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Urban Castle: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943. By Jared N. Day. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 315 pp. Cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-231-11402-8; Paper,
Reviewed by Joel Schwartz
Although the tenements of Manhattan have been the staple of urban studies and reform politics for decades, few accounts have examined their development from the perspective of landlords. In Urban Castles, a book that is part ethnography, part "dream and thought" analysis, Jared Day brings the class of small landlords, the builders and managers of tenements, back into the equation of New York City's housing development. The result is a surprising story of tenement landlords as providers of shelter to the working poor and a glimpse of their checkered involvement in the policies that made the liberal city.
Urban Castles begins with an analysis of early nineteenth-century land tenure, property law, and the housing market in Manhattan, which lodged a population of renters on twenty-five by one hundred square-foot lots, where they subsisted at the mercy of landlords armed with "summary" evictions. As immigration mounted during the nineteenth century, builders covered Five Points with rookeries, rear hovels, and yard privies. This was only a prelude, however, to the scientific crowding permitted by the Tenement House Law of 1879, whose restrictions encouraged the infamous "dumbbell" (named for airshafts that narrowed at the waist). Tens of thousands of these structures were erected on the Lower East Side and wherever else the poor lived in Manhattan.
Based on a close examination of real estate literature, which is enhanced by a fascinating photoessay on the construction of dumbbells, Day provides a "thick...