scholarly journals Housing conditions in St. Louis

1907 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Edwin Burch Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Present Report ◽  
Housing Conditions ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Housing Problem ◽  
Graphic Presentation ◽  
Class A ◽  
Tenement House ◽  
The City

"Citizens of the City of St. Louie have joined with Mr. Lawrence Veillier, Deputy Commissioner of the New York Tenement House Commission, in the belief that St. Louis has no tenement problem. Regarding a housing problem the latter has remained silent, the former silently ignorant. To show that St. Louis has a very serious housing problem and a menacing tenement problem is the object of this investigation and report. The present report is founded upon a thorough house to house investigation and based upon its findings, if from no other desire than that of self-preservation. Yet there should be a higher motive for demand - a motive which gives the working class a right to live decently. In determining the area to be investigated the Housing Committee of the Civic League sought for a representative section where St. Louis working peoples were contending with old housing evils and threatened with new ones. As a means of simplification and more graphic presentation, the single large area has been dealt with in this report under the following divisions; (l) the Jewish district; (2) the Negro district; (3) the Mixed district; (4) the Italian district; and (6) the Polish district. Nor is this division one of nationality alone, but rather is it one of physical differences which adhere closely to such a division of peoples."--Pages 1-4.

Reading the Urban Form of Fire

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The City

This chapter considers the big-city blaze as an “object” of interpretation. Given the disturbing frequency of fires that occurred there, New York in the nineteenth century became the home of a unique variety of city reader: the fire watcher. Readers of what were known in this earlier era as “conflagrations” faced a dilemma of formal proportions: whether to interpret the form of fire as a direct material threat to city peoples and property, or else as a captivating pyrotechnic display capable of delighting the senses. Compounding this formal conundrum was the question of how a reader responded to the working-class men who typically volunteered to fight these fires. It was not seldom the case that fire readers who belonged to the middle- and upper classes of society came to regard the improvised physicality and boisterous rowdyism of the amateur fireman as a threat nearly equal to that posed by the city fire.

Popular Catholicism in Irish New York, c1900

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 353-373
Author(s):  
Hugh McLeod
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Life Time ◽  
West Side ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Tenement House ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Popular Catholicism ◽  
Homogeneous Culture

In 1905 was published one of the most interesting books ever written about New York. It was a study by Elsa Herzfeld of twenty-four working-class families living on Manhattan’s West Side. All too briefly, yet with many tantalizing quotations and anecdotes, she discussed a whole series of themes that most previous students of New York life had taken for granted, or perhaps regarded as too trivial to be worth recording: the pictures people had on their walls, the music they liked, relations between spouses and between parents and children, beliefs about good and bad luck, funeral customs, and attitudes to physicians and hospitals. The families all included at least two generations, the older of which was predominantly European born. Most were of Irish or German descent. The purpose of the volume was to identify the distinguishing characteristics of what it termed Tenement-House Man’. There is thus a tendency to stress what is common to the families studied, and to suggest a shared pattern of life. Time and time again, though, there are hints that religion was a differentiating factor within this allegedly homogeneous culture. In particular there are frequent references to Catholics as in some sense a group apart—a very large group apart, as they made up about 40 per cent of the city’s population at that time.

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