and factory workers. In Brooklyn, a group of German labourers were living in a ‘row of shanties’ along Van Brunt Street as early as 1846. Another group of African American workers set up an informal settlement in Brooklyn known as ‘Crow Hill’. Many commuted to Manhattan where they worked as domestic servants and in the Fulton and Washington Markets.20 Other shantytown residents worked within a wider informal economy. Some residents maintained gardens and raised livestock for sale. Offal boiling and piggeries were also popular businesses. As a retrospective history of squatting in the New York Times published in 1880 concluded, the early population of the city’s shantytowns was made up of ‘rag-pickers, pea-nut vendors, street-peddlers, knife-grinders, labourers, idlers, and vagrants’.21
The shantytown and squatter settlements of mid-nineteenth-century New York were nevertheless seen as an obstacle to the further development of the city as a modern metropolis. For city officials, they posed a threat to public health and safety as sites of poverty, pestilence and criminality. In the eyes of the mainstream press, they represented a precarious form of urban existence – a primitive anachronism – that hovered on the edges of ‘civilised modern life’. Shantytowns were unsurprisingly portrayed as ‘plague-spots’ and their residents as ‘strangers’: foreign, un-American and, in many cases, inhuman.22
Such nativist characterisations provided a justification for the repossession of land occupied by squatters and the demolition of their homes. Shanty dwellers were not the dangerous and degenerate characters portrayed in the mainstream press, however. They were, in most cases, labourers and entrepreneurs who ‘took possession of the urban landscape and molded it to their needs’.23 The self-built (and often informal) communities they created spoke to a ‘kind of independent life’: makeshift and precarious on the one hand; resilient and resourceful on the other.24 These were complex and extended communities, a ‘landscape of schoolhouses and chapels, work sites and fenced-in yards, pasturage and piggeries’.25
And yet, these communities were anathema to the gridded regularity of the nineteenth-century American city. ‘The opening of thoroughfares up town,’ one reporter concluded,
Will raze the squatter’s huts, and destroy that somewhat unenviable individuality which distinguishes the tenants. By seeking a shelter in tenement houses, the squatter will lose, it is true, the privilege of considering himself the monarch of all he [sic] surveys, but his descendants will be afforded some insight in the customs of civilised humanity, and the health and appearance of the metropolis will be benefitted.26
Despite fierce resistance, the majority were finally forced out as they gave way to a rapidly expanding city in the 1880s and 1890s. As they disappeared, the everyday experiences of their occupants – the popular working-class culture they produced and nurtured, the experiences of displacement and migration they brought with them – found a new home on New York’s musical theatre stage. One of the most popular plays of the 1880s was Edward Harrigan’s Squatter Sovereignty, a full-length musical comedy which premiered in 1882 at the Theatre Comique on Broadway and ran for over 160 performances.27
If mid-nineteenth-century shantytowns were a source of fear and anxiety for New York’s middle class, they also brought the city’s poor system of tenement housing into sharper focus. Lawmakers were unwilling to legitimise the feudal model that had been practised in the Hudson Valley. They readily transferred, however, the legal aspects of landlord-tenant obligation to New York’s growing urban environment. This was, primarily, a possession–rent relationship in which a landlord turned over ‘possession’ in exchange for rent.28 The contractual aspects of this relationship were nevertheless overlooked, at the expense of tenants who had little legal redress when faced with poor living conditions, especially as landlords were not required to maintain the interiors of their apartments. As one expert on the subject therefore concluded, ‘for landlords to be held liable there had to be statutes regulating tenement housing, and between 1867 and 1900, these laws either did not exist, or they were weak, unenforced, and largely ignored by landlords, inspectors and the courts alike’.29
By the late nineteenth century, New York’s weak landlordtenant laws had combined with an emerging system of leasing and subleasing to produce the severe overcrowding and dangerously unsafe living conditions that was documented by a group of pioneering photographers that included Jacob Riis.30 These developments were challenged by housing advocates and progressive reformers, though there was little sustained opposition from tenants until the early twentieth century. It was working class immigrant (and mainly Jewish) housewives on the city’s Lower East Side who overturned decades of acquiescence and passivity and were ultimately responsible for the city’s first large-scale tenant mobilisation. Following a successful boycott of local kosher butchers in 1902, a series of strikes were organised in 1904 by East Side women in protest against crippling rent hikes. The women transformed their own neighbourhood into a staging ground for the emergence of ‘tenant unions’ (including the New York Rent Protective Association, or NYRPA) that withheld rents and blocked evictions and provided small sums of money to recently displaced tenants. They also formed alliances with neighbourhood socialists who soon seized the reins of the protest.31
Despite their efforts, Lower East Side residents were unsuccessful in assembling an infrastructure and institutional base from which they could organise future strikes and other tenant-based activism. While threatened evictions may have failed to materialise and, in some cases, landlords were even forced to roll back rent to pre-strike levels, the fissures within tenant groups prevented them from building on their victories and, if anything, contributed to their rapid dissolution.32 Within a year landlords were once again raising rents, and by the end of 1907 a new wave of rent strikes had erupted with tenants demanding that landlords ‘decrease the rent immediately’.33 Unlike its predecessor, the 1907 strikes were organised and drew on the leadership, direction and organisational base of the Socialist Party. The political nature of the agitations alarmed many in the city. The strikers were widely criticised by the mainstream press and were, in the eyes of many wealthy New Yorkers, dangerous, unruly and ultimately responsible for fomenting a ‘war’ and ‘uprising’.34 Few tenants were able, however, to win any real concessions, while municipal court judges issued several thousand eviction notices.35
In the decade that followed, tenant action was sporadic at best and spoke to a patchwork of protest rooted in local neighbourhoods and increasingly sedimented histories of dissent. A second intense wave of rent strikes briefly erupted between 1917 and 1920 and was responsible for the ‘largest radical housing uprising in New York’s history’.36 Unlike the configuration of its predecessor, the movement had a broader base. It involved Jewish families as well as Italian and Irish tenants in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn and the East and South Bronx, where socialist organising remained a source of direct political action and engagement.37 A series of tenant unions were set up across the city in Brownsville, Borough Park, Tremont, University Heights and Washington Heights. Most of the unions had strong ties to the Socialist Party, and the prospect of organised tenant power forced the city and state government to pass Emergency Rent laws. The laws imposed controls on rent and provided tenants with some additional protection against eviction.
Tenant militancy waxed and waned in the years that followed as unions fell prey to the Red Scare that swept through the country.38 It was soon revived, however, during the Depression, assuming forms that reflected the emergence of new organisational structures and tactics. The expiration of Emergency Rent laws in September 1920 provided the most immediate source of contention as controls on apartments renting for either fifteen dollars or ten dollars per month were scheduled to end in December 1928 and June 1929 respectively. In Harlem, where the black community faced rigid segregation, local Communists came together and formed the Harlem Tenants League to resist and agitate against impending rent hikes. The League became one of the most important early sites of black Communist activism in New York. It organised demonstrations and rent strikes, blocked evictions and demanded the enforcement of existing housing regulations. While the League worked locally, it also adopted a radically transnational outlook that linked housing insecurity to wider struggles against ‘global white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism’.39
The