If the level of architecture was low in the country, it touched the bottom of the abyss in the city. As early as 1835 the multiple-family tenement had been introduced in New York as a means of producing congestion, raising the ground-rents, and satisfying in the worst possible way the need of the new immigrants for housing. The conditions of life in these tenements were infinitely lower than they had been in the most primitive farmhouse of the colonial period; their lack of light, lack of water, lack of sanitary facilities, and lack of privacy, created an admirable milieu for the propagation of vice and disease, and their existence in a period which was boasting loudly of the advance of science and industrialism shows, to say the least, how the myths which inspired the age stood between the eye and reality, and obscured the actual state of the modern industrial community.
To the disgrace of the architectural profession in America, the worst features of tenement-house construction were standardized in the so-called dumbbell tenement which won the first prize in the model tenement-house competition of 1879; and the tenements which were designed after this pattern in the succeeding years combined a maximum lack of privacy with a minimum of light and air. The gridiron street-design, the narrow frontage, the deep lot, all conspired to make good housing difficult in the larger cities: within this framework good house-design, indeed, still is difficult. The dumbbell tenement of the Gilded Age, however, raised bad housing into an art; and the acquisition of this art in its later developments is now one of the stigmata of “progress” in a modern American city. I say this without irony; the matter is too grave for jest.
During these same ’seventies, the benefits of poor housing were extended in New York to those with money enough to afford something better: the Paris flat was introduced. The legitimate excuse for the small apartment was the difficulty of obtaining household service, and the futility of keeping up large houses for small families: this, however, had nothing to do with the actual form that the apartment took, for, apart from the desire for congestion-rents, it is as easy to build apartments for two families as for twenty. The flat is a genuine convenience for the well-to-do visitor to a city; it gives him the atmosphere of a home without many of its major complications, and those who got the taste for this life in Paris were not altogether absurd in desiring to enjoy the same benefits in New York. Unfortunately, what suits a visitor does not necessarily meet the demands of a permanent resident: one may tolerate a blank wall for a week or a month without being depressed, particularly since a good part of a visitor’s time is spent outside his home; but to live year after year facing a blank wall or an equally-frowning façade opposite is to be condemned to the environment of a penitentiary.
The result of building apartments in New York and elsewhere was not cheaper rents for smaller quarters: it was smaller quarters without the cheap rents. Those who wanted sunlight and a pleasant view paid a premium for it; those who did not get either paid more than enough for what they got. The result of building apartments which would satisfy only a visitor was to make every family visitors: before the acute housing shortage, yearly removals to new premises were the only palliative that made their occupancy tolerable. The amount of wear and tear and waste, the loss of energy and money and good spirits, produced by the inability of the architect to design adequately under the pecuniary standards of the Gilded Age was colossal. The urban nomad in his own way was as great a spendthrift as the pioneer of the prairie. Both of them had been unable to create a permanent civilization; and both of them paid the price for it.
III
During the first period of pioneering, mechanical improvements had affected the milieu of architecture, but not architecture itself, if one overlooks such ingenuities as the circular and octagon houses of the eighteen-thirties. Slowly, the actual methods of construction changed: the carpenter-builder, who had once performed every operation, gave way to the joiner, whose work profited by putty and paint, curtains and carpets—to the plasterer, who covered up the raw imperfect frame—and to the plumber. Weird ornamental forms for doors and window-architraves, for moldings and pendants, were supplied to the builder by the catalogs of the planing and scroll-saw mills. Invention produced novelties of contortion in wood, unique in ugliness and imbecile in design. Like the zinc and iron statues that graced the buildings of the Centennial Exposition, these devices record the absorption of art in a vain technology.
One need not dwell upon the results of all these miserable efforts, conceived in haste and aborted for profit: the phenomenon was common to industrial civilization at this period, and can be observed in Battersea and Manchester as well as in New York and Pittsburgh. Mr. Thomas Hardy, who was trained as an architect, wrote the esthetic apology for industrialism; and in proclaiming the rightness of our architectural deserts, one cannot help thinking that he transferred to the Wessex countryside a little of the horrible depression he must have acquired in London.
“Gay prospects,” exclaimed Mr. Hardy, “wed happily with gay times; but, alas! if the times be not gay! Men have more often suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. … Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new vale in Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer harmony with external things wearing a somberness distasteful to
