I like unposed old pictures, because they give you a window into people’s thinking in the past. They also, if you let them, can give you a window into your thinking now. We don’t make fewer assumptions than people in the past did, just different ones.
That’s the Monday (the title has the day) washing hung out to dry at a block of tenements in 1901 New York. The clothing isn’t divided into whites versus everything else, as some laundry detergent commercials suggest, rather the washers knew to separate whites and pastels from saturated colors to prevent dye bleed.
These are all pre-old-law tenements: they lack the airshafts of the old law, and they have visible signs of aging so an 1860s or early 1870s construction date is likely. This is probably the Lower East Side. These buildings are, simply, packing crates filled with people as tightly as they could be forced in. In 1900, the LES was around 1000 people per hectare, peaking a few years later at around 1500 per hectare. To put that in perspective, Manila is today the densest city in the world, at around 460 people per hectare and Manhattan (which is not known as an empty garden spot) is at 275 people per hectare. Those tenements lacked proper sanitation, light, air, and space, so it’s not that people used whatever means they had to make things work.
Air-drying laundry is, of course, a time-tested method and one that generally works well. It also creates no pollution. On the other hand, the thought of the effort that went into creating that bunch of back yards full of clean clothing is wearying, to say the least.
The slatted shutters look quaint to us, but represent a good pre-air-conditioning solution to the heat of a New York summer: they could be closed to allow air but not sunlight, in what I imagine must have been a desperate attempt to keep cool in weather like we’ve been having lately.
Finally, the roofs look surprisingly neat. I suspect this is because (a) there was no access for the tenants, and so they were completely unused and (b) they were still on their first coating of tarpaper, and so were not yet patched.
