OT: The Model Tenement

According to social theory at the time, from the late 1800's to well into the Mid-20th Century and later, the tenement was the primary social problem to be corrected. You can see from plans presented earlier that the typical tenement was very small: a 3 room tenement would run about 340 square feet; a 4 room tenement would be about 420 square feet. These are not unusual sizes for Manhattan apartments today, of course, but in the era in question, space used today for one or at most two people was considered (even by the reformers) sufficient for 6. Or more.

Households, of course, were larger then. But cramming so many people into such tiny spaces, without adequate ventilation or plumbing, was a recipe for public health crises, fiery tragedies, and all-too-frequent mayhem. Crime bred and flourished under conditions of overcrowding and poverty, and there was a real fear among the middle and upper classes that the masses would one day rise and put a stop to the frivolous ways of their betters.

The tenement was said to be the breeding ground and the center of all sorts of public health and socio/political problems. It was sincerely believed that correcting the tenement problem would solve many others.

Social reformers like Mabel Hyde Kittredge -- whom I have periodically mocked in these entries -- saw it as their bounden duty to improve the lives of their social inferiors and to raise them up from their state of abject misery. Their notions of what to do were not always wrong, by any means. On the other hand, placing too much blame on the tenement itself and being blind to the other social, economic, and political issues of the day was typical for many reformers of the day.

That focus on housing pretty much by itself led to the creation of many working class housing projects that were intended to improve the lot of the struggling workers and get them out of the miseries inherent in the tenement.

Many of such projects have since been demolished. For many of those who were transferred from the tenement slums to the Projects found themselves in an even worse situation than before. Their living conditions might have been marginally improved, but their social fabric and way of life was often destroyed, with nothing viable to take its place.

"If only they lived more like us," the reformers' thinking went, "they'd be more like us, and thus... less of a threat."

So Mabel Hyde Kittredge established Model Tenements in order to teach the residents how to live more like her own middle class self, give them something to aspire to, and to provide them with a foundation for living "better" regardless of where they found themselves. She recruited girls from the neighborhood -- and charged them fees -- to be students of her tenement housekeeping and other courses, and she opened her Model Tenements to view to anyone who chose to take a look, providing residents, tourists slumming, and other social reformers points to ponder over the intractable Problem of the Tenement.

Bertha Smith wrote "The Gospel of Simplicity as Applied to Tenement Homes" for Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman magazine in October, 1905. It detailed the efforts of housing reformers, and particularly Mrs. Hyde Kittredge, in their efforts to provide models and training for the dwellers of New York tenements.

And so, we'll let Bertha H Smith open today's lesson:



Uhhh, "the tyranny of things" is certainly a factor in practically everyone's life, but her assertion that house furnishing has led to more crime than anything else is... surprising. Of course narcotics were legal back then, but still...

Of course the point of this lesson is to convince the immigrant hordes that living simply is better in every respect than living in the tawdry and chaotic manner so many of "those people" did.


The problem, though, is that the "tyranny of things" was hardly as acute for the poor immigrant masses as it was for the middle and upper classes -- like Miss Smith and Mrs Hyde Kittredge. If anyone needed to hear the Gospel of Simplicity it was the members of those classes. But then, I think the Misses S and K knew that. Bertha Smith's article, after all, appeared in "The Craftsman," the monthly magazine of Gustav Stickley, and the veritable Bible of strictly simple middle class living even today. In other posts I have gone into some detail about Craftsman houses and the near religious fervor with which their owners regard them.

To be continued...

OT: Not done with your Tenement Housekeeping yet!

Oh no. Far from it.

In our last episode, the nature of tenement living in New York was briefly examined, and it became clear that around the time Mrs. Hyde Kittredge was teaching tenement dwellers how to take care of their rude hovels, entire households, from the oldest to the youngest, were put to work making clothes and flowers in their tenement "homes" to make ends meet. Everybody had to work, otherwise the household would be out on the street.

In that era, when corporate trusts had a lock on the economy and the lives of workers, subsistence was about the best that working class people -- immigrants or not -- could hope for. "Struggle" wasn't the half of it.

Yet Mrs. Hyde Kittredge, aware of the facts, still made sure her tenement dwellers completed their housekeeping tasks, regardless of any other duties they may have, like sewing clothes for Campbell Kid dolls and making lace. To Mrs. Hyde Kittredge and the like, the Problem was the tenement and the chaos of the dwellers' lives therein. She would teach them how to order their lives in the tenements with the expectation that making their lives more orderly within the tenement walls would lead to greater order, peace and security outside them. There was tremendous fear -- justifiable -- that the tenements were hotbeds of insurrection. Showing the tenement dwellers how to make their lives better in the tenements was openly intended to defuse the fury of the masses at the abject state of oppression and poverty in which they lived.

Our previous lesson ended with some notes on cleaning your sink. Assuming you had one. Some further notes are necessary:



And kerosene. Don't forget the kerosene!

If there was a sink at all in the tenement unit itself (sometimes they were only in the hall), a rusty iron one wasn't surprising.

In the following view, the girls are cleaning up the fancy Model Tenement kitchen. Laundry tubs are next to the rusty iron sink in the corner:



The Improvised Refrigerator is a wooden box hung outside the window (in the air shaft) which was said to be perfectly fine for keeping perishables in all but the hottest weather. No doubt in cold weather, the contents would freeze solid. But given the incandescent heat of the coal stove, no doubt they were quickly thawed when needed.

Hanging on the wall next to the sink are the sink brush and the sink shovel mentioned previously, and there is an absolute abundance of tubs and basins and pans for various cleanly purposes. There are also two spigots at the sink, leading me to wonder if, surprisingly, this Model Tenement is supplied with running hot water. What luxury if so.

The lesson concludes:



Now wait a minute! You're going to have the students boil their garbage pails every day? You're going to put it on the stove and boil it? For how long? But I suppose if the stove is hot, why not?

Oh, and there's a note about roaches and water bugs:



Roach salt. That sounds like a good product. Of course you do have to sweep it up in the morning (along with all the roaches) before you start to cook.

And now the Review:



You got that last part? How to test the temperature of the oven? "Put ya hand in it, dearie, see if it's hot enough! Heah, lemme count witcha. Onnnnne, teeeewwwwooooo, trrrrrrreeeeeee...." Just cruel. But these were tough times. There were no reliable thermometers or temperature regulators on ovens, not even on gas ones. You either put your child's hand in the oven or you ruined your cake.

OT: What is a Tenement?

As I've been off on this tangent on"tenement housekeeping," I've just assumed that everyone who might stumble on this little blog o' mine just knows what a tenement is.

But maybe not, eh?

"Dumbbell" tenements proliferated in New York City during the hey-day of massive immigration from the Old Country, and they continued to be the typical working class housing in New York well into the Thirties and later. They often formed the bulk of the slum housing cleared to build the Projects that in many cased turned out to be magnificent failures that had to be blown up later on.



The floor plan above (click to enlarge) shows a typical New York tenement c. 1910. There are four dwelling units on each floor, and there are probably four or five (but sometimes six or seven) floors. There are two three room units and two four room units on each floor. The two three room units consist of a front room, a kitchen in the middle, and a back room or bedroom. The four room units have two so-called bedrooms, the rear one entered through the front one. Sometimes the rear bedroom would have a door on the public hallway so that it could be entered without going through the other bedroom.

Each apartment's main entrance is in the kitchen. The plan above shows each room with a window to the outside. The rooms in the center had windows on the airshaft that ran from the ground to the roof; the rooms at each end had windows on the street or the rear "yard."

Many tenements built before the Old Law required the "dumbbell" plan had no air shafts at all or only the most minimal slots between buildings. Consequently, the center rooms -- ie: the kitchens and back rooms -- had no direct daylight or ventilation of any kind. The kitchen would instead have an interior window opening on the front room, and the back room would be ventilated through the kitchen.

With the coal range going night and day to heat the water, the tenement apartments were, charitably, stifling. Roofs were often used for sleeping in the summertime, for there was no earthly way for residents to do much but sweat inside their tenements on those hot summer nights.

There are two toilets out in the public hall and a sink. Some tenements did not provide sinks in the individual kitchens, and most did not have toilet or bathing facilities in the individual units. Consequently, residents either made do with sponge baths as best they could or they used the public baths which by 1911 when "Housekeeping Notes" was published were fairly common in New York and other large cities. The absence of any plumbing inside a tenement unit was the source of constant discomfort, but even the New Law of 1901 only required one bathroom for each two households. Better, but still...

These units rented for $10 to $15 a month. Seems reasonable, especially given rents in New York these days, but incomes were much lower, too. If a household could earn $100 a month, it was doing very well indeed, but for that to happen everybody in the household had to work, including the children.

Lewis Hine documented some of the consequences for tenement dwellers in the early 1900's:



Children making flowers


Making doll clothes (Campbell Kids)


Working kids



Making Campbell Kids Clothes



Well-off Girl with Campbell Kid doll:


We haven't quite got back to these conditions in the United States... well, except for some of the conditions under which illegales live and work in this country, but most Americans have no idea about that, and they'd be shocked if they knew.

But given the likelihood that our rulers will continue to forcibly impoverish the masses, how long will it be before we see similar conditions accepted as standard once again?

OT: Tenement Housekeeping (cont'd)

What's missing from the Tenement Test Kitchen pictured in the previous post is all the basins and tubs and pans and such necessary just to begin to handle the tasks of the day. You need dishpans (at least two), towel pans (at least two), coal shuttle (maybe one is enough), floor cleaning pans (you need two or three -- no mops, you do it on your hands and knees with scrub brushes and plenty of newspaper), plus, of course, laundry tubs (two or three), and wash boilers. Yes, the laundry has to be boiled. But we'll get to that.

And you need a BIG kettle on the stove all the time to make hot water. Cause you won't get any out of the tap.

To continue with our lesson, the topic is after breakfast clean up (you've already washed your dishes and pots and pans and put them away and you've washed out your dish towels in the towel pans):



So not only do you have a garbage pail (which we'll discuss in detail eventually) somewhere in that tiny kitchen, you have an ash can as well, because the ash collectors are forbidden to take garbage. Sounds wise. But think about it. You're generating both garbage and ashes all the time, quite a lot of one or the other, and you've got to keep them separate; not only that, you have to make sure the ashes are cool enough they don't set the tenement on fire, and that the garbage can is always covered so as not to provide a haven for the ever present bugs. No doubt you have to take both cans out daily.

The next lesson is a cooking lesson. On stale bread and sinks. Oh joy.



There are no instructions on how to cook the griddle cakes. Are we to assume the poor little girls just know? You can imagine what a disaster the initial attempts must have been. All that batter winding up on the freshly blacked stove top. Must have taken hours with a brush and plenty of newspaper to clean up.

But let's hope when the lesson was actually given, complete instructions for cooking your cakes were provided. And nobody was burned too badly, and little batter wound up on the floor, walls, or stuck to the stove top. It's a clever way to use stale bread at any event.

I'm just barely old enough to remember when bread didn't usually come sliced in the package. You had to have the man run it through the slicing machine -- which was a wonderful device of many blades buzzing merrily through the loaf in a second or two. You could never have done it at home with a knife. And you had to use up the bread fairly fast because it would go stale in a day or two. First it would get hard, then it would get moldy. Strangely, most packaged bread seems to last forever these days...

As for daily care of the sink... get ready:



Sounds OK so far, but don't relax yet:



I don't think I've ever seen a "sink shovel." Sounds like a neat, and come to think of it, necessary utensil. Hm. Whatever happened to them?

"A handful of soda..." I'm not sure exactly what that refers to, except that I'm certain it's not the soda you drink. There were many kinds of "soda" back in the day: washing soda, baking soda, sal soda, sodas of various other substances. So which one were you supposed to throw down the sink drain... and what would happen if you threw the wrong one? Whatever it was, it must have been pretty serious soda if it would eat holes in the pipes and/or combine with any grease in the pipes to make soap and thoroughly clog them up. What fun. Then you're really in a pickle, as I suspect the tenement doesn't have a super.

And you use yet more hot water. By now you should have used up several kettles full in preparing your food, general clean up, repeatedly washing your dishes and pots and pans, and washing your towels. So now you've got to clean out your sink and your drains with more hot water. If you've only got one kettle the size of the one in the picture in the last post, it seems to me you're going to have to wait for the water to heat, yes? There would have to be much waiting for water heating throughout your day. Something many of us can relate to. If your water heater goes out or your pipes freeze (I've had both experiences fairly recently), heating water on the stove is what you have to do, and it never seems like there's enough for any given task. It must have seemed like that to our student tenement housekeepers, too, and I wonder how frustrated they must have become...

Meanwhile:



So it would seem we're referring to washing soda when we talk about throwing soda down the drain to remove grease. Now I wasn't familiar with this substance. But. Leave it to the intertubes to provide an answer:

The chemical formula for washing soda is Na2CO3, and it is also known as sodium carbonate. It is a salt of carbonic acid, a chemical which produces a wide range of salts collectively known as carbonates. One common source of washing soda is the ashes of plants; for this reason, it is sometimes called soda ash. Sodium carbonate can also be created from sodium chloride, also known as table salt.

In laundry, washing soda accomplishes several things. The high alkalinity of washing soda helps it act as a solvent to remove a range of stains, and unlike bleach, washing soda does not usually stain. It is also used in detergent mixtures to treat hard water; the washing soda binds to the minerals which make water hard, allowing detergent to foam properly so that clothing will come out clean, without any residue. Sodium carbonate is also used by some textile artists, since it helps dyes adhere to fabric, resulting in deeper penetration and a longer lasting color.

Around the house, washing soda can be used to descale things like coffee machines and bathroom tiles which may accumulate mineral deposits as a result of exposure to hard water. It can also be used to strip floors of wax so that they can be refinished, and for other touch cleaning jobs like scrubbing the stove. You should wear gloves when cleaning with washing soda, because it can cause skin irritation. Incidentally, the best way to treat some types of chemical burn is with baking soda, also called sodium bicarbonate, as it is a buffer and it will neutralize both acids and alkalis. To treat a hydrofluoric acid burn, apply baking soda mixed with water to the site of the burn for several minutes, flush the wound with water, and seek medical attention.



Many markets carry washing soda, typically with other laundry products. Some companies make mixed detergents with washing soda which are specifically formulated for hard water, and you can also find washing soda on your own. Since sodium carbonate can be dangerous in large quantities, make sure to keep washing soda out of the reach of children and pets, and clearly label the container to indicate that it is caustic. It can be harmful to the eyes, cause irritation to the lungs if inhaled, and may cause abdominal pain or vomiting if large doses are swallowed.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-washing-soda.htm

But you must not confuse it with baking soda:



Which you use to make your cookies and clean your bathtub and "freshen" your refrigerator. Except you probably don't have a bathtub or a refrigerator in your tenement. There's a toilet out in the hall that you share with all the other households on your floor. If you want to take a bath, you go down to the public baths several blocks away.

"Refrigeration" amounted to sticking stuff out the window in winter. In summer, things didn't keep. You had to buy perishables every day and hope that they wouldn't go bad before you could use them.

And wait. This instruction says to put your soda (presumably washing soda) in your hot water kettle and let it boil, then pour it down the drain to make the grease vanish, then pour hot rinse water down the drain so as not to cause soap to form or your pipes to corrode. So you really have to have several hot water containers going all the time. Or you're out of luck. Your pipes are clogged.

Feh.

Enough for today. We'll continue later on.

OT: More Tenement Housekeeping

I filched the picture above from Shorpy. Anyone who's interested in photos from times gone by should bookmark and spend plenty of time paging through the site's collection of photos from many sources, including his own family. Consider joining and contributing your own pictures of the past. (Note on Shorpy: Shorpy is the name of the site, from the nickname of a boy coal miner from Alabama who is pictured in the right-hand column of the site. The blogger is "Dave".)

At any event, the picture looks like it was taken in a tenement kitchen in New York, c.1910, where Mrs Hyde Kittredge's lessons in tenement housekeeping were held and from which the lessons in "Housekeeping Notes" have been derived.

The coal range on the left looks properly blacked, and no doubt all the dampers and draughts and checks have been adjusted properly. The girl is getting hot water from the kettle kept constantly on the stove. On the right are the covered laundry tubs. There will be lessons about doing the wash in your tenement anon.

The table is covered with newspaper, and we will find Mrs. Hyde Kittredge recommending newspaper for all kinds of uses in the tenement kitchen, from wiping off the stove, to covering the kitchen table when recipes are being prepared, to polishing glassware. Did average tenement households have that much newspaper around?

Staples are kept in glass jars on the shelves above the table. This is one of Mrs. Hyde Kittredge's recommendations. The jars are vermin and dust proof, both inherent problems of tenement living. The girl on the right is getting down the powdered sugar. The girl on the left is getting down the jar of corn starch. Next to the corn starch is a jar of beans. Next to that, a jar of brown sugar. The next jar appears to be unlabeled, but I'm sure the contents are known to the students. Next to that jar is one of oatmeal. That takes forty minutes to cook on your nicely blacked range in a double boiler. The next jar is coffee, but I can't make out the label on the next jar. (Note: I downloaded a fullsize .tif version of the picture from the Library of Congress -- where this collection is housed -- and by zooming in, many of the details of the scene are quite clear.) The jar next to that one has corn meal in it, powdered sugar next to that. Not sure what's in the next jar, but the cans and boxes on the shelf include pure white pepper, White Rose Gelatine, baking powder (can't quite make out the brand, possibly "Star"), and big cans of Breakfast Cocoa.

On the shelf above there appears to be a bottle of cooking wine (!), a can of olive oil, a jar of matches, a can of tomatoes, various cooking pots and casseroles, and a tin box that may have been for crackers.

There's what looks like a portable stove-top oven on the shelf above the range. If the tenement had a gas hotplate, the presence of the portable oven might make more sense, but maybe the students were to be trained on its use, on the assumption that their own tenement homes may have or need one.

Various sized iron pots are hung from a nail beside the stove, and there appear to be either menus or task-assignments tacked to the wall next to the stove. There's a newspaper in a cloth bag hung on the door on the left. There's an aluminum pot hung below the shelf over the table. I'm sure it's a prized possession. It looks like it has never been used. There are various granite ware and chipped enamel pots, including a coffee pot, hung from the shelf along with a number of utensils.

The door on the right has illustrated instructions for housekeeping duties tacked to it. Some of it that I can make out include making a bed, taking care of a sick person, and staining and finishing furniture.

The girls are very neatly dressed and coiffed, though some of their shoes appear worn. They are wearing matching gingham aprons, but the aprons are not tied, so maybe they aren't real students, and they aren't actually making anything. Hm. Could it be a staged photo?

The teacher is surprisingly young, maybe only in her teens, and is very neatly turned out.

This is the setting in which our next lesson, "Washing the Kitchen Table", is offered.



OK. On the door on the right, there's a whole sheaf of what could be typed instructions for this and that housekeeping operation hanging from a pair of hooks. I bet kitchen table cleaning is among them.

You need a pan of hot water, two towels, a scrub brush (probably not the one you use on the floor, but that's not clear), Sapolio and/or Dutch Cleanser (what, no Bon Ami?) and your newspaper now burning in the stove -- we'll assume. The process is not as bad as I thought it would be, and if the student always covers the table with newspaper before she attempts a task, the table should be fairly clean when she starts. Except for the coal dust, of course, which is going to be everywhere.



Whew!

Then you rest? By no means. Your cereal has been merrily bubbling away in the double boiler on the stove for the last forty minutes.



Think all you have to do is wring out the towels in the sink? No. Think again.



You have a "towel pan?" Didn't know that, did you? And then you need another pan to rinse them in, and by now you really need a much bigger kettle for hot water. Remember, there is no piped hot water in the building. Every drop you use has to be heated on the stove.

You hang your towels up on the rack. Which is where? You'll note the tenement kitchen in the picture is very small, and there doesn't appear to be a towel rack in view. Maybe it's behind the photographer. Maybe you could throw them over the back of a chair next to the stove. And where's that wash boiler?

And you've only just begun.

Mrs. Hyde Kittredge takes pains to urge that these lessons be given in a spirit of constant interest and even fun. Hard to imagine. Especially when this is the easy part...

More to come.