No swearing or loud talking after 9 o'clock

So as usual, I was looking around on the Internet, for what, I do not remember when I came upon the book Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City written by James Dabney McCabe and published in 1872 or thereabouts. I looked up the author and his biography was so boring I stopped reading it and decided not to bore you with any of it here. The only thing you might bear in mind is that he was a Southerner, and a Confederate sympathizer before he moved North.

I’m much enamored of the title, which gives off a certain mysterious energy. The excerpt I’ve included here is essentially a complaint that never goes out of style--that the city is too damn expensive. I’ve included the amounts of things in today’s dollars (converted on this calculator for a greater understanding of McCabe's frustration. I came to the realization that if I had my 2008 salary back in 1872, I’d be rich. But that’s not how this works. I converted my salary today to 1872 dollars—and let's just say I’d be economizing in modestly appointed rooms with very little, if no, hired help. Sort of like I live today.

After McCabe’s diatribe on the high cost of living in the city, comes an excerpt from How the Other Half Lives, by social reformer Jacob Riis. Grim stuff, and grimmer still the photos Riis, who snapped the images himself, included to drive his point home.

For one of the best accounts of Lower Manhattan—also grim, yet dark and funny, please read Luc Sante’s Low Life: The Lures and Snares of Old New York. Sante has a terrific blog called Pinakothek: A Blog About Pictures. All Kinds of Pictures, which is very much worth visiting.

The question is very frequently asked, "Is living in New York very expensive?" An emphatic affirmative may be safely returned to every such interrogatory. Let one's idea of comfort be what it may, it is impossible to live cheaply in this city with any degree of decency. One can go to a cellar lodging-house, and live for from twenty to forty cents a day ($3.50 to $7.00, or $105 to $210 a month), but he will find himself overcharged for the accommodation given him. He may live in a tenement house, and his expenses will still be disproportioned to the return received. The discomforts of life in New York, however, fall chiefly upon educated and refined people of moderate means. The very rich have an abundance for their wants, and are able to make their arrangements to suit themselves. The very poor expect nothing but misery.

To begin at the beginning, the expenses of a family in fashionable life are something appalling. Fifty thousand dollars ($875,000) per annum may be set down as the average outlay of a family of five or six persons residing in a fashionable street, and owning their residence. Some persons spend more, some less, but this amount may be taken as a fair average, and it will not admit of much of what would be called extravagance in such a station.

For those who own their houses, keep a carriage, and do not "live fashionably," or give many entertainments, the average is from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars ($262,680 to 350,240). . .

The average rent of a moderate sized house in New York is $1800 per annum ($31,521 or $2,626 per month rent). This amount may or may not include the use of the gas fixtures, and the house may or may not have a furnace in it. There will be a dining-room and kitchen, with hall or passage in the basement. The first floor will contain two parlors and the front hall. The second floor will contain a bathroom, water closet, and two, or perhaps three, chambers. The third floor usually contains two large and two small rooms, and several closets. The chambers in the more modern houses contain marble basins, with hot and cold water laid on. Where the tenant is unknown to the landlord, he is required to pay his rent monthly, in advance, or to give security for its quarterly payment. Such a house will require the services of at least two women, and if there be children to be cared for, a nurse is necessary. . .

Here comes the tax man (my words)

The General Government secures a large slice of this through its iniquitous income tax, and State and county taxes take up several hundred more. Those who have had experience in keeping house in any portion of the country can easily understand how the rest goes, when one has to pay fifty cents ($8.76) per pound for butter, fifty cents a dozen for eggs, sixteen cents ($2.80) a pound for crushed sugar, twenty-five cents ($4.38) a pound for fowls, and thirty-five cents ($6.13) a pound for the choice cuts of beef. All this, too, with the certainty of getting light weights from your butcher and grocer

Many persons seek refuge in boarding. Those who have no children, or but one or two, may live cheaper in this way, but not in the same degree of comfort that their outlay would bring them in their own homes. A couple with two or three children and a nurse, cannot live in any respectable boarding-house in New York, except in instances so rare that they do not deserve to be mentioned, for less than sixty dollars ($1,051) per week ($4,204 per month) for board and lodging alone. Such persons must pay extra for washing, and there are many "incidentals" which add to the landlady's receipts. . . .

Of late years, a new style of living has been introduced. The city now contains a number of houses located in unexceptionable neighborhoods, and built in first-class style, which are rented in flats, or suites of apartments, as in the Parisian houses . . . .

The "Stevens House" was built and is owned by Paran Stevens, Esq., and is one of the largest buildings in the city. It is constructed of red brick, with marble and light stone trimmings, and is eight stories in height above the street, with a large cellar below the sidewalk. The cost of this edifice is to be one million of dollars ($17,512,000). "The woodwork of the interior is of black walnut; the walls are finely frescoed and harmoniously tinted. There are, in all, eight floors, including the servants' attics. Five stores occupy the lower tier. There are eighteen suites of rooms, to which access is had by a steam elevator. The building is heated upon the principle of indirect radiation, by forcing steam-heated air through pipes into the different rooms (author's note: it goes on and on; I stopped at the steam heat) . . . .

These houses, however, are accessible only to people of ample means. The apartments rent for sums which will secure comfortable dwellings, and the other expenses are about the same one would incur in his own house. The great need of the city is a system of such houses in respectable neighborhoods, in which apartments may be had at moderate rents.

Meanwhile, these poor souls had to pay the equivalent of a dollar sixty five to six dollars a night for these horrible accommodations. Just like today, if you don’t have any money, it doesn’t matter if it’s one dollar (the equivalent of $23) or one hundred dollars.

The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretenses. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles, the lodger. Usually the ten- and seven cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these "hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most secure perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks,; and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when every bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room more than once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight, imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not favor the deception was the air; its character could not be mistaken.

The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. He "ran" three such establishments and made, it was said, $8,000 a year clear profit on his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not suspected. A notice that was posted on the wall of the lodgers' room suggested at least an effort to maintain his up-town standing in the slums. It read: "No swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock." Before nine no exceptions were taken to the natural vulgarity of the place; but that was the limit.

Photos top and bottom by Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives; Photo center from the New York Public Library