Through the Eye of the Needle | Page 6

acquaintance the hordes of
American tourists had made with European fashions of living, it
became easy, or at least simple, to divide the floors of many of these
private dwellings into apartments, each with its own kitchen and all the
apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then had the street entrance
and the stairways in common, and they had in common the cellar and
the furnace for heating; they had in common the disadvantage of being
badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark, cramped, and
uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses, and they
were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers of
them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in
conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and
subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had
been changed.
But the apartment as the New-Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the
same time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New
York work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they
still live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were
called tenement-houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is
commonly packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where
they eat and sleep, without the amenities and often without the
decencies of life, and of course without light and air. The buildings in
case of fire are death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide
some apparent means of escape, which they do in the form of iron
balconies and ladders, giving that festive air to their façades which I
have already noted. The bare and dirty entries and staircases are really
ramifications of the filthy streets without, and each tenement opens
upon a landing as if it opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents
extorted from the inmates is sometimes a hundred per cent., and is
nearly always cruelly out of proportion to the value of the houses, not
to speak of the wretched shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid

the family in arrears is set with all its poor household gear upon the
sidewalk, in a pitiless indifference to the season and the weather, which
you could not realize without seeing it, and which is incredible even of
plutocratic nature. Of course, landlordism, which you have read so
much of, is at its worst in the case of the tenement-houses. But you
must understand that comparatively few people in New York own the
roofs that shelter them. By far the greater number live, however they
live, in houses owned by others, by a class who prosper and grow rich,
or richer, simply by owning the roofs over other men's heads. The
landlords have, of course, no human relation with their tenants, and
really no business relations, for all the affairs between them are
transacted by agents. Some have the reputation of being better than
others; but they all live, or expect to live, without work, on their rents.
They are very much respected for it; the rents are considered a just
return from the money invested. You must try to conceive of this as an
actual fact, and not merely as a statistical statement. I know it will not
be easy for you; it is not easy for me, though I have it constantly before
my face.

III
The tenement-house, such as it is, is the original of the apartment-house,
which perpetuates some of its most characteristic features on a scale
and in material undreamed of in the simple philosophy of the inventor
of the tenement-house. The worst of these features is the want of light
and air, but as much more space and as many more rooms are conceded
as the tenant will pay for. The apartment-house, however, soars to
heights that the tenement-house never half reached, and is sometimes
ten stories high. It is built fireproof, very often, and is generally
equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makes one
level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which have departed
less from the tenement-house original, have no elevators, but the street
door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by the tenant's
latch-key or by the janitor having charge of the whole building. In the
finer houses there is a page whose sole duty it is to open and shut this
door, and who is usually brass-buttoned to one blinding effect of livery
with the elevator-boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found, the
elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where he is

not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, for
each apartment, and