Robert H. Bremner, "The Big Flat: History of a New York Tenement House," The American Historical Review, v64, no. 1 (October, 1958); 54-62.

[Editor’s Note: Footnotes have in been modified for clarity presentation.]

THE model tenement movement as a whole warrants more thorough investigation by historians and is equally, interesting whether studied as a phase of urban social reform as an expression of nineteenth-century philanthropy, or as a problem in American domestic architecture. Moreover, as this note seeks to demonstrate, study of the movement offers a convenient method of getting at specific information, otherwise difficult to obtain, on the way of life of the urban poor in the recent past. Students interested pursuing research along the lines suggested in this note will readily discover a number of other experiments in improved housing launched during the 1870’s, 1880’s, and 1890’s. Some of these ventures were more successful than the one here discussed, and a few may be found to have exercised a more, positive influence on the later course of housing reform.

The Big Flat did not acquire that name until midway in its history. When erected in 1855 by New York's leading philanthropic organization was christened the Workmen's Home. A substantial brick structure, six stories tall and somewhat prison-like in appearance, the Home covered most of six city lots and ran through the block from 96 and 98 Mott Street to 47 and 49 Elizabeth Street. It was the largest multiple dwelling built in New York before the 1880’s.

The man most responsible for the construction of the Workmen's Home was Robert M. Hartley, founder and executive secretary of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. As early as 1847 he had proposed building a group of eight model tenements, each containing twenty-four apartments that would be rented to poor families for $1.00 a week. Lack of funds prevented the AICP from trying the experiment, but the plans were printed and widely distributed in the hope that some philanthropically inclined builder might utilize them. In 1854, disappointed by the failure of private capitalists to act, Hartley organized a subsidiary of the AICP to build and operate a model tenement for Negroes. The project, the first of the kind to be undertaken in this country, was intended to demonstrate the feasibility [end page 54] of providing decent housing, at a price within the means of the poorer classes which would also yield a fair return on the capital invested.

The building was designed by a well-known architect, John W. Ritch, and built at a cost of $60,000 on land purchased for $30,500. It was 53 feet wide by 188 feet deep. There were stores on the Mott and Elizabeth Street sides, a courtyard 22 feet wide on the south, and an open space 5 feet wide on the north. The basement was divided into separate coal bins and storage spaces for each family. On the top story were two assembly rooms which the inmates as Hartley called the tenants, were permitted to employ for "lectures, concerts, or moral and educational uses" during the week and for Sunday School and religious observance on the Sabbath. Immediately inside both street entrances rose fireproof stairways made of iron with slate treads. On the north side of each floor a public hall, lighted by gas lamps at either end, Wended through the length of the building. Along the outside wall of each hall were rows of compartments containing the toilets for the apartments on that floor. In the middle of the halls were water taps and slop sinks--one for each floor.

Originally there were eighty-seven apartments in the building, or about fourteen to a floor. They stretched back railroad-fashion from the halls to the south or courtyard side. Each had three rooms and a closet large enough to be used as an extra bedroom. With the exception of those facing the street; where windows were more numerous, the apartments had two windows apiece, one opening on the courtyard and the other on the hall. A system of small flues rising from each room to the roof supplied, or was supposed to supply, further ventilation. Hartley described these apartments as "commodius and well ventilated." They rented at $5.50 to $8.50 a month.

What the inmates thought of the building is not known, but there is reason to doubt that the Workmen’s Home provided conditions conducive to either health or morality. In most of the apartments only one room had access to outside air and the inner rooms were always dark and practically unventilated. As often as not pressure was inadequate to carry water above the street floor. In winter the toilets, the sink traps, and the water pipes, which were outside the building, froze solid. The halls that ran through the Home from street to street, although intended for the convenience of the tenants, turned out to be among the worst features, since by day and [end page 55] night they attracted a disorderly crowd of idlers into the public portions of the house.

Such defects were by no means peculiar to the Workmen's Home, nor were they entirely confined to the habitations of the poor. In the 1860's up-town apartment houses designed for occupancy by moderately well-to-do families were being erected with no more provision for light and ventilation and with somewhat less attention to fire safety. In 1865 a civic group cited the Home as one of the few examples of "comfortable and decent tenant-houses" in the city. As late as 1884, long after the AICP had sold the house, an expert witness told a legislative commission that, although abominably dirty, it was basically "a fine building, well ventilated and well built." Outside of the AICP, however, the design of the building awakened little enthusiasm, and later builders of model tenements, instead of copying the Home, adopted plans based on contemporary English experiments in low-cost housing.

Despite the pride Hartley took in the building, the conduct of the tenants--"a semi-civilized class," according to Hartley--proved a constant source of embarrassment to him. In 1867 the Association sold the Home for $100,000 to the trustees of the Five Points House of Industry. The new owners spent an additional $40,000 to convert the property, now renamed the Workingwomen's Home, into a "cheery boarding place" for "tailoresses, dress and cloak-makers, milliners, hoop-skirt and artificial flowermakers, book-folders, workers in confectionary, tobacco, cigars, etc. . . . and shop or store clerks." The Workingwomcn's Home was expected to be a self-sustaining enterprise rather than a gratuitous charity, but the trustees proposed to offer the boarders decent living accommodations, wholesome food, and facilities for education and self-improvement at reasonable rates. Above all the Home was expected to serve as a refuge where women whose wages were small would be "withdrawn from temptation and brought under moral and Christian influences." [end page 56]

The remodeled Home opened its doors on October 11, 1867. It had space for between four hundred and five hundred boarders in sixty dormitories and twenty apartments on the five upper stories. The main entrance, now located on the Elizabeth Street side, led into an office or reception room, behind which were a parlor, sewing room, library, and a dining hall just under 100 feet long. The basement contained a kitchen connected by dumbwaiters with the dining hall, a bakery, laundry, "bathing department" and storage space. As before there were sixteen water closets and one sink (now supplied with hot as well as cold water) on each of the upper floors. The house was lighted by gas and heated by fireplaces. The boarders paid $3.25 a week for bed, meals, free use of the baths, and washing of eight pieces of laundry. Comparable accommodations elsewhere in the city, it was estimated, would have cost from $8.00 to $10.00 a week.

The residents, except those whose employment kept them out later, had to be in the house by ten o'clock. Secure within their refuge, the girls could dance in the hallways or walk in the court, which had been converted into a paved yard bordered by well-tended flower beds. Their parlor and library were comfortably furnished and supplied with papers, magazines, and a few books and pictures. Newspaper comments on the venture were uniformly laudatory, and on the first anniversary of the opening of the Workingwomen’s Home, the residents presented the superintendent with a bouquet a silver water pitcher in token of their gratitude.

Even at this early date, however, the sponsors were beginning to complain of "the cost, care, and trouble" involved in operating the Home. Not all of the boarders, it seems, were "grateful and appreciative." Some were "unfortunately constituted" and caused the management and the other residents no little trouble. There was, for example, the sad case of a woman, otherwise estimable, who sang and prayed at unseemly hours and in such a loud voice that she disturbed people even in remote parts of the house. She persisted in these habits despite repeated admonitions and at last had to be dismissed.

The most serious problem, however, was financial. The Home did not fill up. At no time were there more than three hundred women in residence, and by 1872 it appeared certain that the number would decline rather than increase in the future. The trustees had gone into debt to buy and refurbish the building but revenues were never even sufficient to meet current operat- [end page 57] ing expenses, so that instead of being self-sustaining, the Home was a constant drain on the resources of the parent organization. After five years trial the trustees announced that the Home would close on July 1, 1872. They sold the building about a year later for $100,000, the same amount they had paid for it.

A factor that undoubtedly contributed to the failure of both the Workmen’s and the Workingwomen's Home was the disreputable neighborhood in which the house was situated. To the south stretched the Sixth Ward, on of the most densely populated and pestilential sections of the city. Northward lay the Fourteenth Ward with its decaying tenements, fat-boiling establishments, manufactories of glass, soap, and candles, and wood-and metal-working shops. Throughout the entire history of the building, streets gutters, and even walks in the area were covered, winter and summer, with filth, garbage, ashes, and offal.

The march of industry, which was eventually to engulf the Big Flat, a first only made the building less livable. In 1872, shortly before the Workingwomen's Home went out of business, a large factory was erected next door seriously reducing the light and air available to the tenants. But neither it: undesirability as a residence nor the deterioration of the neighborhood affected the value of the property. The man who bought it from the Five Points House of Industry in 1873 sold it only a few months later for $200,000. In the next few years the Big Flat, as it was now called, changed hands several times, reaching its peak value in 1875 when it sold for $221,000. Thereafter every owner of the Big Flat was forced to sell it for less than he had paid. Nevertheless, when finally disposed of for industrial purposes in 1888, the site alone had become so valuable that the property brought $96,000, slightly more than the AICP had invested in the land and building in the 1850's.

Under private management the Big Flat lost whatever attributes of a model tenement it had once possessed. The owners restored the building to something like its original plan but increased the total number of apartments to ninety-one. They also raised the rents, charging as much for the cheapest and least desirable lodgings as the most expensive and best situated ones had formerly cost. Even so, the demand for housing had become so great [end page 58] that most of the apartments were rented. The population of the house, once erroneously estimated at 1,500, seems to have averaged around 500, although the actual number of occupants was difficult to determine because some tenants took in lodgers and unauthorized pawns camped out in the hall. Alfred T. White, a successful builder and operator of model tenements who visited the house in the mid-eighties, concluded that the chief problem was the landlord's failure to supervise and police the property. "At no time," he stated in 1885, "have 'the Big Flats' had an agent equal to the preservation of peace: or the enforcement of any rules."

Overcrowding, neglect on the part of the owners, and violation of the rules of sanitation by the tenants, together with the unfortunate design of the building, created serious hygienic problems. A sanitary inspector by the AICP, who made a careful survey of the Big Flat in 1886, pronounced it a "pest-hole and resort of the worst characters." According his report, all but four of the apartments in the building were dirty; three of the exceptions were clean, and the other was filthy. Other visitors observed "dampness and vegetable organisms" on the walls of the inner rooms, and White found dust and dirt covering the stairs "like a carpet," so that the hard stone steps were soft to the tread. Piles of garbage littered, the halls; the walls and floors around the sinks were wet and smelly; and the sinks themselves appeared to be used primarily to dispose of refuse. The toilets on the upper stories had caused so much trouble that the Board of Health finally ordered them removed--with the result that twenty-eight privy-like compartments originally intended for tenants on the first two doors had to serve all the occupants of the building. Even in the comparative coolness of the early morning hours visitors found the stench permeating he Big Flat almost unbearable.

Deplorable as the situation was, observers agreed the house was about on a par with, and in some respects superior to, the common run of low-grade tenements. In reputation for turbulence and disorder, however, the Big Flat outranked most of its rivals. Perhaps simply because it housed so [end page 59] many people and was frequented by so many others, it gave the police more trouble than smaller tenements. At any rate the number of arrests for both major and minor breaches of the peace was high. The prostitutes who rented most of the ground floor rooms attracted an unruly and occasionally violent clientele into the house. At night streetwalkers from the neighborhood roamed the corridors in search of customers and sometimes engaged in noisy quarrels with the resident prostitutes. Boys and young men loitered around the steps or played cards under the gas lamps. Drunks ejected from the saloon on the Mott Street side, or wandering in from the streets, staggered through the main floor hall, and tramps undismayed by the din, if not actively adding to it, sought free sleeping space on the floor. In 1879 revenue agents discovered an illicit still capable of producing 175 gallons of whisky a day in the abandoned bakery portion of the basement. Several years later a raid on the six opium dens then flourishing in the Big Flat netted twenty-nine persons, fifteen of them white women. One of the men caught in the raid was charged with luring young girls into his establishment.

The saloon dispensed whisky at five cents a glass from 5:30 A.M. until late at night. The proprietor did a brisk carry-out business early in the morning when women and children brought in cups and soda water bottle to be filled with liquor. On Sundays, when it was illegal to sell whisky, the saloonkeeper locked the street entrance but permitted a side door leading to the hall to remain open. Men, women, and children went in and out all day long, usually taking their drinks to the hall where there was likely to be accordion playing, dancing, and loud talk.

The raffish activities and conduct that gave the Big Flat its evil reputation were concentrated on the first two stories. The vast majority of the tenants were law abiding, industrious, and necessarily thrifty souls who had as little as possible to do with their disreputable neighbors. About 85 per cent of the occupants in 1886 were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe mainly Russian, Polish, and Romanian Jews. All but a few worked as well as resided in the Big Flat, since they made their living by finishing coats pants, waists, and overalls in their own apartments. Nearly all of the families had a sewing machine and some owned as many as four. They received needles, thread, buttons, and cut and basted garments from manufacturers. [end page 60] The men operated the sewing machines, and the women sewed on buttons and made button holes by hand. By working at top speed from six in the morning until ten at night a man and wife, assisted by a child or two, could earn $1.60 a day. Many of the families supplemented their earnings by keeping lodgers, who paid $2.00 a week for board and "room"--a quilt or mattress on the floor. About fifty of the lodgers were pushcart peddlers, and these were almost the only adult residents of the Big Flat who worked outside the building.

Slightly more than a third of the Big Flat's inhabitants in the 1880's were children. About half of the youngsters were of school age, but by no means all of them attended school. Some helped their parents in the family sweatshops; others worked in the factory next door, peddled matches, or engaged in other street trades. As was true in other large tenement houses, the high percentage of infants and children under five years of age helped swell the Big Flat’s mortality rate to an alarming figure. In 1883-1885, when the average death rate in the city was about twenty-six per thousand of the population, the average for the Big Flat was equivalent to forty-two per thousand. The infant death rate in the house during this period was more than two and a half times as high as in the city as a whole. Infanticide, as a sanitary reformer sadly remarked, had seldom been practiced on as large a scale as in late nineteenth-century New York.

The owner of the Big Flat in the final and most disreputable phase of its history was the New York Steam Company, a corporation that supplied newspapers and industrial consumers with steam for heat and power. The trustees of the corporation included men prominent in the business community, but the operation of the tenement apparently engaged little of their attention. They had other matters to worry about for, in addition to normal cares and vicissitudes of business, the firm underwent a reorganization and became involved in a bitter dispute with its employees. From time to time, at the insistence of health authorities, the company made changes in the Big Flat. Unfortunately, these alterations--such as the removal of most of the toilets and the transfer of all the slop sinks from [end page 61] the interior to positions outside a window on each hall-only had the effect of adding to the inconvenience of the tenants without materially improving the cleanliness of the house. None of the changes remedied the hardships from which residents of the Big Flat, like dwellers in other tenements, suffered most: lack of privacy, light, air, and above all, water.

One day in the winter of 1888-1889 Jacob Riis, who described the Big Flat as "a regular hot-bed of thieves and peace-breakers," discovered that the building had been demolished. On its site stood a new carriage factory bustling with activity on every floor. To Riis the moral was plain. "Business," he was to exult in his soon-to-be published How the Other Half Lives, "has done more than all other agencies together to wipe out the worst tenements. It has been New York's real Napoleon III. . . . In ten years I have seen plague spots disappear before its onward march with which health officers, police and sanitary science had struggled vainly."

By this time New York contained a few newly constructed tenements that were more nearly model buildings than the Big Flat had ever been and some old houses, such as Gotham Court, which had been made decent by conscientious landlords. These, however, were incapable of housing more that a tiny fraction of the poorer classes of the city. The onward march of industry and the "beneficent spirit of business," which Riis and other reformers hailed, sometimes destroyed bad tenements but almost never built good ones. The overwhelming weight of evidence presented in tenement house inspections and investigations made in the 1890’s leads to the conclusion that the dispossessed tenants of the Big Flat benefited little from its destruction. In all probability they moved into buildings equally as bad, and perhaps worse than the one they had vacated. [end page 62]