ESRWC also generated a report documenting the conditions they found, and succeeded in lobbying the New York State Legislature to authorize the Governor to appoint a Tenement House Committee to do something about them. One element of the cleanup involved the removal of thousands of barrels of trash as well as decomposing dead animals and spoiled food. By late December, the ESRWC had employed “about 150 men in cleaning streets.” By the end of November, the Committee arranged for the participating charities, unions, churches and settlement houses to distribute “work tickets,” entitling each bearer to one hour’s work per day sweeping the streets. ESRWC formulated a plan and raised funds to get men jobs cleaning the streets of New York. The ESRWC had been formed earlier that year by prominent New York City philanthropists, churches, synagogues and charitable organizations seeking to provide work to those who had lost their jobs during the deep national depression which struck that year. In the winter of 1893/94, the East Side Relief Work Committee (ESRWC) hired workers to clean out and whitewash tenement house cellars, alleyways, air shafts, and living rooms. Interestingly, the map’s origins have nothing to do with census data. While it made this argument well, it also preserved an otherwise unattainable window into the population patterns of Manhattan at the time of the 1890 census. Pierce and the 1894 Tenement House Committee (also known as the Gilder Committee after the Committee’s chair, Richard Watson Gilder) placed data based upon the information from the 1890 census on a map of Manhattan which they created to illustrate the need for housing reform in New York City. Courtesy of The National Archives.įortunately for those interested in New York population data and history, there is a workaround! Well before the demise of this documentation, Frank E. Courtesy of The Library of Congressīasement of the Department of Commerce Building after the fire in 1921. The one upside of this tragedy was that it provided the catalyst for the creation of our National Archives. The source of the fire was never determined, but it resulted in the loss of priceless information on the United States population at a critical moment in our nation’s history, when immigration, especially in New York, was reaching unprecedented heights. For those who don’t know the story, the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire in 1921 in the basement of the Department of Commerce building in Washington, D.C. As a historian and researcher who frequently relies on census data for information, nothing frustrates me more than the fact that nearly all of the 1890 Federal Census records were lost.
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