fashions of living, it became easy, or at least simple, to divide the
floors of many of these private dwellings into apartments, each with its
own kitchen and all the apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then
had the street entrance and the stairways in common, and they had in
common the cellar and the furnace for heating; they had in common the
disadvantage of being badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark,
cramped, and uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses,
and they were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers
of them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in
conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and
subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had
been changed.

But the apartment as the New-Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the same
time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New York
work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they still
live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were called
tenement-houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is commonly
packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where they eat and
sleep, without the amenities and often without the decencies of life, and
of course without light and air. The buildings in case of fire are
death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent
means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders,
giving that festive air to their facades which I have already noted. The
bare and dirty entries and staircases are really ramifications of the
filthy streets without, and each tenement opens upon a landing as if it
opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents extorted from the inmates is
sometimes a hundred per cent., and is nearly always cruelly out of
proportion to the value of the houses, not to speak of the wretched
shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid the family in arrears is