Stuyvesant Town’s supporters positioned the area with the press and public as the “worst of the worst,” although in fact it was not appreciably worse than the city’s other decaying tenement districts. A more likely explanation for the choice of this neighborhood for a massive experiment in private redevelopment was the gentrification in the 1920s of the Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park neighborhoods to the west and of Kips Bay and Turtle Bay to the north. The replacement of this working class slum with a middle-income enclave was certain to enhance property values in these neighboring areas and further their transformation.
Most tenement buildings were structurally sound but cheap materials, neglect and age had taken their toll on the interiors where peeling paint, cracked plaster and creaking stairs were the norm. The apartments had little light or ventilation. Living conditions had improved somewhat since the turn of the century. While most tenants had to share bathrooms in the hallways, this was a lot better than the outhouses of the 19th century. By 1945 most apartments on the Stuyvesant Town site had hot and cold running water and about 25 % of the buildings also had steam heat, but there were still some coldwater flats and even a few outhouses. This did not set the neighborhood apart from other tenement districts. According to a Consolidated Edison report in 1945, about 20 percent of the housing units in New York City lacked private toilets and almost two-thirds of the apartments that Metropolitan Life’s relocation bureau offered to the evictees lacked steam heat.
A few brick houses from before the Civil War also still were standing among the tenements before the demolition began. The project’s advocates glossed over the presence in the neighborhood of some newer buildings as well as of some substantially refurbished tenement buildings. Ironically Stuyvesant House, a modern, low-rent housing development built 14 years earlier on Avenue A between 15th and 16th, to provide affordable housing for 100 low-income residents, was among the buildings being razed.
The neighborhood was the heart of the Gashouse, a name acquired in the mid-19th century when gas tanks lined the East River in this area. The first of these tanks went up in 1842. A stench had made the blocks nearest the river among the least desirable and unhealthiest habitations in the entire city. Leaky gas tanks were blamed but the odor was caused more by the chemical processes used to produce gas in those days and the smells put out by other factories, slaughter houses and utilities on both sides of the East River contributed to the miasma. The Gashouse in the broadest sense stretched from 14th Street to 27th, from Fourth Avenue to the River, although the areas around Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park, west of First Avenue and the El, were economically mixed enclaves within this territory and the blocks nearest Union Square and the Flatiron District held publishing houses and other thriving enterprises.
In the decades just prior to the Civil War, the city’s affluent built mansions along Stuyvesant Square, Gramercy Park and the avenues; the middle class moved into single-family row houses on the surrounding cross streets while the poor, most of them Irish or German immigrants, populated the blocks closest to the river where they could find work on the docks or in the warehouses and factories that lined the waterfront. The riverfront blocks became the turf of the Gashouse Gang, one of the vicious Irish street gangs that terrorized the slums in the late 19th century. Old timers in the city might remember a popular music hall song of fifty years earlier, “The Belle of Avenoo A,” that glorified in New Yawkese the tough, freewheeling young working class women of the neighborhood who swung their pocketbooks as they sashayed down the “Avenoo.” A song parody of 1896, “The Belle of Avenue B,” told of Rose, who was spending her summer in prison instead of eating sauerkraut and drinking lager beer back home. But all that was in the past. By 1946, the Gashouse was merely an extension of the Lower East Side without much of a neighborhood identity of its own. Most of the gas tanks, once a distinguishing feature of the New York skyline, were gone, replaced by a giant Consolidated Edison facility. The police had brought the Gashouse Gang under control before the turn of the century and the East River Drive obliterated the worst of the tenement blocks, where thugs had roamed, before the war.
In the first wave of settlement, the poor had crammed into existing single-family houses that had been converted to rooming houses while the penniless squatted in shacks on abandoned farmland where they looked after pigs and sheep. As the population grew, entrepreneurs erected cheaply built, frame or brick-front tenements to house them. The earliest housing lacked even rudimentary amenities like running water. Later in the century came the dumbbell tenements, marginally better housing built around dumbbell -shaped airshafts. The typical tenement was a five-story walk-up with four, three-room apartments per floor. Many of these buildings were owned by absentee landlords who often leased the buildings to sub-landlords who then rented out the apartments. Maintenance was an issue because the sub-landlords did not have the capital and the absentee landlords lacked an incentive for improvements or repairs.
The Gashouse District, like most of the Lower East Side, was ethnically diverse. Historically, the neighborhood, like most of the tenement districts, was a temporary first stop for newcomers, most of them immigrants. The upwardly mobile moved to better housing elsewhere when they were able, and if not them then their children, making way for the next wave of newcomers, but leaving behind a remnant who could not or chose not to leave . Through much of the late 19th century in the Gashouse, an Irish waterfront neighborhood overlapped the northern extension of Little Germany, a thriving, ethnic enclave that began along the Bowery, then spread through what is now the East Village. St. Mark’s Place and Tompkins Square was the heart of Kleindeutschland but the Germans spilled over 14th Street into the Gashouse, with the most affluent settling near Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park. More of the residents than the stereotype would have it were native-born working class Americans, whether the children of immigrants or from older stock. Also present from the beginning were social outcasts, petty criminals, con men and prostitutes of all ethnicities drawn to the bright lights of Fourteenth Street, at one time the city’s entertainment hub. Later in the century, as the Germans increasingly moved uptown to Yorkville and across the river to Brooklyn and Queens, Italians and Eastern European Jews moved in. Eastern European Jews formed the largest ethnic group in the Gashouse by 1945, although the zone slated for demolition included none of the Jewish religious or cultural institutions that were the hallmarks of other, more storied Jewish neighborhoods. Eastern European Christians from Poland, Russia and the Ukraine had moved in around the same time as the Eastern European Christians, followed in the years just before the First World War by a polyglot flow from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, particularly Slovaks but also Rusyns, Ruthenians, Hungarians, Czechs and Gypsies of Roman Catholic, Eastern Rite Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Orthodox faiths. The mass migration of Puerto Ricans to New York had just begun and they were present in small small numbers in the Lower East Side along with a sprinkling of African-Americans. A small Armenian neighborhood to the north spilled over into the lower twenties.
Through the late 19th century, the inflow exceeded the outflow. The area reached its population peak just after the turn of the century, when an estimated 25,000 people lived within the boundaries of what would become Stuyvesant Town. In the 1920s, inflow slowed to a trickle as new restrictive immigration laws aimed at stemming the flood from Eastern and Southern Europe while postwar prosperity magnified the outflow. By this time, the garment trade, a principal employer of many of the newer immigrants, had moved from the blocks east of Fourth Avenue to the Garment District on the Westside. The subway system had opened new areas of the city to dense settlement. The population plummeted as the older immigrant groups departed the neighborhood. By the end of the decade, the Gashouse District, like all of the Lower East Side, had lost about 60 percent of its peak population. In fact, from 1910 to 1930 when the city’s population rose by 2-million and midtown Manhattan experienced a building boom, the borough as a whole lost 500,000 residents, mostly to Brooklyn, the Bronx and increasingly to Queens and the suburbs. Banks, insurance companies and other mortgage-holding institutions foreclosed on emptied- out tenements, holding them in the belief that the Lower East Side was ripe for the sort of redevelopment that was underway in the former East Side tenement neighborhoods further uptown. The Depression put a halt to the redevelopment and trapped many of those who had not yet made their escape. Manhattan showed a modest gain in population in the 1930s.
By 1945 when the evictions began, the era of large enclaves of newly arrived European immigrants in the Lower East Side was drawing to a close and economics increasingly defined the neighborhoods. The Gashouse had become primarily a neighborhood of the working class, not all of whom were desperately poor. Only traces of “Little Germany” remained. The Irish neighborhood had shrunk to a few blocks east of Avenue A on either side of 14th Street. There was a small Italian enclave near First Avenue. Some Eastern European immigrants, including Jews, lived in the neighborhood but in smaller numbers than in the past. Some of the immigrants who remained in the Gashouse spoke little English. The relocation office set up by Metropolitan Life provided Italian, Russian, Polish and other interpreters to deal with these residents.
Many of the area’s remaining residents had little education. Some were elderly, handicapped or suffered from chronic illnesses. Like other rundown neighborhoods with cheap rents and landlords who were not too demanding about references, the Gashouse had its share of flotsam and jetsam, including seamen, drifters, alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, itinerant laborers and young people of modest means and uncertain prospects. The Municipal Lodging House, a Beaux Art building that housed one of the city’s largest homeless shelters, sat on 25th Street between First Avenue and the East River since 1909. It underwent a massive expansion in 1932 to meet the crisis of the Depression, providing temporary shelter for 4500 homeless residents; it would be closed soon after the white-collar crowd moved into Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The homeless also squatted in abandoned tenements or slept in vacant lots and doorways or on benches in nearby Stuyvesant Square. The public bathhouse on 23rd and Avenue A served as the only sanitary facility for some and as a meeting place for gay working class men, according to police reports.
To the west of Second Avenue was the once elegant Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park neighborhoods, that had been undefgoing gentrification in the years before the war. The tenements to the north were being torn down for luxury apartment buildings during the 1920s, a process still incomplete in 1946. To the south was 14th Street, the city's main entertainment and shopping district during the Gashouse District's heyday but at this time a shopping mecca for bargain shoppers. There is more about The surrounding neighborhoods here. .