- In many ways the streets of New York in the early 1900s would feel familiar to the people who walk those streets today. Traffic was chaotic with early cars, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians and horses all fighting for space. Inhabitants were a mix of people from dozens of different cultures. Central Park was a favorite gathering spot for the city's poor who wanted to escape the crowded tenements. Wall Street was one of the country's great financial centers. Broadway plays and professional baseball were there for those who could afford tickets. The city, however, has gotten taller. In 1913 the Woolworth Building opened. At 55 stories, it was the tallest building in the world at that time.
- Although some wealthy New Yorkers lived in large houses, primarily in the suburbs, the vast majority of the city's population lived in tenements. A typical tenement building was four to six stories high with four apartments per floor. Each apartment typically held two or three entire families and had a wood-burning stove and a concrete bathtub, which served as a dining table when planks were laid across it. Many tenements had outhouses in the rear yard, and those that had indoor plumbing typically had two shared toilets per floor. Children frequently slept on the fire escapes in the warm months. Although efforts to clean up and improve tenement housing were made as early as 1865, tenements were mainly overcrowded and unsanitary.
- Unemployment during the early 1900s was high in New York. For many of those who did have jobs, however, most of their waking hours were devoted to hard, low paying and often dangerous work. The bulk of the work in New York was in factories or the ship yards. Because of the large population of poor people and the constant flow of immigration there was a large labor pool, and jobs paid very little. Factory work at the time was difficult and dangerous, with people working long hours, six days per week. It was also a time of labor reform movements as early labor unions were started and people campaigned for better, safer working conditions.
On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed 146 workers, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. This accelerated the calls for reform and resulted in a 54-hour work week for women and children. At the turn of the century most poor children worked rather than attend school. - The key factor in the housing shortages and high unemployment of New York in the early 1900s was the constant flow of immigrants, which made the city crowded and divided it into distinct ethnic and cultural neighborhoods. After the Ellis Island processing center opened, thousands of new immigrants, primarily from Europe, entered the city daily. Some of them passed through to other parts of the country, but many stayed and settled in ethnic enclaves, such as Little Italy, where they lived among people who shared their culture and language. By 1920 New York had a population of 5.6 million; of these, 35 percent were new immigrants and 41 percent were second-generation. There was also immigration from within the U.S. African Americans had been moving to New York since the Civil War, but as the Jim Crow laws intensified, more and more came, settling primarily in Harlem.
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