The $19 New York City Apartment

An option that no longer exists

Photo by João Paulo Carnevalli de Oliveira on Unsplash

In 1955, a young man in Michigan was trying to determine what he should do with his life. After a rough childhood, he had studied at the University of Michigan, first to be a physician, then an actor. While a student, he joined the Army R.O.T.C. and considered a military career after being commissioned as a second lieutenant. Despite the stability of the military and prestige of medicine, he decided his heart lay in acting. This must have surprised his childhood friends, who remember him as a boy who would barely talk, often passing notes rather than speaking due to a stutter. As many thespians will attest, however, once bitten by the acting bug, it’s hard to become anything else. Our young man moved to New York City in 1955 and stayed with his partially estranged father for a short time before finding his own place on the Lower East Side. The rent was $19 a month.

This is the type of housing we have lost in Manhattan and across the United States. Nineteen dollars. A month. To put that into context, in 1955, the minimum wage was $1.00. Those with a full-time job would have their rent covered after working less than a week. Correcting for inflation shows how much things have changed. $19 in 1955 is equivalent to $230 today. Looking at it from a labor perspective, the minimum wage in New York City is about to be $17 an hour. Working for 19 hours yields $323. Think you can find an apartment in Lower Manhattan for $323-a-month? Of course not. There aren’t many apartments available for less than $3,000-a-month.

There used to be an entire class of housing that no longer exists. Places that even minimum wage workers who were trying to break into the acting scene could afford. Now, this $19-a-month apartment in 1955 was not a nice place. It was a “cold-water flat”. That means no hot water. A small kitchen with a stovetop and maybe an icebox. Possibly a shared bathroom down the hall. The stove to heat the unit would require the tenant to provide their own fuel. In the winter, wind would whistle through cracks, and the cold would seep in through the windows. You often had to deal with uninvited roommates of the four, six, and eight-legged variety. Not to mention cold-water flats could be up four or five flights of stairs. It was not pleasant.

Yet not only did cold-water flats exist, but they were popular. Thousands of people moved to New York every year, hoping to make it as an actor, artist, or just to be somebody. With no money or experience, this type of housing provided that opportunity. It certainly wasn’t easy living, but it was a chance to make it, and to have a room of one’s own. Today, that option is gone.

Now, some of the required changes are good. Some rudimentary fire codes are reasonable. All homes today should have heat. Requiring every housing unit to have a smoke detector, for example, is relatively low-cost and saves lives. The problem is most building codes aren’t for safety or to make sure necessities are met. They are to maintain property values. Keep areas “respectable”. Not only can Bohemian artists not live on their own in Lower Manhattan, they can’t live anywhere in New York. The only options are to rely on government assistance or make a decent income.

Worse, it’s not like today everyone in Manhattan has a great place. The cheapest place I could find on Zillow costs $2,250-a-month. It’s still not nice. The unit is smaller than a Midwestern master bedroom and costs more than a Southeastern luxury studio apartment. So not only have prices skyrocketed, but it hasn’t increased overall quality by a commensurate amount. Sure, the place has central heat and hot water, but it’s still no-frills.

We don’t need cold-water flats. But we do need housing that’s meant to be the bare minimum. A 300 square foot place with a bed, stove, refrigerator, and bathroom at the end of the hall. A place for those striving to make it but currently have nowhere to rest their heads. These types of places not only no longer exist, they are functionally illegal. Between safety codes and stairway codes and elevator codes and environmental reviews and the veto power of anyone from the local Alderman to the wealthy property owners two blocks away, the type of housing readily available in the 1950s for poor Americans is kaput.

This has real costs. Today, there are thousands of people who would move to New York in a heartbeat if they could rent a miniscule room for $323. Even if there were rooms regularly available for $500 a month, all would be filled. Instead, those who can’t afford to pay New York prices must live elsewhere. For those who dream of acting on stage or becoming a professional artist, this makes success much harder to achieve. There are other cities with plenty of stage acting opportunities, notably Chicago, but New York, along with London, are the two best cities in the world for the theatre.

The art scene works the same way - there’s New York and then there’s everywhere else. In an excellent post titled “The Decline of Deviance,” Adam Mastroianni discusses how little weirdness there is today. He concludes that as life has become safer and longer, people are less willing to gamble with it. I believe that’s part of the answer, but I also think the lack of cheap housing is a big piece. The typical unskilled worker can’t just up sticks and move across the country. Cheap housing has largely disappeared, so people have to save up first. Saving up means finding a steady job and putting down roots, so people don’t leave. People used to be able to nurture their oddities and still make it in New York. A great example of this is Arturo Di Modica, a man who:

ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own studio—including two sub-basements—by hand, becoming an underground artist in the literal sense. He refused to work with an art dealer until 2012, when he was in his 70s. His most famous work, the Charging Bull statue that now lives on Wall Street, was deposited there without permission or payment; it was originally impounded before public outcry caused the city to put it back.

Someone can’t live that life today. Too many rules, regulations, and too much money. There aren’t many dilapidated buildings in lower Manhattan, and no one would get away with tearing one down and building anew without years of permitting. Who knows what actors and artists we will never hear about, who will effectively never exist, because this type of opportunity is gone.

Of course, in the 1950s, that opportunity did exist. A young man could move to the big city with nothing more than a few dollars in his pocket. Work at a diner to pay the bills while seeking out auditions and casting calls. Pay $19 to live in little more than a shack per month. Such a man could get discovered, make it on stage, then on the big screen, and eventually become one of the most recognizable voices in Hollywood. Such a man would make life for everyone else better. Such a man would be named James Earl Jones.