Tenement Talks - Chinatown Noir

New York's Chinatown comes alive in the work of authors S.J. Rozan and Henry Chang, who read and discussed their respective novels, the Lydia Chin mysteries and the Chinatown Beat trilogy, at the museum yesterday.



A brief history of Chinatown: Around the time 97 Orchard Street was built, Chinese immigrants formed an insular community in the Five Points slum to shield themselves from rising discrimination. Chinatown's population continued to expand even after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in the late 19th century, limiting naturalization and barring the entry of worker's families. Shops and restaurants serving the needs of Chinatown's residents flourished.

Questions for Curatorial - Speaking of Rent...

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

When did rent-control begin?

Rent regulation in New York City, meaning apartments that fall under either rent-control or rent-stabilization laws, dates to the early 20th century. During the Second World War, New York emerged as a crucial center both for the production and shipping of war materials, as well as for the mobilization of troops overseas. After a decade of depression, war industry jobs and the services that supported war industry workers attracted unemployed Americans to New York. But little new housing had been constructed during the Great Depression. This resultant demand for housing also drove rents to exorbitant levels. Indeed, in August 1943, soaring rents sparked a riot in Harlem.

In this context, legislated rent-control emerged as a war measure when the federal Office of Price Administration (OPA) declared the city a “defense rental area” with the aim of landlords to maintain fair rents. At the same time, tenant organizations agitated for a “freeze” on rent increases. On November 1, 1943, the OPA froze the rents of 1.4 million dwellings at the level of March 1, 1943.

When the war came to an end in 1945, tenant groups organized to defend themselves against unaffordable increases. While the OPA maintained rent-control until 1947, these tenant groups persuaded then Governor Thomas Dewey and Mayor William O’Dwyer to impose a system of rent-control on buildings built before 1947. This system mandated vacancy rates to be measured at 3-year intervals—a vacancy rate below 5 percent constituted a housing emergency that could justify a renewal of rent controls by the state legislature. Also under this system, landlords could be granted occasional rent increases of as much as 15 percent.

New York City resumed the administration of rent control in 1962. In 1967 and 1969, the city lifted rent controls on some high-rent apartments and instituted a new system entitled “rent stabilization” on apartment buildings with six or more dwelling units. Under rent stabilization, rent increases were left to self enforcement by landlords belonging to the Rent Stabilization Association.

Widespread fears of chronic housing abandonment led the legislature to weaken rent controls, allowing an increase of 15 percent and liking stabilized rents to a “maximum base” calculated according to a “reasonable” return on investment.

According to a 2003 article in the Gotham Gazette, there are approximately 1 million rent-regulated apartments in New York City today—about half of city’s total rental units.

Facts and Findings - A Free Month's Rent

According to the New York Times, today's economic climate is forcing some New York landlords to offer incentives like a month of free rent - a tradition the tenants of 97 Orchard Street would have been familiar with.

For much of the 19th century, May 1st was moving day for thousands of New Yorkers. Yearly leases expired on May 1, sending tenants all over the city in search of cheaper rents and more commodious dwellings. Business came to a halt as legions of New Yorkers emptied into the streets with carts jammed full of their worldly possessions. In what contemporary observers remarked was an unrivaled scene of chaos and disorder, liquor flowed freely, streets and sidewalks became impassible, and tensions rose to the point of an occasional brawl.

As an incentive, many landlords offered the first month free of charge. But the annual practice of moving on May 1st also allowed landlords to set rents at whatever price the market could bear.
New York's immigrant residents likewise took the opportunity May 1st offered to look for better accommodations.

When the Irish immigrant Moore family moved into 97 Orchard Street in 1869, it was their third home in four years. But they weren't there for long; the Moores were on the move again in 1870, this time to 224 Elizabeth Street.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About 97 Orchard Street

1. 7,000 people from 20 countries lived at 97 Orchard Street from 1863-1935.
2. The Museum has identified over 1,900 by name.
3. 97 Orchard Street is a pre-Old Law tenement.
4. The German immigrant who built it lived there from 1863-1868.
5. The first tenants were mainly from Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, and Hanover.

Tenement Talks - Samuel Kassow Interviewed on NPR

Only hours before speaking at the museum, Trinity College history professor Samuel Kassow discussed his latest book, Who Will Write Our History, on the Leonard Lopate show. The book chronicles a group of Jewish scholars' efforts to record life in Nazi-occupied Poland by burying thousands of artifacts in boxes and cans. Check out the interview below.

Facts and Findings - Scourges of the 19th Century

In their January/February issue Ancestry Magazine had a interesting piece on 19th century diseases. Although sickness can strike anyone, those living in overcrowded conditions, where disease can more easily spread, often bear the brunt:

In the crowded tenements in U.S. cities, poor sanitation helped disease thrive. The late 19th century saw epidemics of typhoid, typhus, smallpox, influenza, and bubonic plague, among others. A lack of understanding of the cause and means of prevention helped two epidemics—cholera and yellow fever—become particularly difficult and persistent.

Cholera reached the United States in the 1830s, as steamship travel and immigration increased. Public sentiment on the diseases, wrote historian Charles Rosenberg in The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, was that cholera “was a scourge not of mankind but of the sinner” and that the disease would target people who engaged in what was considered morally reprehensible activity. “Most Americans did not doubt that cholera was a divine imposition,” said Rosenberg.

Read the full article...

The New York Historical Society recently had an exhibit on New York's cholera outbreaks, which shaped the city that we know today. Here's the New York Times review, and here's the NY Historical's blog on the exhibit, where among other things you can find an 1832 letter from printer William S. Bayley:

On Sunday (yesterday) the Park [City Hall Park] was black with persons anxiously waiting for the day’s report…. It [cholera] has been at No. 5 Walker Street, yesterday No. 9, and there was a case in our block in Church Street. The report to day shows five cases in Walker Street on the other or farther side of the Bowery. In a word, the disease is so completely spread that we were counting yesterday and could not recollect a street in which it had not been with the single exception of Park Place.

Of course, cholera is all too well known in the modern world. Last fall the disease struck more than 16,000 people and killed 780 in Zimbabwe, where clean drinking water is recently hard to come by and some sewer lines have burst. More at the Times.

Facts and Findings - Small apartments are universal...

Many of our visitors wonder how so many people (up to 10 or 12 in some families) could live in such tiny apartments (some as small as 325 square feet). They find it difficult to visualize how such living would take place - the logistics of where people sleep, how they do laundry, how they cook their meals when there is barely room to turn around. We answer by saying that they found a way... just as many people still do today. Here's a visitor's impression of apartment living in Ho Chi Minh City:
http://nikolebouchard.blogspot.com/2009/02/day-013-ho-chi-minh-city.html

You can click on the photos for a larger version.