James Roman's Blog: New York: 1900

The urgent demand for steel across the nation in 1900 enabled New Yorker J. P. Morgan to create the first billion-dollar corporation in history: U.S. Steel. It was an era of opportunity for both hard-working capitalists and unscrupulous entrepreneurs, all thriving on New York’s severe caste system.

Men were traditional wage earners, working 12 hours daily with a half-hour for lunch, six days per week, with no yearly vacation, no health insurance, life insurance, unemployment insurance, or pension. Only printers and metalworkers had unions. With the steady influx of laborers, job security wasn’t determined by seniority or longevity, but by the whim of an employer. If a breadwinner fell ill or lost his job, the destitute family relied upon the charity of friends and family for there were no welfare agencies. Conversely, there were also no income taxes levied upon wage earners. Only affluent men like J. P. Morgan paid taxes.

Women with office careers were expected to provide janitorial services for the office in addition to their clerical tasks. A woman hired to type and file usually started her day by dusting and polishing the office furniture and equipment, then cleaned the tobacco juice from putrid brass spittoons, a common office accessory. In 1900, a high-paid woman earned $8 for a 60-hour work week.

Seven percent of New York’s population was illiterate. Twelve-year-olds could earn wages if they attended schools for 80 days a year. In 1897, New York was the last major US city to open public high schools (DeWitt Clinton, Wadleigh, and Peter Cooper); in 1900 only 13,700 of the 500,000 students in elementary schools graduated from the eighth grade. Thousands of homeless children roamed the city, many sleeping on canal boats along the rivers, many working abusively long hours in the city's 40,000 factories.

It was the era of quacks. Medical science was in its infancy, bearing little resemblance to the Park Avenue doctors and world famous hospitals New Yorkers rely upon today. Lacking money, organized effort, or leadership, independent physicians probed and prodded to diagnose patients while highly profitable "laboratories" hyped impossible cure-alls by extolling the virtues of bogus pills, syrups, and ointments. Unfounded claims like: "A Certain Cure for All Contagious Diseases," or outlandish before-and-after illustrations to proclaim "cures" for consumption and even malaria were common. These entrepreneurs turned dubious medicine into a million-dollar industry, employing thousands of New Yorkers, while publishers and retailers reaped profits from it too. With no Better Business Bureau to expose the purveyors of these questionable products, some shysters even expressed open contempt for legitimate medicine with ads like "Avoid the doctor if you value your health." Sadly, many people did.

It was also an age of philanthropy. Those Fifth Avenue millionaires wielded a power possibly as great as President McKinley himself, adopting a civic responsibility toward their metropolis while reinforcing their names and reputations in New York society. John Jacob Astor, James Lenox, and Samuel Tilden pooled their resources to create the New York Public Library, while a gift from Andrew Carnegie made 62 branch libraries possible. John D. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901, which still stands on its original site at York Avenue between 64th to 68th Streets. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1902, J. P. Morgan endowed it with his magnificent collection, later serving as its President.

It was an age of contrasts. While opulent Fifth Avenue residences boasted many more rooms than occupants, a short distance away entire families crowded into single rooms that lacked hot water, while lodging houses rented communal floorspace on which to sleep for five cents a night. With over 1000 people per acre, the Lower Eastside was the most densely populated region in the world, generating more rent than any other region as well. Boatloads of immigrants settling in New York created ethnic neighborhoods and gravitated to professions where their native languages might be heard. Ironically, there was a reverse trend to American immigration, as wealthy New Yorkers enhanced their family names by marrying Europeans with titles. All these people combined to create the "melting pot" image that defined New York for over a century, while businesses thrived. In 1900, New Yorkers manufactured over $1.3 billion worth of goods, accounting for 10% of the entire nation's output.

Imagine New York without Times Square: without subways, without taxis, crosswalks, or neon. Imagine no phone books. Imagine no taxes! New York in 1900 is an astounding chronicle, for no place on earth underwent such magnificent transformations in so many fields. It’s a study in microcosm of man’s progress in the Twentieth Century.

Surprisingly, much of what we lovingly call “Olde New York” actually arrived during the 20th century. The subway opened in 1904. The venerable old Plaza Hotel wasn’t erected until 1907. The first eastside high-rise, 998 Fifth Avenue, wasn’t built until 1911, the same year the New York Public Library opened on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. Despite these absences, New York in 1899 was viewed as radically modern; where inventors and entrepreneurs implemented new amenities affecting the lives of every citizen, representing America at its aggressive peak.

Real Estate
A century ago, New York was decidedly a Townhouse kind of town. The city still had 2000 farms occupying over a quarter of its land mass. However, those farmlands were rapidly being converted to urban residences, since the city was undergoing a population explosion like nowhere else in the world. The new immigration center called Ellis Island, which opened in 1892, admitted over 750,000 people into America each year, all of them passing through New York City (857,000 in 1903; 1.2 million by 1907). The demand for laborers was continuous, the demand for housing intense. As swiftly as farmland was returned to the city, real estate developers subdivided it into lots, simultaneously constructing contiguous homes for speculative purchase by the burgeoning middle class. Unlike downtown's old-fashioned brick houses, modern townhouses were built of brownstone from Connecticut, hewn in large blocks that could be assembled quickly. Townhouses were often sold prior to completion, as potential owners pored over catalogs with developers to select the final ornamentation of mantles, staircase spindles, and gaslights. It’s the way most of Carnegie Hill and the Upper Westside were constructed, in the years shortly before and after 1900.

Meanwhile, New York’s gentry flaunted their wealth by building ever-larger mansions on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park. The New York Herald referred to it as "a solid mile and a half of millionaire's residences," including the Vanderbilts, Astors, Havemeyers, Goulds, Whitneys; topped in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie with his 64-rooms at 2 East 91st Street. (It's today's Cooper-Hewitt Museum.) In 1905, Senator Elihu Root built Park Avenue’s first mansion (at 71st Street). Despite New York’s forward-thinking reputation, the moneyed set felt queasy when contemplating those newfangled apartment houses, where families were stacked above each other in common flats. Regardless, high-rise living at the turn of the century was a roaring success, with a residential high-rise at 34 Gramercy Park, along with The Dakota and the Ansonia Hotel in the Westside hinterlands, each considered the apex of modern living. Imagine having closets, toilets, a restaurant, and an elevator all under one roof! (Of course, those closets were utilized a little differently at first; the coat hanger wasn’t invented until 1902!) The introduction of steel to housing construction during the late 19th century shook the foundations of those moneyed mansions. In just a few years, that same Senator Root abandoned his manse to reside in the Avenue’s first high-rise, 903 Park. Awestruck New Yorkers watching steel girders reshape their world coined a new word for what they saw: a Skyline. A new era was dawning.

To be continued . . .

JR



Bibliography

Casill, Peter, New York Memories of Yesteryear, Exposition Press, New York, 1964.

Lyman, Susan Elizabeth, The Story of New York, Crown Publishers, New York, 1964.

Ellis, Edward Robb, The Epic of New York City, Coward McCann Inc., New York, 1966.

Tauranac, John, Essential New York, Holt Rinehart, Winston, New York, 1979.