Watching Godfather II again reminded me of a number that always amazes me.
At the turn of the century an ethnic working-class area of New York contained about six hundred people per acre.
There were no elevators, so walkups were all they had to reduce the crowding.
A five-story apartment would have ONE toilet.
What makes this worse is that it never occurred to the residents of these areas to go back to Ireland or Poland or Italy. By the standards they and their ancestors had lived in, this was a terrific IMPROVEMENT.
They urge their kinfolk to come and join them and they did. That’s how the ethnic communities developed in the first place.
An acre is exactly one percent less than 44,000 square feet. This means these folks lived in an average of seventy-three square feet apiece, about one and a half times his height in each direction.
Day after day, decade after decade.
Do that to a lab rat and he will go nuts.
They thrived and they multiplied.
#1 by Quent on 05/02/2006 - 9:50 pm
Along this lines, here is a quotation from THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, a fantastic novel by William Hope Hodgson, written before WW I:
It was Tonnison’s idea to camp out instead of getting lodgings in one of
the cottages. As he put it, there was no joke in sleeping in a room with
a numerous family of healthy Irish in one corner and the pigsty in the
other, while overhead a ragged colony of roosting fowls distributed
their blessings impartially, and the whole place so full of peat smoke
that it made a fellow sneeze his head off just to put it inside
the doorway.
The seventy-three square feet you write about must have seemed spacious after living in a cottage like this.
That brings up another point. Have you noticed how quickly things go to Hell when a nation becomes affluent? Ireland is riding high now as “The Celtic Tiger”, and it now has all the social ills deriving from Political Correctness which didn’t exist in that country even twenty years ago.
#2 by Antonio Fini on 05/02/2006 - 10:50 pm
Those eastside tenements are sill there Bob, and guess what ? the apartments are only half their original size now. But rents start at $1800 a month.
It’s a whole different demographic though. Lot’s of young childless urban professionals who want to be in the center of it all and stay childless.
Also plenty of Japanese kids with rich parents.