Selling the Lower East Side

Housing and Social Reform

For most of the nineteenth century, the municipal government neglected to provide services to improve ghetto conditions. As conditions within the immigrant ghetto worsened, middle-class social reformers lobbied for public assistance in the affairs of the poor. Housing reformers took the lead in pressuring government intervention in regulating the tenements. But the reformers' plans were not noticeably effective before 1901. In How the Other Half Lives (1890), Jacob Riis portrayed the frightening world of the Lower East Side. 

The horrible conditions of tenement interiors were meticulously detailed in images and text. The popularity of Jacob Riis' series of exposes on slum conditions and the tenement house exhibition shown at 404 Fifth Avenue in February 1900 further jostled the public's support for solutions to the decades-old "tenement problem."

Reformers also established settlement houses that offered residents social services and educational programs. The University Settlement was founded in 1886 as the first settlement house in the United States. The University Settlement was influential in social and housing reform. Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement in 1893. Grand Street, the Educational Alliance and the Christodora were all central institutions in both local and national reform circles. In 1928 the Christodora settlement moved from 1637 Avenue B to a new seventeen-story building at the corner of 9th Street and Avenue B donated by Arthur Curtis James, a railroad tycoon. The "sky-scraper settlement" housed, among other facilities, a music school, a poet's guild, a dining hall and a playhouse.

 

Links (click to follow)

Read about the University Settlement.

Click here to read about turn-of-the-century immigration and settlement houses.

Visit these pages about Lillian Wald, social reformer:

                     Wald Page 1

                     Wald Page 2

                     Wald Page 3

Here is information about women in the Progressive Era.

Here is an excellent link to primary sources about the Triangle Strike and Fire.

Click here to read about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911.

More about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

A photo from the Shirtwaist Fire.

Information about the building that burned in the Shirtwaist Fire.

Images (click to enlarge)

       

   Model of an 'improved'  tenement house.

          

The front of a tenement house.

            

The 2nd Ave. "L"

 

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The book upon which this web site is based,

Selling the Lower East Side,

is available directly through University of Minnesota Press
or order through Amazon.com

Site design © 2000: Kurt Reymers and Dan Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of Sociology)