A friend of mine who recently failed disastrously, showed me one of these new flat houses he had put up. It was three lots broad, each lot one hundred feet deep, making a front of seventy-five feet. Each of these lots he held to be worth $30,000, making $90,000 for the situation, though it was not on a fashionable street, but rather up a side street. He then raised one upon another seven apartments on each side of the entrance, and over the entrance were six bachelor apartments, each consisting of only one room, a bed alcove, and a bath closet. Consequently, there would be in such a building twenty tenants, of whom fourteen would be families. These fourteen paid from $1,800 to $1,300 apiece. Each had the same number of rooms, in the same space, the rents only being modified by the position of the floor. The lower floors of course rented higher than the upper floors. Generally speaking, each living place consisted of a parlor and a side room, either library or sitting room, a bath room, and a servant’s bath also, about three bed rooms, beside a servant’s bed room, a dining room, a kitchen, pantries and wardrobes. The only economy in such living lies in the reduction of the number of servants, and in the less expense of furnishing. The proprietor has to keep an engineer, an assistant engineer, a porter and assistant, and perhaps a housekeeper, and of course a watchman. Elevators front and rear accommodate the landlords and the servants. Such a building, exclusive of the ground, probably cost $150,000, and therefore it would be hard work to make ten per cent. upon it after paying salaries, taxes, etc. The bachelor apartments rented from $50 to $30 per month.
Now this stylish apartment house looks out at the rear upon a series of common tenement houses, where in old brick or frame buildings a dense mass of people look out of the back windows on their more aristocratic neighbors. These latter houses perhaps have a pole erected in the back yard which is as high as the house, and from every floor proceed to this pole clothes lines, attached there by pulleys, and whatever is washed is affixed to the line and run out by the pulley to dry. Most of the people in these back apartments live in one room, or at most in two, and there the good man arises in the morning, takes his early breakfast and goes out with his truck or dray, or hies him off to work and does not return again till night. The wife arises and sends the children off to school, and then she proceeds to wash or iron, or do other work, cooking her meals meantime, and supplying the children at noon, and the old man at night. Perhaps in that room or two live half a dozen people. They may even have a sub-tenant. There must be more or less exposure, more or less bad air, more or less indifference to the decencies of life, and yet it is surprising, on the whole, how much cleaner and better these people live than might be expected. This to some extent arises from the happy construction of the blocks in the new or uptown quarter of New York. Many of our American cities have deep blocks and alleys, or inferior streets, running up between them. The ground is too precious in New York to be sacrificed in such lanes, so the back yards touch each other, and the houses are built high stooped, the basement being the first story, and through the basement hall the slops, ashes, etc., are carried to the front street and there left for the scavenger and the ash-man to come and remove them. Consequently, each of these uptown blocks is one great court, open to the sun and to the sky. New York streets across town are only two hundred feet apart, and therefore the lots are of uniform depth.