The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

Epilogue "Decay of the Boarding-House"

epilogue “Decay of the Boarding-House” The boardinghouse, the New York Times declared in 1878, “represents the sinking industry of Manhattan, and . . . in its sinking evokes few tears even from them whose lachrymose glands are most easily and needlessly disturbed.” In claiming that boarding was a “sinking industry,” the Times reporter exaggerated , for boardinghouses would remain important institutions for decades to come. Yet, he did pinpoint the very beginnings of a trend. As the nineteenth century waned and the twentieth century beckoned, American urbanites increasingly abandoned boardinghouses for greener pastures. As the Times put it, “boarders have simply ceased to be boarders; they have decided to live more wholesomely and satisfactorily.”1 Not surprisingly, given nearly half a century of antiboardinghouse discourse, living more wholesomely in the Times’ view meant relocating to a “home” or its equivalent by removing to “suburban places” or “set[ting] up house-keeping in a small way.” Improvements in public transportation made suburban residence practical and affordable for increasing numbers of white-collar employees ; apartments would emerge as the domiciles of choice for middle-class families who could not or would not escape the city. For the Times reporter and numerous other Americans, keeping house, even “in a small way,” was key to wholesomeness, for the apartments the Times championed were not the cooperative endeavors or kitchenless apartment hotels envisioned by feminist housing reformers. Apart from residences constructed specifically for bachelors, the apartments that eventually triumphed were the sorts with which we are familiar today, each with its own kitchen. Only dwellings that ensured that women performed their wifely duties by allowing them to keep house “in a small way”—in other words, those that resembled miniature versions of middle-class homes—achieved widespread social approval.2 Working-class families had always lived in “apartments”; indeed, one of the key challenges early apartment builders faced was to distinguish them from the crowded tenements that packed urban slums. Single people of moderate means, what housing reformer Albert Wolfe called “the great middle class of clerks, salesmen, skilled mechanics, and miscellaneous industrial workers,” might also room together in apartments or, if uncommonly prosperous , live alone. More often, they opted for lodging houses (also called rooming houses and furnished-room houses), which provided a place to sleep but no meals. Wolfe found that the number of boarders in Boston had decreased from 15,938 to 9,496 between 1885 and 1895; at the same time the number of lodgers increased from 24,280 to 44,926 (though in the state’s smaller cities the change was far less pronounced and boarders in many cases continued to outnumber lodgers).3 Like the boardinghouses they slowly replaced, the quality and clientele of rooming and lodging houses varied. In some cities, for example, Boston and San Francisco, the term lodging house described all sorts of establishments. More often, rooming house or furnished room house connoted fairly comfortable quarters that housed skilled and clerical workers, lodging house a flophouse that charged transients a few cents a night for a tiny cubicle or a spot on the floor. Both tenement and apartment families might take in a lodger or two, offering him a room or a portion of a room, expecting him to take his meals elsewhere. At the other end of the scale were the purpose-built structures that sheltered twenty to thirty souls. Most commonly, however, lodging houses were either former “homes” or former boardinghouses. Even more so than boardinghouses, they clustered in particular places. Usually located within walking distance of their inhabitants’ workplaces and dependent on the presence of nearby restaurants, saloons, and laundries, lodging-house districts emerged in neighborhoods like Boston’s South End (a neighborhood Wolfe described as having been invaded by “an army of lodgers and lodging-house keepers”), San Francisco’s Western Addition, and Chicago’s Near North Side.4 Like the apartments that sheltered their wealthier counterparts, lodging houses offered their residents greater privacy and freedom. Lodgers, especially those who chose not to live with “private families,” could lock their doors and theoretically live safe from the prying eyes of inquisitive landladies and curious housemates. (In reality, lodging-house keepers, ever alert to the coming and goings of residents and their guests, could be every bit as nosy as their predecessors .) They could eat their meals whenever they wished and, depending on the size of their respective pocketbooks and the quality of the available “cuisine,” they could eat whatever they wished instead of having...