Letter of John I. Davenport, Esq. : on the subject of the population of the city of New York, its density, and the evils resulting therefrom : the over crowded condition of the laboring portion of the community and of the poor, and the high sickness and death rates of the city, shown to be primarily due to a lack of cheap and rapid transit. The Arcade Railway, Melville C. Smith, President, 1884. 26x17cm, 23pp. Original wrapper. FAIR copy only, nearly disbound, with chips and browning, and some frailty to the text. On the other hand, this title does not show up very much at all, and is held by only five WorldCat member libraries worldwide (LC, NYPL, NYHS, Columbia, Yale, Wisconsin Historical). This document is interesting in its reporting of slum conditions in NYC (below 14th St., where almost half of the 1 million people of Manhattan lived), as well as being significant for its impact on urban planning. Again, this is a problematic pamphlet of some scarcity, so pricing is a little difficult–this is mind, I reckon $150.
“Like almost all reformers of his time and social class, Davenport’s concern with the problem of the slums, creditable as it was, belied an even greater anxiety, indeed a fear, about the possible effects on the moral, social, and political character of American life of the “social disease” of the slum. As someone who devoted much of his life to the study and control of political corruption…And yet, in spite of his ideology, Davenport made a very good argument for a rapid transit underground railroad. In part, this was because he filled his pamphlet with a multitude of facts and figures about slum life… He knew all about the beginnings of the tenement-house slum in the early nineteenth century. He described how old single-family dwellings were converted into “tenant houses” for three or more families, and how, once landlords discovered that these converted houses yielded substantial profit in rent, they began to erect new houses designed especially as tenements — “buildings upon small lots, frequently two buildings, one in front and one in the rear of the lot, without the slightest attention being paid to the most simple and ordinary sanitary measures.” https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_New_York_Rapid_Transit_Decision_of_1900_(Katz)
“All of Davenport’s facts and figures were directed to the promotion of a subway. His thesis was both simple and true: that in New York public transit facilities always came too late to do any good. By the time they made their appearance — he had in mind the horsecars in the 1850’s, and the “els” in the 1870’s and 1880’s — rising land values, a further expansion of the business center, and a new and even more massive stream of immigration rendered these “improvements” useless with respect to the problem of the slums in the lower East Side. In the year he wrote, 1884, a subway was urgently needed, not only because the elevated trains did not provide true rapid transit, but also because a subway, if not built now but later, would be ineffective…”–Katz, again as above.
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