The Evictions
Mayor LaGuardia announced the city’s intention to clear the neighborhood for the construction of Stuyvesant Town in his Sunday radio address on April 18, 1943. Rumors had spread through the neighborhood before then but, according to the newspapers, the news fell like a bombshell on the residents. Elsewhere in the city the news was met with applause. This was a move toward the city of the future, as shown at the World’s Fair in 1939, an urban utopia where people lived and worked in high-rise towers on landscaped grounds and whizzed around in their cars on expressways. The city and Metropolitan Life positioned the new project as a future home for returning vets, introducing a patriotic note. Not many worried much about what would happen to the current residents of the site, seen only as decaying slum, a blight on the landscape of the city.
While outsiders could not imagine anyone wanting to live in the Gashouse, a survey of 836 families in the neighborhood by the Community Service Society found that 59 percent of the residents wanted to stay. Some had lived in the same apartment or block for more than 50 years and scarcely knew any other part of the city. They wanted to live out their lives where they had grown up, gotten married, raised a family and buried loved ones. Some wanted to stay long enough for their sons fighting in the war to return to the homes they had left. Some residents wanted to stay because they owned shops or other small businesses in the neighborhood or could walk to their jobs at Consolidated Edison, the Coca Cola Bottling plant or one of the other factories in the neighborhood. Some felt culturally uncomfortable elsewhere, especially those who hadn’t mastered English; The poor did not feel so poor where most of their neighbors were just as poor and those who had a few bucks in a bank account could be somebody in the Gashouse. Even some who were doing relatively well economically in the wartime economy did not want to give up their cheap rent, a once commonplace phenomenon in the city where there was plenty of other ways to spend your money than rent. And who knew what the postwar economy would bring? The Depression had hit pretty hard here.
If they did leave, where would they go? This relocation was taking place during wartime when there was little decent, affordable housing available anywhere. The Community Service Society found that only three percent of the families it surveyed in the Gashouse would meet the financial criteria to rent at Stuyvesant Town, which did not guarantee that the highly selective rental office would accept them as tenants. Another 22 percent of the families surveyed were willing, qualified candidates for public housing. The option for the remainder was moving from a slum where they had friends and family to one where they would be strangers. And they had to bear much of the burden of moving themselves with minimal assistance from Metropolitan or the city.
The demolition zone included two Catholic and one Lutheran church, as well as one public and two parochial schools. The churches were remnants of the neighborhood’s former communities. Immaculate Conception, a brownstone edifice on 14th Street between Avenues A and B, was the largest. The church laid its cornerstone in 1855 on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, a doctrine proclaimed by the Pope the year before. The first services were held in 1858. According to the church’s website, Immaculate Conception was at one time one of the largest parishes in the city. In the years just before World War One, the church’s parochial school, which had opened in 1864, had more than 3,000 students, largely of Irish, German and Italian ethnicity. The parish and school went into sharp decline soon after as the neighborhood population dropped and demographics changed. Auxiliary Bishop J. Francis McIntire led the final mass at the original building in August 1945. The congregation then moved across the street to the former Grace Protestant Episcopal Chapel on 14th between First and Avenue A. This chapel had been built by Grace Episcopal, an elite parish on Fifth Avenue in the Village, as an outreach to the Lower East Side. Grace ran a hospital and dispensary for children and the elderly in the neighborhood and a settlement house on 13th Street where immigrants, mostly Germans and Italians, could swim or learn English and job skills. Grace Chapel and settlement house also went into decline in the twenties and thirties and the doors closed in 1942. Immaculate Conception razed the settlement house to build a new parochial school, looking forward to an invigoration of the parish and school after the veterans and their families moved into Stuyvesant Town.
St. Mary Magdalen’s on 17th Street was a 72- year old church that had ministered to the once sizable German-speaking Catholic community. It had a school and a convent adjoining to the rear on 18th Street. The parish was building a new church on Avenue D between 12th and 13th Streets, where a remnant of the old German-speaking community clung on.
Christ Lutheran traced its history back to a blacksmith shop on 14th Street where the Reverend George Unangst Wenner preached to a congregation of ten in 1867, using an anvil as his pulpit. Wenner was a German-American from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, whose family had been in America since the Revolution. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary, he had learned to speak German for his ministry. The church had several locations before settling in 1882 into a red-brick, fortress-like building at 406 East 19th Street that formerly had housed a chapel of St. George’s Episcopal Church, an affluent parish on Stuyvesant Square. Wenner served as minister of Christ Lutheran for 66 years until his death at 90 in 1934, by which time he had become a venerated figure as the city’s oldest and longest-serving active clergyman; numerous newspapers articles celebrated the occasion. During the heyday of Little Germany, the church had more than 500 congregants and was one of several Lutheran churches in Kleindeutschland. An article in the Edison Monthly on the electrification of the church’s parish hall in 1910 noted that most of its former members had moved uptown. According to a New York Times story in 1934, membership had fallen to about 120.
The World-Telegram religious editor, Alice Moldenhower, visited Christ Lutheran for an article that appeared on April 20, 1946, marking the occasion of the congregation’s final Easter service in its old sanctuary. In the feature, she noted the church’s high-gabled front with belfry and the 75-year old melodian, a gift from Peter Cooper, in the Sunday school room. Moldenhower’s tour guide was the church’s 80 year old sexton, Max Wedell, who had served the church in a variety of capacities for 56 years, previously having worked addressing envelopes at home for Tammany Hall and then for the YMCA. He told her that during his tenure as the church’s Sunday school superintendent, the infant class once had numbered 150. The church had a brass decorated pulpit and lectern, a baptismal font carved from stone from the Black Forest, a stained glass window of Christ as the Good Shepherd in the chancel and memorial windows presented over the years by various confirmation classes. Moldenhower reported that most of the churches small but staunchly loyal membership traveled in for services from Woodside, Sunnyside, Jamaica and Jackson Heights in Queens, which had been an easier journey when the Second Avenue El connected some of these neighborhoods directly with the Lower East Side. Although The New York Times reported that on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Wenner had proudly displayed a letter from President Von Hindenberg of Germany congratulating him for keeping German culture and language alive in the United States, the bilingual congregation ended its German- language services after Pearl Harbor. The congregation hoped to build a new church one block west, where the parish house stood. The New York Times reported that the current minister’s sister, Madge Offerman, had written a poem, “The Little Brick Church on the Old East Side,” to help the fundraising effort. The faithful Wedell left the church $20,000 in his will, a big boost for the congregation’s efforts to build a new place of worship. They finally broke ground in 1948.
Among the other buildings being demolished for Stuvesant Town was the Mecca Theater on Avenue A between 14th and 15th Street. It had been the neighborhood movie theater in the 1920s but it closed during the Depression and was being used mostly for furniture storage. Several Consolidated Edison buildings and gas tanks also came down, as did the Dairyman’s League Cooperative Association building and Dowd’s Lumber Company on Avenue A. The Bull’s Head Horse Auction Company building on East 18th Street was a remnant of the days when stables and horse marts were a notable feature of the Gashouse. In more recent years, a few large parking garages had opened along Avenue B. Several ice plants, commercial bakeries and laundries were located in the demolition zone as well as 500 small stores, machine shops and factories, some of them housed in brick buildings that predated the Civil War. Among the larger businesses, The Goodman Noodle factory had moved to Long Island City from its location on East 17th Street, the American Marble Works moved from Avenue A to East 11th St. and the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant, which had stood on 19th Street at the East River, was moving to a new building being constructed at 34th Street and FDR Drive. Novoye Rosskoye Slovo publishing house, which published the city’s premiere Russian language newspaper, moved uptown to West 56th Street.
The evacuation of the Gashouse began in February 1945. The first group had until the end of March to find a new home. Democratic Assemblyman Francis X McGowan of Manhattan introduced a bill that month to stay the evictions until six months after the war. He lost. Meanwhile a Republican-sponsored bill supported by LaGuardia to provide tax exclusions for improvements to old law tenements, intended to ease the relocation of Stuyvesant Town residents, was held up in committee. That same month the Tenant Relocation Bureau, hired by Metropolitan Life to help the displaced residents find new homes, reported at a mass meeting of neighborhood residents that it had found 6,000 apartments to house the evictees. But only 36 percent of these replacement apartments had both heat and hot running water. Sixty percent had hot water but lacked heat. Another four percent had neither. Only 114 of the apartments were in rehabilitated buildings. In short, most of these apartments were no better than the tenements that were being torn down. James Felt, the president of the bureau, conceded that they had not found any comparable housing for the 300-400 residents of the district who lived in relatively modern apartment buildings, including the 100 who lived in Stuyvesant House. A tenant group formed, not so much to fight for the right to stay, a lost cause, but to postpone the date of the evictions until after the war to allow them the opportunity to find adequate housing alternatives.
A New York Times reporter visited the neighborhood on a Saturday in early March of 1945. Moving vans and trucks were parked throughout the neighborhood. Kids in “amazing numbers” were playing in the littered streets. An organ grinder, sans monkey, played “East Side, West Side” on 18th Street. Some residents were doing their weekend shopping on First Avenue while others lined up at the Relocation Bureau on 14th Street. LaGuardia and Moses had granted a reprieve to some of those on the lower blocks. Upon request those who originally had been given until the end of March or April to vacate could now have until July 1 while those with an August 1 eviction date could remain until October 1. Demolition would begin as soon as the first blocks were vacated. At the time of the article, the relocation bureau had 1700 applications for assistance on file. Besides providing interpreters, the bureau ferried applicants by station wagon to see available apartments. Felt told the reporter that many of the evictees were resentful but “philosophical” about being uprooted. According to Felt, many did not mind the lack of facilities at the apartments they were offered because it was what they were used to and cheap rent was their primary requirement. Harder to satisfy were those whose income had risen in wartime and who now could afford and wanted better accommodations; there were almost no mid-rent apartments available for them in wartime New York. Hardest of all to satisfy were the 400 residents who lived at modest rent in modern buildings scattered throughout the area. There was nothing comparable available for them, according to Felt.
A subsequent report by the Tenants Relocation Bureau said that most of the tenants who had moved before July 1 had found equivalent or better accommodations, meaning some had settled for worse. The majority had ended up in tenements in nearby areas. Apartments for large families were especially hard to secure. One mother with 11 children smuggled six of them into their new apartment in barrels. Those tenants who had moved before July 1 received one month's rent to help pay for moving expenses, which proved to be inadequate for many, who complained that moving companies had taken advantage of their situation by charging excessive fees. Those families that remained in their apartments after July 1 faced a number of problems. Essential services had been cut off in some buildings. Crime in the area, particularly burglaries, rose as the neighborhood became increasingly deserted. Rats and cockroaches migrated from the razed buildings into the ones still standing and demolition activities filled the air with dust. By October 1945 almost everyone was gone. A photo of the site in The New York Times on May 26, 1946, showed a scene of utter devastation, a vast plain filled with rubble and punctuated by pile drivers.
For all the criticism of Stuyvesant Town, the need for middle-income housing was real in postwar New York. By June applications were pouring in for apartments in the new development. More than 7,000 letters had been received before the rental offices had formally opened. Veterans wrote of having to live in furnished rooms with their brides or sharing apartments with in-laws, of long commutes from their residences to their jobs in the city, of marriages postponed because the couples had nowhere to live. The letter writers were informed that they would have to apply in person at the rental office. According to figures released by the City Commissioner of Housing and Buildings on Dec. 13, 1946, no new apartments had been built during the year and the city had added only 1603 single family and 822 two-family homes. The remodeling of older structures had created a mere 597 new units. Meanwhile 765,000 veterans had returned to the city. The federal government had provided 2352 family units in Quonset huts and former barracks and 1240 dorm rooms for unmarried students. The New York City Housing Authority had 85,000 applications on file from veterans looking for temporary or permanent apartments. Most of these applicants said they did not want to buy houses and few of those who were interested in buying had sufficient income, averaging a weekly salary of $56 a week rather than the $90 they would need to qualify for a mortgage.
When critic Lewis Mumford , who objected to the project on almost every ground, wrote in The New Yorker in 1948 that the completed Stuyvesant Town resembled a prison compound, some of the tenants wrote back that they were “in heaven.” The project did revitalize the surrounding area. Within three years of its opening, property values along First Avenue tripled. Old neighborhood shops were forced out as commercial rents soared. Middle-class newcomers brought new life to the churches and synagogues in the area. On the other hand, the neighborhood below 14th Street and east of First Avenue, now separated from the more affluent parts of the city by Stuyvesant Town, became even more of an isolated slum.