Zachary Violette, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
Richard Plunz’s canonical 1992 History of Housing in New York City–and, indeed, James Ford’s 1936 Slums and Housing–understood the history of New York’s residential architecture as a sequence of elite interventions that gradually changed prevailing patterns. Zachary Violette objects that these narratives ignore ordinary architecture. Revisiting often-maligned Old Law tenemenets like 305 Broome Street, he finds fashionable working-class dwellings that fulfilled inhabitants’ desires better than reformers’ “progressive” alternatives. There’s no revised grand narrative, but that’s the point: Violette’s insistence on the relevance of the norm over the exception leads to a more synchronic mode of analysis.
Violette’s portrait of the late nineteenth century as a moment of “urban renewal” is particularly striking against today’s backdrop. Then, too, a hot real estate market drove the rebuilding of the Lower East Side at higher densities, but the parallels go only so far. The proto-developers of the 1880s and ’90s belonged to local immigrant communtiies, and neighbors could expect new construction to be more aesthetically pleasing, better equipped, and no less affordable than what it replaced. It was no socialist utopia–private fortunes were made–but it is a stark reminder that “housing was always built for profit” doesn’t mean things were always the same.