A Springtime Scrub

Last week we marked the official first day of spring, coinciding with a warm spell here in New York City. Many people are getting out mops and brooms along with their shorts and sandals, gearing up for the traditional spring cleaning.

This is a custom with diverse roots. This time of year, Chinese people clean and sweep the graves of their ancestors as part of the Qingming festival; Iranians practice Khouneh Tekouni ("shaking the house") in anticipation of Nowruz, their new year celebration; Greek Orthodox households give everything a good scrub just before Lent, and Jewish families rid the house of chametz (the crumbs of leavened bread) in preparation for Passover. Along with these culturally-prescribed traditions, there's the universal urge to throw open the windows and start fresh this time of year, ridding the house of winter's grime and musty smells.


In an 1897 article, the New York Times gave detailed advice to female readers on the spring cleaning of their homes. The article advises washing walls or having them "freshly kelsomined"(coated with whitewash or chalk paint), taking down window shutters and light fixtures for washing, swathing bric-a-brac in cheesecloth for storage until autumn, flushing sinks with scalding water and baking soda, wiping down doorways and doorknobs, and on and on...

The Times as a proto-Martha Stewart: advice for home makers in 1897

If the prospect of this work seems daunting, the Times assures its readers that "In progressive households, wherever the spirit of the new woman wields its healthful and energetic influence, the housecleaning is gradually accomplished silently and almost imperceptibly, save to the actual workers...The first step...is the mustering of the working staff."

Of course, for 97 Orchard Street residents and other less affluent city dwellers, spring cleaning was undertaken without hired help. As we noted in a 2009 blog post, this wasn't always easy. Nonetheless, Josephine Baldizzi remembered that her mother Sadie was "extra clean", never forgetting to scrub her cooking pots--or her children. She even earned the nickname "shine-em-up Sadie" as a testament to her gleaming cookware.

The tools of Sadie's trade on display in the Baldizzi Apartment

Sadie Baldizzi's vigilant campaign against grime counteracted a prevailing stereotype that tenement dwellers were unclean. In 1917, the Times cited the "venerable conviction that the majority of tenement house dwellers are slovenly, irresponsible and indolent" and "that they are content with filthy and squalid surroundings...", but asserted that the notion was outdated, thanks to the efforts of social workers.

The article praised the city's Tenement House Committee, which "distributed an educational primer named For You to educate the huge Tenement house population to their rights under the law and their duties and the essentials of proper community living." For You served as a propaganda tool to "impress upon [its readers] the importance of cleanliness, good housekeeping and sanitation" and the "social demands of close community living."

These public campaigns for cleanliness weren't limited to tenements. In 1922, New York City Mayor John Francis Hylan issued a city-wide spring cleaning proclamation, saying "...all rubbish and useless articles, which invariably become the breeding place for diseases, germs, vermin, rats and endless pests, should be disposed of." Though it's no longer proclaimed as a civic duty, spring cleaning never seems to go out of fashion!

-- Posted by Public Relations Manager Kira Garcia

Questions for Curatorial: Exhibit Design

How did the Museum design the privy shed that now appears in the reconstructed rear yard of 97 Orchard Street?

While the physical composition of 97 Orchard Street’s privies cannot be known with any certainty, archaeological research, reformers’ accounts, and available photos of similar facilities help paint a picture of their appearance. Based upon extant photographs taken of Lower East Side tenement rear yards during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 97 Orchard Street’s privy probably contained four compartments positioned in a row, roughly 2 feet 6 inches wide by 3 feet 9 inches deep, divided by wooden partitions. Indeed, the vault below measures approximately 9 feet long, suggesting that four stalls was the maximum number that could feasibly be sited over the sewer-connected privy.

Each compartment likely had door with a small ventilation hole and a possibly a lock. The floors, seats, and casing between the floors and seats in each compartment were also probably made of wood. While the typical length and width of tenement privy sheds were recorded by the reformers who wrote The Tenement House Problem, they failed to note the height of these structures.

In photos taken of tenement rear yards by the Tenement House Department between 1902 and 1904, the heights of privy sheds appear to have ranged between 6 and 8 feet. In many cases, the roof of the privy shed reached as high as the woodplank fence surrounding the yard, and both were often in line with the tops of the ground floor, rear facade windows of the tenement which they serviced.

In addition, these sheds exhibited ether peaked and flat roofs. Constructed using knotty pine, wooden privy sheds were truly vernacular structures whose size and shape was dictated both by the needs of the building owner and the prior experience of the carpenter who built them.

Below this structure, underground, sits a narrow, rectangular, mortared brick vault, 12 feet long and 4 1/2 feet wide, with some water at the bottom of the 9 foot long vault interior. Each compartment of the privy possibly had a funnel connecting the seat with the vault below, allowing waste to fall into the water-filled vault.

In addition, the brick vault had a drain on the east end, which connected to the sewer system. The drain might have been stopped with an iron cylindrical hollow plug, about 1 foot in height, and a bar and rod used to lift it out of the drain. There also may have been a pipe that was connected to the vault, which provided water from the Croton Aqueduct to periodically flush out the school sink privies.

Questions for Curatorial - Keeping Things Clean

We saw last week that it was difficult to keep the streets and stoops in tenement neighborhoods clean due to the near-constant pile-up of trash, manure, ashes, and other kinds of waste. What about inside the home? Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

How did the residents of 97 Orchard Street wash their dishes before running water was available in the building?
Although substantial evidence is lacking, several sources help paint a picture of how this necessary household task was carried out. For example, in 1894, a New York Times article describing the “Evils of Tenement Houses” took care to mention that the author found relative cleanliness in one Lower East Side tenement. The author noted, “Most of the women were neat in attire and person, and a pretty, rosy-cheeked girl of sixteen who was washing dishes in the yard [emphasis added], had her charms enhanced by a dainty waste and gown…” One might suspect other things besides washing had taken his attention.

In addition, according to historian Suellen Hoy, “most immigrant women found housework in America more difficult ‘with the cleaning of woodwork, washing windows, care of curtains, carpets, and dishes, and more elaborate cooking.’”

Source: Hoy, Suellen, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Where did the water at 97 Orchard Street come from? Where did the sewage go?
In 1864, as the first residents of 97 Orchard Street moved in, the water retrieved from the backyard spigot and used to flush the school sinks under the privy was delivered from the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County via the Croton Aqueduct.

Beginning in 1842, the Croton Aqueduct served as the main source of water for residents of Manhattan. By the time the Aqueduct was completed, however, the city had already outgrown it. Not only had the city’s population grown exponentially, by 1898 New York had annexed all of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. As a result, construction of the Catskill Watershed in upstate New York began in 1907 and, by 1917, was delivering water to all five boroughs.

The same water carried into Manhattan first by the Croton Aqueduct and later from the Catskill watershed also flushed the city’s wastes from sewer-connected outhouses and indoor toilets through underground pipes. Partly in response to a devastating cholera epidemic, the Croton Aqueduct Department was charged with building a comprehensive sewer system.

While over seventy miles of sewers were constructed between 1850 and 1855, one was not laid on the Orchard Street block between Broome and Delancey Streets until 1863.

Laundry day, once running water was available inside.

- Posted by Kate Stober