Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860

Chapter 1: Boardinghouse Life, Boardinghouse Letters

Chapter 1  Boardinghouse Life, Boardinghouse Letters Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me . . . , it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. —Ishmael, from chapter 2, “The Carpet-Bag,” in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, 1851 In March 1842, a 22-year-old New York journalist named Walter Whitman declared the “universal Yankee nation” a “boarding people.” He provided as proof of his claim what would become, in the following decade, a characteristic catalog description of his United States. For this early Whitmanian gesture, the future poet employed simple city arithmetic , calculating his country’s distinguishing features by adding together the domesticating peoples and residential places that then comprised an urbanizing America. “Married men and single men,” Whitman wrote, “old women and pretty girls; milliners and masons; cobblers, colonels, and counter-jumpers; tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers, ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers and parsons—‘black spirits and white, blue spirits and gay’—all ‘go out to board.’”1 Almost two centuries later, Whitman’s pronouncement reads as something of a riddle, given the current comparative neglect of that once representative American domicile, the boardinghouse. Indeed, as editorial prophecy, Whitman’s remarks might strike the retrospective observer as incomprehensible, since boarding long since has relinquished the kind of self-evident (and largely self-explanatory) status that it formerly enjoyed both as a topic for periodical commentary, and as a wholesale symbol of a young United States. As contemporary newspaper reportage, however , Whitman’s words well capture the state of the United States prior to the Civil War. For Americans of his day in fact were “a boarding people ,” drawn as they were to boardinghouses in numbers large enough 35 to constitute a sizeable national constituency. One might expect a certain hyperbole from the author of the country’s first free-verse rhapsody, Leaves of Grass (1855). But even the Long Island–born poet-turnednewspaperman ’s subsequent claim that three-quarters of Manhattan’s adult population had lived or even then were living in boardinghouses as of 18562 —this at a time when the vast majority of U.S. residents still favored the stand-alone dwelling—matches recent estimates of the central place the boardinghouse held in mid-nineteenth-century American life.3 Quite simply, it is neither statistical inflation nor poetic license that threatens to distort the historical importance of boarding in America’s past. It is, rather, the opposing risk of understatement, of denying the boardinghouse its proper due, that bids to prevent a faithful measure of antebellum America. The spirit of Whitman’s remarks is not only telling, then, but socioculturally accurate as well, inasmuch as they suggest the extent to which a former “boarding people,” by the time of his writing, had managed to transform the boardinghouse itself into a habitual habitation —and self-identifying shelter—in the modernizing West. It is the purpose of the opening section of this first chapter to inquire into what boarding was, precisely, and how it achieved outsized proportions in the United States. Such an inquiry is fraught with complications. Foremost among them is this: despite boarding’s early prominence among Americans, contemporaries could be as imprecise as they were inconsistent when they referenced a trend that was once widespread enough to qualify as a veritable national pastime. Just one consequence of this general abstraction is the question of classification. There is no simple schema, let alone a reliably scientific taxonomic system, by which to highlight the boardinghouse out of a whole spectrum of improvised midcentury housing practices. Two of the more familiar residential options from the period— boarding and lodging—not infrequently constituted a distinction without a difference in the desperate minds of renters, at least semantically speaking . Amid the ascendance of urban America, few metropolitans were inclined to care that an evolving domestic vernacular could turn a term like “apartment,” for instance, or the phrase “going a-boarding,” in multiple (and perhaps meaningless) directions.4 Outweighing the subtleties of colloquial taxonomy was the more pressing necessity of finding, and keeping, suitable city shelter. Yet, neither the strong demand for adequate urban housing, nor the precariousness of city-dwellers’ living predicament, could long obscure the fundamental difference between boarding’s communal living-dining experience and the comparatively solo (and supperless) enterprise that 36 Chapter 1 was lodging. Moreover, if the varieties of metropolitan habitation differed in nature, they...