The Land of Bows then Tenements

While spending a few days in New York City last week, I happened to hear an NPR story about the spread of an invasive ant species in Manhattan: dubbed the ManhattAnt. Arriving in 2011, it is now vying with the pavement ant to be the most common ant species. On first look, they don’t seem so bad. They don’t bite, though they do climb, meaning skyscrapers are accessible, but in an aspirational city like Manhattan that deserves respect. And while a minor ant species in its homeland of Europe, the continent they’re from, they has become dominant in Manhattan, with scientists having found that they are “very aggressive” towards other ants, even other ManhattAnt colonies. Moreover, they are spreading beyond Manhattan at the rate of a mile a year (fast in ant terms) with a potential range from Maine to Georgia.

As I heard the story, after visits to the Museum of the City of New York and the Tenement Museum, it was extra poignant, as it sounds eerily similar to another story of an invasive sub-species that had taken over the island in the early 1600s, that of the European colonists, who colonized Lenape land in the early 1600s.

Hoards

The Museum of the City of New York (City Museum) had several excellent data visualization efforts—mapping as a tree ring the different waves of immigration in NYC from its early beginnings, and an excellent digital map that painted a picture of the transition from Lenape land to Dutch colony to megacity. But let’s start with Lenape time, when the population of Manhattan and surrounding areas was about 2,000.

Mannahatta is a Lenape word for “the place where wood is gathered for bows.” Such a beautiful and evocative image. I can imagine this island forested,¹ filled with game and cultivated for millennia by the Lenape to grow food, fiber, and medicine. Then one day, the Dutch show up and claim the southern tip of the island.

Intersectional Indigenous Rights Poster from the Queer Liberation March June 27, 2021 (Photo by Erik Assadourian)

Like the ant, they probably seemed pretty innocuous. They arrived half starved, in small numbers—surely they couldn’t be a problem. But that was quickly proven wrong. One quote in the City Museum from a Lenape Leader in the mid-1600s noted, “When you first came upon our coast, you sometimes had no food. We helped you with oysters and fish to eat, and now for a reward you have killed our people.” Tragic that the Lenape’s Samaritan act led to their mass death and displacement. And horrible that a little invasive human subspecies could do such damage—not just to the island but the entire continent as they spread.

It wasn’t long before the deep water harbor and Dutch Colony was fortified with a wall securing the southern tip. Over time the Lenape died from disease, and were reduced to a few small groups “scattered across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.” Meanwhile, the Dutch, then British, made Manhattan into a global city. The city wall eventually became “Wall Street” and over the decades Manhattan became a trading, commercial, and financial center, eventually merging with the other boroughs to become New York City.

Now, over 8 million people live there—more than twice the population of my home state of Connecticut, which, if you’re wondering is almost 12 times the size! It’s surreal that the land of bow wood became the land of many bodies in just four hundred years. And it turns out that much of the city’s history is based on the living conditions of those masses, the disparities between rich and poor, and the demands for a bit more.

The City Wall that became Wall Street. (Drawing by Johannes Vingboons (cartographer) and Jacques Cortelyou (surveyor) from New York Historical Society via Wikipedia)

The Right/Fight to Survive

The City Museum had an interesting special exhibit on activism over the centuries, and many of the battles have centered around the right to survive—whether labor, the cost of goods, or more recently the able to move around (as in the disability movement). This all was made far more salient in my tour of the Tenement Museum, an old building made up of about 20 three-room apartments. With 120 folks living there, no running water, electricity, or toilets (there were four outhouses in the courtyard), it was tough living from today’s standards (hence the negative connotation of the word today, though at the time it was simply a synonym for apartment building). While tough going, even there, there was significant diversity. Some were occupied by just a family of four, others by eight—serving as a shop, housing, even a boarder’s lodging as well.

One of the tours focused on the women of the tenements living in the early 1900s—who not only had to work and maintain the household, but even give birth while the day’s operations were running, as in the case of a woman whose home doubled as a dressmaker’s shop. Interestingly, one of the stories focused on a woman-organized strike against kosher meat, which doubled in price suddenly, making it unaffordable. Women organized a league to demand lower prices, protesting, vandalizing butcher shops,² even barging into homes and searching for kosher meat (and if they found it, throwing it to the floor and stomping on it).

Dressmaker’s shop and home for eight (Photo by Erik Assadourian)

As the guide noted, this may have set women up to understand their might in protesting unacceptable conditions—which was exercised a few years later in labor protests after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 people (mostly women) in 1911.

The fascinating part is that as we walked around Manhattan, we came across a huge weird windowless building that turned out to be an armory (of the 69^th Infantry Regiment). I wondered about that until visiting the City Museum, where I learned that fearing revolution (from the steady stream of protests, which often included violence) city officials built armories around the city to quell potential uprisings.

So from the beginning, the city has been rooted in struggles—of one people against another, of one class against another. And now today, one generation against another. The Dutch colonists’ right to survive came directly at the expense of the Lenape people. And currently the right to “survive” for the millions of high consumption New Yorkers is coming at the expense of future generations.³

Of course, those consumers, complete with their air conditioners and furry companions do not see themselves as the problem—no more than the ManhattAnt do or Dutch colonists did (or perhaps you and I do). But when systems fail, will New Yorkers quietly accept a new era of tenement living? Or will they take to the streets demanding more, even as more of the world burns and floods?

Is the Future Again Tenements?

Graffiti seen in Manhattan (Photo by Erik Assadourian)

For a data wonk like me, the most fascinating part of the Tenement Museum tour was the description of the drudgery. Every morning and all day long, women (and probably children) had to descend the narrow staircases in the gloom (there was no inside lighting) to collect water and about 50 pounds of coal to keep the coal stove going—for cooking, cleaning, and in the case of the dress-maker to heat the irons.⁴

As the edges of Manhattan and surrounding islands flood, as people keep coming from the South as Florida goes under and Puerto Rico is racked by hurricanes and coastal flooding, more folks will find themselves pressed up against each other in smaller and smaller areas.

As ecological systems fail and forests ignite, food, energy, even freshwater may become hard to come by again, worsening conditions significantly in the city. Will we return to coal (giving up on stabilizing the climate) or will even the opportunity to heat one’s home and cook one’s food become precarious? Perhaps renewables will be enough to supply the needs of the future, or maybe the rooftops will be dedicated to solar ovens, but this dense and complex city does not seem resilient to the scarcity ahead, and the next era for the city may be more similar to the tenement era than the solarpunk imaginings of today.⁵

Maybe the continuing power of activism will prove me wrong, or maybe the city will finally see its early investment in armories pay off, as it stops its citizens from tearing apart the city as conditions falter and it shifts permanently toward a post-consumer, tenement future. But the question remains, will New Yorkers invest that activist energy into cultivating sustainable ways to do more with less, while more equitably redistributing the shrinking pie, or simply force the redirection of goods from other parts of the world that have less power or force of will?

Is this the past? Or the future? (Image of tenement at Park Avenue circa 1900, public domain via Wikipedia)

Endnotes

1) Yes, Manhattan really is an island!

2) As this was the era before refrigeration, folks bought their food every day, and there were scores of butcher shops in just the few block radius of the tenement.

3) The biggest disappointment of the Activism exhibit was there was nothing about fighting against pollution or for the environment anywhere.

4) That adds up to a thousand pounds of coal a day per tenement! Extra disturbing: in one mock apartment, the crib was literally right next to the coal stove. The fumes must have been wicked.

5) I’m not optimistic about the future life of most skyscrapers, though some may commandeer resources, be protected by private security forces, and thrive in the midst of surrounding poverty—similar to the vision Paolo Bacigalupi paints in his novel The Water Knife.