USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 10
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3 Lemuel Shattuck, Letter ... in Relation to the Introduction of Water into ... Boston (Boston, 1845), 13 ff.
4 Cf. infra, Tables II, V; for the density of population in peninsular Boston in 1845, cf. Report of the Committee on the Expediency of Providing Better Tenements for the Poor (Boston, 1846), 4.
Derived from Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors, 1850.
COMMON
Each dot represents a unit of fen persons per street
MAP I. DISTRIBUTION OF
THE IRISH IN BOSTON.
1850. BY STREETS
96
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
throughout the city. Once having secured employment, which their backgrounds enabled them to do more readily than the Irish, they easily adjusted the routines of their old lives to new homes. In some instances, several German, French or English families resided on the same street, but generally there were no French, German, or English districts.5 For hetero- geneous pursuits scattered these aliens everywhere and limited numbers permitted them to slip at will into almost any section without altering its essential characteristics.
Although some Irish joined the exodus, the overwhelming number remained where they were. Their poverty, combined with Boston's geography, assured that. Unlike every other American city, Boston was completely waterlocked, with no direction in which its people could move without the payment of tolls or fares. Those who could not afford to pay twenty cents per day to go back and forth to the environs, necessarily sought accommodations within short walking distance of their daily fifteen-hour drudgery in the mill or at the wharf.6 Even those who occasionally worked elsewhere felt compelled to keep close to the source of new assignments.7 The peaceful suburbs of Roxbury and Dorchester, the quiet streets and roomy houses, were not for them.
Instead, they clustered about the commercial heart of Bos- ton - the narrow peripheral strip of piers and the small area on the peninsula proper pivoting about State Street and ex- tending from the water-front westward to Washington Street and from Water Street north to Ann. Here were the city's most important enterprises, its docks and markets, offices and counting houses, stores and work-shops. Intertwined with this section, in a long line down Washington Street and its ex- tension, Ann Street, was the garment district, for the merchant was still the manufacturer and his shop the factory.8 In this
5 Cf., e.g., infra, Map II.
" For communications, cf. Dissertation Copy, 180.
"Cf., e.g., Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor ... 1870 . . , Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1870, no. 120, pp. 175, 176.
8 Dissertation Copy, Map IV; also Horace Greeley, et al., Great Industries of the United States . . (Hartford, 1872), 592.
Derived from Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors, 1850.
COMMON
Each dot represents a unit of ten persons per street
MAP II. DISTRIBUTION OF NON-IRISH FOREIGNERS IN BOSTON, 1850, BY STREETS
98
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
region tailors and unskilled laborers were most apt to find work.
Within easy reach of these crucial districts were two centers whose development made them the logical receiving points for the Irish proletariat. Above Ann Street, stretching from Commercial to Causeway Streets, was the North End, always the most congested part of the city. South of Water Street was a similar neighborhood encompassing Fort Hill and Pearl Street and extending to include the South Cove, made land created by filling operations in the 1830's.9 Both the North End, which in its more prosperous days had contained many fine mansions, and the less elegant but eminently respectable Fort Hill, had once been purely residential, but the encroach- ment of trade impaired their fashionableness, draining off many old dwellers.1º Nevertheless, the very proximity of busi- ness gave real estate a highly speculative value. Because it was unprofitable to make or maintain improvements where there was a "marked discrepancy between the value placed on the property by the owner and its value for any uses" to which it could immediately be put, landlords permitted their buildings to deteriorate.11 Their prime object was to avoid expense and to rent at a price sufficient for mere upkeep while waiting to sell.
In this transition originated the Boston slums - precisely the housing the Irish needed. Near the wharves and cheap in rent, these localities became the first home of such immigrants in Boston. Newcoming Irishmen, nostalgic for the Emerald Isle, gravitated towards these vicinities, augmenting the num- ber of Irish already there, and making their countrymen re-
9 Robert A. Woods, ed., City Wilderness ... (Boston, 1898), 21 ff .; Justin Winsor, ed., Memorial History of Boston . .. (Boston, 1880), IV, 40.
10 Cf. Albert B. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem in Boston ... (Boston, 1906), II; Henry F. Jenks, "Old School Street," New England Magazine, Novem- ber, 1895, XIII, 259; Robert A. Woods, ed., Americans in Process . .. (Boston, 1902), 16 ff .; Freeman Hunt, Lives of American Merchants (New York, 1856),
I, 143 ff .; Wide Awake: and the Spirit of Washington (Boston), October 7, 1854. 11 Cf. Mabel L. Walker, Urban Blight and Slums ... (Cambridge, 1938), 6, 3 ff .; cf. also James Ford, Slums and Housing ... (Cambridge, 1936), I, 5, 6.
99
THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
luctant to leave the home-like community even when they could. As a result, there were few natives in the North End and Fort Hill and even fewer non-Irish aliens, for these groups fled, sacrificing other interests in order to avoid the decline in social status that resulted from remaining.12
Several towns convenient to these two primary Irish settle- ments received those who, "leaving the low and reclaimed land to foreign laborers, plant themselves in the suburbs . . . avail- ing of the frequent omnibuses, or of special trains" to reach the city.13 Each of these districts experienced approximately the same evolution. At first penetrated only by the very rich, and then by other natives, and English, Scots, and Germans, they gradually attracted some of the more affluent Irishmen after 1845. When industries existed in these places the employees sought homes nearby; but as long as the cost of transportation continued high, the Irish poor who worked in Boston were pre- vented from commuting. They surmounted this last obstacle only in the 1850's when the horse-railroad stretched from Scollay Square throughout the whole metropolitan region and threw open sections which theretofore had preserved their exclusiveness by steep rates. The laws which chartered these lines limited fares to five cents and provided for round-trip tickets at six and eight cents, loosing a floodgate and, by the 1860's, inundating the outskirts of Boston with Irish immi- grants.14
The West End, Charlestown, the South End, and even the remotest environs, felt the shift in population. As the Irish preëmpted the North End and South Cove, the original in-
12 Cf. supra, Maps I, II. An analysis of the Broad, Cove, and Sea Street dis- trict in 1850 found only 75 Americans in a population of 2,813 (Amasa Walker, Tenth Report to the Legislature . . . Births, Marriages and Deaths . . . 1851, Massachusetts Public Documents, 1853, III; "Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors, . . . 1850," Boston City Documents, 1850, no. 42, p. 39).
13 E. H. Derby, "Commercial Cities ... Boston," Hunt's Merchants' Mag- azine, November, 1850, XXIII, 484 ff.
14 For statutory fare provisons, cf. Charter and Ordinances of the City of Boston . . . (Boston, 1856), 422, 424, 433; Ordinances of the City of Boston . . . (Boston, 1865), 65; for routes, cf. H. A. Brown, Guide-Book for the City and Vicinity of Boston, 1869 (Boston, 1869), 23; Irish-American, May 8, 1858.
100
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
habitants of every class abandoned their homes to move into the West End, which then included some of the choicest resi- dences in the city, particularly on the south side of Beacon Hill. Though only the wealthiest lived there at first, those of more modest means entered early and increased in number when the former began to drift into the newly filled Back Bay after 1857.15 The West End became a stronghold of middle- class homes with luxurious fringes of moneyed elegance and shadier ones of poverty and vice. The more sordid quarters centered in "Nigger Hill" on the north side of Beacon Hill. Although more than half the city's Negroes concentrated there, they took up only a small part of it, primarily in Belknap (now Joy) and Southac (now Phillips) Streets, where they had lived in their highly combustible houses since the turn of the century.16 In addition, there was a cosmopolitan mixture of bars, sailor dance halls, and low boarding houses that were of special concern to the police, and that had early earned a disagreeable reputation as a "horrid sink of pollution." 17
Most of the West End was respectably American, however. Until well in the 1850's, Irishmen and, indeed, other foreigners were few in number.18 But soon, the trend which was to trans- form the area after the Civil War, began. The small industries in the upper West End attracted many Irish; and the horse- car line to Watertown and Cambridge, passing through the heart of the district in 1858, enabled many workers to live there and commute at a nominal rate, so that the proportion of
15 Cf. Woods, Americans in Process ... , 33 ff .; Winsor, op. cit., IV, 35-37.
16 For the distribution of Negro population, 1813-1850, cf. infra, Maps III, IV. Throughout the period the concentration persisted in the same streets of the West End, with a scattering in other parts of the city. Cf. also [James W. Hale], Old Boston Town .. (New York, 1880), 29; Daily Evening Transcript, December 22, 1831; and, in general, Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in South and North America (London, 1853), 177.
17 Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes, A . . . Brief Account with Extracts from the Reports of their Missionaries . . (Boston, n.d.), 15 ff. Cf. also Minutes of the Selectmen's Meetings 1811 1818 (Volume of Records . . . , XXXVIII), Boston City Documents, 1908, no. 60, pp. 107, 113, II6.
18 Cf. Dissertation Copy, Map IX; Woods, Americans in Process, 36, 37, 42 ; Walker, Tenth Report . . . 1851, Massachusetts Public Documents, 1853, 110.
"Boston Directory ... 1813 ...
(Boston, 1813) pp. 272-6 ; Boynton, New ... Map ... of Boston,
4
COMMON
.
.
.
.
Each dot represents
one person
MAP III - COLORED POPULATION OF BOSTON - 1813x
IO2
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
Irish grew constantly thereafter.19 Following the route of the street railroads, they also crossed into East Cambridge, joining the nucleus of their countrymen already established around the glass works and other factories. Stimulated by the cheap five-cent fare of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, and by the opening of rapid transit service in 1856, they pushed the natives ever further into the dim reaches of Old Cambridge, Watertown, and Arlington.20
Other outlying suburbs paralleled this movement. In the 1830's Charlestown, linked to the North End by the Warren and Charles River Bridges, was still "a place almost wholly occupied by people of English descent." 21 But the Irish ad- vance along the Middlesex Railroad (chartered 1854 to Somer- ville), added to those already employed in the Navy Yard, drove the earlier settlers into the rural wastes of Anglo-Saxon Somerville. By 1860 approximately 10,000 of Charlestown's 25,000 inhabitants were Catholics - almost all Irish.22
South Boston, once the seat of many opulent country homes, experienced a similar transition. Although in 1847 its resi- dents still boasted it contained "not a single colored family" and only immigrants "of that better class who will not live in cellars," changes were already impending.23 The erec- tion of the South Boston docks created a demand for common wharf labor, satisfied, at the beginning, by the influx of Irish hands; and the remarkable development of manufacturing there after 1840 accelerated this process. The neighborhood did not become thoroughly working-class until after the Civil War, but many poor Irish drifted in throughout the period,
19 Cf. Edwin M. Bacon, Book of Boston . . . (Boston, 1916), IIO.
20 Cf. Dissertation Copy, Maps X, XI; George Adams, Brighton and Brook- line Business Directory . .. (Boston, 1850), 20 ff .; Chauncey M. Depew, 1795- 1895-One Hundred Years of American Commerce ... (New York, 1895), I, xxvii.
21 James F. Hunnewell, Century of Town Life ... (Boston, 1888), 36.
22 Cf. Charter and Ordinances of the City of Boston . .. (Boston, 1856), 436; Dissertation Copy, Maps X, XI; Boston Pilot, August 25, 1860.
23 Boston Common Council, South Boston Memorial, Boston City Docu- ments, 1847, no. 18, p. II.
* Derived from Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors ... 1850; G. W. Boynton, New ... Map ... of Boston
DN
·
.
COMMON
.
-
.
Each dot represents a unit of ten per street.
MAP IV - COLORED POPULATION OF
BOSTON - 1850X
104
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
particularly after the Dorchester Railroad in 1857 and the Broadway Railroad a few years later made it accessible to those employed elsewhere.24 The newcomers edged the natives and even some Irish just beyond South Boston into Dorchester. This town was still thoroughly rural in 1855. But by then the Irish had already so far penetrated into Washington Village, the sector nearest Boston, that it seceded and joined South Boston. 25
Somewhat more gradual, but ultimately as conclusive, was the development of the Neck or the South End. Its settle- ment had proceeded slowly, for, as an investigating committee discovered in 1845, none would live there unless they worked there.26 After the extension of Washington, Harrison, and Suf- folk (later Shawmut) Streets, and the introduction of horse- cars (1856) through the South End to Roxbury, the Irish trickled into the area.27 Their representation nevertheless was limited, composed largely of intelligent trades-people and mechanics, and confined north of Dover Street in a minority among their neighbors. For throughout this period the South End, still a desolate marsh and less desirable than other sub- urbs, was yet too expensive and inconvenient for the slum dwellers of the North End and Fort Hill.28 Its extension, Roxbury, was even more isolated by high fares. Although by
24 Ordinances of the City of Boston . .. (Boston, 1865), 76; State Street Trust Company, Boston, England and Boston, New England .. . (Boston, 1930), 10; Dissertation Copy, Map X.
25 Cf. Alfred Pairpoint, Uncle Sam and His Country ... (London, 1857), 196-201; Dissertation Copy, Map XI; Boston Pilot, June 2, 1855; Edward H. Savage, Boston Events ... (Boston, 1884), 7, 8; George H. McCaffrey, Political Disintegration and Reintegration of Metropolitan Boston (MS., H. C.L.), 194.
26 Report of the Committee on Expediency, 14.
27 Woods, City Wilderness, 26, 27; Charter and Ordinances of the City of Boston .. . (Boston, 1856), 408 ff .; Ordinances of the City of Boston . . . (Boston, 1865), 78, 79; Francis S. Drake, Town of Roxbury . .. (Boston, 1905), 51.
28 Walker, Tenth Report . . . 1851, Massachusetts Public Documents, 1853, III; cf. also Dissertation Copy, Map XI; Woods, City Wilderness, 53, 28-30; Tenth Annual Report of the Benevolent Fraternity of Churches . . . (Boston, 1844), 25.
IO5
THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
1850, 40 per cent of Roxbury's population comprised foreigners or children of foreigners, these were primarily prosperous groups and included many non-Irish.29 Only the opening of the street railroads in 1858 exposed Roxbury to the masses who thereafter moved in, forcing their predecessors back into West Roxbury and Dedham.30
Noodle's Island, East Boston, eventually the most important outskirt, lay across a narrow arm of Boston Bay. The East Boston Company, founded in 1833 to exploit its real estate, met with slight success until 1840, when the Cunard Line assured the future of the Island by fixing its western terminus there. The construction of piers and the subsequent necessity for stevedores attracted many Irish. In 1850 the introduction of Cochituate water ended the dependence upon wells and increased the capacity of the island. By then, a steam ferry shuttled across the Bay every five minutes transporting as many as 14,000 passengers each day for a two-cent fare and facilitating the migration of many North-Enders.31 The isola- tion of Chelsea, the town beyond East Boston, persisted until the Winnisemet Ferry, closed before 1830, was replaced. But after the establishment of the Boston and Chelsea Railroad through Charlestown and the Winthrop Railroad through East Boston, even this remote community added to its population from the continuous drift out of peninsular Boston, and only such towns as Malden, Brighton, and Brookline, without direct connections, were unaffected.32
This process consolidated the lines drawn between the Irish and other groups by the city's economic evolution. Al-
20 Particularly a large representation of Germans (cf. Dissertation Copy, Map XI). Cf. also "Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors . . . 1850," Boston City Documents, 1850, no. 42, p. 34; "Report of the Standing Committee on Towns ," Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1851, no. 82, passim.
30 Cf. D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Norfolk County . . . (Philadelphia, 1884), 72, 73; Dissertation Copy, Maps IX, XI.
Winsor, op. cit., IV, 39; Dissertation Copy, Map X; "Report ... on the East Boston Ferry, 1864," Boston City Documents, 1864, no. 44, pp. 4 and passim; Boston Pilot, June 8, 1850.
32 Ordinances of the City of Boston .
. . (Boston, 1865), 75, 82 ; Dissertation Copy, 192-194.
106
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
most all the non-Irish, free to take advantage of the rise of contiguous towns, dispersed everywhere, never concentrating in a single section. But although rapid transit permitted some Irish to move out of the densest areas, most remained in the hideous slums of Fort Hill and the North End, subject to all their rotting evils.
Wherever the Irish proletariat resided, distinctive accom- modations appeared to meet their extensive demands and limited ability to pay. Upon their arrival they could not hope to find truly permanent homes, for few had any notion of where to live or work. Coming without funds, they shifted about until they found a situation and earned enough to pay the initial costs of establishment. But even employment did not solve their problem, for their jobs were invariably low- paid and transitory. Their every-day expenses, subtracted from their wages, left only privation in the balance. It took years to accumulate even meager reserves, and many never managed to save enough to furnish a flat, much less to buy a home. Unable to afford domiciles of their own, they lodged awhile with friends, relatives, or countrymen; no matter how cramped the quarters of those already settled, there was always more room for the sake of rent, charity, or kinship. Such makeshifts were unsatisfactory, however, and a durable solu- tion awaited the development of the only quarters thousands of Irishmen could afford.
The ultimate housing of the Irish required an extensive process of adaptation on the part of Boston real estate. The simplest form was conversion of old mansions and disused warehouses into tenements. In many cases, boarding house keepers, wishing to profit by the new demand, took over prop- erties which, after a few alterations, emerged as multiple dwellings. In other cases, a sub-lease system developed, whereby a contractor, usually Irish himself and frequently a neighborhood tradesman, leased an old building at an annual rental, subdivided it into immigrant flats, and sub-rented it at weekly rates. Sometimes the structure passed through the
IO7
THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
hands of several agents, completely severing control from ownership.33 Solely interested in immediate income, having the welfare of neither the building nor the tenants at heart, sub-landlords encouraged a host of evils, while the occupants suffered from their "merciless inflictions." 34 By this meta- morphosis "houses . .. long inhabited by the well-to-do class of people, are vacated by them for others in more fashionable quarters .. . and then a less fortunate class of folk occupy for a while, - they, in their turn, to make room for another class on the descending scale . . . till houses, once fashionable .. . become neglected, dreary tenement houses into which the families of the low-paid and poverty smitten . .. crowd by the dozens. . . " 35
Despite its lack of conveniences or sanitation, and its gen- eral inflammability, the remodeled type was far superior to any other available to the Irish. While those adapted from factories, as was Chickering's old Franklin Square plant, were unrivaled in their perniciousness, even the barracks in Stillman Street in the North End had some benefits of light, air, and privacy (Fig. 1).36 Whatever the intention of proprietor or lessee, transformed buildings could not utilize space as care- fully as those created specifically for immigrants.
New dwellings, completely free of restrictions, displayed every stratagem for economy at the expense of the most humble amenities. The prevailing architecture on hitherto unused space in the peripheral Irish areas such as the West End, South Boston, and East Boston, was characterized by many flats along a narrow passageway. In 1857, for instance, Samuel Hooper reared two four-story wooden edifices with brick ends
33 For instance, a building in Kingston Court, owned by L. M. Sargeant was leased to T. Thompson whose agent was James Connors, who sub-leased it to a neighborhood grocer, P. Collins (Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor 1871, Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1871, no. 150, pp. 524, 526).
34 John H. Griscom, Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York ... (New York, 1845), 6; Ford, op. cit., I, 105, 134.
Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor
. . 1872, Massa- chusetts Senate Documents, 1872, no. 180, p. 437.
36 Boston Pilot, June 2, 1855.
108
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
in Friends Street Court, each holding thirty-two one-room apartments to which the sun never penetrated. A narrow path, fourteen feet wide, half obstructed by a row of privies and water hydrants, separated the two blocks. In Institute Avenue a similar development centering in an alley of only ten feet, exploited the available plot even more thoroughly.37
Within the focal points of Irish concentration, however, the price of real estate was too high to permit like construc- tions. Instead, enterprising land-owners utilized unremunera- tive yards, gardens, and courts to yield the maximum number of hovels that might pass as homes. The abundant grounds surrounding well-built early Boston residences, and the hith- erto unusable sites created by the city's irregular streets, once guarantees of commodious living, now fostered the most vicious Boston slums. Every vacant spot, behind, beside, or within an old structure, yielded room for still another.38 And even- tually, to correct the oversight of the first builders who had failed to exhaust the ultimate inch, their more perspicacious successors squeezed house within house, exploiting the last iota of space. This resulted in so tangled a swarm that the com- piler of the first Boston atlas gave up the attempt to map such areas, simply dismissing them as "full of sheds and shanties." 39
The whole brood of evils typical of this development ma- terialized in Half Moon Place (represented by no. I in Fig. 5 and pictured in Fig. 6) and the two alleys leading off it. This pest hole consisted of a very limited tract, originally vacant, between the rear of the Broad Street tenements and Fort Hill (Fig. 4). A rise in the value of land led to the excavation of additional portions of the hill, and the erection of tottering rookeries with their backs flush upon it.40 Not one of these
37 Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1870, 169 ff., 176; Edward H. Savage, Police Records and Recollections ... (Boston, 1873), 268.
28 Cf., e.g., the plan and the picture of the house in the rear of 136 Hanover Street, Figs. 2 and 3. For others, cf. Woods, City Wilderness, 62 ff.
30 Cf. C. Pinney, Atlas of the City of Boston ... (Boston, 1861), Plates 17, 23; Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1870, 166.
40 Represented by the shaded areas in Fig. 5.
FIG. I TENEMENTS IN STILLMAN STREET
Old Shed
about 50ft.
Passage
FIG. 2 PLAN OF REAR OF 136 HANOVER STREET
N.BROWN.SC.
FIG. 3 REAR OF 136 HANOVER STREET
IIO
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
melancholy warrens, moldering at their very conception, opened directly upon a street. The inhabitants of the central court (no. 1, Fig. 5; Fig. 6) and Bakers Alley (c in Fig. 5) emerged to the main thoroughfare through two gaps between the Broad
FORT
HILL
BROAD
STREET
FIG. 4 PROBABLE ORIGINAL CONDITION OF HALF MOON PLACE *
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