned reformer who is probably best remembered for his attacks on tenements, both individually and as a concept. He describes Riis’s view of tenements as “necessarily vicious” and holds him up as a paragon of cultural chauvinism (p. 63). Violette does not engage with the fact that Riis was also an immigrant, one who arrived as an adult. Perhaps his Danish nationality offers some explanation for this hostility, particularly given the geopolitical conditions in Europe during his lifetime, but as it stands, Riis is lumped in with the nativists of the day. Hubka is helpful here, as he contends that Riis peddled sensationalism, as the desperately poor people he featured in his works were never more than 0.1 percent of the city’s residents, although he wanted his audience to assume their numbers were legion (p. 11).
The reformers in Violette’s book wanted everyone to eventually live in single-family homes, as it would civilize them, make them more individualistic, and somehow offer them Christian redemption. This is the ideal that Hubka explores, without identifying it or acknowledging the contempt that reformers expressed for high-density, multifamily housing. Hubka is also interested in working people, but the reader gets the sense that these are generally very different people. Though, it is hard to tell, because there are very few actual people in either book, outside of builders, architects, or reformers. It is difficult to really know what the inhabitants of either book did to earn their livings or how comfortable their lives were. We are left to imagine and fill this in on our own. While I was not expecting extensive ethnography, history without people can be alienating. We get more hints in Violette’s work, and the fact that it is concentrated in just a few neighborhoods helps.
Hubka, though, focuses on working people in different cities in different states, defining them as the middle 60 percent of the income distribution throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century. At best, this is an unwieldy concept, for several reasons. For one, there is never any indication of what income distributions were, in terms of dollars. How significant was the inequality among the three groups, or even within the “middle majority”? Hubka is repeatedly critical of what he terms “middle class creep” or the “tendency to enlarge a frame of reference to include greater housing or population constituencies than is warranted,” but this is exactly what he does (pp. xvii-xix, 21). Complicating this more is the fact that the lives of working people changed substantially between 1900 and 1940. Union density exploded. Workers were fighting and winning against Ford, General Motors, and U.S. Steel. Industrial workers were moving away from the common existence of people who had no job security whatsoever, to people who could speak of careers in shipbuilding or plumbing.
In terms of the people working in these cities, in 1900, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South. By 1940, the Second Great Migration was underway, leading to millions of Black people living all over the country, earning far more money and changing their living standards in profound ways, not to mention gaining access to political rights long denied. Many millions of southern and eastern Europeans had immigrated in the early part of the century, prior to the implementation of the quota system in 1924. Beyond this, it is likely that 60 percent of Hubka cites included lawyers, accountants, and professionals of all manner. It seems incongruous to speak of these people as living in the same world as workers deemed unskilled laborers. And, if I am wrong, there is no indication in this book that there is good reason to do so, other than convenience. Of course, we have to simplify and sort to speak of large numbers of people, but an amorphous 60 percent is probably too large, and it is inaccurate to describe them all as working class, as the book’s title does, just because they work. One suspects even hedge fund managers work at times.
Hubka’s book would benefit greatly from racial analysis. Race is noticeable here solely for its absence. This working class is similar to the one of which we often hear in political rhetoric, which has (white) preceding it. Where are the Mexican Americans, the African Americans, the Japanese Americans? Are there Jews to be found here? After all, African Americans were the permanent working class for two centuries, and most were still held there throughout the entire time this book covers. Enormous numbers of southerners, Black and white, were trapped in futureless sharecropping and tenant farming. Surely, these people worked as hard as anyone and of course lived in homes, which were likely not very modern. Again, we are left to imagine for ourselves who these working-class people in these homes Hubka covers were, and many readers will probably default to white homogeneity, as this is what we are conditioned to do. Perhaps they were, but it is never clear.
Violette does better with race and ethnicity, especially regarding Jewish immigrants and the anti-Semitism they faced. While such sentiments have never disappeared, what he describes is sadly more relevant now than it has been in a long time. He portrays leading anti-tenement activists as assiduously promoting a stereotype, “that nobody associated with tenement construction, whether builders, architects, or even low-level building inspectors, particularly those of Jewish origin, could be trusted without intense oversight” (p. 205). Here, Jacob Riis is the most explicit anti-Semite, describing Jewish builders as “intruders” who were entirely aware of the supposed misery of their tenants, but the Jewish landlord did “not care, so long as he gets his pound of flesh” (p. 201). However, Violette does not engage much with other residents of the city. Manhattan had a small Black population in the late nineteenth century, probably no more than thirty-five thousand, but the reader never knows whether the neighborhoods he analyzes were entirely comprised of European immigrants or not.
Both authors demonstrate the rapid increase in working-class living standards in the periods they cover, but this is where Hubka really shines. His main concern is documenting the seemingly mundane “acquisition of bathrooms, utilities, and other groundbreaking improvements that contributed to what came to be known as ‘standards of living’ and ‘housing standards’” (p. xiii). While wealthy and (confusingly, given his focus on the middle 60%) “middle-to-upper-class houses” already featured these advancements by 1900, those of the classes below them did not (p. xv). The houses he chooses are found in what he describes as “older, pre-World War II residential neighborhoods from around the country—often within an inner ring of urban metropolitan, working-class suburbs now averaging about a century old.” He writes of these houses not because of their distinction, but rather because they were the most common of their time, in their respective places—mostly Maine, Wisconsin, and Oregon, with brief stops a few other places, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Hubka is quite specific in what makes a house modern. He identifies nine improvements: bathroom fixtures, kitchen appliances, modern utilities, dining rooms, private bedrooms, larger houses with more rooms, closets, recreational porches, and automobiles. He asserts that few of the “middle majority” homes had any of them in 1900, over half had most by 1940, and another quarter had many. As for the lower 20% percent, they lived in homes with “only partial or minimal domestic improvements” in the years he covers (p. 86). Much of the rest of the book is devoted to exploring these various improvements at length and in depth, whether vacuum cleaners or three-fixture bathrooms (sink, toilet, shower).
It is here that we really get a sense of how the interiors of people’s homes changed, in terms of what was in them, and in turn, how their lives changed. For example, only 40 percent (!) of homes had a refrigerator by World War II. Details like this really help the reader identify with those who live in the past. Things that are non-negotiables in the modern United States—washing machines, water heaters, central heating, air conditioning, or even just electricity—were either new or developing a century ago. It also shows that while technology has advanced, there have been few introductions of such profound changes to people’s homes since. How the Working-Class Home Became Modern is particularly effective in putting the revolutionary, if now boring, changes ordinary people experienced in their homes in the first decades of the twentieth century into perspective and really humanizing them.
Far from crude hovels, the tenements that Violette shows the reader, which he persuasively portrays as typical, offered residents modern household technology unavailable to rural people, here or abroad. While indoor plumbing and gas stoves are utterly pedestrian today, this was not the case less than 150 years ago. He does place at least some of these developments prior to Hubka’s periodization. As he writes, tenements constructed in the late 1880s and early 1890s in Manhattan had a whole host of things that many in the working class never had access to before: a kitchen with a range, a hot water boiler, and a sink with running water and sewer connections; a dumbwaiter easing the vertical lugging of goods and fuel; a flush toilet, albeit likely down the hall and shared with a number of other families . . . [and] gas lighting. (p. 16)
Perhaps did these amenities develop earlier in New York City? His proposal that the tenement was ever a desirable place or represented anything other than marginalization is not one that I was ready to accept. However, Violette’s arguments are quite persuasive, if they are occasionally stretched too far.