ShmoopTube

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You're a farm worker during the Industrial Revolution.

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Sounds great, right?

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Eh. E-I-E-I. No. [man walks backwards with a bag full of potatoes]

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It's grueling work and early mornings.

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You end each day exhausted.

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So, you decide to ditch the farm for the slightly more glamorous lifestyle of a factory worker in the big city. [farmers on a ranch with cows]

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So, there you are, newly arrived in Manhattan or London or wherever the wind blew you.

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You know you're going to need a place of your own to crash between shifts on the factory floor.

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Except you can forget that whole “place of your own” thing.

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After all, you're poor, and because there are so many poor

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people just like you in this urban utopia, the only way you can

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afford rent is to squish up with a bunch of other folks, [two guys sharing a bed]

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not to mention the rodents and the roaches,

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in a tiny room with no light and no air.

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And don't even get us started on the bathroom thing. [man unhappy with bathroom]

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The world was a hectic place during the Industrial Revolution.

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Technical innovation wasn't the only thing sweeping across the globe.

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As we mentioned earlier in the unit, famine and war

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drove many, many people out of their homes

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and into cities, or into whole new countries altogether.

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And where were all of these people, many of them poor, to go?

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Straight to the tenements, the only housing they could afford. [picture of building with hanging laundry]

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Look at it this way.

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Manhattan is a little under thirty-four square miles in size. [map of Manhattan]

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Yet between 1890 and 1900, more than 600,000 immigrants

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settled in New York City,

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with another 700,000 settling there between 1900 and 1910.

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We'd imagine the Big Apple felt more like the

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Super Cramped, Uncomfortable Apple. [old photo of crowded road]

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But that doesn't look as nice on a postcard.

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Granted, many of these immigrants lived in places like Brooklyn

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instead of super-cozy Manhattan, but still,

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that's a lot of people for one city to find room for

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over a twenty-year period.

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The poverty of those who lived in the tenements, the rapidity with which they arrived in the city, and—let's face it—the generally uncaring nature of the slumlords

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who owned the tenements,

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meant a lot of people were forced to live in rat holes.

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Maybe there was a bright side. Maybe they shared cheese. [hand reaching for cheese with a rat next to it]

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A lack of infrastructure was also a huge problem for tenement dwellers.

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In other words, there's no polite way to say this: the urban poor had no way to get their poop from Point A to Point B,

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which created serious public health hazards and really upped the yuck factor for those living in the city. [poop falling from building window]

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A great example of the problems roving poop can cause

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is the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854.

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Also, bet you've never heard the phrase "roving poop" before. [Shmoop board meeting about Roving Poop]

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You're welcome. That's a Shmoop original.

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See, there was so much sewage in London that the

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city started dumping it into the River Thames. Gross.

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What's even more disgusting is the fact that people in London

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got their drinking water from the river, including the people who lived on and around Broad Street.

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You see where we're going with this, right?

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The ensuing cholera epidemic killed more than 600 people. [grave yard]

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The disease only stopped spreading after a doctor named

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John Snow figured out that cholera was a water-borne disease

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and that the water coming out of the Broad Street pump was killing people.

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Well done, Johnny.

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Watch your back, Sherlock. There's a new detective in town.

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Eventually, cities wised up and decided to make tenements healthier, happier places.

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Well, healthier, anyway.

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In 1867, New York City passed the First Tenement House Act,

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which required windows and fire escapes in tenement dwellings. [view of windows and fire escapes in building block]

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The Second Tenement House Act of 1879 required said

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windows to face light and air and not, you know, an interior hallway.

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Some people are such jerks.

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The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 required that

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every tenement have a courtyard where residents could put their garbage.

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Up until then, the ventilation shafts in tenement dwellings had been used for garbage disposal, which meant the air quality inside these hellholes really sucked.

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The farmhands of the Industrial Revolution had big dreams of making it in the big city.

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However, given the brutal living conditions urban residents were forced to endure, we think we'd have opted for life on the farm with Aunt Em and Toto.

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Now, where'd we leave those ruby slippers? [slippers fall out of building into poop]

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