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Life styles and cost of living in New York City The following information was generously provided to the Jewishgen Discussion Group of Jewishgen.org in a posted message by jewishgenner, Naiomi Fatouros. (web site: newsgroup:soc.genealogy.jewish) 1900-1920--Life styles and cost of living, New York city "Subject: Part One re"1900 jobs and salaries in New York" From: NFatouros@aol.com Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 17:47:12 EST X-Message-Number: 54 Edward Rosenbaum's 11-25-00 inquiry concerned jobs and salaries in New York City in 1901, and the typical prices then paid for various goods. A year ago I was curious about these subjects because my father had always emphasized how poor his family had been when he was growing up on New York's Lower East Side (1900-1920). Instead finding and leafing through "The Journal of Economic History" and "The Journal of Urban History" or scrolling through NY Times microfilmed articles, I lazily went scrounging on the Internet. The first URL I clicked on, which I failed to note, showed that the average annual earnings in 1900 was $418 (equivalent in 1998 to $7,993), and that one pound of bacon cost 14 cents (equivalent in 1998 to $2.68). Being a woman of Jewish heritage, I went on to find: http://www.nhmccd.edu/contracts/lrc/kc/decade00.html which said that the wage of the average worker was $12.98 for 59 hours per week. At http://www.nv.cc.va.us/home/nvsageh/Hist122/Part1/WorkingMen.htm I learned that a sweatshop girl in Brownsville (Brooklyn) earned $4.50 per week, starting at $2.00. She eventually earned $5.00. She paid $2.00 for a room and apparently had a hot plate to heat up coffee and a bun. At dinner she ate a bowl of soup and slice of bread with her landlady. (At another website whose URL I also failed to note, said that a cup of coffee cost one cent.) At http://www.therblig.com/riis/chap11.html I found that, according to Jacob Riis, "The Sweaters of Jewtown" young seamstresses earned from $2.00 to $5.00 a week. Bread cost 15 cents, a quart of milk, 4 cents, a pound of meat 12 cents, butter was 8 cents per quarter pound, and coal was 10 cents a pail. (According to a number of books and the testimony of my late sister's long deceased friend, people gleaned bits of coal fallen from delivery carts, and many children enjoyed stealing fruit and potatoes from pushcarts.) Riis also wrote that one restaurant's dinner of soup, meat stew, bread, pie, pickles and a schooner of beer cost 13 cents. A rival restaurant charged 15 cents, but the meal included two schooners of beer and a cigar or cigarette. At http://www.senioract.com/wwwboard/messages/4895.html a Catherine DeMoss posted a response to someone's question and, not citing her source, listed prices for various food items for the period these topics see the section "Water, Water, All You Want: Keeping Clean" in Neil M. Cowan and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "Our Parents' Lives." I must also remark that people also washed themselves with heated or unheated water in basins. The water was drawn from a tap in the apartment or carried in a pail upstairs from a pump in the yard. Often, children were bathed in the kitchen sink. About lodging hotels, the Chicago site said that single men with steady employment paid 14-50 cents a night at a better class place where there was a bathroom down the hall between 1890 and 1915 as well as prices for miscellaneous household and other items which she may have found in an old Sears Roebuck catalogue or some similar source. She also noted that in Detroit a trolley car ride cost a nickel. According to Dorothy Parker's site, http://www.bway.net/~kfifty/dhaunts.htm [Mod Note: URL was not accessible] a NYC subway ride had cost a nickel. (The price for NYC trolley, bus and subway rides stayed a nickel even when I was a small child (pre 1940) and could ride for free on my mother's lap. Years later the price of trolley and bus rides went up to 10 and 15 cents, but my mother was glad to pay double or more because she hated the subway and, although my father used the subway to get to his office, she forbade me to use it when at last she permitted me to travel about New York unaccompanied.) At http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/1900/fam.html prices for food are listed according to the 18th Annual Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Labor: "Cost per pound : Rib Roast $.13, Chuck Steak $.08, Sirloin $.14, Corned Beef $.06, Butter $.22, Cheese $.17, Coffee $.14, Flour $.02, Lard $.10, Mutton $.08, Pork Chops, $.10, Rice $.06, Sugar $.06 Other prices: Dry Beans quart $.09, Bread 1 pound loaf $.05, Eggs dozen $.18, Milk quart $.06, Molasses gallon $.60, Irish Potatoes Bushel $.39." The same site says that tenement apartments of two or three small dark rooms rented for $4.00-7.00 per week. The average rent in slum areas was from $8.00-10.00 per month with heat and bath not included (or, I should add, not even provided in many cases). Also, I know that the heating arrangements could be a coal stove or kerosene heater- both of which good for heating up pressing irons! Water closets were shared and were either in a hallway or under the stairs. Or there were poorly drained outhouses in the yard. For more about tenements see Chapter 5 of Moses Richin's "The Promised City: New York's Jews: 1870-1914." A bath in a bathing establishment cost 25 cents but there were also free public baths which charged for soap and towel and limited the minutes spent. For more about and separate rooms for each renter. Cheaper rooms which cost 20 cents had partitions and poor sanitary conditions (which may mean that there were no indoor toilets). The very cheapest hotels offered crowded floor space for 2 cents, but for 5 cents a dirty mattress could be rented. For free, one could also sleep on the floors of the police stations, space for which was in heavy demand. Also at the Chicago site there is a list of occupations and the wages paid for laborers like plasterers, bricklayers, boilermakers, etc., but this list may not be of relevant here because most Jews on the Lower East Side were peddlers and garment workers. (Part Two of this message to follow.) Naomi Fatouros (nee FELDMAN) Bloomington, Indiana Subject: Part Two re "1900 jobs and salaries in New York" Date: 30 Nov 2000 12:20:30 -0800 From: NFatouros@aol.com At least for the time being, this message finishes up my too lengthy response to Edward Rosenbaum's 11-2 inquiry about 1900 Jobs and salaries in New York. Bits and pieces of information about wages and costs of living can be gleaned from various paragraphs of Irving Howe's "World of Our Fathers," and from many other accounts of the Lower East Side. Howe talks about the 1902 rise in meat costs made by wholesale butchers, which injured Jewish retailers. Angry women loosely organized as the "Ladies Anti-Beef Trust Association" rioted because kosher meat had risen to 17 or 18 cents a pound. When the wholesalers gave in, the meat retailers failed to reduce their own prices which the housewives refused to pay. Howe also writes that in 1904, there was a rent strike, and in that same year, girls went on strike against a paper box factory which had cut by 10% cut their wages of $3.00 per thousand cigarette boxes. Howe also says that during the years between 1913 and 1920, prices for food and housing rose hugely: food by 199 per cent, shelter by 58 per cent, clothing by 116 per cent, fuel by 68 per cent, and so on. In this period Lower East Side women as well as poor women in other cities made concerted protests against the sharp rise in food and other prices. People complained they could not manage when potatoes were 7 cents a pound; bread, 6 cents; cabbage, 20 cents; and onions 18 cents. Elizabeth Ewen, in "Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars," cites the 1906 Report of the Mayor's 1906 Pushcart Commission as well as the US Peddling Commission of Greater New York, neither of which I've read. A propos of the 6 cent per pound for sugar (see above) Ewen quotes a Lower East Side shoemaker who complained that a certain grocer charged 8 cents per pound! Fictional accounts, like those of Anna Yezierska, are also useful sources of information. In one story, Yezierska writes that a fish peddler demanded 14 and then 15 cents per pound for a large carp, for which a haggling woman customer ultimately paid 13 cents per pound. I have read elsewhere that a fellow seeking work upon his arrival agreed to take a job in the garment industry only to find that he would have to pay $5.00 to learn how to perform his task. This practice was corroborated by Gerald Sorin's "The Prophetic Minority" in which the author mentions, with a cite to a personal interview, that for his new job in a knee pants shop one immigrant paid a foreman $10 to work for nothing for two weeks but, contrary to the agreement, a third week of free work was exacted. Probably the best sources for statistics of the sort in which Mr. Rosenbaum, I and other Jewishgenners would be interested are a US Government 1900 Bureau of Labor Statistics, like the 18th Annual Labor Commissioner's Report cited above, or some New York City official report. I haven't yet tried to find any such sources at I.U.'s Library department for government documents, but I have found there other types of government reports and documents, some of which are more than a century old. These can be retrieved on request from the Library's archival depository, and the few that I have examined require delicate handling because the pages have turned so brittle. I've had to hold my breath while reading some of these texts lest I blow away a broken fragment of the pages. While re-reading the other day an old letter written to me by my mother, I was reminded that my birth during the Depression had been largely paid for by my father's mother, Esther. Despite her husband's probably low wages in the early 20th century Esther and Nathan evidently saved up something for their old age and could also afford to help out their architect son for whom there was little work during the 1930's! |
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