III. The Site and its Residents
This plan shows the site of the future Amsterdam Houses as it stood in 1946.
Citizens Housing and Planning Council Archives, Amsterdam Houses Folder
Citizens Housing and Planning Council Archives, Amsterdam Houses Folder
According to a 1941 NYCHA document that used a 1934 real estate survey, 1,389 people lived on the site that would become the Amsterdam Houses. Nearly 80% were African-Americans.
Box 54D5, folder 2, NYCHA Collection, LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
93% of the structures on the site were “old law” tenements, meaning that they were built before the 1901 Tenement House Act which required improved light, ventilation, and toilet facilities. And so less than one in five buildings on the site had toilets in their apartments. Most of San Juan Hill’s residents had access only to a single toilet in the hall outside their apartment that they shared with four or five other families.
Old Law tenements in New York City could be very crowded as these images reveal.
Old Law Tenement, 07/26/1939, NYCHA Collection, La Guardia Archives.
Mrs. J. Demesmacke works in the kitchen of her old law tenement apartment
in Chelsea, on the West Side of Manhattan, August 26, 194 ID# 02.003.00117
In contrast to the conditions in San Juan Hill, The Amsterdam Houses would provide modern amenities, including bathrooms built within apartments, central heating, and central hot water. Not only that, but the development would reduce the density of the building, limiting overcrowding.
FAREWELL TO THE SLUMS: NYCHA’S HOPES AND PLANS
Celebrating what seemed like a major step forward for the residents of San Juan Hill, on October 6, 1941 NYCHA held a “Farewell to The Slums” block party on the site of the future Amsterdam Houses.
Mayor La Guardia attended the festivities, which including dancing to big band jazz music.
As the mayor said in his remarks, the planners believed that providing “decent homes” for the poor through NYCHA would “strengthen democracy” and “reduce crime.”
And, as the document below reveals, NYCHA hoped that most of the future tenants of the Amsterdam Houses would be the largely African-American residents of the site where the development would rise.
BUT as we will see shortly in Section VIII below, World War II not only delayed the building of the Amsterdam Houses, but also made impossible NYCHA’s plans to house those displaced by the construction (known as former site occupants or “FSOs”) in the development.
