May 2002, Vol 92, No. 5 | American Journal of Public Health 753
© 2002 American Public Health Association
Baxter Street Then
Elizabeth Fee,
Theodore M. Brown,
Jan Lazarus and
Paul Theerman
Elizabeth Fee, Jan Lazarus, and Paul Theerman are with the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. Theodore M. Brown is with the Department of History and the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Elizabeth Fee, PhD, Bldg 38, Room 1E21, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894 (e-mail: elizabeth_fee{at}nlm.nih.gov).
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INTRODUCTION
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THIS IMAGE OF BAXTER Street, New York City, NY, was published in A Handbook of the People's Health (1913), one of several textbooks written by Walter Moore Coleman.1 Like other textbooks in the series, it was intended to present modern problems in an engaging way to audiences of adolescents. The upbeat text emphasizes how much things have changed for the better and how modern, professionally led public health reform initiatives will lead to a better and healthier life for all.
This particular photograph was meant to capture the horrors of 19th-century housing before tenement house reform. Successive waves of immigrants had made Baxter Street their home. Early in the century, German bakers and grocers opened corner stores here, Jews from Bavaria and Bohemia operated used clothing stalls, and the Irish dealt in iron, brass, and copper.2 As the immigrants continued to come, landlords converted the wood frame houses originally built for single artisan families (in the foreground of the photograph) into rabbit-warren boarding houses jammed with renters. When these increasingly dilapidated houses could hold no more, the landlords built huge tenements (in the background of the photograph) where they could pack in hundreds of poorly paid laborers and artisans. In general, the higher the density of rental housing, the poorer the health conditions, and the greater the mortality rates of the populations inside.
This photograph captures a kind of archaeology of urban housing horrors that Coleman would have us believe were being successfully abolished by Progressive-era reform.3 Later 20th-century developments would prove that the problems of urban housing were easier to identify than to solve.
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Source. Prints and Photographs Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
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Footnotes
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Note. Most of the Prints and Photographs Collection of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine may be viewed through the on-line database "Images From the History of Medicine" at http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/. The Web site also provides information on ordering reproductions of images. If you have a print, photograph, or other visual item that might be appropriate for this collection, please contact the History of Medicine Division.
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References
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1.
Coleman WM. A Handbook of the People's Health: A Textbook of Sanitation and Hygiene for the Use of Schools. New York, NY: Macmillan; 1913.
2.
Burrows EG, Wallace M. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 1999.
3.
DeForest RW, Veiller L, eds. The Tenement House Problem, Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900. 2 vols. New York, NY: Macmillan; 1903.
Copyright © 2002 by the American Public Health Association
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INTRODUCTION
References
