Housing
Single-family and two-family wooden structures with a distinctive, gray Victorian appeal, complete with a small yard, dotted the several neighborhoods of the city dating back to the 1850s. This construction boom had happened quite a bit ahead of the land development in the Centralville section of town on the other side of the Merrimack River, where many of my family members resided. However, most persons employed in the textile mills and the leather-working factories never had the required down payment to purchase such cozy elegance. Their lot was to reside with others in similar financial straits living cheek to jowl in the ubiquitous, multi-family tenement blocks reminiscent of the crowded New York East Side in the same time period.
Of course, the less modest but more numerous, three and four story clapboard structures of the multi-family variety also provided living quarters for many of the city’s less financially successful working-class individuals consisting of mothers and fathers plus under aged-children, who also worked in the mills.
Although these gray and depressing tenements early on lacked many of the comforts that we, Americans, today consider essential like indoor plumbing, electricity for lighting, gas stoves for cooking and heating, these rustic, living accommodations were often considered an encouraging improvement over the conditions that these immigrant families had experienced in their home country such as Ireland, Greece and Quebec Province as an example.
American Immigrant Urban Housing in the 1870s to 1920s Timeframe
There exists on the web photographic evidence of immigrant living conditions needed to satisfy our natural concerns for the emotional and financial well-being of destitute families barely existing in large, industrial, urban, manufacturing centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago. Similar harsh lifestyles also existed in Lowell at the time.
The Lowell Historical Society provides the reader with some answers to the socioeconomic, humane issues related to these questions. In addition, our related curiosity can be abated by carefully examining similar situations that occurred in Manhattan’s Lower East Side slums, as reported b the Daily Mail.
Another piece of forgotten and often ignored history of our successful Industrial Revolution is outlined clearly in the following Vintage News article.
The basic people cost measured in blood, sweat, and tears associated with any large human endeavor is frequently ignored when evaluating the totality of a project.
The Lowell Experiment also falls into this oversight, I believe. Of course, my personal evaluation may not be fully shared by other individuals, who also have a vested interest in the ever-changing, human condition.
In essence, when are the calculated people costs simply too great, when a company or a government measures the desirability of potential goals?
More details on these issues will follow in other articles.