The Nineteenth Century Squatters of the West Side

Every era has its squatters, with people living on land or in buildings they do not own. After World War I, veterans camped along the Hudson River. In the Depression in the 1930s, squatters lived in “Hoovervilles” in Central Park and along the river. In the 1970s, people seized abandoned property and became owners through “sweat equity.” Today, people may find squatters in their unoccupied apartments. In nineteenth-century Manhattan, squatters settled in many areas where land was owned but undeveloped, becoming a part of city life.

News accounts about squatters began in the 1850s, as New York experienced a surge in immigration, with many impoverished newcomers arriving from Germany and Ireland. The Irish people came from a country in a famine crisis, and were in the worst shape. Charles Loring Brace wrote for The New York Times about the hardworking squatters who built their “cabins” on vacant lots, making a living by picking through the streets and collecting anything of value.  But Brace also sounded an alarm that “from these hordes come our thieves, vagabonds, and prostitutes.” He appealed for help in establishing a Hudson River Industrial School on West 28th Street, where the young people would learn English and job skills.  Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society, where one of the solutions to handling orphaned immigrant children was to place them on Orphan Trains bound for the West.

In 1867, a newspaper describes the squatter father as a laborer for a “street-opening contractor,” while the mother takes in washing and ironing from a private house, raises poultry, and “supplies a small shop with the milk from a sickly cow.” Some squatters pay a nominal rent to a landlord who is trying to make some money while they wait for the price of the land to increase. Others go to City Hall to study the property maps and choose land owned by old New York families, rather than real estate speculators who would be more likely to evict them. Other news reports describe their shanties, built of scrap wood with pieces of tin nailed to the roof.

Other news articles take a more sensational tone, describing the places where squatters gather as “dens of wretchedness, murder, theft, and riot,” blaming the squatters for the 1863 Draft Riots, and bemoaning the number of Democratic voters who live there who are known to vote multiple times in any election.

Real estate owners began to organize in the 1870s to promote their interests as they recognized the increasing value of uptown real estate. Although the 1873 economic recession was a setback, the building of the Ninth Avenue elevated railroad in 1879 spurred development. The west side had more rocky outcrops, so street-opening was more difficult as the grid of mapped streets was created. Streets had to be built, block by block, by blasting and cutting through the rocks, filling in the hollows, grading, establishing water and sewer lines, and finally paving.  Landlords often delayed leveling their property until real estate values rose, thus leaving the unoccupied space available for squatting.

Today, you can see a rocky outcrop that was never demolished on West 114th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive.
​
This photo of the old Brennan farmhouse, rented by Edgar Allen Poe in the summer of 1884, shows how the first buildings perched on the uneven landscape.

The real estate owners who joined the West Side Association, formed in 1866, began to push the City of New York for both street openings and the completion of parks, including Morningside and Riverside, as well as assistance in handling the squatters who dotted the West Side.

In the 1870s, the real estate men pushed the state legislature to pass laws forbidding the relocation of shanties from one lot to another, extending the fire law so that it would be illegal and later, they advocated for the requirement that all structures be connected to city water and sewage lines. Meanwhile, owners committed to removing the squatters from their land by May 1880 by serving the illegal dwellers with a 10-day notice, followed by the marshals’ eviction, and then the demolition of the structure.

The New York Herald reported on May 23, 1880, on the raids on “hovels extending from West 65th to West 72nd Streets,” demolishing some fifty shanties, along with the occupants threatening trouble. That report estimated that there were 2,500 structures on the west side, from 59th to 110th streets, with a population of 13,000. Another source reported that Deputy Marshals had been attacked, some by dogs, and one had a milk can emptied over his head. Herman H. Camman, an owner of many west side properties, claimed he had eliminated 200 squatters.

In September 1880, Harper’s Monthly published an article with sketched illustrations that portrayed the squatters of the west side in a somewhat romantic light, depicting them as hard-working individuals with numerous garden plots throughout the neighborhood. As many writers did, this one noted the contrast between the new buildings of New York and the squatters in their hand-made hovels, quoting another writer who called the city “Paris, but with a backwoods.”
​
"If you stand in the hollow at the corner of 86th Street and Eighth Avenue, you will see a long stretch of garden with a weathered old cottage near the middle, and if you do not raise your eyes, it will seem to you that you are in Ireland. But the actual location is recalled to you by the elevated trains buzzing to and from Ninth Avenue, and through the thread-like work you can see, further away, an abandoned mansion with an aristocratic cupola blinking in the sunshine."

​

In April 1880, The New York Times estimated that approximately ten thousand people were living as squatters between 59th and 100th Streets, mostly of German and Irish descent, congregating by nationality. The article noted that there was a group of “Hollanders” near West 81st Street in a district known as Ashville because it was a favorite dumping ground for ashes. They had their own church and school. But, regretfully, no sewerage hookup, so the area had an “offensive” odor in the warm weather.

Prior to the Civil War, the concept of “Squatter Sovereignty” emerged at the national political level, suggesting that people occupying the territories of the United States had the right to legislate for themselves, particularly in deciding whether their territory would become a slave state. That term would later be applied to the New York City squatters who claimed ownership rights to their space. This was particularly true for those who were paying rent or had purchased a shanty. In the early 1880s, a popular show by Edward Hannigan, a resident of West 101 Street,  titled “Squatter Sovereignty,” became one of the earliest musical comedies, portraying life outside the fashionable society, and making the immigrants of New York part of the city’s story. It was revived in the 1890s — an indication that squatters were still part of New York life.

By the 1890s, the news reports of squatters were more about the end of their settlements. Shanties became a feature of photographs of the new apartment flats with a wooden structure nearby, although many were legal property owners who grew fields of vegetables, fruits, and flowers for the local markets. Photographer Robert Bracklow, whose photo can be found at New York Historical, documented the final days of old wooden buildings on the west side.

Some journalists were able to write about actual people, such as Mrs. Rose McGloin, whose home had been located on the old Apthorpe Lane, which ran between West 93rd and West 94th Streets. The forty-year resident had lost access to the street as the new buildings fenced her in, and the Lane was officially demapped as a legal street.  Another writer discovered a group of men living on an empty lot on West 96th Street, huddled in a cave-like room carved out of the rock outcrop that remained

In 1898, The Irish American reported the death of Mary Ann Burns, one of the last Boulevard squatters who lived in a three-room shanty near Grant’s Tomb, convinced that she had rights to her site “by right of long occupancy.”
​
By the end of the nineteenth century, the West Side’s blocks were filling in with brownstones and rowhouses, with little resemblance to the days of the “Harlem goats and Bloomingdale pigs.”

Sources
​
Newspaper archives at www.newspapers.com
“Squatter Life in New York,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine No CCCLXIV, Volume LXI, September 1880