Tenement living conditions and sanitation

Conditions of urban New York were barely livable.  There were very little laws regulating how tenements were designed.  With two-thirds of New York City's population living in urban areas, builders and landlords saw an opportunity for a huge profit.  So they just renovated old houses and made them the worst conditions possible.  Tenements were described as, "narrow, ill lighted, badly ventilated and overcrowded[.]" Living conditions at the time were certainly not competent for the population.

Men outside tenement

In 1881 the New York City Department of Street Cleaning was made to clean the streets of garbage.  Four years later there was an incinerator built on Governor's Island.  This incinerator only burnt 25% of New York City's trash, the rest was dumped in the Atlantic.  Then in 1895 George Waring became the Commissioner of the Department of Street Cleaning.  He initiated a waste plan that made ocean dumping illegal and started a recycling effort.  His plan divided trash into 3 categories.  Food waste was steamed and compressed to make grease and fertilizer.  Rubbish was paper and other materials, and ash was landfilled with other non-marketable rubbish.  Later in 1905, New York City used an incinerator to make electricity.

Despite the efforts of the Sanitation Department living conditions remained the same.  It was not until 1901 that the New York State legislature passed regulations on living conditions of tenement houses.  The Tenement House Act of 1901 put heavy regulations on tenement buildings.  For example, each bedroom required a window and had to have cleaning access.  All public spaces had to be lit naturally or artificially.  Landlords had to install metal fire escapes with ladders.  Fire escapes even had to be in the hallways and on the first floor.  The law now required at least one indoor toilet for every two families.  With these new laws came enforcement.  The organization that enforced the laws was the Tenement House Department.  They sent inspectors to investigate tenement complaints, and there were a lot of them.  If the property did not comply with the law, landlords faced fines and potential condemnation of their property.  

Bandit's Roost

Landlords were not very happy about these new regulations.  So, builders and landlords found ways to bend the law even though it would cost them less to build a new building that complied with the law.  One example is how landlords would sometimes install windows that opened up into the interior airshafts.  There was even a group of landlords and builders that acted politically to delay the full effect of the law by 10 years.  This group was the United Real Estate Owners' Association.  

Man sleeping in cellar

Since landlords had an extra 10 years to not worry about regulations the conditions stayed the same.  An article in the New-York Tribune (31 May 1903 p.7) shares some of the complaint letters that were written.  These letters reveal the truly inhumane conditions that the landlords provided for their tenants.  One letter reads, "Why has the inspector not come? Four weeks has a dead cat been under the staircase, and the odor is awful."  The next letter tells about the extremely dangerous conditions that tenants had to endure.  "Please come and look after the house of No. - Suffolk-st., because the gas didn't burn[.]"  My breath was taken away when I read this letter.  Not only could everybody in the tenement died of gas poisoning, the whole building could have caught on fire if somebody decided they were going to smoke indoors.  

Cigar makers

So, what caused New York's issue with disease, living conditions, and waste management?  The clear cause were the masses of immigrants that came and stayed in New York.  Ellis Island best exemplifies New York's trash problem throughout its history.  When New York needed to expand, the government built Ellis Island with landfill material.  Ellis Island originally had about 3 acres of land, the other acres were built with landfill.  This is not a very practical use of a landfill but it shows how much trash New York had.  With time living conditions got better.  The Tenement House Act is still the standard for apartment regulations today. But New York still struggles finding new ways to rid the city of garbage.

Ragpickers Row

Sources:
Jstor: book with photos of Jacob Riis.
I used this source to look at some of Jacob Riis' photography

cuny.edu: Timeline of New York waste management
I used this source to get certain dates of the Sanitation Department's History

Library of Congress, Chronicling America: article describing tenement conditions
I used this to get a description of what tenements were like

Library of Congress, Chronicling America: article with tenant complaints
I used this to read some of the complaints

PovertyHistory.org: Tenement House Act
I used this to research what the tenement house act required

Gizmodo: Ellis Island built on trash
I used this to see what parts of New York were built on trash

Migration

Today I learned that race has very little to do with genetics.  I always thought that different races had a slightly different genetic code.  But there are no genetic differences between races.  I also learned that there are some people that actually migrate into North Korea.  pewglobal.org says that North Korea has less than 10,000 migrants from South Korea and 30,000 migrants from China in 2013.  There were also 50,000 people living in North Korea that were not born there in 2013.

Migrants on a boat

Philanthropy

I learned that philanthropy is not the same as charity.  Charity is more directed toward sympathy and Philanthropy is directed toward humanitarian purposes.

Philanthropy 

Thinking About Success

Factors of success ranking from most to least important

1.  Hard Work - Anyone that gives 100% effort at their job will be successful at their job.
2.  Skill - Most people that have a certain skill will be successful as long as they have a good work ethic
3.  Opportunity - Somebody with a good opportunity will either take it or ignore it.  Those who take their opportunity will be successful.
4.  Luck - Some people are just lucky when it comes to their economic success.

success

Supply Chain

Today I read a few articles about the supply chain of fashion and technology.  What I found interesting was how the clothing company H&M has a team that predicts fashion trends.  That puts them ahead of the Zara clothing company because Zara reacts to trends.  

Next I found two articles about Apple and Samsung using child labor.  Samsung said they would get rid of child labor but children on the street said they worked at the factory.  What surprised me was that Apple had about 100 children employed.  This makes me wonder if companies are lying when they say they don't use children for work.  And I also wonder what products are 100% made in America.

Samsung finds child labor

US History Classwork: Textbook Research

In this classwork I were researching the word savage and savagery.  Mariam-Webster  defines savage as "not domesticated or under human control" and "lacking the restraints normal to civilized human beings."  I then searched up the word "savages" in the textbook archive and found some interesting descriptions of Indians.  They were always referred to as savages and nothing else.  The textbook made it sound like Indians were easily provoked to violence and were a disease to western expansion.  The best example I found was when the textbook said that the wilderness was "infested by savages"

If I read this in school in the late 1800s I would think that Indians were always up to no good and were very violent.  But if I read this today I would think otherwise.  

USH Newspapers

In an article in The Douglass Independent there was a story about Indians in San Antonio.  It says that some Indians are driving off local livestock and killing everybody in sight.  This article seems to bash local Indians by saying that they are just a bunch of savages running around.

There are a lot of stories and articles on the first page.  There are sections for national news, regional news, and world news.  The front page ads are conveniently pushed over to the far right and all the news is to the left.  The front page is mostly factual.  In the later pages the opinion based articles are found.  Compared to a modern newspaper, the news articles are short and concise, and the articles aren't from the day that a certain event happened.  I personally like this newspaper more than a modern one.


August 21, 1880
Dear Phillip,

Did you hear about the railroad incident on August 12th? Truly horrific.  One of the train's cylinders exploded and released boiling water into one of the cars.  It sounds like the people who were injured were hurt very badly or killed.  And in San Antonio, there were a bunch of Indians who were driving off local cattle and killing people along the trail! And in Little Rock some Indians ravaged a mail coach and killed the passengers.  It sounds like Indians are the main cause of violence in the news.  But I must be generalizing, there are good and bad Indians.  We only hear about the bad in the news.
Here's another crazy story.  A man named Tom Beckett was searching for his wife in Jacksonville and he broke into his mother-in-law's house and it led to a shootout with the police.  Stories like this have me concerned with our countries morals.  The weirdest story by far is about a robbery in Denver.  The man robbing the bank used a sandbag instead of a gun! Isn't that wild?

It seems that today's news is mostly tragedy.  Is that the case for the news up in Boston? But on a happier note, I read today that the United States is exporting more silver than we are importing.  Must be a good thing for a port city like Boston.  I also heard that a prospector in a Mexican village outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico struck gold! Very unlikely for a poor Mexican village.  Such a crazy world we live in today!

5 articles
choose 5 more
other articles

Your's truly,
William Joiner

Train Wreck

Deep thought

"Our use of social media for news is selective and intentional so that we may tend to remain interested only in things we're already interested in.  On the other hand professional news outlet like newspapers expose readers to information on a broad range of topics.  This helps me to see what other people are interested it or think is important."
-Mrs. Lawson

Newspaper History

3.  Merriam-Webster defines the word newspaper as "a set of large sheets of paper that have news stories, information about local events, advertisements, etc., and that are folded together and sold every day or every week"

4.  The first newspaper publication was in Strasbourg Germany in 1605.

5.  The oldest publication in the Thirteen Colonies was The Boston News-Letter in 1704.  The first New-England Courant was published in 1721.  The first newspaper publication after America was an actual country was The Boston Chronicle in 1768.

6.  In The Wall Street Journal the first headline is "Dell to Buy EMC for $67 Billion".  There is an article about terrorism in Libya below the first article.  Above the articles is information about stocks and currency.  Other things that receive attention throughout the newspaper include labor, foreign affairs in the U.S., terrorism, economics, buisness, world news, stocks, sports, and politics

7.  Wikipedia says that a newspaper of record is "a major newspaper that has a large circulation and whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered professional and typically authoritative."  The New York times is the newspaper of record in the United States.  The Times is considered the other newspaper of record in the U.S.

8.  For daily news, I think that newspapers still have an edge over social media.  Newspapers have a big bolded headline to catch your attention with the full article below.  And it has enough articles in it to keep up with major news.  When reading a newspaper you almost always have to read the whole article to get the news, but this is not the case with social media.  Social media like Twitter has a shorter headline and the full article linked if you choose to read it.  Social media also tells what the article talks about in its headline.  Twitter also has constant updates to either get news fast, or read on the go.  Sometimes an account will post some articles that they did not put in the newspaper.  In short, newspapers have more in depth news and social media is fast paced news.  It comes down to personal preference for which one you read.

The Boston News-Letter first issue