The Enigma of the Slum in Postwar America
In the vocabulary of urban affairs, the term “slum” is among the most powerful.
“No word in the language,” wrote Charles Abrams in the 1960s, “has called up more horrible images of the poor man’s lot or is more capable of marshaling the forces of protest.” The slum, Abrams observed, has been the “main motivating force for housing reform in both Britain and the United States.” The historian and preeminent expert on the subject Alan Mayne agrees and notes that Abrams’s point also applies to the present-day Global South.
As editor of the new book, The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum, Mayne brought together more than two dozen scholars to explore the idea and realities of the slum, across six continents, from the nineteenth century to the present.
My chapter in the book, “The Return of the Slums in Postwar America,” investigates the traits and plight of inner-city neighborhoods from the 1940s to the 1960s. It is a subject close to my heart. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where as a child and teenager I witnessed the life of those exciting precincts. Similar to the findings of other authors featured in the book, my research revealed that the places called slums are more varied and dynamic than most people think, a misapprehension that has led to policies that are harmful to their residents.
The Great Migration and other mass migrations repopulated inner-city neighborhoods
Black residents of brownstone row houses on Chicago’s South Side, April 1941 (Russell Lee)
During the nineteenth century, the idea of the slum took hold in the United States. Missionaries, public health officials, and social reformers used the term to describe certain urban neighborhoods as places of degradation where helpless lower-class people, often European immigrants or African Americans, crammed into decrepit structures, suffered from disease and fires, and were exposed to crime, alcohol and drug addiction, and prostitution. In 1890 the New York journalist Jacob Riis published a masterpiece of slum literature, How the Other Half Lives. Riis described the worst conditions in the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, illustrated by photographs of its most wretched inhabitants and unflattering stereotypical descriptions of the immigrants who lived there.
In response, in the early twentieth century, Progressive Era reformers waged a broad-based war against the slum, promoting such reforms as fire escapes, indoor plumbing, street cleaning, health clinics, and playgrounds. Like their counterparts today, Progressive reformers focused particularly on the problem of poor housing, and their calls for “slum clearance” helped bring about the demolition of thousands of dwellings and eventually the New Deal’s public housing program.
Yet the so-called slums of New York and other American cities were complex places, much like informal settlements around the globe today. They contained not only impoverished people and awful housing, but also myriads of businesses, entrepreneurs, and upwardly mobile families.
By the outbreak of World War II, the worst conditions of inner-city neighborhoods had diminished greatly. With the development of mass transit and outer-city neighborhoods, working-class families moved elsewhere, reducing the population density in once-crowded communities such as New York’s Lower East Side. As immigrants assimilated, Americans came to see the slum districts as simply working-class neighborhoods and sometimes even tourist destinations.
Meanwhile, however, new population migrations were creating conditions similar to those of the late nineteenth-century slums. Industrial growth, spurred by demand for military goods during the war and consumer goods after the war, attracted millions to American cities. In the 1940s and 1950s, working-class Southern Blacks and whites, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans moved to urban centers in search of economic opportunities. Bottled up in inner-city neighborhoods by housing shortages and racist real estate practices, they found shelter in cut-up apartments, old houses, and even informal dwellings in basements, abandoned industrial buildings, and shacks. As before, fires, garbage, and disease afflicted the cities’ crowded and dilapidated areas.
Both conditions and depictions of postwar inner-city housing resembled those of Progressive Era slums
Mother and children in crowded apartments, in New York City, 1910 (Lewis W. Hine), and Chicago, 1941 (Russell Lee)
Journalists of the day viewed postwar inner-city neighborhoods through the lens of the Progressive Era reformers, often describing them in the same style of Gothic prose used by nineteenth-century writers. So New York City’s East Harlem, the port of arrival for Puerto Ricans, was, wrote one reporter, “a spawning ground of crime, drug addiction, prostitution, and disease.” Another writer recounted that to enter the worst building on the worst block in East Harlem, investigators had to climb “over its litter and up its dim-lit rickety stairwells,” echoing the words of New York’s first health inspector’s report a century earlier. Like Riis, many observers in the 1940s and 1950s were prejudiced against the newcomers, whom they considered uneducated and uncivilized.
The official response to the postwar slum was to destroy it and build something else — a physical cure for physical problems. The Housing Act of 1949 made slum clearance a national policy. Under its auspices, in the 1950s and 1960s, urban redevelopment, later renamed urban renewal, swept through urban working-class neighborhoods like a tornado, displacing inhabitants and businesses wherever it went. Furthermore, many urban renewal projects increased segregation of urban dwellers by race and class.
Despite poverty and substandard physical conditions, however, postwar lower- and working-class neighborhoods were often vital communities, a fact known to only a few outsiders. One such observer was the writer Jane Jacobs. Where others had seen hopelessly pathological conditions in East Harlem, Jacobs found a mixed-income community that contained “an immense array of Puerto Rican cultural, social and business establishments.” John Seeley, a sociologist, took up residence in a so-called slum that he described as a colorful community that fulfilled a wide array of human needs. I myself remember vividly not only the bare backyards and teetering porches of Chicago’s South Side six-flats but also the bustling 63rd Street commercial corridor and the music clubs where blues greats such as Howlin’ Wolf performed. Indeed, postwar slum communities produced some of America’s most cherished popular music, including rhythm and blues, gospel, mambo, country, and conjunto.
Although considered slums, postwar inner-city neighborhoods were vibrant communities
Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom, South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) at 47th Street, Chicago, April 1941 (Russell Lee)
The passage of time disproved the idea that the slums permanently trapped their residents in squalor and degradation. Despite their reputation, many of the postwar migrants to cities succeeded economically and, as a result, starting in the 1960s, left inner-city neighborhoods for greener pastures. By the 1980s, the departure of working- and middle-class people had rendered the postwar slum neighborhoods into virtual wastelands, whose few remaining residents often earned very low incomes. For decades local officials, policymakers, and activists have struggled to repopulate and revitalize the neighborhoods that had once been condemned as slums.
The history of American postwar urban neighborhoods offers lessons for today about understanding modern communities. One lesson is that middle-class observers of working-class communities, be they policymakers, planners, social scientists, or journalists, should be wary of their own biases and observe with an open mind. It is also important to recognize the agency of working-class and low-income people in pursuing their lives and the value of the communities they create. Finally, we should be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions from a snapshot in time and instead look for the trajectory. Cities are constantly changing. What is here today is often gone tomorrow.