From Curbed-In December 1894, the vestry and clergy of Trinity Wall Street—New York’s oldest, wealthiest, and trendiest Episcopal church—should have been deep into their celebrations of Advent, a time of penitence and reflection before Christmas.
Instead, Trinity’s leadership was reflecting on something entirely different: the near-daily revelations in New York’s newspapers about the church’s recently discovered role as the city’s most egregious slumlord.
“Tenement Houses in a Deplorable Condition” blared the front page of the New York Times on December 9, 1894.
The next day, the New-York Tribune led with “Tenement-House Abuses,” while the less staid Evening World ran an illustration labeled “In the Shadow of Trinity,”
showing the back side of the elegant Gothic Revival church at the
corner of Broadway and Wall Street overshadowing dilapidated tenements.
Four days later, that same paper would run the headline “DEATH LURKS IN SQUALOR”
over a story about the “appalling” mortality rate in Trinity tenements,
which was 35 percent higher than the city’s average. Even “in the
larger tenements in similar localities,” the World reported, “the death rate has never exceeded that in the houses owned by the Trinity corporation.”
More here-
No comments:
Post a Comment