Looking at the Urban Landscape to Understand its Makers: Reflections on Process and Examination of the Decorated Tenement
As a lonely graduate student newly arrived in Boston in the summer of 2005, I was in the habit of frequently taking long, exploratory walks. On one such walk I stumbled on a group of buildings that were a revelation to me, but which I struggled to understand. In the jumbled, colonial-era landscape of the North End, they stood out for their size—four and five stories tall—and their glazed brick. But the thing that attracted my attention most was the insistent, flamboyant ornament: heavy cornices, terra cotta panels, and copper-clad bay window stamped with all sorts of patterns (Figures 1-6). There were also names stamped, cast, and carved: Segel, Di Steffano, and so on. And there were dates: 1893, 1896, 1914. Wasn’t the North End supposed to have been a “slum” during this period, famously rundown and teeming with immigrants? Wasn’t the housing of this period unmitigatedly ugly and hopelessly wretched? Why were these buildings so dignified? So ornamental? And so unlike anything I could recognize from the architectural style guidebooks? Might this gap have something to do with the primarily Jewish and Italian surnames I was seeing?
Answering these questions consumed me for nearly the next decade and a half. First it led from a seminar paper to a masters project, by which point I had recognized that the Boston buildings—what I came to call “decorated tenements”—were part of a larger American story of housing from this era that included other working-class landscapes like the iconic Lower East Side of New York. Then it led to a doctoral dissertation and, now, a book: The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Architects and Builders Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age. With a growing recognition of the importance of these buildings at each stage of the project, I worked to re-center the role that they—and their immigrant designers and builders—played in the rising housing standards of the nineteenth century. These decorated tenements, I came to believe, spoke persuasively of the agency of immigrant communities to improve their own housing situation in a way that reflected culturally specific notions of dignity, improvement, communal identity, and trans-national ideals of what it meant to participate in urban culture.
This interpretation—which shifts focus away from the elite preoccupations like air, light, and privacy that characterized the housing reform movement of that era (and histories of urban housing ever since)—required not just a different analytical approach, but a whole lot of new data. Voluminous studies of tenements were written by nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers, yet these mainly problematized the type. The buildings themselves suggested a different story to me. To reveal it, I needed to know more about them.
Despite decades of slum clearance, a surprising amount of the nineteenth century working-class landscape survives in Boston and New York: large swaths of housing that were under-analyzed and under-theorized (not to mention under-landmarked). I aspired to look at all of it. Indeed, I decided that by looking at every extant tenement in Boston’s North and West Ends (particularly the North Slope of Beacon Hill) and New York’s Lower East Side (everything below East 14th Street), I could avoid the selective looking that led reformers and historians to the narrow conclusions long common to studies of such housing.
So over the course of two years I did a lot more walking, documenting over three thousand surviving buildings with field examination that resulted in over thirteen thousand research photographs. Next, I identified, to the extent building permit records allowed, the builder, architect, and construction cost of each building. I then determined the ethnicity and background of a large number of these people, using census and immigration records. And most crucially to my initial questions, I used the field data to study, in depth, the facades, with their mass-produced ornament. I numerically scored each on a scale of one to ten, from austere (figure 8) to overelaborate (figure 14), and catalogued every element of every facade—each cornice bracket, bizarre face in a keystone or corbel (figures 17 and 19), florid terra cotta panel, and pattern of stamped sheet metal. (Unfortunately, city tax assessment photographs, like the set taken in New York City in 1940, just before widespread slum clearance got underway, had yet be digitized; had they been, the number of examples at my disposal would have increased dramatically.)
This intensive research method allowed me not only to correlate every exterior decorative element across the landscape, but to analyze them for iconographical and other meanings. Determining their costs, which I found in period trade catalogs, allowed for a sense of how much builders spent on these things. My data set—over fifteen thousand instances of two thousand distinct items—provided a window into the vibrant and varied culture of the production of architectural material.
Since this was, after all, housing, I also assigned each building a score of what I conceived as housing amenity. I based these in part on period housing inspection records—notably the Initial Inspection (I Cards) in New York, created at the turn of the twentieth century—which provided key details like floor plans, room sizes, window configurations, and the availability of features like sinks, stoves, hot water heaters, dumbwaiters, toilets, and bathrooms. Together, fed into the mill of a self-built database, my indices of decorative and material conditions began to reveal a new story about urban working-class housing.
The project was, at this stage, an ad-hoc experiment in Digital Humanities, made possible by recently digitized sets of records: databases of historical building permit and inspection records; commercial genealogy databases that made census and immigration records worldwide accessible; period trade publications; and open data set of property records. Quick study of a few programing languages and other affordable technologies facilitated speedy image processing, geocoding, data entry, even algorithmic analysis. From the start, the database did basic analysis—counting attributes, charting date trends, comparing buildings—on the fly. And as the project progressed, it was able to use the data I was generating and scripts I was writing to handle more complex tasks, like basic tasks of connoisseurship. It could, for example, easily tease out the relationships between multiple buildings and identify the characteristic attributes of their makers.
The answers provided by my data, however, raised new questions, including methodological ones about the application of Digital Humanities to architectural history investigations. What happens when the problem is not the dearth of information—as has long been the case in the humanities—but an over-abundance? Much of the best work that considers the use of digital tools in architectural investigations, such as those described in a recent essay by Brent Fortenberry, revolve around intensive physical documentation of a more limited number of sites. But when looking at landscape with large quantities of resources, how do we mitigate the risks of over-abstraction, of substituting data for culture? Such problems inherent in the quantitative study of human activity have been recognized for decades but remain open questions.
Therefore if my dissertation, grounded in new evidence, was data-driven, to wrestle with these questions I decided to center my book on narrative. This change also promised to make my research accessible to a wider audience. So in The Decorated Tenement I shifted the focus from details of the buildings to enlivening the culture that produced them. This was reflected in both the text and presentational aspects of the project.
“The photographs allow us to see these buildings with more clarity and dignity than ever before; to see them, I argue, as their designers, builders, and tenants would have intended them to be seen.”
The dissertation was bursting with charts, graphs, and maps. These correlated, for instance, ornamental approaches, floor plans, and entry schemes with dates of construction, construction costs, builders’ ethnicity, geographic locations, and so forth. But they hardly conveyed the social and cultural significance of these buildings in an easily legible way. So I replaced them, where appropriate, with nearly one hundred highly produced, carefully composed contemporary photography by Sean Litchfield, over sixty of which appear in the book.
The polished aesthetic achieved in these photographs initially seems at odds with stereotypes about tenements. But to Litchfield, trained as a landscape, architecture, and interiors photographer, this approach was important, as it produced a “documentary photograph with substance,” thoughtfully controlling compositions while letting the complexities and unpredictability of urban life happen. According to Litchfield, such pictures are about “letting the space speak for itself, trusting you have everything you need in front of you.” And to my eye this approach was particularly meaningful because it was closely related to the techniques of the “grand style” of architectural photography which, as historian Peter Hales has described, developed as part of nineteenth-century urban boosterism: high-vantage-point views that monumentalize city buildings and capture the energy of their environment. With scant period interest in publishing tenements, few grand style photographs had made of these buildings when they were new. Indeed, my project was the first time many of them had been photographed using the conventions of modern architectural photography. This fact alone makes the book an important contribution to the visual culture of the U.S. urban landscape. The photographs allow us to see these buildings with more clarity and dignity than ever before; to see them, I argue, as their designers, builders, and tenants would have intended them to be seen.
A project like mine is grounded in the fundamental tenets of vernacular architecture studies: that close looking at the landscape of common buildings, attuned and sympathetic toward the ideas encoded in their designs, can tell us stories far richer and more inclusive than the narratives that come from written sources, whose biases of both selection and analysis are usually skewed toward the prerogatives of the elite. The significance of the decorated tenement—the pride, dignity, and agency it represented—were hidden in plain sight, waiting for the more intense looking that new tools allow. Today, I’m applying these methods to the next chapter in American housing: the inner suburban apartment houses that were the decorated tenement’s successor. This different landscape might demand a somewhat different approach, but the goal of understanding the built environment through its makers remains.
