The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917-1929 9780300205589

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T H E G R E AT R E N T W A R S

Robert M. Fogelson

THE G R E AT RENT WA R S New York, 1917–1929

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Copyright © 2013 by Robert M. Fogelson. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. yalebooks.com/art Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz. Set in Swift Light type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fogelson, Robert M. The great rent wars : New York, 1917–1929 / Robert M. Fogelson. pages

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-19172-1 (alk. paper) 1. Rent control—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. I. Title. KFX2085.R3F64 2013 346.747´104344—dc23

2012048964

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Nancy Kirk, Duncan Kincaid, and Maria J. Fuente

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CONTENTS

Prologue, 1 PART O N E | F RO M RENT HIK ES TO RENT STRI KES

1 The Postwar Housing Shortage, 17 2 Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 40 3 A Weighty Decision, 62 4 The Great Rent Strikes, 85 PA RT T WO | T HE ROA D TO RENT CO NT ROL

5 The Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, 109 6 Enter the State Legislature, 132 7 The April Laws, 153 8 The September Laws, 176 PART T H R E E | CO NSTIT U TIO NA L CH A LLENGES

9 The Battle in the State Courts, 203 10 The Fight in the Federal Courts, 229 PART F O U R | RENT CO NTRO L W ITH O UT A REN T COM M I SSI ON

11 A Question of Coverage, 257 12 A Reasonable Rent, 282 13 The Four Exceptions, 309

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PART F I V E | T HE PO LITICS O F RENT CO NTROL

14 Landlords and Tenants in New York and Albany, 333 15 The Extension of Rent Control, 360 16 The Expiration of Rent Control, 387 Epilogue, 415 Notes, 421 Acknowledgments, 475 Index, 477 Illustrations appear following p. 214

T H E G R E AT R E N T W A R S

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PROLOGUE

On January 9, 1918, barely a week after taking office, Mayor John F. Hylan declared that New York was facing the worst crisis in its history. With more than two months of winter ahead, the city was running out of coal, the fuel that supplied nearly all its heat, light, and power. A coal shortage was not something New Yorkers ordinarily worried about. But in April 1917 the United States had entered World War I. Seven months later, after the first cold snap of the season, many landlords found that they had very little coal in their cellars and, wrote the New York Call, the city’s Socialist newspaper, no idea “where the next lot of fuel is coming from.” “We are in no position to deliver what we haven’t got,” said one coal dealer. Holding on to wooden carts and baby carriages lined with newspapers, housewives lined up “at dawn to wait for the opening of coal offices and to plead with distracted dealers for a few pounds of the precious fuel.” All too often they were still waiting when the dealers posted the sign “No more orders taken.” By mid-December the city’s coal supply was “dangerously low,” wrote the Call. “What,” it asked, “can be said of a social and commercial system that will bring [New York] face to face with the first great snowstorm of the winter with empty coal bins?” By the end of the year a spokesman for the Retail Coal Dealers Association warned that the city had less than one day’s supply on hand. Fully one-third of the city’s apartment houses had no coal at all. “The situation is as bad as it has ever been,” wrote the counsel for the Greater New York Coal Dealers in early February. New York was “on the verge of a complete fuel famine,” warned the Call.1 Hylan’s claim notwithstanding, the coal shortage was not the worst crisis in the city’s history. It was not as bad as the cholera epidemic of 1849, much less the yellow fever outbreak of 1798, which had carried off nearly 5 percent of the population. But it was bad enough. As the temperature fell in the winter of 1918, many New Yorkers found themselves with little or no heat and hot water. Life in the tenements was

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“beyond description,” said a social worker. “Gas is frozen, homes are dark, no water in the toilets, sanitary conditions unspeakable, faces blue and pinched from the bitter cold and ever so many kiddies down with pneumonia.” Many people went to bed to stay warm, often with overcoats on. Hundreds suffered from frostbite, some losing fingers, toes, and ears. Thousands died of pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. The situation got so bad that some New Yorkers waited all night in front of the coal yards and then, “with shawls wrapped around their heads,” wrote the Bronx Home News, “stood in line for hours, begging for coal.” When Tuttle and Son of Williamsburg, a working-class district in Brooklyn, announced that it had run out of coal, three thousand women stormed the yard. Several children were trampled before the police restored order. Another coal riot erupted in nearby Brownsville. In Manhattan children scavenged the streets, reported the Call, looking for pieces of coal, wood, or “anything that can possibly be used for fuel.” Even the well-to-do were vulnerable. The businessmen and professionals who lived at “The Imperator,” an apartment house at Riverside Drive and 150th Street that was exposed on three sides to the wintry blasts off the Hudson River, went without heat and hot water for weeks at a time. Even John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had to move from his posh home in Manhattan to his father’s six-thousand-acre estate in Tarrytown when the central heating system that he depended on shut down for lack of coal.2 For most New Yorkers the new year was anything but happy. As the Call wrote: Up from the tenements, with the accumulation of dust and dirt and their defenselessness against the icy blasts of winter, the cry is swelling— “Coal!” Up from the houses of the middle-class comes the echo—“Coal!” And now from even the inhabitants of the apartments of Riverside Drive, West End Avenue, and other thoroughfares of the well-to-do, and the rich, the cry is commencing to be heard—“Coal!” But there was so little coal that before long, the city was taking steps that would once have been unthinkable. Several high schools sent students home, as did dozens of elementary schools. Some settlement houses closed, and a few hospitals were on the verge of shutting down. Subways, els, and streetcars ran without heat—and, in some cases, stopped running. A few criminal courts shut down as well. Manhattan District Attorney Edward Swann and his staff read by candlelight. And inmates of the Tombs, an old prison in Lower Manhattan, were wrapped in blankets and sent to bed. To conserve fuel, office buildings banked their fires and turned off the lights at 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays. Employees of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of Wall Street’s leading financial institutions, worked in overcoats. Hotels, clubs, and restaurants shut off outside lights. Even the Waldorf-Astoria, a Midtown Manhattan hotel that catered to the very wealthy, urged guests to turn off the lights when leaving the rooms. In addition to “meatless” and “wheatless” days, two wartime innovations of U.S. Food Administrator (and future president) Herbert C. Hoover, New Yorkers now had to get used to “lightless” nights.3

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By mid-January the coal shortage was a national crisis. It left thousands dead and thousands more unemployed not only in New York, but also in Boston, Chicago, and other cities all over the Northeast and Midwest. It also jeopardized the war effort. Freighters sat idly in ports up and down the East Coast, unable to deliver sorely needed munitions and other military supplies to the Allied forces. With no relief in sight—and with rail traffic brought to a standstill by a blizzard that dumped four feet of snow on Chicago—U.S. Fuel Administrator Harry A. Garfield, son of the late president James A. Garfield, took what a New York Times reporter called a “revolutionary” step. He ordered virtually all factories east of the Mississippi River to close from January 18 to January 22—and on Mondays for the next month and a half. He later extended the order to department stores and retail shops other than grocery and drug stores. The order aroused “a storm of protest,” the likes of which “I have never seen,” wrote one of President Woodrow Wilson’s closest advisers. It even spurred an attempt by some congressmen to wrest control of the war effort from the White House and place it in the hands of a non-partisan war cabinet. The Wilson administration weathered the storm. And businesses complied with Garfield’s order. Even the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors. But if the order eased the tie-up at the ports, it did not relieve the shortage in the cities. By early February New York had received so little coal that the Bronx, whose residences and businesses normally consumed five thousand tons a day, was down to its last thousand. As one of its many long-suffering tenants told a reporter, “We have had no heat all winter, except what was turned on in the mornings to keep the pipes from bursting.”4 For as long as most Americans could remember, coal had been plentiful. And it remained so even after the European powers went to war in August 1914. Although the demand for coal rose steadily, so did the supply, which increased by more than one-third over the next two and a half years. But after the United States entered the war, the mines could not keep up with the soaring demand. With the American military mobilizing and the American economy booming, the mines could not supply enough coal to keep the nation’s railroads, ships, and factories running, much less to keep its homes and shops warm and well lit. To make matters worse, the railroads were hard-pressed to carry the coal from the mines to the cities. The rail system—if system is an appropriate word for the hodge-podge of companies that ran the trains— could not cope with the sudden 50 percent increase in orders. So severe was the shortage of rolling stock, the result in part of the Wilson administration’s decision to push American manufacturers to supply sorely needed locomotives and cars to France and Russia, and so monumental were the traffic jams, that in the summer and fall of 1917 some mines closed because they could not get the coal to the market. The situation became so grave that in late December the federal government took control of the railroads, placing them in the hands of the U.S. Railroad Administration, which was headed by Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo.5 By the time the Railroad Administration began work, winter had arrived in the Northeast and Midwest. And what a winter it was. Early in December the temperature in New York fell to ten degrees. It was so cold, reported the Times, that “the few

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vessels that came into port were sheathed in an armor of ice.” Three weeks later the temperature plunged to thirteen below zero, breaking the previous record of twelve below set in 1886. It was the lowest reading since New York’s Weather Bureau had started keeping records in 1871. The temperature averaged nine degrees below normal in December. And there was no relief in January. On only two days did the temperature reach as high as thirty degrees, the average daily temperature for that time of year. The weather was as cold in Boston and even colder in Chicago, where one day in mid-January the temperature plummeted to twenty-five below. Exacerbating the cold were the strong northwesterly winds. Blowing out of Canada and driving across the Midwest, they hit New York at speeds of thirty and forty miles an hour, with gusts of seventy and eighty one day in mid-December. Along with the frigid temperatures and blustery winds came heavy snow. In the month after the federal government began running the railroads, five blizzards struck the Northeast and Midwest, one of which left Chicago paralyzed. Nearly twelve inches of snow fell on New York in December and more than thirteen in January, roughly twice as much as normal. By early February it was clear that the winter would be one of the worst on record.6 The arctic weather did more than increase the demand for coal. It also reduced the supply. Ordinarily it took twenty-one days to get coal from the mines to the yards. But not this winter. As engines, switches, and water stations froze and tracks were buried under snowbanks three and four feet high, traffic came to a standstill for days at a time over much of the Northeast and Midwest. When the trains finally arrived at the terminals in New Jersey, the coal was often “frozen solid and covered with snow,” wrote the Times. It had to be thawed out before it could be “dumped into barges and brought to the city.” From the docks in Jersey City, Bayonne, and South Amboy to the yards in Manhattan and Brooklyn was less than a mile. But with much of New York harbor clogged with ice—more ice, said shippers and seamen, than at any time in the past thirty years—it was too risky for tugboats and barges to make the trip. Dozens of vessels were already caught in the floes. Finally, with tugs and other ships provided by the railroad companies and the U.S. Navy, efforts were made to break through the ice. In early January, for example, four tugs, linked by a giant hawser, opened a one-hundred-foot channel that allowed 100,000 tons of coal to be shipped from the Reading Railroad’s terminals in South Amboy. But it was hard going. In early February, after yet another bout of frigid weather, so much ice piled up in the harbor that there was “a practical embargo on shipping,” wrote the Times. What, the paper asked, did it say about the competence of federal and local officials that with so much coal sitting in New Jersey “such wretched driblets of it reach New York?”7 Although cities all over the Northeast and Midwest had been hard hit by the coal shortage, none were hit harder than New York. What made New York so vulnerable was not that it consumed so much coal, roughly twenty million tons a year. Rather, the Times explained, it was that even in normal times it had very little coal on hand. Its surplus was so small as to be “without a parallel among the large cities of the

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world.” People imagine, said the paper, that “there are vast places, somewhere around [the city], for the storage of coal.” They were wrong. As the manager of a leading trade publication put it, “There is no place to store a large surplus of coal in New York.” Land values were so high it made no sense to buy or rent space to store such a bulky commodity. Thus not even the largest of New York’s coal yards carried much of a surplus. Its giant utility companies seldom had more than one or two months’ supply on hand. Most apartment houses needed a delivery every few days— or at least once a week. Many factories required weekly deliveries too. And many hotels, including some of the most palatial, bought coal every day. In the event of a shortage, wrote the Times, the city “would begin to feel the pinch [within a week].” And in the winter of 1917–1918 the coal shortage dragged on for months.8 As the temperature fell, many tenants grew desperate. Aside from bundling up and staying in bed or, as the Call wrote, “gathering around the scanty fires of more fortunate neighbors,” what could they do? What good would it do to line up for hours when there was no coal in the yards? Or to go scavenging when there was no coal or wood in the streets? The tenants pleaded with the landlords for heat and hot water. But more often than not, they responded that there was no coal. Many tenants were skeptical. (If some landlords had no coal, they believed, it was because they were unwilling to buy when prices were so high or refusing to burn it to save money.) But there was not much they could do. Some tenants, among them the residents of “The Imperator,” many of whom paid more rent in a month than most New Yorkers paid in a year, threatened to sue their landlords for breach of contract and ask the courts for damages. But the chances of a favorable verdict were slim. Running out of ideas, a group of tenants of a five-story apartment house on West 137th Street turned to the Harlem Police Court in early January. “We have been living a life of hell in this house,” said the spokeswoman, an elderly widow who had lived there for over ten years. For two weeks the tenants had no heat or hot water; now that the pipes were frozen, they had no cold water either. If we return to our homes under these conditions, she told the court, “we will freeze to death.” The magistrate was sympathetic, but said he could not help. All he could do was suggest that the tenants bring the matter to the attention of the mayor.9 Whether it would do much good to appeal to Hylan—or, for that matter, other elected officials—was far from clear. But as far as the tenants were concerned, it was worth a try. Early in February a delegation of twenty-one men and women who represented ten thousand tenants met with the mayor, who had formed two citizens’ committees to help the poor deal with the rising price of coal and urged local fuel administrators to prevent coal dealers from gouging small consumers. Although Hylan took note of their complaints, he made no promises. More responsive than the mayor was Democratic alderman Clarence Y. Palitz. At the behest of tenants, he introduced two ordinances. One would have compelled landlords to inform tenants how much of the rent was for heat and hot water, a measure that would have helped them figure out how much to withhold if the landlord failed to provide either or both. The other would have authorized New York City to set up a municipal heating

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plant to supply steam to apartment houses and other dwellings, a measure that had been adopted in Cleveland and several European cities. Another politician who was supportive of the tenants was Assemblyman Samuel Orr. On behalf of the Socialist minority in the lower house, he filed a bill that would have required landlords to keep steam-heated apartments at a minimum of sixty-eight degrees from October through April—though only during those hours when the tenants were, as the Times put it, “up and about.” If a landlord failed to do so, the tenants would be allowed to deduct from the rent a sum equal to what they spent on heaters and fuel. Under another bill introduced by Orr, a delinquent landlord was liable to a $200 fine, ten days in jail, or both.10 The tenants did their utmost to drum up support for these legislative measures. Besides meeting with elected officials, they held large rallies, one of which was sponsored by the newly formed Washington Heights Tenants League at Blaney’s Hall on 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. “Have you been sufficiently abused this winter through lack of steam heat and hot water?” the announcements asked. “How About Next Winter?” Under the auspices of the Socialist Party and the Bronx Tenants League, some tenants even went to Albany to attend committee hearings on Assemblyman Orr’s bills. (The oldest of the tenant associations, the Bronx Tenants League, had been organized the previous winter by residents of Crotona Park, most of whom were working-class, Russian Jewish immigrants who had gone on a rent strike to protest the landlords’ failure to supply heat and hot water.) Not all the tenants were content to leave matters up to the elected officials. Before long hundreds, even thousands, many of whom were well-off, took a step that was bound to infuriate the landlords. To protect their families from the cold, they bought oil or gas heaters—and the fuel to run them. A case in point was Austin J. Wall, manager of the British government’s Allied Food Bureau, who lived with his wife and child on West 129th Street. After bearing up with no heat from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on several days and no heat at all from December 26 to December 31, his wife bought a gas heater. It cost $3.95, said Wall, and so far he had spent another 96 cents on gas. When the rent came due, Wall and other tenants informed their landlords that they would not pay the full amount.11 Some elected officials endorsed the tenants’ position and, in the case of Palitz and Orr, incorporated it into legislative proposals. “Shelter is a fundamental requisite of life,” said Palitz, a lawyer who had represented hundreds of Bronx tenants who were threatened with eviction for nonpayment of rent. And shelter included heat (and sometimes hot water). In the past many tenants could heat their apartments by burning wood or coal. But now, Palitz pointed out, five out of six tenants in Manhattan and the Bronx relied exclusively on steam heat, a form of central heating that could only be provided by the landlords. The landlords included heat and hot water in the rent, said Palitz. And without it, the tenants were not getting what they were paying for. Due to the cold weather, the coal shortage, and not least of all the landlords’ greed, many apartments were now uninhabitable. Although suffering “great discomfort,” the tenants were showing admirable restraint, Palitz

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insisted. They were not suing for damages, which was their right. Nor were they refusing to pay rent. All they were doing was demanding a reduction in the rent equal to the amount they were spending to heat one or two rooms to a temperature at which their families could survive the winter.12 The landlords saw things differently. Most landlords were willing to pay any price for coal, said Morris Morganstern, one of the largest landlords in the Bronx and president of the Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners, an organization he and other landlords had formed to counter the “altogether unjust criticism” to which they were now being subjected. Most landlords were even willing “to cart it [the coal] away from the yards in their own trucks at their own expense.” A “very small minority” may have tried to capitalize on the coal shortage, Morganstern conceded. But in the “vast majority of cases the failure to provide heat and hot water was due to circumstances beyond the control of the landlord[s],” who, he said, were no more to blame for rationing fuel than restaurant owner were for refusing to serve wheat on “wheatless” days and meat on “meatless” days. Even so, said Morganstern, he was not averse to reducing the rent for tenants whose homes had no heat and hot water. In the case of a typical five-story walk-up with five apartments on a floor, he estimated that the cost of coal came to 30 cents per room per month. Hence a fair reduction would be $1.20 a month for a four-room apartment or $1.50 a month for a five-room apartment. But, Morganstern pointed out, many tenants were demanding half or even a full month’s rent, even when the heat and hot water had been off for only a couple of days. The result was a growing antagonism between landlords and tenants, an antagonism he blamed on the “professional agitator,” who deliberately misleads otherwise reasonable tenants, and the “ ‘deadbeat,’ who sees in these abnormal times an opportunity to dodge the rent and ‘put one over’ on the landlord.”13 Some landlords favored Morganstern’s approach. Roughly six months before the coal shortage, one property owners’ association recommended that each landlord insert in the lease a provision stating that if he were unable to provide heat and hot water through no fault of his own the tenants would be allowed to deduct 10 percent of the per diem rent for each day on which heat and hot water were not furnished. Of the 10 percent, 8 percent was for heat, 2 percent for hot water. (As an inducement to the landlords to make this concession, the lease provided that the tenants could not sue for breach of contract if the landlord could not get coal and that they would pay extra if the price of coal rose by more than 25 percent over the current market price.) Other landlords took a more aggressive stance. Speaking for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, an organization that had been set up in 1908 to promote the interests of property owners on the Lower East Side, Harold Phillips held that landlords had no obligation to provide heat or hot water; their cost was not included in the rent. In cases where the tenants had a lease that entitled them to heat and hot water, Phillips urged the landlords to rewrite it and, in the words of historian Jared N. Day, “absolve themselves of any responsibility.” An alternative was to issue an ultimatum to the tenants stating, “Your rent pays for the rooms you occupy. Not for

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steam heat or hot water. Agree to this or vacate.” Notice to this effect went out to four thousand tenants in the Bronx in early February.14 With the threat of eviction hanging over their heads, many tenants paid the rent. Others withheld part of it to cover what they had spent on heaters and fuel. Still others refused to pay any rent until the landlord restored heat and hot water. By mid-winter a host of rent strikes, many of them organized by the Socialist Party and the newly formed tenant associations, were under way in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In the face of this resistance, some landlords attempted to work out a compromise. Unable to get coal, the owner of a tenement on West 122nd Street offered to reduce the rent by five dollars a month, and the lessee of a building on East 97th Street proposed a two-dollar-a-month reduction. But most landlords refused to give in and, in the words of the Home News, told their tenants, “If you don’t like it, you can move.” When the striking tenants ignored the ultimatum, many landlords proceeded to evict them. One option available to them was the common law remedy of ejectment. But as one authority on landlord–tenant law pointed out, ejectment was a very complicated, long drawn out, and expensive process. Hence the landlords usually resorted to the statutory remedy of summary proceedings, a “simple, expeditious, and inexpensive remedy,” wrote two other authorities on landlord–tenant law, that had been provided by the state legislature in 1920. It worked as follows. If a tenant did not pay his rent (or stayed after his term expired), the landlord could serve notice telling him to vacate the premises. (For a tenant who rented month-to-month, five days’ notice was required; a tenant who rented for an indefinite term, even if he paid by the month, was entitled to thirty days.) If the tenant refused, the landlord could ask the court for a precept, ordering the tenant to show cause why the premises should not be delivered to the landlord. Unless the tenant could show cause—unless, that is, he could prove the complaint was unfounded—the judge had no choice but to issue a final order awarding the premises to the landlord. The judge could grant a stay, giving the tenant up to five days to find another place to live. But if after five days he refused to vacate, the judge had to issue a warrant authorizing the city marshals to remove him and his belongings from the premises. By mid-February more than thirty thousand summary proceedings had been brought in New York.15 The landlords were confident that the courts would rule in their favor if they brought summary proceedings against a tenant who refused to pay the rent or move out when the lease expired. And, observed one New Yorker, they had good reason. Writing in the early 1890s, after a year in which 24,000 tenants had been evicted in New York, almost four times as many as in all of Ireland, he pointed out that under the law, “The courts must see that the rent is paid or that the tenant goes into the street. What becomes of the tenant afterward is nobody’s business unless the police have occasion to look after him or the morgue-keeper fixes him in a deal [a fir or pine] box for interment in the home of the desolate on Hart’s Island—Potter’s Field.” Things did not change much over the next twenty-five years, wrote the Call. “When it comes to a squabble between them [the tenants] and the landlord they haven’t got

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as much chance as a wax candle on a stove.” The residents of Crotona Park learned this the hard way in the winter of 1916–1917. At the urging of the Socialist Women’s Consumers’ League, nearly a thousand tenants refused to pay their rent until the landlords, two large Manhattan real estate firms, provided heat and hot water. They then formed the Bronx Tenants League, which started a strike fund and set up a picket line. The landlords promptly took the tenants to court. Although some tenants gave in when the landlords reduced the rent hike from two dollars to one dollar a month, others refused to back down. At trial their lawyer, a Socialist named Leon Malkiel, argued that the tenants had an oral agreement that bound the landlords to supply heat and hot water. This the landlords denied. Judge Michael J. Scanlan sided with them, saying that in the absence of a written lease the tenants had no choice but to pay or move. When the landlords threatened to bring in the marshals, the strike collapsed.16 Despite Scanlan’s ruling, some lawyers held that the landlords’ confidence was misplaced. Tenants, they argued, were not as much at the mercy of landlords as they had once been. A few decades ago—when, said a Manhattan lawyer, “it was a standing joke that a lease should leave nothing to the tenant except to breathe and pay rent”—a tenant had no right to heat unless it was explicitly called for in the lease. He had to pay rent even if the landlord did not furnish heat. (Except in the case of an infestation of rats or another nuisance so intolerable as to constitute what was known as a “constructive eviction,” the tenant had to pay the rent even if he vacated the premises.) Pointing to several cases decided in the recent past, these lawyers argued that nowadays landlords had to supply heat even if it was not stipulated in the lease. The provision of heat was “an implied, if not an expressed, obligation,” wrote the Times. As Harold G. Aron, a professor of real property law at New York Law School, explained, the modern apartment building was so designed that the heating system was entirely under the landlord’s control. Now that central heating was commonplace, few apartments were provided with fireplaces or other heating facilities of their own. Thus even if coal was in short supply, it was up to the landlord to furnish heat even if he had only an oral agreement with the tenant. If he failed to do so, the tenant could leave, stop paying rent, and sue for damages. A landlord could escape this obligation only if he provided another way by which the tenant could heat the apartment and stipulated in the lease that he had to do so.17 Much as Aron and others expected, some judges ruled against the landlords. Explaining why he refused to issue a final order against three striking Brooklyn tenants, Jacob S. Strahl said, “Contracts were made providing that they should be furnished with heat and hot water and the evidence here shows that the contracts have not been kept. They [the tenants] have been put to the trouble of buying their own heaters, and something should be done for them.” In the case of Austin J. Wall, whose lease included a provision that the landlord would provide heat and hot water, Judge George L. Genung reduced the rent five dollars to cover what Wall had spent on a heater and fuel. The landlord’s lawyer made the argument that the lease included a provision that Wall would pay the rent “without any deduction,” but

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Genung dismissed it on the grounds that the tenant was not getting what he was paying for. A Brooklyn judge refused to issue a final order against twenty tenants who had gone on strike because the landlord had failed to furnish heat and hot water. And a Bronx judge granted a 10 percent reduction to twelve tenants who had rejected the landlord’s offer of a two-dollar-a-month reduction in rent. More disheartening to the landlords was a decision handed down by the Appellate Term of the New York Supreme Court. Affirming a ruling by Manhattan’s Seventh District Court, it held that even in the absence of a written agreement a tenant could pay less than the full rent if the landlord failed to supply heat. The Home News hailed these decisions, noting that the courts were beginning to realize that tenants “must be protected from avaricious landlords.” Even the staid New York Times saw no reason “why landlords should not have to bear, in the shape of decreased rents, their share of the woes produced by [the coal shortage].”18 Although sympathetic to the tenants’ plight, other judges felt compelled to rule in favor of the landlords. Attorney Morris Gisnet, counsel for the Bronx Tenants League, protested that in many of the more than one hundred cases he handled in the Second District Court he proved that the landlords who failed to provide heat and hot water had plenty of coal. Yet the judge “invariably ruled in favor of the landlords, declaring that he was bound to follow the law as it is and that the law of today favors the landlords.” Noting that the law was written long before the advent of steam heat, Gisnet urged the legislators to change it, a position shared by Judge John R. Davies, who presided over one of Manhattan’s busiest courts. Still other judges tried to find a compromise that was acceptable to both sides. A case in point was Peter A. Sheil, who sat on the Bronx Second District Court. In mid-February the landlords of an apartment house on Washington Avenue brought summary proceedings against thirty-two tenants for nonpayment of rent. Henry J. Soffer, another counsel to the Bronx Tenants League, responded that his clients were willing to pay, but only after 20 percent was deducted for the landlords’ failure to provide heat and hot water. Sheil said he was prepared to reduce the rent by as much as 15 percent in cases where no heat had been furnished for a whole month. In this case, where it had been furnished for part of the month, he would not go as high as 10 percent. With the judge’s help, the two sides reached a compromise. As part of the settlement, the landlords also promised to provide sufficient heat and hot water and withdrew a threat to evict the ringleaders of the strike.19 Before long the landlords realized that some judges would evict tenants for nonpayment of rent if their apartment had no heat and hot water, and others would not. But with about fifty municipal court judges sitting in twenty-four courthouses— and not always in the same one—the landlords could not be sure to whom the case would be assigned. Given this uncertainty, some landlords were inclined to compromise with the tenants. Rather than press ahead with an effort to evict a dozen striking tenants on East 136th Street, one landlord allowed them to deduct five dollars for a five-room apartment and four dollars for a four-room apartment and promised to provide as much heat as possible. To avoid going to trial, another

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Harlem landlord reached a settlement with several striking tenants by agreeing to reduce the rent 15 percent. Other landlords attempted instead to evict their tenants on grounds other than nonpayment of rent. A noteworthy example occurred in the Bronx, when tenants at 1345 Washington Avenue complained about the lack of heat and hot water and formed an association to do something about it. Although the tenants paid the next month’s rent, the landlord refused it, saying “he would not take $1,000 a month from them,” and brought summary proceedings on the grounds that the tenants were “undesirable.” Under the law a tenant was “undesirable” if the landlord deemed him so. No proof was needed, and the judges had no authority to allow tenants to offer evidence to the contrary. In short order, eight tenants were evicted. When two of them could not find another apartment in the five days given them, their families were ousted and their furniture put on the sidewalk.20 By late winter the coal shortage was over. The miners were digging hard, the railroads were running on time, and as the ice floes melted in New York harbor, the barges had no trouble making deliveries. As a prominent coal dealer said in late February, “New York is in pretty fair shape now. We are receiving coal in our Bronx yards for the first time since the trouble started.” Although state and local officials still urged conservation, they eased the “lightless” night regulations, which had applied to every day but Saturday. Effective March 1, only Thursdays and Sundays would be dark. As Garfield’s order expired, factories and stores resumed normal schedules. With the coming of mild weather, landlords were able to furnish enough heat and hot water, albeit at a price they thought too high. Another sign that the worst was over was that public officials began to look ahead to next winter. To ensure that New York would not run short of coal again, they suggested that dealers find a place to store enough coal to tide the city over in the event of another harsh winter. One possibility was Central Park. But it was unlikely, said one coal dealer, that the public would allow the park to be used to store coal. (That spring a public outcry had forced the Liberty Loan Committee to shelve its plan to boost fundraising for the war effort by building symbolic trenches in the park.) Public officials also urged New Yorkers to stock up on coal in the summer so they would have enough in the winter, to overhaul their furnaces and clean their flues, and, if need be, to get accustomed to washing dishes in cold water and taking cold baths. If appropriate measures were adopted, said Harry T. Peters, chair of the Coal Conservation Commission, the city would not be faced with so severe a crisis again.21 Still another sign that the worst was over was that elected officials were losing interest. The Board of Aldermen took no action on Palitz’s bill to establish a municipal heating plant. Nor did it act on his bill requiring landlords to inform tenants how much of the rent was for heat and hot water. Nothing came of Palitz’s more drastic proposal to compel landlords to equip every apartment with a dual heating system—so that if the landlords could not get coal the tenants could heat their homes with gas or other fuel. Nor did anything come of a proposal by Commissioner of Public Markets Jonathan Day that the city go into the coal business. Tenant

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advocates made no headway in the state legislature either. In the face of strong opposition from the Real Estate Board, the city’s oldest and most influential property owners’ association, the upper house shelved a bill introduced by Senator Edward J. Dowling that would have allowed a tenant to withhold part of the rent in the event that a landlord who had agreed to furnish heat failed to do so. And the lower house killed the bill introduced by Assemblyman Orr that would have required landlords to keep their apartments at sixty-eight degrees and, if they failed to, allowed tenants to deduct from the rent what they spent on heaters and fuel. The Assembly also shelved Orr’s bill penalizing delinquent landlords. Aside from the Board of Estimate’s decision to appropriate $50,000 to purchase fuel and food for sale to the poor, the elected officials did virtually nothing to help the tenants. They were reluctant to antagonize the powerful real estate interests. And they saw no need to now that the coal shortage was over and, it was widely assumed, landlord-tenant relations would soon return to normal.22 But it was far from clear that landlord-tenant relations would soon return to normal. The tenants were furious with the landlords not only for failing to furnish heat and hot water, but also for exploiting the coal shortage to raise the rent. While these profiteers boast of their patriotism, said one tenant, women and little children “suffer untold agonies.” The tenants were also fed up with the arrogance of the landlords, who told long-term residents, “if you don’t like it you can move” and, when they withheld part of the rent, brought summary proceedings against them. How much lower could a man sink, the tenants asked, than to hire marshals to oust families with small children and throw their belongings onto the sidewalk? The landlords were as angry as the tenants. As one complained, “Tenants control our property, move in and out of it as they please, pay rent or withhold it as they please and treat with the landlords or ignore them as they please.” All over the city, said Morris Morganstern, professional agitators “appealed to the worst instincts of ordinarily peaceable and law-abiding tenants,” inciting them not only to withhold the rent, but also to vandalize the apartments. When landlords were forced to go to court, they were “held up for public derision and ridicule,” Morganstern lamented. “It would seem that ownership of real estate carried with it the sacrifice of all sense of decency and morality [and stripped a man] of all human feeling.”23 In view of this deep-seated antagonism, it was even possible that landlord-tenant relations might take a turn for the worse. Consider what happened on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. In late winter and early spring about one hundred tenants from a few adjacent tenement houses started a rent strike not so much because their landlord, a Manhattan doctor named Benedict Weissman, had failed to supply hot water and make necessary repairs as because he had raised the rent $1.00 to $1.50 a month. A highly militant bunch, the striking tenants not only withheld their rent, but also called on the Moving Van Workers’ Union to refuse to move new tenants into the houses and even attacked new tenants who moved into the building. Weissman served notice on eleven of the striking tenants. But shortly before the case came to trial in Brooklyn’s Second District Court, he reached a settlement with the

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tenants’ counsel, Joseph E. Klein, a young Brooklyn Socialist, by which he agreed not only to provide hot water and make necessary repairs, but also to put off the rent hike for five months, to raise the rent only fifty cents in the sixth month, and to raise it not at all in the next twelve months. Before the Myrtle Avenue rent strike, it was clear that many tenants would fight a rent hike if the landlords did not provide heat and hot water. Afterward it was possible, even probable, that they might go on strike to stop the landlords from raising the rent too.24

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PA R T O N E

From Rent Hikes to Rent Strikes

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1 The Postwar Housing Shortage

As New York real estate men never tired of pointing out, rent was a function of the law of supply and demand. It was a law, said John J. Hopper, a landlord and one-time public official, that “not only applies to rent, but to everything that is bought and sold.” When the demand for space exceeds the supply, rents go up, remarked Douglas L. Elliman, one of Manhattan’s leading real estate brokers. When supply exceeds the demand, they go down. In New York the supply rarely exceeded the demand. As early as 1825, when New York was more than twice as large as Philadelphia and more than three times as large as Boston, Niles Weekly Register wrote that “a finished house without a tenant is not to be found in this great city.” By midcentury the New York Times observed that a private house was “not to be found for love or money.” Things grew even worse in the second half of the century, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans poured into New York and hundreds of thousands of Americans left the countryside for the metropolis. Spurred by the huge influx of immigrants, the population of New York soared to more than 3.4 million by 1900. And though they tried, the builders could not keep up with the growing demand. The housing shortage was especially hard on workingclass New Yorkers, the great majority of whom were first- and second-generation immigrants. Most of them rented apartments in extremely crowded and highly unsanitary apartments on the Lower East Side and in other ethnic ghettos. The less fortunate slept in cellars or in police stations, where they were housed as vagrants or “indigent lodgers.”1 As far back as the 1850s, New York’s squalid tenements had aroused grave concern among the city’s upper-middle-class reformers, one of whom referred to New York as “the City of Living Death.” After fobbing off the reformers with a few half-hearted and largely ineffective measures, the state legislature finally bowed to their pressure and adopted the Tenement House Act of 1901. The most important

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law in the history of tenement housing in the United States, it was designed to regulate future construction in ways that would reduce congestion and improve sanitary conditions. Opponents argued that the law would increase building costs, deter residential construction, and thereby exacerbate the housing shortage. When construction slowed down in the year or so after the law was enacted, it seemed they might be right. But the slowdown was short-lived. Starting in 1903, a building boom got under way the likes of which New Yorkers had never seen. With labor plentiful, building materials relatively inexpensive, and, most important of all, capital readily available, builders erected everything from posh high-rise apartment houses on Manhattan’s East and West sides to modest five- and six-story walk-ups in Brooklyn and the Bronx. As one observer wrote in the middle of the boom, “It is doubtful if New York City, or indeed any other city of the world, ever before witnessed the expenditure of so many millions of dollars in the construction of tenement houses during a similar period.”2 By the time the boom came to an end in late 1916, the builders had transformed much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In less than a decade and a half they had erected nearly 27,000 apartment houses with close to 400,000 units. To put it another way, more than 40 percent of all the apartments in New York in 1916 had been built since 1903. The new construction was enough to house the population of every American city except Chicago. Even more noteworthy, it was enough to offset the steady growth of New York, whose population rose by well over a million in the decade before the United States entered World War I. It was also much more than enough to offset the loss of about six thousand old-law tenements, with roughly forty thousand apartments, which were demolished to make way for parks, schools, roads, and commercial buildings, chief among them the new Pennsylvania Railroad Station. With supply running well ahead of demand, the number of vacant apartments soared, reaching more than 67,000 in 1909, or enough to house the population of Washington, D.C. So did the vacancy rate, which was compiled by the city’s Tenement House Department. By early 1909 it had reached 8.1 percent, which was unheard of in New York. And in early 1916, by which time the boom was winding down, it still stood at 5.6 percent, which was nearly twice as high as normal, according to Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann.3 For the many New Yorkers who had long been hard-pressed to find a decent apartment at a reasonable rent, the soaring vacancy rate provided a golden opportunity. And they seized it, noted Abram I. Elkus, a close ally of Governor Alfred E. Smith. Thousands of families moved out of old-law tenements on the Lower East Side and into new-law tenements in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where they found “much better apartments,” with plenty of light and air and even hot water, toilets, and bathtubs. Often they moved not once but many times. They “moved from one apartment to another upon the slightest inducement,” said one real estate man. They moved so often, remarked another, that New Yorkers maintained their reputation as “the most restless population in the world.” Knowing they had “the upper hand,” as one real estate man put it, prospective tenants drove a hard bargain. Said

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another, they “could pick, choose, demand and dictate to the limit and no man could say them nay. This condition existed for ten long, weary years.” Current tenants drove a hard bargain too. As Jacob Leitner, a Manhattan landlord, later recalled, tenants would come to him and say, “Mr. Leitner, if you don’t give us a month’s free rent in July we are going to store our furniture [and move] to the country for July and August. You give us that month’s retn [sic] free, we agree to stay. [Otherwise we] won[’]t sign any lease.”4 Desperate to fill their apartments, New York’s landlords went to great lengths to get tenants and hold them. They not only made repairs, but also painted and otherwise “decorated” the apartments—often, lamented one real estate man, “according to the whim and caprice of the tenants.” Some even attempted to attract new tenants by offering to pay their moving expenses and to give them a ton of coal. Perhaps the most striking sign of the landlords’ desperation was their willingness to grant “concessions,” free rent for a month or two—and occasionally even longer. Although some real estate men deplored this practice, many landlords found the logic of concessions irresistible. Most tenements, perhaps as many as 90 percent, were erected not by long-term investors, but by speculative builders, who were anxious to sell the buildings as soon as they were finished, pay off the first and maybe second and third mortgages, and then begin work on another building. Their problem was that the value of the property depended above all on its rent roll—not its rental income. The higher the rolls, the higher the value. Among real estate men, the rule of thumb was that the value of an apartment house was eight to ten times the rent roll. By employing concessions, not to mention fraudulent leases, builders conveyed what Jared N. Day calls “the illusion of high rental returns,” which was vital to landlords who were attempting to unload their holdings.5 Given a choice, most landlords preferred to grant concessions rather than reduce rents (and thereby drive down rent rolls). But during the prewar years they often had no choice. As Elkus put it, they had to take “whatever rent they could get.” There were so many apartments available that one Manhattan landlord had to drop his rent to $3.50 per room per month even though the economic rent—the rent needed to cover his costs and yield a 6 percent return—was $7.50 per room per month. So many landlords followed suit that rents fell all over New York, especially in Washington Heights, which had been wildly overbuilt during the boom and where, according to a prominent real estate lawyer, they dropped by fully one-third. The situation was so grim, said a broker who specialized in Greenwich Village and Washington Square properties, that an apartment house that brought in 6 percent “was [a] particularly good investment.” Indeed, to most landlords 6 percent would have been a godsend. Said one broker whose firm handled more than one hundred buildings with two to three thousand apartments, his best properties brought in 4 percent. Most landlords were lucky to earn 3 to 3.5 percent, which was less than the interest paid on savings accounts, said another real estate man. In many cases, wrote a special committee of the Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association, landlords “did well if they were able to secure sufficient income from their properties to

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pay taxes, water rents, insurance, and the mortgage interest, without any return whatever on their equities.”6 Fed up with years of what the head of a major real estate firm called “abnormally low” rents, some landlords gave up and watched as banks and other mortgagees foreclosed on their properties. In the hope that conditions would improve, others held on, doing what they could to stay a step ahead of their creditors, sometimes even digging into savings to pay interest, taxes, and other charges. Starting in early 1917, however, there were signs that things might be looking up. At long last, demand was catching up with supply. “Practically every desirable building is booked to its capacity,” the Times wrote in January. Even new apartment houses still under construction were half rented. By April one real estate man predicted that unless the price of building materials declined, which was highly unlikely, “there is going to be a scarcity of apartments.” Before long, landlords stopped offering concessions and for the first time in years began raising rents. Although the rent hikes were modest—a dollar or two in working-class neighborhoods, 10 to 15 percent in middle- and upper-middle-class districts—they were the largest in years. By mid-summer New York’s Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, the industry’s leading trade publication, wrote, “Apartment houses are now on a splendid paying basis, and the owner has cause for encouragement. He has had much to contend with during the past few years, but the wheel seems to have turned in his favor.”7 By the time the fall rental season arrived, most landlords and brokers were euphoric. “The apartment house situation has never been more promising,” said Roland P. Elliman of Douglas L. Elliman & Co. It has been a good year, declared W. H. Dolson, another prominent broker, and next year “ought to be [even better].” Apartments were renting fast at all prices, said a West Side broker, “and we expect to be 100 per cent. rented by September 1.” Other brokers were just as optimistic. By mid-winter one agent reported that he had only one vacancy among the two thousand apartments under his management and “several hundred applicants for it.” Another agent said he had no vacancies at all. With so few vacant apartments— fewer, remarked Arthur K. Mack of the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, than at any other time in the city’s history—one landlord saw no point in spending money on advertising. With “nothing to offer” the dozens of applicants who came to his office every day, one broker stopped putting their names on his waiting list. Finding an apartment was as hard as finding “the needle in the haystack,” another broker pointed out. And it would not get easier. “Remain in your apartments,” he and other brokers advised tenants late in 1917, “and be satisfied to meet even slight advances in rent, because next year you may be unable to obtain a new apartment in Manhattan at any price.”8 It was good advice. As the Call wrote in September 1917, the landlords had the tenants “at their mercy.” Whether they lived in Manhattan or the outer boroughs, most tenants would soon be paying more for housing. The Times agreed. “Practically every resident of New York, from the poorest tenement house dweller to

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the occupant of the most elaborate Fifth Avenue apartment, will pay more [next year] for [the] privilege of being a New Yorker,” it predicted. And pay more many did. Some landlords had already raised the rent as of October 1, one of the two days, the other being May 1, on which annual leases usually expired. During the fall others hiked the rent of monthly tenants and tenants without a lease as well. To the dismay of many tenants, especially those who had no heat and hot water, some landlords even raised the rent during the coal shortage. Often they said that they needed the increase to cover the soaring price of fuel. Although the price fell in the spring of 1918, rents continued to rise. By April, wrote the Call, they had reached an “UNBEARABLE POINT.” Many landlords raised the rent during the summer and fall too. By the end of the year many tenants had seen the rent go up not once, but two, three, and even four times. As one whose family had moved into a six-room apartment in the East Bronx in 1906 testified, the landlord raised the rent twice in 1918, twice in 1919, and once in early 1920, even though the building was “in very bad condition” and the bedrooms were so small “you have to come out [to] dress yourself.”9 Many tenants charged that the rent hikes often amounted to gouging. A tenant at 725 Riverside Drive, a fashionable apartment house in Manhattan known as the “Tomahawk,” complained that his landlord had raised the rent from $750 a year in 1916 to $900 in 1917 and $1,000 in 1918, an increase of 33 percent. (A few months later the landlord demanded an additional $300, prompting the irate tenants to say that the building, which had recently been renamed the “Beglad,” ought to be called the “Besad.”) Pancrazio Genovese, president of the Bronx Tenants Protective League, told the story of a New York City policeman who lived near Southern Boulevard, a working-class, largely Italian neighborhood, most of whose residents could not afford to pay more than seven to eight dollars a room per month. For a four-room apartment, which got heat, said Genovese, “when it pleases the landlord to give it,” the rent was raised from $28 a month in 1916 to $32 in 1917 and $40 in 1918, an increase of over 40 percent. By 1920 it was up to $53. Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who had emerged as one of New York’s leading labor organizers and later as one of the city’s most prominent tenant activists, claimed that rents had nearly doubled in some working-class neighborhoods. Other instances of alleged rent gouging appeared regularly in the city’s newspapers. The Call, which was highly sympathetic to the plight of New York’s working class, reported in the spring of 1918 that some landlords had raised rents by as much as 64 percent. And the Bronx Home News charged that some landlords had asked for increases of $100 to $300 a year, a sizable sum at a time when many New Yorkers earned less than $1,000 per annum.10 Most landlords and real estate men dismissed the charges of gouging as groundless. Rents, they acknowledged, had gone up in the last year or two, but not very much. Where they went up, it was largely to cover operating costs, which had started to rise a year or two after the outbreak of World War I. And in most cases the rent hikes had not kept pace with these costs. Even though rents were rising, profits were falling. Some landlords “are lucky if they are able to keep their properties going at

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all,” wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. A case in point was John P. Leo, a builder and landlord as well as chair of the Board of Standards and Appeals, which administered the city’s zoning ordinance. “I own twelve apartment houses in Washington Heights,” he said in June 1918, “and any man who will take them off my hands will forever have my gratitude.” He had raised his rents the previous fall and expected to raise them again this fall, but not, he stressed, “to increase my profit,” only “to keep down the deficit.” Rents, real estate men also pointed out, were not going up “at anything like the same rate” as other commodities. They were not rising as fast as lumber, paint, bricks, and coal, not to mention sugar, meat, shoes, dresses, tables, and chairs. They were not even going up as fast as the price of newspapers, wrote Morris Morganstern. Annoyed by the many articles lambasting landlords for gouging tenants, he asked the editors of the New York Times, the price of which had just doubled, “Can you now purchase anything at the same price [at which it] was purchased heretofore?” Charles F. Noyes, a leading Manhattan broker, spoke for most real estate men when he pointed out that “rentals have always been and are the last commodity to increase in prices.”11 Both sides had a point. Some landlords were gouging their tenants. They were charging what they “could get” rather than what “they needed,” wrote Allan Robinson, president of the City and Suburban Homes Company, New York’s largest builder and manager of model tenements. But these landlords were the exceptions. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, rents went up very little in New York, less than 3 percent in 1917 and less than 4 percent in 1918. They rose less than the wages of superintendents, porters, and elevator operators and less than the prices of glass, paint, and brooms, which jumped from $4.00 to $5.50 a dozen. The cost of housing in New York also went up much less than the cost of other necessities. Between 1916 and 1918 clothing, furniture, and furnishings more than doubled, and food, by far the largest item in most household budgets, nearly doubled. Rents also rose slightly less in New York than in other cities, where the average increase was just over 9 percent, and much less than in Detroit and Seattle, where the demand for workers in shipbuilding and munitions-making drove housing costs up 40 percent. These statistics were somewhat misleading, however. Rents in New York went up much faster in 1917 than in 1916, when they had declined slightly, faster in 1918 than in 1917, and faster still in the second half of 1918 than in the first half. By late 1918 many tenants feared that rents would continue to rise at an even faster rate in 1919.12 Their fears were fueled by the city’s acute housing shortage, which had grown steadily worse since the United States entered World War I. The shortage was not as bad in New York as in Detroit and other cities to which thousands of workers had been drawn by the prospects of well-paying jobs in war-related industries. And the shortage was nowhere as bad in the United States as in France, Belgium, and other Western European countries, much of whose housing stock had been destroyed during the war. But the housing shortage in New York was bad enough. “Never before in the history of the real estate market has there been such a scarcity of

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dwellings for rent,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in August 1918. “With the approach of the fall renting season,” it noted, “brokers are beginning to realize that there will [soon] be a famine in apartments.” The city was short tens of thousands of apartments of all sizes, from small ones of three and four rooms to large ones of six or more rooms, and all types, from posh elevator buildings in upper-middleclass enclaves to five- and six-story walk-ups in working-class neighborhoods. The housing shortage was so acute, Allan Robinson told a reporter, that there were no vacancies in any of City and Suburban Homes Company’s nearly three thousand walk-up apartments, most of which were located in the unfashionable sections of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.13 By early 1919 New York’s housing shortage was so severe that of the city’s nearly one million apartments fewer than 22,000 were vacant, down from more than 53,000 in 1916 (and more than 67,000 in 1909). In the meantime the vacancy rate fell from 5.6 percent in March 1916 to 3.7 percent in March 1917 and 2.2 percent in March 1919. If anything, these figures understated the housing shortage. As John J. Murphy, a former tenement house commissioner, pointed out, “most of the reported vacancies are entirely unavailable for one reason or another.” The Tenement House Department counted as vacant many apartments that were not even on the market, some because they were in buildings that were closed for repairs and others because they were in buildings that were tied up in legal proceedings. Moreover, most of the vacant apartments were found in rundown old-law tenements, the great majority of which were located on the Lower East Side. As Frank Mann, the current tenement house commissioner, observed, these buildings “are habitable ‘legally,’ but not humanly fit places to live.” Or as Nathan Hirsch, chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, explained, “You wouldn’t want anybody near or dear to you to live in them.” Indeed, among new-law tenements, the vacancy rate was a mind-boggling 1 percent in Manhattan, one-half of 1 percent in Brooklyn, less than two-tenths of 1 percent in the Bronx, and less than one-tenth of 1 percent in Queens.14 The housing shortage was manifested in ways other than the falling vacancy rate. One was the highhandedness of the landlords. A case in point was N. Finkelstein of Manhattan, who told his tenants on Belmont Avenue in the Bronx not only that he was raising their rent five dollars a month, but also that henceforth they would have to pay for interior repairs, agree to move out on five days’ notice, and give two months’ rent in advance, one as a deposit and one as security. When the tenants resisted, he issued an ultimatum: “Sign [the lease] or get out.” Other landlords refused to rent to tenants with children on the grounds that the youngsters did damage to the property and drove away hard-to-find janitors. “They say,” wrote the Home News, “they have as many as ten applications for every vacant apartment, and they are in a position to select only those tenants as are entirely acceptable to them.” Another sign of the housing shortage was desperation of the tenants. Following the advice of brokers many stayed put, paying the increased rent (and sometimes bearing up under conditions that would once have driven them to move). The result,

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said a real estate man who managed hundreds of apartments in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, was that October 1, 1918, was “one of the quietest [moving days] I have witnessed in 31 years.” Other tenants were even less fortunate. “It was a common sight [in Brooklyn and the Bronx] to see streams of women marching from house to house inquiring for cheap apartments,” wrote the Call. If they found one, they had to move in as soon as the old tenant moved out, sometimes even before the landlord had finished decorating and making repairs. If they did not, they often had to move back to the Lower East Side and into dilapidated old-law tenements that had been abandoned for years and whose landlords, wrote one observer, “laugh at the tenants’ requests for repairs.”15 The housing shortage took most New Yorkers by surprise. Residential construction had soared from 1905 to 1907, during which time the city’s builders put up nearly 10,000 apartment houses, with more than 130,000 units, enough to house the entire population of Boston. Although it fell off after the Panic of 1907, it rebounded strongly in 1910 and 1911. And as late as 1914 to 1916 the builders erected more than 1,000 apartment houses, with more than 20,000 units. But starting in 1917, observers noticed a sharp decline in residential construction. “Fewer new houses have been built for occupancy this Fall on Manhattan Island than for several past seasons,” the Times reported in August. A few months later the manager of Pease & Elliman’s Upper West Side office remarked that “practically no new building projects are underway.” Construction was down not only on the Upper West Side, but everywhere in Manhattan, and not only in Manhattan, but in the outer boroughs too. In what turned out to be a monumental understatement, another real estate man said that the outlook for 1918 “was not particularly hopeful.” Indeed, by spring 1918, the Call wrote, “Construction was practically at a standstill.” The Building Department’s figures confirmed the sharp drop in residential construction. In 1917 builders put up only 760 apartment houses, with just over 14,000 units, and in 1918 they erected only 130 buildings, with fewer than 3,000 units—fewer than at any time since 1902, the year after the Tenement House Law was enacted. Indeed, in 1918, a year in which tens of thousands of families poured into New York and drove up the demand for housing by leaps and bounds, only a dozen more apartment houses were constructed than demolished.16 More than anything, it was World War I that brought residential construction to a halt in New York (and, for that matter, other American cities). Even before the United States entered the war, the price of building materials had started to go up, and by late 1918 they cost nearly twice as much as they had in early 1914. Even at the inflated prices, they were often very hard to find—and, if found, very hard to ship. With so many men serving in the armed forces and so many others taking jobs in war-related industries, labor was also in short supply. It was much more expensive too. Between 1913 and 1918 wages in New York City went up 10 percent for carpenters, 16 percent for bricklayers, 25 percent for painters, and 80 percent for laborers. As a result, the cost of construction rose roughly 50 percent. To build a typical five-story brick walk-up on a fifty by one hundred foot lot cost $32,000 in

Even as residential construction ground to a halt, most Americans remained confident that it would pick up as soon as the war was over. As early as November 1917, when the end of the war was nowhere in sight, Frank R. Millet, president of the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, predicted that “a worldwide boom is inevitable during the period of reconstruction.” The demand for space was “self-evident,” and the end of hostilities would free up the capital, labor, and materials needed for construction. As the prospects for peace improved, S. W. Straus, the head of a Chicago investment firm that bore his name, foresaw “an extended period of unprecedented activity in all branches of the building and construction industry.” When the boom got under way, New York was bound to be in the middle of it, claimed the city’s real estate men. Especially optimistic were brokers and agents from the outer boroughs. “With the return of normal conditions in building operations,” said one, “Flatbush [a Brooklyn neighborhood that had recently been connected to Manhattan by subway] will experience one of the greatest building booms in the history of the city.” The revival would not start immediately, said another, perhaps not even in a few months, but “we shall see a wonderful improvement, especially in the line of new buildings, in the spring.”19

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1913, $40,000 in 1916, and $50,000 in 1918. An even greater obstacle to residential construction was that savings banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions were rejecting applications for mortgages with what Frank Mann called “monotonous regularity.” According to their executives, they had put much of their money into Liberty Bonds. What little capital was left was being invested not in residential mortgages, which yielded only 3 percent after federal and state taxes, but rather in tax-exempt state and local bonds, which paid 5 to 6 percent, and in gilt-edge securities, which paid 7 to 10 percent.17 Making matters even worse for the builders was a series of tough measures that the Wilson administration had adopted to prevent the diversion of materials, labor, and capital from the war effort. Underlying these measures, which started in late 1917 and culminated in late 1918, was the belief, as Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo put it, that “building operations absorb the very materials and the very labor and the very kind of money, that the Government requires most urgently at this time.” Acting on this belief, the Railroad Administration gave low priority to the shipment of materials used in residential construction. The Department of Labor classified the building trades as nonessential. The Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board pretty much excluded the building industry from the money markets. And in a move that pushed the industry to what Senator William M. Calder of New York called the “zero hour for building,” the federal government imposed restrictions on the use of materials for structures that cost more than $2,500. Not long afterward, the War Industries Board ordered builders to stop work except on projects that needed only finishing touches. Even in those cases, New York’s builders needed a permit from the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense to complete the job.18

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This sense of optimism soared when the war came to an end in November 1918, more than four years after it started and about a year and a half after the United States joined forces with the Allies. “With peace assured,” said Charles F. Noyes, “real estate will be in demand as an investment as never before in my time.” It might take a few months—indeed, he added, “I hope we will have no immediate ‘boom’ ”—but brokers will soon be as busy as at any time in the last twenty years. Builders will also be just as busy, remarked Noble Foster Hoggson, president of Hoggson Brothers, Builders. All indications “point to the greatest building revival during 1919 which this country has ever experienced.” Although the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide agreed with Hoggson, not all New York real estate men were so confident that a boom was imminent. Capital was still fairly tight, they pointed out. Wages were abnormally high, as were the prices of building materials. It was far from clear, they said, how long it would take to return to the conditions that had spurred the surge of speculative housing in Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx before the war. But even the more cautious of these real estate men had little doubt that residential construction would pick up in New York and other big cities in the not-too-distant future.20 In the immediate aftermath of the war, it seemed that they were right. The War Industries Board promptly lifted the restrictions on buildings that cost less than $10,000 and shortly after lifted them on all buildings. Builders no longer needed special permits from the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense, which was soon disbanded, only routine permits from the borough building departments. Secretary McAdoo, who had led the campaign to halt nonessential production, now urged builders to resume work. Labor was more plentiful than it had been in years, partly because of the demobilization of the armed forces and partly because of the closing of war-related factories. Building materials were less scarce too. Enough material was on hand for the winter, reported the New York Times, and with manufacturers pressing ahead, it would probably be available in the spring—and at no higher prices. Even the mortgage market was “beginning to show signs of a revival,” noted William A. White & Sons, a prominent Manhattan real estate firm, in late 1918. Conditions were so auspicious, wrote the Times, that at the behest of builders, “architects are rushing work on plans to get as early a start on Spring construction as possible.” Indeed by late November the city’s builders had put forth proposals for $75 million worth of construction, of which $10 million was earmarked for apartment houses, roughly half as much as for commercial and industrial structures.21 As expected, residential construction picked up after the war. But the revival soon sputtered and then died out. Americans were perplexed. “It is but natural that lack of building during the war should have resulted in a scarcity of housing,” wrote one observer in March 1919. “What now mystifies people, however, is that building does not go forward with a rush.” By spring residential construction was back in the doldrums, where it stayed for the rest of the year. During 1919, a year in which the city’s population rose by almost 115,000, New York’s builders erected only 95 apartment houses, with just over 1,600 units, even fewer than in 1918 and fewer by far

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than in any year since the turn of the century. Things were bad in Brooklyn, where 62 apartment houses (with only 600 units) went up, and even worse in the other boroughs. In the Bronx, builders erected only 24 apartment houses (with just over 800 units). In Queens—which, said a Jamaica real estate man two weeks after the Armistice, was “on the eve of the biggest building boom in its history”—they built only six apartment houses (with fewer than 70 units). And in Manhattan, which had more people than any American city except Chicago, they constructed only three apartment houses (with fewer than 140 units). For every apartment house put up in New York in 1919, two were knocked down. The city’s builders erected more than 6,600 one-family houses and more than 2,300 two-family houses in 1919, the great majority of them in Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond. But this did little to offset the slowdown in apartment house construction.22 One reason that residential construction was stuck in the doldrums was the high price of materials and labor. Although materials were no longer in short supply, they were still very much in demand. As Clarence S. Stein, a well-known planner and designer (and a close associate of Governor Smith), put it, “Bricks that are needed for houses are being used to build theaters; glass is being put into expensive automobiles instead of into houses.” Prices, wrote the Times in late 1918, had been “almost prohibitive” during the war. But contrary to expectations, they did not fall afterward—except for structural steel. Indeed, from December 1918 to December 1919 the price of materials went up 40 percent. And a special committee of the New York City Merchants’ Association concluded that it was not likely to drop much “for an indeterminate period—a number of years at least.” Labor was also more plentiful in 1919 than at any time in recent years. But again contrary to expectations, wages in New York continued to rise after the war, a result in part of the clout of the building trades unions and in part of the soaring cost of living. From 1918 to 1919 wages in New York rose nearly 8 percent for bricklayers, nearly 17 percent for plumbers, more than 18 percent for carpenters, more than 25 percent for plasterers, and more than 60 percent for painters. Only the laborers, whose wages had gone up sharply during the war, received no raises.23 The high price of materials and labor put New York’s builders in a severe bind. If they went ahead at these prices, the new apartment houses would cost far more to build than the old apartment houses, at least 50 percent more and perhaps as much as 100 percent more. To make a profit, these builders would have to charge much higher rents than their competitors. Instead of $6.50 to 7.00 a room for a typical fivestory walk-up erected in 1913 or $8.00 a room for one put up in 1916, they would have to charge roughly $12.00 a room. Even in the midst of an acute housing shortage, builders had reason to worry whether they would be able to fill their apartments at these rents. They might hold their own if the price of materials and labor remained high. But what if prices fell? The findings of the Merchants’ Association’s special committee notwithstanding, most Americans believed that prices were going to fall—and sooner rather than later. If they fell, other builders would rush in. They would be able to put up similar buildings for less money and

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charge lower rents for similar apartments. If it would be hard for new apartment houses to compete with older ones, it would be even harder for them to compete with newer ones. In an even more serious bind were the many speculative builders who had no intention of holding on to their properties. In order to make a profit, they had to sell them at a price that took into account the inflated costs of construction. It was highly unlikely that investors would pay this price when they could buy comparable properties for much less.24 Another reason that residential construction was stuck in the doldrums—a reason even more important than the high price of materials and labor—was the lack of capital. Although the insurance companies still had a good deal of their assets tied up in government bonds, the savings banks and other financial institutions had plenty of money on hand. But like building materials, capital was very much in demand. Apartment house builders had to compete for loans with other builders, who needed money to put up theaters and other commercial and industrial structures, as well as with other businessmen, who needed money to manufacture automobiles and other consumer goods. In this competition the apartment house builders labored at a serious disadvantage. Real estate mortgages still yielded only 3 percent after federal and state taxes, much less than tax-exempt municipal bonds, first-class railroad bonds, and gilt-edge industrial securities. Little wonder that many insurance companies and savings banks were moving their assets out of real estate and into stocks and bonds. For the speculative builder—about whom the Times wrote “the more he borrows, the happier he is”—this was an ominous development. He had long counted on these financial institutions to provide the first mortgages that covered most of the construction costs and served as the basis on which other lenders provided the second and third mortgages that covered the rest.25 Even when the banks and insurance companies were willing to make loans on new apartment houses, they were reluctant to lend as much as the builders wanted. Before the war, a Brooklyn real estate broker pointed out, most financial institutions made loans of as much as 70 to 75 percent of the cost of construction. (The savings banks, which were regulated by the state, were not allowed to go higher than 60 percent of the property’s value.) But like the builders, the bankers and insurance company executives were afraid that now that the war was over the country was in for a strong dose of deflation. As the cost of goods and services fell, so would the value of real property. If the financial institutions made loans of 70 to 75 percent of the construction costs and then property values went down, it would not be long before the apartment houses were worth less than the outstanding loans. To protect themselves against deflation, the financial institutions would lend only up to 50 to 60 percent of the cost of construction—and sometimes not even that much. Some would lend only on the basis of prewar valuations, others only as much as the buildings would bring at a forced sale. The builders could always take what the banks and insurance companies offered and then try to get a substantial second and third mortgage. But these mortgages carried such high interest rates that one builder after another complained that it was all

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but impossible to borrow money at a rate that would provide a reasonable return on his investment.26 With the number of New Yorkers rising by almost 115,000 in 1919, the housing shortage grew even more acute. “Despite the falling off of immigration during the war,” wrote the New York Telegram in August, “there never has been a time, perhaps, in the history of New York when rooms, apartments and houses were so scarce.” “Every new house that has gone up has been sold or rented—in many cases before the walls were up.” It would only get worse when thousands of families returned to the city from the summer resorts. By the fall the manager of Pease & Elliman’s Upper West Side office observed that tenants were offering as much as $150 to $500 for help finding an apartment in Manhattan. He doubted it would do much good. “There are simply no apartments to be had, and it looks to me as though many families will have to camp in the park.” In the Bronx, said Judge Harry Robitzek, “there are no flats or apartments to be had at any price.” Landlords no longer put out “To Let” signs, wrote the Telegram. And one family barely moves out before another moves in. Some residents of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn looked for housing in Queens, the second smallest of the five boroughs, only to be told by brokers that they had “nothing to rent.” Every agent from Long Island City to the Rockaways “has a waiting list of from 30 to 100 desirable applicants,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By year’s end it was widely believed that New York City was short as many as 80,000 to 100,000 apartments—enough to house 400,000 to 500,000 people.27 The housing shortage drove the vacancy rate down to unheard-of levels. From March 1919 to April 1920, it plummeted from just over 2 percent, which was by far the lowest point it had reached since the Tenement House Department started calculating it in 1909, to one-third of 1 percent. In other words, of the city’s nearly one million apartments, only 3,500 were vacant. The vacancy rate hit a record low not only in new-law tenements, where it was one-tenth of 1 percent, but also in old-law tenements, where it was one-half of 1 percent, down from more than 3 percent in 1919. It also hit record lows everywhere in the city. Only in Manhattan and Richmond was it more than one-half of 1 percent. In Brooklyn and the Bronx it was only one-tenth of 1 percent. Five of every six vacant apartments were in the oldlaw tenements, more than three-quarters of them in Manhattan, where they were heavily concentrated on the Lower East Side. These tenements, wrote one observer, were “almost unfit for human habitation.” They were the worst of the worst. And as a result of the housing shortage, the worst were getting worse. According to the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing—which was commonly known, after its chairman Senator Charles C. Lockwood of Brooklyn, as the Lockwood Committee— the Tenement House Department had pretty much stopped enforcing the city’s building and sanitary laws. It could not force the landlords to do much about the more than 100,000 violations in the old-law tenements. And if the department condemned these buildings, it would leave tens of thousands homeless.28 Notwithstanding the record low vacancy rates, some New Yorkers held that the accounts of the housing shortage were very much exaggerated. One of the most

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outspoken was Samuel McCune Lindsay, a professor of social legislation at Columbia University. In a long report prepared under the auspices of the Real Estate Board, he argued that the claims that New York was short tens of thousands of apartments were based on erroneous estimates of its recent population growth. Citing Lawrence Veiller, a prominent tenement house reformer and secretary of the National Housing Association, Lindsay stressed that despite the housing shortage very few people were sleeping in the streets. On that point he was right. With some exceptions, among them a few Brooklyn families who were pitching tents in vacant lots and cooking meals over fires, virtually everyone had some sort of shelter. But as Homer Hoyt, who would later become the nation’s leading real estate economist, pointed out, even if the housing shortage had not driven Americans to sleep outdoors, it had forced many to move “into closer quarters.” Before the war, he wrote, “there were always the unoccupied ‘marginal’ houses, the dark spots that were seldom if ever rented, the extra bed-room for guests, the inside hotel rooms for which people seldom registered, the cheap lodging houses that were never filled to capacity.” But nowadays the housing shortage “has forced families to accept the dark apartments they formerly passed by with disdain; lack of accommodations compels the late-comer to sleep in the parlor or in a boiler room; some families give up their ‘extra’ rooms to roomers, while other families dispose of their homes and confine themselves in small furnished quarters.”29 What was true for Americans was true for New Yorkers. Hard-pressed to find an apartment, let alone one at a reasonable rent, some New Yorkers stayed in summer bungalows at the shore or in the mountains and installed gas radiators to get through the winter. Others moved into small apartments, some of which had been carved out of large apartments, and furnished rooms. Still others found accommodations in National Guard armories, among them the 12th Regiment Armory on the Upper West Side, whose gymnasium and squad rooms were turned into dormitories. Heat and hot water were provided, as were cots, mattresses, blankets—and even breakfast. The children, wrote a reporter, waved American flags as the guardsmen went through their drills. Several churches (and synagogues) also opened their doors to desperate tenants—though, as Socialist assemblyman A. I. Shiplacoff pointed out, “churches are poor substitutes for homes.” Some New Yorkers doubled up with relatives and neighbors and stored their belongings in warehouses, most of which were full. And as the Times observed, many families who had no place to live and no place to store things had “no recourse but to depend on the hospitality of friends, who, in many cases, are already entertaining homeless guests.” Some who had no one and nowhere to turn to slept in the basements and hallways of buildings from which they had been forced to move. Most poignant of all, a few New Yorkers asked the Catholic Protectory, Hebrew Orphan Asylum, and Charity Organization Society to take in their children until they found a home for their family.30 If the war years were a bane for New York’s builders, they were a boon for its landlords. What the Lockwood Committee called “the inexorable economic laws

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of supply and demand” did more than bring residential construction to a standstill and set in motion, in the committee’s words, “a housing famine” unparalleled in the city’s history. As one real estate man put it, they also gave the landlords “the upper hand.” Indeed, they gave the landlords the sort of leverage over the tenants they could only have dreamed about before the war. Where once the landlords had trouble filling their buildings, they now had several families applying for each apartment. Where once the landlords had to give in to the tenants’ demands that they make repairs, redecorate the apartments, and even, said one real estate man, provide “glass domes and fancy chandeliers,” they could now brush them aside. Where once the landlords had to hold down (or even reduce) the rent—and more often than not give the tenants concessions of one, two, or three months—they could now set the rent, as a lawyer for a Bronx landlord put it, “at any rate [they] saw fit.” If current tenants objected to a rent hike, they were free to leave, the landlords said. And if prospective tenants thought the rent was too high, they could look elsewhere. “If these people think I am asking too much,” a Queens landlord said about his tenants in October 1919, “let them move out tomorrow and before nightfall I will have the apartments rented.”31 Many landlords held the view that the housing shortage gave them an opportunity that was highly unlikely to come again anytime soon. As one who had just raised the rent on his apartments 90 percent told an unhappy tenant of ten years, he wanted “market value” for his property. “Why,” he said, “should we ask [for] a $500 raise when we can get $1,500?” Why indeed? A substantial rent hike generated much needed additional revenue to help the landlords cover the soaring costs of maintenance and repairs, make up for the lean years before the war, and earn a reasonable return on their investments, something that many of them had been unable to do for some time. A substantial rent hike also raised property values. For every increase of $1,000 in the rent roll, the value of an apartment house went up $10,000, pointed out Nathan Hirsch. Take the case of a typical five-story walk-up with four apartments to a floor, each of which rented for $25 to 30 a month. A rent hike of $5 a month would boost the rent roll by $1,200 a year and thereby raise the value of the property by $12,000—or more than one-third the cost of construction. This was no small consideration at a time of rampant speculation in residential real estate—a time when even Brownsville, a largely Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn that was described by the well-known radical Scott Nearing as “a Socialistic oasis in a desert of capitalism,” had a busy curbside exchange where, wrote one reporter, as many as three and four hundred landlords and brokers, “bearded and shaven, young and old,” bought and sold houses and lots.32 Notwithstanding the housing shortage, a few landlords were hard-pressed to raise the rent. Ironically, many of them were owners of expensive apartment houses on Park Avenue, Riverside Drive, and other fashionable streets. In an effort to fill their buildings in 1917 and 1918, these landlords had offered their well-to-do tenants a reasonable rent if they would sign a long-term lease, often for three years and sometimes for as long as five. But a reasonable rent in 1917 and 1918 was way below

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the market rent in 1919 and 1920. Some landlords tried to find a way out of this bind. Consider the story of the Langhorne, a posh building on Riverside Drive in Upper Manhattan whose forty-eight tenants had long-term leases. In an arrangement that reeked of collusion, the owner, the Langhorne Construction Company, allowed the mortgagee to foreclose on the property. The tenants were assured that the foreclosure would not affect them. But as soon as the property was sold, the new owner, the Bergmill Holding Company, notified the tenants that their leases were void. If they wanted to stay, they would have to sign a new lease, which called for rent hikes of 45 to 69 percent. The tenants, most of whom were prominent businessmen, professionals, and academics, formed a committee, hired counsel, asked the courts to issue a stay, and called on the state and local authorities to investigate. At issue, said Lloyd Willis—chair of the tenants committee, once secretary to former governor Charles S. Whitman, and now assistant to the president of United Picture Theaters of America—was whether landlords could repudiate leases and raise rents by transferring property. In the face of this resistance, the Bergmill Holding Company backed down. But other landlords in the same position waited for the leases to expire and then demanded huge rent hikes—in one case as much as 92 percent, in another a whopping 140 percent.33 Even among the well-to-do, long-term leases were far from common. In high-class buildings like the “Tomahawk,” most ran from October 1 of one year to September 30 of the next. Among the working class written leases of any duration were the exceptions. In other words, the great majority of New Yorkers were either monthly tenants or month-to-month tenants. As one legal authority explained, a monthly tenancy was “a definite hiring,” one that automatically expired at the end of the month, but could be renewed if the tenant “held over” (or stayed put)—in which case another monthly tenancy was created under the same terms. A month-to-month tenancy was “an indefinite hiring,” one that had no expiration date, only a requirement that the tenant pay the rent each month. As Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg pointed out, it was often very hard to determine whether a given tenancy was monthly or month-to-month. But down through the early twentieth century it did not make much difference. Under common law, an oral agreement, which was what most New Yorkers had with their landlords, had the same legal status as a written lease. And under an old statute that had been reenacted in 1896, a lease that did not specify the duration of the tenancy was deemed to expire on May 1. Hence a tenant could challenge a landlord who asked for an increase on October 1 on the grounds that he had an oral agreement that fixed the rent until April 30.34 In April 1918, however, the state legislature enacted what was known as the Ottinger Law, which was named after its sponsor, Senator Albert E. Ottinger of Manhattan (now remembered, if at all, as the Republican candidate for governor who lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1928). The original bill, which was strongly supported by the real estate industry, was designed to deal with landlord-tenant disputes in cases where there was no written lease. The disputes usually arose when a landlord moved to take back an apartment or raise the rent and the tenant claimed

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that his actions were in violation of an oral agreement. Even if the landlord believed the claim was fraudulent, he was often reluctant to bring his case before a jury made up largely of tenants. But by a process that is more than a little murky, what emerged out of the legislative hopper as the Ottinger Law was not a minor change in the Statute of Frauds but a major amendment to the Real Property Code—an amendment, said one of the bill’s staunchest opponents, that broke with three hundred years of common law. It provided that henceforth all agreements between landlords and tenants in New York City would expire at the end of one month unless otherwise specified in writing, signed by both parties, and filed with the county clerk. Its backers may have been well-intentioned, said Judge Spiegelberg, but the results were disastrous. By virtually nullifying oral agreements, the Ottinger Law “gave landlords an opportunity to make successive raises, unhampered by promises that tenants could remain for one year [at the same rent].”35 When the landlords raised the rent, there was not much the tenants could do. “We are not able to pay another increase,” complained one, “but the word if you don’t pay is ‘Get out!’ ” Yet where would the tenants find another decent apartment at a reasonable rent? His tenants might not want to move, said a Bronx landlord, but “I can make [them] get out if I want to.” All he had to do was institute summary proceedings. It is true that the state legislature adopted some measures to relieve the plight of New York City’s tenants in 1919. It required that instead of five day’s notice the landlord had to give a monthly tenant twenty days’ notice and a monthto-month tenant thirty days’ notice. It also empowered the municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to twenty days, provided that the tenant deposited the old rent with the court, which would then turn it over to the landlord. But these measures did not stop the proceedings; they only delayed them. Once the stay expired, the judges had no choice but to issue a warrant authorizing a city marshal to oust the tenant. Many judges were highly sympathetic to the tenants. But “our hands are tied,” said one. The law gives us “no discretion,” said another. Judge Harry Robitzek, whose landlord had raised the rent on his apartment in the Bronx from $600 a year to $660 in May 1919, was especially outspoken. In dealing with rapacious landlords, he told the Senate and Assembly committees on cities, “We have tried everything by way of persuasion. We have done it by duress. We have threatened them with every possible means, but of course we haven’t the power to do these things.”36 Although most landlords were well aware that the housing shortage offered them a splendid opportunity, some were disinclined to seize it. A celebrated case in point was Max Dick, an orthodox Jew who owned a large tenement house at Rivington Street and First Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Dick was a highly atypical landlord. He and his family lived in the building, which he had owned for nineteen years. He also doted on his Jewish tenants’ many children, the little Esthers, Ruths, Benjamins, and Levis. He gave the parents a gift every time a child was born and, wrote a Call reporter, prizes—“substantial ones”—for “a pair of deuces [meaning twins] and for every ninth child, if it is a boy.” Before Passover, Dick saw to it that each apartment was cleaned and painted or repapered. Above all, Dick did not raise

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the rent. As he told the reporter, “I have been poor myself and I know what it is to struggle with family bills. It would break my heart to have men coming to me as I know they do to some other landlords and beg me not to raise the rent.” “Where could you find another such landlord?” asked a tenant who overheard the conversation. When the tenants learned Dick was not going to raise the rent in the spring of 1919, they held a party at which everyone shook his hand “and told him how happy they were to live with him.” One tenant even painted a verse on Dick’s door that read, “He is the greatest landlord in New York town, we say, / Because he doesn’t raise the rents from day to day.”37 The situation was much the same in the outer boroughs. Not all landlords “are rapacious,” conceded Henry O. Falk, an attorney for the Brownsville Tenants Union. “There are a few who have refused to raise their rents.” To show their appreciation of one such landlord, his tenants hung a sign on the front of the building that read, “We honor our landlord. He has not raised his rents in six months.” Another such landlord was Peter Larsen, a native of Denmark who had been shipwrecked near Boston, where he lived for five years before moving to Brooklyn. There he built apartment houses and single-family homes and earned a reputation as a highly compassionate landlord. When told that one of his tenants paid very little for his apartment, Larsen responded, “I know it, but they have just had twins in the family and they have enough expenses without [my] raising their rent.” Asked by the Bronx Home News, “Have you a fair landlord?” a tenant who lived in an apartment house on Eagle Avenue replied that his landlord, J. Guthiel, had raised the rent only once in the last five years—and then very little. And he “was always ready to make the needed improvements in my flat.” J. Hoble, the owner of an apartment house on Jackson Avenue, had asked for a rent increase of only one dollar in four years, said one of his tenants. He was “the best and finest landlord in the Bronx.” Huebner & Escher, a firm that owned an apartment house in the south Bronx, had raised the rents “but very, very little,” said one of its tenants. “Even the agent, Mr. Ulfeld, who collects the rents, calls with a smile and asks if we are ready for him,” she added. “If we are not he leaves with a smile and calls a week later.”38 But as Falk pointed out, such landlords were “few and far between.” The great majority raised the rents, often by a lot and usually more than once. Referring to a typical landlord from Brownsville, a Call reporter wrote in late 1918, “He took the attitude that everybody was raising the rents, and that he would be a fool not to take advantage of the situation.” “ ‘Maybe after the war I will have to take [a meager] $12 for these rooms,’ he said, ‘so why shouldn’t I get all I can now?’ ” After the enactment of the Ottinger Law, the landlords were especially tough on working-class New Yorkers, most of whom did not have a written lease. In what were hardly judicious remarks, Aaron J. Levy, presiding judge of the city’s municipal courts, told a state commission that the monthly tenants “were being jacked every moment by [the] landlords, who sought their blood. They were jacked and jacked, and then when there could be no more jacking, there was a transfer of the property to some near relative,—mother in law, sister in law, brother in law, and then new jacking

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occurred.” It was “a case,” said Judge Jacob S. Strahl, one of Levy’s colleagues, “of the in-laws becoming outlaws at the expense of the community.” By raising the rent, the landlords not only increased their income, but also boosted the value of the property. Many landlords who had barely gotten through the lean years before the war now found they had a “gold mine” on their hands, wrote Edith Elmer Wood, one of the country’s foremost authorities on housing. Concerned that “this happy condition would not last,” they opted to sell while the market for apartment houses was still very strong.39 Sometimes they sold to other landlords, many of whom viewed the property as a long-term investment and managed it accordingly. More often, however, they sold to speculators, most of whom, wrote the Lockwood Committee, “have never heretofore concerned themselves with housing and who have never constructed a building.” The speculators hoped to capitalize on the rising property values. Operating on a shoestring, loaded down with first, second, third, and even fourth mortgages, they had no interest in managing the property, much less in spending money on upkeep and repairs; they wanted only to sell it for as much as possible as soon as possible. Once they took possession, they raised the rents, not so much to generate income as to drive up property values. If all went well, they turned the building over at a profit in months, weeks, days, even hours. Said Albert E. Kleinert, Brooklyn’s superintendent of buildings since 1918, “They [the speculators] are now selling property between twelve and one o’clock and then at two o’clock they notify their tenants that the rent will be raised, and then when they show an income gain on paper, they sell again.” More often than not, the new owners repeated the process. At times the turnover was so rapid, wrote Wood, that “neither the tenant nor the Tenement House Department had a chance to locate the new owner before he was gone.” But not before he raised the rent—and not before he and other speculators “choke the last dollar out of the tenant,” said the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering.40 Many other landlords opted to hold on to their buildings, but instead of managing them (or hiring an agent to do so) leased them to someone else. The lessees (or, as they were disparagingly referred to, “leasters” or “cockroach” landlords) rented the building, managed the property, sublet the units, and collected the rent. Their profits came from charging the tenants more than it cost to lease and run the building. This arrangement nicely served the wealthy, who, said one New Yorker, “wanted a steady income without very much bother.” It also enabled many first- and second-generation immigrants who lacked the capital to build or buy a tenement house to get a toehold in the real estate business. During the postwar years this arrangement worked very much against the tenants. As property values soared, the landlords raised the price of the leases. At the same time the cost of living climbed, driving up the lessees’ operating expenses. To make a profit, the lessees saw no alternative but to raise rents, often more than once, and reduce costs, usually by putting off routine maintenance and necessary repairs. In some instances they even threatened to cut off the heat, light, water, and elevator service to get rid

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of tenants whose only fault was that they occupied their apartment under a longterm lease at what was now a below-market rent. As soon as the lessees take possession, wrote Judge John R. Davies, they “start in to milk the property.” The “leasters,” said the Lockwood Committee, “never ‘sowed[,]’ rarely repaired[,] always ‘reaped.’ ”41 Judge Robitzek, who presided over a great many landlord-tenant disputes, was especially critical of the lessees. They were engaged, he said, in “pure and simple gouging”—“a deliberate attempt to squeeze out of the tenants of the Bronx the last cent in rents.” Judge Strahl was especially incensed by the speculators. These “rent hogs,” as he called them, were “gambling in real estate” at the expense of the tenants of Brownsville and Williamsburg. State Senator Henry G. Schackno lambasted the landlords for “jabbing” the tenants every two or three months. “There is not such a thing as an honest landlord in the city of New York,” he told his fellow legislators. Spokesmen for the real estate industry took strong exception to these attacks. According to Morris Morganstern, their members were not “hogs,” much less “sharks,” as Judge Levy called them, just businessmen who wanted market value for their property. Many were also recovering from the prewar period, when they were lucky if they earned 3 percent on their equity. “The landlord has got to get that back,” said Stewart Browne, president of the United Real Estate Owners Association, one of the industry’s major lobbying groups. Not in one year, not even in two years. But at some point “he ought to get it back.” Yet as Browne well knew, the only way for the landlords to get it back was to raise the rent—and, given the rampant postwar inflation, to raise it well above prewar levels. And when they did, they laid themselves open to charges that they were gouging the tenants.42 Some landlords raised the rents before the war was over. But most tenants bore up with it, partly because the rents had not yet gone up very much—and, it was widely assumed, would go down before long—and partly because it seemed the patriotic thing to do. As Dr. Irving D. Steinhardt, chair of the New York Physicians Association’s Committee on Legislation, told Governor Smith, when the cost of living soared during the war, “we all just did what every loyal American should have done, ‘Grin and bear it.’ ” But when the war came to an end and the rents continued to go up, many tenants ran out of patience. Along with judges, legislators, clergymen, and social workers, they charged that the landlords were raising the rents far too much. They pointed to apartments whose rents had gone up 70 percent—and higher. As one tenant, whose rent had just been raised 90 percent, wrote the New York Times, “It is reasonable to expect [a] 25 to 30 per cent. raise, but 90 per cent. is going too far.” For some landlords, however, 90 percent was not enough; they asked for rent hikes of 100 percent or more. In what was regarded as a particularly egregious case of gouging, Guyon L. C. Earle raised the rents 70 to 200 percent in the Garden Apartments, which was located in Forest Hills Gardens, a fashionable section of Queens. Under the new schedule a one-room apartment would run from $90 to $110 a month and a four-room apartment as much as $3,000 a year, which was unheard of anywhere except in the most expensive Manhattan neighborhoods.

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Dismissing protests by the tenants, most of whom were businessmen and professionals, Earle said he needed the additional money to build two new apartment houses nearby.43 As well as too much, the landlords were raising the rents too often, charged the tenants and their sympathizers. They pointed to apartments whose rents had gone up three, four, and even five times in less than a year. One tenant who was too frightened to use his name complained that his landlord had raised the rent for a small four-room apartment three times in four months in mid-1918. From $18.50 in June, it went up $3.00 in July, $2.50 in August, and $18.00 in September. After raising the rent more than 125 percent, the landlord warned, “This is only the beginning.” Helen E. Martin, a social worker and president of the Bronx Civic Club, cited a six-room cold-water flat in the Bronx whose rent had been raised twice in 1918, twice in 1919, and three times in 1920. Judge Levy spoke angrily of the “shark[s]” in Brownsville and Williamsburg, one of whom raised the rent eight times in eight months. And Judge Robitzek told state legislators how one landlord, who “could not even speak the language,” conspired with relatives to turn a Bronx apartment house over eight times in eight months and raise the rent each time. Robitzek was deeply troubled by the plight of Harry Goldman and Sadie Kaplan, a young couple from the Bronx who had rented an apartment on East 172nd Street for $26 a month shortly after their wedding. As soon as they settled in the landlord, a lessee named Morris Feldman informed them that he had sold his lease, a common practice at the time. The new lessee raised the rent to $29. Rather than move, the couple paid the increase, whereupon he notified them that the rent would henceforth be $36. When they refused to pay, he took them to court. The lessee refused to rescind the hike but, under pressure from Robitzek, agreed to give the couple a one-year lease.44 Landlords and other real estate men insisted that these charges were largely groundless. They conceded that there were isolated cases of gouging, which were usually attributed to lessees and speculators. As Clarence H. Kelsey, president of Title Guaranty & Trust Company, said, “There are hogs everywhere.” But most landlords, they argued, did not raise rents by more than what was needed to keep up with the rising costs of operations. It was wrong, wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, to assume that “every time rents go up the landlords pocket the increase.” They could not be expected to rent apartments at prewar prices any more than shopkeepers could be expected to sell fifteen-dollar shoes for seven dollars, said a Washington Heights landlord. “It is only fair,” noted a Brooklyn real estate man, “that they should be allowed to take advantage of the present market to even up on [the] lean [prewar] period.” Spokesmen for the real estate industry also pointed out that since the war, rents in New York had gone up less than the cost of living. Between December 1914 and June 1920, during which time the cost of housing rose 32 percent, the cost of food soared 105 percent, the cost of furniture and furnishings 205 percent, and the cost of clothing 240 percent. These spokesmen also pointed out that since the war, rents had increased no more in New York than in most cities—and much less, for example, than in Cleveland, Detroit, and Seattle.45

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These figures were more than a little misleading. Rents in New York rose very slowly during the war, much more slowly than the cost of living. But after the war they went up much faster, roughly fifteen times as fast as the cost of food, four times as fast as the cost of clothing, and six times as fast as the cost of furniture and furnishings. During the war rents also rose more slowly in New York than in Detroit and other centers of war-related production. But though they went up steadily in most other cities after the war, they went up even more rapidly in New York—from 6 percent above 1914 levels in late 1918 to 32 percent above them in mid-1920. Despite what real estate men claimed, most landlords raised the rents a good deal (though rarely as much as 100 percent), and raised them more than once (though seldom as often as every month for eight months). Many landlords were forced to raise the rents because of the soaring costs of labor and materials. Yet despite the urging of Stewart Browne and other real estate men, some landlords were determined to raise the rents to a point where they could recoup the losses from the prewar period in a year or two. Also, as rents rose, values soared—so much so that when property was sold or leased it was not long before even the least rapacious of the new owners or lessees gave in to the temptation to increase the rent.46 Much like the housing shortage, the rent hikes were a citywide phenomenon. They affected all five boroughs, all ethnic and racial groups, and, in what came as something of a surprise, all social classes, even the well-to-do. As the Times reported in early 1919, the rent hikes were generating “a storm of protest not only in the tendollar-a-room [tenement] houses, but in the high class apartments in the Park Avenue section, where the rents run as high as $800 and $900 a room.” Take the case of Maurice Bandler, who rented an apartment on Park Avenue and 92nd Street in 1915 for three years at $2,400 a year. In 1918 the landlord, Orinoco Realty Company, offered him a two-year lease at the same rent, which he accepted. Shortly before the lease expired, however, Orinoco notified him that effective October 1, 1920, the rent would be $5,750. The situation was much the same across town. In 1919 the owner of the Osborne, an expensive apartment house on Seventh Avenue and 57th Street, notified C. V. Van Anda, managing editor of the Times, that he intended to raise the rent from $2,500 a year to $2,700. Van Anda was willing to pay the additional $200. But before the agreement was signed, Walter J. Salmon took a twenty-one-year lease on the building and raised Van Anda’s rent to $5,000. Less than a year later Frederick B. Zittel, the agent for Sylvan Mortgage Company, owner of the Bretton Court, a fashionable building on West 100th Street, told Albert M. Stadler, who was in the business of buying old breweries, dismantling them and then selling the machinery, that when the two-year lease expired on the seven-room apartment he shared with his daughter and grandson the rent would be raised from $1,300 a year to $2,500.47 As hard as it was for the well-to-do, whose rents in most cases could be raised only once every two or three years, it was much harder for the less well off, the vast majority of whom did not have written leases and, under the Ottinger Law, were monthly tenants. Before the war it was common for these tenants to get very nervous at the end of the month, wrote Marie Ganz, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia who

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grew up in two tiny rooms on the Lower East Side with her parents, brother, and a boarder. (Ganz later became a well-known anarchist who once threatened to shoot John D. Rockefeller, Jr., “down like a dog.”) “A knock at the door [on the first of the month] would be followed by a dreadful silence. Father and mother would exchange furtive, anxious glances, and would remain glued to their chairs as if paralysed [sic] with fear. What messenger of evil tidings might be standing behind the closed door? It might be a collector with a long-outstanding bill, or, most dreadful of all, the landlord.” A man of few words, he said only “De Rent.” More often than not, her parents did not have the money. After the war, however, the tenants got even more nervous at the end of the month. A knock at the door announcing the arrival of the landlord, his agent, or perhaps the janitor, meant not only that the rent was due, but also that it might well be raised. As a woman from nearby Yonkers said, “I dread the first of the month, when that knock on the door comes. It means that I am going to get abused or I am going to be asked for more money.” She was not alone, according to Don Holbrook, an employee of the New York Legislative Bill Drafting Commission. Writing to Governor Smith early in 1920, he said, “Thousands of families in the state look forward to the next advance in rents with terror; to them it will be absolutely as unpopular as the unbidden presence of the ‘Grim Reaper’ at the wedding feast, and just as appropriate.”48

2 Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Rather than notify the tenants in person (or send an agent to notify them), many landlords announced the rent hikes by mail. “I want to advise you,” Edward W. Browning wrote one of his tenants on West 119th Street, “that if you desire to remain a monthly tenant after January 31st, the rental of your apartment will be $60.00 per month instead of $41.00 per month as heretofore.” Some landlords made little or no effort to justify the increase. “We believe,” the Usona Construction Company told a tenant on East 163rd Street in the Bronx, “that existing conditions are so fully understood that any explanation or comment on our part is unnecessary.” Others pointed out that the rent hikes were needed to cover the soaring costs of operations, pay for repairs and improvements, and, as one agent said, provide “a moderate return on the investment.” As one tenant wrote, a Manhattan landlord even offered “a mild apology” for raising the rent more than 100 percent. Still, no matter how the notices were phrased, most tenants saw them for what they were— an ultimatum. As several of them put it, the message was clear: “if you don’t want to pay the increased rent, you can get out.” And if they did not get out, the landlord would force them out.1 If most landlords hoped that the tenants would find the rent hikes, in Browning’s words, “just and fair,” they were disappointed. Although most New Yorkers prospered during the war and for a short time afterward, when the growing demand for goods and services drove unemployment down and wages up, they deeply resented the rent hikes. Even the well-to-do, many of whom had the wherewithal to pay what most working-class New Yorkers would have considered exorbitant rents, were incensed by the amount of the increase. Take the cases of Albert M. Stadler and C. V. Van Anda. When Frederick B. Zittel, the Sylvan Mortgage Company’s agent, notified Stadler that the rent would be raised from $1,300 to $2,500 after his two-year lease expired on September 30, 1920, Stadler replied, “ ‘Mr. Zittel, this is an outrageous

40

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increase. Why, that is nearly 100 p[er] c[ent].’ ” When Walter J. Salmon, the lessee who acquired the Osborne in 1919, offered to renew Van Anda’s lease for $5,000 a year, Van Anda turned him down. He even stood firm when Salmon offered him a long-term lease at $3,500 a year, a substantial but not outlandish increase, on the grounds that Salmon was bound by an oral agreement he had made with the owner according to which the rent would be raised to only $2,700.2 As former judge William M. K. Olcott, a spokesman for several landlords in the city’s fashionable neighborhoods, told a group of state legislators, there was little reason to be concerned about the well-being of the well-to-do. Asked about the case of former Fire Commissioner Robert Adamson, who complained that his rent had been raised from $2,000 to $5,500 a year, Olcott said that any tenant who could afford to pay $1,500 a year did not need protection from his landlord. Although some legislators disagreed, they all knew that few tenants paid anything like $1,500 a year. Indeed, few earned $1,500 a year, and for many with stable, if not high paying jobs, a rent hike of five to ten dollars a month, and sometimes even less, made it hard to keep up with the rising cost of living. An employee of the Bronx County Auditor’s Office told the Lockwood Committee that she had recently received a raise of $100 a year, but as soon as the landlord heard of it, “her rent went up to $120.” Another tenant whose rent was raised from $40 to $65 in 1918 (and was about to be raised to $70) wrote Governor Alfred E. Smith, “My entire increase in salary is more than absorbed by the increase in house rents and not one cent remains to meet the increased costs of food, fuel, clothing or medical services.” A Bronx housewife complained that her three children worked “day in and day out” to make ends meet, only to see much of their earnings go the landlord. “These bloodsucking landlords ought not to be allowed to turn people’s blood . . . into gold & automobiles,” she told the governor.3 For many other New Yorkers, especially those who had trouble finding steady work and earned a pittance when they did, a rent hike of as little as one or two dollars a month made it very hard to feed the family. Despite the old rule of thumb, “not more than one day’s pay for one week’s rent,” many of these people were already spending a quarter or more of their income on housing. A Brooklyn housewife whose husband earned $20 a week driving a laundry truck told a reporter that she used to pay $15 a month in rent, but since the United States entered the war, the landlord had repeatedly raised the rent, each time by fifty cents. By cutting back on food, she had paid one raise after another, but now that the rent was up to $19 a month, there was not enough money left to feed her family. Another tenant whose husband earned only $19 a week wrote Governor Smith that her rent had been raised from $17 to $20 a month and that as a result she could afford to cook only one meal a day. Unless the rent is reduced, “we will starve.” And another woman, who spoke for sixty tenants on East 86th Street whose rents had been raised from $17 to $23 a month, told a reporter, “Do you realize we are starving right now? We only eat once a day, and not even a piece of meat.” Added a Brooklyn tenant who spoke for a group of knitters, waiters, drivers, and vegetable dealers whose rent had been raised

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from $15 to $16 and then $18 a month, “We can’t pay it.” Told by the landlord to feed the children less milk and fewer eggs, she said, “Why should we be asked to take bread out of our children’s mouths so that we can give more money to the landlord?”4 To most New Yorkers, it was outrageous to deny their families food in order to pay rent. After the passage of the Ottinger Law, by which the great majority of them were turned into monthly tenants, it seemed pointless as well. Even if they somehow came up with the money, they had no assurance that the landlord would not raise the rent the next month and the month after. Indeed, said a group of Upper Manhattan tenants, among them firemen, policemen, and letter carriers, they were willing to pay a rent hike of $19.50 a month if the landlord assured them he would not raise the rent again for a year. But such assurances were hard to get—and often not worth much. As a Bronx tenant pointed out in April 1919, “We [he and the other tenants] had an agreement with the old landlord [who had recently raised the rent] that we should not be raised again until after October, 1919. But in comes a new lessee with a notice that rents will go up from $4 to $6 on each apartment. We show our agreement, but they look upon it as a mere scrap of paper.” Other tenants told similar stories. It was, they said, all too common for landlords to break their promises that they would not raise the rent in the near future or that in return for a rent increase they would improve service and make much-needed repairs. The tenants could protest, but it was risky. When the tenants of a three-story tenement house in Brownsville sent a complaint to the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, the landlord responded, “Well, just for that I’ll put them out.” “Out they go,” said his wife, “all of them. If they don’t want to pay $18 I’ll make it $20.”5 The rent hikes left most tenants in a bind. At a time when the cost of just about everything was rising sharply, they could “stint on food,” as Justice Frederick J. Spiegelberg put it. They could buy cheap cuts of meat and even go without it a few days a week. They could put off buying new coats and dresses and, in the words of Governor Smith, who knew from his childhood on the Lower East Side what it was like to grow up in poverty, make “old clothes go a little further.” They could do without newspapers and go to the movies once a month instead of once a week—or not at all. But as Albert M. Stadler’s daughter said when he told her he could not afford to pay $2,500 a year for their apartment in the Bretton Court, “Well, we must have a place to go in October. We must have a roof over our heads.” And for a roof over their heads the tenants had to pay all the rent, not just some of it, and pay it when it was due, not when it was convenient. As Smith said, “Nothing is more certain in life than rent day, and when it comes around we must pay.” On occasion, some landlords gave the tenants extra time. As Marie Ganz remembered, her parents’ landlord often left the apartment without the rent, only to return for it a few days later. In the case of a good tenant who was out of work, some landlords let him fall behind for a few months.6 But this was not something the tenants could count on. And during the war and postwar years it was not clear what else they could count on. For the strategies that New Yorkers had developed to deal

Of these strategies, moving to a cheaper apartment—what historian Elizabeth Blackmar calls “voting with [their] feet”—was probably the most widespread. This strategy had long been employed, especially by working-class New Yorkers, who often found themselves hard-pressed to pay the rent when the breadwinner (or breadwinners) lost a job, a grim but routine byproduct of New York’s highly seasonal labor market, or got sick or died. A case in point was the future tenant activist Rose Schneiderman, whose orthodox Jewish parents migrated from Poland to America in 1890, when Rose, the eldest of four children, was eight. The Schneidermans moved into a tenement house on the Lower East Side, where her father worked as a tailor. Two years later he died, leaving the family destitute. Rose’s mother coped as best she could. She took in sewing and, following a widespread practice, sublet space to a lodger, another tailor who lived and worked in the living room. At times she even sent the children to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and another Jewish orphanage. And she moved repeatedly, in one year as many as three or four times. “It was easier for the poor to move than to pay rent,” Schneiderman wrote later. “When you moved into a new place, you always paid a month’s rent and got a concession of a month or six weeks. After that was all used up, if you had the money to pay the next month’s rent you stayed on. If not, you moved again.”7 Many of New York’s first- and second-generation immigrants were ambivalent about moving, especially moving out of the neighborhood. As Robert W. de Forest, a leading tenement house reformer, said in 1906, most newcomers wanted to live near their workplaces, where, more often than not, the only housing available was in squalid old-law tenements. Even more disheartening, he went on, many preferred to stay in the ghettos even when their factories moved to New Jersey, where for the same or less money they could have rented more spacious quarters with better sanitary facilities. This de Forest attributed to a “social instinct,” a desire to live near friends and to enjoy “the social excitement” of city life. Said Henry Roskolenko, a Jewish immigrant from the Lower East Side, “We wanted to be among our own people, our own language, our own religion, to be ourselves down to our last Jewish roots.” If it was important for Jews to live near the synagogues and kosher butchers, it was just as important for Catholics to live near the churches and parochial schools. Whether from Ireland or Italy, Russia or Poland, most newcomers felt at home in the ghettos—or as much at home as anywhere in their adoptive country. To move to a better or cheaper apartment in another neighborhood made little sense to them if it meant severing the ties that gave meaning to their lives.8 Despite this ambivalence, many newcomers were ready to move, inside the neighborhood if possible, outside it if need be. After all, they had already moved from Europe to America. And some had moved within the United States before settling in New York. They moved in bad times, as Smith’s family did after his father,

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with excessive or inopportune rent hikes—of which the most important were moving to a cheaper apartment, appealing to the landlord, and cutting back on other expenditures—were less effective now than ever.

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who had been working as a teamster, became too ill to load his wagon, took a job as a night watchman, and then died. And they moved in good times, as Smith and his wife did after his political career took off and they could afford larger quarters for their growing family. Sometimes, wrote the Times in 1873, New Yorkers moved “from choice.” When jobs were plentiful, they moved to better, if more expensive, apartments in more pleasant, if less convenient, neighborhoods—like Harlem and Washington Heights, Brownsville and Williamsburg—where fellow immigrants had already started to create businesses, social institutions, and houses of worship of their own. Other times, they moved “from necessity.” When jobs were scarce, they moved to cheaper apartments. They also moved when the landlords raised the rent or threw them out. And in the tens of thousands, they moved when their apartment houses were demolished to make way for stores, shops, and office buildings or to create space for new parks, new streets, and the approaches to the new bridges that connected Manhattan and Brooklyn. Whatever the reason, said the Times, New Yorkers move a lot, and they are not likely to stop “until they are moved to their last resting place.”9 This phenomenon was manifested in many ways, the most conspicuous of which was Moving Day. It went back at least as far as the early nineteenth century. As one observer wrote in 1832, New York City was “in an uproar for several days before and after the 1st of May,” when tens of thousands of residents moved from one house to another. Overloaded with sofas, chairs, sideboards, and other household items, the many carts and barrows left “the sidewalks almost impassable.” (According to historian Perry R. Duis, Moving Day was also “an annual ritual” in Chicago, where in the 1870s about one-third of all families changed residences each year.) Shortly after the turn of the century, October 1 gradually supplanted May 1 as Moving Day—first in Manhattan and later in Brooklyn. It also changed in another way. It became, wrote a Times reporter in 1905, “an exact science.” Gone were the days of “the rickety, green-painted express wagon, with a semi-detached tin sign giving notice that the man who owned it was licensed to smash the best bedroom set by letting it roll down three flights of stairs.” “It costs twice as much now to move,” said one of the industry’s leading figures, “but the job is managed with infinitely less trouble and damage.”10 As late as September 1917 New Yorkers were still inclined, wrote the Call, to “give up their apartments and search for something more reasonable, rather than pay the new rental.” But as the housing shortage grew worse in 1918 and 1919, many began to have second thoughts. They could always move out of their apartment, but as the vacancy rate fell to record levels, where would they find a cheaper apartment? Indeed, as landlords put away their “To Let” signs and brokers stopped keeping waiting lists, how would they find one? Some tenants tried, but often to no avail. A woman from the South Bronx, five children “tugging at her apron,” told a court clerk in late 1919 that her rent had been raised six times in two years, from $15 to $30 a month. As a widow who earned only $15 a week, she had no choice but to move into a cheaper apartment. But there were none available, she said. “I have

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been to more than two hundred places in a week, and everywhere I looked I found some one had beat me to it.” Albert M. Stadler, who made a good deal more than $15 a week, could not find a suitable apartment for anything like what he had been paying at the Bretton Court. “I looked everywhere [in the neighborhood],” he said. “There were plenty of apartments on the lower East Side” for those tenants “who did not demand hot water, steam heat or a bath,” one real estate broker pointed out. But few New Yorkers were willing to move into an apartment that, in the Sun’s words, was “so much worse than the one [they] have been living in”—and probably not that much less expensive.11 Even a tenant who was lucky enough to find a new apartment at a reasonable rent was well aware that his troubles were far from over. To begin with, he had to join in what the Brooklyn Standard Union called “the mad scramble for [moving] vans.” Long before Moving Day all the reputable moving companies were booked solid for the four or five days around the first of the month. They were compelled to turn away business that they could easily have handled any other time of year, said Charles Morris, secretary of the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse Company. “No amount of money could hire a regular van yesterday,” wrote the Times on Moving Day 1919. Attempting to capitalize on the shortage of vans, less reputable movers— what industry leaders referred to as “fly by night” movers—offered their services. So did movers from as far away as New Rochelle, White Plains, and Bridgeport. But there were not enough vans—and not enough of what the Sun called “the supermen who juggle pianos.” Come Moving Day, wrote the Tribune, “Sedans, limousines, Ford cars and trailers, horse-drawn carts and trucks—in fact, anything on wheels[—]is being used to make up for the shortage of vans.” The wealthy pressed touring cars “into service,” wrote the Times. The poor relied on pushcarts. “Some [Lower] East Side residents even tried to move on crosstown buses,” said the Sun.12 Moving had other serious drawbacks. One was that it was expensive. The day has passed, wrote the Herald in 1919, “when one could barter with half a dozen moving men at the same time to get the lowest possible rates. Now one has to approach the moving man on bended knee”—and with a full wallet. Although moving rates were set by the city, the ordinance had a loophole that allowed the movers to ask whatever they wanted. By late 1919 the reputable movers charged $10 an hour for a van and driver, plus 50 cents an hour for each member of the crew. (They also asked $2.00 to pack each barrel, $1.00 to pack each box, as well as $1.50 extra for moving a piano and 50 cents more for each flight of stairs.) The “fly by night” movers charged $15 to 25 an hour. A typical job, which started as soon as the van left the garage or stable, might take three or four hours—much longer if the van got stuck in traffic or was forced to wait at the curb while other movers carried furniture in and out of the apartment house. One van had to wait so long, wrote the Tribune, that the crew “stretched themselves out on a makeshift bed and fell asleep.” Given that a tenant with a four-or five-room apartment would have to hire two vans, moving would probably cost $100 or more. “There used to be a time when a tenant could move five rooms of furniture for $6 and $8,” a Brooklyn Eagle reporter said to a mover. “Yes,” he replied,

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“and there used to be a time when you could get bread for a nickel a loaf.” Robert L. Moran, president of the Board of Aldermen, had introduced an bill to close the loophole in the law and thereby reduce the high cost of moving, but it went nowhere.13 Another serious drawback of moving was that it was risky. Tenants, wrote the Times in 1919, wondered not only whether the movers would arrive on time and how long it would take them, but also “how much of the furniture would reach its destination as furniture and how much as firewood.” Who knew, said the Tribune, whether the movers would wrap the furniture in quilts and blankets or, to save time, leave these useful items “piled up on the driver’s seat”? Who knew whether a valuable piece of furniture, a family heirloom or a recent acquisition, would be “scraped beyond recognition”? The risks were especially high in the case of the “fly by night” movers, many of whom relied on inexperienced crews. Moving Day was extremely trying in 1919 because of a downpour that “lasted throughout the better part of the day,” wrote the Times. The rain fell on the many items, some expensive and others fragile, that were carried in open trucks or, in the many cases where a tenant was unable to get into his apartment on schedule, left standing in front of the building or outside the warehouse. The rain also turned the movers into “water-soaked grouches” who did “slovenly work,” wrote the Times. As a result, “Many an object d’art or a favorite armchair will go down through the days, if it survives at all, with the battle scars of the famous Oct. 1 of the year after the great war.” Indeed, remarked the Home News, “Only those who have been confronted with the alternative to move or to be gouged can realize the misery which comes about on October 1st.”14 Many tenants ran into another serious, if not wholly unexpected, problem, one that was a direct result of the housing shortage. As the Tribune wrote on October 1, 1919, “Many of the thousands who moved yesterday found the apartments they had engaged and hoped to occupy had not been vacated.” It was a case of “[being] ‘all packed up and no place to go,’ ” said the Sun. Sometimes the old tenants were unable to find a new apartment. And “in the absence of houseboats, tents or other means of shelter,” they “could not be budged.” Instead of vacating the apartment, they stayed put, knowing that even if the landlord started summary proceedings the judge would probably grant a stay, which, after the law was changed in June 1919, could be as long as twenty days. More often, the Sun pointed out, the old tenants were waiting for their movers, who might have started out late, gotten stuck in traffic, or been delayed by what the Brooklyn Standard Union referred to as “the infinitely difficult task of moving [one family] in as the other family moved out.” As the Sun explained, “Mr. and Mrs. Jones will sit on their goods on the sidewalk waiting for Mrs. Smith’s movers to come and get her out. And very possibly the reason Mrs. Smith’s movers did not come is that they are busily engaged in waiting until it is possible to get out Mr. and Mrs. Jones.” It was “a vicious circle,” wrote the Sun, though the moving men, who are getting $10 or more an hour a van, are generally able “to bear up under it.”15 The many tenants who could not get into their new apartments had to find a place to store their household goods. Since they could not move their belongings

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back to their old apartment, which was now occupied by another family, they had to store them in a warehouse. But as Nathan Hirsch, chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, pointed out, the storage warehouses were “just about chockablock.” Some New Yorkers had already stored their goods because they had no place to live, said William A. Schiffman, manager of the Eagle Warehouse and Storage Company. Others had been forced to double up with friends or relatives, which meant, wrote the Sun, “that one or another [family] must put part of their furniture in storage.” Still others had moved into smaller apartments (or furnished rooms) and were storing their goods until the housing shortage was over. In twenty-five years, said Schiffman, “he had never seen such a rush for storage rooms.” Unless the new tenants could persuade the old ones to allow them to put their furniture in one of the rooms, which some were willing to do, they had only two options. They could leave their stuff in the hallways or the cellar of the apartment house, a poor solution at best. Or, if they could afford to, they could take it to the suburbs or even farther out of town, where, said the Sun, “empty storerooms, barns and other spaces are being filled with the overflow of furniture.”16 The tenants who could not get into their new apartments also had to find temporary housing. Although they could not move back into their old apartments, they could try to find a room (or rooms) in one of New York’s many lodging houses, boarding houses, or hotels—which is what the members of a family from Red Bank, New Jersey, did when they found that the old tenants were still living in what was now their two-bedroom apartment in Harlem. But the lodging houses and boarding houses were full. So were the hotels. The Biltmore, Plaza, and WaldorfAstoria had been booked for weeks, reported the Tribune. And many less fashionable hotels were so “jammed with persons who could not get into their apartments” that the guests were “sleeping two and three to a room.” With the hotels full, many tenants were forced to move in with their parents (or other relatives) or to double up with friends (or neighbors). And “in many flats in the poorer section of the city,” reported the Tribune, “both the old and new tenants are living together.” Very few of these tenants ended up sleeping on the streets, but as the Tribune observed in late 1919, “This year [they] count themselves as members of the elite if they have any place to which to go.”17 Although tens of thousands of families moved in the fall of 1919, many more stayed put—in large part because they had lost faith in the strategy of moving to a cheaper apartment when the landlord raised the rent. As a real estate broker who handled sixty apartment houses observed, “only six families had mentioned moving . . . and some of these changed their minds later.” Many were disheartened, wrote the Herald, by “the difficulty of finding new quarters” and, added the Sun, by the realization that after spending a good deal of time hunting for an apartment they might well have to settle for one that made them feel like “the world’s greatest failure.” Others, wrote the Sun, concluded that “the old adage to the contrary notwithstanding, it is cheaper to pay rent than to move.” It was less traumatic too. Many Bronx families, said the Home News, would rather give in to the landlord’s

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demand than “submit to the hardships of moving.” Many tenants were also aware that moving to a cheaper apartment was at best a short-term solution. As Don Holbrook pointed out, even if a tenant found a reasonably priced apartment (and survived Moving Day), he had no assurance that the new landlord would not raise the rent—and perhaps raise it over and over again. Judge Peter A. Sheil made the same point. “If you move today,” he told several tenants who appeared in his courthouse, “you will meet the same situation to-morrow.”18 As a strategy to deal with excessive or inopportune rent hikes, appealing to the landlord had long made good sense to New York’s tenants. It was less expensive and less traumatic than moving to another apartment. It was also less painful than cutting back on food and clothing. Even if the landlord refused to rescind or reduce the rent hike, the tenants were no worse off than before. What is more, the process was a familiar one. For longer than anyone could remember, landlords and tenants had bargained over the amount of the rent, the duration of the lease, and, at times when there was a glut on the market, the length of the concessions. It was not uncommon for tenants to refuse to sign or renew a lease unless the landlord agreed to redecorate the apartment and make repairs and improvements. Nor was it uncommon for the landlords to refuse to do so unless the tenants agreed to pay for it. Before World War I many landlords were more than willing to accommodate their current (and prospective) tenants. They were reluctant to spend the money necessary to remove a tenant, and they were hesitant to remove one tenant unless they were confident they would find another, which was easier said than done when apartments were plentiful. As one historian has pointed out, nothing troubled a landlord more than an empty apartment.19 But as Albert Stadler learned in the spring of 1920, it was one thing to appeal to the landlord (or his agent) and another to persuade him to rescind or reduce the rent hike. When Frederick Zittel informed Stadler that effective October 1 the rent on the seven-room apartment he shared with his daughter and grandson would be raised from $1,300 to $2,500 a year, Stadler protested that the increase was “outrageous.” Zittel replied, “Well, I cannot help it. It is the [owner’s decision].” Stadler asked whether he had another apartment at about $1,200 or $1,300. Zittel answered, “No, I haven’t a thing now.” What about around October 1? “I cannot say,” Zittel said, “and I doubt very much whether I will have anything.” When Stadler asked for time to decide, Zittel gave him ten days. Stadler tried hard to find an apartment in another building, with no success. When they met again, he offered to pay 50 percent more. “That is impossible,” Zittel declared. “You have either got to take the apartment today or else I will lease the apartment to someone else. In fact, I could rent it today.” Pointing out that at $2,500 Stadler would be paying only $30 a room per month, Zittel stressed that similar buildings in the neighborhood were charging $40 a room. Even in Washington Heights and the Bronx, walk-up apartments were renting for $25 a room. Although Zittel acknowledged that the owners were not going to do much to improve the Bretton Court, he refused to budge on the

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rent. Perhaps swayed by his daughter’s insistence that come October 1 “we must have a roof over our heads,” Stadler agreed to pay the $2,500.20 Stadler was not a typical tenant. He was well off. Even at $1,300 a year, he paid three times as much rent as most New Yorkers. By virtue of his two-year lease, he was one of the few New Yorkers who was paying the same rent in 1920 as in 1918. And aside from Zittel’s demand for a rent hike of nearly 100 percent, he was satisfied with how the owners ran the Bretton Court. But Stadler’s experience was not atypical. Although some tenants managed to persuade the landlord to rescind or reduce the rent hikes—in some cases only after they dropped their demands for repairs and improvements—most landlords held fast. A Brooklyn landlord who had recently raised the rent $3 a month (or 25 percent) and was now planning to raise it another $3 to $6 was told that the tenants were barely able to make ends meet. “I can’t worry about the tenants,” he said. “I have my own problems.” Asked if he would be willing to arbitrate if he were assured a rent high enough to net him a fair return, he replied, “There is nothing to negotiate.” A Bronx landlord who had not only raised the rent from $20 to $25 a month but also demanded one month’s rent in advance and another month’s rent as security was asked by the tenants, “Where are we to get [the money]”? “Sign or get out,” he replied. “Appealing to [these] profiteers is like appealing to the imperial German government,” Joseph E. Klein, a lawyer for the Williamsburg Tenants League, told President Woodrow Wilson.21 As Stadler learned, it did not matter that he was a good tenant—good enough that Zittel was willing to do some work on his apartment in order to make him more comfortable. Nor did it matter that he was under a physician’s care for an enlarged colon and that his daughter and grandson were dependent on him. What mattered was that New York was caught up in such an acute housing shortage that Zittel could easily rent Stadler’s apartment for $2,500 a year—and rent it right away even though the new tenant could not move in until Stadler’s lease expired in several months. What Zittel could do at the Bretton Court, other landlords could do at less expensive apartment houses in less fashionable neighborhoods—indeed at apartment houses of every kind in every neighborhood except perhaps for the worst of the old-law tenements on the Lower East Side. Said a Long Island City landlord whose tenants objected to a recent rent hike, “I have tenants from Manhattan beseeching me to rent them my apartments. If these people [the current tenants] think I am asking too much let them move out tomorrow and before nightfall I will have the apartments rented.”22 The new tenants would be so happy to have a roof over their heads that they would not insist that he redecorate the apartments, much less that he reduce the rent. If the current tenants were unwilling to vacate the apartments, the landlord would have to go to the expense of removing them. But even if the judge granted a stay, the tenants would have to pay the rent. And with so many tenants looking for a place to live, the landlord could be sure that the apartments would not be empty long. Some landlords treated an appeal from the tenants to rescind or reduce a rent hike with an arrogance that bordered on contempt. A case in point was Andrew

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O’Brien, who owned an apartment house on Webster Avenue in the Bronx (and was regarded by Captain Charles A. Goldsmith, chief mediator for the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, as “one of the worst [landlords]” he had ever dealt with). When his tenants complained about a rent hike, reported the Bronx Home News, “he insisted [that] he could do as he liked, and that no one could make him do anything he didn’t want to.” Even more arrogant was William H. Lammars, who had raised the rents of five of his thirteen tenants on Anderson Avenue in the Bronx from $23 to $45 a month or from $28 to $50 a month. When Judge Harry Robitzek asked, “How do you figure these new rentals?” Lammars’s lawyer replied, “None of your business.” It was in this spirit that another Bronx landlord who was making 25 percent on his investment declared, “What is there to stop me from making 30 per cent?” and a Manhattan landlord who had doubled the rent in the summer of 1919 told his tenants, “This is only the beginning.” When he said he needed the additional money to install steam pipes in September, the tenants pointed out that they would not be getting heat before October 15. “Never mind,” he told them, “I’ll raise you now and when I start giving heat I’ll raise you again.”23 But most landlords responded to the complaints in a more temperate—or at any rate, more circumspect—way. Rather than insist that no one had the right to call their actions into question, they urged the tenants to treat them not as “gougers,” “sharks,” and “profiteers,” but as “hard-working businessmen.” As merchants who dealt in space, they adhered to the same law as other businessmen, the law of supply and demand. All they wanted, said the head of the Bushwood Realty Company, was to get “market value” for their product. Of course rents were going up, wrote Isidor Berger, manager of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, most of whose members owned one or two old-law tenement houses on the Lower East Side. But so was everything else. “Your grocer does not sell sugar and other groceries for the same price as he did five years ago. The barber’s prices have gone up 200 per cent, and in some sections of the city, 300 per cent.” Tailors had raised their prices too. It was unfair to single out the landlords for the rising cost of living, wrote another real estate man. “Why isn’t a constant fire of protest directed against the profiteers in food, clothing, shoes and other vital commodities against whom there is only raised an occasional complaint?”24 When the landlords justified their decisions to raise the rents, they invariably stressed the rising cost of running their properties. Since the outbreak of the war, they pointed out, the price of materials had soared. They had to pay much more not only for coal, one of the largest of their expenses, but also for brooms, paint, wallpaper, fixtures, and glass, once seventy-five cents a pane, but now, with installation, nearly four dollars a pane. What was true for materials was true for labor. Wages were way up for everyone from skilled tradesmen to unskilled laborers, from elevator operators and hall boys, who were found only in expensive apartment houses, to janitors or superintendents, who were found even in cheap tenement houses. The result, said one real estate broker a little over a year after the United States entered the war, was that “everything pertaining to the maintenance and

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upkeep of property has advanced, and if the landlord asks the tenant to bear just a little of the increased cost he is accused of profiteering.” Taxes were on the rise too, a sore point with many landlords. So were interest rates. If a landlord had the misfortune to have to pay off a mortgage during or soon after the war and to have to ask the bank or insurance company for another loan, he could count on his interest rate rising from 4 percent to 5.5 or 6 percent. In light of the soaring costs of operations, many real estate men argued that what was surprising was not that rents were going up, but that they were going up so slowly.25 Even with the rent hikes, many landlords pointed out, they still had trouble paying the bills. Said the owner of a dozen apartment houses in Washington Heights who had raised the rent in the fall of 1917 and intended to raise it again in the fall of 1918, “My income from these houses do [sic] not begin to meet the expenses of maintenance.” Indeed, remarked a real estate broker in mid-1918, “owners are lucky nowadays if they are able to keep their properties going at all.” If they bowed to pressure to rescind or even reduce the hikes, they would not be able to maintain their properties. Nor would they be able to earn a reasonable return on their investment, much less a return large enough to encourage capital to enter the housing market, which most real estate men believed was the only long-term solution to the housing shortage. Even worse, said Douglas L. Elliman, the soaring costs would drive many landlords into foreclosure. Testifying before the Lockwood Committee, Clarence H. Kelsey was especially blunt. “You put the taxes up on us, you put the rates of interest up on us, and our expenses increase, and yet you ask us to rent the property for just what we rented it before [the war].” What, he said, “is the sense of owning it?” Asked by Elmer G. Sammis, counsel to the committee, what should be done, he replied “Grin and bear it.”26 After the war (and, in some cases, even sooner), more than a few landlords raised the rents to a level that enabled them to cover the rising expenses and even earn a moderate profit. It was about time, real estate men believed. “We do not have to go very far back,” wrote a landlord, who was also a butcher and meat packer, to Governor Smith in 1920, “[to the time] when tenants had their [w]ay, obtained apartments at their own rental and often two, three, four and five month’s free rental, all of which never created a bit of sympathy for the poor landlord.” Indeed, the prewar decade had left a deep and lasting impression on most real estate men. One after another, they spoke of the lean years when landlords had often rented their apartments at prices that did not cover their expenses. For many years, said one, the landlords had provided housing “at, or below[,] cost.” The real estate men also spoke of the many landlords who had watched helplessly as property values plummeted and banks and insurance companies foreclosed on their apartment houses. During these years, said Elliman, “the tenants showed no mercy for the landlords.” Taking full advantage of the housing glut, they made every effort to pay as little rent as possible “without any thought of whether the owner was securing an adequate return for his money.” New York’s tenants “have had their own way so long that perhaps they are a trifle spoiled,” he said in early 1919.27

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But by then, as Elliman well knew, the tenants were no longer spoiled. Far from it. Now that the tenants no longer had the upper hand, said one real estate man, the landlords had the right to take advantage of current market conditions to make up for the lean years. They ought to be free to charge enough “to offset the losses in previous years,” added another. They deserved to be compensated for the many years during which they earned little or nothing from their property and even dipped into capital to keep their buildings afloat. Indeed, wrote the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association, they were “entitled to at least a commercial return on their equities,” a return that could not be achieved without much higher rents. Of the many New Yorkers who held this position, Stewart Browne was among the most noteworthy. A native of Scotland who had come to the United States by way of Canada, Browne was president of the United Real Estate Owners Association as well as one of New York’s most influential and most cantankerous real estate men. As he told the Senate and Assembly committees on cities in early 1920, the landlords should get back the money they lost in the prewar years. “There is no question about that at all.” But they should take their time getting it back. Indeed, several months earlier Browne had advised the landlords to “go easy” on the tenants. If they did not, he warned, there was a good chance that the state legislature would make them “regret that they ever raised rents, no matter how little.”28 Of the many landlords who ignored Browne’s advice—who asked for steep rent hikes and then brushed aside appeals to rescind or reduce them—some did so as much to get even with the tenants as to pay current expenses and offset past losses. The sources of this animosity were twofold. One had its roots in the landlords’ experiences with what one real estate agent described in 1883 as the many “ignorant, shiftless, and filthy” tenants. As another agent put it, “if the Waldorf was filled with these people and even if a sufficient force of servants was retained to clean the halls and entrances each day, in three weeks it would be like a pig pen.” This attitude persisted into the early twentieth century—a time, said Judge Edgar J. Lauer, an authority on landlord-tenant law, when relations between landlords and tenants were even worse than relations between employers and employees. People talk about “unscrupulous landlords,” said one real estate man in 1918. “What about ‘unscrupulous tenants,’ who damage property, default on the rent, trump up baseless claims, and move out over night?” And what, other real estate men asked, about tenants who throw garbage out of the window rather than invest ten cents in a garbage pail, who toss trash down the dumbwaiter shaft, and who drop apple cores in the hallways? And what about the tenants who clean their apartments only after the painter comes and leave behind “a heap of rubbish” when they move out? “It’s enough to drive a landlord desperate” said one, “to see what some tenants get away with.”29 The other source of this animosity had its roots in the landlords’ experience with what they felt were overly fussy and extremely greedy tenants, who wanted only the most up-to-date features but were unwilling to pay for them. It was not that they could not afford to pay, one real estate man pointed out. “They have invested in phonographs, pianos and other luxuries and when it comes to the landlord’s time

Of all the strategies to deal with rent hikes, cutting back on other expenditures was far and away the most painful. It meant that the family would have to make many sacrifices, perhaps the hardest of which was what one Brownsville housewife called “pinching on the children’s food.” Down through the early twentieth century this strategy was employed not only in the days before the rent was due, but also when a family member took ill, died, or lost a job. (Indeed, it was a routine way to cope with New York’s unstable and seasonal job market, where as late as 1922 many unskilled workers were unemployed for several months a year.) To cut back on expenditures other than rent, working-class housewives bought less food, less expensive food, and lower-quality food. They used clothing that had been handed down from one child to another and from one family to the next. They cut down on housing costs by taking in lodgers and boarders, a practice that was frowned on by tenement house reformers. And they did without newspapers, books, music lessons, and other things that were not essential to the survival of the family.31 After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, cutting back on food took on a new meaning. Instead of a way for working-class Americans to cope with adversity, it became a way for all Americans to help win the war. It became an act of patriotism, a way to make sure that America’s troops and its allies had enough to eat. Warning of the prospect of “starvation on an unparalleled scale” in Europe, U.S. Food Administrator Herbert Hoover launched a far-reaching campaign to change the nation’s eating habits. Stressing that “Food will win the war,” he called on Americans to cut back on wheat, meat, and sugar, all of which were in short supply. He recommended one wheatless day a week (and one wheatless meal a day), one meatless day a week (and one meatless meal a day), and two days a week without pork. Americans should also consume no more than three pounds of sugar a month. As the Home News wrote, Americans could contribute to the war effort not only by eating less, but also by eating differently. Instead of wheat, meat, sugar, and fats, the

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to receive a just and fair return on his investment, they gnash their teeth and do everything possible to get back to the old conditions where they were paying sixty per cent. of what their home was really worth each month.” How, asked one landlord, was he supposed to deal with tenants who were forever fussing about paint jobs, steam heat, and hot water and then “when I go for the rent there’s nobody home?” How, said another, was he supposed to feel when he came to collect the rent and the tenant’s daughter told her mother, “The profiteer is coming up?” How, asked another landlord, was he supposed to think about tenants who “lie and tell some of the most terrible hard luck stories ever heard [and then] laugh up their sleeves at [him]?” Said a Brooklyn landlord, whose tenants were complaining about his decision to raise the rent from $15 to $18 a month, “The place was a stable when I got it. I fixed everything up. I spent a fortune on that place. I put in new ranges and hot water boilers. I had the roof fixed.” After spending so much money to upgrade the building, he had no qualms about evicting the ungrateful tenants if they refused to pay the new rent.30

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Food Administration suggested that they eat corn, oats, rye, fish, poultry, fruit, and vegetables, all of which were plentiful. Just as important, they should not waste food. “Preach and practice the ‘gospel’ of the clean plate,” they were advised. They should also conserve food. If they did not know how, the Food Administration would show them.32 The campaign to change the nation’s eating habits did not ease after the war. Instead, driven by the growing concern over the rising cost of living, it picked up. This concern had surfaced even before the United States entered the war. In February 1917 it spurred thousands of angry housewives to join in food riots on New York’s Lower East Side. And six months later it prompted Congress to pass the Lever Act, which regulated the price of grain, sugar, and other commodities. When peace brought no respite from the inflationary spiral, the Wilson administration mounted an attack on meatpackers and other alleged profiteers. With the support of the Food Administration, well-to-do women set up fair-price committees to monitor the cost of milk, bread, and other items, which in time included shoes and clothing. Newspapers urged Americans to find inexpensive substitutes for expensive foodstuffs. And home economists advised housewives how to “Spend Less and Live Better.” They taught them how to purchase, prepare, and preserve food in ways that would save money. They also called on them to replace meat with cheaper sources of protein three times a week, to eat more vegetables, especially cheap vegetables, and to buy raisins, currants, and other dried fruit. “Learn the little tricks of garnishing,” the home economists urged the housewives. “If you haven’t started a winter [herb] garden do so at once.” Make use of leftovers. And waste nothing. Sour milk can be used to make biscuits and turned into cottage cheese, meat drippings can be clarified and used as shortening in cookies and cakes, and butter can be scraped off a plate and “spread on bread for the hungry child.”33 Although cutting back on food and other items was often a hardship, most New Yorkers accepted it as part of the price of winning the war. As one put it, “We’d like to have some of the things we used to have, but every body ought to be willing to make some sacrifices to win the war.” Although it was commonly expected that prices would fall after the war, most New Yorkers also saw the wisdom of cutting back to check the rising cost of living and to curb the giant beef, sugar, and other companies that were widely blamed for it. But for many New Yorkers, especially working-class New Yorkers, it was unfair to expect them to cut back on necessities in order to pay rent hikes. “Why,” asked one tenant, “should the landlords not be made to share the cost with us of winning the war?” “Why,” said another, “should we take bread out of our children’s mouths to enrich the landlord?” What right did a landlord have to say to his tenants, as one Brooklyn landlord did, “Give your children one less egg every day and you can pay my advance”? It was also impractical to expect the tenants to reduce their other expenditures enough to pay the increased rents. They were already hard-pressed to make ends meet. At a time of rampant inflation— in which the cost of living in New York City had more than doubled since the outbreak of World War I—it was hard to find ways to cut back.34

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But somehow most tenants found ways. More than anything else, they cut back on the cost of food, which was the largest item in the average New York family’s budget—though, according to one historian, many working-class families spent more on rent than on food. “Formerly,” said one housewife, “my man had two eggs for breakfast and each of the children had one egg. Now we never have eggs or butter.” Another housewife fed her children “the old-fashioned oatmeal, which is cheaper and affords more nourishment [than the prepared cereals].” She also baked her own bread. Yet another family had nothing but bread and coffee for breakfast. Some New Yorkers drank condensed milk instead of fresh milk, others bought “a cheaper grade” of milk, and one family reserved its milk for a sixteen-year-old with tuberculosis. One housewife no longer bought porterhouse steaks. “Chucks are good enough for us,” she said. Another housewife, who paid $25 a month for an apartment that used to rent for $16, served meat only twice a week, feeding her family spaghetti and dried beans instead. A German-American family cut back on meat from once to twice a week and then to once every other Sunday. Another New Yorker told a reporter, “I have not had meat for so long I have forgotten when.” My family is “doing without butter, meat and vegetables, and about everything else but bread, rice and macaroni,” said one housewife. And another housewife complained, “there is no good way to prepare macaroni” now that she was forced to cut back on cheese and olive oil.35 Many tenants found ways to cut back on the cost of clothing too. Instead of buying new clothes, some housewives bought rags at junkshops and made them into clothing. Others relied on the generosity of friends and relatives. “I make my children’s clothes over from ‘hand-me-downs,’ ” said the housewife who fed her children the old-fashioned oatmeal, “and let me tell you that I am not ashamed to accept garments from friends who have no further use for them.” Other New Yorkers wore the same clothes year after year. And his mother and siblings kept their old shoes “until they were in threads,” wrote novelist Michael Gold, who grew up on the Lower East Side. “This dress [the one she was wearing] I have worn for five years,” the woman who could not remember the last time she ate meat told a reporter. Still other housewives repaired old clothing over and over again. Said a thrifty German American woman, “I patch and mend and darn all [the time].” She mended not just clothing, but also sheets, pillowcases, and towels. Another housewife, whose landlord had raised the rent on her four-room apartment in the Bronx from $24 to $35 a month, not only rented two rooms to lodgers, but also did all the washing and cleaning—and “with two extra roomers there is quite some washing and cleaning to do.” She also saved thirty cents a week by asking her husband to wear soft collars to work. “These I [wash] in boiled starch until they look like linen collars done by a laundry,” she said. “This seems like a small item to save, but figure it up in a year and you will see I have saved $15.60.”36 Many tenants cut back on the cost of housing too, usually by subletting one or more rooms to lodgers and boarders. (Less common, though for some tenants no less important, was to work as a janitor in return for a rent-free apartment.) Many

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working-class families—from one in four to two in five, a study made in 1909 reported—had long used this strategy, which, in addition to providing the lodgers and boarders a cheap place to live, supplied the families a steady source of revenue that was often needed to pay the rent, especially in times of illness and unemployment). For the many Jewish immigrants who lived on the edge, writes historian Annelise Orleck, the small contribution of the lodgers and boarders “was all that stood between their families and eviction.” Some working-class families did not want to take in lodgers and boarders. But when rents soared during and after World War I, many had no choice. It was a way to make ends meet, a way to stay in their apartments. As Frank Mann told the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, it was not uncommon to find apartments “where the beds were warm day and night, where [one boarder] worked at night and slept in the daytime and another worked in the daytime and slept at night.”37 Many tenants found ways to cut back on other costs as well. Even before the housing shortage some New Yorkers who had to provide their own heat had saved money by collecting pieces of wood that were lying on the streets and docks or at construction sites and railroad tracks. As Louis Lefkowitz, who grew up on the Lower East Side and later served as New York State attorney general for two decades, recalled, he and his friends would make a truck of sorts out of fruit carts and then “follow the coal delivery trucks and pick up the pieces as they fell off the truck.” After rents went up during and after the war, some New Yorkers still went scavenging for wood and coal. Others heated only a few of their rooms. And still others used the cinders to keep a fire going at night. Less essential than heat were amusements and vacations, on which the average New York family spent roughly $20 a year, nearly $9 of it on movies, and what the Bureau of Labor Statistics called education and uplift, of which the average family spent $18 a year, more than $9 of it on newspapers. Many tenants cut back on these things too. Hard-pressed to pay the rent, some stopped reading the paper. One couple went to the movies once a month instead of once a week. And an Irish American woman went to the movies only in the afternoon, when “it cost only six cents.” An Italian American man gave up the opera for the movies, which were much cheaper. Now he was about to give them up too. His daughter had started music lessons, but his wife was afraid that she would soon have to stop.38 As many New Yorkers found out, it was hard to cut back enough on other expenditures to cover the rising cost of housing. A housewife could save by serving chuck roast, which cost less than 16 cents a pound in 1913, instead of sirloin steak, which cost more than 25 cents a pound. But food prices went up so much during and after the war that chuck roast cost more in 1919 than sirloin steak in 1913. So did pork chops, lamb, and poultry. What was true for meat was true for other goods. Evaporated milk cost more in 1919 than fresh milk in 1913, and lard was more expensive now than butter was six years earlier. As Marie Ganz, a leader of the 1917 food riots, complained, even the price of staples was soaring. “A pound of potatoes [that once] cost two cents, now costs seven; onions have risen from three cents a pound to twenty.” And “the price of bread has tripled.” A housewife could cut costs

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by making clothes out of “hand-me-downs” and then mending and patching them. She could also cut costs by taking in lodgers and boarders, who, according to one study, added as much as 12 percent to the average household income. But the average family would save less than $9 a year if it stopped going to the movies and less than $10 a year if it stopped buying a newspaper. The average family could save another $30 a year, but only if it was willing to stop making contributions to churches and other voluntary associations that provided not only solace and companionship, but also help in times of illness and accident and sometimes money for a decent burial.39 Many working-class families were also unable or unwilling to adopt some of the cost-cutting measures that were put forward during and after the war. Home economists urged housewives to stop ordering by phone, which was not something most working-class housewives had even started, and to check prices firsthand in several stores. Al Smith suggested that they look for bargains. But for many working-class housewives, this was not an option. “I know that there is a store two blocks away where prices are cheaper,” said one, “but I hardly ever can leave the children long enough to go there.” Home economists also suggested that housewives serve meat no more than three times a week, even though many working-class families were lucky if they could afford meat once a week. Home economists pointed out that food would taste better if garnished with parsnips, cress, and radishes, which cost very little and “can easily be grown at home,” in a window box in the kitchen or dining room. But very few families on the Lower East Side had a kitchen with enough sunlight to grow anything—and virtually none had a dining room. Many Jews would not eat non-kosher food, even if it was less expensive than kosher food. Many Italians would not eat rice, even if it was cheaper than pasta. And few New Yorkers were willing to eat horsemeat instead of beef, which, wrote the Bronx Home News, was “more expensive, but not more nutritious.” One observer summed up the predicament of the working-class housewife as follows. “She cannot spend hours in bargain hunting, in experimenting with new food combinations, in making and mending garments. She has not, and cannot be expected to have, the training and ability to do all these things, even if she has the time. She has to take the methods of housekeeping that are traditional in her environment and apply them as skil[l]fully and intelligently as her native and acquired powers of mind and body permit.”40 As the Food Administration acknowledged, there was a point beyond which food costs could not be cut. There was a point too beyond which clothes could not be mended and shoes could not be repaired. Some working-class families might have wanted to take in more lodgers and boarders. But when immigration came to a standstill during the war, they were not easy to find. And even if lodgers and boarders could be found, many families would have had trouble making space for them. Apartments on the Lower East Side were so crowded—with 1.5 persons per room on average, according to a 1909 study—that some lodgers and boarders slept on a mattress on the floor or on a board placed across two kitchen chairs, which was known, writes one historian, as “renting a sheet.” Working-class families could send

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the children out to scavenge for pieces of wood and coal (and heat only some of the rooms). But if the weather was cold enough, there was a point at which they had no alternative but to buy fuel. As one tenant put it, “If you don’t want to freeze at home, you just have to pay what they ask.”41 For many New Yorkers, especially working-class New Yorkers, cutting back on expenditures other than rent was a painful but effective way to deal with a shortterm problem. It was something they could do for a few days (or for a week at the end of the month) until they paid the landlord. It was also something they could do for a while at any time until one or another member of the household got healthy or, when the contractors, shippers, and garment manufacturers started hiring, found a job. It was something they could do until they took in a new lodger or boarder or found something of value for the pawnbroker. And it was something they could do until one child or another was old enough to join the labor force— which in many immigrant families was as young as thirteen or fourteen, the childlabor laws and truant officers notwithstanding. But for many New Yorkers, the postwar rent hikes were a long-term, not a short-term, problem. And with residential construction stuck in the doldrums in 1919 and early 1920, a solution was nowhere in sight. To some extent, the problem was alleviated by relatively low unemployment and relatively high wages. But as Mary Marfdin pointed out, “The hue and cry about the prosperity of the workingman is mere drivel, when you look at the price of food.” And if the price of food was not enough, “along comes the landlord and says his taxes demand an immediate raise—and then another raise and another.” By what reasoning, she asked, “Does the landlord need from $36 to $60 a year on each family to keep up with his taxes?”42 Of the many New Yorkers whose rent was raised after World War I, some moved. A few had the good fortune to find a cheaper apartment. Others were evicted, either because they could not pay the increased rent or because they had offended the landlord in one way or another. But most stayed put. A few managed to persuade the landlord to rescind or reduce the rent hike. The rest found a way to pay the increased rent—though often at great hardship. In addition to cutting back on food, clothing, and other household expenditures, they took children out of school and sent them to work. They tapped into what little savings they had set aside, sometimes to prepare for the proverbial rainy day or, especially in the case of the Italians and Jews, to bring relatives over from the old country. They visited the neighborhood pawnbroker, who paid cash not only for jewelry, clothing, and musical instruments, but also, as Michael Gold remembered, for “everything worth more than a quarter,” even false teeth. Other tenants took more drastic steps. A case in point was a piano tuner who lived in an apartment house in Washington Heights. During the past six months, he wrote Mayor John F. Hylan, the building changed hands three times and the owners raised the rent from $20 to $38 a month. He tried to find another place, but nothing was available. Hence, he said, “I sold everything I bought in the last twenty-four years to pay the extra raise in rent so I would not be put in the street.”43

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A good many tenants whose rents were raised took an even more radical step, one few landlords expected: they ignored the ultimatum to pay or to move, and they joined forces with other tenants who refused to pay or to move. In other words, they went on a rent strike. As Charles Solomon, a Socialist assemblyman from Brooklyn, said at a meeting of the Brooklyn Tenants League that was held in April 1919, all New Yorkers need a roof over their heads. “We cannot live in corners of houses or in the walls or in cellars like rats and dogs.” But neither can we pay the oppressive rent hikes the landlords are demanding. Something has to be done to stop rent profiteering. And “If everything else fails, why there is nothing left for us to do but strike.” During the nineteenth century, rent strikes were not uncommon in European cities. In Paris, for example, tenants went on strike in the 1880s. Led by the Socialists, they withheld the rent and, to cries of “Long Live the Commune,” attempted to block evictions. But rent strikes were unheard of in American cities before the Civil War. Even in the late nineteenth century, when workers were going on strike in one industry after another and in one city after the next, they were very rare. And though some tenants had gone on rent strikes in New York in the 1890s, these strikes were few and far between. They had taken place exclusively on the Lower East Side, home to many Jewish immigrants—and a hotbed of socialism to boot. And they had had little impact.44 Not long after the turn of the century, however, a series of rent strikes erupted in New York on a scale that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. They started in the spring of 1904, when several Lower East Side landlords raised the rent 20 to 30 percent. Hard-pressed to move to cheaper apartments because of a serious housing shortage—a result partly of the great surge of immigration from southern and eastern Europe and partly of the widespread demolition of old-law tenements in Lower Manhattan—many tenants appealed to the landlords to rescind the rent hikes. When the landlords refused, hundreds of tenants went on a strike that lasted a few weeks. Under the leadership of local housewives, many of whom had participated in the successful boycott of kosher butchers two years before, the strikers withheld the rent and urged other tenants to follow their lead. They handed out cards, printed in Yiddish and English, that called on neighbors to refrain from renting apartments in buildings whose tenants were on strike. With the support of local labor unions, the strikers formed the New York Rent Protective Association. Its membership included both tenants, whose main objective was to hold down the rents, and Socialists, whose main objective was to build political support. The association’s staff offered legal counsel to tenants who were summoned to appear in court and provided financial support to tenants who were evicted from their homes. Although the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide predicted that the protests would be futile (and, if they scared away builders and thereby exacerbated the housing shortage, might even drive rents up), the strikers had some success. Many landlords rescinded the rent hikes. And few tenants were evicted, usually because they reached an agreement with the landlords before the judges issued a ruling.45

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Aside from a rent strike in East Harlem, which broke out a month later when the new owner of a row of apartment houses on 100th Street asked eighty tenants for a 50 percent increase, the rest of the year was uneventful. In July 1905, however, a group of Lower East Side tenants, all of whom were Jewish, went on strike when the landlord, whose name was S. Cohen, raised their rents by as much as five dollars a month. The tenants not only withheld the rent, but also threatened Cohen and, noted the Tribune, made him “a virtual prisoner” in his apartment. Cohen refused to give in. After he served notice, the courts dispossessed twenty families. Shortly after, wrote the Tribune, “The sidewalks were heaped high with furniture, cooking utensils and clothing.” There was much talk about rent strikes in the fall, but nothing came of it until January 1906, when Lower East Side landlords began to raise rents again. “Pay or move!” their agents told the tenants, who refused to do either. A much larger strike, which involved more than five hundred tenants, erupted a few months later in Williamsburg, a neighborhood that was home to many former residents of the Lower East Side. It started when a syndicate of Manhattan real estate men bought several apartment houses and raised the rent from one to three dollars a month. Charging that the new owners were increasing the rent for the purpose of driving up property values and selling at a huge profit, the tenants withheld their rent. They threatened the landlords, called mass meetings, built up a fund to pay legal expenses, and intimidated prospective tenants. “Don’t Try To Rent Rooms Here If You Know What’s Good For You!” read one of their signs. Many of the striking tenants were so aggressive that the marshal and the movers (who were commonly known as schleppers) needed police protection.46 Another round of rent strikes erupted in December 1907. Thousands of tenants took part in what were by far the largest of the prewar rent strikes. They were also the best organized—and to the landlords and many other New Yorkers, the most ominous. Although they started on the Lower East Side, they quickly spread to Brownsville and Harlem. Before long there was talk of rent strikes in some of New York’s Italian neighborhoods as well as in parts of nearby Hoboken, Newark, and Jersey City. Caught up in a nationwide depression that left 75,000 to 100,000 unemployed on the Lower East Side, the striking tenants insisted that the landlords rescind the recent rent hikes, which were fairly small, and even reduce the rent. Although most of the strikers were neighborhood housewives, many of the leaders were members of the Socialist Party. Operating out of party headquarters on Grand Street, they advised tenants how to deal with landlords and, if that failed, how to organize a strike. In some cases Socialist leaders negotiated directly with the landlords and represented the tenants in court. In other cases Socialist labor unions offered financial aid to needy tenants. As the strike dragged on, some landlords gave in. But most fought back. They knew that if they took the tenants to court they could count on the judges to rule in their favor. The law was on their side. And many judges were deeply troubled by the Socialist Party’s role in the strikes. The landlords also knew that they could count on the police to side with them. Hostile to socialism and more than a little xenophobic and anti-Semitic, the New York Police Department

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was inclined to deny striking tenants a permit to demonstrate (and, if need be, to break up the demonstrations with billy clubs). It was also ready to protect the landlords (and their agents) as well as the marshals and schleppers. Before the strike fizzled out in January 1908, some striking tenants prevailed on the landlords to reduce the rent or rescind the rent hike, but most paid, moved, or were evicted.47 Although the tenants were reluctant to admit it, the prewar rent strikes did not have much of an impact. They saved some tenants a little hard-earned money and made others aware of what a contemporary called their “common interests.” But as one historian has pointed out, they left behind no institutions—nothing, for example, like the labor unions that had inspired many of the striking tenants—to defend these interests, much less to change landlord-tenant relations. The prewar rent strikes were too sporadic. They also ended almost as soon as they started. They were confined largely to the Lower East Side and a few other largely Jewish neighborhoods like Brownsville and Harlem. Indeed, writes another historian, “From the beginning this was a Jewish strike; the organizers were Jewish, the tenants were Jewish, and, for the most part, the landlords were Jewish.”48 If the prewar rent strikes had a lesson for New York’s tenants in the postwar years, it was that not hundreds or thousands, but tens and even hundreds of thousands would have to go on strike. The strikers would have to come not from one or two neighborhoods, but from dozens. They would have to include not just Jews, but also Italians, Irish, Germans, and Poles—and even native-born New Yorkers. And they would have to attract not only the working class, but also the middle and upper-middle classes. Only by organizing rent strikes on a thus far unheard-of scale did the tenants stand a chance in a legal and political system that was stacked in favor of the landlords.

3 A Weighty Decision

More than three thousand irate tenants, many of whom had been notified that their rent would be raised on May 1, 1919, attended the Brooklyn Tenants League meeting at which Socialist Assemblyman Charles Solomon declared, “If everything else fails, why there is nothing left for us to do but strike.” Before the meeting adjourned, they adopted a resolution, which was sent to Governor Smith, saying that unless state officials did something to curb rent profiteering, thousands of tenants would be forced to go on strike. As the tenants well knew, it was one thing to adopt a resolution and quite another to carry it out. If they withheld the rent, the landlords would not take it lying down. It was conceivable that they would blacklist the striking tenants, hire thugs to intimidate them, and out of spite raise the rent even higher. It was also likely that they would deny the strikers heat and hot water and cut back on maintenance and repairs. And it was all but certain that they would take steps to evict the strikers and their families by bringing summary proceedings, which would lead to what a spokesman for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor called “the dreaded dispossess notice.” For most landlords the logic of eviction was unassailable. The sooner they got rid of the striking tenants, the sooner they could fill the apartments with paying tenants. The eviction of the strikers would also send a message to other tenants who were thinking of joining the strike. At stake was more than money, said one landlord who was trying to evict the organizer of a rent strike in his tenement house on the Lower East Side: “It was not the 50 cents I wanted, it was the principle of the thing.”1 The fear of eviction ordinarily deterred even the most irate tenants from going on a rent strike. Indeed, at just about every stage of the process the tenants had good reason to be frightened. Once the landlord started summary proceedings, the tenant was caught up in the arcane world of notices, precepts, orders, and warrants that was incomprehensible to almost anyone but a lawyer. What the many first- and

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second-generation immigrants who could not read English made of these documents is hard to imagine. If the judge issued a precept, the tenant was required to appear in court and, with scores or even hundreds of strangers looking on, explain to a formidable figure in a black robe why he should not be evicted. The tenant was at the mercy not only of the judge, but in some cases of an interpreter too. Intimidated by the legal process, many men were “scared to death” and many women left “speechless,” said a leader of the Fair Play Rent Association. Unless the tenant could show cause why he should not be evicted, which was highly unlikely, the judge would have to order him to vacate the premises. He might grant a short stay during which the tenant could look for another place to live. But when it expired, the judge would have to issue a warrant authorizing a city marshal to remove the tenant, his family, and their belongings and turn the apartment over to the landlord.2 When a tenant was unable to find another apartment before the warrant was issued, what happened in the street was even more frightening than what went on in the courthouse. As he and his family (and often their friends and neighbors) looked on, a marshal and a team of schleppers descended on their home. If they had trouble getting in, they broke the locks and battered down the doors and sometimes climbed up the fire escape and through the windows. The schleppers carried out tables, chairs, pots, pans, toys, trinkets, clothing, even the beds in which the tenants slept. They piled the stuff on the sidewalks, sometimes with so little care that furniture was smashed and glasses and dishes broken. Some tenants were able to store their stuff in a warehouse or a neighbor’s apartment. Others had to leave it on the sidewalk. In one case the neighbors took up a collection so that an evicted tenant could buy tarpaulin to protect his belongings from the rain. In another case, where a woman who was evicted became so hysterical that she had to be hospitalized, the Mother Superior of the St. John’s Orphan Asylum stored the belongings in the asylum basement—though only after they had been on the sidewalk for two days. “The most heartbreaking thing you can imagine is the sight of a poor family’s furniture piled on the sidewalk,” said Judge John R. Davies, whose Harlem courthouse was the scene of more than its fair share of summary proceedings. “I know of no greater misfortune that could befall a tenant short of personal injury.”3 At least as heartbreaking—and in cold weather even more so—was the sight of the tenants and their families huddled on the sidewalk alongside their furniture and other household goods. In the spring and fall of 1919, the Call reported, this sight was all too common. Writing of an eviction in East Harlem, it noted that all day long women and children hung out on the street with little food and no way to stay warm. A year or so later Marie Ganz recalled the pathetic sight of a poor woman who had just been evicted standing beside “the wreck of her home.” “Clinging to her dress were three frightened little children, the largest surely not more than six years old.” Many of these tenants had no place to go. Sometimes kindly neighbors offered to take in young children (and, less often, older children and adults). But doubling up, as it was known, was stressful. It was also risky. More than one landlord threatened to evict any tenant who provided shelter to a homeless neighbor. Since the courts were

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likely to evict tenants on nothing more than the landlord’s word that they were undesirable, this was no idle threat. Other times the tenants sought shelter in churches, temples, and other quasi-public facilities. But as the Call pointed out, “churches were poor substitutes for homes.” So were armories. What the “suffering tenants of this city” want is not to sleep in “army cots in churches, fly filled tents and army barracks,” said Socialist assemblyman Abraham I. Shiplacoff. They want “to sleep in their own homes.”4 Given New York’s acute housing shortage, many tenants had reason to be afraid that they would be homeless if they were evicted. They also had reason to be afraid that they would be unemployed. On the Lower East Side and in other immigrant neighborhoods, thousands of families worked in their homes. As Jacob Riis wrote in 1890, their homes were their workshops. “You are made fully aware of it before you have traveled the length of a single block in any of these [Lower] East Side streets, by the whir of a thousand sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn till mind and muscle give out together. Every member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand.” Besides sewing clothes, the tenants rolled cigars and made artificial flowers. On the Lower East Side it was common to see children carrying boxes of raw materials from the contractors to their homes. Some tenants also did the laundry of the well-to-do. (“Monday was laundry day,” writes historian Elizabeth Ewen, “and the entire household was turned upside down; the clothes were washed in big tubs filled with water boiled on the stove, then put out to dry on the famous clotheslines of the Lower East Side.”) Working in the tenements enabled immigrant women, especially Jewish and Italian women, to supplement the household’s irregular income without leaving home—but only as long as they had a home to work in.5 It was very hard when a worker went on strike and lost his job. It was especially hard in the case of the many working people who were barely able to make ends meet when they were employed. But when a tenant withheld his rent and lost his home, it was not just hard. It was humiliating. Under ordinary circumstances a worker was fired at his factory, shop, or office, usually in private and with others in the same boat. But a tenant was evicted at his home and in public, in front of his wife and children, his friends and neighbors. An eviction revealed that the tenant could not provide his family a roof over their heads and could not prevent strangers from barging into their home and removing their worldly goods. Piled on the sidewalk, the threadbare furniture, tattered clothes, and long-used utensils were exposed to public view. Items that were once a source of pride were now an embarrassment. For all these reasons tenants saw eviction as a terrible hardship, one to which they were extremely reluctant to subject their family. As a World War I veteran wrote Governor Smith, if worse came to worst, “I can go back to the shelter of a tent, and brave the cold winds and storms of the winter.” But women and children could not be expected to live that way.6 Landlords had some compassion for tenants who were unable to pay the rent through no fault of their own—who, for example, got sick or lost a job. But for

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tenants who refused to pay on the grounds that the rent was too high, they had no compassion. Hence it was highly likely that the landlords would try to evict these tenants. And given that the tenants could not count on much support from the municipal court judges, city marshals, and New York City police, each of whom played a pivotal role in the eviction process, it was highly likely that the landlords would succeed. By far the most important of these parties were the municipal court judges. These judges, of whom there were about fifty in the immediate postwar period, were elected officials whose terms ran for ten years. Most were Democrats. With the exception of Jacob Panken, a Socialist whose courthouse in Manhattan’s Second District was not far from Wall Street, the rest were Republicans. They presided over an institution that had taken its modern form in the mid-nineteenth century and was now divided into twenty-four districts, nine in Manhattan, seven in Brooklyn, four in Queens, and two apiece in the Bronx and Richmond.7 Sitting in the busiest (and more often than not dingiest) of New York’s many trial courts, the municipal court judges dealt exclusively with civil matters, among the most common of which were landlord-tenant disputes. And of these disputes, summary proceedings were among the most heartrending. Most municipal court judges, especially the dozen or so Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Bronx judges who heard the bulk of the landlord-tenant disputes, had strong feelings about summary proceedings. They had no sympathy for the landlords, the so-called “hogs” and “sharks” who were jacking up the rent. Nor had they any sympathy for the speculators, who were raising the rent in order to drive up values and then sell at a profit, and the lessees, who were not only raising the rent, but also neglecting the property. When these rapacious landlords went to court to force the hard-strapped tenants to pay the rent or move out of their home, many municipal court judges were outraged—not the least, said Harry Robitzek, because it made these tenants “easy prey” for Bolsheviks and other radicals. (Their antipathy to these landlords notwithstanding, most of the judges were strongly opposed to rent strikes. Tenants “have no more right to strike against landlords than landlords have [to strike] against tenants,” said Aaron J. Levy. Most judges were also strongly opposed to what Levy called the “Bolsheviki” tenants leagues that encouraged their members to go on strike. Caught up in the “Red Scare” that swept over the country after World War I, these judges took great pride in their opposition to radicalism of every kind. As Robitzek boasted, he had done as much as anyone “to drive Bolshevism [out of] the Bronx.”)8 Still, most municipal court judges felt an obligation to put these feelings aside even when dealing with the most rapacious landlords and the most hard-strapped tenants. They had taken an oath to uphold the law. And the law was unambiguous. If a landlord raised the rent, a tenant could refuse to sign a new lease and move out when the old one expired. A tenant without a lease could move out at the end of the month. But a tenant who signed a new lease or who held over without a lease had to pay the rent, and to pay it in full. (Indeed, in late 1918 the Appellate Term of the New York Supreme Court reversed the municipal court decisions that allowed

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tenants whose landlords had not provided heat to deduct from the rent what they spent on heaters and fuel. The court held that in the absence of a written lease requiring the landlord to provide heat the tenant had to pay the rent in full even if the apartment had no heat.) Many municipal court judges felt that the landlords were taking unfair advantage of summary proceedings, a law, they said, that had not been enacted to enable landlords to oppress tenants. But there was nothing they could do about it. As one said, the judges have a strictly “ministerial” role in summary proceedings. If a tenant stays in an apartment and refuses to pay the rent, they have no choice but to award possession to the landlord. Judges, another pointed, were not evicting tenants because they “want to do it,” but because they “must do it.” “The law,” he said, “gives them no discretion.”9 Although most municipal court judges held that their hands were tied, some found ways to stop (or at least slow down) summary proceedings. One was to exercise the power given them by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. Passed by Congress in March 1918, roughly a year after the United States entered World War I, the act was designed to protect servicemen and their families from profiteering landlords. If a landlord attempted to evict the wife, children, or other dependents of a serviceman for nonpayment of rent, the judges were empowered to stay the proceedings for up to three months—provided that the rent was not more than $50 a month. But as the New York Telegram pointed out, the law was “violated right and left.” Many landlords raised the rent and, if the servicemen’s families could not pay it, brought summary proceedings against them. Some tenants yielded. Others resisted. If they submitted proof that they were dependent on a soldier or sailor, some judges threatened to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney, which was often enough to prompt the landlord to rescind the rent hike. Other judges refused to issue a final order and advised the tenants that they could stay put for three months. William E. Morris, who had a well-deserved reputation as “a tenant’s judge,” went even further. In one case he refused to sign an eviction warrant until the landlord submitted an affidavit, a sworn statement made under oath, that none of the tenants was dependent on anyone in the military. Morris stuck by his position even after the landlord’s lawyer threatened to file suit to force him to sign the warrant.10 Even in the great majority of cases where the tenants were not covered by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, many municipal court judges found ways to block summary proceedings. Some took the cases under advisement, a step that allowed them to spend up to fourteen days looking into the claims before making a decision. If they ruled in favor of the landlord, they routinely granted a stay of up to five days—and, after the state legislature amended the law in June 1919, up to twenty days. Faced with a delay that might cost them a month’s income—and more if the tenant asked for a jury trial—a few landlords had second thoughts about raising the rent. Some judges also acted as mediators. Exploiting their position, which was as intimidating to the landlords, especially the first- and secondgeneration immigrants among them, as to the tenants, they pressed both parties to compromise. Sometimes the landlords lowered the rent, and sometimes the

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tenants paid the rent in return for a lease that barred another hike in the near future. If the landlords were intransigent, some judges even denied their motion. “I confess I did violence to [the] law,” said Judge Levy, speaking of a case in which he ruled against a landlord who had raised the rent of a widow “of rather limited means” more than 100 percent. Although he thought justice had been served, he expected the appellate courts to reverse him. In a case where a landlord raised the rent from $18 to $50 a month, Judge Robitzek lambasted the agent, who was the landlord’s son, saying, “Your very action is enough to breed discontent among the poor.” Ignoring the statute and applying what he called the “law of common sense,” Robitzek dismissed the case and said the landlord was free to challenge his ruling in the appellate courts.11 But there was only so much even the most sympathetic municipal court judges could do for a tenant who was being sued for nonpayment of rent. Indeed, as historian Jared N. Day has written, “if [New York’s landlords] really wanted their tenants out, they were out.” The landlord would have to wait as many as fourteen days if the judge took the case under advisement—and as many as another five days (or, after June 1919, another twenty days) if the judge granted a stay after issuing a final order. (In the event that the tenant was protected by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, the landlord would have to wait a full three months.) If the judge believed that the tenant was being gouged, the landlord might be pressed to reduce the rent hike. If he withstood the pressure, he might have to bear up with a good deal of verbal abuse. If a judge refused to issue a final order, the landlord would have to ask another judge to reverse the decision. And if a judge refused to issue an eviction warrant, the landlord would have to apply to another judge for a writ forcing him to do so. All this took time, money, and, not least of all, a thick skin. If the landlord persisted, however, he was almost certain to prevail. Even the strongest tenant advocates, among them Assemblyman Samuel Orr and Morris Gisnet, counsel to the Greater New York Tenants League, conceded that the tenants stood little chance of success in summary proceedings. So did the Telegram’s rent editor, who wrote a regular column offering advice to tenants. Replying to a letter from a Bronx tenant whose landlord had raised the rent from $30 to $60 a month, he warned that if the tenant went to court, “The best he could hope for was a delay.”12 The city marshals had fewer qualms about summary proceedings than the municipal court judges. The marshals were an adjunct of the municipal courts. Members of an old if far from venerable institution, they stood in much the same position to the local courts as the sheriffs stood to the state courts. They served summonses, executed warrants, sold attached properties, and otherwise carried out the judges’ orders. Unlike the judges, however, the marshals were not elected. Rather they were appointed, by the mayor and as a rule for a six-year term, almost always as a reward for service to the political machine. The mayor had the power to remove the marshals—though only for cause and only after giving notice and holding a public hearing. And from time to time one or another exercised it. Anyone could be appointed a city marshal, provided that he lived in the borough

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in which the court to which he was assigned was located and posted a bond of $2,000, guaranteed by two New York residents and property owners, to ensure he carried out his duties faithfully. Most important of all, the city marshals, of whom there were more than sixty in the immediate postwar period, were not public employees. Rather they were independent contractors who were authorized to collect a fee for each of the tasks they carried out, a fee that was set by the authorities and paid by the litigants.13 The marshals spent much of their time on summary proceedings, so much that one historian has written that they worked more for the landlords than the city. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that they “were basically hirelings of the landlords,” many of whom found it cheaper to hire a marshal than retain a lawyer. The marshals were deeply involved at virtually every step in the process. Although by law they were barred from acting on behalf of either party in summary proceedings, they often drafted the necessary papers, the forms for which were readily available in legal stationery stores, and then represented the landlords in court. It was not uncommon for a marshal to appear for a landlord (or landlords) in a dozen or more cases at one session. Judge Morris refused to hear cases in which the landlords were represented by a marshal, but other judges were not so exacting. Among other things, the marshal served the precept on the tenants and, in the event that the judge issued a final order in favor of the landlords, executed the eviction warrants, an action for which they were often vilified. Along with a team of schleppers who were paid by the landlords, the marshals showed up at the apartments. Although they did not move anything, they cleared the way for the schleppers, who operated under their supervision. Wrote one critic, “they merely stand around and see that it [the eviction] is done”—that the tenants (and their belongings) are removed and that the landlords are given possession of the apartments.14 The fees for these tasks, which were fixed by statute, were fairly low. To give a couple of examples, the marshals were allowed to charge one dollar for serving a precept and one dollar for executing a warrant. (If they had to travel more than a mile, “one-way only,” from the courthouse to execute a warrant, they were allowed to charge an extra six cents a mile.) This did not add up to much in the decade or so before World War I, when few evictions took place. But after the war, when the landlords brought tens of thousands of summary proceedings, the marshals made out extremely well. “The office of city marshal is now the surest road to quick and large wealth,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1920. The marshals were charging the landlords as much as $7 for each eviction, which was well above the statutory rate. Some were carrying out so many evictions that they were earning as much as $100 to $500 a day, far more than most New Yorkers earned in a week, even more than many earned in a month. According to a municipal court judge, one marshal once made a whopping $642 in one day. Many marshals, some of whom had three or four offices and a staff of deputies and assistants, earned enough to buy homes of their own, drive expensive motorcars, and wear diamond jewelry. There was so much money to be made as a city marshal in the postwar years that some New Yorkers who

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were not one of the sixty-seven mayoral appointees passed themselves off as marshals—and earned as much as $2,000 a month.15 As marshals Henry F. Tiernan and William J. Kelly wrote a few years before the outbreak of World War I, they were not insensitive to the plight of the tenants who were facing eviction. When they came across families in “real poverty and distress,” they reported them to one or another of the city’s charitable organizations, which often paid their rent or found them other quarters. “In no case was a deserving family neglected,” declared Tiernan. When the number of summary proceedings soared in the postwar years, some marshals engaged in profiteering, conceded Marshal Harry Wolkoff. But most had in them “the milk of human kindness,” he said. A case in point was an assistant marshal known as “Fatty” Hagen. In mid-1921 Marshal Nicholas Zelinsky sent Hagen and three deputies to remove Rose Nowacki, a widow with four children, from her apartment on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn— an apartment from which she had been evicted for nonpayment of rent, but in which she was still living because she was unable to find another. Upon arriving at the building, Hagen learned that Nowacki’s late husband, John J. Nowacki, a chief steward and then paymaster in the U.S. Navy, had been lost at sea when the Abraham Lincoln was sunk in May 1918. By an extraordinary coincidence, Hagen had served on the same ship. “I was his buddy,” he told his widow, “only I escaped when she went down.” Declaring, in the words of a Times reporter, that “he was not going to move out a stick of Mrs. Nowacki’s furniture,” Hagen let her and the children remain in the apartment.16 Most marshals were seldom as sympathetic as “Fatty” Hagen. Early in September 1919, for example, Marshal Daniel McBride arrived with a team of schleppers to oust several hundred families who had been evicted after a long and bitter rent strike from seventeen five-story tenement houses in Brooklyn owned by the B.F.W. Realty Company. The schleppers started clearing out a top-floor apartment on Flatbush Avenue. But when they learned the tenants were members of the Williamsburg Tenants League, the schleppers, who were themselves members of a labor union, stopped working. McBride then announced that he would return the next morning with another crew of schleppers, one that was presumably less squeamish about removing members of a tenants league. As McBride and the other marshals saw it, they had a duty to obey the court’s mandate, not to defy it. As Mayor William J. Gaynor said a few years before the outbreak of World War I, they were expected to do their job an orderly manner. But they were expected to do it. If it was at times an unpleasant job, that was not their fault. Taken to task by John S. Flynn, president of the West Harlem Community League and Tenants Association, for removing African American tenants whose landlords were charging unreasonable rents, Marshal Henry H. Lazarus replied that he could not understand what high rents had to do with the execution of a warrant—or “why Mr. Flynn should suppose I am responsible for the high rents.”17 Although the marshals did not make a point of it, they got paid for executing warrants, not for ignoring them. And as the Call pointed out, it was in their interest to execute as many warrants as possible.

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By 1920 some New Yorkers felt that the marshals and schleppers were out of control—that they were “running amuck,” as Harry Allen Ely, chair of the Audubon Community Council and Washington Heights Tenants Association, put it a few years later. In some cases they were extremely heavy-handed. According to a woman who watched the eviction of forty-nine families from a tenement house on Bartlett Street in Brooklyn, the marshal and forty schleppers “made a raid upon the flats as if it were a siege.” They “pounded and battered upon doors, and broke the locks with jimmies and crowbars, when the tenants were not at home. Women were pushed and slapped, their furniture and personal belongings seized and thrown into the street.” In other cases the marshals and schleppers spared no effort to make the evictions as orderly as possible. And in still other cases the marshals and schleppers were abused by the tenants. After an eviction in East Harlem, Marshal Lazarus complained to Mayor Hylan’s secretary that the tenant was a “very vindictive” woman who not only falsely accused him of stealing her husband’s watch, rings, and diamond pins, but also threw bottles at him and his men, who “narrowly escaped injury.”18 But no matter how the marshals and schleppers behaved, the tenants regarded them as adversaries. They knew all too well that in the event that a judge issued a final order in favor of the landlord they had good reason to believe that the marshal would not hesitate to remove them from their homes under all but the most unusual circumstances. For the tenants the arrival of the marshal was by far the most traumatic moment in an extremely traumatic process. As Mayor Gaynor acknowledged in 1910, “it is a pretty hard thing to go into the house and take a man’s goods away.” If it was hard before World War I, it was much harder afterward. In the midst of the postwar housing shortage, a time when the number of evictions soared to record levels, the marshals had their work cut out for them. In many cases they had to remove dozens of families who had nowhere else to live and no place to store their belongings. In many other cases the marshals found themselves in the middle of a rent strike, with scores and even hundreds of tenants manning picket lines and as many neighbors offering moral support. Before the war it was commonly assumed that once the marshal showed a warrant from the court even the most aggrieved tenants would yield to the inevitable. Rarely should it be necessary for the marshals to ask the police for help in carrying out an eviction, said Mayor Gaynor. “Exercise your own authority,” he told them, “and let them [the policemen] keep to their posts.”19 But in the postwar years this assumption was untenable. Outnumbered by the angry tenants and their supporters, the marshals often found they had no choice but to call on the police. Less than a century old, the New York City Police Department was far and away the nation’s largest. With nearly 12,000 sworn officers, it was about as large as the Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit police departments combined. It was to these officers, the great majority of whom were patrolmen assigned to one of the city’s many precinct houses, that the marshals turned when they needed help. They invariably got it. By virtue of New York’s residency requirement, which forced the

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police and other public employees to live inside the city, just about all the officers were tenants. And as many were in the same unenviable position as the Bronx policeman whose landlord had raised the monthly rent on his apartment near Southern Boulevard from $28 in 1916 to $53 in 1920, they may have had some sympathy for the tenants who were about to be dispossessed. But they had no sympathy for the tenants who were on strike—who were withholding rent and resisting eviction. As the policemen saw it, their job was to maintain order. To them a rent strike was much like a labor strike, “by its very nature a breach of order,” in the words of historian James F. Richardson. When the striking tenants set up picket lines—when they attempted to stop the marshals and the schleppers from executing a warrant by blocking access to the entryways, sidewalks, and streets—most policemen felt the tenants were not only breaking the law. They were also undermining their authority.20 Given that most New York City policemen were first- and second-generation immigrants and nearly all were working class, it may seem puzzling that they had so little sympathy for the striking tenants, the great majority of whom were also working-class first- and second-generation immigrants. But many of the striking tenants (and many of the most militant of the striking tenants) were Jewish Americans, most of them recent immigrants from Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. And like most Americans, most New York City policemen, among them the many Irish American policemen whose ancestors came to the United States after the potato famine of 1845, were not only racist, but also xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Their anti-Semitism was underscored by the infamous Hoe Riot on the Lower East Side, which erupted in July 1902, when scores of officers lashed out at thousands of Jews, most of them part of a huge funeral procession, who tried to defend themselves from an attack by a group of factory workers. Moreover, the striking tenants drew much of their inspiration from labor unions. And the New York City police, who did not have a union of their own (and who relied on politicking rather than collective bargaining in their struggle for higher wages and better working conditions), were hostile to organized labor. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time of widespread industrial turmoil, the officers regularly sided with management. In one labor dispute after another, they broke up picket lines, disrupted public meetings, protected scabs at the workplace, and at day’s end even escorted them home or to the streetcars.21 If New York’s tenants had any hope that the police would be sympathetic to their plight, it was dashed by the officers’ behavior in the prewar rent strikes. In July 1905, for example, the police drove away scores of striking tenants who were attempting to prevent a marshal from evicting them from two tenement houses on Goerck Street on the Lower East Side. Less than a year later a similar incident occurred on Cook Street in Williamsburg. In addition to helping the marshals, the precinct captains turned down striking tenants who applied for a permit to hold a public meeting. When a group of tenant activists from the Lower East Side complained to Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham, he replied, “If you don’t

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like your rents get out. If you are not satisfied with our system of rents go back where you came from.” When the tenants went ahead without a permit, the officers broke up the meetings, charging the demonstrators with nightsticks and arresting some of them. At the request of several landlords, the officers tore down the red flags that hung from the windows. And at the urging of one East Harlem landlord, who was incensed that his tenants were posting signs reading “This house is on strike”—and by so doing, he claimed, were destroying his property—the officers took down the offending posters. Even the normally conservative New York Times believed that the officers had gone too far, taking them to task for lending “moral support” to the landlord and pointing out that nothing about the signs was so “prejudicial to public morals” to justify sending in the police.22 As historians of the prewar rent strikes have pointed out, the NYPD was especially heavy-handed when dealing with tenants who were affiliated with the Socialist Party. Like other New Yorkers, most policemen had a deep-seated fear of socialism and other radical ideologies, a fear that led them to view rent strikes not as run-ofthe-mill disputes between landlords and tenants but as integral elements of an ongoing effort to foment revolution. These fears, which surfaced in the late nineteenth century, persisted in the twentieth century, intensified in the aftermath of World War I, and following the Bolshevik Revolution, culminated in the “Red Scare” of 1919 and 1920. Bolshevism “is gaining very rapidly and will soon, if not checked, be a great and grave danger to our republic,” Nathan Hirsch, chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, warned John F. Hylan. Judge Aaron J. Levy agreed, saying, “If one has the temerity to protest against high rents and if one urges his fellow victims to organize, he ought to be hanged.” At a time of widespread hysteria— a time when Democratic and Republican legislators had joined forces to expel five recently elected Socialists from the New York State Assembly—it was highly unlikely that the NYPD would deal with striking tenants in an evenhanded way.23 The striking tenants sometimes left the police no choice but to move in. During the prewar strikes the tenants tore down “To Let” signs, intimidated apartment hunters, and even talked of burning down tenement houses whose residents were on strike. They threatened landlords, burned one in effigy, and assaulted the wife of another. When Samuel Cohen raised the rents on his tenement houses on the Lower East Side, the tenants not only withheld the rent, but also smashed the windows of his apartment. He and his family were not hurt, but only because the shades were down. During the strike, wrote the New York Tribune, Cohen “ventur[ed] out only under police protection.” About the tenants’ efforts to block the evictions on Cook Street in Williamsburg, the Tribune wrote, “had it not been for the timely arrival of the police, they [the marshal and schleppers] would have been roughly handled.” In the aftermath of World War I the striking tenants were well aware that they could expect no sympathy from the NYPD even if they behaved in an orderly way. Caught up in the “Red Scare,” the officers refused to grant the striking tenants permits to hold public meetings and forbade women to wear sashes that showed the location of the buildings whose tenants were on strike. They broke up picket lines even after

Most tenants knew that the landlords would move to evict them if they withheld the rent. And if they did not know, they soon found out that if they went on strike the odds were very much against them. A case in point was Mrs. Aaron Stein, one of eighteen tenants at 1486 Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville who decided in the spring of 1918 to withhold the rent when the landlord’s agent notified them that it was being raised again. “Everybody is against us,” she told a Call reporter. The landlord brought summary proceedings against the striking tenants. A magistrate fined the chief organizer of the strike $25. “Why,” said Stein, “nobody knows.” The police threatened to arrest the strikers if they stood in front of the building—and as the strike dragged on, charged several of them with “creating a disturbance” and “obstructing the sidewalk.” It was hard to know what the strikers could do, Stein pointed out. “One of the judges says we may picket but another says we mustn’t.” Before too long “the landlord threw me out.” In the face of such powerful constraints, why did Stein and her neighbors go on a rent strike? The answer, she said, was that “we could stand it no longer.” What they could not stand was that the landlord was steadily raising the rent, which in many cases went up from $13.50 a month in April 1917 to $16.50 a month a year later. As one of Stein’s neighbors said, it was “a question of starving to death or refusing to pay [the rent].”25 Another thing Stein and her neighbors could not stand was that the same landlords who were raising the rent were spending little of it on the buildings. “We wouldn’t have felt quite so sore about these raises in the rent if the house had been kept clean and in repair,” said Stein. “But it hasn’t been fixed up for over seven years.” In the aftermath of World War I, many other tenants, especially tenants from working-class neighborhoods, felt much the same way. One after another they complained not only that their apartments lacked adequate heat and hot water, but also that they were in serious disrepair. The ceilings were full of cracks (and, in one case, “ready to drop”); so were the walls. The paint was blistering, and the wallpaper peeling—so much so that in one South Bronx apartment it was waving in the breeze that came through a rear window. Some of the windows had lost so much of their caulking that during storms the rain poured in. The stairwells were filthy, the halls full of trash, the floors unsteady, the cellars crammed with junk, and the dumbwaiters out of order. The fire escapes were rotting too. From the Allen Street elevated railroad, which ran through the Lower East Side, it was possible to see the rust flaking off them, remarked one New Yorker. If the tenants had to use these fire escapes in an emergency, “the Lord help them.” Dust and dirt were everywhere.

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a municipal court judge held that striking tenants had a right to picket. They even enforced a departmental directive banning anyone from speaking at a public gathering in a language other than English. The ban, which was supposed to prevent the dissemination of “dangerous propaganda,” was later held unconstitutional.24 It was highly unlikely that a police force that had no compunction about riding roughshod over the civil liberties of striking tenants would hesitate to help the marshals and schleppers remove them from their homes.

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So were insects and vermin. In many apartments, the plumbing was defective. And in one apartment in East Harlem, said Robert Ferrari, chief counsel for the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York, “mushrooms [were] growing in the toilet.”26 Time and again, said the tenants, they called on the landlords to do something. But as a rule the landlords brushed them off. Asked to fix defective plumbing, replace missing shades, and repair torn wallpaper, one Bronx landlord replied, “Pay me the rent first.” “Then,” said one of the tenants, “we never see him again till the next month”—when he comes back to collect the rent. Michael Gold, who grew up in “a junk-heap of rotten lumber and brick” in which the pipes froze in the winter and the women had to lug pails of water up the stairs, remembered that when the tenants asked the landlord to fix the plumbing, he replied, “Next week.” “A dozen times he has told us that, the yellow-faced murderer,” said Gold’s mother. Sometimes the landlords promised to do routine maintenance, make needed repairs, and improve service, but they seldom kept their promises, the tenants complained. And they raised the rent just the same. Said a tenant in Upper Manhattan whose rent had been raised from $16 a month in 1916 to $40 a month in 1920, “I haven’t got a single bit of improvement in [a decade].” After receiving notice that her rent was going up again, another tenant told Governor Smith, “In the years I am living here [in Harlem] they [the landlords] have not spent 5 cents on my apartment.” This attitude led a group of striking tenants who were about to be evicted from a rundown building in the South Bronx to take the position that they were willing to pay the rent hike, but only if the landlord decorated the apartments (and gave them a lease that would prevent another rent hike in the near future).27 To many tenants, especially but not exclusively working-class tenants, it seemed that there were no limits to which the landlords would go to capitalize on the housing shortage. To give a few of the more flagrant examples, some raised the rents of tenants whose households included very old folks, severely ill children, and even women who had just given birth. If the tenants could not pay, the landlords moved to evict them anyway. (In some cases this was too much for the schleppers. Ordered by the marshal to oust a husband and wife who were over one hundred years old from an apartment in the Bronx, they balked. “Please give us car fare home,” they said to the neighbors, “and let us get out of here.”) In violation of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, other landlords imposed rent hikes on dependents of U.S. servicemen, some of whom were on active duty in Europe, and threatened to evict them if they did not pay. At the urging of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, U.S. Attorney Francis G. Caffey ordered his staff to investigate these infractions. After raising the rent three times in one year, a Bronx landlord not only refused to provide hot water in the summer, but also turned off the hall lights at night. When the tenants protested they could not see their way upstairs, he said it was up to them “to come home earlier.” Another Bronx landlord notified a dozen Jewish tenants that the rent was going up. They refused to pay, in part because he had made no improvements. Although the landlord was also

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Jewish, he had no compunction about bringing summary proceedings even if it meant the tenants would have to appear in court on Yom Kippur, the highest of the Jewish holy days.28 All this created a good deal of ill will among the tenants. Such ill will was nothing new. It went back well into the nineteenth century, a time, Elizabeth Blackmar writes, when landlords were “stock villains in antebellum melodramas.” Down through the century tenants in New York were much like tenants in Paris, who, another historian points out, viewed landlords as “idle parasites, reaping huge profits without any productive labor, at the expense, always, of the working population.” During the early twentieth century the rapacious landlord was a staple not only of novels and short stories, but also of motion pictures, in one of which, D. W. Griffith’s The Usurer, he was shown squeezing the last dollar out of his impoverished tenants to pay for lavish dinners, fine wines, and expensive cigars. The animosity toward the landlords was as deep as ever at the time the United States entered World War I. The tenants, wrote the Bronx Home News in early 1917, believe that “it is the avarice of the landlords that is the cause of all their complaints and troubles.” The landlord may shut off the heat, turn off the gas, remove the phone from the building, and put in the weakest possible bulbs in the halls, said one tenant. “Still he is [always] around the first of the month before ten o’clock in the morning with his hand out for the rent.” Most real estate men held that this animosity was unwarranted. But they acknowledged that it was extremely widespread. As one wrote in late 1917, “There is, in the minds of all rentpayers, and their name is legion, a subconscious feeling that the landlord is a flint-hearted, grasping rascal, a grafter and a parasite on the body politic.”29 If relations between tenants and landlords were bad before the war, they were much worse afterward. By 1919 they were so bad that the Times wrote that tenants and landlords were “natural enemies.” A few years later Judge Edgar J. Lauer pointed out that there was more “bad blood” between tenants and landlords than between wage-earners and capitalists. The tenants saw the landlords—or, as they called them, the “blood-sucking landlords,” the “sharks,” “gougers,” “shylocks,” and “new Czars of America”—as rapacious and merciless. They jacked up the rents on rundown tenements in order to live in posh apartments on Riverside Drive and to buy diamond pins for their neckties and fur coats for their wives. Their greed knew no limits, wrote Anzia Yezierska. In one of her stories about life on the Lower East Side, the landlord raised the rent five dollars a month after a tenant named Hanneh Hayyeh painted the kitchen in anticipation of her son’s return from active duty in France. When she said she could not pay the additional five dollars, he told her, “If you can’t pay, somebody else will.” Now that she had done the painting, he added, “I can get more money for [the apartment].” “ ‘If there is any justice and mercy on this earth,’ Hayyeh cried, ‘then may the landlord be tortured like he is torturing me! May the fires burn him and the waters drown him! May his flesh be torn from him in pieces and his bones be ground in the teeth of wild dogs!’ ”30 Although few tenants were as angry as Hanneh Hayyeh, many were angry

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enough to go on strike if that was the only way to protect their families from New York’s avaricious landlords. But even for the angriest and most desperate tenants, it was still a weighty decision to go on strike. And it was a decision that fell in large part on the housewives. As Rachel Panken, the wife of Judge Jacob Panken, pointed out, the women ran the household.31 It was to them that the husbands (and older children) turned over their wages—and that the lodgers and boarders paid the rent. Based on these modest (and often irregular) sources of income, the housewives had to calculate how much to spend on food, clothing, housing, and other items. In the event that the landlord raised the rent, it was largely up to them to figure out whether they could afford to pay it—and, if they could not, whether they would have to move, cut back on other expenditures, or possibly withhold the rent. If the family decided that they had no choice but to go on strike, the housewives were well aware that they would have to play a leading role. With their husbands (and older sons and daughters) at work, it would be up to them to persuade other tenants to join the strike, mobilize the support of neighbors and shopkeepers, walk the picket lines, discourage prospective tenants from renting apartments in buildings whose residents were on strike, and perhaps put up other tenants whose families had been dispossessed (and whose belongings had been put on the sidewalk). More than the men, it was the women who would have to stand up to the landlords (and their agents) and face the marshals, schleppers, and in some cases, police officers—and do so without neglecting their families. Down through the late nineteenth century, few New York housewives had the stomach for these confrontations. But as the prewar rent strikes revealed, things began to change after the turn of the century. And as the years passed, they continued to change—so much so that by the end of the war many women were ready to challenge the landlords in ways that would have once been unthinkable. Underlying the changes was a growing militancy among working-class women, a willingness to resort to collective action to curb a wide range of abusive practices. Inspired in large part by the trade union movement and the Socialist Party, both of which had made deep inroads on the Lower East Side and in other ethnic neighborhoods, women in New York did what women in other cities did. As one historian puts it, they “took to the streets to defend their families against the encroachment of capital.” This newfound militancy was manifested in a host of strikes that erupted in the late nineteenth century, notably in the garment industry, and culminated in late 1909 and early 1910 in what was known as “the uprising of the 20,000.” Led by a young Jewish immigrant (and passionate Socialist) named Clara Lemlich, tens of thousands of women, many of whom were still in their teens, walked off the job at the shirtwaist factories to protest low wages and abysmal working conditions. For three months, writes labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky, they “walked the picket lines and suffered the tribulations—cold, hunger, bodily injury, and personal insult—which were part and parcel of the strikers’ lot.”32

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The newfound militancy was also manifested in a host of boycotts that were aimed at shopkeepers who were taking advantage of customers. Among the most widespread of these protests was the boycott of kosher butchers that swept through the Lower East Side and other neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in 1902. Outraged by the rising price of kosher meat, up from 12 to 18 cents a pound, housewives stopped buying from kosher butchers and urged others to follow their lead. They denounced women who ignored the boycott as scabs and even broke into their homes and tossed the meat onto the street. The housewives stormed the butcher shops too, one historian writes. They “dragged the huge sides of meat from their hooks and trampled upon them.” They also “impaled the meat on painted sticks, carrying it around ‘like red flags.’ ” Even more widespread were the food riots of 1917, in which housewives joined forces to drive down the soaring prices of bread, milk, vegetables, meat, and eggs, which had gone up from 32 to 80 cents a dozen since 1916. Hard-pressed to feed their families, even forced to dilute milk with water, they started a boycott of bakers, greengrocers, and butchers. Besides threatening shopkeepers, they attacked peddlers, overturning their pushcarts and scattering their produce. They also lashed out at police officers, who were sent in to restore order. By the time the United States entered World War I, New York’s working-class women were so militant that many of them even went on strike when the Board of Education attempted to introduce a version of Progressive education known as the “Gary Plan” into the city’s elementary schools.33 New York’s middle- and upper-middle-class women were much less militant. But during the war they too showed a growing willingness to act together, especially in the efforts to curb the rising price of food and conserve wheat, meat, sugar, and other scarce products. Even before the United States entered the war, President Wilson had been seriously concerned about the issue, a concern spurred in part by the riots that erupted in New York and other cities in early 1917. In May that year, a month after the nation went to war, he appointed Herbert C. Hoover U.S. food administrator. Under the auspices of the Food Administration, writes historian Meg Jacobs, “prominent women [in New York and other cities] lent their names and organizational talents to enlist housewives in the anti-inflation campaign.” Their aim was to reduce prices by curtailing demand. Shortly afterward the Food Administration shifted its focus to conserving food that was sorely needed by the nation’s troops and its allies. Through its state and local offices—and through Community Councils for National Defense, which were sponsored by the War Department—housewives were mobilized all over the country. Inspired by the belief, as a Food Administration spokesman put it, that “the war is going to be won in the kitchens of America,” millions of them—300,000 in New York City alone—pledged to conserve food. They also agreed to report anyone who wasted food to the nearest Food Administration office. “Every housewife became a war worker,” writes one of Al Smith’s biographers, “asked to participate in a national effort run by the U.S. government.”34 To the dismay of most Americans, who had expected the inflationary spiral to wind down after the war, the price of food continued to soar in 1919. So did the price

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of clothing and other necessities. Before long a nationwide campaign was launched against the “high cost of living.” In the forefront was what the New York Times called “a small army of women,” which was mobilized in large part by the Community Councils for National Defense and the local chapters of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. With the backing of the Food Administration, these women set up “fair price” committees that monitored the price of food (later clothing and shoes too) and provided housewives with lists of what grocers should charge for their produce. Under the leadership of Mary Rumsey, the daughter of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, fifty thousand New York women went from store to store checking prices and reporting cases of profiteering. “We are not going to set off any bombs under retailers,” Rumsey assured New Yorkers, “but we do want to learn if they are justified in charging the present prices.” To reduce the high cost of living, housewives were urged not only to seek out the lowest prices, but also to cut back on consumption. “It is time to stop buying,” said the chair of the National Housewives League. “Rich and poor alike are asked to help.” In support of this position, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer encouraged housewives to ignore “the buy-now propaganda” of retailers and manufacturers.35 By the end of World War I many New York City housewives, working-class and middle-and upper-middle-class alike, were ready to join forces to stop (or at least slow down) the repeated rent hikes that were wreaking havoc on their families. If women were mobilizing to bring down the price of food, housewives wondered, why should they not be mobilizing to hold down the price of housing? If women had the courage to confront rapacious employers and heavy-handed foremen—who, said Clara Lemlich, treated workers no better “than I imagine slaves were [once treated] in the South”—why should they be afraid of greedy landlords and abusive agents? If women were willing to walk off the job even if it meant standing up to brutal policemen and hostile judges—one of whom told a striking cloakworker, “If you were in Russia, you would be sent to Siberia”—why should they be less willing to withhold the rent even if it meant standing up to unsympathetic marshals and indifferent schleppers?36 If women were ready to risk losing their jobs in order to improve their wages and working conditions, why should they not be ready to risk losing their homes in order to make sure that their families had enough to eat? If the women of New York were up to taking part in strikes and boycotts to protect their families against unfeeling employers and unscrupulous retailers, why should they not be up to going on strikes to protect them against avaricious landlords? Hence for the many tenants who were fed up with the frequent rent hikes, enraged by rapacious landlords, and confident in the efficacy of collective action, a decision to go on strike was a much less weighty one during and after World War I than it had been before. One reason was that the tenants were convinced that a rent strike was the only way to protect their families. Another reason was that the tenants were hopeful that if they went on strike they stood a fair chance of forcing the landlords to rescind or at least reduce the rent hikes. Yet another reason

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was that the tenants felt that a rent strike was justified on moral grounds because it contributed not only to the well-being of their families, but also to the nationwide campaign against profiteering. Viewed in this context, a rent strike was not so much a struggle between landlords and tenants as between profiteers and patriots. It was a struggle between those who were taking advantage of the housing shortage to enrich themselves and those who were doing their part to win the war and, when the war was over, to drive down the high cost of living. The campaign against profiteering got under way before the United States entered World War I. At first it was aimed at the munitions makers and other companies whose profits would climb to record levels during the war. In 1916 Congress went so far as to enact the nation’s first excess-profits tax, the bulk of which was paid by E.I. du Pont de Nemours, the giant chemical company. When the United States went to war, the campaign gathered momentum. In the summer of 1917 Congress passed the Lever Act, which was designed to regulate the prices of a wide range of commodities. Shortly thereafter Food Administrator Hoover declared that those who sold “the blood of our sons for profit” were as bad as Judas Iscariot. As the prices of virtually everything soared—and according to the Federal Trade Commission, as corporate profits rose 100 percent (and in some cases, even more)— the campaign against profiteering extended from munitions makers and steel, copper, and chemical companies to meat packers, mine owners, lumber dealers, dairymen, greengrocers, fishmongers, bakers, butchers, druggists, and even, wrote the New York Call, “casket makers.” The war came to an end in November 1918, but prices continued to soar. And far from slowing down, the campaign against profiteering picked up. “By all means,” wrote the New Republic in September 1919, “let the profiteers be harried.”37 And harried they were—by consumers groups, which mounted strikes against butchers and bakers, by big-city newspapers, which launched campaigns against profiteering storekeepers, and by the U.S. Justice Department, which went after meatpackers and other high-profile companies. Shortly after the United States entered the war, the campaign against profiteering was extended to housing as well. It was triggered by what historian Roy Lubove described as “an orgy of rent profiteering” that erupted in New London, Norfolk, and the other cities into which hundreds of thousands poured in search of well-paying jobs in war-related industries. It was widely feared that the skyrocketing rents in these communities would undermine the war effort. Under the auspices of the U.S. Housing Corporation and the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which had been authorized by Congress to build housing for workers in war-related industries, scores of cities and towns created Rent Profiteering Committees (or Rent Adjustment Committees), all of which appealed to the landlords to go easy on the tenants. If appeals did not work, they resorted to threats. As the war dragged on—and as rents soared—the campaign spread to other cities. The Socialist Party spoke out against rent profiteering. So did the American Federation of Labor and local tenants organizations. Pointing to the rising rents in New York City, Mary Marfdin asked, “Is this the way the landlords are helping to win the war?” Speaking for the Williamsburg

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Tenants League, Joseph Klein told President Wilson that it was outrageous that at the same time that the nation’s servicemen were risking their lives, “their families and dependents are left to the mercy of [profiteering] landlords.” “Somewhere along the line a check must be put on this profiteering,” wrote the Call. “If the government does not do it, then the people may, and in their own fashion.”38 Far from winding down after the war, the campaign against rent profiteering gathered force. Indeed the concern over skyrocketing rents was so widespread that the National Housing Association made rent profiteering one of the principal issues at its annual conference in Boston in late 1918. (According to the Call, a couple of the participants took the position that hanging was “the only fit punishment for landlords who took such advantage of the workers’ need for shelter.”) This concern was especially deep-seated in New York, where a former soldier told a mass meeting of angry tenants, “We went to war to protect our homes, and now that we have returned we find them wrested from us by an enemy more insidious, more villainous, than the Hun.” That enemy, he said, “is the war profiteer.” Of all the forms of profiteering, rent profiteering was “the most flagrant and most acute,” not to mention the hardest to avoid, declared the Lockwood Committee. Governor Smith agreed. So did Mayor Hylan, who branded the rent profiteers “a public menace.” It is worth noting that when Hylan finally bowed to pressure to form an official body to deal with the rising rents, he named it the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, a name that did not sit well with the city’s real estate industry. Although the charges of rent profiteering were voiced most forcefully in New York, where there was even talk of a “rent rebellion,” they were made, “in varying degree, in virtually every other city in the United States,” wrote the Literary Digest in early 1920.39 The real estate interests took strong exception to these charges. Some property owners might have taken advantage of the housing shortage to boost their profits, their spokesmen conceded, but they were very much the exceptions. Many may have made what a title insurance company executive called “a proper adjustment of rents,” but they were forced to do so by the soaring costs of labor, materials, taxes, and mortgages. In so competitive a business as rental housing, a business that was not dominated by a handful of giant companies, profiteering was “practically impossible,” declared the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. At a time of rampant inflation, it was unfair to “ask the landlord to give away his commodity for the same old dollar,” said Morris Morganstern. Isidor Berger made the same point. Stressing that profiteering was an extremely vague term, he insisted that New York’s landlords were acting much like grocers, butchers, and even tailors, all of whom were raising their prices. “A person who cannot pay fifty dollars for a suit of clothes must be satisfied with a twenty-five dollar one,” he pointed out. And in New York, “There is as much a shortage of good $25 suits as there is of good $25 apartments.”40 But as Berger and other real estate men learned, they had their work cut out for them. As hard as they tried, they could not disabuse other Americans of the notion that most landlords were profiteers. Well before the war was over, rent profiteering was widely regarded as a serious problem not only in many cities and states, but also

In June 1918 New York Call reporter J. C. Duckworth went to Brooklyn to talk with Mrs. Stein and other tenants about the ongoing rent strike that had started at 1486 Pitkin Avenue and then spread to much of Brownsville, a largely Jewish neighborhood that had a well-deserved reputation as a “Socialist stronghold.” Duckworth left favorably impressed with the strike, which he called a “novel weapon” in the struggle against “profiteering landlords.” Although there had been other such strikes in New York—in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan in the winter of 1917–1918, for example, and in Williamsburg in March and April 1918—a rent strike could still have been described as a novelty as late as mid-1918. But the novelty soon wore off. Following another round of rent hikes, a great many tenants went on strike in the fall of 1918. During the next few months relations between landlords and tenants grew so strained, wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, that some neighborhoods were “like Mount Vesuvius on [the] point of eruption.” And when the landlords raised the rents again in the spring of 1919, many more strikes broke out. Some were confined to one or two apartment houses, others involved a handful, and a few, including one in Brooklyn that took place several months later, extended to dozens of buildings, with hundreds of tenants and thousands of residents. By the fall of 1919, when there were signs that the tenants were growing more restive, the New York Globe wrote that the rent strike was now as much a feature of everyday life in the city as the boycott, the lockout, and the blacklist.42 The postwar rent strikes had much in common with the prewar rent strikes. The housewives appealed to their neighbors to withhold the rent and lend moral support to the striking tenants. In the meantime the leaders of the Socialist Party and the tenants leagues, most of whom were men, tried to organize the rentpayers by houses, by blocks, and by neighborhoods. These “soap-box orators,” as the Brooklyn

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in the nation’s capital. Believing, in the words of Representative George Huddleston of Alabama, that “profiteering in rents is just as oppressive as profiteering in food,” several congressmen introduced legislation to protect ordinary tenants in ways that servicemen and their dependents were protected by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. Many of the bills dealt with the District of Columbia, the one American city that was under congressional control. And after a long struggle Congress imposed rent control in the capital, prompting Senator James A. Reed of Missouri to say, “The day will come when the lovers of liberty will charge us with having sown the dragon’s teeth from which an army of anarchists have sprung up.” Other bills were introduced to extend rent control to the rest of the country. One bill, which applied to all cities of thirty thousand or more, would have prevented landlords from raising the rent of any apartment whose “normal rental,” which was defined as the rent on the day the United States entered World War I, was $50 a month or less. Another bill would have imposed the provisions of one of the most stringent Washington, D.C., rent control bills on other cities. Although Congress did not enact these bills—or for that matter, any form of nationwide rent control—its members did much to lend credibility to the charges of rent profiteering.41

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Daily Eagle called them, held mass meetings and street-corner rallies over much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The housewives also walked the picket lines, one of the principal ways by which they tried to discourage prospective tenants from renting (or even looking at) vacant (or soon-to-be-vacant) apartments in buildings whose tenants were on strike. Speaking of Brownsville, the Call wrote in late April 1918, “On every block there is a procession of women wheeling baby carriages back and forth in front of the ‘struck’ houses or a row of them.” Sometimes older children joined the picket lines after they were let out of school. To call attention to the strike, the tenants posted signs on their windows, often in Yiddish as well as English, that read “This house is on strike!” and “Down with profiteering landlords!” They put similar signs in nearby grocery stores and barber shops and even on the trucks of sympathetic expressmen. In another practice that infuriated the landlords, the striking tenants hung flags outside their windows, American flags in some households, red (or Socialist) flags in others.43 More often than not, the landlords served notice on the striking tenants, forcing them to appear in court to “show cause” why they should not be ousted from their apartments. Before long, wrote the Call, “the courts [were] filled with women with dispossess notices in their hands” and often with young children in tow. On their own—and sometimes with counsel provided by the Socialist Party or one of the tenants leagues—the strikers attempted to dissuade the judge from issuing a final order. Failing that, they requested as long a stay as possible in order to find another place to live. Unless the strike was settled (or the tenants moved out), the landlords then asked the court for a warrant authorizing the marshal to remove the tenants and their belongings. Although the marshal and schleppers often ran into strong resistance, they usually prevailed sooner or later. So many tenants were being evicted in Brownsville, wrote the Call in 1918, that “doubling up” was becoming common. Many tenants opened their homes to their evicted neighbors and offered to store their worldly goods. “No sooner than the furniture of a family is carried out it is brought in again on[to] another floor of the house, in[to] the home of a tenant whose time to pay the rent has not expired.” Even so, said the Call, “it is almost an unusual sight to pass a street without furniture in front of a tenement house.” Nor was it unusual to see tenants and their families spending the night on the sidewalk next to their former homes.44 For all that they had in common with the prewar rent strikes, the postwar rent strikes attracted far more tenants—tens and hundreds of thousands, as opposed to thousands—and affected far more buildings—hundreds and maybe even thousands, as opposed to dozens. In late 1919, the Call reported, hundreds of rent strikes were under way on Manhattan’s Upper West Side alone. Unlike the prewar strikes, which were confined largely to the Lower East Side, the postwar rent strikes spread to other neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. A few strikes broke out in Queens too, but not in Staten Island, which had very little in common with the other boroughs. Unlike the prewar strikes, the postwar strikes drew support not only from Jewish Americans, but also from Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and

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other first- and second-generation immigrants. (It was especially risky for African Americans, who were barred from all but a few neighborhoods, to go on strike. But pointing out that “the only Negroes who can pay the rents [in Harlem] are the ones who run a buffet or a crap table in their apartments,” William Nichols tried to organize three houses on West 142nd Street anyway. He was promptly evicted for his efforts.) As well as many working-class radicals, who had been the mainstay of the prewar strikes, the postwar strikes even galvanized some policemen, firemen, and letter carriers. As one observer wrote in 1919, rent strikes were under way in “respectable neighborhoods far removed from the influence of the bomb-throwing anarchist fraternity.” Even some upper-middle-class tenants went on strike. “From the Bronx and the [Lower] East Side,” the Call pointed out, also in 1919, “the rent strike movement [has even] made its way to the exclusive and fashionable circles of Riverside Drive.”45 Unlike the 1904–1905 rent strike, which was taken over by the New York Rent Protective Association, an offshoot of the Jewish labor movement, and the 1907–1908 rent strike, which was controlled by the Lower East Side branch of the Socialist Party, the postwar rent strikes spurred the formation of a host of tenants leagues (or tenants unions). Among the first was the Washington Heights Tenants League, which was established early in 1918. The Williamsburg Tenants League was formed shortly afterward. Before long, tenants leagues could be found in dozens of neighborhoods all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—among them Harlem and Yorkville, Brownsville and Borough Park, and Tremont and University Heights. By 1920 these tenants leagues were nearly as ubiquitous as the city’s many property owners and taxpayers associations, most of which had been organized along neighborhood or ward lines before the turn of the century. Many of the tenants leagues were closely tied to the Socialist Party, with which they were “blood relatives,” said Abraham Beckerman, a Socialist alderman and president of the East Side Tenants League, whose offices were located in Socialist Party headquarters on the Lower East Side. Other tenants leagues, among them the East Harlem Tenants League, operated out of the party’s branch offices. Although run on a shoestring, the tenant associations mounted rent strikes, offered advice to striking tenants, negotiated for them with landlords, represented them in court, and engaged in lobbying in city hall (in Lower Manhattan) and the state capitol in Albany. They also joined forces to set up boroughwide and even citywide tenant associations, first the Greater New York Tenants League and later the Federation of Tenants Organizations of Greater New York.46 “Every house should be organized,” said Samuel Orr, a Socialist assemblyman and leader of the Greater New York Tenants League, “and every block.” Every neighborhood should be organized too, every borough, and, if possible, the whole city. The tenants had to be well organized, explained Abraham I. Shiplacoff, whose wife was one of the leaders of the Pitkin Avenue rent strike, because the landlords, who were doing everything in their power to break the strikes and evict the strikers, were well organized. Like the tenants, the landlords had a great many neighborhood

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associations, some of which went as far back as the late nineteenth century. Brownsville, the scene of some of the New York’s largest rent strikes, had several such associations, among them the Landlords Protective Association and the Brownsville Landlords Association, which was one of the most bellicose of its kind. The landlords also had a few citywide associations. Among the most important were the United Real Estate Owners Association, the first citywide real estate group to include tenement house owners, which was set up by several of New York’s leading real estate men in the aftermath of the Tenement House Law of 1901, and the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, which was set up by a hundred Lower East Side tenement house owners to break the rent strikes of 1907–1908. In the face of such well-organized (and well-heeled) opposition, the tenants knew they stood little chance of forcing the landlords to rescind or reduce the rent hikes unless they joined forces and stuck together. “Call it Bolshevism or anarchism,” Socialist Alderman B. C. Vladeck said at a mass meeting of tenant leaders and their supporters in March 1920, “but I call it real Americanism, when the people of the city get together to better their condition.”47

4 The Great Rent Strikes

Some of the postwar rent strikes had a lighthearted, even festive air. Writing about one at 473 Powell Street, a tenement house in Brownsville, the New York Call reported in August 1918 that “the whole affair has been a picnic. The children have enjoyed the excitement. The hospitable women have enjoyed taking in their evicted neighbors. The evicted women are enjoying their visit. The rest are getting ready to take their turn when the marshal comes.” During some strikes mothers cooked meals on the sidewalks and children sang while they paraded around the block. “Strike, strike, strike!” went the songs. “I’m a striker, you’re a striker!” During a strike on the Lower East Side, wrote the Call, the strikers, their children, and even their grandparents marched along Avenue C “to the tunes of the [nearby] music store’s victrolas.”1 But the rent strikes were not picnics. They were serious matters, not life-and-death matters, but close enough. They were fraught with great risks. The strikers might lose their homes. Their families might end up on the street. The strikers might be attacked by thugs and beaten and arrested by the police. Their children might fall ill, especially if the strike took place in winter. And their furniture and other worldly goods might be damaged. In other words, the rent strikes were fierce, often violent struggles, the outcome of which had profound consequences not only for the tenants, their families, and their neighbors, but also for the city and the state. For some New Yorkers, especially the leaders of the Socialist Party, the rent strikes were an integral part of an ongoing campaign to transform American society. Rents, they believed, were a result not so much of rising prices or even profiteering landlords as of the capitalist system and the institution of private property on which it was based. We do not want to reform the landlords, said Louis B. Paiewsky, a Socialist candidate for the Board of Aldermen who had joined the party in 1892. Rather, he said, “we want Socialism to supplant capitalism; we want an overthrow

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of the ownership of private property.” At a mass meeting of the East Side Tenants League, several Socialists spoke out in favor of taking the tenement houses from the landlords and turning them over to the tenants. William Karlin, a Socialist candidate for municipal court judge, declared, “The Socialist Party does not say you should pay less rent. It says you shouldn’t pay any rent.” The soaring rents were tailor-made for the Socialists, Alderman Abraham Beckerman acknowledged. If the party helped the tenants bring a halt to the rent hikes, it would be “only natural to expect that the people we helped would vote with us.” Not all of them, but perhaps enough to gain control of the city government.2 But for most New Yorkers the rent strikes were nothing more and nothing less than a short-term measure to force the landlords to rescind or reduce the rent hikes (and to deter them from raising the rents again in the near future). New York’s tenants were no more revolutionary than its workers, most of whom joined forces to raise wages and improve working conditions, not to take the place of employers. They were much less revolutionary than the Veracruz tenants who went on strike in the early 1920s under the leadership of Herón Proal, the “Mexican Lenin,” who asked, “Why should we pay our rent? Why should our money help make the bourgeoisie fatter?” Even in Brownsville—which, wrote the Call, was the most “class conscious” neighborhood in the city—few tenants objected to paying a reasonable rent. Speaking on behalf of the Brownsville Tenants Union, which had roughly five thousand members, Samuel Spievack, its treasurer, and Henry O. Falk, its counsel, pointed out that “the fight is not against the landlords as such, but against the jacking up of rents, month by month, to the point where the man of small wages finds it impossible to pay.” The landlords, they conceded, were entitled to “a fair and equitable profit” and, at a time of rising prices, even to a modest rent hike. But for the recent increases, which ran as high as 100 percent, “there is absolutely no excuse.”3 Given their precarious legal position, the striking tenants were aware that they faced an uphill fight. But they were also aware that most landlords were vulnerable to a rent strike. And the longer it dragged on, the more vulnerable they were. With the exception of the few who had other business interests or other sources of income, the landlords needed the rent not only to support their families, but also to maintain their properties. It was out of the rent that they paid their taxes. And in the case of the many landlords who had first mortgages—and, even more so, the others who had second, third, and even fourth mortgages—it was out of the rent that they made their payments. It was also out of the rent that they paid the coal dealers and the utility companies as well as the janitors and other employees. The landlords could put off paying some bills for a while—and even cut back on heat and hot water and defer routine maintenance and non-emergency repairs. But at some point the suppliers and utilities would cut them off. The employees would find other jobs. Worst of all, the city and the banks would start foreclosure proceedings. A case in point was Yetta Kaufman, the owner of a small tenement house in Brooklyn whose eleven tenants went on strike in the spring of 1919. Unable to pay her taxes and interest, she lost the property.4

In their efforts to force the landlords to rescind or reduce the rent hikes (and in a few cases to lower the rents), the striking tenants employed much the same strategy that had been employed in the prewar rent strikes. They did what they could to reduce the landlords’ revenue. They withheld the rent—or in some cases offered to pay the old rent, not a dollar more. They told the landlords (or their agents and janitors) that “they are on strike,” said the attorney for an East Harlem

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Moreover, if the landlords were driven to bring summary proceedings, they would have to pay someone to serve notice on the striking tenants. They would have to hire a marshal to represent them in court—to explain to the judge why he should issue a final order and then to ask him to issue an eviction warrant. The landlords would also have to pay the marshal to execute the warrant. Just how much these charges came to is hard to say. But during the 1907–1908 rent strike on the Lower East Side, it cost $8 to evict each tenant. After World War I it probably cost twice as much. If a landlord retained a lawyer to represent him in court, it cost much more. It also cost at least as much—and, in many cases even more—to remove the tenants and their belongings. The schleppers charged $10 to $12 per apartment, according to one estimate, $12 to $15, according to another. By early 1920, when the going rate was $15 an apartment, they were asking $5 a room. To empty a tenement house with sixteen to twenty-four tenants would cost more than $250, said the chair of the Harlem Tenants League, in December 1918. In September 1919 the agent for the B.F.W. Realty Company, which owned seventeen tenement houses in Brooklyn, estimated that it would cost over $12 apiece to oust the 450 tenants against whom eviction warrants had been issued from their three-room apartments. Given that the company was asking only $12.50 to $15 a month for rear apartments and $14 to $20 for front apartments, this was a substantial sum.5 Many tenants were confident that a well-organized strike—a strike that mobilized every family in the building and that dragged on for weeks and perhaps months—would expose these vulnerabilities. They believed that once a landlord realized how much it would cost to resist the strikers’ demands—how much he would lose if the tenants withheld their rent and how much he would have to spend to evict the striking tenants—he would have no choice but to give in. Modeled on the practices of striking workers, who tried to force employers to raise wages and improve working conditions by shutting down production, this strategy had been applied with limited success in the prewar rent strikes. Faced with the loss of as much as one or two months’ rent and the expense of ousting the striking tenants, some Lower East Side landlords decided that it would be cheaper to reduce the rent. Whether a strategy that had worked in some cases in one neighborhood before the war would work elsewhere in the city after the war remained to be seen. But if it was too much to expect that a rent strike would bring the landlord “to his knees,” as J. Lewis Dubow, secretary of the Harlem Tenants League, put it in early 1920, it was perhaps not too much to expect that it might force him to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement with the striking tenants.6

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landlord. Sent to collect the rent, the janitors for a large Brooklyn real estate trust “received little encouragement and less money,” reported the New York Daily Tribune. “I visited 50 families,” remarked an agent for a landlord who had just raised the rent at his apartment house in Long Island City. “Not one of the tenants would pay me the increased rent.” Some offered to pay the old rent, but he refused to accept it. Although not violent, the striking tenants were “quite abusive,” he noted. Some of the strikers took a more aggressive stance. When he came to collect the rent, a group of tenants led by three housewives would not let him into the building, complained Abraham Levow, who owned a tenement house at 1294 Lexington Avenue. The strikers not only collected the rent and held onto it, but, declaring that they would run the building “to suit themselves,” even refused to let the plumber in to make repairs. Marching into the janitor’s apartment, they cried, “The Bolsheviki are in control.”7 For many landlords it was bad enough when the striking tenants withheld the rent, even worse when they collected it and refused to turn it over. According to Harry Kannensohn, who owned two six-story tenement houses on East 104th Street, forty-four of his tenants went on strike in the spring of 1919. They formed what he called “a tenant’s soviet,” joined a local tenants league, and set up a strike committee, which collected and held $1,200 in rent. (To Kannensohn’s charges that the strikers were Bolsheviks, one of their leaders replied, “I am 100 per cent. American. My husband and I are members of the Wichita Democratic Club,” which was part of Tammany Hall.) By collecting and holding the rent, the tenants gained a good deal of leverage over the landlords. One group refused to turn the money over to the landlord until he signed an agreement that he would reduce a recent rent hike and would not raise the rent again in the near future. Another group told Rose Rudinsky, the owner of several tenement houses on East 136th Street, that it would hold onto the money until she made what the tenants regarded as necessary improvements. (Refusing to give in to the striking tenants’ demands, Rudinsky’s lawyer declared, “We claim the right to operate the house as we see fit, and not as the tenants dictate.”) In some cases the tenants leagues told the landlords “what repairs are to be made, when they are to be made, and by whom they are to be made,” wrote the New York Herald. They then held the rent until the landlords complied.8 The strikers also appealed to their fellow tenants—many of whom were afraid they would be evicted if they went on strike—to withhold their rent. Neighbors had a moral obligation to stand by one another, the strikers said; unless they did, there was little chance that the strike would succeed. If the other tenants ignored these appeals, the strikers resorted to ostracism, intimidation, and even violence. “The ‘evicted’ woman is the hero in Brownsville today,” the Call wrote in April 1918; “no one has any use for the woman who is submissive and pays the rent.” Writing about the strike at 473 Powell Street, the paper said, “Every family in the house but one has refused to pay the increase.” For the holdout the neighbors had only scorn. “She is the scab,” the other women said. Many strikers were so hostile to the scabs that in some cases where the landlord was willing to rescind or reduce the rent hike

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they refused to call off the strike unless he promised to evict them. The hostility was especially pronounced at 1574 Lexington Avenue, where an elderly tenant named Esther Domowitz broke ranks with the striking tenants and paid a $5 rent hike. Pauline Hinerfield, another tenant and owner of a nearby candy store, upbraided Domowitz, who refused to back down. After a brief scuffle, the women had to be separated by bystanders. Returning home to find his mother hysterical, Solomon Domowitz attacked Hinerfield, who was taken to Harlem Hospital. Aroused by rumors that Hinerfield had been killed, a large crowd went after Domowitz, but the police took him into custody before things got out of hand.9 Realizing that in order to generate much needed revenue the landlords had to replace the striking tenants with paying tenants, the strikers did their utmost to deter prospective tenants from renting apartments that were (or would soon be) vacant. In addition to posting signs on their windows saying that the house was on strike, they urged prospective tenants to keep away. “Don’t scab,” read one of the signs. The striking tenants also set up picket lines in front of the buildings. When a prospective tenant arrived, the picketers would say in what the Call described as “a healthy stage whisper, ‘Rent strike, lady.’ ” The picketers would then encircle the prospective tenant, explain why they were on strike, and ask for support. Many prospective tenants, especially those who were members of labor unions, were unwilling to cross a picket line. Had they tried, the picketers would have blocked them. Even some landlords and their agents were intimidated by the picket lines. Referring to a woman who worked as an agent for Abraham Pearlman, the owner of 473 Powell Street, the striking tenants told a reporter, “She brings customers looking for rooms to this house while we are asleep at night. She takes them up the stairs in the house next door and brings them down through the roof to look at the rooms that are to let here.”10 Even in New York’s tight housing market, all but the most desperate prospective tenants would probably have decided to look for an apartment in another building rather than sneak into 473 Powell Street after dark. These measures were often effective. The pickets have “frightened off prospective tenants,” observed the lawyer for a Harlem landlady in late 1919. They “have thus far prevented [a Brooklyn landlord] from renting a single apartment,” wrote a Call reporter in early 1920. But if need be, the striking tenants were prepared to take more drastic measures. Some of them warned prospective tenants that if they moved into the apartments of evicted tenants they would be beaten and thrown out of windows. To further discourage prospective tenants, the striking tenants urged old tenants to stay in their apartments as long as possible, making it hard for new tenants to move in. The strikers also urged the unions that represented the craftsmen who decorated apartments when they turned over to ask their members to refuse to do work in any apartment from which a tenant had been evicted. They also called on the Moving Van Workers Union, which represented many schleppers, to refuse to move a new tenant into an apartment whose previous tenant had been ousted for withholding the rent. If a prospective tenant was not put off by these obstacles, a group of tenant activists from Brownsville and East New York urged the strikers to

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find out whether he was affiliated with any labor union or fraternal, social, and religious group. They would then report “the offending new tenant” to the organization and demand that he be expelled, which would make it hard (and sometimes impossible) for him to get a job.11 In their effort to force the landlords to submit, the striking tenants also did what they could to make it as expensive as possible to evict them. They stayed in their apartments after they began withholding the rent—and called on other tenants to stay put as well. By so doing the striking tenants left the landlords with no choice but to start summary proceedings. Hence they were obliged to employ one or more agents to serve notice on the striking tenants, to request a precept from a municipal court judge requiring the tenants to show cause why they should not be evicted, to explain to the judge why he should issue a final order and, if a stay was granted, to wait until it expired and then appeal to the judge for an eviction warrant. In most cases—in roughly 95 percent of one thousand landlord-tenant disputes in Manhattan and the Bronx in May 191912—the landlords hired a marshal to represent them in court (as well as to serve the papers and execute the warrants), which was not cheap. In the other cases they retained a lawyer, which was much more costly. If all went well, the landlords also had to hire the schleppers to remove the tenants. At a time when many tenants were withholding the rent, the cost of summary proceedings was a heavy drain on more than a few owners. Although summary proceedings were fairly expensive, the striking tenants found a few ingenious ways to make them even more expensive. When striking tenants were summoned to show cause why they should not be removed from the premises, the case was ordinarily heard by a municipal court judge, who as a rule had no choice but to issue a final order—and perhaps grant the tenants a short stay to look for another apartment. But the striking tenants had the right to ask for a jury trial, provided they were willing to pay a modest fee. A small but not insignificant number of striking tenants exercised that right. A case in point was a group of thirty tenants at 1402 Clay Avenue in the Bronx, all of whom elected to put their fate in the hands of a jury. By asking for a jury trial, the strikers often forced the landlords to go to the additional expense of retaining a lawyer—a boon for the many lawyers who were losing business to the marshals. From the tenants’ viewpoint, a jury trial had other advantages too. Most of the jurors were tenants, who were anything but sympathetic to the landlords. And though the judges were bound to instruct them that the law was on the landlord’s side, there was always a possibility that the jurors would rule in the tenants’ favor anyway. As the New York Telegram wrote, many tenants believe that by asking for a jury trial “they stand a better chance of resisting their landlord.” A jury trial also delayed the proceedings, often for a week or two, so that even if the tenants lost they were able to withhold the rent that much longer.13 Another way by which the striking tenants attempted to make summary proceedings more expensive was to ask the judge to deny the landlord’s request for an eviction warrant. Since a final order had already been issued, most judges saw no

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grounds on which to grant the tenants’ motion. But there were exceptions. One was Harry Robitzek, who was fed up with the many landlords who were taking advantage of the housing shortage to jack up the rents. Citing the authority of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, he declared in April 1919 that before signing a warrant he would henceforth insist that the landlord provide a certificate showing that none of the tenants was in military service (or dependent on anyone in military service). If the landlord could not provide a certificate, Robitzek would order an adjournment. The landlords argued that to get a certificate from the War Department would take a week to ten days and put them to much additional expense. Although Robitzek was not swayed by this argument, he offered to sign a warrant if the landlord would make a sworn statement that the tenants were not covered by the Civil Relief Act. None of the landlords did so, he pointed out. A month later Judge William E. Morris took much the same position. Over the strong objections of the landlord’s lawyer, Morris refused to sign a warrant until he received affidavits that none of the tenants was dependent on anyone in military service. The landlord, who was already paying the lawyer to represent him in court, now had to pay a marshal to obtain the affidavits too.14 Yet another way by which the striking tenants attempted to make summary proceedings more expensive was to deter the schleppers from removing them from their apartments. When the owner of a tenement house in the South Bronx raised the rent from $15 to $26 a month, his tenants objected. And when the landlord’s agent rejected their offer to pay the increased rent in return for a six-month lease, the tenants threatened to strike. The landlord promptly served notice. And after the court issued a final order and an eviction warrant, the schleppers started ousting the tenants. But when told by the tenants that a mother of six who had just given birth to twins lived in one apartment and an elderly couple lived in another, the schleppers “threw up their hands,” wrote a Call reporter, and announced, “We won’t put those people out under any circumstances.” Things were much the same in Brooklyn, where 450 tenants went on strike when the B.F.W. Realty Company raised the rents from $9 to $15 a month on some apartments and from $11 to $18 a month on others. The company brought summary proceedings. The court ruled in its favor. And armed with eviction warrants, a team of schleppers began ousting the tenants in September. But when the striking women showed they belonged to the Williamsburg Tenants League, the schleppers, who were themselves union members, stopped work.15 If the schleppers were not swayed by appeals to their compassion and class interests, the striking tenants were prepared to take more drastic (and if need be even unlawful) measures. In May 1919 Marshal David Goldberg and a team of schleppers started to evict the striking tenants at 405 Hinsdale Avenue in Brooklyn. Things went smoothly enough until the schleppers reached the apartment of a tenant whose eleven-year-old was suffering from the grippe and tonsillitis. Pointing out that the Board of Health had not issued a certificate of illness, Goldberg ordered them to press ahead. But as soon as the schleppers took the furniture out of the

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apartment, a group of angry women put it back. The women then took up a collection and gave $12 to the schleppers “on condition,” wrote the Eagle, “that nothing more be done to disturb the unhappy tenant.” A month later a group of Bronx tenants who were about to be evicted piled pianos, stoves, and other heavy and bulky objects in front of the door of their tenement house on Brown Place. With the schleppers faced with the task of moving these objects away from the entrance and then carrying the furniture down five or six flights of stairs, Marshal Charles Moshier persuaded the landlady to reduce the rent hike by more than half and sign an agreement that the rent would not be raised again for a year. Still other striking tenants attacked a marshal, his deputies, and the schleppers with bricks and stones and, in one case, charged the schleppers, using furniture and bedding rolls as weapons, and drove them from the site.16 The striking tenants took it for granted that it was in their interest to withhold the rent and resist eviction as long as possible. A long strike, one that dragged on for weeks or months, deprived the landlords of much needed revenue at the same time that it forced them to dip into reserves to pay the marshals, schleppers, and lawyers. A long strike also left the landlords vulnerable to unforeseeable developments that could further push back the day when they could regain possession of their buildings and fill them with paying tenants. In early May 1919, for example, the schleppers went on strike for higher wages, thereby bringing evictions to a standstill. And in early December the municipal court judges agreed to honor the holiday spirit by making every effort to postpone all dispossess proceedings until after Christmas. A long strike put the landlords at the mercy of the tenants in another way. Perhaps inspired by the prewar rent strikes, during which a few tenants threatened to burn down the houses, some strikers threatened to do serious damage to the buildings. A few carried out the threats, breaking windows and fixtures, defacing walls, and destroying stoves and hot water heaters, before vacating the premises. In one Bronx apartment house the striking tenants did $5,000 in damage before they were evicted, said the lawyer for the landlord’s agent.17 If the strike dragged on long enough, the landlords might be forced to conclude that it made more sense to rescind the rent hikes than to hold the line and spend a year or more trying to recoup their losses. The landlords believed that the way to break a strike as quickly as possible was to bring summary proceedings. For their part the tenants assumed that the way to win a strike was to drag these proceedings on as long as possible. Although this was easier said than done, the tenants had cause for cautious optimism. They could often count on the tenants leagues and socialist organizations to provide lawyers to represent them in court. The striking tenants also had reason to hope that their case might be heard by one of the many municipal court judges who were openly antagonistic to profiteering landlords. If the judge ruled against them, the striking tenants could count on some of the neighbors to take them in. They also knew that they could find temporary shelter in churches, synagogues, and armories. If worse came to worst, the striking tenants could often depend on the tenants leagues and other groups to store their belongings in nearby warehouses. And they had reason to

To what extent the tenants’ confidence was warranted is hard to say. Between May 1918 and April 1920, the heyday of tenant activism, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of rent strikes in New York. The newspapers covered only a few, usually the largest, longest, and most tumultuous, and covered even fewer from start to finish. And no agency made a systematic survey of the strikes and their outcomes. What is more, the available evidence is contradictory. Judge John R. Davies, who presided over Manhattan’s Seventh District Court on West 145th Street, one of the busiest in the city, wrote in late 1919 that of the 12,000 landlord-tenant disputes that came before him, fewer than a dozen resulted in eviction. Yet the Lockwood Committee reported in early 1920 that “never before in the history of the city of New York have there been so many evictions.” More than half took place in Manhattan. More than a quarter occurred in Brooklyn, where, the Call wrote in mid-1919, “Scarcely a day passed without 15 or 20 families being evicted [in Brownsville alone]” and the Eagle added that Marshal David Goldberg “has been about the busiest man [in the neighborhood].” Another sixth of the evictions took place in the Bronx, where the Telegram wrote in late 1919 that it was common to see “women and children sleeping in the hallways and basements of the buildings they have been forced to vacate.” So many tenants were facing eviction, the Home News reported, that there was talk about turning the Pelham Bay Naval Camp barracks into a temporary shelter.19 Some rent strikes were successful. A case in point was the strike at 473 Powell Street, a small tenement house in Brownsville, which started in the summer of 1918, when Abraham Pearlman served notice that he was raising the rent as of September 1. His twenty tenants objected. With the help of the Brownsville Consumers League, which was affiliated with the Socialist Party, they went on strike. All but one, who was denounced as a “scab,” withheld the rent, and some posted signs in Yiddish on their windows calling attention to the strike. Pearlman responded by bringing summary proceedings. Before long, six of the striking tenants, including one of the two leaders, were evicted. Four other tenants were to be evicted within a week. And the other tenant leader was about to appear in court, where he was unlikely to fare any better than the other strikers. The strike, however, dragged on. The other tenants withheld the rent—and took in their homeless neighbors, who stored their furniture in a nearby warehouse. Concluding that it would cost too much to oust all the tenants, Pearlman offered to meet with their representatives and their lawyer, Emanuel Mehl, counsel for the Brownsville Consumers League. Together they reached an agreement by which Pearlman rescinded the rent hikes for some tenants and reduced them for the others. He also

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believe that in the event such arrangements fell through their neighbors might take up a collection to buy tarpaulin to protect their belongings from the rain. The local firefighters might be willing to supply tarpaulin too.18 Given this moral and logistical support, the strikers were confident that they could force the landlords to abandon their efforts to raise the rent.

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promised that he would not raise the rents again before May 1, 1919, and in the meantime would make repairs as needed. Pearlman allowed the evicted tenants to move back into their homes—and at the insistence of the strikers even agreed to evict the “scab” at the end of the month.20 Another successful strike took place at 952 Anderson Avenue, an apartment house in the Bronx that was owned by William H. Lammars. Early in October 1919 Lammars notified his fifteen tenants that effective November 1 he was raising the rents from $23 to $45 on some apartments and from $28 to $50 a month on the others. When the tenants refused to pay the increased rent, Lammars’s attorney brought summary proceedings against five of the strikers. Judge Harry Robitzek, who presided over the Bronx First District Court, appointed a lawyer to represent the tenants. At his request, the judge granted an adjournment. When the case resumed, Robitzek urged Lammars to consider reducing the rent hikes. The landlord refused—and his lawyer, George H. Hannecke, insisted that the judge had no power to adjust the rent. Robitzek said that might be true under ordinary conditions, but conditions in the Bronx were far from ordinary. When Robitzek calculated that under the new rents revenues would exceed expenses by 50 percent, he told Lammars, “I do not intend to sit here and let you or any other landlord continue practices that will make the people of this home-loving community Bolsheviks and anarchists.” Lammars refused to give in. He “wanted the money or the rooms,” said Hannecke. When Robitzek asked on what basis Lammars set the rent and Hannecke replied, “None of your business,” the judge had enough. Declaring that it was indeed “my business,” he refused to sign the eviction warrants, thereby allowing the five striking tenants to stay in their apartments. “I will test this case in a higher court,” shouted Hannecke. “That’s your privilege,” responded Robitzek.21 Other rent strikes were unsuccessful. One example was the strike at 399 and 405 Hinsdale Avenue, two small tenement houses in Brownsville that were owned by L. Halperin. Starting in March 1918, Halperin imposed the first of five hikes, which raised the rent on his apartments from $15 to $23 a month. But when he announced the rent was going up another $2 on May 1, 1919, the tenants refused to pay. Early in May Halperin brought summary proceedings against the thirty-eight striking tenants. Shortly thereafter Judge Cornelius Ferguson, who presided over Brooklyn’s Fifth District Court, ordered the strikers to pay the new rent or move out. When the tenants ignored the judge’s order, Marshal David Goldberg and a team of schleppers began emptying the apartments. In short order they ousted fourteen tenants, whose families were taken in by other tenants and whose belongings were stored at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum. But in the face of mounting resistance from the tenants and their neighbors, Goldberg ordered the schleppers to stop. At the urging of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, Halperin agreed to meet with representatives of the remaining twenty-four tenants on May 20th—provided that Socialist assemblyman Abraham I. Shiplacoff did not sit in on the meeting. Although Shiplacoff agreed to step aside, negotiations soon broke down when Halperin refused to consider any settlement that allowed the evicted tenants to return to

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their apartments. Weather (and a schleppers’ strike) permitting, Marshal Goldberg got ready to oust the remaining tenants.22 Another unsuccessful strike took place at 740 and 744 Trinity Avenue, two rundown apartment houses in the South Bronx. The strike got under way in late September 1919 after Louis Margolies, the agent for the owners, notified the sixty-two tenants that the rent would be raised $3 to $5 a month effective October 1. The tenants, who had gone along with two previous rent hikes, protested. Forming a union, they informed Margolies that they would pay the increased rent only if he decorated the apartments and gave them a year’s lease. Insisting that he would not deal with the tenants as a group, Margolies started summary proceedings. When the tenants stuck to their position, however, he agreed to meet with their representatives. But he refused to back down, even when the tenants offered to settle for a sixmonth lease. “I can’t do anything for you,” he said. Neither, it turned out, could the courts. Armed with eviction warrants, the marshal and schleppers began removing the tenants on October 20. They soon ousted some tenants, many of whom spent the night on the sidewalks, sitting next to their furniture, or moved in with neighbors. When the schleppers balked at removing others, the marshal prevailed on Margolies to meet again with the tenants’ representatives. But there was little reason to believe that the agent would give in or that the tenants would have any choice other than to pay the increased rent or vacate the premises, which many were prepared to do.23 Still other rent strikes were settled on more or less mutually satisfactory terms. A case in point was one that broke out in the Bronx in the fall of 1918 and, according to the Call, turned into the “biggest rent strike of the year.” Early in September the landlord, a company that owned several apartment houses on East 197th Street, notified about 130 tenants that their rents would be raised on October 1. The tenants responded by holding a mass meeting at the Seventh Assembly District headquarters of the Socialist Party. With the support of Samuel Orr and Morris Gisnet, they went on strike. For roughly two months the tenants withheld their rent. Unable to break the strike, the landlord agreed to negotiate with the strikers. Representatives of both sides held several meetings and what the Call referred to as “arbitration conferences,” which were chaired by Mary Marfdin, executive secretary of the Greater New York Tenants League. In early December they reached an agreement by which the landlord reduced the rent hike by a dollar a month, promised to reduce it again in April 1919, and guaranteed that the apartments would have adequate heat and hot water. The tenants called off the strike—and, though the Call did not say so, presumably paid the rent they had withheld in October and November.24 Another rent strike that was settled on more or less mutually satisfactory terms took place a year later in Brooklyn. Early in August 1919 the B.F.W. Realty Company, which owned seventeen five-story apartment houses in Williamsburg, notified the tenants that the rents would be raised on September 1. Fifteen or twenty tenants responded by starting a rent strike. Before long hundreds of others, many of whom were members of the Williamsburg Tenants League, joined them. Spokesmen for the tenants justified the strike on the grounds that the increase was excessive and

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the houses were poorly cared for. Spokesmen for the landlord defended the increase on the grounds that the company had spent $20,000 on repairs and improvements since acquiring the properties in June. When negotiations broke down, the company brought summary proceedings against 450 tenants. Although the court sided with the landlord, Marshal Daniel McBride ran into trouble when the schleppers refused to remove the strikers who had “union cards.” After five weeks—during which, wrote the Times, the neighborhood was “a storm centre for rent striking”—representatives of the landlord and tenants sat down together and, with the help of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, hammered out an agreement. The tenants would call off the strike and pay the rent that had been withheld (and deposited in a bank by the strike committee). In return the landlord would reduce the rent hike, offer the tenants a nine-month lease, and make repairs as needed.25 Of the many postwar rent strikes, most were settled. A few were resolved out of court. In some cases the landlords and tenants came to an accord on their own. In others they reached an agreement at the urging of one of the city marshals or highranking police officers. But most strikes were resolved in court. According to wellinformed observers, several municipal court judges tried hard to get the landlords and tenants to settle their differences amicably. Among them were Morris Eder of Manhattan, Jacob S. Strahl of Brooklyn, and Peter A. Sheil of the Bronx. Sheil was especially successful, wrote the Bronx Home News. A native of the Bronx, he went to P.S. 12, Manhattan College, and New York Law School, entered politics as a Democrat, and, after serving three terms on the Board of Aldermen, won election as a municipal court judge in 1907 and again in 1917. During the fall of 1919, Sheil heard five thousand landlord-tenant disputes in the First District Court, which he presided over with Harry Robitzek. In most cases, wrote the Home News, Sheil prevailed on the landlords and tenants to settle—and even persuaded the landlords to give the tenants a lease, usually for a year, which protected them from another rent hike in the near future and enabled them to avoid what the paper called “an almost hopeless search for a new apartment.” Asked to account for his success, Sheil replied, “There is no secret to it. I just use common sense. Both the landlord and tenants come to Court with what they believe is [a just] grievance.” After listening to both and telling them how it looked to a third party, “in nine times out of ten both the landlord and tenant see the light of day and agree to settle.”26 Although Judge Sheil usually tried to persuade the parties to settle, he was not always solicitous of the tenants who appeared before him. In the spring of 1918 twenty families went on strike when their landlady, a Miss Klemann, raised the rent on their apartments at 1102–1106 Union Avenue $5 to $9 a month. Klemann responded by bringing summary proceedings. Rather than risk eviction, five tenants paid the increased rent. The other fifteen were summoned to appear before Sheil in late May. Although the tenants’ lawyer, Assemblyman Samuel Orr, offered evidence that Klemann had promised she would not raise the rent more than $3 a month, the judge was not moved. “I have no sympathy for the tenants,” he said. When Orr reminded him that Klemann had broken her promise to the tenants, Sheil declared,

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“That is her business.” Sheil sometimes ruled in favor of the tenants, among them a South Bronx family covered by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, to which he granted a stay of three months over the strenuous objections of the landlord. When he threatened to appeal, the judge told him to “appeal to President Wilson.” But as late as the spring of 1919 Sheil was still advising tenants that it was not in their interest to go on strike when the landlord raised the rent—and that if they did he would have no alternative but to oust them.27 By late 1919 several other municipal court judges were severely troubled by the plight of the tenants and the greed of the landlords. Among them were not only Jacob Panken, New York’s only Socialist judge, who, as the Call pointed out, did not “camouflage his sympathies [for the tenants],” but also Aaron J. Levy, who was an outspoken opponent of socialism and Bolshevism. Shortly before stepping down from the bench, he said how painful it had been for him to watch hundreds and even thousands of tenants being gouged by their landlords. He was as outraged as much by the profiteering landlords as by the “Bolsheviki” tenants leagues, both of which “must be wipe[d] out.” Much like Levy, Harry Robitzek felt that the tenants “have been gouged to the limit.” Although he told one group of striking tenants that they “ought to have more sense than to listen to the babblings of Bolshevik agitators,” he acknowledged, “There is too much profiteering going on.” “It amounts to nothing more than a plunder of the poor.” And it drives otherwise law-abiding people to Bolshevism. “If anything can be found to stop this crime,” he said, “this court will do all it can.” Among the other judges who were fed up with being asked to order hard-strapped tenants to pay excessive rent hikes or move out of their apartments were Jacob S. Strahl, who told a packed court in October 1919, “I will not be a party to the profiteering landlord’s game.”28 As the housing shortage grew worse, many of these judges—even some who complained that under the law they had no alternative but to issue eviction warrants in cases of nonpayment of rent—took steps to ease the plight of the tenants. As early as April 1919 Robitzek announced that he would not order tenants to pay the rent except in cases where the increase was reasonable. Several months later he declared, “I am not going to issue a single eviction warrant where I am assured the tenant has been gouged.” In May 1919 Morris also said that he would not issue eviction warrants and that whenever a landlord attempted to “hog it all” he would string the case out as long as possible. By the fall Panken was refusing to issue eviction warrants too. And several Bronx judges were denying the landlords’ requests except in cases where the tenants had withheld the rent without good reason or engaged in acts of vandalism. In early October so many tenants were facing eviction that Levy, president of the Board of Municipal Court Justices, asked his colleagues to stay all summary proceedings until November. At the end of the year the Bronx judges agreed to make every effort to postpone these proceedings until after the holidays. And in early February 1920 Judge Morris said, “We are going to do what we can to prevent evictions of any kind until the fair weather sets in.” If possible, “we will keep tenants in their apartments until April 1.”29

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Not all the municipal court judges were as sympathetic to the tenants as Morris. A case in point was Benjamin Hoffman of Manhattan, who thought that the reports of the housing shortage were much exaggerated. There were plenty of desirable apartments for rent on the Lower East Side, he said. The problem was that most tenants, even many tenants of “modest means,” refused to live in the old-law tenements. They insisted on an up-to-date apartment, with “a marble entrance, marble stairs, an elevator, [and] a bathroom, the tub of which is not infrequently used for the baby to sleep in or to store some household paraphernalia.” Another case in point was Edward A. Richards of Brooklyn, who denounced a group of striking tenants from Brownsville as “nothing but Bolsheviks.” The law “empowered a landlord to charge as much as he wanted,” Richards said. Unless the tenants agreed to pay the rent or move out of their apartments, they “could expect nothing better than the harshest treatment from him,” the Call reported. Richards’s remarks so outraged the leaders of the Brooklyn Tenants Union that they called for his impeachment. Just as Morris and other judges invariably sided with the tenants, so Richards and other judges regularly ruled in favor of the landlords. The result, said William H. Stonebridge, a Bronx real estate dealer, was that the municipal courts had no uniform standards by which they dealt with landlord-tenant disputes in general and rent strikes in particular. “This is not law or justice,” he protested. “It is just as unfair to the tenant as to the landlord. It is worse than anarchy.”30 The municipal courts had several problems other than the lack of uniform standards. By far the most serious was the staggering increase in the caseload. By virtue of the soaring number of summary proceedings, a result in large part of the great rash of rent strikes, the courts were jam-packed in 1919. The situation was bad enough in early May, when there were 2,000 landlord-tenant cases on the calendar, including 350 in Judge Michael J. Scanlan’s courthouse in the North Bronx, where all records for summary proceedings were broken. It was even worse in the fall. By early October there were 10,000 cases on the calendar, a whopping 1,400 in Judge Robitzek’s courthouse on East 163rd Street alone. “There has never been a time when there were so many cases to be heard in one day [in the Bronx],” the Telegram observed. The courts were very busy in Brooklyn too. More than one hundred cases were on the calendar in the second, fourth, and sixth judicial districts, and more than two hundred in the first, third, and seventh. October 6 was “one of the busiest days” ever in the Brooklyn municipal courts, wrote the Daily Eagle. The courts were also very busy in Manhattan, especially in Harlem and on the Lower East Side. All things considered, wrote the Herald, October 6 was “the busiest day” in the history of the municipal courts. The caseload declined later in the year, though in early December the Bronx courts were still so clogged that three Manhattan judges were dispatched to help their overworked colleagues uptown.31 In virtually all these cases the defendants were tenants, most of whom had refused to pay the rent or had “held over,” remaining in the apartments after the leases had expired. Summoned to show cause why they should not be evicted,

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thousands of them converged on courthouses all over much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Most were women, many of whom carried infants in their arms, wheeled baby carriages, and watched over other children who tugged at their dresses. “They’re too small to leave alone,” explained Mary Nolan, a Bronx mother of four. More often than not, the tenants arrived in the early morning. But the courtrooms were so quickly filled that most had to stand outside and wait—in the sun if they were lucky, in the rain if, like Nolan and her children, they were not. Sometimes they waited until mid- or late afternoon. The crowd in front of Judge Robitzek’s courthouse was so large that police reserves, who were sent from the Morrisania precinct house, told the tenants to form seven lines, which stretched from the courthouse stairs to the sidewalk and brought pedestrian traffic to a halt. The reserves also set aside an open space opposite the courthouse for baby carriages. Elsewhere in the Bronx the courthouse doors were locked from the inside to keep the tenants out until the judge was ready to hear their case. “As the cases were called,” the Times reported, “the titles of the actions were relayed through the crowds that lined the stairs until they finally reached the street, where the announcements were made and the principals involved threaded their way into the court room.”32 The courtrooms were, if anything, even more crowded than the sidewalks. They were jam-packed not only with tenants and their families, but also with landlords and their agents, marshals and their deputies and clerks, and, of course, lawyers, “some representing clients,” wrote the Home News, and “some looking for clients.” Judge Levy said that his courtroom on East Broadway was so crowded that “you could hardly enter [it].” Indeed, the courtrooms in the Bronx were so jammed that some tenants could not even get in—and thus could not answer the summons. With some courtrooms so crowded that, as the Telegram put it, they “could not have held another person,” many litigants were unable to make their way to the witness stand when their case was called. Often they had to give their testimony from their seats in the rear, wrote the Evening Post. In some cases the courtrooms (and the corridors and stairways leading up to them) were so crowded that after the case was disposed of the litigants could only get out by climbing down the fire escape. Robitzek’s courtroom was so packed, the Home News wrote, that at times the noise reached a level where “it was utterly impossible for the justice or his clerks to hear a word that was being said.”33 With the courts and sidewalks jammed with thousands of anxious tenants, most of whom were very angry at their landlords, it is not surprising that things sometimes got out of hand. When the landlords arrived, the tenants denounced them as “profiteers” and “thieves”—and, in some cases, wrote the Home News, “hissed and jeered” at them. Some tenants even pelted “profiteering” landlords with vegetables—and, in one case, with stones. In Harlem and the Bronx, said the World, the disorder “at times took on the proportions of a small riot.” And in Brooklyn, the Eagle reported, five hundred women, “weeping and wailing, with little children toddling at their heels,” stormed the Pennsylvania Avenue municipal court. On occasion police or police reserves had to be sent in to restore order. Things

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sometimes got out of hand inside the courts as well. A small brawl broke out in Robitzek’s courtroom when Mrs. Alice Cavanaugh, who represented fifty-six striking tenants, hit Julius D. Tobias, the landlord’s lawyer. Although dazed, Tobias “returned the blow,” wrote the Call. A bigger brawl erupted in Magistrate Francis X. Mancuso’s courtroom in Harlem, where Louis Schecter and his brother Lazarus were facing criminal charges that grew out of a dispute with one of their tenants at 260 Riverside Drive. Toward the end of the trial Lazarus Schecter punched Assistant District Attorney William O’Shaughnnessey in the nose. O’Shaughnnessey retaliated. Shouting “you are killing my brother!” Schecter’s sister then threw a book at the prosecutor. Court attendants broke up the fight, wrote the Times, but not before several chairs and tables were overturned.34 By late 1919 and early 1920 the municipal court judges were at their wits’ end. “What in God’s name are we to do [with] the men and women and children, thousands and thousands of them, [who are pouring into our courtrooms?]” Harry Robitzek asked. To give each case the attention it deserved—to allow the tenants and landlords to testify, to permit the lawyers to examine (and cross-examine) witnesses, to evaluate the evidence, and, if possible, persuade the parties to settle—took a good deal of time under ordinary circumstances. It took even more time when some of the litigants could not speak English and many of them, as many as three-quarters, estimated the Home News, did not “understand what was going on.” But the judges did not have the time. With so many cases on the calendar, they “are unable to give but a few minutes to the consideration of [each one],” reported the Lockwood Committee. Often a few minutes were more than they could spare. The judges were also aware that hundreds, if not thousands, of tenants and their children were waiting outside the courts, often for hours and sometimes in the rain, which gave them another incentive, wrote the Home News, “to hurry the cases through in record-breaking time.” Small wonder that more than a few judges concluded that the only way to clear their calendars was to postpone the cases in the hope that the landlords and tenants would come to an agreement before they were scheduled to return to court.35 The municipal courts were so clogged with landlord-tenant disputes that it seemed the judicial system was on the verge of collapse, wrote the Herald. Overwhelmed by the many thousands of summary proceedings, the judges had no time to deal with other types of civil suits, the parties to which were left in legal limbo. Unless the judges were able to prevail on the landlords and tenants to settle, they were likely to leave one side or another extremely dissatisfied—not only by the verdict but also by the cursory process by which it was reached. If, on the one hand, the judges applied what Robitzek called “the law of common sense”—and refused to issue eviction warrants in cases of rent profiteering—the landlords would be outraged. And as Levy pointed out, there was a good chance that these judges would be reversed on appeal. But if, on the other hand, the judges adhered to the New York State statutes (or, in Robitzek’s words, “the present antiquated laws”)—and issued warrants of eviction in cases of nonpayment of rent—the tenants would be furious.

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And if a tenant finds that he cannot get relief from the courts, Robitzek pointed out, “he becomes not only dissatisfied with the court[s] but invariably with our form of government, and he becomes easy prey for the public agitator or socialist”—a concern that was shared by many municipal court judges.36 Much as Robitzek feared, there were signs that many tenants were losing faith that the courts would protect them from profiteering landlords. To stop landlords from raising the rent, to deter them from bringing summary proceedings, and, if necessary, to force them to rescind or reduce the hikes, some tenants threatened to destroy their property. Late in 1919 a group of tenants told Max Feuerstein, a Lower East Side landlord, that if he tried to collect the rent, “We will break the glass, the plumbing and anything [else] we run across.” Other tenants went even further, threatening the landlord’s life and limb. When Andrew O’Brien raised the rent on her five-room apartment in the Bronx from $30 to $40 a month, one of his tenants declared that “if she were a man she would take O’Brien out in the backlots and beat him as ‘they did [the usurious] landlords in Ireland.’ ” Lieutenant P. J. Commerford, an officer in the naval reserve who was facing eviction from his apartment on West 111th Street for withholding the rent, which had been raised from $36 to $53 a month, said that if he could get his landlord on a ship he would “throw him overboard.” Jacob A. Glass, a Bronx landlord, testified that when he threatened to evict one of his tenants if she did not stop fussing about a rent hike of two dollars a month, “she told me she would put a bullet through my heart, and, if she didn’t do it, she would get a gangster to do it.” Harry Minarsky, who had raised the rent four dollars a month in a five-story tenement house he leased in East Harlem, complained that his tenants started a vendetta against him, not only threatening him but also carrying about the streets an empty coffin with a sign on it that read “Here lies Minarsky.” There was “no R.I.P.,” wrote the Call.37 In many cases the threats were idle. In others they were anything but. Some tenants did a good deal of damage to their apartments before they were evicted. A few even destroyed the landlord’s other properties. A group of striking tenants broke into the cellar of one tenement house and smashed the hot water heater. And following the eviction of a striking tenant, sympathetic neighbors tore apart a vacant store on the first floor of another tenement house and built a bonfire out of the wreckage. Other tenants vented their anger not so much at the landlords’ property as at the landlords themselves. After being evicted from a tenement house on Hinsdale Avenue in Brooklyn, a group of irate women went after the landlord, M. Sidman, and his son Irving. They chased the Sidmans for half a mile. When they took refuge in the Miles Bros. paintbrush factory on Pitkin Avenue, the crowd, which by then included men as well as women, surrounded the factory and threw stones and bricks through the windows. The Sidmans escaped serious injury, but only because the police spirited them away in a patrol wagon. The police also had to rescue Jacob G. Feldman, who was attacked by an angry crowd of women after he evicted more than a dozen tenants from a tenement house in Brownsville. Some tenants beat and scratched their landlords, others doused them with hot water, and

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one tenant even invited his landlord into the apartment, where he pointed a revolver at his head and threatened to kill him unless he agreed to reduce the rent.38 At times, as Irving Sidman found out, the landlord’s family was also a target of the tenants’ rage. During a rent strike on Maujer Street in Brooklyn, a group of women tenants attacked Abraham Ernstedoff, the landlord’s son. When his mother attempted to ward off the women with a rolling pin, one of them, Esther Yerkowitz, grabbed it and struck Ernstedoff. The police dispersed the crowd and arrested Yerkowitz, who was charged with felonious assault. The landlord’s employees were sometimes in the line of fire as well. To give a few examples, Mary Karp, the janitor of a tenement house on the Lower East Side, served notice on Rose Sprung in June 1919. Sprung reacted by pouring hot coffee on Karp, burning her back and shoulders so badly that she had to be taken to Gouverneur Hospital. After forcing their way through the crowd, the police arrested Sprung. A month later Jacob and Sadie Gold were evicted from their apartment in Brownsville. When sympathetic neighbors moved the Golds’ furniture from the sidewalk into Beckie Scholl’s apartment, the janitor urged the landlord, who was her brother-in-law, to evict Scholl as well. With the help of the Golds, Scholl then broke into the janitor’s apartment and attacked her. Later in the year B. Goldstein, an agent for Morgenstein Brothers, owner of an apartment house on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, got into an argument with a tenant whose rent had been raised from $52 to $75 a month. As a crowd gathered, the tenant punched Goldstein in the jaw, knocking him to the ground.39 Incidents such as these were so common in 1919, said Patrick J. Reville, Bronx Superintendent of Buildings, that “it is absolutely impossible for a landlord to walk through certain sections of the Bronx today.” One such landlord was Herman Kauffman, the owner of an apartment house on Longfellow Avenue and, according to Captain Charles A. Goldsmith of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, “a rent gouger of the worst sort.” “It was not safe for me to visit my property,” Kauffman complained. When he got within five blocks of the building from which he had recently evicted several families, the tenants “would start to throw rocks at me, trying to kill me.” Kauffman was so frightened that he carried a police whistle with him. Things were much the same in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Joseph Lazarus, the agent for the Doscher Estate, which owned several tenement houses in Brownsville, was so concerned about his safety that he hired a bodyguard to accompany him when he collected the rent. And Harry Minarsky, whose coffin was carried around the streets of East Harlem, was so traumatized, wrote the Call, that “he began to have dreams about mobs of angry tenants chasing him into the Harlem River, or stringing him from the highest span of the Williamsburg bridge.” When he imagined seeing “angry faces peering into the front windows at night” and hearing “whisperings from under his bed,” Minarsky moved his family out of the apartment and gave up his lease on the building.40 In the face of the tenants’ threats and attacks, some landlords backed down. But others responded in kind. A Bronx landlord not only verbally abused one of his tenants, but also threatened to “break the neck” of one of her children. After

The postwar housing crisis, of which the rent strikes were the most dramatic manifestation, not only pitted tenants against landlords. They also pitted tenants against tenants. A case in point occurred in Brooklyn in the summer of 1919, when thirteen tenants went on strike after the landlord raised the rent three dollars a month. They were summoned to appear before Judge Jacob S. Strahl, who declared that he would not go along with a rent hike unless the owners provided

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conceding that he had “lost his head,” he was found guilty of disorderly conduct and fined $25. A Brooklyn landlord struck a tenant who he claimed had incited the other tenants against him. He was ordered to post a $500 bond and keep the peace for six months. Accompanied by police officers, a Manhattan landlord pulled a revolver out of his pocket when a tenant refused to allow him to enter her apartment and take down the strike signs. Another Bronx landlord came to collect the rent with a man masquerading as a police officer who drew his gun and threatened to shoot two striking tenants. Some landlords left the dirty work to others, especially in Brownsville and other working-class neighborhoods. They hired thugs to harass picketers, disrupt meetings, and do whatever else was necessary to break the strikes. The thugs, wrote the Call, “are doing all in their power to provoke a riot,” which would have forced the police to intervene, presumably on the landlord’s side. (One landlord took the unusual step of ordering the janitor to lock the doors of his apartment house after dark to prevent the striking tenants from going out. Although Judge Robitzek held that the landlord “has no right to make the tenants in the house prisoners at night simply because they refuse to pay their rent,” he nonetheless issued eviction warrants against the strikers.)41 By themselves these confrontations between the landlords and tenants were a threat to public order. And when the marshals, schleppers, and police officers got caught up in them, as they often did, the threat became more serious. During 1919 and early 1920 it was not uncommon for striking tenants to attack the marshals, schleppers, and police officers—even, in some cases, to pour boiling water, straight out of the teakettles, on them. In May 1919, for example, a group of women assaulted six schleppers after they evicted three tenants from a tenement house on Williams Street in Brownsville. The police arrested two of the women, one of whom was charged with assault and the other with interfering with a policeman, but the crowd wrested them away from the officers. Reserves had to be summoned from the Liberty Avenue police station to re-arrest the women and protect the officers. It was also not uncommon for police officers, though not marshals and schleppers, to use excessive force in dealing with the striking tenants and, in some cases, innocent bystanders. During the long strike against the B.F.W. Realty Company, for example, an officer knocked down a pregnant tenant who was manning the picket line. Suffering from contusions and shock, she had to be confined to bed, prompting other tenants to threaten to file charges of police brutality with Police Commissioner Richard C. Enright. Another officer arrested a striking tenant and a mother of seven just for asking why he had taken one of the other striking tenants into custody.42

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better service and ordered their agent, J. Louis Bookman, to meet with a committee of striking tenants. After a long meeting, Bookman agreed to reduce the increase to one dollar a month, paint the rooms in need of it, and make repairs where necessary. But the tenants insisted they would not end the strike unless he evicted the three families who had refused to join the strike. On that point negotiations broke down. Said Morris Jaffee, secretary of the Brooklyn Tenants Union, “The tenants would not agree to any settlement whereby the strikebreakers would remain in the house.” The housing shortage pitted landlords against landlords too. An investigator for the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering found that a Bronx property owners association was “using every possible means to bring pressure to bear upon those landlords who have thus far refused to raise their rent above the fair profit mark.” Also, in an effort to drive up property values, speculators were urging landlords who were not taking advantage of the housing shortage to boost rentals. According to Nathan Hirsch, several Bronx lessees had joined forces to raise rents in their neighborhood and threatened other lessees who did not want to. “One woman who refused to be coerced was told her house would be wrecked,” Hirsch reported.43 As well as pitting tenants against landlords, tenants against tenants, and landlords against landlords, the postwar housing crisis further divided a city already sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines. Drawing on a deep-seated strain of xenophobia, many New Yorkers placed much of the blame for the soaring rents on “foreigners,” most of them recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. These “greedy landlords,” most of them Italians, Germans, and Hebrews, are “hardly able to speak our language,” said J. J. McDonald of Brooklyn. They are not even citizens, noted State Senator Peter A. Abeles of the Bronx. These landlords “don[’]t give a dam[n] for the American people,” wrote a tenant who called himself an American Soldier. “They laugh at our flag[,] they spit on our flag.” The authorities “ought to put them on one ship and sink them of[f] Sandy Point,” a spit of land off the coast of New Jersey. After noting that his landlord “looks as if he might have been a fugitive from the Czar of Russia at one time,” a Bronx tenant observed, “It is a curious state of affairs when a foreigner can come to America, and by thieving tactics throw an American into the street.” Pointing out that “we Americans are up against it,” two other New Yorkers declared that the profiteering landlords should be sent back to Russia. Even as sophisticated a New Yorker as Judge Robitzek shared these views. As he told a meeting of the Taxpayers Alliance, more than half the landlords and lessees who appeared before him—among them a man “who controls more than a million dollars worth of property in New York”—had not bothered to learn English and could not even sign their names. “How,” he asked, “can we expect honesty or fair dealing at the hands of this class of men and women?”44 Closely related to this deep-seated xenophobia was a virulent anti-Semitism, which led many New Yorkers to blame rent profiteering not so much on foreign immigrants as on Jewish immigrants, not so much on Russians as, in the words of two New Yorkers, on “dirty Russian Jews.” As John R. Hill, a veteran real estate man, wrote Governor Alfred E. Smith, the Russian Jews lease or buy property “on a shoe

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string.” They fill it up, not always with respectable families, and then milk it for all it’s worth. As a landlord—indeed, Hill added, even as a tenant—the Russian Jew “is a nuisance and a menace to every thing that is American.” Referring to her landlord, a lessee named Abram Liss who had raised the rent on her Upper West Side apartment from $35 to $51 a month, Myra Marshall was willing to wager that two years ago he “was living in filth and squalor with his family on the lower East Side.” Rather than trying to earn a modest but honest living, he was now doing his utmost to “out-Shylock Shylock.” A Brooklyn tenant who blamed “Bolsheviki Jew landlords” for rent profiteering warned Governor Smith, “If you don[’]t put a stop to the dirty Jews I will.” An East Harlem tenant, an “American Citizen” whose Jewish landlord had raised the rent $4, $6, and then $8 a month in less than a year, wrote the governor, “Kill him[,] shoot him[,] put him in prison.” Speaking of profiteering Jewish landlords, another New Yorker told Smith, “If you will let me carry a gun and look out for me I will kill these Russian dogs in a few hours.” Other less bloodthirsty New Yorkers said they would be satisfied if the government put these landlords in jail, “where they belong,” or sent them back to Russia, “where they came from.”45 The postwar housing crisis further divided the city along ideological lines as well. Much like other Americans, many New Yorkers were caught up in the “Red Scare” that swept through the country after World War I. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, they feared that anarchism, socialism, and above all Bolshevism were gaining force. Indeed, warned Stewart Browne, there were already over two hundred thousand “potential anarchists” in the city waiting for “a favorable opportunity to raise the flag of Soviet government.” Browne and other New Yorkers placed much of the blame for the spread of radicalism on the tenants leagues and their leaders. These demagogues “stand on soapboxes and do nothing else but excite the populace,” said Alexander S. Greshler, a spokesman for the Brooklyn Board of Real Estate Brokers, “rousing them I may say to the border line of revolution.” They are “fomenting a spirit of unrest and endeavoring by every means possible to overthrow [the government],” added James Brackenridge, president of the Bronx Board of Trade. Judge Levy, to whom Bolshevism was “the most despicable thing in the world,” pointed out that for all their talk of reducing rents and otherwise helping tenants, these agitators were “sowing the seeds of discontent,” in the hope of leading New York “into anarchy, riot and revolution.”46 Levy detested the Bolsheviks so much that he once favored deporting them and later decided “the noose would be better.” But he believed that the profiteering landlords—the “shark[s]” who were raising the rents well beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest New Yorkers—were almost as much to blame for the current unrest as what he called the “Bolsheviki Tenants Leaguer[s].” Robitzek agreed with him. So did state senator John J. Dunnigan, who told one profiteering landlord, “You are making Bolsheviki all over the Bronx by your treatment of the tenants, and you know it.” Many other New Yorkers felt the same way. “If Bolshevism ever comes to this country,” wrote one tenant, “there is no one to blame but [the profiteering landlords],” whom he denounced as an “organized band of thieves.” Another tenant even

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held the profiteering landlords responsible for the rise of the IWW (the International Workers of the World), one of the country’s most militant labor unions. By a twisted sort of logic, some New Yorkers charged not only that the profiteering landlords were breeding Bolshevism, but also that they were themselves Bolsheviks. At the same time that he defended most landlords as honorable businessmen, Alexander Greshler condemned the few “the Bolsheviki [rent] profiteer[s].” And Reverend G. A. Carstensen, the pastor of Holy Rood Episcopal Church in Washington Heights (and a tenant whose rent had just been raised nearly 50 percent), railed against “the affrontary [sic], the thievery and the Bolshevism of these men [the profiteering landlords] of whom some of us are the victims.”47 In the aftermath of World War I it seemed that the housing shortage, and especially the rent hikes and rent strikes that it set in motion, were eroding the social fabric of the city, pitting landlords against tenants, “Americans” against “foreigners,” and Christians against Jews. With the courts clogged by the record number of summary proceedings and with the streets convulsed by fights between the marshals and schleppers, on the one side, and the tenants and their sympathizers, on the other, it also seemed that the rent wars were undermining public order. As the Red Scare gathered momentum, it even seemed that the city was on the verge of civil disorder. As a Bronx landlady who had not raised the rent in fourteen years told the members of the Senate and Assembly committees on cities in early 1920, “Between the Bolshevism of the poor, helpless, ignorant, illiterate alien[s],” by which she meant the low-income tenants, who “came here believing that this was the golden land[, and] the Bolshevism of the people,” by which she meant the profiteering landlords, who “squeeze every last dollar out of their fellow men and women . . . between the Bolshevism below and the Bolshevism up above, it is a case of God help the rest of us.”48 As these fears grew, elected officials came under enormous pressure to ease the housing shortage, curb the rent hikes, and stop the rent strikes. As it became increasingly clear that Congress was not going to do anything about the nationwide housing crisis—that, in other words, the federal government was not going to follow the lead of the many European countries that had adopted rent control during the war—the pressure on local and state officials became intense. And nowhere was it more intense than in New York City.

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5 The Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering

On November 6, 1917, nearly 700,000 New Yorkers went to the polls to choose who would govern the city for the next four years (and also whether women would be given the right to vote). The result, the Times reported, was “A Tammany Sweep”—a resounding victory for the New York County Democratic machine that had dominated city politics for much of the nineteenth century and, in conjunction with the Kings County Democratic machine, for much of the twentieth. Tammany Hall won all the citywide offices. The mayor-elect was John F. Hylan, who handily defeated his three rivals—John Purroy Mitchel, the incumbent, a Fusion candidate who had been elected in 1913 with the support of Republicans and anti-Tammany Democrats; Socialist Morris Hillquit; and Republican Joseph Bennett. Carrying every borough, Hylan won by the largest plurality since the consolidation of New York and Brooklyn in 1898. Charles L. Craig, the new controller, and Alfred E. Smith, the new president of the Board of Aldermen, won by wide margins too. As well as the three citywide offices, Tammany took the five borough presidencies, giving it complete control of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, an executive council that had great power over budgetary, land-use, and other vital matters. Tammany also won a large majority on the Board of Aldermen, the city’s legislative body, which had sixty-seven members. When the new board convened, the Democrats outnumbered the Republicans by almost two to one and the Socialists by more than five to one.1 During the campaign Mitchel defied anyone to point to anything of value Hylan had to say about the city’s many pressing problems. While Mitchel may have exaggerated his opponent’s shortcomings, Hylan, it turned out, did not have much to say (and, according to one of his speechwriters, had trouble saying it). About the housing problem, he did not say anything. Neither did the other candidates. Housing was not an issue in the 1917 campaign. Nor was rent. Even the coal shortage was not an issue. Hence it was small wonder that when these issues emerged in the months

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ahead, the new mayor was woefully unprepared. Other than to appoint a couple of citizens’ committees, one to help the poor cope with the rising price of fuel and another to discourage coal dealers from gouging small consumers, Hylan ignored appeals to take steps to ease the coal shortage in the winter of 1917–1918. Down through the fall of 1918, when residential construction was coming to a standstill, vacancy rates were plummeting, and rents and evictions were soaring, he also resisted pressure to do anything about the housing problem. As late as July 1919, by which time landlord-tenant relations in New York were more strained than ever, the mayor was more than a little out of touch. Testifying before the Lockwood Committee, he declared, “The great majority of landlords and their tenants are friends.”2 As early as September 1917 Manhattan Borough President Marcus N. Marks, one of the many Republicans swept out of office in the Democratic landslide two months later, called a conference to figure out why construction was slowing down and rents were going up. Out of the conference emerged the Committee on the Alleviation of Building Stagnation, which, wrote the New York Call, produced “MUCH RHETORIC AND NO RELIEF.” Much the same could be said about the Board of Aldermen that took office on January 1, 1918. Late in May 1918 Alderman Robert L. Moran, a Democrat from the Bronx, introduced a resolution asking each member to look for evidence of rent profiteering in his district and, if he found it, to report back to the board. Based on these ad hoc inquiries, the board would decide whether to launch an investigation, one, said Moran, that would cast “the glare of pitiless publicity” on rent profiteers. Although the Real Estate Board of New York offered its cooperation— claiming that “if there is any extensive rent profiteering,” which it doubted, its members were “as anxious as any one else to bring it to life”—the Board of Aldermen did not make an investigation. A couple of months later the board instructed the New York Police Department to canvass the city’s apartment houses, compile lists of vacant dwellings, and, for the benefit of the many tenants looking for apartments, post them in the precinct houses. But it was not until spring 1919, by which time the Lockwood Committee was about to launch an investigation into the state’s housing crisis, that the board authorized its Committee on General Welfare to hold hearings on rent profiteering.3 Given that five of every six New Yorkers were tenants, it is more than a little puzzling that the elected officials pretty much ignored the housing problem. One reason is that the problem was unlike any they had faced before. Even a highly capable mayor would have been hard-pressed to solve it, and Hylan was anything but. Born on a farm in Ulster County, he had moved to New York at nineteen and gone to work on the Brooklyn elevated railway, starting as a stoker and ending up as a motorman. He went to New York Law School, got involved in Brooklyn politics, and caught the attention of John H. McCooey, the leader of the Kings County Democratic machine, who used his influence to get him appointed (and later elected) as a judge and then selected as Tammany’s candidate for mayor. The New York World may have exaggerated when it declared that Hylan was “the most inept, incompetent candidate for Mayor that [Tammany] has nominated since consolidation,” but not when it

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insisted that he “has shown no capacity whatever for administering the affairs of the city.” Hylan was far less capable than Al Smith, president of the Board of Aldermen. A Tammany stalwart, Smith had grown up on the Lower East Side, which he represented in the State Assembly for a decade, serving as minority leader, majority leader, and speaker. A savvy politician with a firm grasp of municipal affairs, Smith was “the best representative of the worst element in the Democratic party,” said Judge Samuel Seabury, one of Tammany’s most outspoken critics. But Smith had little interest in presiding over the Board of Aldermen, a job with little power. He had accepted the nomination only to accommodate Tammany’s leaders. Once in office he spent less time trying to solve the housing problem than preparing to make a run for governor in 1918.4 Another reason the housing problem was pretty much ignored is that for all their rhetoric about standing up to what Hylan called “the moneyed interests,” most of New York’s elected officials were deeply conservative and extremely reluctant to tamper with the market in general and with the real estate market in particular. A case in point was Edward Riegelman, a lawyer and politician who had been handpicked by McCooey as Tammany’s candidate for Brooklyn borough president in 1917. “I do not believe there is any legislative panacea for housing conditions,” he told the Lockwood Committee. They are “controlled to a very large extent by the law of supply and demand.” Another case in point was Henry Bruckner, who had been a successful businessman—the owner, with his brother, of one of New York’s largest soda-water companies—and a three-term Congressman before he was elected Bronx borough president in 1917. In most cases, he pointed out, rising rents were a result of rising costs, not of profiteering. Landlords were as much entitled to a reasonable return as other businessmen. Robert L. Moran, a Tammany loyalist who was elected to the Board of Aldermen in 1913 and 1917 and became its president after Smith was elected governor, took a similar position. Although he told the Lockwood Committee that the housing shortage was going to get worse before it got better, he stressed that there was nothing city officials could do about it. Given that “the Constitution of the United States provides that a man is able to do within the law what he sees fit to do with his property,” there was nothing state officials could do either.5 Moran elaborated on his position at a dinner of the New York Building Managers Association in May 1919, by which time he had had been president of the Board of Aldermen for about five months. He was very much in his element. A native New Yorker, Moran had studied real estate at the Y.M.C.A., attended New York University (though at night and for only two years), and then, like many Tammany leaders, gone into real estate, working mainly in the Bronx. Although he conceded that many lessees were jacking up the rent, he insisted most real estate owners were not profiteers. They were ordinary businessmen, upon whom the city government had imposed onerous regulations and a crushing tax burden. The current housing problem could not be solved by legislative action, least of all by public housing. Not long ago, he went on, the Socialist members of the Board of Aldermen had introduced a resolution authorizing the city to build houses, a step, they claimed, that

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would bring down rents. Offended by the notion that public officials should enter into competition with private businessmen, he spoke out against the resolution and took credit for its defeat. Like many New Yorkers, Moran was confident that now that the war was over, residential construction would soon resume, easing the housing shortage in New York City and relieving the plight of its tenants.6 Residential construction picked up somewhat after the war, but before long building was back in the doldrums. Although demand for apartments was strong, builders were reluctant to resume work until the costs of labor and materials dropped to prewar levels. Anticipating a sharp decline in property values, lenders were leery about lending, except at what the builders considered prohibitive rates. With residential construction at a standstill, the housing shortage grew worse, driving vacancy rates down to unheard-of levels. Taking advantage of the shortage, most landlords raised the rents—and, when the tenants refused to pay, brought summary proceedings. Tenants leagues proliferated, especially in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. And rent strikes erupted in one neighborhood after another. By early 1919 the situation had gotten out of hand. Many tenants were agitated about yet another round of rent hikes that was scheduled for May 1, the one day of the year on which the law allowed landlords to dispossess tenants without giving the required five days’ notice. Rumors spread that 200,000 tenants would go on strike in Brownsville alone. It would be “the greatest rent strike New York has ever seen,” Socialist assemblyman Charles Solomon told a crowd of three thousand that had packed the Brownsville Labor Lyceum.7 And as things went from bad to worse, the Hylan administration came under growing pressure to do something about the housing problem. The pressure came not only from the neighborhood tenants leagues, many of which were affiliated with the Socialist Party, and the Greater New York Tenants League, a citywide organization that was formed in May 1918. It came also from labor unions, settlement houses, civic groups, newspapers, and clergymen. To give a few examples, the Union Settlement, an umbrella organization of fifty or so settlement houses, called on Hylan to curb rent profiteering, which, its spokesman claimed, was fomenting “the spirit of Bolshevism.” After a mass meeting at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, the Housing Committee of the Lower West Side (whose chairman was A. Ray Petty, Judson Memorial’s pastor) adopted a resolution urging the mayor to appoint a citizens’ commission to look into the housing shortage and come up with ways to alleviate it. The Bronx Home News continued an ongoing campaign against rent profiteering, prompting Alderman Clarence Y. Palitz to offer to appear in court on behalf of any Home News reader who was served with a dispossess notice. Reverend Father Breslin, pastor of a Catholic church in Washington Heights, spoke out forcefully against rent profiteering. So did Reverend William H. Kephart, a Protestant minister from the South Bronx, who pointed out that profiteering landlords were forcing tenants to double up, thereby endangering health and undermining morality. He “who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind,” Kephart warned the landlords.8

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The Hylan administration might have withstood this pressure were it not for the growing strength of the Socialist Party. During the prewar years the party had made some inroads on the Lower East Side, in Brownsville, and in other working-class communities that had long been Tammany strongholds. But it had had little success at the polls. In 1913, for example, its candidate for mayor, a well-known journalist and author named Charles E. Russell, won only 5 percent of the vote. In 1917, however, Morris Hillquit got more than 145,000 votes, nearly half as many as Hylan, almost as many as Mitchel, nearly three times as many as Bennett—and nearly five times as many as Russell. A Latvian immigrant who become a successful lawyer, a labor organizer, and one of the founders of the Socialist Party, Hillquit ran on an anti-capitalism and anti-militarism campaign and did well not only among Jewish immigrants, but also among Irish Americans and German Americans who opposed the Wilson administration’s decision to enter World War I. Even more stunning, the Socialist Party won seven seats on the Board of Aldermen—four in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, and one in the Bronx—as well as ten seats in the State Assembly, all from New York City. The party’s strong showing shocked the nation. It is “a disgrace to the first city in the country,” declared the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “A blow to the cause of Americanism,” wrote the Baltimore Sun, which added, “Fortunately New York is not the nation.” But it gratified Hillquit, who declared that the Socialist Party was now a force to be reckoned with in New York City.9 For a while it was. Far from “impractical dreamers,” to quote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Socialist aldermen turned out to be effective legislators. They had what the Eagle called “the gift of gab.” They were well informed, thanks in large part to the newly formed Socialist Aldermanic Bureau of Municipal Investigation and Research. And if need be, they could be flexible. At times they even joined forces with the Republicans, with whom they had nothing in common, wrote the Eagle, other than “hostility toward the Democratic Party.” Before long they earned the grudging respect of the Tammany majority. In the meantime, the Socialist Party was gearing up for the November 1918 election, in which the governor’s office and the state legislature were at stake. Hoping to take advantage of the housing shortage, the party made rent profiteering the centerpiece of its campaign. Its spokesmen stressed that “the capitalist party candidates by their very nature are incapable of fighting the rent profiteers” and pointed out that the profiteering landlords were working hard on behalf of the Tammany and Fusion candidates. They demanded that all candidates take a position on a proposal to establish a state administrator to regulate rents as well as on a law to prevent landlords and lessees from raising rents more than 10 percent above what they had been in 1916. “The Socialists speak against profiteering in rent, food and fuel,” read one of the party’s ads. “The politicians yell—Patriotism.” “Vote Down the Profiteers,” urged other ads. “Vote a Straight Socialist Ticket.”10 Despite strong support from New York’s tenants leagues, the Socialist Party did much less well in 1918 than in 1917, in large part because of the sharp dropoff in the anti-war vote. In the race for governor, Socialist Charles W. Ervin, editor of the Call,

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got only 85,000 votes, far fewer than Al Smith and Charles S. Whitman, the Republican incumbent whom Smith narrowly defeated. Although the election of 1918, the first in which women were allowed to vote, brought out three times as many New Yorkers as the election of 1917, Ervin did not win as many votes for governor as Hillquit had won for mayor. Despite suffering from tuberculosis, Hillquit ran for Congress, but was defeated by Republican incumbent Isaac Siegel. Meyer London, New York’s only Socialist Congressman, lost to Henry R. Goldfogle, a Democrat who had beaten Hillquit in his first run for the House in 1906. “It was a mighty good day’s work to defeat MEYER LONDON, the Socialist Representative of the Twelfth New York District,” crowed the Times. “It was even better work to defeat MORRIS HILLQUIT in the Twentieth.” The Times was also happy to report that Fiorello H. La Guardia, the Republican incumbent from the Fourteenth District, had beaten Socialist Scott Nearing, “the eminent friend of academic freedom and other kinds of freedom verging on sedition.” With the Democrats and Republicans endorsing the same candidate in several contests, the Socialist Party also lost eight of its ten seats in the Assembly. Only Charles Solomon of Brownsville and August Claessens of East Harlem were returned to office, leaving the Socialists a tiny minority in the Republican-dominated legislature.11 Although disheartened by the results of the 1918 election, the Socialist Party was not about to abandon the political arena. Nor was it inclined to shift the focus away from rent profiteering. As the Call wrote, the soaring rents have “given the Socialist speaker a chance to come off his soap box of theory and teach the unorganized worker working class tactics, organization, solidarity and a recognition in practice of the class struggle.” As long as the rents continued to soar, Hylan and other politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, believed the Socialist Party would remain a serious threat. As M. M. Fertig, a Democratic Assemblyman from the Bronx, pointed out, “People all over my district have been coming to me and declaring [that by failing to keeping down the rents] ‘you are driving us [in]to the Socialist camps.’ ” By early 1919 the disaffection was widespread. As a Bronx tenant whose rent had been raised from $12 to $24 a month wrote, “My family and myself have always been stanch Democrats but I am sorry to say that if we get no relief we will have to look to the Socialist Party.” Upon learning that his rent, which had already been raised from $28 to $39 a month, was about to be raised to $42, a Manhattan tenant said, “I thought of murder, suicide and court proceedings. But upon contemplation I discovered they did not offer any relief. I resolved to be a Bolshevist.” And a Brooklyn tenant, whose rent had been raised each time the building changed hands, remarked, “I have brought this matter to the attention of party leaders in my district and they say they can do nothing. I am a Republican, but if I find that my party and the Democratic party can do nothing to help I’ll vote a straight Socialist ticket in protest.”12 Mayor Hylan finally bowed to the growing pressure to do something about rent profiteering in early April 1919, a week or so after meeting with Mary Marfdin, a socialist and leader of the Greater New York Tenants League. Marfdin was one of a

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small group of New Yorkers who had met earlier with Nathan Hirsch, the city’s tax commissioner, the chairman of the mayor’s Committee on Taxation and Investigation of Mortgage Loans, and a close associate of Hylan. The group told Hirsch that the city needed an organization to protect the hard-strapped tenants against profiteering landlords and that they were prepared to serve on it. Hirsch conveyed their sentiments to Hylan. The mayor responded by asking Hirsch to form a subcommittee of the Committee on Taxation to look into rent profiteering. At Hylan’s recommendation, Hirsch chose Edward I. Hannah, a labor leader and president of the Central Federated Union; Pastor A. Ray Petty, one of the New Yorkers who had met with Hirsch; and two members of the Mayor’s Committee on Taxation— Peter J. Brady, another labor leader and president of the Allied Printing Trades Council, and Henry Bloch, a lawyer and president of the Real Estate Owners’ Association of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Wards. With Hirsch as chairman, what soon became known as the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering set out, in its words, “to get at the root of an evil which is causing widespread unrest in this city.” Stressing that he and his associates were not so much concerned about the well-to-do tenants on Riverside Drive as about the impoverished tenants on the Lower East Side, Hirsch predicted that the Mayor’s Committee would wipe out rent profiteering within sixth months.13 Although many tenant activists had pressed the Hylan administration for action, not all were impressed by its newfound concern about rent profiteering. It is only because the city officials “are afraid that the tenants will join the Socialist Party and the [Greater New York] Tenants League for relief [that] they are [now] making an effort to stop it,” said Morris Gisnet. Although some real estate men supported the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, many others opposed it. Some were unhappy that Hylan had singled out profiteering landlords. What about profiteering grocers and profiteering retailers? they asked. Other real estate men objected not so much to the committee as to its name. The Real Estate Magazine of New York, a publication of the New York City Real Estate Board, expressed concern that the committee’s name would lead many people to believe that “practically every landlord is a rent profiteer.” And Robert E. Simon told the members of the New York State Association of Real Estate Boards. “Just stop and think of the effect of this title, which brands the landlord called before the Committee a profiteer even before he has a chance to be heard.” It should be called the “Mayor’s Committee for Adjusting Rent Disputes,” he said. Isidor Berger, manager of the Greater New York Taxpayers League, agreed. “If I am a landlord who does not profiteer, I don’t want to go before a committee on rent profiteering.”14 Notwithstanding the objections of the real estate men, there were signs that most landlords did not have much to fear from the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. Like the scores of similar bodies that had been set up in New London, Cleveland, and other cities during World War I, Hylan’s committee intended to focus its attention exclusively on profiteering landlords, who, Hirsch declared on more than one occasion, made up only 10 percent of New York’s landlords. And

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most of them were lessees, he pointed out. Another sign was that the committee’s members were not openly antagonistic toward the city’s landlords (or, for that matter, toward the real estate industry in general). Although some, including Reverend Petty, were sympathetic to the plight of working-class tenants, none was affiliated with the tenants leagues. And none was a member of the Socialist Party. Mary Marfdin had offered to serve on the committee, but Hylan declined her offer. The mayor did not want Marfdin (or any of her associates) to sit on a committee of his, partly because she could not be expected to toe the Tammany line and partly because she would have alienated the city’s real estate interests. As Hirsch assured the members of the Real Estate Owners’ Association of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Wards in May 1918, “Mayor Hylan is a friend to real estate” and will do all he could “to protect and conserve the city’s greatest asset.”15 Another sign that most landlords did not have much to fear from the Mayor’s Committee was that Hirsch—its chair, spokesman, and far and away most influential member—was a wealthy property owner and a well-regarded real estate man. From the very start he pledged that the committee would be as fair to landlords as to tenants. By virtue of his work as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Taxation and Investigation of Mortgage Loans, most real estate men had good reason to trust him. Established by Hylan in January 1918, the committee had been charged with finding ways to relieve real estate of “its steadily growing burden of taxation” and to prevent, wherever possible, “the calling of mortgage loans during the war.” After consulting with many leading property owners and taxpayers associations, the Committee on Taxation came up with a host of recommendations. Most were designed to reduce municipal expenditures and generate additional revenue from sources other than property taxes. As part of what might be called a real estate industry wish list, the committee even favored imposing a limit on the tax rate on real property. Although Hirsch was a Tammany stalwart, which might have put off some real estate men, he was also an outspoken opponent of Bolshevism.16 Even if the Mayor’s Committee had wanted to go after the landlords, it had virtually no authority. It could hold public hearings, but it could not force landlords, agents, and lessees to appear and, if they appeared, to testify. Nor could it compel them to submit their financial records. The Mayor’s Committee had no authority over the city marshals and municipal court judges either. It could not stop a judge from issuing a final order or a marshal from executing an eviction warrant. In September 1919, for example, the committee asked Marshal Daniel McBride to put off executing an eviction warrant in Brooklyn. The marshal complied. But when the landlady applied to the Kings County Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, Judge Leander B. Faber ruled that the committee had exceeded its authority and ordered the marshal to execute the warrant. As Hirsch told U.S. Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer in August 1919, “When a profiteering landlord is recalcitrant, we have no legal means of bringing him to terms.” If he is determined to capitalize on the city’s housing shortage and exploit its hard-strapped tenants, “we are powerless to prevent him from doing so.”17

Under Hirsch’s leadership, the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering set up shop in cramped offices on the twelfth floor of New York’s Municipal Building, a forty-story structure erected in 1914 to house the city’s rapidly growing workforce. Located in Lower Manhattan, it towered over City Hall, which had been built a century earlier. By the “begging, borrowing or ‘stealing’ of office assistants from one [city] department or another,” Hirsch assembled a small staff that included Lillie Grant, a niece of Commissioner of Accounts David Hirshfield, who later made additional space available to the committee. To cover its expenses, the committee drew on the resources of the Mayor’s Committee on Taxation, of which the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering was legally a part, and later on an appropriation of $10,000 from the Board of Estimate. When it ran short of money, Hirsch even dug into his own pockets. Following the lead of the Williamsburg and other tenants leagues, the Mayor’s Committee invited tenants to submit complaints of rent profiteering. By mail, by phone, and in person, the complaints poured in, sometimes as many as five hundred a day. (Some tenants also filed complaints with the Board of Aldermen’s Committee on General Welfare and the Office of the Commissioner of Accounts, each of which held hearings on rent profiteering in the spring of 1919.) By the end of the year the Mayor’s Committee had received tens of thousands of complaints, by no means all from working-class neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.19

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Although the Mayor’s Committee had virtually no authority, it still found ways to ease the plight of the city’s tenants. To help “deserving persons, who through no fault of their own” were unable to pay the rent, it solicited funds from wealthy New Yorkers. (To ward off criticism, Hirsch stressed that the committee had no intention of infringing on the city’s charitable organizations.) Philanthropist Jacob Schiff gave $500, Tammany chief Charles Murphy $200, and Governor Al Smith $50. The committee even sponsored a gala benefit at the Century Theatre, which netted $2,000. At a hearing held after Hirsch resigned from the committee, the acting chairman, former judge S. A. Lewinsohn, was so moved by the plight of a mother of nine who had just been evicted from her apartment in Brooklyn that he took up a collection for her. About $75, mostly in nickels, dimes, and quarters, was dropped into a hat. The committee also asked landlords for a list of vacant apartments, which was passed on to tenants looking for a place to live. It made arrangements to house homeless tenants in churches, synagogues, and armories. And it urged the city’s Bureau of Encumbrances to instruct its inspectors to disregard a law that required tenants who had been evicted to remove their belongings from the sidewalk within forty-eight hours. Despite what Hirsch told Palmer, the committee even found ways to put pressure on profiteering landlords. Whether these measures would be enough to curb rent profiteering remained to be seen. It also remained to be seen whether they would be enough to persuade what the Daily Eagle called “the poor and downtrodden,” whose loyalty had long been “Tammany’s trump card,” that there was no need to turn to the tenants leagues and the Socialist Party, whose eradication was one of the main objectives of the Hylan administration.18

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As Hirsch announced at the outset, the Mayor’s Committee would attempt to curb rent profiteering by mediation and arbitration. In other words, it would bring tenants and landlords together and help them reach an amicable settlement. But it was soon clear that if the committee followed this approach it could not resolve the thousands of complaints that were pouring in. So Tammany Hall—which, wrote the New York Sun, “saw the possibility of making friends with oppressed rent payers”—offered to help. Judge Robert L. Luce, a member of the New York Supreme Court and chairman of what became the Law Department of the Mayor’s Committee, invited one hundred members of Tammany’s Law Department to volunteer their services. At first, seventy-five lawyers accepted Luce’s invitation, and in time 150 were at his disposal. Working under the supervision of an assistant corporation counsel—first Walter S. Kennedy and later Leo Kenneth Mayer, who were assigned to the Mayor’s Committee by the Corporation Counsel’s office, another Tammany stronghold—the lawyers looked into the tenants’ complaints. If they found them justified, they tried to resolve the matter with the landlords. If these efforts failed, the lawyers referred the cases to the Mayor’s Committee. And if the landlords brought summary proceedings against the complaining tenants, the lawyers represented them in court.20 Even with the help of Tammany’s lawyers, the Mayor’s Committee had its hands full. As Hirsch told Attorney-General Palmer in August, “Our offices are thronged from morning to night by distressed citizens, whose rents have been unjustifiably raised.” As bad as things were in the summer, they were even worse in the fall. As more and more landlords sent out notices that the rent would be raised on October l, more and more tenants filed complaints. In an effort to ease the crushing burden on the municipal courts, the committee tried to deal with as many of these complaints as possible before Moving Day. Before long the committee (or one of its subcommittees) was simultaneously holding four hearings in the Municipal Building and two in the New York County Court across the street. But even that was not enough. So starting in late summer, the committee began to hold hearings at night in the outer boroughs as well. On Mondays and Tuesdays it sat in the Bronx, ordinarily in Borough Hall, where Borough President Henry Bruckner put the largest rooms at its disposal, and sometimes, when the crowd was too large for Borough Hall, in Morris High School. On Wednesdays the committee met in the Queens Borough Hall in Long Island City, on Thursdays in the Kings County Courthouse in downtown Brooklyn, and on Fridays in the New York Public Library in Harlem. The hearings usually started at about eight in the evening and often went on until one or two, and sometimes even five or six, in the morning.21 As historians have pointed out, the committee’s hearings were a form of “grand public theater,” a highly charged mixture of comedy and tragedy. With so much at stake, the “actors” were more than a little edgy. They were extremely raucous too. The tenants jeered, heckled, and threatened the landlords, some of whom responded in kind. On several occasions the meetings turned violent. At a hearing at Morris High School that was attended by three thousand tenants, a landlord took a swing

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at the chairman, who ducked and hit him in the chest. A free-for-all ensued. According to the Times, when it became obvious that the hearing could not be conducted “with any semblance of order,” the committee called it off. A good many hearings would probably have turned violent were it not for the soothing presence of Captain Charles A. Goldsmith, the committee’s chief mediator. A retired naval officer who presided over more hearings than anyone else, Goldsmith had a knack for defusing even the tensest situations. Indicative of his approach was his response to a belligerent landlady who had grudgingly bowed to pressure to reduce a rent hike from $5.00 a month to $2.50. The issue resolved, Goldsmith expressed the hope she and her tenants would leave on good terms. “What,” she snapped, “be on good terms with the people that have brought me to this place!” “What’s the matter with this place?’ asked Captain Goldsmith. “Ain’t we all comfortable and pleasant? Ain’t I good-lookin’ enough? Don’t we have good-looking [police] officers here to take care of us all?” (Were it not for the timely intervention of these officers, some of the freefor-alls might well have developed into full-blown riots.)22 By the hundreds and thousands, the tenants flocked to the hearings. In one case a group from the East Bronx arrived at Borough Hall in a cavalcade of fifteen touring cars led by a jazz band playing “Homesick Blues.” The group was given a round of applause by the other tenants who were already assembled there. The tenants came to complain about the rent and speak out against the landlord. If they could not be spared a rent hike, they could at least be amused by Captain Goldsmith. Many landlords appeared before the committee too. A few came willingly, anxious to tell their side of the story. But most came reluctantly, afraid to ignore a summons. To heighten these fears, the committee threatened to issue subpoenas. These threats were hollow, though in all likelihood many landlords did not realize it. What were not hollow were the committee’s threats to refer defiant landlords to the Aldermanic Committee on General Welfare or the Office of the Commissioner of Accounts, both of which had the power to subpoena witnesses. Both the Aldermanic Committee and the Commissioner of Accounts also had the power to compel landlords to answer questions and submit financial records, which would be examined by Hirshfield’s accountants and investigators.23 For a while relations between the Mayor’s Committee and the Commissioner of Accounts were strained—so much so that in May 1919, Hirsch complained to Hylan’s secretary Grover A. Whalen that Hirshfield’s hearings were interfering with the committee’s work. Although Hirshfield assured Hirsch that “I am not trying to overshadow your luster,” Hirsch had reason to be both annoyed and perplexed: annoyed because Hirshfield’s hearings were attracting a good deal of attention and perplexed because it was not clear why the Commissioner of Accounts was looking into rent profiteering at all. Set up in the 1870s to curb the skullduggery that had plagued New York under the Tweed Ring, Hirshfield’s office was a sort of municipal watchdog that was supposed to keep on eye on public officials, not private landlords. But Hirsch was in no position to challenge the commissioner. A Rumanian immigrant, Hirshfield had come to the United States at thirteen, attended NYU Law School, and

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joined the Kings County Democratic organization, where he had met Hylan and in time become a close friend and trusted adviser. Fortunately for Hirsch, Hirshfield soon discontinued his hearings, perhaps because he came under sharp criticism from real estate interests, one of whom, the counsel to the Brownsville Landlords Protective Association, accused him of “catering to the Bolshevist element.” He also pledged to support the Mayor’s Committee, offering to turn his information over to Hirsch and his associates and put his staff at their disposal.24 Whether chaired by Goldsmith or one of the other mediators, the committee’s hearings all followed much the same pattern. Take the case of Rebecca Persky, who was summoned to appear before Captain Goldsmith in Marshal David Goldberg’s office in Brownsville. At the beginning of the hearing several tenants complained that Persky had raised the rent twice in the last six months and was now raising it another two dollars. It was too much, they insisted. Speaking “in mingled English and Yiddish,” wrote an Eagle reporter, Persky responded that she had been forced to increase the rent to cover her rising costs. “If other people can get more money for their flats, why can’t I?” she asked. Goldsmith urged her to compromise, warning that otherwise she might be compelled to turn her books over to the commissioner of accounts. How about a one dollar raise, he suggested. “I can’t afford it,” she replied. After some arm-twisting, she agreed to give the tenants a year’s lease, according to which they would pay $1.00 more for the first ninth months and $1.50 more for the next three. Goldsmith was tougher on the owners of the G. and G. Realty Company, a Brooklyn firm that had just bought two apartment houses in the Bronx and promptly announced a rent hike, the fifth in a year. Calculating that after the hike G. and G. would earn 38 percent a year on its investment, he declared, “It is a clear case of profiteering. Why don’t you stay in Brooklyn where you belong instead of coming to the Bronx and gouging the people.” Bowing to what Hirsch called “moral pressure,” the owners cut the rent hike in half and gave the tenants a year’s lease. In another case Goldsmith tried in vain to persuade a Bronx landlord named Herman Kauffman to come to terms with his tenants. Calling him “a rent gouger of the worst type and the kind of landlord that makes Bolsheviks out of good citizens,” Goldsmith said “a law should be passed which would prevent men like Kauffman from owning property.”25 Hirsch and his associates hoped to resolve the landlord-tenant disputes before they reached the courts. But not all the tenants submitted their complaints in time. As a result the committee was dragged into several contentious rent strikes, not to mention many routine summary proceedings. To give a few examples, a group of Brooklyn tenants went on strike in September after the landlord’s agent notified them that the rent would be raised on October 1. The landlord started summary proceedings. And the tenants appealed to the Mayor’s Committee, but only after the judge ruled in favor of the landlord. Another group of Brooklyn tenants turned to the committee, but only after fourteen of them had been evicted. Things were much the same in the Bronx. In the summer of 1919 forty tenants went on strike after their landlord told them the rent would be raised almost 100 percent. Led by Sophie

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Epstein, the wife of a dressmaker and mother of three, the tenants fought the landlord on the streets and in the courts But to their dismay, Judge Harry Robitzek issued eviction warrants against twelve of them. A day after the marshal removed the first three, the tenants went to see Captain Goldsmith, who obtained an injunction delaying the other evictions and then negotiated an amicable settlement. In yet another case a lessee brought summary proceedings against a group of striking tenants one day after she appeared before the Mayor’s Committee. Robitzek ruled in her favor, and a marshal then executed the warrant, “without,” said the committee, “giving the tenants proper notice.” Even before the committee filed an appeal, Robitzek decided to reopen the case. Shortly thereafter the Mayor’s Committee helped resolve the dispute.26 In its efforts to curb rent profiteering, the Mayor’s Committee ran into more than a few intransigent landlords, most of whom were strong believers in the sanctity of private property. As one told the committee, “He could do as he liked [with his property], and no one could make him do anything he didn’t want to.” Among the most intransigent of these landlords was Andrew O’Brien, who owned an apartment house in the Bronx. Calling O’Brien “a racketeering landlord,” one of the worst who had ever appeared before the committee, Goldsmith said to him, “Not alone are you making over 24 per cent on your investment, which is beyond reason, but you are attempting to gouge your tenants to the utmost.” Another was Dr. Bernard Stattman, the owner of two apartment houses in Brooklyn, who appeared before the committee three times. You are “the most arbitrary, most unreasonable, and most [autocratic] landlord in New York City,” Goldsmith said. Just as intransigent was Joseph Smolensky, who owned five apartment houses in the Bronx and, after raising the rent, told the tenants, “Get out if you don’t want to pay the increase.” Even under pressure from the committee, he refused to meet the tenants halfway. Losing his temper, something he rarely did, Goldsmith told Smolensky, “You are only guided by the dollar.” “You make a profit of 27 per cent. on your investment, [and yet you still] want to put your poor tenants on the streets.” It was unconscionable. Unmoved, Smolensky responded by threatening legal action against Goldsmith.27 Some of the intransigent landlords, the Mayor’s Committee discovered, were gouging the dependents of U.S. servicemen (even in a few cases servicemen who had been wounded or killed), which was a violation of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. (In an attempt to get around the law, some landlords refused to rent to servicemen or their families, a practice, said Hirsch, that “is worse a thousand times than mere profiteering.”) To solve this problem, the committee came up with a simple solution. Starting in August, Hirsch directed Walter S. Kennedy, the assistant corporation counsel in charge of the committee’s legal affairs, to turn all evidence of violations of the Civil Relief Act over to Francis G. Caffey, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which covered Manhattan and the Bronx. In time the committee received so many complaints that the Civil Relief Act was being violated that it announced it would turn the evidence over to Caffey even in cases

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where the landlord pled ignorance of the law as an excuse. It also began to refer violations to James D. Bell, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which covered Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. 28 But most tenants were not protected by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. And as hard as it was to persuade intransigent landlords to rescind the rent hikes in the case of servicemen’s families, it was much harder to prevail on them to reduce the hikes for other tenants. Hence the Mayor’s Committee had to find other ways to persuade these landlords to ease up on their tenants. One way, which it borrowed from Commissioner Hirshfield, was to threaten to report the profiteering landlord to the Department of Taxes and Assessments and to recommend it raise the assessed value—and thus the property taxes—on the building. As Hirshfield pointed out, this approach had a nice logic to it. Given the conventional wisdom that the value of an apartment house was based on its rent roll, it seemed to make sense that if a landlord raised the rent roll the city should increase the assessed value. The Times questioned the legality of this approach. It doubted that the courts would allow the Department of Taxes to assess two identical buildings on the same street at different values simply because one landlord raised the rent and the other did not. But believing that this approach might well eliminate (or at rate weaken) the incentive to engage in rent profiteering, the Mayor’s Committee was not deterred. In the case of Dr. Stattman, Captain Goldsmith threatened to see to it that the assessed value on his two apartment houses in Brooklyn was raised from $80,000 to $126,000 if he did not settle with his tenants. And when asked by a reporter what the Mayor’s Committee was going to do in the case of another intransigent landlord, one of its members replied, “Just watch. I will ask the tax assessor to increase the assessment on the property from $96,000 to $152,000.”29 Again following the lead of Commissioner Hirshfield, the Mayor’s Committee also tried to bring pressure on intransigent landlords by threatening to report them to one of the municipal agencies that regulated apartment houses. Chief among them were the Tenement House Department, which could cite the landlords for violations of the building laws, and the Department of Health, which could cite them for violations of the sanitary laws. (To add weight to its threats, the committee invited the Tenement House Department to send representatives to the hearings; as the landlords watched, they took note of the violations that the tenants called to the committee’s attention.) Less important, but by no means inconsequential, were the Fire Department, Police Department, and Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity. These agencies could order the landlords to remove violations and levy fines if they failed to do so. Speaking to one landlord, Captain Goldsmith warned that “if he failed to make an amicable settlement [with his tenants], the City Departments would keep him busy making repairs.” Referring to another landlord, a member of the committee told a reporter that by asking half a dozen municipal agencies to “look over” his apartment house “I will give [him] something to think about.” Since all these agencies answered to Hylan, Hirsch and his associates had good reason to expect them to cooperate. If the landlords still ignored the

committee’s threats, the committee could, as a last resort, urge the municipal court judges and city marshals to deal as leniently as possible with the tenants.30

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According to Hirsch, the Mayor’s Committee was extremely successful in its efforts to curb rent profiteering. In the week ending June 8, he reported, it resolved more than 500 landlord-tenant disputes; in the next week more than 1,000; and in the week after, more than 1,400. The pace slowed down in July, but picked up in August. In the week ending August 3 the committee settled more than 1,300 cases, in the week ending August 24 more than 1,200, and in the week ending August 31 nearly 2,000. In early September Judge Robert L. Luce wrote that if the Law Committee accomplished as much in the next four months as it had in the past four, it would by the end of the year have adjusted the rents of 20,000 families (or 100,000 people)—and thereby saved them more than $1 million. As it turned out, the Mayor’s Committee was busier than ever in the fall. In the week ending September 14, roughly 2,400 cases were settled, and in the week ending November 9 another 3,500. Thus at the end of the year Hirsch reported that the Mayor’s Committee, of which the Law Committee was an integral part, had adjusted the rents of 30,000 families (or 150,000 people). As a result, he told Mayor Hylan and the other New Yorkers who attended the gala benefit at the Century Theatre, “many families could eat their Christmas dinners this year without fear of the landlord walking in on them to announce a raise in rent.”31 Most complaints were resolved by the Law Committee, whose members held their hearings in private. In early May a group of tenants from the Bronx charged that the landlord had raised the rent 65 percent. The landlord responded that he had not raised the rent more than 60 percent, which “seemed fair to him.” But when attorney Louis B. Felix warned that unless he reduced the rent hike the case would be turned over to the Mayor’s Committee, where it would generate a good deal of publicity, the landlord settled for a 20 percent hike. Several days later Henry Kempner, another Tammany volunteer, settled a dispute in the Bronx by prevailing on the owner of two apartment houses to give his seventeen tenants a one-year lease, make needed repairs, and in some cases reduce the rent. A much more complicated case was resolved in June. It started when the Prompt Realty Company, which owned three apartment houses in the South Bronx, notified the tenants that the rent, which had been raised five dollars a month the previous October, was being raised another three dollars. The tenants refused to pay. Prompt’s owner responded by evicting six of the thirty-one tenants who had filed a complaint with the Mayor’s Committee. An unnamed member of the Law Committee persuaded Prompt’s owner to give the tenants a one-year lease, under which the rent would be raised $1.00 in the first four months and $1.50 in the next eight. He also agreed to allow the six evicted tenants to return to their apartments and even offered to pay half the costs of moving their furniture back in.32 Many other complaints were resolved by Hirsch, Goldsmith, and the other mediators, all of whom held their hearings in public. In some cases they brought about

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a settlement quickly, with little effort and less contention. A good example occurred in July, when M. Finkelstein, who owned a tenement house in Lower Manhattan, was summoned to appear before the committee. At the hearing he was surprised to find a dozen of his tenants present. “What are your grounds for asking $12 a month more from these tenants?” asked Hirsch. Seeing that Finkelstein was bewildered, the tenants produced letters from him demanding a $12 a month increase. Finkelstein explained that it was “a typographical error.” He wanted only a twodollar-a-month increase, which, he said, “I had been told [presumably by the tenants] was satisfactory.” With the matter settled, wrote the New York Daily Tribune, “the landlord and tenants left together.” In other cases, however, the mediators were able to bring about a settlement only after expending a good deal of time and energy. A good example was the dispute between B.F.W. Realty and its 450 tenants in Williamsburg, which came to the attention of the Mayor’s Committee in early September, after a long drawn-out rent strike, four abortive efforts to remove the tenants, and an unsuccessful attempt at arbitration by a group of municipal court judges. In an attempt to settle the dispute, Goldsmith met with the landlord’s counsel and the tenants’ representatives until eleven at night on September 6. When it seemed that the parties were deadlocked, he sent them home. But somehow they reached a tentative agreement on the steps of the Municipal Building. The next day Goldsmith spent more than seven hours working out the details of what was by far the largest settlement in the committee’s history.33 Many other landlord-tenant disputes were resolved in the courts. Starting in early May, when there were thousands of landlord-tenant cases on the calendar, the Mayor’s Committee assigned its lawyers to appear in each of the municipal courts on behalf of the tenants under threat of eviction. They persuaded the judges to dismiss some cases on technicalities, to grant stays in others, and to delay the proceedings until mediation could be given a chance in still others. As a result, wrote the Times, “few eviction notices were signed.” The committee’s efforts reached a peak in early November, when the courts were jammed with landlord-tenant cases, most of them brought by landlords who wanted the judges to issue eviction warrants against tenants who had been granted a stay in early October. Captain Goldsmith and several members of the Law Committee appeared on behalf of the tenants. And with the cooperation of Harry Robitzek, Michael J. Scanlan, Jacob S. Strahl, and other judges who were sorely troubled by the plight of the tenants, the Mayor’s Committee helped bring about a settlement in nearly three thousand cases in which dispossess proceedings were pending. As the Sun put it, “Many a landlord, looking for unusual profits, was steered judicially along common sense paths which led [them] to [make] concessions”—and abandon their efforts to oust the tenants.34 In a handful of cases resolved by the Mayor’s Committee the complaints were dismissed on the grounds that the rent hike was either justified or, in the words of the Home News, “marginal.” But in the great majority of cases the landlords were prevailed upon to settle. Some rescinded the rent hikes. Many others reduced them, often—at the urging of the lawyers and mediators—splitting the difference with the

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tenants and settling for half of what they had asked and sometimes as little as 10 or 20 percent. Some promised that they would not raise the rent again—or that they would not do so without first notifying the committee. Under pressure from the committee, which was anxious to prevent future increases (and additional complaints), many landlords agreed to give the tenants a written lease, usually for one year. In some cases the lease provided that the rent would go up a few dollars in the first few months and a few dollars more in the last few months. A Bronx landlord who gave his tenants such a lease allowed a few who could not afford the new rent to stay at the old rent. As part of the settlement, many landlords also agreed to make much-needed repairs. Three Brooklyn landlords, each of whom had brought summary proceedings against dozens of tenants, pledged not only to make repairs where necessary, but even to install electric lights and put in new boilers, heaters, and radiators. At the behest of the committee, a few landlords offered to return the security deposits (or to pay interest on them). Many others allowed the evicted tenants to return to their homes—and, in a few cases, even reimbursed them for part of their moving expenses.35 What drove these landlords to settle with their tenants? For some it was the fear of the Mayor’s Committee and especially its threats to subject them to what the Real Estate Bulletin called “the tender solicitude” of the Department of Taxes and other municipal agencies. As one journalist pointed out, this prospect was extremely frightening to the small landlord who “hails from Russia and carries the wholesome fear of Government in his heart [and doesn’t] doesn’t want to interest [the] authorities at all.” For other landlords it was the ordeal of a public hearing, at which they would be heckled, insulted, and perhaps attacked by scores and even hundreds of angry tenants. (“Lynch the landlord!” a group of Bronx tenants shouted before the outbreak of the free-for-all that forced the committee to halt its hearing at Morris High School in late September.) For other landlords, it was the concern about the newspaper accounts of the hearings, in which they were often portrayed as ruthless profiteers who, wrote the Home News, had no compunction about evicting “a child sick with diphtheria,” “a hopeless cripple,” and “a woman on her death bed.” Still other landlords settled with their tenants because, in the words of a group of Lower East Side tenement house owners, they wanted to “win them away from the tenants’ leagues.” The Brownsville Landlords Protective Association was so worried about the growing strength of the tenants leagues that it decided to refer all landlord-tenant disputes in Brownsville to the Mayor’s Committee, whose decisions would be binding on its members.36 There was, however, a good deal of evidence, much of which was overlooked by Hirsch and his associates, that the Mayor’s Committee was not so successful in its efforts to curb rent profiteering. Some tenants who filed complaints failed to follow through when they learned that the committee was so busy that they would probably be evicted before the hearing was held. Other tenants who went to the hearings gave up when the committee ran out of time before their case was called. “As a result,” wrote the New York Telegram, “many legitimate claims against landlords have

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been pigeonholed.” Even more important, many tenants whose rents were raised did not file complaints. Some were as reluctant as their landlords to get involved with the authorities. Others preferred to turn to the tenants leagues, many of which held regular meetings to hear complaints. As Hirsch acknowledged, other tenants feared that if they filed a complaint with the Mayor’s Committee, the landlords would retaliate. On more than a few occasions they did. A good example was a Bronx landlord named Blumenthal. When summoned to appear before the committee to explain why he had raised the rent nearly 100 percent in two apartment houses he had bought only three months earlier, he told the tenants that he was going to “raise the rents $5 more to pay for his trouble.”37 Even worse, many landlords retaliated by threatening to evict tenants who filed complaints with the Mayor’s Committee. A case in point was I. H. Smith, one of three owners of a small apartment house in Brooklyn. Informed that his tenants had complained to the committee not only that he had raised the rent from fifteen to eighteen dollars a month, but also that he had failed to make necessary repairs and do routine maintenance, Smith responded, “Is that so? Well, just for that I’ll put them all out.” “I won’t let those or any other tenants work any Bolshevist business on me.” Another case in point was David Schaefer, who owned 604–610 Concord Avenue in the Bronx. Summoned to appear before the Mayor’s Committee to defend his decision to raise the rent from $25 to $41 a month, Schaefer rescinded the rent hike. But shortly thereafter he brought summary proceedings against the three tenants who had filed the complaint, on the grounds that they were “undesirable.” Under pressure from the committee, Schaefer’s lawyer agreed to allow two of the tenants to remain in their apartments. But the third, the alleged ringleader, would have to go. It was, said Captain Goldsmith, one of “the most glaring cases of an attempt by the landlord to wreak vengeance upon a tenant for having complained to the committee because of an excessive increase in rent.” As a result of this intimidation, historian Jared N. Day writes, “many tenants chose to stay away [from the committee] rather than risk swift eviction at a time of severe housing shortages.”38 As Hirsch and his associates were aware, the landlords posed a much bigger problem than the tenants. Many of them—as many as 40 percent at the beginning, according to one estimate—failed to appear when summoned by the committee. Some ignored its subpoenas, which would probably not have held up in court, on the grounds that the committee was, in Day’s words, “an institutionalized arm of ‘the mob’ where they could not get a fair hearing.” Of the landlords who did appear before the committee, many refused to cooperate. Despite strong pressure from the mediators, they balked at answering questions and providing information. At a hearing in early October, Herman Kauffman—the Bronx landlord whom Goldsmith had denounced as “a rent gouger of the worst type”—told the captain that he had been so busy evicting tenants from his apartment house on Longfellow Avenue that “he did not have any time to find what the monthly rent roll from his property amounted to.” He had no trouble, however, remembering that he had spent $2,000 a year on coal, noting that “his tenants were very particular in seeing that their

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children were bathed at least three times per day,” a remark that did little to calm the tenants at the hearing.39 Moreover, many landlords who settled with their tenants later failed to keep their promises. In June 1919 a representative of H.S. Dewey, Inc., the owner of an apartment house on Monroe Avenue in the Bronx, informed the Mayor’s Committee that the company, which had come to terms with its tenants not long before, had changed its mind and obtained eviction warrants against six of them. And in March 1920 a group of tenants who lived on 42nd Street in Brooklyn protested that their landlord, who, after raising the rent several times, promised he would not raise it again for a year, notified them of another rent hike. “Where are his promises?” they asked. “What is his respect for law?” Also, many landlords who settled with their tenants found a way to do so without rescinding or reducing the rent hikes. As Morris Gisnet, counsel to the Greater New York Tenants League, pointed out, it did not take the landlords long to figure out that more often than not the committee’s strategy was to urge them to split the difference with the tenants. “So instead of demanding a small increase of a dollar or two per month, these landlords usually sent notices to their tenants demanding increases anywhere from $5 to $10 per month, thus making sure that when they would appear before the Mayor’s Committee they would have plenty of room to compromise and, in any event, get more than the tenants were willing to give.” As S. A. Lewinsohn put it, the landlord “first raises his rent at least twice what it was before. If he reduces it at all, he makes himself appear a charitable gentleman.”40 Finally, many landlords—as many as 35 percent, according to one estimate— flat-out refused to settle with their tenants. One of the most intransigent was H. Stern, who had raised the rent on an apartment on West 111th Street in which Lieutenant P. J. Commerford lived with his wife. Commerford’s wife refused to pay the increase until she could consult with her husband, who was at sea. As soon as Commerford returned home, he filed a complaint with the Mayor’s Committee, which then summoned Stern to a hearing at the Municipal Building. According to the Times, the hearing “became so heated that it threatened to end up in fisticuffs.” By almost any standard, Stern’s intransigence was striking. He did not take into consideration that Commerford was not only an officer in the naval reserve, but also a veteran of both the Spanish-American War, in which he was wounded five times, and World War I. He brushed aside Commerford’s argument that he was protected by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act on the grounds that the lieutenant was no longer on active duty. Even when Commerford offered to pay the increased rent, Stern responded that he would not have him as a tenant “whether he was willing to pay the rent or not.” Walter S. Kennedy pleaded with him to allow Commerford and his wife to remain in the apartment. But Stern refused, saying that he “intended to stand on his constitutional rights.” Unable to do anything else, Kennedy declared he would look into the lieutenant’s legal status and refer the case to the Tenement House Department for violations of the sanitary laws.41

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The landlords who refused to settle with their tenants insisted that no one had the right to tell them what to charge for their apartments. They were setting the rents according to the law of supply and demand, trying, as all businessmen did, to get fair value for their goods. If the tenants felt the rent was too high, they were under no obligation to sign the lease. As Abraham Blumenthal, whose company owned the Kimberley Apartments on West 164th Street, said at one of Commissioner Hirshfield’s hearings, to which he was summoned after he refused to follow the recommendations of the Mayor’s Committee, “If profiteering means getting the market value for a commodity one handles, then we plead guilty.” “If I am a profiteer,” he added, “who of you [assembled here] is not.” Moreover, these landlords were not intimidated by the committee’s threats to report them to the municipal authorities. Informed by Captain Goldsmith that his case would be referred to the Department of Taxes, one landlord said that “he was willing to pay the City extra money rather than to relieve his tenants from paying the increased rentals.” Told by Lewinsohn that his case would be sent to the Health Department, another landlord remarked that “he did not fear the Health Department because he kept the rooms of his apartments as well supplied with heat that the tenants were compelled to keep the windows wide open in zero weather.” Before long most landlords would realize that it was very costly “to defy the committee,” said William O’Connor, one of its mediators, at a hearing at Queens Borough Hall. But evidently it was taking some landlords much longer than others to get the message.42 On January 2, 1920, less than three weeks after the gala benefit at the Century Theatre, Nathan Hirsch announced that he was resigning as chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. The resignation came as a surprise, wrote the Times, because relations between Hirsch and Hylan had “always been of the friendliest.” But Hirsch had been thinking about stepping down for a while. In mid-November he had asked Hylan for permission to resign, ostensibly for “business reasons,” but the mayor turned him down. Then in late December Hirsch told Hylan that the committee could no longer continue to live from “hand to mouth.” If the mayor could not find $30,000 to support the committee in the year ahead, he should disband it. When Hylan ignored what was in effect an ultimatum, Hirsch stepped down. The mayor, who apparently made no effort to dissuade him, said only that he regretted the city could not provide the committee as much money as Hirsch thought it needed. Whether or not Hirsch’s resignation was a “calamity” for the city, as William J. Schieffelin, chairman of the Citizens Union, claimed, it was an embarrassment for the mayor. To make matters worse, Captain Goldsmith, by far the best known of the committee’s mediators, resigned a day later. To deal with the political fallout (and also to jumpstart the committee, which had come to a standstill), the mayor named as new chairman Arthur J. W. Hilly, a lawyer active in Democratic politics who would serve as Corporation Counsel under Hylan’s successor, James J. Walker. In place of Block and Petty, Hylan also appointed two new members—Albert Sokolski, a Manhattan real estate man, and

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Mrs. Oliver Harriman, chair of the Food Committee of the Mayor’s Committee on National Defense.43 Hirsch’s resignation fueled the debate over the effectiveness of the Mayor’s Committee, a debate that had started well before he stepped down and would continue long after. On one side were the many New Yorkers who were very much impressed by the committee’s work. Alderman Clarence Y. Palitz of the Bronx wrote Hirsch in October 1919 that he could think of no city agency that had done more for the people of New York, especially for “the suffering masses, which are burdened with the high cost of living.” A month later Stewart Browne, president of the United Real Estate Owners Association, praised Hirsch for his unstinting and unselfish efforts, adding that any real estate organization that criticized the committee “should be condemned as an enemy of law and order.” A day after Hirsch resigned, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle gave the committee credit for resolving disputes, stopping evictions, and otherwise easing the strain caused by the housing shortage. Even more striking were the remarks of some New Yorkers who believed that the Mayor’s Committee had been instrumental in preventing the breakdown of public order. As Judge Michael J. Scanlan told the Lockwood Committee in 1920, “I really believe that if it were not for the Mayor’s Committee . . . we would have had bloodshed in the Bronx.” And as Jabez E. Dunningham, a spokesman for the Community Councils of the City of New York, said a few years later, in the absence of the Mayor’s Committee there might well have been a “rebellion” in the city.44 On the other side were the many New Yorkers, not all of whom were Socialists or tenant activists, who were not that impressed by the committee’s achievements. As Morris Gisnet pointed out, instead of preventing rent profiteering, the committee “invariably granted an increase to the landlords whose case was brought to its attention.” Indeed, said a lawyer who had represented many tenants at the hearings, the committee succeeded “only where the landlord was willing to make a concession.” Samuel Lewinsohn went even further, saying, “The only thing the Mayor’s Committee has done is to legalize profiteering,” a position shared by Socialist alderman B. C. Vladeck. Other critics, even some who gave the committee credit for resolving many landlord-tenant disputes, took it to task for doing nothing about the main cause of these disputes: the acute housing shortage. Writing in the Call, Gertrude Weil Klein, a Socialist who ran for the State Assembly in 1919, argued that the Mayor’s Committee had dealt with the problem “in a superficial way,” making no effort to find a “permanent solution” to the housing problem. Instead it “twaddled away” for months on investigations that “seemed more like inquisitions for tenants than anything else.” As she put it, the Mayor’s Committee “was a Committee of Arbitration which could not arbitrate,” a committee that “made a grandstand play of curbing the profiteers [without] step[ping] on the toes of the real estate interests.”45 On one point, however, there was no room for disagreement. Despite the efforts of Hirsch, Goldsmith, and their associates, the Mayor’s Committee had done little to hold down rents, head off strikes, and weaken the tenants leagues. Indeed, by late 1919 and early 1920 the tenants leagues, many of which were affiliated with the

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Socialist Party, were stronger than ever. And to Tammany’s dismay, Socialist alderman Abraham Beckerman had recently organized the first tenants league on the Lower East Side, where the landlords had just started to raise the rents in the dilapidated old-law tenements. Known as the East Side Tenants League, it was run out of Socialist Party headquarters on Grand Street. Thus on the eve of the 1919 election, the committee launched what one scholar calls “a concerted campaign against the tenant leagues,” a campaign designed to break the leagues not by resolving landlord-tenant disputes, but by subjecting their leaders to legal harassment. Hirsch started the campaign in early October, when he wrote Hylan that several “sinister organizations” were sowing discord between tenants and landlords, inciting rent strikes, hampering the efforts of the Mayor’s Committee, and “breeding Bolshevism, unrest and anarchy at an alarming rate.” Hylan responded that he shared these concerns. Insisting that tenants had no right “to take the law in[to] their [own] hands,” he urged Hirsch to ask District Attorney Edward A. Swann of Manhattan and his counterparts in the outer boroughs to bring “John Doe proceedings” (in which the prosecutors were not required to identify the defendants) against the leaders of the East Side and other tenants leagues.46 A few days later Swann assigned the case to Assistant District Attorney Theodore L. Waugh, who shortly thereafter brought the proceedings in the courtroom of Frederic Kernochan, chief justice of the Court of Special Sessions. A few weeks later District Attorney Francis Martin empanelled a grand jury to look into the activities of the leaders of the tenants leagues in the Bronx as well. For more than a month a host of policemen, judges, landlords, and tenants testified that the East Side and other tenants leagues were, as the Herald put it, “a puppet of the Socialist Party.” Besides inciting strikes and fomenting rebellion, their leaders were allegedly exploiting the tenants for political purposes and diverting their dues into the Socialist Party’s campaign coffers. The leaders of the tenants leagues denounced the proceedings as the product of an “unholy alliance” between the Hylan administration and the city’s landlords, “the echo of the whine of beaten dogs,” said Beckerman, “the inevitable harvest of progressive movements,” remarked S. J. Block, counsel to the East Side Tenants League. They also insisted that the dues were spent exclusively on running the leagues, retaining lawyers to represent members in court, and building an emergency fund to help evicted tenants. The proceedings, which petered out not long after the election and resulted in no indictments, revealed more about the desperation of the Mayor’s Committee and the Hylan administration than about the duplicity of the Socialist Party and the tenants leagues.47 The committee continued its work after Hirsch resigned, albeit not in the same way or at the same pace, first under Arthur J. W. Hilly and later under Lillie Grant. But even before Hirsch stepped down, it was plain that the committee was not capable of resolving the problem. Nor was the Hylan administration. It had neither the authority nor the inclination. Thus as things went from bad to worse in late 1919 the Board of Aldermen did nothing more than adopt an ordinance requiring lessees to obtain a license, which cost $25 a year for three apartments (and ten

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dollars for each additional one) and could be revoked for profiteering. Drawn up by Hirsch and introduced by Palitz, it was based on the widespread belief that the lessees were responsible for most of the profiteering. And it was designed to prevent the lessees, “many of whom were aliens,” said Walter S. Kennedy, from transferring property for, in Hirsch’s words, “the sole purpose [of] bleeding the tenants after they have already been bled white.” Giving the aldermen the benefit of the doubt, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, “Some good may be done by such municipal legislation, but not much.” That this ordinance was all the aldermen could come up with reinforced the growing belief, as one tenant activist said before the Mayor’s Committee was formed, that “the only body that can act to prevent rent profiteering is the state legislature.” In other words, if the problem was to be solved, it would be solved not by city officials but by state officials, and not in New York but in Albany.48

6 Enter the State Legislature

Down through 1918 the plight of New York City’s tenants was not a matter of much concern in Albany. Not to the governor, Charles S. Whitman, a Republican who had been elected in 1914 largely on the basis of his reputation as the crusading Manhattan district attorney who had successfully prosecuted Lieutenant Charles Becker of the New York Police Department for the murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal. And not to the state legislature, both houses of which were firmly under the control of the Republicans, most of whom came from upstate New York. Under no pressure from the governor to do otherwise, the legislators dealt with bills to hold down the rising rents in much the same way that they dealt with bills to alleviate the coal shortage: they shelved them. A bill introduced by Socialist assemblyman Charles B. Garfinkel of the Bronx would have prevented the landlords from raising the rent for a year after the tenants moved in—or, if they had already moved in, until May 1, 1919. If the landlords wanted to raise the rent thereafter, they would have to give the tenants thirty days’ notice. Another bill, introduced by Socialist assemblyman William N. Feigenbaum of Brooklyn, would have created a housing commission and empowered it to acquire land, erect dwellings, and rent them for only enough to cover the cost of upkeep. Neither bill made it out of committee.1 With the conspicuous exception of the ten Socialist assemblymen, all of whom came from New York City, most legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, did not view rent profiteering as a serious statewide problem. Although rents were going up in New York City, they were not rising at an alarming rate. Nor were they going up anywhere as rapidly in New York as in Detroit, Cleveland, and other cities. And even if rent profiteering was a source of concern in New York City, it was not much of an issue upstate, where most local officials felt “they had the housing situation well in hand.” Senator Peter A. Abeles, a Bronx Republican, recalled that when he arrived in Albany in January to start his first (and, it turned out, only) term, most

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of his colleagues believed that rent profiteering was not widespread in the city, much less the state. He therefore took it upon himself to persuade them that “the situation was growing more intolerable daily and that nothing could make for unrest more than the Legislature’s indifference.”2 Even the few state legislators who regarded rising rents as a serious problem were not sure it was up to them to try to solve it. Like most Americans, they were aware that the problem was a national, even an international one. To deal with it Britain, France, and other European countries had already imposed rent control. It was time for the United States to follow suit, said many Americans, among them the leaders of the American Federation of Labor and the Greater New York Tenants League. Under the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, which was passed in March 1918, Congress had protected U.S. servicemen and their dependents from profiteering landlords. It should now offer the same protection to all Americans, many of whom were contributing to the war effort in other ways. Under the Saulsbury Resolution, which was adopted in May 1918, Congress had acted to stop rent profiteering in Washington, D.C. It should now take steps to stop it in other cities. Although Congress shelved two nationwide rent control bills in June 1918, there was still reason to believe it would do something about rent profiteering before long.3 Like other Americans, most New York State legislators were also confident that the problem would soon be resolved even if Congress did nothing. Once the war was over residential construction would surge, easing the housing shortage and ending most rent profiteering. During the first half of 1919, however, the plight of New York City’s tenants emerged as a matter of a growing of concern in Albany. As the housing shortage became acute, most New York landlords raised the rents, often by substantial amounts, and then in many cases raised them again. Contrary to expectations, rents in New York went up more rapidly after the war than during the war. They also went up more rapidly in New York than in most other big cities. Moreover, the housing shortage was no longer confined to New York City. As John Alan Hamilton, a lawyer from upstate and also the president of the Erie County Bar Association, pointed out, the problem had spread not only to Buffalo, Hamilton’s home town, but also to Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. By mid-1919 it was becoming clear that despite the growing furor over the high cost of living, Congress was not going to do anything to curb rent profiteering. It came close in late August, when the House of Representatives voted by a narrow margin to put landlords under the Lever Act, which had been passed in 1917 to curb profiteering by coal dealers, retail grocers, and other businessmen; but under pressure from Republicans, the bill was shelved.4 It was also becoming clear that notwithstanding the law of supply and demand, the housing problem was not going to solve itself: residential construction, far from picking up after the war, was still stuck in the doldrums and would probably stay there for the foreseeable future. Whether this concern would lead to action remained to be seen. But there was good reason to believe that Albany might be more sympathetic to the plight of

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New York City’s tenants in 1919 than in 1918. As a result of the November election, the Republicans lost seven seats in the Senate and four in the Assembly, nearly all of them from New York City. Although the legislature was still “safely Republican,” wrote the Times, the GOP’s working majority was down to four in the upper house and seventeen in the lower house, which was not enough to override a gubernatorial veto. The Socialists fared even worse, losing all but two of their ten seats in the Assembly. By contrast, the Democrats did very well, gaining four seats in the Senate and thirteen in the Assembly. Even more stunning was the defeat of Republican governor Whitman, who was running for his third term against Alfred E. Smith, a Democrat and president of the New York City Board of Aldermen. A lackluster campaigner, Whitman tried hard to smear Smith by stressing his ties to Tammany Hall. “Shall Albany be run from Fourteenth Street [the site of Tammany’s headquarters]?” he asked the voters. But Smith ran very well in New York City, where he was supported not only by Tammany, but also by anti-Tammany Democrats, insurgent Republicans, and other urban progressives, and pretty well in the heavily ethnic districts of several upstate cities. In the end he won by fewer than 15,000 (or less than 1 percent) of the more than two million votes cast. The vote was so close, writes one historian, that Whitman “spent a month in futile litigation to obtain a recount and prevent Smith from taking office.”5 During the campaign Smith did not have much to say about the housing problem. Neither, for that matter, did Whitman. Only the Socialists made an issue of it. And Smith, who owed his political success to Tammany Hall, was not a Socialist—or a radical of any kind. At one point he even signed a bill making it a misdemeanor to display a red flag at any rally or parade. Yet Smith was a champion of working people. His father had been a workingman. And were it not for his political know-how and good fortune, he would probably have ended up one too. (During the campaign he reminded voters, “When Whitman was an Amherst College student, I was working at the Fulton Fish Market.”) During his many years in the State Assembly, first as a member and then as a leader, he had shown a readiness to regulate private enterprise in the interest of working people. As a legislator with an expansive notion of the police power, he supported bills to enhance the safety of factory workers and to limit the hours of labor for women and children. He also backed workmen’s compensation and a minimum wage, though again only for women and children.6 It was not clear how far he would go to solve the housing problem when he took office in January 1920. But even if he would not go as far as the Socialists, he would almost certainly go farther than Whitman. And as governor from 1919 to 1921—and again from 1923 to 1929—he would be tested as much by the housing problem as by any other issue. In the months after Smith took office, a host of committees, public and private, began to look into the housing problem in New York City. One of the first was the Advisory Committee on Housing, a committee of the State Reconstruction Commission, which the governor set up in January 1919 to study the state’s postwar

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needs. (Chaired by Abram I. Elkus, a well-known lawyer who had played a prominent role in Smith’s campaign, the commission ran into so much opposition in the Republican-dominated legislature that it was forced to rely on private donations.) A few months later the legislature formed a committee of its own, the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, which, as mentioned earlier, was commonly known as the Lockwood Committee, after its chairman Senator Charles C. Lockwood of Brooklyn. At about the same time the Merchants’ Association, which represented New York City’s leading retailers, set up a special committee on housing, as did several civic groups, including the Bronx Board of Trade, and neighborhood organizations, among them the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association. “If a multiplication of committees will solve the housing problem in New York,” wrote the Globe in May 1919, “then the matter is as good as settled.”7 Like most New Yorkers, these committees disagreed on a number of points. But on one they all agreed, as did virtually everyone else, among them real estate men and tenant activists, Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists. And that was that the rising rents were a result of the housing shortage. Drawing on the findings of the Advisory Committee on Housing, Elkus told the Lockwood Committee that “rent profiteering was a symptom of a disease, and that disease is that there are not enough houses.” Or as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, the profiteering landlords were “only an incident of the condition and not the cause of it.” The Merchants’ Association reached much the same conclusion, as did the City Club, which attributed the “acute rental situation” to “a sharp falling off in building operations.” Joseph A. Kellogg, counsel to Governor Smith, agreed that rising rents were due to “the absolute shortage of houses in the city.” With too many people and too few apartments, the competition for space inevitably drives up rents, he said. Clarence H. Kelsey, president of Title Guaranty & Trust Company, made the same point. So long as there are three families for each apartment, he told the Lockwood Committee, the landlords “will get all [they] can.”8 To Elkus, the solution to the problem was obvious: “build more homes and build them now,” he told the Bronx Board of Trade. Other members of the Smith administration agreed, among them Belle Moskowitz, secretary of the Reconstruction Commission, who declared, “Building is the only real solution to the problem of housing in New York.” Hylan and Hirsch agreed. So did the Merchants’ Association and the City Club. Richard M. Hurd, the country’s foremost real estate economist, also held that “the only way to cure a housing shortage was to build more buildings[, especially] more apartment houses.” On this point, if on few others, Alexander Braunstein, a Socialist alderman from the Bronx, and members of the Bronx Board of Trade, found common ground. The press saw things in much the same way. “The only solution to the rent profiteering problem is to build more homes and build them now,” wrote the Times. “The rent situation will not be solved until several thousand more apartment houses have been built,” added the Eagle. Among the many New Yorkers who agreed with the Times and the Eagle was the governor. In August 1920, at which time he was under enormous pressure from the tenants leagues and

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other groups to call a special session of the state legislature to enact one or more laws to curb rent profiteering, Governor Smith insisted that “The crying need is more housing” and that “nothing short of an active resumption of building on a large scale will bring adequate relief.”9 Although there was a consensus that New York sorely needed more housing, there was no agreement about how much more. The Reconstruction Commission reported that the city was short about 40,000 apartments. Bruce Bliven, a wellknown journalist, wrote that it needed 75,000 more. Frank Mann, the tenement house commissioner, and Lawson Purdy, the head of the Charity Organization Society, a citywide group that provided relief to the “worthy poor,” estimated the shortage at roughly 100,000. So did Mayor Hylan. The Lockwood Committee also came up with a figure of 100,000, but that was for the entire state. The estimates varied so widely because without data from the 1920 census, which had not yet been compiled, it was very hard to figure out how many people lived in New York. Given that thousands of apartments, most of them in old-law tenements on the Lower East Side, were more or less uninhabitable, it was also very hard to figure out how many dwelling units existed in the city. Indeed, drawing on a wide range of sources, Professor Samuel McCune Lindsay contended there was no housing shortage at all in New York. In a study done under the auspices of the Real Estate Board—which, he insisted, had made no effort to influence his finding—Lindsay concluded that the city’s population had not gone up as fast as projected and by no means fast enough to deplete the surplus of housing that had been left by the great surge of residential construction before World War I. Lindsay’s elaborate tables and charts notwithstanding, very few New Yorkers found his report credible.10 For New Yorkers other than Lindsay, it was less important to figure out how many more houses had to be built than to find a way to build them. Most of them took it for granted that this was a job for private enterprise—and, above all, for the speculative builders who had erected most of New York’s apartment houses. But the speculative builders were not building. Driven by the soaring price of labor and materials, the cost of construction had gone up at least 80 percent in the past few years. Making matters worse, most well-informed observers saw no reason to believe that wages and prices were likely to go down anytime soon. “The present level of prices and wages will be maintained indefinitely,” predicted the Housing Committee of the Merchants’ Association, a blue-ribbon committee that was chaired by Burt L. Fenner of McKim, Mead & White. “I do not believe we will ever return to pre-war prices in building construction,” declared Senator William M. Calder. A few other observers were less pessimistic. But even they did not think there was much that the federal or state governments could do to reduce the cost of construction. For most builders, it was too risky to put up new apartment houses that would have to compete with old ones that had been erected for half as much money.11 Even the builders who were willing to take the risk often found that they were unable to raise the capital. Although there was “plenty of money in the country,” wrote Walter B. Stabler, controller of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, it

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was not available for mortgages on residential real estate. The savings banks and insurance companies were afraid that in the event of a postwar deflation, the apartment houses would be worth less than their outstanding debt. Moreover, many financial institutions were, in the words of Harry Fischel, a veteran Manhattan real estate broker, “loaded up with Liberty Bonds” and thus “unable to make [real estate] loan[s] even if they would like to.” Worst of all, said Stabler, “untold millions” of dollars have been entirely removed from the real estate mortgage market because mortgages were not competitive with other investments, a point also made by the Housing Committee of the Merchants’ Association. After taxes, they yielded less than gilt-edge corporate securities and tax-exempt state, county, and municipal bonds. Investors “cannot be expected to leave their money in highly taxed mortgages or make new investments of this kind,” Stabler pointed out, “when there are perfectly safe securities which will pay twice as much.”12 Stabler and other New Yorkers urged federal and state officials to act on one or more of several far-reaching proposals to attract capital back into real estate. (Hirsch even went so far as to call for the state legislature to enact a law requiring insurance companies to invest a portion of their assets in residential property.) Of these proposals, none generated as much enthusiasm as one to exempt mortgage interest from federal and state income taxes, a measure that would have made real estate mortgages competitive with other securities. The Reconstruction Commission and the Lockwood Committee endorsed this proposal. So did the Real Estate Board, the Merchants’ Association, and Mayor Hylan. And with the conspicuous exception of Robert E. Dowling, the president of a leading New York real estate firm who did not think it would have much of an impact on home building for low-income residents, so did many other New Yorkers. Although the proposal’s supporters disagreed on some points—for example, whether the exemption should be temporary or permanent and whether a ceiling should be imposed on the amount of the mortgages subject to exemption—they all agreed that once mortgage interest was exempt from federal and state income taxes, what Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann called “a flood” of capital would pour into residential real estate. When it did, the builders would rush to meet the huge pent-up demand for apartments—and, in Senator Calder’s words, take advantage of a market that would be “unequaled in the last fifty years.”13 In response to mounting pressure, Senator Calder introduced a bill to exempt from federal income taxes the interest on mortgages up to $40,000. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee. Representative James C. McLaughlin of Michigan filed a similar bill, which was sent to the House Committee on Ways and Means. Among the groups that testified before the Ways and Means Committee was the New York City Real Estate Board, whose spokesmen supported what became known as the Calder-McLaughlin bill, but pointed out that a mortgage of much more than $40,000 would be required to build an apartment house. Some observers, among them Isidor Berger of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, were optimistic about the bill’s prospects. But others, including Al Smith, doubted that Congress

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would act on it. And he was right. Once Congress failed to pass the Calder-McLaughlin bill, the New York State legislature saw no point in enacting a tax-exemption law of its own. The state income tax was so much lower than the federal income tax that such a law would not have done much to make real estate mortgages attractive investments. A few groups, notably the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association and the City Club, came up with a different tax-exemption proposal, one that did not require federal action. Under this proposal new apartment houses would be exempt from local property taxes for several years after they were erected. But it was not until mid-1920 that this proposal generated much interest.14 Even before World War I was over, it was widely believed that private enterprise could ease the housing shortage not only by erecting new buildings, but also by altering old ones. As Frank Mann pointed out in November 1918, there were thousands of three- and four-story single-family houses, most of them in Manhattan and Brooklyn, which had “outlived [their] usefulness” and had “no rental or market value.” They were “invariably of good construction, well lighted and ventilated,” he added. If they were converted into three- and four-family tenement houses, tens of thousands of apartments would be added to the city’s housing stock. During the late nineteenth century a great many property owners had converted single-family homes into tenement houses. But after the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, they stopped. As Thomas A. Hart, secretary of the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, explained, the provisions of the act were so “exacting” that these conversions were now prohibitively expensive. In some cases they were physically impossible.15 Hence many New Yorkers—especially, but not exclusively, many real estate men—came to the conclusion that it was time for the state legislature to amend the Tenement House Act of 1901 in ways that would facilitate the conversion of single-family homes into tenement houses. As the housing shortage grew worse, it seemed like an idea whose time had come. Incorporated into a handful of bills introduced during and after World War I, the efforts to amend the Tenement House Act were supported by builders, property owners, labor unions, and real estate men and later by the Reconstruction Commission and the Lockwood Committee. But they were opposed by the tenement house reformers and their allies, who feared that the proposed amendments would undermine the changes for which they had fought so long and hard and bring about a return to the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions that had led to the enactment of the 1901 law. Speaking against the Dowling bill, which was designed to make it easier to convert three- and four-story private dwellings into three- and four-family tenement houses, John J. Murphy, a former Tenement House Commissioner and now secretary of the Tenement House Committee of the Charity Organization Society, argued that it did not provide adequate requirements for light and air, much less adequate safeguards against fire hazards. Fire Chief John Kenlon agreed with Murphy, saying that allowing the property owners to leave the wooden, winding stairways of the old dwellings in place in the new structures, as the Dowling bill did, “is, to my mind, inviting disaster.” And Lawson Purdy was not only opposed

As early as 1918 some New Yorkers were skeptical that private enterprise could do much to ease the housing shortage. And as the shortage went from bad to

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to the effort to facilitate the conversion of single-family homes into tenement houses, but also cynical about the motives of some of its backers. Referring to a bill that was introduced in 1920, he claimed that it was designed not so much to provide additional housing as to boost the value of otherwise worthless buildings.16 As a result of this opposition, the efforts to amend the Tenement House Act ran into a good deal of trouble. At the urging of the Brooklyn Board of Real Estate Brokers and the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, which held that conversion was “an economic necessity” for many property owners, the state legislature enacted the Lawson bill in 1917. But as Frank Mann observed, the bill was “ineffective.” It included so many provisions that were designed for large tenement houses that it did not greatly reduce the costs of conversion. By virtue of these provisions, not to mention the shortage of capital, labor, and materials, only a handful of property owners took advantage of the Lawson bill. The Dowling bill, which was introduced a year later, fared even less well. Although supported by the Real Estate Board, the bill was so strongly opposed by the Charity Organization Society, the Fire Department, and other organizations that the state legislature shelved it. Like the Dowling bill, the Dodge bill, which was drafted by the Real Estate Board and filed early in 1919, would have allowed as many as four apartments in each of the converted buildings. Although the bill, which would have added from 20,000 to 50,000 apartments to New York City’s housing stock, was backed by the Buildings Trades’ Employers Association and the State Federation of Labor, it too went nowhere, again largely because of the opposition of the tenement house reformers.17 Also filed in early 1919 was the Burlingame bill, which was backed by a coalition that included the Real Estate Board of New York and the Tenement House Committee of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities. The Burlingame bill was designed to do what the Lawson bill had failed to do—reduce the costs of converting single-family homes into tenement houses without jeopardizing the health and safety of the residents. In an effort to soften the opposition of the tenement house reformers, the bill’s sponsors drew the line at the conversion of three-story single-family homes into three-family tenement houses. By drawing the line, wrote the Eagle, “precisely where the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities and other supporters of the tenement house law draw it,” they prevailed on the legislature to pass the Burlingame bill in the spring of 1919. And Governor Smith signed it. There was no doubt, said Thomas Hart, that the Burlingame bill would be “a godsend” to many property owners, who would now be able to convert a three-story house into a three-family tenement for only $2,000–$2,500, charge their tenants a fair rent, and still earn a reasonable return on their investment. At a special session called by Smith in June, the legislature enacted a revised version of the Dodge bill as well. Only the two Socialist assemblymen spoke out against it. But in August 1919 Belle Moskowitz reported that no one had yet taken advantage of the Burlingame and Dodge laws.18

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worse, the skepticism grew. By far the most skeptical were the Socialists, who had little faith in private enterprise and even less in speculative building. To them, the solution was obvious. If private builders were unable to supply the sorely needed housing, wrote one, “what else is there left to do except for the state or municipality to step in?” By stepping in, he meant acquiring land, building houses, and renting them to what the Call referred to as people of “moderate means.” Alderman Alexander Braunstein agreed. Pointing out that the only way to bring down rents was to put up houses, he declared, “Private enterprise finds it unprofitable to do so. The City of New York will find it unprofitable not to do so.” The problem is “too gigantic for other than collective action.” Public housing “is a new proposal,” said Judge Jacob Panken, “but it is the only one that will solve the problem effectively.” In an effort to alleviate the housing shortage, several Socialists introduced legislation authorizing the city or state to go into the housing business. Following the lead of Assemblyman Feigenbaum, Assemblyman Charles Solomon submitted a bill that would have enabled the city to create a housing commission and empower it to acquire land, erect houses, and rent them at cost. Not long afterward Alderman Braunstein filed a bill to create a municipal housing bureau to build apartment houses on vacant city-owned land.19 Of the New Yorkers who sided with the Socialists on this issue, most were far from enthusiastic about public housing. But they saw no other way to alleviate the housing shortage. Typical was Belle Moskowitz, who told the Lockwood Committee, “If it cannot get housing in any other way, if it cannot get housing through the speculative builder, if it cannot get it through cooperative associations or any other fashion, the city [of New York] will have to build it.” Al Smith, Moskowitz’s boss, came out in favor of public housing in early 1920, less than a year after he had declared that “no legislation could make houses grow on empty lots.” So did Stewart Browne, president of the United Real Estate Owners Association (and a maverick in real estate circles), who said in late 1920 that while he opposed public housing in principle, “it was the only practical measure to meet the situation.” A few New Yorkers, the most important of whom were Fiorello H. La Guardia, president of the Board of Aldermen, and Henry H. Curran, borough president of Manhattan, were more enthusiastic about public housing. So were some progressive periodicals. The housing situation was “alarming,” wrote the Nation. “People are robbing themselves of food in order to pay the landlord who robs them in excessive rent, and families already indecently crowded are taking in lodgers.” Private enterprise offers no hope for relief because capital “must have its interest” and landlords “will exact the utmost farthing.” Only the government “can give homes to the people who need them now and provide the homes that will be needed in the immediate future.”20 Public housing was much more controversial than tax exemptions for mortgage income and revisions of the tenement house laws. From the start it aroused a great deal of opposition, especially from real estate interests and tenement house reformers, two groups that were ordinarily at odds with each other. Public housing was un-American, its opponents charged. It was a form of socialism that had no

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place in a country that had been built by private enterprise. Asked by the Lockwood Committee if the state should put up houses, Jacob Leitner, a Bronx real estate man, replied, “No, no more than I think the State should feed its people.” If the state provided housing, why not food, clothing, motorcars, and even theater tickets, said Lawrence Veiller, the nation’s leading tenement house reformer. For the state to tax one class of citizens for the benefit of another “is bad principle and worse policy,” added E. R. L. Gould, another tenement house reformer and president of the City and Suburban Homes Company. It was a form of paternalism, a type of what Lawson Purdy called “charitable relief, however disguised,” that would demoralize the tenants. Not the least, public housing would create new opportunities for skullduggery. Given the sordid history of machine politics in New York City, “it would in all likelihood result in a veritable orgy of political favoritism and corruption,” warned Samuel Untermyer, a prominent lawyer and chief counsel to the Lockwood Committee.21 According to its opponents, public housing was objectionable on practical as well as ideological grounds. It was, in the words of the New York City Real Estate Board, “economically unsound.” Public officials could not put up housing “any cheaper, better or quicker” than private builders, the opposition argued. Hence it would be impossible for the cities to build apartments and rent them at cost. They would have to charge market rents, which most low-income tenants could not afford, or run a deficit, which would have to be picked up by the taxpayers. Even if New York was inclined to give public housing a chance, where would it find the money? “Even if the grave economic and governmental objections to putting the city into the housing business were ignored,” said Clarence H. Kelsey, “it is perfectly plain that the city could not provide the $600,000,000 [needed] in the next five years for housing, or anything like that sum.” The City Club agreed, arguing that even “the most lavish expenditure of public funds” would not provide enough housing. New York “has enough on its hands now” without going into the housing business, added Frank Mann. To emphasize the point, the opponents argued that public housing had been a failure in England and other European countries. Indeed, said former tenement house commissioner Murphy, their experience demonstrated “the economic futility of attempting to solve the housing problem that way.”22 Rather than alleviate the housing shortage, public housing would exacerbate it, the opposition contended. Underlying this position was the conventional wisdom that if public authority went into business it would drive out private enterprise. Thus when it came to housing, said Gould, “municipal regulation, not municipal ownership, is the best watchword for American policy.” Kelsey explained the logic of this position as well as anyone. “The only reason for taking the city into the [housing] business is to furnish space at a loss,” he said in 1920. But how, he asked, could a builder be expected to compete with the city “as long as it furnishes space at a loss?” A builder “will not take the risk of so building if the city stands over him with power, whenever it pleases[,] to go into the business of producing space for less than it is worth and destroying the value of his property.” The Daily Eagle, a conservative

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newspaper that subscribed to the conventional wisdom, warned that if New York went into the housing business it might ease the shortage for a while, but it would drive out private builders. And once the city had outgrown “the new municipal construction,” the situation would be as bad as ever.23 Opponents also claimed that public housing was unconstitutional. Relying on an opinion submitted by Corporation Counsel William P. Burr to Mayor Hylan in May 1919, they argued that under the New York State Constitution the city was barred from spending money for anything other than a public purpose. And as Burr told the Lockwood Committee, to erect buildings and rent apartments was “a private purpose.” Even if it had incidental public benefits, municipal housing could not be regarded in the same way as municipal water and sewer systems or even municipal electric light and gas plants. Burr’s successor, George P. Nicholson, concurred. So did Louis B. Marshall, an eminent New York lawyer and one of the nation’s leading constitutional authorities. The constitution, Burr noted, could be amended to permit cities to incur debt for the purpose of building houses. But as the opponents of public housing pointed out, a constitutional amendment would have to be approved by two successive sessions of the state legislature before it could be submitted to the voters. Even if all went smoothly, which in view of the widespread opposition to public housing seemed highly unlikely, it would take at least three years before construction got under way. Given the acute housing shortage, few New Yorkers were willing to wait so long. Thus noted Mayor Hylan’s Housing Conference Committee, any plan for public housing, “even if it were not objectionable from an economic and governmental point of view,” would be delayed “too long to be of any practical value.”24 These objections were groundless, responded the backers of public housing. To some of the many New Yorkers who held that rent profiteering was largely to blame for the spread of radicalism in the city, it seemed preposterous to attack public housing as a form of socialism. If anything, public housing was designed to help prevent radicalism from taking hold. Some New Yorkers also dismissed these charges as beside the point. A good example was Dr. Royal S. Copeland, who had moved from Michigan to New York, where he served as dean of Flower Hospital and Medical College until 1918, when he was appointed New York City’s health commissioner. Deeply concerned by the impact of the housing shortage on the city’s health, he became an outspoken advocate of public housing. Testifying in 1920 before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Reconstruction and Production, Copeland declared, “It may be socialistic or communistic or idealistic, but I say that if we can not get houses any other way they must be built with public funds.” Another good example was John V. Van Pelt, a New York City architect (and a Cooper Union faculty member), who told the National Housing Conference in 1918, “I have always been intensely conservative; but if providing houses, schools, [and] recreation buildings for the needs of [working] men and women, the sinews of our country, is Socialism, then up to this point I am ready to be called a Socialist.”25 Public housing was not impractical either, its supporters claimed. Although it had not yet been tried in the United States, a point emphasized by the New York City

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Real Estate Board, it had already been adopted in many Western European countries. Indeed, said Copeland, public housing was widely accepted in “every other civilized country in the world”—though in the wake of World War I, it was not clear that some of these countries were all that civilized. Moreover, said La Guardia and Curran, public housing worked well in European cities. And there was no reason to think it would not work as well in American cities. Most American cities now did many things that were once regarded as inappropriate. They built public schools, public markets, public piers, public parks, public playgrounds, and public baths. Most provided water, and some furnished transportation. A few even operated ferries, Stewart Browne pointed out. And they did so without demoralizing the riders. (This remark was aimed at Edward P. Doyle, the manager of the Real Estate Board’s Bureau of Research and Information and an outspoken opponent of public housing, who rode the Staten Island ferry to Manhattan every day.) Where private enterprise failed to provide health care for poor New Yorkers, the city established hospitals, clinics, and dispensaries, wrote the Outlook. Now that private enterprise was apparently “on the verge of failing to provide shelter” for thousands of New Yorkers, the city should supply housing as well.26 As for the charge that public housing would be grist for Tammany’s mill, its supporters evidently thought the less said the better. To the charge that public housing would exacerbate the housing shortage by driving private enterprise out of the field, its supporters responded that “the field is large enough for everybody.” Some even took the position that it would not be much of a loss if private enterprise were driven out. As the New Republic wrote in 1920, “Competitive building for profit has never worked, works abominably now and will certainly never work tolerably well in the future.” Clarence S. Stein, an architect and planner and secretary of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission, explained why. The speculative builders, who erected the apartment houses that lined the streets of New York for miles on end, “built to sell, not to house.” And they built badly, putting up houses “without any thought of permanence or comfort.” The result, wrote Stein, was that “there have never been houses enough for the poorer workers.” Moreover, the way things were going, it would not be long before “there will not be houses enough even for the moderately well-to-do.” Even the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, which was no friend of public housing, acknowledged that “it has been economically impossible for many years to provide a large part of the population of this State with decent homes according to American standards of living.” Even at prewar prices, said Edith Elmer Wood, a leading authority on housing, it was not possible for private builders to put up decent housing, charge reasonable rents, and earn a reasonable return. “It simply cannot be done.”27 By far the strongest argument against public housing was that the state constitution barred the city from going into the housing business. Corporation Counsel Burr’s opinion was well thought out. It was based on a careful analysis of municipal law, not on a personal hostility to public housing. (Indeed, he told the Lockwood

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Committee that he would rather have reached a different conclusion.) And most legal authorities found it persuasive. Even so, a few backers of public housing, of whom La Guardia was the most outspoken, challenged Burr’s opinion. La Guardia, who had studied law at night at New York University, was not a legal scholar. But that did not stop him from arguing that the New York and Massachusetts cases on which Burr based his opinion were not on point. New Yorkers “have the right to meet this crisis by building immediately and not waiting for any constitutional amendment,” he argued. Like Senator Peter A. Abeles, the only member of the Lockwood Committee who favored public housing, La Guardia believed that the city was facing an emergency, one that was as serious as anything the country had faced during World War I. Unlike La Guardia, however, Curran and most other backers of public housing were resigned to amending the constitution. And the sooner the better. Hylan, who had initially opposed public housing, claimed in mid-1920 that if the state legislature acted quickly the city might be able to begin building as early as 1922, a claim that was more than a little far-fetched.28 The debate over public housing, which started before World War I, picked up in the immediate postwar years when its advocates put forward several proposals to authorize the city to go into the housing business. Corporation Counsel Burr’s opinion notwithstanding, State Senator John D. Doyle introduced a bill in early January 1920 to empower New York to build houses on city-owned land in the Bronx. As many as 25,000 families could be housed under this plan, Doyle said. Shortly thereafter La Guardia called on the Board of Aldermen to ask the Board of Estimate to authorize housing on municipal property at Jamaica Bay and other sites for New Yorkers of moderate income “who cannot find homes except at extortionate rentals.” At least twenty thousand families could be housed there before the end of the summer, he claimed. An ingenious idea was also put forward by George Donnelly, president of the Fair Play Rent Association, one of the conservative tenants leagues that was formed in early 1920 as an alternative to the radical tenants unions. In an effort to get around the constitutional constraints on public housing, he suggested that the city sell the Jerome Avenue Reservoir site in the Bronx to Fair Play and authorize the association to build houses on it. In the meantime, Curran urged his colleagues on the Board of Estimate to appropriate $10 million to build housing on city-owned land. At his request the board also instructed Corporation Counsel Nicholson to draft a bill amending the state constitution, but the bill was introduced too late in the session to be acted on. Shortly afterward Curran implored Governor Smith to call a special session to enact this bill and other housing legislation.29 Given the deep-seated opposition to public housing, these proposals had little chance of success. What little chance they had was severely weakened by the widespread belief that the authorities could do more to ease the housing shortage by lending money or extending credit to private builders than by going into the housing business. The members of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee favored making loans to builders—provided that they were “well secured

By early 1919 many New Yorkers—even many who held that the long-term solution to the housing problem was “to build more homes and build them now”— had come to believe that neither private enterprise nor public authority could do much to alleviate the housing shortage in the near future. From this belief it was only a short step to the conclusion that the state legislature had to take action to stop the city’s rapacious landlords from raising the rent and then bringing summary proceedings against the hard-strapped tenants who could not pay it. The legislature, it was assumed, had two options. It could impose rent control on residential property, preventing the landlords from raising the rent above a certain amount or even from raising it at all. Although a draconian measure, rent control was not unprecedented. It had been enacted in many European countries during World War I. Under what was known as the Saulsbury Resolution, Congress had regulated rents in the District of Columbia. And Assemblyman Garfinkel had filed a rent-control bill in February 1918. The legislature could also revise the state’s landlord-tenant laws (under which, said Charles Solomon, “the landlord can do anything”) in ways that would make it more difficult and more expensive for landlords to bring summary proceedings. After all, said Judge Harry Robitzek, summary proceedings had not been designed to enable the landlords to use the courts “for the purpose of increasing rents beyond a fair and reasonable amount.”31 Shortly after the state legislature convened in January 1919, several senators and assemblymen filed bills to protect the city’s tenants from profiteering landlords. One bill, which was introduced by Senator Abeles, provided that a landlord who brought summary proceedings against a tenant for nonpayment of rent would have to show that he had not raised the rent above a rate that would yield more than 10 percent of the property’s assessed value. Another bill, which was introduced by Assemblyman David Dreschler of Brooklyn, would have made it a misdemeanor for a landlord who provided heat to charge a rent that brought in more than 12.5 percent of the assessed value. If the landlord did not provide heat, he would be

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and made upon a business basis, without expense or risk of loss to the State.” Other New Yorkers supported extending state credit to builders, though in some cases only to limited-dividend companies and in other cases only for the construction of moderately priced homes. Many real estate men were far from enthusiastic about what were in effect subsidies for private enterprise, but most found them less objectionable than public housing. Yet the extension of state credits had serious drawbacks of its own. One was that the state and its cities could no more lend money or extend credit to private interests than they could go into the housing business. To do either required a constitutional amendment. The other was that some supporters of public housing viewed this approach as outrageous. It would be “a vicious insult to the people,” said Judge Panken, for the authorities to issue bonds and then turn the proceeds over to the very builders who were to blame for the housing shortage. If the state or the cities supplied the capital, they should build and manage the houses.30

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allowed only 10 percent. Neither Abeles nor Dreschler went as far as Samuel Orr and the other leaders of the Greater New York Tenants League, who called for legislation authorizing a board of municipal court judges to rule on proposed rent hikes in much the same way as public service commissioners ruled on proposed transit fares—that is, unless the board found the hike reasonable and necessary, the landlord would have to rescind it. Nor did Abeles and Dreschler go as far as Judge Panken, who favored legislation that would have allowed landlords to raise the rent only once a year and then only with the approval of a commission appointed by the governor, a commission that would have been authorized to fix rentals for each building according to its location and improvements.32 Still, Abeles and Dreschler went a good deal further than any legislator other than Garfinkel. Several other bills were filed to amend the state’s landlord-tenant laws. Perhaps the most important was the Lyons bill, which was designed to repeal the Ottinger Law. Enacted in 1918, the much-criticized law provided that unless otherwise specified in writing, all tenancies would run from month to month. The Lyons bill provided instead that in the absence of a written agreement to the contrary, all tenancies would expire on May 1 of the following year. Under a bill introduced by Assemblyman Joseph V. McKee, the landlord would have to give a tenant twenty-one days’ notice before a rent hike could go into effect. Under another bill filed by Assemblyman M. M. Fertig, the landlord would have to give not five days’ notice, as required by the current law, but ten days’ notice before attempting to oust a tenant who refused to move out after his lease expired. Senator Charles E. Russell offered an amendment calling for thirty days’ notice, but indicated he was willing to settle for fifteen. Yet another bill, which was filed by Senator Henry G. Shackno, gave a municipal court judge who issued a final order in favor of the landlord the discretion to grant the tenant a stay of up to twenty days, as opposed to five days under the current law, provided that he deposited the old rent with the court for the period of the stay. Shackno also introduced another bill providing for a stay of up to sixty days for tenants who were evicted from buildings that housed three or more families.33 Spokesmen for the tenants leagues, all of whom held that the state’s landlordtenant laws were, in the words of Morris Gisnet, “antiquated,” supported these bills. So did leaders of the Socialist Party, who wanted even more stringent legislation. Also in favor were the Bronx Democratic County Committee and many municipal court judges, one of whom, Jacob S. Strahl, called on legislators to forbid rent hikes for six months. It could be justified as a war measure, he said, even though the war had ended six months earlier. Having been forced to issue eviction warrants against thousands of tenants, these judges were fed up. With their support, the McKee bill was passed by the Assembly and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. And the Abeles bill, which limited rents to 10 percent of the property’s assessed value, was approved by the Senate. But much as Gisnet predicted, most of these bills went no further. Only the Fertig bill, which required the landlord to give ten days’ notice in holdover proceedings, was enacted before the legislature adjourned in-mid April. But the governor could only sign it if the mayor gave his approval. And Hylan refused.34

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As Gisnet pointed out, most of these bills were shelved largely because of the vigorous opposition of New York’s real estate interests, especially the city’s Real Estate Board, which kept a close eye on what went on in Albany. Spokesmen for this formidable lobbying group contended that the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws were unfair, if not unconstitutional. Most landlords were not profiteers. If they were raising the rents, it was not so much to gouge their tenants as to cover their expenses, which had doubled since 1914, and to offset the heavy losses of the prewar years, when, said Douglas L. Elliman, no one gave any thought to “whether the owner was securing an adequate return for his money.” The city was undergoing “a proper adjustment of rents,” said a title insurance company executive. There was “not enough rent profiteering to get excited about,” much less to justify revising longstanding landlord-tenant laws. Spokesmen for the real estate industry acknowledged that a few lessees and speculators were taking advantage of the housing shortage to raise the rent. But in their view it was not fair for the legislators to punish the large majority of reputable landlords for the abuses of a small minority of rapacious ones. Nor was it fair for them to single out the landlords when manufacturers and retailers were raising the prices of food, clothing, and other items, which were increasing even more rapidly than the cost of housing.35 Spokesmen for the real estate industry also charged that the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws were impractical. “You can no more legislate the cost of living up and down than you can stop the tide by building a sea wall,” declared Leo Day Woolworth, secretary of the Advisory Council of Real Estate Interests. Rents were a function of supply and demand. They would go down only when the cost of labor and materials fell to a level at which it was profitable for builders to put up apartment houses. Legislative efforts to meddle with the housing market would only make things worse, argued many real estate men. As I. Montefiore Levy, a leader of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, advised Governor Smith, regulating rents would drive builders and investors out of the residential real estate market and thereby exacerbate the housing shortage. Revising the landlordtenant laws would not work either, said Robert E. Dowling, president of the City Investing Company. The legislature could amend the summary proceedings law, but the unscrupulous landlords would find ways to get around the amendments. The legislature could also increase the discretion of the municipal court judges, but that would leave landlords and tenants alike “dependent upon the whim of the men on the bench, who may be sober or drunk or half drunk or straight, or half-straight,” ready to do almost anything to stay on good terms with the voters in their district.36 Even many New Yorkers who were not in the real estate business had reservations about the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws. A case in point was Leopold Prince, a German immigrant, graduate of NYU Law School, member of Tammany Hall, and former state assemblyman who had served for thirty years as a municipal court judge in Manhattan. (As well as a judge, Prince was a violinist and the founder and conductor of the City Amateur Symphony Orchestra, a 110-piece ensemble that gave free classical music concerts on the mall in Central

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Park.) Prince decried his colleague Jacob Panken’s proposals to ease the plight of the city’s tenants as “Socialistic.” “Why pick on the landlords?” he asked. “Why all this hue and cry?” The housing problem would be solved as soon as wages and prices fell to prewar levels, he declared. Even Judge Aaron J. Levy, who was more outraged by New York’s profiteering landlords than Prince, was not sure that the legislature could do much to help the city’s tenants “without do[ing] violence to well defined and well-settled rules of law.” Nor was he sure that legislators could curb profiteering landlords without imposing an unreasonable burden on reputable landlords. And Judge Robitzek, who was deeply troubled by the plight of the city’s tenants, had doubts that rent control was constitutional, a view that was shared by many other New Yorkers.37 Many state legislators, especially upstate Republican legislators, had the same reservations about the proposals to regulate rents and revise the landlord-tenant laws. They also saw no point in taking on the city’s powerful real estate interests. What is more, the legislature had only recently appointed the Lockwood Committee to look into the housing shortage and come up with ways to deal with it. It made no sense to take action before the committee issued its report, and the committee would not even begin its hearings until after the legislature adjourned. The executive office was in much the same bind. Governor Smith, who was far from convinced that new laws were needed to ease the tenants’ plight, had set up the Reconstruction Commission early in 1919. He was inclined to defer action until its Housing Committee issued a report. The committee, it turned out, was skeptical that legislation, however well intentioned, would increase the supply of housing, which it believed was the only way to bring down rents. Indeed the committee was critical of the enthusiasm for “rent regulating and landlord-baiting,” which were “at present the most popular indoor and outdoor sports.” The proposed laws to curb the power of the landlords to raise rents and evict tenants would only “aggravate the already unhappy state of the average tenant,” the committee declared: “We cannot very consistently urge capital to build houses at the same time we are threatening to take away all incentive to build.”38 A week or so after the state legislature adjourned in mid-June, several New Yorkers launched a campaign to persuade Governor Smith to call a special session to deal with the housing problem. In the lead was Charles Solomon, who told a mass meeting at the Brownsville Labor Lyceum that it was time for the legislature to set up “legal barriers” between “the rent profiteers and their helpless tenants.” Hylan jumped on the bandwagon. After a mass meeting at City Hall, which adopted a resolution in favor of a special session that was introduced by Edward I. Hannah, a member of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, the mayor appointed a committee of five to urge Smith to summon the legislators back to Albany. One of its members was Nathan Hirsch. Although he had told the Lockwood Committee a month earlier that he supported revision of the landlord-tenant laws “only as an emergency measure,” Hirsch was now in favor of a special session. So was Lockwood, who insisted, “There is no reason why the people should [have to] wait until January [for relief].” The legislators represent their constituents all year, he said, not just

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during the few months when in session. Also in favor of a special session were many tenant activists, some municipal court judges, and a few newspapers, among them the New York Call and Brooklyn Standard Union, which wrote that unless conditions improved soon, which seemed highly unlikely, “it might be necessary to call the Legislature into extraordinary session.”39 At the outset the governor made it clear that he was reluctant to call a special session to deal with the housing problem. Instead he was inclined to wait until the legislators returned to Albany in January 1920. (New York’s Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, the industry’s foremost trade journal, commended Smith for refusing to get carried away by the “hysteria” of the mass meeting at City Hall and joining in what it called “the indiscriminate attack on landlords.”) In defense of his position, the governor stressed that it was far from clear that new laws were necessary. “Many people have the mistaken idea that all reconstruction problems pressing for solution need an immediate change in our laws,” he said. “As much can be done to solve some of these difficulties without new laws as with them, if we can bring about a spirit of cooperation.” Smith’s reluctance to call a special session may also have stemmed from the belief, as the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee put it, that the current housing shortage, “although sufficiently distressing, is temporary.” Far more serious was the lack of suitable workingmen’s houses, which was “a condition that has long existed,” wrote the committee, “and that offers no prospect of improvement in the future, unless radical measures are taken.”40 If so, Smith may well have wanted to spend his political capital not so much on short-term schemes to curb rent profiteering as on long-term efforts to stimulate working-class housing. For a month or so the governor withstood the pressure to call a special session. But it was not easy. Many landlords continued to raise the rent, and thousands of tenants responded by going on strike. There was even talk of a general rent strike in Brownsville, where a group of militant tenants demanded that their rents be reduced. The courts were inundated with summary proceedings, prompting Robitzek and other judges to insist that something had to be done sooner rather than later. The sidewalks were cluttered with furniture and other household goods, the belongings of the many tenants who had been ousted from their homes. In an effort to call attention to rent profiteering, the United Hebrew Trades, a federation of Jewish labor unions, began mobilizing trade unions, tenants leagues, and Socialist groups. And mass meetings held in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx attracted thousands of tenants, some of whom vowed “War to the death” against profiteering landlords. As bad as things were in the spring, they would be even worse in the fall, said Judge Peter A. Shiel. Robert L. Moran, president of the Board of Aldermen, agreed. When New Yorkers returned to the city at the end of the summer—and when servicemen came back from Europe—New York would face “an acute crisis,” he warned.41 And the crisis would reach a peak on the eve of the 1919 election, an election in which the Socialist Party was certain to make rent profiteering the centerpiece of its campaign. As Governor Smith weighed the pros and cons of calling a special session, the U.S. Senate made a momentous decision that brought the matter to a head. Following

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the lead of the House of Representatives, it approved an amendment to the Constitution that gave women the right to vote, a right for which many had been struggling for more than half a century. For Smith, who very much wanted New York to be one of the first states to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, the issue was now not whether to call a special session, which he did a few days later; it was whether to add the housing problem to the agenda. Both Hirsch and Lockwood urged him to. So did the Greater New York Tenants League, whose leaders asked Smith, “Why not kill two birds with one stone?” Why not support suffrage for millions of women and at the same time provide relief for millions of tenants? Smith informed Hirsch that he was well aware of the gravity of the problem and was willing to consider concrete recommendations for “remedial legislation.” If he deemed these recommendations advisable, he would submit them to the legislators. To find out whether there was a consensus about what should be done—and thereby avoid a long-drawn-out discussion of the housing problem—the governor met with Hirsch, Lockwood, Elkus, and Tenement House Commissioner Mann as well as Senate Minority Leader James A. Foley and Assembly Minority Leader Charles D. Donohue. Shortly thereafter he put the housing problem on the agenda of the special session.42 On the eve of the special session another meeting was held at which Elkus, Lockwood, Hirsch, and Foley were joined by Republicans J. Henry Waters, president pro tem of the Senate; Thaddeus C. Sweet, speaker of the Assembly; and John J. Murphy, secretary of the Tenement House Committee of the Charity Organization Society. Drawing largely on the findings of the Lockwood Committee and the Reconstruction Commission, they came up with a legislative program to deal with the housing problem. It consisted of four bills and two resolutions. These proposals were introduced on the night of June 16, shortly after the state legislature—first the Assembly and then the Senate—unanimously adopted a resolution making New York the sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. As the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide reported, “There was not a hitch in the proceedings.” The bills, all but one of which were approved unanimously, were rushed through both houses. So were the resolutions. The Real Estate Board protested about the haste with which this “ill advised legislation” was enacted, but to no effect.43 Two of the four bills, both of which were signed by Governor Smith after Mayor Hylan gave his approval, were designed to ease the plight of New York’s tenants by amending the landlord-tenant laws. One, which was a revised version of the bill that was introduced by Assemblyman Fertig at the regular session, provided that a landlord who elected to terminate a tenancy at the end of the month would have to give the tenant twenty days’ notice. Under the previous law the landlord had to give only five days’ notice—and under the Fertig bill only ten days’ notice. The other bill, which was similar to one that Senator Schackno had filed at the regular session, empowered a municipal court justice who had issued a final order to grant a stay of up to twenty days—provided that the tenant deposited with the court a sum

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equivalent to the old rent prorated for the length of the stay. Taken together, wrote Harold M. Phillips, counsel to the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, the new laws gave the tenants forty days, as opposed to only ten under the old laws, “within which to find other premises from the day when notice to remove is served to the day when the warrant of dispossess may be executed.” Although the new laws were “wholly favorable” to the tenants, Phillips commended the legislators for enacting them and predicted that as they became better known “the wisdom of the Legislature will be more and more appreciated.”44 The other two bills, which were signed by the governor within a week, were designed to ease the plight of the city’s tenants by increasing the supply of housing. One, which was modeled on the Dodge bill that had gone down to defeat at the regular session, amended the Tenement House Act of 1901 in ways that facilitated the conversion of four-story single-family houses into four-family tenement houses. To win the support of the tenement house reformers, the bill included provisions to ensure that the new houses would have adequate ventilation, insulated stairways, and fire escapes. The other bill, the only one that applied to the entire state, amended the Banking Law, according to which savings banks were not allowed to provide mortgages to builders worth more than 40 percent of the value of the property. Under the new law, which was meant to increase the flow of capital into residential construction, these banks would now be permitted to lend up to 60 percent of the value. The two resolutions, which were also designed to increase the supply of capital available for new construction, urged Congress to enact two laws, one to create a federal building loan bank along the lines of the federal Farm Loan Bank and the other to exempt the bonds of the New York State Land Bank from federal income taxes.45 (Oddly, the legislators did not ask Congress to exempt income from residential mortgages from federal taxes, a measure that had been called for by many New York real estate men and supported by both the Lockwood Committee and the Reconstruction Commission.) Many New Yorkers were pleased—even, in some cases, “elated,” wrote the Telegram—by the results of the special session. Mayor Hylan praised the revisions of the landlord-tenant laws as “the best [such measures] that have come before me,” stressing that they would provide much-needed relief to the tenants without imposing excessive burdens on the landlords. He also dismissed as “groundless” the charges of spokesmen for the real estate industry that the new laws would give tenants so much time to move that if so inclined they could destroy the apartment houses from which they were about to be evicted. If a tenant “deliberately destroys property,” Hylan said, he will be subject to arrest and prosecution. Commending the legislators for doing “a splendid piece of work,” Judge Robitzek said that as soon as the new landlord-tenant laws went into effect, he expected to see “a decrease of more than fifty per cent [in the number] of dispossess cases.” Governor Smith, who some had feared might bow to pressure from the tenement house reformers and veto the amendments to the Tenement House Law, claimed the new Dodge Law would not only ease the housing shortage, but also relieve the intolerable congestion on the Lower East Side and in other working-class neighborhoods. Senator Lockwood, one

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of the strongest supporters of the new Dodge bill, agreed, predicting that the law would spur the renovation of thousands of vacant buildings and thereby provide accommodations for as many as forty thousand families on the Lower East Side.46 Other New Yorkers were far from pleased with the results of the special session. Some complained about the changes in the landlord-tenant laws. Others, notably the Real Estate Board, objected to the revised version of the Dodge bill. In a protest filed with Governor Smith and the legislative leaders, it declared, “You can amend the tenement house law [of 1901]. You could repeal drastic and costly regulations, enacted in a period of hysteria at the instance of parlor socialists.” But it would not do much good. “As a matter of fact,” it added, “if you will leave the situation alone, it will remedy itself.” Residential construction was already under way. And once capital realized that even at the current prices of labor and materials “houses can be built and sold or rented profitably, there will be abundant funds to do all the building necessary.” Also displeased with the results of the special session was the Greater New York Tenants League. In a letter to Smith its leaders pointed out that the new laws would not curb rent profiteering. What was needed was rent control, specifically legislation to bar the landlords from raising the rent more than once a year even if the property changed hands. Nor would the new laws stop landlords from bringing summary proceedings “upon the slightest provocation.” What was needed was legislation to make the process more expensive—by, say, raising the cost of a precept to five dollars and banning the marshals from representing the landlords in court, a measure that would force them to retain a lawyer.47 As one scholar has suggested, the special session was noteworthy less for what it did than for what it did not do. The legislators did not impose rent control on residential property, not even a temporary freeze that was recommended by some municipal court judges. Nor did they empower the judges to take into consideration whether a landlord was charging a reasonable rent before issuing a final order, a measure supported by Senator Abeles. The legislators did not reconsider the Ottinger Law, which, said Bronx Senator Abraham Kaplan, who had filed a bill to repeal it in January 1919, left many thousands of tenants at the mercy of profiteering landlords and lessees. Despite the growing support for public housing, they did not even discuss amending the constitution to allow the state and its cities to go into the housing business, a step that had been taken by the Massachusetts legislature three years earlier.48 But for all that the special session did not do, it did do two things of great importance other than enact four laws and adopt two resolutions. It revealed that the state legislature, a conservative body that was dominated by upstate Republicans, was prepared to revise the landlord-tenant laws over the objections of New York’s powerful real estate interests. It also gave the city’s hard-pressed tenants reason to believe that if rents continued to soar in the months and years ahead, the legislators might well be willing to take even more drastic action.

7 The April Laws

In the aftermath of the special session there was some evidence that the new landlord-tenant laws might be more than “pure buncombe,” as one resident of Brooklyn called them. More than 60 percent fewer landlord-tenant disputes were filed in the municipal courts in early July 1919 than in early July 1918. And in many cases, reported the Telegram, the judges were refusing to issue eviction warrants “unless there is sound merit to the claims of the landlords.” A month or so later a Bronx landlady named Dorris Hecht brought summary proceedings against a group of tenants who had gone on strike after she raised the rent from $25 to $30 a month. In their defense, the tenants told the court that Hecht had not given them the twenty days’ notice required under the new laws. After deliberating for a few minutes, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the tenants. Before long, however, many New Yorkers realized that the laws enacted at the special session left a good deal to be desired, not least because the number of landlord-tenant disputes was rising to record levels in some courts. A case in point was Judge Edward A. Richards, against whom the Brooklyn Tenants Union had asked Mayor Hylan to bring impeachment proceedings for his hostility toward striking tenants. The new laws “have been helpful,” Richards wrote Nathan Hirsch in September 1919. But “at best [they] afford [only] temporary relief.” By requiring the landlords to give the tenants twenty days’ notice and empowering the judges to grant them stays of up to twenty days, the legislation “simply puts off for a short time the evil day that’s sure to come,” Richards said.1 The problem, Richards continued, was that there were not enough houses. And as both the Call and the Journal of Commerce pointed out, none of the new laws were doing much to stimulate residential construction. Until the costs of labor and materials fell, builders were reluctant to build. And lenders, worried about a postwar decline in property values, were hesitant to lend. A few builders—most of whom,

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wrote the New York Sun, “figure that as bad as conditions are they were going to get worse, so it is better to build now than never build at all”—filed plans for new residential structures, which would have provided homes for roughly fifteen hundred families in the Bronx. But as the Home News reported, “only a few of them are being built.” Some were never started, and others were put on hold because of a “sudden advance” in wages in the building trades. A good many single-family homes went up in the outer boroughs during the summer of 1919, but they were “hardly a drop in the bucket,” said the Telegram. Many were sold or rented “before the walls were up.” Of the few multi-family houses that were completed, virtually all were designed for the well-to-do. With rents of $15 and $20 a room per month, they were out of the reach of most working- and middle-class families—the very families, observed Belle Moskowitz, that were especially “hard pressed by the rent profiteers.”2 As late as September 1919 some New Yorkers still expected a surge in residential construction. Anticipating that it would drive down rents, a few landlords even tried to persuade their tenants to sign long-term leases in the fall. But there was no surge, not in late 1919 (and not in early 1920). Only ninety-five multifamily buildings were erected in New York in 1919—just six in Queens, three in Manhattan, and none in Richmond. According to the Tenement House Department, fewer apartment houses went up in 1919 than in any year since the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901. With residential construction at a standstill, the housing shortage went from bad to worse. The vacancy rate, which had been as high as 5.60 percent in March 1916, plummeted from a very low 2.18 percent in March 1919 to an unheard of 0.36 percent in April 1920. Of the nearly one million apartments in New York, only 3,500 were vacant, most of them cold-water flats that were barely habitable. Their owners should have been cited for what the Times called “flagrant violations” of the sanitary and building codes. But the Tenement House and other city departments “winked at” these violations, unwilling to take any step that might force them to shut down the buildings and thereby exacerbate the housing shortage. As the Lockwood Committee put it, “It has become necessary to practically suspend the operation of our sanitary and building laws so as to preserve any sort of roof over the heads of the poorer population.”3 Given the acute housing shortage, many New Yorkers believed it would be very hard to find apartments in the fall. It would be especially hard for the many residents who were about to return from their summer retreats, the Telegram warned. They “will find homes just as scarce as ever, if not scarcer.” By mid-August some New Yorkers were offering $10 to $50 to anyone who helped them find a suitable apartment; a month and a half later they were willing to pay $150 to $500. Under the circumstances a few real estate men urged the landlords to exercise restraint in raising the rents. Perhaps the most outspoken was Stewart Browne, one of the few real estate men to acknowledge that the average tenant could no longer afford to pay a rental that would yield the landlord a reasonable return on his investment. From his perspective as “a semi-paternal Socialist,” he believed that “the day is gone forever when Shylocks . . . can exact the last drop of blood from the community

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simply because they have the legal power.” In a letter to Hirsch, excerpts of which were published in the Times in mid-November, Browne warned that if the landlords did not “go easy” on their tenants in the months ahead, there would be bills introduced at the next session of the state legislature “that will cause [them] to regret that they ever raised rents, no matter how little.” There would also be trouble from the more than two hundred thousand “potential anarchists” in the city who were hoping for a revolution.4 New York’s landlords had good reason to be concerned about the upcoming session of the legislature, if not about the revolutionary intentions of the city’s “potential anarchists.” Despite the moderate tenor of the special session, many New Yorkers were still calling for drastic action to curb rent profiteering. Led by Samuel Orr, a former Bronx assemblyman and leader of the Greater New York Tenants League, the Socialists were pressing Governor Smith to find the funds for public housing, an idea that was supported by many people who were anything but Socialists. At the same time the Board of Municipal Court Justices, by no means a radical body, was preparing a report whose recommendations included imposing a limit on rent hikes and authorizing the courts to determine a reasonable rent. The Telegram favored not only repealing the Ottinger Law, but also enacting a law enabling the tenants to file suit for breach of contract against landlords who failed to provide essential services. The East Bronx Community Council proposed legislation that would have required landlords to declare (and, if challenged, prove) that they were not attempting to oust their tenants in order to raise the rent. Under this proposal the landlords would be able to obtain an eviction warrant only if they could show that the rent was reasonable. And in January 1920 Judge Harry Robitzek suggested to Assemblyman Joseph V. McKee that the legislature empower the municipal courts to look into whether landlords were bringing summary proceedings in good faith.5 Despite the growing furor over rent profiteering, most landlords did not heed Browne’s warning, which was probably issued too late to do much good anyway. Rather than “go easy” on their tenants, they raised the rents anywhere from 10 to 50 percent, reported the Sun in September. By the end of the year, the Call pointed out, there were very few neighborhoods in which “the increase has not been at least 25 per cent.” The press may have exaggerated, but not by much. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, rents in New York City, which had risen not at all in 1915 and 1916, very little in 1917, and only somewhat more in 1918, soared in 1919, and continued to go up in the first half of 1920. Indeed, they went up almost as rapidly in the second half of 1919, after the laws to protect the tenants were enacted at the special session, as in the first half. Rents, which were only 6 percent higher in December 1918 than in December 1914, were 13 percent higher in June 1919, 23 percent higher in December 1919, and 32 percent higher in June 1920. (Especially hard hit were New York’s wage earners, whose rents went up more than 51 percent between July 1914 and July 1919, according to the National Industrial Conference Board.) To the dismay of many New Yorkers, rent continued to go up more rapidly

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than food, clothing, and other necessities in the postwar years. It also continued to increase more rapidly in New York than in most other big cities.6 Much as Browne had warned, what the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide called “a flood of [housing] bills” inundated the state legislature when it convened in early January 1920. On the very first day, Senator Charles C. Lockwood introduced several bills that had been drafted by his committee. Other legislators soon followed his lead. Never before had so many housing bills been filed so early in a session, observed the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. More bills were introduced over the next two months. By mid-March journalist Helen Lowery Bullitt estimated that sixty bills had been filed—“and they’re multiplying over night, [even if] apartments aren’t.” By the end of the month the number was up to eighty, reported the Record and Guide. And by the time the legislature adjourned in late April, it had reached about one hundred, according to Richard O. Chittick, executive secretary of the Real Estate Board. If Chittick was right, there were almost as many housing bills as there were state legislators. Most of the bills were introduced by New Yorkers, some of whom filed more than one. Many of the legislators did not believe in their bills—or even “in the principle of rent regulation,” charged Chittick. But “they felt they dared not go back home to face the music of the tenant-band unless they could, by bringing home the scalp of the landlord, change that doleful music into a paean of joy.”7 Most of these bills fell into one of two categories. In the first were the bills that were designed to curb rent profiteering, especially to prevent speculators from raising the rent for the purpose of selling the property at a profit. Among the least controversial was Assemblyman Joseph V. McKee’s bill, which was designed to stop landlords from steadily jacking up the rent by repealing the Ottinger Law, something other legislators had tried to do without success in the previous session. It stipulated that where the duration of a tenancy was not specified in writing it would be construed to run until the following May. Closely related to the McKee bill was one filed by Senator Schackno that provided that in the case of new tenancies the rent could not be raised for twelve months unless the landlord and tenant made an agreement in writing to the contrary. If the landlord wanted to raise the rent after twelve months, he had to give the tenant thirty days’ notice. In the case of existing tenancies, the rent could not be raised until May 31, 1921, and thereafter only with thirty days’ notice. Under several other bills, one of which was drafted by the Central Federated Union, whose president was a member of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, any tenant against whom summary proceedings was brought would be allowed to enter a defense that the rent was unreasonable. Under guidelines that varied from one bill to another, the municipal court judges were empowered to decide whether the rent was reasonable—and, if it was not, to deny the landlord’s request for a final order and an eviction warrant.8 A few other bills were designed to curb rent profiteering by enabling the state and some of its cities to set up rent commissions. Unlike the citizens’ rent profiteering committees formed during World War I, most of which had little or no legal

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authority, these commissions were official agencies that were empowered to hold hearings, investigate complaints, determine a reasonable rent, and enforce their decisions. New York City’s real estate interests found these bills, two of which applied only to New York (and one to Buffalo, Rochester, and other upstate cities as well), extremely objectionable. At least as objectionable to the real estate interests were a few other bills that were designed to stop rent profiteering by revising the state’s tax laws and in particular by imposing an excess profits tax of the sort that the federal government had imposed during the war. Under a bill sponsored by Senator Abeles—a “pretty drastic” bill, acknowledged John Boyle, Jr., a former Bronx municipal court judge who supported it—the landlords would be allowed to earn up to 10 percent on their investment. On $1,000 above the 10 percent, they would be subject to a 10 percent surcharge, on $2,000 a 15 percent surcharge, and on $5,000 or more a 100 percent surcharge.9 In the second category were the bills that were designed to protect the tenants, especially against profiteering landlords who were intent on evicting them. Among these bills was one that was prompted by a recent court decision, which held that the law requiring the landlords to give twenty days’ notice did not apply to tenants in one- and two-family houses. Under this bill, which was drafted by the Lockwood Committee, all tenants were entitled to thirty days’ notice. Another bill called for two months’ notice, in the absence of which the lease would be automatically renewed when it expired. Another Lockwood Committee bill gave the municipal court judges the discretion to grant a stay up of to thirty days to tenants against whom a final order had been issued. Yet another provided for a virtually unlimited stay. Far more drastic than these bills was one sponsored by Senator Abraham Kaplan and Assemblyman Charles D. Donohue. If the evidence showed that summary proceedings had been brought “incidental to an attempt to raise the rents beyond a reasonable figure,” wrote the Times, the bill empowered the municipal court judges to dismiss the case, which would leave the landlord no recourse other than the common law remedy of ejectment, a much more expensive and protracted proceeding that had to be brought in state court. By denying profiteering landlords access to summary proceedings, the bill, said Kaplan, would discourage them from “seeking to dispossess tenants willing to accept a fair increase but unwilling to submit to extortion.”10 A few other bills were designed to prevent the landlords from resorting to a number of underhanded, if not illegal, tactics to drive the tenants out of their homes. Under Waitt Construction Company v. Lorraine, a decision handed down by the Appellate Term of the First Department in December 1919, a landlord could terminate a lease simply by alleging that a tenant was “undesirable”; he did not have to give a reason or provide evidence. As the Lockwood Committee saw it, this ruling left the tenants “at the mercy” of the landlords, many of whom were claiming that their tenants were undesirable as a pretext for ousting them and then renting the apartments to others for more money. To protect these tenants, the committee introduced a bill under which a landlord who brought summary proceedings

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against an “undesirable” tenant would have to prove to the court’s satisfaction that he was indeed undesirable. Based on its hearings in the summer and fall of 1919, the Lockwood Committee also found that some landlords, most of them “professional lessees” who had acquired properties subject to written leases, were trying to drive the tenants out by threatening to cut off the light, water, heat, and telephone and elevator service. Once they left, the lessees were free to raise the rent as much as they wanted. To protect these “defenseless” tenants, the committee drafted an amendment to the penal law that made it a misdemeanor for a lessee “wilfully to fail” to furnish any service that was required by the terms of the lease or necessary for the proper operation of the building.11 Most of the remaining bills were designed to spur residential construction. Other than a bill sponsored by Senator Kaplan and Assemblyman Donohue, which required life insurance companies to invest at least one-half of the premiums originating in the state in New York real estate, few broke new ground. On the advice of financiers, the Lockwood Committee filed a bill to exempt from state taxes the income derived from mortgages on improved real estate up to $40,000. Abeles introduced a similar bill in the Senate. After consulting with builders, Brooklyn Assemblyman Martin G. McCue filed a bill that approached the problem in a different way, one that had been recommended by the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association in mid-1919. Under this bill, apartment houses that were started after the law went into effect and completed (and ready for occupancy by no fewer than six families) by May 1, 1921 would be exempt from local property taxes for seven years. His bill would go a long way “to reduce the shortage of tenement houses in our cities,” McCue said. And it would do more to solve the housing problem than all the talk about “punishing landlords.” Convinced that the housing shortage could not be relieved without some sort of public housing, Socialist Assemblyman Charles Solomon, Democratic Senator John J. Dunnigan, and at least one other legislator introduced bills that authorized New York and other cities to go into the housing business.12 From the outset most of the housing bills ran into a good deal of opposition, much of it stirred up by the New York City Real Estate Board. A week and a half after the session opened, the board’s Committee on Legislation and Taxation issued a report on more than a dozen bills; two weeks later it reported on three others. With one exception—a bill to license and regulate brokers and salesmen, the final draft of which had been prepared by the board’s special counsel after consultation with several leading real estate organizations—none was approved. Pointing out that the Appellate Term had already amended its recent decision and now required landlords to prove that tenants were “undesirable,” the committee declared that a Lockwood Committee bill that was designed to annul that decision was “redundant.” It objected to another Lockwood Committee bill that required the landlord to give thirty, as opposed to twenty, days’ notice on the grounds that it did not place the tenant “under like obligation to give notice of his intention to quit.” And it opposed yet another Lockwood Committee bill that empowered municipal court

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judges to grant tenants a stay of up to thirty days on the grounds that it applied to all tenants, “industrial and mercantile,” not just to residential tenants. The Committee on Legislation and Taxation even disapproved of two bills, one filed by Assemblyman George N. Jesse, a Republican from Manhattan, and another by Assemblyman Henry Dimin, a Republican from Brooklyn, to exempt new apartment houses from property taxes for a few years, taking the position that in light of the high costs of labor and materials and the scarcity of capital the measure would not do much to stimulate residential construction.13 The Committee on Legislation and Taxation directed its sharpest criticism at what it regarded as several far more drastic bills. It took strong exception to one that made it a misdemeanor for a landlord to withhold heat and other essential services to which the tenants were entitled, a bill that was filed by Senator Lockwood and Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney, vice chairman of the Lockwood Committee and president of a Lawrence, Long Island, realty firm that bore his name. What made the bill so “pernicious” was not only that it would swell “the ever-increasing tide of landlord and tenant litigation,” but also that it would make an alleged breach of contract a criminal offense “when the aggrieved party [already] has adequate means of redress in civil action.” The committee also strongly opposed two bills, one introduced by Senator Schackno and the other by Assemblyman Sol Ullman, a Republican from Manhattan, both of which authorized New York City to set up a commission to regulate rents. These bills imposed such “radical and vicious” restrictions on private ownership of property that they were “unworkable and unconstitutional,” the committee argued. If enacted, they would bring residential construction in New York City to a halt “for all times.” Even more objectionable was another rent control bill introduced by Assemblyman Jesse that applied to Buffalo, Rochester, and other upstate cities as well as to New York. The bill, wrote the committee, would not only deprive property owners of the right to make contracts, but also wipe “from the statute books the existing law of landlord and tenant, so far as it applies to residen[tial] property.”14 The Real Estate Board was not the only organization to speak out against most of the housing bills. Chief among the others were the United Real Estate Owners Association, the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, the Advisory Council of Real Estate Interests, and the Real Estate Owners Association of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Wards, all of which sent representatives to testify before the Assembly Committee on Taxation against George N. Jesse’s statewide rent control bill. (Also opposed to rent control was the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, which held that “fair rentals” cannot be fixed by a rent commission, only by the law of supply and demand—a law, said one observer, that makes “no distinction between the market for palaces and the market for sirloin steaks, the market for cottages and the market for cabbages.”) These organizations did not always take the same position on proposed legislation. Whereas the Real Estate Board objected to bills empowering the municipal court judges to grant stays of up to thirty and sixty days, I. Montefiore Levy, a spokesman for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association,

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favored an indefinite stay, “a stay not of ten days, twenty days, thirty days, sixty days, but a year if necessary.” (Levy also believed that if conditions warranted it a tenant should be allowed to go to court at the end of the year and ask the judge for another stay.)15 But these organizations all strongly opposed legislation that empowered courts or commissions to regulate rents or barred landlords from bringing summary proceedings. New York’s real estate men objected to most of the housing bills on several by then familiar grounds. One was that they were unjustified. The great majority of landlords were not profiteers, just businessmen. If they raised the rent, which not all did, it was in most cases only enough to cover the rising costs of operations, which had doubled since the outbreak of World War I. Many landlords were now earning a reasonable return, the opponents of the housing laws acknowledged, but it was barely enough to offset their losses in the prewar years. Although most landlords had furnished housing at or below cost in the decade before the war, John R. Hill, a New Yorker who had been in the real estate business for more than twenty-two years, wrote Governor Smith, “I do not recall any one [sic] expressing any sympathy for owners then.” New York City might well be caught up in a severe housing shortage. But as J. C. M. Phillips, a spokesman for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, told a group of legislators, that was no reason to enact a law empowering the municipal court judges to stay an eviction “as long as they please” if the tenant was willing to pay either the old rent or what the judges deemed a “reasonable” rent. Such a law would deprive the landlords of “nearly every element of ownership.”16 Most of the housing bills were also unfair, their opponents charged. It was wrong to punish the great majority of reputable landlords for the rapacity of a small minority, most of whom were lessees and speculators—and Russian Jews to boot, said Hill. As Phillips pointed out, a law that put a limit of, say, 20 percent on rent hikes would be especially unfair to the many landlords who had not raised the rents at all (or had raised them very little) in the past, but might want to raise them in the future. According to the Real Estate Board’s Committee on Legislation and Taxation, the housing bills were also one-sided. Referring to a bill introduced by Assemblyman Samuel Dickstein, a Manhattan Democrat, that required the landlords to give sixty days’ notice, the committee held that it should have required the tenants to give sixty days’ notice as well. Most unfair of all, the anti-profiteering bills singled out landlords for what real estate men regarded as “special and highly invidious treatment.” Even though the price of food and clothing was also going up—even though, said Leo Day Woolworth, New Yorkers now paid one dollar for a forty-cent steak and $75 for a $35 suit—these bills were aimed exclusively at landlords. As a Bronx landlord put it, no one expects the shoemaker to sell $15 shoes for $7, much less to sign an agreement with his customers to sell the shoes at that price for a year. Why, asked Morris Morganstern, president of the Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners Association, should anyone expect landlords to rent their apartments “for the same old dollar?”17

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Most of the housing bills were shortsighted as well, their opponents charged. These bills might provide the tenants some relief in the short run—provided, said Robert E. Dowling, that the lessees, whom he described as “a very sharp lot,” did not find ways to get around whatever restrictions were imposed. But in the long run they would only make things worse. They would not stimulate residential construction, argued the Real Estate Owners Association of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Wards. They would stifle it. Builders would be even more reluctant to build and lenders even more reluctant to lend. Instead of alleviating the housing shortage, the housing bills would exacerbate it. Noting that virtually all the bills “seem to totally ignore the inexorable law of supply and demand,” the association held that the legislators would be well advised to let it “govern the rentals just as it has always done in the past.” The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide agreed, saying that a bill to empower municipal court judges to determine a reasonable rent was just “another move to effect by legal enactment what can only be determined by the well known, long established and safer rule of supply and demand.” As the Real Estate Board declared in the aftermath of the special session of June 1919, the housing problem would eventually be solved, but only when builders found it profitable to erect apartment houses—not when legislators decided it was time to tinker with the law of supply and demand.18 Given the deep-seated opposition of New York’s real estate interests, the 1919 legislature did little to curb the city’s profiteering landlords and protect its hardstrapped tenants. And in the aftermath of the November election, there was little reason to think that the 1920 legislature would do more. The election brought about a change in the makeup of the Assembly—though not of the Senate, where only two seats had been up for grabs, one from Manhattan and one from Queens, each of which was retained by the Democrats. But the change did not bode well for New York’s tenants. The Republicans gained fifteen seats, and the Democrats lost eighteen—fifteen to the Republicans and three to the Socialists. For every Democrat in the Assembly, there were now three Republicans. What is more, the Democrats, who gained six seats in upstate New York, lost twenty-one seats downstate, leaving them with only twenty-nine assemblymen from the city, or just one more than the Republicans, which, according to the Times, was fewer than “at any session within the memory [of the legislators].”19 The change in the makeup of the Assembly notwithstanding, there was a chance that the 1920 legislature might be more disposed to deal with the housing problem than the 1919 legislature—and even that it might be inclined to enact several laws that Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg, chairman of a special committee on rent legislation of the Board of Municipal Court Justices, called “radical and rather drastic.” For the better part of a year the Lockwood Committee had been holding hearings at which scores of witnesses, experts and laymen alike, testified about the severity of New York’s housing shortage, the rapacity of some of the city’s landlords, and the distress of many of its tenants. And based on their testimony, it concluded that rent profiteering in New York was widespread and “almost inescapable.” The

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Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering held hearings of its own that highlighted many of the same problems. And in the summer of 1919, nearly two decades after the Tenement House Law of 1901 was enacted, the Lockwood Committee, the Mayor’s Committee, and the State Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee reported that the conditions under which thousands of tenants lived on the Lower East Side were still abysmal.20 In the wake of the many hearings, reports, and studies, the legislators could still object to one or another of the housing bills that were filed in early 1920, but not on the grounds that they were unaware of the problem or in need of additional information. Nor could the legislators object to these bills on the grounds that the problem was not serious. Much as many New Yorkers had predicted in the spring of 1919, the housing shortage went from bad to worse. By October 1, which the New York American called “one of the most trying ‘moving days’ in history,” the situation was dire. The landlords were attempting “a wholesale ousting of tenants,” wrote the Telegram, bringing summary proceedings in record numbers, as many as thirty thousand, according to one estimate. Virtually no apartments were vacant. And very few movers were available. Three questions were on the minds of New York’s tenants, wrote the Sun. “Where shall we go? How will we get there? How much will we pay? There are no answers to the first two questions, but the answer to the third is another question: How much have you?” With hundreds if not thousands of cases on their calendars, the municipal court judges did what little they could to resolve the problem, adjourning some cases, postponing others, and—provided that the tenants paid the old rent to the court—granting a stay of up to twenty days in still others, which they had been empowered to do under the laws enacted at the special session. So many stays were granted that by early October roughly $650,000 had been deposited with the courts. Despite the best efforts of the judges, tens of thousands of tenants were ousted from their homes, often after a fight with the marshals, schleppers, and police. From his courthouse in the Bronx, where 1,400 cases were on the calendar in one week in early October, Robitzek warned that New York City was “on the verge of a revolution,” a matter of great concern to the state legislators.21 Also of great concern to the legislators was the upcoming election, in which the Socialist Party was fielding a large slate of candidates. Convinced that no issue was of greater interest to working-class New Yorkers, the Socialists made rent profiteering the centerpiece of their campaign. The Socialists argued that the Democrats and Republicans were so beholden to the landlords that they would not do anything to ease the plight of the tenants. Only the Socialist Party could be counted on to push for legislation to regulate rents and prevent evictions. As it turned out, the Socialist Party did not do as well in 1919 as it had in 1917, when Morris Hillquit ran for mayor. And several prominent Socialists lost their seats on the Board of Aldermen, among them their leader, Algernon Leo. But the Socialist Party was still a force to be reckoned with. It held on to its two seats in the Assembly and picked up three more, giving it five, two from the Bronx and one each from Brownsville, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side. Also, under pressure from the Socialists, several Democrats and

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Republicans felt compelled to speak out against rent profiteering and pledge to stop it. A case in point was Sol Ullman, a Republican from the Lower East Side who had been elected to the Assembly as a Fusion candidate in 1918. In his race against Elmer Rosenberg, a member of the Cutters’ Union and former Socialist assemblyman, Ullman stressed not only that he had represented many tenants before the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, but also that he now favored legislation to limit landlords to a reasonable rent, which he defined as 4 to 6 percent on their investment.22 By early 1920 the legislators were under more pressure than ever to restrain the landlords and protect the tenants. The pressure came not only from the tenants leagues and Socialist Party, but also from the municipal courts and organized labor, two groups whose leaders could not easily be dismissed as wild-eyed radicals. During 1919 the plight of New York’s tenants had been a source of growing concern to Robitzek, Levy, and a few other judges. But by early 1920 many others had come to share their concern. One was Charles B. Law, a Republican (and former congressman) who presided over Brooklyn’s Seventh District Court. In a letter to Senator Lockwood, Law stressed that the housing problem was an emergency “just as great and just as serious” as the wartime emergency that had prompted Congress to pass the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. Pointing out that a resumption of residential construction was unlikely to get under way for several years, he favored legislation to empower the municipal court judges to grant stays for up to three months, a step that would provide tenants adequate time to look for another apartment and “put an effective curb” on profiteering landlords. In the meantime, organized labor was “growing restive.” Down through 1919 most unions had watched the struggle between landlords and tenants from the sidelines. But under pressure from the rank-and-file, who were hit hard by the rising cost of living, the Central Federated Union joined the struggle in early 1920. So did the State Federation of Labor, the Brooklyn Central Labor Union, and the United Hebrew Trades, whose leaders were anxious not only to slow down the rising cost of living and to lend support to the militant tenants leagues, but also to stem the growth of anti-Semitism, which was aimed at both Jewish landlords and Jewish tenants.23 As Judge Spiegelberg said, some of the housing bills were radical, even drastic. But by early 1920 not even the most radical and drastic of them could be dismissed out of hand. During 1919 legislation to regulate rents and prevent evictions, which had already been enacted in most Western European countries, was filed (and in some cases adopted) in the United States. In August Congress came close to including landlords in a nationwide anti-profiteering law, prompting the New York Evening Mail to remark that it was “a pity” that profiteering landlords were not put on “the same footing” as other rapacious businessmen. Two months later Congress passed the Ball Rent Act, which supplanted the Saulsbury Resolution. The act imposed rent control in Washington, D.C., and set up the District of Columbia Rent Commission to implement it. Realizing that Congress was unlikely to do for other places what it had done for the District, several cities and states began to adopt measures of their

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own to curb rent profiteering. In August 1919 Dayton established a rent adjustment board. A couple of months later Baltimore empowered the courts to refuse to issue an eviction warrant in cases where the landlords were engaged in profiteering and to allow the tenants to stay in their homes for another thirty days. Not long thereafter the Cleveland Common Council asked Ohio governor James M. Cox to call a special session to enact a law creating a state rental board of review and empowering it to limit rents to 10 percent of the original cost of the building. Rent profiteering bills were also introduced in a good many states, and in time they were enacted in Maine, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and a handful of others.24 Barely two hours after the 1920 legislative session got under way, Thaddeus C. Sweet, a Republican from Oswego County and speaker of Assembly, startled his colleagues by summoning the five Socialist assemblymen to the rostrum. Charging that the Socialist Party was a criminal conspiracy, he called for an investigation into whether the assemblymen should be allowed to retain their seats. Although all belonged to the party’s moderate wing and all but one had served in the legislature before, the Assembly suspended them by a lopsided vote of 140 to 6 and authorized the Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation. It started on January 20 and dragged on for two months. Even at the height of the Red Scare, the Assembly’s witch hunt aroused a storm of opposition from both Republicans and Democrats, among them Charles Evans Hughes, the former G.O.P. presidential candidate, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the leader of the Wilson administration’s postwar crusade against radicals. Despite this opposition, a sharply divided Judiciary Committee voted to expel the five Socialists on March 30, and a day later the Assembly ousted them. (The controversy went on long after the session was over. The five Socialists regained their seats at a special election in September, but the Assembly expelled three of them, prompting the other two to resign in protest. At the regular election in November only two were sent back to Albany, where they were joined by one other Socialist assemblyman and the state’s first Socialist senator.)25 As historian Robert K. Murray has pointed out, the ouster of the five Socialist assemblymen did as much as anything to discredit the Red Scare. It had other consequences too, not the least of which, wrote the Times in early February, was that it “disrupted the entire legislative program for the 1920 session.” Most assemblymen were busy watching the Judiciary Committee’s hearings. So were many senators. On most days too few members were present in either house to form a quorum. Not much was done in committee either. The result was that of the many bills that were filed, only a handful were enacted—and none dealt with the major issues facing the legislature, one of which was rent profiteering. Nor were things likely to change in the week ahead, commented the Times. “Many members in both Houses, contending that little will be done beyond continuing the Socialist hearing, purpose [sic] staying home.” Even the strongest opponents of rent profiteering were resigned to wait. Speaking of a bill he intended to introduce—a bill drafted by a Brooklyn lawyer named Joseph Applebaum that provided that in the absence of a

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written agreement to the contrary all tenancies would run for a year—Senator Abeles said that “when the Assembly gets through ousting the five Socialists there is no doubt that it [the legislature] will take up the matter,” but not before. (Anticipating criticism that the bill was one-sided, Applebaum quipped, “If the time ever comes when the down-trodden and oppressed landlord cries out for relief against the profiteering tenant, the Legislature can then consider the passage of anti-tenant laws.”)26 The legislature gradually got back to work in late February and early March. But it made little progress on the rent profiteering bills. As the Bronx Home News complained, “The bills are read, deposited with committees and never heard from again.” The legislators were bogged down for several reasons other than the ouster of the Socialist assemblymen and opposition of the real estate interests. There were too many bills—more, it seemed, every day. Some were unsound on economic grounds, noted the Times, and “without legal precedent.” According to Attorney General Charles D. Newton, at least one was unconstitutional. And as former Judge John Boyle, Jr., conceded, others, including his excess profits tax bill, were “by no means perfect.” Many bills were at odds with one another too. The legislature could authorize the courts or a commission to regulate rents, but not both. It could empower the judges to grant stays of thirty days, sixty days, or even longer, but not all three. Making things even harder, the legislators wanted to restrain profiteering landlords—the “sharks and vultures,” as Senate Minority Leader (and future mayor) James J. Walker called them—without punishing reputable landlords. They also wanted to provide relief to tenants without discouraging builders from resuming residential construction. As even the Home News acknowledged, “No man will invest his money in tenements or apartment houses if he feels that every time he raises rents he may have to face a court, hire a lawyer, and show his books.”27 Although the legislature was bogged down, some of the housing bills were given a hearing, a few were reported out of committee, and at least one—a revised version of one of the original Lockwood Committee bills that required the landlords to give all tenants, commercial as well as residential, thirty days’ notice—was approved by the Senate. But this did little to pacify the tenants. As their anger grew, so did the pressure on the legislators. The Central Federated Union, which had threatened to call a general strike in February unless something was done to stop rent profiteering, now considered instructing its members to break the agreements with their employers and demand wage increases to offset the rent hikes. Hylan endorsed one of the more drastic housing bills. So did Arthur J. W. Hilly, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. Fiorello H. La Guardia, the newly elected president of the Board of Aldermen and one of the most outspoken opponents of the landlords, told some eight hundred tenants who attended a mass meeting in the Bronx that if the legislators did not put an end to rent profiteering they should “kick them out of office.” Other New Yorkers pointed out that if nothing was done there would be “wholesale evictions” on May 1. If so, they predicted, things would be tumultuous in the spring. As Senator Loring M. Black, a Brooklyn Democrat, warned, there would be “a social eruption” beyond anything the city had ever experienced.28

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On March 8, Speaker Sweet bowed to the growing pressure. In a letter to the chairmen of the Assembly committees on cities, codes, taxation, and the judiciary, a letter that was promptly released to the press, he pledged that the legislature would find a way to curb rent profiteering before it adjourned. J. Henry Walters, another upstate Republican and president pro tem of the Senate, backed Sweet. And Senator Minority Leader Walker said that the Democratic legislators were ready to work with the Republican leaders. Sweet and Walters were confident that within a week to ten days they could come up with a bill or bills that would meet with the approval of the legislature and the governor. Sweet and Walters then met with several New York City bankers and businessmen, all of whom strongly supported the Lockwood Committee’s bill to exempt income from residential mortgages from state taxes. A week later the two leaders invited a group of legislators, Democrats as well as Republicans, to meet with Judge Spiegelberg, Attorney General Newton, and Elmer G. Sammis, counsel to the Lockwood Committee, to hammer out a legislative package. Drawing heavily on the proposals of the Lockwood Committee, the group reached agreement on March 16 on nine bills, six of which had already been introduced into the legislature. The other three would be filed the next day. Under a special rule all the bills would be advanced to a third (and final) reading and referred to the Senate and Assembly committees on cities, which would hold a joint hearing on March 23.29 The bills embodied the most thorough overhaul of New York’s landlord-tenant laws in well over half a century. Five were not too drastic, among them three that had been drafted by the Lockwood Committee. One repealed the Ottinger Law, thereby restoring the validity of oral leases and providing that unless specified otherwise a tenancy would not expire until October 1. The second provided that before terminating a monthly lease the landlords would have to give all tenants, commercial as well as residential, thirty days’ notice. Under the third a landlord who brought summary proceedings on the grounds that a tenant was undesirable would have to prove it. The other three bills, which were much more radical, were based on one bill that had been introduced by Senator John J. Boylan and Assemblyman Charles D. Donohue, at the behest of the Central Federated Union, and another that had been filed by Senator John J. Dunnigan, a member of the Lockwood Committee. One allowed the landlords to bring summary proceedings only in cases where the rent had not been raised at all in the preceding month or more than 20 percent in the preceding twelve months. Another provided that if a tenant against whom summary proceedings was brought offered as a defense that the rent was unreasonable it was up to the landlord to prove otherwise. And the other empowered the courts to grant what was virtually an unlimited stay in cases where the tenant was willing to pay the old rent or what the judge deemed a reasonable rent.30 Although the Daily Eagle expressed serious reservations about the bills, it predicted that in view of the bipartisan support of the legislative leadership they would not run into any opposition. Events soon proved the Eagle wrong. Within a few days the

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Real Estate Board held a dinner at which it informed a group of legislators that its members had strong objections to most of the bills. At the same time Stewart Browne invited the members of the United Real Estate Owners Association to a meeting at the Hotel Astor. Four hundred landlords and other real estate men showed up. Pointing out that “unless we do something, we are going to get it in the neck,” Browne recommended that the landlords attempt to head off the worst of the bills by agreeing to limit their profits to 20 percent on the assessed value of the property—or, if the property cost more than the assessed value, on the price paid for it. His recommendation generated a furor. “It isn’t enough,” said one landlord. “We want all the money we can get,” declared another. If the housing bills were constitutional, “robbery was constitutional,” remarked yet another. (Not all real estate men felt the same way. “Any man who isn’t satisfied with a net profit of 20 per cent. is a hog and an idiot,” said one after the meeting.) Shelving Browne’s recommendation, the association decided to oppose all the landlord-tenant bills except the one that repealed the Ottinger Law and to appoint a committee to voice its opposition to the legislators. Most of the city’s other leading real estate organizations also decided to send a delegation to Albany to spell out their objections to one or more of the bills.31 Although the tenants and their allies were optimistic that the bills would be enacted, they were not inclined to take anything for granted, especially in view of what the Call referred to as the “amazing insolence” of the United Real Estate Owners Association. In the vanguard of efforts to drum up support for the legislation were the Tenants’ Rights League, which had been formed two weeks earlier, and the United Hebrew Trades, which was busily mobilizing synagogues, lodges, workmen’s circles, labor unions, and socialist organizations. Informed that two thousand landlords and other real estate men were planning to go to Albany, the Executive Committee of the Bronx County Democratic organization appointed a committee, which included Judge Harry Robitzek and Robert L. Moran, former president of the Board of Aldermen and now Bronx County Clerk, to attend the hearings. The Fair Play Rent Association also sent a delegation, as did the Central Federated Union and the New York State Federation of Labor. And many tenants followed the advice of Moran’s successor, Fiorello H. La Guardia, who urged them to “Go to Albany.” Led by La Guardia, Arthur J. W. Hilly, Commissioner of Accounts David Hirshfield, and a group of senators and assemblymen, one thousand tenants and their allies boarded the Empire State Express and two additional trains at Grand Central Station on the morning of March 23. On the same trains, though in different cars, were eight hundred landlords and other real estate men, many of whom spent their time “thresh[ing] out . . . grave economic questions,” wrote the Daily Eagle.32 That afternoon two to three thousand people filled the Assembly chamber, probably the only public space in Albany large enough to accommodate them. Senator John B. Mullan, a Rochester Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Cities, opened the hearing by saying that the legislature’s committees on cities intended to consider all the housing bills that had been introduced, not just the nine bills that had been endorsed by Speaker Sweet and his colleagues. He also

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instructed the witnesses to confine their remarks to the proposed legislation rather than to comment on the housing shortage and the soaring rents, both of which the legislators were “thoroughly familiar with.” Senator Lockwood then explained that the nine bills combined the committee’s original bills with the best of the other bills filed by other legislators. Next Judge Spiegelberg gave a brief description of the nine bills, pointing out that they were designed not to provide a long-term solution to the housing problem, only to give immediate relief to the hard-strapped tenants. Describing them as “emergency measures pure and simple,” Spiegelberg stressed, “They are not to be permanent. They are to remain in effect [only] until [November] 1922.” After letting Assemblyman McCue say a few words in favor of his bill to exempt new apartment houses from property taxes, a bill that had not been included in the Lockwood Committee’s legislative package, Mullan invited the spokesmen for the tenants and landlords to address the committee.33 Among the spokesmen for the tenants were a handful of judges, a couple of clergymen, a few community leaders, and a great many elected and appointed officials, Republicans as well as Democrats, almost all of them from New York City. A large majority endorsed the nine bills. (Some also supported Assemblyman McCue’s taxexemption bill.) A few, however, took exception to them on the grounds that they were not tough enough. Joseph M. Callahan, a New York City Court judge (and former Democratic assemblyman and Bronx County clerk), favored a law that would not so much revise summary proceedings as eliminate it—and thus ensure that henceforth “summary proceedings shall not be used to oppress [New Yorkers].” John Boyle, Jr., the former Bronx municipal court judge, declared that the bills would not stop rent profiteering. He also objected to empowering the municipal courts to determine a reasonable rent on the grounds that the outcome “depend[s] upon what one judge may do today and another . . . may do tomorrow.” He favored instead an excess profits tax. La Guardia went even further, arguing that the bills would not only “legalize the existing exorbitant rents,” but also allow the landlords to raise them even higher. “All that is left for you to do,” he told the legislators, “is to pass the McCue [bill] giving them [the landlords] an additional subsidy, exempt them from taxation, put a halo around their heads and wings on their shoulders and send them back to New York.” Far better, he argued, was the bill filed by Senator Abeles to limit the landlords’ profits to 10 percent of the building’s assessed value.34 Ignoring Senator Mullan’s instructions, many of the spokesmen for the tenants devoted much of their time to lambasting the landlords, many of whom were nothing but “rent hogs,” charged Judge Jacob S. Strahl. These landlords were jacking up the rent, said James B. Holland, president of the New York State Federation of Labor, “until every dollar a man earns [has been] taken away from him.” Forced to pay exorbitant rents, many families had no choice but to go without food or to live with one or two other families in small unsanitary apartments, La Guardia pointed out. They cannot afford to buy milk for their babies, added Reverend G. A. Carstensen; if their babies die—and “they will die by the thousands”—they have no money to bury them. Although most speakers confined their criticism to rapacious landlords,

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many of whom “could not even speak the language,” said Judge Robitzek, a few insisted there was no other kind. After charging that the landlords “have been jabbing it into [the tenants] consistently and regularly during the past year and a half,” Senator Schackno remarked, “There is no such a thing as an honest landlord in the city of New York,” a remark that “kept the Chamber in turmoil for several minutes,” wrote the Times. (“If there is to be any [more] jabbing,” Schackno warned the landlords, “the members of the [legislature] are going to jab it into you first.”) Another uproar followed after La Guardia declared, “I come here not to praise the landlord but to bury him.” For a moment it appeared that La Guardia and one of the many hecklers were about to come to blows.35 By and large the spokesmen for the landlords, among them Stewart Browne, I. Montefiore Levy, and A. C. McNulty, counsel to the New York City Real Estate Board, took a different tack. Speaking of the scores of landlord-tenant bills pending in the legislature, Browne had declared at the recent Hotel Astor meeting, “We will fight every one of them to a white heat.” But by now most real estate men were not up for a fight, at least not in public. Although many still made the familiar arguments that the landlord-tenant bills were unjustified, unfair, and shortsighted, not to mention unconstitutional and socialistic, most spoke in a temperate, even conciliatory tone. Browne was a case in point. Although stressing that only a dozen or so of the United Real Estate Owners Association’s ten thousand members were engaged in profiteering, Browne conceded that “the time has gone” when property rights should have priority over human rights. The landlords were entitled to make up for their losses in the prewar period, but not in a year or two. Another case in point was William M. K. Olcott, a prominent lawyer (and former Manhattan district attorney) who represented an association of property owners in some of New York’s most affluent neighborhoods. Acknowledging that legislation was needed to provide relief for the city’s working-class tenants, he insisted that no one who could afford to live on Riverside Drive or Park Avenue needed protection from the landlord. And he called on the legislators to exempt from the bills all apartments that rented for more than $1,500 a year.36 Olcott was not the only witness who asked for special treatment for his clients. Campbell & Boland, a Manhattan law firm that represented the city and state hotel associations, requested that hotels be excluded from the proposed legislation. The Real Estate Board seconded this proposal and extended it to apartment hotels and rooming and boarding houses. Through McNulty, the board objected to any legislation that smacked of rent regulation and that impaired contractual obligations. It also stressed that the only way to solve the housing shortage and prevent rent profiteering was to stimulate residential construction. But advised by legislative leaders before the hearing that it would be pointless to try to block the bills, the board decided instead to attempt to amend them. Its amendments were designed to make the legislation less onerous not only to landlords, but also to brokers and other real estate men, many of whom feared that if the bills were enacted as written it would be extremely difficult to buy and sell property in the future. High on the long list of

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amendments was one that limited the bills to residential, as opposed to commercial, property and to multi-family, as opposed to single-family, houses. Perhaps even more important was another under which the landlord would be allowed to bring summary proceedings even if he had raised the rent as much as 25 percent in the past twelve months as well as if he had signed a lease that set the rent more than a year earlier or had made substantial renovations in the meantime.37 The long and turbulent hearing—as turbulent as any in memory, reported the Times—made “a deep impression” on the legislators, wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. “From start to finish,” it said, it “resembled the convocation of the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd following the overthrow of the Kerensky regime.” The hearing “opened the eyes” of upstate legislators to the fury of New York City’s tenants, remarked the Brooklyn Standard Union, especially their hostility toward the landlords. It also dispelled any remaining doubts, wrote the Daily Eagle, that the legislature had to do something to protect the tenants. If it did not act quickly, the consequences would be dire. “If we don’t get this legislation through before Apr[il] 1,” said Senator Kaplan, “God help the politicians at the polls this year.” If nothing was done, La Guardia predicted that the radicals might take over the legislature next year (and spend their time debating whether to oust “five old-party men”). Judge Robitzek estimated that the Socialist vote in the Bronx would soar from 30,000 to 150,000. His colleague Jacob S. Strahl warned that unless the legislators enacted the Lockwood Committee bills there would be widespread disorder in New York City. And after praising the legislators for ousting the five Socialist assemblymen, Arthur J. W. Hilly urged them to “go one step further [and] eradicate the causes of Socialism by preventing rent profiteering.”38 Although some observers were persuaded that in the wake of the hearing it was all but certain the bills would be enacted as written, others were not so sure. As the Standard Union pointed out, “There was a wide difference of opinion about the nine housing bills.” Many opponents held that they were much too tough, and some supporters, of whom La Guardia was the most outspoken, felt they were not tough enough. Other supporters were concerned that in the absence of what the Daily Eagle called “an active building campaign” the bills would provide only “temporary relief.” Even Senator Lockwood thought the bills might well be modified before they were enacted. Much more troubling was a division within the ranks of his committee. On the day of the hearing Senator McWhinney announced he was opposed to the bills that empowered the municipal courts to determine a reasonable rent and barred the city’s landlords from raising the rent by more than 20 percent. These bills were objectionable, he argued, because they would give judges arbitrary power and discourage builders from resuming residential construction. Not least of all, Senator McWhinney said, they were unconstitutional. (For a while it even seemed that the Lockwood Committee’s package might be sidetracked by a wholly unrelated bill to repeal the daylight savings law.)39 Afraid that if the bills were not adopted before April 1, the day on which landlords would start serving notice on tenants, there would be “wholesale evictions” on

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May 1, Speaker Sweet and President Pro Tem Walters knew they had no time to lose. On March 24, the day after the hearing, they met with Spiegelberg, Sammis, Robert C. Cumming, the New York State bill drafting commissioner, and nine legislators, all of them Republicans, and reached an agreement by which they would refer twelve bills to the Senate and Assembly committees on cities. If all went well, they could be enacted within a week. Under these bills, which retained most of the features of the nine bills that had been agreed on a week earlier, a rent hike would be deemed unreasonable only if it exceeded 25 percent, not 20 percent. A landlord who failed to furnish essential services could be charged with a misdemeanor, which was punishable by a fine of $1,000, a year in prison, or both. And the judges were empowered to grant a tenant against whom a final order had been issued a stay of up to nine months—provided that the tenant deposited the old rent with the court and proved to the judge that, in the words of the Times, “he has diligently sought to secure suitable premises for himself and his family and has failed through no fault of his own.” To head off a constitutional challenge, the bills were justified on the grounds that the housing shortage was forcing tenants to pay unjust and unreasonable rents, thereby impairing their “freedom of contract” and creating a state of emergency that threatened public health, safety, and welfare. The bills, the most drastic of which were due to expire on November 1, 1922, applied not only to New York but also to Buffalo and Rochester, the state’s other “first class” cities.40 Over the next few days the Real Estate Board made a last-ditch effort to narrow the scope of these bills. Among other things, it urged the legislators to exclude buildings that were under contract for sale or rent subject to existing leases and tenancies, that were required for the immediate occupancy of the landlord and/or his family, or that were substantially reconstructed after the laws went into effect. Nothing came of this effort. In the meantime several legislators made a last-ditch attempt of their own to broaden the scope of the bills. One called for an act to cover commercial tenants, many of whom claimed that they needed protection from profiteering landlords as much as residential tenants did. Another sponsored a measure to extend the bills to Syracuse, Albany, and other “second class” cities, many of whose tenants argued that rent profiteering was widespread upstate as well as downstate. Both proposals were shelved, as was another that would have limited rent hikes to 10 percent. A few amendments were adopted, one to expand the bills to include Westchester County, which encompassed Yonkers and several other small cities that were part of greater New York, and another to empower the municipal court judges to grant stays as long as twelve months. On the afternoon of March 31 the Senate enacted what became chapters 130 to 139 and 209 and 210 of the Laws of 1920. After suspending debate on the ouster of the five Socialists, the Assembly followed suit. (Excluded from the legislative package was the original Lockwood Committee bill to exempt income from mortgages up to $40,000 from state taxes, a bill that was stalled in the Senate Committee on Cities and would probably not have done much to stimulate residential construction unless Congress exempted such income from federal taxes, which thus far it had been unwilling to do.)41

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Well into March the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide clung to the faint hope that Governor Smith “would not be swept off his feet” by the frenzy over rent profiteering, that at the very least he would not sign “measures of such far-reaching importance” without first holding a hearing. This hope was not entirely groundless. The governor had not been in the forefront of the campaign against profiteering landlords. On more than one occasion he had stressed that the only way to bring down rents was to build houses. Smith also shared the belief of the Reconstruction Commission that the current emergency “will pass,” that far more serious was the lack of suitable workingmen’s houses, a longstanding problem that would not be solved by regulating rents or punishing landlords. But by the end of the month this hope was dashed. Like the legislators, Smith had long been under intense pressure to curb profiteering landlords and protect hard-strapped tenants. If the only way to do so was by what he later called “temporary expedients,” so be it. The governor was also too savvy a politician to allow the Republicans to take all the credit for the new laws. Hence he told the legislators, “I’m ready to go with you as far as the constitution of the state permits.” He sent them an emergency message that put the bills on the fast track. And shortly after midnight on April 1 he signed the bills. Most went into effect immediately; the others, which were among the least important, a couple of weeks later.42 If the spokesmen for the landlords were unhappy with the governor, they were furious at the legislature—especially at what the Record and Guide called “lawmaking by clamor.” “The enactment of ill-conceived, loosely considered legislation used to be an act of folly generally confined to the Wild and Wooly [Populist] West,” it wrote. But with the passage of these “half-baked” laws, the culmination of an agreement “to legislate in haste and repent in leisure,” this was no longer so. As the real estate men saw it, the decision to overhaul the law of summary proceedings was bad enough. Even worse was the decision to empower the courts to determine a reasonable rent. As Chittick put it, “For the first time in the history of New York, and so far as I know, of any State in the Union,” the control of residential property has been taken from the owners “and lodged, to a certain extent, jointly in the owner, the Justices of the Municipal Courts, and the tenants.” Speaking on behalf of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, J. C. M. Phillips said that it was more than a little hard to understand why the same legislators who had ousted the five Socialists from the Assembly were now doing “the very things they [the Socialists] recommend.” And in a letter to the Times John L. Parish, secretary of the Advisory Council of Real Estate Interests, wrote that the only good thing to say about what would become known as the April laws was “that they are all unconstitutional and will not stand the scrutiny of the courts.”43 The spokesmen for the landlords were frustrated not only by what the legislature did but also by what it did not do. As they pointed out, virtually everyone agreed that the only way to stop rent profiteering was to put up houses. Yet the legislature shelved the two bills that would have encouraged builders to build and

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lenders to lend. One was the Lockwood-McWhinney bill, which exempted income from mortgages up to $40,000 from state taxes. One of the original Lockwood Committee bills, it was filed on the first day of the legislative session. And as Parish pointed out, “No measure was ever more thoroughly ‘heard.’ ” The city’s bankers and other lenders endorsed it. Hardly anyone spoke out against it. “Yet it lingers in committee for some mysterious reason.” The other bill, which was filed by Assemblyman McCue, exempted new apartment houses from local property taxes for seven years. The bill had widespread support too. Indeed, wrote the Times, McCue was the only speaker at the Committees on Cities hearings whose proposal met with the approval of both landlords and tenants. The bill was endorsed by the Senate Committee on Cities. But it was bottled up in the Senate Committee on Taxation. A week and a half after the April laws were passed, the Record and Guide warned that if the legislature adjourned without acting on one or more of the pending bills to encourage capital to invest in residential mortgages, “the housing situation will go from bad to worse.”44 Although most spokesmen for the tenants felt that the legislature had gone a long way toward curbing rent profiteering, some held that it had not gone far enough. Morris Gisnet, a veteran of countless landlord-tenant disputes, charged that the April laws would not provide the tenants much relief, “permanent or temporary,” because “the landlords can get around them in a hundred ways.” La Guardia insisted that it was outrageous to allow the landlords who had raised the rents so much in the past couple of years to raise them yet again—and by as much as 25 percent. He and others argued that the legislature would have been better advised to put a ceiling on rental profits or impose an excess profits tax on landlords. Judge Jacob Panken protested that the April laws would do nothing to increase the supply of housing. What was needed, he and other Socialists believed, was public housing, not tax exemption. Indeed, they held, the housing shortage would not have become so severe if the legislature had enacted one or another of the Socialist public housing bills. Panken even went so far as to suggest that the Board of Health commandeer the many unoccupied or partly occupied houses in some of New York’s most fashionable neighborhoods and open them on a temporary basis to the city’s hardstrapped tenants. Pointing out that Panken’s scheme had been “devised some time ago by the highly progressive economists now in control of Russia,” the Times wrote that it was “a little too advanced” for most New Yorkers.45 Spokesmen for New York’s commercial tenants, most of whom rented stores, offices, and lofts in Lower Manhattan, also held that the legislators had not gone far enough. A soon as the April laws were enacted, they launched a campaign to persuade them to give commercial tenants the same protection that they had just given residential tenants. Leading the campaign were the Merchants’ Rent Committee, the Office Tenants League, and more than a score of trade associations, most of which represented New York’s garment industry. Stressing that some of their members’ rents had been raised as much as 100 to 500 percent, these organizations prevailed on Senator Abeles to introduce several bills to curb rent profiteering

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in commercial property. They also sent a delegation to attend a hearing of the Senate Committee on Cities, to which the bills were referred. Despite a strong showing at the hearing, the campaign was doomed from the start. At a time of growing concern over the rising cost of living, few New Yorkers felt much sympathy for these businessmen. (The Standard Union suggested that if the rents were too high in Manhattan they should “bring their business to Brooklyn—as, in fact, many of them are [already] doing.”) Even fewer New Yorkers viewed rent profiteering in commercial property as a menace to public health, safety, and welfare. In the face of strenuous opposition from the Real Estate Board and its allies, the Senate Committee on Cities voted twelve to one to shelve the Abeles bills, saving the city from what the board called “a veritable calamity.”46 In defense of the April laws, Lockwood, Spiegelberg, and their associates stressed that it had never been their intention to solve the housing problem, only to provide a respite for the tenants—and to do so in time to head off wholesale evictions in May. This, they argued, they had done without imposing an unfair burden on reputable landlords (and without violating the state and federal constitutions). As Spiegelberg pointed out, the landlords could still raise the rent. But now that the Ottinger Law had been repealed, they could no longer take advantage of the many tenants who did not have a written lease. Under the new laws the landlords had to prove to the court’s satisfaction that a tenant was “undesirable” before replacing him with a tenant who was willing to pay a higher rent. And they risked fines or imprisonment, or both, if they cut off essential services in order to drive out tenants who were paying below-market rents. As Spiegelberg also pointed out, the landlords could still bring summary proceedings. But they now had to give the tenants thirty days’ notice. Moreover, if the landlords brought summary proceedings for nonpayment of rent, the tenants could offer as a defense that the rent was unreasonable. The decision was left to the judge, but if the rent was more than 25 percent higher than it had been a year earlier, the burden of proof was on the landlord. Otherwise it was on the tenant. If the landlords brought summary proceedings for holding over (or staying in an apartment after the lease expired), the judges were empowered to grant the tenants against whom a final order had been issued a stay of up to twelve months—provided they were unable to find another apartment and willing to deposit the old rent with the court.47 The April laws, wrote the Standard Union, were “a notable victory for tenants”—or at least for residential tenants in New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, and Westchester County. How much of a victory remained to be seen. As Spiegelberg acknowledged, the April laws would do nothing to ease the housing shortage—nothing, noted the Daily Eagle, to “get anybody into the five [rooms] and a bath he is looking for.” If the laws discouraged builders from putting up apartment houses, they might even exacerbate the problem. If so, warned the American, they might well “do infinitely more harm than good.” The tenants had gotten more or less what they wanted, which was a law “with teeth,” wrote the Home News. But were the April laws tough enough to stop rent profiteering? The Daily Eagle believed they were. But no one

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could be sure, if only because New York State had never tried to regulate rents before. The tenants’ victory, if a victory was what it turned out to be, would come at a price, the Times pointed out—one that would be paid not so much by profiteering landlords, who had been steadily jacking up the rents, as by reputable landlords, who had been asking for only modest increases. But if even reputable landlords could no longer charge what they want, wrote the Daily Eagle, they have only to thank “the unscrupulous men in their own business, who have taken advantage of the lack of houses to profiteer in rent. Honest and considerate landlords will suffer from the excesses of their business associates who have shown themselves to be neither.”48

8 The September Laws

No sooner had the state legislature enacted the April laws than the real estate interests launched a campaign to water them down. The laws might protect some tenants from profiteering landlords, they believed, but they would do nothing to relieve the housing shortage; if anything, they would discourage residential construction. They would also reduce property values and stifle real estate transactions. As Edward P. Doyle, legislative agent for the Real Estate Board, pointed out, many deals had fallen through because under the April laws, which empowered the municipal court judges to grant tenants stays of up to twelve months, sellers could not tell buyers when they could take possession. Although the real estate interests realized that there was no chance the legislators would repeal the April laws, they thought there was a possibility they might amend them—and, in particular, that they might exempt some residential structures from the most stringent of the laws. Hence the Real Estate Board drafted several amendments, most of which were incorporated into a bill that was filed in mid-April by Senator Alvah W. Burlingame. A Brooklyn Republican (and a strong supporter of the effort to ease the housing shortage by amending the Tenement House Act of 1901), Burlingame was one of the few legislators who voted against the April laws. Stressing that “the housing problem could not be solved by harassing landlords,” he said the only reason these laws were enacted was that “election day is not far off.”1 Senator Burlingame’s bill carved out a handful of exemptions to the three April laws that were the keystone of the recent legislation—chapter 136, which declared rent hikes of more than 25 percent in one year “unjust, unreasonable and oppressive”; chapter 137, which allowed tenants to use chapter 136 as a defense in summary proceedings for nonpayment of rent; and chapter 139, which empowered the municipal court judges to grant stays of up to twelve months. These exemptions applied to buildings that had been “constructed or substantially constructed for dwelling

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purposes” after April 1, 1920, the date on which the rent laws went into effect. They also covered properties that were “required, in good faith, for immediate and substantial reconstruction or complete building” as an apartment house, provided that the plans were approved by one of the borough building departments. The Burlingame bill also provided that chapters 136, 137, and 139 would not apply in a few other cases. One was where a tenant who had been given written notice of a rent hike at least four months prior to the termination of a lease of one year or longer failed to notify the landlord within thirty days whether he was willing to renew the lease at the increased rent. Another was where the tenant had been occupying the premises by virtue of a lease of two years or longer that expired on or before October 1, 1920. Yet another was where a building had been sold (or was about to be sold) as a cooperative to members who intended to live in it.2 Senator Burlingame argued that the bill would ease the housing shortage and protect the hundreds of landlords “who are now subject to unfair discrimination under the far too drastic laws we have just enacted.” But Senator Charles C. Lockwood, whose committee had drafted most of the April laws, spoke out forcefully against the measure. The bill, he said, would nullify the new laws, leaving many thousands of tenants “at the mercy of the worst type of rent profiteers.” Lockwood also pointed out that the Burlingame bill was unnecessary because the city’s Board of Municipal Court Justices had recently adopted a set of rules that provided more than adequate protection both to landlords who wanted to remodel their buildings for dwelling purposes and to tenants who hoped to purchase their apartments on a cooperative basis. A. C. McNulty, counsel to the Real Estate Board, responded that the Board of Municipal Court Justices’ rules rested on nothing but “moral suasion.” They had “no legal force” and could be disregarded by the judges. Whatever its merits, the Burlingame bill stood no chance. Although many legislators were aware the April laws would do nothing to stimulate residential construction, they were extremely reluctant to reopen the issue of rent profiteering at the end of the session. So they shelved the Burlingame bill (and apart from making it somewhat more expensive for landlords to bring summary proceedings, took no action on the other proposals to amend the April laws).3 The legislators shelved the Burlingame bill for several reasons, not the least of which was that they were afraid that if they watered down the April laws they would inflame New York City’s tenants. Their fears were not altogether groundless. On the eve of the passage of the April laws the newly formed Tenants Defense League mounted a campaign to enlist the 800,000 members of the Jewish labor unions in a citywide rent strike on May 1, 1920. Shortly thereafter rumors spread that tens of thousands of residents of Brownsville and other Brooklyn neighborhoods were getting ready not only to go on strike, but to organize tenant soviets as well. To many New Yorkers, it seemed that the city’s agitators, most of whom were trying “not to redress real grievances but to create fancied ones,” wrote the Times, were planning a “Red revolution” to coincide with May Day. New York officials warned that the city would not put up with what Arthur J. W. Hilly, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee

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on Rent Profiteering, called a “display of red-flagged disorder.” All “the power of the city Government would be invoked to uphold the law,” he vowed. As well as issue warnings, Hilly assured the tenants that now that the April laws were in place they had no cause to go on strike, much less resort to violence. Even Harry Rich, head of the Brooklyn Tenants Protective Association, one of the tenant leaders who dismissed the talk of a huge May Day demonstration as “ridiculous,” stressed that in view of the enactment of the April laws “a rent strike was unnecessary.” Apparently the tenants agreed. Only a few hundred went on strike on May Day—a tribute, said Leo Kenneth Mayer, counsel to the Mayor’s Committee, to “the new rent legislation passed in Albany.”4 Hilly was optimistic that the April laws would discourage landlords from engaging in rent profiteering and tenants from going on rent strikes. But would they? More than anything else, the response of the municipal court judges would be decisive. As Aaron J. Levy, president of the Board of Municipal Court Justices, told his colleagues, the new laws gave them more power than they “have ever had before.” Indeed, he said, no legislature had ever given so much power to a court. Not even the U.S. Supreme Court had such “extraordinary power,” wrote Stanley M. Isaacs, a sharp critic of the April laws. While the municipal court judges did not have “virtually absolute power” over landlord-tenant disputes, as the Times claimed, they did have virtually unheard-of discretion. Although the legislature did not authorize the judges to fix the rent, it did empower them to determine whether the rent was reasonable—and, if they found it was not, to deny the landlord’s request for a final order. In the process, Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg stressed, the judges were not bound by the so-called 25 percent rule. It was well within the judge’s power to approve a rent hike of more than 25 percent or disapprove one of less than 25 percent. In early April, moreover, the Board of Municipal Court Justices adopted a set of rules to deal with the new laws, one of the most controversial of which provided that the judges should not grant a stay in a proceeding where the landlord showed that he or a member of his family wanted the premises “for immediate and permanent occupancy.” But as McNulty pointed out, these rules were not binding.5 Many New Yorkers were confident that the municipal court judges could be counted on to exercise their new powers in a way that was fair to both landlords and tenants. Chief among them were the judges themselves, many of whom strongly supported the April laws. They had long complained that under the existing landlord-tenant laws there was not much they could do to protect the city’s tenants from profiteering landlords. It was time to rewrite the laws, said Harry Robitzek, who told the committees on cities, “There is not a judge in the municipal court who cannot be relied upon to give a square deal to the landlord and to the tenant.” Aaron J. Levy agreed. The municipal court judges were fully capable of using their discretion in an evenhanded way, he held. If one or another of them abused it, the appellate courts would soon “set him right.” Other New Yorkers were not so sanguine. Former Judge John Boyle, Jr., questioned the wisdom of enacting a law whose impact would vary from one court to another and from one day to the

Even before the April laws were enacted, many landlords realized that the state legislature was about to do something to curb rent profiteering. Hence more than a few decided to serve notice before the legislature acted, informing the tenants that they would soon have to pay a higher rent or move out. If the old tenants balked at paying the increased rent, the landlords were confident that they could replace them with new ones. To the landlords it also made sense to serve notice after the April laws were enacted. Given that the municipal court judges were now empowered to grant stays of up to twelve months, the sooner the landlords started summary proceedings the sooner they could recover their property. Unwilling to pay the increased rent or move out of their homes, some tenants went on strike. Two thousand of them even joined a demonstration outside Olav Scholem, a Brooklyn synagogue where a few of their landlords worshipped. But after the April laws went into effect, most tenants were inclined to heed the advice of Hilly and other city officials who urged them not to go on strike but to trust the municipal court judges. Jacob S. Strahl, who presided over Brooklyn’s Fourth District Court, was one of the many judges who favored this approach. As he said to a Daily Eagle reporter, “My advice to tenants, when they receive an eviction notice, is not to be alarmed. Let them take the matter calmly, proceed to court and allow the presiding justice there to determine what is to be done.” The tenants would be treated fairly, said Strahl, as would the landlords.7 The result was pretty much what McNulty predicted. In the week or so after the April laws went into effect the municipal courts were inundated with what the Standard Union called “a record-breaking flood” of landlord-tenant disputes. Nearly five hundred cases were heard in Brooklyn’s Seventh District Court. “It was the biggest day’s business the court has ever done,” reported the Eagle. “More than 1,000 litigants and their families jammed the sidewalks, hallways and courtrooms,” added the Times. Hundreds of cases were also on the calendar in Brooklyn’s Second, Third, Fourth, and Eighth district courts. In one Brooklyn court the calendar, which usually ran to no more than a foot or two, came to fifteen feet. And in some courts, observed the Eagle, the calendar was so long that it “had to be rolled on spindles like adding machine tapes.” The municipal courts were packed in Manhattan and the Bronx too. On one day in early April more than 350 cases were heard in the Seventh District Court in Harlem and nearly three hundred in the Sixth District Court on the Upper East Side. On April 6 more than a thousand people tried to force their way into Judge William E. Morris’s courtroom in the Bronx, a courtroom that held five hundred. And on April 8, the Times reported, “More than 450 litigants greeted Justice Harry Robitzek when he opened the Second Municipal Court yesterday.” Looking at

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next. J. C. M. Phillips, who spoke for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, held that no one, not even a municipal court judge, should be entrusted with “such wide discretion” in matters about which the public had such strong feelings. And McNulty predicted that if the April laws were enacted the courts would be so inundated with landlord-tenant disputes that “it will be months[,] if not years, before a majority of [the cases] can be heard and disposed of.”6

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the hundreds of men, women, and children who jammed the courtroom, Robitzek said he had “never witnessed such a scene.”8 The municipal courts were not as busy in the second half of April. But with tens of thousands of leases due to expire shortly—and untold numbers of stays about to run out—some judges feared the worst was yet to come. “The conditions on May 1 will be such as we have never experienced before,” said Strahl, who had heard more than three thousand landlord-tenant cases since the April laws were enacted. Strahl may have exaggerated, but not by much. The municipal courts were again inundated with landlord-tenant cases in early May. Judge Morris had seven hundred on his calendar. Judge Panken, who presided over one of the five courts in Manhattan’s Second District, which included the Lower East Side, had almost as many. Judge Charles B. Law, who presided over Brooklyn’s Seventh District Court, had such a full calendar that he had to hear cases from nine in the morning to seven in the evening. Summer was ordinarily a quiet time in the municipal courts, but not in 1920. The April laws notwithstanding, the Bronx courts “continue to be jammed with landlord-tenant cases,” the Home News wrote in late July. In early August it reported that more than eight hundred such cases were on Robitzek’s calendar, which was so full that Robitzek held court from nine-thirty to six and the chief clerk ordered the court attendants to cut short their summer vacations. Some of the more than two thousand men, women, and children who jammed Robitzek’s stifling courtroom nearly fainted as they waited for their cases to be called. The Brooklyn courts were so “packed,” said Strahl, that “I found it necessary to sit until seven, half past seven and eight o’clock every night, although summer sessions are supposed to close at two o’clock in the afternoon.” He even took only fifteen minutes for lunch.9 As some judges acknowledged, it was almost impossible to hear so many cases and still do justice to both landlords and tenants. If each case was given the attention it deserved, if both sides were allowed as much time as they needed, “the calendar would be choked,” one judge told a leader of the Fair Play Rent Association. Making matters worse, the courts were jammed with tenants (and their neighbors), landlords (and their agents), and lawyers—many of whom reminded a Home News reporter of a “chameleon,” pleading on behalf of the tenants one minute, fighting for the rights of the landlords the next, and doing so “without a change of countenance, even a smile.” “In most of the courts,” observed the Eagle, “S.R.O. [Standing Room Only] signs would have been grossly misleading—there wasn’t standing room for an under-sized molecule.” The crowds were often so large that it was very hard for the landlords and tenants to get into the courtroom and, once they did, to make their way up the aisles to the witness stand. As well as very crowded, the courts were very noisy, sometimes unbearably so. With so many people talking to one another, it was at times “absolutely impossible to hear what is being said,” complained the judges. In an effort to prevent what the Times called “the buzz of conversation” from drowning out the witnesses, Robitzek pounded his gavel so hard one morning that he broke it. He “weathered the storm” with what was left of it. Some courts were so tumultuous that the police had to be summoned to maintain order.10

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Critics of the April laws charged that even if the courts had not been inundated with landlord-tenant cases, the judges would not have been able to do what was asked of them. “They are not as a rule men of property,” wrote Albert Atterbury, a New York City landlord; “nor have they practical experience in the business of managing real estate.” How, asked Stanley M. Isaacs, was a judge, even a conscientious judge who was not swayed by political considerations, supposed to determine a reasonable rent when the state legislature had not defined it? The April laws, he pointed out, did not say whether a reasonable rent should be based on the market value of the property or the landlord’s equity in it. Nor did they say what deductions should be made in calculating net income, whether depreciation should be taken into account, how capital improvements and other “extraordinary expenditures” should be dealt with, and “whether the landlord should be allowed to recoup the losses of previous years, and, if so, over how long a period.” Also, Isaacs asked, how was a judge supposed to determine a reasonable rent when he has not seen the apartment, when he does not know the size of the rooms and “whether they are light or dark,” when he has no idea whether the landlord is providing “good service or bad” and whether he is taking care of the property or neglecting it? To get this information took a lot of time, and given the crushing caseload, the judges had very little. All they had, said Isaacs, were the “ex parte statements of landlord and tenant, [which were] of course mutually contradictory.”11 Although the judges had their work cut out for them, they soldiered on. Working with what the Call described as “lightning-like rapidity,” they disposed of hundreds of cases not in months, as McNulty had predicted, but in days and even hours. The proceedings were often “superficial and undignified,” Isaacs claimed, and sometimes “confused and disorderly.” Thus said McNulty, “there were as many differences of opinion as to how the rent laws should be applied as there were [municipal court] justices.” Although the differences were not as striking as McNulty said, they were striking enough. A telling example took place in Brooklyn when the F.A.L. Realty Corporation raised the rent at 765 Park Place from $29 to $55 a month, an increase of nearly 90 percent. A tenant named John Eichbauer refused to pay the rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable. F.A.L. Realty responded by bringing summary proceedings against him. Sitting in Brooklyn’s Fourth District Court, Judge Jacob S. Strahl ruled in favor of Eichbauer and ordered F.A.L. Realty to reduce the new rent to $36.25, or only 25 percent more than the old rent. Another tenant, John Janson, refused to pay the increased rent for the same reason. F.A.L. Realty brought summary proceedings against him too. Sitting in the same court, Judge O. Grant Esterbrook held that the new rent was not unreasonable and ordered Janson to pay the $55 or move out. As the result, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, one tenant was now paying half again as much as another to live in the same building and in a “practically identical” apartment.12 Two months later Aaron J. Levy grudgingly confirmed what many New Yorkers already believed—that when it came to the implementation of the April laws there were “tenant judges” and “landlord judges.” Jacob Strahl was one of the so-called

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tenant judges. Born in 1878, he grew up in Williamsburg, graduated from New York Law School in 1897, and, though a Democrat, was elected municipal court judge from Brooklyn’s Fourth District, ordinarily a Republican stronghold, in 1909 (and again in 1919). Widely regarded, wrote the Times, as “the tenants’ friend,” Strahl was very hard on what he viewed as intransigent landlords, so hard that former municipal court judge Edward A. Richards accused him of ruling against landlords “merely for the purpose of gaining public applause.” In the case of one landlord who refused to settle for a 25 percent increase, Strahl ordered his tenants to pay only 10 percent more and granted them a stay of one year. In the case of another landlord who would not go along with a two-dollar-a-month raise, Strahl forced him to let the tenants remain at the old rent by threatening to charge him court costs of ten dollars for each of the sixteen tenants. In late April Strahl announced that he would not issue eviction warrants on May 1, and shortly thereafter he said he would not dispossess anyone for failing to pay a rent increase. Especially revealing was his treatment of Angelina Buongioni, who wanted to oust Mrs. Artilio Cavallaro, a mother of six, from an apartment in which she had lived for two years. Asked why, Buongioni replied: “I want the rooms for my niece,” who, it turned out, had four children. Told that the niece lived in New York, Strahl denied Buongioni’s petition, saying, “Let her [the niece] stay in New York. Brooklyn has plenty of rent problems of its own, without importing more.”13 Another of the so-called tenant judges was Jacob Panken. The city’s only Socialist justice, Panken was born in Kiev, the son of Russian peasants who had emigrated to the United States when he was a youngster. Raised on his father’s farm in Connecticut, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an accountant and studied at NYU Law School. For a while he practiced law on the Lower East Side, helping to found the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and other labor unions. Running on the Socialist Party ticket, he was elected municipal court judge from Manhattan’s Second District in 1917. Panken was extremely sympathetic to the many tenants who appeared before him, most of them working immigrants from the Lower East Side. He worked hard to persuade the landlords to reduce their rent hikes. Although nothing in the April laws empowered him to do so, he also ordered them to make much-needed repairs. And he seldom issued eviction warrants. When a landlord named Louis Ruhe, who sold animals and birds for a living, asked the court to oust eight tenants from their apartments at 351 Bowery because he needed the space for his business, Panken denied the request and granted the tenants a stay of sixty days. “Have a heart,” he said to Ruhe. “All I ask of any landlord is to have a heart. Look at [the tenants’] little children. Are they not more important than birds or animals?”14 Yet another (and by far the most colorful) of the so-called tenant judges was William E. Morris, who presided over the Bronx’s Second District Court. Morris was born in Boston in 1858 and, claiming to be four years older than he was, enlisted in the army as a teenager. At seventeen he was assigned to the Seventh United States Cavalry, the luckless force commanded by General George A. Custer that was decimated in 1876 by Chief Sitting Bull and a combined force of Lakota, Northern

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Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Although badly wounded, Morris survived. In 1878 he left the army and moved to New York, where he worked as a waiter in the Bowery and studied law in his spare time. Admitted to the bar, he formed the firm of Morris, Kane & Costello, which built up a successful practice in criminal law. Morris also joined Tammany Hall and went into politics, serving one term as an assemblyman and two terms as an alderman. For a while he was also the leader of Tammany’s Thirty-fifth Assembly District Club, a post from which he stepped down in 1911 when he was elected to the first of three successive terms as a municipal court judge. Sitting in the courtroom on Washington Avenue and 162nd Street that he shared with Judge Michael J. Scanlan, Morris became well known after World War I for his deep-seated antipathy to what he referred to as the “grasping landlord” who had no compunction about using the courts “to help him take one-half of a man’s income for rent.” But until early 1920 he did not have the power to prevent even “grasping” landlords from raising rents or evicting tenants.15 When the April laws gave Morris the power, he took full advantage of it. In one case a landlord named Philip Becker brought summary proceedings against a group of tenants who refused to pay a 25 percent rent hike. When Morris learned that the rent had been raised three times in the last year, he ruled that the new rent was unreasonable, ordered the tenants to pay the old rent, and granted them a one-year stay. In another case a landlady named Bestnick served notice on a tenant who had been paying $45 a month but balked at paying an additional 25 percent. When Bestnick appeared before him, Morris declared it was “all poppy-cock for landlords to think they were entitled to an increase of 25 per cent. You are welcome to it if you can prove it, but you’ll have to do some tall proving to convince yours truly.” Bestnick’s lawyer tried anyway, but to no avail. “I’m glad he [the tenant] refused to pay the 25 per cent. increase,” Morris told Bestnick. “You are not entitled to it.” He then fixed the rent at $45 until March 1, 1921. “But your Honor,” objected Bestnick’s lawyer, “I think—.” “There’s no charge for thinking,” Morris interrupted. “I have ruled. Good day.” In another case a tenant named Zerkman refused to pay the rent, which had been raised from $25 to $29 a month, because the landlord had failed to keep his promise to paint the apartment. “Now Shapiro,” Morris said to the landlord, “You look like a pretty good fellow. Get a couple of gallons of second hand paint and fix this woman’s apartment up.” When Morris added, “I know a lot of Shapiros that are good painters,” the landlord chimed in, saying, “I’m a painter myself.” “That makes it all the better,” said Morris. “Now madame pay your rent and Shapiro here will do a little artistic work on the walls and ceilings of your apartment.”16 As reluctant as Morris was to allow landlords to raise rents, he was even more reluctant to permit them to evict tenants. Rather than dispossess one group of tenants for nonpayment of rent, he granted them stays of thirty days and said, “If you haven’t found a place by then, come back and I’ll give you a month or two more.” He gave other tenants stays of twelve months, the longest allowed under the April laws. And he refused to oust a tenant whose landlord had raised the rent from $47 to

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$65 a month on the grounds that she was undesirable. Telling her, “If you had paid him the $65 you would be very desirable,” he allowed her to remain in the apartment at the old rent for nearly nine months. Morris also balked at evicting a tenant whose landlord said he wanted to move from his fifth-floor apartment into her firstfloor apartment because his wife, who suffered from heart disease, had trouble climbing stairs. Saying, “Climbing stairs is the healthiest thing in the world,” Morris granted the tenant a stay of almost eight months. When another landlord claimed that a tenant was not entitled to a stay because she had not made an attempt to find a new apartment, a claim that she disputed, Morris said he agreed with her. “I know nearly every house, every apartment and nearly every family [in the neighborhood], and I know you can’t get rooms.” He gave her a stay of two and a half months— though, to the surprise of the spectators, at a higher rent—and promised to extend it if she could not find another apartment. If any doubts remained about where Morris stood, they were dispelled one day in early August when he told a thousand people who jammed his stifling courtroom, “It’s too hot to put people out now, and in a few months it will be too cold to do so.” “I can assure you now there will be no evictions,” he went on. “We are not going to put people on the street.”17 Morris was greatly admired by the tenants, who found him deeply compassionate and highly entertaining. The Home News reported that at a meeting of the Fair Play Rent Association, at which he was the speaker, “men and women stood and shouted, each trying to be the loudest in their cries of welcome.” After he dismissed a case in which the landlord failed to appear, some of the tenants stopped long enough as they left the courtroom to say, “Thank you, Judge Morris. God bless you Judge.” In anticipation of the upcoming Jewish holidays, one tenant wished him “Happy New Year.” Admired by the tenants, Morris was despised by the landlords, who thought he was abusing his authority and was to be avoided if at all possible. He was the target of “poison-pen letters” from anonymous New Yorkers who referred to him as “you old fool” and “you old bum.” He was also the focus of criticism by disgruntled lawyers, to whom he gave as well as he got. When one charged that Morris was prejudiced against landlords, he responded that he had nothing against landlords, only against rapacious landlords. When a lawyer who was so angry the judge had postponed his case because of the heat announced that he was going to apply for a writ of mandamus, which would have forced Morris to hear the case forthwith, the judge shouted, “I’ll mandamus you in the nose.” When another lawyer was so incensed that the judge had denied his client eviction warrants that he threatened to appeal to the Supreme Court, Morris told him, “Go to the Supreme Court. Go to hell. I think more of one little finger of one of the children of those tenants than of all the bleeding, grasping landlords combined.”18 Few judges ruled in favor of the landlords as consistently as Strahl, Panken, and Morris ruled in favor of the tenants. Hence it is much easier to identify the so-called tenant judges than the so-called landlord judges—the judges, said Aaron J. Levy, to whom the landlords brought their cases and “winked and won.” Indeed, some of the so-called landlord judges were anything but. Consider Harry Robitzek, who presided

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over the First District Court in the Bronx. Born in New York City in 1883, Robitzek studied at Columbia and NYU Law School, served two terms on the Board of Aldermen, and was elected a municipal court judge in 1917. Although regarded by some as a “landlord’s judge,” Robitzek handled disputes arising out of the April laws in an evenhanded way. He allowed rent hikes, even hikes as high as 20 to 25 percent, but not over what he called “the present inflated rents” and not without evidence that the increase was justified. More often than not, he tried to persuade the landlord and tenant to settle. In some cases, notably where the tenants refused to pay the old rent or a small increase, he was ready to issue an eviction warrant. But in most he was inclined to grant a stay, sometimes for as long as twelve months. Robitzek was willing to remove a tenant on the grounds that he or she was “undesirable,” but only if the landlord could prove it. He was also prepared to oust a tenant if the landlord needed the apartment for himself or a member of his immediate family, but not if the ouster was a way to get around the April laws. And if a landlord claimed he wanted to remove the tenants in order to remodel the building, Robitzek insisted that he submit architect’s drawings, building permits, or other evidence to support his claim.19 Unlike Harry Robitzek, Peter A. Sheil, who also presided over the Bronx First District Court, was very much a “landlord’s judge.” Born in 1874, Sheil grew up in the Bronx. After graduating from P.S. 12, he studied at Manhattan College and New York Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1898. Like many other ambitious young men, he joined the Democratic Party and went into politics. After serving three terms as an alderman, he was elected a municipal court judge in 1907. He was reelected in 1917—and again in 1927, less than a month before he died of a heart attack. From the start it was clear that Sheil was not inclined to rule in favor of the tenants in cases arising out of the April laws. Of the more than two hundred tenants who appeared before him in late April for nonpayment of rent, only a few had their raises reduced—and then only by one or two dollars. Most were ordered to pay the full increase, “even in some instances,” wrote the Times, “where the landlord indicated a willingness [to] compromise.” In one case Elizabeth H. Sears raised the rent from $28 to $32 a month in an apartment house on East 189th Street, a house so decrepit, said one observer, that the “ceilings looked like badly put together Chinese puzzles in plaster.” She then brought summary proceedings against seventeen Italian American tenants who went on strike. When Sears told the court that the current rent was not enough to cover the upkeep—and that the extra money was necessary to avoid foreclosure—Sheil accused the tenants of “profiteering.” Although she was willing to settle for a two dollar increase, he ordered them to pay the full four dollars. “These tenants have a soviet of their own,” said the judge, who vowed “to break it up.”20 Sheil decided two other cases in July that underscored his sympathy for the landlords. One arose when the Feldblum Realty Company, which had bought an apartment house on East 167th Street in late March, notified the twenty tenants a few days later that the rents would be raised eight dollars to ten dollars a month. Although the building had not been repaired in years, the tenants agreed to pay the increase,

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largely because Feldblum Realty offered them an eighteen-month lease. But when the company withdrew its offer, the tenants changed their minds—whereupon Feldblum Realty brought summary proceedings against three of them, one of whom was the chairman of the tenants’ committee. Before the hearing the committee calculated Feldblum Realty’s revenues and expenses and concluded that the company was already earning 44 percent a year on its investment. With the proposed rent hike, it would earn over 66 percent. But Sheil never gave the tenants a chance to submit their figures. Instead he summarily ordered the three tenants (and by implication the seventeen others) to pay 25 percent more than they had been paying in July 1919, which was only a few dollars less than Feldblum Realty was asking. The tenants were furious. The 25 percent clause was designed “to give deserving landlords a fair break,” said one. “It was not intended to be imposed indiscriminately in all cases,” especially not when the landlord was already earning 44 percent.21 The other case arose when twenty-four tenants who lived in a rundown tenement house on East 136th Street went on strike after the landlord notified them that the rent was being raised well over 25 percent. Indeed, in the case of one woman with seven children whose husband earned $31 a week, it went up from $32 to $52.50 a month, or more than 60 percent. Although the building had not been repaired in seven years, the tenants were willing to pay a 25 percent increase. “But Justice Sheil would not listen to us,” one tenant told a Home News reporter. “He said we would have to pay the landlord what he asked without argument or else get out.” When they refused, Sheil issued eviction warrants. “We elected him,” she said, “and this is what he does for us.” Judge Sheil sometimes ruled in favor of the tenants. In one case Joseph Spivack gave Mrs. F. Minton thirty days to move out of her apartment on East 164th Street. When he learned that the case was going to be heard by Morris, Spivack sent his son to ask for an adjournment on the spurious grounds that he was ill. Not taken in, Morris denied the request and allowed Minton to stay put. Spivack tried again, this time in Sheil’s courtroom. Although Spivack now said he wanted to oust Minton because he intended to move into the apartment, Sheil refused to modify Morris’s ruling. In another case Nellie and Alexander Weddick claimed they needed John J. O’Connell’s apartment on East 201st Street for a niece and her three children, a claim challenged by O’Connell’s lawyer, who argued that the Weddicks wanted to oust his client because he had refused to pay a rent hike. Sheil resolved the dispute by ordering the Weddicks to give O’Connell a one-year lease, albeit at a higher rent. But few tenants fared as well in Sheil’s courtroom as Minton and O’Connell.22 Among the other judges who ruled in favor of the landlords in cases in which many of their colleagues would probably have ruled in favor of the tenants were George L. Genung and Michael J. Scanlan. Born in upstate New York in 1882, Genung went to Cornell and New York Law School, worked as secretary to Nathan L. Miller, a New York Supreme Court justice (and later governor of New York), and at thirty-five was appointed to fill a vacancy in Manhattan’s Ninth District Court. Shortly thereafter he was elected to a full ten-year term. Like all municipal court judges, Genung

Not long before ruling against Private Bogomolia, Scanlan told the Lockwood Committee that the April laws “have worked out very well [in the Bronx]” and “ought to be left as they are.” Charles Carroll, who had been sitting in

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sometimes sat in courts other than his own. One day in late August he presided over a dispute in the Sixth District Court between the Kayell Realty Corporation, which owned an apartment house on East 97th Street, and forty of its tenants, who refused to pay a 40 percent rent hike. When Genung proposed that the tenants pay an increase of 25 percent immediately and 10 percent more on October 1, William Karlin, the tenants’ lawyer, objected, pointing out that the rents had already been raised $3 to $5 in April 1919, another $11 in November 1919, and now ranged from $28 to $42 a month. “I don’t care how large the rents are,” said the judge, “the law recognizes the landlord’s right to [a] 25 per cent increase,” a common but erroneous reading of the April laws. After conferences among Genung, Karlin, and Alexander Lurie, the landlord’s agent, and between Karlin and his clients, Genung decided to grant the tenants a stay until October 1, after which the rents would be raised 35 percent above the August 1919 rates, bringing them from $37.80 to $56.70 a month—a substantial increase, if not quite as much as Kayell Realty wanted.23 Unlike Genung, Scanlan was a native New Yorker. Born in 1858, he attended public school and then studied law at NYU. Admitted to the bar in 1877, he was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Bronx Second District Court in 1916 and a year later was elected to a full term. By a stroke of bad luck, Scanlan was sitting in the First District Court in late September when David Goodman, the owner of a building on Charlotte Street, asked for a final order against Private Beril Bogomolia for nonpayment of rent. A father of three small children, Bogomolia had enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after the United States entered World War I. At the Battle of the Argonne, wrote the Home News, he “ran into a German machine gun nest” and “was riddled with bullets” that left his left arm and left leg shattered and his right arm useless. After a while Bogomolia was shipped home and admitted to Fox Hills Hospital. While he was undergoing treatment, Goodman notified his wife that the rent was going up from $25 to $35 a month. Mrs. Bogomolia, whose only source of income was a military allowance of $55 a month, pleaded with the landlord to postpone the increase, but to no avail. Fearing eviction, she gave in. Shortly thereafter, however, her husband decided that the rent was unreasonable and refused to pay it. Before long he was summoned to appear before Judge Scanlan. “Pale, emaciated and crippled,” wrote the Home News, the much-decorated soldier “hobbled into the crowded courtroom, assisted by two women.” On the verge of collapse, he described his plight to Scanlan, who, to the dismay of the spectators, ruled against him and, though he had the power to grant a stay of up to twelve months, declared, “You will have to pay your rent or move within five days.” The disabled man sobbed “so this is what I fought for” as he was helped from the courtroom. (Scanlan’s decision generated such a furor that the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering managed to obtain a ten-day stay for Bogomolia and stop the city marshals from evicting him.)24

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Brooklyn’s Third District Court for less than a year, agreed. “So far,” he said, “the laws have worked out wonderfully well”—even, he said, in Brownsville, where he had recently sat for three weeks. Adam Christman, who presided over the Third District Court in Queens, felt much the same way. Although he disagreed with how some of his colleagues interpreted the April laws, he had little trouble dealing with disputes that arose out of them. In nine cases out of ten he was able to prevail on the landlords and tenants to settle. Also favorably impressed with the April laws was Frederick J. Spiegelberg, who sat on Manhattan’s Fifth District Court. Reminding the Lockwood Committee that the new laws were intended to curb rent profiteering, not to stimulate residential construction, he testified that “they are doing as well as can be done”; indeed, “they are doing much better than most people thought they would do.” Even Fiorello H. La Guardia, president of the Board of Aldermen, praised the April laws. Although they “did not go as far as some of us hoped,” he said, they have been “a blessing for New York City.”25 To other New Yorkers, the April laws were anything but a blessing. By the summer the tenants had come to believe that the laws had not done enough to curb rent profiteering. To the many whose landlords had raised the rent in 1918 and 1919, it was outrageous that some judges were allowing them to raise it 25 percent more in 1920—and might allow them to raise it another 25 percent in 1921. To the tenants who wrongly assumed that under the April laws the landlords were entitled to no more than a 25 percent increase, it was even more outrageous that some judges were letting the landlords raise the rent 40 and 50 percent. Against such rapacious landlords, one tenant wrote Governor Alfred E. Smith, the April laws “have little or no effect.” Many tenants also wrongly assumed that under the new laws they could not be dispossessed as long as they were willing to pay a 25 percent increase. But they soon learned that if the landlord brought summary proceedings against them for holding over, the judge could do no more than grant a stay, at the expiration of which the tenants could be ousted. Rather than face eviction, many tenants gave in to the landlord’s demands, no matter how unreasonable. As Judge Strahl put it, “holdover proceedings have turned into holdup proceedings.” The tenants were also dissatisfied with the April laws because some judges gave stays of one month, others of three months, and still others of one year. Moreover, said Judge Christman, some judges would grant a stay and then tell the tenant, “If you cannot find anything in that time, come back here, and I will give you a further stay,” and others, himself among them, held that no judge “has a right to grant a further stay [once he] signs a final order.” As Mrs. Harry Arthur, a leader of the Fair Play Rent Association, told the Lockwood Committee, when women facing summary proceedings asked her, “Do you think we have got a chance[?]” she responded, “Who is your Judge and where is your court[?]”26 Another source of dissatisfaction was what Leo Kenneth Mayer called “the many devious methods by which landlords tried to circumvent the recently enacted rent legislation and frighten tenants into paying inflated rentals.” Some landlords applied to what Jacob Strahl branded “handpicked” state court judges for a writ to

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prevent the municipal court judges from hearing cases until the tenants had been evicted. In some instances the landlords also threatened to sue the tenants for damages in state court if they refused to move out after their leases expired. Some landlords were “ready to swear to anything as long as [they] get the Almighty dollar,” charged Judge Morris, even if it meant committing perjury. In an attempt to justify rent hikes, they inflated the old rentals and submitted fraudulent receipts for expenses. In an effort to oust the current tenants, they claimed they wanted apartments for themselves that they had no intention of occupying. They also filed for permits for alterations and renovations that they had no intention of making. Some landlords converted large unfurnished apartments into two or more small furnished apartments, charging exorbitant rates for a few pieces of furniture and in the process, said Arthur J. W. Hilly, replacing families with bachelors or couples with “a pet dog.” Other landlords designated apartment houses as office buildings, which were not covered by the April laws. Still other landlords put their buildings on the market as cooperatives, which, Mayer pointed out, was done sometimes “to get tenants out quickly [and] to get others in at fabulous rentals, and at other times as a stock-jobbing scheme through which the promoters hope to unload their property at highly inflated prices[,] at the same time perpetuating their management and control.”27 The landlords were even more dissatisfied with the April laws than the tenants. Despite the repeated assurances by Senator Lockwood and Judge Spiegelberg, most of them soon became skeptical that the new laws were aimed exclusively at rapacious landlords. Even reputable landlords were not being given a “square deal,” said the Harlem Property Owners’ Association. Under the April laws, the landlords complained, many judges did not allow them to raise their rents enough to cover their expenses, and some did not allow them to raise the rents at all. Hence many landlords were hard-pressed to make ends meet. Asked in court what profit he made on his investment, a Bronx landlord replied, “Profit! Ugh, believe me, Judge, I don’t know what a profit is.” “It’s a crime, Judge, the way I am losing money,” money that “I spend like running water.” Some landlords even claimed that the April laws were driving them to “the verge of bankruptcy,” wrote the Home News. Under the new laws, the landlords also complained, it was very hard to oust a tenant who refused to pay a rent hike or move out after the lease expired. “This is the tenants’ day,” a Brooklyn tenant told her landlord, who testified that she “as much as defied me to dispossess her.” By virtue of the new laws, Assemblyman McWhinney pointed out, the landlords have a good deal of trouble renting apartments. Given that the municipal court judges were now empowered to grant a stay of up to twelve months to any tenant who tried without success to find another apartment, the landlord “can give [a prospective tenant] no assurance of possession.” The result was an “endless chain of trouble” for landlords and tenants alike, said the real estate interests.28 More frustrating to the landlords than how the April laws were written was how they were enforced. As Rachel Ellison wrote Governor Smith, the April laws left the landlords at the mercy of municipal court judges who “have not the faintest idea of

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realty values” and whose sympathies “are entirely with the tenants.” The landlords also claimed that the courts were so busy that even if they tried, the judges could not give each case the attention it deserved. With so many cases on the calendar, a judge would have to be “a lightning calculator” to figure out what rent a landlord was entitled to. And not all judges tried, said Michael Murray, who owned a house on Hunt Avenue in the Bronx. Murray brought summary proceedings against John W. Pawling for nonpayment of rent in early August. Although Murray had raised Pawling’s rent from $27 to $40 a month, or nearly 50 percent, he felt that the increase was justified because he had spent $3,200 on the property in the past few months, finishing the exterior in stucco and putting in electricity, hot water, and steam heat, all of which turned it into “one of the finest houses in the neighborhood.” But even before Murray had a chance “to say a word” to the court, Judge Robitzek granted Pawling a stay until January 1921 at the old rent—and, to the landlord’s dismay, promptly called out, “Next case.” Stanley M. Isaacs held that the April laws not only posed a problem “far beyond” the capacity of many municipal court judges, but also provided few guidelines to help them solve it. The judges did not even see fit to follow the rules they themselves had established, Isaacs added, and thus “each justice establishes and applies his own theories.”29 Some New Yorkers also charged that the April laws blocked the resumption of residential construction. Among the most outspoken was A. C. McNulty. In the aftermath of World War I, he wrote Governor Smith, it was extremely risky to build an apartment house. Under the April laws it was downright foolhardy. “No sane man” would erect an apartment house knowing that “when completed and occupied[,] the property would pass from the control of its owner to that of the Municipal Court Justices.” Nor would anyone invest in such an enterprise, added Albert H. Atterbury. Other New Yorkers contended that these charges were groundless. Judge Spiegelberg insisted that residential construction was at a standstill not because of the April laws, but because of the cost of labor, the scarcity of materials, and the shortage of capital. Clarence S. Stein, secretary of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, agreed. The April laws had no impact on builders because “they were not going to build [anyway],” he said. It is not clear which side was right. Despite the unfavorable economic conditions, builders were putting up offices, lofts, theaters, and garages—indeed virtually everything except dwellings, which were the only buildings that were covered by the April laws. By the same token, residential construction was still in the doldrums not only in New York, but also in Chicago and other cities where rents were not regulated. What is clear is that the April laws had done nothing to stimulate residential construction. Or as Walter J. Arndt, secretary of the Citizens Union, told Governor Smith, they had not provided builders any incentive to erect apartment houses.30 Given the widespread dissatisfaction with the April laws, many New Yorkers urged Governor Smith to call a special session of the state legislature to try again to resolve the housing problem. At first it was just a few tenant activists, civic leaders, and financiers. But they were soon joined by a diverse group, Republicans as well as

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Democrats, among them Borough President Curran, Judge Robitzek, Senator Dunnigan, and Harry Allen Ely, president of the Washington Heights Tenants Association. Also included was the Mayor’s Housing Conference Committee, a blue-ribbon panel that was appointed by Mayor Hylan in May and, under the leadership of Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann, was supposed to find ways to stimulate residential construction. Not everyone was in favor of a special session. Hilly saw no need for one, especially if its purpose was to revise the April laws. Judges Spiegelberg and Scanlan agreed with him, as did Mayor Hylan, Leo Kenneth Mayer, and Commissioner of Accounts David Hirshfield. But they were the exceptions. And as Hilly acknowledged, by mid-summer the governor, who was nearing the end of his first term and getting ready to run for a second, was under a great deal of pressure to summon the legislators back to Albany before the November election—a move, the Real Estate Board pointed out, that would lend support to its position that the enactment of the April laws had been a serious mistake.31 Despite this pressure, Smith was slow to make up his mind. He was well aware that a special session was ordinarily so short, no more than a few days in most cases, that it was unlikely to be productive unless a consensus about what ought to be done was arrived at beforehand. But there was no consensus about how to prevent rent profiteering. Some New Yorkers favored repealing the April laws (and, if that was not possible, loosening them)—a step, said the Real Estate Board, that would ease the housing shortage and thereby curb the profiteering landlords. Others wanted to tighten them. Still others recommended extending them to cover commercial as well as residential tenants and medium-sized as well as big cities. Even among the New Yorkers who wanted to tighten the April laws, there was no agreement about how to do so. Some wanted to broaden the discretion of the municipal court judges, others favored narrowing it, and still others recommended setting up a board that would regulate rents in much the same way that public utility commissions regulated rates. Some New Yorkers were in favor of defining a reasonable rent by statute. Others wanted to place the burden of proof on the landlords even if the increase was less than 25 percent. Still others called for imposing a ceiling of 12 percent on rent hikes. Some New Yorkers favored empowering the judges to grant stays of as long as three to five years—or even longer. Others wanted to abolish summary proceedings in holdover cases. And Ely even proposed banning judges who were landlords from hearing landlord-tenant cases. If introduced at a special session, most of these measures would have run into a good deal of opposition.32 Nor was there a consensus about how to stimulate residential construction. In order to induce capital to invest in housing, some New Yorkers favored exempting mortgage income from state and federal taxes. Others wanted to exempt new residential structures from local property taxes. Still others recommended that financial institutions, some of which were not averse to lending money to Peruvian railroad companies, be required to invest a portion of their assets in residential mortgages. Some New Yorkers also proposed suspending the Tenement House Act of

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1901 until the emergency was over—and in the meantime empowering the tenement house commissioner to expedite the conversion of one- and two-family houses into three- and four-family tenements, a proposal that was strongly opposed by the tenement house reformers. Many other New Yorkers believed that private builders were unlikely to do much on their own to increase the housing supply. Led by Curran, some called for a constitutional amendment to authorize the state and its cities to go into the housing business. Others, among them Clarence S. Stein and the members of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, favored a constitutional amendment to permit the state to extend credit to builders who wanted to erect moderately priced homes for working people. If introduced at a special session, most of these measures would have run into a good deal of opposition too.33 The governor was well aware that there were times when it made sense to call a special session even in the absence of a consensus about what should be done. And it looked as if the summer of 1920 might be one of those times. Although World War I had been over for more than a year and a half, labor and materials were still so costly and capital still so scarce that very few builders were resuming residential construction. During the first half of 1920, Stein told the Lockwood Committee, fewer than one hundred multi-family houses were erected in New York. And only 2,200 apartments were added to the housing stock, a stunning figure in a city where roughly 28,000 apartments a year had been added before the war. Of the few apartments under construction, the Home News reported, most were rented before they were finished and at rates well beyond the means of working-class families. At the same time nearly one hundred tenement houses were demolished and another two hundred converted into non-residential structures. A number of one- and two-family houses were built, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, but far too few to make up for the slowdown in apartment-house construction. With New York’s population growing steadily, the vacancy rate plummeted. And there was little reason to think it would return to normal in the near future. By mid-1920 New York City was short 100,000 apartments, and the shortage would probably rise to 125,000 by 1921. “We are approaching a crisis,” warned Walter B. Stabler, controller of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in June.34 The April laws, it was widely believed, had headed off one crisis in the spring. But it was far from clear that they could head off another in the fall. Despite these laws, many landlords were raising the rents and, when the tenants refused to pay, bringing summary proceedings. By mid-August, the Times reported, the number of evictions was soaring, reaching one thousand a week in Brooklyn and five to six hundred a week in Queens. Starting in the summer, some landlords also notified the tenants that their leases would not be renewed on October 1 even if they were willing to pay a substantial rent hike. Many others followed suit. Before long they had served roughly 100,000 dispossess notices, generating widespread fears of wholesale evictions in the fall. Several well-informed observers argued that these fears were groundless. Hilly pointed out that even if a landlord refused to renew the

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lease, the tenant was still protected by the April laws. Judge Spiegelberg stressed that even if a tenant were summoned to court, it would be days, if not weeks, before his case was heard. And in the end the judge would probably give the tenant a long stay. But most New Yorkers were not reassured. They believed that there would be a crisis in the fall, one that would be “beyond anything New York has ever known,” wrote the Daily Tribune. And, said Judge Robitzek, things would be even worse next spring, when thousands of one-year stays would expire and as many as 40,000 families would be left homeless in the Bronx alone. Even Hilly acknowledged that conditions would be “chaotic” in the fall, when tens of thousands of tenants who had leased a new apartment effective October 1 discovered they could not move in because the old tenants would not move out.35 As late as early August, Governor Smith said he had not yet decided to call a special session. Asked about a statement to the contrary by a representative of the Real Estate Board, he declared there was “absolutely nothing” to it. But Smith was being disingenuous. If he had not yet decided to call a special session, he was very much leaning in that direction. Like many New Yorkers, he feared that if there were wholesale evictions in the fall there might well be civil disorder in the city. As Belle Moskowitz, one of his closest aides, pointed out, it would occur “on the very eve of the presidential election, which will play into the hands of the Socialists, who have no remedy themselves [for the housing problem], but will say that they have.” It would also play into the hands of the Republicans, some of whom were trying to capitalize on the widespread dissatisfaction with the April laws. In view of the growing unpopularity of the Wilson administration, moreover, Smith would face an uphill battle in his race for reelection. He was well aware, as one constituent reminded him, that “there are five hundred tenants” for every five landlords. Hence on August 12 the governor issued a proclamation calling for a special session. It was to convene on September 20, which left the legislators only five weeks to reach an agreement about what to do before Moving Day.36 The Daily Eagle had reservations about Smith’s decision. Prior efforts to solve the housing problem had “accomplished nothing,” it commented. Given the high costs of labor and materials, any attempt to induce private enterprise to resume residential construction was doomed. And any attempt to amend the constitution to permit the erection of public housing or the extension of public credit would take too long to do much good. The Times was more optimistic. Stressing that the April laws were “merely palliatives,” it expressed confidence that the legislators would be able to devise a policy to ease the housing shortage. Also more optimistic were Curran, who had urged Smith to call a special session, and La Guardia, who praised the governor for keeping “his ears close to the ground.” This optimism, which was shared by other New Yorkers, spurred a flurry of activity. Senator Lockwood promptly announced that his committee would have several recommendations ready by September. And before long hundreds of bills (and a few constitutional amendments) were being drafted to deal with the housing problem, some of which, wrote the Times, were “almost diametrically opposite in their purposes.” It was not without

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reason that many New Yorkers believed that the special session would be inundated with “a flood of measures.”37 As Smith was well aware, a special session was not the place to deal with “a flood of measures.” Hence a week after issuing his proclamation he appealed to the legislative leaders to come up with “a definite program” that would spare the legislators the task of considering separately each of the hundreds of bills that were likely to be submitted at the special session. The Lockwood Committee was quick to respond. In an effort to restrain what the Times called “the clash of conflicting interests,” it invited virtually every major group with a stake in the outcome of the special session to send one or more representatives to a conference at City Hall. At the conference, which was held in early September, the governor made an impassioned speech in favor of public housing. A week or so later the legislative leaders called a conference of their own to hammer out an agreement before the special session convened. It was not easy to find common ground. It seemed that almost every day one or another group—representing not only landlords and tenants, but also builders, bankers, civic organizations, settlement houses, and state and local officials—came up with recommendations about what should be done (or, just as important, not done) to curb rent profiteering and stimulate residential construction. More often than not, these recommendations were at odds with one another. Even with the strong support of the governor, who pledged “to do everything in his power to cooperate with the Legislature,” it seemed highly unlikely that Assembly Speaker Sweet, Senate President Pro Tem Walters, and their associates would come up with a legislative package before September 20.38 The result was exactly what Smith had hoped to avoid. When the special session convened, wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, “both the Senate and the Assembly were literally swamped with bills.” The Lockwood Committee submitted eight to stimulate residential construction, five to curb rent profiteering, and one to expand its scope and powers. The governor also made several recommendations, all of which were spelled out in his message to the legislature. With the help of Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann, New York City Corporation Counsel John O. Brien drafted five bills on behalf of the Hylan administration. The Real Estate Board also came up with a handful of bills, as did the Apartment House Association. Among the others on whose behalf bills were submitted were Hilly, La Guardia, Bronx District Attorney Francis Martin, and the Tenants Union of Greater New York. With the Assembly sidetracked by a debate over what to do about the five ousted Socialists who had regained their seats as a result of a special election on September 16, the Senate and Assembly leaders met on and off for three days to consider the scores of bills in the hopper. Things came to a head on September 23, when, after five noncontroversial bills were passed, a public hearing was held, one that was as acrimonious than the hearing on the April laws. Following the hearing, a group of legislative leaders got together with several influential lobbyists and, driven by the fear that if they did nothing else there would be rioting and bloodshed in October and political retribution in November, hammered out an

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agreement on another five bills. These bills, which were much more controversial than the first five, were passed just before the special session adjourned late at night on September 24.39 To the dismay of many New Yorkers—landlords as well as tenants, Republicans as well as Democrats—only one of these bills was designed to ease the housing shortage. Known as chapter 949, it was a revised version of a bill introduced by Assemblyman Martin G. McCue at the regular session. Enacted over the opposition of owners of prewar apartment houses, it allowed the cities, towns, and counties to exempt new residential structures—including apartment houses of four or more stories whose ground floor was used for commercial purposes, but not hotels—from property taxes until January 1, 1932, provided that construction was completed after April 1, 1920, or commenced before April 1, 1922, and completed within two years or, if now under construction, before September 27, 1922. In the face of deep-seated ideological and practical objections from the real estate interests, the legislators shelved the bills to amend the constitution to enable the cities to go into the housing business and permit the state to lend its credit to private builders. Under intense pressure from the financial industry, they also backed away from requiring savings banks and insurance companies to invest a portion of their assets in residential mortgages. And when Frank Mann could not reach an agreement with Lawson Purdy and other tenement house reformers, the legislators tabled the bills to amend the Tenement House Act of 1901 and expedite the conversion of one- and two-family houses into three- and four-family tenements. A bill to exempt mortgage income from state taxes, which for a while seemed to be one of the few things on which the legislators agreed, passed the Senate “without a murmur,” wrote the Times. But in the face of strenuous opposition from upstate officials and experts on tax policy, one of whom testified that the measure was nothing but “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” the Assembly voted down the bill by a wide margin. So far as stimulating residential construction was concerned, the legislature has done “nothing, or next to nothing,” noted the Times. It “might as well have not been called into session,” added the Home News.40 Much more momentous than chapter 949 were chapters 942, 944, 945, and 947, the other bills enacted at the end of the special session, all of which were designed to protect the tenants from the landlords until November 1, 1922. Chapter 942, which applied only to New York and cities in the adjoining counties, suspended summary proceedings in holdover cases, which meant that under ordinary circumstances a landlord could no longer oust a tenant whose lease had expired. As a result, said Hilly, “moving day” was abolished for two years. “The 100,000 dispossess notices sent out have been wiped out as if they never existed”—and the city marshals deprived of “their lucrative gold mine.” Chapter 944, which applied to New York, Buffalo, Rochester, and Westchester County, tightened chapter 136 of the April laws. It struck out any reference to the 25 percent rule and provided that if a landlord brought summary proceedings for nonpayment of rent he would have to prove to the municipal court judge that the rent hike, no matter how small, was reasonable.

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He would also have to submit a bill of particulars, spelling out his revenues and expenses, and turn it over to the tenants before trial. Chapter 945, which also applied to New York, Buffalo, Rochester, and Westchester County, supplemented chapter 944. It stipulated that a landlord could not bring summary proceedings for nonpayment of rent unless the rent was no higher than it had been in the preceding month and no higher than it had been a year earlier. Henceforth a tenant could only be evicted for nonpayment of rent if he failed to pay the old rent or a reasonable rent as determined by a municipal court judge. Chapter 947, which applied only to New York City and cities in the adjoining counties, provided that in the event a landlord attempted to circumvent chapter 942 by bringing an action for ejectment, the state court judges would be bound by the same rules as the municipal court judges.41 Governor Smith was far from pleased with the outcome of the special session. Like most New Yorkers, he was disappointed that the legislators had passed only one measure to ease the housing shortage—a measure, some observers believed, that would do little to stimulate residential construction. He was also annoyed that the legislators had ignored the report of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, whose recommendations embodied his administration’s long-term solution to the housing problem. Moreover, Smith was under pressure to veto one or more of the bills. It came not only from spokesmen for the landlords, who, wrote the Call, complained that “the bills limited to an unheard of degree their control over their own property,” but also from spokesmen for the tenants, who protested that “the bills leave so many loopholes that landlords will be able to get by them as they did when the rent laws of last winter were enacted.” These constraints notwithstanding, there was no doubt that Smith would sign the bills. He believed he had to do something to protect New York’s tenants. And the only way to do so was to go along with the legislature. A veto, especially a veto of chapters 942, 944, 945, and 947, would have done serious injury to many New Yorkers. And given that on the same day the special session adjourned the Democratic Party nominated Smith as its candidate for governor, it would also have done severe damage to his political prospects. Hence on September 27, a little over a month before the election, Smith signed all ten bills, which took effect immediately and were known as the September laws.42 The September laws—which, together with the April laws, were known as the emergency rent laws—constituted the most extensive revision of landlord-tenant law in New York State since 1820, the year in which the state legislature had established summary proceedings and, in the words of two legal scholars, provided the landlords with “a simple, expeditious and inexpensive” alternative to ejectment. As James C. Cropsey, a Brooklyn appellate court judge, wrote, these laws created a tenancy that was “different from any kind that had theretofore existed or had [theretofore] been recognized.” By that he meant that most New Yorkers were now statutory tenants, who occupied their apartments not by virtue of an agreement with the landlord, but by virtue of a statute enacted by the legislature. As statutory

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tenants, they could not be ousted from their apartments before November 1, 1922, unless the landlord could prove to the satisfaction of a municipal court judge that he was entitled to an eviction warrant on the basis of one of the four exceptions stipulated in chapter 942. These exceptions were that the tenant was undesirable, that the landlord (or a member of his immediate family) wanted to move into the premises, that the landlord intended to demolish the old building and replace it with a new one, and that the building was being converted into a cooperative whose members intended to live in it. Unless one of these exceptions applied, a statutory tenant could only be evicted if he refused to pay the old rent or a reasonable rent as determined by a municipal court judge.43 In its efforts to regulate rents and prevent evictions, New York did not go as far as France, Britain, and other European countries, most of which enacted extremely stringent housing legislation during and after World War I. As early as December 1914 France had relieved servicemen and their dependents from the obligation to pay rent for up to six months. This law was subsequently renewed—and extended to residents of war zones and other vulnerable groups. In March 1918 it adopted a comprehensive law that protected the tenants against rent hikes and evictions for at least six months after the war. And to ease the burden on the landlords, it passed legislation indemnifying them against 50 percent of their losses and imposing a moratorium on mortgage payments. Britain had also enacted stringent laws to curb rent hikes and stop evictions (as well as to regulate interest rates on mortgages and prevent lenders from calling them). When the housing situation did not improve after the war, Parliament passed the Rent Act of 1920, which eased only slightly the provisions of the previous laws. By the end of the war, wrote Edith Elmer Wood, “nearly the whole of Europe [and not just the countries involved in the conflict] was covered by some form of tenant protection.”44 Nor did New York State go as far as some New Yorkers wanted. Besides shelving several bills designed to stimulate residential construction, the legislature ignored a couple of other proposals designed to ease the housing shortage. One, which was supported by the Call and the Nation on the grounds that in light of the current crisis “no man has a moral right to close the doors of a building which he does not use,” would have authorized the municipal authorities to take every unoccupied structure, renovate it, and then rent the apartments to needy tenants. The other proposal— which was backed by Joseph A. Guilder, acting borough president of Brooklyn, and other New Yorkers who were outraged that at the same time that residential construction was at a standstill builders were busily putting up office buildings, movie theaters, and other commercial structures—would have empowered the municipalities to impose a ban on the construction of anything but dwelling places. The legislators also refused to act on a host of other measures that were designed to protect New York’s tenants. They did not abolish summary proceedings outright, not for holding over and not for nonpayment of rent. Nor, despite lobbying by merchants, manufacturers, and other businessmen, did they give commercial tenants the same protection as residential tenants. And notwithstanding strong

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pressure from tenants groups, they did not provide statutory limits on how much and how often the landlords could raise the rent. The legislators also exempted new residential buildings from many of the emergency rent laws.45 But for most New Yorkers, the emergency rent laws went far enough—and, in the opinion of virtually all real estate men, too far. Although they did not go as far as the war measures enacted in Europe, Edith Elmer Wood contended that they were the most drastic infringement of property rights “of any housing measure adopted outside of Soviet Russia.” According to the Times, the emergency rent laws were widely regarded by many lawyers as “the most drastic measures [affecting property rights] ever enacted by the lawmaking body of this State.” The Nation agreed. It found it ironic that the same legislature that began the year by ousting the five Socialist assemblymen ended it by enacting “the most socialistic legislation in the history of the commonwealth.” New York has done more to regulate rents and prevent evictions than any other state, Henry R. Brigham, chairman of the Housing Committee of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, told the Ninth Annual Conference on Housing. Along with the congressional act that set up the District of Columbia Rent Commission—which, said Representative Theodore E. Burton of Ohio, who had served eight terms in the House, was “one of the most drastic statutes I ever read,” one that looked as if it were drawn by “a disgruntled tenant” who wanted “to get even” with his landlord—the emergency rent laws went “far beyond anything ever attempted before in this country,” said Bingham.46 Some New Yorkers strongly condemned the emergency rent laws. They were a form of oppression for the landlords and “sovietism for the tenants,” wrote the Real Estate Board. Many other New Yorkers praised them just as strongly. The new laws “are by no means perfect,” declared La Guardia, but “as a first step, they were the most useful piece of legislation in the history of the State.” Virtually everyone agreed that the emergency rent laws were a landmark in the history of landlord-tenant law. The Survey, which was deeply concerned about the plight of New York’s tenants, called the new laws “the most radical revision [of landlord-tenant relations] ever attempted in this country.” And the Home News, which boasted that it had long been the champion of the borough’s tenants, described these laws as “one of the most drastic acts since the American revolution.” A. C. McNulty agreed. These laws represented “the most extreme exercise of the police power that has ever been essayed by an American commonwealth,” he said. McNulty’s view was shared by Louis B. Marshall and Lewis M. Isaacs, both of whom were pillars of the New York City Bar and sharp critics of the emergency rent laws. Pointing out that the laws took the control of property “devoted to purposes essentially private” out of the hands of its owners, they wrote that “never before in the history of our country has legislation of so revolutionary a character been undertaken.”47 Aside from several Socialist leaders, one of whom said that the legislature had done too little too late, most New Yorkers held that the emergency rent laws were, in the words of the Globe, “a great victory” for the tenants. As one New York lawyer wrote:

In substance, the State of New York said to the landlords: “You are enti-

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tled to rental, but not to extortionate rental; you will not be permitted to welfare. You shall not have what the market will enable you to get if it had free scope. We will authorize our courts to fix ‘fair and reasonable rentals’ for such housing and you will take that and no more. We will not permit our courts to be used as instruments of oppression. There will be no dispossession of tenants for non-payment of rents when our courts determine that the rents are reasonable.”48 But other New Yorkers knew that the tenants’ “great victory” might well be shortlived. As Samuel Untermyer, chief counsel to the Lockwood Committee, pointed out, the emergency rent laws stretched the constitutional power of the legislature to “the utmost limit.” And no sooner were the laws enacted than some of the many real estate men who believed that they went well beyond the “utmost limit” decided to challenge them on constitutional grounds.

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take advantage of this extraordinary situation at the cost of the public

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PA R T T H R E E

Constitutional Challenges

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9 The Battle in the State Courts

New York’s real estate men lost no time launching an attack on the emergency rent laws. On October 1, just a few days after the September laws went into effect, the Board of Governors of the Real Estate Board held a special meeting at which it decided to test what it viewed as the state legislature’s misguided decision to suspend the fundamental rights of the city’s property owners. As counsel, the board retained George L. Ingraham, a former presiding justice of the First Department of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, which covered Manhattan and the Bronx, and now a partner in a leading New York City law firm. At the same time a group of apartment house owners, brokers, and managers held a meeting at which they formed the Real Estate Investors, Inc., sometimes referred to as the Real Estate Interests, Inc., an organization whose sole purpose was to test the constitutionality of the rent laws. As counsel, it retained Francis M. Scott, another former New York Supreme Court judge and now a partner in a prominent New York City law firm too. The Real Estate Investors, Inc., soon joined forces with the Real Estate Board, as did the Apartment House Owners and Builders Association and other property owners’ groups. If all this were not enough, some New York landlords were planning to challenge the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws on their own.1 Most New York real estate men believed that the emergency rent laws would not withstand judicial scrutiny. According to A. C. McNulty, counsel to the Real Estate Board, and F. S. Bancroft, vice president of Pease & Elliman, many of these laws, especially chapters 942, 944, and 947, violated one or more provisions of the U.S. and New York State constitutions. The members of the Brooklyn Real Estate Board agreed. Even some legislators had doubts about the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws, noted the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. The Real Estate Investors, Inc., pointed out that no less an authority than Charles Evans Hughes,

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former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (as well as former governor of New York and Republican presidential candidate), had rendered an informal opinion that the laws were unconstitutional. But many other New Yorkers believed that the rent laws would survive a constitutional challenge. “I have no fear as to the constitutionality of [the] measures enacted at the emergency session,” declared Arthur J. W. Hilly, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. With the possible exception of chapter 947, “there was nothing in the new laws that was not absolutely consistent with every principle of Anglo-Saxon justice,” contended Harold G. Aron, professor of Real Property Law at New York Law School. His committee had done its utmost to draft laws that “would hold water,” said Senator Charles C. Lockwood, even shelving several bills that might have curbed rent profiteering out of fear that they would be held unconstitutional.2 But many lawyers held that the issue was less clear-cut. As Aron pointed out, the problem was that the emergency rent laws consisted of more than twenty different acts, of which half were enacted at the regular session and half at the special session. The less stringent ones were almost certain to pass judicial muster. But the more draconian ones raised serious constitutional issues. A case could be made that these laws impaired the contractual obligations of landlords and tenants, which was barred by article 1, section 10 of the U.S. Constitution (as well as a similar provision of the New York State Constitution). A case could also be made that these laws deprived the landlords of property without due process of law and denied them the equal protection of the law, which was prohibited under the Fourteenth Amendment (and another provision of the state constitution). In light of the current emergency, it was possible that the rent laws would withstand judicial scrutiny. It was also possible that they would be held unconstitutional. It was even possible that the state courts would rule one way and the federal courts another. As of October 1920 the situation was so fraught with uncertainty that the constitutionality of the New York rent laws “must be regarded as still open,” wrote Henry H. Glassie, a prominent Washington, D.C., lawyer who would later appear before the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of the Ball Rent Act, which regulated rents in the District of Columbia.3 Glassie knew what he was talking about. As of October 1920 there was good reason to believe that the emergency rent laws would survive a constitutional challenge. Starting in May, several landlords had filed suit for nonpayment of rent and, when the tenants responded that the rent was unreasonable, argued that the April laws were unconstitutional. To the dismay of most landlords, the courts were not swayed by this argument. In some cases they sidestepped the constitutional issue. In Paterno Investing Corporation v. Katz, which was handed down in June, Judge Irving Lehman ruled in favor of the landlord on the grounds that the April laws were not retroactive, but also insisted that the constitutionality of the laws was not “in any way involved in the decision.” And in Blek v. Davis, which was decided in July, the First Department of the Appellate Division “left the [constitutional] question open,” to quote Aron. The courts upheld the April laws in other cases

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too. In Seventy-Eighth St. & Broadway Co. v. Rosenbaum, which was decided in May, Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg ruled that chapter 136 did not violate article 1, section 10 of the U.S. Constitution. And in Kuenzli v. Stone, which was also handed down in May, the Appellate Term of the Second Department upheld a ruling of a Queens municipal court judge in favor of the tenant. Writing for the court, Charles H. Kelby rejected the landlord’s argument that chapter 137 was unconstitutional. Since the state legislature had created summary proceedings, it was within its power to modify or even abolish it.4 But as of October 1920 there was also good reason to believe that the emergency rent laws would not survive a constitutional challenge. For one thing, the September laws were much more onerous than the April laws—and thus much more vulnerable to attack. To give one example, the April laws changed the rules governing summary proceedings, but not the rules governing ejectment, the other action by which a landlord could recover his property. Indeed, in Kuenzli v. Stone, Kelby stressed the point that under the April laws “owners of real property still have the remedy of an action in ejectment.” But under chapter 947 of the September laws the legislature suspended actions in ejectment in all but a few exceptional cases until November 1, 1922. For another thing, the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals, one of the country’s most influential federal courts, had recently held that two measures that regulated rents in the nation’s capital were unconstitutional. In Willson v. McDonnell, which was decided in December 1919, it struck down the Saulsbury Resolution, which Congress had adopted in May 1918 to prevent Washington landlords from raising rents and evicting tenants until World War I was over. And in Hirsh v. Block, which was handed down six months later, the Court of Appeals ruled against the Ball Rent Act. Passed by Congress in October 1919, this act superseded the Saulsbury Resolution, imposed rent control in the capital, and set up the District of Columbia Rent Commission to implement it.5 With the stakes so high, both sides assembled a team of top-notch lawyers. In addition to retaining Ingraham and Scott, the real estate interests brought in five veteran real estate lawyers to work with them. Assuming that the case or cases would be taken up to the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, and the U.S. Supreme Court, the real estate interests enlisted the help of Louis B. Marshall, who was called “a great constitutional lawyer” by Julius Henry Cohen, a prominent attorney who had helped stabilize labor relations in the garment industry and would later serve as general counsel to the Port of New York Authority. During the 1880s and 1890s Marshall had probably argued more cases before the Court of Appeals than any other lawyer. Not to be outdone, the Lockwood Committee put together an extremely well-qualified team of lawyers, which included Cohen, Elmer G. Sammis, and Bernard Hershkopf, a member of Guthrie, Bangs & Van Sinderen, one of New York’s foremost law firms. At the request of Governor Alfred E. Smith, Charles D. Newton came on board. And at the urging of Hershkopf, William D. Guthrie, the senior partner in Guthrie, Bangs & Van Sinderen, agreed to defend the emergency rent laws in the appellate courts. As towering a figure as Marshall,

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Guthrie was a highly successful corporate lawyer who had probably appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court as often as anyone. He was also a leading authority on the Fourteenth Amendment, which he had long viewed as the principal safeguard against misguided social legislation. By defending the emergency rent laws, writes one legal scholar, Guthrie would be arguing against “the sanctity of private property which he had done so much to preserve.” Guthrie’s decision, which astonished many of his fellow lawyers, was a great boon for the defense. With such an eminent conservative jurist on our side, “we could not be called a bunch of radicals,” wrote Cohen.6 What the Times called preliminary skirmishes got under way soon after the September laws went into effect. Most of them took place in the New York Supreme Court, which, its name notwithstanding, was a trial court as well as an intermediate appellate court. According to the Times, the first case to be “decided squarely” on constitutional grounds was brought in early October by Jacob L. Guttag, the owner of an apartment house on Crotona Parkway who asked the court to eject Hyman Shatzkin, a tenant who had balked at signing a new lease at a much higher rent and refused to move out when the old lease expired. In a Bronx courtroom that was jammed with landlords, tenants, and lawyers, Guttag’s counsel, Bernard S. Deutsch, asked Judge Edward R. Finch, a former state assemblyman, to oust Shatzkin, arguing that the legislature had overstepped its constitutional limits by suspending ejectment. Claiming that the “emergency” was a “bug-a-boo” created by the press, he stressed that if the legislature was allowed to suspend ejectment for two years it might as easily suspend it indefinitely. Shatzkin’s lawyer, Julius D. Tobias, countered that the legislature had the power to determine that an emergency existed and to deal with it. Chapter 947 did not strip the New York Supreme Court of its power to eject tenants; it just limited it “for a certain time.” Two weeks later Finch ruled in favor of Shatzkin. The September laws were constitutional, he wrote. It was up to the legislature, not the courts, to determine whether an emergency existed. And in his judgment the means adopted to deal with it were “appropriate to the end sought.” Praised by Hilly, who called it “as fine a piece of judicial interpretation as I have seen in many a day,” and the Times, which voiced the hope that it would stand up on appeal, Finch’s decision was a “decisive blow” to the landlords, wrote the Bronx Home News.7 The blow was cushioned somewhat at the end of October, when Judge Henry D. Hotchkiss, a Tammany Hall chief and close associate of former Tammany leader Richard Croker, granted a motion by Rose Heyman, the trustee of an apartment house on West 104th Street, asking the court to eject a holdover tenant by the name of Louis W. Osterweis. In explaining his decision, Hotchkiss made the point that chapter 947 applied only to leases entered into after September 27, 1920, the day on which the September laws went into effect, which was not so in the case at hand. If construed otherwise, it would be unconstitutional. Hotchkiss could have stopped at this point. But instead he went on to say that the constitutionality of the September

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laws “should be passed upon by the court of last resort as soon as possible.” And though he found it “impossible” to express his views on the issue in “a formal opinion,” he had no compunction about declaring that he had “grave doubts” about the validity of chapter 947. In conjunction with chapter 942, it deprived landlords “of all remedy for the repossession of their property.” Since the act did not compensate them for any losses, it could not be upheld as a proper use of eminent domain; nor could it be sustained as “a valid exercise of the police power.” Chapter 947 also discriminated between owners of old buildings and owners of new buildings as well as between “owners who seek to regain possession of their property for their personal use and those who seek possession for other purposes.”8 In other words, it deprived landlords of property without providing them the due process of law and denied them the equal protection of the law. If the real estate interests’ hopes were raised by Judge Hotchkiss, they were dashed by Judge Robert F. Wagner, a Democrat who had spent over a decade in the New York State legislature and would later serve four terms in the U.S. Senate. A month after Hotchkiss sided with the landlord in Heyman v. Osterweis, Wagner ruled for the tenant in two cases, Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel and Ullmann Realty Co. v. Tamur. The first case went back to the spring of 1920, when Levy Leasing, which owned an apartment house on West 57th Street, notified Jerome Siegel that the two-year lease on his apartment, the rent for which was $1,450 a year, was going to expire on October 1. Unless he signed a new lease, under which the rent would be raised to $2,160 a year, he would have to vacate the premises. Afraid that he would be unable to find another apartment, Siegel signed the lease in May, agreeing to pay $180 a month starting on October 1. But when the first month’s rent came due, Siegel informed Levy Leasing that he was willing to pay the old rent, but not the new rent. Levy Leasing filed suit, asking Wagner to grant a motion ordering Siegel to pay the outstanding $180. In his defense, Siegel claimed not only that he had had signed the lease under duress, but also that he was protected by chapter 944, which prohibited landlords from charging an unreasonable rent. In response, Levy Leasing argued that chapter 944 was unconstitutional. Wagner held otherwise and denied the company’s motion.9 In the second case Wagner did more than just rule in favor of a tenant named Kintara Tamur, who had held over in her apartment on East 66th Street after Ullmann Realty raised the rent from $30—which, observed the judge, she “has ever since been ready and willing to pay”—to $35. He also dealt with an issue that Judge George V. Mullan had sidestepped a few weeks earlier on the grounds that the trial courts should leave constitutional issues up to the appellate courts. That issue was the constitutionality of chapters 942, 944, and 947, the centerpiece of the rent laws. After a trial at which Guthrie and Cohen appeared as amici curiae, Wagner held that the rent laws did not impair contractual obligations. Nor did they deprive landlords of property without due process of law. Dismissing the plaintiff’s argument that the statutes applied to dwellings, but not to hotels and rooming houses, and to large cities, but not to small ones, Wagner said the statutes did not deny landlords

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the equal protection of the law either: “The Constitution only requires that those similarly situated shall be treated alike, not that all shall be subject to the same regulations.” Summing up his sweeping decision, Wagner wrote, “I cannot subscribe to any doctrine that hinders or restrains our legislative power from enacting a clear and reasonable design to relieve the actual distress of the thousands of tenants in this community who would otherwise be made homeless. I think their rights to homes in which to live during an emergency of the kind which now confronts us is transcendentally paramount to any private rights of property.”10 Julius H. Zieser, a spokesman for the Real Estate Investors, Inc., downplayed the significance of Ullmann v. Tamur, saying that it was only the opinion of “a court of first instance” in “a highly technical legal skirmish.” But as the World wrote soon after the decision was handed down, there was no denying that thus far the real estate men had failed to show that the legislature had overstepped its constitutional bounds. If things looked bleak for the landlords in late November, they looked even bleaker in early December, when Judge Leonard A. Giegerich, a Tammany stalwart who was serving his third fourteen-year term on the bench, upheld the constitutionality of chapter 942 in two virtually identical cases. In neither case were the facts in dispute. The plaintiffs, the Brixton Operating Corporation and the Durham Realty Corporation, each of which owned a large apartment house on the Upper West Side, had asked Judge Edward B. La Fetra to issue a precept, which was the first step in bringing summary proceedings against a holdover tenant. When La Fetra denied the request on the grounds that chapter 942 barred landlords from bringing summary proceedings except under circumstances that did not apply in the cases at hand, the plaintiffs asked Giegerich to grant a writ of mandamus compelling La Fetra to issue the precept on the grounds that chapter 942 was unconstitutional. Following a hearing in early November, Giegerich denied the plaintiffs’ motions— and not on the narrow grounds that summary proceedings was a statutory remedy that once given could be taken away, but rather on the broad grounds that chapter 942 was a valid exercise of the police power.11 Judge Giegerich’s decisions were a crushing blow to New York’s real estate men, one of whom denounced them as the triumph of “sentiment” over “logic.” For Brixton and Durham were more than legal skirmishes. They were full-scale test cases that had been brought by the Real Estate Board, of which at least one of the plaintiffs was a member. Well aware of their significance, both sides sought the help of several of New York’s most eminent lawyers. Chief among them were Ingraham, who was retained by the Real Estate Board, and Cohen and Guthrie, who, with Sammis and Hershkopf, filed a brief of more than one hundred pages on behalf of the attorney general and the Lockwood Committee. Of all the lawyers, none made a longer or more impassioned argument than Ingraham. In his fifty years at the bar, some of which had been spent in the very court in which he now appeared, he had never seen such an attempt “to absolutely despoil an owner of his property.” The emergency rent laws—by which “the legislature can take away a man’s property, devote it not to a public use, but to a private use, without paying him a particle of

Even before Judge Giegerich issued his rulings in Brixton and Durham, it was clear that the real estate interests intended to appeal one or more of the trial court decisions. But down through late December it was far from clear how the Appellate Division would rule. The Second Department had recently heard a case about the constitutionality of the rent laws, but its decision was inconclusive. The case was brought by the Rayland Realty Company, a Brooklyn firm that had asked New York Supreme Court Judge Leander B. Faber to issue a writ of mandamus compelling William R. Fagan, a municipal court clerk, to sign an eviction warrant against a holdover tenant. When Faber refused, Rayland Realty appealed. After a trial in which the main issue was the constitutionality of chapter 942—about which Ingraham, Scott, Guthrie, and I. Maurice Wormser, the editor of the New York Law Journal, all submitted briefs—the court ruled for the defendant, who was represented by Assistant Corporation Counsel William B. Carswell. Writing for the majority, Justice Almet F. Jenks rejected the plaintiff’s argument that chapter 942 prevented landlords from regaining possession of their property. “The statutory remedy [summary proceedings] is not abolished,” he wrote; “it is but postponed and for a definite period.” He also dismissed the plaintiff’s argument that chapter 942 deprived the landlord of property without due process of law. “The statute does not touch the title of the owner.” Nor does it take the premises. All it does is “interfere to a degree for two years with the owner’s absolute control.” In light of the current emergency, “I cannot see that the statute flouts the Constitution.”13 To most of the other judges, the issue was less clear-cut. Of the three who concurred in Jenks’s decision, two wrote separate opinions—and one of these held that while chapter 942 was constitutional, there were “very grave questions” as to the constitutionality of chapters 944 and 947. To complicate matters, Abel E. Blackmar, a Republican who had been elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1908 and appointed to the Appellate Division nine years later, disagreed with his colleagues. In a forceful dissent, he argued that chapter 942 deprived the plaintiff of his property “for upwards of two years.” And it did so without due process of law. There was no doubt that the state could regulate the use of property, even “to the injury of the owner,” Blackmar conceded. But the means employed had to have a “real substantial relation” to the ends sought. Since chapter 942 would not “add one square foot” to the housing stock, it was hard to see how it would ease the housing shortage. In the case at hand the property was not taken “for a public use,” he pointed out; nor was the owner compensated for his loss. By taking private property

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compensation for it”—were not just a violation of the federal and state constitutions. They were “the entering wedge” in the effort to “subvert the government.” When his turn came, Guthrie argued that the emergency rent laws were well within the state’s police power. And after claiming that Brixton and Durham were perhaps “the most important case[s] that [have] ever come before this court,” Cohen said, “I cannot picture the disorder, the misery, the tumult that will result if the court decides against the constitutionality of this law.”12

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and devoting it to private use, the legislature had stepped over the boundary of the police power. Blackmar conceded that the state might be justified in exercising its police power where it involved a “comparatively insignificant taking of private property for what in its immediate purpose is a private use.” But given that chapter 942 prevented the plaintiff from recovering his property for two years, during which time he had to pay the bills as they came due but could not raise the rents as he saw fit, this was hardly a “comparatively insignificant taking.”14 Two and a half weeks later, one day before Christmas, the First Department of the Appellate Division issued several eagerly awaited rulings on the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws. Once again the results were inconclusive, indeed so inconclusive that it was now certain that the issue would have to be settled by the Court of Appeals. The First Department, it turned out, was as sharply divided as the Second Department. Among the more than half a dozen cases considered by the First Department was Guttag v. Shatzkin, in which the plaintiff asked the court to reverse Judge Finch’s decision upholding chapter 947 and grant its motion to eject the defendant from his apartment. Well aware of the importance of the case, both sides assembled a large team of eminent lawyers. Joining Deutsch, Guttag’s lawyer in the trial court, were Wormser, Zieser, and Scott, counsel to the Real Estate Interests, Inc. Appearing as amici curiae on behalf of the Real Estate Board were McNulty, Ingraham, and John M. Stoddard, an associate governor of the board and a partner at Stoddard & Mark, the firm that had represented the Brixton and Durham companies before Judge Giegerich. Representing Shatzkin were Tobias and Gilbert Ray Hawes, a well-known real estate lawyer. Appearing for the state were Cohen and Guthrie. Also on hand were Sammis and Hershkopf, counsel for the Lockwood Committee, and Joseph A. Seidman, counsel for the Marcus Brown Holding Company, which was challenging the constitutionality of the rent laws in federal court.15 The case against the emergency rent laws was spelled out in a long brief submitted by Deutsch, with Scott, Wormser, and Zieser of counsel, and a short one submitted by McNulty, with Ingraham and Stoddard of counsel. Declaring that “no clearer case has ever been presented of legislation absolutely in conflict with the fundamental law of this State and of the United States,” Deutsch argued that chapter 947 violated article 6, section 1 of the state constitution by stripping the New York Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over “the common law action of ejectment.” Read in conjunction with chapter 942 and applied to leases entered into before the statute went into effect, it violated article 1, section 10 of the federal constitution too. If this did not impair contractual obligations, “it is difficult to conceive what would.” Chapter 947 also deprived the appellant of property without due process of law, wrote Deutsch. It allows him “to have the satisfaction, forsooth, of calling himself an owner,” but takes away “his power of possession and of repossession, which is at the basis of all private right of property.” And the property in question was private, in no way “a business charged with the public use.” Citing Judge Hotchkiss’s decision in Heyman v. Osterweis, Deutsch also argued that chapter 947 violated the equal

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protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. After claiming that the statute would do nothing to alleviate the housing shortage, Deutsch concluded that chapter 947, along with chapter 942, was “a deliberate and wanton affront to the genius of our ancestors. Such laws would be eminently in place in a communistic form of government,” but not in the United States.16 McNulty made many of the same points as Deutsch. But instead of just challenging the constitutionality of chapter 947, he launched an all-out assault on the emergency rent laws, of which he had long been one of the most outspoken opponents. Under the U.S. and New York State constitutions, he pointed out, an owner was entitled to possession of his property. But under the rent laws, he “cannot institute any proceeding to recover his property. He cannot enforce any agreement for rent of the property, if the tenant alleges that it is unreasonable and oppressive, but if he fails to furnish such occupant with hot and cold water, heat, elevator service, and any other service or facility, and if he interferes with the quiet enjoyment of the lease premises, he is guilty of a crime.” In defense of such blatantly unconstitutional measures, McNulty pointed out, it was argued that the legislature had determined that the state was facing an “emergency.” But the legislature did not define “the emergency,” nor did it spell out how to deal with it. It was also argued that under the rent laws the landlord’s property was taken for only two years. But if the legislature can take the property for two years, it can take it “for twenty years.” The courts have long held that the state can regulate grain elevators and other businesses “devoted to public use” and “in which the public have an interest,” McNulty acknowledged. But they had never said “that it can take the property of a private person and compel him to devote it to [a particular] service, and then regulate the charges that he is entitled to receive for the use of his property.”17 The case for the emergency rent laws was also spelled out in two briefs—one of only ten pages that was drafted by Tobias, with Hawes of counsel, and another of over one hundred pages that was prepared by Guthrie, Cohen, Sammis, and Hershkopf, who submitted it to the appellate court not only in Guttag v. Shatzkin, but in four other closely related cases as well. In his brief Tobias argued that chapter 947 did not “abrogate, limit or suspend the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.” It merely suspended the landlord’s right to bring an action in ejectment against a holdover tenant “except under certain conditions, within a limited period of time.” Although the New York Supreme Court is vested with “general jurisdiction in law and equity,” it is well within the power of the legislature to regulate its practices and procedures, Tobias insisted. He also pointed out that New York City was facing “a public emergency,” a consequence of the postwar housing shortage. To deal with it, the legislature was driven to use its police power. It enacted chapter 137 of the April laws, which was designed to deter landlords from bringing summary proceedings in the municipal courts. And when some of them attempted to get around the statute by bringing ejectment actions in the state courts, it passed chapter 947. Like other laws that were based on the police power, chapter 947 did not compensate the property owners for their losses. But such laws are not unconstitutional, Tobias

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argued, because “they do not appropriate property for public use, but simply regulate its use and enjoyment.”18 In their brief, a revised version of one that was filed with the trial court in Brixton v. La Fetra, Guthrie and his associates, relying heavily on the findings of the Lockwood Committee and the State Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, described the emergency that had confronted the legislature in September 1920. Next they discussed what other countries had done to mitigate the impact of the worldwide housing shortage and summarized the rent laws and the recent rulings upholding them. Guthrie and his associates then argued at length that neither the contract clause nor the due process clause “abridges” the power of the legislature to enact “appropriate and necessary laws” to safeguard the public welfare. After reviewing the historical precedents for the emergency rent laws, they went on to stress that the distinctions in the laws between residential and commercial property, large and small cities, and old and new buildings were fully justified and in no way a violation of the equal protection clause. Guthrie and his associates also denied that chapter 947 was invalid on the grounds that it stripped the New York Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over ejectment. They even argued that chapters 942 and 947 were valid if applied in the case of leases entered into before they were enacted, an issue on which the courts were sharply divided. Calling the attack on the September laws “a manifestation of the intolerance with which only too many lawyers approach the novel in legislation,” they concluded that our constitutions “do not stay progress nor forbid innovation, and the powers of government thereunder seeking the accomplishment of legitimate ends are equal to all emergencies.”19 On the basis of the briefs and oral arguments, which were heard in December, the Appellate Division reversed Judge Finch’s ruling and granted Guttag’s motion, allowing him to oust Shatzkin. In an opinion that was handed down the day before Christmas, Justice Francis C. Laughlin, a New York Supreme Court judge since 1896 and a member of the Appellate Division since 1900, held that chapter 947 was unconstitutional. The statute, which suspended ejectment in the state supreme court for over two years except under exceptional circumstances, was “a clear encroachment upon the jurisdiction of the court,” which is derived “not from the Legislature, but from the [State] Constitution,” and thus a violation of article 6, section 1. The statute was also a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Laughlin said. In conjunction with chapter 942, it left the landlords with no way to remove a tenant after his lease expired. The legislature had the power “to take away one remedy and substitute another.” But by taking away every remedy—by, in effect, making it impossible to enforce a “lawful contract”—it deprived the owner of property without due process. It was up to the legislature to determine whether an emergency existed, Laughlin conceded, but in attempting to deal with it by enacting chapter 947, the legislature “has not adopted means appropriate to the end.” John Proctor Clarke, who had succeeded Ingraham as presiding justice in 1916, concurred. So did Victor J. Dowling and Samuel Greenbaum. Edgar S. Merrell dissented—though neither he nor the others filed a separate opinion.20

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Besides Guttag v. Shatzkin, the First Department of the Appellate Division also heard Brixton and Durham. In both cases, the appellants asked the court to reverse Giegerich’s decision upholding chapter 942 and grant a writ of mandamus to force La Fetra to sign the precepts. At issue in each case was the constitutionality of the statute that suspended summary proceedings for just over two years. Both sides relied pretty much on the same group of eminent lawyers who had appeared before Giegerich—among them Ingraham, Stoddard, and McNulty for the appellants and for the respondents Assistant Corporation Counsel John F. O’Brien and Deputy Attorney General Robert P. Beyer as well as Guthrie, Cohen, Sammis, and Hershkopf. Since the facts were more or less the same in both cases, the court decided to deal with the constitutional issue in Brixton and then apply the ruling to Durham.21 On behalf of the Brixton Operating Corporation—and, as the judges of the First Department were well aware, on behalf of the Real Estate Board as well—Ingraham launched an all-out attack on chapter 942. In a brief that ran sixty-eight pages, he argued that the statute violated several provisions of the U.S. and New York State constitutions, chief among them the contract clause, due process clause, and equal protection clause. Under chapter 942, Ingraham pointed out, a tenant can remain in the apartment after the lease expires—even if he has signed a contract to move out and even if other tenants want to move in. And he can remain there as long as he wants, provided only that he pays “what the Court may find as a reasonable rent.” Or if the tenant prefers, he can move out—and, since his lease is no longer binding, he can do so “at any time.” In other words, the tenant “is given the possession of the property without the consent of the owner.” Chapter 942, Ingraham went on, was not for the benefit of the public. It and the other September laws were “solely for the benefit of occupants of apartments who are trespassers, to meet no emergency that now exists, except to prevent owners of property from gaining possession of their property from tenants whose terms have expired.” Hence they are “an appropriation of real property for the benefit of individuals, without due process of law, without compensation, and, so far as appears in this record, without any public interest requiring such drastic legislation.”22 According to Ingraham, the respondent’s case was based on the assumption that chapter 942 was a valid exercise of the police power. But this assumption was untenable. It had long been settled that the state could use its police power in ways that infringe on property rights “where a person is engaged in performing a State duty” and “where a person is engaged in performing a duty in which the public has an interest.” But it could not use the police power in matters “in which neither the State nor the public has any interest.” In the case at hand no claim was made that “the State requires this property for public use.” Nor was a claim made that the appellant “has devoted its property to a public use.” It was argued that the state legislature enacted the rent laws because it found that an “emergency exists.” But, responded Ingraham, if the legislature can deprive the appellant of the power to enforce a lawful contract and take away his property and hand it over to someone else just because it believes that an “emergency exists,” the contract and due process

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clauses of the federal and state constitutions “are mere shams.” It was also argued that the state can only take the appellant’s property for two years, but if it can take it for two years, said Ingraham, it can take it for twenty years. No matter how dire the situation, Ingraham argued, the state legislature has no power “to override or violate express constitutional provisions, whether in the exercise of the so-called police power or in the exercise of any other power derived under the State Constitution.”23 Appearing on behalf of Attorney General Newton, Guthrie and Cohen made much the same arguments in defense of chapter 942 that they had made in defense of chapter 947. Beyer, who also appeared on behalf of Newton, and O’Brien, who represented La Fetra, also denied that the statute was unconstitutional. Chapter 942 was “a lawful exercise of the police power,” Beyer insisted. Relying heavily on Judge Finch’s decision in Guttag v. Shatzkin, which described at length the emergency that had faced the legislature after World War I, he claimed that the statute was “absolutely necessary” to relieve the “anticipated distress of many thousands of tenants who would [otherwise have been left] homeless.” Neither property rights nor contractual rights are absolute, Beyer pointed out. Both are subservient to the public welfare, which may sometimes justify “the taking, using and even destruction of private property.” In addition to responding to Ingraham’s arguments, both Beyer and O’Brien stressed the point that summary proceedings was a statutory remedy. As Beyer wrote, “The law is well settled that where a particular remedy . . . had its origins solely in statutory enactment . . . such remedy may be destroyed or restricted at the pleasure of the legislature.” Or as O’Brien put it, what the legislature gave, “it can take away.” It even had the authority to strip the courts of jurisdiction over landlord-tenant disputes. La Fetra “did not refuse to perform his duty to entertain appellant’s application [for a precept],” O’Brien concluded. “He did consider it and, acting judicially, denied it.”24 In the end the Appellate Division sided with Beyer and O’Brien, affirming Giegerich’s decision and upholding the constitutionality of chapter 942. Writing for a unanimous court, Judge Laughlin held that none of the many authorities cited by Ingraham convinced him and his colleagues that “a party to a contract” was entitled to “the precise remedy” that was available at the time the contract was signed. The rule was that contracts “are deemed to have been made subject to legislation changing the remedy for the enforcement thereof.” A statutory remedy, of which summary proceedings was one, “may be modified or withdrawn” as long as “some adequate remedy remains.” In light of the court’s ruling in Guttag v. Shatzkin, which was issued on the same day as Brixton v. La Fetra, such a remedy was available to the plaintiff. In other words, chapter 942 did not deprive the Brixton Operating Company of property without due process of law because it could still regain the premises by bringing an action in ejectment. Summary proceedings, Laughlin acknowledged, was “a more speedy remedy” than ejectment, but the difference was not sufficient reason for the court to hold that its suspension “unlawfully impairs the value of the contract.” In conclusion, wrote Laughlin, “the court would not be warranted in

“Rent Day,” by Ryan Walker (New York Call, March 24, 1918, Harvard College Library)

“No Coal This Winter,” by Ryan Walker (New York Call, December 30, 1917, Harvard College Library)

“They Asked [for] Heat and Got This” (New York Call, February 20, 1918, Harvard College Library)

“And This Is No Joke . . .,” by Zere (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16, 1919, Harvard College Library)

“Wallowing in It,” by Robert W. Satterfield (New York Call, June 24, 1918, Harvard College Library)

“Rooting It Up,” by Nelson Harding (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 7, 1920, Harvard College Library)

“An Eviction in the Tenement District of the City of New York,” by Charles Mente (Harper’s Weekly, February 1, 1890, Harvard College Library)

“An East Side Eviction” (New Era Illustrated Magazine, May 1904, Harvard College Library)

An eviction in New York City (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

“Evicted Brownsville Rent Strikers Make Their Homes in the Streets” (New York Call, May 21, 1918, Harvard College Library)

Striking tenants outside their building (September 1919, Bettmann/CORBIS)

Rent strikers on the street (March 1920, Bettmann/Corbis)

“The Overflow Crowd in the Street at Bronx Municipal Court” (Bronx Home News, October 7, 1919, General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

“Patriotic Bronx Citizens Ready to Fight for Their Homes. A Part of the Delegation at the Albany Hearing” (Bronx Home News, January 26, 1920, General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

“Another Czar Dethroned,” by Rollin Kirby (New York World, September 25, 1920, Harvard College Library)

“Right in the Nose!” by Nelson Harding (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 27, 1920, Harvard College Library)

“Evicted,” by Rollin Kirby (New York World, March 10, 1921, Harvard College Library)

“Out of Luck,” by Rollin Kirby (New York World, April 20, 1921, Harvard College Library)

“The New Lease,” by Ryan Walker (New York Call, July 12, 1923, Harvard College Library)

“A New York Apartment if Overcrowding Goes On,” by Rollin Kirby (New York World, October 17, 1923, Harvard College Library)

“For Rent: $5000 per Year and Up,” by Edmund Duffy (New York Leader, October 18, 1923, Harvard College Library)

Tenants rally with banners at City Hall (November 9, 1925, Bettmann/CORBIS)

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annulling this act of the Legislature merely on the ground that thereby the plaintiff was relegated to an adequate, but less summary and speedy and somewhat more expensive, remedy than was afforded by law when the contract was made.”25 Yet another case that was heard by the First Department of the Appellate Division was Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, in which Wagner had ruled that Siegel was within his rights to refuse to pay the new rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable. At issue was the constitutionality of chapter 944. Representing Siegel was Rose & Paskus, a prominent firm that had been formed in 1878 as Rose & Putzel. Once again Guthrie and Cohen appeared on behalf of the attorney general and Sammis and Hershkopf on behalf of the Lockwood Committee. Representing Levy Leasing was Lewis M. Isaacs, a member of M.S. & I.S. Isaacs, a firm that had been founded in 1862 by his father Myer, who was joined by his brother Isaac five years later. One of New York’s most prominent Jewish firms, it specialized in real estate law. Joining Isaacs, with whom he had appeared in 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern, another case that was heard by the First Department in December, was Louis B. Marshall, who was retained by the Real Estate Board. As the board was well aware, Marshall was not only one of the leading authorities on constitutional law, but also one of the sharpest critics of the police power. As he wrote Isaacs in early October, he strongly objected to the rent laws, of which he regarded chapter 944 as the most egregious. Some of the laws, notably chapter 942 and three others that dealt with summary proceedings, would probably be upheld by the courts, but “read in conjunction with Chapters 944 and 947,” he pointed out, “the entire legislative scheme constitutes a violation of the Constitution.”26 In the brief submitted on behalf of Levy Leasing, Marshall and Isaacs argued that chapter 944 violated both the U.S. and New York State constitutions. Taking issue with the argument that it was a valid exercise of the police power, they pointed out that the plaintiff’s property was not devoted to “any public use.” It was not, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “affected with a public interest.” To hold that the legislature had the right to regulate the rent of apartments would be to hold that it had the right to regulate the price of food and clothing. No matter how grave the alleged emergency, a point that was made much of by counsel for the defendant, the legislature cannot disregard “the safeguards contained in our fundamental law.” Even if the housing shortage was as acute as the legislature (and the governor) claimed, which it was not, chapter 944 would do nothing to alleviate it. If anything, the statute would exacerbate the problem.27 Marshall and Isaacs also asked the court to strike down chapter 944 on the grounds that it prescribed no standards by which to determine whether the rent was unreasonable; and such standards, they argued, were necessary to ensure due process of law. Although the statute required the landlord to file a lengthy bill of particulars, it said nothing about how to calculate the value of the property, which was essential in any attempt to figure out a reasonable rent. Nor did it take into account that during the prewar years many landlords had rented their apartments for so little that they had earned “considerably less than the legal rate of interest.”

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The statute was also silent about the deadbeat tenants and the myriad of other things that landlords consider in setting a rent that would yield a reasonable return. New York City had fifty-two supreme court justices, ten city court justices, and fortyfive municipal court justices, Marshall and Isaacs told the court. And each one was likely to have his own standards. Under chapter 944, “the rental value of similar apartments located on ten different pieces of property may thus be determined according to ten different standards, with ten varying results, all dependent upon the length of the chancellor’s foot.” (A similar position was taken by Wormser, Zieser, and Scott, counsel for the Real Estate Investors, Inc., who argued that chapter 944 “goes further than any legislation which can be found in the statute books.” It is “impractical in its operation,” “discriminatory in its results,” and “seriously dangerous in its tendencies.” “If it is to be upheld because of an alleged emergency,” they wrote, “constitutional limitations are meaningless and fundamental safeguards become an empty sham.”)28 Although Marshall and Isaacs made a strong case against chapter 944, they failed to persuade the court. Writing for the majority, which included Merrell and Greenbaum, Laughlin ruled that the statute did not violate the due process clause. It was not necessary for the court to decide whether the renting of houses and apartments in big cities was a business “in which the public is so directly or intimately interested as to warrant its regulation in ordinary times,” he wrote. For “that has not been attempted.” What had been attempted was to regulate rents during an emergency. And that was a valid exercise of the police power—and not, as Marshall and Isaacs argued, a violation of the due process clause. The legislature cannot compel the landlords to open their doors to the homeless, Laughlin explained. That would be “a taking of the property.” But during an emergency it may provide that “so long as they see fit to lease their property and enjoy the protection of the state, they must deal justly with their tenants.” The legislature showed “great foresight” in enacting chapter 944, he added. The statute would stop profiteering landlords from taking advantage of the housing shortage and exacting “unreasonable and unconscionable and extortionate rentals for the use of their property.” It would also deter them from evicting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who would have been hard-pressed to find other accommodations. Indeed, even if chapters 942 and 947 were held unconstitutional, chapter 944 would do much to prevent the landlords from carrying out “their threats of wholesale evictions.” So long as they could only charge a reasonable rent for their apartments, they would have no incentive to replace one tenant with another.29 Laughlin disposed of Marshall and Isaacs’s other points in a succinct, almost perfunctory manner. Contractual obligations were not “absolute and universal,” he wrote. The state has the power to modify them, provided it does so in a way that is designed to promote the general welfare, that is reasonable, and that is not applied retroactively. To Marshall’s argument that chapter 944 denied the plaintiff the equal protection of the law, Laughlin responded that it was confined to property that was “devoted to the same use,” that it “embrace[d] all such property,” and that

There was little doubt that the Appellate Division’s rulings would be challenged in the Court of Appeals. Supporters of the emergency rent laws were severely troubled not only by Guttag v. Shatzkin, but also by 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern, another case in which the court held that chapter 947 was unconstitutional. Under these rulings, said Julius D. Tobias, “any landlord wishing to get rid of a tenant need only to begin ejectment proceedings in the Supreme Court.” Since the tenant was left with no defense, he would be forced to move out in thirty days. Like Judge Harry Robitzek, who believed that as a result of Guttag v. Shatzkin practically all landlordtenant cases would be transferred to the New York Supreme Court, Tobias predicted that the state courts would soon be as busy as the municipal courts. Opponents of the emergency rent laws were just as troubled by Brixton v. La Fetra, Durham v. La Fetra, Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel, and Clemilt Realty Co., Inc. v. Wood, another case in which the court held that chapter 944 was constitutional. Under these rulings the landlord would not be able to bring summary proceedings against a tenant whose lease had expired. Nor would he be able to charge more than what the municipal court judge deemed a reasonable rent. From the start both sides had been prepared to take these cases to the Court of Appeals. Now that they had on hand a stellar group of lawyers, who had already done much of the research and drafted much of the briefs, they saw no reason to change their minds.31 Nor was there much doubt that the Court of Appeals would hear the challenges to the Appellate Division’s rulings. The constitutionality of the emergency rent laws was a legal issue with profound social, economic, and political ramifications, an issue important enough to engage several of the country’s most eminent lawyers. It was also an issue on which the Appellate Division was sharply divided, if not on the validity of chapter 942, then on the validity of chapter 944 (and, to a lesser degree, chapter 947). And it was an issue in which many important institutions, among them the Real Estate Board, the Real Estate Investors, Inc., the attorney general’s office, the corporation counsel’s office, and the Lockwood Committee, had a deep interest. Hence it came as no surprise that the Court of Appeals agreed to hear six cases that dealt with the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws. (It also agreed to hear three other cases, all of which hinged on whether a municipal court judge could refuse to sign an eviction warrant after a final order was granted, an issue on

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it applied to this property and to no other. To the argument that chapter 944 prescribed no standards by which a reasonable rent was to be determined, he answered that it provided that a landlord was entitled to “a reasonable income on his investment,” which was an adequate standard. Laughlin’s decision did not sit well with Clarke, who agreed with Marshall and Isaacs that chapter 944 violated the due process clause and other provisions of the federal and state constitutions. But rather than elaborate on his views, he filed a brief dissent, with which Dowling concurred, signaled his agreement with Judge Blackmar’s opinion in People ex rel. Rayland Realty Company v. Fagan, and urged that the constitutional issues raised by the rent laws “be submitted as speedily as possible to the Court of Appeals.”30

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which the First and Second departments of the Appellate Division were sharply divided.) In mid-January, less than four weeks after the Appellate Division handed down its decisions, what the Times called “a big array of legal talent,” which included Guthrie, Cohen, Marshall, Ingraham, and Scott, made the short trip to Albany and walked into the Court of Appeals Hall, a Greek Revival building not far from the capitol that had housed the high court since the 1910s. There they argued about the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws for three days.32 There was, however, a great deal of uncertainty—and more than a little wishful thinking—about how the Court of Appeals would rule. According to William P. Rae, a prominent real estate man who was leading an effort to persuade the state legislature to repeal or modify the emergency rent laws, the Brooklyn Real Estate Board believed that the court would hold the laws unconstitutional. Writing more than two decades later, Julius Henry Cohen recalled that he and Bernard Hershkopf had been confident that the Court of Appeals would be persuaded by their arguments—though Cohen also remembered that the great majority of Wall Street lawyers expected the court to strike down the emergency rent laws.33 Although some of these people were better informed than others, it is safe to say that none knew how the Court of Appeals would rule. It is also safe to say that none even knew whether the justices would deal separately with each of the statutes, as the Appellate Division judges had, or whether they would issue a decision about the entire legislative package. If the emergency rent laws had been enacted before World War I, they would have stood little chance in the Court of Appeals. As one legal scholar has written, the prewar court “was widely regarded as hostile to social and economic reform.” If not as “reactionary” as some critics charged, it was highly conservative. It is true that in People v. Lochner, which was handed down in 1904, the Court of Appeals upheld a statute that barred bakeries from requiring employees to work more than ten hours a day and sixty hours a week, a decision that was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. But as another legal scholar has pointed out, Lochner was “an exception to the rule.” More typical were People v. Marcus and People v. Williams. In Marcus, which was decided in 1906, the court struck down a statute that outlawed the “yellow dog” contract, which prevented employees from joining labor unions. And in Williams, which was handed down a year later, the court overturned a statute that barred women and children under eighteen from working in factories before six in the morning and after nine in the evening. By far the best known of the court’s rulings was Ives v. South Buffalo Railway Co., which was handed down in 1911. In this case the court reversed the Fourth Department of the Appellate Division and held that New York’s pioneering workmen’s compensation law was not a valid exercise of the police power. The Ives decision generated a nationwide protest, in the vanguard of which were former president Theodore Roosevelt and a group of eminent lawyers that included Roscoe Pound and Ernst Freund.34 Not long after the Ives decision, most of the judges left the court. Between 1912 and 1920 Chief Justice Edward A. Cullen, his successor, Willard Bartlett, and four

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associate justices stepped down when they turned seventy, the mandatory retirement age for New York State judges. And William E. Werner, who wrote the Ives decision (and staunchly defended it when he ran for chief justice two years later), died in 1916. Of the two judges who were still on the court in early 1921, one was Emory A. Chase, who strongly believed in freedom of contract, but did not take part in the rent laws cases. The other was Frank H. Hiscock, chief justice from 1917 to 1926. Hiscock, who did not take part in the Ives case, was one of the least conservative members of the prewar court. Replacing Cullen, Werner, and their colleagues was a group of well-known figures, some of whom—including Nathan L. Miller, the future governor, and Abram I. Elkus, the chairman of the State Reconstruction Commission—resigned before 1921. Of the judges who remained on the court, the most prominent was Benjamin N. Cardozo, a brilliant lawyer who had been appointed to the Court of Appeals in 1914 and elected chief justice in 1926, a position he held until he was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1932. Also extremely prominent was Cuthbert W. Pound, who joined the Court of Appeals in 1915 and succeeded Cardozo as chief justice in 1932. Besides Hiscock, Cardozo, and Pound, the other judges who heard the cases about the rent laws were John W. Hogan, William S. Andrews, Frederick E. Crane, and Chester B. McLaughlin, who had been appointed to the Court of Appeals by Governor Charles S. Whitman in 1917.35 The new judges were much more disposed than their predecessors to approach statutes enacted under the police power with what Hiscock called “the presumption of constitutionality.” As a Supreme Court judge in upstate New York, Pound had held that the workmen’s compensation law of 1910, the law that was struck down by the Court of Appeals in Ives, was “within the constitutional powers of the Legislature.” And though Cardozo “looked carefully at the particulars of regulation,” writes his biographer, “his sympathy on the big issues was with the power of the legislature to regulate business.” As early as 1915, seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Muller v. Oregon, which upheld an Oregon law that barred women from working more than ten hours a day, the Court of Appeals, without explicitly reversing People v. Williams, ruled in favor of a statute that barred women from working in factories before six in the morning and after ten in the evening. A few months later, less than two years after the voters adopted a constitutional amendment that was designed in large part to undo Ives, the court held that the state’s new workmen’s compensation law was constitutional. By the end of the decade, writes Cardozo’s biographer, the Court of Appeals was no longer as torn as it had once been “between upholding individual freedom of contract and permitting legislative regulation in the name of safety, health, and protection of the public welfare.” But whether it was ready to go so far as to hold that the rent laws were a valid exercise of the police power remained to be seen.36 Along with assorted notices, affidavits, and the like, the lawyers filed with the Court of Appeals several briefs, the longest and most thorough of which were submitted by Stoddard & Mark, with Ingraham and Stoddard of counsel, by Marshall and Isaacs, and by Guthrie, Cohen, Sammis, and Hershkopf. Aside from taking

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into account the recent decision in Guttag v. Shatzkin, these briefs covered much the same ground as the ones filed with the Appellate Division (and, in some cases, with the trial courts). Both sides agreed about one thing: rather than deal separately with each of the statutes, the court should treat them as parts of a single legislative package. As both Ingraham and Marshall pointed out, the emergency rent laws were passed at the same session of the legislature. They also dealt with the same subject. This argument was risky. If the Court of Appeals upheld the entire legislative package, it would have to reverse the Appellate Division’s ruling in Guttag v. Shatzkin. But Ingraham and Marshall were prepared to take the risk. So were Cohen and Guthrie. Although they were aware that if the court held one of the laws void, it might—indeed, Ingraham argued, it should—hold all of them void, their brief dealt not only with chapter 942, the statute in question in Brixton and Durham, but also with chapters 944, 945, and 947, the three other statutes “of paramount importance.”37 About everything else, however, the two sides strongly disagreed. These disagreements raised a host of difficult questions with which the justices wrestled after the lawyers made their oral arguments in mid-January. Aside from whether chapter 942 violated article 3, section 15 of the state constitution, a technicality to which the court paid no heed, these questions were of great moment. Were the emergency rent laws a violation of the U.S. and New York State constitutions, an argument made by Ingraham, Marshall, and Leonard Klaber, a New York lawyer who submitted a brief as amicus curiae on behalf of the Battery Realty Company? Did they deprive the landlords of property without due process of law, deny them the equal protection of the law, impair contractual obligations, and take private property for public use without compensation? Or were the emergency rent laws a valid exercise of the police power, an argument made by Guthrie and Cohen as well as by Deputy Attorney General Beyer and Assistant Corporation Counsel O’Brien? In the interest of safeguarding “the public health, peace, order and welfare,” in Guthrie and Cohen’s words, was the legislature justified in taking what were admittedly unprecedented measures to curb “widespread extortion and oppression in rents” and prevent “wholesale evictions of tenants who were able and willing to pay fair and reasonable rentals for their homes and were unable to find other accommodations?”38 How the justices answered these questions depended in large part on how they answered several other no less difficult questions. The state legislature had declared that New York was facing a public emergency. But was it? Citing the reports of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, the findings of the Lockwood Committee, and the governor’s message to the legislature, Guthrie and Cohen argued that the legislative declaration was “abundantly supported by the facts.” Indeed, they went on, “perhaps no legislation was ever passed by the Legislature of the State of New York which was the subject of more thorough and exhaustive investigation.” Marshall and Isaacs disagreed. Nothing Guthrie and Cohen cited showed that New York’s landlords were charging excessive rents, much less earning “an exorbitant profit.” Despite the widespread belief that the city was short 100,000

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homes, “nobody has been compelled to live in the street,” and “everyone seems to have a roof over his head.” Based on the reports of the Tenement House Department— and a study made for the Law Committee of the Real Estate Board by Columbia professor Samuel McCune Lindsay—Marshall and Isaacs argued that the supply of housing had kept up with the demand. Citing vital statistics that showed that New York City’s death rate was lower in 1919 than in 1918, and even lower in 1920, they denied that the alleged housing shortage was a threat to public health. As for the fear that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were about to be evicted from their homes, they contended that there were fewer summary proceedings in 1919 and 1920 than in 1917 and 1918.39 Even if New York was facing an emergency, were the September laws well designed to deal with it? To put it another way, were the means adopted appropriate to the ends sought? Citing the report of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, Ingraham argued that the problem was not the rent hikes, but the housing shortage. And the way to solve this problem was not to prevent landlords from raising rents, but to encourage builders to erect houses. This the emergency rent laws did not do. Marshall made much the same point. Residential construction was down because it was not profitable, he argued. Labor and materials were very expensive, and capital, “if it can be obtained at all,” was only available at prohibitive interest rates. Since the rent laws would not make residential construction less costly for builders and more attractive to investors, they would do nothing to ease the housing shortage. Guthrie and Cohen disagreed. The housing shortage was a long-term problem, one that even the Real Estate Board, an outspoken opponent of the emergency rent laws, acknowledged could not be solved in the next year or two. In the meantime, something had to be done about the dire consequences of what the Mayor’s Housing Conference Committee called a “famine of housing space,” among the most serious of which were the increased overcrowding, the deteriorating sanitary conditions, the soaring rents—which drove even the well-to-do out of their apartments—and the imminent eviction of hundreds of thousands of tenants. It was to alleviate these conditions, not to ease the housing shortage, that the legislature enacted the September laws, Guthrie and Cohen argued.40 Even if the September laws were well designed to deal with the emergency, were they permissible under the U.S. and New York State constitutions? In other words, did the police power extend to dwellings? Given that neither property rights nor contractual obligations were absolute, as Guthrie and Cohen argued, was renting space in apartment houses akin to renting space in grain elevators, whose rates were subject to regulation under the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Munn v. Illinois? Rejecting what one legal scholar calls “a closed concept of businesses affected with the public interest,” Guthrie and Cohen insisted that all property was subject to the police power—and to the state’s duty to safeguard, “by fair and appropriate means,” the general welfare of the community. But as Marshall and Ingraham pointed out, a dwelling was not a grain elevator—or, for that matter, a fire insurance company, whose rates were subject to regulation under the high court’s ruling in

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German Alliance Insurance Company v. Lewis. It was in no way devoted to public use. Indeed, it was “the most private” of places, a place in which the public had no interest, a place into which no one could even enter without permission. If the Court of Appeals upheld the emergency rent laws, said Marshall, “there is not a business conceivable, no matter how private it may be, that could not with equal right be made dependent upon the action of the Legislature.” Ingraham was even blunter. At issue before the court, he declared, was whether the Constitution is still “the supreme law of the land” or whether it is to be “relegated to a subordinate position— subordinate to the so-called police power.”41 Among the other difficult questions, a few stand out. The emergency rent laws drew distinctions between residential and commercial property, old and new buildings, and large and small cities. Were these distinctions arbitrary, as Marshall and Isaacs said, and thus a violation of the equal protection clause? Or were they reasonable, as Guthrie and Cohen said? “The Constitution only requires that those similarly situated shall be treated alike,” they argued, “not that all shall be subjected to the same regulations.” How could chapter 944 be constitutional if it did not prescribe standards by which to determine a reasonable rent, Marshall and Isaacs asked? Courts are routinely called on to determine “what is reasonable,” Guthrie and Cohen responded. “The common law prescribes no standards in those cases except the judgment of the ordinary prudent man upon all the relevant facts.” Also, should the court go along with Ingraham and Stoddard, who argued that the Appellate Division was wrong in sustaining chapter 942 on the grounds that it had overturned chapter 947? After all, they pointed out, both statutes were “designed to accomplish the same purpose.” An action in ejectment, the only remedy left to the landlords under Guttag v. Shatzkin, was so slow and costly that it amounted to “a denial of justice.” Or should the court side with Guthrie and Cohen, who urged the justices to reverse Guttag v. Shatzkin on the grounds that under chapter 947 an action for ejectment was still available to the landlords “in every case in which the public interest does not require it to be temporarily suspended?” To affirm the Appellate Division’s decision in Guttag would be to say that “no exercise of legislative power,” no matter how sorely needed, was permissible without a constitutional amendment if it in any way suspended or abolished an existing remedy, “no matter how obnoxious to the public interest that remedy may have become.”42 The Court of Appeals issued its decisions on March 8, 1921, roughly ten weeks after the Appellate Division delivered its rulings and seven weeks after the lawyers made their oral arguments. The court agreed with Ingraham and Marshall that the emergency rent laws should be treated as a single legislative package. But on the other issues it sided with Guthrie and Cohen. With only one dissenting opinion, which was written by McLaughlin, the court affirmed the Appellate Division’s ruling in People ex rel. Durham Realty Corporation v. La Fetra and People ex rel. Brixton Operating Corporation v. La Fetra. In an opinion written by Pound (and concurred in by Hiscock, Hogan, Cardozo, Andrews, and, with some reservations, Crane), the court held that the emergency rent laws were a valid exercise of the police power. On the

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basis of the Durham opinion, it also affirmed the Appellate Division’s rulings in Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel and Clemilt Realty Company, Inc. v. Wood and reversed its rulings in Guttag v. Shatzkin and 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern. The result was a clean sweep for the emergency rent laws. And writes one legal historian, the Durham opinion convinced Felix Frankfurter, Rexford Tugwell, and other observers that Pound was “a remarkable jurist whose reputation was obscured only by the presence on the Court of his more illustrious colleague Benjamin Cardozo.”43 Pound began his opinion by summarizing the facts at hand and the laws in question. He then pointed out, “If chapter 942 alone were to be considered, we would not hesitate to say that the Legislature may repeal or suspend in whole or in part the remedy of summary proceedings,” which was the main point of Deputy Attorney General Beyer’s brief. The landlord has “no vested or contractual property right” in any particular remedy, much less one that was established by statute. But chapter 942 was an integral part of a legislative package that included chapters 944 and 947, wrote Pound. If construed together, they raised serious constitutional issues, at the core of which were two fundamental and long-established principles. One was that “private business may not be regulated, and may not be converted into public business by legislative fiat.” The other was that the state may exercise its police power to impose regulations that are “reasonably necessary to secure the general welfare of the community,” even if “the rights of private property are thereby curtailed and freedom of contract is abridged.” In the cases at hand these principles were in conflict. To resolve the conflict, Pound said, the court had to answer a question that arose out of chapter 944. “May the legislative power, in a season of exigency, consistently with the due process clauses of the state and federal Constitutions designed to protect property rights, so invade the domain of private contract as to interfere with and regulate the right of a landlord to exact what he will for his own in the way of rent for private property?”44 A landlord, Pound pointed out, is a businessman, “a purveyor of a commodity,” the “vender of space in which to shelter one’s self and family,” who has “heretofore been permitted to make his own terms with his tenants.” As such he has property rights that cannot be infringed on under ordinary circumstances, among them to pick to whom to rent his space and to charge what he sees fit for it. But circumstances were far from ordinary. As a result there was a disparity between theory and practice. In theory, Pound went on, housing is not a monopoly. Nor is it a public utility, like, say, a railroad. If a tenant cannot find an apartment in one building, he can find one in another. The rent is fixed by “economic rules,” and “the market value is the reasonable value.” People move from one city to another when it suits them. And no one is compelled to live in New York. Thus “to call the legislation an exercise of the police power, when it is plainly a taking of private property for private use without compensation, is a mere transfer of labels, which does not affect the nature of the legislation.” But the theory was at odds with the facts, Pound pointed out. As the legislature found, “the state of demand and supply is at present abnormal,” no one builds because it is not profitable to do so, and the owners of property “seek the

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uttermost farthing from those who choose to live in New York and pay for the privilege rather than go elsewhere.” The result is that profiteering and oppression have become widespread. “It is with this condition, and not with economic theory,” Pound declared, “that the state has to deal in the existing emergency.”45 To deal with this condition, the legislature turned to the police power, which Pound described as “a dynamic agency, vague and undefined in its scope, which takes private property or limits its use when great public needs require, uncontrolled by the constitutional requirements of due process.” Whether a statute was a valid exercise of the police power depended not on whether a business was devoted to the public use, but rather on whether the use of the property affected the wellbeing of the community. To construe the police power otherwise, Pound wrote, would be to deprive the state of “one of the attributes for which governments are founded” and leave it “powerless to secure to its citizens the blessings of freedom and to promote the general welfare.” The scope of regulation was constantly widening, he pointed out. And since no similar legislation has come before the courts, “precedent is of little value and may prove misleading.” Nor was novelty an argument against constitutionality, Pound wrote. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in German Alliance Insurance Company v. Lewis, he stressed that “changing economic conditions, temporary or permanent, may make necessary or beneficial the right of public regulation.” Whether such regulation well serves the public interest or whether it is nothing more than “another example of misdirected zeal in dealing with a crisis”—or even, for that matter, whether a public emergency existed— is not for the courts to say. When reviewed in light of these principles, Pound concluded, the argument that chapter 944 deprives the landlords of property without due process of law is untenable.46 Pound spent much less effort dispatching the other objections to the emergency rent laws. Under these laws, he conceded, “one class of landlords is selected for regulation because one class conspicuously offends; one class of tenants has protection because all who seek homes cannot be provided with places to eat and sleep.” And tenants who are willing to pay exorbitant rents or unable to pay any rent at all “have been left to shift for themselves.” But these distinctions are reasonable, Pound held, and “deny to no one the equal protection of the laws.” Nor did the emergency rent laws violate the contract clause. “The rule alike for state and nation is that private contract rights must yield to the public welfare when the latter is appropriately declared and defined and the two conflict.” Siding with Guthrie and Cohen, Pound also rejected the argument that chapter 944 was unconstitutional on the grounds that it did not prescribe standards by which to determine a reasonable rent. And taking issue with the Appellate Division’s ruling against chapter 947, he wrote, “To uphold the right of the landlord to maintain ejectment would be to crack the legislative design into fragments which would afford little protection to the tenants in possession.” In light of present theories of the police power, he concluded, “the state may regulate a business, however honest in itself, if it is or may become an instrument of widespread oppression” and “the business of renting homes in the city of

As one well-informed observer wrote, not even the strongest champions of the emergency rent laws anticipated so sweeping a decision. The Court of Appeals not only upheld all the laws (“in every particular,” said Senator Lockwood); they upheld them by a six-to-one vote. As Julius Henry Cohen later recalled, he and Bernard Hershkopf “felt sure” they could count on Cardozo and Pound, both of whom were “liberal judges.” But to win over four of the other five justices was more than they expected. More stunning than the decision were the grounds on which it was based. In Durham v. La Fetra Pound took an even more expansive view of the police power than Guthrie and Cohen, who had based much of their case on the existence of an emergency—and even conceded that once the emergency was over the courts could decide that the laws were no longer operative. “Even in the absence of an emergency,” Pound held, “the state may pass wholesome and proper laws to regulate the use of property.” The “taking” in the rent laws was “analogous to the abatement of a nuisance or the establishment of building restrictions,” the constitutionality of which was not contingent on the existence of an emergency. “The police powers of a State have never before received so broad an interpretation,” the New York World wrote. The Washington Post agreed. Not since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Volstead Act, which was passed by Congress to implement the

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New York is now such an instrument.” It was therefore within the power of the legislature to suspend summary proceedings and actions in ejectment and to prevent landlords from charging more than a reasonable rent.47 McLaughlin disagreed. Eight months earlier he had written the decision in which the Court of Appeals ruled that New York City’s pioneering zoning law of 1916 was “a proper exercise of the police power.” But now he believed his colleagues had gone too far. In a long and forceful dissent, which drew heavily on the brief submitted by Marshall and Isaacs, he explained why. Chapter 944 substitutes for the old contract a new one, one that “the parties never made, and to the terms of which they never agreed.” It not only impairs contractual obligations; it destroys them. Under the emergency rent laws, the landlord must permit the tenant to remain on the premises and take whatever rent “the court fixes as reasonable.” Yet the tenant may refuse to pay and move out at any time without giving notice. “If this does not amount to depriving a landlord of his property without due process of law,” McLaughlin wrote, “it is difficult to imagine what would.” By treating the owners of old and new buildings differently, the laws also violated the equal protection clause. “One class is compelled arbitrarily to retain tenants whether desired or not, and to accept what the court fixes as a fair rental, while the other class may select its tenants and fix the rent at an amount upon which the parties agree.” The rent laws also take private property for a private purpose, even though the renting of property is no more a public matter than “the sale of food, clothing, or any other article.” It is much better, McLaughlin concluded, “to adhere strictly to the Constitution, the anchor of good, safe, and sound government, rather than to embark on the sea of paternalism, the dangers of which cannot be foreseen or the perils foretold.”48

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Eighteenth Amendment, “has there been such a broad assertion of the police power of the State or Federal government.”49 The tenants were elated by the court’s decision. So were the many New Yorkers who had fought hard for the emergency rent laws. Senator Lockwood said that Pound’s opinion “completely vindicates” the efforts of his committee and the results of the special session. Corporation Counsel O’Brien called the outcome “gratifying,” and Health Commissioner Copeland described it as “most gratifying.” Julius Henry Cohen praised the ruling as “very salutary.” He even went so far as to say that “decent landlords will ultimately hail this as a victory for them.” Assemblyman Joseph V. McKee deemed the decision “a great victory” for the tenants. So did Judge William E. Morris. Arthur J. W. Hilly pointed out that the ruling had prevented the eviction of 75,000 to 100,000 tenants. “Had the decision gone the other way,” he said, “the streets of New York would be so littered with furniture within the next few days that there wouldn’t be traffic room for a sparrow.” Captain Charles A. Goldsmith, the former chief mediator of the Mayor’s Committee, agreed. “If the rent laws had not been upheld there would have been chaos and perhaps bloodshed,” he said. Judge Harry Robitzek thought that an adverse decision would have been “calamitous.” And some of his colleagues believed that if the laws had been struck down, “something akin to revolution would have taken place.”50 The court’s decision left the Bronx Home News euphoric. It hailed the ruling as “a victory for the paper as well as for the people of the Bronx,” the culmination of a long campaign to protect the borough’s tenants from profiteering landlords. The Call, which was pleasantly surprised by what it called a “revolutionary” opinion, praised the court for its willingness to discard “the academic and legalistic formulas” that had long blocked social change. Other newspapers were less impressed by the decision. The World, which was troubled not so much by the opinion as by the reasoning underlying it, held that the court had gone to “needless extremes.” Pointing out that under Durham v. La Fetra there seemed to be “no bounds or restraints” on what the legislators could do in an emergency, the ruling is “so farreaching in its implications as to leave in doubt whether anything is left of the Constitution that on occasion may not be set aside by the Legislature.” The Daily Eagle shared this concern. The Herald had reservations too, but of a different kind. Although it did not take issue with the court’s decision, it stressed “the cold truth that the constitutionality of the legislation is one thing, its effect on the housing shortage is another.” Like the laws themselves, the ruling would discourage investors from putting money into residential construction. And without a huge infusion of money, the housing problem would go “from bad to worse.”51 The landlords were, to say the least, disappointed by the court’s decision. With a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of whom was Stewart Browne, so were the leading real estate men. As they saw it, Pound’s decision was not just bad law, an abandonment of constitutional principles that had served the country so well for so long and, in the words of Louis Marshall, “a confiscation of private property for public use.” It was also bad policy. Now that the rent laws had been upheld, said

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Ernest T. Pratt, executive secretary of the Real Estate Investors, Inc., “there can be no immediate solution of the housing problem in New York City.” Builders will not build, and lenders will not lend, he pointed out. The time is coming when even tenants will realize that the emergency rent laws will have to be repealed. Victor M. Earle, a member of the board of governors of the Real Estate Board, agreed. Calling the decision “short-sighted,” he asked, “Can it not be seen that houses unrestricted by rent laws have grown like mushrooms? Can it not be seen that an absolutely unprecedented stagnation of dwelling construction is the direct result of these laws?” Stanley M. Isaacs, chairman of the Law Committee of the Apartment House Owners Association, was especially disheartened by the court’s decision. He predicted that New York City would soon face “the greatest crisis” in its history.52 In the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision, some real estate men were inclined to give up the struggle. As one said, “The only thing that can be done now is to be patient until [the end of] October 1922, when the [emergency rent] laws expire.” Others were determined to carry on. Browne recommended that the real estate men attempt to persuade the state legislature to amend the laws in ways that would give landlords and tenants alike “a square deal.” Pratt insisted that the emergency rent laws should be repealed before the housing shortage grew worse. And Isaacs, reported the Times, urged “either the prompt repeal or substantial amendments of the existing laws.” But to amend or repeal the laws would take so much time that some real estate men favored pressing ahead on the legal front in the meantime. Hence on the day after Durham v. La Fetra was handed down, representatives of the Real Estate Board, Real Estate Investors, Inc., and Apartment House Owners Association held a meeting at which they decided to appeal the Court of Appeals’ ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Brooklyn Real Estate Board thought an appeal was warranted. So did the World. In addition to upholding the emergency rent laws, it wrote, the ruling by the Court of Appeals raised questions about “what may or may not be done under the police powers of the States,” questions of such “lasting importance” that they “call[ed] for definitive settlement by the highest court of the land.”53 If the U.S. Supreme Court took the appeal, which was by no means a sure thing, it was not clear how the justices would rule. They had at least three options. One was to strike down the emergency rent laws. Another was to uphold them. And yet another was to uphold them, but not on the broad grounds spelled out by Pound. That was the position taken by Justice Frederick E. Crane, who wrote a separate opinion in Guttag v. Shatzkin, on the basis of which he concurred in Durham v. La Fetra. As Crane saw it, the issue was not whether the state could regulate rents on the grounds that housing was a business that “has become charged with a public interest.” Rather it was whether the state had the power to deal with “a peril to life and health.” In his opinion, it did. When as a result of the postwar housing shortage the people of New York City “were threatened with [eviction] except upon payment of exorbitant rents, the state legislature had the power to stay any and all proceedings for a reasonable time.” The emergency rent laws were valid, he wrote, but only

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as long as “the danger or peril lasted.” If it was unclear how the U.S. Supreme Court would rule on these laws, there was good reason to think that it would be clear before long. For the rent laws had been challenged not only in state court, but also in federal court. And the case at issue in federal court, Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al., had already wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on March 3 and March 7, the day before the New York Court of Appeals issued its decision in Durham v. La Fetra.54

10 The Fight in the Federal Courts

Less than a week after the September laws were enacted, the New York Times reported that they would soon be challenged on constitutional grounds in federal court as well as state court. Bringing the challenge was Marcus Brown, a native of Poland who was born in 1854, came to the United States when he was nine, and lived in upstate New York until 1904, when he moved to New York City and went into the real estate business. By 1920 he owned both the Marcus Brown Construction Company, which built apartment houses on the Upper West Side, and the Marcus Brown Holding Company, which managed them. According to the Times, Joseph A. Seidman was going to file suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of the Marcus Brown Holding Company. He intended to ask the court to order a holdover tenant by the name of Arnold Pollak to move out of his apartment in the De Soto, a thirteen-story building at 215 West 91st Street that was assessed at nearly $1.2 million. He also intended to ask the court to enjoin District Attorney Edward Swann from charging the Marcus Brown Holding Company with violating chapter 951, which barred the landlord from depriving a tenant of heat or other essential services. As Seidman acknowledged, the suit was being filed not so much to oust Pollak and restrain Swann as to test the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws.1 For the most part the facts in what became known as Marcus Brown Holding Co. v. Pollak et al. were not in dispute. On July 10, 1928, Pollak signed a lease by which he agreed to rent a five-room apartment in the De Soto for $1,600 a year from the Marcus Brown Construction Company, which later leased and then sold the building to the Marcus Brown Holding Company. Under his agreement with the Marcus Brown Construction Company, Pollak was obliged to vacate the premises when the lease expired on September 30, 1920. With several months left on the lease, the Marcus Brown Holding Company notified Pollak it had a prospective tenant, one

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Minnie R. Griffen, who was willing to pay $2,300 a year for the apartment. When Pollak informed the company that he did not intend to stay after the lease expired, it rented the apartment to Griffen for three years starting October 1. But when October 1 came, Pollak refused to move out, which made it impossible for Griffen to move in. He took the position that under the newly enacted rent laws he had the right to stay in his apartment. He was willing to pay “a ‘reasonable’ increase,” reported the Times, but not an increase of more than 40 percent. Pollak also filed a complaint with District Attorney Swann, alleging that the Marcus Brown Holding Company had tried to force him to move out by shutting off the heat and other services, which was a misdemeanor under chapter 951. Swann advised the company that if it in any way interfered with Pollak’s “quiet enjoyment and occupation of the premises,” he would press charges against its officers.2 Believing that the most promising way to force Pollak to move out, enable Griffen to move in, and avoid prosecution was to challenge the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws, Brown instructed Seidman to file suit in District Court. A hearing was held in the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan in early October, but was adjourned because under the federal judicial code a suit to block the enforcement of a state law on constitutional grounds had to be heard by a panel of three judges, at least one of whom was a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court. Another hearing was then scheduled for late October. To comply with the code a special court of equity was empanelled. It consisted of Learned Hand, a member of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; Martin T. Manton, a member of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which was based in New York City; and Julian W. Mack, a member of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which was based in Chicago. As well as three eminent judges, the hearing brought together what the Times called “a brilliant array of lawyers.” Besides Seidman, they included David L. Podell, who represented Pollak, and John Caldwell Myers, who represented Swann. Also appearing were Deputy Attorney General Samuel A. Berger for Attorney General Charles D. Newton, Louis B. Marshall for the Real Estate Board, Francis M. Scott and George L. Ingraham for the Real Estate Investors of New York, Inc., and William D. Guthrie and Julius Henry Cohen for the Lockwood Committee.3 At the hearing, which was held on October 26, Seidman argued that the state legislature had exceeded its power by depriving his client of property without due process of law. Pointing out that there had been a glut in the housing market before World War I, he took issue with the claim that New York was now facing an emergency. “So long,” he argued, “as this legislation restrains the freedom of the citizen to make a valid and enforceable contract respecting property, which is not a public utility nor a private monopoly, it comes within the inhibition of the fifth and fourteenth amendments of the Constitution of the United States.” In response, Podell pointed out that “even after making [a] diligent search,” his client had been unable to find a suitable apartment and so was left with no alternative but to invoke the protection of the rent laws. He went on to say, “These laws may be said to be

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extraordinary, but the emergency which brings them forth and makes them necessary for the protection of the public is even more extraordinary.” The state legislature would have been “grossly negligent” if it had not adopted measures to deal with an emergency that was threatening to bring about “the destruction of the home” and thereby “undermine the basis of our national existence.” Under the circumstances the rent laws were a valid exercise of the police power, which did not so much deprive landlords of their property as limit the way in which they could use it.4 The District Court handed down its decision on November 13, less than three weeks after Seidman and Podell made their arguments. Written by Justice Hand, a member of one of the country’s most eminent legal families, it was anticlimactic. The plaintiff’s suit raised important constitutional issues, Hand wrote. But it had “a defect,” one that is “absolute as far as we can see.” Under federal law the District Court had no jurisdiction in cases where the amount at issue was less than $3,000, exclusive of interest and costs. And in this case it was. The amount at issue was the plaintiff’s loss from October 1, 1920, when Griffen was supposed to move in, to November 1, 1922, when the rent laws were supposed to expire. Calculating the difference between what Griffen had been paying and what Pollak was willing to pay, Hand concluded that only about $1,500 was at stake. “In no aspect does it seem to us, therefore, that the cause is within our jurisdiction,” Hand concluded, “and the [defendant’s] motion to dismiss must be granted.” As for the complaint against Swann’s “prospective prosecutions,” it too was outside the court’s jurisdiction.5 Although disappointed by Hand’s ruling, the Marcus Brown Holding Company pressed ahead with its attack on the rent laws. What it needed was a case in which at least $3,000 was at stake. It had no trouble finding one. For several months the company had been embroiled in a dispute with Marcus Feldman and Benjamin and Frank Schwartz, who had rented a seven-room apartment in the De Soto for three years, starting October 1, 1917, for $2,100 a year. In early March the company informed the tenants that it had recently leased their apartment to one Benjamin Goldsmith for five years, effective October 1, 1920, for $3,800 a year. Feldman and the Schwartz brothers responded by retaining Samuel R. Gerstein, a Manhattan lawyer who advised Seidman in June that his clients were prepared to renew their lease “at a reasonable increase to be determined by the Mayor’s Committee [on Rent Profiteering].” They had made “repeated attempts” to find another apartment, but without success; and if the company brought summary proceedings against them, they intended to ask the court for “a long stay” under the April laws. Seidman wrote back that the company expected the tenants to move out when their lease expired. He also informed Gerstein that several apartments were available on the Upper West Side at “a reasonable rental” of $2,600 to $3,500 a year. Gerstein replied that his clients had already looked at these apartments and found them unsuitable. By midJuly there was little doubt that Feldman and the Schwartz brothers would not be moving out when their lease expired—and after the September laws were enacted,

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there was none. When the tenants refused to move out on September 30, the Marcus Brown Holding Company had its test case.6 In the complaint that was filed with the District Court, Seidman argued that under the lease that Feldman and the Schwartz brothers had entered into with the Marcus Brown Construction Company in February 1917 they were obliged to move on September 30, 1920. And according to the laws in effect when the lease was signed, they “should be treated as a trespasser” for holding over “against the will of the owner.” The emergency rent laws, on which the tenants based their defense, deprived the landlord of property without due process of law, Seidman claimed. They left the De Soto “encumbered and unmarketable,” reducing its value by $100,000, which was more than enough to give the court jurisdiction. By impairing the obligations of the contract between the landlord and the tenants, the laws also violated article 1, section 10 of the Constitution. By making an “unreasonable and arbitrary discrimination between different persons and different classes of persons”—and by taking property from “one class of persons” and transferring it to “another class”—they also violated the equal protection clause. And by compelling the landlord to provide heat and other services “to persons trespassing upon his property,” which, said Seidman, constituted “involuntary servitude,” the rent laws even violated the Thirteenth Amendment. On these grounds he asked the court to order Feldman and the Schwartz brothers to vacate the premises, enjoin Swann from pressing charges against his client, and strike down all the September laws (and most of the April laws).7 With David Podell of counsel, Gerstein took issue with Seidman’s claim that the emergency rent laws were unconstitutional. He also denied that more than $3,000 was at stake. Gerstein stressed that his clients had offered to renew their lease in March 1920—and had been “ready, able and willing at all times to pay a reasonable rental for the use and occupation of said premises, or any sum that may be determined by a court of competent jurisdiction.” But in what Gerstein decried as an attempt to obtain “an exorbitant, unjust, unreasonable and inequitable rental,” the landlord rejected the offer. He added that his clients had made “repeated efforts, from day to day, in and about the city,” to find another apartment, even one at an “exorbitant” rent. But in the case of the few apartments that were available, the landlords could not guarantee that a new tenant could move in on October 1 because they could not be sure that the old tenant would move out when his lease expired. Swann and his lawyer, Robert S. Johnstone, also contended that the amount at stake was less than $3,000. They insisted that the emergency rent laws—especially chapter 951, whose enforcement was Swann’s responsibility—were a valid exercise of the police power. Pointing out that federal agencies had no authority to prevent state agencies from prosecuting “violations of a criminal statute [of New York],” Swann and Johnstone joined Gerstein in urging the District Court to dismiss Seidman’s complaint.8 To hear Marcus Brown Holding Co. v. Feldman et al., another special court of equity was empanelled. Besides Hand, it consisted of Julius M. Mayer, a former New York

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State attorney general who had been appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1912, and Charles B. Hough, a former District Court judge who had been appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1916. Based on a lecture Hough gave at Cornell in 1918, there was good reason to think that he would look with favor on the emergency rent laws. He did. So did his colleagues, who joined him in a decision that was handed down on December 15. Writing for the court, Hough first disposed of a few technical points—refusing, for example, to sever the case against Swann from the case against Feldman and the Schwartz brothers. He then held that the court had jurisdiction in the case at hand and that the issue before it was the constitutionality of the rent laws. Next he summarized the cardinal features of the laws. They were designed to enable tenants to remain in their homes until November 1, 1922, he wrote. They provided that the landlord “cannot select his tenants, but must accept what may be called statutory tenants,” who were required to pay a reasonable rent if they stayed and were free to move out if they chose. To prevent the landlords from “rendering their apartments uncomfortable for, if not uninhabitable by, the unwelcome statutory occupants,” the laws also made it a misdemeanor for the owner and everyone else involved in the management of the building to fail to furnish services to which the tenants were entitled.9 Hough acknowledged that the rent laws were unprecedented. “No legislation really like that at bar has been discovered in American history by the research of counsel,” he wrote. And the constitutional issues raised by the laws were not trivial. The plaintiff argues that the statutes impair contractual obligations. “This is plainly true,” wrote Hough. The plaintiff also insists that the statutes “put an end to liberty of contract and take property for a private use.” To a degree that is true too, Hough added. That in many cases “there is no liberty of contract under these statutes cannot be denied.” Nor can it be denied that property “is taken from the landlord for the use of the statutory tenant.” Under the laws the landlord may be “compelled to let his property be enjoyed by one whom he does not want” and who may pay less than what it might bring on the “open market.” But it was also “a wearisome truism that any legislative act is presumptively constitutional,” Hough pointed out. And “no matter how astonishing the legislation appears,” the courts had long held that “the wisdom, experience or sincerity of the Legislature is not open to judicial scrutiny.” Only the reason for the “legislative intention” is. And the reason was well known. By virtue of the cessation of residential construction during and after World War I, the demand for housing far exceeded the supply, leaving many tenants at the mercy of their landlords. When the landlords brought summary proceedings against 100,000 families in the fall of 1920, threatening to oust as many as half a million people “on the eve of winter,” the legislature had reason enough to give the tenants the option of remaining in their homes at a reasonable rent.10 Noting that nothing in the record showed that the market rent was different from a reasonable rent—or that the municipal court judges were calculating a reasonable rent in a way that was unconstitutional—Hough dismissed the argument

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that the emergency rent laws were a taking of property for private use. He also dismissed the argument that the laws violated the contract clause on the grounds that it “does not override the power of the state to establish regulations reasonably necessary to secure the health, comfort, or general welfare of the community.” Hough then turned to a more difficult question. Did the rent laws deny the landlord a constitutional right to choose his tenants? In other words, “Are these statutes an exercise of police power reasonably suitable for combating or lessening the evil proved, and therefore constitutional, although at other times and under other circumstances they might plainly be obnoxious to fundamental principles of constitutional government?” In a long line of decisions that went back to Munn v. Illinois, he wrote that the courts had held that the police power extended not only to “property devoted to a public use,” but also to “property affected with a public use.” In the process they upheld statutes that regulated grain elevators, fire insurance, and even trading stamps. Some people believed that “any business is affected with a public interest as soon as the electorate becomes sufficiently interested in it to pass a regulatory statute,” Hough said. Although not inclined “to go so far,” he held that “the business of renting out living space is quite as suitable for statutory regulation, and as much affected with a public interest, as [fire] insurance and trading stamps.” Hence the rent laws did not deprive the plaintiff of property without due process of law.11 Hough then dismissed the plaintiff’s one remaining point—that the emergency rent laws violated the equal protection clause because they regulated only “one class of landlords” and protected only “one class of tenants.” There was no scarcity of property “other than dwellings,” he pointed out; and “the consequences of a scramble for stores and offices are not of the same deteriorating social character as is one for homes.” Moreover new buildings, which were exempt from the emergency rent laws, cost much more to erect than old ones. If the laws applied to them, they would in all likelihood discourage residential construction and “prevent exactly what was necessary to relieve the [housing] shortage,” which had prompted the state legislature to act in the first place. Having rejected all the plaintiff’s arguments, Hough ruled that the emergency rent laws were constitutional. But in a statement that foreshadowed Justice Frederick E. Crane’s concurring opinion in Guttag v. Shatzkin, which was written about three months later, he added that the court was speaking only “in the present tense.” It “does not necessarily follow that because they [the statutes] violated no fundamental law in September or December, 1920, they will never so violate. Should it be shown thereafter that the reason for the laws had in fact passed, questions may arise not now before us, and as to which we do not wish to seem to foreclose discussion.”12 There was little doubt that the Marcus Brown Holding Company would appeal Hough’s ruling. And under a provision of the federal judicial code that dealt with constitutional issues, the company was able to bypass the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and take Brown v. Feldman directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Under ordinary circumstances the high court might have been reluctant to review a unanimous opinion of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Even if it agreed to hear the case, the court would probably have needed a year or so to reach a decision. But circumstances were far from ordinary. During and after World War I, elected officials had enacted laws to curb rent profiteering in more than half a dozen states and more than a dozen cities. And in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and a few other places these laws had been challenged on constitutional grounds, more often than not successfully. But nowhere outside of New York was the challenge as momentous as in Washington, D.C., where the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reached a decision in June 1920 that put it squarely at odds with the District Court for the Southern District of New York. This decision was also appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court a few months later. With two of the nation’s foremost courts at odds over the constitutionality of rent control, it was highly likely that the high court would hear Brown v. Feldman—and hear it sooner rather than later.13 The nation’s capital, a city of roughly 364,000 in the year before the United States entered World War I, had been hit hard by the wartime housing shortage. Indeed, wrote the District of Columbia Rent Commission, the housing shortage was more acute there than anywhere else, “with the possible exception of the city of New York.” Residential construction, which had been booming in the prewar years, came to a standstill in 1917 and did not resume after the war was over. In the meantime—a time, said one congressman, when Washington seemed “not only the center of the United States, but, indeed, the pivotal point of the world”—tens of thousands of newcomers, many of them young women in search of well-paying jobs in war-related activities, poured into the District. As a result its population soared to about 421,000 by July 1918, an increase of more than 15 percent in two years. By early 1918 the demand for housing far exceeded the supply. Rents, which had been falling before the war, started to rise. Although they rose less in Washington than in most other cities, many tenants charged that the landlords were engaging in what the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia called “merciless profiteering.” Spokesmen for the real estate industry denied the charges, claiming that property owners were raising rents in order to cover rising costs. Despite these denials, many Washingtonians believed that the soaring rents were forcing much of the District’s workforce to cram into small apartments and furnished rooms, thereby threatening the well-being of the community and even undermining the efficacy of the war effort.14 Although Washington, D.C., was in theory governed by a three-member board of commissioners appointed by the president, it was in practice ruled by Congress, which was under mounting pressure to do something about rent profiteering in the District. Late in January 1918 Representative Ben Johnson, a Kentucky Democrat, introduced a bill to solve the problem by imposing an excess profits tax on landlords. The bill passed the House in early March. But it made little headway in the Senate, which favored a bill sponsored by Atlee Pomerene, an Ohio Democrat. The Johnson and Pomerene bills were “radically different,” reported the Washington Post.

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And when it became clear that the House and Senate would be unable to reach an agreement, Senator Willard Saulsbury, a Delaware Democrat, introduced a resolution to protect the many District tenants who were about to be evicted. The revised version of what became known as the Saulsbury Resolution provided that until ninety days after the United States and Germany signed a peace treaty no tenant could be ousted from his home except under a few exceptional circumstances as long as he paid the rent stipulated in the lease. Some congressmen attacked the resolution as impractical, unconstitutional, and un-American. “I defy anyone in this Chamber to point to anything that has been done by that aggregation of insanity, imbecility and anarchy known as the Russian Soviet that goes further than this joint resolution,” said Senator James A. Reed, a Missouri Democrat. But most congressmen believed that something had to be done to curb rent profiteering in the District and that the Saulsbury Resolution was better than nothing. It was adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in late May.15 Led by Charles W. Fairfax, president of the Real Estate Brokers Association, Washington’s landlords had fought hard to block the Saulsbury Resolution—and when Congress adopted it, they continued the fight in court. The initial results were mixed. The District of Columbia Supreme Court held that the resolution was constitutional in one case and unconstitutional in another. The issue was not resolved until December 1, 1919, when the District of Columbia Court of Appeals handed down a decision in Willson v. McDonnell. The case got under way in July, when Curtis C. McDonnell filed suit against Hannah T. Willson, a tenant who refused to move out after her lease expired. In her defense Willson invoked the Saulsbury Resolution. When the D.C. Supreme Court ruled in favor of McDonnell, she went to the D.C. Court of Appeals. Writing for himself and Josiah Van Orsdel, Charles H. Robb held that the capital’s residents were entitled to the same constitutional protections as other Americans: not even a declaration of war superseded the Constitution. Robb went on to note that there was no need for the court to determine whether renting space was a business “affected with a public interest” and subject to regulation by Congress under the police power. For in the case at hand the regulation, which took private property without compensation, was not reasonable. And since it treated property under lease one way and property not under lease another way, it was not “uniform in its operation.” Hence, Robb concluded, the court had no choice but to find the Saulsbury Resolution unconstitutional and affirm the lower court’s judgment. Constantine J. Smyth, who had been appointed chief justice in 1917, issued a brief dissent, in which he urged his colleagues to reconsider. They refused. And in October 1921 the U.S. Supreme Court denied Willson’s appeal.16 By the time the Court of Appeals issued its ruling, the Saulsbury Resolution was defunct. As Representative Thomas L. Rubey, a Missouri Democrat, put it, the resolution was a “makeshift” that was designed to prevent evictions in the District while Congress tried to figure out how to curb rent profiteering. And not long after it was adopted, the legislators started looking for another solution to the housing problem. Taking the lead was Senator A. Heisler Ball, a Delaware Republican and chair of a

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subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, who launched an investigation of the high cost of living in the capital. Based on the subcommittee’s findings that apartments were hard to find at any price, that rents were rising by as much as 50 percent, and that overcrowding was becoming widespread, Ball introduced a far-ranging bill that imposed rent control in the District of Columbia. The bill generated a heated debate. Opponents charged that it would do nothing to relieve congestion, that it would be found unconstitutional, and even that it smacked of socialism. Pointing out that this “vicious legislation” denied the landlord the right not only to set his rents, but also to choose his tenants, Representative James T. Begg, an Ohio Republican, said, “Why, the wildest-eyed Bolshevist that ever spoke from a soap box in the city of New York never advocated a wilder doctrine than this.” But over the objections of Begg and others, Congress enacted what was commonly referred to as the Ball Rent Act in October.17 Unlike the Saulsbury Resolution, the Ball Rent Act was an attempt not only to prevent evictions, but also to regulate rents. Although many other countries had already imposed rent control, it was the first such attempt in the United States. And more than New York’s emergency rent laws, the first batch of which were enacted six months later, it served as the model for other states and cities that were trying to curb rent profiteering. The act established a District of Columbia Rent Commission, which consisted of three presidential appointees, to deal with landlord-tenant disputes, either after a complaint or on its own initiative. It was authorized to prescribe standard leases, extend tenancies beyond their expiration date, and, most important of all, set fair and reasonable rates for rental property. Its rulings could only be appealed to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where they could only be set aside or modified for errors of law. The act also prevented landlords from ousting tenants except in cases where the tenants failed to pay the rent or violated other terms of the lease or where the landlords intended to demolish the old building and construct a new rental property on the site. The landlord could also sue to recover the premises if he and/or his family wanted to occupy it. If, however, he cut off services to which the tenants were entitled, he was subject to a fine of up to $1,000, imprisonment for up to one year, or both. Like the New York rent laws, the Ball Rent Act was deemed a temporary response to the postwar emergency and was therefore set to expire in two years. But unlike the New York laws, it applied to all rental property, commercial as well as residential.18 Whether the Ball Rent Act would survive judicial scrutiny was far from clear, especially in the aftermath of Willson v. McDonnell. Henry E. Davis, Willson’s lawyer, predicted that the act would fare no better than the Saulsbury Resolution when it reached the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Senator Ball was more optimistic. So was Henry H. Glassie, who argued that the two measures were based on such “an entirely different principle” that the ruling in Willson v. McDonnell would have no bearing on the validity of the Ball Rent Act. The issue came to a head in the spring of 1920, when a few landlords filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the act. By far the most important of them pitted Louis Hirsh against Julius Block. In

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mid-November 1919 Hirsh bought a three-story building at 919 F Street, Northwest that he intended to use as a retail store. A month later he notified Block, a tenant who ran a shop of his own out of the cellar and first floor, that he would have to move out when his three-year lease expired on December 31. Citing a provision of the Ball Rent Act that required landlords to give thirty days’ notice, Block refused. In early January 1920 Hirsh asked the District of Columbia Municipal Court to oust him. When Judge Robert H. Terrell, the capital’s first African American judge, ruled against him, Hirsh appealed to the D.C. Supreme Court. In late March what the Washington Post called “an imposing array of counsel”—which included William G. Johnson, who had been practicing law in Washington for twenty-five years, and Julius I. Peyser, who would one day serve as president of the District of Columbia Bar Association—appeared before Justice Frederick L. Siddons. When Siddons, a former member of the District’s Board of Commissioners, affirmed the trial court’s decision and held the Rent Act constitutional, Hirsh took his case to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.19 The case was heard by Justices Smyth, Robb, and Van Orsdel in early May. On behalf of Hirsh, Johnson and his associates argued that the Ball Rent Act did not differ materially from the Saulsbury Resolution—which they reminded the judges had been found unconstitutional in Willson v. McDonnell. Like the resolution, the act transferred property to the tenant without the consent of the landlord, which had never been held “a constitutional exercise of the legislative power.” Johnson and his associates also gave short shrift to Congress’s declaration that the Ball Rent Act was a necessary response to a wartime emergency. “War carries many and grievous afflictions,” they pointed out, “but among them is not the abrogation, temporary or permanent, of the constitutional limitations upon the power of Congress.” On behalf of Block, Peyser and his colleagues—among them Jesse C. Adkins, who would precede Peyser as president of the D.C. Bar Association—responded that the plaintiff’s arguments against the constitutionality of the Ball Rent Act were baseless. The act was not an unlawful “exercise of the war and police powers of Congress.” It did not impair the plaintiff’s vested rights. Nor did it deprive him of property without due process of law or take it “for private use” or “without just compensation.”20 A month later a divided Court of Appeals issued its ruling, reversing Judge Siddons’s decision and remanding the case “for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.” Writing for himself and Robb, Van Orsdel began by saying that the only issue before the court was the constitutionality of the Ball Rent Act. If it was valid, the defendant had a “complete” defense, because the plaintiff did not give the thirty days’ notice required by the act. (Hitherto the law allowed a District of Columbia landlord to recover his property without giving any notice as soon as the lease expired.) But if the act was not valid, the defendant had no defense at all. Citing Willson v. McDonnell, Van Orsdel wrote that the residents of the District could not be denied “the constitutional guarantees of life, liberty, and property.” Nor could they be deprived of their property “except by due process of law.” Under the Ball Rent Act, however, the tenant could remain on the premises at the old rent even

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after the expiration of his lease, which was a valid contract when the act was passed. If so inclined, he could even ask the District of Columbia Rent Commission to reduce the rent. Also under the act the landlord could not ask the court to review the Rent Commission’s decision on the basis of the facts. Nor could he sell the property “except subject to and burden by the option of the tenant.” Thus, said Van Orsdel, it would seem “that if the property clauses of the Constitution are [much] longer to have any restraining power over Congress, the case here presented is one within the inhibition of the Fifth Amendment.”21 Nor could the Ball Rent Act be justified as a taking of private property for public use, he went on. Both the plaintiff and defendant are private citizens, “engaged in private business.” And a private business “cannot be made public, or impressed with a public interest, merely by legislative fiat.” Hence the case at hand was not controlled by Munn v. Illinois and other Supreme Court decisions that had upheld the power of the legislature to regulate businesses devoted to a public use. Moreover, in none of the cases where the court had upheld the right to regulate rates had it sustained the power “to continue existing contracts in force” after they expired or to require the owners to remain in business against their will. Yet under the Ball Rent Act, wrote Van Orsdel, “the landlord is not only prevented from going out of the renting business, but is required to continue it upon the terms fixed by the act.” Congress has the power to take private property for public use, provided it compensates the owner. But “it has no power, under any circumstances, to take private property for a private use,” much less to “to take the private property of one individual and turn it over to the use of another private individual.” The declaration of an emergency provides a reason for the Ball Rent Act, he went on. But it “adds nothing to the constitutional power of Congress.” Nor does it “make an act constitutional which otherwise would be unconstitutional.” Not least of all, it does not empower Congress to enact a law that made the D.C. Rent Commission’s findings of fact “binding and conclusive” and thereby deprives tenants and landlords of the right of trial by jury, which was guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment.22 Chief Justice Smyth, who had disagreed with his colleagues in Willson v. McDonnell, also disagreed with them in Hirsh v. Block. In a dissent that was longer than the majority opinion, he argued that Hirsh had no right to challenge the constitutionality of the Ball Rent Act. The act gave Hirsh “a direct and effective” way to recover his property. All he had to do was apply to the D.C. Rent Commission, which was required to award him possession as long as he could prove he was a bona fide purchaser who intended to occupy the premises. If Block still refused to move out, Hirsh could give thirty days’ notice and then ask the D.C. Municipal Court to oust him. Smyth also took issue with his colleagues on two other matters. According to Van Orsdel, the Ball Rent Act deprived Hirsh of “the unrestricted right” to sell or rent his property “without any claim or charge upon it” and to rent it “without let or hindrance from Block.” But, argued Smyth, Hirsh did not petition the court for the right to sell or rent the property, only to use it for his own purposes. “It will be time enough to adjudicate the other rights when they properly arise.” Also according

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to Van Orsdel, the Ball Rent Act deprived Hirsh of the right to trial by jury. “But,” said Smyth, “he did not ask for a jury trial.” To the contrary, he filed a motion for a judgment “without the intervention of a jury.” Why, Smyth asked, should the court “raise a question not presented in the record in order that [it] may assail an act of Congress, especially in view of the rule, universally held, that it is the duty of all courts to sustain a statute if it can be done”?23 Suppose Hirsh had the right to challenge the constitutionality of the Ball Rent Act, Smyth continued. Would it “stand the test?” Congress, he wrote, has the same police power in the District as the legislatures have in the states. And it may exercise that power over property “clothed with a public interest.” But “who is to decide when property is so clothed?” he asked. “Manifestly this must be done in the first instance by Congress.” And Congress has determined that rental property in the District is “clothed with a public interest,” a determination that “is entitled to great respect by the courts.” “What, then, is the test by which the court is to ascertain whether this determination by Congress is sound?” The answer is found in Munn v. Illinois, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that if the facts that justified the statutes could exist, “they must be presumed to exist.” It was up to Hirsh to prove otherwise. And he had not done so. In the midst of an acute housing shortage that not only endangered public health, but also prevented government employees from doing their jobs, Smyth could only conclude that the business of renting property in the District of Columbia “is affected with a public interest” and thus subject to regulation under the police power. This does not mean that Congress can deprive an owner of property without due process of law or deny him “a reasonable compensation for its use.” But the Ball Rent Act does “not impinge upon any constitutional right which Hirsh is entitled to assert here.” “If in a proper action by him it should appear that the enforcement of any of the provisions of the act would deprive him of such a right, the court will be open for his protection.” But until then the judgment of the District of Columbia Supreme Court should be affirmed.24 There was no doubt that Block’s lawyers would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the D.C. Court of Appeals decision. With the D.C. Rent Commission in limbo and no end of litigation in sight, the sooner the high court ruled the better, wrote the Washington Post. But in their attempt to bring the case before the Supreme Court, Block’s lawyers ran into one obstacle after another. In late June the Court of Appeals denied Peyser’s application for a writ of error, which, if granted, would have sent the case to the high court. As the Post put it, the Court of Appeals was “washing its hands” of the Ball Rent Act and the D.C. Rent Commission. Along with Adkins, Peyser then applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of error in early July. But Chief Justice Edward D. White refused to grant it on the grounds that the Court of Appeals decision was not final. The court had not given Hirsh “a judgment for possession.” It had only remanded the case to the D.C. Supreme Court. Although the Court of Appeals had left the D.C. Supreme Court no alternative but to order Block to vacate the premises, it had not yet done so. Shortly thereafter the case went back to the

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D.C. Supreme Court where it was heard by Walter I. McCoy. Under pressure from both parties to rule as quickly as possible, McCoy entered a judgment for Hirsh in late July. The Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in mid-November, again by a twoto-one vote. A few days later, more than five months after it handed down Hirsh v. Block, the court granted a writ of error and sent the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.25 Not long after, the high court agreed to hear what had been Hirsh v. Block but, now that Block was the appellant, would henceforth be known as Block v. Hirsh. The case was put on the calendar for the October term. In the meantime the District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of Feldman and the Schwartz brothers. And when the Marcus Brown Holding Company asked for a review of Justice Hough’s decision, the high court agreed to hear Brown v. Feldman as well. It too was set for the October term, 1920, though it was much lower on the calendar than Block v. Hirsh. It is hard to see how the U.S. Supreme Court could have declined to hear these cases. Rent control was a momentous issue in the immediate aftermath of World War I. And if the high court had let both Block v. Hirsh and Brown v. Feldman stand, it would have been unconstitutional in Washington, D.C., but constitutional in New York, not to mention Buffalo and Rochester. As the justices were well aware, their decisions would have a profound impact on more than just the nation’s capital and its largest city. If the court held the Ball Rent Act and the emergency rent laws unconstitutional, it would bring to a halt the ongoing efforts to impose rent control. If instead it found the laws constitutional, subsequent rent control measures would only have to pass muster in the state appellate courts, which would have been strongly influenced by the Supreme Court’s position.26 Events took an unexpected turn on February 28, 1921, a few days before Block v. Hirsh was to be heard. Joseph A. Seidman, counsel for the Marcus Brown Holding Company, asked the high court to advance Brown v. Feldman from the bottom of the calendar and hear it together with Block v. Hirsh. The court had good reason to deny Seidman’s request. The federal and state laws differed in many ways. Whereas the Ball Rent Act applied to all rental property, commercial as well as residential and new as well as old, the emergency rent laws exempted commercial property and new buildings. Whereas the Washington, D.C., law set up an administrative agency to determine reasonable rents and oversee summary proceedings, the New York State statutes left the implementation of rent control up to the municipal courts. Brown v. Feldman also raised constitutional issues that were not raised in Block v. Hirsh—and vice versa. To give a couple of examples, Seidman challenged chapter 951 on the grounds that it compelled “one man to render involuntary servitude to another.” And William G. Johnson and Hirsh’s other lawyers attacked the Ball Rent Act on the grounds that it deprived the District’s residents of the right to trial by jury.27 But the Supreme Court had even better reasons to grant Seidman’s request. For all their differences, the Ball Rent Act and the emergency rent laws had much in common. Both were enacted to deal with the postwar housing shortage. Both were designed to protect vulnerable tenants against profiteering landlords. Except under

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certain circumstances, both prevented the landlords from ousting the tenants when their leases expired, provided they were willing to pay a reasonable rent. Both barred the landlords from cutting off services to which the tenants were entitled. And among other things, both were set to expire in two years. For the most part, moreover, Block v. Hirsh and Brown v. Feldman raised many of the same constitutional issues. Among the most important were whether the laws deprived landlords of property without due process of law, whether they took private property for private use, whether they denied landlords the equal protection of the law, and whether they impaired contractual obligations. In view of these common features, the high court granted Seidman’s request and advanced Brown v. Feldman to the top of the calendar. On March 3 it held a hearing at which Adkins argued on behalf of Block, Johnson on behalf of Hirsh, and Glassie, special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, as amicus curiae on behalf of the United States. And on March 3 and 7 Guthrie spoke for the attorney general of New York, Seidman for the Marcus Brown Holding Company, and Podell for Feldman and the Schwartz brothers.28 The oral arguments are no longer available, which is unfortunate because Guthrie was at the peak of his power and the other lawyers, if not of his stature, were first-rate advocates. (Like Marshall, his opposing counsel in Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel, Guthrie addressed the justices as if he were their mentor, wrote Julius Henry Cohen.) But the written briefs, which were submitted in late February and early March, have survived. Full of historical analogies as well as legal citations, they were learned, often brilliant, and sometimes ingenious. Most were also very long. Block’s brief, which was filed by Peyser, Adkins, and their associates, ran sixty-one pages. Hirsh’s brief, which was submitted by Johnson and his colleagues, was almost as long, but less than half as long as Glassie’s brief, which was filed on behalf of the United States. Even more voluminous were the briefs that were submitted in Brown v. Feldman. Seidman filed a 129-page brief on behalf of the Marcus Brown Holding Company, and Podell, Gerstein, and their associates a 73-page brief on behalf of Feldman and the Schwartz brothers. With Lewis M. Isaacs, Marshall submitted an amici curiae brief that was virtually the same as the one they had recently filed in the New York Court of Appeals on behalf of the Levy Leasing Company. It ran 112 pages. Last but by no means least, Guthrie and Cohen submitted a brief on behalf of the attorney general and the Lockwood Committee. A revised version of the one they had filed on behalf of Judge Edward B. La Fetra in the New York Supreme Court, and later on behalf of La Fetra, Hyman Shatzkin, and others in the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals, it was 150 pages long.29 Although these briefs ran more than seven hundred pages in total, they raised few issues that had not been raised in the lower courts. The Ball Rent Act and the emergency rent laws were attacked on the grounds that they violated fundamental constitutional provisions. And they were defended as a valid exercise of the police power (and, in the case of Block v. Hirsh, of the war power as well). The briefs also raised a host of questions. Was there a public emergency arising out of World War I, as Congress and the New York State legislature had determined? Or was the so-called

He may [they wrote] keep the property idle or rent it to whomsoever he pleases at whatever oppressive rent he may fix. No economic or other condition can justify the slightest modification of these rights. There may be war, the tenant may be drafted and be abroad fighting for the landlord, the tenant’s family may all be sick of influenza and accommodations in hospitals or other shelter impossible. Under these

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emergency a figment of popular imagination, a product of postwar hysteria? If there was an emergency, how serious was it? Were the measures enacted to cope with it appropriate? Was the business of renting space affected with the public interest? Or was it a strictly private matter in which no one other than the landlord and the tenant was involved? Did the Ball Rent Act and the emergency rent laws take property from its owner, which was only justified if it was taken for a public purpose and he was compensated for his loss? Or did the laws do nothing but stop the landlord from ousting his tenants for two years and in the meantime prevent him from charging more than a reasonable rent?30 In drafting the briefs the lawyers adhered to the customary practice of spelling out the facts, summarizing the laws at issue, and then drawing conclusions based on legal precedents and other evidence. But on occasion they also catered to prejudice and engaged in hyperbole. After pointing out that the emergency rent laws were “more drastic and revolutionary than any law ever enacted in any state of the Union,” Seidman wrote, “our distinguished and learned opponents [meaning Guthrie and Cohen] ask that we go back to ancient history and adopt the principles of the Romans governing the rights of serfs and tenants who were mere slaves; that we take into consideration the Irish Land Bills affecting tenantry, and that we accept as our own laws the acts of the British Parliament enacted during the World War.” They might as well have “asked us to adopt as laws the decrees of Soviet Russia.” Marshall and Isaacs, who also stressed the revolutionary character of the New York laws, wrote that if the legislature may say to a landlord “that he shall not be permitted to enter into a contract for the leasing of his property except on condition that the contract shall run the gauntlet of the courts and juries and that the amount that he shall be permitted to charge shall eventually be fixed by a court or jury, then it is difficult to understand why the Legislature may not say to the farmer or to the grocer that, irrespective of the contract price at which he may sell to a customer milk, potatoes, wheat, or any other of his products, the purchaser may contest the reasonableness of the price and be limited in his payment to the sum that a court or jury may eventually determine to be the just and reasonable price.” Such legislation is a “vehicle of oppression,” they said, “and the precedent it would establish, if held to be constitutional, would be appalling.”31 In an otherwise temperate brief Peyser, Adkins, and their associates sharply criticized the majority opinion in Hirsh v. Block, saying it held that a landlord “has the absolute, uncontrollable right to oust the tenant instantly at the expiration of his time.”

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circumstances the landlord may say to the stricken wife and mother, “Pay me a rent ten times greater than the old [rent] or I will put you and your children in the street.” The legislature is so impotent that it cannot fix the return which this landlord may receive from any tenant of this property; it cannot say that if this property continues to be rented the present tenant shall have the first opportunity [to rent it]; it cannot stay evictions until the soldier has opportunity to return; and, finally, it cannot even require the landlord to give a month’s notice of his intention to evict his tenant. The Court of Appeals ruling notwithstanding, “We do not believe that government is powerless in such an emergency,” Peyser, Adkins, and their associates declared. Even more caustic was the response of Johnson and his colleagues to the argument that the Ball Rent Act was valid as a war measure. By signing the lease, they said, Block had agreed that he would not use or sublet the premises for anything other than a store for “ladies wear.” And it was hard to imagine “that the successful prosecution of the war against the Imperial German Government required that Mr. Block should continue to sell ‘ladies’ wear’ at 919 F Street.”32 Despite the Court of Appeals decision, Louis Brownlow and Charles W. Kutz, two of the District of Columbia’s three commissioners, were confident that the high court would uphold the Ball Rent Act. So was James F. Oyster, former chairman of the D.C. Rent Commission. But according to the Washington Post, many of the District’s lawyers expected the high court to find the Ball Rent Act unconstitutional on the grounds that it impaired contractual obligations. Julius Henry Cohen recalled that when word spread that Guthrie had agreed to defend the emergency rent laws, many friends approached him at the Downtown Club in Lower Manhattan and “intimated politely that he must be rapidly approaching senility.” “They all predicted a good sound thrashing for us in the United States Supreme Court.” Still Cohen was cautiously optimistic. So were many other New Yorkers. In view of the recent decisions by the state and federal courts in New York City, “there was little expectation of a reversal in Washington,” wrote the World.33 If the court’s prior decisions were a reliable indicator, the Ball Rent Act stood a good chance of passing muster. So did the emergency rent laws. Between 1887 and 1911, wrote Charles Warren, a prominent Boston attorney and legal scholar, the high court had ruled in favor of state laws that were designed to promote “social justice” in all but a handful of cases, of which Lochner v. New York was perhaps the best known. Far from reactionary, it had “been steady and consistent in upholding all State legislation of a progressive type.” Nor did it change much during and immediately after World War I, other legal scholars pointed out. The justices had shown a high degree of “judicial self-abnegation,” a strong inclination to defer to the legislature on matters of social and economic policy. And they had repeatedly held that “businesses which are today purely private may tomorrow, through a now inconceivable change

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of conditions, enter the ‘public interest’ class.” Charles B. Hough, who wrote the District Court’s opinion in Brown v. Feldman, made a similar point in a lecture at Cornell in 1918. Due process of law is no longer much of a constraint on the police power, he said. Neither is freedom of contract. Given the deep-seated belief that every American “can do what he likes, where and when he pleases,” it “dies very hard.” But “it is dying.” And when invoked today under the due process clause, the courts “are doing little more than easing the patient’s later days.”34 But as an indicator of how the Supreme Court would rule in Block v. Hirsh and Brown v. Feldman, its prior decisions were not too reliable. The justices were often so evenly divided that if one or two had voted the other way the outcome would have been completely different in many cases. One example was German Alliance Insurance Company v. Lewis, which had been handed down in April 1914. In this case the high court voted five to three to affirm a decision of the Circuit Court for the District of Kansas and uphold a Kansas statute that empowered the state’s Superintendent of Insurance to regulate fire insurance rates. Another example was Wilson v. New, which was handed down in March 1917. In this case the court voted five to four to reverse a ruling of the District Court for the Western District of Missouri and uphold the Adamson Act, by which Congress imposed an eight-hour day, with no corresponding reduction in wages, for railroad workers engaged in interstate commerce. Indicative of how evenly the justices were divided was Hammer v. Dagenhart, which was handed down in June 1918. In another five-to-four decision, the court affirmed a decision of the District Court for the Western District of North Carolina and ruled that the Keating-Owen Act, which was designed to curtail child labor, was unconstitutional. During the early 1920s the court struck down so many laws by a five-to-four vote, usually on the grounds that they violated the due process clause, that Senator William E. Borah of Idaho introduced a bill that would have barred it from holding a law unconstitutional unless seven justices concurred.35 Moreover, Block v. Hirsh and Brown v. Feldman were much more draconian than most of the other measures that had been heard by the court. James T. Begg’s claim that the Ball Rent Act was form of Bolshevism was open to debate. So was Louis Marshall’s argument that the emergency rent laws were nothing short of revolutionary. What was not open to debate was that these measures were drastic, even radical—that, in the words of Samuel Untermyer, chief counsel to the Lockwood Committee, they went to “extreme lengths.” They limited what the landlord could charge for the use of his property and even suspended his right to recover it after the lease expired. If this right could be suspended for two years, opponents of these laws pointed out, they could presumably be suspended indefinitely. And as an Alabama lawyer told the Maryland State Bar Association, the Ball Rent Act and the emergency rent laws dealt not with grain elevators and insurance companies, much less with monopolies and public utilities, but with “strictly private buildings.”36 Of the nine justices, it was highly likely that three would vote to uphold the D.C. and New York rent laws. The most senior of these “liberal judges,” as Julius Henry Cohen referred to them, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. A Boston Brahmin,

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Holmes had sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for twenty years before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. A brilliant justice whom Judge Hough called “the Voltaire of our bench,” he was regarded by many as the greatest jurist since John Marshall and Joseph Story. A strong believer in judicial restraint, he was inclined, writes one legal historian, “to uphold any reasonable social legislation enacted by a representative body.” As brilliant as Holmes was Louis D. Brandeis, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and a corporate lawyer who had become “the people’s advocate,” in the words of Woodrow Wilson, who appointed him to the high court in 1916. If Holmes was “an enlightened skeptic,” Brandeis, writes his biographer, was “a militant crusader,” for whom the principal objective of jurisprudence was social justice. Like Holmes, he believed “the judiciary had no business second-guessing the legislature, nor striking down laws simply because the judges did not agree with their underlying philosophy.” Also appointed by Wilson to the high court in 1916 was John M. Clarke of Ohio, another corporate lawyer turned progressive reformer who almost invariably sided with Brandeis. According to his biographer, Clarke viewed the Constitution not as “a straight-jacket by which the past is to be imposed on the present,” but “as a working charter for a living government, which has proved in experience perfectly adaptable to conditions of life and society of which its framers never dreamed.”37 It was also highly likely that three of the justices would vote to strike down the rent laws. One was James C. McReynolds, a native of rural Kentucky and attorney general in the first Wilson administration who was appointed to the high court in 1914. A major disappointment to Wilson, McReynolds, writes one legal historian, turned out to be a “fanatically conservative” justice who invariably sided with the majority in cases where state regulatory measures were held to have run afoul of the due process clause. A man’s liberty and property, he wrote, should not be “subordinate to whims or caprices or fanciful ideas of those who happen for the day to constitute the legislative majority.” Another staunch conservative—and, in the words of one legal scholar, “the foremost intellectual conservative on the court”— was Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming. A corporate lawyer, Devanter was a Republican stalwart who served as assistant attorney general in the Department of the Interior under President William McKinley. In 1903 Roosevelt appointed him to the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and seven years later William Howard Taft picked him to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he took a very narrow view of the police power. Much less rigid than McReynolds and Van Devanter was Edward D. White. A member of the Louisiana gentry and a Confederate Army veteran to boot, White had been appointed to the high court by Grover Cleveland in 1894 and named chief justice by Taft in 1910, the first associate justice to be so elevated. More moderate than most strict laissez-faire conservatives, he sided with the minority in Lochner v. New York, but wrote the majority opinion in Wilson v. New.38 How the three other justices would vote on the rent laws was anyone’s guess. The most senior of them was Joseph McKenna. A former California congressman

On April 18, 1921, less than a month and a half after hearing oral arguments, the court issued Block v. Hirsh, reversing the decision of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and upholding the constitutionality of the Ball Rent Act. Largely on the basis of Block v. Hirsh, it also issued Brown v. Feldman, affirming the ruling of the District Court for the Southern District of New York and upholding the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws. Both cases were decided by a five-to-four

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and circuit court judge, he had served as attorney general under McKinley, who appointed him to the high court in 1897. The author of the majority opinion in the German Alliance case—which, wrote one lawyer, “broadened practically without limit the field of price regulation”—he took an expansive view of the police power during much of his time on the bench. But in the aftermath of World War I, writes his biographer, he abandoned many of his long-held principles “in his haste to meet the approaching threat of socialism.” Also hard to read were William R. Day and Mahlon Pitney. Born in Ohio into a family of judges, Day was another prominent lawyer and staunch Republican, who, after serving as assistant secretary of state under McKinley and as a member of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, had been appointed to the high court by Roosevelt in 1903. Often a swing vote, he sided the majority in the German Alliance case, but wrote the majority opinion in Hammer v. Dagenhart. A native of New Jersey who prepared for the bar by working in his father’s law office, Pitney was a former Republican congressman and member of the New Jersey Supreme Court before being appointed to the high court by Taft in 1912. A strong believer in freedom of contract, he was often at odds with Holmes and Brandeis.39 Unlike the New York Court of Appeals under Frank H. Hiscock, the U.S. Supreme Court under Edward D. White was not a particularly collegial body. As well as divided on ideological grounds, it was racked by personal animosity. According to William Howard Taft, the former president who was appointed chief justice by Warren G. Harding shortly after White died in May 1921, McReynolds was “a continual grouch.” He was also known for his “biting sarcasm and rude behavior.” Although he got along with Holmes, he had a strong aversion to Brandeis, which was based at least as much on ideological differences as on anti-Semitism. For years, writes one legal historian, he “would leave the room when Brandeis spoke in conference.” He even refused to pose for a court photo because under the rules of seniority he would have had to sit next to Brandeis. He would not speak to Clarke either; nor would he sign a letter of appreciation when Clarke resigned in September 1922. Moreover, according to legal historians, an “odd and in most ways pointless little rivalry” existed between McKenna and Holmes. McKenna dissented frequently from Holmes’s opinions, and his dissents often had “a certain sharpness.” Given that the justices were so divided ideologically and personally—and given that Block v. Hirsh and Brown v. Feldman raised constitutional questions about which even wellmeaning and well-tempered judges could disagree—it seemed highly unlikely that the high court would reach a decision on the basis of anything other than a very narrow majority.40

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vote, which led Holmes, who wrote the majority opinion, to say to Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law School professor who would be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939, “It was a close shave, wasn’t it?” As expected, Brandeis and Clarke went along with Holmes. (The opinion “is in every way worthy,” Brandeis told him. “I do not recall when you have done better.” It “is a long stride,” Clarke wrote, “but you have taken it with clearness and force. And I march with you.”) Less expected but no less important, Day and Pitney went along with Holmes. In both cases McKenna— who, Holmes told Frankfurter, was “very much disturbed by the decision,” perhaps, writes one constitutional scholar, because his opinion in the German Alliance case “furnished the majority with its leading precedent”—wrote the dissenting opinions. McKenna’s scathing opinions, in which White, Van Devanter, and McReynolds concurred, annoyed Holmes, who thought they were in “bad form.” Sixty-five years later another constitutional scholar called them “a diatribe.”41 Holmes acknowledged that the court could have confined itself to the validity of the provision of the Ball Rent Act that required landlords to give tenants thirty days’ notice. But this approach had little appeal for him. The constitutionality of the Ball Rent Act “must be decided, if not in this then in the next case,” he declared, “and it should be disposed of now.” Pointing out that legislative declarations are “entitled to at least great respect,” he wrote that it must be assumed that a housing emergency existed in the District of Columbia after World War I. The question before the court was “whether Congress was incompetent to meet it in the way in which it has been met by most of the civilized countries of the world.” He thought it was. The German Alliance and other cases had dispelled “the notion that what in its immediate aspect may only be a private transaction may not be raised by its class or character to a public affair.” And changing circumstances had “clothed the letting of buildings in the District of Columbia with a public interest so great as to justify regulation by law.” Citing Welch v. Swasey, in which the high court had upheld a Massachusetts statute that limited the heights of buildings in Boston, Holmes stressed that “a public exigency will justify the legislature in restricting property rights in land to a certain extent [even] without compensation.” If the legislature has the power to regulate building heights, it has the power to regulate building rents.42 The only matter “open to debate,” Holmes went on, “is whether the statute goes too far,” whether it “might amount to taking without due process of law.” In his view, it did not. The Ball Rent Act is only “a temporary measure,” he said. “A limit in time, to tide over a passing trouble, may well justify a law that could not be upheld as a permanent change.” Under the act, moreover, the landlords were entitled to a reasonable rent, which was to be determined by the District of Columbia Rent Commission. It was of no concern to the court whether the provisions of the Ball Rent Act “were the wisest, whether they may not cost more than they come to, or [whether they] will effect the result desired,” Holmes went on. “It is enough that we are not warranted in saying that legislation that has been resorted to for the same purpose all over the world, is futile or has no reasonable relation to the relief sought.” He concluded his opinion by saying that the plaintiff’s objection that the

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act deprives landlords and tenants of the right to trial by jury “amounts to little.” Given the importance of ensuring “a speedy and summary administration of the law,” the court was not prepared to hold “that the suspension of ordinary remedies was not a reasonable provision of a statute reasonable in its aim and intent.”43 As for the emergency rent laws, Holmes wrote, “The chief objections to these acts have been dealt with in Block v. Hirsh.” But he thought it necessary to deal briefly with a few issues that were not raised (or, at any rate, not emphasized) in the other case. The plaintiff argued that these laws impair contractual obligations. But, said Holmes, the court has long held that “contracts are made subject to this exercise of the power of the State when otherwise justified,” as it was in this case. The plaintiff also claimed that the laws apply to some cities, but not others, and to some buildings, but not others, which was a violation of the equal protection clause. “But,” he pointed out, “as the evil to be met was a very pressing want of shelter in certain crowded centers the classification was too obviously justified to need explanation.” Holmes also dismissed the plaintiff’s argument that chapter 951 of the emergency rent laws was void on “the rather singular ground” that by requiring landlords to provide heat and other services to holdover tenants it infringes upon the Thirteenth Amendment. It is true, he acknowledged, that “the traditions of our law are opposed to compelling a man to perform personal services against his will even when he has contracted to render them.” But the services in question here “are so far from personal that they constitute the universal and necessary incidents of modern apartment houses.”44 McKenna agreed with Holmes that two cases, which “were argued and submitted on the same day and practically depend upon the same principles,” should be considered together. What he had to say in Hirsh v. Block applied as well to Brown v. Feldman. On everything else, however, McKenna disagreed with Holmes. To Holmes’s claim that the Ball Rent Act was made necessary by the postwar housing shortage, he responded that the country had fought other wars without relaxing constitutional requirements or exercising arbitrary power. “Of what concern,” he then asked, “is it to the public health or the operations of the Federal Government who shall occupy a cellar, and a room above it, for business purposes in the City of Washington?” And “Why is it the solicitude of the police power of the State of New York to keep from competition an apartment in the City of New York?” To say that it is to supply homes to the homeless “does not satisfy,” because all the laws do is keep one tenant in and another out. This they do by withdrawing “the dominion of the property from its owner, superseding the contracts he confidently made under the law then existing and subjecting them to the fiat of subsequent law.” “If such an exercise of government is legal,” McKenna asked, “what exercise of government is illegal? Houses are a necessary, but other things are as necessary. May they too be taken from the direction of their owners and disposed of by the Government?” If the government can extend a lease, it can compel one. If so, it can appropriate “unoccupied houses or unoccupied space in occupied houses.” Counsel for the New York tenants pointed out that similar laws have been enacted

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in other countries. But does this mean that conditions in the United States had reached a point “that socialism, or some form of socialism, is the only permanent corrective or accommodation?”45 Returning to the Constitution, McKenna went on, “Has it suddenly become weak—become, not a restraint upon evil government, but an impediment to good government? Has it become an anachronism, and is it to become ‘an archaeological relic,’ no longer to be an efficient factor in affairs but something only to engage and entertain the studies of antiquarians?” This, he thought, was “the inevitable consequence of the decision just rendered.” Under the Constitution, he pointed out, a contract cannot be impaired; “its obligation is impregnable.” And a lease is a contract. Yet under the rent laws the government was using its power to annul “a contract between two of its citizens and to transfer the uses of the property of one and vest them in the other.” If such power exists, what is its limit? McKenna asked. At stake was not “who shall have a cellar in the City of Washington or who shall have an apartment in a million-dollar apartment house in the City of New York,” but whether an owner can be deprived of property without due process of law and whether property can be “taken for public use without just compensation.” The Fifth and Fourteenth amendments notwithstanding, the majority held that the rent laws were justified by the existence of an emergency, a position the court had rejected in Ex Parte Milligan. The majority also ruled that the laws were a valid exercise of the police power because the renting of houses in Washington, D.C., was “clothed” with a public interest. But, said McKenna, there was a palpable difference between regulating the rates of a fire insurance company and exempting “a lessee from the covenants of his lease, with the approval of the State, in defiance of the rights of the lessor.” There was also a difference between imposing a restriction on building heights, which prevents one person from using his property in a way that injures another, and putting a limit on rent hikes.46 McKenna conceded that it was hard to draw the line between the constitutional and unconstitutional use of the police power, “but it must be drawn.” And in the case of the Ball Rent Act (and, by implication, the emergency rent laws), the legislature had crossed the line. “Call it what you will—an exertion of police or other power—nothing can absolve it [the Ball Rent Act] from illegality.” “Limiting it to two years certainly cannot,” he wrote. It was what the law does, not how long it does it, that was beyond the pale. Moreover, if the government has the power to regulate rents, it can exercise that power for as long as it sees fit, “whether for two years or more than two years.” McKenna concluded his dissent, which was more than twice as long as Holmes’s opinion, by posing a few other questions. If the state may impair contracts and their obligations—which, he said, are at the heart of the country’s life and all its business—“may not the State have other interests besides the nullification of contracts, and may not its police power be exerted for their consummation? If not, why not? Under the decision just announced, if one provision of the Constitution may be subordinated to that power, may not other provisions be?” McKenna’s dissent in Brown v. Feldman, which was only two pages long, added

Many Americans were dismayed by the court’s rulings. Referring to Block v. Hirsh, Representative Theodore E. Burton of Ohio said, “I do not believe there is any decision that has been rendered by the Supreme Court for many years that has caused so much criticism by the legal profession.” Representative George S. Graham of Pennsylvania agreed, as did Senator Frank W. Brandegee of Connecticut. Although Julius Henry Cohen recalled otherwise, Louis Marshall took the defeat hard. The decisions were “revolutionary,” he wrote a friend. “They constitute a confiscation of private property for private use.” George W. Wickersham, Taft’s attorney general, felt much the same way. Unless the high court reversed itself, “we must frankly recognize that the age of individualism is past and the age of collectivism [has] arrived; that all rights are to be held subject to the legislative will, restrained only by the remnants of judicial power to be asserted where the encroachment appears to the Court to be obviously unjust.” The Central Law Journal went even further. After pointing out that Block v. Hirsh put the police power above the Constitution, it wrote, “If this principle is carried to its logical conclusion, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are but ‘scraps of paper.’ ” Unless the high court set limits to this power, “any man’s property can be taken whenever the majority sees fit to take it. Bolshevism could not ask for more.” Many real estate men claimed

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nothing to his dissent in Block v. Hirsh—except perhaps for a snide reference to the majority’s efforts to weaken the Constitution by “refined dialectics”—a remark, writes one legal scholar, that “was aimed at Holmes and intended, presumably[,] to wound.”47 In the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Feldman, some real estate men claimed that the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws was still open to question because the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the decisions that had been handed down by the New York State Court of Appeals. But most New Yorkers believed otherwise. As the Home News wrote, the high court’s decision “settles for all time the question of the validity of the legislation.” David L. Podell, who had appeared before the court on behalf of Feldman and the Schwartz brothers, agreed. Brown v. Feldman was decisive because “the Supreme Court would have to reverse itself in order to reverse Judge Pound.” Podell, it turned out, was right. In October 1921 the high court disposed of Brixton v. La Fetra without considering it. And in March 1922 it affirmed the rulings by the Court of Appeals in Edgar A. Levy Leasing Company, Inc. v. Siegel and 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern. Writing for the court, Justice Clarke held that for the most part these cases raised the same questions as the Marcus Brown case “and must be ruled by it.” Concurring were Holmes, Brandeis, Day, Pitney, and Taft. Dissenting were McKenna, McReynolds, and Van Devanter, none of whom wrote an opinion. There were many New Yorkers who shared Louis Marshall’s view that the decision was one of “the most pernicious ever” and that the Constitution now “belongs in a museum for exhibition with old battle flags.” But there were hardly any who took issue with the Call’s view that it brought an end to the efforts to challenge the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws.48

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that the court’s decisions were bad policy as well as bad law. They would discourage investment in residential construction and, in the words of the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, “indefinitely prolong” the very crisis the rent laws were supposed to bring to an end.49 Many other Americans were heartened by the court’s decisions. The New York World denied that they paved “the way toward Socialism.” “When an emergency arises it would be unfortunate not only for the people but for the enduring framework of the Government itself if there were not inherent power in Congress or in Legislatures to cope with the situation.” Property rights “must in the last analysis give way to public welfare.” The New York Times also came out in favor of the decisions, as did the Washington Post, which noted that “some of the most important questions ever decided by the United States Supreme Court were determined by the narrow margin of one vote.” The Outlook did not believe the Ball Rent Act was “a very wise law,” but neither did it think Block v. Hirsh was a “radical” decision. The Supreme Court had been steadily expanding the police power for the last twenty-five years, it pointed out. Taking strong exception to the minority opinion, one legal scholar wrote in the California Law Review, “To what purpose would avail the half-million people in New York City, about to be unhoused, the felicity of expression of the dissenting justices and their eloquent tribute to the Constitution?” How could the Constitution be regarded a “the most wonderful work . . . of man” when “under its beneficent protection it is the law that hundreds of thousands of families [may] be unsheltered by those hiring out one of the basic and primal necessaries of life”? Even a few businessmen who were not happy with Block v. Hirsh conceded that it made it clear to landlords and tenants “where they stand.”50 Still other Americans, many of them academics, took a more dispassionate view of the court’s decisions. Walter F. Dodd, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, argued that the impact of the rulings had been exaggerated. They “justify no great alarm on the part of those opposed to further government regulation, and no great encouragement to those favoring such a policy.” They mark neither a “material or permanent breakdown of constitutional guarantees” nor a “judicial sanction for the regulation of prices.” Edward S. Corwin, a Princeton political scientist who said it was impossible not to sympathize with Justice McKenna, agreed with the majority that “private rights must ultimately yield to urgent public interest,” but took it to task for assuming “that because government has the power to meet emergencies, anything which it may do to that end is necessarily constitutional.” The Supreme Court has dealt property interests “a staggering blow,” wrote George W. Goble, professor of law at the University of Kentucky, but at the same time it has provided “an effective antidote to property’s most persistent enemy, socialism.” If “the legislature can [henceforth] assume as full and complete control over private property and private business as the welfare of the public requires,” for what, he asked, do Americans need socialism? Justice McKenna said that Block v. Hirsh “smacks of socialism,” but isn’t “it better for the interests of all that the decision should smack of socialism, than that it be socialism?”51

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No matter how they felt about the Supreme Court’s decisions, most Americans viewed them as a great victory for the tenants and a great defeat for the landlords. Washington’s tenants, among them more than a few Congressman who had been gouged by profiteering landlords, were “jubilant,” reported the Post. And added the Home News, New York’s tenants were relieved that the high court had “finally resolved, once and for all, the right of the people to protect themselves from grasping property owners.” By contrast, Washington’s landlords were “panic-stricken,” wrote the Post. And New York’s landlords were keenly disappointed, said the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. The court’s decisions also had a profound impact in cities other than Washington and New York. In Chicago officials of the Tenants’ Protective League were so elated by the high court’s decisions that they made plans to storm Springfield, where a few rent control bills had been passed by the Senate and were being considered by the House Judiciary Committee. (A spokesman for the Chicago Real Estate Board said that now that the board stood no chance in the courts, it “will leave no stone unturned to defeat these bills in the legislature.”) In Los Angeles, where the Apartment-House Owners’ Association had filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of a rent-control ordinance, a spokesman for the Tenants’ Protective Association predicted that as a result of the Supreme Court’s decisions the suit would be dropped.52 A few Americans were not convinced that the Supreme Court’s decisions were a great victory for the tenants. Indeed, Fiorello H. La Guardia later said that once he understood that the New York rent laws were valid only as long “as the emergency existed,” he realized that what had once seemed “a great victory” was in fact “a great defeat.” Although prone to hyperbole, La Guardia had a point. As the World wrote, Block v. Hirsh did not rest on “such a sweeping assertion of the police power” as did Durham v. La Fetra. Although Pound ruled in favor of the New York rent laws on the grounds that the state had the power to regulate the use of private property even “in the absence of an emergency,” Holmes held that the Ball Rent Act was “justified only as a temporary measure” and might well not have been sustained as “a permanent change.” Holmes was not the first to come up with this idea. Pound’s colleague Frederick E. Crane went along with Durham v. La Fetra on the basis of his opinion in Guttag v. Shatzkin, in which he held that the emergency rent laws were valid only as long as “the danger or peril lasted.” Also, after pointing out that in view of the emergency facing New York it was reasonable for the legislature to suspend evictions for two years, Guthrie and Cohen said, “If, therefore, it should hereafter or before November 1, 1922 [the date on which the rent laws were to expire] come to pass that the housing shortage and emergency in the City of New York disappear, the courts will then have ample power to declare these laws to be no longer in operation.”53 What deterred the Supreme Court from following the lead of the Court of Appeals and upholding the rent laws as a valid exercise of the police power? One possible reason is that Holmes was not prepared to go as far as Pound. As he wrote in another decision that was handed down about a year and a half later, the two statutes “went to the verge of the law.” Another possible reason is that Holmes did

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not have the votes to uphold the laws on more sweeping grounds, that he had to take the position that they were temporary measures in order to put together a majority and especially to win over Day and Pitney, both of whom had dissented in Wilson v. New. Whatever the reason, the result was momentous. Block v. Hirsh shaped the subsequent history of rent control not only in Washington, D.C., but also in the rest of the country. In the case of New York, the decision meant that the emergency rent laws would stand until November 1, 1922, unless they were modified or repealed by the state legislature. But it also meant that in the event the legislature saw fit to extend the laws it would probably have to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that an emergency still existed in New York and the other cities to which the laws applied. And that, Louis Marshall pointed out, would be easier said than done.54

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11 A Question of Coverage

A few months before the U.S. Supreme Court issued Block v. Hirsh, John H. Wigmore, dean of Northwestern University School of Law (and the country’s foremost authority on evidence), wrote an article about how to curb rent profiteering without violating the Constitution. The most effective way, he said, was for the state legislature to establish an independent administrative agency that would regulate rental housing in the same way that other administrative agencies regulated other businesses “impressed with a public interest.” Appointed by the governor, its members would be empowered to fix rates for rent, make rules for service, and resolve other landlord-tenant disputes. The belief that regulatory legislation should be carried out by an independent (and presumably nonpartisan) agency was part of the conventional wisdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1920 it had given rise to the Interstate Commerce Commission and a host of state and local railroad, public utility, and other commissions. It also led Congress to entrust the implementation of the Ball Rent Act to the District of Columbia Rent Commission. Aside from Wisconsin, where the state legislature authorized the Railroad Commission to regulate rents in Milwaukee, most of the states and cities that imposed rent control after World War I followed Congress’s lead and set up an independent agency to implement it.1 Even before Congress passed the Ball Rent Act, a few New Yorkers had launched a campaign for an independent rent commission. Caught up in the growing concern over rent profiteering, many others joined them in late 1919 and early 1920. In the lead were the Socialists, among them Assemblyman Samuel P. Orr of the Bronx, Judge Jacob Panken of Manhattan, and Joseph E. Klein of Brooklyn. Allied with them were many of the tenants leagues, one of which insisted in November 1919 that all candidates for office spell out their position on a proposal that called for the appointment of a rent administrator for the state. Also in favor of a rent commission

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were several trade unions and religious groups. In response to this mounting pressure, a few legislators filed bills in early 1920 authorizing the creation of an independent rent commission. By far the most important was introduced by Assemblyman George N. Jesse, a Manhattan Republican, which called for two rent commissions, one for New York and the other for Buffalo and Rochester. Two other bills—one filed by Senator Henry G. Schackno, a Bronx Democrat, and the other by Assemblyman Sol Ullman, a Manhattan Republican—would have created a rent commission, but only for New York City. For a while it seemed that an amended version of the Jesse bill stood a chance. But in March, Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet announced that the legislature had no intention of enacting any of these bills. Rather than establish a rent commission, it put the implementation of the April laws in the hands of the municipal court judges.2 The Jesse, Schackno, and Ullman bills were shelved largely because of the vigorous opposition of New York City’s real estate interests. Leading the opposition was A. C. McNulty, counsel to the Real Estate Board. Joining him were Stewart Browne of the United Real Estate Owners Association, John L. Parish of the Real Estate Interests of New York, Inc., and Harold M. Phillips of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association. Testifying before legislative committees, they spelled out much the same objections to an independent rent commission that had already been made by the Real Estate Board’s Committee on Legislation and Taxation. A rent commission, it argued, was impractical and unconstitutional. It was impractical because it imposed an “embargo” on residential construction. It was unconstitutional because it “utterly abrogates the right of property owners to make leasehold contracts.” Spokesmen for the real estate interests also pointed out that rents were a function of supply and demand, not of governmental regulation. One even claimed that the establishment of a rent commission would open the floodgates to graft and corruption.3 Left unspoken was the fear that once a rent commission was established its members would do all they could to persuade the legislators to extend the emergency rent control laws on which its existence depended. Less than two weeks after the legislature enacted the April laws, Assemblyman William C. Amos, a Manhattan Republican, introduced a bill that would have divided New York State into three rent districts and set up one rent commission in New York City, another in Buffalo, and yet another in Albany. The commissions would be empowered not only to fix fair and reasonable rents, but also to lease unimproved property and erect dwellings and even to appropriate vacant dwellings and convert them into apartment houses. Given that the legislature was likely to adjourn in a couple of weeks, Amos must have known that a bill so far-reaching was doomed from the start. Perhaps he wanted to send a message that the campaign for a rent commission was not over. Indeed, as many New Yorkers became increasingly dissatisfied with the long delays in the municipal courts and the inconsistent rulings of the municipal judges, the campaign picked up momentum among Democrats and Republicans alike, including Dr. Royal S. Copeland, Mayor John F. Hylan’s Health Commissioner, who proposed the creation of a Central Housing

From the start New York City’s forty-seven municipal court judges—who presided over twenty-four courthouses, two-thirds of which were in Manhattan and Brooklyn—had to deal with a host of knotty issues that arose out of the emergency rent laws. Among the knottiest was to figure out who was covered by the new laws.

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Commission with power to regulate rents and erect houses for working people, and the Committee on Housing and Rent of the Republican Club of the Twenty-third Assembly District, which called for the appointment of a rent commission “with plenary power over the whole situation.”4 Although the campaign for a rent commission generated widespread support, it also sparked a good deal of opposition. In addition to the hostility of the real estate interests, it ran into two principal obstacles. One was political. As Governor Smith told Bernard Hershkopf, counsel to the Lockwood Committee, Republican legislators would not vote to establish a new administrative agency whose members would be appointed by a Democratic governor. And without the backing of the Republicans, who held a majority in both the Senate and the Assembly, the legislature would not have been able to enact laws to curb rent profiteering. The other obstacle was legal. Even the backers of rent control were uncertain that a rent commission could withstand judicial scrutiny. This uncertainty intensified in the aftermath of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals decision in Hirsh v. Block. In an exchange with Max Arnheim, a stock and bond broker who was urging the Lockwood Committee to campaign for a rent commission, Senator Lockwood explained why he was reluctant to do so. “In Washington,” he said, “they went to the Commission plan, and tried it. The courts held it to be unconstitutional. It would be utter folly for us, in the face of that decision, to suggest the same sort of proposition here, because it would be knocked out, and people would come here and say we deliberately set it up to be knocked out.”5 Some groups continued to push for a rent commission in the days leading up to the opening of the special session. Not the least important was the Citizens Union, perhaps New York’s most influential civic organization. But these efforts came to nothing. And in enacting the September laws the state legislature made no provision for a rent commission. Shortly after the September laws went into effect Samuel Strasbourger, a former New York City tax commissioner and municipal court judge, recommended that the legislature empower the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court to appoint a rent commission in each judicial district—a step, he said, that would remove landlord-tenant disputes from politics. As the years passed, other New Yorkers urged the legislature to set up a rent commission of one kind or another. But the legislature stood firm.6 Thus from the spring of 1920, when the emergency rent laws were enacted, to the summer of 1929, when they expired, New York was one of the few cities in which rent control was administered by the courts. The job was not imposed on the judges against their will. Indeed, many had urged the legislators to give them the power to deal with landlord-tenant disputes. But few were aware of what they had gotten themselves into.

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The issue was of great moment, for unless a tenant was covered, he could not refuse to pay the rent and, when the landlord filed suit for nonpayment, ask the court to dismiss it on the grounds that the rent was unreasonable. Nor could he refuse to vacate the premises and, when the landlord requested a final order, ask the court to deny it on the grounds that he was a statutory tenant. The issue arose shortly after the April laws were enacted, when a good many landlords filed suit against tenants who had signed leases before April 1, 1920, and now balked at paying the rent. In their defense, the tenants cited chapter 136, which barred the landlords from charging an unreasonable rent. The landlords responded that chapter 136 did not apply to tenants who had entered into leases before the April laws went into effect. At issue was whether the April laws were retroactive, that is, whether they covered only the relatively few tenants who entered into leases after April 1, 1920, or also the great many who entered into leases before then.7 As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, there was “considerable haziness” about the issue. Elmer G. Sammis, counsel to the Lockwood Committee, held that the April laws were not retroactive. So did Assemblyman Amos. But as Judge Robitzek told the Lockwood Committee, many New Yorkers believed otherwise. One reason for the confusion was that neither the April laws nor the September laws addressed the issue. Another reason was that there were good arguments on both sides. As William D. Guthrie and Julius Henry Cohen pointed out, the overriding purpose of the emergency rent laws was to prevent the impending eviction of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, most of whom had entered into a lease before the laws were enacted. To hold that the laws did not apply to these tenants would render the laws “wholly ineffectual.” But Lewis M. Isaacs argued that if the emergency rent laws were deemed retroactive, the courts would have to determine to what point in time they went back. Should it be to the date on which the legislature declared an emergency existed? Or should it be to the date on which the emergency started? The result would be “utter confusion,” Isaacs contended. “One court would find the emergency existed for one period of time and another for a longer or shorter period of time.”8 Probably the first municipal court judge to rule on the retroactivity of the rent laws was John R. Davies, who presided over Manhattan’s Seventh District Court. A Republican and former member of the Board of Aldermen, Davies had been elected to the municipal court in 1907 and reelected for another ten-year term in 1917. Among the 350 landlord-tenant cases that inundated his Harlem courtroom in the first week of April 1920 was one brought by a group of thirty tenants who lived in an apartment house at 56 West 139th Street. They complained that their rent, which was more than 25 percent higher than it had been a year earlier, was unreasonable and therefore a violation of chapter 136. In ruling in favor of the tenants, Davies held that it did not matter that they had entered into their leases before April 1: the rent laws were retroactive. And “any tenant who has been raised more than 25 per cent within the last year is entitled to a rebate on everything above the 25 per cent.” When the landlord’s agent argued that the some of the tenants had not even been living in the building a year ago, Davies responded that it made no difference. “It

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was intended that the new laws should benefit all tenants,” he said, “whether they have lived in a certain apartment for a year or for only a short time. The law provides that the rates existing last April are to be regarded as the basis for fixing new rents, without regard to whom the tenants may have been.”9 A month later, however, Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg, who presided over Manhattan’s Fifth District Court, ruled that the April laws were not retroactive. The ruling was especially noteworthy because Spiegelberg, another Republican who had been elected to the bench in 1907 and reelected ten years later, had helped draft the April laws. In ruling in favor of the Seventy-eighth & Broadway Company, which had filed suit for nonpayment of rent against Joseph Rosenbaum, Spiegelberg held that chapter 136, on which Rosenbaum based his defense, was a valid exercise of the police power. But it did not apply in this case because Rosenbaum had entered into the lease before the April laws were enacted. The plaintiff had the “absolute right” to recover the rent “subject only to the defenses as they existed at the time of making the lease.” It is “the general rule,” Spiegelberg wrote, that statutes “will be construed to operate prospectively only,” except when their language and intent provide otherwise, which was not so in the case at hand. And this rule “is applicable with peculiar force where the statute, if retrospective, would impair the obligation of contracts or interfere with vested rights.” Indeed, if construed to be retroactive, chapter 136 would be unconstitutional. It was true that “the conditions which brought about the emergency were in existence prior to April 1, 1920,” but this was no reason to “turn a prospective statute into a retrospective direction.”10 Shortly thereafter Judge Irving Lehman also ruled that the April laws were not retroactive. The son of Mayer Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers, the once mighty investment bankers, and brother of Herbert H. Lehman, the future New York governor and U.S. senator, Lehman had been elected to the state supreme court in 1908. The case before him pitted the Paterno Investing Corporation against Jacob Katz, who had leased one of the company’s apartments in June 1919 for $2,300 a year and, after the April laws were enacted, withheld the rent on the grounds that it was $950 (or 70 percent) more than it had been in April 1919. Lehman held that if chapter 136 applied to leases entered into before it was enacted, “the agreement was presumptively unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive.” But it did not. Nothing in the statute indicated that it was meant to be retroactive. It was also hard to see how a tenant could avail himself of a defense that a contract was oppressive when “the contract was made before the Legislature had declared that an emergency existed.” To hold otherwise would serve no purpose other than to “impair the tenant’s obligations under the contract for the tenant’s financial benefit.” The “sanctity of contractual obligations, lawful in themselves, must be preserved,” Lehman said, “and the Legislature cannot give to a party to a contract, binding when made, an option to tender in satisfaction of his contractual obligations an amount smaller than he agreed to pay.”11 The Spiegelberg and Lehman rulings notwithstanding, there was “a great difference of opinion about whether [the April laws] were retroactive,” wrote the Bronx

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Home News in July. In mid-May Judge Peter A. Sheil held that they were not, and in late September he ruled that the September laws were not retroactive either. “A lease is a binding contract,” he said. “Any law passed by a State that could, in any way, impair the validity of a contract or agreement, would be unconstitutional.” On the basis of Paterno Investing Corporation v. Katz, Robitzek agreed with Sheil. But Jacob S. Strahl, who presided over Brooklyn’s Fourth District Court, ruled in July that the April laws were retroactive, a ruling that put him at odds with O. Grant Esterbook, who presided over Brooklyn’s Second District Court. Judge Jacob Panken pointed out in May that even if the April laws were not retroactive, many municipal court judges were applying them to leases entered into before April 1, 1920, anyway. And in October Judge William E. Morris said he would not hesitate to scrutinize leases that had been entered into before the September laws were enacted. Given that rulings by trial court judges were not binding on other trial court judges, the Home News wrote in late September, “There will probably be no uniformity of opinion until a decision is given by a higher court.” Until then hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers would have no way of knowing whether they were covered by the emergency rent laws.12 The issue was finally resolved in late February 1922, when the Court of Appeals handed down a decision in Orinoco Realty Co., Inc. v. Bandler. Orinoco Realty, which owned an apartment house at 1155 Park Avenue, had filed suit in the New York Supreme Court against Maurice Bandler, a tenant who signed a new lease in March 1920 under which his rent was raised almost 140 percent, effective October 1. Citing the emergency rent laws, he refused to pay the first three installments. When Judge Edward G. Whitaker ruled in favor of Orinoco Realty, Bandler appealed to the First Department of the Appellate Division. Writing for the court in July 1921, Samuel Greenbaum affirmed Whitaker’s ruling on the grounds that the emergency rent laws were not retroactive. Bandler took the case to the Court of Appeals. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Frank H. Hiscock argued that there was nothing in the statutes to indicate they were to be construed retroactively. The legislature had been well aware that Spiegelberg and Lehman had held the April laws were not retroactive. Indeed, the Lockwood Committee had attached extracts of their opinions to the report that laid the groundwork for the September laws. But though the legislature amended the April laws in many ways, it did nothing to give the September laws “a retroactive force.” Affirming Greenbaum’s ruling, he concluded that the rent laws did not apply to leases entered into before April 1, 1920—though where the September laws were amendments to the April laws they applied to leases entered into before September 27.13 Of the many tenants who entered into a lease before April 1, some employed an ingenious strategy to ensure that they would be covered even if the courts held that the emergency rent laws were not retroactive. When sued for nonpayment of rent, they told the judges that they had signed their leases under duress, a defense that was available to them under common law. As David Hirshfield, Mayor Hylan’s commissioner of accounts, said, “Duress does not necessarily mean that the tenant signed the lease at a point of a revolver.” “If the landlord impressed the tenant with

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the fact that unless he signed the lease he would have to vacate the apartment and if the tenant, unable to find another apartment, signed the lease in order to keep a roof over his family’s head, it is my opinion that the agreement was signed under duress.” Arthur J. W. Hilly, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, thought this defense had merit. So did Judge Morris, who declared that if a tenant could prove he signed a lease under duress he would annul it and that if the rent was unreasonable he would reduce it. Less than two months after the September laws were enacted, Judge Panken ruled in favor of a tenant who claimed he had been forced to enter into a lease out of fear that the landlord was going to evict him and that he would be unable to find another apartment. Whether other judges would follow Morris’s and Panken’s lead remained to be seen.14 For a while it seemed like they might. In mid-December Judge Spiegelberg, who had held earlier that the April laws were not retroactive, ruled in favor of a tenant who argued in a suit for nonpayment of rent that he had signed the lease under duress. Whether a tenant was under duress, Spiegelberg said, depended on whether fear “made it impossible for him to exercise his own free will.” In the case at hand the Sylvan Mortgage Company had threatened Albert M. Stadler that if he did not sign a new lease, which called for a rent hike of 92 percent, he would have to move out of his apartment when the old lease expired. Stadler offered to pay 50 percent more, but the landlord’s agent rejected the offer. He also tried without success to find another apartment. Worried about the well-being of a daughter and grandson who lived with him, he finally signed the lease. Based on these facts, Spiegelberg concluded that Stadler had not been “free to act,” only to decide whether “to submit to the unreasonable demands of the plaintiff or to face the loss of his home.” He conceded that “a threat to do a lawful act cannot constitute duress”—and that it was lawful for the landlord to threaten to bring dispossess proceedings unless a lease was signed. But the general rule implied that the threat could only be made to obtain “what the party making the threats was entitled to.” And the Sylvan Mortgage Company was not entitled to “an oppressive rent.” Spiegelberg was not prepared to say that the housing shortage in itself was ground for the common law defense of duress. But when the defense was supported by other facts, he felt compelled to hold the lease on which the suit was based “void and unenforceable.”15 Early in March 1921, however, Judge Chester B. McLaughlin filed a dissenting opinion in Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel that indicated that if Sylvan Mortgage appealed, Spiegelberg’s ruling would probably be reversed. Although his colleagues on the Court of Appeals disagreed with him about the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws, McLaughlin wrote, they all agreed that a tenant could not withhold the rent on the grounds that he had signed the lease under duress. The facts show that “the defendant [Jerome Siegel] voluntarily executed it with full knowledge of its contents.” To Siegel’s claim that Levy Leasing had made a threat that he would have to vacate the premises unless he signed a new lease, McLaughlin responded, “This is precisely what he agreed to do when he executed the [old] lease and what the law obligated him to do.” Even if Levy Leasing threatened to oust Siegel at the expiration

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of his lease, “It never constitutes duress for a person to threaten to enforce his legal rights by lawful means.” Moreover, Siegel alleged that if ousted he would not be able to find another apartment, but he did not prove it. And though he signed the new lease in May, he did not raise the issue of duress until after the September laws were enacted. Nor did he offer to rescind the lease and move out of the apartment. Instead he continued to occupy it “under the lease which he claims was obtained by duress.” Citing the general rule that “a party cannot rescind while retaining the fruits of the contract,” he added that in order to rescind, Siegel would have had “to surrender possession of the property.”16 As expected, Sylvan Mortgage appealed. And in mid-April the Appellate Term of the First Department reversed Spiegelberg’s ruling. Writing for the court, Judge Lehman held that the landlord’s threat to oust Stadler at the expiration of his lease did not constitute duress, which, he said, “can never be predicated upon a threat to enforce legal rights by lawful means.” He then dealt with the argument that in the case at hand, duress rested on “the helpless condition of the [tenant]” and “the unconscionable conduct of the landlord.” The courts, Lehman wrote, can release a party from a contract “which has been extorted from him by unfair means,” but only if he showed that he had been forced to enter into the contract. That Stadler did not do. Nor did he attempt to “disaffirm” the contract until the September laws were enacted several months later. Stadler may have reasoned that in view of the housing shortage it was worth his while to make an agreement “in advance for the continued possession of a suitable apartment.” But even so, the court cannot “relieve this defendant from the obligation of a contact which was lawful when made and which gave to the defendant a right he desired to obtain, merely because the defendant, acting under a fear shared by thousands of other tenants, that unless he secured a right of future possession of a suitable apartment, he might thereafter be entirely unable to obtain such an apartment or unable to obtain it except at a prohibitive rate.”17 Judge Robert F. Wagner disagreed. In late June he ruled in favor of a tenant who based his case on the common law defense of duress. Adopting what two legal scholars called “a rather original theory,” he wrote: Although at common law, it is necessary that the defendant disaffirm the contract and surrender the advantages derived therefrom, he is prevented in this instance from so doing by the very duress he claims compelled him to make the contract originally. In other words, the deplorable housing conditions of the present day forced him to make the contract; the same conditions prevent him from surrendering the advantages of the contract and thereby perfecting the plea of duress. If there was duress at all, it continues to the present time. If the law recognizes that the assent of one of the contracting parties was originally invalidated by the duress, will not the law also recognize that such party cannot abandon the fruits of the contract because of the same duress?

As soon as the September laws were enacted, another issue arose that left the municipal court judges sharply divided and the landlords and tenants in legal limbo. Chapter 137 of the April laws empowered a judge who issued a final order in favor of the landlord to grant the tenant a stay of up to twelve months. When the stay expired the landlord could apply to the court for an eviction warrant, which, under ordinary circumstances, would be issued forthwith. But circumstances were far from ordinary after the September laws were enacted. Under chapter 942 the courts could not issue an eviction warrant in “a pending proceeding”—except under four exceptional circumstances that were spelled out in the statute. There were, however, thousands of tenants against whom a final order had been issued in the spring and summer, but who had been granted a stay that expired after September 27. Hence when one landlord after another asked for an eviction warrant in October and November, many tenants argued that the court could not sign it because the proceeding was pending, a position with which the landlords strongly disagreed. At issue was at what point was a proceeding pending. Was it only until a final order was issued, as the landlords argued, or not until an eviction warrant was signed, as the tenants contended? At stake, said Arthur J. W. Hilly, was whether thousands of tenants would be evicted in the near future or permitted to remain in their homes until November 1, 1922, the date on which the September laws were due to expire.19 Among the first to realize that chapter 942 was going to have serious unintended consequences was Aaron J. Levy, president of the Board of Municipal Court Justices. As early as September 30, 1920, he made what the Times called the “eleventh hour discovery” that in spite of the September laws, thousands of tenants were about to be evicted. These tenants, who occupied their apartments by virtue of a stay granted by the courts, were at risk because when the legislature enacted the September laws it repealed the provision of the April laws that empowered the municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to twelve months. Having voted to suspend summary proceedings in holdover cases, the lawmakers had assumed that this provision was no longer necessary. As things now stood, however, a judge could grant a stay of no more than thirty days. At the urging of Senator Lockwood, Levy called an emergency meeting of the Board of Municipal Court Justices and, with the approval of his colleagues, sent a telegram advising the chief clerk of each municipal court that “until further orders you are hereby instructed not to issue any warrants in holdover landlord and tenant proceedings commenced before Sept. 28, 1920.” Levy then

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As the legal scholars pointed out, Wagner’s opinion ran counter to “the overwhelming weight of authority.” Hence in December 1921 the Court of Appeals affirmed Lehman’s ruling. Two months later it handed down Orinoco Realty Co. v. Bandler, a decision in which it disposed of the common law defense of duress on the basis of Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel. And in March 1922 the Appellate Division reversed Judge Wagner’s ruling, a decision that was affirmed by the Court of Appeals four months later.18 After two years of uncertainty, it was finally settled that the rent laws did not cover tenants who had entered into a lease before April 1, 1920.

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summoned his fellow judges to another meeting, at which they adopted a rule that no warrants would be issued until further notice.20 Following this rule, one court clerk after another refused to sign eviction warrants in cases where tenants against whom a final order had been entered had been granted a stay that expired after September 27, 1920. The landlords responded by applying to the state supreme court for a writ of mandamus to compel the clerks to issue the warrants. The results were mixed. In October, Judge Leander B. Faber denied Clara Wasserman a writ of mandamus against William R. Fagan, a clerk in Brooklyn’s Sixth District Court, who had refused to issue an eviction warrant against one of her tenants. Faber held that the proceeding was still pending. A final order, he held, is not a contract in “the ordinary sense” of the word, one in which Wasserman had a vested right. Whatever rights she has “must yield to the public necessity.” Judge George V. Mullan disagreed. And in October he granted H.D.H. Realty Corporation a writ of mandamus against William J. Murphy, a clerk in Manhattan’s Fourth District Court who had declined to issue an eviction warrant against one of its tenants. Appearing on behalf of Murphy, Assistant Corporation Counsel John F. O’Brien argued that the proceeding was still pending. But Mullan dismissed his argument, saying, “A final order is, of course, a judgment.” Chapter 942 notwithstanding, Murphy was obliged to enforce it.21 With the Manhattan trial court at odds with the Brooklyn trial court—and with some judges agreeing with Murphy and others with Faber—it was clear that the issue would have to be resolved by the appellate courts. George L. Moscowitz, a prominent Brooklyn lawyer, promptly filed an appeal of Judge Faber’s decision. The case, which started out as Wasserman v. Fagan, would henceforth be known as People ex rel. Rayland Realty Co., Inc. v. Fagan. Hilly and Lockwood said that Judge Mullan’s decision would soon be appealed too. With so much at stake—and with the possibility that the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws might be at issue—New York’s real estate interests took a strong interest in the proceedings. So did city and state officials. Both sides retained a host of eminent lawyers. Filing amici curiae briefs on behalf of Rayland Realty were. Ingraham, Scott, and Wormser, who also worked on the brief for H.D.H. Realty, which was represented by Charles C. Peters, a highly regarded real estate lawyer. Representing Fagan were Assistant Corporation Counsel William B. Carswell and, on the brief, Assistant Corporation Counsel John F. O’Brien. O’Brien also represented Murphy. Joining him were David L. Podell, as amicus curiae for H.D.H. Realty’s tenants; Guthrie and Cohen, who appeared for Attorney General Charles D. Newton; and Sammis and Hershkopf, who appeared for the Lockwood Committee.22 Both sides agreed, as O’Brien wrote, that the issue before the appellate courts was “whether a proceeding in which a final order has been entered is a pending proceeding . . . . when the execution of such a final order has been stayed.” O’Brien insisted it was. “It has always been understood in the Municipal Courts that the warrant was the final act of the Court in landlord and tenant proceedings,” he argued. In the case at hand a warrant had not been issued because chapter 137

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of the April laws empowered the municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to twelve months to a tenant against whom a final order had been entered. Since the court had not issued a warrant—since, in other words, the relationship between landlord and tenant had not been terminated—the proceeding was still pending. In New York, O’Brien went on, the courts had construed “pending” in two ways, one “liberal” and the other “strict.” In the case at hand the court should adopt the “liberal” construction in order to carry out the intent of the legislature, which was to prevent the wholesale eviction of New York’s tenants. Moreover, O’Brien contended, the clerks had no authority to issue an eviction warrant against a tenant whose stay had not expired before September 27 because the Board of Municipal Court Justices had stripped them of this “ministerial function.” Hence the state supreme court judges had no power to issue a writ of mandamus to force the clerks to issue a warrant.23 Peters and Moscowitz strongly disagreed, insisting that the proceeding in question was not pending. The final order “ended the litigation,” argued Peters. It was a judgment, “binding and conclusive” on both parties. The landlord was entitled to an eviction warrant, and the clerk had no choice but to issue it. Taking a position that put him squarely at odds with O’Brien, Peters said that issuing a warrant was a purely “ministerial” act, “the performance of which can be compelled by [a writ of] mandamus.” Moreover, once the court entered a final order, the landlord had a vested right in both the order and “a means of enforcing it.” If chapter 942 was construed to apply to a proceeding in which a final order had been issued, it would be unconstitutional, Peters contended. It would impair contractual obligations. It would also “take away property rights without due process of law.” If the courts reversed Judge Mullan’s decision—and if at the same time they upheld the constitutionality of the rent laws—the landlord “would have no way of obtaining the possession of the apartment until November, 1922, when Chapter 942 comes to an end.” In the meantime he would be obliged, under chapter 951, “to furnish water, heat, light, power, and all other facilities to [the tenant].” And he would have to wait until the emergency rent laws expired before he could sue the tenant for damages or “the reasonable value for the use and occupation of the premises.” For these reasons Peters urged the appellate court to affirm Judge Mullan’s ruling.24 The Second Department of the Appellate Division handed down its decision in Rayland Realty Co. v. Fagan on December 7, 1920, less than two months after Judge Faber had denied the company’s application for a writ of mandamus. The ruling was puzzling. The court dealt mainly with the constitutionality of the emergency rent laws and only incidentally with the meaning of “pending,” the issue on which Rayland Realty based its appeal. The court was also sharply divided. Almet F. Jenks, who wrote the majority opinion, affirmed Faber’s decision on the grounds that the rent laws were a valid exercise of the police power. Isaac N. Mills concurred, but only because the case at hand involved chapter 942. Had the constitutionality of chapters 944 and 947 been raised, he might well have ruled otherwise. William J. Kelly, who also concurred, took much the same position. But Abel E. Blackmar issued a forceful

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dissent in which he argued that chapter 942 violated the due process clause. Although sharply divided about the constitutionality of the rent laws, the judges all agreed that a proceeding in which a final order had been issued against a tenant was pending if a stay had been granted that expired after September 27, 1920. As Jenks wrote, a final order does not terminate the proceeding because “the relation of landlord and tenant exists” until an eviction warrant is issued.25 For the time being the tenants in Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond who were occupying their apartments by virtue of a stay that expired after September 27 were covered by the rent laws. But what about the tenants in Manhattan and the Bronx who were in the same position? It was expected that the Appellate Division’s First Department would answer that question when it ruled on H.D.H. Realty Corporation v. Murphy. But its decision, which was handed down on December 24, was inconclusive. Writing for the court, Judge Frank C. Laughlin pointed out that prior to the enactment of chapter 942 the landlord had a vested right to an eviction warrant after a final order had been entered—and that “this was as property right of which he could not be deprived by [an] act of the legislature.” And although chapter 942 barred the landlord from bringing summary proceedings in most cases until November 1, 1922, Laughlin continued, the statute did not apply when a final order has been entered before it went into effect. He and his colleagues were therefore inclined to affirm Judge Mullan’s ruling. Before they handed down their decision, however, they learned of the Second Department’s ruling in Rayland Realty Corporation v. Fagan. With “all due deference” to their “learned” colleagues, “we still adhere to our own views,” Laughlin wrote. But in an odd turnabout they decided to follow the Second Department’s lead and deny H.D.H. Realty’s application for a writ on the grounds that if they affirmed Mullan’s opinion, “a different rule [would be in effect] under the same statute in different parts of the same city” and that the Court of Appeals would soon review the Appellate Division’s decisions anyway.26 The Court of Appeals resolved the issue in early March, when, by a vote of six to one, it affirmed the Second Department’s decision in Rayland Realty Co. v. Fagan and the First Department’s decision in H.D.H. Realty Corporation v. Murphy. It also upheld People ex rel. Ballin v. O’Connell. In that case the First Department overruled a Supreme Court judge who had issued a writ of mandamus ordering a clerk in Manhattan’s First District Court to deliver an eviction warrant to a landlord whose tenant held over when his stay expired on October 4, a week after the September laws were enacted. In light of the Second Department’s ruling in the Rayland Realty case, these decisions were not surprising. What was surprising was that in both cases the Court of Appeals issued a memorandum decision, one that affirmed the Appellate Division decisions on the basis of Durham v. La Fetra, which had upheld the constitutionality of the rent laws, but in no way dealt with the meaning of the word pending. Still, a memorandum decision was as binding as any other decision. By affirming the Appellate Division rulings, the Court of Appeals let stand their interpretation of a pending proceeding. And that meant that many of the thousands of New Yorkers

against whom a final order had been entered before September 27, 1920, were covered by the emergency rent laws.27

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While the judges were wrestling with the issue of retroactivity and the meaning of pending, yet another issue arose that left many other tenants wondering where they stood. One such tenant was Milton E. Schattman, a lawyer with an office in Lower Manhattan. On April 6, 1920, Schattman entered into a lease with Ellen A. Stewart by which he agreed to rent an apartment on West 105th Street for seventeen months at $130 a month effective May 1. Schattman paid the May rent but, upon learning that the previous tenant had been paying only $80, withheld the June rent. Stewart responded by bringing summary proceedings against Schattman. In June, Judge William Young held a hearing in Manhattan’s Fifth District Court. Citing chapter 136 of the April laws, Schattman argued that the rent was unreasonable and that the agreement under which Stewart sought to recover the apartment was oppressive. In an effort to show that the rent had been raised more than 25 percent, he asked the court for time to obtain a deposition from the previous tenant, who was now living in Los Angeles. Stewart objected on the grounds that the prior rent had no bearing on the case. Young agreed. The April laws, he held, applied to old tenants, but not to new tenants—or, in other words, to tenants who were in possession of their apartments when the laws were enacted, but not to tenants who took possession afterward. He therefore directed the jury to find for Stewart and ordered Schattman to move out.28 While some judges agreed with Young, others did not.29 One reason was that nowhere in the April laws or the September laws did the legislature say whether new tenants were covered. Another reason was that the rent laws were so novel that there was little case law to which the judges could look for guidance. Hence they were obliged to rely on their reading of the intent of the legislature. If the judges believed its intent was to prevent wholesale eviction, it was hard to see why the emergency rent laws should apply to new tenants, few of whom were at risk of eviction from the apartments in which they now lived when the laws were enacted. But if the judges thought the intent of the legislature was to curb rent profiteering, it was hard to see why the laws should not apply to new tenants, many of whom were now at the mercy of the landlords because of the housing shortage. How the courts resolved this issue was not a matter of great moment in the immediate aftermath of the April laws, a time when virtually all the tenants were old tenants. But as time passed—as many tenants moved from one apartment to another and as many newcomers poured into the city—the number of new tenants soared. Before long a great many New Yorkers had a stake in how the issue would be resolved. It came to a head in the spring of 1921, when Schattman took Judge Young’s decision to the Appellate Term of the First Department. Writing for the court, Irving Lehman held that the emergency rent laws covered new tenants. The fact that the tenant entered into a lease after April 1, 1920, for an apartment he had not previously occupied may be regarded as evidence by a judge when he considers whether

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the agreement was oppressive. But “it does not as a matter of law bar such tenant from raising the defense that the rental is unreasonable and the agreement oppressive.” It was the intent of the legislature “to prevent landlords from using their property for purposes of oppression,” Lehman wrote. In so doing it did not “expressly” limit the statute to apartments that were occupied by tenants who were “in possession before [it] went into effect.” And there was no ground for holding that such a limitation was implied. Given the acute shortage of housing, the legislature had determined that the landlord’s “freedom of contract” should be curtailed and that his rents should “no longer be regulated solely by competition.” What was true then was true now. “The conditions which enable a landlord to exact unreasonable rents from tenants in possession on April 1st enable him to exact similar rents from tenants who may seek accommodations in the landlord’s premises thereafter, and the same evils result from oppressive rents so exacted.” Hence Judge Young’s decision should be reversed.30 For a while it seemed that the issue was settled. In late June the Appellate Term of the First Department reversed a ruling in favor of the Klamer Realty Corporation, which had brought summary proceedings against a tenant who had signed a lease on October 14, 1920, and refused to pay the November rent on the grounds that the landlord was charging him $125 a month for an apartment that had previously rented for $62.50. Writing for the court, Francis B. Delehanty held that the ruling could not be sustained because it had been “definitely established” by Stewart v. Schattman that new tenants were covered by the emergency rent laws. Ten months later, however, the Appellate Division issued a decision that revealed the issue was anything but settled. The case pitted the Farnham Realty Corporation, which owned an apartment house on Broadway and 77th Street, against William A. Posner, who had signed a lease on October 6, 1920, for seventeen and a half months effective October 15. Posner paid the rent, which was $4,000 a year, for the first eight months and then withheld it for the ninth. Farnham Realty responded by bringing summary proceedings against Posner, who based his defense on chapter 136 of the April laws and chapter 942 of the September laws. Judge Hotchkiss, who had expressed “grave doubts” about the constitutionality of chapter 947 in Heyman v. Osterweis, denied Farnham Realty’s request for a final order on the grounds that Posner was covered by the rent laws even though he had entered into the lease after September 27, 1920. Farnham Realty, which was represented by Lewis M. Isaacs, appealed.31 Writing for the court, Alfred R. Page—a former state senator who had been elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1910 and elevated to the Appellate Division six years later—held that the rent laws did not apply to new tenants. Citing Pound’s opinion in Durham v. La Fetra, McLaughlin’s dissent in Levy v. Siegel, and Hough’s opinion in Brown v. Feldman, he wrote that it was clearly the intent of the legislature “to make a preferred class of those tenants who were in possession [prior to] October 1, 1920” and “to permit them to remain in possession until November 1, 1922.” The emergency on which the laws were based was not the increase in rents, but the threat of eviction, which was hanging over the heads of hundreds of

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thousands of New Yorkers. But this threat did not extend to “the person out of possession who was seeking a home,” said Page. To hold that the rent laws applied to such a tenant would be to assume that the legislature intended “to brush aside all the constitutional safeguards of private ownership of real estate, and also to abrogate the great economic law of supply and demand.” This the court could not do. The tenant, Page went on, was seeking to escape from a contract into which he had voluntarily entered and was asking the jury to make a new contract that “will be binding on the landlord.” If the court grants this request, “why should not the man who bought a suit of clothes from his tailor for $150, which he could have obtained in prewar days for $75, be allowed to refuse to pay, on the ground that the price was unreasonable, and ask that a jury determine what the tailor is entitled to receive and at what rate he shall continue to furnish him clothes?”32 The Real Estate Board saw Page’s ruling as cause for celebration. It even went so far as to say that the decision “bears out [our contention] that the entire housing question would have settled itself through the exercise of the economic law of supply and demand.” The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide agreed. Had the legislators taken into consideration the facts on which the Appellate Division based its opinion—and had they used these facts to head off the clamor for rent control— residential construction would already have resumed and largely alleviated the housing shortage. But the celebration was premature. In late October 1922 the Appellate Term of the Second Department weighed in. Six months after the September laws were enacted Irving L. Weiser rented an apartment at 1600 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn from Samuel Marion, the landlord’s agent, for $75 a month. Weiser paid the rent for April, but not for May. Marion thereupon filed suit for nonpayment of rent in Brooklyn’s Fourth District Court. In his defense, Weiser argued that the rent was unreasonable under chapter 944. Judge Charles J. Carroll agreed. He therefore denied Marion’s motion and reduced Weiser’s rent. Marion appealed. The issue was straightforward, said Judge James C. Cropsey, who had been appointed and then elected to the New York Supreme Court in 1916. “Can the tenant avail himself of the defense provided by the housing statutes?”33 Writing for the court, Cropsey acknowledged that the opinions cited in Farnham v. Posner referred to tenants in possession prior to the enactment of the September laws as “a preferred class.” But, he argued, these opinions dealt with the constitutionality of the laws, not their construction, and “we think their constitutionality would have been upheld if they had been given a much broader construction.” Indeed, after reading the statutes, “we do not see how we can reach the conclusion that was arrived at in the Farnham Case.” The legislature provided that the statutes did not apply to new buildings. If the legislature thought the statutes applied only to old tenants, why did it bother to provide that they did not apply to new buildings? It may be, he conceded, that the tenants in possession were most in need of protection when the September laws were enacted. But if they needed protection then, “there was then and is now need of protecting tenants who were not and are not in possession. Especially is there need of protecting those (many thousands of

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them there must be) who were then in possession, but who have since been obliged to vacate for one of the reasons which the housing laws make the basis of a dispossess at the end of a term.” There was no reason “why they should not be protected the same as tenants who were more fortunate and who were not required to leave their old buildings.” Saying that Judge Lehman’s opinion in Stewart v. Schattman, which applied to the April laws, was also applicable to the September laws, the Appellate Term affirmed the trial court’s decision.34 The landlords were as troubled by Marion v. Weiser as the tenants were by Farnham v. Posner. And as one legal scholar pointed out, the decisions were “in irreconcilable conflict.” As long as they stood, new tenants were covered by the emergency rent laws in Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond, but not in Manhattan and the Bronx. Although the situation was untenable, New Yorkers could have lived with it if the September laws had expired as scheduled on November 1, 1922, which was four days after Marion v. Weiser was handed down. But in mid-April, a week or so before Farnham v. Posner was handed down, the laws were extended until February 15, 1924, or for another sixteen and a half months. Although the Real Estate Board, United Real Estate Owners Association, and other property owners groups argued that the emergency was all but over, there was never much doubt that the legislature would approve an extension. With the strong support of the Lockwood Committee, it passed with what one scholar calls “little opposition.” And it was signed into law by Governor Nathan L. Miller, a former mayor of Buffalo and member of the Court of Appeals who, by virtue of the Republican landslide that sent Warren G. Harding to the White House, had narrowly defeated Governor Smith in November 1920.35 It was widely assumed that in time, perhaps a year or so, the Court of Appeals would resolve the conflict between the First and Second departments. But many New Yorkers were unwilling to wait. Among them was Samuel I. Rosenman, who is best known today as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s counsel, confidant, and speechwriter. Born in San Antonio in 1896, Rosenman was the son of a Jewish peddler and storekeeper who had moved his family from Ukraine to New York City in 1905. A precocious youngster, Rosenman graduated at the top of his class from Columbia College and Columbia Law School and then went into politics, joining the Monongahela Democratic Club on the Upper West Side. After an unsuccessful campaign in 1921, he was elected to the State Assembly in 1922 for what would be the first of five consecutive terms. In May 1923 Rosenman introduced a bill that provided that all tenants who entered into a lease after September 27, 1920, were covered by the rent laws. Designed to overturn Farnham v. Posner, the bill was vigorously opposed by New York’s real estate men. Leading the opposition was Stewart Browne, who believed the rent laws were unobjectionable, provided they applied only to old tenants. Despite Browne’s opposition, the Rosenman bill was one of a handful of housing bills that were passed before the end of the session—a session that the Times called “one long partisan wrangle” between Governor Smith, who had handily defeated Miller in the 1922 election, and the Democrat-controlled Senate, on the one hand, and the Republican-dominated Assembly, on the other.36

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Smith had reservations about the Rosenman bill. At a hearing held in Albany on May 22, he declared, “You can’t go on indefinitely invoking the police power of the State to permit tenants to virtually fix their own rents.” The Rosenman bill went so far, he added, that if enacted it might well jeopardize rent control in New York. According to Browne, Smith had once said in public that he would veto the Rosenman bill if it were approved by the legislature. Speaking for the Real Estate Board, Edward P. Doyle urged him to do just that. The bill, he argued, would overwhelm the municipal courts, which were already jammed with landlord-tenant cases. It would also enable tenants who had moved recently to break their contracts with landlords. It would even leave the rent laws open to constitutional challenges, a remark that was more than a little disingenuous coming from a spokesman for an organization that had led the attack on their constitutionality. Rosenman defended the bill, as did James A. Fink, a representative of the City Parliament of Community Councils, who argued that new tenants were entitled to the same protection as old tenants. Concerned about the continuing increase in rents and afraid of the political fallout from a veto, Smith signed what became known as chapter 892 into law on June 2. He explained that he did so in order to resolve the conflict between the First and Second departments and to carry out the “evident intent” of the rent laws, which was “to protect tenancies occurring at any time during the period that [they] remain upon the statute books.”37 A week later the United Real Estate Owners Association announced that it intended to challenge the constitutionality of the Rosenman Act in the near future. Rosenman welcomed the challenge, saying that he too wanted “a speedy determination.” Given the decisions in Durham v. La Fetra and Brown v. Feldman, he was confident that the courts would uphold the act. It seemed he was right. In a test case that was heard in Manhattan’s Third District Court in late October, a case in which Rosenman appeared for the tenant, Judge Thomas E. Murray held that chapter 892 was constitutional. In mid-January 1924, however, Judge Isidor Wasservogel of the state supreme court ruled on the basis of Farnham v. Posner that the Rosenman Act did not apply to tenants who had entered into leases after the September laws were enacted. The decision “clearly violates the intention of the Legislature,” said Rosenman. Judge Leopold Prince, who presided over Manhattan’s Eighth District Court, agreed. Less than two weeks later he refused to abide by Judge Wasservogel’s ruling. Saying he was unwilling to leave thousands of tenants at “the mercy of profiteering landlords,” he declared that “a tenant, no matter when he takes occupancy of an apartment, is entitled to some relief.” In late June, moreover, the Appellate Term reversed a decision of Manhattan’s Sixth District Court in favor of the landlord that was based on Wasservogel’s ruling. Writing for the court, Judge Aaron J. Levy, who was elected to the New York Supreme Court in November 1923, held that the Rosenman Act applied to all tenants who had entered into a lease at any time after September 27, 1920.38 If any doubt remained that the emergency rent laws applied to new tenants, it was dispelled in May 1925 when the Court of Appeals handed down Nod-Away Co. v. Carroll. The case began in Westchester County when the Nod-Away Company, based

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in Yonkers, sued Robert E. Carroll for nonpayment of rent. Citing chapter 944, Carroll argued that the rent was unreasonable. Nod-Away responded that Carroll could not avail himself of this defense because he had entered into the lease after the September laws were enacted. Judge William F. Bleakley disagreed. He ruled in favor of Carroll and ordered Nod-Away to reduce the rent from $75 to $60 a month. When the Appellate Division affirmed the ruling, Nod-Away took the case to the Court of Appeals. In an unsigned opinion, in which Frank H. Hiscock, Benjamin N. Cardozo, Cuthbert W. Pound, and Irving Lehman concurred, the court held that the intent of the legislature was clear. Chapter 944 was meant to apply to leases entered into after the September laws were enacted. The passage of chapter 892 put the issue “beyond the realm of controversy.” Frederick E. Crane filed a vigorous dissent, in which he was joined by Chester B. McLaughlin, the only member of the court who had held that the rent laws were unconstitutional. The tenant, Crane said, agreed to rent an apartment for $75 a month. Under the law he can remain at the same rent after his lease expires. But he cannot ask the court to reduce the rent. Neither the September laws nor chapter 892 “were intended to permit the courts to modify or break agreements whereby tenants entered into possession.” “If there were such an intent,” Crane wrote, “the legislation in my judgment is unconstitutional.” Crane’s dissent notwithstanding, Nod-Away Co. v. Carroll was a great victory for the one hundred thousand or more tenants who had entered into a lease after September 27, 1920.39 Not long after the September laws were enacted, one other major issue arose that affected a good many tenants. The state legislature had provided that the laws applied only to residential property. Indeed, it shelved several bills that would have covered commercial property as well. But the legislature had overlooked the fact that in much of Manhattan and parts of the outer boroughs tens of thousands of tenants were using their apartments as both a residence and a workplace. In the same space where they slept, ate, raised children, and got together with friends and relatives, many tenants worked as dressmakers, seamstresses, and tailors. This arrangement was especially common on the Lower East Side, where, Jacob Riis wrote, “the homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops.” Most tenants sewed. Others rolled cigars, washed laundry, and made paper flowers. Still others ran small stores and shops out of the front of their apartments, which were ordinarily on the ground floor, and lived in one or more rooms in the rear or on the floor above. They sold cigars, candy, stationery, newspapers, and groceries; framed pictures; and made window shades. A few tenants, most of them doctors and other professionals, had offices in their homes too.40 It did not take long for the judges to realize that the legislators had left them in a quandary. When the landlords brought summary proceedings against holdover tenants who were using apartments as both a residence and a workplace, the tenants argued that under chapter 942 of the September laws they could not be forced to move out before November 1, 1922. The landlords responded that the tenants could

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not avail themselves of this defense because the premises were being used for business, not for “dwelling purposes.” This was a knotty problem, observed Judge Cropsey, the author of the appellate court’s opinion in Marion v. Weiser. Where the premises were used “solely for business purposes,” he said, chapter 942 did not apply and the landlords would be able to recover the property forthwith. Where the premises were used “solely for dwelling purposes,” the statute did apply and the tenants would be entitled to stay until November 1, 1922. But what about the cases where “the premises are used both for business and for dwelling purposes by the same tenant”? “The recent statutes seem to contain nothing that bears directly upon the situation,” Cropsey wrote, and to complicate matters neither the lawyers nor the courts had found a case that was on point.41 In the absence of statutory guidelines and relevant case law, some judges found for the landlords. Others ruled in favor of the tenants. Take the case of Hermitage Co. v. Preziose. In 1919 the Hermitage Company, which owned a tenement house at 331 West 27th Street that was used exclusively for residential purposes, rented an apartment to Preziose, who later told the agent that he was looking to rent a store in the neighborhood for his wife, who did “a little dressmaking,” and asked whether he had any objection if she worked in the apartment in the meantime. The agent said he did not. Business flourished—so much so that Preziose went to work with his wife, hired a worker to help, and bought several sewing machines and cutting boards. To attract business, Preziose even put up several signs and fashion plates in the front windows. Feeling that the situation was getting out of hand, Hermitage brought summary proceedings not long after the September laws were enacted. In his defense, Preziose cited chapter 942. Hermitage responded that Preziose was using the apartment as a workplace. It also pointed out that by virtue of his business the city labor department had classified the building as a factory and that as a result the fire insurance company had raised its rates. Hermitage added that it had offered to rent Preziose a vacant store in an adjoining building for his dressmaking business, but that he declined the offer. Despite Hermitage’s arguments, the judge ruled that since Preziose was using the apartment as a residence he was covered by the emergency rent laws.42 In May 1921 the Appellate Term of the First Department reversed the trial court’s decision. But rather than rule on whether an apartment that served as both a residence and a workplace was covered by chapter 942, Judge Edward G. Whitaker held for the landlord on the narrow ground that a tenant who rented the premises for dwelling purposes had no right “to convert them into business premises and claim the protection of the statute.” Two months later the Appellate Term of the Second Department addressed the issue. The case pitted Rebecca A. Bavendam, the agent for the owners of a two-story house on Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn, against Morris Levinson, who had entered into five-year lease in 1916 under which he ran a retail store on the ground floor and lived with his family on the second. The lease was not renewed, and when Levinson refused to move out after it expired, Bavendam brought summary proceedings. After a trial in Brooklyn’s Second District Court, the judge

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held that Levinson was not covered by chapter 942 and directed the jury to enter a verdict in favor of Bavendam. Levinson appealed. Writing for the Appellate Term, Judge Cropsey ruled that under chapter 942 Levinson could not be ousted from the rooms in which he and his family lived, but that he could be removed from the rest of the house. Nothing in the statute barred the landlord from recovering possession of commercial property. And “no reason has been advanced why the landlords here should not recover that portion of the property which has been and is being used solely for business purposes, even though another portion of the premises is occupied by the tenant for dwelling purposes.”43 Cropsey’s approach—which was to treat an apartment that served as both a residence and a workplace as two separate places, one of which was covered by the emergency rent laws and one of which was not—was ingenious. It was also unorthodox—and did not sit well with some judges. One of them was Jacob Marks, who presided over Manhattan’s Sixth District Court. Late in 1921 Nathan Morgenroth, the executor of an estate that owned a building at Madison Avenue and 107th Street, asked Marks to issue a final order against Harris Emert, a long-term tenant who occupied the ground floor apartment, framing pictures and making window shades in the front and living with his family in four rooms at the rear. Although Morgenroth subsequently abandoned his claim to the four rear rooms, Marks denied his motion on the grounds that the use of the premises as a store was “merely incidental” to its use as a dwelling. Morgenroth took the case to the Appellate Term, which adopted Cropsey’s approach. In late March 1922 it reversed Marks’s ruling and gave the part of the apartment that was being used as a store to Morgenroth. Citing Bavendam v. Levinson, Judge Charles L. Guy wrote, “While at common law a lease of a combined store and dwelling was not divisible, the weight of authority is that the contrary is the rule under the recent rent laws.”44 Although Judge Cropsey’s approach settled one issue, it created another. Was it feasible to separate one part of an apartment from another? If a tenant used the premises as both a workplace and a dwelling, could the court oust him from one without depriving him of the “quiet enjoyment” of the other? In the case of Bavendam v. Levinson, Junius Pendleton Wilson, Levinson’s lawyer and chief counsel of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, argued that it could not. Judge Cropsey disagreed. Pointing out that there was a hall leading from the street to the second floor, he held that the tenant could easily get to his dwelling without passing through the store. In Bracken et al. v. Hahn and Same v. Sacks, which were handed down in May 1922, Judge Guy came to a different conclusion. In both cases the Manhattan Second District Court had issued a final order against two tenants, each of whom occupied a seven-room apartment, part of which was used for business purposes and part for dwelling purposes. Although the order applied only to the parts used for business purposes, Guy reversed the trial court’s ruling. “To give the landlords possession of the front rooms in the instant cases would deprive the tenants of air and ventilation from the street; would put it in the power of persons calling to the business portions to intrude upon the privacy of the tenants and deprive them of

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the beneficial enjoyment of the premises.”45 Whether it was feasible to separate one part of an apartment from another was, however, a question of fact, not of law. And so far as the law was concerned, the issue was settled. As part of its attempt to limit rent control to residential property, the state legislature had also provided that the emergency rent laws did not apply to lodging and boarding houses that rented rooms by the day or by the week. In the course of enacting these laws, however, it had overlooked the fact that in much of Manhattan as well as parts of the outer boroughs, thousands of tenants were subletting space in their apartments and houses. It was common for some New Yorkers, most of them working-class immigrants who lived in old-law tenements on the Lower East Side, to take in one or two lodgers and boarders in an effort to make ends meet. It was also common for New Yorkers to lease apartments as a business. They made their livelihood by renting rooms to subtenants. In some cases they lived on the premises; in others they resided elsewhere. It was common as well for New Yorkers to lease fourand five-story houses, many of them on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan, live with their families on one or more floors, and sublet the other floors in whole or in part.46 In other words, thousands of New Yorkers were not only tenants. They were also landlords. It was not long before the judges realized that the legislators had left them in another quandary. When the landlords brought summary proceedings against holdover tenants who were subletting all or part of the premises, the tenants argued that under chapter 942 they could not be ousted before November 1, 1922. The landlords countered that the statute did not apply to the tenants because they were renting the property not to live in it, but to make money from it. At issue was not whether the tenants were using the property as a workplace. They were not. It was rather whether they were leasing it for business purposes or dwelling purposes. This was a complicated issue, wrote Judge Lehman in January 1921, a little more than two years before he was elected to the Court of Appeals. It was very hard to define the words “dwelling places,” especially in a way “which will be always applicable, regardless of the context in which they are used.” The statutes did not provide much in the way of guidance. Neither did the case law. Indeed, Lehman pointed out, the courts had construed “dwelling purposes” to mean one thing when it was used in a statute that defined burglary and another when used in a statute that restricted the granting of liquor licenses in residential neighborhoods, one thing when it was used in a restrictive covenant in a deed and another when used in a warranty in an insurance policy.47 One of the first landlords to raise this issue was William B. May. Shortly after the September laws were enacted he asked Manhattan’s Third District Court for a final order against Gertrude Dermont, a widow whose lease had expired on a sixteenroom house in which she occupied one or two rooms and sublet the others. Despite May’s argument that Dermont was using the premises for business purposes, the judge held that she could not be forced out before November 1, 1922. May appealed. Writing for the Appellate Term in January 1921, Judge Lehman acknowledged that

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the statute was not meant to apply to premises leased “for purposes of profit.” But it could not be argued that the legislature intended to exclude “premises occupied as a dwelling, not only by the tenant, but also by self-supporting members of the family, who pay rent or board to the head of the household.” Nor, it followed, could it be argued that the legislature intended to exclude premises occupied by “paying guests, and perhaps strangers,” so long as “the renting of the rooms to [them] is merely incidental to the occupation of the premises by the tenant as his dwelling.” Even though Dermont sublet all but one or two of the rooms, the house was her dwelling, Lehman said. “So far as the record shows, she manages the household affairs,” and the subtenants “are in a sense members of the household, and even of the family.” Holding that the statute “cannot be given its proper force and effect” unless it was deemed to cover tenants who occupy part of the premises and sublet other parts, Lehman affirmed the trial court’s decision.48 In another decision that was also handed down by the Appellate Term of the First Department, Judge Nathan Bijur went further than Lehman. Not long after the September laws were enacted, T. J. Fletcher Jackson and Gertrude H. M. Jackson brought summary proceedings in Manhattan’s Fifth District Court against Edna Grey, a holdover tenant who had leased the second and third floors of their house on West 87th Street and sublet them to four different people. The trial judge issued a final order on the grounds than Grey was using the premises for business purposes. Grey appealed, and in January 1921 the Appellate Term reversed the decision. Writing for the court, Bijur held that the premises fell under the September laws because they were occupied solely for dwelling purposes. To rule otherwise, as the lower court did, would thwart the intent of the legislature—and serve “no useful purpose” other than possibly “to enable the landlords to succeed without compensation to ‘the business’ of the tenant in subletting the apartments.” Six months later, however, the Appellate Division ruled that the Appellate Term had gone too far. Writing for the court, Alfred R. Page explained that chapter 942 applied where the tenant occupies the premises for dwelling purposes, but not where “the premises are leased to a tenant not for the purposes of a residence, but for the purposes of a business of subleasing to others.” Pointing out that Grey did not move into the premises until October 1, 1920, by which time her lease had already expired, Page ruled that she was not occupying them for dwelling purposes and therefore was not covered by the emergency rent laws.49 A week after the Appellate Division of the First Department issued Jackson v. Grey, the Appellate Term of the Second Department handed down Howie v. McKenzie. The case began when William J. Howie, the agent for the owner of a four-story brownstone on Washington Avenue, brought summary proceedings in Brooklyn’s Sixth District Court against Edward L. McKenzie, a holdover tenant whose wife ran a rooming house on the premises. Even though the McKenzies did not reside in the house, Judge O. Grant Esterbrook held that the premises were being used for “dwelling purposes,” which meant that they came “within the purview” of chapter 942. When he denied the request for a final order, Howie appealed. The Second

The courts had to deal with other disputes over the scope of the emergency rent laws. Some affected only a few New Yorkers. To give a couple of examples, the laws, which were designed to protect residents, as opposed to visitors, applied to apartment houses, but not to hotels with 125 or more rooms. But what about apartment hotels, which were operated as hotels but occupied by residents whose leases ran a month or longer? In the case of the George Washington, a fifteen-story building on West 72nd Street, in which only fifteen of 140 units were reserved for transients, the Appellate Division of the First Department held in May 1921 that an apartment hotel was not so much a hotel as an apartment house and thus was covered by the emergency rent laws. What, the courts were also asked, about apartment houses that had been sold at a foreclosure proceeding, under which the new owners were ordinarily released from the contractual obligations of the old owners. Were they covered by the rent laws? Spokesmen for the tenants argued that

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Department, in which the appeal was filed, had previously disagreed with the First Department over whether a summary proceeding was pending after a final order was issued. But on the issue now at hand the two departments were of one mind. Writing for the court, Charles H. Kelby pointed out that the rent laws had been enacted to protect tenants who were at risk of being evicted by their landlords. But McKenzie was not at risk because he did not live on the premises. “On the contrary,” Kelby wrote, he “is housed elsewhere.” He leases the premises for no purpose other than “to make money.” Kelby therefore reversed Esterbrook’s ruling and granted Howie a new trial.50 For about three years it seemed that the issue was settled. But in June 1924 the Appellate Division of the First Department handed down Nystad & Krassner v. Zerbe, which was brought as a test for about sixty similar cases. At the request of Nystad & Krassner, a firm that owned a five-story house at 249 West 23rd Street, Manhattan’s Third District Court had issued a final order against Gustave R. Zerbe, a holdover tenant who lived on two floors and sublet rooms on the other three. Holding that under Jackson v. Grey Zerbe was covered by chapter 942, the Appellate Term reversed the lower court’s decision. Nystad & Krassner took the case to the Appellate Division, which heard arguments in December 1923. Writing for the court in July 1924, by which time the emergency rent laws had been extended to February 1926, Walter Lloyd Smith held that the three floors that were sublet to roomers were not being used “for dwelling purposes.” To hold otherwise would mean that a tenant could occupy one room in a large house and then claim that the house was not being used for business purposes even though “all the other rooms were occupied by subtenants upon weekly or even monthly leases.” Ruling that the premises did not fall within the purview of chapter 942, Smith reversed the Appellate Term’s decision, awarded possession of the three floors to Nystad & Krassner, and allowed Zerbe to remain on the two other floors. Whether a tenant who sublet rooms in a house or apartment was covered by the rent laws now depended not only on whether he lived in the premises, but also on how much of the premises he lived in.51

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if the courts held that these buildings were exempt they would encourage collusion among landlords who were looking for ways to circumvent the rent laws. But in the case of the Stockbridge, a six-story apartment house on West 188th Street that had been “knocked down” at a foreclosure sale in April 1921, the First Department of the Appellate Division ruled nine months later that in the absence of any evidence of collusion the building was no longer covered by these laws.52 Other disputes affected a great many New Yorkers. One began when the Cohen Bros. Building Company brought summary proceedings in Brooklyn’s Fourth District Court against several tenants who held over after their leases expired in the fall of 1923. The company was entitled to a final order, its lawyer argued, because the building had been erected after September 27, 1920, and was therefore exempt from the rent laws. In their defense, the tenants contended that under chapter 892, the so-called Rosenman Act, the rent laws applied not only to all leases entered into after September 27, 1920, but by implication to all buildings used for dwelling purposes whenever they were erected. The issue was straightforward, wrote Judge Charles B. Law. Was chapter 892 enacted just to resolve the conflict between Farnham v. Posner and Marion v. Weiser, as the landlord argued? Or was it also designed to extend the operation of the rent laws “to all buildings occupied for dwelling purposes now in existence,” as the tenants contended? To put it another way, said Judge Law, “Did this amendment operate to extend the application of the emergency housing laws to new buildings erected or completed since September 27, 1920?” By virtue of the great surge in residential construction in New York in the early and mid-1920s, this question was of keen interest to tens of thousands of tenants.53 The answer, Law held, was no. Chapter 892 was enacted for no purpose other than to resolve the conflict between the First and Second departments. The legislature had exempted new buildings in order to encourage residential construction. Recognizing “the obvious fact that permanent relief could come only as a result of increased construction,” it offered an inducement to builders, one that dealt with the concern that the rent laws would exacerbate the housing shortage. “By providing the exemption, the Legislature gave virtual assurance, to those desiring to engage or invest in building operations, that all buildings in course of construction on September 27, 1920, or commenced thereafter, would be free of the burden of the emergency laws.” The inducement was offered in good faith, wrote Law. Relying on it, builders had spent millions on the construction of new buildings. “To now extend the operations of the emergency laws, not merely to buildings to be erected in the future, but to those that have been erected since September 27, 1920, would obviously be an act of bad faith.” And the court would not impute an act of bad faith to the legislature.54 Another dispute that affected a great many New Yorkers broke out in the fall of 1924, when Madeleine S. Stern asked the state supreme court to eject Carrie Mautner and her family from their apartment at 970 Park Avenue. Mautner’s husband, Julius, had rented the apartment for three years starting October 1, 1919, and after the lease expired he and his family had occupied it as statutory tenants. But after Julius’s death in August 1924, Carrie and her family remained on the premises without

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Stern’s permission. At issue, said Judge Francis Delehanty, was whether “a landlord can eject the widow and other members of the household of a deceased ‘statutory tenant’ upon the sole ground that his tenancy was terminated by his death and that therefore his widow and other members of his family forthwith become ‘squatters’ and ‘intruders’ and no longer entitled to the protection of the ‘Emergency Rent Laws.’ ” Delehanty conceded that “no authority squarely on point has been called to my attention.” But he believed that to grant Stern’s motion would defeat the purpose of the rent laws and put thousands of families in jeopardy. Delehanty also pointed out that Mrs. Mautner had inherited not only her late husband’s personal property, but also “whatever property rights he had as a ‘statutory tenant.’ ” Holding that the emergency rent laws “must be construed broadly enough to regard the widow as a ‘statutory tenant,’ ” Delehanty denied the landlord’s motion.55 Stern appealed the ruling to the Appellate Division, where her lawyer argued that Mautner’s rights under the rent laws terminated upon her husband’s death. The Appellate Division was not convinced. Writing for the court, Victor J. Dowling held that the laws were designed to protect not only the tenant, but the members of his household as well. “That such laws should protect the head of a family in his desire to provide an adequate home for himself and his family, and still prove impotent to protect his widow and family, when he is dead and they need shelter and protection most, would be a [sorry] reflection on [the] Legislature and [the] courts.” Citing May v. Dermont, in which Judge Lehman ruled that the emergency rent laws applied not only to the tenant, but also to “self-supporting members of the family” and even to “paying guests” who are “perhaps strangers,” Dowling went on, “with how much more force can it now be urged that such statutes should be held to extend to the widow and children of a deceased statutory tenant, in order to insure their continued occupancy of their home now that its head has gone.” Dowling thus affirmed Delehanty’s decision and allowed Mautner and her family to remain in their apartment.56 In his opinion Dowling observed that the courts had construed the emergency rent laws in “a most liberal” way.57 For the most part he was right. By virtue of their decisions, most of which were made in the absence of clear statutory guidelines and relevant case law, the laws did not cover tenants who entered into a lease before April 1, 1920, but they did cover tenants against whom a final order was issued if they were granted a stay that expired after September 27, 1920. The laws did not apply to new buildings, but they did apply to new tenants. The laws covered many, though not all, of the tenants who were using their dwelling as a workplace and many, though again not all, of the tenants who were subletting parts of the premises. And though the laws did not apply to tenants whose buildings were sold at a foreclosure proceeding, they did apply to widows and other family members of a statutory tenant. The result of the court rulings was that most of New York’s roughly one million tenants and their families were protected by the emergency rent laws. And it was not long before many of these tenants invoked these laws to prevent their landlords from raising the rent and ousting them from their homes.

12 A Reasonable Rent

Under chapter 944 a tenant who was sued for nonpayment of rent could argue in his defense that the rent was unreasonable (and that the agreement under which the landlord was attempting to recover it was oppressive). How, the judges wondered, were they supposed to determine rental values in a city that had hundreds of thousands of apartments, ranging from large and lavish ones on the Upper West Side—with elevators, steam heat, hot water, and doormen—to small and squalid ones on the Lower East Side, most of them cold-water flats in old-law tenements with few sanitary facilities? How, the judges also wondered, were they supposed to make sure that what was a reasonable rent for one apartment was a reasonable rent “for similar apartments in similar houses in the same neighborhood,” when some landlords were reputable and others rapacious—when, said Jacob Marks, who presided over Manhattan’s Sixth District Court, “some look after the comfort and welfare of their tenants, while others are indifferent and require pressure of the public authorities to put rooms in habitable conditions?” And how, asked William J. A. Caffrey, who sat in Manhattan’s First District Court, was a judge supposed to figure out a reasonable rent when the landlord appears before him and says, “I am not getting a sufficient return on my money,” which in many cases is true, and then the tenant takes the stand and says, “Judge, I am not able to pay more rent,” which in many cases is also true?1 Nothing was more difficult than to figure out “a fair and reasonable rental value,” Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg said in 1923. A few years later Judge Chester B. McLaughlin wrote, “As well might it be said that a fixed price could be established for a suit of clothes, a pound of sugar, or a barrel of flour, as that a fixed sum could be established as a fair rental for the use of real estate.” Even the experts were hardpressed to define a reasonable rent. When several lawyers and real estate men were asked to answer the question “What is a fair rent?” at the Eighth National Conference

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on Housing, which was held in December 1920, they were at a loss. Harold G. Aron, a lawyer and law professor, pointed out that a fair rent was not “all that the traffic will bear,” the position taken by some misguided landlords. Rather it was “the rent fixed by the law of supply and demand under normal conditions.” But as everyone knew, conditions were not normal. What a fair rent was under abnormal conditions, Aron had no idea. Ferdinand I. Haber, a lawyer who admitted that he was sympathetic to the landlords, stressed that in enacting the emergency rent laws the state legislature had suspended the law of supply and demand, which had heretofore been the basis on which a reasonable rent was determined. Hence it was now up to the courts to find “some other basis.” But what that was he did not say. Other than to stress that the rent laws were working a great hardship on property owners, Edward P. Doyle, a spokesman for the Real Estate Board, had nothing to add.2 Among the many reasons that it was so difficult to figure out whether the rent was reasonable, two stood out. One was that chapter 944 did not define a reasonable rent. The statute provided that the rent was presumptively unreasonable whenever it was higher at the time the lease was entered into than it had been one year earlier. But according to Judge Edgar J. Lauer and attorney Victor House, the authors of a treatise on landlord-tenant law, this was a “rebuttable,” as opposed to a “conclusive,” presumption, one that could be overcome if the landlord could prove otherwise. During World War I several states and cities had adopted anti-profiteering measures that included a definition of a reasonable rent. After the war more than a few New Yorkers tried to persuade the New York State legislature to follow suit, but their efforts went nowhere. The legislators were well aware that it would be very hard to define a reasonable rent and close to impossible to define it in a way that was acceptable to both landlords and tenants. If no two economists could agree on what was meant by a reasonable rent, said Ernest Pratt, executive secretary of the Real Estate Investors of New York, Inc., it was unlikely that scores of legislators could. Moreover, an attempt to forge an agreement would probably be so contentious that it might well stymie the efforts to enact any anti-profiteering law at all. The legislators were also well aware that that a statute that defined a reasonable rent in a way that severely limited the landlord’s profits would be open to attack in the courts on the grounds that it was confiscatory.3 Another reason it was so difficult to figure out whether the rent was reasonable was that chapter 944 did not provide much in the way of guidelines. The statute gave the judges a good deal of discretion, but it did not spell out how they were supposed to exercise it. As Louis B. Marshall and Lewis M. Isaacs argued, chapter 944 prescribed no standards for determining a reasonable rent, not even for calculating the value of the property involved. (At a time of rampant inflation, they added, a legislative declaration that an increase in rent of any amount was “presumptively unjust, unreasonable and oppressive” was “in itself unreasonable and arbitrary.”) As William D. Kilpatrick, a New Yorker who had been in the real estate business for nearly forty years, observed, the emergency rent laws forced the courts “to make bricks without straws [sic].” Under chapter 944 the landlords were required to file

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with the court “a verified bill of particulars,” in which they itemized the building’s revenue, expenses, and other financial details about which the tenants ordinarily knew little or nothing. The legislators believed that unless these details were made available to the tenants before the trial, it would be very hard for them to make a case that the rent was unreasonable. But nowhere did the statute say what the judges were supposed to do with this information, much less how they were supposed to use it to determine a reasonable rent.4 Some New Yorkers thought the judges should base the rental value on the tenant’s income, that they should follow what the Times called the “old rule of thrift,” according to which a tenant was supposed to spend no more than 20 (or at most 25) percent of his income on rent. Although no more than “one day’s work for one week’s rent” or no more than “one week’s pay for one month’s rent” was the rule of thumb in American cities, this approach was impractical. At a time when few New Yorkers filed income tax returns, the judges had no way of knowing how much a tenant earned. Nor had they any way of knowing how much his wife and children (and, for that matter, his lodgers and boarders) contributed to the household economy. And as Lauer and House pointed out, it was not the legislature’s intention that the tenant should have to prove that he could not afford to pay the rent, much less that the courts should have to inquire “into the amount of a tenant’s income and his sources of revenue.” This approach was probably unconstitutional too. At a time when employment in New York City was highly seasonal and otherwise sporadic—a time when seamstresses, longshoremen, and other workers were regularly laid off for days, weeks, and months on end—it was not uncommon for tenants’ income to fall precipitously. If a reasonable rent was defined as 20 or 25 percent of their income, there would be times when the landlords would get virtually nothing. And this the courts would not have gone along with.5 If the judges could not base a reasonable rent on the tenant’s income, they had no alternative than to base it on the landlord’s return. Following the approach of the public utility commissions and other regulatory agencies, they took the position that a reasonable rent provided a reasonable return. A rent that provided more than a reasonable return was ipso facto an unreasonable rent. But no one—not the legislators, not the judges, and not the regulatory officials—could say with certainty what a reasonable return was or what it should be based on. As one authority on public utility regulation wrote in 1925, “The whole matter is in a state of vagueness and confusion. It has been endlessly analyzed, discussed and litigated, but without [much in the way of] clarification.” Indicative of the uncertainty was the testimony of Judge Charles J. Carroll to the Lockwood Committee. Asked what he considered “a fair and reasonable return,” Carroll replied that he could not say. Pressed whether a 20 or 25 percent return on equity was reasonable, he responded, “I would rather not go into that.” All he was willing to say was “You know when a man is profiteering, and when he is not.”6 But even if the judges did not know what reasonable return was, they knew what they would have to do to arrive at it—and that was what the public utility commissions and other regulatory agencies had long been doing. First

By far the hardest of these tasks was to determine the value of the property. For decades regulatory officials had wrestled with this issue but they were unable to reach a consensus. Some regarded the value of property as the fair market value, others as the original purchase price, and still others as the reproduction cost. As one scholar pointed out in the late 1920s, each approach had its advocates—and, he might have added, its detractors. To complicate matters, the courts had been reluctant to commit themselves “to one method or another.” Although the New York State legislature had sidestepped the issue, the landlords and other real estate men made it clear where they stood. For them the only sound basis on which to figure out a reasonable return was the fair market value, the price at which the property (or a similar property in the same vicinity) would sell for in a bona fide (or arm’s length) transaction. There was nothing “novel” about this approach, argued Lewis M. Isaacs on behalf of the Real Estate Board. The public utility commissions and other regulatory agencies had long followed it. So had the courts, which were often called on to determine the value of property taken under eminent domain. No less an authority than John H. Wigmore held that the “true value” of property was its “market value,” added Louis W. Stotesbury, a well-known New York lawyer.7 Many New Yorkers, most of whom were more sympathetic to the tenants than the landlords, denied that the fair market value was a sound basis on which to figure out a reasonable return. As one witness told the Lockwood Committee, property values in postwar America were largely “fictitious.” They were nothing more than a manifestation of the speculative spree that had been set off by the housing shortage. As the committee reported, “sharks” and other fly-by-night operators routinely engaged in “colorable sales,” by which they bought property at an outlandish price, jacked up the rents, and then resold the property at an even more outlandish price. The new owner would then repeat the process. These speculators made phenomenal profits, charged Samuel Untermyer, counsel to the Lockwood Committee, because it was possible “to obtain almost any price for apartments” before the emergency rent laws were enacted. Property values soared even though what he called “the intrinsic value” of the property “remained practically unchanged.” If the emergency rent laws were construed to mean that the landlord’s return should be based on the fair market value of his property, Untermyer went on, “they might as well never have been enacted.”8 These New Yorkers stressed two other points. One was that it was common practice to base the fair market value of real estate on gross income. According to Judge Harry Robitzek, an apartment house ordinarily sold for about six times as much as its annual rent rolls in New York (and for twenty and even thirty times as much as rent rolls elsewhere in the world). And according to Nathan Hirsch, chairman of the

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they would have to determine the value of the property, then they would have to calculate its net income, and finally they would have to figure out whether it provided the owner a reasonable return on his investment. Unfortunately for the judges, this was more easily said than done.

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Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, the value of a typical New York apartment house went up $10,000 for every $1,000 increase in its rent rolls. But whether the ratio was six to one or ten to one, the result was the same, argued Untermyer. Before the emergency rent laws were enacted, “every increase in rental value caused an increase in the market value of the property, and every increase in market value became an excuse for a further increase in rents.” It was, he pointed out, “a vicious circle,” equivalent, said others, to “a dog chasing its own tail.” It was to break this vicious circle that the state legislature had imposed rent control in the first place. To base a reasonable return on fair market value, Untermyer contended, would allow the landlord once again “to ‘jog up’ his rents for the purpose of enhancing values and then to claim rentals based upon the values thus enhanced.” To put it another way, it would reestablish the law of supply and demand according to which “whatever rent owners of property can exact will [once again] become ipso facto reasonable.”9 The other point was that it was common practice to base the fair market value of real estate on expert testimony. But the experts—most of whom were owners, agents, and brokers—were far from disinterested. For them higher values meant higher prices, higher rents, and higher commissions. As the Lockwood Committee reported, they invariably sided with the landlords. Even if the tenants could afford to hire them, which as a rule they could not, the experts were reluctant to appear on their behalf. As Judge Sidney C. Crane, who sat on Manhattan’s Seventh District Court, said, “It is against human nature that a man whose bread and butter is with the owners of real estate should testify against them.” What is more, the experts were far from competent. They were ready to give an opinion about the value of an apartment house. But when pressed to explain how they arrived at it, they were more often than not tongue-tied. Asked on what basis he estimated the value of two apartment houses on the Upper West Side at $400,000 apiece, one veteran real estate man told the court, “I looked at the building and it looks as if it were worth so much money to me.” Most tenants were skeptical of the experts, as were their lawyers. So were some judges, one of whom once said that expert testimony about real estate was “utterly speculative and of no value.”10 Some New Yorkers believed that the value of an apartment house should be based on its reproduction cost—to wit, on what it would cost at present to erect the same building on the same site. But as others pointed out, the cost of construction had doubled since the outbreak of World War I. This approach would allow the landlords who had built at prewar prices to charge at postwar prices, which would have defeated the purpose of the rent laws. There were a few other bases on which to figure out a reasonable return. One was the current owner’s purchase price, which was in most cases substantially less than the fair market value and the reproduction cost. Another was the fair market value of the property at some time before the postwar housing shortage had driven values up to record levels. Still another was the assessed value of the property—the value at which the city appraised it for tax purposes. Judge Spiegelberg favored this approach, as did Judge Jacob Panken, who said that a landlord was only entitled to a return on “what he pays taxes on.” The

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New York Times also endorsed it, and so, with reservations, did a few real estate men and property owners associations, among them Stewart Browne and the Washington Heights Taxpayers Association.11 These methods also raised serious problems. Suppose the value of the property was based on its purchase price, said Lewis M. Isaacs. What would happen in the case of an owner who had acquired an apartment house as a gift or by a bequest? If he had paid nothing for the property, should he be allowed to charge only enough to cover his operating expenses? Nor was that all, Louis W. Stotesbury pointed out. To base a property’s value on the purchase price “would create different rental values for similar apartments in identical houses similarly located and of equal value merely because the amount which the owner paid in cash for the property in one case was more than that so paid for the property in another case.” Moreover, he went on, many properties had changed hands several times in recent years, each time at a higher price. If value was based on purchase price, these properties would be far more valuable than similar properties that had remained under the same ownership. Surely, said Stotesbury, the emergency rent laws were not meant to reward the speculators, who milked their properties for all they were worth, and to punish the reputable landlords, who ran their buildings as a long-term investment. Also, suppose the value of the property was based on its fair market value prior to the onset of the housing shortage. Who could say when “the period of abnormality” started, wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. “Did values commence to be abnormal when the European war began, or when we entered the war, or when it was half over, or after the Armistice, or a year later?”12 To base the value of the property on its assessed value was problematic as well. Given that the Hylan administration was hard-pressed to meet its mounting expenses, the Department of Taxes and Assessments was under intense pressure to generate additional revenue. In response to this pressure, the assessors usually set property values as high as possible. And as a result, complained Stewart Browne, most properties were over-assessed. (This did not sit well with the owners; in Manhattan alone, 18,500 filed appeals in 1921.) A few real estate men acknowledged that some properties were under-assessed, perhaps as a consequence of the political clout of their owners. And many others thought the situation was sorely muddled. Jesse Sharp pointed to a nine-story apartment house on East 69th Street that was assessed at $245,000, or $42,000 more than a slightly larger though virtually identical nine-story building on East 36th Street. Joseph Paterno knew of one property that was assessed at twenty times what it was worth and another that was assessed for less than half its value. One well-informed New Yorker explained that the situation was a mess in part because the Department of Taxes and Assessments was so short-handed—especially in Manhattan, where thirteen assessors were assigned to deal with more than half a million properties—that it was always two or more years behind in its valuations.13 If all this were not enough, another problem soon became apparent. Property in American cities was assessed on the basis of its “highest and best use,” the use to

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which it could be put that would produce the largest possible return and thus the highest possible value. In some neighborhoods the “highest and best use” of property was its present use. But in other neighborhoods, especially in ones that were undergoing (or about to undergo) a change from residential to commercial use, the “highest and best use” was its future use. A case in point was Midtown Manhattan, where owners and speculators were anticipating that many run-down tenement houses would soon be demolished to make way for stores, hotels, theaters, and office buildings. As a result, said Judge Spiegelberg, property values there were going up “by leaps and bounds.” So were assessed values. To base property values in these neighborhoods on their assessed values would drive up the reasonable return to which the landlords were entitled. And as the reasonable return went up, so would the reasonable rent, sometimes to a point that would be well beyond the reach of the tenants.14 Although the tenants would pay more, they would not get more. With no goal in mind other than to unload the properties at a large profit, the landlords would see no point in spending more than the bare minimum on the buildings. Once the judges determined the building’s value, they had to calculate its net income, that is, the difference between its revenue and its expenses. In most cases it was fairly simple to figure out the building’s revenue, which was one of the items that had to be included in the bill of particulars. Where it was more complicated was in the case of the many apartment houses in which the ground floor was leased to shopkeepers and other businessmen, usually at a higher rent than the dwellings on the upper floors. Spokesmen for the tenants argued that these rents should be counted as part of the building’s revenue. Spokesmen for the landlords disagreed. Before long the issue ended up in court, where, according to the Times, millions of dollars were at stake. The case pitted the Markwin Realty Corporation against several tenants who lived in its two five-story apartment houses on the Upper East Side. When the tenants prevailed in Manhattan’s Ninth District Court, Markwin Realty appealed. Its lawyers argued that the emergency rent laws did not apply to commercial property. They pointed out that on Broadway and elsewhere in Manhattan commercial rents were so high that if they were treated as part of a building’s revenue, many of the residential tenants would pay little or nothing. They added that there would be a huge disparity between rents in apartment houses with stores and shops and rents in similar buildings in the same neighborhood without them. On the basis of these arguments, the Appellate Term reversed the trial court’s ruling. And though aware that the presence of stores and shops on the ground floor would increase property taxes, insurance premiums, and other expenses, all of which would be grounds for raising the rent, the Appellate Division upheld the Appellate Term.15 But if it was fairly easy to figure out a building’s revenue, it was very hard to calculate its expenses. It is true that the landlords were required to include in the bill of particulars not only their fixed costs—what they paid in interest, taxes, insurance, and, if lessees, rent—but also their operating expenses, or what they spent on coal, water, utilities, wages, supplies, and repairs. But many landlords were incompetent,

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dishonest, or both. Some provided estimates, but no receipts to support them. Others, said one accountant, listed expenses that were “grossly and wickedly exaggerated and misleading.” Still others filed claims that were fraudulent or, in the words of one municipal court judge, “a tissue of lies.” To give a few examples, one landlord estimated that he spent as much money on coal in the spring as in the winter. Another claimed that he paid nearly $2,000 for painting, even though very little of it was done in the apartment in question. According to Fiorello H. La Guardia, yet another submitted so many charges for his Lower East Side tenement house that “you would think it was the Lincoln Memorial!” The tenants could challenge the landlord’s claims. And in some cases—among them one in which the tenants’ accountant uncovered what one appellate court called “material discrepancies” between the receipts and the corresponding items in the bill of particulars—they were successful. But as Samuel Leavitt, a spokesman for the West Side Community Council, pointed out, it took a good deal of time, effort, and money to mount an effective challenge, often more money than the tenants could afford and sometimes even more than they would save if they were successful.16 Even the most meticulous bills of particulars raised serious problems. It was far from clear which of the landlord’s expenses were legitimate—or, in the words of the Appellate Term of the First Department, “properly chargeable” against his income. Suppose the landlord made repairs. Were they necessary? Were they the result of years of neglect? Or were they a subterfuge, a way to justify a rent increase? Was it appropriate for a landlord to charge for both repairs and depreciation when one might well offset the other? Should the landlord be allowed to charge for depreciation when so few new buildings were being erected that many old buildings were increasing in value? If so, what was a fair charge? Should depreciation be based on the original cost of the building or its current market value? What about obsolescence, which was more often than not a byproduct of undesirable changes in the neighborhood? Was it a legitimate expense? If the landlord hired an agent to manage the building and collect the rent, his fee should be included in the operating expenses. But what if the landlord managed the building and collected the rent himself? Or suppose the landlord retained a lawyer to defend a rent hike or dispossess a tenant? Were legal fees a legitimate expense? Suppose too that the landlord owned and managed several apartment houses. Should he be allowed to charge the salaries, rent, and office expenses against his income? If so, how much should be charged against the building in question and how much against his other buildings?17 Moreover, suppose the landlord installed central heating, bought a new hot water heater, replaced the old roof, repointed the brickwork, or wired the building for electricity. And suppose he could show that these capital expenditures were vital to the long-term well-being of the property. Should these improvements—which cost much more than ordinary maintenance and repairs—be charged against the income for the year in which they were made? Or should they be “pro-rated,” in Untermyer’s words, and charged against the landlord’s income for the next ten or twenty years?

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Or should they be amortized over their normal life expectancy? Judge Spiegelberg believed that it was unfair to compel the tenants “to pay in one year the expense of a permanent improvement.” It was especially unfair, said Lillie Grant, acting head of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, when so many of these improvements were good “for an indefinite period,” often for long after some of the tenants whose rents were raised to cover their costs had moved out. At times, however, it was extremely difficult to draw a line between major repairs and permanent improvements. And if permanent improvements made after the emergency rent laws were enacted should be apportioned over ten or twenty years, did that mean that similar improvements made before the rent laws were adopted should be brought forward and charged against present and future income?18 The last task for the judges was to figure out whether the net income from the property provided the landlord a reasonable return on his investment. The problem was that New Yorkers were not sure what constituted a reasonable return on real property. A few real estate men believed it was as low as 7 percent, but most felt it was much higher—at least 10 percent, according to some, and as much as 15, 20, and even 25 percent according to others. Some New Yorkers thought that a reasonable return was one thing if it was based on assessed value and another if it was based on fair market value. Others took the position that a reasonable return varied according to the type of building and the level of service. One Brooklyn resident believed that landlords were entitled to 18 percent if they supplied heat, hot water, and elevator service; 15 percent if they provided just heat and hot water; and 12 percent if they supplied only hot water. Still other New Yorkers changed their minds from time to time. Stewart Browne once suggested that 20 percent was more than adequate, which prompted one member of the United Real Estate Owners Association to protest, “It isn’t enough.” He later proposed 15, 10, and even 8 percent. Some New Yorkers insisted it was impossible to come up with a reasonable return that applied to all real property. Each case “should rest on its own merits,” a Manhattan lawyer who represented both tenants and landlords told the Lockwood Committee.19 Nor were New Yorkers sure on what a reasonable return on real property should be based. Should it be the return on other types of investments, as Judge Spiegelberg argued? If so, which ones? Should it be U.S. government bonds, which provided relatively low returns but entailed relatively little risk? Or should it be riskier and potentially higher-yielding corporate stocks? If the return on these other investments went up or down, should the return on real property be adjusted? If so, how often? Ordinarily real property was one of the safest investments, but it was also one of the least liquid. And unlike bonds and stocks, it had to be managed, not just held. To what extent should these considerations be taken into account in defining a reasonable return? Also, should a reasonable return be defined as a return that attracted capital to residential construction and thereby maintained the balance between supply and demand? If the landlords earned less than a reasonable return during the “lean” years, were they entitled to more than a reasonable return during the “fat” years, as Louis B. Marshall and Lewis M. Isaacs contended? Under normal

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conditions, wrote one economist, a reasonable return was what it took to induce landlords to operate old houses and builders to erect new ones. But on what, he asked, should a reasonable return be based at a time of “abnormal scarcity,” which drove rents beyond the means of many tenants? How were the judges supposed to reconcile what he called “the normal competitive return” with “the high scarcity return”? In other words, how were they supposed to define a reasonable return that would “prevent extortionate rents” without “discourag[ing] the normal flow of new capital into building construction?”20 If all this were not complicated enough, some New Yorkers, most real estate men among them, argued that a reasonable return should be based on the value of the property rather than on the landlord’s equity in it. Whether the landlord had a first (or a second, or even a third) mortgage was “none of the tenants’ business,” said Ferdinand I. Haber. A landlord might be foolhardy to encumber the property with so much debt that he risked losing it if he could not fill all the apartments or was forced to reduce the rents. But that was his choice. Moreover, if a reasonable return was based on the landlord’s equity, the consequences would be inequitable, Haber pointed out. “Take the case of two buildings, side by side, identical in every respect,” except that one is owned free and clear and the other is heavily mortgaged. “If the owner is entitled to, let us say, a 10 per cent return upon his investment,” the rents in the first building would have to be much higher than the rents in the second one. Other New Yorkers, most of whom were sympathetic to the tenants, disagreed. To base a reasonable return on the value of the property rather than on the landlord’s equity would be “unreasonable and indefensible,” said Untermyer. Indeed, he added, it would be “contrary to the spirit and meaning of the [emergency] rent laws.” It would provide “enormous returns” to “the reckless speculator” who bought the building on a shoestring (and then sold it as soon as another wheeler-dealer offered a higher price), but only “trifling returns” to “the genuine investor” who spent his own money to build or acquire the property (and intended to hold it for the long term).21 William E. Russell, a lawyer who represented thousands of tenants and chaired a Washington Heights rent profiteering committee, explained why it would be misguided to base a reasonable return on the property’s value as opposed to the landlord’s equity. Consider, he said, an apartment house on Riverside Drive that had been sold to its present owner for $500,000, of which he paid $25,000 in cash and borrowed the rest. Assuming that the mortgage was 6 percent, the owner would have to pay $28,500 in interest each year. But under a decision by the Appellate Term of the First Department, he was entitled to an 8 percent return on his investment. If the investment were defined as the value of the property, he would earn $38,000 on the mortgagee’s $475,000—or $9,500 more than his interest payments. He would also be entitled to $2,000 on his own $25,000. The result was that the landlord would earn a profit of $11,500, a return of 46 percent, which was not what the legislature had in mind when it attempted to curb rent profiteering. If the landlord were entitled to a 10 percent return, as the Appellate Term of the Second Department held, he would earn a profit of $21,000, a return of 84 percent. If a reasonable return

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was based on the property’s value, Untermyer pointed out, even the landlords whose buildings were less heavily encumbered would receive 16 to 25 percent on their equity per annum—enough to recoup their investment in four to six years.22 In the absence of statutory guidelines, it would have been very hard for even the most capable and conscientious municipal court judges to implement chapter 944. But given enough time to listen to the testimony of the landlords and tenants, hear the arguments of the lawyers, and review the bills of particulars, they might have been able to do so. With some exceptions, however, the judges did not have enough time. Although very few landlord-tenant disputes came before the municipal courts immediately after the September laws were enacted, a great many poured in shortly thereafter. In the second week of October, Judge Peter A. Sheil predicted that the courts would be “swamped” before long. And swamped they were, nowhere more so than in the Bronx. One day in October the courthouse on Washington Avenue and 162nd Street was so crowded that William E. Morris “had to call on officers to clear a path for him to get to his chambers,” reported the Times. As hard as he worked, Morris fell so far behind that a few months later he had more than five thousand landlord-tenant cases on the calendar. The backup at the courthouse on Williamsbridge Road was so bad, said Harry Robitzek, that even if the judges dealt with nothing but landlord-tenant cases it would take five years “to clean up the calendar.” According to the Bronx Home News, the rent laws generated “an unprecedented flood of business” not only for the judges, but also for the lawyers, some of whom were earning as much as $1,000 a week, and the marshals, many of whom were doing “a land-office business.”23 A great many more landlord-tenant disputes inundated the municipal courts in the spring and fall of 1921. In April so many cases were on the calendar in the Williamsbridge Road court, wrote the Home News, that the lawn outside the courthouse “resembled Broadway during the theater hours.” In October, reported the Eagle, the Brooklyn courts were “jammed to capacity.” A month later more than three thousand people jammed Brooklyn’s Lee Avenue court, one of many courts to which police reserves were summoned to maintain order. It was so crowded that when an attendant ordered a man to take off his hat, he replied that he could not. As the Times explained, he was “wedged in so tight” that he could not lift his arm. By early fall there were roughly 100,000 landlord-tenant cases on the calendar, the great majority of them in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. By the end of the year, wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, the municipal courts were “more congested than at any time since the Emergency Rent Laws were enacted, and no immediate relief was in sight.” Aaron J. Levy, one of five judges who sat on Manhattan’s Second District Court, agreed. The work “is piling up all the time, getting more unmanageable every day,” he said in early 1922. (The courts were swamped not only with cases, but with money as well. Under chapter 944 the tenants who refused to pay the new rent were obliged to deposit the old rent with the clerks. So many did so, wrote the Times, that in one court the clerks’ office

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“resembled the receiving teller’s station in a bank.” By late 1921 as much as $10 to $12 million had been deposited in the municipal courts.)24 The judges faced “a herculean task,” Levy pointed out. Even if they worked very hard—even if they stayed on the bench well into the evening, held court on Saturdays, and cut short their summer vacations or gave them up entirely, which said Levy, many of them did—they could hear at most twenty-five to thirty landlord-tenant cases a day. That might have been enough to clear the calendars in the municipal courts in Queens and Staten Island, but not in the municipal courts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Moreover, if the tenants asked for a jury trial, which took much longer than a bench trial, the judges could hear only a handful of cases a day. And it was not long before some tenants began asking for jury trials, to which they were entitled provided that they paid a three-dollar fee. As time passed so many others followed their lead that by early August 1921, ten thousand landlord-tenant cases were scheduled for jury trials in the Bronx Second District Court alone. The tenants assumed that the juries, which were largely made up of other tenants, would have little sympathy for the landlords. They also realized that a request for a jury trial would put their case off for several months, possibly for as long as a year. And in the meantime all they had to do was deposit the old rent with the courts. So many tenants took advantage of this arrangement that the United Real Estate Owners Association urged the state legislature to abolish trial by jury in cases that arose out of the emergency rent laws.25 As president of the Board of Municipal Court Justices, Levy took a few steps to reduce the large and growing backlog of landlord-tenant cases. Late in September 1921 he announced that four of Manhattan’s municipal courts would soon begin holding sessions at night, a proposal that had been put forward earlier by Morris Eder, one of the other judges who sat on Manhattan’s Second District Court. Shortly thereafter Levy temporarily assigned five judges from some of the least congested courts to Manhattan’s Seventh District Court, one of the most congested. After this so-called “flying squad” finished its work in Manhattan, it would move on to the Bronx. Levy also made several efforts to persuade state and local officials to increase the number of judges. But though the number of landlord-tenant cases soared, doubling in some courts and quadrupling in others, nothing came of these efforts. As Judge George L. Genung, who presided over Manhattan’s Ninth District Court, complained, “not a single additional judge” was appointed. (“Not a single additional clerk” was hired either. And “not a single additional court” was built, even though many of the existing ones were nothing “short of a disgrace,” some of them “firetraps” which were so dangerous that if they had been used as theaters the city would have been forced to shut them down.) As a result, fewer than fifty municipal court judges were left to deal with the more than 100,000 landlord-tenant cases that were brought under the emergency rent laws.26 Realizing that it might take months and perhaps even years to deal with these cases, many judges tried hard to prevail on the landlords and tenants to settle. Indeed, Judge Caffrey admitted he sometimes exercised “a little extra-judicial

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authority” in an attempt to persuade the parties to resolve their differences. Aside from an understandable reluctance to risk antagonizing the judges, many landlords and tenants had strong incentives to settle. The landlords feared that they stood little chance of getting a fair hearing in the municipal courts; and in the many cases where the tenants asked for a jury trial, these fears were far from groundless. For many a landlord, remarked John M. Stoddard, a prominent New York City lawyer, it often made sense to “take what he can get and forget about it.” For their part, the tenants knew that even if their case was put on the calendar, it might well be postponed once, twice, or even three times. For many working-class tenants, it often made good sense to pay a few dollars more in rent than to lose one or more days’ wages sitting in court waiting for their case to be called.27 Some judges settled their cases out of court. One such judge was Jacob S. Strahl, who sat on Brooklyn’s Fourth District Court, but was assigned to Brooklyn’s Third District Court one day early in the summer of 1921. When he arrived, Strahl found the courthouse inundated with 114 landlord-tenant cases. That was too much for “a hot day,” observed the unhappy judge. Turning to the clerk, he said, “Before you call the calendar let me see if I can do something about it.” Declaring he was tired of so many “picayune” cases, he ordered the landlords and tenants to “get into the street, all of you, and see if you can’t get together.” When no one moved, Strahl ordered the attendants to clear the court. After an hour and a half of heated discussions, the landlords and tenants filed back into the court and informed the judge that as a result of what the Times called “sidewalk conferences,” sixty-eight of the disputes had been resolved. Under pressure from Strahl—who told the intransigent landlords and tenants “you will hear from me if your cases are trifling”—most of the other forty-six cases were settled too. Another judge who settled many cases out of court was Adam Christman, who presided over the Third District Court in Queens, which covered several neighborhoods made up largely of two- to six-family houses. He took the unusual step of inviting the landlords and tenants, most of whom “are acquainted with yours truly,” to his home on Halleck Avenue, where he acted not as a judge but as a mediator. In “at least seven times out of ten,” and perhaps “nine times out of ten,” the disputes were amicably resolved, he said.28 Other judges settled their cases in a more conventional way. A good example was Harry Robitzek. In the spring of 1921 Jacob Crausman, who owned an apartment house on Carter Avenue, asked Robitzek to order six of his tenants to pay the new rent or move out. Calculating that Crausman had been earning 15 percent under the old rent (and would earn 26 percent under the new rent), Robitzek felt that Crausman was not entitled to an increase. But in an effort to resolve the dispute without a trial—and to encourage the landlord to make much-needed repairs—he offered Crausman’s lawyer, Arthur B. Kelly, a dollar-a-month increase. “Better settle it at that,” Robitzek said. “That’s not enough,” Kelly replied. “Make it a dollar and a half with a lease to Nov[ember] 1921,” the judge countered. “No,” said Kelly, “it ought to be at least $3.” “All right,” responded Robitzek. “How about $1.60?” And so it went, wrote the Bronx Home News, for about twenty minutes. To complicate matters,

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the lawyer for the tenants objected to any rent hike at all. At the urging of Robitzek, both sides eventually agreed to an increase of $1.50 a month, provided that Crausman gave the tenants a lease to November and made the repairs within sixty days. Robitzek settled other cases in much the same way. So did other judges, one of whom said that his calendar was so crowded that in one case he did not have time even to look at the bill of particulars. Without hearing any evidence, he reduced the rent by two dollars a month, which was too little for the tenant and too much for the landlord.29 Some judges settled landlord-tenant disputes in ways that seem more than a little odd today. Late in 1921 Bertha Levy, who owned a tenement house on East 117th Street, raised the rent by five to six dollars a month. When the tenants refused to pay, she filed suit in Manhattan’s Seventh District Court. After a brief hearing, at which Levy argued that the rent hike was needed to keep up the property, Judge Samson Friedlander, a Tammany stalwart and former member of the Board of Aldermen, ruled that a three-dollar increase would be reasonable. When two of the tenants said they were out of work and could not pay it, the Times wrote, “The Justice pulled out his checkbook and made out checks covering the increase for the next six months.” As he handed the checks over to the tenants, he said, “I[f] at the end of that time you are still unable to pay, come back and I’ll see what I can do.” Judge Robitzek ran into a similar problem when Morris Polsky, who owned a tenement house on East 174th Street, filed suit against Mrs. Philip Justus for failing to pay her last month’s rent. When Robitzek learned that Mrs. Justus had eight children ranging in age from one to thirteen and a husband who was unemployed, he gave Polsky permission to take up a collection for her. The judge, who started it off, gave five dollars, and the landlord contributed another five dollars. With several others in the courthouse chipping in, $61 was raised, of which $38 was handed over to Mrs. Justus and $23 turned over to the clerk for another needy tenant.30 When the landlords and tenants refused to settle, the judges had no choice but to mark the cases down for trial. Among the judges who heard these cases, some were extremely capable, others much less so. Some had hundreds of cases on their calendars, others far fewer. While some “work themselves to death,” a special committee informed the New York City Bar Association, others “do just enough” to stay “out of trouble.” Although Robitzek thought the terms “a gross insult,” it was widely believed there were “landlord judges” and “tenant judges.” As Seymour Mork, a former assistant district attorney who had gone into private practice, told Judge Morris, “If I represent the landlords, I want the case to be heard by Justice Sheil; if it is the tenants I represent, I prefer you.” (Indeed, most Bronx landlords went to great lengths to avoid appearing before Judge Morris, who did nothing to hide his sympathy for the tenants. Shortly after the September laws were enacted, he told a landlord’s lawyer, “Now that we have the new rent laws, counsellor, it will be my aim to reduce the rents in the Bronx to what they ought to be.” “But how can you say whether a raise in rents is unjust or not?” asked the lawyer. “Bring the case before me,” replied the judge, “and I’ll show you just what I can do. The landlords

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don’t like me now. Well, they’ll like me less in a month or so.”) Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the trials were characterized by what Judge Sidney C. Crane called a “lack of uniformity.”31 A. C. McNulty, counsel to the Real Estate Board, was even more critical. How the emergency rent laws were applied varied widely from one court to another, he wrote in early 1921. The judges did not adhere to the same principle in determining the value of the property. Most based it on fair market value, which one appellate court defined as “the price at which property of a similar character is bought and sold in the open market.” But other judges preferred to base the value of the property on its assessed value. Panken took this approach. So did Robitzek. In one of the first cases tried under the September laws—a case in which John Finkberner, the owner of an apartment house near Fordham Road, filed suit against twenty-five of his tenants— Robitzek declared that he was unwilling to base the value of the property on “present-day speculative values.” Instead he would be guided by its assessed value, to which he would add 25 percent, wrote the Times, “to make sure the owner would receive full value.” After delivering what the Times called “a body blow” to the landlords, Robitzek added that if Finkberner was not satisfied with this arrangement, he could have the assessed value “raised as high as he likes.”32 Nor did the judges follow the same rules in calculating the property’s net income. In an effort to dispose of their growing caseloads, some judges did not look closely at the bill of particulars. And over the objections of the tenants, more than one judge held that the landlords were under no obligation to offer proof of their expenses. Other judges scrutinized the bill of particulars with care, but came to strikingly different conclusions. Although many allowed the landlords to charge for lawyer’s fees and depreciation, others did not. One such judge was Michael J. Scanlan, a decision of whose was reversed by Judge Irving Lehman, who held that fees for legal services, “reasonable in amount and properly incurred,” were a proper expense and that as the landlord was entitled to a return that would “keep his capital intact,” so was depreciation. Whether a landlord could charge for management fees, office expenses, and rent collection was another source of disagreement. So was whether he could deduct for capital improvements and major repairs. Some judges held that they should be charged against the year in which they were incurred; others ruled that they should be apportioned over several years, especially if they were the result of the owner’s neglect. In two cases that were heard together in Manhattan’s Fourth District Court, one judge instructed the jury to take into consideration many thousands of dollars that would be spent on major repairs in the future. Writing for the Appellate Term of the First Department, Edward R. Finch reversed the decision on the grounds that “the proposed repairs may never materialize” and ordered a new trial.33 The judges also disagreed about what constituted a reasonable return. Spiegelberg allowed one landlord a return of only 2.5 percent, mainly on the grounds that he provided the tenants little or no service. (He was disinclined to reward him for failing to fix a leaky roof and refusing to supply enough heat and

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adequate lighting.) Other judges ruled that 5 or 6 percent was a reasonable return. (One, whose decision was upheld by the appellate court, came up with the novel idea of allowing the landlord 6.5 percent on 60 percent of the value of the property and 10 percent on the other 40 percent.) Still another judge held that a return on equity of more than 20 percent was not unreasonable. As one observer wrote, the municipal court judges “were in hopeless conflict” not only about what constituted a reasonable return, but also about whether it should be based on the property’s value or the landlord’s equity. In an attempt to obtain guidance from the court, one befuddled juror asked a Manhattan judge whether 10 percent was a reasonable return. In reply, the judge said only that a reasonable return was “what the average man would deem to be a fair and reasonable return.” It all depends “on the facts you have before you,” he added, not too helpfully.34 The result of these “many differences of opinion,” wrote the Times about a year after the September laws were enacted, was that there were “as many decisions as there were Municipal Justices,” which was what Louis B. Marshall and Lewis M. Isaacs had predicted. In some cases the judges ruled that even very large rent hikes were reasonable. In one that attracted a good deal of attention, the Alabama Holding Corporation, which owned a posh apartment house on Riverside Drive between 141st and 142nd streets, raised the rents of its units, which ranged from four rooms with one bath to seven rooms with three baths, 70 to 90 percent. When 72 of the 176 tenants refused to pay, the company filed suit against Lee F. Conrey and fourteen others. The judge to whom the case was assigned was Morris Eder, who had been elected to Manhattan’s Second District Court in 1919, but was sitting at the time in Manhattan’s Seventh District Court. After listening to testimony from experts and arguments by counsel, Eder ruled that the company was entitled to an 82 percent rent hike, an increase that would bring it a return of more than 20 percent. (Conrey and his fellow tenants appealed. After finding that the testimony of the expert witnesses left much to be desired and that several items in the bill of particulars were “of doubtful validity,” the Appellate Term reversed Eder’s decision and reduced the rent hike to 35 percent, which was what the tenants had been willing to pay all along. Although the Appellate Division called 35 percent “most liberal,” it upheld the Appellate Term’s decision.)35 In other cases the judges ruled that even fairly small rent hikes were unreasonable. Late in 1920 Edgar F. Hazleton, who had recently been elected to the Queens Fourth District Court, heard two landlord-tenant disputes. One involved the H. &. H. Model Apartment Company, the owner of an apartment house in Astoria, which had notified its tenants that the rent, which ranged from $19 to $27 a month, would be raised five dollars. When twenty-seven of them refused to pay the new rent, the company took them to court. Calculating that the building’s expenses were just over $16,000 a year and that at the current rents its annual revenue was nearly $24,000, Hazleton held that a net income of almost $8,000 was sufficient and that the proposed increase, which would have brought in an additional $4,200, was unreasonable. The other case involved Louis J. Baltzeri, the owner of an apartment house

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in Long Island City, who had informed his tenants, who were paying from $29.50 to $36.00 a month, that the rents would be raised seven to ten dollars, an increase of roughly 25 percent. When forty-nine balked at the rent hike, he filed suit. After estimating that the building’s expenses were roughly $28,000 and that under the new rents its revenue would increase from a little over $5,400 to more than $9,300, Hazleton ruled that the rent hike was unreasonable. On the assumption that the landlord was entitled to 10 percent on his equity, which came to $64,000, the judge ordered the forty-nine tenants to pay only an additional $1.67 a month, an increase of less than 6 percent for some and less than 5 percent for others.36 Perhaps nowhere were the judges as much at odds as in the Bronx. Take the case of Edward Lennon, who owned an eight-family apartment house on East 179th Street, seven of whose tenants were paying $35 a month and one, the last to move in, $45. Believing that $35 was not sufficient, he asked the seven tenants to pay an additional $15 sometime in late 1920. When they balked, he took two of them to court. They appeared before Judge Morris, who held that $35 was a reasonable rent and denied the landlord’s motion. “Was Lennon downhearted?” asked the Home News. “Not so you would notice it.” He then took the other five to court, four of whom came before Judge Scanlan and one before Judge Sheil. Although Lennon filed the same bill of particulars in each case, Scanlan allowed him to raise the rent five dollars a month, and Sheil approved a fifteen-dollar increase. As the Home News said, “the first justice sent the landlord home badly beaten, the second gave him a slight balm for his injuries and the third gave him so much of a raise that he doesn’t know how to spend it all.” “What would have happened had the case gone to the fourth justice [Harry Robitzek]?” the Home News asked. It was hard to say, but as a rule Sheil gave the landlords 15 percent, Robitzek 10 percent, Scanlan 5 percent, and Morris no increase at all. They are known, wrote the paper, “as the 15, 10, 5 per cent. and zero Justices.”37 The juries, which were made up largely of tenants, were more consistent than the judges. In some cases they sided with the landlords. One jury allowed a Manhattan landlord to raise the rent from $175 to $250 a month for an eight-room apartment on West 83rd Street, a verdict that was set aside by the Appellate Term. Another gave a 35 percent increase to a Manhattan landlord who Judge Spiegelberg thought was not entitled to any increase. But in most cases, Judge Sheil pointed out, the juries sided with the tenants. In one that was tried in Sheil’s courtroom, Max Mosner, who owned a tenement house on Bathgate Avenue, sued Hyman Geller, who refused to pay the rent for his four-room apartment, which had just been raised from $31.50 to $38 a month. Although Geller did not make any effort to rebut Mosner’s testimony or submit any evidence to challenge his bill of particulars, it took the jury only ten minutes to return a verdict against the landlord. In another case, which was heard in Robitzek’s courtroom, the jury decided against Sol Unger, the owner of an apartment house on East 138th Street who had notified his one hundred tenants that their rent would be raised two dollars a month. “There was loud cheering,” wrote the Times, when it was announced that Unger was only

According to Judge Crane, the problem was that there were almost fifty municipal court judges, each of whom was given a great deal of discretion and none of whom was inclined to follow the rulings “of [his] brethren unless these rulings appeal to [him].” It would not be solved until the appellate courts handed down “a controlling decision,” one that would incorporate a set of guidelines to which the municipal court judges would be obliged to adhere. So far as chapter 944 was concerned, the appellate court judges did not relish the prospect of reviewing the decisions of the municipal courts. They were well aware of the difficulties under which the trial judges labored. They were also well aware that if these judges scrutinized every item in the bill of particulars their courts would be even more congested than they already were. Before long, however, scores of landlord-tenant cases ended up in the appellate courts. Most of them were brought by landlords, in large part, said Judge John R. Davies, because many of his colleagues were “pretty much from Missouri when it came to raising rents”—by which he meant that they subscribed to the view that “you’ll have to show me.” In some cases the issues were of moment. In others the proceedings were, in the words of one appellate court, “lax and unsatisfactory” and the decision “seems to have no ascertainable relation to the evidence.” Hence the appellate courts often felt that they had no alternative but to step in.39 In some cases, Judge Davies said, the appellate courts affirmed the trial court decisions. But in many they did not. In some, including the one in which the Appellate Term of the First Department ruled that a municipal court judge erred in holding future repairs a proper expense, they reversed the decision. In others, including Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, they modified the judgment. To some degree, the appellate courts thereby provided the municipal courts some guidance about which methods of valuation were appropriate, which expenses were legitimate, and whether a specific rate of return was too low or too high. But as late as August 1921, nearly a year after the September laws were enacted, the appellate courts had not yet handed down “a controlling decision” about chapter 944. They were extremely reluctant to take issue with the position that had been spelled out by Judge Jacob Marks in December 1920. In a case in which he refused to set aside a jury’s verdict in favor of the tenant, he declared that whether the rent is reasonable “depends on the facts of each case,” on the location of the building, the size of the apartments, the quality of the service, and a host of other variables. As a result, he went on, “There can be no hard and fast or arbitrary rule to guide the judge or jury in fixing what is a reasonable or unreasonable rent or return upon investment.”40 Faced with a growing concern over “the lack of certainty,” the appellate courts eventually weighed in. Taking the lead was the Appellate Term of the Second Department, which handed down a landmark decision from its courthouse in

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entitled to an additional twenty-six cents a month. Stewart Browne spoke for many real estate men when he said that the attitude of most jurors was “here comes the landlord, let’s soak him.”38

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downtown Brooklyn on August 31, 1921. The facts in what was known as Hirsch v. Weiner were not in dispute. On July 20, 1920, Morris Weiner agreed to rent an apartment for one year, starting on October 1, from Esther Hirsch, the owner of two buildings in Flatbush. After the September laws went into effect, however, Weiner (and another thirty-three tenants, most of whom had signed leases in August) withheld the rent for October, November, and December 1920 as well as for January and February 1921. Hirsch sued Weiner (and the other tenants) for the five months’ rent. At the trial, which took place in Brooklyn’s Sixth District Court, both sides stipulated that the rent for Weiner’s apartment was higher than it had been a year earlier. Weiner’s counsel then argued that the new rent was unreasonable and the agreement under which Hirsh sought to recover it was oppressive. Hirsch’s lawyer disagreed. After listening to expert opinion about the property’s fair market value, reviewing the landlord’s bill of particulars, and calculating the rate of return on the investment, the judge held that the rent was not unreasonable and ruled in favor of Hirsch. Weiner appealed. With Edward A. Richards, a former municipal court judge, representing Hirsch and Professor Harold G. Aron representing Weiner, the Appellate Term heard the case a few months later and handed down its decision in August.41 Writing for the court, Charles H. Kelby affirmed the trial court’s ruling. The tenant, he wrote, argued that the landlord is entitled to a reasonable return not on the fair market value, which was more than $200,000, but on the original purchase price, which was much less. But this argument was “clearly unsound,” said Kelby. Otherwise a landlord who had acquired the property by will or gift would not be entitled to any return at all, only enough to pay his expenses. Stressing that fair market value was the only sound basis for figuring out a reasonable rent, Kelby wrote that if a property acquired a few years earlier for $10,000 was now worth $15,000, “why should not the owner, who has held it all the time, have a fair return on the amount it now represents?” And if the landlord paid more for the property than it is worth now, “why should the tenant be obliged to pay a large rent because of that fact?” Kelby also held that it made no difference whether there was a mortgage on the property; otherwise the rents in two houses “exactly alike and adjoining one another” would differ just because one was encumbered and the other was not. Kelby added that a landlord should be allowed to charge not only for taxes, insurance, repairs, utilities, and janitorial services, but also for depreciation. And only in cases where a building was “largely remodeled and rebuilt” should the cost of capital improvements be spread over several years. Hirsch was willing to settle for a return on 7 percent, Kelby noted. But pointing out that at present it was possible to buy high-quality bonds that yielded 8 to 8.5 percent, he concluded that in order to encourage residential construction, owners should get at least as much from real property, “with all its attendant trouble.”42 Kelby could have stopped at that point. But believing that the case at hand could help elucidate “a general rule” for the trial courts, he spelled out “a sensible way” to figure out a reasonable rent. The municipal court judges should first determine

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the fair market value of the premises, on the basis of either expert testimony or other “competent evidence.” Next they should calculate the gross revenue—the revenue that would be generated by the new rents. They should then estimate the operating expenses, including the cost of rent collection, the loss of rent by virtue of vacant apartments or deadbeat tenants, and an allowance for depreciation—2 percent a year of the building’s fair market value. The judges should then deduct the operating expenses from the gross revenue. If they find that the net income does not exceed 10 percent of the property’s fair market value, they should rule that “the rent demanded is not unreasonable.” Kelby conceded that a reasonable rent might vary with “changing financial conditions.” But taking into consideration “the return upon other well-recognized and generally accepted forms of investment, we think that 10 per cent. as a net return to an owner of real property is not unreasonable.”43 Spokesmen for the landlords hailed Judge Kelby’s decision. It was “eminently fair,” said A. C. McNulty. It was fair to the landlords, many of whom felt they were getting “an even break at last,” said the Daily Eagle. At a time when capital could easily be invested at 6 to 8 percent with safety and “no trouble whatever,” a 10 percent return on residential property was more than reasonable, remarked Lawrence B. Elliman of Pease & Elliman. It was also fair to the tenants, claimed the Real Estate Board, because it “stabilizes rents, [just] as the rent laws have stabilized tenancies.” According to spokesmen for the landlords, Hirsch v. Weiner would stimulate residential construction and encourage the small investor “to come into the [real estate] market.” It would also reduce the intolerable congestion in the municipal courts and ease the strained relations between landlords and tenants. Perhaps most important of all, Hirsch v. Weiner would bring “order out of chaos,” putting an end to a situation, said a Brooklyn real estate man, where “neither the landlord nor the tenant knew what to expect from the court.” No longer, declared the Real Estate Board, would each municipal court judge interpret the emergency rent laws in his own way, “to the utter despair of lawyers and litigants and the annoyance and distress of the overburdened appellate tribunals.” As Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann put it, “Instead of thirty or forty different opinions on the subject, there will [now] be a uniform basis on which to fix a rental value.”44 By contrast, spokesmen for the tenants denounced Kelby’s decision. Chief among them was Samuel Untermyer, who said it established “a vicious and unsound precedent,” one that was “contrary to the spirit and meaning of the [emergency] rent laws.” By allowing landlords a 10 percent return on fair market value, rents would be driven up to the point where the roughly 75 percent of the landlords whose property was mortgaged would receive “an average [return] of about 20 per cent per year.” Untermyer also objected to Kelby’s ruling that the costs of capital improvements could be charged against current revenues, pointing out that if this ruling stood, a landlord could “practically rebuild his property and lay the burden of these [improvements] on the tenants for a particular year.” Another critic of Hirsch v. Weiner was Nathaniel Goldstein, associate counsel to the Lockwood Committee, who

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warned that the ruling would encourage “the speculator and ‘shoe string’ gambler” and penalize “the legitimate investor.” Jacob Panken, who was running for mayor on the Socialist Party ticket, was critical of Hirsch v. Weiner too. Besides opening the floodgates to additional landlord-tenant litigation, the decision would undermine the purpose of the emergency rent laws, which were “intended primarily to meet an emergency which constitutes a menace to the entire community and not to guarantee profits on realty investments.”45 Critics also pointed out that there was what the Eagle called a “sharp clash” between Hirsch v. Weiner and Hall v. Moos, a decision that the Appellate Term of the First Department had handed down from its courtroom in Lower Manhattan about three months earlier. The plaintiff in that case was A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Company, the owner of two adjoining and virtually identical ten-year-old apartment houses on West 98th Street that had fifty-five spacious units, all but one of which were leased through September 30, 1920, for $1,100 to $1,650 a year. The defendants were Leon Sidney Moos and fifteen other tenants who were notified that effective October 1, their rents would be raised 60 to 70 percent (and, in some cases, even more). Believing the new rents were unreasonable, they withheld their payments for October, November, and December. At the trial, which was held in Manhattan’s Fifth District Court, Hall Realty submitted an unusually thorough bill of particulars, and its counsel put on the stand four expert witnesses, all of whom were real estate agents, brokers, or developers, to testify about the fair market value of the property. After a long and contentious hearing, Judge Aaron J. Levy ruled on January 29, 1921, that a reasonable rent for Moos’s apartment was $1,900 a year, $300 less than the Hall Company was asking, but almost 60 percent more than Moos had been paying, and he ordered Moos to pay the three months’ rent, which came to $475, within five days. Shortly thereafter Moos and the other fifteen tenants to whom Levy’s ruling applied filed an appeal.46 After hearing arguments from Goldman & Unger for the tenants and Stotesbury & Miner for the landlord, the Appellate Term reversed Judge Levy’s ruling and ordered a new trial. In a relatively brief opinion, Judge Charles L. Guy wrote that the lower court had erred by admitting proof about the present market value of the property that was based largely on “the excessive rentals charged by owners of similar property”—that is, the rentals that had brought about the very emergency that the rent laws had been designed to deal with. “In other words,” wrote Guy, “to permit this line of proof would be to justify extortionate demands on the part of landlords by proof that the extortionate demands had resulted in an increase of market value for similar property. It was clearly the intent of the Legislature that a landlord should be restricted to such rentals as would yield, not a reasonable income on values created by profiteering methods, but a reasonable income on his investment.” The admission of such proof was “highly prejudicial” to the defendants, he held. The lower court also erred by allowing the landlord to include in the bill of particulars not only an estimate of the property’s present market value, “which can in no sense affect the net income to which the landlord was entitled,”

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but also an item for a pro-rata share of the salaries of company officials. The bill of particulars, said Guy, was restricted to items bearing on “the cost of maintenance of the premises—not the cost of maintenance of a corporation that may or may not have a much larger and wider field of operation.”47 New Yorkers were dismayed by the “sharp clash” between Hall v. Moos and Hirsch v. Weiner. As the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide wrote in early September, “what is the law as to a reasonable return in Manhattan and the Bronx is totally different from what is the law in Brooklyn and Queens” (and, it should have added, Richmond). The Eagle agreed. So did the Times. As the Real Estate Board pointed out, there was no doubt that the Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond judges would have to abide by Hirsch v. Weiner. But what about the Manhattan and Bronx judges? Bernard S. Deutsch, a lawyer who had represented a great many landlords, argued that Hirsch v. Weiner was binding in all trial courts, “regardless of what department they are in.” Other lawyers disagreed. Unless the Court of Appeals upheld Hirsch v. Weiner, the Bronx and Manhattan tenants had nothing to fear, said Agnes Craig, who appeared on behalf of a great many Bronx tenants. Some judges, among them Harry Robitzek, took the position that Hirsch v. Weiner did not apply in the Bronx (and presumably Manhattan). And some of his colleagues announced they would not abide by Judge Kelby’s decision. Other judges, of whom Aaron J. Levy was the most noteworthy, admitted they were not sure “which course to follow.”48 It was widely agreed that the situation was untenable. New York was one city, and as the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide pointed out, there could not be “one set of rules” in some boroughs and “another set” in the others. But it was far from clear what could be done to resolve the differences. Governor Nathan L. Miller, who had been in office for less than a year, could have called a special session of the state legislature, which had adjourned several months earlier and would not convene again until January 1922. But it was unlikely that the legislators, many of whom were divided about the wisdom of the emergency rent laws, would be able to reach a consensus about the issues that divided the appellate courts. Miller could also have called a special term of the Appellate Division of the First and Second departments, which were not scheduled to meet until October. The Lockwood Committee favored this approach. So did the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, which urged the governor “to immediately convene” the Appellate Division of the Second Department to hear Hirsch v. Weiner. But with Moving Day only a month away, it was unlikely that the Appellate Division could issue a decision before the landlords notified the tenants of their new rents. Indeed, Brooklyn landlords were already demanding larger rent hikes than Manhattan landlords, reported the Times.49 Late in September the Lockwood Committee designated Samuel Untermyer to lead the fight against Hirsch v. Weiner. A brilliant lawyer, Untermyer shared the committee’s view that the issue, to quote the Times, “should be thrashed out in a test case.” But he did not believe that Hirsch v. Weiner was the right case, arguing, perhaps disingenuously, that it did not raise “all the important questions that will have to be finally determined by the higher courts.” Hence he recommended that the

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Lockwood Committee join forces with the Real Estate Board and find another case to submit to the of the Appellate Division and then to the Court of Appeals. If the parties cooperated, said Untermyer, the issue could be resolved within three months. At first the Real Estate Board agreed to work with the Lockwood Committee. But shortly thereafter it had a change of heart. With time running out, the Lockwood Committee began to negotiate with other real estate organizations, the most prominent of which was the United Real Estate Owners Association. But after two months of negotiations, during which more than two hundred cases were considered, the Lockwood Committee and the association were unable to agree on a case with which to proceed.50 Under the circumstances, both sides had no choice but to turn their attention from Hirsch v. Weiner to Hall v. Moos, which Hall Realty had already taken to the Appellate Division of the First Department. In a brief filed on behalf of the company, Louis Stotesbury urged the court to reverse Judge Guy’s decision on the grounds that it was “contrary to authority, unsound in principle, and unreasonable in result.” He took strong exception to Guy’s ruling that any proof of present market value was inadmissible and that the cash paid for the property was “the only basis upon which reasonable rental is to be computed.” “To apply such a standard [Stotesbury argued] would create different rentals for similar apartments in identical houses similarly located and of equal value, merely because the amount which the owner paid in cash for the property in one case was more than that so paid for the property in another case; and property which has changed hands a dozen times within the last ten years, and each time with a profit, would have a different and far greater rental value than similar property, such as that herein, built by the [Hall brothers] over ten years ago and ever since maintained and operated by them.” In another brief, which was submitted on behalf of the Real Estate Board as amicus curiae, Lewis M. Isaacs also stressed that the property’s present value, not its original cost (and not the landlord’s current equity), was the only sound basis on which to calculate a reasonable return. Following Hirsch v. Weiner, he insisted that the return should be equal to the return on other investments, which at the time were as high as 8 percent per year, and that the courts should take into account evidence that in some cases an even higher rate of return was reasonable.51 In a brief filed on behalf of Moos and the other tenants, William F. Unger and Samuel Untermyer, whose appearance indicated the importance of the case, pleaded with the court to affirm the Appellate Term’s ruling. If a reasonable rent was based on real estate values—which “are to a large extent merely a reflection of the rents themselves” and especially of the “excessive and extortionate rents derived from similar property”—the intent of the emergency rent laws “would be nullified.” Even if the court found otherwise, Unger and Untermyer went on, the evidence of fair market value was based “largely on mere speculation by the [Hall Realty Company’s] experts,” whose testimony “was of little or no probative force.” Under crossexamination, none of the four expert witnesses was able to justify his conclusions, most of which were “of little value, except as an example of the unreliability of

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expert evidence from interested witnesses.” When pressed by counsel for the tenants, “they took refuge in explanations which were either wholly inadequate or grossly absurd.” Unger and Untermyer also challenged Hall Realty’s claim that it was entitled to a 12 percent return on its investment, saying that no court had allowed so high a return under chapter 944. And they reminded the court that even in Hirsch v. Weiner, where the Appellate Term held that a 10 percent return was not unreasonable, the landlord had stipulated that he would be satisfied with a 7 percent return.52 On February 17, 1922, the Appellate Division handed down a decision affirming the Appellate Term’s ruling. Writing for the court, Samuel Greenbaum pointed out that the testimony of Hall Realty’s expert witnesses about the fair market value of the property was “most unreliable in character and most unsatisfactory in every respect.” Given the breakdown in the law of supply and demand, the value of property should not be based on its fair market value, which was a reflection of the “prevailing oppressive rentals.” Instead it should be based on its fair market value prior to the housing shortage as well as on its construction cost, its purchase price, and/or its assessed value. In line with Hirsch v. Weiner, Greenbaum ruled that a reasonable return should be based on the property’s value, not the landlord’s equity. This rule would provide a landlord whose building was heavily mortgaged a larger return than one whose building was not. But it would ensure the tenants “a fairly uniform scale of rentals of similar properties.” A reasonable return is not “readily determinable,” Greenbaum said. It varies with “market fluctuations in the rates of interest [as well as] returns on other classes of investments.” But taking issue with the Appellate Term of the Second Department, he wrote that “under existing circumstances” a reasonable return was 8 percent.53 In an effort to figure out what rents would yield the landlord 8 percent, Greenbaum carefully reviewed the bill of particulars. In the process he promulgated several rules about the charges, all of which were binding in Manhattan and the Bronx, if not in Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond. Federal and state income taxes were not a proper charge, Greenbaum wrote. What he called the “tribute” that the landlord has to pay to the government “may not be foisted on the tenant[s],” most of whom were obliged to pay income taxes of their own. Rental losses, a result of vacancies and deadbeat tenants, were a proper charge, but only if satisfactory proof was offered, which in the case at hand it was not. The same was true for sundries. The salaries of Hall Realty’s officers were not a legitimate expense (and were “properly stricken out” by the Appellate Term), Greenbaum wrote. In the case of “comparatively new fireproof apartment building[s],” obsolescence was not a legitimate expense either, unless the landlord could offer satisfactory proof that the building was (or was becoming) obsolete. Depreciation, however, was “a different matter,” though the courts should not assume that 2 percent a year, the figure accepted by federal officials, was a fair rate. Here too satisfactory proof was necessary. It was in part on the basis of this review of the bill of particulars that the Appellate Division affirmed the Appellate Term’s ruling—a ruling, wrote the Times, that was a “victory”

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for Moos and his fellow tenants, if not as complete a victory as Untermyer (and the Lockwood Committee) had hoped for.54 As former judge Richards said, many landlords would have been satisfied with a return of 8 percent, provided it was based on the value of the property and not on their equity in it. But the Hall brothers were not among them. Hence they lost no time in filing an appeal, perhaps hoping that the Court of Appeals would reverse Hall v. Moos on the basis of Hirsch v. Weiner. Their prospects were not good. They became even worse in mid-January 1922, when the Appellate Term of the Second Department handed down Kelly v. Medford, a decision that resolved one of the two major issues on which the Manhattan and Brooklyn appellate courts were divided. Late in 1921 a Brooklyn jury allowed Mary T. Kelly, the owner of a few apartment houses on Meserole Avenue, to raise the rent $2.50 a month, which would have provided her a return of 8 percent. Believing on the basis of Hirsch v. Weiner that she was entitled to 10 percent, Kelly appealed. In upholding the jury’s verdict, Kelby and his colleagues stressed that there had been “a serious misunderstanding” of Hirsch v. Weiner. “The court,” they wrote, “did not decide that a 10 per cent. return upon the value of the property was a conclusive and invariable standard.” To the contrary, it held that a reasonable return depended on “the conditions of the financial market.” Sometimes a reasonable return might be more than 10 percent, other times it might be less. In the case at hand the court could not say that a return of 8 percent was less than reasonable “in the absence of any proof as to the return on good securities at the time of the trial.”55 As expected, the Court of Appeals denied the Hall Realty Company’s motion and, without filing an opinion, affirmed the Appellate Division’s decision. Thus starting in May 1922, Hall v. Moos was, in Judge Crane’s words, “a controlling decision,” one that applied not only in Manhattan and the Bronx, but also in Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond. (It remained so until June 1926, when the Court of Appeals held that Hall v. Moos notwithstanding, “No general rule can be laid down which will establish in every case what is a fair return or rental on real estate.”) It is true that the Appellate Division of the First Department left some issues unresolved. Greenbaum held that the landlords were entitled to a return of 8 percent. But, as Spiegelberg pointed out, he did not say whether 8 percent would still be a reasonable return when other high-grade investments yielded less than 8 percent. Greenbaum also ruled that the value of the property should not be based on its fair market value, which was a reflection of the “prevailing oppressive rentals.” But he did not spell out which of the other variables it should be based on. Despite these unresolved issues, it is also true that Hall v. Moos went a long way toward clarifying the meaning of a reasonable rent.56 In addition to Hall v. Moos, the appellate courts handed down a few other decisions that were expected to help the municipal court judges deal with the flood of landlord-tenant litigation. To give one example, some real estate men argued that when a landlord filed suit for nonpayment of rent against several tenants, it would

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save time and money if the judge heard the cases together rather than separately. Although a few judges were willing to do so, most were not. Some were reluctant to do anything that would encourage the landlords to sue for nonpayment of rent; others were unsure that they had the authority to join the cases, especially if the tenants asked for a jury trial. As a result, wrote the Times, the landlord “had to bring forty separate actions, with forty complaints, forty bills of particulars and forty everything else, even though the complaints, bills, etc., were identical save for the names, room locations and amounts.” Forty trials might have to be held, and forty appeals might have to be heard too. The issue came to a head in mid-1922 when a landlord known as S.L. & Co. appealed a ruling by Judge John Hetherington who had dismissed a suit for nonpayment of rent against seven tenants in an apartment house in Long Island City on the grounds that each case had to be tried separately. The Appellate Term of the Second Department reversed Hetherington’s ruling, holding, wrote the Times, that “all the suits which a landlord brings against the tenants of one house or row of houses may be joined into one action.” The decision, said the Times, was “expected to reduce by one-third and maybe more the vast volume of landlord and tenant litigation that is choking the municipal courts of Brooklyn and Queens.”57 Despite the appellate courts’ efforts to resolve the municipal courts’ differences, many spokesmen for the landlords were dissatisfied with the implementation of chapter 944. The trial courts were unfair to the landlords in 90 percent of the cases, complained Stewart Browne. Sometimes “they take the bill of particulars and throw it out the window and say, ‘I don’t care what you have got there, no increase.’ ” Charles Weidt, a large property owner in Yorkville and president of the Real Estate Owners of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Wards, agreed. “I have never yet had one judge who made a fair decision,” he declared. William D. Kilpatrick, who owned and managed apartment houses in Manhattan, said he knew of a judge who boasted that he had never raised the rent, not even after the appellate court reversed his decision and ordered a new trial. The jurors, he went on, were even less fair to the landlords than the judges. How these disputes were resolved, the critics charged, depended not so much on the facts as on the judges and the lawyers, not so much on reason as on “whims.” The result was that many landlords gave up on the legal system. “It is useless for me to go to court,” said one after a judge denied his request for a rent hike and a jury ruled against him when the tenant countersued.58 With some exceptions, many spokesmen for the tenants were dissatisfied with the implementation of chapter 944 too. The United Tenants Organization, a citywide organization of tenant associations, protested that the landlords were raising the rents “as high and as much” as ever and that the judges were doing little to stop them. (Although the organization exaggerated, a few judges acknowledged that “the profiteering landlord is still with us.”) Harry Allen Ely, president of the Washington Heights Tenant Association, protested that some judges were ignoring the emergency rent laws in their rulings and instructing the jurors in ways that were inconsistent with the statutes. Another tenant advocate pointed out that the

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municipal courts were so inundated with landlord-tenant cases that many judges were acting not as justices but as arbitrators—and, more often than not, ruling in favor of the landlords. Many tenants were frustrated because, as Agnes Craig observed, it was often impossible for them to disprove the landlord’s bill of particulars, no matter how “ridiculous” it was. After watching Edward Lennon file suit in one court after another until he found a judge who held that his rents were not unreasonable, one tenant grew so disheartened that he wondered “what use were the rent laws enacted last fall.”59 Some New Yorkers defended the courts. Writing in the late 1920s, Spiegelberg said that on the whole they had “fairly satisfactorily resolved” the problem of figuring out a reasonable rent. But many judges came under fire, both before and after the Appellate Division handed down Hall v. Moos. In February 1921 the Federation of Tenants Associations, an amalgam of the Fair Play Rent Association and several neighborhood tenants leagues, asked the Appellate Division to launch an investigation of judges Robitzek and Sheil, both of whom were characterized as “dictators” and “Czars” and lambasted for leaning toward the landlords. A year and a half later the Appellate Term of the Second Department criticized John R. Farrar, who sat on Brooklyn’s Second District Court, for refusing to adhere to the law, and especially for permitting juries to return verdicts for the tenants in cases where he should have instructed them to rule in favor of the landlords. Whether these charges were founded is not clear. What is clear is that the enactment of the emergency rent laws did little to ease the burden of the municipal court judges, much less to improve the relationship between landlords and tenants. As Edgar J. Lauer pointed out, “litigation became a habit to some landlords and tenants” after the emergency rent laws went into effect. As a result the municipal courts also became the “battle ground” for a great many landlord-tenant disputes that did not revolve around chapter 944.60

13 The Four Exceptions

Other than chapter 944, no emergency rent law was the source of as many landlord-tenant disputes as chapter 942. This statute prohibited the landlords from bringing summary proceedings against tenants whose leases expired before November 1, 1922, provided that the tenants were willing to pay a reasonable rent. Designed, said the Lockwood Committee, to “do away with the anxiety” of the many New Yorkers who were holding over in their apartments or had been served notice to move by October 1, 1920, chapter 942 covered all buildings that were “occupied for dwelling purposes,” but excluded new buildings—ones that were under construction when the law went into effect or were started thereafter. In conjunction with chapter 947, which barred the landlords from bringing actions in ejectment against holdover tenants, chapter 942 deprived the landlords of what A. C. McNulty, counsel to the New York City Real Estate Board, called their “time honored” right to take back their property at the expiration of the lease. What made chapter 942 the source of so many landlord-tenant disputes, however, was not that it suspended summary proceedings for slightly more than two years, but that in McNulty’s words, “under certain unusual conditions” it allowed landlords to ask the courts to oust holdover tenants.1 The “unusual conditions”—or, in Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg’s words, “the four exceptions to the tenant’s right to remain against the landlord’s will”—were largely the result of the Real Estate Board’s campaign to water down the rent laws. This campaign was launched in early 1920, by which time it had become apparent that the state legislature was likely to pass a bill, known as chapter 137, that would empower the municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to twelve months to holdover tenants against whom a final order had been issued. The bill, the board’s spokesmen pointed out, would not only prevent owners from moving into their own property, but also deter builders from erecting new apartment houses and discourage the sale of apartments to tenants, which, it was widely believed, would

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stabilize rents and promote thrift. On behalf of the board, McNulty urged the legislators to amend the bill to exempt property that was required “for immediate, actual and bona fide occupancy” by the landlord (and his family), needed for the purpose of demolition or substantial reconstruction, or sold (or to be sold) to tenants (or others) on a cooperative basis. Senator Charles C. Lockwood conceded that some of the Real Estate Board’s amendments were reasonable. But he refused to incorporate them into the bill, believing that the matter should be left to the municipal court judges, who he thought could be counted on to adopt a set of rules that would allay the board’s concerns. At the behest of the Lockwood Committee, the legislature shelved the amendments and in late March enacted chapter 137.2 Much as Lockwood expected, the Board of Municipal Court Justices adopted several rules in early April to ensure uniformity in the implementation of chapter 137. Among other things, they provided that the judges should not grant a stay in the following situations: if the landlord could establish that he or a member of his family wanted to move into the premises immediately and reside there permanently; if the landlord (or someone to whom he was about to sell the property) intended to reconstruct the building or to demolish it and erect a new one in its place, provided that the reconstructed or new building increased the stock of residential or commercial space; or if the building had been sold to several people who planned to live in it or to a corporation whose stockholders intended to move in forthwith. Although these rules dealt with most of the Real Estate Board’s concerns, its spokesmen were sorely disappointed with the outcome. The rules were fair to both the tenants and the landlords, McNulty pointed out. “But what happened” after they were adopted? “Did the judges follow the rules they themselves had established? Not a bit of it!” Instead, many of them declared that the rules, “having been made without statutory authority,” were not binding—that they were, as Richard O. Chittick, executive secretary of the Real Estate Board complained in September 1920, “merely advisory.” As a result, said McNulty, each of the municipal court judges interpreted chapter 137 as he saw fit.3 The Real Estate Board renewed its campaign to water down the rent laws in late August, not long after Governor Alfred E. Smith announced his intention to call a special session of the legislature to deal with the housing problem. In preparation for the special session, the Lockwood Committee and several legislators drafted a host of bills to regulate rents and prevent evictions, many of which were much harsher than the April laws. Of particular concern to the Real Estate Board was a bill that temporarily suspended summary proceedings in New York City and cities in the adjoining counties. This bill, which became chapter 942, had the support of Senator Lockwood and Arthur J. W. Hilly, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. In its attempt to water down the bill, the Real Estate Board urged the legislators to include a handful of exceptions, which were for the most part revised versions of the ones for which it had been pushing without success since the spring of 1920. Stressing the widespread view that in the long run the only way to relieve the housing shortage was to promote residential construction, Chittick and other real estate men hammered

Chapter 942 was one of the most draconian of the emergency rent laws. Whether it was revolutionary, as some opponents charged, is debatable. What is

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away at the point that it made no sense for the legislature to “urge capital to build houses” while at the same time “[taking] away all inducement to build.”4 Spokesmen for the tenants opposed these exceptions on the grounds that they provided “loopholes through which [the] law can be entirely emasculated.” As the executive secretary of the United Tenants Organization said, the landlord could claim he wanted the apartment for himself in order to oust the old tenant and lease it to a new one at a higher rent. The landlord could also claim he intended to demolish one building and replace it with another when he had no intention of doing so. And, warned the Call, many tenants would also be forced to move under the provision “that was ostensibly designed to promote cooperative home owning.” The result of what it called the “joker” in the September laws would be “an orgy of evictions.” Despite these objections, the legislators were unwilling to do more than modify the exceptions in ways that allayed some of the tenants’ concerns. Apparently Senator Lockwood and his colleagues believed that the inclusion of these exceptions would not only undermine the opposition to chapter 942, but also render the law less vulnerable to attack on constitutional grounds. (Indeed, William D. Guthrie and Julius Henry Cohen would later argue in court that chapter 942 did not deprive the landlord of property without due process of law because it allowed him to recover the premises under certain conditions. “In every fair and reasonable situation, he may have back his property,” they said; it was only when he “desires to evict without reason” that he may not.)5 As enacted in late September, chapter 942 provided that a landlord could not bring summary proceedings against a holdover tenant in greater New York before November 1, 1922, unless he could prove to the satisfaction of the court that he met one of following criteria. One was that he sought “in good faith” to recover the premises as a dwelling for himself and his immediate family, which did not include his brothers, sisters, and other relatives. To take advantage of this exception, the landlord had to be “the owner of record” and “a natural person,” as opposed to a corporation. Another was that he intended, also “in good faith,” to demolish the old building and erect a new one, the plans for which had been approved by one of the borough building departments. Under pressure from organized labor, the legislators shelved a proposal that the new building had to be used exclusively for residential purposes. Yet another was that the building had been sold, again “in good faith,” to a corporation formed under a cooperative ownership plan, according to which all the apartments were to be leased to the stockholders “for their own personal, exclusive and permanent occupancy.” The stockholders would have to take possession as soon as the tenants were ousted. Chapter 942 also provided that the landlord could bring summary proceedings against a holdover tenant if he could prove to the satisfaction of the court that the tenant was objectionable, a provision that was a revised version of chapter 133 of the April laws. These exceptions were also incorporated into chapter 947, which suspended actions of ejectment until November 1, 1922.6

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not debatable is that it was a striking departure from past practices. Hitherto, said Tenement House Commission Frank Mann, “the landlord had absolute control of his property and could do what he liked insofar as the tenants were concerned.” One manifestation of this “absolute control,” noted Junius Pendleton Wilson, chief counsel to the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, was a clause in nearly every lease that a landlord could at any time bring summary proceedings against a tenant whom he regarded as objectionable. “Shocking as it may appear to our conceptions of justice,” wrote Judge Spiegelberg, “under this clause the landlord could terminate any lease, no matter how long it had to run, by the mere assertion that he deemed the tenant objectionable.” He did not have spell out in what way the tenant was objectionable. Nor did he have to offer proof. His word was enough. The tenant could not challenge the landlord’s charge; nor could he offer evidence to the contrary. As Judge Harry Robitzek put it, under the law the landlord has the right to terminate a lease “when the tenant does anything which [he construes] as being improper or objectionable.” The landlord has to do nothing but give the tenant notice. And the court has no option other than to issue a final order—and, if inclined, grant a short stay.7 In the aftermath of World War I, some judges watched with growing concern as many landlords brought summary proceedings against tenants who had no prior history of objectionable behavior. More often than not, it seemed the suit was, in the words of Judge Charles L. Guy, “a mere subterfuge,” an attempt to raise the rent by replacing the old tenant with a new one. Early in 1919, for example, the Seventh Avenue Holding Corporation asked Judge Robitzek to dispossess Frank J. Deyber from his apartment on Ogden Avenue six months before his lease expired. Robitzek did not think that Deyber (or any member of his family) had acted in “a disorderly or improper manner.” But he felt obliged to issue a final order for the landlord. If his ruling was upheld, “and I have not the slightest doubt that it will [be],” he warned, “every lease made in New York [City] is void.” Peter A. Sheil, who sat in the same courthouse as Judge Robitzek, went even further. Late in 1919 William Korn brought summary proceedings against three tenants whose leases had not yet expired. He argued that the tenants, who had demanded that he provide steam heat and hot water and repair a broken window, were objectionable. Ignoring the law, Sheil instructed the jury to rule in favor of the tenants. There was no reason to believe that the tenants were objectionable, he declared; nor was there any evidence that the landlord was acting in good faith.8 The issue came up again in December 1919, when the Appellate Term of the First Department handed down a decision in a case that pitted the Waitt Construction Company against Jeanne Lorraine. Waitt Construction had asked Manhattan’s Seventh District Court to oust Lorraine, whose lease ran from October 1, 1919, to September 30, 1920, on the grounds that she was objectionable. Although the lease contained a clause that allowed the company to terminate the tenancy if it deemed the tenant objectionable, the trial judge dismissed the petition, holding that the clause did not give the landlord the right to bring summary proceedings against the

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tenant. Waitt Construction appealed. Writing for the Appellate Term, Irving Lehman reversed the lower court’s ruling on technical grounds and ordered a new trial. But he then went on to say that since the landlord could only terminate the tenancy if he deemed the tenant objectionable, “he should be required to allege and prove this fact.” Lehman’s decision created a good deal of confusion. And many New Yorkers assumed that it would enable landlords to oust tenants “whose sole offense,” wrote the Times, was that they could not pay as much rent as others. Troubled by what he called a “widespread and erroneous construction” of his opinion, Lehman incorporated into it a provision that “not only must the landlord allege in the petition that he deems the tenant ‘undesirable,’ [he must] also prove it.”9 If any doubt remained about where things stood, they were dispelled three months later, when the Appellate Term issued a ruling in a case that had been filed in Manhattan’s Seventh District Court. In this case the Gorham Construction Company asked the judge to oust Samuel B. Woolman, whose lease did not expire until the end of September, on the grounds that he was objectionable. Arguing that the landlord had not provided evidence to show that he had acted in good faith or that the tenant had behaved in an objectionable way, Woolman’s lawyer moved that the petition be dismissed. The judge denied the motion. He also excluded the tenant’s testimony, which alleged that the company had never filed a complaint against him and that one of its officers had warned he would be evicted unless he agreed to pay a higher rent. The judge then ruled in favor of Gorham Construction and issued a final order against Woolman, who took the case to the Appellate Term, which reversed the lower court’s ruling. Writing for the court, Judge Guy held that the trial judge erred in excluding testimony showing “lack of good faith on the part of the landlord.” Pointing out that he had misconstrued Waitt v. Lorraine, it ruled that the landlord must “allege and prove that he deemed the tenant objectionable.” The tenant was entitled to submit evidence that the landlord had not acted in good faith, which was a question of fact that should be left up to the jury. “In determining the issue, proof as to whether the landlord had reasonable ground for deeming the tenant undesirable is relevant and material.”10 At a time when many thousands of dispossess proceedings were pending in the municipal courts, many New Yorkers soon came to believe that Waitt v. Lorraine did not go far enough. So did many legislators. The Appellate Term had only ruled that a landlord who brought summary proceedings against a tenant whose lease had not yet expired had to prove that he deemed the tenant objectionable—that, in other words, he was acting in good faith—and not that the tenant was in fact objectionable. Thus under Waitt v. Lorraine, the Lockwood Committee pointed out, a landlord was still able “to get rid of any tenant when he had an opportunity to get a higher rent from a new one.” Thus shortly before Gorham v. Woolman was handed down, the committee filed a bill, known as chapter 133, that provided that if the landlord attempted to terminate a lease on the grounds that the tenant was objectionable, he would have to prove “to the satisfaction of the court” not only that he deemed the tenant objectionable, but also that the tenant was objectionable. As the Times put it,

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“the burden of proof” was placed squarely on the landlord. One of the few April laws that was a permanent measure, chapter 133 was enacted on April 1, 1920, and went into effect forthwith.11 Before long many New Yorkers came to believe that chapter 133 did not go far enough either. Like Waitt v. Lorraine and Gorham v. Woolman, chapter 133 covered only tenants whose leases had not yet expired. It provided no protection to holdover tenants, many of whom had been served with a notice to vacate their apartments. Hence when the Lockwood Committee drafted a set of bills for the special session of the legislature in September, it included in what became chapter 942 a provision that a landlord could not oust a holdover tenant on the grounds that he was objectionable unless he could prove “to the satisfaction of the court” that the tenant was objectionable. Under chapter 942, which was enacted in late September, even a holdover tenant was given, in Junius Pendleton Wilson’s words, “every opportunity to introduce evidence that the landlord was not acting in good faith, and that he [the tenant] was not, in fact, objectionable.” To the dismay of some New Yorkers, however, chapter 942 did not define “objectionable.” Nor did it provide guidelines for defining it. Whether a tenant was objectionable was a matter of fact, not of law, the determination of which was left to the municipal courts.12 This was not an easy task, not for the judges and not for the jurors. If the landlords were to be believed, some tenants were indeed objectionable. A few turned their apartments into “a house of ill fame.” And some made “hooch,” or illegal alcohol, on the premises; the Eighteenth Amendment notwithstanding, at least one Bronx tenant sold “home brew” to his friends. (He was very popular, the landlord’s lawyer told Judge William E. Morris. “No wonder,” Morris said.) Other tenants broke bathroom fixtures, shattered glass windows, and left faucets open so long that other apartments were flooded. Still other tenants threw garbage out the windows, put trash in the ash cans, and dropped cigar butts on the roof. One tenant kept sixteen dogs in a four-room apartment. A few tenants were often intoxicated and combative, sometimes going as far as to attack the landlord, his family, his employees, and, in one case, the janitor’s daughter. Sometimes the tenant’s family was objectionable too. One tenant’s wife refused to allow the landlord into the apartment to repair a gas range and then threw a glass pitcher at him. And another tenant’s children teased the landlord’s wife, a devout Catholic, about her religion, tossed beans and tomatoes at her, and, after a storm, piled up snow two-feet deep in the vestibule.13 But were the landlords to be believed? Many New Yorkers, some of whom shared State Senator Henry G. Schackno’s view that “there is no such thing as an honest landlord,” had their doubts. As they saw it, most landlords accused their tenants of being objectionable only because they refused to go along with a rent hike. Although the municipal court judges were well aware, as Judge William J. A. Caffrey put it, that there were “bad tenants as well as bad landlords,” many of them were dubious as well. As early as late 1919 Harry Robitzek, who was struck by the sharp increase in the number of summary proceedings in the Bronx, remarked, “I cannot conceive of all these defendants being undesirable.” In his opinion, the increase was

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attributable not so much to objectionable tenants as to profiteering landlords. William E. Morris was skeptical, too. After hearing a case a year later in which the landlord brought summary proceedings against a tenant who had refused to pay a rent hike, Morris said to the tenant that if he had paid the landlord the $65, “you would be very desirable.” A year later another municipal court judge observed after a trial that the tenant had resided in the apartment for many years, during which time he had done nothing to trouble the landlord. Then the landlord raised the rent, the tenant balked at paying, and “now suddenly [he] becomes objectionable.” “It is scarcely believable,” said the judge. Indeed, wrote Spiegelberg several years later, “it is amazing to contemplate the number of tenants whom the landlords consider objectionable.”14 In some cases the municipal courts ruled in favor of the landlords. In Kline v. Kleenan, which was handed down in Manhattan’s Third District Court in late 1920, the judge ruled that the tenant whose wife refused to allow the landlord into the apartment to repair the gas range and then threw a glass pitcher at him was objectionable. He issued a final order ousting the tenant, but granted him a stay until March 1, 1921. The result was much the same in McGowan v. Stevens, which was handed down in Manhattan’s Fifth District Court in early December 1920. The case involved an eight-room apartment that was occupied by the tenant’s daughter (and on occasion by the tenant herself) as well as by as many as ten roomers, who slept in every room but the kitchen and bathroom. Although Judge Spiegelberg found that both the tenant and her daughter were “highly respectable women,” he also found that many of the roomers had engaged in “improper behavior.” If the tenant knew of this behavior, she should be held responsible; if not, she was “culpable” of failing to take “proper care” in the selection of “those who shared the apartment with her.” In either case, she was objectionable. To permit or connive at “improper conduct” is “ground for removal,” Spiegelberg later wrote.15 In most cases, however, the judges and juries ruled in favor of the tenants, especially when the charges were trivial or—in the case of a landlord who claimed a tenant was objectionable because he sat on the stoop in a rocking chair every evening—“little short of ridiculous,” wrote the Bronx Home News. In such cases the court had good reason to dismiss the petition. To give a few examples, Judge Morris refused to oust a tenant for playing cards in her apartment. Even before she responded to the charge, Morris said, “Sh-h-h—Madam, Sh-h-h.” Don’t say anything. “It’s no crime to play cards.” He then bid her good day, told her to pay the rent, and declared, “case closed.” Morris also ruled against another landlord who was trying to remove a tenant whose children had broken a few windows. “All children break windows,” he said. Writing in the Times, one journalist pointed out that several judges held that a tenant was not objectionable if his children “leave marbles on the sidewalk, leave the front door open, and otherwise conduct themselves in the manner of little boys everywhere.” It took a jury only four minutes to decide that Jacob B. Kessler, a costume maker who lived on Fort Washington Avenue, was not objectionable because his children played the piano and danced in the apartment.

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The jurors may have been influenced by Mrs. Kessler’s testimony that the S. and K. Realty Corporation told her it had a prospective tenant who was ready to pay nearly twice as much for the apartment as she and her husband were paying.16 Even in cases where the charges were more serious—so serious, wrote Spiegelberg, that it was the landlord’s “duty to bring the case before the court”—the outcome was often the same. Despite the evidence that a tenant was often intoxicated, noisy, and violent, that he annoyed the other tenants and even attacked the janitor and struck her daughter, a Manhattan judge ruled in Hilliard v. Dorritie that he was not objectionable. And in Papa v. Ferraro a Bronx judge refused to find a tenant objectionable even though he had threatened the landlord, saying that if he was evicted, “God help you. We fix you.” Although he warned the tenant “you will land in jail if you do not let the landlord alone,” the judge declared, “I have never signed an order ruling that a tenant is objectionable, and I am not disposed to do so on the testimony presented in this case.” Another Manhattan judge ruled against a landlord in Klingenbeck v. Young because the evidence showed that the tenant, who threw refuse out the window and otherwise annoyed the other tenants, was objectionable in June 1920, but not in October 1920, when the landlord filed the suit. After deliberating for three minutes, wrote the Times, one jury decided “that a tenant who made home brew in his leisure hours was far from objectionable.” Another jury found that a tenant was not objectionable even though he had once been arrested and convicted for disorderly conduct and now ran a distillery out of his apartment.17 As a rule the landlords did better in the appellate courts than in the trial courts. Pointing to the “undisputed” evidence that the tenant was objectionable, the Appellate Term reversed the lower court’s ruling in Hilliard v. Dorritie and granted the landlord’s petition. Citing the “overwhelming” proof that the tenant was objectionable, it also overturned the lower court’s decision in Papa v. Ferraro. Besides awarding the landlord possession of the premises, Judge Guy took the trial judge to task for his unwillingness to consider the landlord’s evidence. The Appellate Term ruled that the trial judge had erred in Klingenbeck v. Young too. Although the court dismissed the appeal on technical grounds, it held that the trial court’s interpretation of chapter 942, under which a tenant could only be ousted if he was “doing things that are objectionable at the time of the proceedings,” was “too narrow.” The judge “had no right to withdraw the case from the jury merely because there was no evidence that the objectionable acts had continued over the summer.” The appellate court also held that the trial judge erred when he denied a precept to the Hermitage Company, one of whose tenants had converted his residence into as workshop without the landlord’s permission and refused to move out when his lease expired. Writing for the court, Edward G. Whitaker ruled that the tenant was objectionable and that the landlord was entitled to take back the premises.18 But most landlords were reluctant to take a case to the appellate courts. It cost too much money and took too much time. Indeed, many landlords were even disinclined to file suit in the trial courts. The calendars were often so full that if the tenant asked for a jury trial it might be a year or longer before the case was heard,

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said Reuben J. Wittstein, a lawyer and spokesman for the Upper Harlem Tax Payers Association. In the meantime, remarked John H. Hallock, who managed more than 450 tenement houses on the Lower East Side, the tenant was free to remain in the premises and do serious damage to the property. Wittstein also pointed out that the landlords had no way of knowing how the courts would rule. Nor did the lawyers. “It is impossible to advise a landlord as to what constitutes [objectionable behavior],” he said. The question is one of fact, which was up to the judges and juries. But the landlords had misgivings about the judges, many of whom were sympathetic to the tenants. They were also leery of the juries, most of which were made up largely of tenants. As one Manhattan landlord said, most of his tenants were “decent and respectable people,” but one was an anarchist who constantly quarreled with the janitor and the other tenants. Although reluctant to retain counsel, he eventually attempted to oust the tenant on the grounds that he was objectionable. But as soon as the tenant requested a jury trial, he dropped the suit.19 As well as disheartened by what they regarded as the bias of the judges and jurors, the landlords were frustrated by the judicial process itself. After all, chapter 133 put the burden of proof on the landlords—and chapter 942 left it there. As Stewart Browne complained, the courts would not take the landlord’s word that a tenant was objectionable, not even if it were corroborated by a member of the tenant’s family or the superintendent or janitor of the apartment house. Indeed, said Isaac Hyman, president of the West Harlem Property Owners Association, the courts would not rule in the landlord’s favor unless the other tenants testified that the tenant in question was objectionable. “In other words,” he went on, “they [the courts] have construed the word ‘objectionable’ as not objectionable to the landlord but objectionable to the community.” But most tenants were afraid to testify against objectionable tenants, even, said Hyman, in the most egregious cases. They would be bullied, threatened, and assaulted if it became known that they were willing to testify, said Browne. As a New York World reporter wrote, “it is difficult to persuade other tenants to testify against gunmen and other gentlemen who have a habit of using firearms with unpleasant accuracy.” Most tenants were also aware that if the court refused to remove the “objectionable” tenant from the apartment they would be in what Hallock called “a perfect pot of hot water.” And even if the court ousted the tenant, it would probably grant a stay of at least a month, during which time the other tenants would have him as a neighbor—a grim prospect, to say the least.20 Before long many landlords came to believe, as the World reporter wrote, “that it was difficult—in fact almost impossible—for them to evict undesirable tenants.” A case in point was Stewart Browne, who told the Lockwood Committee, “It is an utter impossibility to get a tenant evicted, no matter how undesirable he may be.” Isaac Hyman agreed. Asked what a tenant would have to do to be found objectionable, he replied, “She would probably have to kill the landlord.” The courts, he added, would not find a tenant objectionable “unless every [other] tenant goes on the stand and testifies that [the tenant in question] is objectionable.” Along the same line, Leo Rosenberg, a spokesman for the Harlem and Bronx Property Owners, said, “It is

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much easier to convict a person today of murder in the first degree than [to] obtain a final order before a jury ousting a tenant upon the ground of being objectionable.” As Browne put it, “There isn’t a single species of physical destructive devilment that the human mind can conceive of that is not occurring daily in thousands of homes in New York City.” And under the emergency rent laws there was nothing the landlords could do about it.21 Although it was very hard to oust an objectionable tenant, some landlords tried—though only, said one, when he could count on the support of the other tenants. Many others gave up, deciding it was not worth their while to file a suit or dropping the suit after filing it. Deeply frustrated, the real estate men urged the legislature to revise the emergency rent laws in ways that would permit reputable landlords to get rid of objectionable tenants, yet prevent unscrupulous landlords from claiming that a tenant was objectionable in order to increase the rent. One way, said Browne, was to make it mandatory for the courts to oust an objectionable tenant provided the landlord posted a bond equal to twelve month’s rent that would require him to enter into a twelve-month lease with a new tenant at the same rent that the old tenant had been paying. Other real estate men held that as long as the emergency rent laws remained in effect, there was only one solution to the problem. “When filling apartments be careful in your choice of tenants,” H. M. Lazinsk urged the members of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association. “Size them up, look them up, acquaint yourself with their past history as tenants. Make sure of their reputations and characters first[, and] then let them in or turn them down.” Landlords were better off leaving an apartment vacant, even if it meant losing a month’s rent, than ending up with “a bad egg for a tenant.”22 No sooner were the September laws enacted than a few landlords attempted to oust the tenants who were holding over on the grounds that they or members of their immediate family wanted to move into the apartments. As time passed, hundreds and then thousands of others followed suit. Some may have been driven to do so when they realized how hard it was to oust a tenant on the grounds that he was objectionable. Indeed, as Agnes Craig, attorney for several Bronx tenants leagues, said, it was not unheard of for a landlord to bring summary proceedings against a tenant on the grounds that he was objectionable and then, if the court dismissed the petition, to file another suit to oust the tenant on the grounds that he wanted the apartment for his “immediate and personal occupancy.” By the summer of 1921 many municipal courts were inundated with such suits, probably none more so than the Bronx Second District Court, where thousands of these proceedings were marked down for jury trials. For the judges—many of whom agreed with Judge Spiegelberg that it was “unjust to exclude the landlord from occupying his own property and [to] permit a stranger to remain”—these suits posed a knotty problem.23 Among the many judges who were well aware of this problem was Peter A. Sheil. As he pointed out, some landlords brought summary proceedings against their

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tenants because they wanted the apartment for themselves and their family and intended to move in as soon as it was vacant. To understand why, bear in mind that many of these landlords were also tenants. If they were to be believed, some had been notified that they would be evicted unless they agreed to pay a rent that was beyond their means. Others wanted to move from their old apartment to a new one that was closer to his or her (or a spouse’s) place of work. Still others felt that their apartments were no longer suitable. Raphael Saperstein claimed his sixth-floor apartment was “unfit” because he and his wife could no longer climb six flights of stairs. He wanted to move into an apartment on the third floor of a building that he had recently bought. Henry Dreyer, who owned the building in which his family lived, told the court that he wanted to move into one of the five-room apartments because his wife was “too old and infirm” to take care of their seven-room apartment and their daughter was about to be married and move out. And Christopher Kenehan wanted an apartment of his own, one he would occupy with a housekeeper, because his daughter, with whom he was living in a house she inherited from her mother, was “suffering from nervous prostration and heart trouble” and could no longer “attend to me properly.”24 Many other landlords said their apartment was no longer suitable because it was too small. Sadie Rubin wanted to move from a five-room apartment in Manhattan—in which she lived with her husband, three children (and a fourth on the way), her brother, and a maid—into a seven-room apartment in the same building. The current tenant was willing to exchange apartments, said Rubin, but only if she gave him $300. Susan McFarland filed suit to oust a tenant from his sevenroom apartment because there was not enough space for her father in the five-room apartment she was renting in another building. Saying that she wanted to keep her family of ten together, Sarah Bernstein, who lived in an apartment in the Bronx, sought possession of the adjoining apartment, which was occupied by a family of three. She offered the tenant a choice of five vacant apartments, two at a reduced rent, but he refused on the grounds that they were less desirable. Among the others was an Italian American who had worked for eighteen years as an ice dealer and eventually saved up enough money to buy a small tenement house on the Upper East Side. He now wanted to move out of a two-room apartment in which he lived with eight children and into one of the five-room apartments in his own tenement house. “How he put his eight children and himself in that apartment I don’t know,” said Judge John R. Davies.25 But as Judge Sheil pointed out, some landlords who brought summary proceedings against their tenants did not want the apartments any more “than I do.” Nor did they intend to move in as soon as they were vacant. The proceedings were often a “subterfuge,” to quote Judge Davies, to replace the old tenant with a new one (and sometimes to replace militant tenants—the “ringleaders” of the rent strikes—with docile ones). In one instance after another, said Judge Levy, the landlord demands a rent hike and, when the tenant refuses to pay, “suddenly and impulsively conceives the notion that he requires [the] apartment for his own use.” A case in point was a

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Bronx landlord who brought summary proceedings against a tenant who balked at paying an increased rent on the grounds that she wanted the apartment for herself. After the jury returned a verdict in favor of the tenant, she filed another suit, claiming this time that she wanted the apartment for her daughter, who, she said, was part owner of the property. Another case in point, wrote the Times, was a “fashionably-gowned landlady, wearing expensive jewelry,” who brought summary proceedings against four tenants who refused to pay a 25 percent rent hike. Appearing in Judge Benjamin Hoffman’s court in Lower Manhattan, she told Assistant Corporation Counsel James D. Sullivan, who was representing the tenants on behalf of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, that she had a plan. “I’ll tell the Judge that I want one apartment for myself, one for my son, a third for my daughter and the fourth for my son-in-law.” Asked by Sullivan if she or they intended to move into the apartments, she replied, “I’ve got to give the Judge some excuse.”26 Many other landlords had no compunction about lying to the court. A Bronx landlord told Judge Robitzek that she needed the ground floor apartment in her tenement house for her ailing sons who were returning from military service in France and sorely needed a porch, back yard, and fresh air to recuperate. Believing that she was acting in good faith, Robitzek issued a final order against the tenant, a city employee with eight children, whose rent was $50 a month. The day after he moved out, an ad appeared in the Home News offering the apartment for $85 a month. Other landlords placed ads even before a final order was issued. As Judge Caffrey pointed out, “there are thousands of cases where the landlord within a week, sometimes two days after he went on the stand and testified [that he wanted the apartment for himself or members of his immediate family] has gone right out and let his place to somebody else [at a higher] rent,” often, according to Judge Leopold Prince, 50, 75, or 100 percent higher. Agnes Craig remarked that there were very few cases “where the landlord really moves in after the tenant moves out.” And even Stewart Browne conceded that in most cases the landlord had no intention of occupying the premises. (Many landlords claim they wanted the apartment for a child who was about to be married, wrote the Home News. But sometimes the wedding does not take place, and even when it does, “the young couple seldom moves into the vacant flat.”)27 How were the judges and jurors supposed to figure out when the summary proceedings were on the up-and-up and when they were a subterfuge? It was easy to tell whether the petitioner was “the owner of record” (and, for that matter, “a natural person”). But it was far from easy to know whether the petitioner was acting “in good faith,” which, said Judge Robert F. Wagner, was “the corner stone upon which the whole provision rests.” Did he (or the members of his immediate family) intend to occupy the apartment as a dwelling, as the statute required? And did he (or they) intend to move in as soon as it was vacant? That, said Judge Spiegelberg, was a question of intent, which was very hard to gauge. “You cannot look into the hearts of men and determine whether they are telling the truth.” Moreover, he went on, it was very easy for the landlord to declare his intention to move into

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an apartment and very hard for the tenant to prove otherwise. In a decision handed down in December 1920, Spiegelberg said he was not persuaded that the landlords, who had filed suit to oust a tenant from an apartment on the Upper West Side, were acting in good faith. But after ruling against them, he went on, “I am not absolutely confident that I am right. Nobody can be where an inquiry into the intention is involved.”28 In some cases the trial courts ruled in favor of the landlords. Shortly after the September laws were enacted, Spiegelberg held a hearing at which the landlord claimed that he and his wife were invalids, no longer able to climb up to their walk-up apartment. Since the tenant provided no evidence to the contrary, “I very reluctantly granted a final order,” Spiegelberg said. (A month later he ran into the tenant’s lawyer, who informed him that after the final order was granted the landlord told the tenant that when he asked for a 40 percent raise “you did not give it to me. Now I have you by the throat and I will ask you for an increase of 75 per cent.” Facing eviction, the tenant gave in.) Less than a year later another Manhattan judge awarded possession of an apartment to a landlady even though she lived full-time in Stamford, Connecticut, in a house in the summer and in a hotel in the winter. In another case a Bronx jury voted to oust a tenant after the judge instructed its members—erroneously, ruled the appellate court—that the landlord was entitled to recover the apartment unless the tenant, “upon whom the burden of proof is,” persuaded them that the landlord “does not want it for himself.” In still another case a Manhattan judge directed the jury to return a verdict in favor of the landlord even though he had notified the tenant that he could stay in his five-room apartment if he paid an extra two dollars a month (or, if he preferred, moved into a fourroom apartment in the building at the same rent).29 But in most cases the trial courts ruled in favor of the tenants. A Bronx jury refused to oust two tenants from their apartments on the sixth floor of a house on Ogden Avenue because the landlord, a doctor who lived in an apartment on the second floor, wanted the additional space for herself, her nurses, and her servants. In a case in which the tenant claimed that the landlord tried to raise the rent before filing the suit, a Manhattan court dismissed the petition even though the landlord denied that she had tried to raise the rent and pointed out that the tenant offered no evidence to prove otherwise. In another case a Bronx judge, probably William E. Morris, held that when landlords sue for a rent hike and, after the court rules against them, “[wake] up to the idea that they want [an apartment] for their own use, it is very strong evidence of bad faith.” In what he called “one of the most outrageous cases of profiteering I have seen for some time,” he not only denied the landlord’s motion but also refused to permit him to try his luck with another judge. The trial courts also ruled in favor of the tenants where, according to the appellate courts, the landlord’s testimony was “uncontradicted,” the ruling went “against the weight of the evidence,” and the verdict was “unsupported by any evidence.”30 Why, wondered Clarence S. Stein, were so many judges inclined to rule against the landlords? Judge Davies thought he knew. The typical municipal court judge, he

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said, “is right out in the field.” He is well aware of “living conditions” in the city. He is sympathetic to the tenants, most of whom have reason to believe the landlord has “ulterior motives,” but no way of proving it. The judge is also “naturally suspicious” of the landlords, many of whom use the personal exemption provision of chapter 942 as a subterfuge and have no intention of moving into the apartment. Many judges have been “deceived [by the landlord] time and time again,” said Peter A. Sheil, who added that in cases where the landlord lived in the building he would give him the tenant’s apartment only if he would give the tenant his apartment in exchange. “I don’t want to put anybody out of a house,” he said. The municipal court judges were especially skeptical in cases where the landlord attempted to oust the tenant after the court refused to approve a rent hike, William J. A. Caffrey pointed out. Even to a man of “average intelligence,” which “is all we Municipal Court Judges claim to be,” this was evidence of “the mala fides of the landlord.”31 Many trial court rulings were appealed, usually to the Appellate Term of the First Department. In most cases—at least three out of four, according to Judge Davies—they were reversed. On occasion the appellate court ruled in favor of the tenant. In one case it overruled a Bronx judge who had refused to hear testimony (or even swear in witnesses) before he awarded the premises to the landlord. In the absence of any testimony, the court said it could not go into the merits of the case. But holding that the tenant was “entitled to his day in court,” it vacated the final order. In the case of the landlady who lived in Stamford, Connecticut, the appellate court reversed the trial court, saying that the facts “establish that the plaintiff did not seek in good faith to recover possession of the premises for the immediate and personal occupancy of herself and family.” In another case the appellate court held that the trial court’s ruling that the burden of proof was on the tenant was “a sufficiently prejudicial error to require a reversal of the final order.” Under chapter 942, it held, the burden of proof was on the landlord. In yet another case the appellate court overruled a Manhattan judge who had directed the jury to return a verdict in favor of the landlord. He should have let the jury decide whether the landlord, who had offered the tenant a four-room apartment on the fourth floor if he moved out of his five-room apartment on the second floor, was acting in good faith.32 But most of the time the appellate courts ruled in favor of the landlord. In some cases they just said that the trial court’s ruling was not supported by the evidence (or that the judge excluded evidence that should have been admitted or admitted evidence that should have been excluded). In other cases the appellate judges spelled out the reasoning underlying their decisions. In one case the appellate court held that it did not matter that a Bronx landlord asked one court to oust the tenant shortly after asking another court to raise the rent. Was asking for what the court deemed an unreasonable rent “sufficient evidence of bad faith” to “preclude the plaintiff from changing her mind,” from deciding she would rather occupy the apartment than rent it, “and thus deprive her forever from getting possession of her own property?” Writing for the court, Edward G. Whitaker held it was not. Saying that it was “a very serious matter” to bar an owner from living in her house, he

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reversed the lower court’s decision and entered a final order in favor of the landlord. In another case the appellate court disagreed with a judge who refused to grant a final order to the Manhattan landlord whose daughter was moving out and whose wife was old and infirm unless he agreed to exchange his seven-room apartment for the tenant’s five-room apartment in the same building. Writing for the court, Edward R. Finch said, “If the landlord in good faith desired to occupy for himself and his family the apartment in question, the court below was without authority to impose as a condition that the landlord permit the tenant to occupy the larger apartment.” The judgment was reversed and a final order entered in favor of the landlord.33 Provided that the landlord wanted the apartment “for the immediate and personal use of himself and family,” his right to recover it was “absolute,” wrote Judge Lehman in a case handed down by the Appellate Term of the First Department. There was nothing in chapter 942 that prevented the owner from ousting a tenant from an apartment because there was another apartment in the building that “is unoccupied and might meet the landlord’s needs as a dwelling.” Lehman went so far as to say that it was immaterial whether the landlord preferred to move into the occupied apartment because he could get a higher rent for the unoccupied one. He therefore overruled the Bronx Second District Court, which had dismissed the landlord’s petition. The same court also reversed a ruling of Manhattan’s Third District Court, which had refused to issue a final order in favor of a landlord who filed suit against a tenant who refused to move out of her seven-room apartment on the second floor and into a vacant seven-room apartment on the fifth floor. Although the landlord offered to decorate the fifth-floor apartment and rent it for five dollars less than the second-floor apartment, the tenant, who lived with her sister and brother-in-law, rejected the offer not only because she had a “weak heart,” which prevented her from climbing to the fifth floor, but also because she had spent $350 to decorate the apartment. The appellate court ruled that it made no difference that the tenant preferred to retain possession for “personal reasons.” Since the landlord was acting in “good faith,” she was “entitled to the apartment.”34 The appellate court rulings left many municipal court judges disheartened. “With all due respect to their superior knowledge and wisdom,” said Judge Davies, the appellate judges “don’t understand the type of people [who appear] before us as well as we [the trial judges] do.” They base their rulings entirely on “the cold typewritten record,” which they approach in “an analytic, scientific way.” The result, said Judge Prince, was that the landlord can establish good faith just by claiming that he wants to move into the premises. All he has to say, added Davies, is, “I want the apartment and I am telling the truth.” The trial court has to take the landlord’s word, remarked Judge Spiegelberg, unless the tenant offers “evidence to the contrary.” But “in most cases he has nothing to offer. He cannot look into the [landlord’s] mind.” Said Judge Caffrey, he is bound “if he is sitting alone to render a final order for the landlord, or in the event that he sits with a jury, to direct a verdict for the landlord.” “That is the law,” he explained, “and we must follow it.” A year before

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he was elected to the state supreme court, Judge Aaron J. Levy observed that for all practical purposes the appellate court rulings prevented the judges from considering the landlord’s good faith and denying his petition to oust the tenant. Under chapter 942 the landlords were entitled to a final order provided only that they “show[ed] good faith” and did not “employ the proceedings as a subterfuge.”35 Not the least of the reasons that the municipal court judges were disheartened by the appellate court rulings was that in many cases they believed the landlords were lying—and lying under oath. No provision of the emergency rent laws was as tainted by perjury as the personal use exemption of chapter 942, Judge Caffrey said. “It is most deplorable to think that men and women who consider themselves goodliving, respectful law[-]abiding people, without the slightest hesitation[,] will go into a court of justice and there under the sanctity of an oath make a statement that they know and must know is false.” It made a “mocker[y] of justice,” he declared, “almost a farce.” Especially disheartening to Caffrey was that even when the landlords committed perjury there was nothing much the judges could do about it. As he pointed out, the Appellate Term had ruled that “the landlord has the right to change his mind,” not only to decide to occupy an apartment that he had recently preferred to rent, but also to choose to stay in his old apartment rather than to move into a new one. “It was the only time in the history of mankind that I know of,” Caffrey said, “where a man has been given what has heretofore been regarded [as a] woman’s privilege, that of changing his mind.”36 Judge Spiegelberg agreed with Judge Caffrey. So did Agnes Craig, who said it was almost impossible to prove perjury by a landlord. She pointed out that one of her clients, a city employee with eight children, had been ousted from his apartment in the Bronx because the landlord claimed he wanted it for himself. When the landlord placed an ad for the apartment in the Home News the day after the tenant moved out, Craig brought the matter to the Bronx district attorney. But the district attorney was unwilling to file charges, saying that under the law the landlord had the right to change his mind. Speaking of the Bronx tenant organizations for which she served as counsel, she said, “We have not been able, in all our experience, to prosecute one landlord for perjury when he has refused to carry out an oath that he took on the stand.” Assemblyman Samuel I. Rosenman also agreed with Judge Caffrey. It was impossible to get an indictment against a landlord, he said. The landlord could always plead that he wanted the apartment at the time he brought the proceedings, but “after the tenant moved out he honestly changed his mind about moving in.” “Of course, this is a shallow subterfuge,” Rosenman said, “but [it] would nevertheless be a good defense in a criminal prosecution.” Given the appellate court’s position, “prosecutions for perjury are rare,” wrote Judge Spiegelberg, “and convictions for that offence almost unknown.”37 To prevent the personal use exemption of chapter 942 from being used as a subterfuge, some New Yorkers urged the state legislature to enact a law requiring the landlord to post a bond—equal, say, to six or twelve months’ rent—that would be forfeited if he did not move into the apartment after the tenant moved out and did

Chapter 942 spelled out two other “unusual conditions” under which a landlord could oust a holdover tenant. One was if he could prove to the satisfaction of the court that he intended to demolish the old building and replace it with a new one, the plans for which had been approved by “proper authority.” The other was if the building had been sold to a corporation on a cooperative ownership basis, according to which all the apartments were to be leased to the stockholders for their “own personal, exclusive and permanent occupancy.” Both provisions raised complicated issues. An owner might bring summary proceedings because he intended to replace an old apartment house with a new one—a move, it was hoped, that would help alleviate the housing shortage. (Given, as Judge Spiegelberg pointed out, that the new building “need not be for dwelling purposes,” that it may be “of any character,” even “a theatre or a garage,” it was far from clear how much this provision would have added to the housing stock.) Or an owner might bring summary proceedings not because he wanted to replace an old building with a new one, but because he wanted to replace the old tenants with new ones, who would presumably be willing to pay a higher rent. It was not an uncommon practice. According to one New Yorker, her landlord claimed he wanted to tear down five walk-up tenements on the Upper West Side in order put up a nine-story elevator building on the site. To that end he brought summary proceedings against twenty tenants, all of whom were forced to move. Rather than demolish the five houses, however, he turned what had been unfurnished apartments into furnished rooms, which were then rented to other tenants.39 In other cases a building was converted into a cooperative for legitimate reasons. As owners, the residents would no longer be at risk of eviction—an extremely appealing prospect, said C. R. White, a spokesman for the cooperative movement in New York State, for the many tenants “who have found themselves in a continuous state of uncertainty as to whether they would have a roof over their heads.” The

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not live in it for “a prescribed time,” said Assemblyman Rosenman (no less than a year, suggested Harry Allen Ely, president of the Washington Heights Tenants Association). But a bill that would have compelled the landlord to put up a $1,000 bond as evidence of good faith was shelved at the regular session in March 1925. Also shelved was a bill that would have barred landlords from bringing summary proceedings against a tenant on the grounds that they wanted the premises for themselves or their families. Other New Yorkers proposed that if the landlord did not move into an apartment from which he ousted the tenant the judges should set aside the final order and allow the tenant to move back in. Still others recommended that the judges should fine the landlord or even cite him for contempt, a step that Judge Jacob Panken took in the case of a landlord who had deceived the court in order to “visit injustice and hardship” upon a tenant. If implemented, these measures might have deterred some landlords from lying to the courts. But they would not have provided relief to the tenants who had already been evicted. For them, said Judge Davies, “the damage had [already] been done.”38

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residents would also be protected from rapacious landlords and, as Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann put it, ensured “a safe and profitable investment.” Cooperative housing made sense, argued its champions, not only for the well-to-do, but also for working people. Yet in other cases—indeed, said Agnes Craig, in most cases that did not involve apartments for the very wealthy—the cooperatives were often a gimmick to jack up the rents and/or unload the property at a highly inflated price. Clarence S. Stein was skeptical of cooperative housing. So was Fiorello H. La Guardia, president of the Board of Aldermen, who told the Fair Play Rent Association that buying a cooperative apartment “is much like taking your mother-in-law to live with you.”40 Although these provisions generated much less litigation than the ones dealing with objectionable tenants and personal use, the courts made some effort to resolve the issues they raised. For example, the Appellate Term of the First Department reversed a ruling of Manhattan’s Fifth District Court, which issued a final order in favor of the Rossman Realty Corporation, whose owners wanted to renovate a sevenstory apartment house so that it would accommodate twenty-five families instead of twelve. Rossman Realty planned to take out partitions, put in additional plumbing, fire escapes, and dumb-waiter shafts, and install two new bathrooms on each floor. Noting that the company was not going to make any changes to the foundation, floors, walls, and roof, Judge Nathan Bijur held that it was evident that it did not intend to demolish the old building “for the purpose of constructing a new one within the meaning of [chapter 942].” But in another case Judge William Young, who sat on Manhattan’s Fourth District Court, granted a final order to the Ladies’ Christian Union, which wanted to convert five houses on East 36th Street into one building that would be used as a home for working girls. Pointing out that the union intended to change the exterior in a way that would leave the building with two entrances instead of five and redo the interior in a way that would “entirely destroy the identity of the five houses,” Young held that the proposed change “was much more than a mere alteration.” Saying that it was not necessary to tear down the shell of the building to comply with chapter 942, he awarded the union immediate possession of the premises.41 In a case in which a stockholder asked the court to oust a tenant from an apartment in a co-op on East 97th Street, the Appellate Term overruled the trial court and dismissed the petition on the grounds that “the alleged cooperative corporation is merely a subterfuge.” Pointing out that the stockholders occupied only five of the twenty-nine apartments—and that some of the stockholders owned several apartments and thus could not possibly occupy all of them—Judge Whitaker held that the petitioner was not acting in good faith. In other cases, however, the courts ruled against the tenants. They held that even when one stockholder had no intention of occupying his apartment, chapter 942 did not prevent the other stockholders from bringing summary proceedings against the tenants. Nor did the statute bar the stockholders from bringing summary proceedings where the building was not used exclusively for residential purposes. Perhaps the most important of these cases

Late in December 1923, more than three years after the emergency rent laws were enacted and more than a year and a half after they were extended the first time, Stewart Browne wrote a nine-page letter to the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, which had been appointed by Governor Smith to figure out whether the laws should be extended a second time. President of the United Real Estate Owners Association, Browne was one of the few prominent New York property owners who had not opposed rent control when it was first proposed. But by now he had had enough. “The Rent Laws originally were intended to prevent the eviction of law[-] abiding tenants willing to pay a reasonable rent,” he told the commission, “but they have degenerated into preventing the eviction of lawless tenants unwilling to pay a reasonable rent.” Browne, who was particularly incensed that the rent laws now covered tenants who had moved into their apartments after October 1, 1920, pointed out that under these laws it was very hard for the landlords to earn a reasonable return on their investment and virtually impossible for them to oust an objectionable tenant. Relations between landlords and tenants were worse than ever, and they were getting worse every day. The result was that “decent landlords” were being forced to sell out to what he called “shyster landlord[s].” And in a year or two “there will be [only] a few decent landlords.” The shyster landlords will then “beget additional shyster tenants, each trying to exploit the other.” And “ ‘Dog eat dog’ will be the order of the day.”43 Like many landlords, Browne placed more of the blame on the implementation of the emergency rent laws than on the laws themselves. “Justice in the Municipal Courts has completely broken down,” he wrote. The courts were so jammed that if a tenant asked for a jury trial, it often took six months to two years before the case was heard. While some judges were able and conscientious, others were incompetent, ignorant of the law, and susceptible to political pressure. Why, Browne wondered, did they “accept tenants’ statements without question” and landlords’ testimony only if corroborated by other tenants? And why did the courts require the landlords to file a bill of particulars and then sometimes just “throw it out the window, and say, ‘I don’t care what you have got there, no increase’?” Knowing that they stood little chance of getting a “square-deal,” many landlords were unwilling to go to court, where they would “be harried, insulted and bullied” and forced to spend a good deal of money on lawyers and expert witnesses. If they went to court anyway,

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involved Woodrow Court, an apartment house on Broadway between 169th and 170th streets whose owners filed suit against one of the twenty-eight holdover tenants who refused to move out after the building was turned into a co-op. When the jury found in favor of the co-op, the tenant asked Judge Edgar J. Lauer to set aside the verdict. Ruling against him, Lauer held that the stockholders did not have to be in possession at the time of the sale, only at the time of the proceeding; nor did the cooperative plan have to be “perfected” before the statute was enacted, only before the suit was filed. Given that there was strong evidence the stockholders intended to occupy the apartments, Lauer denied the tenant’s motion for a new trial, a decision that was affirmed by the Appellate Term.42

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they were likely to lose in nine cases out of ten. The landlords could complain to the appellate courts, but they were reluctant to act except at the behest of the New York City Bar Association, which was not inclined to get involved. The implementation of the rent laws was “a disgrace to the administration of justice in the city of New York,” Browne declared.44 Given that many courts had far more cases than they could handle—and that many cases raised fine points of law and complicated questions of fact—it was hardly fair to blame the judges for these shortcomings. But blamed they were. The Appellate Term of the Second Department took a Brooklyn judge to task for failing to follow the law in his instructions to the juries. And the Appellate Term of the First Department criticized a Bronx judge for his prejudice against the landlords. The Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners urged that William E. Morris and Michael J. Scanlan, both of whom were regarded as “tenant judges,” be removed from the bench. (The bar association even took the unusual step of refusing to endorse Morris for reelection, saying that his conduct on the bench demonstrated “his unfitness for judicial office.” Despite the bar association’s opposition, Morris was reelected to a second ten-year term in 1921.) Nor was it only real estate men who were critical of the judges. The Federation of Tenants Associations asked the Appellate Division to investigate several judges for leaning toward the landlords’ positions. And Harry Allen Ely accused most municipal court judges of ignoring the emergency rent laws and instructing the juries “according to their own notions and not according to the statutes.”45 By 1923, if not earlier, many New Yorkers were fed up. Victor M. Earle, a principal in a real estate firm that managed about forty apartment houses, most of them on the Upper West Side, pointed out that the long delays and political wheeling and dealing were very hard on the landlords. He proposed that the rent laws be “taken out of the hands of the courts and [put] into the hands of [an independent rent] commission.” William D. Kilpatrick, another Manhattan real estate man, agreed with him. Stewart Browne was open to the idea. So was Professor Samuel McCune Lindsay. The courts were ill prepared to deal with the complicated issues raised by the emergency rent laws, he argued, and a special administrative agency was sorely needed. On this point, if on few others, Morris Gisnet, a spokesman for the Bronx Tenants League (and chief counsel for the Greater New York Tenants League), agreed with Lindsay. Testifying before the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, he urged that “an independent tribunal” be established to enforce the rent laws. The Bronx chapter of the Tenants Union of New York went even further, recommending that the governor appoint a rent administrator for every borough and county in the state. And Samuel Leavitt, a spokesman for the West Side Civic League, said that New York should deal with the rent laws “the way they do in Washington,” where the Ball Rent Act was enforced by the District of Columbia Rent Commission.46 The D.C. Rent Commission may have been the best known of the nation’s independent rent commissions, but it was also the most controversial. To many Washingtonians it was “a godsend,” without which the District’s tenants would

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have been at the mercy of the landlords. To many others, however, it was an abomination, a dysfunctional agency that had done little to help the tenants, much to harm the landlords, and a great deal to exacerbate the housing shortage. The commission stressed that as a mechanism for enforcing rent control a rent commission was far superior to the municipal courts. Pointing out that New York State’s emergency rent laws had encouraged “a multiplicity of [law]suits,” it insisted that “a commission is the only practical solution for the problem of rent regulation.” But when it attempted to enforce the Ball Rent Act—when, for example, it tried to determine whether a landlord was acting in good faith when he said he wanted the premises for himself and his family—the D.C. Rent Commission ran into many of the same problems as the New York municipal courts.47 Would New York landlords have been less upset if the state legislature had set up an independent rent commission to enforce the emergency rent laws? Although it is hard to say, I think not. Given the longstanding and deep-seated animosity between the landlords and tenants, a rent commission would probably have been as inundated with disputes as the municipal courts. And given that the legislature was extremely reluctant to provide much in the way of guidelines, the rent commissioners would likely have had as much trouble as the municipal court judges when they tried to determine who was covered by the rent laws, whether the rent was reasonable under chapter 944, and whether a tenant could be ousted under chapter 942. As Judge Charles H. Kelby pointed out, the laws were written in a way that left much to be desired. But the judges had to deal with them as they were. And the commissioners would have had to do likewise. Contrary to what Stewart Browne believed, the problem for the landlords was not so much the implementation of the emergency rent laws as the laws themselves. And in their efforts to solve this problem the real estate interests did more than just urge the legislature to transfer the enforcement of the laws from the municipal courts to a rent commission. They also tried hard to find ways to circumvent the rent laws—as well as to persuade the legislature to weaken the laws, shelve the proposals to strengthen them, and withstand the pressure to extend them before they expired.48

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PA R T F I V E

The Politics of Rent Control

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14 Landlords and Tenants in New York and Albany

Many of the efforts to circumvent the emergency rent laws were aimed at chapter 944, which empowered the municipal courts to set reasonable rents for residential property. Some landlords inflated the value of their property—or hired expert witnesses to inflate it for them. Others padded the bill of particulars, claiming expenses for work that was not done (or was done for less money or in another apartment) and charging against current income capital improvements that should have been amortized over years if not decades. Even a spokesman for the United Real Estate Owners Association acknowledged that some landlords were not above “swearing falsely” in rent cases and filing “fake receipts” with the courts. It was not just some landlords, Fiorello H. La Guardia said in 1925, when he was serving his third term in Congress. If there were any honest ones, “I have not met them.” To illustrate the point, he spoke of a meeting in East Harlem at which he tried to resolve a landlord-tenant dispute. The landlord asked if the tenant would agree to a 10 percent increase. When La Guardia said no, the landlord told him, “I will get 15% and if I want I will get 20%.” How can you be so sure? La Guardia asked. “If I want a 15% increase[,] I lie 15%,” the landlord answered, “and if I want [a] 20% increase, I lie 20%.”1 Spokesmen for the tenants pointed out that there were several other ways by which the landlords attempted to get around chapter 944. Where the courts ruled that a rent increase was unreasonable, the landlord waited a few months and then asked for another increase. If the court turned him down a second time, he tried a third. As Samuel Leavitt, a spokesman for the West Side Civic League, explained, the landlords believed that many tenants would rather pay a rent hike than lose a day’s wages each time they went to court. According to the Lockwood Committee, the landlords also engaged in “wash sales,” a gimmick by which they sold the property back and forth to one another, each time at a higher price. Every time the property

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changed hands, the rent went up. What is more, many landlords routinely asked for very large rent increases. They assumed that many judges whose courts were inundated with landlord-tenant disputes would do everything possible to persuade the parties to settle and that as a result, said Leavitt, “the more you ask for the more you will get.” The United Real Estate Owners Association thought there was much to be said for this approach. In a booklet published in July 1921, it advised landlords to “always ask for more than you expect.” Bear in mind, it said, that the courts favor the tenants. And the judges know they run the risk of being called “a landlords’ judge” if they give the landlord “all he asks for.” Noting that Stewart Browne urged landlords to demand twice as much as they were hoping to get, one New Yorker told tenants to offer “half as much as they were willing to pay.”2 Not the least of the ways by which the landlords attempted to get around chapter 944 was to make improvements—sometimes just “slight improvements,” wrote George H. Soule, a well-known economist, journalist, and Socialist—as a pretext for raising the rent. They hung new wallpaper, replaced gas with electricity, and converted “cold-water flats” into “hot-water flats.” More often than not, said Charles Marks, a lawyer for several Manhattan tenant organizations, they raised the rent by an amount that exceeded the cost of the improvement. They often made the improvements without consulting the tenants and sometimes made them over the tenants’ objections. For example, many low-income tenants saw no need to change from gas to electricity, especially if meant they would have to pay a higher rent (as well as put down a deposit for the meter and pay a higher price for lighting). One such tenant was an impoverished widow who lived with her four children in a rundown three-room apartment on Henry Street for which she paid only fourteen dollars a month. Against her wishes, the landlord wired the apartment for electricity and then removed all but one of the gas jets. According to Edith B. Coff, who worked at a settlement house on the Lower East Side, he told the widow, “Now, you can open the electric light or not open it. It is up to you. If you open it and use my improvement, you will have to pay $3 a month more. If you do not open it, you will stay in the dark.”3 Many of the other efforts to circumvent the rent laws were aimed at chapter 942. As I pointed out earlier, some landlords accused tenants, even long-term and respectable tenants, of being objectionable. Others claimed they wanted the tenant’s apartment for themselves or their family even though they had no intention of occupying it. (A Bronx tenant told the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning that each of the many times his apartment house was sold, the new owner tried to oust him on the grounds that he wanted to move into his unit. “They [the landlords] all say they [want] it—but they don’t means a word of it—not a word.”) Still other landlords told the courts that they intended to demolish the old building and erect a new one on the site or that the building had been (or was about to be) converted into a co-op. (Lena Marlow, a member of the Harlem Tenants Association, said that one landlord posted a sign on an apartment house in Harlem saying, “This building is to be torn down.” About twenty tenants moved out of the building—and, in some cases,

Still other efforts were made to circumvent the emergency rent laws in general. As the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering reported, some landlords classified apartment houses as office buildings and hotels, which were not covered

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out of the neighborhood. Was the building demolished and replaced by a new one? “No, not at all,” she replied.)4 Of the other ways that the landlords attempted to get around chapter 942, two struck the tenants as especially underhanded. Under New York law the city marshals were required to serve notice in person in most civil actions. But in summary proceedings they were not. If neither the tenant nor a member of his household was at home, the marshals were allowed to tack the notice to the door. Reuben J. Wittstein, an attorney for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, defended this practice on the grounds that it was often very hard to find the tenants, especially in the summer, when many of them were on vacation, an argument that La Guardia found more than a little disingenuous. “The landlords have no trouble finding [their] tenants around the first of the month, when they want the rent,” he said. What made this practice so reprehensible, said Charles Marks, was that “many unscrupulous marshals and landlords and their agents will, within ten minutes after the notice is stuck up on the door, take it off.” Hence the tenant never sees the notice, and when he fails to appear in court, remarked Assemblyman A. Spencer Fuld, a Manhattan Democrat, the judge issues a final order in favor of the landlord, “and the first thing the tenant knows about it is when the marshal comes with a moving van and out they [he and his family] go.” To stop this practice, Marks proposed that the marshals be required to serve notice in person.5 In addition, under New York law, chapter 942 did not apply to apartment houses that were sold at a foreclosure proceeding. Unless there was collusion between the old owner and the new owner, which was very hard to prove, the tenants could be ousted from their apartments even if they were willing to pay a reasonable rent. If they refused to move out after receiving notice, the owner could ask the courts to issue a writ ordering the marshals to remove them. Once the writ was issued, said Lillie Grant, acting chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, “there’s nothing to be done.” Instances of collusion were not uncommon, Grant pointed out, in part because it took much less time to foreclose on a mortgage and obtain a writ than it did to persuade a judge to approve a rent hike. Agnes M. Craig, counsel to several Bronx tenant associations, was also troubled by this practice. Appearing before the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, she spoke about an apartment house on East 135th Street whose mortgage was foreclosed for the sole purpose of ousting the tenants and raising the rents. The property was sold at public auction for $18,500 to a man who then transferred it to the previous owners. They later served notice on the tenants and, when they refused to move, obtained a writ to force them out. To curb this practice, the Lockwood Committee recommended that chapter 942 be amended to cover buildings that were sold at a foreclosure proceeding.6

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by the rent laws. As a spokesman for the New York Urban League said, others converted large apartments into small ones, turning, say, a five-room apartment that rented for $50 a month into a two-room apartment that rented for $40 and a three-room apartment that rented for $60. In some cases four- or five-room apartments were converted into studio apartments, which were also known as “lap-dog” apartments because they were more suitable for a couple with a small dog than for a family with children. According to Eleanor Blackman, assistant director of United Hebrew Charities, most of whose clients lived on the Lower East Side, some landlords offered the tenants $25, $50, and as much as $100 to move. A few agreed to pay the tenants’ moving expenses as well. Other landlords took the unusual step of leaving apartments vacant. As the Leader, the successor to the Call, observed, these landlords were well aware that the market value of their property was based on its “total rental capacity.” By taking what the courts deemed a reasonable rent, which was ordinarily lower than the listed rent, they were afraid they might get less for the building when they sold it. Far better, they reasoned, to forgo current income than to sacrifice future profit.7 Many of the ways by which the landlords attempted to circumvent the rent laws were highly controversial. Under a statute that was enacted before the emergency rent laws and incorporated into the city’s Municipal Court Code as section 17, the landlords were allowed to file suit against their tenants in a municipal court district in which any of the plaintiffs or defendants resided (or did business). In other words, the landlords did not have to sue to recover rent or oust a tenant in the district in which the premises were located. Harry Allen Ely, president of the Washington Heights Tenants Association, urged the state legislature to include in the emergency rent laws a provision repealing section 17 and requiring the landlords to file suit in the district in which the tenant lived. The legislature refused. Hence a landlord who owned an apartment house in a district whose judges were known to be sympathetic to the tenants could file suit in another district where he thought he stood a better chance. Even more important, said Judge Aaron J. Levy, a landlord who had property in Williamsburg could file suit in Tottenville, the southernmost part of Staten Island, and thereby force the tenant to appear in court at “the other end of the city.”8 No one was more deeply troubled by this loophole in the emergency rent laws than Judge Harry Robitzek. Take the case, he told a reporter, of an unscrupulous landlord who has a home (or an office) in Staten Island, the least accessible of New York City’s five boroughs, and owns an apartment house in the Bronx, the northernmost of all the boroughs. Suppose he raises the rent from $40 to $50 a month. If the tenant refuses to pay, the landlord files suit in one of the two municipal courts in Staten Island. Once the tenant is served notice, he has to walk or take the trolley to the nearest el or subway station, ride the train to South Ferry, the southernmost point of Manhattan, and then take the ferry to the St. George Terminal on Staten Island. He has to spend the better part of two hours traveling each way and perhaps as much time waiting in court for his case to be heard. If the landlord’s lawyer asks

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for an adjournment, he has to make the trip at least one more time. Each time he loses a day’s wages. According to the Home News, some landlords intended to make it as inconvenient as possible for the tenants by filing suits in “distant points of Westchester [County] or Long Island.” One landlord even opened an office in Greene County, which meant that his tenants would have to appear in a court that was more than a hundred miles north of New York City.9 No sooner were the September laws enacted, wrote the Times, than Robitzek and his colleagues grew concerned that “the landlords were planning to make litigation under the new laws as vexatious as possible” by filing suit in parts of the city that were “far removed from the tenants’ homes.” Hence at a meeting in early October the Board of Municipal Court Justices adopted what became known as rule 35, which went into effect after it was approved by the presiding justice of the Appellate Division of the First Department. Under this rule most landlord-tenant disputes that arose out of the rent laws had to be brought in the district in which the premises were located. If a complaint was filed in another district, the judge would have to dismiss it, and the landlord would have to pay court costs. Rule 35, which was uniformly followed by the municipal court judges, was “a serious blow” to the landlords, wrote the Home News. Little wonder that before long the Real Estate Investors of New York, Inc., one of the groups that had attacked the constitutionality of the emergency rent law, challenged the rule. It brought a test case in which it asked the state supreme court to overturn a decision by municipal court judge William Young, who had ruled against Annie Nassoit in a suit for nonpayment of rent on the grounds that the suit had been filed not in the Seventh District Court, in which the premises were located, but in the Fifth District Court.10 The case was assigned to Judge Daniel F. Cohalan, a former grand sachem of Tammany Hall who had been appointed to the bench in 1911 and elected to a fourteen-year term a year later. Appearing on behalf of Nassoit was McLaughlin & Stern. Representing Young was Corporation Counsel John P. O’Brien. After hearing arguments late in 1921, Cohalan ruled in favor of Nassoit, holding that rule 35 violated section 17 of the Municipal Court Code. O’Brien took the case to the Appellate Division, which handed down its decision in February 1921. Writing for the court, Victor J. Dowling held that the Board of Municipal Court Justices had exceeded its authority when it adopted rule 35. The board had the power to amend the rules, he held, but not “to abrogate the provisions of the Municipal Court Code.”11 Dowling’s ruling, which was as serious a blow to the tenants as rule 35 was to the landlords, left the issue up to the legislature. The legislators were aware that the rule had not worked out exactly as anticipated. As I. Montefiore Levy pointed out, it increased the congestion in a few municipal courts, notably Manhattan’s Seventh, which was located in Harlem. Before rule 35 most cases there were heard within two or three days, said Levy; now it “takes weeks and perhaps months.” And the court clerks complained that “it is impossible for them to keep up with their work.” This unintended consequence notwithstanding, the Lockwood Committee believed that

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without rule 35 the tenants would be subject to “unnecessary loss of time and additional expense.” Hence two months after the Appellate Division handed down its decision, the committee drafted a set of amendments to the rent laws, one of which provided that the landlords would have to file suit in the district in which the premises were located. Most New Yorkers supported the amendment. So did some upstate residents, who were fed up with traveling to New York City to defend themselves against claims made by landlords who owned property upstate, but lived downstate. The amendment, known as chapter 135, was passed in mid-April. As things now stood, wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the landlords were required to bring summary proceedings in the municipal court district where the property was located and actions for ejectment in the county where it was situated.12 Starting in late 1920, the real estate interests devised another ingenious way to circumvent the emergency rent laws. In the lead was a group of Bronx landlords who threatened to evict their tenants unless they signed a lease waiving their rights under the April laws. Following their lead, the United Real Estate Owners Association drafted two sample leases, both of which deprived the tenants of some of their rights under the rent laws, and urged its members to rent only to prospective tenants who were willing to sign one or the other. Although Stewart Browne insisted that the leases were “in strict conformity” with the rent laws, Junius Pendleton Wilson, counsel to the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, declared that many of their provisions were contrary to the spirit and even the letter of the statutes. A tenant should show the association’s lease to an attorney before signing it, said one New York lawyer. And even if a tenant signed a lease waiving his rights under the emergency rent laws, the courts would not enforce it, argued Elmer G. Sammis, counsel to the Lockwood Committee.13 The issue came to a head in the spring of 1923. In the fall of 1922 Joseph Gallagher had rented a house on Staten Island from St. Andrews Parish. According to the lease he not only agreed to move out on April 30, 1923, but also waived his right to hold over under the rent laws. When he refused to move after the lease expired, St. Andrews asked Richmond’s First District Court to oust him. The judge ruled in the landlord’s favor, holding that the agreement was enforceable because there was nothing in the statutes to the contrary. Gallagher took the case to the Appellate Term, which handed down its decision in June 1923. Writing for the court, James C. Cropsey held that even in the absence of a statutory provision barring such an agreement, “it is, nevertheless, unenforceable, because it is against public policy.” The general rule was that parties may waive their rights, “whether secured by contract, conferred by statute, or guaranteed by the Constitution.” But there were exceptions to this rule, he said. And if it is against public policy to permit employees to relieve employers from liability for injuries that are the result of their negligence, it follows that it is against public policy to allow tenants to waive their rights under the emergency rent laws. “If tenants who are obliged to seek new homes could obtain them only upon [the] condition that they would agree to waive the benefits of these Acts,”

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Cropsey wrote, “the statutes, to a considerable extent, would be effectually nullified.” In a decision that was praised by the Daily Eagle, the Appellate Term reversed the trial court and issued an order in favor of the tenant.14 Cropsey’s ruling disappointed many landlords, none more so than Stewart Browne. A notorious civic gadfly who, wrote the Times after his death in 1938, had the dubious distinction “of having been ejected from the [Board of Estimate meetings] by every Mayor since [William J.] Gaynor,” Browne had initially supported the rent laws. And he was one of the few leading real estate men who refused to join in the attack on their constitutionality. But as time passed, Browne became increasingly dissatisfied with what he called “the unfair practices” of the municipal court judges, some of whom were riding “rough shod” over the landlords. He was also incensed by the Rosenman bill, which had been enacted shortly before St. Andrews Parish v. Gallagher was handed down. And he came to believe that there were “at least one hundred ‘shyster’ tenants to every ‘shyster’ landlord [in New York].” Determined to find a way to protect decent landlords from incompetent judges and unscrupulous tenants, Browne and the United Real Estate Owners Association’s lawyers devised in July 1923 what was known as the “ironclad lease,” whose eighteen clauses ran five single-spaced pages, and urged the association’s members to insist that all prospective tenants sign it.15 Although Browne said that nothing in the ironclad lease violated the emergency rent laws, he was being more than a little disingenuous. Indeed, as historian Jared N. Day has written, the ironclad lease was designed to nullify not only many of the harshest provisions of these laws, but also many of the central features of the Tenement House Act and the city building ordinances. To give a few examples, the ironclad lease provided that if a tenant renewed a lease, the rent would be no less than what he agreed to pay under the new lease or what he had paid under the old one, whichever was higher. In the event that the landlord sued for nonpayment, the tenant was obliged to deposit with the court the amount for which the action was brought and thereafter to pay to the landlord “a like sum” on the first of each month until the case was adjudicated. If the tenant stayed in the apartment after the lease expired and refused to move out after being served notice, the landlord had the right to bring summary proceedings. If the occupants behaved in an objectionable manner, the landlord, “who shall be the sole judge thereof,” could terminate the lease and oust the tenant. If the landlord failed to supply steam heat, hot water, and other essential services, his failure would be deemed to be “by and with the consent of the [t]enant,” who thereby waived his right to sue for reduced rent or accrued damages. The tenant also agreed to make all repairs, renovations, and decorations and to keep the walls, ceilings, plumbing, and fixtures clean and “in good repair.” If he did not do so, the landlord could hire someone and charge the cost to the tenant.16 The ironclad lease aroused a furor. Leading it was Harry Allen Ely, president of the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York. Convinced that the United Real Estate Owners Association was attempting to undermine the tenants’

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hard-won victories in the legislature, he retained Samuel Untermyer to test the ironclad lease in court. Untermyer, who represented the federation pro bono, had no doubt that the lease, which he described as “a grotesque, unsound and unlawful scheme to circumvent the [emergency rent] law[s],” would be held unenforceable. Ely also urged the U.S. commissioner of immigration to deport Browne, a native of Scotland who had never filed for U.S. citizenship, as “an undesirable alien” for his efforts to incite class strife and civil unrest in New York City. Joining Ely was Agnes Craig, who helped organize several protest meetings at local public schools. There the tenants were advised to refuse to sign the ironclad lease, which, wrote the New York Call, stripped them of their rights and left them “only the ‘privilege’ of paying rent.” They were also urged “to present a united front against the landlords,” and especially against the United Real Estate Owners Association, which the Call referred to as “The Rent Hogs’ Union.”17 Browne and his associates might have withstood the attack if other real estate men had supported him. But most of them were critical of the ironclad lease. Nathan Hirsch, a landlord and former chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, said that adopting it was like “waving a red flag before thousands of already harassed tenants.” He resigned in protest from the United Real Estate Owners Association. The Greater New York Taxpayers Association, which represented the owners of roughly twenty thousand old-law tenement houses, also condemned the ironclad lease. So did many prominent real estate brokers who handled high-end property on the Upper East and Upper West sides. The ironclad lease would generate ill will between landlords and tenants, they pointed out. Given that any lease that required the tenants to waive their rights under the rent laws would be held “null and void,” why, said Frank S. Bancroft, vice president of Pease & Elliman, “butt your head against a stone wall?” At first Browne defended the ironclad lease and predicted that “every one of [its] clauses will be upheld” by the courts. But after what he called a few days of “hullabaloo”—and what Jared Day describes as “a week of withering public condemnation”—Browne backed down. He and his associates then began working on another lease that omitted the most onerous provisions of the ironclad lease. In the years ahead the United Real Estate Owners Association and other property owners’ groups drafted leases that reduced the bargaining power of the tenants. But for the most part the landlords no longer tried to force them to waive their rights under the rent laws.18 The landlords also attempted to circumvent the emergency rent laws by taking steps (or, as one New Yorker put it, employing “ruses”) to drive old tenants out of their apartments and replace them with new ones, most of whom were willing to pay a higher rent even after passage of the Rosenman Act. One step was to make the premises as unpleasant as possible by shutting off the gas, electricity, heat, and water. Things were so bad in some tenement houses, said Judge Jacob Panken, that one woman had to carry pails of water up three flights of stairs to flush the toilet. In another tenement house the tenants had to make do without

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bathtubs and washbasins, which had been removed by the landlord. As a way to drive out the old tenants, this practice left something to be desired. Under chapter 951 of the September laws, it was a misdemeanor for the landlord (as well as his agent or janitor) to fail to provide services that were necessary for the “proper or customary use” of the building. If prosecuted, the landlord could argue that the lack of, say, heat or water was due to circumstances beyond his control—a coal shortage, for example, or a broken pipe. But if the court found this argument unconvincing, the landlord would be required to restore service and might be fined, imprisoned, or both.19 Reluctant to risk prosecution under chapter 951, some landlords tried to drive out the tenants by taking advantage of what some New Yorkers considered loopholes in the housing laws. One loophole was that the landlords were not required to “decorate” their apartments. Before World War I most landlords decorated every two years or so in order to retain old tenants and attract new ones. But with the onset of the postwar housing shortage, the landlords had so little trouble renting their apartments that some no longer thought it necessary to decorate them. After years without decorating, many apartments were a mess, the walls and ceilings filthy, the paint and plaster cracked, and the wallpaper falling off. In their defense, the landlords pointed out that tenants sometimes agreed to pay a higher rent when the apartment was decorated, but after the work was done, they claimed the new rent was unreasonable. Other landlords stressed that some tenants were so slovenly that it was pointless to decorate their apartments. Speaking of a nice but incapable old woman, one said that if her apartment were painted that day, it would be “as filthy in one week as another apartment that has not been painted in five years.” As a way of driving out the tenants, this practice also left something to be desired. No matter how run down their apartments, many tenants stayed put. After listening to a tenant describe the appalling condition of a four-room apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in which she lived with her husband and two children—an apartment, she said, that “has not been touched in seven years”—Samuel Untermyer asked, “Why don’t you move?” She replied that as hard as she tried she could not find an apartment for less than $75 a month, which was three times what she was paying and much more than she could afford.20 Another loophole in the housing laws was that the landlords were not required to make repairs in the apartments. Before the war they had to keep the property in good repair or risk losing their tenants, but after the war they had little incentive to do so. If the current tenants moved out, other tenants would move in—and in all likelihood pay a higher rent. Moreover, after the rent laws were enacted, the landlords could not be sure that the municipal court judges would permit them to raise the rent enough to cover the cost of repairs. In some cases the landlords made only what one lawyer called “absolutely necessary sanitary repairs” or repairs that the tenants had agreed to pay for. In other cases the tenants made the repairs themselves. But in still other cases no repairs were made, sometimes for as long as six or seven years. The result was that many apartment houses had leaky roofs, flooded

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cellars, broken toilets, and out-of-order dumbwaiters, some of which were so clogged with garbage, said Agnes Craig, that “you could not pull them up.” When sued for nonpayment of rent, many tenants complained that their landlords had refused to make much-needed repairs. And most of these complaints were well-founded, said Judge Leopold Prince, who sat on Manhattan’s Eighth District Court. By virtue of the landlords’ unwillingness to repair their apartments, many New Yorkers were currently “living under conditions which were formerly unheard of,” wrote Assemblyman Samuel Rosenman in late 1923.21 Most real estate men acknowledged that many apartments were in need of repair, not to mention decorating. But they did not believe that the landlords were neglecting their property in an effort to drive out the old tenants and replace them with new ones. As these real estate men saw it, the sources of the problem were twofold. Under the rent laws it made little sense for the landlords to make repairs that might cost the equivalent of two, three, or even four months’ rent when the tenants could move out at any time, even a month or two later, said William H. Dolson, secretary of the Real Estate Board. Nor did it make much sense for the landlords to spend money on repairs when many tenants were bent on destroying the property. As J. Irving Walsh, a Manhattan real estate agent who managed everything from cold-water tenements to high-class elevator buildings, said, “I have known them to deliberately cut the sashcord, put the electric wiring out of commission, break the windows, mark up the wallpaper, fresh wallpaper, mark it all up.” Stewart Browne also insisted that vandalism was commonplace. So did William D. Kilpatrick, another Manhattan real estate man. A popular form of “indoor amusement” for tenants, he said, was to dump garbage or rubbish (or indeed “anything at all the spirit moves them to”) down the toilets until it “sticks in the trap of the sewer.” They then watched from their windows as the plumber, his feet clad in rubber boots and a “snake” in his hands, cleaned out the mess.22 Under the law, Assemblyman Rosenman pointed out, the tenants could file a complaint against the landlord only if conditions in the apartments “endanger the safety and health of the occupants.” Against “unsightliness,” no matter how egregious, they had no recourse. But with which city agency were they supposed to file the complaint? Was it the Tenement House Department, the Health Department, or the Fire Department? Not even Dr. Frank Monaghan, the health commissioner, was sure. Indeed, it was not uncommon for the inspectors of one department to inform the tenants that their complaints should have been filed with another department. To make matters worse, the Tenement House Department, the agency to which most tenants turned, was on the verge of collapse. Emboldened by the rent laws, the tenants were filing more complaints than ever: between 1919 and 1923 the number of complaints soared from 35,000 to 100,000 a year. With just 228 inspectors, only twelve more than before World War I, the department could not possibly deal with all these complaints, let alone carry out periodic inspections. Even if conditions in the apartments endangered “the health and safety of the occupants,” there was not much the Tenement House Department could do. If the department condemned the

A few landlords took a more reprehensible step to drive out the old tenants and replace them with new ones. As George H. Soule pointed out, they rented vacant apartments to “undesirable” tenants, chief among whom were African Americans (who were then commonly referred to as “negroes” or “colored people”). These landlords were confident that most whites would move out rather than share a building with blacks. They were also aware that so many neighborhoods were open to “Caucasians Only” that blacks invariably paid a higher rent than whites for similar apartments, sometimes two or three times higher, said Judge Frederick J. Spiegelberg. Before 1920, when the landlords could oust the tenants at the expiration of the lease, this tactic was unheard of. But after the rent laws were enacted, it became fairly common, nowhere more so than in Harlem, which was located in Upper Manhattan, north of Central Park and south of Washington Heights. Originally developed as a middle- and upper-middle-class residential neighborhood, with broad, tree-lined streets and spacious, up-to-date houses, Harlem had gone through its share of real estate booms and busts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After one of the busts, writes historian Gilbert Osofsky, many landlords were unable to find white tenants. And when faced with the dilemma of “maintaining a ‘White Only’ policy, and possibly losing everything, or renting

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many buildings with outstanding violations, said Commissioner Frank Mann, tens of thousands of tenants would be left homeless, forced to live in the parks or on the streets. Given the acute housing shortage, he had no choice but to “close one eye, and sometimes both.”23 Well aware of the breakdown of the Tenement House Department, some municipal court judges “took matters into their own hands,” said Prince. It was common, he pointed out, for the tenants to withhold the rent because the landlord had failed to make necessary repairs and then for the landlord to take them to court. In cases where there was an outstanding violation, Prince refused to order the tenants to pay the rent until it was removed. In similar cases John R. Davies instructed the tenants to deposit the rent with the court. If the tenant’s claim was justified, he held the money until the repairs were made. If not, he turned it over to the landlord. A different tack was taken by Judge Panken, who, after saying that many apartments were “not even fit [for] pigs,” declared that if a landlord reneged on a promise made in court to repair the premises he would hold him in contempt. According to one real estate lawyer, two other Manhattan judges allowed tenants to deduct from the rent what they spent on repairs. This “arbitrary exercise of authority” was “unworkable,” argued the Real Estate News. Given that the Tenement House Department was severely understaffed, who would help the judges decide whether repairs were necessary? Were the taxpayers supposed to pay for the “large staff of trained inspectors” that would have to be assigned to the municipal courts? The use of what Judge William J. A. Caffrey called “extra-judicial authority” might have been an appropriate stopgap, but it was not a long-term solution to an increasingly serious problem.24

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to Negroes at higher prices and surviving,” most chose “what seemed to them the lesser of two evils.” For many African Americans the temptation to move from San Juan Hill and other squalid neighborhoods on the West Side to Harlem was irresistible. By 1920 roughly 150,000 lived there, nearly three times as many as in 1913.25 For a few years the influx was uneventful, in part because whites were moving out of Harlem as rapidly as blacks were moving in and in part because virtually all the landlords adhered to “the unwritten law” that the so-called “black belt” should not extend below 125th Street. After 1920, however, the housing shortage deterred many tenants from moving elsewhere, and the rent laws prevented many landlords from raising rents. It was then, said one Harlem civic leader, that some landlords began using “the colored people” as “a club” to hold over the white tenants, both below and above 125th Street. They threatened to bring in blacks if whites resisted rent hikes. And some carried out these threats, instructing their agents to do whatever they could “to get rid of white families” and to rent the vacant apartments to black families for as much as possible. Not all these landlords were white, said the assistant pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose leader was the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell. At an evening service he delivered what the New York Amsterdam News called “a terrible tirade” against “a colored man, who called himself a Christian,” for driving out whites who were paying $30 to $35 a month and renting their apartments to blacks for nearly twice as much. The result of this rent profiteering, reported the Amsterdam News in late 1923, was that “run-down apartments, which one year ago were being rented to white tenants for from forty to fifty dollars a month, are now bringing from seventy-five to one hundred dollars per month from colored tenants.”26 Of the Harlem landlords who drove out the whites and replaced them with blacks, none was more notorious than Charles Klein. A Russian immigrant who had come to the United States shortly after the turn of the century, Klein settled in Pennsylvania and then moved to New York, where he worked as a butcher and meatpacker. Having saved some money, he went into the real estate business. He operated as a small-scale lessee until after World War I, when he met Edward W. Browning, who had recently purchased nine buildings at 118th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, known as the Garden Court Apartments, from the Central Savings Bank for $335,000, of which he put down $60,000. After spending $25,000 on repairs and improvements in late 1919, Browning raised the rent 50 percent. He promised the tenants, all of whom were white, that he would not raise it again for a year. But rather than live with the consequences of his promise, he offered to lease the Garden Court to Klein for ten years, $42,000 for the first year and $75,000 a year thereafter. For Klein, who was confident that the housing market was so tight that he could easily double the rent, it must have seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime. His timing could not have been worse. Shortly after he took over the property, the legislature enacted the April laws—and when Klein doubled the rent, the tenants refused to pay. When he sued for nonpayment in Manhattan’s Seventh District Court, the jury found in favor of the tenants. Before long Klein was in serious trouble. With expenses

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exceeding revenues, he was hard-pressed to pay his bills. Rather than a windfall, the Garden Court was a sinkhole. When Browning refused to release him from his obligations, saying, “I don’t care [about your problems]. I want my money,” Klein was at his wits’ end.27 In desperation, he approached Harry Goodstein, president of the West Harlem Property Owners Association, and pleaded with him (and his associates) to purchase his lease. Otherwise, he said, “I am going to get colored people into this property and I am going to fill it with the cheapest kind of people I can find, and I will ruin this section.” When Goodstein refused, Klein followed through on his threat. With Browning’s approval, he ousted one tenant on the grounds that he wanted the apartment for himself and his family. A month or two later he rented it to African American lodgers. As other white tenants left, he converted their apartments into furnished rooms and placed ads in Newark and Baltimore newspapers, offering “Colored people” the “chance of a lifetime”—“secure, elegant, newly furnished rooms” in “the beautiful Garden Court.” To tenants who objected to turning fine apartment houses into cheap rooming houses, he said, “Get out if you are not satisfied.” And get out they did. When the Tenement House Department ordered Klein to stop renting the rooms because they did not have adequate fire escapes, Klein turned them back into apartments and leased them to other black families. Said a doctor who had lived in the neighborhood all his life, out went many more white tenants who did not want “to associate with negroes in their house.” Everything Klein did, Goodstein stressed, was for the sole purpose of driving out white tenants, evading the emergency rent laws, and getting around the decision of Manhattan’s Seventh District Court. It was not a matter of “black against white or vice-versa,” but of “a white man using the colored people for his personal aggrandizement.”28 Some white tenants and property owners tried to stop Klein and other likeminded landlords. They had little success. A few Garden Court residents appealed to Browning to rein in Klein. One even said, “Your name will be cursed” by the many people “you are injuring, hundreds and thousands of them.” “Well, I can’t help that,” Browning replied. “If white people will not pay Klein his rent,” he told another tenant, “he will get it out of the colored people.” Arguing that many Garden Court apartments were overcrowded and unsanitary, several tenants asked Judge William P. Burr to enjoin Klein from renting them to African Americans. Burr denied the request, saying, “There is no law in this State which prohibits a landlord from renting his apartments to tenants solely because of the[ir] race, creed, or color.” Any violation of the sanitary code, he added, should be called to the attention of the Board of Health. Another group of white tenants and property owners attempted to persuade Joseph Smolensky to abandon his plan to open an apartment house on West 182nd Street to African Americans. Smolensky, who was embroiled in a rent dispute with the tenants, refused to back down. He intended to rent to anyone, no matter what his race or ethnicity, who would pay the rent and behave properly. “A nigger is as good as anyone,” he said. Even the Ku Klux Klan joined the fray. Following what the Times called “several disagreeable transactions” with the white tenants of

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an apartment house on West 117th Street, the managing agent of Rox Realty Company announced that he intended to rent to African Americans. Calling the decision “wholly un-American,” the Klan warned that unless it was rescinded, “unpleasant things may happen.” Rox’s president dismissed the threat, saying, “This property is not the first negro house on the street,” adding, “A real American does not hide behind a shroud.”29 Fueled by the breakdown of the color line north of 110th Street and the black exodus from the South during and after World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans moved to Harlem in the 1920s. For most of them it was a mixed blessing. No longer confined to a few wretched neighborhoods on the West Side, they now lived in the most famous black community in the country. But they paid a steep price. The rent laws notwithstanding, the cost of housing soared in Harlem. Blacks paid higher rents than whites, and as they earned less than whites, they spent as much as 30, 40, or even 50 percent of their income on housing. To make ends meet, some tenants sublet furnished rooms, and one in four took in lodgers and boarders. Others adopted the “repeating” or “hot bed system,” whereby one person got into a bed as soon as another person got out. Still other tenants threw what were known as “rent parties.” For a modest fee the guests were provided entertainment and refreshment, including what the New York Age referred to as “booze of dubious origin,” under whose “enlivening influence” they would “indulge in the energetic dance movements of the day, until the floor threatens to give way or the neighbors summon the police.” Housing conditions in Harlem were “deplorable” in 1920, said James D. O’Sullivan, the assistant corporation counsel assigned to the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. But in the next decade, one in which little new housing was built and much old housing was neglected, they grew worse. Indeed, a 1929 survey of more than one thousand families found that nowhere in New York was the housing problem as serious as in the black neighborhoods of West Harlem.30 While Klein and other landlords were trying to circumvent the emergency rent laws, many of New York’s principal real estate organizations were attempting to weaken them. In the lead was the Real Estate Board, whose chief lobbyist was Edward P. Doyle, a resident of Staten Island, former assemblyman, and prominent businessman, about whom it was said that in his long and colorful career in Albany he had handed out “several carloads of cigars” to state legislators and other officials. Joining in this effort were the United Real Estate Owners Association, the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, the Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners, and, among others, the New York State Association of Real Estate Boards. These groups did not always see eye to eye. (For example, I. Montefiore Levy, counsel to the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, favored extending the emergency rent laws to apartment houses erected after September 27, 1920, a proposal that was strongly opposed by other real estate men.) But more often than not, these groups found common ground. In their attempt to weaken the emergency rent laws, they sent lobbyists to Albany at the start of one legislative session after another. And with

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the help of A. C. McNulty and other lawyers, they drafted scores of bills, persuaded sympathetic legislators to introduce them, testified on their behalf, and otherwise drummed up support for them.31 A few real estate groups called on the legislature to repeal the emergency rent laws. Among them was the New York State Association of Real Estate Boards, which condemned the laws as “unscientific, uneconomic and un-American.” Insisting that the laws were discouraging residential construction and encouraging timeconsuming litigation, the Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners urged the legislature to retain the April laws, but rescind the September laws. Yet even the most outspoken opponents of the rent laws were aware that the legislators had no stomach for another bruising battle over these laws, especially when they were due to expire in two years. Thus so long as the laws were on the books, the real estate interests devoted most of their effort to watering them down. Among their many proposals, some were designed to limit the coverage of the emergency rent laws. To give a few examples, former judge Francis M. Scott, counsel to the Real Estate Investors of New York, Inc., urged that apartment hotels be treated not as apartment houses, which were covered by the rent laws, but as hotels, which were not. Scott also wanted to exempt from the laws any tenant whose lease ran for two years or longer. Other real estate men favored denying the protection of the laws to anyone who had signed a long-term lease before World War I or rented an apartment after the September laws went into effect.32 Other proposals were designed to undercut chapter 944 and thereby make it easier for the landlord to raise the rents. Victor M. Earle, a spokesman for the Real Estate Board, called on the legislature to define a reasonable rent, rather than leave it up to the municipal court judges. He favored 10 percent, based on the fair market value. So did former judge Scott. Stewart Browne did not object to basing a reasonable return on assessed value, provided that the judges had the discretion to increase or reduce it by 10 to 20 percent. But he asked the legislature to bar the tenants from arguing that the rent was unreasonable when the landlord’s net income did not exceed 8 or 10 percent. Like a few other real estate men, Browne proposed that the implementation of chapter 944 be put in the hands of an independent rent commission. But so long as it was left in the hands of the municipal court judges, he suggested that the legislature abolish trial by jury, a suggestion that was seconded by Reuben J. Wittstein. Browne also took the position that a tenant who withheld the rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable should be required to file a bill of particulars, which would include his income. Why should only the landlords be required to file a bill? he asked. And the Federation of Bronx Real Estate owners recommended that the landlord’s net income be based not on his actual expenses for the previous year, but on his projected expenses for the upcoming year, a recommendation the Home News described as “absurd.”33 Still other proposals were designed to undercut chapter 942 and thereby make it easier for the landlord to oust the tenants. Browne called on the legislature to require the judges to find a tenant objectionable if he had been convicted of a crime.

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Other real estate men favored an amendment that would allow the landlord to oust an undesirable subtenant as well as an undesirable tenant. Browne also wanted the legislature to make it mandatory for the judges to dispossess a tenant if a landlord who claimed he needed the apartment for himself or his family agreed to post a bond equivalent to six (or twelve) months’ rent. The bond would be forfeited if he or his family did not move into the apartment and occupy it for six months. Pointing out that under the law all buildings with eight or more apartments had to have a live-in superintendent or janitor, other real estate men proposed that the landlords be allowed to oust a tenant whose unit was needed for one or the other. For his part, Earle recommended eliminating the requirement that all the apartments in a building that had been (or was being) converted into a co-op had to be sold to the shareholders. Saying that “it is impossible to organize a 100 per cent co-operative plan in Manhattan,” he suggested setting the bar as low as 25 percent. Other real estate men wanted to amend chapter 942 so that a landlord could oust the tenants even if he intended not to demolish the building, just to alter it substantially.34 The efforts to weaken the emergency rent laws ran into a good deal of opposition from the tenants leagues and their allies, who were a force to be reckoned with—a force, said Edward P. Doyle, whose leaders stressed “that there were from one to five million tenants in Greater New York who were waiting to destroy any legislator who acted against their interests.” In a few cases the real estate interests were able to overcome this opposition. Consider their effort to persuade the legislature to enact what was known as “the three-months rule.” Among the landlords’ many complaints about the rent laws was that under chapter 944 a tenant was allowed to sign a lease, pay the rent for a month or two, and then withhold the next month’s rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable. A case in point was Maurice Rentner, who leased a twelve-room apartment on West End Avenue from the Paterno Construction Company for $9,600 a year, and paid the first nine months’ rent before withholding it the next two months. When Paterno Construction attempted to oust him, Rentner cited chapter 944. Tenant spokesmen—among them Vito Marcantonio, a leader of the Harlem Tenants Association and close associate of Fiorello La Guardia—argued that a tenant should be allowed to withhold the rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable at any time, no matter how many months’ rent he had paid. Spokesmen for the real estate interests strongly disagreed. How, they asked, were the landlords supposed to pay their bills when the tenants refused to pay their rent?35 Some landlords tried to solve this problem by suing the tenants for nonpayment of rent. Once a tenant had signed a lease and paid the first month’s rent, the landlords’ lawyers argued, he should not be permitted to withhold the second month’s rent on the grounds that the rent was unreasonable. A few municipal court judges found this argument persuasive. William Young ruled that Milton E. Schattman, who had paid Ellen A. Stewart the first month’s rent for an apartment on West 105th Street and then withheld the second month’s rent, could not contend that his rent was unreasonable even though it was 60 percent more than the previous tenant’s. One of Young’s colleagues reached the same conclusion. In B. and S. Realty

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Corporation v. Joseph Wald, he ruled in favor of the landlord on the grounds that the tenant had ratified the agreement when he paid the first month’s rent. Both judges were reversed on appeal. Writing for the Appellate Term of the First Department in April 1921, Irving Lehman acknowledged that payment of the first month’s rent constituted a ratification of the agreement. But though it prevented a tenant who withheld the next month’s rent from claiming that he had signed the lease under duress, it did not bar him from arguing that the rent was unreasonable. The court could take into consideration that the tenant had paid the first month’s rent, but it could not dismiss his defense on the grounds that he waived his right under by failing to exercise it “at the first opportunity.”36 Even before the appellate court ruled in these two cases, the real estate interests had begun pressing the Lockwood Committee to bar tenants who had paid one month’s rent from withholding the next month’s rent. Following negotiations in early 1921 between Senator Lockwood and other legislators and Doyle and other leaders of the Real Estate Board, the committee drafted an amendment to chapters 136 and 944 of the emergency rent laws that was enacted shortly afterward. Under the amendment, which was known as chapter 434, tenants who paid “three successive monthly instalments of rent” could not withhold the next month’s rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable. The amendment, wrote the committee, was fair to both the tenant, who has “sixty days to find out what he should do,” and the landlord, who knows “his rental is established when three monthly payments have been made.” Judge William Morris protested that “the three-months rule” was unfair to the tenants; so did George Hall, attorney for the Harlem Community Council. And some landlords tried to circumvent it by demanding that prospective tenants pay a lump sum equivalent to three months’ rent at the time they signed the lease. For the most part, however, the issue was resolved—and to the landlords’ satisfaction. As Judge George L. Genung said, the rent laws “were intended as a shield against oppression,” not “as an aid to repudiation.” Nor were they designed “to permit tenants indefinitely to sleep on their rights.”37 Another issue was resolved to the landlords’ satisfaction by chapter 434. Under chapter 944 a tenant who refused to pay the new rent on the grounds that it was unreasonable was required to deposit the old rent with the courts. In some cases the judges instructed the clerks to hold on to the deposits until the trial was over, which could take two or three months (and sometimes even longer). By early 1921, at which time the courts were holding at least $4 million of what the landlords viewed as their money, the real estate interests were fed up. How, asked the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, could a landlord pay “all the current bills from month to month” while “his entire income [was] sequestered in court?” Although this arrangement may have discouraged some landlords from seeking “postponement after postponement,” wrote the Home News, for no reason other than “to annoy their tenants,” even public officials who were sympathetic to the tenants acknowledged that it was unfair to other landlords. At the behest of the Real Estate Board and other propertyowner groups, the Lockwood Committee therefore incorporated in what became

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chapter 434 a provision that authorized the court clerks to hand the first month’s deposit over to the landlord and thereafter obliged the tenants to pay the old rent directly to the landlord on the first of every month until the case was settled.38 In most cases, however, the real estate interests were unable to overcome the opposition of the tenants leagues and their allies. Consider their effort to prevail on the legislature to enact what was known as “the four-months rule.” Among the landlords’ complaints about the rent laws was that under chapter 942 a tenant was allowed to remain in the apartment after his lease expired, provided that he was willing to pay a reasonable rent. Yet he was permitted to move out at any time thereafter. As former judge Scott pointed out in March 1921, “It is now possible for tenants to occupy apartments [for] part of the rental period and vacate without notice to the landlord.” More than a few tenants did just that. The landlord, who had no time to find another tenant, often lost a month’s rent. When the tenant moved out without notice at the beginning of the summer, when many well-to-do New Yorkers left for the countryside or the shore and the demand for expensive apartments was at its lowest, the landlord might well lose two or three months’ rent. Making matters worse, observed William H. Dolson, whose firm managed 130 apartment houses, even if a tenant notified the landlord that he intended to move in a month or two, he was free to change his mind at the last minute. Hence many prospective tenants were reluctant to sign a lease for an apartment that was not yet vacant for fear that after they moved out of the old apartment they might not be able to move into the new one. Under chapter 942, A. C. McNulty pointed out, a prospective tenant signs a lease “at his peril.”39 Several real estate men put forward proposals that were designed to resolve the problem. Stewart Browne called on the legislature to enact a law that would apply in cases where the landlord notified the tenant by registered mail four months before the lease expired that he was willing to renew the lease at the same rent for another year. The tenant would then have to notify the landlord at least two months before the expiration of the lease whether he intended to stay. If he responded that he did, he had to sign another lease and agree to pay the rent for the upcoming year. If he did not respond to the landlord’s notice—or if he responded that he did not want to stay—he would have to move. Chapter 942 notwithstanding, the landlord would be free to rent the apartment to another tenant. Other real estate men thought that three months’ notice was more than adequate. And Victor M. Earle wanted to give the tenant only thirty days to respond. “The fairness of this [proposal] is too obvious to need explanation,” he said. Earle also wanted the legislature to require a tenant who held over to remain until September 30 of the next year. Dolson and McNulty also insisted that a holdover tenant should be required to stay another year, a requirement that would prevent tenants from moving out “when[ever] it suits their convenience.” Stanley M. Isaacs agreed. If the landlord was obliged to honor the lease, he argued, it was unfair to allow the tenant to break it.40 Although Browne later denounced the Lockwood Committee as “Bolshevik all through, and nothing less,” the senator and his colleagues felt that there was much

The efforts to strengthen the emergency rent laws started in the early 1920s and continued more or less without interruption for nearly a decade. At one session after another, Edward P. Doyle said, the legislature was flooded with hundreds of bills, most of which were filed at the behest of the tenants. Pressing the legislators to enact these bills was a well-organized lobby whose members arrived in Albany when the session convened and remained there until it adjourned. Most of the bills, Doyle complained, manifested not only hostility toward real estate, but also “a spirit of

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to be said for these proposals to amend the emergency rent laws. In an effort to prevent tenants from holding over in the winter and then moving out in the summer, the committee drafted the so-called four-months bill, which was modeled closely on Browne’s proposal and filed at the 1921 legislative session. Under this bill a tenant who received four months’ notice could renew the lease at the same rent, in which case he would be liable for the rent until the lease expired. Or he could refuse to renew it, in which case he would no longer enjoy the protection of chapter 942, which, as the World pointed out, meant that he would be subject to eviction before November 1, 1922. Although supported by Lockwood and most of his colleagues, the bill ran into a good deal of opposition from legislators who were afraid it would create a loophole that would enable the landlords to engage in what the Daily Eagle called “unfair practices.” In the end it was defeated in the Senate. A similar bill was filed at the 1922 session, but it too was shelved. And in 1925 Assemblyman Walter F. Clayton, a Republican from Brooklyn, introduced two other bills at the behest of the real estate interests, both of which ran into strong opposition from Democratic legislators. One, which would have made a holdover tenant liable for the next year’s rent, did not make it out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee. The other, a revised version of the four-months bill, was defeated by a large margin in the Assembly.41 Despite strong pressure from the real estate interests, the legislature shelved several other proposals that were designed to weaken the rent laws. It refused to set up an independent rent commission to deal with landlord-tenant disputes. It also balked at defining a reasonable rent. To do so, wrote the Lockwood Committee, would be “impracticable and of questionable legality.” The legislature even passed a statute that provided that in rent actions the presumptive value of the property was its assessed value, not its fair market value. Although Browne and other real estate men insisted that the rent laws applied only to old tenants, the legislature also extended the laws to new tenants. The legislature refused as well to abolish trial by jury in landlord-tenant disputes, to require tenants to file a bill of particulars, and to allow landlords to bring summary proceedings in cases where they intended not to demolish the building, but just to make substantial alterations. These measures never stood much of a chance. Neither did most of the other proposals to water down the emergency rent laws. Indeed, writes Jared N. Day, what success the real estate interests had was limited “to a series of defensive victories” in which they managed not so much to weaken these laws as to head off the efforts to strengthen them.42

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opposition to property rights generally.” In the forefront of the efforts to strengthen the emergency rent laws were a host of neighborhood, borough, and city-wide tenant organizations, among the most influential of which were the Bronx Council of Tenant Leagues, the Fair Play Rent Association, and the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York. Founded in the early 1920s, the federation was a nonpartisan umbrella group that claimed to speak for forty-two tenants leagues with more than three million members. These organizations filled the void created by the demise of the older, more radical tenants leagues, many of which had been affiliated with the Socialist Party. Like the party itself, these tenants leagues were devastated by the Red Scare of 1919. Writes historian Joseph A. Spencer, “There is no evidence of Socialist-led tenant activity after early 1921.”43 The president and chief spokesman of the Federation of Tenants Associations was Harry Allen Ely, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who was commonly referred to afterward as Captain Ely. A “self-proclaimed ‘soldier of fortune,’ ” in Spencer’s words, Ely found his calling after World War I, when in his mid-sixties he became the head of the Audubon Community Council and Washington Heights Tenants Association. From then until his death in 1928, he devoted his considerable energy to the cause of New York City’s tenants. Besides running the two Upper Manhattan tenants groups and the Federation of Tenants Associations, Ely edited the New York Tenant, which championed the interests of the city’s rent payers. He testified on their behalf before the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, and fought with New York’s real estate men—who, he said in late 1923, had created a “slush fund” that “is so large that they are afraid to look at it.” (Ely had a loyal following among the residents of Washington Heights, many of whom rallied to his defense in early 1925 when he was charged with criminal libel for publishing an article that called Judge William J. A. Caffrey a “nincompoop” and “popinjay” who was unfit to hear landlord-tenant disputes. Hundreds of Ely’s followers attended his trial in the Court of General Session. After he was convicted, they raised the money to pay his bail and legal bills. The Appellate Division upheld Ely’s conviction. But Judge Francis X. Mancuso suspended the sentence in May 1927 after Ely made a public apology to Caffrey.)44 Late in 1923 Ely held a meeting in his apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue and 157th Street that was attended by Congressman La Guardia; Assemblyman Rosenman; Senator Michael E. Reiburn, a Manhattan Democrat; and half a dozen other legislators, lawyers, and tenant leaders who were strong supporters of rent control. Following the meeting, Ely wrote a long letter to Governor Al Smith, who was in the middle of his second term, in which he denounced “the law-breaking methods of the rent-hog-landlords,” all of whom he believed should be put in jail or driven out of the country; stressed the need “for legislative relief from the intolerable housing conditions” prevailing in New York City; and spelled out the federation’s legislative program, which included more than twenty measures to strengthen the rent laws. Some were designed to expand their coverage. One, which called for the enactment of a bill that was introduced by Senator Reiburn at the last legislative

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session, would have imposed rent control on commercial as well as residential property. The soaring rents of stores, offices, and lofts—all of which were “affected with a public interest”—were a source of “fraud, extortion, [and] exorbitant rates,” Ely said. Another measure would have extended the Rosenman Act not only to tenants who entered into a lease after September 27, 1920, but also to apartment houses erected under chapter 949, the statewide law that permitted cities, towns, villages, and counties to exempt new residential construction from property taxes until January 1, 1932.45 Ely’s other proposals were designed to make it harder for landlords to raise rents. Chief among them was one that would have required the landlord to prove that the apartment house complied with all the building, health, and fire laws before filing suit for nonpayment of rent—a proposal that Stewart Browne called “laughable”— and another that would have permitted a tenant who withheld the rent to argue in his defense that the landlord had failed to keep the premises “in proper repair.” Others would have repealed “the three-months rule” and allowed the tenants to contend that the rent was unreasonable at any time; required the landlord to amortize the cost of repairs over their normal life and exclude a charge for depreciation in cases where the property was kept “in first-class condition”; and prevented a new landlord from raising the rent in an apartment whose rent had already been adjudicated. Still other proposals were designed to make it harder for landlords to oust tenants. Chief among them was one that would have required a landlord who had been granted a final order on the grounds that he or his family wanted to live in the apartment to post a bond of not less than $1,000 in favor of the tenant before the court issued an eviction warrant. The bond would be forfeited if the landlord did not move in within thirty days after the tenant moved out and/or occupy the apartment for at least one year. Another, which Browne called “ridiculous,” would have prevented the city marshals from executing an eviction warrant unless the judge “personally signed” it—and then only after reexamining all the facts. 46 Ely was not the only spokesman for the tenants who urged the legislators to strengthen the emergency rent laws. Agnes Craig called on them to extend the laws to cover all buildings erected after September 27, 1920. So did Arthur J. W. Hilly. Judge Aaron J. Levy went so far as to recommend the abolition of summary proceedings, a measure that would have left a landlord who wanted to oust a tenant with no alternative other than the common law remedy of ejectment. The Tenants Union of New York, which claimed to represent a million families, pressed the legislature to enact a law reducing current rents to no more than 10 percent more than prewar rents—and to enable tenants to sue to recover excess rents paid in the past five years. It also suggested that a rent commission be appointed for each borough and county and that the local authorities be required to provide counsel for tenants in disputes with profiteering landlords. Among its other proposals was one that would have imposed a three-year ban on the alteration or demolition of apartment houses, many of which were being torn down to make way for garages, theaters, and office buildings, and another that would have required that an owner who intended to

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demolish one apartment house and replace it with another devote the new building to residential use everywhere except on the ground floor. In what was perhaps the most bizarre of its many proposals, the Tenants Union insisted that all landlords, agents, and lessees had to be American citizens.47 In a few cases the real estate interests were unable to thwart the efforts to strengthen the rent laws. They failed to prevent the legislature from enacting statutes that extended coverage to tenants who entered into a lease after September 27, 1920, that required landlords to bring summary proceedings in the judicial district in which the premises was located, and that made the property’s assessed value its presumptive value. (To the representatives of half a dozen real estate organizations who opposed this measure on the grounds that assessed values were usually lower than market values, Samuel Untermyer responded, “If the landlords feel that their assessed valuations are too low, there is ready remedy. All they have to do is to go to the Tax Board and tell them that their properties have not been taxed enough, and I am sure that the matter will be attended to.”) But in most cases the real estate interests were able to head off the efforts to strengthen the rent laws. They could not stop the legislators from filing bills that favored tenants, but with the help of sympathetic officeholders like Assemblyman Edmund B. Jenks, they could bottle up the bills in committee. (Jenks, who was leader of the Broome County Republican Committee and chairman of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, believed that there was no need for the emergency rent laws except “in the minds of folks who were unwilling to stand upon their own feet” and that the housing problem would have been resolved long before if the laws had never been enacted.) If a bill made it out of committee, they could use their considerable influence to defeat it on the floor of one or another of the houses.48 Of the real estate industry’s many “defensive victories,” two were especially noteworthy. Some New Yorkers were troubled that the rent laws applied only to residential property. They had been disappointed in 1920 when the state legislature refused to bow to pressure from merchants and manufacturers to extend the laws to commercial property. Rather than give up, these businessmen resumed their efforts after the laws went into effect and kept at it through the mid-1920s. In the forefront were the Greater City Merchants Tenants Association and the Retail Clothiers and Furnishers Association, both of which complained that their members’ rents had doubled and even tripled since the end of World War I. Commercial tenants needed protection against profiteering landlords as much as residential tenants did, their spokesmen argued. The New York City Bar Association was also concerned about the rising cost of office space, as was the New York County Lawyers Association. Although Stewart Browne predicted in early 1921 that there was not the slightest chance the rent laws would be extended to commercial property, other real estate men were so concerned that they started soliciting funds to head off the effort to regulate the rent of stores, lofts, and offices.49 Much as these real estate men feared, the merchants and manufacturers prevailed on Assemblyman Louis A. Schoeffel, a Bronx Democrat, and other legislators to file

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bills extending the rent laws to commercial property. On at least one occasion the Greater City Merchants Tenants Association, whose leaders warned that small storekeepers faced disaster unless profiteering landlords were reined in, sent a delegation to Albany to lobby for the bills. But the opposition, which was led by the Real Estate Board, was well prepared. Speaking before the Assembly Judiciary Committee in February 1923, Edward P. Doyle stressed that the bills were “manifestly repugnant to the Constitution,” a remark that prompted Congressman La Guardia, who favored extending the rent laws to commercial property, to say, “Anything that is unpopular of course is immediately labeled unconstitutional.” The bills, Doyle went on, call for “the exercise of the police power in an emergency that does not exist.” The rent laws were designed to prevent landlords from ousting tenants from their homes. How anyone could favor treating a store, “which for practical purposes may be considered on a par with an article sold for profit,” in the same way as a dwelling “is absolutely beyond me.” As Browne predicted, these bills were shelved in one session after another, rarely making it out of committee. Another bill was filed in 1924 that would have extended the rent laws to shops located in apartments that were also used as dwellings. This bill, which the Real Estate Record described as “a brand new artifice,” was shelved as well.50 Many New Yorkers were also troubled that the emergency rent laws did not require the landlords to keep their apartments in good repair. The tenants were not entirely without recourse. Under Altz v. Lieberson, a decision that was handed down by the Court of Appeals in February 1922, a tenant could sue for damages if he or she was injured as a result of the landlord’s failure to make necessary repairs. In an opinion written by Benjamin N. Cardozo, the court held that “the ancient rule,” according to which the landlord was obliged only to make repairs to the halls and other parts of the building that the tenants enjoyed in common, had been “swept aside” by the Tenement House Law, which provided that “every tenement house and all the parts thereof shall be kept in good repair.” The statute, wrote Cardozo, was designed for “the care of those who are unable to care for themselves. The legislature must have known that unless repairs in the rooms of the poor were made by the landlord, they would not be made by any one.” Altz v. Lieberson upset many landlords. And it generated what Judge John M. Tierney referred to as an “unprecedented wave of litigation,” not to mention a slew of “fanciful or even trumped up claims.” But it did not help the tenants much. Under Cardozo’s ruling a tenant who sued for damages still had to prove that he had notified the landlord of the defect and that the injury was the result of a failure to make the necessary repairs.51 Thus even after the Court of Appeals handed down Altz v. Lieberson, spokesmen for the tenants urged the legislature to amend the rent laws in ways that would force the landlords to keep their property in good repair. Some seconded Ely’s proposals that landlords who sued for nonpayment of rent should be required to show that their buildings were in compliance with the tenement house, health, and fire laws and that tenants who withheld the rent should be allowed to argue in their defense that the landlord had failed to keep the premises in good repair. Other

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spokesmen for the tenants called on the legislature to empower the municipal court judges to withhold the rent in cases where the landlord had refused either to make needed repairs or to permit the tenants to make them and deduct their costs from the rent. (Ely also wanted the legislature to enact a statute that would establish the value of heat, light, hot and cold water, elevator service, and trash removal, which could be deducted from the rent when these services and facilities were suspended. “Imagine drafting such a bill,” responded Browne.) Still other spokesmen for the tenants favored legislation requiring the landlords to repaint and repaper the walls and ceilings once every three years. The Tenants Union of New York went even further, appealing to Governor Smith to support a proposal that every occupied apartment be decorated once a year.52 Starting in the early and mid 1920s, Schoeffel, Abraham Grenthal, a Republican assemblyman from Harlem, and several other legislators filed bills that incorporated one or another of these proposals. (One of the bills had been filed so many times that it had “whiskers on it,” said Assemblyman Louis A. Cuvillier, a Manhattan Democrat.) Without exception, the bills ran into a good deal of opposition, which was led by the Real Estate Board. Speaking of the Schoeffel bill, which would have allowed the tenants to withhold the rent if the landlord refused to make muchneeded repairs, Doyle told the Assembly Judiciary Committee that if it were enacted, one tenant could join with others to keep the property in disrepair and, by appealing to the courts, “occupy the flat or apartment without payment of rent.” Referring to the Grenthal bill, which would have permitted the tenants to withhold the rent if the building was not in compliance with the Tenement House Law, Doyle pointed out that there were always so many pending violations, as many as 150,000 to 200,000, that the enactment of this measure would be a legal nightmare. Moreover, he added, neither the state nor the city could afford to hire the inspectors to enforce the law. Vincent C. Pepe, a Democratic assemblyman from Manhattan who owned several three-story apartment houses in Greenwich Village, agreed. If enacted, he said, the Grenthal bill would leave the landlords at the mercy of “unprincipled tenants,” many of whom would do anything to avoid paying rent.53 Some of these bills never stood a chance. A case in point was one that would have required landlords to repaint and repaper the apartments once every three years. It failed in 1923 and again in 1924. A few other bills made some headway, though they too went down to defeat. Although the Schoeffel bill died in the Assembly Judiciary Committee in 1923 and 1924, the Grenthal bill made it out of committee a year later over the objections of Israel Fertig, a spokesman for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, who urged legislators “to let [the bill] die a natural death.” The bill was passed by the Assembly, but so late in the session that it did not come to a vote in the Senate. The Assembly voted in favor of the Grenthal bill in 1926, but it died in the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Doyle, four of the bills that were designed to force the landlords to make repairs made it through one house, but none made it through both. For the tenant leaders, the refusal of the legislature to enact the Schoeffel and Grenthal bills was bad enough. Even worse, Ely complained

In addition to the many bills that were designed to amend the rent laws, there were other bills that were designed to encourage residential construction and thereby alleviate the housing shortage. On behalf of the tenant organizations, some legislators filed bills to enable the state and/or its cities, towns, and counties to build housing for working-class families. On behalf of the real estate interests, other legislators filed bills—the best known of which was sponsored by Senator George N. Jesse, a Manhattan Republican, and Assemblyman Benjamin Antin, a Bronx Democrat— to revise the Tenement House Law in a way that would facilitate the conversion of single-family homes into three- and four-family apartment houses. Most of these bills aroused a great deal of opposition, none more than the public housing bills, which most real estate men viewed as a form of socialism. And with a few exceptions, they were shelved. (The most conspicuous exception was what was known as the $100 million Metropolitan Life bill, which allowed insurance companies to invest up to 10 percent of their assets in low- and moderate-income housing. Under this law, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Nathan L. Miller in April 1922, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company underwrote the construction of more than two thousand apartments in Long Island City that rented for nine dollars a room per month.) It is not possible here to discuss the legislative history of these bills, a full account of which would require a book of its own. Nor is it necessary. For none of them had much of an influence on the history of rent control in New York City.55 There were, however, other housing bills that had considerable impact. These bills dealt with chapter 949, the only emergency rent law that was designed to encourage residential construction. Chapter 949 was enacted in September 1920 over the objections of the owners of prewar apartment houses. The statute allowed the cities, towns, villages, and counties to exempt new residential structures other than hotels from property taxes until January 1, 1932, provided that construction was completed after April 1, 1920, or commenced before April 1, 1922, and completed within two years or, if now under construction, by September 27, 1922. Unlike chapters 942 and 944 and other emergency rent laws, chapter 949 was an enabling act. The local officials could exempt new residential structures from property taxes, but they did not have to. According to the Times, most New York City real estate men were optimistic that the municipal authorities, meaning the Board of Aldermen and the Board of Estimate, “would stand behind the measure and bring it into effect at once.” And believing that chapter 949 would reduce the cost of construction—by as much as by 30 percent, according to some estimates—a number of builders applied for permits as soon as the statute was enacted. Along with the decline in the price of lumber, chapter 949 prompted builders to file more applications in Queens in late September than at any time in recent years, observed John W. Moore, the borough’s buildings superintendent.56

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to James J. Walker in 1927, a year and a half after the former assemblyman and senator was elected mayor, was the failure of the Tenement House and Health departments to enforce the laws already on the books.54

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No sooner was chapter 949 enacted than Mayor John F. Hylan urged the Board of Aldermen to pass an ordinance to exempt new residential structures from property taxes, preferably one that protected the city from “a raid upon its treasury” and excluded dwellings for the well-to-do, “for whom there is no need of relief.” In early October William T. Collins, a Manhattan Democrat and the board’s majority leader, drafted an ordinance that empowered the city to grant builders a tax exemption, but only if their applications were endorsed by the Tenement House Department and approved unanimously by the Board of Estimate. The ordinance, which was referred to the Committee on General Welfare, of which Collins was the chair, ignited a heated controversy. In favor were many builders and some public officials, chief of whom was Manhattan Borough President Henry H. Curran. Opposed were some backers of chapter 949, among them the City Club, which feared the ordinance would not survive judicial scrutiny and, if it did, would introduce an element of uncertainty, not to mention favoritism, into the process. Also opposed were many critics of chapter 949. Some held that the statute would not spur residential construction. Others, including La Guardia, president of the Board of Aldermen, protested that it would do nothing to stop rent profiteering—it would only enrich builders at the expense of taxpayers. Still others complained that the statute was unfair to owners of old apartment houses. How could they possibly compete with the owners of new apartment houses, which were already exempt from rent control and, if the ordinance were passed, would now be relieved of property taxes too?57 Over the next month and a half Collins attempted to find a way to head off the opposition. In late November the Committee on General Welfare submitted a substitute ordinance that it believed would withstand judiciary scrutiny, safeguard the city treasury, and still provide relief to working men and their families. Under this ordinance, the city was empowered to exempt all new residential structures from property taxes for ten years, but only on $10,000 of the value of single-family homes, $20,000 of the value of two-family homes, and $10,000 of the value of each unit in an apartment house. Collins, Curran, and Dr. Royal S. Copeland, the New York City health commissioner, supported the ordinance. After a spirited debate that lasted over three hours, the Board of Aldermen turned it down in late December by a vote of thirty-four to twenty-eight. Against the measure were a few Democrats, among them Charles H. Haubert of Brooklyn, who argued not only that chapter 949 was unfair to the owners of prewar buildings, but also that the housing shortage was not as bad as it had been when the statute was enacted. Joining the dissident Democrats were Republicans like La Guardia, who pointed out that chapter 949 would cost the city $50 to $60 million dollars, a sum its taxpayers could ill afford; Socialists like Abraham Beckerman, who stressed that chapter 949 was nothing but a “sop” to the real estate interests; and B. C. Vladeck, who insisted that the millions that would be lost by exempting new dwellings from property taxes could be better spent on building houses for working people.58 Chapter 949’s supporters, one of whom blamed the defeat of the ordinance on those aldermen “who are more interested in State Socialism than they are in

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housing relief,” resumed their efforts in early January. A month later the Committee on General Welfare reported out another ordinance that empowered the city to grant a tax exemption of up to $5,000 for each house and up to $1,000 per room, but no more than $5,000, for each apartment. The familiar battle lines were soon drawn. Opposing the ordinance were La Guardia, Vladeck, and Republican Minority Leader August Ferrand. In favor of it were Collins and Copeland, who said that he would “join the Socialists and advocate municipal housing” if the city officials failed to do something about the housing shortage. The issue came to a vote in mid-February. For a while it appeared that the new ordinance would fare no better than the old one. But after another long and tempestuous hearing, at which both sides hammered away at the same points they had made in late December, Collins rallied his forces, most of whom were under strong pressure from Tammany Hall to support the ordinance. At his urging, the board rejected two amendments, one offered by La Guardia and the other by Vladeck, that would have watered down the measure, and then, with the backing of most Democrats and some Republicans, adopted it by a vote of forty to twenty-seven.59 Mayor Hylan promptly signed the ordinance, which then went to the Board of Estimate. The outcome was never in doubt. In favor of it were Hylan, who had three votes, Controller Charles L. Craig, who also had three, and Borough President Curran, who had two. Opposed was La Guardia, who as president of the Board of Aldermen had three votes. To block passage of the ordinance, he needed the five votes of the other four borough presidents: the borough president of Brooklyn, who had two, and the borough presidents of the Queens, Richmond, and the Bronx, each of whom had one. At another three-hour public hearing, which was held in late February, some witnesses spoke against the ordinance. Chief among them was Robert E. Dowling, one of the city’s leading real estate men. Asked by Hylan, “How are we going to get more houses [other than by granting tax exemptions]? What [else] can be done to induce some one, somehow, to build more houses?” he replied, “No matter whether we need more houses or not, we should not abandon a sound principle to build them. I say that houses are being built and will be built,” with or without chapter 949. But most witnesses spoke in favor the ordinance, and many real estate men said they would begin building as soon as it was passed. In the end only Calvin D. Van Name of Richmond sided with La Guardia, and the board approved the ordinance by a vote of twelve to four. The response was mixed. Many thought that the board had done the right thing and, said Copeland, that “building will be resumed at once.” Others believed it had made, in La Guardia’s words, “a monumental blunder.” Still others were ambivalent, opposed in principle to giving what the Eagle called a “very large subsidy” to builders, but inclined to believe that chapter 949 was what the World called “the only practical cure yet suggested for the housing famine.”60

15 The Extension of Rent Control

Although some of the emergency rent laws were permanent, chapters 942, 944, 945, and 947, which were widely viewed as the keystone of the legislation, were not. They were supposed to expire on November 1, 1922, or slightly more than two years after being enacted. And while the legislature could extend these laws for another two years or even longer, that was easier said than done. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Feldman, the legislature would have to make the case that New York was still facing an emergency. Even William D. Guthrie and Julius H. Cohen acknowledged that it would be hard to justify the rent laws once the emergency was over. But as A. C. McNulty complained, the legislature had not defined the emergency. In the absence of a definition, Louis Marshall and Lewis B. Isaacs asked, “How is the existence of an emergency to be ascertained or tested?” Also, “How long may an emergency continue? Is it to be for one, five, or ten years?” And what happens when it goes “from the acute to the chronic stage?” Is it still an emergency?1 From the early 1920s to the end of the decade, a host of elected and appointed officials looked for answers to these questions. In the process they found themselves caught up in one of the great controversies in the history of New York State and New York City. When the state legislature convened in early January 1922, there was no doubt that the rent laws would be extended beyond November 1, 1922. Conditions were just as bad in late 1921 as in late 1920. Chapter 949 notwithstanding, residential construction was still in the doldrums except in a few remote parts of the outer boroughs where vacant land was available at relatively low prices. Only 319 apartment houses were erected in New York in 1921, more than half of them in Brooklyn. In Manhattan, where, wrote the Times “speculative building” was “absolutely dead,” only thirty-two went up. And most of them were built for the well-to-do. “Apartments at from $30 to $50 a month, which not long ago was considered a respectable sum,

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simply cannot be obtained,” wrote Junius Pendleton Wilson, chief counsel to the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, in August 1921. With supply lagging far behind demand, the housing shortage was still so acute that the vacancy rate was only one-third of 1 percent as late as March 1923. Thanks to the rent laws, most tenants could no longer be evicted when their leases expired. But they still had to pay the rent. And for many it was more than they could afford, said Charles Marks, counsel to several Manhattan tenants associations. “To the class of people who can only pay not more than $10 a room (and the majority of people are in this class),” he wrote in October 1921, “the emergency still exists and in all probability will continue to exist for at least [another] three years.”2 Of the many New Yorkers who believed that the emergency was not over, none was more influential than Senator Charles C. Lockwood. Late in November he let it be known that his committee would probably recommend that the rent laws be extended for at least one year and perhaps for two. And early in January it held another round of hearings in New York’s City Hall. Testifying were spokesmen for the leading real estate organizations, who insisted that the emergency was over, and representatives of the major tenants associations, including Harry Allen Ely, who warned that there would be “a revolution in New York if the emergency rent laws were allowed to expire.” Among the dozens of other witnesses were Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann, Health Commissioner Royal S. Copeland, Judge Aaron J. Levy, Professor Samuel McCune Lindsay, most of the borough building superintendents, and some of the city’s landlords and tenants. Questioned by the committee’s chief council Samuel Untermyer, one speaker after another spelled out the reasons for the slowdown in residential construction, estimated the extent of the housing shortage, described the conditions in the tenement houses, discussed the impact of the rent laws, and recommended whether the laws should be extended.3 The Lockwood Committee submitted a preliminary report three weeks after closing its hearings and a final report, which ran more than 250 pages, a month later. As expected, the committee found “overwhelming evidence” that the emergency that existed when the September laws were enacted “still exists.” Indeed, in the case of the many tenement houses whose apartments had once rented for four to eleven dollars a room per month, it was even “more acute.” By virtue of the high cost of labor and materials, no new apartment houses were being built for working people—and only a few for the well-to-do. At the same time many old-law tenements were becoming “obsolete and uninhabitable,” and many others were being torn down to make way for stores, lofts, and other commercial structures. All told, New York City had a shortage of 80,000 low- and moderate-income dwellings. The result was that congestion was increasing to the point where it was “a menace to the lives, health, morals and safety of the entire community.” The committee also spelled out the findings of its previous hearings on the corruption of the city’s labor unions, the skullduggery of its trade associations, and the irresponsibility of its savings banks and insurance companies. On the basis of an exhaustive and at times sensational investigation, it urged the legislature to enact more than a score of new laws,

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some to prevent illegal combinations in the building trades, others to regulate financial institutions, and still others to amend the rent laws. To the surprise of no one, it recommended that these laws be extended until February 15, 1924.4 This recommendation, which was incorporated into one of the many Lockwood Committee bills, was strongly supported by the tenants, whose spokesmen argued that only by extending the emergency rent laws could the state prevent a recurrence of the crisis of September 1920. Many municipal court judges agreed. Saying that the “housing crisis is still with us,” Frederick J. Spiegelberg stressed that the rent laws have been “the most potent agency to allay social unrest” and that their expiration would be “nothing short of a civic calamity.” Also in favor of extending the laws was the Call, which wrote that the “rent hogs are still working overtime.” By contrast, the spokesmen for the Real Estate Board strongly opposed the Lockwood Committee’s recommendation. Its estimate that New York had a shortage of 80,000 dwellings “is utterly without foundation,” said Charles G. Edwards. By blocking the resumption of residential construction, the rent laws were exacerbating the housing problem, added Victor M. Earle. Although some real estate men insisted the emergency was over, I. Montefiore Levy, counsel to the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, disagreed. Although “not as acute as it was,” it “still exists.” Stewart Browne also believed there was an emergency, though only in the case of apartments that rented for less than fifteen dollars a room. Afraid that if the landlords prevailed on the authorities to abolish the rent laws the tenants would press for even more drastic legislation, he thought the best course of action was to “let sleeping dogs lie.”5 Even before the Lockwood Committee submitted its preliminary report, it was widely expected that the rent laws would be extended. There was no sign of “any organized opposition” in the legislature, reported the Times in mid-January 1922. Two and a half weeks later Governor Nathan L. Miller told the members of the Real Estate Board, “You will probably have [the rent laws] for another year.” Instead of “opposing the inevitable,” he said, “the wisest thing to do is to accept the situation, to make the best of it.” Even the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, which had long opposed the rent laws and now insisted “the sooner [they] are dropped the better,” advised New York’s real estate men that “it would seem the [better] part of wisdom” to try to change the laws than to try to eliminate them. By early March, by which time it was clear that several of the Lockwood Committee bills would probably be shelved, the extension of the emergency rent laws was “apparently assured,” wrote the Times. In mid-April the Senate voted to extend them until February 15, 1924. The Assembly followed suit. And shortly thereafter Governor Miller signed the bill into law.6 While Governor Miller was holding hearings in Albany on the Lockwood Committee bills, former Governor Al Smith was working in New York City as chairman and chief executive officer of United States Trucking Company. Whereas his father “had barely made ends meet as a teamster,” writes Smith’s biographer, the ex-governor was paid $50,000 a year, a princely sum at the time, to manage a hauling business with 2,000 employees, 2,500 horses, 300 trucks, and depots all

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over the city. Although Smith remained active in public affairs, sitting on the board of the Port Authority of New York and testifying before legislative committees, he made it clear that he had no intention of running against Miller again. But under pressure from Charles F. Murphy, the leader of Tammany Hall, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1920, and other party leaders, Smith changed his mind. The campaign was completely one-sided. Miller, who had beaten Smith by 74,000 votes two years earlier, was an inept candidate, and Smith, writes his biographer, was “in great form.” In what the World called “a triumph of liberalism” and the Tribune referred to as “a grievous blunder,” Smith won by nearly 400,000 votes, carrying New York City by nearly half a million and losing upstate New York by only 80,000. In what the Times described as a “Democratic tidal wave,” the party won all the other statewide positions, took control of the Senate for the first time in years, and cut into the Republican majority in the Assembly.7 Among the issues that Smith inherited from Miller was the housing shortage in New York and other big cities. Closely related to it was the future of the emergency rent laws, which were due to expire a little over a year after he took office. Although Smith had signed the laws—and once even said, “I’m their father”—he was ambivalent about them. Like the members of the Housing Committee of the State Reconstruction Commission, which he had set up during his first term, Smith believed that residential construction was the only solution to the housing problem and that rent control would do little to stimulate it. Smith was also concerned about the state’s reliance on stopgap measures. Hence his administration did not intend “to permit these laws to remain on the statute books any longer than is necessary,” he declared in April 1923. But Smith was sympathetic to the plight of New York’s hard-strapped tenants, especially the many who lived in the sort of working-class neighborhoods in which he had grown up. He was also aware that these people were the core of his constituency. As a Bronx widow who urged Smith to extend the rent laws for a few years reminded him, “I voted for you and worked hard for you.” I have also “done novenas [and] said the Rosary, and I will keep on doing it.” Thus for both sentimental and political reasons, Smith told the legislature in January 1923 that in view of the state’s failure to solve the housing problem he believed the rent laws “should be continued.”8 A shrewd and well-informed politician, Smith knew that it would be much harder to extend the emergency rent laws in 1923 than it had been in 1922. The Real Estate Board would strongly oppose an extension, as would the New York State Association of Real Estate Boards. At its annual convention, which was held in Binghamton in February 1923, the executive committee declared that now that the housing problem would soon be solved “through the operation of the economic law of supply and demand,” the rent laws were no longer necessary. Without dissent it adopted a resolution opposing their extension. Even Stewart Browne, one of the few prominent real estate men who had supported the rent laws, was fed up with them, especially after the passage of the Rosenman Act. If the rent laws were extended, he said, they should apply only to tenants who had entered into a lease before September

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27, 1920. There was no shortage of apartments at rents that tenants “are able to pay,” only at rents they “won’t pay,” he added. With some exceptions, the real estate men agreed with the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide that the rent laws “have outlived the emergency which inspired them,” that they have been “unfair to the great majority of landlords,” that they have prolonged the housing shortage, which exists only in the case of “low-priced quarters for workingmen,” and that if rents were higher now than before World War I, so was the price of food, clothing, and everything else. Now that “the emergency has passed,” argued the Record and Guide, the rent laws should be allowed to expire.9 To extend the rent laws, it would be necessary not only to overcome the opposition of the real estate interests, but also to prove that the emergency still existed. As Untermyer explained to Smith in May 1923, “The fact that an emergency existed when the original law was passed and again in 1921, when it was extended, is no proof that an emergency now exists.” And proof was required, Untermyer stressed. The courts would not let the rent laws stand on the basis of a “mere recital” that there was an emergency. Smith got the point. Responding to a heartfelt appeal to extend the rent laws “not for one or two years, but at least five,” he wrote a young woman who lived with her widowed mother in an apartment in Washington Heights whose rent had been raised from $38.00 to $62.50 a month that the laws would only be sustained if the legislature found evidence “that the emergency still exists.” Indeed, in June 1923 Smith vetoed a bill sponsored by Senator Michael E. Reiburn, a Manhattan Democrat, that would have extended the rent laws from February 15, 1924, to April 15, 1924. Defending his decision, for which he was sharply criticized by Senator George N. Jesse and other Republican legislators, Smith pointed out that the Reiburn bill would have extended the rent laws for only two months. And in the absence of any effort by the legislators to make a case that the emergency still existed, it would probably have been found unconstitutional.10 Moreover, it was not clear that a case could be made. Although the longanticipated building boom had not yet gotten under way, residential construction was no longer at a standstill. As well as tens of thousands of one- and two-family homes, nearly 1,200 apartment houses were erected in 1922, nearly four times as many as in 1921. With time running out on the tax-exemption law, builders were filing plans at a record pace. “Never before in the history of the city has the rush to file [building] plans been so great as it was during the past month,” reported the Record and Guide in April 1923. By the end of the year nearly 1,800 new apartment houses went up, adding 32,000 units to the housing stock, the most in any year since 1911. By virtue of the growth in the city’s population and the demolition of old-law tenements, the vacancy rate was still at a record low in March 1923. But it was on the rise and would reach nearly 1 percent in January 1924. Many New Yorkers were still doubling up, but few were living on the streets. Except in a few high-priced apartment houses, some of whose tenants were paying as much as $3,000 a year, rents were holding steady too. Given that it cost much more to build in the postwar years than in the prewar years, experts thought it unlikely that they would go down soon.

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There was still a “crying need” for apartments that rented for less than twenty dollars a room per month, wrote the Record and Guide. But here and there landlords were putting up “To Let” signs for the first time in years.11 Even if a case could be made that the emergency still existed, it was not clear who would make it. Hitherto it would have been up to the Lockwood Committee, which had held the hearings that led to the enactment of the emergency rent laws in 1920 and their extension in 1922. But after focusing on the housing problem— and, it claimed, saving New York’s tenants a whopping $280 million—the Lockwood Committee had turned its attention to the city’s building industry, both its labor unions and its trade associations. In the process it uncovered evidence that resulted in scores of indictments, many of which led to fines and imprisonment. Although the committee aroused a great deal of opposition among the building trades, which were closely allied with Tammany Hall, the legislature extended its life for another year in February 1922. At Untermyer’s prodding, the committee then took on New York’s insurance companies, financial institutions, and stock exchange. By so doing, it made more (and more powerful) enemies. Indeed, observed the Nation, it “achieved something remarkable.” It unwittingly forged “an alliance between the business interests, the New York Stock Exchange and the labor unions”—all of which urged the legislature to abolish the committee. Late in January 1923 the Senate dealt the committee what the Times called “the death blow” when it turned down a proposal by John J. Dunnigan, the new chair of the Senate Finance Committee, to extend its life until April 1, 1923. And not long afterward Senator Lockwood, who had served for three terms, announced that he would not seek a fourth.12 Under the circumstances Governor Smith did in April 1923 what most other governors would have done: he asked the legislature to set up a new state agency to take the place of the Lockwood Committee. And a month and a half later the legislature passed a bill sponsored by Senate Majority Leader James J. Walker that created the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning and empowered it to hold hearings, make studies, and otherwise gather information about the housing problem. The commission consisted of five regular members, who would be appointed by the state architect, and three ex officio members—the state architect, state highway commissioner, and state industrial commissioner—all of whom served at the pleasure of the governor. The law authorized the state architect to provide the commission with a secretary, stenographer, and clerk. It also appropriated $10,000 to cover the commission’s expenses. As Smith saw it, the commission would serve two purposes. If it found that the emergency still existed and the legislature voted to extend the emergency rent laws, he could not be blamed if the laws were held unconstitutional. And if the commission reported that the emergency was over and the legislature decided to let the emergency rent laws expire, he would be insulated to some extent from the political fallout.13 In mid-August the governor’s office announced that Clarence S. Stein, the former secretary of the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee, would chair the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, which would henceforth be known

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as the Stein Commission. An architect with a deep interest in social problems, especially the lack of decent housing for working people, Stein was one of the many bright young men and women who were drawn into Smith’s orbit. And he shared the governor’s view that the rent laws had done much to protect the hard-strapped tenants, but little to solve the underlying problem—which, he told the Lockwood Committee, was “the scarcity of housing.” Also appointed to the commission were Oliver Cabana, Jr., a Buffalo industrialist who was an influential figure in the Democratic Party; Peter D. Kiernan, former president of the Albany Chamber of Commerce; and Sara A. Conboy, international secretary of the United Textile Workers of America. (Another commissioner, Walter A. Stabler, controller of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, resigned shortly after he was appointed.) Joining them were the ex officio members—State Architect Sullivan W. Jones, who spent two years at M.I.T. before returning to New York and going into practice; Industrial Commissioner Bernard L. Shientag, whom the governor called “the brains, heart and soul” of the state’s labor movement; and Highway Commissioner Frederick Stuart Greene, a member of Smith’s kitchen cabinet, who was replaced by his successor Lowell Grossman after he was appointed state superintendent of public works. Heading the staff was George Gove, an expert on low-rent housing (and later the Metropolitan Life vice president who oversaw the construction of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village).14 The Stein Commission’s mandate was twofold. Its first was to determine whether the emergency that existed in 1920 and 1922 still existed and advise the governor and legislature whether to extend the rent laws. As Stein told the commission’s advisory council—which was made up of dozens of real estate men, bankers, businessmen, tenant activists, labor leaders, architects, planners, settlement house workers, municipal court judges, and other public officials—the legislators who enacted the emergency rent laws were much like “the little Dutch boy” who “found a leak in the dike which endangered the existence of his native town” and “held his hand over the hole” all night until help came. The commission, Stein went on, had to figure out “whether the hole in the dike still exists” and whether it was still necessary for the state to impose rent control in order to plug it. “It is not sufficient,” he pointed out, “to say that houses enough have been erected during the last two years to take care of the normal increase in population [and make up] the deficiency of houses that exists on account of the lack of building between the years 1916 and 1921.” Even if this were so, it did not mean that the emergency was over. “Houses may exist,” Stein said, “and yet rentals may be so high that it is impossible for a large portion of the population to afford these rentals. That there are vacancies in certain types of houses does not prove that there are not many families who are unable, on account of lack of income, to secure suitable dwelling places.”15 To Stein, the commission’s second task was just as important and even more complicated. As he explained, New York was in the midst of not only a short-term emergency, but also a long-term problem whose “roots go way back to the beginning of the industrial age and the rapid growth of cities.” As the Reconstruction

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Commission’s Housing Committee found, it had long been impossible for builders to provide decent housing that working people could afford. The result was that millions had grown “accustomed to inhuman and un-American standards of living.” Nowhere was this problem more serious than in New York City. Despite many investigations and much legislation, a solution had not yet been found. To find it—to figure out, in Stein’s words, “how to make inadequate incomes pay for adequate homes”—the commission would have to do more than just come up with ways to bring down the cost of construction. For as Stein pointed out, much of the expense “is not in the house itself, but in the site,” the layout and improvement of which involved many wasteful practices that drive up the price of housing. Imaginative site planning would help. So would effective regional planning. The housing problem of big cities cannot be solved “unless we find new and better means of distributing industry among our working population.” Only by using planning to foster decentralization would it be possible to “meet the problems of congestion of homes, of streets, [and] of transit lines.” By devoting part of their effort to the longterm housing problem, Stein and his associates were picking up where the Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee had left off.16 Given that the commission had to submit a report by January 31, 1924, it had no choice but to focus its initial efforts on the rent laws. In early August it sent a questionnaire to every city in the state with at least ten thousand people asking for information about the housing shortage in 1920, the amount of residential construction since then, and the current status of the housing market. At its request, the Buffalo Real Estate Board provided information about housing conditions in the state’s second largest city, which was covered by chapters 944 and 945. And the New York State Association of Real Estate Boards submitted additional information about Rochester, which was also covered by chapters 944 and 945, and a dozen other cities, including Albany and a handful of others in the capital district on which the state had imposed rent control in early 1923. The commission also made a survey of apartments in eight typical blocks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx; two surveys of working-class families elsewhere in the city; and an investigation of housing in a handful of small cities near the capital. The commission intended to begin its hearings in New York City in late September. But at the request of representatives of several tenants associations, who said they needed more time to compile the information requested by the commission, the hearings were postponed. And instead of New York City, the commission opened its hearings in Buffalo on October 1 and spent the next three days taking testimony in Rochester and Schenectady. A week and a half later it convened in New York City, where tenants and landlords alike eagerly awaited what was widely expected to be a memorable public hearing.17 Held in the Aldermanic Chamber, the largest room in City Hall, and attended by more than a thousand New Yorkers, the hearings got under way as scheduled on Monday, October 15. After Chairman Stein read a letter from Governor Smith and announced that Commissioner Shientag would preside, Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia, one of the few Republicans who had survived the Democratic landslide in

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November 1922, introduced Harry Allen Ely, the first of many witnesses who favored extending the emergency rent laws. After Ely came a host of tenant leaders and hard-strapped tenants, many of them, wrote the New York Evening Post, “poorly dressed mothers, whose voices trembled as they described their troubles in keeping a roof over their children’s heads.” The first witness who opposed extending the rent laws was John M. Stoddard, who spoke for the Real Estate Board. Following him were Professor Lindsay, who had made a long and highly controversial study of the housing shortage under the board’s auspices, and several real estate men, including some of the city’s foremost landlords, agents, and brokers. Among the other witnesses, most of whom favored extending the emergency rent laws, were Senator Lockwood, Assemblyman Rosenman, Tenement House Commissioner Mann, former health commissioner (and now U.S. senator) Copeland, and Lillie Grant, acting chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering. Also appearing were a good many municipal court judges, settlement house workers, and borough building superintendents. By the time the hearings were adjourned on Friday, October 19, the commission had heard more than 130 witnesses and taken just over 1,200 pages of testimony.18 Most of the witnesses, many of whom were questioned by La Guardia and Agnes M. Craig, counsel to several Bronx tenants leagues, testified that the emergency was far from over. Indeed, said Judge Aaron J. Levy, “conditions are even worse [now] than when the emergency rent laws were enacted.” As these witnesses saw it, the emergency was a result of the acute housing shortage, a shortage of 175,000 dwellings, according to Ely. Builders were erecting “plenty of garages” and “some moving picture houses,” testified Martin Buckner, president of the South Bronx Tenants and Civic League. Taking advantage of the tax-exemption law, which was “the most constructive legislation ever passed,” said Bronx Buildings Superintendent Patrick J. Reville, they were even putting up a few apartment houses. But as one witness after another pointed out, these houses were for the well-to-do. If there were any new apartments that rented for eight to twelve dollars a room per month, which was as much as most working-class New Yorkers could afford, “I never heard of it,” said Manhattan Buildings Superintendent Charles Brady. Neither had Ely. Except for one erected in the Bronx for philanthropic purposes, none of the new houses had “a single solitary apartment” that rented for ten dollars a room, he testified. The reason was simple, observed Reginald Auchincloss, president of the City and Suburban Homes Company: it was impossible to build a new apartment house, charge less than fifteen dollars a room, and still earn a reasonable return.19 Despite the housing shortage, there were some vacant apartments. There were a few in her neighborhood, most of them on Broadway and Riverside Drive, said Ellen Manning, chair of the Manhattanville Community Council. But they rented for $2,500 a year and up, which was cold comfort for the many New Yorkers who earned $1,500 to $2,000, wrote the Leader. At rents working people could afford, there were “none whatever.” According to other witnesses, the situation was much the same

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elsewhere in Manhattan. “There are no vacancies at all [in Harlem],” said Vito Marcantonio. Another witness testified that there were no vacant apartments in Washington Heights except for one or two, which rented for $60 to $65 a month and which “I would not pay five cents for or would not live in if they paid me.” Speaking of fourteen new buildings that had just been erected in Inwood, the northernmost part of Manhattan, yet another witness said that three-quarters of the apartments, which rented for $60 to $70 for three rooms, $76 to $90 for four rooms, and $95 to $105 for five rooms, were leased “before the plaster was dry on the walls.” Things were just as bad in the outer boroughs. Referring to a largely Italian neighborhood between Williamsburg and Ridgewood, in which he served as pastor of Our Lady of Pompeii, Father Ottavio Sylvester told the commission that there were no vacancies even in rear tenements, many of which were wooden shanties whose tenants had no light, air, heat, or indoor plumbing and lived “not like men but like beasts.” Yet “once one family moves out, another moves right in?” La Guardia asked him. “Yes,” replied Father Sylvester. Everything else was “beyond their means.”20 Many tenants—as many as five thousand in Washington Heights alone, said Ely— would move if they could find another place to live. Some were paying more than they could afford, others were living in wretched apartments, and still others were facing eviction. As hard as they tried, they rarely found anything. Take Laura Von Bayer, who lived with her husband and six-year-old in a rundown seven-room apartment on West 143rd Street for which the landlord was asking $175 a month, two and a half times as much as she had paid six years earlier. As she told the commission, she had spent the previous summer looking for an apartment between 72nd Street and 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue and Riverside Drive, walking mile after mile, “one block up the street, down the other side, on the avenue, on the street, from one house to the other.” All she found was one “old fashioned dark apartment” on the ground floor that rented for $25 a room. Jeanette Sampson, who lived with her ten-year-old daughter in five small rooms in a walk-up apartment on Manhattan Avenue, told an even sadder story. With her husband being treated for a nervous breakdown at the Bloomingdale Asylum in White Plains, her income was only $25 a week, not nearly enough to pay the rent, which was $58 a month, up from $33 in 1916. She had looked for a cheaper apartment. But three rooms in a walk-up cost as much as $75 a month. By sharing her apartment with another woman and renting out one of the rooms, she was getting by, but she was afraid that she and her daughter might soon end up on the street. These stories were all too common, said Lillie Grant. As hard as they look, most tenants “cannot find anything within their means.”21 Spokesmen for several civic groups, settlement houses, and charitable societies also testified that the housing market was extraordinarily tight, especially, though not exclusively, for wage earners. Jabez E. Dunningham, executive secretary of the Community Councils of the City of New York, told the commission that his organization had placed ads for vacant apartments in the New York World, Long Island Daily Star, and other newspapers. But “we got no reply from anyone who had apartments

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to rent [for] under $85 a month.” Dr. John Elliott, a spokesman for the United Neighborhood Houses, which represented some fifty New York settlement houses, said that when a very unattractive apartment in Chelsea was advertised in one Sunday paper twenty people applied for it, each of whom was willing “to take it practically sight unseen.” Stanley E. Cromwell, a spokesman for the Tremont Tenants League, whose members lived in the Bronx, north of 167th Street and east of the Grand Concourse, testified that the league had sent out questionnaires to 20,000 tenants asking if they knew of apartments that rented for ten dollars a room. Not one did. Lawson Purdy, director of the Charity Organization Society, also sent out a questionnaire. “Did you have clients living in unfit apartments for whom you sought better accommodations?” he asked each of the society’s district secretaries. “They all said yes.” But when asked, “When you have sought an apartment for a client during the past year, what success have you had?” they replied “Very little” or “None.”22 Drawing on first-hand experiences and second-hand accounts, one witness after another told the commission that the housing shortage had driven up rents all over the city. Emma Shattuck, who had moved into a small six-room apartment in the southeast Bronx in 1906, testified that her landlord had raised the rent twice in 1918, twice in 1919, and once in 1920. Although the apartment was badly run down, he was now trying to raise it again. To Pancrazio Genovese, president of the Bronx Tenants Association, most of whose members were Italian Americans, it seemed that every time a building was sold the rents went up. With speculators hoping to capitalize on the housing shortage, some buildings changed hands as often as three or four times a year, said Buildings Superintendent Reville. The rent hikes were often huge, Lillie Grant testified. According to the tenants who appeared before the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, some landlords had raised the rent as much as 100, 200, and, in the case of an apartment at 210 Hawthorne Street in Brooklyn, 300 percent. (Grant added that the Hawthorne Street landlord was demanding a ten-dollar increase on another apartment in the building, even though it had no electricity, no bath, a toilet that was often out of order, and a furnace that supplied “a little heat once in a while.”) As a representative of the North Harlem Community Council said, nowhere did the landlords raise the rents more than in Harlem, where blacks were moving into apartments that had previously been occupied by whites, sometimes paying $70 a month for an apartment that had recently rented for $25.23 How, Bernard L. Shientag wondered, were the landlords able to raise the rent so much after the enactment of the rent laws? In some cases, he was told, the tenants were afraid of the landlord and worried that if they withheld the rent he would figure out a way to oust them. Knowing how hard it would be to find another place to live, they were inclined to pay the increase rather than take their chances in court. In other cases the landlords persuaded the tenants to go along with a rent hike by promising to decorate the apartment, make repairs, and install electricity. As often as not, they failed to keep these promises. In still other cases the landlords managed to persuade the municipal court judges that the new rent was not

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unreasonable. Before the Rosenman Act, moreover, some judges ruled that the rent laws did not apply to new tenants. Hence many landlords jacked up the rent as much as they saw fit as soon as the old tenant moved out. As Assemblyman Rosenman testified, the new tenants paid 15 to 20 percent more, “not because they had better apartments or cleaner apartments or more beautiful apartments, but simply because they were unfortunate enough to have moved into [them] after September 27th, 1920.” It was not uncommon for new tenants to pay two or three times as much as old tenants, other witnesses told the commission.24 Many tenants could not afford the rising rents. Some doubled up, said Sadie Byrnes of Melrose, a South Bronx neighborhood where “it [now] takes two families to pay the rent.” Others took in lodgers and boarders. The result, Ely pointed out, was that many tenants were “herded like cattle” into the tenements and forced to sleep, said Reverend Joseph Selipigni, whose parish was on the Lower East Side, not only in the bedrooms, but also in the parlor, “if there is a parlor,” and the kitchen. It was not unheard of for nine or more people to share a three-room apartment, said Bailey S. Burritt, a spokesman for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, one of the city’s oldest charitable organizations. As well as severely overcrowded, many apartments were extremely unsanitary. The sanitary facilities “have gone from bad to worse” in working-class neighborhoods, said Harry Fleischman, director of the Educational Alliance, an organization devoted to the “Americanization” of the immigrant. Some apartments had less “air space” than “the death cell at Sing Sing,” the commission was told. Others were infested with rats, which had the run of the place, and insects, which were hidden under layers of crumbling wallpaper. Many tenants were forced to move into decrepit old-law tenements that had been “practically abandoned ten years ago,” said John J. Murphy, a former tenement house commissioner. But if the Tenement House Department condemned these buildings, added Frank Mann, the current commissioner, tens of thousands would now be “camping in the parks and streets.”25 Forced to spend so much of their income on housing—25 percent for unheated apartments and 30 percent for heated ones, according to Harry K. Hervitz, a statistician for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union—many wage earners had no choice but to cut back on food. A tenant with several children who earned $25 or $30 a week and rented a three-room apartment for $25 or $26 could not pay the rent and still feed the family, said Edith B. Coff, who worked at a settlement house on the Lower East Side. A tenant who made $32 a week and paid $48 a month for a fourroom apartment could afford only a quart of milk a day for his four children, added Mona Caruso, a social worker with the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities. Small wonder, several witnesses testified, that many youngsters suffered from malnutrition. Many wage earners had to cut back on clothing too. “We have nothing for clothing at all,” said Kate Knipper, who lived in a six-room apartment on West 96th Street with her husband, a painter who earned $36 a week, and two children, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. It was all she could do to “scrape up the rent,” which had gone up from $30 to $55 a month since 1917. It was not uncommon for children to skip school

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because they had nothing to wear, said Julia Dunn, a mother of ten, some of whose children had to stay home for two weeks “for want of shoes,” which prompted a visit from the truant officer. Nor was it uncommon for children to go to school without underwear, said Edith Coff. By forcing working-class tenants to live in overcrowded and unsanitary apartments and cut back on food and clothing, the soaring rents were a menace to public health, safety, and morals, Senator Copeland testified.26 Although these witnesses believed that the emergency was far from over, they disagreed on a few points. Most acknowledged that the rent laws had not done much to alleviate the housing problem—though several, including Walter W. Efe, president of the Fair Play Rent Association, took issue with the Real Estate Board’s contention that they had blocked the resumption of residential construction. But as Judge Spiegelberg reminded the commission, the emergency rent laws were designed to protect tenants, not to stimulate building. Superintendent Charles Brady testified that the laws had not brought down rents. But as Daniel J. Traynor, president of the Mount Morris Community Council and Civic Organization, pointed out, they had prevented some landlords from raising them. Moreover, said Robert Ferrari, chief counsel for the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York, they had stopped them from ousting a great many tenants. Eleanor Blackman testified that among her clients, most of whom lived on the Lower East Side, it was widely believed that tenants would be “at the mercy of unscrupulous agents and landlords” without the emergency rent laws. And Superintendent Reville told the commission that in the absence of these laws, so many tenants would have withheld their rent that the situation would have gotten out of hand. “There would have been chaos,” said Ely.27 On one point, however, virtually all these witnesses agreed: the emergency rent laws should be extended beyond February 15, 1924. Although Reginald Auchincloss thought that “possible changes in the situation” might make the laws “superfluous and unfair,” he favored extending them for one year. Jabez E. Dunningham recommended two years, as did Arthur J. W. Hilly, former chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering and now corporation counsel of New York City. Senator Lockwood also favored a two-year extension, not because he thought the emergency would be over by then, but because he doubted the legislature had the power “to declare an emergency for five years ahead.” Although he thought the emergency would last for another ten years (and possibly even twenty-five), Ely wanted the laws extended for at least two years. So did Assemblyman Rosenman. Commissioner Mann and Senator Copeland thought the laws should be extended until the emergency was over. And William B. Riley, who lived in Upper Manhattan, suggested they be extended indefinitely. (Several of these witnesses also argued that the emergency rent laws should be tightened. Judge Levy wanted the legislature to abolish summary proceedings. And Agnes Craig thought it should bar a landlord who already had a place to live from ousting a tenant on the grounds that he wanted the apartment for himself or his family. But other witnesses held that if the rent laws were changed they might be vulnerable to attack on constitutional grounds.)28

Spokesmen for the real estate interests, who took the stand for the first time on October 17, the third day of the hearings, told a different story. Most of them appeared at the behest of the New York City Real Estate Board, which was represented at the hearings by John M. Stoddard, a member of its Board of Governors and the chair of its Law Committee. In his opening statement Stoddard reminded the commission not only that the state legislature had enacted the rent laws to

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Many witnesses warned the commission that the expiration of the emergency rent laws would have dire consequences, especially, said Senator Lockwood, for “those least able to bear it.” The landlords would promptly raise the rents, predicted Eleanor Blackman. And many working-class New Yorkers who were already spending more than a quarter of their income on rent would be hard-pressed to come up with the extra money, pointed out Sophie Irene Loeb, president of the New York City Board of Child Welfare. Helen Hart, who was affiliated with the East Side House, a settlement house on East 76th Street, at the time one of the poorest neighborhoods in Manhattan, agreed with Loeb. “It really is impossible for these people to pay anything like the increased rents that would certainly follow if these rent laws were repealed or allowed to lapse,” she told the commission. The residents of the Lower East Side, an even poorer neighborhood, “will just be driven to despair,” added Edith B. Coff. To make matters worse, Assemblyman Rosenman told the commission, “thousands and hundreds of thousands of tenants would be evicted” if the legislature did not extend the rent laws. For many New Yorkers the rent laws had been “the only rays of sunshine,” said James L. Foy, who had lived with his wife in the same cold-water flat in East Harlem for twenty-three years. And the landlords were eagerly waiting for the day when these rays would be extinguished.29 Some witnesses also warned the commission that the expiration of the rent laws would have dire consequences not only for low-income tenants, but for other New Yorkers as well. At the least, said Superintendent Brady, “we won’t have enough marshals in the City of New York to put the tenants out.” At the worst, remarked Judge William J. A. Caffrey, there will be “a crisis the like of which has not been seen in years.” Sounding like the most passionate advocates of rent control in the fall of 1920, Lillie Grant testified, “I shudder to feel what is going to happen” if the emergency rent laws are not extended. There would be “riot” and “bloodshed” in New York, she said. Lawson Purdy also expected “rioting and disorder.” Pointing out that “when a man’s home is threatened” his instinct is to defend it, Vito Marcantonio predicted “bloodshed” as well. And Judge Adam Christman said there would be an “uprising” if the rent laws were allowed to expire—though the quiet Queens neighborhood in which he sat was an unlikely setting for civil disorder. Although he did not predict rioting and bloodshed, Judge Spiegelberg warned that it would be “nothing short of a civic calamity” if the emergency rent laws were allowed to expire. And in one of the more memorable moments in the hearing, Edith B. Coff told the commission that she would rather see the recurrence of the plague than the expiration of the rent laws.30

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deal with an emergency “seriously affecting or threatening the health and welfare of the people,” but also that the Supreme Court had ruled that these laws were constitutional only as long as the emergency existed. “As soon as the emergency ceases the rent laws must expire.” Rent control was permissible only as “a temporary expedient,” Stoddard went on. It could not be imposed to deal with “a chronic trouble.” Rents have risen since 1920 and may well rise again, “just as the price of any commodity may fluctuate from time to time,” but it does not follow that when they do it was “lawful or constitutional or ethical” for the state to regulate them. Could rents rise to a point where legislation was justified? Commissioner Shientag asked. It would depend, replied Stoddard, on whether there was an emergency, which was to say on whether there was a housing shortage so severe that people were about to be “thrown on the street.” To show that there was not such a housing shortage, he called his first (and principal) witness, Samuel McCune Lindsay.31 Born in Pittsburgh in 1869, Lindsay had studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wittenberg in Germany, where he earned his Ph.D. He taught briefly at Penn and, after becoming an expert on child labor and other social problems, joined the Columbia faculty in 1907. Among his classes was a seminar about housing, which was attended by Edith Elmer Wood, who would soon emerge as one of the country’s foremost authorities on housing. The seminar attracted the attention of Lewis M. Isaacs. At his request, Lindsay agreed to do a study of the housing situation in New York City for the Real Estate Board. To ensure that it was done, in his words, with “an impartial scientific spirit,” Lindsay insisted that he would take no payment, only five hundred dollars for expenses. With the help of current and former students, he wrote a 113-page report that the Real Estate Board submitted to the Lockwood Committee in 1921. In it Lindsay argued that there had not been a housing shortage in 1920. If there had been an emergency, it was “very much a state of mind,” a result of mass hysteria more than anything else. The Lockwood Committee did not find the report persuasive. Nor did the state legislature, which extended the rent laws in 1922. To tell New Yorkers that there was no housing shortage in 1920 was like telling American soldiers “who fought in France that there was no war,” wrote Clarence Stein shortly before the laws were extended. Still, when the state legislature authorized the Stein Commission to look into whether the laws should be extended a second time, the Real Estate Board asked Lindsay to update his report.32 The revised version, which was submitted to the commission in October 1923, served as the basis for Lindsay’s testimony, which was by far the longest of the hearings. Unlike most witnesses, who testified for no more than half an hour, Lindsay spoke for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon on October 17 (and for a few minutes on October 19, when he was recalled). His testimony ran over 125 pages, more than one-tenth of the entire proceeding and more than four times as long as Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann’s testimony, the second longest. As well as very long, Lindsay’s testimony was very dry. Unlike the many other witnesses who told heartrending stories about working-class New Yorkers who

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could not make ends meet because of rapacious landlords, Lindsay relied entirely on what he admitted were “rather dry statistical tables.” Drawn from the reports of the New York Tenement House Department, studies by the U.S. Department of Labor, and a host of other sources, they dealt with population growth, residential construction, turnover rates, and the cost of living, among other things. Asked by Shientag what he thought of the tales of hardship the commission had heard over the past two days, Lindsay said, “I do not believe you can judge the effects of legislation applicable to millions of people upon the impressions [that you can take] or [the] deductions that you can make from such testimony.”33 Well aware that the commission wanted to know not whether there had been an emergency in early 1920, but whether there was an emergency in late 1923, Lindsay devoted most of his testimony to what had happened in the previous three and a half years. Questioned by Stoddard, he testified that between January 1, 1920, and June 30, 1923, there had been a net increase of more than 36,000 units in apartment houses. From July 1 through September 30, certificates of occupancy had been issued for another 8,000 units, bringing the total to nearly 45,000, which was less than in the prewar years, but much more than in the postwar years. If he had included non-housekeeping units, clubs, apartment hotels, and buildings under construction, the number would have been much higher, Lindsay pointed out. At the same time, he told the commission, there had been a net increase of 78,000 apartments in one- and two-family houses. To put it another way, there were 8.1 percent more apartments in New York on June 30, 1923, than on January 1, 1920, a time during which the population of the city had increased only 5.5 percent. Since January 1, 1920, residential construction had not only “kept pace with the increase in population,” Lindsay concluded; it had gone up even faster, creating a surplus of apartments for 165,000 people. The resumption of residential construction was so well under way that before long New York City would have a housing surplus that would be large enough to increase “the range of choice and the bargaining power of [its] tenants.”34 Indeed, Lindsay told the commission, the resumption of residential construction was already having a beneficial impact. According to an analysis of the New York Times real estate section on four Sundays in late August and early and mid-September, there were more vacancies now than at any time since the end of World War I. There were also more turnovers. According to a questionnaire that was sent to thousands of real estate men in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, 14 percent of the tenants had moved in 1923, up from 7 percent in 1920. (Reminded by Stoddard, Lindsay pointed out that the questionnaires had been returned by September 1, 1923, which meant they did not include the many tenants who had moved on October 1.) Lindsay also told the commission that between 1914 and 1923, the cost of housing in New York City had risen less than the cost of living. And rents had gone up less in New York City than in most other big cities. Asked by Stoddard to respond to a statement by Health Commissioner Copeland that overcrowding in New York was a menace to public health, Lindsay said that according to the Health Department’s own records

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the death rate in the city had declined from more than seventeen per thousand in 1918 to less than twelve per thousand in 1922.35 Although his findings were not “conclusive,” they were “suggestive,” Lindsay told the commission. “Suggestive of what?” asked Shientag. They suggested, answered Lindsay, that housing conditions in New York City were approaching “normal,” that they were returning to the point where landlords and tenants were beginning once again to bargain as equals. If the emergency had been in part a result of the breakdown of bargaining, it was safe to say that it was over, said Lindsay. And if the emergency was over, the rent laws should not be extended. To protect tenants against exorbitant rents, the state would be better advised to foster “the greatest possible competition” than to impose rent control. Although rent control might provide “a small measure” of relief in the short run, it was likely to “defeat its very purpose” in the long run. Although the rent laws did not apply to new buildings, they nonetheless discouraged investment in residential construction. As he had already testified, residential construction had resumed in the past few years, thanks in large part to the tax-exemption law, which was extended in April 1922 and again in June 1923. But in the absence of the emergency rent laws, Lindsay argued, there would have been even more residential construction.36 After his appearance before the Lockwood Committee in January 1922—at which Samuel Untermyer called his testimony “absurd,” a hodgepodge, he later said, of “useless academic deductions apropos of nothing”—Lindsay no doubt expected to be grilled by the Stein Commission. And grilled he was, especially by Shientag and Stein. After getting Lindsay to concede that there had not been enough apartments for wage earners in 1920, Shientag asked him what had been done since then to meet the demand for low-rent housing. “There has been very little new construction,” Lindsay replied. So is it fair to say, Shientag went on, that “practically nothing has been done since 1920 to relieve the emergency [that] existed so far as apartments ranging in rentals from $12 to $15 [a room per month] is concerned?” Lindsay admitted that “very little, practically nothing, has been done,” though he added that the emergency rent laws were partly to blame. Can the typical wage earner, whose income is, say, $33 a week, afford to pay $12 to $15 a room for an apartment?” Shientag continued. Not unless he spends one-third of his income on housing, said Lindsay. Summing up, Shientag asked, is it not true that for wage earners the emergency that existed in 1920 still exists in 1923? Rather than answer the question, Lindsay said that there had never been enough decent apartments in New York within the reach of working people. It was not that rents were too high, but that wages were too low. The problem was poverty, not housing.37 Shientag also asked Lindsay whether the commission should take the vacancy rate into account when it attempted to determine whether an emergency still existed. Lindsay replied that it should. Having just heard him testify that residential construction was on the increase and that the Times and other New York newspapers were full of ads for apartments, why, Shientag wanted to know, was the vacancy rate only one-third of 1 percent? Why, as Tenement House Commissioner Mann

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testified the day before, was it no higher in March 1921 than in April 1920? Lindsay was hard-pressed to say. Under questioning by Stoddard, who in all likelihood had anticipated this line of inquiry, he had already pointed out that the Tenement House Department’s most recent survey had been made in March, not October, and that a great many new apartment houses had been erected in the last several months. “That would not change the result materially, would it?” asked Shientag. Lindsay could not say that it would and, if so, by how much. Lindsay also said that the Tenement House Department’s surveys only covered apartment houses, not one- and two-family houses, a great many of which had been built since January 1920. But pressed by Shientag, he admitted that he had no information about vacancy rates in one- and two-family houses, though he had to concede that there were probably even fewer vacancies in one- and two-family houses than in apartment houses.38 Lindsay qualified some of his other statements as well. He conceded that the decline in the death rate in New York might well have been due to the development of new tests for diphtheria and new serums for other contagious diseases. He acknowledged too that New York spent more on public health than most European cities. And questioned by Stein, Lindsay also conceded that the U.S. Department of Labor reports on the cost of living were based on “small, very small” samples, which might not be reliable in a city as large as New York. Even more noteworthy was Lindsay’s response to Shientag’s question about whether he would favor extending the emergency rent laws not to all apartments, but only to ones that rented for $15 a room or less. Having already testified that no apartment houses had been built for wage earners since 1920, Lindsay could hardly say no. So instead he replied that “if it can be done constitutionally,” he would support distinguishing between highand low-rent apartments. He would be willing to provide protection for the poor, but not for the well-to-do, who are “able to take care of themselves.” A line would have to be drawn, he told the commission. And it should be drawn “as narrowly” as possible. In his opinion, $15 per room would be too high, but “somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 [a room]” would be about right.39 At the behest of the Real Estate Board, several prominent real estate men took the stand after Lindsay. Among them were J. Irving Walsh, an agent and broker who dealt mainly with Greenwich Village and Washington Square properties, and William H. Dolson, another agent and broker, most of whose buildings were located north of Gramercy Park. Questioned by A. C. McNulty and William H. Stotesbury, these witnesses told much the same story. Times had been very hard for landlords before World War I, they said. Many apartments were vacant, and others could be rented only at rates that barely covered expenses. Most landlords were lucky to earn 4 percent on their investment, Dolson pointed out. Indeed, added Walsh, “a house that paid six per cent was [a] particularly good investment.” Some landlords even lost money. And when they could not make their payments, the banks foreclosed on the mortgages. Conditions improved after World War I, these witnesses testified. Although operating expenses soared, rent rolls went up too. At long last residential

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property was profitable. Then the state legislature enacted the rent laws. “The result,” said M. P. Somerville, a broker who handled high-rent apartment houses on the Upper West Side, “is that you cannot sell your property for the full value. You have to take the best you can get, or else go into the Municipal Courts and take a licking anyway.” The rent laws left much to be desired, said William D. Kilpatrick, who had been in the real estate business for thirty-eight years. So did their administration. The judges “are not fair,” and the juries “are still more unfair.”40 Asked by Stotesbury whether the rent laws should be extended, “either in their present form or in some modified form,” Kilpatrick replied no: “I would like to see them off the books.” There was no emergency in high-rent apartments, “if there [ever] was one,” he declared. The Real Estate Board’s other witnesses agreed. As a result of the resumption of residential construction, there were a good many vacant apartments in the city, as many as fifteen out of forty-four in one new building in the Bronx, said Kilpatrick, and as many as 350 between Washington Square and East 96th Street, added Francis S. Bancroft, a vice president of Pease & Elliman. Some had been empty for as long as six weeks, Dolson pointed out. Charles H. Dubois, an agent and manager, testified that he had counted fifty “To Let” signs on Broadway between 135th and 181st streets. Walsh added that the turnover rate was as high as 50 percent a year in “better class houses.” These witnesses acknowledged, however, that there were fewer vacant apartments and lower turnover rates in low-rent houses, very few of which had been erected since World War I. As Walsh pointed out, “It is not profitable to build [an apartment] house that will rent for $10 or $15 a room.” The cost of labor and materials was still too high. Indeed even the City and Suburban Homes Company could no longer build model tenements, rent the units for less than $15 a room, and “earn a fair return on the investment,” its president told the commission.41 Not all the real estate men who appeared before the commission opposed the extension of the rent laws. Stewart Browne said that if the laws were allowed to expire, many landlords “would unquestionably take advantage of the more or less shortage of space.” To restrain these “potential profiteers,” he favored extending the laws, but limiting them to tenants who had entered into a lease before September 17, 1920 (or who had moved into their new apartment after being ousted from their old one under one of the four exceptions in chapter 942). Nathan Hirsch, a landlord and former chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, also held that the rent laws should be extended, though with modifications. So did John H. Hallock, who managed thousands of apartments on the Lower East Side. “I do not think you can get along without them,” he told the commission. John V. Campbell, a builder who claimed he could erect an apartment house “equal to anything in the City of New York” and rent it for $10 a room, declared that it was imperative to extend the rent laws. “Conditions today are worse than they ever were,” he testified. Some witnesses, including I. Montefiore Levy, said that the laws should be extended for one year. And pointing out that the housing problem would not be solved in the near future, Jacob Leitner, a landlord who sat on the mortgage committee of the

Title Guarantee & Trust Company, held that the laws should be extended “for at least three years.”42

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The response to the hearings—which Victor H. Lawn, a journalist who ran for Congress on the Socialist ticket in 1920, called a veritable textbook for students of sociology and economics—was mixed. The Herald wrote that the landlords had made a strong case. It was especially impressed by Lindsay’s testimony, which was a good example of “high scholarship,” free of self-interest. But the Herald was the exception. While acknowledging that Lindsay had undertaken his research “with no prospect of personal gain or of reward,” the Times noted, “He overlooked, or seemed to overlook, the plight of those in need of greatest relief, the average wage earner who cannot pay $10 or $12 a room.” The Leader agreed. Under cross-examination by Commissioner Shientag, “our friend, Prof. State-of-Mind Lindsay” [admitted that the] average wage earner is unable to pay what the average landlord asks.” Even the Eagle, which held that neither the emergency rent laws nor the tax-exemption law had done much to alleviate the housing problem, wrote that Lindsay had lost sight of the many tenants who earned only $32 a week. Indeed, it added, the landlords’ witnesses confirmed what the tenants’ witnesses claimed: that “so far as the families of moderate incomes are concerned,” no housing was available except at “prohibitive” rents. The World went so far as to say that the landlords made “a very poor showing.” Ridiculing Lindsay for “the amazing conclusion that there was no housing shortage,” it wrote that it would take “a good five years” to restore “the old normal ratio between supply and demand.”43 The World believed the tenants had made a much stronger case than the landlords. What good, it asked, did it do most New Yorkers that there were plenty of apartments available at $2,500 a year? The enactment of the emergency rent laws had prevented rioting in the streets, it added, and their expiration “was a contingency to be viewed with alarm by the entire community.” The Times was also impressed by the tenants’ testimony. So was the Amsterdam News, which wrote, “The evidence adduced at the hearings overwhelmingly proves that these laws should be kept on the books.” It would be very hard for the Stein Commission “to turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the poor and middle-class inhabitants of New York City and allow the Rent Laws to expire,” The Leader was impressed by the tenants’ testimony too. The recent hearings showed that “the housing situation is desperate, and [that] it is getting worse,” which “is what every man and woman in the city knew before the Housing Commission began to hold its hearings.” The hearings also revealed that the private sector had failed to provide decent housing for working people. Stressing that housing “is too vital to be left in the hands of the speculators,” the Leader argued that it should be viewed as a public utility, much like the city’s schools and water supply. Not all newspapers were willing to go that far, but more than a few shared the Eagle’s concern that neither the tenants nor the landlords had come up with “the shadow of a remedy for the existing situation.”44 Of the many New York newspapers, the venerable Evening Post was the most incisive. Both sides, it wrote, had offered testimony “that cut a considerable part of the

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ground from under their own feet.” Spokesmen for the landlords had long argued that the emergency rent laws would discourage residential construction. But their own expert testified that builders had put up “surplus accommodations for 165,000 people” in the past few years. So much for the argument that the rent laws would lay “a paralyzing hand” on builders. Spokesmen for the tenants had long contended that the emergency rent laws would provide much-needed relief for New York’s working people. Yet one witness after another spoke of “the heartrending conditions” under which they and their families now lived, fully three years after the laws were enacted. This does not mean that rent control should be lifted, the Evening Post noted. But it does mean that both sides had missed the point: “To speak of housing for the unskilled workers as an ‘emergency’ was to obscure the real situation.” What was disclosed at the recent hearings was nothing new. As many investigations, some of which went as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, had revealed, “There have never been enough decent houses at a price that the poorest paid can afford. They have always had to inhabit tenements that were overcrowded, filthy, dilapidated, dark, and lacking in plumbing.” The rent laws “cannot avail much against a situation which has been with us for decades and has grown more difficult [in recent years].”45 On one point, however, most New Yorkers agreed. And that was that the commission would recommend that the legislature extend the rent laws. The Amsterdam News did not think it had a choice. Neither did the World. The law of supply and demand might solve the housing problem in time, it wrote, but the tenants needed protection now. Indeed, a couple of days after the hearings were adjourned, Commissioner Shientag was quoted in the Herald saying, “The general opinion is that the emergency rent laws in some form ought to be continued.” But in what form? Lawn, for example, believed that the commission would recommend not only that the rent laws be extended, but also that they be amended to cover new buildings. He thought that it might even propose abolishing summary proceedings, thereby limiting landlords to the forms of redress available “to the butcher, the baker, and other tradesmen,” and empowering the cities to go into the housing business. But no matter in what form the emergency rent laws were extended, George H. Soule warned his fellow Socialists that they “cannot continue in force indefinitely.” The laws had been passed to deal with an emergency, but in New York the emergency was “normal.” If the legislature extends the rent laws again and again, “the courts are sure to hold them unconstitutional sooner or later.”46 Speaking on behalf of the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York, Ely said he had no doubt that the tenants had carried the day at the hearings. But what he called “the real estate trust” had raised a huge “slush fund”—perhaps, one assemblyman told a constituent, as much as $20 million, which it intended to use to persuade the state legislators to limit the rent laws to low-rent dwellings. “The real estate trust realizes that it has lost the fight,” Ely pointed out, “but it wants to save the privilege of profiteering on the high-class apartments.” Congressman La Guardia, a leading advocate of rent control in both New York and Washington, D.C.,

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was more sanguine. At a conference of tenants leagues and community councils that was held a couple of days after the hearings were adjourned, he declared, “The tenants have made out a perfect case.” The landlords, by contrast, have made “a sad spectacle” of themselves, and anything they say “must be taken with a grain of salt.” Drawing on his legal training, La Guardia went on, “[Even] the most skeptical must admit that the tenants have proved not only with a preponderance of the evidence but beyond a reasonable doubt that [a] crisis exists.” The commission had more than enough evidence “to certify to the Legislature that there is a shortage of housing and that literally hundreds of thousands of [New Yorkers] are living improperly.”47 Neither La Guardia nor Ely was inclined to take anything for granted. Nor were the other spokesmen for the tenants. All of them were ready to make the commission aware of how strongly they felt. A month and a half before the hearings got under way, representatives of fourteen tenants leagues and community councils met in La Guardia’s office, where they formed an alliance and launched a campaign for the extension of the rent laws. Among other things, the alliance asked each candidate for the State Assembly to sign a pledge to vote to extend the laws if elected. At a meeting of more than two thousand tenants that was sponsored by the alliance, held at the end of August, and chaired by Jabez E. Dunningham, La Guardia told the audience that the emergency rent laws had taken “the ‘lord’ out of landlord” and New York’s tenants intended to keep it out. “Any one who says that an emergency does not exist simply does not know what he is talking about,” he declared a week and a half later. The campaign quickly picked up momentum. Samuel Untermyer endorsed it. So did Lillie Grant, who urged not only that the emergency rent laws be extended, but also that they be amended to cover new buildings, “tax-exempt or otherwise.” Additional support came from the National Vigilance Association, a citizens group whose objective was “to protect [residential] tenants and shopkeepers from exploitation by profiteering landlords.”48 In an attempt to send a message to the legislature and the commission (and presumably to the governor as well), Ely, La Guardia, and their associates stepped up the campaign after the hearings were adjourned. Ely let it be known that the Federation of Tenants Associations intended to send a committee to Albany at the upcoming legislative session to thwart “the lobby of the real estate trust.” La Guardia said that the tenants would see to it that the legislature did not water down the rent laws when it extended them. And early in December Frank J. Monaghan, the city’s health commissioner, informed Clarence Stein of the results of two surveys, both of which had been in progress when he testified before the commission. According to the surveys, vacant apartments were “few and far between,” except in buildings for the well-to-do. The result was that many families had been forced to double up, and “the lodger evil has increased by leaps and bounds.” Indeed, many working-class New Yorkers were now living in barely habitable one- and two-room apartments. To allow the emergency rent laws to expire, Monaghan told Stein, would lead to “a health hazard of no inconsiderable moment” and work “a hardship bordering on a calamity.” A few days later the United Neighborhood Houses released its legislative

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program for 1923, one provision of which called for the extension of the rent laws for at least two years.49 Unlike the tenants, the landlords were at a loss after the hearings. Most of their spokesmen expected the worst. Noting that politicians were inclined “to delight tenants and punish property owners,” the Real Estate Board had predicted in midNovember that the legislature would extend the emergency rent laws (and amend them to cover commercial property). The board also feared that the legislature would impose a limit on rental income, require the landlord to make repairs “at the will of the tenant,” and prevent the landlord from ousting a tenant from an apartment that he or his family wanted to occupy. But other than to complain, as the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide did in late September, that “the greatest outdoor sport in the metropolis has been the hurling of bricks at New York landlords,” the real estate men seemed resigned to their fate. Part of the problem was that they were not, in the words of the Leader, “in sweet accord.” Most opposed the extension of the rent laws, under which, one landlord lamented, “We have been hounded and abused and robbed by pettifogging Judges and thieving tenants.” But some favored it. In the absence of a united front, most real estate men probably thought there was not much for them to do except wait for the commission’s report.50 They did not have to wait long. On December 22, roughly two months after the hearings and more than one month before the deadline, the commission issued a preliminary report. Two weeks later Governor Smith submitted to the state legislature what the Times called “a much more extensive” version. The commission first described its legislative mandate. It then spelled out the criteria it intended to use to determine whether the emergency still existed, a subject on which neither the legislature nor the governor had provided much guidance. Whether the emergency still existed, the commission said, depended not on whether rents were out of the reach of most New Yorkers, as the tenants argued, or on whether some New Yorkers were forced to live in the streets, as the landlords contended. It depended rather on the answers to three questions. “Are unjust, unreasonable and oppressive agreements now exacted by landlords from tenants under stress of prevailing conditions?” “Is freedom of contract between landlord and tenant now restored?” “Has the housing congestion prevalent in 1920 been relieved sufficiently so that it no longer menaces public health, welfare and morals?” Based on the answers to these questions, which, it turned out, were yes, no, and no, the commission concluded that the emergency still existed in New York City. After pointing out that “if the emergency rent laws were needed in 1920 they are even more necessary at the present time,” it recommended that they be “re-enacted immediately” for two years—and, to ensure that no time was lost “in allaying the tenants’ anxiety,” that they be enacted again without amendments.51 Next the commission summarized the evidence on which it based its answers. Drawing on the testimony at the hearings, records of the Tenement House Department and other city agencies, and surveys of selected apartments in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, it found that rents were still rising, even in

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buildings in which repairs had not been made for years. In some cases they had doubled since 1914; in others they had gone up even more. With demand exceeding supply, many tenants had no choice but to pay the increased rent, no matter how unreasonable. Another indicator that freedom of contract had not been restored between landlords and tenants was the vacancy rate. Although it should be at least 5 percent in order to maintain “the bargaining power of the tenant,” it was only one-third of 1 percent. Despite the resumption of residential construction, it had increased only one-tenth of 1 percent since 1920. To make matters worse, many New Yorkers were living in old-law tenement houses that had been widely viewed as uninhabitable not long ago. The commission acknowledged that a good many apartments had been added to the housing stock in recent years. But it found no evidence to confirm Lindsay’s findings that the new construction had produced a housing surplus large enough to accommodate 165,000 people. In any case virtually all of these apartments were built for the well-to-do. “An empty apartment at $100 a month has little value to a man with an income of $25 a week,” the commission pointed out.52 The Stein Commission also found that congestion was still increasing, especially in low-income neighborhoods. It was not uncommon for two or three families to share one apartment or for nine or more people to live in three or four rooms. Many of these rooms were so dark that “gas lights must be burned all day” and so stifling that “families are forced to sleep on the roofs” in the summer. Moreover, the commission went on, sanitary conditions had not improved since 1920. “They have, in fact, grown worse,” exhibiting “a progressive deterioration, readily attributable to the housing emergency.” The dumbwaiters were often out of order, as were the toilets, many of which were located in the halls or the yards. The garbage was piled up. Even the fire escapes were “rotten through and through.” Compelled to live under such conditions, many tenants became susceptible to pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other respiratory diseases. Their children were especially vulnerable. With little or no privacy, morals broke down as well. Citing Children’s Court Judge Edward F. Boyle and Civil Service Commissioner Ferdinand Q. Morton, the commission reported that delinquency and promiscuity was all too common. Given that the housing shortage was having such a woeful impact on the city’s health, welfare, and morals, the commissioners thought it not at all surprising that one witness after another had called for the extension of the rent laws.53 The commission reached a few other conclusions that are worth mentioning. In a brief submitted after the hearings, the Real Estate Board proposed that if the legislature extended the rent laws it should exclude apartments that rented for twenty dollars a room or more. The commission disagreed. Leaving aside the constitutional issues raised by this proposal, it insisted that there were so few vacant apartments in New York that the laws should be extended “without discrimination as to rentals.” The commission also investigated housing conditions in the nine cities in upstate New York that were covered by the emergency rent laws, chief among which were Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany. Although it found signs of improvement, it

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concluded that only in Rochester “can conditions be said to be ‘normal.’ ” Hence it recommended that the emergency rent laws be extended everywhere else. Lastly, the commission acknowledged that the rent laws would not solve the housing problem. It was necessary not only to enact laws to protect the hard-strapped tenants, but also to find ways to stimulate residential construction—and thereby increase the “supply of adequate and decent homes for all classes.” Without explicitly endorsing public housing, it recommended that the state and its cities should be freed from the legal restrictions that prevented them from alleviating the housing shortage. And to that end the state constitution should be amended as soon as possible.54 A week and a half after the commission issued its preliminary report, Governor Smith delivered his annual message to the state legislature. Among the many things it dealt with was “the housing problem.” He started out by discussing the history of his administration’s approach to the problem. Then after praising the commission for its “commendable promptness,” he pointed to its finding that the emergency was not yet over. Saying that no time should be lost in allaying the “great anxiety” of New York’s tenants, he recommended that the rent laws be extended for at least two years. It was widely expected that Smith would ask the legislature to extend the laws. Since early 1923 he had been under pressure to push for an extension. And the pressure grew after he vetoed the Reiburn bill, which would have extended them from February 15 to April 15. If Smith had recommended that the legislature take any other course of action, he would not only have alienated many ordinary New Yorkers and disappointed more than a few prominent ones, among them Samuel Untermyer and former U.S. Senator William A. Calder; he would also have repudiated a commission that had been established at his request and whose members had been handpicked by his office. Having defended his veto of the Reiburn bill in part on the grounds that he was waiting for the commission’s report, Smith was hardly in a position to ignore its recommendations.55 It was also widely expected that the legislature would extend the rent laws. Although the Republicans, who were at odds with the governor on many issues, had retained control of the Assembly in November 1922 and increased their sizable majority in the lower house a year later, rent control was not a partisan issue, especially not in New York City. On the eve of the 1923 election, a day before the Stein Commission finished its hearings, the New York County Republican Committee issued a report in which it not only denounced the governor for refusing to sign the Reiburn bill, but also declared that the emergency was not yet over and that the rent laws should be extended. (Indeed, no legislator criticized the governor for his veto of the Reiburn bill more than Assemblyman George N. Jesse, a Republican whose district included Washington Heights.) The Republicans were as well aware as the Democrats that the Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York was a force to be reckoned with. Moreover, on the extension of the emergency rent laws, the federation had the support of the Citizens Union and other influential civic groups. Given that some landlords favored extending the rent laws and a few leading

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real estate organizations, including the United Real Estate Owners Association and the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, announced that they would not oppose an extension if the commission recommended it, most legislators had little to gain by rejecting the governor’s recommendation.56 Sharing Governor Smith’s belief that no time should be lost, two Democratic senators, John J. Dunnigan and Michael E. Reiburn, introduced bills to extend the rent laws on the first day of the legislative session. Under the Dunnigan bill, the laws would remain on the books until February 15, 1926; under the Reiburn bill until May 1, 1926. Shortly thereafter Assemblyman Joseph C. H. Flynn, a Brooklyn Republican, filed a bill of his own to extend the rent laws for two years. “It is generally believed at the Capitol,” wrote the Times, “that both the Democratic Senate and the Republican Assembly will lose little time in passing either the Dunnigan or Reiburn bills.” Senate Majority Leader James J. Walker did not care whether the emergency rent laws were extended to February 15, 1926, or May 1, 1926, only that they were extended before they expired. Hence three and a half weeks later the Senate Judiciary Committee, to which the Dunnigan and Reiburn bills were referred, reported out both of them. Within a week the Senate passed the Dunnigan and Reiburn bills without a dissenting vote, thereby leaving it up to the Assembly to decide not only whether the emergency rent laws should be extended, but also whether they should be extended until February 15 or May 1.57 The issue came to a head in early February, when the Assembly Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Flynn bill. Although the outcome was not in doubt, the real estate interests made a last-ditch effort to head it off. On behalf of the Real Estate Board, John M. Stoddard said that it might be appropriate to extend the rent laws for one year, but not for two. The legislature had no way of knowing what conditions would be like in two years, he argued. If they remained the same after one year, the legislature could always extend the laws for another year. Pointing out that there was no scarcity of medium-priced apartments, Dr. W. H. Bergen, a member of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, objected to even a one-year extension. The Judiciary Committee was not impressed. After Senator Reiburn and Harry Allen Ely spoke in favor of the Flynn bill, the committee reported it out. A few days later the Assembly substituted the Dunnigan bill for the Flynn bill and, after a brief debate, passed it unanimously. On February 13, just two days before the emergency rent laws were due to expire, Governor Smith signed the bill, which applied to Buffalo as well as New York City. He also signed a bill that reimposed rent control in Albany and half a dozen nearby cities for two years. (A month and a half later, after another round of hearings by the Stein Commission, Smith gave his approval to a bill to extend the tax-exemption law, which was due to expire on April 1, 1924, for one year. But after a long, drawn-out battle, in which the opposition argued that tax exemption was a boon for builders, not for tenants—that it was used to raise profits, not to lower rents—the Board of Aldermen refused to adopt the law. And in the absence of strong support for tax exemption in New York City, the legislature allowed the law to lapse on April 1, 1925.)58

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As expected, the Dunnigan Act was challenged in the courts. Taking the lead was the Orinoco Real Estate Company, which owned an apartment house on Park Avenue and 84th Street. Late in September 1922 the company leased an apartment to Martin H. Goodkind for $4,200 a year, effective October 1. A month before the lease expired it notified Goodkind that the rent was being raised to $5,200. Believing he was covered by the rent laws, Goodkind refused to pay the new rent. In March 1924, a month after the legislature extended the rent laws, the company filed suit, asking the court to order Goodkind to pay the rent or move out. Judge Francis B. Delehanty heard the case in late April. On behalf of Goodkind, Abraham L. Gutman urged the court to dismiss the complaint on the grounds that the new rent was unreasonable and that the company had not filed a bill of particulars. Representing Orinoco, Lewis M. Isaacs argued that his client was not obliged to prove the rent was reasonable, much less to file a bill of particulars. Citing Professor Lindsay’s findings that there was no shortage of high-rent apartments in New York City, Isaacs argued that the emergency no longer existed and thus the Dunnigan Act was unconstitutional. Clarence M. Lewis, who appeared for the Stein Commission as “a friend of the court,” responded that the Lindsay report notwithstanding, the commission had found that the emergency still existed. Lewis also said that the U.S. Supreme Court had been well aware of the Lindsay report in 1922, when it ruled that the emergency rent laws were constitutional in Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel. If the original laws were constitutional, he said, so was the Dunnigan Act.59 In his decision, which was handed down in mid-May, Delehanty ruled in favor of Goodkind on the grounds that Orinoco Real Estate had not filed a bill of particulars. But he sidestepped the constitutional issue, saying only that whether an emergency existed was a question of fact that should be left to a jury. Orinoco appealed. But the Appellate Division of the First Department ruled against the company in late June— and, perhaps assuming that the case would end up in the Court of Appeals no matter what it said, did not bother to write an opinion. Orinoco appealed again, and the Court of Appeals heard the case in early October. In a unanimous decision, which was handed down in late November, it not only affirmed the Appellate Division’s ruling, but also ruled that the Dunnigan Act was constitutional. After making “a full and complete survey” of the housing situation in New York City, the Stein Commission had reported that conditions “had not materially improved,” the court pointed out. And based on the commission’s report, the state legislature had extended the emergency rent laws for two years. Although the extension was valid only if the emergency still existed, the court could not say that the legislature had made an “obvious mistake”—and where the validity of a statute depends on facts found by the legislature, it stressed, the courts must be cautious in setting the statute aside.60 The constitutional issue settled, the rent laws would remain on the books until at least February 15, 1926.

16 The Expiration of Rent Control

Even before the Court of Appeals handed down Orinoco v. Goodkind, a few prominent real estate men began laying the groundwork for a campaign to stop the state legislature from extending the emergency rent laws beyond February 15, 1926. One was Isidor Berger, general manager of the Greater New York Taxpayers Association. Starting two weeks after Governor Smith signed the Dunnigan Act, Berger wrote a series of articles in the Real Estate News, the association’s monthly journal, in which he stressed that the emergency no longer existed. Citing a recent report by Tenement House Commissioner Frank Mann, Health Commissioner Frank J. Monaghan, and Commissioner of Public Welfare Bird S. Coler, Berger insisted that the Stein Commission had exaggerated the housing shortage and its baneful impact. A few months later he said that the commission’s findings—which relied on “so-called investigations [by] pseudo-social workers and professional agitators [and] impassioned statements by hysterical women”—have “no basis in present facts and conditions.” “To Let” signs were found everywhere in New York; hundreds of new buildings, some offering prospective tenants one month’s free rent, were half empty in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx; and in Eastern Parkway and other parts of Brooklyn, apartments “with all modern improvements and conveniences” were “going begging at a rental of $15 per room.” In October, Berger said that so many apartment houses had been erected recently that builders were afraid there would soon be a glut on the market.1 During the next few months Berger stepped up his attack on the rent laws. In January 1925 the Real Estate News pointed out that a recent Tenement House Department survey showed that the housing shortage had been over for six months. A month later Berger said there was not even a “vestige [of] justification” for the “continuation” of the laws. In March he insisted that housing conditions in New York City were getting better, not worse. In the effort to head off a third extension of

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the rent laws, Berger was joined by other New Yorkers, one of whom was Stanley M. Isaacs. Best known today as the borough president of Manhattan in the late 1930s and the one Republican member of the City Council during much of the 1940s and 1950s, Isaacs was a real estate lawyer, a partner in the family firm of M.S. and I.S. Isaacs, and a member of the Real Estate Board’s Committee on Legislation and Taxation. Writing in the Real Estate Magazine of New York, the board’s monthly periodical, Isaacs pointed out in May 1925 that it was “common knowledge” that there was a large surplus of dwellings in New York and, without mentioning the Stein Commission by name, added that “no sane-minded governmental agency can seriously conclude that any general emergency still continues.” Although he conceded that something would have to be done to “tide [the tenants] over” after February 15, 1926, Isaacs argued that under the circumstances it was hard to believe the legislature would “seriously consider any further extension of the rent laws.”2 Why was Isaacs so optimistic that the rent laws would not be extended again? For one thing, he had reason to believe that the legislature would find it hard to declare that an emergency still existed in late 1925 and early 1926. Despite the dire predictions of some real estate men, there had been a surge in residential construction in 1924 and 1925, the likes of which had not been seen since 1906 and 1907. With institutional investors flush, building materials plentiful, and labor relations relatively peaceful, builders rushed to capitalize on the pent-up demand for space in new apartment houses, which were not covered by the rent laws. In 1924, a year in which all records were broken, builders erected 3,900 apartment houses, with over 55,000 dwelling units. In 1925 they put up another 2,800 houses, with over 42,000 units. By January 1926 there were over 1.1 million units in New York’s apartment houses, almost 120,000 more than in March 1923. At the same time builders erected tens of thousands of one- and two-family houses, some of which were divided into two or more apartments. This “Building Boom,” to quote the New York World, held down the rent hikes, especially in apartments that cost $15 to $30 a room per month, and drove up the vacancy rate, which climbed from 0.37 percent in March 1923 to 3.46 percent in January 1926. Notwithstanding the extension of the rent laws and the expiration of the tax-exemption law, there was no sign that the boom was running out of steam, wrote the World in late 1925.3 For another thing, Isaacs had reason to believe that the courts might well find another extension of the emergency rent laws unconstitutional. On April 21, 1924, three years after issuing Block v. Hirsh, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Chastleton Corp. v. Sinclair. The Chastleton Corporation, which owned an apartment house in a fashionable Washington, D.C., neighborhood, had challenged a decision by the District of Columbia Rent Commission on the grounds that Congress had exceeded its authority when it extended the Ball Rent Act the second time. The D.C. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Commission, as did the D.C. Court of Appeals. But the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. Speaking for the court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had written the majority opinion in Block v. Hirsh, held that “upon the facts we judicially know,” which did not prove that an emergency still existed in the nation’s

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capital, “we should be compelled to say that the law [the Ball Rent Act] has ceased to operate.” But aware that other facts might lead to a different conclusion, the high court sent the case back to the District courts. Seven months later the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in Peck v. Fink that the Chastleton decision left it no option but to hold that the wartime emergency was over, that the Ball Rent Act no longer was valid, and that the D.C. Rent Commission no longer had any authority. The commission appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. It was not clear what impact the Chastleton decision would have in New York City. Some observers held that it applied only to Washington, D.C. Others said that it meant rent control was an idea whose time had gone. And still others believed that at the very least the New York courts would no longer just take the legislature’s word that the emergency still existed.4 Despite the building boom and Chastleton decision, it was not going to be easy for the real estate interests to prevent the extension of the rent laws. The tenants—for whom, Edith Elmer Wood wrote, rent control was like “other habit-forming drugs”— were unlikely to give up without a struggle. There were millions of them. They were, wrote the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, well organized, a veritable “Tenant Army” whose neighborhood, borough, and citywide leagues covered much of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. They had good friends in high places, not the least of whom was Congressman La Guardia. And in the eyes of New York politicians, they were a force to be reckoned with—so much so that in the fall of 1925 Judge John R. Davies, the Republican candidate for Manhattan borough president, made the extension of the rent laws the centerpiece of his campaign, prompting Julius Miller, the Democratic incumbent, to respond not only that he supported the rent laws, but also that as a member of the state Senate in 1920 he had been “one of the fathers of the[se] law[s].” Indeed, in the days leading up to the November election, in which all the seats in the Assembly were up for grabs, one candidate after another, Democrat and Republican alike, pledged to vote to extend the rent laws. Commenting on the situation in New York, Bernard J. Newman, a Philadelphia city planner, wrote that it was too much “to expect a legislative body, constituted as it is with members who are quickly responsive to political conditions and influences, to pass legislation which will be distasteful to so large a portion of their constituencies.”5 It was also too much to expect, Newman might have added, because spokesmen for the tenants could make a plausible case that there was still an emergency. It was true that residential construction was booming. But in only a few new developments, notably the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s fifty-four apartment houses in Long Island City, did the apartments rent for less than $15 a room, which was more than most New Yorkers could afford. The rents were going up in many old buildings too, though not as much as in the immediate postwar years. It was also true that the vacancy rate was rising. But it was still well below the 5.6 percent that was widely viewed as “necessary to allow freedom of movement with normal turnover.” Moreover, most vacant apartments were either in high-rent apartment houses, few of which were within the reach of working people, or in old-law tenements,

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many of which were close to uninhabitable. In an interim report devoted mainly to the long-term housing problem, the Stein Commission wrote in March 1925 “that there has been no material improvement in the housing conditions [of most New Yorkers in recent years].” And in the case of “people of low and moderate income,” things were worse. It had long been assumed that most of the obsolete old-law tenements would soon be demolished, the commission added. But many were still standing and, by virtue of the housing shortage, still occupied. “Unfit for use in 1900 and still unfit in 1914,” these buildings were now “ten years older and ten years more the worse for wear.”6 The issue came to a head in October 1925, when the Stein Commission announced that it would hold another round of hearings to determine whether the emergency rent laws should be extended beyond February 15, 1926. Presiding over the hearings would be Clarence S. Stein, and joining him would be four former members of the commission—Oliver Cabana, Jr., Sara A. Conboy, Peter D. Kiernan, and Sullivan W. Jones—and three new members. One was Chauncey J. Hamlin, a Buffalo lawyer and financier who had been the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in 1914 and was now director of the Buffalo City Planning Commission. The other two were James A. Hamilton, the retiring secretary of state, who was named state industrial commissioner when Bernard L. Shientag was appointed a New York City judge, and Arthur W. Brandt, a high-ranking Highway Department official who had replaced Lowell Grossman as commissioner of highways after he was removed from the post for violating departmental regulations. Heading the commission’s staff was George Gove, and serving as its chief counsel was Walter L. Pollak, a New Yorker who would later represent the Scottsboro Boys in the U.S. Supreme Court. After inviting the landlords and tenants to prepare testimony and make surveys, the commission held one set of hearings in Buffalo, Schenectady, and Albany. And with both sides “lining up for a fight,” wrote the Evening Post, it opened another set in New York City on Monday, November 9.7 According to the Post, the 1925 hearings drew an even larger crowd than the 1923 hearings. An estimated 1,500 people, most of them tenants and, said the Times, many of them mothers “with children in their arms,” stormed City Hall. They “came early,” said the Evening Post, “and kept coming.” It was as if “the gray old hall” was under siege. The crowd was so large that many had to wait on the steps outside. And according to the Herald, many who got in “were unable to push their way into the Aldermanic Chamber.” Under the watchful eye of half a dozen policemen, they waited on line or milled about in the corridors. Some who were admitted into the chamber found seats. The others stood in the aisles or between the chairs, which, observed the Post, “a thoughtful architect” had provided for the city fathers. The hearings were often moving, especially when some of the witnesses broke down, “mingling tears and threats as they pleaded for an extension.” And at times they were boisterous. Stein, “a thin, kindly man who looks like a college professor,” wrote the Post, “never seemed to lose his grip” (and even remembered to ask for two

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minutes of silence on Armistice Day). The hearings were supposed to end on Friday, November 13. But at the request of the Real Estate Board, some of whose witnesses had not yet had a chance to testify, they were extended one more day. By the time the commission closed this round of hearings, it had heard more than two hundred witnesses, received several hundred exhibits, and taken over nine hundred pages of testimony in New York City alone.8 Questioned by Agnes Craig and other sympathetic lawyers, the tenants and their spokesmen made more or less the same points that they had made two years earlier. Indeed, after the first day of hearings, which was devoted exclusively to the tenants’ side, the Times reported that except for the details, “there was nothing new in the testimony.” Drawing on personal experiences and neighborhood surveys, one witness after another told the commission that there was still a severe shortage of apartments, especially apartments that rented for $10 a room or less. Capitalizing on the shortage, the landlords were raising the rents, sometimes as much as 100 percent, a serious problem at a time when wages were falling. Especially offensive were the many landlords who took advantage of the loopholes in chapter 942 to oust the old tenants and replace them with new ones, most of whom had no choice but to pay a higher rent. Forced to shell out so much of their income on housing, many tenants were obliged to cut back on food and clothing. Many others were obliged to double up or take in lodgers and boarders. The result, said the many social workers who testified at the hearings, was that the tenement houses were more congested than ever. Since the landlords had no incentive to make necessary repairs—and the Tenement House Department was unable or unwilling to enforce the Tenement House Act—sanitary conditions were worse than ever too. As things now stood, there was no doubt that the emergency still existed, the tenants and their spokesmen concluded. If anything, said Charles Marks, counsel to several Manhattan tenants associations, it was more severe in 1925 than in 1923.9 Nor was there any doubt that the rent laws should be extended, the spokesmen for the tenants argued. Most of the other witnesses agreed. As Lillie Grant, chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, told the commission, the landlords were “biding their time.” They were “waiting for an opportunity to get revenge,” said Leo Gitlan, president of the Brownsville Tenants League, and warned the tenants “we will get you after February next,” added James T. Galligan, president of the Washington Heights Welfare League. If the legislature allows the emergency rent laws to expire, Assemblyman Abraham Grenthal testified, the tenants will be “at the mercy” of the rapacious landlords, who have no compunction about raising the rent, said former Senator Charles C. Lockwood. If the tenants cannot pay the increased rent, there will be “wholesale evictions” all over the Bronx, added Agnes Craig. Employing the familiar rhetoric, Senator George N. Jesse predicted it would be “a calamity” if the rent laws were not extended. Assemblyman Grenthal forecast there would be rioting and bloodshed. According to the Times, other witnesses warned that if the rent laws were allowed to lapse landlords “would be found dead in the streets” and property owners “would be met by tenants with shotguns.”10

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The spokesmen for the landlords told a very different story. Questioned by A. C. McNulty, counsel to the Real Estate Board, and Harold M. Phillips, counsel to the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, they testified that as a result of the recent surge of residential construction, the housing shortage was over. Indeed, said Ernest Tutito, a Brooklyn real estate man, it had ended at least nine months earlier. Plenty of vacant apartments were available in New York, some for six to seven dollars a room, said John H. Hallock, and others for as little as three to five dollars a room, added Isidor Berger. To keep old tenants, many landlords were reducing the rent. And to attract new tenants, others were offering concessions of as much as two months’ free rent. Some apartments were in disrepair, Berger conceded. But the fault lay not so much with the landlords as with the tenants, many of whom were “incorrigible,” said Hallock. Some apartments were also congested and unsanitary. But this was nothing new. The problem went as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, said McNulty. And it was even more serious then than now, added Patrick J. Reville, the Bronx buildings superintendent. The crux of the problem, Stanley M. Isaacs said, was that at no time in the history of New York City, especially not since the passage of the Tenement House Act of 1901, had apartment houses been built for “the very poor.” This was a chronic problem, not an emergency.11 Now that the housing shortage was over, the emergency no longer existed, J. J. Walsh, president of the Real Estate Board, told the commission. Arthur W. Gelston, executive secretary of the Brooklyn Real Estate Board, agreed. So, he said, did Brooklyn’s real estate brokers, most of whom believed that the rent laws “have done more harm [than] good to tenants.” Pointing out that vacant apartments were available “all the way from $4.00 per room per month to $200.00 per room per month,” Stewart Browne declared that the predictions of wholesale evictions were wholly unfounded, and the warnings of “riot” and “revolution” were “ridiculous nonsense.” Asked by Phillips, “Is there an emergency?” Isidor Berger replied yes, “an emergency for the landlord,” a reply that set off “a tumult of applause” from the landlords in the audience. Some of the witnesses held that the legislature should let the rent laws lapse on February 15, 1926. Either there is an emergency or there is not, insisted Reuben J. Wittstein, counsel to the Upper Harlem Taxpayers Association. But most of the witnesses believed that it should do something to prevent undue hardship in the months after the laws expired. Isaacs, who stressed that the laws should not have been set to expire in midwinter—and, for that matter, in the midst of the legislative session, when they became “the football of politics”—favored empowering the municipal court judges to grant stays of four to six months (and even longer if need be). And Dr. Henry W. Berg told the commission that “in order to quiet the fears of the tenants,” it might be a good idea for the legislature to ban rent hikes for four months.12 Few witnesses knew more about the rent laws than Samuel Untermyer, who had served as counsel to the Lockwood Committee in the early 1920s. Untermyer, one of the nation’s most successful lawyers—a partner at Guggenheimer, Marshall

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& Untermyer and counsel to the “Pujo Committee,” a congressional committee that investigated the “money trust” in 1912 and 1913—had long managed to combine private practice and public service. And when he took the stand on November 12, the fourth day of the hearings, the commission paid close attention. He had been “a consistent champion” of the rent laws, he testified. He had also been a strong supporter of their extension in 1922. And he thought it would be unwise to allow them to lapse in the middle of winter. But as things now stood, he saw no reason to extend the laws beyond May 15, 1926, for apartments that rented for fifteen dollars a room or more. Indeed, he believed that it had been a mistake for the legislature to include high-priced apartments in the rent laws. There was a serious shortage of housing for low-income tenants, he said, and “there always will be.” “It is no more possible to have tenements at 3 and 4 and 5 dollars [a room] per month than it is to have roast beef at 20 cents [a pound] or eggs at a penny apiece.” Although he favored extending the rent laws for apartments that rented for twelve dollars a room or less, he warned the commission that if the laws were renewed until vacant apartments became available at four to eight dollars a room, “they will go on forever.”13 Untermyer was not the first New Yorker to argue that high-rent apartments should be exempt from rent control. As early as March 1920 William M. K. Olcott, a former alderman and judge who represented a group of Park Avenue, Riverside Drive, and West End Avenue landlords, had appeared before the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities. The legislature would be well advised to enact one or more laws to protect hard-strapped tenants who were “at the mercy” of rapacious landlords, Olcott said. But these laws should not apply to apartments that rented for more than $1,500 a year. The tenants who can afford to pay that much do not need protection from their landlords. They may want it, Olcott said to Senator Abraham Kaplan, many of whose constituents lived on the Upper West Side, but they do not need it. If they object to paying more than $1,500 a year, they “can readily move to [New] Jersey and get a cottage.” Senator Lockwood opposed Olcott’s proposal, saying that it would give the landlords an incentive to raise the rents above $1,500. So did I. Montefiore Levy, who pointed out that many of the rapacious landlords were found on the Upper West Side and in Washington Heights.14 As expected, Olcott’s proposal was not incorporated into the April laws. One New Yorker who agreed with Olcott was Stanley M. Isaacs. In August 1920, a month before the special session of the legislature met to revise the April laws, he argued that rent control “should be confined to lower-priced apartments.” Congress had imposed a ceiling when it passed the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act of 1918, he said. So had the British Parliament when it approved the Rent Restriction Act of 1915. And “to permit the litigation in the Municipal Courts of questions affecting the rents asked by owners of high-class modern elevator apartments renting for thousands of dollars per year to tenants fully able to take care of themselves and by whom rents are paid more for service, location and fashion than for housing, on the theory that such tenants need the protection of the Legislature or the courts and that the public welfare is involved in their receiving such services

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and accommodations at low cost, is of course thoroughly unsound.” The rent laws, he argued, should be limited to walk-up apartments and others that rented for $250 per room per year or less in 1919. Although the legislature did not incorporate his proposal into the September laws, Isaacs did not give up. Writing in the Real Estate Magazine of New York two years later, he said that a fashionable Fifth or Park Avenue apartment—one that provides “waiting rooms, handsomely decorated halls, parlors, reception rooms and libraries, huge and luxuriously furnished chambers [as well as] attendants at the doors and at the elevators”—can hardly be considered “a ‘necessity.’ ”15 The issue surfaced again in January 1922, when the Lockwood Committee held hearings on whether the emergency rent laws should be extended beyond November 1, 1922. For the first time several prominent real estate men, some of whom had initially supported the rent laws, urged the committee to draw a line between lowpriced apartments, of which there was still a shortage, and high-priced apartments, of which there was not. Stewart Browne argued on one occasion that the line should be drawn at ten dollars a room, and on another at fifteen dollars a room. So far as apartments that rented for $50, $30, and even $20 a room were concerned, there was no emergency. Some real estate men disagreed. Victor M. Earle, an agent and manager whose firm specialized in Upper West Side property, declared that there was no emergency, period—and went so far as to say that “there never was an emergency.” But other witnesses thought that Browne’s argument made sense. As Judge Aaron J. Levy told the committee, rent control was for “the poor unfortunate” tenants who lived on the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Brownsville, East Harlem, and the Bronx and whose landlords were jacking up the rents “until the traffic will bear no more.” The well-to-do tenants who resided on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, many of whom had long-term leases that protected them from rent hikes, “can take care for [sic] themselves,” said Levy. The committee was not swayed by Browne’s argument. Neither was the legislature.16 By the time the Stein Commission held its first round of hearings in New York in October 1923, the tide was beginning to turn. In February Samuel Untermyer had advised Governor Smith that the emergency rent laws should be extended, but only in the case of apartments that rented for no more than fifteen dollars a room. And in August John M. Stoddard had informed Louis B. Marshall that the Real Estate Board was thinking about drafting a bill that would exempt high-priced apartments from the rent laws if and when they were extended. The result was that the commission felt obliged to ask several witnesses whether the laws should henceforth apply to some apartments but not to others. Although the Real Estate Board favored exempting apartments that rented for twenty dollars or more a room, Judge Abraham Ellenbogen had doubts that such a measure would withstand judicial scrutiny, a concern that had been voiced by Senator Lockwood at the hearings of the Joint Committees on Cities in March 1920. The courts well might find the measure a violation of the equal protection clause, added William E. Russell, a lawyer who had represented more than a thousand tenants. Other witnesses objected on

New Yorkers had mixed feelings about the hearings. Many shared the view of the Post, which wrote that “nothing could be fairer than the attitudes of the commission,” especially its chairman. Rather than attempting to “please the extremists,” which was impossible, it was “doing its best to give both landlords and tenants their full day in court.” But others agreed with Stuart Browne, who claimed that the hearings were rigged in favor of the tenants. (When Browne accused the commission, judges, politicians—and, he was about to add, newspaper editors—of doing everything in their power “to extend the rent laws,” Stein cut him off, saying, “There is no use of your being on the stand if you have any opinions of that kind” and, after letting him finish his prepared statement, declared, “There will be no examination of the witness.”) Also displeased with the hearings was the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, which complained about the “hysterical attacks” and reckless attitude of the tenants and predicted that “very little of value seemed likely to result” from the proceedings. It also took the newspapers to task for publishing what it called “startling headlines” about the likelihood of rioting and bloodshed

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different grounds. Samuel Leavitt told the commission that tradesmen, professionals, and small businessmen were as vulnerable to rent profiteering as wage earners. Said Judge Jacob Panken, “The man who is able to pay $20,000 a year [for an apartment] is entitled to the protection of the laws as much as the person who can only pay $10 a month.” Although the commission acknowledged that there was no longer an emergency in the case of apartments that rented for twenty dollars a room or more, it found “no dividing line” above which the rent laws could be allowed to expire “with safety to tenants.”17 When the commission held its second round of hearings in New York two years later, however, it came under a good deal of pressure to find such a “dividing line.” Spokesmen for the landlords argued that there was no shortage of apartments, especially high-priced apartments, and thus no reason to extend the rent laws. Spokesmen for the tenants disagreed—but even they stressed that it was the low-rent apartments that were in short supply. As Mary K. Simkovitch, the founder of Greenwich House, and other social workers pointed out, low-income tenants were being forced to live in overcrowded and unsanitary tenements, cut back on food and clothing, and take in lodgers and boarders. And as Ethel Ader, a representative of the Fair Play Rent Association, told the commission, she was concerned about “the poor tenants” who paid five to eight dollars a room “for whom [the rent laws] were made,” not about the wealthy residents of Riverside Drive and the Grand Concourse, who pay $20 to $30 a room and “can take care of themselves.” Even Norman M. Thomas—a clergyman and pacifist who joined the Socialist Party and ran on its ticket for governor in 1924, mayor in 1925, and president, for the first of six times, in 1928—testified that he could go along with legislation that drew a line between high- and low-rent apartments so long as it was “higher than $12” a room, which, he said, was more than many “better paid” workingmen and professionals were paying.18

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after February 15, 1926. The Record and Guide was seriously concerned that if the hearings were any indication, the legislators might well “ignore the facts and base their action entirely on political considerations” when they took up the issue in January 1926.19 However they felt about the hearings, most New Yorkers realized that the commission had its work cut out for it. As Stein said, there was no doubt that “a time will come” when the emergency was over—and the rent laws will have to be allowed to expire. But had that time arrived? If the commission took at face value “the pathos and indignation exhibited by witnesses at yesterday’s hearing,” wrote the Eagle, it will “have to conclude that so far as people of moderate means are concerned conditions in home-renting are worse in this city [now] than two years ago.” But according to the Record and Guide, the testimony of J. Irving Walsh, president of the Real Estate Board, and other witnesses showed “that the housing crisis has passed and that [the] continuance of the Emergency Rent Laws is unnecessary.” Conditions were “deplorable” in many tenement houses, the Record and Guide conceded. But “that always has been the case” and “probably always will be.” Nor were the rent laws doing anything to alleviate these conditions. There was, it seemed, no way that the commission could satisfy both sides. “There will be loud cries of dissatisfaction if the rent laws are extended,” wrote the World, “and equally loud cries if they are permitted to expire.”20 In the aftermath of the hearings, the real estate interests hammered away at the point that there was no need to extend the rent laws. In late November the Associated Builders of Kings County announced that the laws have “served their purpose”—and that, “if left unhindered,” the law of supply and demand “will in itself shortly create a surplus [of housing] and cause a voluntary reduction of rentals.” A week later the Real Estate Board filed a brief with the commission in which it argued that the housing shortage was over and, citing the report by Commissioners Mann, Monaghan, and Coler, even claimed that there were no slums in New York City, only “isolated instances” of “acute congestion.” But despite the vigorous efforts of the real estate interests, it was widely expected that the commission would recommend that the emergency rent laws be extended. The commissioners were under enormous pressure from the tenants. They were also well aware that most New York City politicians favored an extension. All twenty-three Republican candidates for the Assembly from Manhattan had pledged to vote to extend the rent laws. And John R. Nugent, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, told the commission, “We will do everything we can to put them over.” Indeed, in a rare case of bipartisanship, the Republican minority on the Board of Aldermen joined the Democratic majority and unanimously adopted a resolution urging the legislators to extend the rent laws, stressing, wrote the Times, that “over 100,000 families would be at the mercy of ‘unprincipled and profiteering’ landlords if the rent restrictions were removed.”21 The commission submitted its report, which ran more than one hundred pages, in late December. It found that conditions in New York City had improved since March 1925, when it had issued its interim report. By virtue of the recent surge in

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residential construction, a surge that was “without precedent,” there were roughly 20 percent more apartments now than in 1920. The commission also reported that the number of vacant apartments was rising, even “approaching the pre-war normal.” According to the Tenement House Department’s annual census, the vacancy rate had climbed from 0.37 percent in 1923 to 2.23 percent in January 1925. And based on systematic surveys of selected neighborhoods, one made by the commission, another by the West Side Taxpayers Association, and yet another by the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, it was now somewhere between 4.5 and 5.5 percent (and perhaps a little higher). Since 1923, the commission found, average rents had increased only 4.5 percent, largely because tenants who had moved in the previous year or two were paying 30 percent more than tenants who had stayed put since 1919, and market rents had not gone up at all. The turnover rate was on the increase as well, indicating that there was “greater freedom of movement now than there was in 1923.” Based on a survey of eight typical blocks, seven in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, all of which were occupied by workingmen and their families, there was good reason to believe that apartments were no more congested in 1925 than in 1923.22 Despite the surge in residential construction, however, the commission found that only 2.4 percent of the apartments completed in 1924 rented for less than $12.50 a room per month and only 19.7 percent for less than $15.50. In other words, nearly all the new apartments were well beyond the reach of most New Yorkers. Although the vacancy rate was approaching normal, the commission reported, many of the vacant apartments were not suitable for “human habitation.” As an indication of the wretched conditions in these apartments, it pointed to a rundown, “ill-lighted and poorly ventilated” tenement house on the Lower East Side that was fully occupied even though its “halls were wet and slimy,” its “court yard was covered with refuse,” and its fire escapes were “so old and begrimed” that they were scarcely recognizable. Market rents may have reached their peak in June 1924, but they were still 100 percent higher in 1925 than in 1914. And the rent laws notwithstanding, average rents were 68 percent higher. If the laws were allowed to expire on February 15, 1926, the commission pointed out, the landlords would demand market rates. In half of the apartments that were covered by the rent laws the increase would come to 30 percent, in one-quarter as much as 65 percent. Such an increase would result in “untold misery” for millions of New Yorkers who would find themselves in the same bind in 1926 that they had been in shortly after World War I. Indeed, the commission concluded, “A sudden readjustment could be made in most cases only by so drastic a reduction in the standard of living as to work irreparable damage to public health and welfare.”23 On the basis of these findings the commission recommended that the state gradually “de-control” rents, a measure that would facilitate “the return to a free market.” It should extend the rent laws until June 1, 1927, but only in New York, Buffalo, Albany, and Yonkers. Given that there was no longer a shortage of highpriced housing even in these cities, the laws should expire on June 1, 1926, or well

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after winter was over, for apartments that rented on December 31, 1925, for twenty dollars a room in New York and fifteen dollars a room in the other three cities. To prevent undue hardship during the process of “de-control,” it urged the legislature to empower municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to six months in holdover proceedings where “it appears” that a tenant who had made “a reasonable effort” was unable to find “a suitable dwelling” in the neighborhood. Last, the commission suggested that the emergency rent laws be revised so that a holdover tenant could no longer “remain in occupancy” as long as he saw fit or “move out at will,” an arrangement that was a sore point with many landlords. It also served notice that “as changing conditions permit,” it would recommend “further steps toward de-control as may be warranted.”24 Governor Smith sent the commission’s report to the state legislature in early January. Although he was under intense pressure to extend the rent laws, he was inclined to let the legislature take the lead. Indeed, in his annual message he said much less about the need for rent control—which he stressed did not “go to the heart of the housing problem”—than about the need for low-income housing, which he proposed to meet by empowering the cities to issue tax-exempt bonds, the proceeds of which would be loaned to limited-dividend companies that were willing to construct dwellings for working people. The governor’s decision not only reflected his belief that the housing problem could only be solved by building homes, but also a realization that the political situation in the state had changed since the November election. Smith won reelection by 110,000 votes, defeating Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the son of the late president. But the victory was very much a personal achievement, one, wrote the Times, that “demonstrated his unrivaled hold upon the affection and confidence of this city and State.” With Calvin Coolidge, the Republican presidential candidate, carrying New York State by almost 870,000 votes, the Republicans not only won the lieutenant governor’s office and other statewide positions, but also regained control of the Senate, where they held twenty-nine out of fifty-one seats, and increased their majority in the Assembly, where they outnumbered the Democrats nearly two to one. Thus whether the rent laws were extended beyond February 15, 1926, depended largely on the Republican legislators.25 No sooner did the 1926 legislative session get under way than Senator Michael E. Reiburn, a Democrat who represented the Upper West Side, introduced a bill to extend the rent laws until February 1928—not, as the Stein Commission recommended, until June 1927. To protect the many New Yorkers who rented high-priced apartments that would be “de-controlled” under the commission’s plan, the Reiburn bill covered apartments that rented for more than twenty dollars a room. Before the month was over, nearly a dozen related bills had been introduced in both houses, the most important of which was filed by Senator Courtlandt Nicoll, a Manhattan Republican who supported nearly all the commission’s main recommendations. These bills—some of which extended the rent laws for one year, others for two years,

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and at least one for longer, and some of which covered all apartments and others only apartments that rented for less than twenty dollars a room—set the stage for what the World predicted would be a “bitter struggle.” “The heat of the controversy may well assuage the cold winds of an Albany winter,” it said. Things were also warming up in New York City, where the spokesmen for the landlords and tenants were engaged in a heated debate over the validity of the commission’s findings and the logic of its recommendations.26 The issue came to a head on February 2, when the Senate and Assembly committees on the judiciary held a joint hearing on the Nicoll and other bills. Although the Assembly chamber was jammed, wrote the Times, there was nothing like “the frenzy and bitterness of other years when supporters of two factions have almost come to blows and the din and turmoil have been audible a block or more in either direction from the capitol.” It was “a welcome change,” remarked the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide. Spokesmen for the landlords argued that there was no longer a housing shortage. “If there is no shortage of houses then what excuse is there for the extension of [the rent] laws?” asked A. C. McNulty. “If you [are] think[ing] of extending the rent laws leave Brooklyn out,” said Arthur W. Hilton, executive secretary of the Brooklyn Real Estate Board. “We have a large surplus of housing.” Spokesmen for the tenants strongly disagreed. Pointing out that 90 percent of the new apartments were out of reach for 75 percent of New Yorkers, Charles Marks urged the legislators to extend the rent laws for two years. So did John P. Holland, president of the New York State Federation of Labor. In defense of the commission’s proposals, Stein pointed out that many New Yorkers who lived on “limited incomes” still needed “the protection of the emergency rent laws.” “If these laws are swept away,” he said, “these people would find themselves in worse conditions than they were in before the statutes were enacted,” which “is not true of persons who can afford to pay more than $20 per room per month.”27 As the Times reported, most spokesmen for the landlords seemed to believe that the Nicoll bill was “the best they could get.” So did many spokesmen for the tenants. There were, however, a few exceptions. The Brooklyn Real Estate Board, which had opposed the rent laws since their inception, attempted to block the extension of the laws by arguing that the commission’s report was deeply flawed, that its findings were based largely on the testimony of social workers and other witnesses who knew nothing about housing. Senator Reiburn and Assemblyman Joseph A. Gavagan, another Democrat who represented the Upper West Side, tried to block the exemption of high-priced apartments by introducing a concurrent resolution calling for another legislative investigation of the housing problem in New York and other big cities. Neither effort made any headway. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported out the Nicoll bill, and the upper house passed it without a dissenting vote. The bill then went to the Assembly, where it ran into a good deal of opposition from several New York City Democrats who objected to the exclusion of apartments that rented for twenty dollars a room and up. Denouncing it as “class legislation of the worst type,” Gavagan warned that it would bring “untold hardships” to the many “white

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collar” workers who would now be “at the mercy” of their landlords. But speaking for his fellow Democrats, all of whom believed “that half a loaf was better than none,” wrote the Times, J. S. Berg pointed out that they had no choice but “to vote for it.” And on February 10, five days before the emergency rent laws were due to expire, Governor Smith signed the Nicoll bill into law.28 A. Spencer Fuld and several other assemblymen, Republicans as well as Democrats, were concerned that the Nicoll bill, which became chapter 6 of the Laws of 1926, would not withstand judicial scrutiny. So was Senator Reiburn, who stressed that a measure that imposed rent control on some apartments but not on others would be “fraught with great doubt as to its constitutionality.” But most lawyers believed the Nicoll bill would pass judicial muster. A case in point was Julius Henry Cohen. In January 1926 he advised Senator Nicoll that if it was reasonable for the legislature to draw a distinction between residential and commercial property, it was reasonable for it to draw one between low-priced and high-priced apartments. Louis B. Marshall came to the same conclusion in October 1923, when he informed John M. Stoddard that he had no doubt but that the courts would allow the legislature to treat one class of apartments one way and another class another, provided “there is a reasonable basis for differentiating between the two.” Perhaps afraid that if they brought a test case they would lose—or maybe aware that if they won it would not be before the emergency rent laws were supposed to expire—the real estate interests did not challenge chapter 6 on constitutional grounds.29 It was just as well. In February 1927 the Appellate Term of the Second Department handed down a decision that revealed that the courts would probably have ruled against them. The case arose when Nathan Blauweis brought summary proceedings against William Kirschner. Kirschner’s lawyer argued that chapter 6 prevented the landlord from ousting his client, a holdover tenant who was paying nineteen dollars a month for a five-room apartment in Brooklyn. Blauweis’s attorney responded that chapter 6 had been repealed by chapter 842, a statute that empowered the municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to six months to a holdover tenant against whom a final order had been issued. (This measure, which had been recommended by the Stein Commission, was passed by the legislature in April 1926, and signed by the governor in May.) When Judge Charles J. Carroll ruled in favor of Blauweis, Kirschner appealed. The Appellate Term reversed Carroll’s ruling and ordered a new trial. Writing for the court, Harry E. Lewis held that there was nothing in the record to indicate that the legislature intended to repeal chapter 6 when it enacted chapter 842. Nor was there anything in chapter 842 that impaired contractual obligations or deprived the landlord of property without due process of law. Chapter 842 notwithstanding, Kirschner was still covered by the emergency rent laws. And until June 1, 1927, so were most other New York City tenants whose apartments rented for less than twenty dollars a room.30 Chapter 6 was widely viewed as a victory for the tenants, most of whom were protected by the rent laws for another fifteen and a half months. But because

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the statute exempted apartments that rented for twenty dollars a room or more after May 31, 1926, the victory came at a high price—a price that would be paid not so much by the well-to-do, who, as Clarence Stein pointed out, could take care of themselves, as by the less well off. By exempting apartments that rented for twenty dollars per room or more, chapter 6 reduced the number of New Yorkers who had a stake in rent control. It is true that only about 10 percent of the city’s apartments rented for as much as twenty dollars per room. But if the legislature could exempt apartments that rented for twenty dollars a room, it could exempt apartments that rented for fifteen dollars a room, as it did in the case of Buffalo, Albany, and Yonkers, which would decontrol 20 percent of the apartments. And it could exempt apartments that rented for ten dollars a room, which would de-control 30 percent. If it did, the beneficiaries of rent control, which had once included many middle- and upper-middle-class New Yorkers, would now consist almost entirely of workingclass New Yorkers. From a political perspective, said Senator Reiburn, the Nicoll bill “amounts to nothing more than a first step toward a final and complete removal from the statute books of the rent laws as they now exist.”31 Even its supporters acknowledged that the Nicoll bill had a serious drawback. Shortly before it was enacted, the World asked, “Does it [the legislature] believe that during 1926 the contractors will provide an adequate supply of apartments at less than $20 [a room] a month? Does it think that even four or five years hence there will be an adequate supply of good, cheap, $15-a-month rooms?” If it did, it was severely mistaken. “Regulation is commendable in an emergency,” the World went on. “But we are getting beyond the emergency and coming face to face with the chronic housing problem that New York has never solved.” It was not for lack of trying, Governor Smith said. The Reconstruction Commission’s Housing Committee had studied the problem; so had the Lockwood Committee and the Stein Commission. Indeed, Smith wrote in early 1926, “The whole question has been investigated, and re-investigated, and investigated all over again.” Yet there was still a shortage of decent low-income housing in New York. And many of the city’s “dark, ill-ventilated, overcrowded, unsafe tenement houses” were still standing, “a menace to the health and morals of the community.” The time for “temporizing” was over, Smith told the legislature. It was now up to public authority to do what private enterprise could not: provide much-needed housing for low-income families, and rebuild the state’s many congested and unsanitary neighborhoods, especially New York City’s Lower East Side.32 Under a plan that was described in brief in the governor’s annual message to the legislature, which was delivered in early January and spelled out at length in the Stein Commission’s fourth (and, it turned out, final) report, which was submitted in mid-February, the state would enact a law to stimulate the construction of housing “within congested areas for wage earners by private capital at reasonable rents.” (The law, which was drafted by Julius Henry Cohen, defined “reasonable rents” as $12.50 per room in Manhattan; $11.00 in Brooklyn and the Bronx; $10.00 in Queens and Staten Island, as well as in other big cities; and $9.00 elsewhere in the state.) To

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carry out this ambitious plan, the law called for the establishment of a State Housing Board, a State Housing Bank, and a number of limited-dividend housing companies. The Housing Board would be empowered to designate neighborhoods in which private enterprise could not provide wholesome accommodations for wage earners at reasonable rents. The board would then enter into an agreement with the limiteddividend companies, which, in return for the opportunity to erect and manage the buildings, would be required to raise one-third of the capital, charge the statutory rents, and pay no more than 6 percent a year to stockholders. The project would also have to be approved by the Housing Bank, which was authorized to issue bonds, the proceeds from the sale of which would provide the other two-thirds of the capital, and in the event that the owners were unwilling to sell, take their property by eminent domain. If the cities and towns were so inclined, they could exempt the new housing from property taxes.33 The plan, which was submitted to the legislature in late February and incorporated into bills that were filed by Senator Bernard Downing and Assemblyman Maurice Bloch, was extremely controversial. Although supported by the tenants associations, it was opposed by the real estate interests, which saw it is as “a radical departure in public policy.” More than anything else, the Real Estate Board and other like-minded groups objected to the State Housing Bank, especially to the provisions that authorized it to lend public credit to private parties and to take property from one owner and give it to another. As they saw it, the bank was unconstitutional. Even worse, it smacked of socialism. From the start, the Republican leaders made it clear that they would not go along with the governor’s plan. Before long they endorsed a substitute bill. Introduced by Senator Nicoll and Assemblyman Samuel H. Hofstadter, it included some features of the Smith plan, notably the State Housing Board and limited-dividend companies, but made no provision for the State Housing Bank. Over the opposition of such groups as the Brooklyn Real Estate Board, which pointed out that there were plenty of apartments available at $10.00 to $12.50 a room (and, on the Lower East Side, even at three to five dollars a room), the legislature passed the Nicoll-Hofstadter bill in April. The governor signed it into law in May. Although he conceded the bill was “not perfect,” he praised it as “the beginning of a lasting movement to wipe out of our State those blots upon civilization,” the old-law tenements that have long been “unfit for human habitation.”34 Shortly after the Nicoll-Hofstadter Law went into effect, the Stein Commission was replaced by the State Board of Housing, whose mandate was to promote lowincome housing and slum clearance. According to the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, its members were “as well qualified to undertake the work as any set who could be induced to accept places on the [board].” The chair was Darwin R. James, who was appointed after negotiations between the governor and Republican Party leaders. President of Brooklyn’s East River Savings Bank (and at one time leader of the Kings County Republican Party), James had worked with Alfred T. White, the pioneer model tenement builder, and served as president of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities. Joining James were Oliver Cabana, Jr., the Buffalo industrialist who was a

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holdover from the Stein Commission; State Architect Sullivan W. Jones, another holdover who served ex officio; Aaron Rabinowitz, the head of Spear & Co., one of New York’s leading real estate firms, and an advocate of cooperative housing for working people; Louis H. Pink, a lawyer who had once headed the United Neighborhood Guild Settlement and later chaired the Housing Committee of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce; and John Halkett, who had been elected president of the Building Trades Council of New York a few years earlier. Serving as the board’s secretary was George Gove, who had been chief of staff for the Stein Commission.35 As the successor to the Stein Commission, the State Board of Housing had the unenviable task of advising the governor and the legislature whether the rent laws should be extended beyond May 31, 1927. To that end it held two days of hearings at City Hall in mid-February. On the first day the spokesmen for the tenants, all of whom favored the extension of the rent laws, told the board that conditions were as bad as ever. In order to pay the rent, families were doubling up, children were going without food, and old folks were moving into poorhouses. The situation was especially grim on the Lower East Side, where many tenants were living in fifty-year-old rookeries that had been condemned, wrote the Times, “as unsanitary and uninhabitable [long] before the rent laws were passed.” Nothing had been done in recent years to help families that could not pay more than twelve dollars a room per month, said Agnes Craig. Another witness added that the landlords were telling their tenants, “Wait until the rent laws lapse in June and we will give you the trimming of your lives.” Judge Jacob Panken held that the rent laws should be extended, as did Deputy Health Commissioner Shirley W. Wynne and Manhattan Buildings Superintendent Charles Brady, who told the board that there was still a housing shortage in Manhattan for all but the well-to-do. But Brooklyn Buildings Superintendent Albert Kleinert, who pointed out that plenty of apartments were available in Brooklyn at $7 to $40 per room, disagreed. So did Bronx Buildings Superintendent Patrick J. Reville, who claimed that many apartments were available in the Bronx at fifteen dollars per room and added that some landlords who were asking twenty dollars a room were offering one or two months’ free rent to prospective tenants.36 On the second day of the hearings the spokesmen for the landlords, all of whom opposed the extension of the rent laws, told the board that the housing shortage was over. There were, they said, plenty of vacant apartments in every borough, some of which rented for as little as five to six dollars per room, which was well within the reach of most New Yorkers. There were even many vacancies in Manhattan’s old-law tenements, a result in part of the federal government’s decision to restrict immigration and in part of the former residents’ decision to move into new-law tenements in the outer boroughs. Indeed, said John H. Hallock, whose firm managed many oldlaw tenements on the Lower East Side, he had nearly five hundred vacant apartments, most of which rented for six to eleven dollars a room. For the first time in years, these witnesses testified, many Lower East Side landlords were repairing and decorating apartments, installing bathrooms and electric lighting, and offering concessions, all in an attempt to retain old tenants and attract new ones. Responding

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to witnesses who had testified the day before that many of the tens of thousands of vacant apartments were virtually uninhabitable, Edward P. Doyle told the board that these apartments were no worse than the houses of the poor in Ireland and Holland, where his ancestors had come from. He then went on to say that they were even better than the houses of the poor elsewhere in Europe, from which the parents and grandparents of most New Yorkers had come—a remark, wrote the Times, that “brought hisses from the tenants and applause from the property owners.”37 The hearings revealed that there were no grounds for “a further extension of the Emergency Rent Laws,” declared the Record and Guide. It was true that so far as the poor were concerned, housing conditions were “unsatisfactory” and “in some instances deplorable.” But the rent laws had done nothing to alleviate these conditions in the past. Nor was there reason to believe they would do much in the future. Pointing out that New York now had 61,000 vacant apartments, up from just over 1,500 in 1921, the Record and Guide insisted that the emergency on which the rent laws were based “no longer exists.” Now that the vacancy rate was approaching 5.2 percent, up from just under 3.5 percent a year earlier, the Board of Housing had no choice but to recommend that the legislature allow the rent laws to expire on June 1. Many tenants, some of whom told the board about the appalling conditions under which they lived, did not agree. Neither did the New York Age, one of the city’s few African American newspapers, which wrote that conditions in Harlem were as bad as they had been when the rent laws were enacted and that very few apartments with heat and hot water were available at ten to twelve dollars per room. Given that no housing was being built for working people, many of whom were already paying the landlord more than they could afford, the Age urged the board to recommend that the rent laws be extended to include apartments that rented for less than fifteen dollars a room.38 By the time the Board of Housing held its hearings, Assemblyman Louis A. Cuvillier, a Manhattan Democrat, and about half a dozen other legislators had filed bills to extend the emergency rent laws. Many of them were referred to the Assembly Judiciary Commission, which held hearings in early February. Although not packed, the hearings were tumultuous—so much so that Chairman Edmund B. Jenks, no friend of the rent laws, had to pound his gavel on more than a few occasions. When Stewart Browne tried to shout “above the thumps of the gavel,” wrote the Times, Jenks suggested that he file, not read, his testimony. Spokesmen for the tenants argued that if the emergency rent laws were allowed to expire, many New Yorkers would “find their rents suddenly raised and themselves on the streets.” Spokesmen for the landlords countered that the housing shortage was over. Citing the Tenement House Department’s figures, Isidor Berger pointed out that there were now more than 60,000 vacant apartments in New York, more than twice as many as a year earlier. “I challenge Mr. Cuvillier to go with me through his own district” in East Harlem, added Reuben J. Wittstein, “and I will find a vacancy in practically every house.” Reminding the board that the legislature had exempted apartments that rented for twenty dollars per room and up from the rent laws a year earlier, Edward

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P. Doyle asked, “Did anything happen? Was there any protest?” “No!” he said. Now that the emergency was over, “How can the legislature justify an[other] extension of the Rent Laws?”39 Although many legislators had reservations about extending the rent laws, most said they intended to wait for the Board of Housing’s report before making a decision. Wait they did, as the board held another round of hearings in Albany and Buffalo and then reviewed the testimony and exhibits. It was not until mid-March, about a month later than expected, that the board issued its report. It found that vacancy rates had almost reached prewar levels, market rents were no longer rising, and the “bargaining power” of the tenants was nearly back to normal. “If present forces continue to operate as they have in the past year, no further control will be needed.” But the board also found that there was still a shortage of low-priced apartments—and that the expiration of the rent laws would do “irreparable damage to the health and welfare [of a great many tenants].” Hence it recommended that in the meantime the legislature adhere to the policy of gradual decontrol that had been devised by the Stein Commission and extend the emergency rent laws for one year, though only in the case of apartments that rented for fifteen dollars a room per month or less in New York and seven dollars a room per month or less in Buffalo. (It should let them expire in Albany and Yonkers, where there was “no evidence of a housing emergency.”) As a concession to the landlords, who had long complained that that after the Rosenman Act was passed many tenants had moved into new apartments, withheld the rent, and then invoked chapter 944, the board also recommended that if the rent laws were extended they should apply only to current tenants.40 Governor Smith, who had been reelected in November 1926, endorsed the report, saying that it “shows the wisdom of having a fact-finding body like the Board of Housing,” and urged the legislature to enact its recommendations. But the real estate interests took strong exception to it. As the Greater New York Taxpayers Association wrote, it “was entirely political and against the weight of the evidence.” “All that the rent laws accomplish now,” complained the association’s president, “is to keep in smug protection that tenant who rented his apartment at a pre-war rental, which under present circumstances is ruinious [sic] to the owner.” The Brooklyn Real Estate Board added that no Brooklyn tenants organization was in favor of an extension. The so-called emergency “is confined to a small segment of Manhattan where, due more to living customs than housing conditions, a situation exists which may be temporarily relieved by philanthropy but will never be remedied by law. And that situation existed long before any housing shortage appeared.” The representatives of these and other real estate groups gathered in Albany, where they argued that with so many vacant apartments there was no need to extend the rent laws and, wrote the Times, vowed “to continue their fight right up to the closing day of the session.” But despite their lobbying, “it was expected that the bills carrying out the State Board’s recommendations will be passed by the Legislature with little opposition,” observed the Record and Guide.41

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In the end the board’s recommendations were incorporated into a bill that was filed by Senator Leonard R. Lipowicz, a Republican from Buffalo. Without a dissenting vote, the Senate passed it on March 2, and the Assembly followed suit two days later. It was all politics, wrote the Real Estate Magazine of New York. Many legislators opposed the Lipowicz bill, but under pressure from the Republican leadership it was passed “to prevent the Democratic organization [by which it meant Tammany Hall] from claiming that the Republicans had prevented an extension of the [rent] law[s].” The Record and Guide saw things in much the same way. The rent laws, it declared, “have been useful in producing votes on election day year after year,” but they have done little or nothing to build houses and reduce rents. Over the objections of Stewart Browne and other real estate men, some of whom threatened to challenge the constitutionality of the measure, Governor Smith signed the Lipowicz bill into law on April 2, thereby providing protection for a good many New Yorkers and Buffalonians, but further reducing the number of tenants who had a stake in rent control. The extension of the rent laws troubled many New Yorkers other than the real estate men. If an emergency still exists after several years of “exceptional prosperity,” wrote the Times, it is here to stay. “In fact, then, if not in name, we have Government control of rents” not as a temporary arrangement but as a permanent policy.42 As the Board of Housing expected, the surge of residential construction continued at a record pace in 1927. Driving it were the speculative builders, who had little trouble raising capital and found it easy to sell their buildings at a profit as soon as they were finished. As a result, rents were no longer rising, though they were not falling either. As Douglas L. Elliman, whose firm dealt mainly with Upper East Side property, pointed out, some landlords were offering concessions, but New Yorkers “who expect to obtain high class apartments at prewar prices will be disappointed.” Under the circumstances it was probable that the Board of Housing would recommend that the emergency rent laws be allowed to expire. But it was possible that it would favor retaining them, though only in the case of apartments that rented for, say, ten dollars a room or less. Even if the board advised complete decontrol, it was not clear that the legislature would follow its advice. Nor was it clear that the governor, who was in the middle of his fourth (and, in view of his presidential aspirations, almost certainly his final) term would support the expiration of the rent laws. As the Times observed, rent control in New York had become a “habit” that would be hard to break.43 The Board of Housing started its investigation in early January and, though it did not hold hearings, finished in late February. In the meantime a host of legislators, at least twelve and perhaps as many as seventeen, filed bills to extend the rent laws for another year. There was a good deal of support for these bills, especially in New York City. In late January John R. Davies, a former municipal court judge and Republican candidate for Manhattan borough president, said that many low-income New Yorkers still needed the protection of the rent laws. Even if limited to apartments

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that rented for twelve to thirteen dollars a room, they should be extended for at least one more year. A week and a half later the Board of Aldermen pointed out that a shortage of “moderate priced tenement houses still exists in the congested sections of the city” and unanimously adopted a resolution in favor of the extension of the rent laws. There was also a good deal of opposition to these bills, not only from property owners in New York City, but also from legislative leaders in Albany. A good example was Assemblyman Edmund B. Jenks. Sending a message to the many New York City assemblymen who, wrote the Record and Guide, “make it a practice of re-introducing Rent Law extensions each year [for political purposes],” he declared that after looking at the situation in the metropolis, “I have been unable to discover any shortage of housing that would justify the extension of these statutes under any form.” He made it plain “that landlord-baiting will not be allowed to continue this year as the favorite indoor sport of legislators seeking to coddle the tenant vote.”44 The issue came to a head when the Board of Housing submitted its report in late February 1928. Since its previous report, it wrote, there had been “further improvement in the general housing situation in New York City.” Residential construction was booming. Between October 1, 1926, and October 1, 1927, there was a net increase of more than 94,000 apartments, with more than 74,000 in new-law tenements and the rest in one- and two-family houses. For every one thousand New Yorkers, there were now 301 apartments, up from 286 in 1926 (and as few as 235 in 1921). As a result of the boom in residential construction (and the slowdown of European immigration), the number of vacant apartments, which had been as low as 8,000 as recently as January 1924, soared from fewer than 61,000 in January 1927 to more than 83,000 in January 1928. And the vacancy rate, which was less than 1 percent in January 1924, climbed from less than 5.2 percent in January 1927 to more than 6.6 percent in January 1928, which was almost as high as it had been in February 1909, when it had reached a peak of nearly 8.1 percent. Among the other signs that conditions were improving was that in eight selected blocks—the same blocks that had been surveyed by the Reconstruction Commission, the Stein Commission, and the State Housing Board—market rents were going down somewhat, turnover rates were going up slightly, and overcrowding was not quite as bad in January 1928 as it had been in January 1927.45 Not all the news was good, the board acknowledged. Roughly 1.8 million New Yorkers still lived in old-law tenements, many of which “were condemned as unfit for habitation over twenty-five years ago.” And in the state’s other big cities many tenants were still housed in “sub-standard, unsanitary, inadequate dwellings which are in themselves a direct and constant menace to public health and welfare.” The reason, the board went on, was that there was still a shortage of apartments that rented for less than fifteen dollars a room. But that was “not a temporary condition”— a point that many real estate men had been making for several years. Nor had it “arise[n] out of the economic adjustments following the war.” Rather it was a chronic problem, “for which a permanent, constructive solution can be found only in the advancement of the present housing policy of the State.” Leaving no doubt

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about where it stood, the board concluded, “The ‘public emergency,’ in the meaning of the law, and on the basis of which the Rent Laws were sustained by the Courts, no longer exists.” And “the time has arrived when further emergency rent legislation cannot be justified.” The board therefore recommended that the rent laws, which “now applied to New York City and to Buffalo, be permitted to lapse automatically on May 31st, 1928.” To provide “a measure of relief” for the 700,000 New Yorkers who would no longer enjoy the protection of these laws, the board also recommended that chapter 842, which empowered the courts to grant a stay of up to six months to holdover tenants until May 31, 1928, be reenacted “without time limitation.”46 By early March it seemed that the emergency rent laws were doomed. None of the dozen bills that were referred to the Assembly Judiciary Committee came to a vote, partly because Chairman Jenks opposed them and partly because their supporters feared that if they came to a vote they would be defeated. Instead the bills were sent to the Assembly Rules Committee, which had long been regarded as a legislative “morgue,” from which, wrote the Record and Guide, “there is small chance of any of them being reported out.” A few other bills were languishing in the Senate Committee on Cities. With the legislature hoping to adjourn by March 16— and with the lawmakers, who, wrote the Times, were in a hurry “to get back home,” wrestling with a revision of the Tenement House Act and other controversial measures—the Record and Guide predicted that “the Rent Laws will be allowed to lapse.” The Times agreed. The bills providing for an extension of these laws “will be sent to the scrap heap without much ceremony.” There was a chance that Governor Smith would send a special message urging the legislature to extend the rent laws for one more year. But in light of the Board of Housing’s report, it was remote. Even Assemblyman Abraham Grenthal, who was bitterly disappointed with the board’s report, said he would no longer press for legislation to extend the rent laws. Something would have to be done to prevent the landlords from taking advantage of the tenants, he said, “but I do not know just what it should be.”47 In mid-March, however, Senator John J. Dunnigan, a Bronx Democrat, and Assemblyman Phelps Phelps, a Manhattan Republican, made a last-ditch effort to extend the emergency rent laws. To sidestep Assemblyman Jenks, they urged the Senate Committee on Cities to hold a hearing on the bills that had been referred to it. Even though the Board of Housing had recently released a supplemental report in which it again voiced its opposition to an extension of the rent laws, the Committee on Cities agreed. The turnabout reflected not only the mounting pressure of the tenants organizations, but also a change of heart by Speaker of the Assembly Joseph A. McGinnies and other Republican leaders. According to the Times, the Republicans feared that if they followed the Board of Housing’s recommendation, the Democrats would try “to make political capital” out of it. They may also have thought that by extending the rent laws they might embarrass the governor, who was likely to be the Democratic candidate for president in 1928, “by compelling him to choose between the loss of tenants’ votes and [the] repudiation of the Housing Board, whose members he appointed.” (It was also possible, wrote the Record and

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Guide, that the legislators were reluctant “to lose a campaign issue which has been translated into votes so successfully since 1920.”) The Republican leaders were aware that in view of the board’s report the courts might rule that an extension of the rent laws was unconstitutional. But according to the Times, their attitude seemed to be, “Let the tenants take their chances in the courts.”48 The Committee on Cities, which was chaired by Senator James L. Whitley, an upstate Republican, held what the Times called “a stormy public hearing” on March 14. “Don’t play politics,” Reuben J. Wittstein told the legislators. “If there is an emergency, all right. But if you don’t believe the Housing Board report, go through the [lower] east side and see for yourself.” “For eight years we have been patient,” said Frank De Muth, a leader of the West Side Taxpayers Association. “We were with you to begin with. We never wanted to gouge. But now the laws are no longer necessary, and we want to control our own property.” Among the other witnesses who urged the legislators to allow the emergency rent laws to expire were Edward P. Doyle, Stewart Browne, and Henry F. A. Wolf, a spokesman for the Bronx Taxpayers Association. In favor of extending the rent laws was Agnes Craig, who testified that the board’s own figures showed that 52 percent of the 83,000 vacant apartments “are in substandard buildings that are not fit for human habitation.” If so, the vacancy rate was only 3.4 percent—and among apartments covered by the rent laws only 1.5 percent. “If this does not constitute an emergency, what does?” Moreover, if the rent laws were to lapse on May 31, she warned, 700,000 New Yorkers would face eviction. Among the other spokesmen for the tenants was Lucille Zeumer of the Academy Tenants Association, which represented several thousand tenants who lived on the Upper West Side between 96th and 125th streets. The rent laws were needed more now than in 1920, she told the committee. “The men at least had jobs then. Now we have bread lines reaching for blocks. Today the landlords are shaking their fists in our faces and saying, ‘Next June you will go out on your ear.’ ”49 The Real Estate Board and other organizations sent a delegation to the Committee of Cities hearing. Following the hearing, Doyle, Browne, and several others remained in Albany to lobby against the extension of the rent laws. It did no good. The Republican leadership had already decided that it was too risky for the party to allow the rent laws to expire in a year in which not only the legislature but also the presidency and other offices were up for grabs. Bringing the recalcitrant legislators into line was Speaker McGinnies, whose word, wrote the Times, was “virtually law in the Lower house.” Joining him was John Knight, another upstate Republican and president pro tem of the Senate. Although Knight had hitherto opposed the extension of the rent laws—and in light of the Board of Housing’s finding that the emergency was over, now believed an extension would not be sustained by the courts—he had little choice but to come around. As the Times pointed out, the Democrats in the upper house were “to a man committed” to an extension of the rent laws. And though the G.O.P. held a narrow majority in the Senate, there were several Republican senators “who now aspire to State offices and who, if they thought voting in favor of the emergency rent law extension would improve their prospect

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of election, would not hesitate to do so.” Hence McGinnies, Knight, and their associates opted to take what one anonymous legislative leader called “the easiest way out” and, according to the Times, left it up to the governor to decide whether to extend the rent laws for another year “in the face of a recommendation to the contrary by the [State Board of] Housing.”50 On March 21, the next-to-last day of the session, the legislative leaders met with the sponsors of the bills to extend the rent laws and reached an agreement to go ahead with one filed by Assemblyman Grenthal. It was amended that evening and reported out by the Rules Committee. In the meantime the Senate Committee on Cities reported out what was known as the Dunnigan bill, which was identical to the Grenthal bill. Under both bills the emergency rent laws would be extended in New York until December 1, 1928, for apartments that rented for fifteen dollars a room per month or less and in New York and Buffalo until June 1, 1929, for apartments that rented for ten dollars a room per month or less. On the final day of the session the Grenthal and Dunnigan bills were brought to the floor of both houses, where they passed “by unanimous vote and without debate.” Also without dissent or debate, both houses passed another bill filed by Grenthal that extended the power of the municipal court judges to grant a stay of up to six months in cases where a landlord attempted to oust a tenant who refused to pay a rent increase. Reflecting the view of the real estate interests, the Record and Guide wrote that it would have been “logical” for the legislature to let the emergency rent laws “die a natural death,” but “the temptation to play politics proved too great.”51 Although Smith sent the emergency message that expedited the passage of what were now known as the Grenthal bills, he made it “perfectly clear,” noted the Times, that he had not yet decided whether to sign them. To help him decide, he announced that he would hold a hearing on March 28. At the hearing, which was well attended by both sides, the spokesmen for the landlords made another attempt to block the extension of the rent laws. Other than to argue that the legislature had been swayed by “purely political considerations,” they had nothing to say that they had not said before. Neither did the spokesmen for the tenants, who were confident that despite the Board of Housing’s report, the governor would side with them. From what he said at the hearing, it seemed that their confidence was justified. Smith observed that he had been very impressed by the board’s finding that the expiration of the rent laws would affect more than 700,000 New Yorkers whose only protection would be Grenthal’s six-month-discretionary-stay law. But as a result of faulty draftsmanship (or typographical errors, which, said the Times, “would be, to say the least, a trifle strange”), there was a good chance that this law would be struck down by the courts, he pointed out. If so, wrote the Times, “the situation would then revert to what it was before any emergency rent legislation was enacted.” Smith also stressed that the legislators had passed the Grenthal bills without a dissenting vote—and, in doing so, had made clear their preference for gradual decontrol.52 A week and a half later Smith signed the Grenthal bills. In a memorandum explaining his decision—a memorandum, wrote the Herald Tribune, in which he

Shortly after Governor Smith signed the Grenthal bill, Stewart Browne announced that the United Real Estate Owners Association intended to challenge it on constitutional grounds—and a few months later it did. The case, which was heard by municipal court judge James J. Fitzgerald, pitted Gertrude E. Krauth, a Bronx landlord, against August J. Wilson, who had been renting her four-room

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made “an ineffectual effort to clamber out of the deep pit which he had dug for himself when, heedlessly or otherwise, he transmitted the Housing Board’s finding to the Legislature without reservation or protest”—he acknowledged that the extension of the rent laws could no longer be based on “the continued existence of a great emergency.” But from what the Board of Housing and other agencies had told him, he was satisfied “that there must be a gradual decontrol and that we cannot terminate the protection of these laws without creating a most serious condition” for hundreds of thousands of tenants. In other words, Smith went on, “when we set up a new and drastic form of protection of tenants on account of an emergency due to lack of housing we cannot consistently throw these tenants out into the street or force them to move overnight without allowing a reasonable time for them to find vacant places into which they can move.” The legislature, he said, had acted wisely not only by extending the rent laws in New York and Buffalo, but also by empowering the municipal court judges to grant stays of up to six months in cases “where every effort has been made by the tenant to find other premises or where on account of family illness or some equally good reason it is impossible for him to move.” Commenting on the governor’s decision, one observer wrote that rent control in New York is “dying,” but it is “dying hard.”53 The real estate men were sorely disappointed by the governor’s decision. What, they wondered, was the point of establishing a fact-finding body and then disregarding its recommendations? The Herald Tribune agreed. In light of the Board of Housing’s report, it wrote, Smith should probably have vetoed the Grenthal bill. But the presidential election was approaching, and the governor was almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. So when the legislature, which “had an eye on the political calendar,” forced him to choose between its position and the board’s, he left James and his colleagues “in the lurch.” Although he “did not challenge the validity of the board’s findings,” he still signed the Grenthal bill. “But,” asked the Herald Tribune, “if the board is right that no emergency exists and if the theory holds good that legislative action must conform to administrative findings, what constitutional warrant is there for the law which the Governor signed?” If Smith wanted to give the tenants “an unassailable law,” he might have asked the board to revise its findings before the legislature acted. Or he might have argued that its findings were at odds with the facts. He might even have vetoed the bill and called the legislature back into session to reenact it on the basis of “a new and affirmative board finding.” Instead, wrote the Herald Tribune, “he has left the situation as muddled it was before.” If the courts found the bill unconstitutional, “the responsibility will be inevitably laid at the Governor’s door.”54

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apartment on Marion Avenue from her for $30 a month. Three weeks after the Grenthal law went into effect, Krauth notified Wilson that she was going to raise the rent to $40 a month on June 1. When Wilson refused to pay, Krauth took him to court. Representing Krauth (and the United Real Estate Owners Association, which the Times referred to as “an interested party”) was Bernard S. Deutsch, president of the Bronx Bar Association. Citing the Board of Housing’s finding that there was no longer an emergency, Deutsch argued that the legislature had exceeded its authority when it enacted the Grenthal law. Agnes Craig, who represented Wilson, responded that the board was merely a fact-finding body that had “no authority to draw conclusions as to whether or not an emergency existed.” She moved that the case be dismissed. Fitzgerald granted her motion, saying that so far as he was concerned the Grenthal law was constitutional. Hence the rent laws remained in effect—though after December 1 only in the case of apartments that rented for ten dollars a room or less.55 Judge Fitzgerald’s ruling set the stage for the sixth (and, it turned out, the last and least controversial) fight over the extension of the rent laws. After the legislative session opened in January 1929, Louis A. Cuvillier and nearly a dozen other New York City assemblymen filed bills to extend the rent laws for another year. The bills were referred to the Judiciary Committee, which consisted of thirteen members from upstate New York, most of whom were Republicans, and four from New York City. None of the bills made it out of committee. As Cuvillier reported, each was voted down by nine of the upstate legislators, all of whom took at face value the statements of New York City’s landlords that there was no longer an emergency. Cuvillier, who believed that an emergency still existed in the case of apartments that rented for as high as twenty dollars a room and feared that the city’s “avaricious landlords are only waiting for the present laws to expire so they can immediately raise the rents,” was frustrated that the fate of New York City’s tenants had been decided by a small group of upstate legislators. He was in complete agreement with Mayor James J. Walker, the Tammany stalwart, former assemblyman, Senate minority leader, and well-known bon vivant who succeeded James F. Hylan in 1926 and who, when reminded of the legislature’s refusal to extend the emergency rent laws, asked, “What do the gentlemen from Essex, Chautauqua or St. Lawrence counties know about conditions in New York City?”56 A savvy politician who had sat in the Assembly on and off since 1907, Cuvillier must have known that it took more than the opposition of a small group of upstate legislators to block the extension of the rent laws. Now that the 1928 election was over, the Republican leaders were disinclined to accommodate New York City’s lowincome tenants. And Franklin D. Roosevelt, the former Dutchess County state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, and Democratic vice presidential candidate who was elected governor in 1928, had more on his mind than rent control. In early March, moreover, the State Board of Housing released yet another report in which it found that housing conditions were improving, residential construction was booming, and vacancy rates were rising. The emergency rent laws would do nothing

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to provide decent housing for the more than 1.7 million New Yorkers who still lived in dilapidated old-law tenements, it declared. The spokesmen for the tenants had repeatedly warned that there would be widespread suffering and civil disorder if the rent laws were allowed to expire, said Stanley M. Isaacs. But what happened when the legislature exempted apartments that rented for twenty dollars a room or more? Nothing. “There was no sign of disturbance or hardship anywhere,” he pointed out. To say that there is still an emergency “deprives the word of any special force,” argued the Evening Post, and to enact laws to deal with it was “to endorse price fixing as a normal policy of legislation.”57 In the waning weeks of rent control, many New Yorkers shared Assemblyman Cuvillier’s concern that the landlords would soon start raising the rents and ousting the tenants and that the courts would be powerless to do anything about it. The real estate men acknowledged that in some cases the tenants had cause for concern. By virtue of the rent laws, Isaacs argued, many tenants were then paying “far less than a reasonable rent”—as little as 60 percent of the market rent, added William D. Kilpatrick, a veteran Manhattan real estate man. “Some rise will be inevitable,” Isaacs said. The tenants will be forced to pay a rent “more in keeping with market conditions” or move to less desirable buildings or neighborhoods, observed Benjamin M. Phillips. After the rent laws expire, the real estate men conceded, some landlords might bring summary proceedings in order to oust tenants whom they had long regarded as undesirable. Landlords are “only human,” said Kilpatrick. It was only to be expected that some “who have gone through the mill of mob rule; who have been despoiled of a return on their investment by judges and juries; who have been made the butt of insolence, ridicule and untold vandalism by the Bolshevik tenants in certain parts of the city [will,] with great enthusiasm and regardless of loss, fire out of their houses the firebrands, intimidators, ringleaders, [and] malcontents who have lived at the owners’ expense for [the past] nine years.”58 But in most cases, the real estate men insisted, the tenants had nothing to worry about. The expiration of the emergency rent laws “will pass without a ripple,” said Isaacs. Although in theory the landlords would be free to charge whatever they wished, in practice there would be no “general advance in rentals.” With so many vacant apartments renting for ten dollars a room or less, said a Manhattan real estate man, the landlords would be reluctant to do anything to drive out old tenants or drive away new ones. If they were foolish enough to raise the rents, reported the Times, they would “find their properties deserted for equally desirable suites now available in many parts of New York.” Even on the Lower East Side, rent hikes were unlikely, said Joseph Platzker, secretary of the East Side Chamber of Commerce. “We have in our files notices from several score property owners who are willing to lease their apartments for a year or more at the same price.” Henceforth rents will be a function of supply and demand, said Phillips. And given that supply now exceeds demand, the tenants can “pick and choose” where to live and how much to pay. The landlords can also be expected to keep their apartment houses in good repair, added a Brooklyn real estate man, not only because “a well-kept building” is more

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attractive to the tenants, but also because it “lasts longer and brings a better price when a sale is necessary.” Reflecting the view of most real estate men, Isaacs said that when rent control comes to end “both the landlord and tenant should breathe a sigh of relief.”59 On June 1, 1929, the Times reported that the emergency rent laws had expired at midnight May 31, nine years after they had been enacted. Strictly speaking, this was not true. Many of the rent laws were permanent, chief among them chapter 131, which provided that unless otherwise specified a tenancy did not expire until October 1; chapter 133, which required the landlord to prove that a tenant against whom he brought summary proceedings on the grounds that he was objectionable was in fact objectionable; and chapter 951, which made it a misdemeanor for a landlord to deprive a tenant of heat and other vital services. But at the core of the rent laws were the temporary statutes, notably chapters 942, 944, 945, and 947—and these statutes did indeed expire on June 1. Enacted in the aftermath of World War I, they were allowed to lapse on the eve of the Great Depression, when the market, to which New York’s rental housing had been returned, would be tested as never before in American history.60

EPILOGUE

The expiration of the emergency rent laws was not a problem for “the gentlemen from Essex, Chautauqua or St. Lawrence counties.” But what about the gentlemen from New York City? What about the mayor and the members of the Board of Aldermen and Board of Estimate, the vast majority of whose constituents were tenants? For them the political fallout of the legislature’s decision was a source of great concern. To deal with it, Alderman Charles H. McGillick, a Democrat from Harlem, introduced a bill in late May to impose rent control in New York after June 1. Drafted by Assemblyman Louis A. Cuvillier, the bill was designed to prevent the “unjust, unreasonable and oppressive agreements” that were “now being enacted by landlords from tenants,” creating “a public emergency” and “endangering the public welfare.” It provided that if a landlord sued a tenant for nonpayment of rent, the rent would be deemed unreasonable if it was higher than it was a year earlier. Under the bill the landlord was also required to file a bill of particulars. If it showed he was earning 8 percent or more, the judge was authorized to dismiss the case. Although some lawyers had doubts about the bill’s constitutionality, its supporters contended that it was “well within the home-rule powers of the city.”1 McGillick’s bill generated a good deal of support from tenants groups, among them the Harlem Tenants League. Afraid that the landlords would soon start raising the rents in Harlem—where there were very few vacant apartments and virtually none that rented for less than five dollars a room per month and not many that rented for ten dollars a room, and where many apartments were “unfit for human occupancy”—Richard B. Moore, the league’s president, led a parade and mass meeting on June 1. “Down with disease-breeding tenements and high rents,” read one of banners. “Down with segregation and discrimination against colored tenants,” said another. Also in favor of the bill were the Socialists, notably Norman

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Thomas, the former mayoral candidate, who called on city officials to pass a rent control law forthwith. According to reports, Tammany Hall intended to enact rent control eventually, Thomas said. “If eventually, why not now?” “Why give the landlords in Harlem and other districts a chance to add to the overcrowding and extortion that now prevail? Why, indeed, unless Tammany wants to please the landlords by the rents and the tenants by a belated and largely ineffective law?” Thomas also urged the city fathers to set up a municipal housing authority and empower it to build decent homes for working people.2 But McGillick’s bill also aroused a good deal of opposition, especially from the real estate interests. There may have been “a semblance of justification” to enact the emergency rent laws in 1920, the Greater New York Taxpayers Association declared. But there was no “vestige of such justification” to reenact them now. “The reports of fact finding committees and commissions have left no doubt that the emergency, which could be the only possible excuse for such a measure, long ago ceased to exist,” added the Real Estate Board. Pointing out that the Walker administration “knows that there is no emergency,” the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide denounced the proposed ordinance as “the saddest exhibition of political jugglery that one can conceive.” The Times agreed. In an editorial entitled “An Imaginary ‘Emergency’ ” it claimed that “there is no excuse for further extension of the emergency rent laws,” not with more than 50,000 apartments available at less than eight dollars a room and more than 10,000 available at less than five dollars a room. The Sun and the Herald were also critical of McGillick’s bill. So was the Post, which wrote that while the Board of Aldermen “may not know much about rents it knows a lot about politics. Especially does it know that there is an election of Mayor and other city officials this fall.”3 Concerned that some of the provisions of McGillick’s bill would not survive judicial scrutiny, Mayor Walker instructed his bill-drafting commissioner, William J. Cahill, to eliminate what the Times called “its more radical features.” As revised, the bill deleted any reference to an 8 percent return, exempted new apartment houses, and provided that the restrictions would expire on May 31, 1930. McGillick filed the revised version on June 11. At the same time the mayor sent an emergency message to the Board of Aldermen certifying “the necessity for the [bill’s] immediate passage.” The board promptly approved it by a unanimous vote. Alderman Edward W. Curley, a Bronx Democrat who pointed out that that the landlords were demanding huge rent hikes and that the courts were flooded with landlord-tenant disputes, was delighted. But the real estate men were dismayed. Speaking for the Real Estate Board, Edward P. Doyle protested that the ordinance was not limited to apartments that rented for ten dollars a room. “Under the terms of this bill, as I understand it,” he said, “tenants paying $20,000 a year can take their landlords into court and bargain with them.” Calling the ordinance “absolutely ridiculous,” Louis H. Pounds, president of the Brooklyn Real Estate Board, said that there were now more than 100,000 vacant apartments in New York City. “Do you suppose landlords would dare increase rents when all the aggrieved tenant has to do is to move into another apartment?” he asked.4

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On June 13 the Board of Estimate held a public hearing on the McGillick bill, a hearing, wrote the Times, that was “packed to suffocation.” Testifying against it were Doyle and other spokesmen for New York’s taxpayers, property owners, and real estate organizations, all of whom insisted that there was no housing shortage and thus no need for rent control. Speaking in favor of it were Alderman Edward W. Curley and other representatives of the tenants leagues, community councils, and welfare groups, one of whom pointed out that since the rent laws had expired many landlords had raised the rent 25 to 60 percent and brought scores of summary proceedings. Walker was sympathetic to the tenants. “We are simply trying to protect [them] against grasping landlords who intend to take advantage of the lapse of the State law,” he said. What harm would the bill do if the landlords have no intention of raising rents? he asked. In response to what the Times called “a storm of protest” from representatives of high-rent apartment houses, he held “a whispered conference” with Cahill, Curley, Controller Charles W. Berry, and Joseph V. McKee, president of the Board of Aldermen, out of which emerged an amendment that limited the bill to apartments whose rents had been fifteen dollars a room or less on May 31, 1929. The board adopted the amendment. It then passed the bill—which, it was estimated, would cover one-third of the city’s tenants, most of whom lived on the Lower East Side and in other low-rent neighborhoods.5 The amended bill aroused mixed feelings. “We are pretty well satisfied,” said Peter W. Grimm, president of the Real Estate Board, most of whose members dealt with apartments that rented for much more than fifteen dollars a room. But the West Side Taxpayers Association was not satisfied. Nor was the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, most of whose members owned the old-law tenements on the Lower East Side that were covered by the law. It was not fair to impose rent control on some landlords and not on others, a man who claimed to speak for “the poor landlords” shouted at the hearing. “This bill ought to be passed to include all classes of landlords,” he said. Frank Mann, a former Tenement House Commissioner and now a spokesman for low-income tenants, thought the amended bill was acceptable. So did most of the tenants who attended the hearing, scores of whom “broke into applause,” wrote the Times, when the mayor announced that it had passed. But Norman Thomas, who was nominated as the Socialist Party’s candidate for mayor a few days later, was extremely critical of the bill. He called the decision to limit it to apartments that rented for fifteen dollars a room or less “a surrender to the real estate interests,” another of the many outrages that Mayor Walker had “perpetrated against the workers of the city.” By failing to provide protection to tenants who were paying slightly more than fifteen dollars a room, the mayor has condemned “hundreds of thousands of families to live in old-law tenements unfit for human habitation,” Thomas declared.6 The bill was sent back to the Board of Aldermen, where it was supported not only by McGillick and Curley, who told his colleagues that many landlords were “lying in ambush, waiting for the State rent law to expire,” but also by two other powerful aldermen, Peter J. McGuinness of Brooklyn and William P. Sullivan of

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the Bronx, both of whom insisted that “a real emergency existed.” Under an emergency message from Mayor Walker, who wanted the issue resolved before the summer recess, the board passed the bill on June 18. A week later the mayor held a hearing at which both sides hammered away at the familiar points, with spokesmen for the landlords arguing that the housing emergency was long over and spokesmen for the tenants contending that the rapacious landlords had to be restrained. In support of the landlords’ position, two briefs were filed, one by Joseph F. Mann on behalf of the Building Owners and Managers Association of New York and the other by Joseph A. Keenan on behalf of the real estate boards of Brooklyn, Jamaica, Staten Island, and New York, the last of which had apparently changed its mind about the bill. In support of the tenants’ position, half a dozen women showed the mayor notices of rent hikes of 25 to 100 percent, accompanied, wrote the Times, by “written threats of eviction in the event of non-compliance.” Afterward McGillick told the mayor that these six women were only a few of the many thousands who were being threatened by their landlords. If they had all showed up, they would have filled City Hall plaza, he said.7 Walker had intended to announce his decision immediately after the hearing. But feeling obliged to look at the briefs filed in opposition to the bill, he decided to hold off. It made no difference; and as expected, he signed the bill on June 27. The real estate interests were disappointed, to say the least. Speaking for the Real Estate Board, Executive Vice-President Jones Wilder Mersereau wrote that under the McGillick Law it would be impossible for builders to erect apartment houses, charge low rents, and still earn a fair return on their investment. “To be sure,” he went on, “there is a shortage of good apartments at five to ten dollars a room.” But there is also a shortage of “ ‘two-for-five’ cigars, and two dollar orchestra seats, and of twocent a mile railroad travel, and five dollars a quart champagne . . . none of which will be restored by legislative action.” Speaking for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, Isidor Berger blamed the enactment of the McGillick Law on “political expediency” and above all on the upcoming election. With “an utter disregard for conditions as they actually exist” and with “the one and sole aim of pleasing the mass of voters,” the Walker administration had “sacrificed [the landlords] to the great idol of politics. “Thus,” he wrote, “with practically one stroke were the opinions of the Governor, the State Legislature, and the State Housing Commission brushed aside.” Thus was rent control reimposed in New York City.8 No sooner had McGillick introduced his bill than the Greater New York Taxpayers Association informed the Board of Aldermen that it would challenge the bill in court. In an attempt to head off its passage, the Real Estate Board and several other property owners’ organizations issued a similar threat. Their spokesmen were confident that the measure would be found unconstitutional. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, they pointed out, rent control was valid only during an emergency. And as the State Board of Housing had reported, the emergency was over. Also, under the home rule amendment of the New York State Constitution, the city officials did not have the authority to regulate rents, much less to revise summary

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proceedings; only the state legislature did. By mid-June, when it appeared that the McGillick bill was likely to be enacted, the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, Real Estate Board, and United Real Estate Owners Association all began making plans to challenge it on constitutional grounds. Believing that the measure could not withstand judicial scrutiny, they pressed ahead after Mayor Walker signed what would henceforth be known as Local Law No. 9. Before long two cases were pending in the state courts, one of which was brought by the Greater New York Taxpayers Association on behalf of a Bronx landlord named Gussie Zelmanowitz and the other by Ernest N. Adler, the owner of an apartment house on East 93rd Street and treasurer of the United Real Estate Owners Association. Several other cases were also pending in the municipal courts.9 By far the most important of these cases was Gennis v. Milano. The first to be decided, it pitted Ladi Gennis, who owned an apartment house on East 116th Street, against Edward Milano, a holdover tenant whose rent had been raised from $23 to $35 a month as soon as the emergency rent laws expired. When Milano refused to pay, Gennis brought summary proceedings in Manhattan’s Eighth District Court. The case was heard by Joseph S. Fontanelli, who had recently been appointed by Mayor Walker to fill in for an ailing judge. The facts were not in dispute. The apartment was used for dwelling purposes, the tenant was paying less than fifteen dollars a room, and the landlord had served the required thirty days’ notice. What was in dispute was whether Local Law No. 9, on which Milano based his defense, was constitutional. Fontanelli held that it was and therefore denied Gennis’s request for a final order. “The court,” he wrote, “believes that the elective legislative body of the city of New York, whose members are most intimately acquainted with the housing conditions of their local constituents, are in the best position to know whether emergency legislation is necessary.” A landlord, he added, was akin to “a quasi-public utility which affects the very life, safety and health of the tenant.” And high rents create “a problem alike to an emergency.” Local Law No. 9 does not deprive the landlord of his property, but merely requires “fair play and reasonable profit”—and only until May 1930, by which time further legislation may be unnecessary.10 Gennis appealed. In a unanimous decision, which was handed down on November 19, the Appellate Term reversed Fontanelli, awarded Gennis possession of the apartment, and, as the Times observed, set a precedent that was almost certain to “be followed in the previous cases still undecided.” Writing for the court, Nathan Bijur pointed out that the issue at hand was whether Local Law No. 9, which was “substantially a re-enactment of the state housing laws as they existed [when they expired] on June 1, 1929,” was valid under the City Home Rule Law. It was, he acknowledged, very difficult to draw a distinction between “state affairs” and “city affairs.” But citing a recent opinion by Benjamin N. Cardozo, chief justice of the Court of Appeals, he argued that among the affairs that fell exclusively under the state’s jurisdiction were affairs “of contracts.” And, he went on, “the relation of landlord and tenant is plainly contractual, and the attempt to interfere between them after the amount of rental has been agreed upon, and [to] base it upon what

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the court may deem just and reasonable, is clearly a measure which alters the very essence of contract.” Nor, he held, did the city have the authority to interfere with the law of summary proceedings, which involves “the remedies and procedure provided by the Legislature for the entire State.”11 Peter W. Grimm hailed the decision. So did the Times, though it noted that in light of the recent stock market crash—or what it referred to as “certain resounding events in Wall Street”—the timing might have been better. The Times predicted the case would be taken to the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals. But on November 20, Corporation Counsel Arthur J. W. Hilly, who had appeared as amicus curiae in Gennis v. Milano, announced that the city did not intend to appeal Bijur’s ruling. With this announcement by the former chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, rent control came to an end in New York City. In the words of T. S. Eliot, who wrote The Hollow Men five years earlier, it ended “not with a bang but a whimper.” First imposed by the state legislature in the aftermath of World War I—“a war baby,” in Edith Elmer Wood’s words—rent control would later be reimposed by the U.S. Office of Price Administration as part of the federal government’s effort to curb inflation during World War II.12 But that is another story—and, as fascinating as it is, one for another historian.

NOTES

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Bar Association Library Block v. Hirsh Brown v. Feldman Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal

Brown v. Pollak Durham v. La Fetra

Goldman-Unger Brief

Guthrie-Cohen Brief

Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Block, Trading Under the Name of Whites v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135 Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al., 256 U.S. 170 Supreme Court of the United States, Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc., Appellant, v. Marcus Feldman, Benjamin Schwartz, et al., Harvard Law Library Marcus Brown Holding Co. v. Pollak, 272 F. 137 People ex rel. Durham Realty Corporation v. La Fetra and People ex rel. Brixton Operating Corporation v. La Fetra 130 N.E. 601 New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co., Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Leon Sidney Moos, Defendant Respondent. Brief on Behalf of Defendants-Respondents, Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1920, No. 731, Marcus Brown Holding Company, Plaintiff-Appellant v. Marcus Feldman, Benjamin Schwartz, Frank Schwartz, and Edward

421

NOTES

422

Hylan Papers Ingraham-Stoddard Brief

Isaacs Brief

Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel Lockwood Committee Files

Lockwood Committee Hearings

Lusk Committee Papers

Marshall-Isaacs Brief

Myers Brief

Swann, District Attorney of the County of New York, Defendant-Appellees. Brief on Behalf of the Attorney General and the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing of the State of New York in Support of the Constitutionality of the Emergency Housing Laws Enacted September 27, 1920, Harvard Law Library Mayor John F. Hylan Papers, New York City Municipal Archives Court of Appeals of the State of New York, The People of the State of New York on the Relation of Brixton Operating Corporation, Relator-Appellant, Against Edward R. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of New York, Defendant-Respondent. Appellant’s Point, Bar Association Library New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, Orinoco Realty Co., Inc., Against Maurice Bandler. Brief for Respondent, Library of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 130 N.E. 923 Unidentified and undated newspaper clippings, files of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, New York State Archives, Albany Hearings of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, New York Public Library (vols. 1–6) and New York State Library, Albany (vols. 8, 12, 13) Papers of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, New York State Archives, Albany Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1920, No. 731, Marcus Brown Holding Company, Appellant, Against Marcus Feldman et al., Respondents. Points for Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. and 810 West End Avenue Inc. as Amici Curiae on Constitutionality of Chapters 136, 944 and 947 of the New York Laws of 1920, Harvard Law Library Supreme Court of the United States, Marcus Brown Holding Co., Appellant, Against Marcus Feldman and Benjamin Schwartz and Frank Schwartz and Edward Swann, as District Attorney of the County of New York in the State of New York,

Smith Papers Stein Commission Hearings

Stein Commission Report

Third Stein Commission Report

PROLOGUE

1. New York Times, December 30, 1917, January 10, 1918; New York Call, November 16, 19, 27, December 12, 1917, January 5, 10, 1918. 2. Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), p. 55; New York Call, December 12, 14, 1917, January 1, 5, 1918; Bronx Home News, December 19, 1917, January 2, 1918; New York Times, December 11, 1917, January 1, 6, 1918. 3. New York Call, January 1, 5, 1918; New York Times, December 11, 13, 1917, January 1, 6, 1918. 4. Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 (Chicago, 1991), pp. 204–208; New York Times, January 17, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 1918; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980), pp. 124–125; Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), p. 96; New York Call, February 20, 1918. 5. Platt, Electric City, pp. 204–206; Kennedy, Over Here, pp. 252–253; New York Times, January 17, 1918. 6. New York Times, December 11, 28, 30, 31, 1917, January 1, 12, 28, February 6, 1918; New York Call, January 1, 1918; Bronx Home News, January 9, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 28, 1918; Platt, Electric City, p. 207. 7. New York Call, December 12, 15, 1917; New York Times, December 11, 15, 29, 30, 1917, January 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 28, February 6, 1918. 8. New York Times, January 6, 1918. See also New York Call, December 12, 1917. 9. New York Call, January 15, February 8, 9, 1918; Bronx Home News, December 19, 1917, January 2, 16, 23, February 3, 1918. 10. Bronx Home News, January 23, February 3, 1918; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 99–100; New York Times, January 6, 29, 31, February 5, 24, 1918.

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Report of the Mayor’s Committee

Appellees. Brief for Appellee, Edward Swann, as District Attorney, Harvard Law Library Report [of the] Mayor’s Committee on Taxation and Investigation of Mortgage Loans and the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering Governor Alfred E. Smith Papers, New York State Archives, Albany Hearings Before the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, Avery Library, Columbia University Report of Commission of Housing and Regional Planning to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York on the Present Status of the Housing Emergency (Albany, 1924) Report of the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 6, 1925 (Albany, 1925)

N O T E S T O PAG E S 6 – 1 9

424

11. Bronx Home News, January 9, 13, February 3, 18, 27, 1918; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 55; Day, Urban Castles, p. 96. 12. New York Times, February 24, 1918. 13. New York Times, February 10, 1918. See also Day, Urban Castles, 100, 122. 14. New York Times, June 3, 1917; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 82–83, 100–101; Bronx Home News, February 3, 1918. 15. Bronx Home News, January 9, 13, 23, 1918; New York Call, February 9, 15, March 12, 31, 1918; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 96–97; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 56; David McAdam, The Rights, Duties, Remedies, and Incidents Belonging to and Growing Out of the Relation of Landlord and Tenant in Two Volumes Supplemented by This Volume Devoted to Summary Proceedings (New York, 1901), pp. 2–4; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord (New York, 1921), pp. 32, 42, 58. 16. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, p. 32; William P. McLoughlin, “Evictions in New York’s Tenement Houses,” Arena, December 1892, pp. 48–57; New York Call, January 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 1917, February 13, 1918; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 54–55; New York Times, January 1, 2, 4, 6, 1917. 17. New York Times, February 3, June 3, 1917, January 20, 1918. See also Day, Urban Castles, pp. 19–20. 18. New York Call, February 8, 16, 17, 1918; Bronx Home News, January 9, 1918. 19. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 4, 1918; Bronx Home News, January 9, 13, 16, 23, 1918; New York Call, February 8, 15, 17, 22, 1918; New York Times, January 29, 1918. 20. New York Call, January 20, February 16, 20, 1918. See also Day, Urban Castles, pp. 101–102. 21. New York Times, February 23, 26, March 18, 19, April 2, June 16, 1918. 22. New York Times, February 5, 17, 24, 26, April 3, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 28, 1918. 23. New York Call, November 27, 1917, February 8, 9, 20, 1918; Bronx Home News, January 2, 23, 1918; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 57; New York Times, February 10, 1918. 24. New York Call, March 13, 31, 1918. C H A P T E R 1 . T H E P O S T W A R H O U S I N G S H O R TA G E

1. New York Evening Post, June 14, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, February 23, 1919; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, 1989), p. 183. 2. Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh, 1962), chapters 1–5 and p. 123; Hearings Before the [U.S.] Senate Committee on Reconstruction and Production (Washington, D.C., 1921), vol. 1, p. 111; E. Everett Thorpe, “Apartment House Rents,” Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the National Association of Building Owners and Managers: 1921, p. 433; Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1970–1914 (Cambridge, 1962), p. 85. 3. Gordon D. MacDonald, Apartment House Construction: Manhattan, 1902–1953 (New York, 1953), pp. 9, 18; Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and the Redevelopment of the Inner City (New York, 1993), pp. 10–11; New York Times, October 27, 1918; Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York. March 9, 1927 (Albany, 1927), pp. 24–25; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 170. 4. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 755, 909, vol. 5, p. 832; Thorpe, “Apartment House Rents,” p. 433; William Douglas Kilpatrick, “Interesting Facts About Tenement House Rents,” Real Estate Bulletin, September 1919, pp. 5–6. 5. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, p. 832; Kilpatrick, “Interesting Facts,” pp. 15–16; Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943

425

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 9 – 2 5

(New York, 1999), pp. 46–47; Thorpe, “Apartment House Rents,” p. 433; Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem (New York, 1903), p. 369; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 86. 6. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 540–542, 565, 594–595, 615–617, vol. 3, p. 751, vol. 4, p. 327a; New York Times, May 18, 1919; John R. Hill to Alfred E. Smith, March 24, 1920, Smith Papers. 7. New York Times, January 26, April 15, July 22, 1917, June 2, 1918; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 617; Bernard J. McGovern to George R. Van Namee, May 10, 1920, Smith Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 28, 1917, p. 103. 8. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 28, 1917, p. 103; February 2, 1918, pp. 131–132; New York Call, September 11, 1917; New York Times, August 9, September 16, November 11, 1917. 9. New York Call, September 16, November 27, 1917, February 8, April 9, 16, 26, May 29, 1918; New York Times, September 16, 1917, March 10, 1918; Bronx Home News, January 2, 1918; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 267–269, vol. 5, pp. 897–898. 10. New York Sun, June 13, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, July 13, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 82–84; Survey, July 13, 1918, p. 435; New York Call, April 9, 1918; Bronx Home News, July 13, 1918. 11. New York Times, April 7, June 2, 1918, February 23, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 5, May 26, November 17, 1918; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 1, 1918, pp. 695–696, May 7, 1921, pp. 583–584. 12. New York Call, June 15, 1918; New York Times, January 28, 1917, April 11, 17, May 28, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 27, 1918; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 587; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 1, 1918, pp. 695–696; “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, September 1920, pp. 75–83; “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States, 1913 to June, 1920,” Monthly Labor Review, October 1920, p. 65. 13. William F. Ogburn, “A Study of Rents in Various Cities,” Monthly Labor Review, September 1919, p. 9; International Labour Office, The Housing Situation in the United States (Geneva, 1926), p. 8; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1928; New York Times, October 28, 1917. 14. Report of the State Board of Housing: 1927, pp. 24–25; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 920–924; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 100–101; New York Times, April 18, 1919. 15. New York Call, September 17, 1917, October 19, 1918; Bronx Home News, September 10, 1918; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 5, 1918, p. 386; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 13, 1918; Clarence S. Stein, “The Housing Crisis in New York,” Survey, September 1, 1920, pp. 659–660. 16. MacDonald, Apartment House Construction, pp. 9, 18; New York Times, August 9, November 11, 1917; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 17, July 7, 1918; New York Call, April 9, 1918; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), p. 53. 17. “Revised Index Numbers of Wholesale Prices of Building Materials, 1913 to March, 1922,” Monthly Labor Review, May 1922, pp. 81–83; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 23, July 7, 1918; New York Times, November 25, 1917, March 3, October 27, 1918, May 20, 1919; “Wages and Hours of Labor,” Monthly Labor Review, November 1919, pp. 173–190; U.S. Department of Labor, Information and Education Service, Division of Public Works and Construction, Economics of Construction (Washington, D.C., 1919), p. 16. 18. New York Times, February 5, March 3, 1918; U.S. Department of Labor, Economics of Construction, pp. 228–233; International Labour Office, The Housing Situation in the United States, p. 12; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 20, December 8, 1918.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 2 5 – 3 2

426

19. New York Times, November 25, 1917; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 15, October 27, November 17, December 8, 1918; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 28, 1918, p. 740. 20. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 23, 1918, pp. 594–595, November 30, 1918, p. 619, December 7, 1918, p. 651, December 28, 1918, p. 740; New York Times, November 24, 1918. 21. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 8, 1918; New York Times, November 24, 1918; International Labour Office, The Housing Situation in the United States, pp. 16–17. 22. Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York, 1931), p. 84; Intermediate Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1922), p. 20; “Rising Rent,” The Public, March 1, 1919, pp. 200–201; MacDonald, Apartment House Construction, pp. 9, 18; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 27, 1918; Samuel McCune Lindsay, Some Aspects of the Recent Emergency Housing Legislation in New York (1924), pp. 97–99. 23. Stein, “The Housing Crisis in New York City,” p. 660; New York Times, November 24, 1918, July 27, 1919; “Wholesale Prices of Building Materials,” pp. 81–83; “Union Scale of Wages and Hours,” pp. 172–190. 24. New York Times, October 27, 1918; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 3083–3084; T.D., “The Housing Crisis,” Socialist Review, May 1920, pp. 331–334. 25. New York Times, July 18, 27, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 24, 1919, p. 681; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), p. 11; Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, 1976), p. 160; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 3083–3084; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 27, 1919. 26. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 27, 1919; New York Times, February 3, November 24, 1918; T.D., “The Housing Crisis,” pp. 331–334; George Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 1917–1929 (New York, 1947), pp. 102–103; A. C. McNulty to Alfred E. Smith, August 31, 1920, Smith Papers; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 12; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 24, 1919, pp. 683–684. 27. Report of the State Board of Housing: 1927; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, pp. 1, 19–20; New York Telegram, August 26, October 1, 5 (and another issue whose date is not legible), 1919, New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, April 8, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 3, April 23, 1919; Samuel McCune Lindsay, Economic Aspects of the So-Called Emergency Housing Legislation of 1920 in New York State and the Alleged Housing Shortage in New York City (1920), pp. 8–9. 28. Report of the State Board of Housing: 1927, pp. 24–25; “The Vampire City,” Survey, May 31, 1919, p. 366; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 7. 29. Lindsay, Economic Aspects of the So-Called Emergency Housing Legislation, pp. 5–7, 12; Homer Hoyt, “The Housing Shortage and the Supply of Building Materials,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 1920, pp. 67, 72. 30. New York Journal, September 30, 1919, New York American, October 22, 1919, New York Telegram, October 6, 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, May 10, September 28, October 22, 1919; Wood, Recent Trends, p. 85; New York Call, May 4, 1919. 31. Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, pp. 6–7; Bernard J. McGovern to George R. Van Namee, May 5, 1910, Smith Papers; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 6, p. 1947; Bronx Home News, May 15, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1919. 32. New York Call, September 1, 1918; New York Times, October 27, 1918, February 23, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 86, 212; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 6; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 11, 1919. 33. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 29, 1919, p. 396; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 30, 1919; New York Times, March 30, April 3, 7, 1919; Sylvan Mortgage Co. v. Stadler, 185 N.Y.S. 293; New York Law Journal, April 5, 1922.

427

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 2 – 3 9

34. New York Law Journal, October 14, 1919; F. Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” in Harry Hall et al., Real Estate Manual for Brokers, Owners, and Operators (New York, 1928), pp. 132–133; David McAdam, The Rights, Duties, Remedies, and Incidents Belonging to and Growing Out of the Relation of Landlord and Tenant (New York, 1900), vol. 1, pp. 57–58. 35. New York Times, April 21, 1918; J. R. Davies, “Rights and Remedies of Landlords and Tenants,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, January 1920, p. 249; Frederick Spiegelberg, “The Recent Housing Legislation,” Legal Aid Review, April 1921, p. 5; “Memorandum Prepared by Justice Spiegelberg on the Rent Bills Before the Legislature,” undated, probably April 1920, Smith Papers; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 133–134; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 9, 1920. 36. New York Call, April 23, 26, 1919; New York Times, May 10, October 5, 1919; Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 16, 30–32, 119, New York Public Library. 37. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 27, 1919. 38. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1919, March 3, 1922; Bronx Home News, July 1, 1919, September 12, 1920. 39. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1919; Spiegelberg, “Recent Housing Legislation,” p. 5; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 832; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 30–31; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 27; Wood, Recent Trends, p. 85. 40. Wood, Recent Trends, p. 85; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 27; New York Times, December 3, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 11, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 212; “Report of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering,” May 14, 1919, Hylan Papers. 41. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 47–54; New York Times, December 3, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 764; Preliminary Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Housing and Ice Conditions of the State [of New York] (Albany, 1920), p. 10; Davies, “Rights and Remedies,” p. 248; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 6. 42. New York Times, December 3, 1919; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 30–31, 55, 58–59; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 832. 43. Irving D. Steinhardt to Alfred E. Smith, March 11, 1919, Smith Papers; New York Times, February 23, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 16, 1920. 44. New York Call, October 21, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, p. 508; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 69–70, 119–120; Bronx Home News, May 1, 1919; New York Times, February 14, 1918. 45. New York Times, February 23, December 3, 1919, March 23, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 832–833; Bronx Home News, March 10, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 26, 1918; “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, February 1921, pp. 52–61; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 30, 1921, p. 553. 46. “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” pp. 52–61; Irving D. Steinhardt to Alfred E. Smith, March 11, 1919; Robert T. Devine, “Where High Prices Hurt Most,” Survey, September 15, 1920, pp. 710–711; Nation, June 10, 1925, p. 642. 47. New York Times, February 23, 1919; New York Law Journal, April 5, 1922; New York Daily Tribune, October 15, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Papers on Appeals, Sylvan Mortgage Co., Inc. v. Albert M. Stadler, pp. 24–25, 29. Bar Association Library. 48. Marie Ganz, Rebels: Into Anarchy—and Out Again (New York, 1920), pp. 6–7; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), p. 107; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 948; Don Holbrook to Alfred E. Smith, February 28, 1920, Smith Papers.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 4 0 – 4 5

428

CHAPTER 2. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

1. Edward W. Browning to Mr. Anhalt, January 8, 1920, Usona Construction Company, “To Our Tenants,” December 10, 1918 (enclosed in Anna Gilbert to Alfred E. Smith, April 14, 1919), Charles Klein to Anna Seaman, March 23, 1920, Smith Papers; Bronx Home News, January 17, 1920; New York Times, February 23, 1920; New York Call, April 17, 1919. 2. Paul A. Samuelson and Everett E. Hagen, After the War: Military and Economic Demobilization of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1943), pp. 1–45; Papers on Appeal, Sylvan Mortgage Company, Inc. v. Albert M. Stadler, pp. 78–79. Bar Association Library; New York Daily Tribune, October 15, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 3. Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 24–25, New York Public Library; New York Times, May 30, 1919; Anna Gilbert to Alfred E. Smith, April 14, 1919, E. D. Wildner to Alfred E. Smith, March 15, 1920, Smith Papers. 4. New York Times, May 16, 1919, November 15, 1925; Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York, 1985), p. 116; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 131–132; New York Call, June 12, 1918; J. C. Lynne to Alfred E. Smith, February 20, 1920, Smith Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1, 1919. 5. New York Times, September 9, 1919; New York Call, September 17, December 31, 1918, April 17, 1919; Myra Marshall to Alfred E. Smith, September 17, 1920, Smith Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1, 1919, March 14, 1920. 6. “Memorandum Prepared by Justice Spiegelberg on the Rent Bills Before the Legislature,” undated, probably April 1920, Smith Papers; New York Times, March 27, 1920; Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 34–37; Papers on Appeal, Sylvan Mortgage Company, Inc. v. Albert M. Stadler, pp. 35–36; Ewen, Immigrant Women, p. 116; Marie Ganz, Rebels—Into Anarchy and Out Again (New York, 1920), p. 7; Report of the [New York State] Tenement House Committee [of 1894] (New York, 1895), pp. 423–424. 7. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, 1989), p. 249; Slayton, Empire Statesman, pp. 34–37; Rose Schneiderman and Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One (New York, 1967), pp. 29–30. See also Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and WorkingClass Politics in the United States (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 28–29. 8. Royal Commission on London Traffic, Appendices to the Report of the Royal Commission on London Traffic with Index, vol. 4 (London, 1906), p. 74; Robert M. Fogelson, “An Essay on the Ethnic Make-up of the York Avenue Estate,” in Gina Luria Walker and Associates, ed., The City and Suburban Homes Company’s York Avenue Estate: A Social and Architectural History (New York, 1990), vol. 10, pp. 16–17; Charles Bernheimer, “Rent Strikes and Crowded Neighborhoods,” Outlook, January 18, 1907; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 193–194. 9. Slayton, Empire Statesman, pp. 34–37, 48–49, 71, 78–79; New York Times, March 15, 1873, March 5, 1875; Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), pp. 158–159. 10. New York Times, March 15, 1872, April 23, 1905, October 1, 1907; E. Everett Thorpe, “Apartment House Rents,” Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the National Association of Building Owners and Managers: 1921, p. 433; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 213–214; Perry R. Duis, Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837–1920 (Urbana, 1998), pp. 75, 81; New York Age, November 5, 1919. 11. New York Call, September 11, 1917; New York Telegram, October 5, 1919, New York Journal, September 29, 1919, New York Sun, September 28, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Papers on Appeal, Sylvan Mortgage Company, Inc. v. Albert M. Stadler, pp. 31–32. 12. Brooklyn Standard Union, September 30, 1919; New York Sun, September 23, 29, October 2, 1919, New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, October 1, 2, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 30, 1919.

429

N O T E S T O PAG E S 4 6 – 5 2

13. New York Herald, September 21, 1919, New York Sun, September 2, 23, 1919, New York American, October 2, 1919, New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, September 10, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 30, 1919. 14. New York Times, September 30, October 2, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 2, 1919, New York Sun, October 1, 1919, unidentified newspaper, October 2, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, September 10, 1919. 15. New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 1919, New York Sun, September 23, October 1, 1919, and an issue whose date is not legible, but probably from late September 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Standard Union, September 30, 1919. 16. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 152; New York Times, September 30, October 2, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 2, 1919, New York Sun, September 29, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 17. New York Sun, October 1, 2, 1919, New York Daily Tribune, October 1, 2, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, September 28, October 1, 1919. 18. New York Daily Tribune, September 30, October 1, 1919, New York Journal, September 29, 1919, New York Herald, September 21, 1919, New York Sun, October 1, 1919, and an issue whose date is not legible, but probably from late September 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, September 10, 22, 1918, April 29, 1919; Don Holbrook to Alfred E. Smith, February 28, 1920, Smith Papers. 19. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, p. 909, vol. 6, p. 1947; New York Times, March 9, 1879; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, pp. 238–239. 20. Papers on Appeal, Sylvan Mortgage Company, Inc. v. Albert M. Stadler, pp. 27–29, 35–36, 51–52, 60. 21. Brooklyn Standard Union, March 12, 1920; New York Call, June 15, September 1, October 29, December 2, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, October 2, 1919. 22. Papers on Appeals, Sylvan Mortgage Company, Inc. v. Albert M. Stadler, pp. 28, 35–36, 51–52; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 14, 1919. 23. Bronx Home News, September 18, November 25, 1919; New York Call, April 26, November 21, 1919. 24. Frederick C. Zobel, “How Real Estate Is Discriminated Against,” [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 24, 1917, p. 668; New York Times, May 25, 27, 1919; Isidor Berger, “Facts Not Discussed by Tenant Associations and Political Agitators,” Real Estate News, November 1923, p. 4; Simon Greenfield, “Public Opinion and the Landlord,” Real Estate News, July 1920, pp. 9–10. 25. New York Times, January 16, 1917, April 17, June 1, 2, 1918, February 23, 1919, February 23, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 28, 1917, p. 103, June 1, 1918, pp. 695–696, January 18, 1919, pp. 73–75; Real Estate News, May 1918, pp. 473–474; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 587; Thorpe, “Apartment House Rents,” pp. 434–435. 26. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 1, 1918, pp. 695–696; New York Times, February 23, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 831–832. 27. Louis Ottman to Alfred E. Smith, September 21, 1920, John R. Gill to Alfred E. Smith, March 24, 1920, Smith Papers; New York Times, March 3, 1918, February 23, 1919, March 14, 1920. 28. New York Times, May 18, November 16, 1919, February 23, 1920; Isidore Montefiore Levy to Alfred E. Smith, April 21, 1919, Smith Papers; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 55. 29. New York Times, February 18, 1883, March 3, 1918; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 9, 1884; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 832; Bronx Home News, January 24, 1917; Zobel, “How Real Estate Is Discriminated Against,” pp. 667–668.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 5 3 – 5 8

430

30. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 6, p. 1945; Bernard J. McGovern to George R. Van Namee, May 10, 1920, Smith Papers; Bronx Home News, January 24, 1917, March 18, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1, 1919. 31. New York Call, May 2, June 12, 1918; Roger Waldinger, “Another Look at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union: Women, Industry Structure and Collective Action,” in Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of Women’s Labor History (Boston, 1985), pp. 92–93; Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 119–121, 154. 32. New York Times, December 14, 1917; Bronx Home News, February 10, June 12, October 2, November 12, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 2, 16, 1917. 33. Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005), pp. 52–70; Bronx Home News, April 9, 1918, January 2, 1919; New York Times, October 28, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 28, April 5, September 9, November 3, 1919. 34. Emma A. Winslow, “My Money Won’t Reach,” Survey, May 14, 1918, pp. 122–125; New York Call, June 15, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1, 1919; “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, September 1920, p. 78. 35. “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” p. 78; Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 116, 177–179. Charity Organization Society, Committee on Home Economics, “My Money Won’t Reach”: The Experience of 377 Self-Supporting Families in New York City in Endeavoring to Make Their Incomes Provide the Essentials for Healthful Living (New York, 1918), pp. 14–17; Bronx Home News, March 23, 1920; Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 177–179. 36. Charity Organization Society, “My Money Won’t Reach,” pp. 17–18; Bronx Home News, March 23, 1920; Michael Gold, Jews Without Money (New York, 1996), p. 256; Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 177–179. 37. Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 100–101, 119–121; Robert Coit Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Workingmen’s Families in New York City (New York, 1909), pp. 58–66; Fogelson, “An Essay on the Ethnic Make-up of the York Avenue Estate,” pp. 14–15; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 24–25; John Modell and Tamara K. Hareven, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,” in Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930 (New York, 1977), pp. 165–167; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), p. 6; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 361. 38. Ewen, Immigrant Women, p. 153; Charity Organization Society, “My Money Won’t Reach,” pp. 19–23; Winslow, “My Money Won’t Reach,” pp. 124–145; “Average Expenditures in One Year Per Family for Miscellaneous Items in 30 Selected Cities,” Monthly Labor Review, November 1919, pp. 18–19. 39. “Average Retail Prices of the Principal Articles of Food for 51 Cities on Certain Specified Dates,” Monthly Labor Review, February 1921, p. 31; Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 105, 113–115, 177; Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Workingmen’s Families, pp. 58–66; “Average Expenditures in One Year Per Family for Miscellaneous Items in Selected Cities,” Monthly Labor Review, November 1919, pp. 18–19. 40. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 30, April 5, November 3, 1919; New York Times, May 16, March 27, 1920; Charity Organization Society, “My Money Won’t Reach,” pp. 14–17; Bronx Home News, February 4, 1917, April 9, 1918; Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Workingmen’s Families, p. 249. 41. Bronx Home News, February 10, 1918; Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Workingmen’s Families, p. 248; Gold, Jews Without Money, p. 255; Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” p. 78; Susan A. Glen, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, 1990), p. 61; Charity Organization Society, “My Money Won’t Reach,” pp. 20–21. 42. Waldinger, “Another Look at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” p. 92; Ewen, Immigrant Women, p. 101; New York Call, May 2, 1918.

CHAPTER 3. A WEIGHTY DECISION

1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 29, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 752; New York Call, April 20, 1919. 2. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 3007. 3. Mrs. C. J. Roddy to John J. Sinott, August 19, 1920, Max Goldflam to John F. Hylan, July 25, 1921, H. H. Lazarus to John J. Sinott, October 4, 1922, John S. Flynn to John F. Hylan, September 28, 1924, Hylan Papers; New York Times, August 23, October 22, 1919, October 13, 1925; New York Call, April 30, June 12, 1918, May 20, July 23, 1919, September 30, 1920. 4. New York Call, May 3, June 14, October 21, 22, 1919; Marie Ganz, Rebels: Into Anarchy— And Out Again (New York, 1920), pp. 118–119. 5. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1957), pp. 80, 91, 96, 100–101; Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York, 1985), pp. 123–125, 150. 6. Wm. F. McCauley to Alfred E. Smith, September 1, 1920, Smith Papers. See also New York Times, September 30, 1919. 7. William Viertel, compiler, Official Directory of the City of New York, 1920, pp. 159–161. 8. Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 30–31, 68–72, 119–120, New York Public Library; New York Times, December 3, 1919; Bronx Home News, November 30, 1919; New York Journal, October 7, 1919, New York World, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 4, 1920, p. 473. 9. Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord (New York, 1921), pp. 58–60; New York Times, November 24, December 8, 1918; Bronx Home News, November 30, 1919; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 16, 120; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, p. 496. 10. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 32; Edward L. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War Period,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920,

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43. Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 14, 112–113, 118; New York Call, May 15, 1919; Gold, Jews Without Money, pp. 256–258; New York Times, June 1, 1919; New York World, June 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 44. New York Call, December 31, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 29, 1919; Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1902 (Madison, 1985), pp. 113–114; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, p. 248; Hadassa Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 (New York, 2005), pp. 146–147. 45. Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar: Pre–World War I Tenant Activity,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), pp. 39–44; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 9, 1904, p. 782; Archibald A. Hill, “The Rental Agitation on the East Side,” Charities, April 16, 1904, p. 782. 46. New York Times, May 17, 1904, January 16, 22, 1906; New York Daily Tribune, July 6, 7, 12, September 13, 1905, January 16, March 5, April 3, 4, 6, 1906. 47. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, p. 29; Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar,” pp. 44–47; New York Times, December 26, 27, 28, 1907, January 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 27, 1908; William Mailly, “The New York Rent Strike,” Independent, January 16, 1908, pp. 151–152; Victor Rousseau, “ ‘Low Rent or No Rent’: The Tenement Dwellers’ Rebellion in New York,” Harper’s Weekly, January 25, 1907, pp. 16–17; Arlene K. Newman, “Ethnicity and Business Enterprise: A Study of the Jewish Mutual Insurance Companies of New York,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1983, p. 80. 48. Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar,” pp. 46–47; Newman, “Ethnicity and Business Enterprise,” pp. 70, 80.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 6 6 – 7 3

432

p. 20; New York Telegram, June 3, July 11, September 21, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, April 23, May 14, August 17, 28, 1919. 11. Bronx Home News, April 15, 1919; Joint Hearings of the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 120; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 482–483; New York Times, April 11, 1919. 12. Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), p. 21; New York Call, December 14, 1918; New York Telegram, August 26, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 13. Edgar J. Lauer, A Supplement to the New Practice and Procedure in the Municipal Court of the City of New York (New York, 1919), pp. 219–222, 261–262; Edgar J. Lauer, Municipal Court Practice (New York, 1928), pp. 127–142, 676–680; New York Times, August 5, 1910, February 27, August 23, 1911, April 1, 6, 1920, July 16, 1921. 14. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 144–145; George F. Langbein, The Law and Practice of the Municipal Court of the City of New York (New York, 1898), p. 128; New York Call, June 2, 1919, New York Times, April 1, 1920; Bronx Home News, August 22, 1920, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16, 1920. 15. Lauer, A Supplement to the New Practice and Procedure in the Municipal Court, p. 261; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16, 1920; New York Telegram, July 10, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, August 17, 1920; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 144–145. 16. New York Times, December 25, 1914, January 1, 1915, April 6, 1920, July 16, 1921. 17. New York Times, March 31, 1910, September 5, 1919, April 6, 1920; John S. Flynn to John F. Hylan, September 28, 1924, H. H. Lazarus to John F. Sinnott, October 7, 1924, Hylan Papers; New York Call, June 2, 1919. 18. Harry Allen Ely to John F. Hylan, January 13, 1925, Hylan Papers; New York Call, September 30, 1920; H. H. Lazarus to John F. Sinnott, October 4, 1922, Smith Papers. 19. New York Times, March 31, 1910. 20. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, vol. 4: Population 1920, Occupations (Washington, D.C., 1923), pp. 1078, 1103, 1160, 1195; James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York, 1970), p. 200; Joseph Varga, “ ‘For Speaking Jewish in a Jewish Neighborhood’: Civil Rights and CommunityPolice Relations During the Postwar Red Scare, 1919–1922,” in Stacy McGoldrick and Andrea McArdle, eds., Uniform Behavior: Police Localism and National Politics (New York, 2006), pp. 60–67. 21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, vol. 4: Population 1920, Occupations, p. 1160; Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston, 2003), pp. 69–80; Richardson, New York Police, pp. 195–201; Hadassah Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 (Albany, 2000), pp. 141–149. 22. New York Times, April 10, May 17, 18, 1904, December 29, 30, 1907, January 6, 1908; New York Daily Tribune, July 7, 12, 1905, March 5, 1906; Charities and the Commons, January 11, 1908, p. 1370; Day, Urban Castles, p. 79. 23. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 76–78; Joanna Weissman Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar: Pre–World War I Tenant Activity,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1984), p. 45; Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, 1989), chapter 1; Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, October 2, 1919, Hylan Papers; New York Times, November 16, 1919; New York Call, November 22, 1919; Varga, “For Speaking Jewish in a Jewish Neighborhood,” pp. 60–63. 24. New York Times, March 5, 1906; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 7, 1908, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 77–78; New York Daily Tribune, July 6, 7, 1905, March 5, 1906; New York Call, April 26, 30, May 30, 1918; Varga, “For Speaking Jewish in a Jewish Neighborhood,” pp. 58–59. 25. New York Call, June 12, 1918. See also Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, p. 56.

433

N O T E S T O PAG E S 7 4 – 8 0

26. New York Call, June 12, September 17, 1918, April 23, 1919; Bronx Home News, October 23, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 135–136, 187–189, 226, vol. 2, pp. 205, 705–708, 719–721, 776–778, 780–781, 810. 27. New York Call, September 17, 1918, June 27, 1919; Michael Gold, Jews Without Money (New York, 1996), p. 248; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, pp. 897–898; Elizabeth Pieper to Alfred E. Smith, March 19, 1919, Smith Papers; Bronx Home News, October 23, 1919. 28. Bronx Home News, October 23, 1919; New York Telegram, August 19, 24, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, August 13, September 17, 1918. 29. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 246–248; Ann-Louis Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1920 (Madison, 1985), p. 38; Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (New York, 1985), pp. 65–96; Kemp R. Niver, Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1985), p. 343; Bronx Home News, January 24, 28, 1917; Frederick C. Zobel, “How Real Estate Is Discriminated Against,” [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 24, 1917, pp. 667–668. 30. New York Times, April 28, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 822; Yezierska, Hungry Hearts, pp. 65–96; Simon Greenfield, “Public Opinion and the Landlord,” Real Estate News, July 1920, pp. 9–10; “A Few of Your Admirers” to John F. Hylan, April 15, 1919, Hylan Papers; Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York, 1975), p. 27. 31. New York Call, October 30, 1919. See also Ewen, Immigrant Women, pp. 101, 112–113, 116. 32. Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 9; Susan Glen, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, 1990), pp. 189–191, 205; Melvin Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst, 1968), pp. 51–55. 33. Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History, September 1980, pp. 91–105; Kosak, Cultures of Opposition, pp. 143–144, 148; Dana Frank, “Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 Cost-of-Living Protests,” Feminist Studies, Summer 1985, pp. 255–285; Bronx Home News, October 17, 19, 1917; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 19, 22, 1917. 34. Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005), pp. 54–66; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and WorkingClass Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 221; Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 270–271. 35. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, pp. 66–72. See also New York Sun, September 23, 1919, New York Globe, September 24, 1919, New York Evening Post, October 27, 1919, New York Daily Tribune, October 18, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 36. Glen, Daughters of the Shtetl, pp. 175, 180; Kosak, Cultures of Opposition, pp. 116, 119, 123, 147. 37. Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington, Ky., 1997), pp. 127, 135; Hugh Rockoff, Drastic Measures: A History of Wage and Price Controls in the United States (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), chapter 3; “Who Are the War-Profiteers?” Literary Digest, September 29, 1917, p. 11; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 20, 1918; New York Call, September 1, 1918; New Republic, September 3, 1919, p. 139; Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, pp. 66, 71; Bronx Home News, November 28, 1918. 38. Roy Lubove, “Homes and ‘A Few Well Placed Fruit Trees’: An Object Lesson in Federal Housing,” Social Research, Winter 1960, p. 473; U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, Rent Profiteering and Its Control, 1917–1918 (Washington, D.C., 1941), pp. 2–4, 10–16, 23–26; Bronx Home News, November 3, 1918; New York Call, May 2, 15, June 7, September 21, 1918. 39. James Ford, “Rent Profiteering,” and John Ellis, “Rent Profiteering,” in Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on Housing: 1918, pp. 128–146; New York Call, November 27,

N O T E S T O PAG E S 8 0 – 8 7

434

1918; “How to Fight the Rent Profiteers,” Literary Digest, April 17, 1920; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), p. 5; Message from the Governor [of New York] Transmitting the Report of the Reconstruction Commission on the Housing Situation (Albany, 1920), p. 3; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 111–112; John F. Hylan to Robert E. Dowling, draft of an undated letter, Hylan Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 30, 1920, p. 605. 40. New York Times, June 2, 1918, February 23, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 26, 1919; Real Estate Bulletin, June 1918, p. 555; “Facts Not Discussed by Tenant Associations and Political Agitators,” Real Estate News, November 1923, p. 4. 41. Richard O. Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation in New York and Its Nation-Wide Significance,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, July 1920, p. 576; Congressional Record, May 27, 1918, p. 7116, August 22, 1919, p. 4206; Edward L. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War Period,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920, pp. 17–26; Edith Berger Drellich and Andrée Emery, Rent Control in War and Peace (Washington, D.C., 1939), pp. 23–25; New York Call, May 31, 1918. 42. New York Call, April 26, June 12, 1918; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 12, 14, 1919; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 56–57; New York Herald, November 2, 1919, New York Globe, September 20, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 43. Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar,” pp. 42, 44; New York Times, May 6, September 6, 1919, March 30, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 9, 1919; New York Herald, November 2, 1919, New York American, August 31, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, April 30, May 21, October 29, 1918, January 22, 1919. 44. New York Call, April 30, August 16, 1918. 45. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 81–82, 193–194; New York Call, March 22, April 25, 26, October 16, 1919; New York Times, September 9, 1919; “The Vampire City,” Survey, May 31, 1919, p. 365. 46. Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar,” pp. 43, 45; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 56–58; Katherine J. Mayer, “A Study of Tenants Associations in New York City with Particular Reference to the Bronx, 1920–1927,” master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1928; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 20, 1919, p. 626; Real Estate News, November 1919, p. 2; New York Globe, October 22, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, October 18, 1919; Day, Urban Castles, p. 63; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 7–9. 47. New York Call, April 26, June 15, 1918; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 64, 70–74, 80–81, 105–106; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 6, 1919; New York Times, March 30, 1920. C H A P T E R 4 . T H E G R E AT R E N T S T R I K E S

1. New York Call, April 30, May 20, August 16, 1918, May 16, 1919, June 23, 1920. 2. New York Times, December 30, 1907; New York Call, October 23, 1919; undated New York Herald, probably from October 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Real Estate News, November 1919, p. 4. 3. New York Call, May 20, 1919; New York Times, May 6, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 9, 14, 15, 1919. On the Veracruz rent strikes, see Andrew Grant Wood, “Viva La Revolucion Social!: Postrevolutionary Tenant Protest and State Housing Reform in Veracruz, Mexico,” in Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer, eds., Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America (Boulder, 1998), pp. 88–128. 4. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 15, 1919. 5. New York Times, December 31, 1907, September 5, 6, 1919, April 30, 1920; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post-War Housing Crisis,” in Ronald

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Lawson, ed. The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), p. 58; New York Call, December 31, 1918. 6. New York Call, August 20, 1918, March 25, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 31, 1907, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library. 7. New York Times, April 30, September 15, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, an undated issue, probably from late 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 3, 1919. 8. New York Times, September 4, 5, 1919; Bronx Home News, May 22, 1919; New York Herald, October 18, 1919, New York World, October 18, 1919, New York Daily Tribune, November 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 9. New York Call, April 30, August 16, 20, 1918, April 20, 29, July 30, 1919; New York Herald, October 11, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, October 12, 1919. 10. Real Estate News, November 1919, p. 3; New York Times, May 6, 18, August 1, 1919; New York Call, April 30, May 19, June 12, August 16, 1918, January 12, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1919. 11. New York Times, September 5, 1919, September 6, 1920; New York Call, March 13, 20, May 21, 1918, May 15, 1919, March 18, 1920; New York Globe, September 20, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 25, May 6, 1919. 12. New York Call, June 2, 1919. 13. New York Telegram, August 9, 28, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, May 6, October 8, 1919; Bronx Home News, April 6, May 6, October 7, 1919. 14. Bronx Home News, April 27, 1919; New York Times, May 14, 1919. 15. Bronx Home News, October 23, 1919; New York Times, September 5, 1919; New York Call, September 3, 13, 1919. 16. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 23, 1919; New York Telegram, June 28, 1919, New York Herald, October 30, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, May 20, 1919. 17. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 7, 1908, May 10, 1919; New York Times, June 1, August 1, December 5, 1919; Bronx Home News, May 22, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, November 1, 1919, New York Globe, September 20, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 18. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 10, 19, 1919; New York Call, April 30, 1918; New York Times, October 22, 1919; Bronx Home News, October 2, 28, 1919. 19. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 13, 1919, p. 194; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), p. 5; New York Call, May 20, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1919; New York Telegram, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, October 2, 5, 1919. 20. New York Call, August 16, 20, 1918. 21. Bronx Home News, November 25, 1919. 22. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 19, 20, 1919; New York Call, May 20, 21, 1919; New York Times, May 20, 1919. 23. New York Call, October 22, 26, 1919; Bronx Home News, October 23, 1919. 24. New York Call, December 2, 1918. 25. New York Times, September 5, 6, 1919; New York Call, September 5, 7, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 26. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 14, 1919; New York Telegram, June 28, 1919, New York Sun, October 7, November 9, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, April 2, 1920; Bronx Home News, December 30, 1919. 27. New York Call, May 25, 1918; Bronx Home News, April 29, 1919. 28. New York Call, October 31, 1919; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 831; Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 69–70, New York Public Library; Bronx Home News, April 8, 17, 1919; New York Telegram, October 7, 12, 1919, New York American, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, April 11, 1919.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 9 7 – 1 0 5

436

29. New York Times, April 11, December 5, 1919; New York Telegram, October 7, 1919, New York Journal, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, May 27, 1919; New York Call, February 10, 1920. 30. New York Times, May 21, 1919; New York Call, July 1, 18, 19, 20, 1919; Bronx Home News, March 18, 1920. 31. New York Times, May 6, October 5, December 5, 1919; New York Telegram, October 5, 6, 1919, New York Sun, October 7, 1919, New York Herald, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 6, 1919. 32. Bronx Home News, September 9, October 7, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 6, 1919; New York Journal, October 7, 1919; New York World, October 6, 1919; New York American, October 7, 1919; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 6; New York Times, September 9, 1919. 33. Bronx Home News, October 7, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 374–474; New York Telegram, October 6, 7, 1919, New York Herald, October 7, 1919, New York Sun, October 7, 1919, New York Evening Post, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 34. Bronx Home News, September 9, October 7, 1919; New York Telegram, October 7, 1919, New York World, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 9, 1919; New York Call, March 25, 1920; New York Times, October 3, 1919. 35. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 119; New York American, October 7, 1919, New York Telegram, October 6, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, October 7, 1919; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 6. 36. New York Herald, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 6; New York Times, April 11, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 482–483; Bronx Home News, May 1, 1919. 37. New York Daily Tribune, September 6, November 1, 1919, unidentified newspaper, September 6, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, September 18, 1919, February 22, 1920; New York Times, September 6, 1919; New York Call, June 11, 1919. See also Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), p. 107. 38. Bronx Home News, May 22, 1919; New York Times, May 14, June 1, 25, August 1, 23, 1919, April 2, 1920; New York Call, May 30, July 23, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 8, 1919; unidentified newspaper, October 22, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 39. New York Evening Post, October 14, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, July 23, 1919, February 10, 1920; New York Times, June 25, 1919. 40. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 195; Bronx Home News, October 9, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, November 2, 4, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, June 11, 1919. 41. New York Times, October 3, 1919; New York Call, May 20, July 1, September 6, 1919; Bronx Home News, October 30, 1919; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 104–105; New York Telegram, August 30, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 42. New York Herald, October 30, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, May 20, 30, July 18, September 3, 1919; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and WorkingClass Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 222; New York Times, May 29, September 5, 1919. 43. New York Call, July 30, 1919; New York Times, April 19, 1919; New York Telegram, June 28, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 44. J. J. McDonald to Alfred E. Smith, August 12, 1920, Ed. J. May to Alfred E. Smith, January 10, 1920, J. C. Lynne to Alfred E. Smith, February 20, 1920, Harold Lever (and another person whose name is not legible) to Alfred E. Smith, February 13, 1920, Smith Papers; New York Times, March 16, 1919; New York Telegram, June 13, October 20, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 45. Harold Lever (and another person whose name is not legible) to Alfred E. Smith, February 13, 1920, John R. Hill to Alfred E. Smith, March 24, 1920, Myra Marshall to Alfred E.

C H A P T E R 5 . T H E M AY O R ’ S C O M M I T T E E O N R E N T P R O F I T E E R I N G

1. New York Times, November 7, 8, 1917. 2. Edwin R. Lewinson, John Purroy Mitchel: The Boy Mayor of New York (New York, 1966), pp. 242–243; New York Times, July 29, 1919. 3. New York Times, September 21, October 28, 1917, May 26, June 2, July 3, 1918; New York Call, October 17, 1917; Real Estate Bulletin, June 1918, pp. 553–554; Bronx Home News, April 17, 1919. 4. New York Times, November 11, 1917, January 12, 1936; Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 215–216; Robert F. Wesser, A Response to Progressivism: The Democratic Party and New York Politics, 1902–1918 (New York, 1918), p. 210. 5. Lewinson, Mitchel, p. 235; New York Times, August 17, 1917; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 609–610, 620, 657, vol. 2, pp. 683–684. 6. New York Times, May 25, 1919. See also Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 607, vol. 2, p. 683. 7. New York Call, April 25, 27, 1919; New York Times, May 15, 1919. 8. New York Call, April 10, May 11, 1919; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), p. 58; Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, March 14, 1919, A. Ray Petty to John F. Hylan, February 13, 1919, Hylan Papers; Bronx Home News, April 15, 17, May 4, 1919. 9. New York Times, November 7, 8, 1919. See also Charles Leinenweber, “Socialists in the Streets: The New York City Socialist Party in Working Class Neighborhoods, 1908–1918,” Science and Society, Summer 1997, pp. 152–171; Lewinson, Mitchel, pp. 225, 233; Wesser, A Response to Progressivism, pp. 197–198. See also Kenneth Chern, “The Politics of Patriotism: War, Ethnicity, and the New York Mayoral Campaign, 1917,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, October 1979, pp. 291–313. 10. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 19, 1918; New York Call, October 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 1918; Bronx Home News, November 3, 1918. 11. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 58–59; New York Times, November 7, 1918; Norma Fain Pratt, Morris Hillquit: A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist (Westport, Conn., 1979), pp. 91, 140. 12. New York Call, April 30, October 16, 23, 1919; New York Times, February 23, April 17, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 10, 1919.

437

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 0 5 – 1 1 4

Smith, September 17, 1920, “Tenants of Brooklyn” to Alfred E. Smith, July 23, 1920, “American Citizen” to Alfred E. Smith, undated letter, probably August 1919, “American Jew” to Alfred E. Smith, undated letter, either 1919 or 1920, May Lewis to Alfred E. Smith, February 11, 1920, Eddie Morgan to Alfred E. Smith, February 7, 1920, Smith Papers; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 70. 46. Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, October, 1919, Hylan Papers; Report of the Mayor’s Committee, p. 53; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 111–112; James Brackenridge to Alfred E. Smith, September 18, 1920, Smith Papers; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, p. 490; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 20, 1919, pp. 625; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 8, 1919. 47. New York Call, October 21, 1919; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 42, 69–70, 110–112; New York Times, March 24, 1920; “A Tenant” to City Housing Committee, April 26, 1919, Hylan Papers; “American Citizens” to Alfred E. Smith, undated letter, probably from August 1919, Smith Papers. 48. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 75–77.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 1 5 – 1 2 2

438

13. New York Call, April 6, 13, 1919; New York Times, April 13, 14, 1919; Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), pp. 111–112; Report of the Mayor’s Committee, p. 38. 14. New York Call, April 16, 1919; Stewart Browne to Nathan Hirsch, November 12, 1919, Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, February 13, 1919, Hylan Papers; New York Times, October 20, 1919; Real Estate Magazine of New York, January 1920, p. 233; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 30, 1920; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 368–369. 15. Edward L. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920, pp. 26–28; New York Call, May 21, October 23, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 13, 1919, p. 594; New York Times, May 16, 1918; Hirsch to Hylan, March 14, 1919. 16. New York Times, January 31, February 3, March 3, May 12, June 30, 1918, February 9, April 14, 1919, January 7, 1920; Stewart Browne to Nathan Hirsch, November 12, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 19, 1918; Hirsch to Hylan, March 14, 1919. 17. Nathan Hirsch to Howard Bradstreet, September 24, 1919, Hylan Papers; Bronx Home News, December 2, 1919; New York Times, June 9, 1919; New York Sun, August 25, September 23 (or 28), 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 18. New York Times, April 21, 26, May 3, 4, 16, June 15, July 27, August 1, 9, 11, 22, 25, December 15, 1919, March 20, 1920; New York Telegram, October 23, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Day, Urban Castles, p. 112; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 19, 1918; Brooklyn Standard Union, May 25, 1919. 19. Report of the Mayor’s Committee, p. 41, 51–52; Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, December 26, 1919, Hylan Papers; New York Times, April 19, 1919, January 3, 6, 1920, September 9, 1923; New York Call, May 16, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 114; Walter S. Kennedy, “Report of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering” (May 24, 1919), p. 2, New York City Municipal Archives. 20. Brooklyn Standard Union, May 10, 1919; New York Times, April 26, 30, May 11, 1919; Sara Katherine Copeland, “ ‘Down with the Landlords’: Tenant Activism in New York City, 1917 to 1920,” master’s thesis, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000, p. 30; Day, Urban Castles, p. 113; Report of the Mayor’s Committee, p. 44. 21. New York Sun, August 25, 1919, New York Telegram, August 30, September 22, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Report of the Mayor’s Committee, pp. 48, 51–52; New York Times, September 24, October 2, 1919; Bronx Home News, September 11, December 2, 1919. 22. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 112–114; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 62; New York World, July 29, 1919, New York Herald, September 24, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, September 1, 14, 24, 1919. 23. Bronx Home News, May 13, September 11, 1919; New York Times, April 19, May 3, 26, 30, June 1, 15, 1919. 24. Nathan Hirsch to Grover A. Whalen, May 26, 1919, David Hirshfield to Nathan Hirsch, May 26, 1919, Hylan Papers; Bronx Home News, April 26, 29, May 13, 15, 1919; New York Times, January 13, 1918, April 8, 1950; New York World, September 25, 1925, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 7, 1919. 25. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 15, 1919; Bronx Home News, October 9, 30, 1919; New York Times, August 25, 1919. 26. Bronx Home News, November 25, 1919; Brooklyn Standard Union, September 30, 1919; New York Call, May 21, 1919; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 60–61; Report of the Mayor’s Committee, pp. 47–48. 27. Bronx Home News, September 18, October 16, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1919; New York Times, August 30, 1919. 28. New York Times, April 30, August 1, September 1, 1919; New York Telegram, July 11, August 19, 21, September 21, 1919, New York Sun, August 17, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers.

439

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 2 2 – 1 3 0

29. New York Times, April 24, 25, May 4, 5, 15, August 30, 1919; Bronx Home News, May 15, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 1919, p. 26. See also Day, Urban Castles, pp. 115–116. 30. New York Call, May 15, 1919; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 115–116; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide, September 1919, p. 26; New York Times, August 30, September 3, 1919; New York World, October 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, September 11, December 2, 1919. 31. New York American, June 8, 1919; New York World, June 16, 1919, New York Sun, November 9, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, May 20, June 22, August 3, 24, 31, September 2, December 15, 1919; Kennedy, “Report of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering,” p. 5; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 62; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 14, 1919. 32. New York Times, May 9, 14, 1919; New York World, June 16, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 33. New York Daily Tribune, July 13, September 7, 1919, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 34. New York Times, May 6, 1919; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 62; New York Sun, November 9, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 35. New York Times, May 4, June 22, July 27, August 3, September 14, 1919; Bronx Home News, July 24, September 18, 1919; New York Call, May 16, 1919; New York American, June 8, 1919, New York World, June 16, 1919, New York Telegram, August 26, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, May 16, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 14, 1919; Brooklyn Standard Union, July 13, 1919; Kennedy, “Report of the Mayor’s Committee,” appendix following p. 8. 36. New York Herald, September 24, 1919, New York World, July 29, 1919, New York Telegram, August 20, 1919, New York Daily Tribune, November 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, October 16, 1919; Real Estate Bulletin, September 1919, p. 26; New York Times, May 10, 1919, March 14, 1920. 37. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 113, 116; New York Telegram, September 22, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, May 16, 1919; Bronx Home News, April 20, September 11, 1919. 38. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1, 1919; New York Times, December 18, 1919; Day, Urban Castles, p. 116. 39. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 115, 117; New York American, September 24, 1919, New York World, October 1, 1919, New York Sun, September 1, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, October 5, 1921; Copeland, “Down with the Landlords,” p. 33; Bronx Home News, October 9, 1919. 40. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 62; New York Times, June 22, 1919, March 30, 1920; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 14, 1920; New York Call, March 23, 1923. 41. New York Times, September 6, 1919. See also Day, Urban Castles, p. 117. 42. New York Times, April 26, May 25, 27, 1919; Bronx Home News, May 13, September 19, 1919, August 1, 1920; Day, Urban Castles, p. 117; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1919. 43. New York Times, January 3, 4, 7, 1920; Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, December 26, 1919, Hylan Papers. 44. Copeland, “Down with the Landlords,” pp. 30–31; New York Times, November 16, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 4, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2869–2870; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, p. 876. 45. New York Call, December 27, 1919, March 23, 30, 1920; Day, Urban Castles, p. 117; New York Times, March 30, 1920; Max F. Wolff, “Rent Profiteering or Rent Protection,” Real Estate News, December 1919, p. 7, 46. 46. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 62–65; Nathan Hirsch to John F. Hylan, October 2, 1919; New York American, October 4, 1920, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, October 4, 1920. 47. New York Times, October 4, 8, 16, 18, November 8, 1919; New York Daily Tribune, October 8, 1919, New York Herald, October 18, 1919, New York World, October 20, 1919, New York

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 3 0 – 1 3 6

440

Telegram, October 22, November 9, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Real Estate News, November 1919, pp. 2–4; New York Call, October 20, 22, November 22, 1919. See also Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 65. 48. New York Times, December 3, 6, 18, 1919, September 9, 1923; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 67–72; J. R. Davies, “Rights and Remedies of Landlords and Tenants,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, January 1920, pp. 247–248, New York World, undated issue, probably from September 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 18, 1919; New York Call, August 13, 1918. C H A P T E R 6 . E N T E R T H E S TAT E L E G I S L AT U R E

1. New York Times, November 8, 1917, February 24, 1918, March 30, 1947; Paula Eldot, Governor Alfred E. Smith: The Politician as Reformer (New York, 1983), p. 13; New York Call, March 12, September 29, 1920; Housing Betterment, May 1918, p. 45. 2. Preliminary Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Housing and Ice Conditions of the State [of New York] (Albany, 1920), p. 3; New York Times, March 16, April 13, 18, 19, 1919, September 13, 1952, September 22, 1958. 3. Edward L. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War Period,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920, pp. 7–11, 19–25; Edith Berger Drellich and Andrée Emery, Rent Control in War and Peace (Washington, D.C., 1939), pp. 66–74; New York Call, May 29, June 7, 15, August 29, 1918. 4. Preliminary Report of the Committee To Investigate Housing, p. 3; New York Times, May 5, August 23, 1919; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, vol. 2: Population, 1920 (Washington, D.C., 1922), pp. 1280, 1286; New York Evening Mail, August 23, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers, New York State Archives, Albany. 5. New York Times, November 6, 7, 1918; Eldot, Governor Alfred E. Smith, p. 114; Robert F. Wesser, A Response to Progressivism: The Democratic Party and New York Politics, 1902–1918 (New York, 1986), pp. 208–215. 6. Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 135–136; Wesser, A Response to Progressivism, pp. 208–215; Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Boston, 1958), pp. 53–61. 7. Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Landlord Activism and Tenement Housing in New York City, 1890– 1943 (New York, 1999), pp. 129–132; New York Times, April 20, May 18, July 27, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 19, 1919, p. 506; New York Globe, May 16, 21, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 8. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 749, 831–834; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 1, 1919; New York Times, July 27, 1919; Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), p. 145, New York Public Library; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 19, 1919, p. 506. 9. New York Times, April 20, May 1, 12, July 27, 1919, April 2, August 13, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 1919, p. 505; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 20, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 99, vol. 4, p. 1121; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 145; New York Call, March 9, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 11, 1919. 10. New York Times, July 6, August 10, 1919; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), p. 16; Samuel McCune Lindsay, Economic Aspects of the So-Called Emergency Housing Legislation in New York State and the Alleged Housing Shortage in New York City (1921), esp. pp. 5–12; Samuel McCune Lindsay, Some Economic Aspects of the Recent Emergency Housing Legislation in New York City (1924), pp. i–ii; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 1, 1919, p. 580; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 20, 1920; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), p. 3.

441

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 3 6 – 1 4 2

11. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 19, 1919, p. 506, May 31, 1919, p. 717; New York Times, May 17, 18, 19, July 27, 1919. 12. New York Times, May 16, July 27, 1919; Walter Stabler, “Lack of Funds for Building Creating Desperate Situation,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, February 1920, pp. 286, 288, 333; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 27, 1919. 13. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 5, pp. 1406–1407; New York Times, May 23, June 3, July 17, 1919, January 4, 1920; New York Call, May 13, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 31, 1919, p. 721; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 15, 20, 1920. 14. New York Times, May 18, 1919, January 4, March 25, May 30, 1920; Isidor Berger, “Proposed Radical Legislation and Possible Effects,” Real Estate News, March 1920, p. 8; Alfred E. Smith, Up to Now: An Autobiography (New York, 1929), pp. 227–229; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 15, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 148. 15. New York Times, November 24, 1918, May 25, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 24, 1919. 16. New York Evening Post, June 14, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, March 24, 1918, September 20, 1920. See also Hearings Before the [U.S. Senate] Select Committee on Reconstruction and Production (Washington, D.C., 1921), vol. 1, p. 115. 17. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 22, November 14, 1918, March 24, May 17, 25, 1919; New York Times, March 24, 1918, April 25, May 23, June 13, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 1, 1919, p. 580. 18. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 24, May 1, 25, 1919; New York Times, April 25, 29, June 18, August 5, 1919. 19. T.D., “The Housing Crisis,” Socialist Review, May 1920, pp. 331–334; New York Call, January 25, March 9, September 6, 1919, March 12, 17, September 13, 29, 1920; New York Times, March 7, 1920. 20. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 3102; New York Times, May 17, 1919, March 20, 1920; New York Call, September 3, 4, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 20, 1920; Nation, September 4, 1920, p. 261. 21. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, p. 943, vol. 8, pp. 2858–2860; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 31, 1920, p. 135; A. C. McNulty to Alfred E. Smith, August 21, 1920, Smith Papers; Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 184–185; Robert M. Fogelson, “The Parsimony of ‘the Large-Hearted Rich’: An Essay on the Waning of the City and Suburban Homes Company,” in Gina Luria Walker and Associates, ed., The City and Suburban Homes Company’s York Avenue Estate: A Social and Architectural History (New York, 1990), part 1, pp. 22–23; New York Times, December 31, 1923. 22. Real Estate Magazine of New York, September 1920, p. 23; Henry R. Brigham, “How to Meet the Housing Situation,” American Mercury, March 1921, p. 411; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 11, 1920, p. 134, September 4, 1920, p. 311; William H. Calder to Alfred E. Smith, December 28, 1923, Smith Papers; New York Call, September 3, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 148; New York Times, July 12, August 12, 1920; Nation, November 23, 1921, p. 598. 23. Royal Commission on London Traffic, Appendices to the Report of the Royal Commission on London Traffic with Index (London, 1906), vol. 4, p. 75; Lawrence M. Friedman, Government and Slum Housing: A Century of Frustration (Chicago, 1968), pp. 178–180; Fogelson, “The Parsimony of ‘the Large-Hearted Rich,’ ” pp. 22–23; New York Call, September 3, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 1, 1919. 24. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 92, 322, vol. 4, pp. 1237–1254, vol. 5, pp. 1405–1406; A. C. McNulty to Alfred E. Smith, August 21, 1920, Smith Papers; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), pp. 15–17. See also “Government Housing Proposed for New York,” Housing Betterment, May 1924, p. 194. 25. Hearings Before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Reconstruction and Production, vol. 1, pp. 668–671; New York Times, June 2, 1962; John V. Van Pelt, “Government Housing,” Proceedings

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 4 2 – 1 4 9

442

of the Seventh National Conference on Housing: 1918, p. 291. See also Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 13, 1920; New York Globe, May 21, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 26. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 26, 1919, p. 537; Real Estate Magazine of New York, September 1920, p. 22; Hearings Before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Reconstruction and Production, vol. 1, p. 671; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2847–2851, 1887–1893; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 4, 1920, p. 311; New York Call, September 4, 1920; Outlook, April 7, 1920, pp. 582–583. 27. H. Paley to Alfred E. Smith, September 8, 1920, Smith Papers; New Republic, August 25, 1920, p. 346; Clarence S. Stein, “The Housing Crisis in New York City,” Survey, September 1, 1920, pp. 659–661; Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission of the State of New York, March 26, 1920 (Albany, 1920), pp. 3–5, 64–65; Edith Elmer Wood, “Government Housing,” Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on Housing: 1918, p. 297. 28. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 1237–1254, vol. 7, pp. 2035–2037; New York Call, September 3, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 4, 1920; Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 21; New York Times, July 25, 1920. 29. Bronx Home News, January 6, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 13, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 3027–3033; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1984), pp. 66–67; New York Times, July 12, 1920. 30. Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission of the State of New York, March 26, 1920 (Albany, 1920), pp. 4–5, 64–65; Stein, “The Housing Crisis,” p. 661; Nation, September 5, 1920, p. 339; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 141–142; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 4, 1920, p. 311; New York Call, September 13, 1920. 31. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War Period,” pp. 7–11, 24–25; New York Times, February 24, 1918; New York Call, April 29, 1919; Bronx Home News, May 1, 1919. 32. New York Times, April 13, 16, May 8, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 8, 1919; New York Call, December 10, 14, 1918, May 8, 1919. 33. New York Times, April 14, 16, 17, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 19, 1919. See also New York Call, May 8, 1919. 34. New York Call, April 16, 1919; New York Times, April 14, 16, 17, 18, May 8, 1919; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 119; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, May 10, 1919, p. 619; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 6, 1919. 35. New York Call, April 16, 1919; New York Times, February 24, June 1, 1918, February 23, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 26, 1919; New York Evening Post, June 14, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Isidore Montefiore Levy to Alfred E. Smith, April 22, 1919, Smith Papers. 36. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 29, 1918, June 26, 1919; New York Times, February 23, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, p. 648, vol. 3, pp. 831–832; Isidore Montefiore Levy to Alfred E. Smith, April 22, 1919, Smith Papers. 37. New York Times, August 18, 1951; New York Call, May 8, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 473–474, 483–484; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 147. 38. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 15, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 10, 1919, pp. 619, 622; Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission, pp. 4–5, 64–65. 39. New York Call, April 29, May 21, June 3, 1919; New York Times, May 1, 9, 17, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 114; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 25, 1919; Brooklyn Standard Union, April 29, 1919. 40. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 13, 1919, p. 577, May 10, 1919, pp. 617, 619; Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission, pp. 64–65. 41. New York Call, April 29, May 2, 7, 11, 14, 18, 1919; New York Times, May 9, 15, 1919; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 25, 1919; Bronx Home News, April 29, 1919; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 608–609.

C H A P T E R 7 . T H E A P R I L L AW S

1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 26, 1919; New York Telegram, July 9, August 8, 28, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, July 20, 1919; Brooklyn Standard Union, September 29, 1919. 2. New York Call, July 5, 1919, September 29, 1920; New York Times, June 18, August 5, 1919; New York Sun, October 1, 1919, and an issue whose date is not legible, but probably from late September 1919; New York Telegram, August 20, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, July 6, 1919. 3. New York Sun, an issue whose date is not legible, but probably from late September 1919, New York Telegram, October 12, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Gordon D. MacDonald, Apartment Building Construction: Manhattan, 1902–1953 (New York, 1953), pp. 9, 18; Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 9, 1927 (Albany, 1927), pp. 24–25; New York Times, July 18, August 10, 1919; Interim Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1922), p. 7. 4. New York Daily Tribune, July 3, October 1, 1919, New York Telegram, August 20, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, September 23, November 16, 1919. 5. Samuel Orr to Alfred E. Smith, July 15, 1919, Smith Papers; New York Telegram, July 9, October 20, 1919, and another issue whose date is not legible, but probably from September or October 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, January 8, 1920. 6. New York Sun, an issue whose date is not legible, but probably from late September 1919, New York Telegram, an issue whose date is not legible, but probably from late October, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, December 27, 1919; “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, February 1921, pp. 52–61. 7. Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), p. 5, New York Public Library; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 17, 1920, p. 71, January 24, 1920, p. 103, March 27, 1920, p. 408; New York Times, March 14, 1920; Bronx Home News, March 11, 1920; Richard O. Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation in New York and Its Nation-Wide Significance,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, July 1920, p. 577. 8. New York Times, February 25, 26, March 12, 16, 1920; Bronx Home News, March 11, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 107, 116–117, 135–137; New York Call, March 12, 1920. 9. New York Times, February 1, 27, April 12, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 17, 1920, p. 71, January 24, 1920, p. 103; Bronx Home News, March 11, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 77–79. See also U.S. Department of Labor, Rent Profiteering and Its Control, 1917–1919 (Washington, D.C., 1941), pp. 1–19.

443

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 5 0 – 1 5 7

42. New York Times, June 5, 11, 13, 15, 1919; New York Sun, June 13, 1914, New York Journal, June 14, 1919, New York Herald, June 15, 1919, New York Telegram, June 16, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 43. New York Times, June 17, 1919; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 21, 1919, p. 823. 44. New York Times, June 17, 25, October 5, 1919. 45. Ibid., June 17, 1919; New York Call, June 18, 1919; New York Telegram, June 18, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 21, 1919, p. 823. 46. New York Times, June 24, 25, October 5, 1919; New York Telegram, June 18, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers. 47. New York Times, June 17, October 5, 1919; Greater New York Tenants League, Inc. to Alfred E. Smith, June 19, 1919, Smith Papers. 48. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 60; New York Telegram, June 16, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Call, January 18, 1919; Friedman, Government and Slum Housing, p. 97.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 5 7 – 1 6 5

444

10. Preliminary Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Housing and Ice Conditions of the State [of New York] (Albany, 1920), pp. 9–11; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 10, 1920, p. 39. 11. Preliminary Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Housing, pp. 5, 10; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 10, 1920, p. 39; New York Times, January 18, February 1, March 2, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 10, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 115–116. 12. New York Times, March 2, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 10, 1920, p. 39, January 31, 1920, p. 134; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committee on Cities, pp. 13–14, 109–110; New York Call, March 4, 1920. 13. New York Times, January 2, 10, 18, February 1, 1920. 14. Ibid., January 18, February 1, 1920. 15. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 21, 1920, p. 240, February 28, 1920, p. 273, March 20, 1920, p. 370; New York Times, January 18, February 1, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 115–116. 16. John R. Hill to Alfred E. Smith, March 24, 1920, Smith Papers; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 123–124. 17. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 21, 1920, p. 240; John R. Hill to Alfred E. Smith, March 24, 1920, Smith Papers; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 124–125; New York Times, February 1, 23, March 3, 1920; Bronx Home News, March 18, 1920. 18. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 646–647, New York Public Library; New York Times, June 17, 1919, March 14, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 27, 1919, p. 655. 19. New York Times, November 5, 6, 1919. 20. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 6–8; Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), pp. 116, 131–132; New York Times, June 18, August 10, 1919; March 21, 1920; Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1920), p. 5. 21. New York American, October 2, 1919, New York Telegram, October 12, 27, 1919, New York Sun, October 1, 1919, New York World, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Daily Tribune, October 2, 1919; New York Times, October 1, 1919; Bronx Home News, October 2, 7, 1919; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), p. 23. 22. New York Call, October 2, 16, November 1, 3, 1919; New York Times, November 5, 6, 1919. See also Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City (New Brunswick, 1986), pp. 65–66. 23. Brooklyn Standard Union, March 2, 1920; New York Times, March 4, 7, 1920; Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” pp. 67–71; Day, Urban Castles, p. 132. 24. Edith Berger Drellich and Andrée Emery, Rent Regulation in War and Peace (New York, 1939), pp. 23–24; New York Evening Mail, August 23, 1919, New York World, August 23, 191, Lusk Committee Papers; New York Times, June 13, 1920; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” p. 592; Marcus Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, July 1925, p. 345. 25. Thomas E. Vadney, “The Politics of Repression: A Case Study of the Red Scare in New York City,” New York History, January 1968, pp. 56–75. See also Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis, 1955), pp. 235–245. 26. Murray, Red Scare, p. 242; New York Times, February 9, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 10, 1920.

445

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 6 5 – 1 7 3

27. Bronx Home News, March 9, 11, 16, 22, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 6, 1920, p. 305; New York Times, March 9, 1920; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 9, 1920. 28. New York Times, February 9, March 4, 7, 20, 21, 1920; New York Call, February 26, March 11, 1920; Bronx Home News, March 9, 11, 18, 1920; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 9, 1920. 29. New York Times, March 9, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 9, 1920; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 9, 17, 1920. 30. Brooklyn Standard Union, March 9, 17, 1920; New York Times, March 18, 1920. See also Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 116–117. 31. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 17, 1920; New York Times, March 20, 22, 23, 1920; New York Call, March 21, 22, 24. 32. New York Call, March 22, 24, 1920; New York Times, March 20, 23, 24, 1920; Bronx Home News, March 22, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 23, 1920. 33. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 23, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 4–14. 34. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, esp. pp. 14–18, 62–67, 77–86. See also New York Times, March 24, 1920. 35. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 30, 43, 59, 62–65, 119, 132. See also New York Times, March 24, 1920. 36. New York Call, March 22, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, esp. pp. 19–30, 52–57. 37. Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, esp. pp. 92–104; New York Times, March 20, 24, 28, 1920. 38. New York Times, March 24, 25, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 27, 1920, p. 405; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 24, 25, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 24, 1920; Bronx Home News, March 25, 1920; New York Call, March 24, 1920; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 36, 129. 39. Bronx Home News, March 25, 1920; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 23, 24, 25, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 25, 1920; New York Call, March 24, 1920. See also [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 27, 1920, pp. 405–406. 40. Brooklyn Standard Union, March 25, 1920; New York Times, March 25, 1920. 41. New York Times, January 4, March 25, 26, 29, April 1, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 25, 1920; New York Call, March 26, 1920. See also Richard O. Chittick, “A Strenuous Legislative Session,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, pp. 477–478; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” pp. 577–579. 42. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 3, 1920, p. 407; New York Times, March 27, April 1, 1920; Harold Lever (and another person whose name is not legible) to Alfred E. Smith, February 13, 1920, Smith Papers; Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission of the State of New York, March 16, 1920 (Albany, 1920), pp. 3–5, 64–65; Alfred E. Smith, Up to Now: An Autobiography (New York, 1929), pp. 269–270; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 31, 1920; New York Call, April 1, 1920; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” p. 577. See also “New Laws Relating to Landlord and Tenant,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, pp. 471–476. 43. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 27, 1920, p. 405, April 3, 1920, p. 437; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” p. 592; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, p. 122; New York Times, March 31, 1920. 44. Real Estate News, April 1920, pp. 6–7; New York Times, March 24, 31, 1920; Isidor Berger, “Proposed Radical Realty Legislation and Possible Effects,” Real Estate News, March 1920, p. 8; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 3, 13–14; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 25, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 10, 1920, p. 469. 45. New York Call, January 6, March 12, 13, 26, 1920; New York Times, March 13, 24, 30, 31, 1920.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 7 4 – 1 8 4

446

46. New York Times, April 2, 9, 13, 15, 18, 21, 15, 1920; Brooklyn Standard Union, March 12, 1920. 47. Frederick Spiegelberg, “Recent Emergency Rent Legislation,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, pp. 465–468, 501; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” pp. 576–580, 592, 594; New York Times, April 11, 1920; New York Law Journal, April 12, 1920. 48. Brooklyn Standard Union, March 25, 27, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 24, 25, 1920; Real Estate News, April 1920, pp. 6–7; Bronx Home News, March 16, 1920; New York Times, March 25, 26, April 2, 5, 1920. C H A P T E R 8 . T H E S E P T E M B E R L AW S

1. New York Times, March 31, April 3, 11, 16. See also Richard O. Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation in New York and Its Nation-Wide Significance,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, July 1920, pp. 578–579. 2. New York Times, April 16, 1920; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” pp. 577–578. 3. New York Times, April 16, 17, May 11, 1920; Alexander C. McNulty, “Serious Omissions in the New Rent Laws,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, p. 470. 4. New York Times, March 31, April 7, 9, 19, 20, 25, 27, 28, May 2, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 27, May 1, 1920; New York Call, April 19, 25, 28, May 2, 1920. 5. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 6, 1920; Stanley M. Isaacs, “Analysis of Rent Laws to Prevent Rent Profiteering,” [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, August 28, 1920, p. 281; New York Times, May 15, 1920; Frederick Spiegelberg, “Recent Emergency Rent Legislation,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, pp. 467–468; “Rules Recommended by the Board of Municipal Justices,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, page 476; McNulty, “Serious Omissions,” p. 470. 6. Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 16, 18, 32, 82–83, 95–96, 120, 123, New York Public Library; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 485–488. 7. New York Times, April 6, 11, May 2, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 5, 22, 1920; New York Call, April 6, 7, 19, June 23, July 1, 8, 1920. 8. Brooklyn Standard Union, April 5, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 5, 6, 1920; New York Times, April 6, 7, 9, 1920; New York Call, April 7, 1920. 9. New York Times, April 5, May 7, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 22, May 14, 1920; Bronx Home News, July 11, August 8, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 2860. 10. Bronx Home News, August 10, 12, September 21, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 5, 6, 1920; New York Times, April 7, 9, May 11, 1920. 11. New York Times, September 4, 12, 1920; Stanley M. Isaacs, “Analysis of Recent Laws to Prevent Rent Profiteering,” [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, August 28, 1920, pp. 281–282. 12. New York Call, April 6, 7, 1920; New York Times, September 12, 1920; Isaacs, “Analysis of Recent Rent Laws,” pp. 281–282; Alexander C. MacNulty [sic], “The Holding Over of Tenants in Possession of Premises,” Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference in Housing: 1920, p. 281; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 23, 1920. 13. Bronx Home News, September 28, 1920; New York Times, April 9, May 4, 1920, January 24, 1965; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 22, May 6, July 1, August 30, 1920. 14. New York Times, May 7, 1920, February 5, 1968; New York Call, May 7, 1920. 15. New York Times, November 27, 1933; Bronx Home News, August 10, 1920. 16. New York Times, May 11, 1920; Bronx Home News, August 15, 17, 1920. 17. New York Call, April 7, 1920; New York Times, May 11, August 10, 1920; Bronx Home News, August 10, 15, 17, 1920.

447

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 8 5 – 1 9 3

18. Bronx Home News, August 10, 15, 17, September 21, 26, 1920; New York Times, May 4, August 10, 1920. 19. Bronx Home News, September 21, 26, 28, 1920; New York Call, November 8, 1920; New York Times, April 8, 9, 10, August 3, 8, 1920; June 9, 1923. 20. New York Times, April 20, 1920, November 21, 1927; New York Call, April 30, 1920. 21. Bronx Home News, July 11, 1920. 22. Ibid., July 11, 19, 1920. See also New York Times, April 20, 1920. 23. New York Times, November 21, 1927; New York Call, August 26, 1920. See also Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2857–2858. 24. New York Times, March 24, 1923; Bronx Home News, September 2, 5, 1920. 25. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2813–2814, 2852–2855, 2871–2876, 2904–2905, 3155–3161; New York Call, July 15, 1920. 26. New York Call, July 11, 1920; Robert Oppenheim to Charles C. Lockwood, July 22, 1920, “Tenant” to Alfred E. Smith, September 1, 1920, Smith Papers; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2816–2817, 2863, 2872, 2916, 2942, 2946–2947, 2965–2967, 2975–2976, 2987, 3005, 3155. 27. New York Times. April 15, 17, June 22, 27, July 3, 5, 20, 23, August 21, 25, 1920; Bronx Home News, July 6, August 17, 1920. See also Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2862–2863. 28. New York Times, April 16, July 18, 1920; Henry Weber to Alfred E. Smith, September 9, 1920, S. E. Dunne to Alfred E. Smith, September 21, 1920, Bernard J. McGovern to Alfred E. Smith, May 10, 1920, S. Fullerton Weaver to Alfred E. Smith, September 16, 1920, Smith Papers; Bronx Home News, September 1, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 2815. 29. Rachel Ellison to Alfred E. Smith, September 22, 1920, Smith Papers; Bronx Home News, August 12, 1920; New York Times, September 12, 1920; Chittick, “Recent Rent Legislation,” p. 580; MacNulty [sic],“The Holding Over of Tenants,” p. 281. 30. New York Times, April 2, 9, August 27, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2820–2821, 3009, 3126; M. C. Bunyan to Alfred E. Smith, July 10, 1920, A. C. McNulty to Alfred E. Smith, August 31, 1920, S. Fullerton Weaver to Alfred E. Smith, September 16, 1920, Walter C. Arndt to Alfred E. Smith, May 27, 1920, Smith Papers. 31. New York Times, May 26, June 27, July 12, 17, 21, 26, August 22, 1920, September 25, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 18, August 13, 1920; Bronx Home News, August 3, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2820, 2852, 2859, 3097; Harry Allen Ely to Alfred E. Smith, July 30, 1920, Smith Papers. 32. New York Times, July 28, 31, August 23, 27, 29, 1920; David Grossman to Alfred E. Smith, September 26, 1920; Jas. A. Tipping to Alfred E. Smith, September 25, 1920, Harry Allen Ely to Alfred E. Smith, July 30, 1920, Smith Papers; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 3012–3013, 3024, 3121–3126, 3137, 3157; Bronx Home News, October 1, 1920. 33. New York Times, April 11, July 26, August 23, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 18, July 13, 1920; Richard O. Chittick to Alfred E. Smith, September 14, 1920, Charles Goell to Alfred E. Smith, September 23, 1920, Lawson Purdy to Alfred E. Smith, September 20, 1920, Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer to Alfred E. Smith, September 23, 1920, Smith Papers; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2834–2839, 3001–3002, 3095–3096. 34. New York Times, June 17, 27, July 25, August 11, September 5, October 1, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2998–2999, 3081–3089; Bronx Home News, August 3, 1920. 35. New York Times, April 14, July 31, August 17, 1920; Florence J. King to Alfred E. Smith, July 7, 1920, Wentworth Byron Winslow to Alfred E. Smith, July 17, 1920, Francis O. X. McLaughlin to Alfred E. Smith, August 17, 1920, Smith Papers; Bronx Home News, September 2, 3, 1920; Frederick M. Davenport, “The Second Socialist Ouster at Albany and the Housing Crisis in the City of New York,” Outlook, October 6, 1920, pp. 222–223; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2852, 2855; MacNulty [sic], “The Holding Over of Tenants,” pp. 283–284; New York Daily Tribune, April 30, 1920.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 1 9 3 – 2 0 3

448

36. New York Times, August 5, 11, 13, 1920; Davenport, “The Second Socialist Ouster,” pp. 222–223; “ ”Moving Day,” Survey, October 9, 1920, p. 54; Belle L. Moskowitz to Alfred E. Smith, April 14, 1920, J. J. McDonald to Alfred E. Smith, August 12, 1920, Smith Papers; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2923–2928. 37. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 13, 1920; New York Times, August 13, 14, 1920. 38. New York Times, August 19, 22, September 1, 3, 11, 14, 19, 1920. 39. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 25, 1920; New York Times, September 21–25, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 1920; New York Call, September 20–23, 25, 29, 1920; “Moving Day,” p. 54. See also Richard O. Chittick to Alfred E. Smith, September 14, 1920, S. Fullerton Weaver to Alfred E. Smith, September 16, 1920, Smith Papers. 40. Brooklyn Standard Union, September 29, 1920; New York Call, September 25, 27, 1920; New York Times, September 19, 24, 25, 27, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 24, 26, 1920; Bronx Home News, September 26, 1920. See also Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), pp. 291–292. 41. Brooklyn Standard Union, September 29, 1920; Frederick Spiegelberg, “The Recent Housing Legislation,” Legal Aid Review, April 1921, pp. 1–7. See also New York Times, September 26, 28, 1920. 42. New York Times, September 25, 26, 28, 1920; New York Call, September 27, 28, 1920. 43. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, p. 32; Bavendam v. Lewison, 189 N.Y.S., 687, quotation on p. 689; Brooklyn Standard Union, September 29, 1920. 44. Edward L. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War Period,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920, pp. 6–11; Edith Berger Drellich and Andrée Emery, Rent Control in War and Peace (New York, 1939), pp. 66–74; Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York, 1931), pp. 95–96. See also Marcus Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, July 1925, pp. 343–344. 45. New York Call, September 21, 29, 1920; S. W. Steele, Jr., to Alfred E. Smith, July 21, 1920, Thaddeus L. Weatherly to Alfred E. Smith, an undated letter, probably written in August or September 1920, Harry Allen Ely to Alfred E. Smith, July 30, 1920, Smith Papers; “Take Every Empty House!” Nation, September 18, 1920; New York Times, July 13, 16, September 24, 25, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 26, 1920. 46. Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” pp. 343–344; Wood, Recent Trends, pp. 95–96; New York Times, September 26, 1920; “Rent Laws: Then What,” Nation, March 23, 1921, p. 424; Congressional Record, August 23, 1921, p. 5579; Henry R. Brigham, “Do We Need Rent Control Laws Permanently?” Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference on Housing: 1923, p. 206. 47. New York Times, September 26, 1920; Fiorello H. La Guardia, “Rent,” an undated memo, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia Papers, New York City Municipal Archives; “Moving Day,” p. 54; Bronx Home News, March 20, 1921; A. C. McNulty, “Sidelights on Our ‘Emergency’ Rent Laws,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, January 1921, p. 204; Louis Marshall and Louis M. Isaacs, “Points for Edgar A. Levy Leasing Company, Inc. and 810 West End Avenue, Inc. as Amici Curiae on Constitutionality of Chapters 136, 944 and 947 of the New York Laws of 1920,” p. 8, in Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal. 48. Julius Henry Cohen, “Rent Control After World War I—Recollections,” New York University Law Quarterly Review, April 1946, pp. 274–275. See also New York Call, September 29, 30, 1920; Literary Digest, April 1, 1922, pp. 13–15; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, p. 526; New York Times, September 25, 1920. C H A P T E R 9 . T H E B AT T L E I N T H E S TAT E C O U R T S

1. New York Call, September 30, 1920; New York Times, October 2, 3, 8, 10, 1920, February 6, 1922, January 25, 1931; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 9, 1920, p. 496. See also Brown v. Feldman.

449

N O T E S T O PAG E S 2 0 4 – 2 1 0

2. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 2, 1920, p. 455, October 9, 1920, p. 496; A. C. McNulty, “Sidelights on Our ‘Emergency’ Rent Laws,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, January 1921, p. 229; New York Times, October 3, 8, 13, 1920; New York Call, October 3, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2919–2920. 3. Harold G. Aron, “The New York Landlord and Tenant Laws of 1920,” Cornell Law Quarterly, November 1920, p. 3; Walter D. F. Dodd and Carl H. Ziess, “Rent Regulation and Housing Problems,” Journal [of the] American Bar Association, January 1921, p. 12; “Constitutionality of the New York Emergency Housing Laws,” Harvard Law Review, February 1921, pp. 426–430; Henry H. Glassie, “The Regulation of Rents,” Virginia Law Review, October 1920, p. 35; Washington Post, September 11, 1921, February 24, 1923. 4. Bronx Home News, April 2, 1920; New York Times, April 13, 1920; Paterno Investing Corporation v. Katz, 184 N.Y.S. 129, quotation on p. 132; Blek v. Davis, 183 N.Y.S. 737; Aron, “The New York Landlord and Tenant Laws,” p. 7; Seventy-Eighth St. & Broadway Co. v. Rosenbaum, 182 N.Y.S. 505; Kuenzli v. Stone, 112 N.Y. Misc. 125. See also G.V.I., “Constitutionality of Rent Laws,” 11 A.L.R. 1252, esp. pp. 1254–1256. 5. Kuenzli v. Stone, 112 Misc. 125, quotation on p. 132; New York Times, October 13, 1920; Willson v. McDonnell, 265 F. 432; Hirsh v. Block, 267 F. 614. In a case that was decided in July 1920, the New Jersey Supreme Court struck down a Jersey City ordinance that protected tenants from profiteering landlords. See Stell v. Mayor and Aldermen of Jersey City, 111 A. 274. 6. New York Times, October 9, 10, 12, 1920; Julius Henry Cohen, “Rent Control After World War I—Recollections,” New York University Law Quarterly Review, April 1946, p. 275; James C. Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1983, vol. 1, p. i; Alfred E. Smith to Charles D. Newton, October 14, 1920, Smith Papers; Gerald Lawrence Feiner, “Counsel to the Situation: The Lawyer as Social Engineer, 1900–1945,” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1973, pp. 138–139; Robert T. Swaine, The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors, 1819–1947 (New York, 1948), vol. 1, pp. 660–663; Julius Henry Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew (New York, 1946), p. 169. 7. New York Times, October 8, 20, 21, 1920; Bronx Home News, October 14, 21, 1920; New York Call, October 20, 1920; Guttag v. Shatzkin, 185 N.Y.S. 71, quotation on p. 72. 8. New York Times, November 2, 1920; Heyman v. Osterweis, 185 N.Y.S. 311, quotations on pp. 312–313. 9. Edgar A. Levy Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 186 N.Y.S. 5; New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc., Appellant, Against Jerome Siegel, Respondent, Appellant’s Points, pp. 1–2, Bar Association Library. 10. Ullmann Realty Co. v. Tamur, 185 N.Y.S. 612, quotations on pp. 619–620, 630; New York Times, November 27, 1920. See also William Brandt & Co., Inc. v. Weil, 185 N.Y.S. 497. 11. New York Times, November 5, 27, 1920; New York World, November 29, 1920; People ex rel. Brixton Operating Corporation v. La Fetra, 185 N.Y.S. 632; People ex rel. Durham Realty Corporation v. La Fetra, 185 N.Y.S. 638. 12. New York Times, November 5, December 8, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 30, 1920, p. 803; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 8, 1920; Real Estate Magazine of New York, December 1920, pp. 155–157, 173–177, 179, 181, 185. See also New York State Supreme Court, New York County, The People of the State of New York on the Relation of the Brixton Operating Corporation, Relator, vs. Edward B. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of City York, Defendant. Brief on Behalf of the Attorney General of the State of New York and the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing in Support of the Constitutionality of the Emergency Housing Laws Enacted September 27, 1920, New York Public Library. 13. People ex rel. Rayland Realty Co., Inc. v. Fagan, 186 N.Y.S. 23, quotations on pp. 26, 28, 31. See also Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 8, 1920; New York Times, December 9, 1920. 14. People ex rel. Rayland Realty Co., Inc. v. Fagan, 186 N.Y.S. 23, quotations on pp. 31, 33, 35–38. See also New York Times, April 6, 1890, October 18, 1908.

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450

15. New York Times, October 27, December 25, 1920; Guttag v. Shatzkin, 186 N.Y.S. 47. 16. Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, Jacob L. Guttag, Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Hyman Shatzkin, Defendant-Respondent. Brief of Plaintiff-Appellant, esp. pp. 10, 11, 30, 41, 64, Bar Association Library. 17. Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, Jacob L. Guttag, Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Hyman Shatzkin, Defendant-Respondent. Points of Intervener[,] The Real Estate Board of New York, esp. pp. 9, 10, 14, Bar Association Library. 18. Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, Jacob L. Guttag, Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Hyman Shatkin, Defendant-Respondent. Brief for Respondent, esp. pp. 3, 4, 8, Bar Association Library. 19. Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, Jacob L. Guttag, Plaintiff-Appellant v. Hyman Shatzkin, Defendant-Respondent. Brief on Behalf of the Attorney General of the State of New York and the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing in Support of the Constitutionality of the Emergency Housing Laws Enacted September 27, 1920, esp. pp. 54, 135, 138, Bar Association Library. 20. Guttag v. Shatzkin, 186 N.Y.S. 47, quotations on pp. 53–54. See also New York Times, December 25, 1920. 21. People ex rel. Brixton Operating Corporation v. La Fetra, 186 N.Y.S. 58; People ex rel. Durham Realty Corporation v. La Fetra, 186 N.Y.S. 63; New York Times, October 26, 1920; State of New York, Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, First Judicial Department, The People of the State of New York on the Relation of the Durham Realty Corporation, Relator-Appellant, Against Edward B. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of New York. Brief on Behalf of the Attorney-General of the State of New York and the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, esp. p. 64, Bar Association Library. 22. New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, People of the State of New York on the Relation of Brixton Operating Corporation, Appellant, Against Edward B. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of New York, Respondent. Appeal from the Order of the Special Term, Mr. Justice Giegerish Presiding, Entered on the 11th Day of December, 1920, esp. pp. 10–11, Bar Association Library. 23. Ibid., esp. pp. 52, 54, 56. 24. New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, People of the State of New York on the Relation of Brixton Operating Corporation, Appellant, Against Edward B,. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of New York. Brief on Behalf of Respondent, the Attorney-General of the State of New York, esp. pp. 3, 5, 9, and Respondent’s Brief, esp. pp. 3, 6, Bar Association Library. 25. People ex rel. Brixton Operating Corporation v. La Fetra, 186 N.Y.S. 58, quotations on pp. 59–62. See also New York Times, December 25, 1920. 26. Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 186 N.Y.S. 5; Feiner, “Counsel to the Situation,” p. 140; Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” vol. 1, pp. 25–30; Louis B. Marshall to Lewis M. Isaacs, October 9, 1920, Louis B. Marshall Papers, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. 27. New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc., Appellant, Against Jerome Siegel, Respondent. Appellant’s Points, esp. pp. 11, 32, 47, Bar Association Library. 28. Ibid., esp. pp. 16, 19; New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Appellant, vs. Jerome Siegel, Respondent. Brief Submitted by Amici Curiae, esp. pp. 12, 13, Bar Association Library. 29. Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 186 N.Y.S. 5, quotations on pp. 17, 20, and 21. 30. Ibid., quotations on pp. 18, 21, and 22. See also New York Times, December 25, 1920. 31. Bronx Home News, December 301, 1921; 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern, 186 N.Y.S. 56; Clemilt Realty Co., Inc. v. Wood, 186 N.Y.S. 415; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 31, 1920.

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N O T E S T O PAG E S 2 1 8 – 2 2 6

32. New York Times, January 20, 1921; Real Estate Magazine of New York, February 1921, p. 260; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, p. 2; Francis Bergan, The History of the New York Court of Appeals, 1847–1932 (New York, 1985), pp. 258–259. 33. New York Times, December 26, 1920; Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew, p. 170. 34. Andrew L. Kaufman, Cardozo (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 362–365; Bergan, New York Court of Appeals, pp. 245–246; Frank A. Smith, Judicial Review of Legislation in New York, 1906–1938 (New York, 1952), pp. 152–155; People v. Lochner, 69 N.E. 373; People v. Marcus, 77 N.E. 1073; People v. Williams, 81 N.E. 778; Ives v. South Buffalo Ry. Co., 94 N.E. 431. 35. New York Times, October 17, 1923; Kaufman, Cardozo, p. 368. 36. Frank Harris Hiscock, “Progressivism of New York Law,” Cornell Law Quarterly, June 1925, p. 380; Henry W. Edgerton, “A Liberal Judge: Cuthbert W. Pound,” Cornell Law Quarterly, December 1935, p. 22; Ives v. South Buffalo Ry. Co., 124 N.Y.S. 920, quotation on p. 923; Smith, Judicial Review of Legislation in New York, pp. 152–153, 155–156; Kaufman, Cardozo, p. 365. 37. Ingraham-Stoddard Brief, pp. 10, 15, 17; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 6–7; Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc., Appellant, Against Jerome Siegel, Respondent, Appellant’s Points, p. 11; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, p. 12. See also Feiner, “Counsel to the Situation,” p. 141. 38. Ingraham-Stoddard Brief, p. 10; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 4–5; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, p. 3. See also Court of Appeals of the State of New York, The People of the State of New York on the Relation of the Brixton Operating Corporation, Appellant, Against Edward F. La Fetra, Respondent. Brief for Battery Realty Co., Inc., Intervenor, pp. 1–15, Bar Association Library. 39. Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 73–91; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 20–35. See also Samuel McCune Lindsay, Some Economic Aspects of the Recent Emergency Housing Legislation in New York (1923), pp. i–viii. 40. Ingraham-Stoddard Brief, pp. 10, 61–64; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 76–91; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 22–38. 41. Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 19–20, 48–78; Feiner, “Counsel to the Situation,” pp. 137–152; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 31–65; Ingraham-Stoddard Brief, pp. 18–20. 42. Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 98–104, 106–108, 133–141; Ingraham-Stoddard Brief, pp. 12–15; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 9–14, 66–67. 43. Durham v. La Fetra; Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel, 130 N.E. 923; Clemilt Realty Company, Inc. v. Wood, 130 N.E. 928; Guttag v. Shatzkin, 130 N.E. 929; 810 West End Avenue, Incorporated v. Stern, 130 N.E. 931; Feiner, “Counsel to the Situation,” p. 153. 44. Durham v. La Fetra, quotations on pp. 605–606. See also New York State Court of Appeals, The People of the State of New York, on the Relation of the Dunham [sic] Realty Corporation, Relator-Appellant, Against Edward B. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of New York, et al., Defendants-Respondents. Brief on Behalf of Respondent, The Attorney General of the State of New York, pp. 3–5, Bar Association Library. 45. Durham v. La Fetra, quotations on p. 606. 46. Ibid., quotations on pp. 605–607. 47. Durham v. La Fetra, quotations on pp. 604, 607–608. 48. Levy Leasing Co. v. Siegel, quotations on pp. 926–927. See also Lincoln Trust Co. v. Williams Building Corp., 128 N.E. 209, quotation on p. 210. 49. “Control of Rent Profiteering,” Housing Betterment, April 1921, p. 63; New York Times, March 9, 1921; Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew, p. 170; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 41– 42; Durham v. La Fetra, quotation on p. 606; New York World, March 9, 1921; Washington Post, March 9, 1921. 50. New York Times, March 9, 10, 1921; New York World, March 9, 10, 1921; Bronx Home News, March 10, 1921. 51. Bronx Home News, March 10, 1921; New York Call, March 13, 1921; New York World, March 9, 11, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 9, 1921; New York Herald, March 10, 1921.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 2 2 7 – 2 3 6

452

52. New York Times, March 9, 10, 1921; Louis Marshall to Samuel H. Ordway, February 2, 1922, in Charles Reznikoff, ed., Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty (Philadelphia, 1957), vol. 2, p. 1034; New York World, March 9, 10, 1921. 53. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 9, 10, 1921; New York Times, March 9, 10, 1921; New York World, March 10, 11, 1921. 54. Guttag v. Shatzkin, quotations on p. 930. See also Marcus Brown v. Feldman. C H A P T E R 1 0 . T H E F I G H T I N T H E F E D E R A L C O U RT S

1. New York Times, October 3, 7, 1920, August 21, 1941. 2. Ibid., October 9, November 14, 1920; New York Call, October 18, 1920. See also Brown v. Pollak, 272 F. 137; Supreme Court of the United States, Marcus Brown Holding Company, Complainant-Appellant, Against Marcus Feldman, Benjamin Schwartz, Frank Schwartz, and Edward Swann, as District Attorney of the County of New York, in the State of New York, Defendants-Appellees. Brief for Tenants-Appellees, pp. 1–2, in Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal; Myers Brief, p. 18. 3. New York Times, October 9, 20, 27, 1920; Brown v. Pollak, p. 138. See also Smith v. Wilson, 277 U.S. 388. 4. New York Times, October 27, 1920. 5. Ibid., October 27, November 13, 1920; Brown v. Pollak, quotations on pp. 138, 141; Myers Brief, p. 18. 6. Transcript of Record: Affidavit of Joseph A. Seidman. District Court of New York, Southern District of New York, pp. 11–22, in Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal. 7. Bill of Complaint. District Court of the United States, Southern District of New York. In Equity, pp. 23–41, in Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal. 8. Answer. District Court of the United States, Southern District of New York, in Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal, pp. 71–81; In Equity—Motion to Dismiss Bill of Complaint. District Court of the United States, Southern District of New York, pp. 86–89, in Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal. 9. Brown v. Feldman, 269 F. 306, quotations on p. 312. See also Charles M. Hough, “Due Process of Law: To-Day,” Harvard Law Review, January 1919, p. 223. 10. Brown v. Feldman, 269 F. 306, quotations on pp. 313–315. 11. Ibid., quotations on pp. 315–317. 12. Ibid., quotations on pp. 317–318. 13. New York Times, December 17, 1920; Brown v. Feldman, especially p. 171; Marcus Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, July 1925, pp. 344–345; Stell v. Mayor and Aldermen of Jersey City, 111 A. 274; State ex rel. Milwaukee Sales and Investment Co. v. Railroad Commission of Wisconsin et al., 183 N.W. 687; Hirsh v. Block, 267 F. 614; Washington Post, November 19, 1920. 14. Report of the Rent Commission of the District of Columbia to the President of the United States of America, May 22, 1925 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 8; Congressional Record, October 1, 1919, p. 6723; Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Capital City, 1879–1950 (Princeton, 1963), pp. 249–250; “Changes in the Cost of Living in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, February 1921, pp. 52–61; U.S. Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, High Cost of Living in the District of Columbia, 66th Congress, 2nd session, report no. 327 (1919), pp. 18–25; Henry W. Glassie, “The Regulation of Rents,” Virginia Law Quarterly, October 1920, p. 50. 15. New York Times, July 28, 1918; Washington Post, March 12, May 5–10, 12, 13, 20, 22, 24, 26, 1918; Congressional Record, May 27, 1918, pp. 7112–7127, October 11, 1918, p. 6756. See also Edwin L. Schaub, “The Regulation of Rentals During the War Period,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920, pp. 19–25. 16. Washington Post, May 24, June 9, December 2, 1919; Willson v. McDonnell, 265 F. 432, quotations on p. 435; Willson v. McDonnell, 257 U.S. 665.

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17. Congressional Record, October 4, 1919, pp. 6371–6374, October 11, 1919, pp. 6755–6759; Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, High Cost of Living in the District of Columbia, pp. 20–21; Washington Post, August 6, September 16, October 3, 13, 23, December 3, 1919, January 7, 1920; Report of the Rent Commission of the District of Columbia, p. 15. 18. Glassie, “The Regulations of Rents,” pp. 56–58; Hearings [on the] High Cost of Living in the Districts of Columbia Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the District of Columbia, United States Senate Sixty-Sixth Congress, First Session Pursuant to S. Res. 150 (Washington, D.C., 1919), p. 815; F. W. Coker, “Housing and Rent Problems,” American Political Science Review, November 1920, p. 698; Report of the Rent Commission of the District of Columbia, pp. 15–20. 19. Washington Post, December 2, 3, 30, 1919, March 22, May 2, 9, 1920; Glassie, “The Regulation of Rent,” pp. 57–58; Hirsh v. Block, 267 F. 614. 20. Washington Post, May 2, 5, 1920. 21. Hirsh v. Block, 267 F. 614, quotations on pp. 618–619, 622. 22. Ibid., quotations on pp. 619–622. 23. Ibid., quotations on pp. 623–624. 24. Ibid., quotations on pp. 625–627, 629–630. 25. Washington Post, June 3, 22, 24, 30, July 3, 14, 15, 22, November 19, 1920. See also Block v. Hirsh, 267 F. 631. 26. Walter F. Dodd and Carl H. Zeiss, “Rent Regulation and Housing Problems,” Journal of the American Bar Association, January 1921, p. 11. 27. New York Times, March 1, 1921; Glassie, “The Regulation of Rents,” pp. 32–34; Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, No. 731, Marcus Brown Holding Co., Inc., PlaintiffAppellant. Against Marcus Feldman, Benjamin Schwartz, Frank Schwartz and Edward Swann, as District Attorney of the County of New York in the State of New York, Defendants-Appellees. Appellant’s Brief on the Construction of the Constitution Affecting the Validity of the Housing Legislation Enacted by the New York Legislature, pp. 11–17, Brown v. Feldman Record on Appeal; Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1920, No. 640, Julius Block, Plaintiff in Error, vs. Louis Hirsh, Defendant in Error. Brief for Defendant in Error, pp. 19–21, Block v. Hirsch Record on Appeal. 28. Journal of the Supreme Court of the United States, March 3, 7, 1921, Library of the Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D.C., with thanks to Patricia Evans for calling this item to my attention. 29. Block v. Hirsh, p. 135, and Brown v. Feldman, p. 170. See also Julius Henry Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew (New York, 1946), p. 172. 30. For a summary of the briefs, see Block v. Hirsh, pp. 137–152, and Brown v. Feldman, pp. 173–196. 31. Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, No. 731, Marcus Brown Holding Co., Inc., Plaintiff-Appellant. Against Marcus Feldman, Benjamin Schwartz, Frank Schwartz and Edward Swann, as District Attorney of the County of New York in the State of New York, Defendants-Appellees. Appellant’s Brief on the Construction of the Constitution Affecting the Validity of the Housing Legislation Enacted by the New York Legislature, p. 37; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 8, 29–30, 24, 34. 32. Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1920, No. 640, Julius Block, Plaintiff in Error, vs. Louis Hirsh, Defendant in Error. Brief for the Plaintiff in Error, p. 34, Harvard Law Library; Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1920, No. 640, Julius Block, Plaintiff in Error, vs. Louis Hirsh, Defendant in Error. Brief for Defendant in Error, p. 35. 33. Washington Post, July 14, 1920, April 19, 20, 1921; Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew, pp. 169–170; New York World, April 19, 1921. 34. Charles Warren, “The Progressiveness of the United States Supreme Court,” Columbia Law Review, April 1913, p. 295; Ray A. Brown, “Due Process of Law, Police Power, and the Supreme Court,” Harvard Law Review, May 1927, p. 943; A. W. B. “Price Regulation Under the Police Power,” Michigan Law Review, November 1920, pp. 78–79; Hough, “Due Process of Law,” p. 233.

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454

35. Wilson v. New, 233 U.S. 389; 243 U.S. 332; 247 U.S. 251; Brown, “Due Process of Law,” pp. 944–945; New York Times, February 6, 18, 1923. 36. New York Times, March 30, 1923; Forney Johnstone, “ ‘Certain Modern Aspects of the Police Power’—A Study of the Judicial Approach to Constitutional Questions,” Massachusetts Law Quarterly, May 1923, pp. 51–52. 37. Cohen, They Builded Better than They Knew, p. 170; Kermit L. Hall, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 1992), pp. 83–85, 156–157, 405–410; Hough, “Due Process of Law,” p. 230; Johnstone, “Certain Modern Aspects of the Police Power,” p. 58; Paul L. Murphy, The Constitution in Crisis Times, 1918–1969 (New York, 1972), pp. 15–18; Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (New York, 1946), p. 577; Hoyt Landon Warner, The Life and Times of Mr. Justice Clarke: A Testament to the Power of Liberal Dissent in America (Cleveland, 1959), p. 71. 38. Hall, Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, pp. 542–543, 894–895, 927–928; Warner, Justice Clarke, pp. 64–65; Stephen Tyree Early, Jr., “James Clark McReynolds and the Judicial Process,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1954, pp. 78–79, 142, 147, 162, 180, 210–211; Murphy, The Constitution in Crisis Times, pp. 10–13, 15–16. 39. Warner, Justice Clarke, p. 67; Hall, Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, pp. 220–221, 539–540, 635–636; Johnstone, “Certain Modern Aspects of the Police Power,” p. 51; Matthew McDevitt, Joseph McKenna: Associate Justice of the United States (Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1946), pp. 113, 118–121. 40. Warner, Justice Clarke, pp. 87–90; Clare Cushman, ed., The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789–1993 (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp. 329–330; Alexander M. Bickel and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 9: The Judiciary and Responsible Government, 1910–1921 (New York, 1984), pp. 238–241. 41. Block v. Hirsh; Brown v. Feldman; Bickel and Schmidt, History of the Supreme Court, pp. 527–530; Robert W. Mennel and Christine L. Compston, eds., Holmes and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence (Hanover, N.H., 1996), p. 108; Edwin S. Corwin, “Constitutional Law in 1920–1921. I: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1920,” American Political Science Review, February 1922, pp. 33–35. 42. Bickel and Schmidt, History of the Supreme Court, pp. 528–529; Block v. Hirsh, quotations on pp. 154–156. 43. Ibid., quotations on pp. 157–158. 44. Brown v. Feldman, quotations on pp. 198–199. 45. Block v. Hirsh, quotations on pp. 159–162. 46. Ibid., quotations on pp. 163–166. 47. Ibid., quotations on pp. 167, 168, 170. See also Bickel and Schmidt, History of the Supreme Court, p. 529. 48. Real Estate News, May 1921, p. 37; New York American, April 19, 1921; New York Times, April 21, 1921, March 21, 1922; Bronx Home News, April 19, 1921; People of the State of New York ex rel. Brixton Operating Corporation v. Edward B. La Fetra, 257 U.S. 665; Levy Leasing Company, Inc. v. Siegel; 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern, 258 U.S. 242, quotation on p. 248; James C. Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1983, vol. 2, p. 446; New York Call, March 21, 1922. 49. Congressional Record, August 23, 1921, pp. 5579, 5583, May 22, 1922, p. 7390; Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew, p. 172; Charles Reznikoff, ed., Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty (Philadelphia, 1957), vol. 2, p. 1034; George W. Wickersham, “The Police Power and the New York Emergency Rent Laws,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, May 1921, p. 315; “Stretching the Constitution—The Ball Rent Act Decision,” Central Law Journal, May 6, 1921, pp. 315–318; Washington Post, April 19, 1921; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 23, 1921, p. 517.

C H A P T E R 1 1 . A Q U E S T I O N O F C OV E R AG E

1. John H. Wigmore, “A Constitutional Way to Reach the Housing Profiteer,” Illinois Law Review, January 1921, pp. 359–368; Walter F. Dunn and Carl H. Zeiss, “Rent Regulation and Housing Problems,” Journal [of the] American Bar Association, January 1921, p. 6; New York Times, June 13, 1920; Marcus Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, July 1925, pp. 346–347. 2. New York Times, September 26, 1918, May 18, 1919, February 1, March 4, 12, April 7, 12, 1920; New York Call, September 9, 1918, October 22, 1919, March 22, 24, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 24, 1920, p. 103, January 31, 1920, p. 135, March 6, 1920, p. 308; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 17, 1920. 3. New York Call, March 4, 1920; New York Times, February 1, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 24, 1920, p. 103, January 31, 1920, p. 135, February 28, 1920, p. 274, March 6, 1920, p. 308; Brooklyn Standard Union, June 4, 1920. 4. New York Times, April 12, September 13, 15, 1920. 5. Gerald Lawrence Feiner, “Counsel to the Situation: The Lawyer as Social Engineer, 1900–1945,” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1973, p. 136; Brooklyn Standard Union, June 4, 1920; New York Times, September 19, 1920; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2919–2920. 6. Edward C. Gibney to Alfred E. Smith, September 18, 1920, Smith Papers; New York Times, June 13, September 24, October 3, 5, 1920. See also Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” pp. 346–347. 7. Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), p. 145. See also New York Times, October 5, 1920. 8. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 25, 1920; Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), p. 92, New York Public Library; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 2953; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 141–145; Isaacs Brief, p. 6. 9. New York Times, October 28, 1917, April 7, 10, 1920. 10. New York Times, October 23, 1907, May 13, 1920, July 11, 1937; Seventy-Eighth St. & Broadway Co. v. Rosenbaum, 182 N.Y.S. 505, quotations on pp. 513–515. 11. Paterno Investing Corporation v. Katz, 184 N.Y.S. 129, quotations on pp. 130–132. See also New York Times, May 15, 18, 30, 1920, September 23, 1945.

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50. New York World, April 19, 1921; New York Times, April 20, 1921; Washington Post, April 20, 1921; “Property Rights and Human Welfare: A Supreme Court Decision,” Outlook, May 4, 1921, pp. 10–11; J. P. P., “Constitutional Law: Housing Relief Legislation Within Police Power,” California Law Review, May 1921, pp. 342–343. 51. Walter F. Dodd, “Constitutionality of Emergency Rental Regulation,” Virginia Law Quarterly, January 1922, p. 131; Corwin, “Constitutional Law in 1920–1921,” p. 35; Geo. W. Goble, “Are Property Interests Secure? A Consideration of the Recent Rent Decisions of the United States Supreme Court,” University of Kentucky Law Journal, May 1921, pp. 149, 154–155. 52. Washington Post, April 20, 1921; Boston Globe, April 24, 1921; Bronx Home News, April 19, 1921; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 23, 1921, p. 517; Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1921; Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1921. 53. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 132; New York World, April 19, 1921; Guthrie-Cohen Brief, pp. 41–42. 54. Pennsylvania Gas Company v. Mahon et al., 260 U.S. 393, quotation on p. 416; Kenneth K. Baar and W. Dennis Keating, “The Last Stand of Substantive Due Process—The Housing Emergency Requirement for Rent Control,” Urban Lawyer, Summer 1975, pp. 461–462; Wilson v. New, 233 U.S. 389; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, p. 70.

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12. Bronx Home News, July 18, September 30, 1920; New York Times, May 13, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 23, 1920; New York Call, May 7, 1920. 13. Orinoco Realty Co., Inc. v. Bandler, 189 N.Y.S. 855; New York Times, July 3, 1920, March 5, 1922; Orinoco Realty Co., Inc. v. Bandler, 134 N.E. 823, quotation on p. 825; Lewine v. Weil, 188 N.Y.S. 385. 14. New York Times, September 30, October 5, 1920; Bronx Home News, October 3, 1920; New York Law Journal, November 22, 1920; Lawrence v. Denham, 119 N.Y.S. 725. 15. Sylvan Mortgage Co. Inc. v. Stadler, 185 N.Y.S. 293, quotations on pp. 296, 298–301. See also New York Times, November 2, 1920. 16. Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 130 N.E. 923, quotations on pp. 924–925. 17. Sylvan Mortgage Co., Inc. v. Stadler, 188 N.Y.S. 165, quotations on pp. 167–169. 18. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 157–158; Sylvan Mortgage Co., Inc. v. Stadler, 191 N.Y.S. 965; Orinoco Realty Co., Inc. v. Bandler, 134 N.E. 823; Slayton Realty Corporation v. Rhodes, 192 N.Y.S. 683 and 138 N.E. 428. 19. Harold G. Aron, “The New York Landlord and Tenant Laws of 1920,” Cornell Law Quarterly, November 1920, p. 25; New York Times, October 17, 1920. See also Levy v. Baum, 187 N.Y.S. 574; Tauszig v. Kantor, 188 N.Y.S. 92. Italics added. 20. New York Times, October 1, 6, 1920; [New York State] Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, The People of the State of New York ex rel. H.D.H. Realty Corporation, Respondent, Against Willliam J. Murphy, as Clerk of the Municipal Court of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, Fourth District, Appellant. Respondent’s Brief, pp. 7–8, Bar Association Library. 21. People ex rel. Wasserman v. Fagan, Clerk of Municipal Court, 184 N.Y.S. 308, quotation on p. 309; People ex rel. H.D.H. Realty Corporation v. Murphy, Clerk of Municipal Court, 184 N.Y.S. 868, quotation on p. 869. See also New York Times, October 17, 1920. 22. Hyman v. Gordon, 185 N.Y.S. 301; Meer v. Kornblau et al., 188 N.Y.S. 481; New York Times, October 17, 19, 1920; People ex rel. Rayland Realty Co., Inc. v. Fagan, Clerk of Municipal Court, 186 N.Y.S. 23; People ex rel. H.D.H. Realty Corporation v. Murphy, Clerk of Municipal Court, 186 N.Y.S. 38. 23. [New York State] Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, The People of the State of New York on the Relation of H.D.H. Realty Corporation, Respondent, Against William J. Murphy, as Clerk of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, Fourth District. Appellant’s Brief, pp. 3–12, Bar Association Library. 24. [New York State] Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, The People of the State of New York ex rel. H.D.H. Realty Corporation, Respondent, Against Willliam J. Murphy, as Clerk of the Municipal Court of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, Fourth District, Appellant. Respondent’s Brief, pp. 6–18. 25. People ex rel. Rayland Realty Co., Inc. v. Fagan, Clerk of Municipal Court, 186 N.Y.S. 23, p. 25. 26. People ex rel. H.D.H. Realty Corporation v. Murphy, Clerk of Municipal Court, 186 N.Y.S. 38, quotations on pp. 44–45. 27. People of the State of New York ex rel. Rayland Realty Company, Inc., Appellant v. William R. Fagan, Clerk of the Municipal Court of the City of New York, Borough of Brooklyn, Sixth District, Respondent, 130 N.E. 931; People of the State of New York ex rel. H.D.H. Realty Corporation, Appellant v. William J. Murphy, as Clerk of the Municipal Court of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, Fourth District, Respondent, 130 N.E. 932; People of the State of New York ex rel. Sidney Ballin, Appellant v. Thomas O’Connell, Clerk of the Municipal Court of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, First District, Respondent, 130 N.E. 932. See also Meer v. Kornblau et al., 188 N.Y.S. 481. 28. Stewart v. Schattman, 187 N.Y.S. 445. See also New York Times, April 9, 10, 1921. 29. B. & S. Realty Corporation, Landlord, Respondent v. Joseph Wald, Tenant, Appellant, 187 N.Y.S. 436; Klamer Realty Corporation v. Brill, 189 N.Y.S. 92; Farnham Realty Corporation v. Posner, 193 N.Y.S. 189; Marion v. Weiser, 196 N.Y.S. 386. 30. Stewart v. Schattman, 187 N.Y.S. 445, quotations on pp. 445–446.

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31. Klamer Realty Corporation v. Brill, 189 N.Y.S. 92, quotation on p. 93; New York Times, April 22, 1922; Farnham Realty Corporation v. Posner, 193 N.Y.S. 788. 32. Farnham Realty Corporation v. Posner, 193 N.Y.S. 788, quotations on pp. 791–792. See also New York Times, February 4, 1931. 33. New York Times, April 22, 1922, June 17, 1937; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 6, 1922, p. 549, November 4, 1922, p. 584; Marion v. Weiser, 196 N.Y.S. 386, quotation on p. 387. 34. Marion v. Weiser, 196 N.Y.S. 386, quotations on pp. 387–388, 391. 35. Ibid., quotation on p. 391; “Landlord and Tenant,” Columbia Law Review, March 1923, p. 309; New York Times, March 7, 10, April 15, 1922; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post—World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), p. 80; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 22, 1922, p. 488. 36. Samuel B. Hand, Counsel and Advise: A Political Biography of Samuel I. Rosenman (New York, 1979), pp. 2–12; New York Times, April 10, 1921, October 22, 1922, May 5, 23, June 10, 17, 1923, June 25, 1923; Dormand Realty Co. v. Keeping, 205 N.Y.S. 655; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 1139–1140. 37. New York Times, May 23, June 3, June 10, 1920; Hand, Counsel and Advise, pp. 12–13. 38. New York Times, June 9, 17, October 25, 1923, January 19, 27, 1924; Dormand Realty Co. v. Keeping, 205 N.Y.S. 655. See also Hand, Counsel and Advise, pp. 13–14. 39. New York Times, October 25, 1923, June 5, 1925; “Landlord and Tenant,” Columbia Law Review, November 1925, pp. 973–974; Nod-Away Co. v. Carroll, 240 N.Y. 252, quotations on pp. 253, 256; Hand, Counsel and Advise, p. 14. 40. Morgenroth v. Emert, 191 N.Y.S. 522; Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1932), pp. 93, 108, 129–132, 138, 144, 173–174; F[rederick] Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” in Harry Hall et al., Real Estate Manual for Brokers, Owners, and Operators (New York, 1928), pp. 140–141; Bavendam v. Levinson, 189 N.Y.S. 687; Estate of Mali Kornbluth v. Brand, 191 N.Y.S. 329. 41. Bavendam v. Levinson, 189 N.Y.S. 687, quotations on pp. 688–689. 42. Hermitage Co. v. Preziose, 188 N.Y.S. 434, quotation on p. 434. See also Bard et al. v. Fried, 193 N.Y.S. 303. 43. Hermitage Co. v. Preziose, 188 N.Y.S. 434, quotation on p. 435; Bavendam v. Levinson, 189 N.Y.S. 687, quotation on p. 689. See also New York Times, August 21, 1921. 44. Morgenroth v. Emert, 191 N.Y.S. 520, quotation on p. 522; Morgenroth v. Emert, 193 N.Y.S. 305, quotation on p. 305. 45. Bavendam v. Levinson, 189 N.Y.S. 687; Bracken et al. v. Hahn and Same v. Sacks, 194 N.Y.S. 82, quotation on p. 83. 46. Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 140–141; May et al. v. Dermont, 186 N.Y.S. 113; Howie v. McKenzie, 189 N.Y.S. 291; Farrow v. Martin et al., 196 N.Y.S. 244. See also John Modell and Tamara K. Hareven, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,” in Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930 (New York, 1977), pp. 164–187. 47. May et al. v. Dermont, 186 N.Y.S. 113, quotations on pp. 114–115. 48. Ibid., quotations on pp. 115–116. 49. Jackson v. Gray, 114 Misc. 92, quotation on p. 93; Jackson et al. v. Gray et al., 189 N.Y.S. 290, quotation on pp. 290–291. 50. Howie v. McKenzie, 189 N.Y.S. 291, quotations on pp. 292–293. See also New York Times, July 8, 1921. 51. Nystad & Krassner v. Zerbe, 202 N.Y.S. 255; Nystad & Krassner v. Zerbe, 205 N.Y.S. 477, quotations on p. 478. See also New York Times, July 4, 1924.

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52. Waitt Const. Co. v. Chase, 188 N.Y.S. 589; Kilpatrick v. Argyle Co., Inc. et al., 192 N.Y.S. 98, quotation on p. 99. 53. Building Co. of Cohen Bros., Inc. v. Levy et al., 202 N.Y.S. 181, quotations on p. 182. 54. Ibid., quotations on p. 184. See also Arcutel Realty Corporation v. Ruskin. Same v. Appelbaum, 202 N.Y.S. 635, quotation on p. 636; 12 East Eighty-Sixth Street Corporation v. Berstein, 207 N.Y.S. 252. 55. Stern v. Mautner, 211 N.Y.S. 223; New York Times, May 27, 1924. For Delehanty’s opinion, see New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, Madeleine S. Stern, Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Carrie Mautner, Defendant-Respondent. Papers on Appeal from Order, pp. 14–18, Bar Association Library. 56. Stern v. Mautner, 211 N.Y.S. 223, quotations on pp. 225–226. See also Appellant’s Brief, pp. 13–15, in New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, Madeleine S. Stern, Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Carrie Mautner, Defendant-Respondent. Papers on Appeal from Order, Bar Association Library; New York Times, May 27, 1924. 57. Stern v. Mautner, 211 N.Y.S. 223, quotation on p. 225. CHAPTER 12. A REASONABLE RENT

1. New York Times, September 26, October 9, 1920; Bronx Home News, October 7, 14, 1920; Marchbanks v. Moore, 113 Misc. 647, quotation on p. 652; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 911–912. 2. New York Times, October 21, 1923; Glenbrook Co., Inc. v. Phillips, 153 N.E. 43, quotation on p. 44; Harold G. Aron, “What Is a Fair Rent?” Ferdinand I. Haber, “What Is a Fair Rent?” and Edward P. Doyle, “What Is a Fair Rent?” all in Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Housing: 1920, pp. 152–164, 265–269, 270–275. 3. F[rederick] Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” in Harry Hall et al., Real Estate Manual for Brokers, Owners, and Operators (New York, 1928), p. 147; New York Times, September 26, 1920; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), pp. 187–188; Edward L. Schaub, “The Regulations of Rentals During the War Period,” Journal of Political Economy, January 1920, pp. 28–31; Real Estate News, May 1921, p. 37; Aron, “What Is a Fair Rent?” p. 159; Edward A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 186 N.Y.S. 5. 4. New York Times, September 12, 1920; Marshall-Isaacs Brief, pp. 9–31; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 544; New York Times, September 26, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 16, 1920; Schaefer v. Ropes, 186 N.Y.S. 511. 5. New York Times, September 25, 1921, November 15, 1925; Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 125, 131–132, New York Public Library; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 150, 193–194. 6. John Bauer, Effective Regulation of Public Utilities (New York, 1925), p. 43; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, pp. 2914–2915. See also John Bauer, “Returns on Public Service Properties,” Political Science Quarterly, March 1915, p. 107; Hirsch v. Weiner, 190 N.Y.S. 111. 7. Thomas K. McGraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, 1984), p. 59; Charles Maynard Kneier, State Regulation of Public Utilities in Illinois (Urbana, 1927), p. 79; Isaacs Brief, pp. 4–6; New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Judicial Department, A.C. & H.M. Hall, Plaintiff’s Appellant, Against Leon Sidney Hall, Defendant-Respondent. Brief of Plaintiff-Appellant, p. 19, Bar Association Library. 8. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 2959; Intermediate Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1922), pp. 26–27; Goldman-Unger Brief, pp. 4, 23–24; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 148–149. 9. “How Should ‘Reasonable Rent’ Under the New York Housing Laws Be Calculated?” Columbia Law Review, December 1921, p. 804; Jash-Lap Realty Co. v. Fishman, 190 N.Y.S. 117,

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quotation on p. 119; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 86; Goldman-Unger Brief, p. 23; Real Estate News, October 1921, p. 45; New York Call, September 29, 1921. 10. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, p. 210; New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co., Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Leon Sidney Moos, Defendant-Respondent. Case on Appeal, pp. 50–52, 221, Bar Association Library; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 27; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 159–161, 286; Goldman-Unger Brief, pp. 33–45; A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co. v. Moos, 192 N.Y.S. 531; Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, 190 N.Y.S. 511, quotation on p. 512. 11. Haber, “What Is a Fair Rent?’ pp. 266–267; Hall v. Moos Case on Appeal, pp. 65–66; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, p. 219; New York Times, April 2, 1920, June 5, September 9, 25, 1921; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 149; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 279. 12. Isaacs Brief, pp. 3–4; Brief of Plaintiff-Appellant, pp. 24–25; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 4, 1922, pp. 261–262. 13. New York Times, November 28, 1920, October 3, September 25, 1921, February 5, 1922; Hall v. Moos Case on Appeal, pp. 71, 75; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 2962. 14. New York Times, October 3, 1921; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 850–853, vol. 4, pp. 279–280; Ward v. Stillwell, 193 N.Y.S. 550. See also Marcus Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, July 1925, p. 356. 15. New York Times, June 18, 1921, April 6, November 2, 1924; Markwin Realty Corporation v. Geisler, 203 N.Y.S. 712; Markwin Realty Corporation v. Geisler, 206 N.Y.S. 933; Mushekian v. Reilly, 208 N.Y.S. 314. 16. New York Times, September 26, 1920, September 6, November 25, 1921; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 160–184; Canter et al. v. Friedberg, 188 N.Y.S. 834; O’Donovan v. Patterson, 188 N.Y.S. 783; U.S. Congress, Joint Subcommittee of the Committees of the District of Columbia, Hearings [on the] Rent Commission of the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 458; Versailles Holding Corporation v. Shand, 191 N.Y.S. 805, quotation on p. 805; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 101–102, 210–213, vol. 3, p. 933. 17. Maitland v. Kerrigan, 187 N.Y.S. 495, quotation on p. 495; Schwartz v. Deutsch, 187 N.Y.S. 52; Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, 1976), p. 16; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 168, 223; New York Times, September 12, 1920, September 9, 1921; Isaacs Brief, pp. 31–32; Hennessy Realty Co. v. Hayes et al., 193 N.Y.S. 571. 18. Isaacs Brief, pp. 27–28; Maitland v. Kerrigan, 187 N.Y.S. 495; Anmore Realty Co., Inc. v. Bauer, 196 N.Y.S. 520; New York Call, September 18, 1923; New York Times, September 12, 1920; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 153; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 227–228. See also Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” p. 355. 19. Haber, “What Is a Fair Rent?” pp. 267–268; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 21, 1923; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 1, p. 81, vol. 3, pp. 1013–1014, vol. 8, pp. 2959–2960, 3051–3052; W. Bruce Miller to Alfred E. Smith, December 21, 1920, Smith Papers; New York Times, March 22, 26, December 26, 1920, June 5, 1921, March 3, 1923; New York Call, January 18, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 1135; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities, pp. 53–54. 20. Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 149–150; Haber, “What Is a Fair Rent?” pp. 267–268; New York Times, September 22, 1918, September 9, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 20, 1923; New York Law Journal, March 12, 1922; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, p. 236; “What Is a Reasonable Rent?” Literary Digest, February 26, 1921, p. 62; Marshall and Isaacs Brief, pp. 17, 20; Whitman, “The Public Control of House Rents,” pp. 350–351. 21. New York Times, March 4, 1921, March 3, 1923; Haber, “What Is a Fair Rent?” p. 269; New York Call, September 9, 1921.

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22. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 1151–1155; New York Call, September 9, 1921. 23. New York Times, October 2, 12, November 14, 1920, January 19, 1921; Bronx Home News, October 10, November 14, 1920, February 6, 27, 1921. 24. Bronx Home News, April 21, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 3, 1921, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library; New York Times, October 12, 1920, September 29, November 8, December 6, 1921; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 3, 1921, p. 711; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, p. 5132. 25. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, p. 5131; Bronx Home News, November 9, 1920, June 26, August 7, October 20, 1921; New York Times, October 12, 1920, September 30, November 8, 1921, January 18, 1923; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 20, 1921. See also Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 23. 26. New York Times, September 30, October 2, 1921, February 20, 1922 [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 3, 1921, p. 711; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, p. 866; Annual Report of the Committee on Courts of Inferior Jurisdiction to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (1921), p. 2. 27. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 629, vol. 3, pp. 843–844, vol. 4, pp. 295–296, 933–934. 28. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 1, 1921, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library; New York Times, July 12, 1921; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 874. 29. Bronx Home News, September 30, 1920, February 13, June 2, 1921; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 160. 30. New York Times, October 27, 1921; New York World, January 18, 1921. 31. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 865, 890; Annual Report of the Committee on Courts of Inferior Jurisdiction, pp. 5–8; New York Times, February 8, 1921; Bronx Home News, September 30, October 10, 1920, January 27, 30, 1921. 32. A. C. McNulty, “Sidelights on Our ‘Emergency’ Rent Laws,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, January 1921, p. 205; Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, 190 N.Y.S. 511; Maitland v. Kerrigan, 187 N.Y.S. 495, quotation on p. 496; Delriada Realty Co., Inc. v. Lazarus, 191 N.Y.S. 495; L.K. Schwartz Co., Inc. v. Leyendecker, 190 N.Y.S. 520; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 265; Bronx Home News, October 3, 1920; Jash-Lap Realty Co. v. Fishman, 190 N.Y.S. 117. 33. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 160; Widelitz v. Rosenthal et al., 189 N.Y.S. 85; Graebner v. Nichols, 190 N.Y.S. 198; “Recent Rent Laws Decisions,” Real Estate News, September 1921, p. 29; Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, 190 N.Y.S. 511; A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co. v. Moos, 192 N.Y.S, 530; Bronx Home News, October 3, 1920; Osmansky et al. v. Auerbach, 189 N.Y.S. 7; New York Herald, April 17, 1921; Schwartz v. Deutsch, 187 N.Y.S. 521, quotations on p. 523; Bryan et al. v. Hlawatschek, 191 N.Y.S. 317; Maitland v. Kerrigan, 187 N.Y.S. 495; Goeman v. Boyle. Same v. Boyle, 189 N.Y.S. 238, quotation on p. 238. 34. Bronx Home News, October 3, 1921; Brophy v. Gibbons, 192 N.Y.S. 336; Auer Real Estate Co. Inc. v. Wriggle et al., 189 N.Y.S. 160; L.K. Schwartz Co., Inc. v. Leyendecker, 190 N.Y.S. 520; Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, 190 N.Y.S. 511; “How Should ‘Reasonable Rent’ Issues Be Calculated Under the New York Housing Laws?” pp. 802–803; Hennessy Real Estate Co. v. Hayes et al., 193 N.Y.S. 571, quotation on p. 572. 35. New York Times, September 7, October 28, 1921, June 3, 1922; Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, 190 N.Y.S. 511; Alabama Holding Corporation, Appellant v. Lee F. Conrey and Others, Respondents, 194 N.Y.S. 515. 36. Unidentified newspaper, probably the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 29, 30, 1920, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library. 37. Bronx Home News, January 30, 1921. 38. New York Times, February 14, September 30, October 1, 1921, January 22, 1922, January 4, 1923; Hennessy Real Estate Co. v. Hayes et al., 193 N.Y.S. 571; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 648–649; Bronx Home News, October 5, 1920.

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39. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 261–265, 283; Raphael v. Skluth, 194 N.Y.S. 528, quotation on p. 528; Byran v. Hlawatschek, 191 N.Y.S. 317. 40. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 261–265; Marchbanks v. Moore, 113 Misc. 647, quotations on p. 652; Schwartz v. Deutsch, 187 N.Y.S. 521, quotation on p. 522. 41. New York Times, September 1, 1921; Hirsch v. Weiner, 190 N.Y.S. 111. 42. Hirsch v. Weiner, 190 N.Y.S. 111, quotations on pp. 113–116. 43. Ibid., quotations on pp. 113, 116, 117; Marchbanks v. Moore, 113 Misc. 647, quotation on p. 652. 44. New York Times, September 2, 4, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 1, 4, 1921, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library. See also Real Estate Magazine of New York, November 1921, p. 116. 45. New York Times, September 29, 1921; New York Call, September 7, 29, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 4, 1921, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library. 46. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 5, 1921; New York Times, June 19, 1921, February 18, 1922; A.C. & H.M. Hall Company Realty Co. v. Moos et al., 188 N.Y.S. 858; A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co. v. Moos, 192 N.Y.S. 530; Hall v. Moos Case on Appeal, esp. pp. 24–37. 47. A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co. v. Moos et al., 188 N.Y.S. 858, quotations on p. 860. 48. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 10, 1921, p. 325; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 18, 1921, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library; New York Times, September 4, 7, October 6, 1921; Bronx Home News, September 8, 1921; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, p. 5145. 49. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 10, 1921, p. 325; New York Times, September 6, 7, 9, 28, 1921. 50. New York Times, September 27, October 1, 2, 4, 6, 20, November 29, 1921; New York Call, September 29, 1921. 51. [New York State] Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, The A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co., Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Leon Sidney Moos, Defendant-Respondent. Brief of Appellant, esp. pp. 25, 30, and Brief by Amicus Curiae on Behalf of the Real Estate Board of New York, pp. 1–36, Bar Association Library. 52. Hall v. Moos Case on Appeal, esp. pp. 4, 6–7, 20, 29, 34–35. 53. A.C. & H.M. Realty Co. v. Moos, 192 N.Y.S. 530, quotations on pp. 532–533, 535, 537. 54. Ibid., quotations on pp. 536–537. See also New York Times, February 18, 1921. 55. New York Times, October 1, 1921, January 15, 1922; Kelly v. Medford, 191 N.Y.S. 703, quotations on p. 704. 56. A.C. & H.M. Hall Realty Co. v. Leon Sidney Moos et al., 194 N.Y.S. 912; Glenbrook Co., Inc. v. Phillips, 153 N.E. 43, quotation on p. 44; New York Times, April 30, 1922, October 21, 1923. See also Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 167–168. 57. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 97–99; Bronx Home News, February 6, 1921; S.L. & Co. v. “John” Bock, “John” Pepoon et al., 194 N.Y.S. 773; New York Times, July 2, 1922. 58. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 544, 629, vol. 3, pp. 1137, 1180, 1185–1186; New York Times, January 22, October 22, 1922; Bronx Home News, January 27, 1921. See also Real Estate News, December 1921, pp. 21–23. 59. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 896, vol. 5, pp. 872–873; New York Call, November 22, 1920; New York Times, January 8, May 14, 1922; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 3037; Bronx Home News, January 30, 1921. 60. Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 152–153; New York Times, February 8, 1921, June 23, December 3, 1922; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 691, vol. 4, pp. 251–252, 254.

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CHAPTER 13. THE FOUR EXCEPTIONS

1. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 261, 269, 272; New York Times, August 28, 1921; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Landlord and His Tenant: A Treatise (New York, 1921), pp. 51–52, 299–300, 321–323; A. C. MacNulty [sic], “The Holding Over of Tenants in Possession of Premises,” Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Housing: 1920, p. 284. 2. F[rederick] Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” in Harry Hall et al., Real Estate Manual for Brokers, Owners, and Operators (New York, 1928), p. 138; Richard O. Chittick, “A Strenuous Legislative Session,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1920, pp. 477–478; Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), pp. 92–93, New York Public Library; New York Times, April 11, 1920; Lauer and House, The Landlord and His Tenant, pp. 315–319. 3. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 10, 1920, p. 473; MacNulty [sic], “The Holding Over of Tenants in Possession of Premises,” p. 281; Richard O. Chittick to Alfred E. Smith, September 14, 1920, Smith Papers. 4. New York Times, August 23, 29, September 21, 1920; Bronx Home News, September 19, 23, 1920; Richard O. Chittick to Alfred E. Smith, September 14, 1920, Smith Papers. 5. New York Call, September 25, October 12, 1920; New York State Supreme Court, New York County, The People of the State of New York on the Relation of the Brixton Operating Corporation, Relator, vs. Edward B. La Fetra, a Justice of the City Court of the City of New York, Defendant. Brief on Behalf of the Attorney General of the State of New York and the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing in Support of the Constitutionality of the Emergency Housing Laws Enacted September 27, 1920, p. 65, New York Public Library. 6. Lauer and House, The Landlord and His Tenant, pp. 51–52, 299–300, 321–323; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 138–140; Harold Aron, “The New York Landlord and Tenant Laws of 1920,” Cornell Law Quarterly, November 1920, pp. 24–25. 7. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 348, vol. 3, p. 859; New York Times, March 30, 1920, August 28, 1921; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 135; Bronx Home News, April 3, 1919. 8. Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 135; Gorham Const. Co. v. Woolman, 181 N.Y.S. 379, quotation on p. 379; Bronx Home News, April 3, 1919, December 14, 1919. 9. Waitt Const. Co., Inc. v. Lorraine, 179 N.Y.S. 167, quotation on p. 171; New York Times, January 2, 9, 1920. 10. Gorham Const. Co. v. Woolman, 181 N.Y.S. 379, quotations on pp. 381–382. 11. Lauer and House, The Landlord and His Tenant, p. 282; New York Times, March 18, 25, April 1, 1920. 12. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 77, 321–323; New York Times, August 28, 1921, June 3, 1923; New York Call, September 25, 1920. 13. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 849, vol. 4, pp. 364–366, 425, vol. 5, pp. 796–797; New York Times, May 11, 1920, April 13, 1922; Bronx Home News, May 4, July 26, 1921; Hilliard v. Dorritie, 188 N.Y.S. 432; Klein v. Kleenan, 185 N.Y.S. 113; Papa v. Ferraro, 191 N.Y.S. 627. See also Literary Digest, April 1, 1922, p. 14. 14. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 149–150, vol. 4, p. 299; New York World, October 6, 1919, New York Sun, October 7, 1919, Lusk Committee Papers; Bronx Home News, August 17, 1920; New York Times, August 28, 1921; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 135. 15. Kline v. Kleenan, 185 N.Y.S. 113; Lauer and House, The Landlord and His Tenant, p. 78; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 135. 16. Bronx Home News, August 15, 22, 1920, July 26, 1921; New York Times, May 11, 1920, March 6, 1921. 17. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 849, vol. 4, pp. 426–427; Hilliard v. Dorritie, 188 N.Y.S. 432, quotation on p. 432; Papa v. Ferraro, 191 N.Y.S. 627, quotation on p. 628; Klingenbeck et al. v. Young, 185 N.Y.S. 826; New York Times, April 13, 1922.

463

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 1 6 – 3 2 4

18. Hilliard v. Dorritie, 188 N.Y.S. 432; Papa v. Ferraro, 191 N.Y.S. 627; Klingenbeck et al. v. Young, 185 N.Y.S. 826, quotations on p. 827; Hermitage Co. v. Preziose, 188 N.Y.S. 434. 19. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 1197–1198, vol. 4, pp. 405, 418–419, vol. 5, p. 1122; Reuben J. Wittstein, “What Are the Rent Laws?” Real Estate News, November 1922, p. 16. 20. New York Times, March 25, 1920; The Citizen (a publication of the United Real Estate Owners Association), June 1926, p. 18; Stewart Browne to the Chairman and Members of the State Housing Committee, which was what he called the State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, December 24, 1923, Smith Papers; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 400–401, 410, 426–427, vol. 5, p. 1122; New York World, October 17, 1925. 21. New York World, October 17, 1925; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, p. 5098; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 400–401, 426–427; Stewart Browne to the Chairman and Members of the State Housing Committee, December 24, 1923. 22. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 410, 778, vol. 5, pp. 796–797; H. M. Lazinsk, “The Undesirable Tenant,” Real Estate News, March 1921, p. 31. 23. Frederick Spiegelberg, “The Recent Housing Legislation,” Legal Aid Review, April 1921, p. 3; Bronx Home News, September 30, 1920, August 7, 1921; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 292–293; New York Times, October 3, 1920; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 138. 24. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 653; Burns v. Knight, 187 N.Y.S. 504; New York Times, July 9, 1922; Leichtman v. Schonberger, 196 N.Y.S. 516; Boondas v. Miller, 197 N.Y.S. 27; Saperstein v. Rudin, 191 N.Y.S. 405; Dreyer v. Wiers, 189 N.Y.S. 72; Kenehan v. Fitzgerald, 208 N.Y.S. 501. 25. Rubin v. Herowitz, 191 N.Y.S. 378; McFarland v. Kelly, 194 N.Y.S. 83; Bernstein v. Berlin, 190 N.Y.S. 694; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 332–333, vol. 3, pp. 892–893. 26. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 332–333, vol. 2, pp. 653, 841–843, vol. 4, pp. 104–105, 266, 294, vol. 5, p. 688; New York Times, April 13, 1920. 27. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 286–287, vol. 3, pp. 908, 1143, vol. 4, pp. 291–292, Bronx Home News, September 16, 30, 1920, March 9, 1921; New York Times, November 12, 1923. 28. Silkman v. Schwartz, 193 N.Y.S. 793; Kahrs v. Eygabroad, 186 N.Y.S. 531; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” pp. 138–139; New York Law Journal, December 28, 1920. 29. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 857; Liliendahl v. Loughman, 189 N.Y.S. 162; Robitzek et al. v. Barnes, 193 N.Y.S. 533, quotations on p. 533; Rubin v. Letechevsky, 205 N.Y.S. 344. 30. Bronx Home News, October 28, 1920; Leichtman v. Schonberger, 196 N.Y.S. 516; Stein v. Eckert, 188 N.Y.S. 469, quotations on p. 470; Sliffman et al. v. Straus, 205 N.Y.S. 345; Temczyn v. Klein, 206 N.Y.S. 569; Malawista v. Hennessy, 191 N.Y.S. 310, quotation on p. 311; Schwartz v. Rudolph, 200 N.Y.S. 116, quotation on p. 117; Vollhardt v. Broughton, 191 N.Y.S. 452, quotation on p. 452. 31. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 654, 892–893, vol. 4, pp. 265–266, 293. See also New York Law Journal, December 28, 1920. 32. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 265; Anastasion v. Kopel, 189 N.Y.S. 79, quotation on p. 80; Liliendahl v. Loughman, 189 N.Y.S. 162, quotation on p. 163; Robitzek et al. v. Barnes, 193 N.Y.S. 533, quotations on p. 533; Rubin v. Letechevsky, 205 N.Y.S. 344, quotation on p. 345. 33. Stein v. Eckert, 188 N.Y.S. 469, quotations on p. 471; Dreyer v. Wiers, 189 N.Y.S. 73, quotation on p. 74. 34. Saperstein v. Rubin, 191 N.Y.S. 405, quotations on p. 406; McFarland v. Kelly, 194 N.Y.S. 83, quotations on p. 84. 35. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 842–843, 857–858, vol. 4, pp. 265–266, 274, 292–293; Sliffman et al. v. Straus, 205 N.Y.S. 345, quotation on p. 346. 36. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 292–293, vol. 4, pp. 908–909. See also Stein v. Eckert, 188 N.Y.S. 469. 37. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 286–289, vol. 3, p. 858; New York Times, November 12, 1923; Spiegelberg, “Emergency Rent Laws,” p. 139.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 2 5 – 3 3 6

464

38. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 675–676, vol. 3, pp. 274–275, 856–857, 910, 1142, 1145–1146, vol. 4, p. 261; New York Times, November 12, 1923; Harry Allen Ely to Alfred E. Smith, December 28, 1923, Smith Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 7, 1925, p. 8, March 21, 1925, p. 8; Agatowsky v. Novinsky, 208 N.Y.S. 514. 39. Spiegelberg, “Recent Housing Legislation,” p. 4; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 96–98. 40. New York Times, June 27, September 9, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 4, 1920, p. 105; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 299–300; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 3090; Bronx Home News, January 18, 1921. 41. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 856; Rossman Realty Corporation v. Quinn, 188 N.Y.S. 807, quotation on p. 808; New York Law Journal, January 10, 1921. See also Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 86–87. 42. Ravitz v. Semitz, 188 N.Y.S. 402, quotation on p. 403; New York Law Journal, December 8, 1920; 542 Morris Park Ave. Corporation v. Wilkins et al., 197 N.Y.S. 625; Woodrow Court, Inc. v. Ambrookian, 185 N.Y.S. 756, quotation on p. 758; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 88–93. 43. Stewart Browne to the Chairman and Members of the State Housing Committee, December 24, 1923. 44. Ibid. See also Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 194, vol. 3, p. 1137, vol. 4, p. 371. 45. Bronx Home News, March 29, August 7, 1921; New York Times, February 8, August 28, October 12, 1921, May 14, June 23, 1922; Stein v. Eckert, 188 N.Y.S. 469. 46. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, p. 496, vol. 3, pp. 935, 1009–1010, 1124; Stewart Browne to the Chairman and Members of the State Housing Committee, December 24, 1923; Tenants Union of New York to Alfred E. Smith, December 27, 1924, Smith Papers. 47. Hearings Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on the District of Columbia House of Representatives Sixty-Eighth Congress First Session on H.R. 7962 (Washington, D.C., 1924), part 1, esp. p. 140; Report of the Rent Commission of the District of Columbia to the President of the United States of America (Washington, D.C., 1925), pp. 17–18. See also Hearings Before the Committee on the District of Columbia United States Senate Sixty-Seventh Congress First Session Relative to Rent Situation in the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C., 1921). 48. New York Times, July 3, 1920. See also Hirsch v. Weiner, 190 N.Y.S. 111, quotations on p. 113. C H A P T E R 1 4 . L A N D L O R D S A N D T E N A N T S I N N E W YO R K A N D A L B A N Y

1. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, pp. 5086–5087; Real Estate News, December 1921, p. 22; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 127, 135. 2. New York Call, September 13, November 22, 1920; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 108, 235, vol. 2, pp. 933–934, 937; New York Times, July 17, 1921, January 22, 1922; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 21, 1922; Bronx Home News, July 14, 1921. 3. New York Leader, October 15, 1923; New York Call, September 18, 1923; New York Times, September 28, 1921; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 105–106, vol. 2, pp. 775, 807–808. 4. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 44, 92–93. 5. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 109–110, vol. 2, pp. 655–656, vol. 5, p. 688. 6. Kilpatrick v. Argyle Co., Inc. et al., 192 N.Y.S. 98; New York Evening Post, January 28, 1922; New York Call, April 13, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 299–300; Intermediate Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1922), p. 247. 7. Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890– 1943 (New York, 1999), p. 145; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 42–43, vol. 2, p. 773, vol. 4, pp. 144–145; New York Daily Tribune, April 17, 1920; New York Leader, October 2, 1923.

465

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 3 6 – 3 4 5

8. People ex rel. Nassoit v. Young, Justice of Municipal Court, et al., 186 N.Y.S. 334; New York Times, July 13, 1920; Bronx Home News, October 21, 1920. 9. Bronx Home News, September 28, October 7, 1920; New York Times, October 6, 1920. 10. New York Times, October 6, December 26, 1920, February 6, 1921; Bronx Home News, October 7, 1921; People ex rel. Nassoit v. Young, Justice of Municipal Court, et al., 186 N.Y.S. 334. 11. New York Times, December 26, 1920, February 6, 1921, November 13, 1946; People ex rel. Nassoit v. Young, Justice of Municipal Court, et al., 186 N.Y.S. 334, quotations on pp. 346, 347. 12. New York Times, February 6, April 9, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 17, 1921. 13. Bronx Home News, September 2, 1920; New York Times, October 10, November 3, 1920, July 17, 19, 27, 1921. 14. St. Andrews Parish v. Gallagher, 200 N.Y.S. 590, quotations on pp. 591, 593. See also Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 7, 1923. 15. New York Times, July 17, 1921, July 10, 16, 1923, August 5, 1938; Stein Commission Report, pp. 83–89. 16. New York Times, July 16, 1923; Day, Urban Castles, p. 161; Stein Commission Report, pp. 83–89. 17. New York Times, July 15, 17, 1923; New York Call, July 12, 19, 1923. 18. New York Times, July 15, 17, 23, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 21, 1923, p. 71; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 163–164; Stein Commission Report, p. 28. 19. New York Call, November 9, 1920; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 136–137, 236, vol. 2, pp. 674–675, 757, vol. 3, p. 887, vol. 5, p. 792; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), pp. 279–280. 20. New York Times, January 12, December 3, 1922, October 17, November 12, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 356–359, vol. 4, pp. 364–366; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, p. 5203. 21. New York Times, November 12, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 27, 56, 105, 325–326, vol. 2, pp. 671–672, 708, 757, 760–761, vol. 4, p. 143, vol. 5, pp. 521, 523–524; Stein Commission Report, pp. 24–26. 22. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 602, 690, vol. 5, pp. 805–806; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, pp. 5202–5203; Literary Digest, April 1, 1922, p. 14. 23. New York Times, January 12, 1922, October 17, November 12, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 345–356, vol. 2, p. 760, vol. 3, pp. 868–870, vol. 4, pp. 142, 166; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 21, 1921, newspaper clippings files, Brooklyn Public Library. 24. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 671–674, vol. 3, pp. 887, 893, vol. 4, pp. 262, 295; New York Call, March 29, 1923; Reuben J. Wittstein, “What Are the Rent Laws?” Real Estate News, October 1922, p. 17; “The Housing Commission Hearing,” Real Estate News, October 1923, p. 13. 25. New York Leader, October 15, 1923; Bronx Home News, May 8, 1921; New York Times, September 16, 1920, January 27, 1922; Victor R. Daly, “The Housing Crisis in New York City,” The Crisis, December 1920, pp. 61–62; New York Call, April 25, 1919; New York Amsterdam News, October 24, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 1033, vol. 5, p. 498; Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish (New York, 1979), pp. 32–49; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York (New York, 1966), pp. 110–113, chapters 5–8. 26. Lockwood Committee Files; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 58–60, 78, 167, vol. 3, pp. 1033–1035, vol. 4, pp. 76–77, vol. 5, pp. 407–408; New York Amsterdam News, March 7, October 24, 1923. 27. See the statements of Charles Klein and Edward W. Browning, both from January 1922, an undated memo entitled “Re Garden Court Apartments,” and “In the Matter of Garden Courts,” a memo attached to a letter from Harry Goodstein, president of the West Harlem Property Owners Association, to Samuel Untermyer, January 21, 1922, all of which are in the Lockwood Committee Files. See also the New York Times, January 27, 1922.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 4 5 – 3 5 3

466

28. In addition to the items cited in ibid., see the Digest of the Testimony Given Before the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing Jan. 5–Jan. 22, 1922, pp. 292–293, 297, in the Lockwood Committee Files. 29. New York Times, August 17, 1921, January 27, 1922, July 13, 1923; Digest of the Testimony Given Before the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing Jan. 5–Jan. 22, 1922, p. 297; Bronx Home News, May 18, 1921. 30. Osofsky, Harlem, pp. 135–141; New York Age, August 11, September 22, 1923, December 11, 1926; New York Times, September 16, 1920, February 24, 1929. 31. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 147–148; New York Times, January 13, 16, 1921, January 21, 1924, February 6, 1946. 32. New York Times, January 16, March 24, 1921, January 16, 1922; Bronx Home News, December 26, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 18, 1922, p. 200. 33. New York Times, April 10, 1921, January 9, 18, 1922; Stewart Browne to the Chairman and Members of the State Housing Committee, which is what he called the State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, December 24, 1923, Smith Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 1922, p. 23; Reuben J. Wittstein, “What’s the Matter with Our Courts,” Real Estate News, December 1924, p. 25; Bronx Home News, December 26, 1920. 34. Real Estate News, April 1922, p. 23; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 18, 1922, p. 200; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 1142–1143; New York Times, January 9, 1922. 35. New York Times, April 9, 1921, June 15, 1924; B. and S. Realty Corporation v. Joseph Wald, 187 N.Y.S. 436; Paterno Const. Co. v. Rentner, 191 N.Y.S. 156; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, p. 1173. 36. Stewart v. Schattman, 187 N.Y.S. 445; B. and S. Realty Corporation v. Joseph Wald, 187 N.Y.S. 436, quotation on p. 436. 37. New York Times, April 9, June 26, 1921, February 11, 1922; Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 309, 313; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 158; Paterno Const. Co. v. Rentner, 191, N.Y.S. 156, quotation on p. 157. 38. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 306, 310–311; Bronx Home News, December 26, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 19, 1921, p. 357, March 26, 1921, p. 391, April 9, 1921, p. 455; New York Times, April 9, June 26, 1921. 39. New York Times, March 24, 1921; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 564, 588–590, 602; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 18, 1922, p. 200. 40. Real Estate News, April 1922, p. 23; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 23, 1921, pp. 518–520, February 18, 1922, p. 200; New York Times, March 24, 1921, January 9, 1922; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 588–590; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, p. 5213. 41. New York Times, February 20, June 25, 1922; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, pp. 25–26; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 17, 1921; New York World, April 10, 1921; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 31, 1925, p. 8. 42. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 147–148. See also Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, p. 25. 43. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 147–148; New York Times, July 24, October 4, 22, 1923, June 15, 1924; Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), pp. 76–78. 44. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations,” p. 77; New York Times, October 22, 1923, January 17, 20–22, 24, 29, February 3, 11, 1925, May 11, 1927, April 30, 1928. 45. New York Times, December 30, 1923. See also Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 291–292. 46. New York Times, December 30, 1923; Stewart Browne to Alfred E. Smith, January 2, 1924, Smith Papers.

CHAPTER 15. THE EXTENSION OF RENT CONTROL

1. Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1920, No. 731, Marcus Brown Holding Company, Appellant, Against Marcus Feldman et al., Respondents. Points for Edgar A. Levy Leasing Co., Inc. and 810 West End Avenue, Inc. as Amici Curiae on Constitutionality of Chapters 136, 944 and 947 of the New York Laws of 1920, p. 70, Harvard Law Library. See also Edward P. Doyle, “What Is a Fair Rent?” Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Housing: 1920, p. 273. 2. New York World, March 20, 1921; George D. MacDonald, Apartment Building Construction: Manhattan, 1902–1953 (New York, 1953), p. 9; New York Times, February 5, August 4, 16, October 9, 1921; Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 9, 1927 (Albany, 1927), pp. 24–25.

467

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 5 4 – 3 6 1

47. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 833–834, 1173, vol. 4, p. 60; Tenants Union of New York to Alfred E. Smith, December 27, 1924, Smith Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 2, 1921, p. 422, March 7, 1925, p. 8; New York Times, February 11, 1922. 48. New York Times, March 10, 1922; Day, Urban Castles, pp. 147–148; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 28, 1928, p. 9. 49. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 147–148; New York Times, January 5, 9, 1921, January 11, 1923; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 4, 1923, p. 233, May 10, 1924, p. 7. 50. New York Times, January 11, 28, February 7, March 11, 1923; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 10, 1923, p. 167, February 24, 1923, p. 233, May 10, 1924, p. 7. 51. Day, Urban Castles, pp. 153–154; Altz v. Lieberson, 134 N.E. 703, quotations on p. 703; Andrew L. Kaufman, Cardozo (Cambridge, 1998), p. 248; Arlene K. Newman, “Ethnicity and Business Enterprise: A Study of the Jewish Mutual Insurance Companies of New York,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1983, p. 132. 52. New York Times, November 12, December 30, 1923; Ward V. Tolbert to Alfred E. Smith, January 30, 1926, Smith Papers; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 887–888, 893; Stewart Browne to Alfred E. Smith, January 2, 1924; Tenants Union of New York to Alfred E. Smith, December 27, 1924. 53. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 10, 1923, p. 167, February 7, 1925, p. 10; New York Times, April 24, 1923, June 15, 1924. 54. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 10, 1924, p. 7, March 7, 1925, p. 8; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 18, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 458; New York Times, June 15, 1924, November 18, 1925, April 1, 1926; Harry Allen Ely to James J. Walker, May 24, 1927, Smith Papers. 55. On the legislative history of some of these bills, see Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, 1976), chapters 12–13. On the Jesse-Antin bill, see [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 3, 1923, p. 263. 56. Lauer and House, The Tenant and His Landlord, pp. 291–292; New York Times, September 29, 1920. 57. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 9, 1920, p. 497, October 23, 1920, p. 572; New York Times, October 4, 11, 31, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 28, 1920. 58. New York Times, October 23, November 14, December 22, 1920; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 24, December 12, 1920; New York Call, November 24, December 22, 1920; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 25, 1920, p. 864. 59. New York Times, January 2, February 14, 16, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 16, February 3, 16, 1921; New York World, February 5, 1921; New York Call, February 16, 1921. 60. New York Times, April 25, 1901, February 18, 19, 26, March 6, 1921; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 16, 26, 1921; New York World, February 19, March 16, 1921. See also [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 5, 1921, pp. 295–297.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 6 1 – 3 6 8

468

3. New York Times, November 17, 20, 1921, January 6, 7, 8, 12, 1922. See also Lockwood Committee Hearings, vols. 12 and 13. 4. New York Times, January 31, March 6, 1922. See also Intermediate Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1922), esp. chapters 3 and 19. 5. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, pp. 5089–5097, 5194, 5209, vol. 13, pp. 5530–5536; New York Times, March 12, September 30, 1921, February 5, August 6, 1922; New York Evening Post, January 28, 1922; New York Call, August 16, 1921. 6. New York Times, January 18, 29, February 5, March 3, 7, 10, 18, April 11, 23, 1922; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 11, 1922, p. 165, March 11, 1922, p. 295, April 15, 1922, pp. 455, 470, April 22, 1922, p. 485. 7. Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 148–154. See also New York Times, November 6, 8, 9, 1922. 8. New York Times, January 4, May 23, June 3, November 26, 1923; Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission of the State of New York, March 26, 1920 (Albany, 1920), p. 3; Agnes Dreeman to Alfred E. Smith, September 4, 1923, Smith Papers. See also Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), pp. 129–131. 9. New York Times, February 18, June 9, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 1075–1082, 1134–1146; Stewart Browne to the Chairman and Members of the State Housing Committee, which is what he called the State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, December 24, 1923, Smith Papers; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 9, 1922, p. 741, January 13, 1923, p. 37, September 8, 1923, p. 293. 10. New York Times, May 5, 30, June 3, October 30, November 6, 1923; Samuel Untermyer to Alfred E. Smith, March 5, 1923, M. Clifford to Alfred E. Smith, August 30, 1923, Alfred E. Smith to M. Clifford, August 31, 1923, Smith Papers; Louis B. Marshall to J. M. Stoddard, August 29, 1923, Louis B. Marshall Papers, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 24, 1923, p. 360. 11. New York Evening Post, December 31, 1921; New York World, December 10, 31, 1922; New York Times, September 24, December 10, 1922, May 13, 1923; MacDonald, Apartment Building Construction, pp. 9, 18; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 30, 1922, p. 421, April 7, 1923, p. 425; Report of the State Board of Housing: 1927, pp. 24–25. 12. New York Times, February 14, March 1, 1922, February 1, 1923, September 22, 1958; Nation, February 14, 1923, p. 162. See also Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, chapters 2, 4–19, and Final Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1923), chapters 1–6. 13. New York Times, April 27, May 3, 1923; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, June 9, 1923, pp. 719–720; Day, Urban Castles, p. 130. 14. New York Times, August 16, 26, 1923, March 27, 1939, May 24, 1952, January 27, 1955, January 22, 1958, May 6, 1970; Kermit C. Parsons, ed., The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community (Baltimore, 1998), p. 122; Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 8, p. 3089. 15. New York Times, August 26, 1923; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 27, 1923, p. 522; Parsons, The Writings of Clarence S. Stein, p. 120. 16. New York Times, August 26, 1923; Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission, p. 3; Clarence S. Stein, “The Housing Crisis in New York,” Survey, September 1, 1920, p. 660; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, p. 4. 17. New York Times, August 27, September 23, October 7, 1927; Stein Commission Report, pp. 11–12, 51. 18. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 1–6; New York Times, October 16–20, 1923; New York Evening Post, October 16, 1923, November 7, 9, 1925; Stein Commission Report, p. 11. 19. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 12, 28–31, 228, 240, 255–256, 305–306, vol. 2, pp. 729, 780, vol. 3, pp. 833, 869, 889, 915, 921–922, 998–1003, 1008, 1094, 1149, 1154.

469

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 6 9 – 3 8 1

20. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 93–95, 164–165, vol. 2, pp. 712–713, vol. 3, pp. 1061–1062, 1174; New York Leader, October 4, 1923. 21. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 29, 187–191, 389–393, vol. 3, pp. 1049–1050. 22. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 157–158, 309–310, vol. 2, pp. 781–782, vol. 3, pp. 914–915, 926–927. 23. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 44–45, 84–85, 258, 268–269, vol. 3, pp. 1042–1048. 24. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 23–26, 66–67, 84–85, 107–108, 189, 229, 375, vol. 2, pp. 768–769, 771, 775. 25. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 12, 56, 86–87, 113, 154–155, 174–175, 248, vol. 2, pp. 733, 749, 761, 788–789, 791–792, vol. 3, p. 924; Literary Digest, November 3, 1928, p. 38. 26. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 45–46, 115–116, 123, 273–275, 385–386, vol. 2, pp. 741, 804, 819, vol. 3, pp. 1087–1088. 27. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 16, 80, 183, 204, 260, 306–308, vol. 2, pp. 768–769, vol. 3, pp. 846, 875–876, 882–884. 28. Ibid., vol. 1, 32, 123, 162, 290, 335, 366, 375, vol. 2, pp. 665, 718, vol. 3, pp. 833, 861, 1072–1073. 29. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 52–53, 332, 375, vol. 2, pp. 709, 772, 797, 808, vol. 3, p. 898. 30. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 308, 404, vol. 2, p. 808, vol. 3, pp. 845, 874, 889, 907, 918, 1051, 1177. 31. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 408–417. See also New York Times, August 8, 1944. 32. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 417–430, 497–498, vol. 3, pp. 1063–1065; New York Times, November 13, 1959; Samuel McCune Lindsay, Some Economic Aspects of the Recent Emergency Housing Legislation in New York (1924), a slightly revised version of the report that was submitted to the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning in October 1923, pp. i–viii. For Lindsay’s first report, which was submitted to the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, see Samuel McCune Lindsay, Economic Aspects of the So-Called Emergency Housing Legislation of 1920 in New York State and the Alleged Housing Shortage in New York City (1921). 33. New York Times, October 18, 1923; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 494–495. 34. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 430–448, 493–494. 35. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 452–458, 460–474. 36. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 489–491, 495–499, 503–504, 513–514, 530–533. See also New York Times, March 21, April 7, May 12, June 27, July 3, September 22, 1923; International Labour Office, The Housing Situation in the United States (Geneva, 1925), pp. 39–44. 37. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 2, pp. 478–479, 501–505. See also New York Times, January 6–8, 1922. 38. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 1, pp. 338–339, vol. 2, pp. 457–460, 516–519. 39. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 468–470, 473–464, 509–512. 40. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 539–644. 41. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 539–644, vol. 3, pp. 1002–1003, 1128. 42. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 1019, 1057, 1079, 1124, 1134, 1146–1149. 43. Victor H. Lawn, “The Kennels of New York,” Nation, December 19, 1923, p. 710; New York Herald, October 17, 1923; New York Times, October 19, 1923; New York Leader, October 20, 1923; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 18, 1923; New York World, October 18, 21, 1923. 44. New York World, October 17, 21, 23, 1921; “Rent Exactions That Stunt Bodies and Souls,” Literary Digest, November 3, 1933, p. 42; Amsterdam News, October 24, 1923; New York Leader, October 17, 20, 1923; New York Times, October 19, 1923; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 18, 1923. 45. New York Evening Post, October 16, 20, 1923. 46. Lawn, “The Kennels of New York,” p. 711; Amsterdam News, October 24, 1923; New York World, October 23, 1923; New York Herald, October 21, 1923; New York Leader, October 15, 1923. 47. New York Times, August 31, October 22, 1923. See also Congressional Record, February 6, 1925, pp. 4488–4491. 48. New York Times, August 26, 29, 31, September 9, 17, October 4, 1923.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 8 2 – 3 8 9

470

49. Ibid., October 22, December 6, 10, 1923. See also Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 1068–1072. 50. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 18, 1923; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, September 22, 1923; New York World, October 28, 1923; New York Leader, October 20, 1923; A Landlord to Charles F. Gillman, October 3, 1923, Smith Papers; New York Times, October 22, 1923. 51. Stein Commission Report, pp. 7–9. See also New York Times, December 26, 1923. 52. Stein Commission Report, pp. 11–36. 53. Ibid., pp. 37–49. 54. Ibid., pp. 9–10, 51–64. 55. New York Times, January 3, October 23, 28, December 30, 31, 1923. See also Alfred E. Smith to Ward V. Tolbert, November 23, 1923, Smith Papers. The Smith Papers are full of letters about the emergency rent laws, most urging the governor to extend them, some asking him to let them to expire. 56. New York Times, October 19, 30, November 8, 1923, January 14, 1924; Slayton, Empire Statesman, chapters 10–12; New York World, November 11, 1923. 57. New York Times, January 3, 29, February 7, 1924. 58. Ibid., February 6, 12, 14, 17, 21, April 2, June 3, 1924, February 1, June 3, 1925; Real Estate Magazine of New York, July 1924, pp. 956–957; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 24, 1925, p. 7; Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York, 1931), p. 108; International Labour Office, Housing Situation in the United States, pp. 42–43. 59. New York Times, April 28, 30, May 14, 1924. See also Orinoco Realty Co. v. Goodkind, 239 N.Y. 69. 60. New York Times, May 14, June 21, November 26, 1924; Orinoco Realty Co. v. Goodkind, 239 N.Y. 69, quotations on p. 72. C H A P T E R 1 6 . T H E E X P I R AT I O N O F R E N T C O N T R O L

1. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 350a–350b; I. Berger, “The Point of View,” Real Estate News, March 1924, pp. 4–5; I. Berger, “A Review of the Housing Situation,” Real Estate News, June 1924, pp. 4–5; Isidor Berger, “The Housing Emergency—Is It Fact or Fancy?” Real Estate News, October 1924, pp. 4–5, 8. See also Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York, 1999), pp. 82–83. 2. “No Longer a Housing Crisis,” Real Estate News, January 1925, p. 49; I. Berger, “ ‘Housing Emergency’ Propaganda Without End,” Real Estate News, February 1925, pp. 4–5; I. Berger, “Housing Conditions Are Growing Better—Not ‘Worse,’ ” Real Estate News, March 1925, pp. 4–5, 17; Stanley M. Isaacs, “When the Emergency Rent Laws Expire,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, May 1924, pp. 325–326, 340–341; New York Times, July 13, 1962. 3. George D. MacDonald, Apartment Building Construction: Manhattan, 1902–1953 (New York, 1953), p. 9; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 3, 1925, p. 3; New York World, September 7, November 11, 25, 1925; Third Stein Commission Report, pp. 16, 18–19; Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 9, 1927 (Albany, 1927), p. 25. 4. Chastleton Corp. v. Sinclair, 264 U.S. 543, quotations on p. 549; Peck v. Fink, 2 F. 2d 912; Peck v. Fink, 266 U.S. 631; Washington Post, April 22, November 4, 1924; New York Times, April 22, 1924; Bernard J. Newman, “The Rent Situation,” Housing Betterment, May 1924, p. 160; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, December 13, 1924, p. 6. 5. Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York, 1931), p. 97; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, October 17, 1925, p. 5; New York Times, October 13, 19, 21, 22, 23, 1925; New York World, October 19, 21, 1925; Newman, “The Rent Situation,” p. 160.

471

N O T E S T O PAG E S 3 9 0 – 3 9 9

6. Third Stein Commission Report, pp. 16–25. See also Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 653; New York Times, February 25, December 4, 1923. 7. New York Times, March 9, 11, 1924, January 2, October 12, 19, 1925, October 3, 1940, September 15, 1963; New York Evening Post, October 24, 1925; Third Stein Commission Report, p. 11. 8. New York Evening Post, November 7–9, 11, 1925; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 11, 1925; New York Herald, November 10, 1925; New York Times, November 11, 1925; Third Stein Commission Report, p. 11. 9. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 4–162, 250–314, 455–460, vol. 5, pp. 460–525, 540–604, 673–720, 728–733, 854–879, 892a–892b, 895–899, 901–902; New York Times, November 11, 1925. 10. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 4–162, 250–314, 455–460, vol. 5, pp. 460–525, 540–604, 673–720, 728–733, 854–879, 892a–892b, 895–899, 901–902, New York Times, November 10, 1925. 11. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 315–455, 460–462, vol. 5, pp. 747–808, 827–853. 12. Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 315–455, 460–462, vol. 5, pp. 747–808, 827–853. 13. Intermediate Report of the [New York State] Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (Albany, 1922), p. 356; New York Times, March 17, 1940; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, pp. 526–530. 14. Joint Hearings by the [New York State] Senate and Assembly Committees on Cities (1920), New York Public Library; New York Times, March 23, 1920, May 11, 1933. 15. Stanley M. Isaacs, “Analysis of Recent Laws to Prevent Rent Profiteering,” [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, August 28, 1920, p. 292; Stanley M. Isaacs, “High Class Apartments Under the Rent Laws,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, September 1922, p. 594. 16. Lockwood Committee Hearings, vol. 12, pp. 5089–5093, 5097, 5137–5139, vol. 13, p. 5389; Intermediate Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Housing, pp. 8–9. 17. Samuel Untermyer to Alfred E. Smith, February 13, 1923, Smith Papers; Louis B. Marshall to John M. Stoddard, August 29, 1923, Louis B. Marshall Papers, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 3, pp. 861, 880, 936, 1051, 1054; Joint Hearings by the Senate and Assembly Committee on Cities, pp. 23–24; Third Stein Commission Report, pp. 8–9. 18. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, vol. 5, esp. pp. 710, 811. 19. New York Evening Post, November 11, 1925; Stewart Browne, “The State Housing Commission, the State and the Public,” Citizen, a publication of the United Real Estate Owners Association, December 1925, p. 14; New York Times, November 12, 1925; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 14, 1925, p. 5, November 21, 1925, p. 5. 20. Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 4, p. 2; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 10, 1925; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 14, 1925, p. 5, November 11, 1921, pp. 5–7; New York World, November 18, 1925. 21. New York Times, November 17, 29, 1925; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, November 14, 1925, p. 5, December 5, 1925, pp. 8–10; Stein Commission Hearings, vol. 5, p. 892a. 22. Third Stein Commission Report, pp. 11–54. 23. Ibid., pp. 11–54. 24. Ibid., pp. 13–16. 25. New York Times, November 5, 6, 1924, January 7, 1926; Robert A. Slayton, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York, 2001), pp. 220–221. See also, for example, William Fitzjohn to Alfred E. Smith, October 5, 1925, Edward Pollak to Alfred E. Smith, November 17, 1925, and Harry Allen Ely to Alfred E. Smith, January 19, 1926, Smith Papers. 26. New York Times, January 7, 12, 13, 27, 29, 30, February 1, 1926; New York World, October 12, 31, 1925; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 11, 1925. 27. New York Times, February 3, 1926. See also [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 6, 1925, p. 5.

N O T E S T O PAG E S 4 0 0 – 4 0 8

472

28. New York Times, February 3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 1926. 29. Ibid., January 29, February 2, 3, 9, 10, February 18, 1926; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 6, 1925, p. 5; Louis B. Marshall to John M. Stoddard, August 29, 1923. 30. Blauweis v. Kirschner, 219 N.Y.S. 662. See also New York Times, February 5, 1927. 31. Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 6, 1929 (Albany, 1929), p. 71; Clarence S. Stein, “Housing New York’s Two-Thirds,” Survey, February 15, 1924, pp. 509–510; New York Times, February 9, 1926. See also Joseph A. Spencer, “New York City Tenant Organizations and the Post–World War I Housing Crisis,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), pp. 84–85. 32. New York World, February 4, 1926; New York Times, January 7, February 23, 1926; Message from the Governor [of New York State] Transmitting [the] Report of the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning for Permanent Housing Relief (Albany, 1926), pp. 3–7. 33. New York Times, January 7, February 23, 1926; Message from the Governor [of New York State] Transmitting [the] Report of the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning for Permanent Housing Relief, pp. 17–76, especially 55–67. 34. New York Times, January 31, February 23, 24, March 8, April 17, May 11, 1926; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 27, 1926, pp. 5, 7–8, March 13, 1926, p. 5, April 17, 1925, pp. 7–8, May 15, 1926, pp. 5, 7–8. 35. New York Times, June 16, July 1, 2, 8, 1926, August 8, 1937, November 3, 1944, May 19, 1955, April 4, 1973; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, July 10, 1926, p. 5. See also Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, 1976), p. 186. 36. Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 9, 1927, p. 11; New York Times, February 15, 1927; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 19, 1927, pp. 7–8. 37. New York Times, February 15, 16, 1927; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 19, 1927, pp. 8–9. 38. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 19, 1927, p. 5, February 26, 1927, p. 5; New York Times, February 15, 1927; New York Age, February 26, 1927. 39. New York Times, February 2, 9, 1927; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, February 12, 1927, pp. 5, 6, 8. 40. Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Alfred E. Smith and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 9, 1927, esp. pp. 11–16. See also New York Times, March 14, 1927. 41. Slayton, Empire Statesman, pp. 230–232; New York Times, March 14, 15, 1927; “Rent Laws Without Emergency,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, March 1927, p. 274; I. Reich, “Decontrol What?” Real Estate News, March 1927, p. 13; “The Rent Laws,” Brooklyn Realty Magazine, March 1927, p. 1; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 19, 1927, p. 8. 42. New York Times, March 22, 24, 26, April 1, 2, 3, 4, 24; “Rent Laws Without Emergency,” p. 274; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 16, 1927, p. 5. 43. New York Times, April 4, 10, July 3, September 4, 15, 25, November 9, 1927. 44. Report of the State Board of Housing Relative to the Housing Emergency in New York City and Buffalo and Extension of the Rent Laws (Albany, 1928), p. 7; New York Times, January 29, February 10, 28, March 16, 1928; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, January 28, 1928, pp. 5, 9, March 10, 1928, p. 7. 45. Report of the State Board of Housing Relative to the Housing Emergency in New York City and Buffalo and Extension of the Rent Laws, pp. 8, 12–26, 55–74. 46. Ibid., pp. 8–11.

EPILOGUE

1. New York Times, May 23, June 18, 1929. 2. Ibid., February 24, June 2, 3, 1929; Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Legislature of the State of New York, March 6, 1929 (Albany, 1929), p. 83. 3. Real Estate News, June 1929, pp. 7–9; Real Estate Magazine of New York, June 1929, p. 22. 4. New York Times, June 12, 13, 1929. 5. Ibid., June 14, 1929. 6. Ibid., June 14, 15, 17, 1929. 7. Ibid., June 19, 26, 1929. 8. Ibid., June 26, 28, 1929; “New Rent Laws,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, July 1929, p. 20; I. Berger, “Rent Laws Retard Progress,” Real Estate News, June 1929, p. 7. 9. Real Estate News, June 1929, p. 9; New York Times, June 12, 13, 14, 19, 26, August 3, 9, 12, 29, September 20, 1929; Berger, “Rent Laws Retard Progress,” p. 7. See also Gennis v. Milano, 237 N.Y.S. 432. 10. New York Times, June 18, August 21, 1929.

473

N O T E S T O PAG E S 4 0 8 – 4 1 9

47. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 10, 1928, p. 7; New York Times, March 5, 12, 1928. 48. [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 17, 1928, pp. 5, 8–9; New York Times, March 10, 14, 1928. 49. New York Times, March 14, 1928; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 17, 1928. See also “A Permanent Emergency: Rent Control in New York,” Housing Betterment, June 1928, p. 105. 50. “1928 Rent Law Extension,” Citizen, April 1928, page 20; New York Times, March 19, 1928. 51. New York Times, March 22, 23, April 7, 1928; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, March 17, 1928, p. 5. 52. New York Times, March 22, 25, 29, 30, 1928. 53. New York Times, April 7, 1928; [New York] Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, April 14, 1928, p. 10; “A Permanent Emergency,” p. 104. 54. New York Herald Tribune, April 9, 1928. 55. New York Times, April 8, 10, September 19, 1928. See also Real Estate News, September 1929, p. 11. 56. New York Times, March 6, June 14, 18, 1929, November 19, 1946. 57. Ibid., November 8, 1928, January 3, 1929, May 19, 1935; Report of the State Board of Housing to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and to the Legislature of the State of New York, March 6, 1929 (Albany, 1929), pp. 13–16; Stanley M. Isaacs to State Board of Housing, February 2, 1927, Stanley M. Isaacs Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; Real Estate News, June 1929, p. 8. See also Report of the Rent Commission of the District of Columbia to the President of the United States of America (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 17. 58. New York Times, March 6, May 19, 1929; “Death of Rent Laws Will Have But Little Effect on Tenants,” Real Estate Magazine of New York, April 1929, pp. 24–26, 42. 59. New York Times, May 19, 1929; “Death of Rent Laws Will Have But Little Effect on Tenants,” pp. 24–26, 42. 60. New York Times, June 1, 1929; Edgar J. Lauer and Victor House, The Tenant and His Landlord: A Treatise (New York, 1921), pp. 277–297; “Rent Laws Expire June First,” Real Estate News, May 1929, p. 25; Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing, p. 95.

N O T E S T O PAG E 4 2 0

474

11. Gennis v. Milano, 237 N.Y.S. 432, quotations on p. 434; New York Times, November 20, 23, 1929. See also Columbia Law Review, February 1930, pp. 264–265. 12. New York Times, September 20, November 20, 21, 1929; Gennis v. Milano, 237 N.Y.S. 432; Edith Elmer Wood, Recent Trends in American Housing (New York, 1931), p. 95; Mark Naison, “From Eviction Resistance to Rent Control: Tenant Activism in the Great Depression,” in Ronald Lawson, ed., The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), p. 137.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

I had a good deal of help with The Great Rent Wars. Virtually all my expenses were covered by grants from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—from the Institute’s Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Fund, the Center for Real Estate, the Dean’s Fund for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. My thanks to Adèle Santos, Tony Ciochetti, David Geltner, Deborah Fitzgerald, Amy Glasmeier, Anne McCants, and especially Diane McLaughlin. MIT’s Rotch Library was very helpful, as were Harvard’s Widener, Law, Loeb, and Baker libraries. Also very helpful were the New York Public Library, New York State Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Avery Library, New York City Municipal Archives, New York State Archives, Wisconsin Historical Society, and Library of the Bar Association of the City of New York. My thanks to Peter Cohn, Heather McCann, Jolene de Verges, and their colleagues at Rotch as well as to Alan Linder, who provided me access to the Bar Association Library. Several students, friends, and colleagues helped out too. Holly Durso worked as my research assistant for two years. Besides Holly, Donald Gonson, David Handlin, and Lloyd Weinreb read the first draft and suggested ways to improve it. My thanks to them as well as to Nancy Kirk, who edited the book (and all but one of my other books) and the ever-patient Duncan Kincaid, who showed me that it might be easier to write if I learned to use a computer. Thanks also to Ike Williams, Katherine Flynn, and Hope Denekamp of the Kneerim, Williams & Bloom Agency; Michelle Komie and Phil King of Yale University Press, and Nancy Ovedovitz and Lindsey Voskowsky, who designed the book; Julie Carlson, who did the copyediting; Ellen Chen, who did the proofreading; and Alexa Selph, who prepared the index.

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INDEX

Abeles, Peter A., 104, 132–133, 144, 145–146, 152, 157, 165, 168 Abyssinian Baptist Church, 344 Academy Tenants Association, 409 Adamson, Robert, 41 Adamson Act, 245 Ader, Ethel, 395 Adkins, Jesse C., 238, 240, 242, 243–244 Adler, Ernest N., 419 Advisory Committee on Housing, 134–135 Advisory Council of Real Estate Interests, 159 African Americans: rent strikes by, 83; as “undesirable” tenants, 343–346 Alabama Holding Corporation, 296 Alabama Holding Corporation v. Conrey, 299 Albany, N.Y., 384, 405 Aldermanic Committee on General Welfare, 117, 119 Altz v. Lieberson, 355 American Federation of Labor, 133 Amos, William C., 258, 260 Andrews, William S., 219, 222 Antin, Benjamin, 357 anti-Semitism: in New York City, 104–105, 106, 163, 247; of New York City police, 71 apartment hotels: emergency rent laws as applied to, 279–280 Apartment-House Owners’ Association (Los Angeles), 253

Apartment House Owners and Builders Association, 203, 227 Appellate Division (New York): and Gennis v. Milano, 419; and Hall v. Moos, 304–306; and “objectionable” tenant cases, 313, 316; rulings on the emergency rent laws, 212–218, 220, 222–224, 262, 264, 265, 266–268, 269–274, 275–281, 299–308 Applebaum, Joseph, 164–165 April laws, 172–175; changes to, 193–196; critics of, 181; exemptions proposed to, 176–177; impact of, 176–179; mixed views of, 187–191, 193; retroactivity of, 261–263. See also emergency rent laws; housing bills; rent profiteering Arndt, Walter J., 190 Arnheim, Max, 259 Aron, Harold G., 9, 204, 283, 300 Arthur, Mrs. Harry, 188 Associated Builders of Kings County, 396 Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 62, 371 Atterbury, Albert H., 190 Auchincloss, Reginald, 368, 372 Audubon Community Council, 70, 352 Ball, A. Heisler, 236–237 Ball Rent Act, 163, 204, 205, 236, 257, 328; challenges to constitutionality of, 237–240, 241–244, 248, 389. See also Block v. Hirsh

477

INDEX

478

Baltzeri, Louis J., 297–298 Bancroft, Francis S., 203, 340, 378 Bandler, Maurice, 38, 262 Banking Law, 151 Bartlett, Willard, 218–219 Battery Realty Company, 220 Bavendam, Rebecca A., 275–276 Bavendam v. Levinson, 276 Becker, Charles, 132 Becker, Philip, 183 Beckerman, Abraham, 83, 86, 130, 358 Begg, James T., 245 Bell, James D., 122 Bennett, Joseph, 109, 113 Berg, Henry, 392 Berg, J. S., 400 Bergen, W. H., 385 Berger, Isidor, 50, 80, 115, 137, 387–388, 392, 404, 418 Berger, Samuel A., 230 Bergmill Holding Company, 32 Bernstein, Sarah, 319 Berry, Charles W., 417 Beyer, Robert P., 213, 214, 220, 223 B.F.W. Realty Company, 69, 87, 91, 95, 103, 124 Bijur, Nathan, 278, 326, 419, 420 Bingham, Theodore, 71–72 Black, Loring M., 165 Blackman, Eleanor, 336, 372, 373 Blackmar, Abel E., 209–210, 217, 267–268 Blackmar, Elizabeth, 43, 75 Blauweis, Nathan, 400 Bleakley, William F., 274 Blek v. Davis, 204 Bliven, Bruce, 136 Bloch, Henry, 115 Bloch, Maurice, 402 Block, Julius, 237–238, 244 Block, S. J., 130 Block v. Hirsh, 241–244, 388; impact of, 251–254; U.S. Supreme Court ruling on, 247–251. See also Hirsh v. Block Blumenthal, Abraham, 128 Board of Aldermen, 109; and the housing crisis, 110–111, 130–131 Board of Estimate, 12, 117, 144, 417 Bogomolia, Beril, 187 Bolshevism: fears of, 72, 98, 105–106, 112, 130, 251

Bookman, J. Louis, 104 Borah, William E., 245 boycotts: over rising food prices, 77 Boylan, John J., 166 Boyle, Edward F., 383 Boyle, John, Jr., 157, 165, 168, 178 Bracken et al. v. Hahn, 276 Brackenridge, James, 105 Brady, Charles, 368, 373, 403 Brady, Peter J., 115 Brandegee, Frank W., 251 Brandeis, Louis D., 246, 247, 248, 251 Brandt, Arthur W., 390 Braunstein, Alexander, 135, 140 Bretton Court, 38, 42, 45, 48–49 Brien, John O., 194 Brigham, Henry R., 198 Brixton case, 208–209, 213, 220 Brixton Operating Corporation, 208–209, 214 Brixton v. La Fetra, 212, 214, 217, 222, 251 Bronx: impact of coal shortage on, 7–11; rent hikes in, 33, 37, 104; residential construction in, 18, 27; vacancy rates in, 23, 29 Bronx Board of Trade, 135 Bronx Civic Club, 37 Bronx Council of Tenant Leagues, 352 Bronx Taxpayers Association, 409 Bronx Tenants League, 6, 9, 10, 328 Bronx Tenants Protective League, 21, 370 Brooklyn: residential construction in, 18, 27; vacancy rates in, 23, 29 Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, 138, 139, 371 Brooklyn Central Labor Union, 163 Brooklyn Real Estate Board, 203, 218, 227, 399, 405, 416 Brooklyn Tenants League, 59, 62, 104, 153 Brooklyn Tenants Protective Association, 178 Brown, Marcus, 229. See also Marcus Brown Holding Company; Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al. Brown v. Feldman. See Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al. Browne, Stewart: as advocate for landlords, 36, 38, 52, 105, 129, 140, 143, 154–155, 167, 169, 226, 227, 258, 272, 287, 290, 299, 307, 317, 318, 320, 327–328, 334, 336, 342, 347–348, 350–351, 353, 354, 356, 362; and extension of rent laws,

Cabana, Oliver, Jr., 366, 390, 402–403 Caffey, Francis G., 74, 121–122 Caffrey, William J. A., 282, 293–294, 314, 320, 322, 323, 324, 343, 352, 373 Cahill, William J., 416 Calder, William M., 25, 136, 137–138, 384 Calder-McLaughlin bill, 137–138 Callahan, Joseph M., 168 Campbell, John V., 378 Campbell & Boland, 169 Cardozo, Benjamin N., 219, 222, 223, 225, 274, 355, 419 Carroll, Charles J., 187–188, 271, 400 Carroll, Robert E., 274 Carstensen, G. A., 106, 168 Carswell, William B., 209, 266 Caruso, Mona, 371 Catholic Protectory, 30 Cavallaro, Mrs. Artilio, 182 Cavanaugh, Alice, 100 Central Federated Union, 156, 165, 167 Central Park, 11 chapter 942 (et cetera). See emergency rent laws

Charity Organization Society, 30, 136, 138, 139, 150, 370 Chase, Emory A., 219 Chase Manhattan Bank, 2 Chastleton Corporation, 388–389 Chastleton Corp. v. Sinclair, 388–389 Chittick, Richard O., 156, 172, 310–311 Christman, Adam, 188, 294, 373 Citizens Union, 259, 284 City Club, 135, 138, 141, 358 City and Suburban Homes Company, 22, 23, 378 Claessens, August, 114 Clarke, John M., 246, 248, 251 Clarke, John Proctor, 212, 217 Clayton, Walter F., 351 Clemilt Realty Co., Inc. v. Wood, 217, 223 Cleveland, Grover, 246 Coal Conservation Commission, 11 coal shortage, 1–5, 11, 110–111; ordinances proposed in response to, 5–6 Coff, Edith B., 334, 371, 372, 373 Cohen, Julius Henry, 205, 206, 207, 208–209, 210, 211, 213, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 230, 245, 260, 266, 400, 401; and Brown v. Feldman, 242, 243, 244, 253 Cohen, Samuel, 72 Cohen Bros. Building Company, 280 Colahan, Daniel F., 337 Coler, Bird S., 387, 396 Collins, William T., 358 commercial tenants: protection for, 171, 173–174, 288, 354–355 Commerford, P. J., 101, 127 Commission of Housing and Regional Planning. See Stein Commission Committee on the Alleviation of Building Stagnation, 110 Committee on Legislation and Taxation, 158, 159 committees on cities, Senate and Assembly, 33, 52, 106, 166, 167, 171, 173, 178, 393, 394 Community Councils of the City of New York, 369 Community Councils for National Defense, 77, 78 Conboy, Sara A., 366, 390 Conrey, Lee F., 297, 299

479

INDEX

363–364, 378, 392, 394, 395, 404, 406, 409, 411 Browning, Edward W., 40, 344, 345 Brownlow, Louis, 244 Brownsville, 31, 34; rent strikes in, 73, 81, 82, 86, 112 Brownsville Consumers League, 93 Brownsville Landlords Protective Association, 84, 120, 125 Brownsville Tenants Union, 34, 86, 391 Bruckner, Henry, 111, 118 B. and S. Realty Corporation v. Joseph Wald, 348–349 Buckner, Martin, 368 Buffalo, N.Y., 367, 383 building codes: violations of, 154 Buildings Trades’ Employers Association, 139 Bullitt, Helen Lowery, 156 Buongioni, Angelina, 182 Burlingame, Alvah W., 176–177 Burlingame bill, 139 Burr, William P., 142, 143–144, 345 Burritt, Bailey S., 371 Burton, Theodore E., 198, 251 Byrnes, Sadie, 371

INDEX

480

Constitution (U.S.). See contract clause; Fourteenth Amendment; police power construction. See residential construction contract clause (of the Constitution): as applied to rent laws, 233, 234, 243, 245, 249, 267, 270–271, 419–420 Coolidge, Calvin, 398 cooperative apartments, 325–327 Copeland, Royal S., 142–143, 258–259, 358, 361, 368, 372, 375 Corwin, Edward S., 252 Court of Appeals (New York): cases relating to emergency rent laws, 217–225 Cox, James M., 163 Craig, Agnes, 303, 307, 318, 320, 324, 335, 340, 342, 353, 368, 372, 391, 403, 409, 412 Craig, Charles L., 109, 359 Crane, Frederick E., 219, 222, 227, 234, 253, 274 Crane, Sidney C., 286, 296, 299, 306 Crausman, Jacob, 294–295 Croker, Richard, 206 Cromwell, Stanley E., 370 Cropsey, James C., 196, 271, 275, 276, 338–339 Cullen, Edward, 218–219 Cumming, Robert C., 171 Curley, Edward W., 416, 417 Curran, Henry H., 140, 143, 144, 191, 192, 193, 358 Custer, George A., 182–183 Cuvillier, Louis A., 356, 404, 412, 415 Davies, John R., 10, 36, 63, 93, 260–261, 299, 319, 321–322, 323, 325, 343, 389, 406 Davis, Henry E., 237 Day, Jared N., 7, 19, 67, 126, 339, 340, 351 Day, Jonathan, 11–12 Day, William R., 247, 248, 251, 254 de Forest, Robert W., 43 Delehanty, Francis B., 270, 281, 386 De Muth, Frank, 409 depreciation, 305 Dermont, Gertrude, 277–278, 281 Deutsch, Bernard S., 206, 210–211, 303, 412 Deyber, Frank J., 312 Dick, Max, 33–34 Dickstein, Samuel, 160 Dimin, Henry, 159 District of Columbia Rent Commission, 198, 235, 239, 244, 248, 328–329, 388–389

Dodd, Walter F., 252 Dodge bill, 139, 151, 152 Dolson, William H., 20, 342, 350, 377, 378 Domowitz, Esther, 89 Donnelly, George, 144 Donohue, Charles D., 150, 157, 166 Dowling, Edward J., 12 Dowling, Robert E., 137, 138, 147, 161, 359 Dowling, Victor J., 212, 217, 281, 337 Dowling bill, 138, 139 Downing, Bernard, 402 Doyle, Edward P., 143, 176, 273, 283, 346, 348, 349, 351–352, 355, 404–405, 409, 416, 417 Doyle, John D., 144 Dreschler, David, 145–146 Dreyer, Henry, 319 Dubofsky, Melvyn, 76 Dubois, Charles H., 378 Dubow, J. Lewis, 87 Duckworth, J. C., 81 Duis, Perry R., 44 Dunn, Julie, 372 Dunnigan, John J., 105, 158, 166, 365, 385, 408 Dunnigan Act, 385–386, 387 Dunningham, Jabez E., 129, 369–370, 372, 381 du Pont de Nemours, E.I., 79 duress: as defense in landlord-tenant disputes, 263–265 Durham case, 208–209, 213, 220 Durham Realty Corporation, 208–209 Durham v. La Fetra, 217, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 253, 268, 270, 273 Earle, Guyon L. C., 36 Earle, Victor M., 227, 328, 347, 348, 350, 362, 394 East Harlem Tenants League, 83 East Side Tenants League, 83, 86, 130 Eder, Morris, 96, 293, 297 Edward, Charles G., 362 Efe, Walter W., 372 Eichbauer, John, 181 Eighteenth Amendment, 226, 314 810 West End Avenue, Inc. v. Stern, 215, 217, 223, 251 ejectment, 8, 157, 196, 205, 223. See also evictions Eliot, T. S., 420

concerning, 269, 275, 277, 281; landlords’ efforts to circumvent, 333–343; legal defense of, 205–206; as limited to low-end dwellings, 393–395; opposition to extension of, 387–390, 407–411; permanent provisions of, 414; problems in implementation of, 327–329; real estate organizations’ efforts to weaken, 346–351; retroactivity of, 259–265; ruling in support of, 222–227; in state supreme court, 206–209, 337; as temporary measure, 253–254; U.S. Supreme Court cases, 227–228, 241–254; who was covered by, 259–265, 268–274, 279–281. See also April laws; judges (municipal court); Lockwood Committee; McGillick Law; September laws Emert, Harris, 276 Enright, Richard C., 103 Epstein, Sophie, 120–121 Ernstedoff, Abraham, 102 Ervin, Charles W., 113–14 Esterbrook, O. Grant, 181, 262, 278–279 evictions, 8; costs associated with, 87, 90–91; impact of emergency rent laws on, 195–199; judges’ role in, 65–67; marshals’ role in, 63, 67–70; as response to rent strikes, 62–64, 73, 87, 93. See also emergency rent laws; judges (municipal court); rent strikes; summary proceedings Ewen, Elizabeth, 64 excess-profits tax, 79 Ex Parte Milligan, 250 Faber, Leander B., 116, 209, 266, 267 Fagan, William R., 209, 266 Fairfax, Charles W., 236 fair market value: criteria for, 285–287, 296, 301, 302, 305 Fair Play Rent Association, 63, 144, 167, 180, 184, 188, 308, 352, 372, 394 Falk, Henry O., 34, 86 F.A.L. Realty Corporation, 181 Farnham v. Posner, 271, 272, 273, 280 Farnham Realty Corporation, 270 Farrar, John R., 308 Federal Reserve Board, 25 Federal Trade Commission, 79

481

INDEX

Elkus, Abram I., 18, 19, 135, 150, 219 Ellenbogen, Abraham, 394 Elliman, Douglas L., 17, 20, 51–52, 147, 406 Elliman, Lawrence B., 301 Elliman, Roland P., 20 Elliott, John, 370 Ellison, Rachel, 189–190 Ely, Harry Allen, 70, 191, 307, 325, 328, 336, 339–339, 352–353, 356–357, 361, 368, 369, 372, 380, 385 Emergency Fleet Corporation, 79 emergency rent laws: Appellate Division’s rulings on, 212–218, 220, 222–224, 262, 264, 265, 266–268, 269–274, 275–281, 299–308, 337–339, 349, 400; as applied to apartment hotels, 279–280; as applied to commercial property, 288, 354–355; as applied to home-based businesses, 275–277, 281; as applied to sublet premises, 277–279, 281; chapter 6 as applied to, 400–401; chapter 131 of, 414; chapter 133 of, 311, 313–314, 414; chapter 135 of, 338; chapter 136 of, 195, 205, 260; chapter 137 of, 211, 266–267, 309–310; chapter 434 of, 349–350; chapter 842 of, 408; chapter 892 of, 274, 280; chapter 942 of, 195, 196, 203, 207, 208, 209–210, 211, 212, 213, 217, 220, 222, 265, 266, 267, 268, 274–275, 276, 278, 279, 309, 310–311, 326, 334–335, 347, 350, 351, 360; chapter 944 of, 195, 196, 203, 209, 215–217, 220, 222, 223, 267, 274, 283–284, 292–293, 307, 333, 334, 348, 349, 360, 367; chapter 945 of, 195, 196, 220, 360, 367; chapter 947 of, 195, 196, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210–211, 212, 217, 220, 222, 223, 224, 267, 270, 309, 310, 360; chapter 949 of, 195, 357–359; chapter 951 of, 229, 232, 241, 249, 267, 341, 414; confusion surrounding, 265–274; constitutional challenges to, 203–228, 232, 233, 244, 247–251, 268, 337, 388–389; Court of Appeals rulings on, 217–225; efforts to strengthen, 351–357; expiration of, 413–414; extension of, 360–362, 363–365, 366, 382–386, 398–400, 405–407; hearings on, 361, 367–379, 390–392, 403–406; highrent apartments exempt from, 393–395; impact of, 196–199; lack of case law

INDEX

482

Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners, 7, 160, 328, 346, 347 Federation of Tenants Associations of Greater New York, 74, 83, 308, 328, 339, 352, 380, 384 Feigenbaum, William N., 132, 140 Feldblum Realty Company, 185–186 Feldman, Jacob G., 101 Feldman, Marcus, 231–232, 233, 242. See also Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al. Feldman, Morris, 37 Felix, Louis B., 123 Fenner, Burt L., 136 Ferguson, Cornelius, 94 Ferrand, August, 359 Ferrari, Robert, 74, 372 Fertig, Israel, 356 Fertig, M. M., 114, 146, 150 Feuerstein, Max, 101 Finch, Edward R., 206, 210, 212, 296, 323 Fink, James A., 273 Finkberner, John, 296 Finkelstein, M., 124 Finkelstein, N., 23 Fischel, Harry, 137 Fitzgerald, James J., 411–412 Flatbush, 25 Fleischman, Harry, 371 Flynn, John S., 69 Flynn, Joseph C. H., 385 Foley, James A., 150 Fontanelli, Joseph S., 419 Food Administration, 53–54, 57, 77, 78 food prices: increases in, 56, 77–78, 160 foreclosure proceedings: as way of circumventing rent laws, 335 Fourteenth Amendment: as applied to emergency rent laws, 204, 210–211, 212, 216; due process clause of, 216, 225, 242, 245, 267; equal protection clause of, 211, 216, 225, 234, 242, 249, 394 Foy, James L., 373 Frankfurter, Felix, 223, 248 Freund, Ernst, 218 Friedlander, Samson, 295 Fuld, A. Spencer, 335, 400 Gallagher, Joseph, 338 Galligan, James T., 391

Ganz, Marie, 38–39, 42, 56, 63 Garden Court Apartments, 344–345 Garfield, Harry A., 3, 11 Garfield, James A., 3 Garfinkel, Charles B., 132, 145, 146 Gavagan, Joseph A., 399–400 Gaynor, William J., 69, 70 Geller, Hyman, 298 Gelston, Arthur W., 392 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 78 Gennis, Ladi, 419 Gennis v. Milano, 419–420 Genovese, Pancrazio, 21, 370 Genung, George L., 9–10, 186–187, 293, 349 German Alliance Insurance Company v. Lewis, 222, 224, 245, 247, 248 Gerstein, Samuel R., 231, 232 G. and G. Realty Company, 120 Giegerich, Leonard A., 208, 210, 213, 214 Gisnet, Morris, 10, 67, 95, 115, 127, 146, 147, 173, 328 Gitlan, Leo, 391 Glass, Jacob A., 101 Glassie, Henry H., 204, 237, 242 Goble, George W., 252 Gold, Jacob, 102 Gold, Michael, 55, 58, 74 Gold, Sadie, 102 Goldberg, David, 91–92, 93, 94–95, 120 Goldfogle, Henry R., 114 Goldman, Harry, 37 Goldman & Unger, 302 Goldsmith, Benjamin, 231 Goldsmith, Charles A., 50, 102, 119, 120–121, 123–124, 126, 128, 226 Goldstein, Nathaniel, 301–302 Goodkind, Martin H., 386 Goodman, David, 187 Goodstein, Harry, 345 Gorham Construction Company, 313 Gorham v. Woolman, 313–314 Gould, E. R. L., 141 Gove, George, 366, 390, 403 Graham, George S., 251 Grant, Lillie, 117, 130, 290, 335, 368, 369, 370, 373, 381, 391 Greater City Merchants Tenants Association, 354, 355 Greater New York Coal Dealers, 1

Haber, Ferdinand I., 283, 291 Hagen, “Fatty,” 69 Halkett, John, 403 Hall, George, 349 Hallock, John H., 317, 378, 392, 403 Hall Realty, 302, 304–305 Hall v. Moos, 302, 306 Halperin, L., 94 Hamilton, James A., 390 Hamilton, John Alan, 133 Hamlin, Chauncey J., 390 Hammer v. Dagenhart, 245, 247 Hand, Learned, 230, 231, 232 Hannah, Edward I., 115, 148 Hannecke, George H., 94 Harding, Warren G., 247, 272 Harlem: changing demographics of, 343–344; living conditions in, 346, 404, 415 Harlem and Bronx Property Owners, 317–318 Harlem Property Owners’ Association, 189

Harlem Tenants Association, 334, 348 Harlem Tenants League, 87, 415 Harriman, Edward H., 78 Harriman, Mrs. Oliver, 129 Hart, Helen, 373 Hart, Thomas A., 138, 139 Haubert, Charles H., 358 Hawes, Gilbert Ray, 210 Hayyeh, Hanneh, 75 Hazleton, Edgar F., 297, 298 H.D.H. Realty Corporation, 266, 268 H.D.H. Realty Corporation v. Murphy, 268 health concerns: in New York City, 112, 142, 143, 342, 375–376, 383 heat: as obligation of landlords, 5–12 Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 30, 43 Hecht, Dorris, 153 Hermitage Company, 275, 316 Hermitage Co. v. Preziose, 275 Hershkopf, Bernard, 205, 208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 218, 219, 225, 259, 266 Hervitz, Harry K., 371 Hetherington, John, 307 Heyman, Rose, 206 Heyman v. Osterweis, 207, 210–211, 270 H. & H. Model Apartment Company, 297 Hill, John R., 104–105, 160 Hilliard v. Dorritie, 316 Hillquit, Morris, 109, 113, 162 Hilly, Arthur J. W., 128, 130, 165, 167, 170, 177–178, 179, 189, 191, 192–193, 195, 420; and the emergency rent laws, 204, 206, 226, 265, 310, 353, 372 Hilton, Arthur W., 399 Hinerfield, Pauline, 89 Hirsch, Esther, 300 Hirsch, Nathan, 23, 31, 47, 72, 104, 135, 148, 150, 153, 285–286, 340, 378; as chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, 115–126, 130–131; as friendly to landlords, 116; resignation of, 128–129 Hirsch v. Weiner, 301–305, 306; critics of, 301–302 Hirsh, Louis, 237–238, 239–240. See also Block v. Hirsh Hirsh v. Block, 205, 238–241, 243–244, 259. See also Block v. Hirsh Hirshfield, David, 117, 119–120, 122, 128, 167, 191, 262–263

483

INDEX

Greater New York Taxpayers Association, 7, 50, 84, 115, 147, 151, 159–160, 172, 179, 258, 318, 340, 346, 362, 385, 387, 392, 405, 416, 418, 419 Greater New York Tenants League, 67, 83, 95, 112, 127, 133, 150, 152, 155, 328 Greenbaum, Samuel, 212, 216, 262, 305, 306 Greene, Frederick Stuart, 366 Grenthal, Abraham, 356, 391, 408, 410 Grenthal bills, 410–411; legal challenge to, 411–412 Greshler, Alexander S., 105, 106 Grey, Edna, 278 Griffen, Minnie R., 230, 231 Griffith, D. W., 75 Grimm, Peter W., 417, 420 Grossman, Lowell, 366, 390 Guilder, Joseph A., 197 Guthiel, J., 34 Guthrie, William D., 205–206, 207, 208–209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 230, 260, 266; and Brown v. Feldman, 242, 243, 244, 253 Guthrie, Bangs & Van Sinderen, 205 Gutman, Abraham, 386 Guttag, Jacob L., 206, 212 Guttag v. Shatzkin, 210, 211, 214, 217, 220, 222, 223, 227, 234, 253 Guy, Charles L., 276, 302–303, 304, 312, 316

INDEX

484

Hiscock, Frank H., 219, 222, 247, 262, 274 Hoble, J., 34 Hoe Riot, 71 Hoffman, Benjamin, 98, 320 Hofstadter, Samuel H., 402 Hogan, John W., 219, 222 Hoggson, Noble Foster, 26 Holbrook, Don, 39, 48 Holland, James B., 168 Holland, John P., 399 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 245–246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253–254, 388–389 Hoover, Herbert C., 2, 53, 77, 79 Hopper, John J., 17 Hotchkiss, Henry D., 206–207, 210, 270 Hough, Charles B., 233–234, 241, 245, 246, 271 House, Victor, 283, 284 housing bills: April laws, 172–175, 179–179, 187–191, 193–196; enacted in other cities and states, 163–164; enacted in Europe, 197; hearings on, 167–170; opposition to, 158; as proposed by the New York state legislature, 145–152, 156–163, 165–172, 398–400; September laws, 196–199. See also emergency rent laws; housing shortages in New York City; rent profiteering housing shortages in New York City, 17–25, 29–30, 109–112, 153–155, 361–362, 379; committees examining, 134–135; debate over scope of, 387–388, 403–404; legal issues surrounding, 220–221; legislation proposed for, 138–139, 148–149, 150–152, 153; public housing proposed as solution for, 140–145; rent hikes associated with, 20–22, 31–33, 34–35, 74, 91, 135, 172; solutions proposed for, 136–139, 150–152; statistical data on, 374–376; tensions associated with, 103–106. See also emergency rent laws; Lockwood Committee; residential construction; Stein Commission Howie, William J., 278–279 Howie v. McKenzie, 278–279 Hoyt, Homer, 30 H. S. Dewey, Inc., 127 Huddleston, George, 81 Huebner & Escher, 34 Hughes, Charles Evans, 164, 203–204

Hurd, Richard M., 135 Hylan, John F., 1, 5, 58, 70, 72, 80, 128, 412; election of, 109–10; and the housing crisis, 109–111, 112–113, 114–117, 123, 135, 137, 142, 144, 146, 151, 153, 165, 191, 258, 358, 359; ineptitude of, 110–111 Hyman, Isaac, 317 immigrants: in New York City, 17, 43–44 “Imperator, The,” 2, 5 Ingraham, George L., 203, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 230, 266 International Workers of the World (IWW), 106 Interstate Commerce Commission, 257 “ironclad lease,” 339–340 Isaacs, Lewis M., 198, 215–217, 219, 220–221, 225, 242, 243, 260, 270, 360, 374, 386; and property valuation, 283, 285, 287, 290, 297 Isaacs, Myer, 215 Isaacs, Stanley M., 178, 181, 190, 227, 350, 388, 392, 393–394, 413, 414 Ives v. South Buffalo Railway Co., 218, 219 Jackson, Gertrude H. M., 278 Jackson, T. J. Fletcher, 278 Jackson v. Grey, 278, 279 Jacobs, Meg, 77 Jaffee, Morris, 104 James, Darwin R., 402 Janson, John, 181 Jenks, Almet F., 209, 267, 268, 269 Jenks, Edmund B., 354, 404, 407, 408 Jesse, George N., 159, 258, 357, 364, 384, 391 Jewish communities, 43; rent strikes in, 61 Johnson, Ben, 235 Johnson, William G., 238, 241, 242, 244 Johnstone, Robert S., 232 Joint Legislative Committee on Housing. See Lockwood Committee Jones, Sullivan W., 366, 390, 403 judges (municipal court): caseload of, 98–101, 292–293, 294; as interpreters of the emergency rent laws, 259–267, 348–349; lack of uniformity among, 296–297; legislative empowerment of, 156, 157, 158–159, 162, 168, 170, 171, 178–187, 188–190, 216, 258, 259–265; as

Kannensohn, Harry, 88 Kaplan, Abraham, 152, 157, 170, 393 Kaplan, Sadie, 37 Karlin, William, 86, 187 Karp, Mary, 102 Katz, Jacob, 261 Kauffman, Herman, 102, 120, 126 Kaufman, Yetta, 86 Kayell Realty Corporation, 187 Keating-Owen Act, 245 Keenan, Joseph A., 418 Kelby, Charles H., 205, 279, 300–301, 303, 329 Kellogg, Joseph A., 135 Kelly, Arthur B., 294 Kelly, Mary T., 306 Kelly, William J., 69, 267 Kelly v. Medford, 306 Kelsey, Clarence H., 37, 51, 135, 141 Kempner, Henry, 123 Kenehan, Christopher, 319 Kenlon, John, 138 Kennedy, Walter S., 118, 121, 127, 131 Kephart, William H., 112 Kernochan, Frederic, 130 Kessler, Jacob B., 315 Kiernan, Peter D., 366, 390 Kilpatrick, William D., 283, 307, 328, 342, 378, 413 Kirschner, William, 400 Klaber, Leonard, 220 Klamer Realty Corporation, 270 Klein, Charles, 344–345 Klein, Gertrude Weil, 129 Klein, Joseph E., 13, 49, 80, 257 Kleinert, Albert E., 35, 403 Kline v. Kleenan, 315 Klingenbeck v. Young, 316 Knight, John, 409, 410

Knipper, Kate, 371 Korn, William, 312 Krauth, Gertrude E., 411–412 Kuenzli v. Stone, 205 Ku Klux Klan, 345–346 Kutz, Charles W., 244 Ladies’ Christian Union, 326 La Fetra, Edward B., 208, 213, 214, 242 La Guardia, Fiorello H., 114, 194, 198, 289, 348, 352, 355, 367–368, 369; as advocate for tenants, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 333, 335, 380–381; as president of the Board of Alderman, 165, 188, 326, 358, 359; as supporter of public housing, 140, 143, 144 Lammars, William H., 50, 94 landlords: animosity toward tenants, 52–53; April laws as viewed by, 189–190; associations for, 83–84; and efforts to circumvent emergency rent laws, 333–343; fairness of, 33–34; legal recourse sought by, 7–11; legislation affecting, 145–150; maintenance and repairs expected of, 355–357; negligence of, 73–74, 340–343; Justice Pound’s view of, 223–224; as profiteers, 78–81; racial tensions generated by, 343–346; rulings against, in “objectionable” tenant cases, 312–318; as speculators, 35–36; tenants’ animosity toward, 74–76; vulnerability of, 86–87, 92. See also emergency rent laws; housing bills; Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering; rent hikes; rent strikes; summary proceedings Landlords Protective Association, 84 landlord-tenant laws. See emergency rent laws; housing bills Langhorne Construction Company, 32 Larsen, Peter, 34 Lauer, Edgar J., 52, 75, 283, 283, 308, 327 Laughlin, Francis, 212, 214, 216–217, 268 Law, Charles B., 163, 180, 280 Lawn, Victor H., 379, 380 Lawson bill, 139 Lazarus, Henry H., 69, 70 Lazarus, Joseph, 102 Lazinsk, H. M., 318 Leavitt, Samuel, 328, 333, 395 Lefkowitz, Louis, 56

485

INDEX

mediators, 66–67; political leanings of, 65; and property valuation, 296; reasonable rent, as determined by, 282–285, 333; reasonable return, as determined by, 296; role of in eviction process, 65–67; role of in rent strikes, 65–67, 94, 96–101; settlements encouraged by, 293–295; sympathetic to landlords, 184–187, 295; sympathetic to tenants, 91, 92, 181–184, 295 Justus, Mrs. Philip, 295

INDEX

486

Lehman, Herbert H., 261 Lehman, Irving, 204, 261, 262, 264, 265, 269–270, 272, 274, 277–278, 281, 296, 313, 323, 349 Lehman, Mayer, 261 Leitner, Jacob, 19, 141, 378–379 Lemlich, Clara, 76, 78 Lennon, Edward, 298, 308 Leo, Algernon, 162 Leo, John P., 22 Lever Act, 54, 79, 133 Levinson, Morris, 275–276 Levow, Abraham, 88 Levy, Aaron J., 34–35, 36, 37; and landlordtenant issues, 65, 67, 72, 97, 99, 100, 105, 148, 163, 178, 181, 182, 265–266, 273, 292–293, 303, 319, 324, 336, 353, 361, 394 Levy, Bertha, 295 Levy, I. Montefiore, 147, 159–160, 169, 337, 346, 362, 378 Levy Leasing Company, 207, 215 Levy Leasing Co., Inc. v. Siegel, 207, 215, 217, 223, 242, 251, 263–264, 265, 270, 386 Lewinsohn, S. A., 117, 127, 128 Lewis, Clarence M., 386 Lewis, Harry E., 400 Liberty Loan Committee, 11 Lindsay, Samuel McCune, 30, 136, 221, 328, 361, 368; and the Stein Commission, 374–377, 379 Lipowicz, Leonard R., 406 Lipowicz bill, 406 Liss, Abram, 105 Lochner v. New York, 244, 246 Lockwood, Charles C., 29, 135, 148, 150, 151–152, 156, 159, 163, 168, 170, 177, 189, 259, 365; and emergency rent laws, 193, 204, 225, 226, 265, 310, 349, 361, 366, 372, 373, 391 Lockwood Committee, 29, 30–31, 35, 36, 41, 51, 80, 93, 100, 110, 111, 129, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 148, 150, 151, 154, 157–159, 166, 170, 173, 199, 365; and the April laws, 177, 187, 194, 374; and the emergency rent laws, 208, 210, 212, 215, 242, 262, 272, 303–304, 310, 333–334, 335, 349–351, 360–362, 394; and public housing debate, 140–141, 142, 143–144 Lockwood-McWhinney bill, 173

Loeb, Sophie Irene, 373 long-term leases: in fashionable areas, 31–32, 38 Lorraine, Jeanne, 312–313 Lubove, Roy, 79 Luce, Robert L., 118 Lurie, Alexander, 187 Lyons bill, 146 McAdoo, William G., 3, 25, 26 McBride, Daniel, 69, 96, 116 McCooey, John H., 110, 111 McCoy, Walter I., 241 McCue, Martin G., 158, 168, 173, 195 McDonald, J. J., 104 McDonnell, Curtis C., 236 McFarland, Susan, 319 McGillick, Charles H., 415–418 McGillick Law (Local Law No. 9), 415–419; legal challenge to, 419–420 McGinnies, Joseph A., 408, 410 McGowan v. Stevens, 315 McGuinness, Peter J., 417–418 Mack, Arthur K., 20 Mack, Julian W., 230 McKee, Joseph V., 146, 155, 156, 226, 417 McKenna, Joseph, 246–247, 249–251, 252 McKenzie, Edward L., 278–279 McKinley, William, 246, 247 McLaughlin, Chester B., 219, 222, 225, 263–264, 270, 274, 282 McLaughlin, James C., 137 McLaughlin & Stern, 337 McNulty, A. C., 169, 177, 178, 179, 181, 190, 198, 258, 360; and challenges to the emergency rent laws, 203, 210, 211, 296, 309, 310, 347, 350, 377, 392, 398; and property valuations, 301 McReynolds, James C., 246, 248, 251 McWhinney, Thomas A., 159, 170, 189 Malkiel, Leon, 9 Mancuso, Francis X., 100, 352 Manhattan: long-term leases in, 32; residential construction in, 18, 27; vacancy rates in, 23, 29, 154 Mann, Frank, 18, 23, 25, 56, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 150, 191, 194, 195, 301, 312, 326, 343, 361, 368, 372, 374, 387, 396, 417 Mann, Joseph F., 418 Manning, Ellen, 368

Mayor’s Housing Conference Committee, 191, 221 Mehl, Emanuel, 93 Merchants’ Association, 27, 135, 136, 137 Merchants’ Rent Committee, 173 Merrell, Edgar S., 212, 215 Mersereau, Jones Wilder, 418 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 357, 389 Milano, Edward, 419 Miller, Julius, 389 Miller, Nathan L., 186, 219, 272, 303, 357, 362, 363 Millet, Frank R., 25 Mills, Isaac N., 267 Minarsky, Harry, 101, 102 Minton, Mrs. F., 186 Mitchel, John Purroy, 109, 113 Monaghan, Frank J., 342, 381, 387, 396 month-to-month tenancy, 32, 38–39 Moore, John W., 357 Moore, Richard B., 415 Moos, Leon Sidney, 302 Moran, Robert L., 46, 167; and the housing shortage, 110, 111–112, 149 Morganstern, Morris, 7, 12, 22, 36, 80, 160 Morgenroth, Nathan, 276 Morgenstein Brothers, 102 Mork, Seymour, 295 Morris, Charles, 45 Morris, William E., 66, 68, 91, 97–98, 226, 314; critics of, 184; and landlord-tenant disputes, 179, 180, 182–184, 186, 189, 262, 263, 292, 295–296, 298, 315, 321, 349 Morton, Ferdinand Q., 383 Moshier, Charles, 92 Moskowitz, Belle, 135, 139, 140, 154, 193 Moskowitz, George L., 266, 267 Mosner, Max, 298 Mount Morris Community Council and Civic Organization, 372 moving, challenges of, 45–48 Moving Day, 44–45, 195 Moving Van Workers’ Union, 12, 89–90 M.S. & I.S. Isaacs, 215 Mullan, George V., 207, 266, 267, 268 Mullan, John B., 167, 168 Muller v. Oregon, 219

487

INDEX

Manton, Martin T., 230 Marcantonio, Vito, 348, 369, 373 Marcus Brown Construction Company, 229 Marcus Brown Holding Company, 229–232, 241, 242 Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al., 228, 232–234, 245, 270, 273, 360; aftermath of, 251–254; as U.S. Supreme Court case, 234–235, 241–245, 247–251 Marcus Brown Holding Co. v. Pollak et al., 229–231 Marfdin, Mary, 58, 79, 95, 114–115 Margolies, Louis, 95 Marion, Samuel, 271 Marion v. Weiser, 272, 275, 280 Marks, Charles, 334, 335, 361, 391, 399 Marks, Jacob, 276, 282, 299 Marks, Marcus N., 110 Markwin Realty Corporation, 288 Marlow, Lena, 334 Marshall, Louis B., 142, 198, 205, 215–217; and the emergency rent laws, 218, 219, 220–222, 225, 226, 230, 242, 243, 245, 251, 254, 360, 394, 400; and property valuation, 283, 290, 297 Marshall, Myra, 105 marshals: role in eviction process, 63, 67–70 Martin, Francis, 130, 194 Martin, Helen E., 37 Mautner, Carrie, 280–281 Mautner, Julius, 280–281 May, William B., 277–278, 281 May v. Dermont, 281 Mayer, Julius M., 232–233 Mayer, Leo Kenneth, 118, 178, 188, 189, 191 Mayor’s Committee on National Defense, 25, 26 Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering, 23, 35, 42, 47, 50, 72, 74, 80, 94, 96, 102, 104, 148, 163, 187, 290, 335–336; critics of, 129; disputes resolved by, 123–125; early efforts of, 115–117; effectiveness of, 125–128, 129–131; hearings held by, 118–120, 162; limited authority of, 116–117; membership of, 115–116; and pressure exerted on landlords, 117, 122–123, 125 Mayor’s Committeee on Taxation and Investigation of Mortgage Loans, 115, 116, 117

INDEX

488

Municipal Court Code: landlords’ manipulation of, 336–337; rule 35 of, 337–338; section 17 of, 336–337 municipal courts: caseload of, 98–101, 292–293, 294. See also judges (municipal court) Munn v. Illinois, 221, 234, 239, 240 Murphy, Charles, 117, 363 Murphy, John J., 23, 138, 141, 150, 371 Murphy, William J., 266 Murray, Michael, 190 Murray, Robert K., 164 Murray, Thomas E., 273 Myers, John Caldwell, 230 Nassoit, Annie, 337 National Association of Real Estate Boards, 198 National Guard armories: as shelter for New Yorkers, 30 National Housewives League, 78 National Housing Association, 30, 80 Nearing, Scott, 31, 114 Newman, Bernard J., 389 Newton, Charles D., 165, 166, 205, 214, 230, 266 New York City: building boom in, 18; coal shortage in, 1–6, 11, 110–111; ethnic divisions in, 104–105; freezing temperatures in, 3–4; influx of immigrants to, 17; rent commission proposed for, 257–259, 327–329, 347; vacancy rates in, 18, 23, 29, 154, 361, 364, 383, 388, 389–390, 397, 404 New York City Bar Association, 354 New York County Lawyers Association, 354 New York Legislative Bill Drafting Commission, 39 New York Rent Protective Association, 59, 83 New York State Association of Real Estate Boards, 346, 347 New York State Federation of Labor, 163, 167, 168 New York State legislature: and the housing shortage, 138–139, 148–149, 150–152; landlord-tenant laws proposed by, 145–152, 156–163; and public housing proposals considered by, 140, 144, 158, 401–402; rent profiteering as concern

for, 132–134, 145–146; Socialist assemblymen ousted from, 164–165; special sessions called for, 148–152, 190–196, 310. See also emergency rent laws; housing bills; Lockwood Committee; Stein Commission New York State Supreme Court: emergency rent laws challenged in, 206–209, 337 New York Stock Exchange, 3 New York Urban League, 336 Nicholl-Hofstadter Law, 402 Nichols, William, 83 Nicholson, George P., 142, 144 Nicoll, Courtlandt, 398–399, 400, 402 Nicoll bill (chapter 6), 400, 401 Nineteenth Amendment, 150 Nod-Away Company, 273–274 Nod-Away Co. v. Carroll, 273–274 Nolan, Mary, 99 North Harlem Community Council, 370 Nowacki, John J., 69 Nowacki, Rose, 69 Noyes, Charles F., 22, 26 Nugent, John R., 396 Nystad & Krassner, 279 Nystad & Krassner v. Zerbe, 279 O’Brien, Andrew, 49–50, 121 O’Brien, John F., 213, 214, 220, 226, 266–267, 337 O’Connell, John J., 186 O’Connor, William, 128 Office of the Commissioner of Accounts, 117, 119 Office Tenants League, 173 Olcott, William M. K., 41, 169, 393 Orinoco Realty Company, 38, 262, 386 Orinoco Realty Co., Inc. v. Bandler, 262, 265 Orinoco v. Goodkind, 387 Orleck, Annelise, 56 Orr, Samuel, 6, 12, 67, 83, 95, 155, 257 O’Shaughnnessey, William, 100 Osofsky, Gilbert, 343 Osterweis, Louis W., 206 O’Sullivan, James D., 346 Ottinger, Albert E., 32 Ottinger Law, 32–33, 34, 38, 42; efforts to repeal, 146, 152, 155; repeal of, 166, 167, 174 Oyster, James F., 244

Pound, Cuthbert W., 219, 222, 223–224, 225, 226, 251, 253, 270, 274 Pound, Roscoe, 218 Pounds, Louis H., 416 Powell, Adam Clayton, 344 Pratt, Ernest T., 227, 283 Preziose, Hermitage Co. v., 275 Prince, Leopold, 147–148, 273, 320, 323, 343 Proal, Herón, 86 profiteering. See rent profiteering Prompt Realty Company, 123 property: as assessed for tax purposes, 287–288, 296; fair market value of, 285–287; “highest and best use of,” 287–288. See also rental property public housing: debate over, 140–145, 155; in Europe, 143; legal issues surrounding, 143–144; legislation proposed for, 144, 158, 398, 401–402; Panken’s proposal for, 173; Socialist Party as advocate of, 140, 155, 173 public regulation: constitutionality of, 224. See also rent commission Purdy, Lawson, 136, 138–139, 141, 195, 360, 373 Queens: housing shortage in, 29; residential construction in, 27; vacancy rates in, 23 Rabinowitz, Aaron, 403 Rae, William P., 218 Railroad Administration, 3, 25 railroads: impact of coal shortage on, 3 Rayland Realty Company, 209, 266, 267–268 Real Estate Board of New York, 12, 110, 136, 137, 138, 141, 147, 150, 152, 156, 158, 161, 171, 176, 258, 272, 273, 283, 285, 419; emergency rent laws challenged by, 203, 208, 213, 215, 217, 227, 272, 304, 309–310, 363, 373–374, 377–379, 382, 396 Real Estate Investors, Inc. (Real Estate Interests, Inc.), 203–204, 208, 210, 216, 217, 227, 230, 283, 337, 347 Real Estate Owners’ Association of the Twelfth and Nineteenth Wards, 115, 116, 159, 161, 307 Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, 20, 22, 25, 37, 59, 149, 150, 156, 159, 161, 170, 172, 253, 271, 287, 292, 303, 349, 364, 382, 389, 395–396, 402, 404, 406, 408, 416

489

INDEX

Page, Alfred R., 270–271, 278 Paiewsky, Louis B., 85–86 Palitz, Clarence Y., 5–7, 11, 112, 129, 131 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 78, 116, 117, 118, 164 Panken, Jacob, 65, 76, 97, 140, 145, 146, 148, 180, 182, 184, 257, 262, 263, 296, 325, 340, 343, 395, 403; and property valuation, 286, 302; public housing advocated by, 173 Panken, Rachel, 76 Papa v. Ferraro, 316 Parish, John L., 172, 258 Paterno, Joseph, 287 Paterno Construction Company, 348 Paterno Investing Corporation, 261 Paterno Investing Corporation v. Katz, 204, 262 Pawling, John W., 190 Pearlman, Abraham, 89, 93–94 Pease & Elliman, 24, 29, 301, 340, 378 Peck v. Fink, 389 Pennsylvania Railroad Station, 19 People v. Lochner, 218 People v. Marcus, 218 People v. Williams, 218, 219 People ex rel. Ballin v. O’Connell, 268 People ex rel. Rayland Realty Company v. Fagan, 217, 266, 267–268 Pepe, Vincent C., 356 Persky, Rebecca, 120 Peters, Charles C., 266, 267 Peters, Harry T., 11 Petty, A. Ray, 112, 115, 116 Peyser, Julius I., 238, 240, 242, 243–244 Phelps, Phelps, 408 Phillips, Benjamin M., 413 Phillips, Harold M., 7, 151, 258, 392 Phillips, J. C. M., 160, 172, 179 Pink, Louis H., 403 Pitney, Mahlon, 247, 248, 254 Platzker, Joseph, 413 Podell, David, 230–231, 232, 242, 251, 266 police (New York City): and rent strikes, 60–61, 70–73 police power, 213–214, 222, 224–225, 231, 234, 245, 251, 252, 253 Pollak, Arnold, 229, 230, 231 Pollak, Walter L., 390 Polsky, Morris, 295 Pomerene, Atlee, 235 Posner, William A., 270

INDEX

490

Real Property Code, 33 reasonable rent: basis for determining, 282–285, 300–301, 306, 333, 347, 401 “Red Scare,” 72–73, 105, 106, 352 Reed, James A., 81, 236 reformers. See tenement house reformers Reiburn, Michael E., 352–353, 364, 385, 398, 400 Reiburn bill, 384, 398 rental property: gradual decontrol of, 405; improvements to, 289–290; income versus expenses of, 288–290; legislation affecting, 17–18, 32–33, 81, 137–139, 145–152; reasonable return on, 285–286, 288, 290–292, 296–297, 300, 305, 306; regulation of, 257–259; valuation of, 286–287, 296, 302, 305. See also emergency rent laws; landlords; reasonable rent; rent control; rent hikes; rent strikes; tenants rent commission: debate over proposals for, 257–259, 327–329, 347 rent control: in Europe, 145; expiration of, 413–414; federal government’s refusal to adopt, 81, 106; legal challenges to extension of, 411–412; as national issue, 133; opposition to in New York, 159–160; State Board of Housing’s recommendations on, 405–407; in Washington, D.C., 81, 133, 145. See also Ball Rent Act; emergency rent laws; McGillick Law rent hikes: cost-cutting measures as response to, 53–58; during housing shortages, 20–22, 31–33, 34–35, 74, 91, 112, 133, 135, 155–156; landlords’ justifications for, 40, 50–53; landlords’ strategies for, 334; responses to, 43, 48–50, 58–61; tenants’ objections to, 40–42, 49–50, 73–76; after World War I, 36–39. See also emergency rent laws; reasonable rent Rentner, Maurice, 348 rent profiteering, 79–81, 112, 149, 155; in commercial property, 173–174; as concern for the state legislature, 132–134, 145–146, 156–157, 164, 165, 166, 168–169, 172; efforts to alleviate, 117, 118, 125–128, 161–162, 188, 257; investigation of, 110, 114–123; as result

of housing shortages, 135, 172; Socialist Party’s efforts against, 79, 162–163. See also Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering Rent Profiteering Committees, 79 rent strikes, 6, 8–9, 12–13, 112, 177–178; by African Americans, 83; eviction as result of, 62–64, 73, 87, 93; in Jewish neighborhoods, 61; judges’ role in, 65–67, 94, 96–101; justifications for, 78–79; landlords’ response to, 62–64, 67, 102–103; police department’s role in, 60–61, 70–73; postwar, 81–84; resolution of, 96–97; as response to rent hikes, 59–61, 67, 73; Socialist Party’s role in, 59, 60, 72, 76, 81–82, 85–86, 93, 95; success of, 93–96; tenants’ strategies during, 87–93; violence associated with, 89–90, 99–100, 101–103; women’s role in, 76–78 residential construction, 360; costs of, 27–28, 112, 136–137, 191; impact of World War I on, 24–26, 112; impediments to, 153–154, 172–173; lack of capital for, 26, 28; proposals for encouragement of, 137–138, 158, 357–359; slowing of, 26–27; surge of, 406, 407; tax exemptions for, 357–359, 364, 385; in Washington, D.C., 235 Retail Clothiers and Furnishers Association, 354 Retail Coal Dealers Association, 1 Reville, Patrick J., 102, 368, 370, 372, 392 Rich, Harry, 178 Richards, Edward A., 98, 153, 182, 300, 306 Richardson, James F., 71 Richmond (Staten Island), 65, 82, 336, 338, 418; rent laws in, 268, 272, 303, 305, 306, 401; residential construction in, 27, 154; vacancy rates in, 29 Riegelman, Edward, 111 Riis, Jacob, 64, 274 Riley, William B., 372 Robb, Charles H., 236, 238 Robinson, Allan, 22, 23 Robitzek, Harry, 29, 33, 36, 37, 50, 65, 67, 104, 148, 167, 260, 285; and landlordtenant issues, 121, 124, 145, 149, 151,

St. Andrews Parish, 338 St. Andrews Parish v. Gallagher, 339 Salmon, Walter J., 38, 41 Same v. Sacks, 276 Sammis, Elmer G., 51, 166, 171, 205, 208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 219, 260, 266, 338 Sampson, Jeanette, 369 Saperstein, Raphael, 319 Saulsbury, Willard, 236 Saulsbury Resolution, 133, 145, 163, 236 “scabs”: during rent strikes, 88–89, 93–94 Scanlan, Michael J., 9, 124, 129, 183, 186, 187, 296, 298 Schackno, Henry G., 36, 146, 150, 156, 159, 169, 258, 314 Schaefer, David, 126 Schattman, Milton E., 269, 348 Schecter, Lazarus, 100

Schenectady, N.Y., 367 Schieffelin, William J., 128 Schiff, Jacob, 117 Schiffman, William A., 47 schleppers, 60; fees charged by, 87; role of in eviction process, 63, 68, 69, 70, 74, 82, 90, 95; resistance faced by, 91–92; as union members, 89, 91, 96; violence against, 103. See also marshals Schneiderman, Rose, 21, 43 Schoeffel, Louis, 354–355, 356 Scholl, Beckie, 102 Schwartz, Benjamin, 231–232, 233, 242. See also Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al. Schwartz, Frank, 231–232, 233, 242. See also Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al. Scott, Francis M., 203, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 230, 266, 347, 350 Seabury, Samuel, 111 Sears, Elizabeth H., 185 Seidman, Joseph A., 229, 230, 241, 242, 243 Senate and Assembly committees on cities, 33, 52, 106, 166, 167, 171, 173, 178, 393, 394 Senate Committee on Cities, 173, 174 September laws, 196–199; retroactivity of, 262. See also April laws; emergency rent laws; housing bills settlement houses, 370 Seventh Avenue Holding Corporation, 312 Seventy-Eighth St. & Broadway Co. v. Rosenbaum, 205 Sharp, Jesse, 287 Shatzkin, Hyman, 206, 210, 212, 242. See also Guttag v. Shatzkin Sheil, Peter A., 10, 48, 96–97, 149, 185–186, 262, 292, 298, 308, 312, 318–319, 322 Shientag, Bernard L., 366, 370, 374, 376–377, 379, 390 Shiplacoff, Abraham I., 30, 64, 83, 94 Siddons, Frederick L., 238 Sidman, Irving, 102 Siegel, Isaac, 114 Siegel, Jerome, 207, 263–264 Simkovitch, Mary K., 395 Simon, Robert E., 115 Sitting Bull, Chief, 182–183 S.L. & Co., 307

491

INDEX

155, 162, 163, 169, 170, 178, 179–180, 184–185, 190, 191, 193, 217, 226, 262, 292, 294–295, 303, 308, 312, 314–315, 320, 336–337; and property valuation, 296, 298; and rent strike cases, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100–101 Rochester, N.Y., 367, 383–384 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 2, 39 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 32, 272, 363, 412 Roosevelt, Theodore, 218, 246 Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 398 Rosenbaum, Joseph, 261 Rosenberg, Elmer, 163 Rosenberg, Leo, 317 Rosenman, Samuel I., 272–273, 324–325, 342, 352, 368, 371, 372, 373 Rosenman Act, 272–273, 280, 340, 353, 363, 371, 405 Rosenthal, Herman, 132 Rose & Paskus, 215 Roskolenko, Henry, 43 Rossman Realty Corporation, 326 Rox Realty Company, 346 Rubey, Thomas L., 236 Rubin, Sadie, 319 Rudinsky, Rose, 88 Ruhe, Louis, 182 Rumsey, Mary, 78 Russell, Charles E., 113, 146 Russell, William E., 291, 394

INDEX

492

Smith, Alfred E., 18, 27, 36, 39, 41, 43–44, 51, 57, 77, 80, 104, 105, 114, 117, 272, 362–363; elected governor, 134, 363, 398; and the emergency rent laws, 205; and the housing crisis, 136, 137–138, 147, 148, 149–150, 151, 152, 160, 172, 190–196, 272–273, 352, 356, 363, 365, 382, 394, 405–406, 410–411; as president of the Board of Aldermen, 109, 111; and special session of the legislature, 190–196; and rent strikes, 62, 64; as supporter of public housing, 140, 144, 155, 398, 401 Smith, I. H., 126 Smith, Walter Lloyd, 279 Smolensky, Joseph, 121, 345 Smyth, Constantine J., 236, 238, 239, 240 socialism: fears of, 72; public housing as, 140–141, 142 Socialist Aldermanic Bureau, 113 Socialist Party, 6, 8; members ousted from State Assembly, 164–165; political influence of, 112–114, 146; and rent profiteering, 79, 162–163; rent strikes encouraged by, 59, 60, 72, 76, 81–82, 85–86, 93, 95; as supporters of public housing, 140, 155, 173; and tenants leagues, 83, 130, 352 Socialist Women’s Consumers’ League, 9 Soffer, Henry J., 10 Sokolski, Albert, 128 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, 66, 67, 74, 81, 91, 97, 121–122, 127, 133, 163, 393 Solomon, Charles, 59, 62, 112, 114, 140, 145, 148, 158 Somerville, M. P., 378 Soule, George H., 334, 380 Spencer, Joseph A., 352 Spiegelberg, Frederick J., 32, 33, 42; and landlord-tenant issues, 178, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 205, 261, 262, 263, 282, 308, 309, 315, 318, 320, 321, 323, 343; and housing bills, 161, 166, 168, 171, 174; and property valuation, 286, 288, 290, 296–297, 298, 306; on rent laws, 362, 372, 373 Spievack, Samuel, 86 Spivack, Joseph, 186 Sprung, Rose, 102

Stabler, Walter B., 136–137, 192, 366 Stadler, Albert M., 38, 40–41, 42, 45, 48–49, 263, 264 State Board of Housing, 402–406; public hearings held by, 403–404 State Federation of Labor, 139 State Housing Bank, 402 Staten Island. See Richmond State Reconstruction Commission, 134–135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 150, 162, 172, 196, 212, 220, 221; and the public housing debate, 143, 144–145 Stattman, Bernard, 121, 122 Stein, Mrs. Aaron, 73 Stein, Clarence S., 27, 143, 190, 192, 321, 365, 374, 377, 381, 390, 391, 396, 401 Stein Commission (Commission of Housing and Regional Planning), 56, 365–366; conclusions of, 382–384; interim report of, 390; mandate of, 366–367, 382; public hearings on rent laws held by, 367–379, 390–392, 395–396; real estate organizations’ views on rent laws, 373–379; recommendations of, 396–398; responses to the hearings, 379–382; tenants’ views on rent laws, 368–373 Steinhardt, Irving D., 36 Stern, H., 127 Stern, Madeleine S., 280–281 Stewart, Ellen A., 269, 348 Stewart v. Schattman, 270, 272 Stoddard, John M., 210, 219, 294, 368, 373–374, 375, 377, 394, 400 Stoddard & Mark, 210, 219 Stonebridge, William H., 98 Stotesbury, Louis W., 285, 287, 304 Stotesbury, William H., 377 Stotesbury & Miner, 302 Strahl, Jacob S., 9, 35, 96, 97, 103–104, 124, 146, 168, 170; and landlord-tenant issues, 179, 180, 181–182, 184, 188–189, 262, 294 Strasbourger, Samuel, 259 Straus, S. W., 25 strikes: in the garment industry, 76. See also rent strikes subletting, 55–56; emergency rent laws as applied to, 277–279, 281

Taft, William Howard, 246, 247, 251 Tammany Hall, electoral victory of, 109 Tamur, Kintara, 207 tenants: animosity of toward landlords, 74–76; deemed “objectionable,” 312–318; and home-based businesses, 274–277; impact of chapter 942 on, 309, 310–311, 314, 334–335; landlords’ animosity toward, 52–53; laws protecting, 196–199; rights waived by, 336–340; statutory, 196–197, 260, 281. See also housing bills; Mayor’s Committee on Rent Profiteering; rental property; rent hikes; rent strikes; tenants leagues Tenants Defense League, 177 tenants leagues, 6, 9, 10, 21, 34, 49, 59, 69, 81–82, 83, 112, 257; extension of rent laws supported by, 361, 368; growing strength of, 129–30; judges’ view of, 65; legislation supported by, 146; and the Socialist Party, 83, 130, 352 Tenants’ Protective Association (Los Angeles), 253 Tenants’ Protective League (Chicago), 253 Tenants’ Rights League, 167 Tenants Union of Greater New York, 194 Tenants Union of New York, 353–354, 356

Tenement House Act (1901), 17, 24, 84, 191–192, 339, 355, 356, 391; amendments proposed to, 138–139, 151, 176, 195, 357 Tenement House Committee (Brooklyn Bureau of Charities), 138, 139 Tenement House Department, 18, 23, 29, 35, 122, 154, 342–343, 358, 377, 382, 391 tenement house reformers, 17, 30, 43, 53, 138, 139, 151; and public housing, 140–141 tenements, 17–19, 29, 88, 340–341, 407–408 Terrell, Robert H., 238 Thirteenth Amendment, 232 Thomas, Norman M., 395, 415–416 Tiernan, Henry F., 69 Tierney, John M., 355 Title Guaranty & Trust Company, 37 Tobias, Julius D., 100, 206, 210, 211–212, 217 Traynor, Daniel J., 372 Tremont Tenants League, 370 Tugwell, Rexford, 223 Tutito, Ernest, 392 Ullman, Sol, 159, 163, 258 Ullmann Realty, 207 Ullmann Realty Co. v. Tamur, 207–208 unemployment: fears of, 64 Unger, Sol, 298–299, 304, 305 Union Settlement, 112 United Hebrew Charities, 336 United Hebrew Trades, 149, 163, 167 United Neighborhood Houses, 370, 381–382 United Real Estate Owners Association, 36, 52, 84, 129, 140, 159, 167, 169, 258, 272, 273, 290, 293, 304, 327, 333, 338, 346, 385, 411, 419; “ironclad lease” devised by, 339–340 U.S. Congress: housing legislation proposed by, 137–138, 163 U.S. Housing Corporation, 79 U.S. Office of Price Administration, 420 U.S. Supreme Court, 227–228; and Block v. Hirsh, 245–254; and Marcus Brown Holding Company, Inc. v. Feldman et al., 234–235, 241–243, 245–251 United States Trucking Company, 362 United Tenants Organization, 308, 311

493

INDEX

Sullivan, James D., 320 Sullivan, William P., 417–418 summary proceedings: on grounds that the landlord needed the apartment, 318–325; on grounds that tenants were objectionable, 11, 311, 312–318, 348; as provided for in chapter 942 of the emergency rent laws, 309, 325–327, 335; as remedy for nonpayment of rent, 8, 10, 12, 66, 120–121, 196; in response to rent strikes, 62–63, 75, 92, 94; suspension of, 208, 213, 214–215, 217, 310. See also emergency rent laws; evictions; marshals Swann, Edward A., 2, 130; and Marcus Brown Holding Company cases, 229, 230, 231, 232 Sweet, Thaddeus C., 164, 166, 167, 171, 194, 258 Sylvan Mortgage Company, 263–264 Sylvester, Father Ottavio, 369

INDEX

494

Untermyer, Samuel, 141, 199, 245, 285, 286, 289, 291, 292, 301, 341, 354, 364, 365, 376, 384, 392–393; and Hall v. Moos, 304–306; and ironclad lease challenge, 340 Upper Harlem Tax Payers Association, 317, 392 Usona Construction Company, 40 vacancy rates: in New York City, 18, 23, 29, 154, 361, 364, 383, 388, 389–390, 397, 404 Van Anda, C. V., 38, 40–41 Van Devanter, Willis, 246, 248, 251 Van Name, Calvin D., 359 Van Orsdel, Josiah, 236, 238, 239 Van Pelt, John V., 142 Veiller, Lawrence, 30, 141 Vladeck, B. C., 84, 129, 358, 359 Volstead Act, 225–226 Von Bayer, Laura, 369 Wagner, Robert F., 207–208, 264–265, 320 Waitt Construction Company, 312–313 Waitt Construction Company v. Lorraine, 157, 313, 314 Waldorf-Astoria, 2 Walker, James J., 128, 165, 166, 357, 365, 412, 416, 417, 418 Wall, Austin J., 6, 9 Walsh, J. Irving, 342, 377, 378 Walsh, J. J., 392 Walters, J. Henry, 166, 171, 194 War Industries Board, 25, 26 Warren, Charles, 244 Washington, D.C.: housing shortage in, 235; rent control in, 81, 133, 145, 236–240. See also Ball Rent Act; Block v. Hirsh Washington Heights, 19 Washington Heights Taxpayers Association, 19–20, 52, 135, 138,, 158, 287 Washington Heights Tenants Association, 70, 191, 307, 325, 336, 352 Washington Heights Tenants League, 6, 83 Washington Heights Welfare League, 391 Wasserman, Clara, 266 Wasserman v. Fagan, 266 Wasservogel, Isidor, 273 Waters, J. Henry, 150

Waugh, Theodore L., 130 Weddick, Alexander, 186 Weddick, Nellie, 186 Weidt, Charles, 307 Weiner, Morris, 300 Weiser, Irving L., 271 Weissman, Benedict, 12 Welch v. Swasey, 248 Werner, William E., 219 West Harlem Community League and Tenants Association, 69 West Harlem Property Owners Association, 317, 345 West Side Civic League, 333 West Side Taxpayers Association, 409, 417 Whalen, Grover A., 119 Whitaker, Edward G., 262, 275–276, 316, 322–323, 326 White, Alfred T., 402 White, C. R., 325 White, Edward D., 240, 246 White & Sons, 26 Whitley, James L., 409 Whitman, Charles S., 32, 114, 132, 134, 219 Wickersham, George W., 251 Wigmore, John H., 257, 285 Williamsburg Tenants League, 49, 69, 79–80, 83, 91, 95 Willis, Lloyd, 32 Willson, Hannah T., 236, 237 Willson v. McDonnell, 205, 236, 237, 238 Wilson, August J., 411–412 Wilson, Junius Pendleton, 276, 312, 314, 338, 361 Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 49, 77, 80, 97, 236, 246 Wilson v. New, 245, 246, 254 Wittstein, Reuben J., 317, 335, 347, 392, 404, 409 Wolf, Henry F. A., 409 Wolkoff, Harry, 69 women: role of in rent strikes, 76–78; voting rights for, 150 Wood, Edith Elmer, 35, 143, 197, 198, 374, 389, 420 Woolman, Samuel B., 313 Woolworth, Leo Day, 147, 160 World War I: food prices during and after, 56, 77–78; and residential construction, 24–26, 112

Wormser, I. Maurice, 209, 210, 216, 266 Wynne, Shirley W., 403

495

INDEX

Yerkowitz, Esther, 102 Yezierska, Anzia, 75 Yonkers, N.Y., 405 Young, William, 269, 270, 326, 337, 348

Zelinsky, Nicholas, 69 Zelmanowitz, Gussie, 419 Zerbe, Gustave R., 279 Zeumer, Lucille, 409 Zieser, Julius H., 208, 210, 215, 216 Zittel, Frederick B., 38, 40–41, 48–49