The class structure of New York City is intrinsic to the Hudson-Fulton Parade. While members of the four highest groups planned the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, it was aimed at ingraining a specific, idealized version of New York City into the three lowest groups. The very rich, rich, prosperous, and well to do comfortable feared that the well to do uncomfortable, the contented poor, and the submerged would rebel. The celebration sought to resolve tension by creating unity between the classes, between those who had capital and those who did not.

The very rich, the rich, the prosperous, and the well to do comfortable are comparable to the European bourgeoisie. These categories encompass the industrialists, merchants, bankers, and professionals that controlled most of that city’s capital. Although the very rich, rich, prosperous, and well-to-do comfortable were initially fragmented, according to Sven Beckert of Harvard University, by the 1880’s “New York’s merchants, industrialists, and bankers formed a socially cohesive and self-conscious class” ^[2]. They possessed common economic interests and sought to limit the regulation of markets while demanding the “state protect the owners of property”. They were suspicious of workers, who they perceived as a threat to their power ^[2]. The differences between these classes are largely superficial because they essentially possessed the same interests.

The Rich and the Very Rich

Men like J.P. Morgan, who played the chief roles in organizing the parade, were either very rich or rich. These categories consisted of about ten thousand people. Heads of families in this class made one hundred thousand dollars (approximately $2,461,00.00 in today’s currency) ^[b] or more. The very rich possessed multiple homes, one suited to each season. For example, a certain very rich man had a mansion in New York City, a house and farm on Long Island, a house in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, and a winter place near Aiken in South Carolina.  Staffs usually consisted of manservants, dining-room maids, valets, gardeners, grooms, hostlers, stable boys, cooks, scullery maids, and special maids for the ladies of the house. It should be noted that very rich men themselves did not leave New York for extended periods of time because they control the markets and the boardrooms; they controlled New York City. The rich had essentially the same lifestyle as the very rich; however, they generally only possessed two or three homes ^[3].
 

The Prosperous and the Well-to-Do Comfortable

The prosperous and the well to do comfortable too lived in luxury.  The prosperous had about twenty thousand people and heads of households typically made between one hundred thousand dollars a year and twenty five thousand dollars a year (between $2,461,000 and $615,000). The well to do comfortable numbered about fifty thousand people and heads of household usually made between twenty-five thousand and seven thousand five hundred dollars a year (between $615,000 and $185,000). The prosperous had multiple servants. However unlike the very rich and the rich, they did not own multiple homes. They frequently rented “fine apartments” in the area between Seventy-Second Street and Eighty-Second Street, and they hired horses and carriages rather than owning them. This class consisted of successful professionals, merchants, and bankers. The well to do lived lifestyles similar to those of the prosperous. They comprised the majority of those who rent “fine apartments,” which had seven to eleven rooms. ^[4]

The Well to Do Uncomfortable and the Contented Poor

The well to do uncomfortable were far more numerous than the preceding groups, numbering about five hundred thousand. Heads of household made between seven thousand five hundred three thousand dollars a year ($185,000 and $74,000 a year). There was a gigantic gap between the very rich, the rich, prosperous and the well to do comfortable and the next strata, the well to do uncomfortable. While the first four groups represent a New York bourgeoisie that held capital, members of the well-to-do uncomfortable, despite being seen as successful, lacked capital. They were entitled to sympathy because “they are too well-off to be classed with the poor, and while they usually live beyond their means, they cannot possibly keep pace with the classes above them” ^[5]. The well-to-do comfortable are comparable with the modern middle class; those who are not financially stable yet are not eligible for government aid. They were neither rich nor poor, and therefore they were “uncomfortably” lodged between ^[6].

The contented, or the comfortable, poor numbered about three hundred thousand and heads of household made steady incomes between $3,000 and $1,000 yearly ($74,000 to $25,000). Zeisloft believed that this class was content because they did not seek to live beyond their means, like the well-to-do uncomfortable, yet had the means to sustain themselves, unlike the uncomfortable poor. The “model tenements,” which were meant to provide sanitary dwellings for the very poor were too luxurious, and thus too expensive, for the poorest classes ^[7]. They ultimately benefited the contented poor, who could rent a comfortable apartment for as little as a dollar and a half a week (about $37 today) ^[8].              

The uncomfortable poor, or the submerged, consisted of seven hundred thousand people with unsteady incomes, mostly immigrants living in run-down tenement housing. More people belong to this class than any other. Zeisloft contemptuously writes:

^{[The submerged poor]} can never be much benefited by model tenements. They do not like them and do not like to live in the orderly way required of the tenants of such houses… The close confines in which so many human beings are huddled bring out traits and characteristics that tempt one to laugh – until he has delved below the surface. Far from being neighborly, these inmates of the tenements, as a rule, look to each other with suspicion, their common meeting-place being usually the local police court, where they go to settle disputes which constantly arise between them, and are frequently of a serious nature. There is everything in the tenement house atmosphere, its narrowness, its limitations, to bring out not only the meanness and pettiness, but also the most dangerous elements of human nature) ^[9].

While one may expect that the Hudson-Fulton Celebration would attempt to deny the existence of the submerged, by 1909, they were accepted as a part of the metropolis. The immigrant tenants, the “bums” who lived in the Bowery, and the mendicants were viewed as pieces of fabric in New York City’s quilt. 

Perhaps this is because the existence of the uncomfortable poor could not be denied any longer. In the Introduction to the famous exposé, How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis writes that throughout history “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives” because it does not care ^[10]. This was the case in New York City throughout much of the nineteenth century. However,  “there came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent… the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter” ^[11] . By 1909, the situation of the submerged had become unavoidable for the classes above them. In the mid-nineteenth century, homes in previously fashionable neighborhoods along the East River began being partitioned into small apartments to accommodate the destitute masses. The apartments grew ever smaller, and landlords began constructing upward, resulting in tenements that were six, seven, and eight stories high. Epidemics of tuberculosis and cholera spread through the swarming tenements, and death rates were exorbitantly high. For example, in one tenement, a converted Baptist Church on Mulberry Street, 75 out of 1000 tenants died in a year. ^[12] By 1890, there were thirty seven thousand tenements occupied by 1.2 million people ^[13]. Tenements were ubiquitous in the immigrant neighborhoods of the East Side of Manhattan, among the new wave of Italian and Jewish immigrants, and the uncomfortable poor could not be ignored.

The concern for the plight of the poor was demonstrated by tenement reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The creation of “model tenements” sought to solve the tenement problem with the creation of sanitary, comfortable housing for the submerged. However, these buildings failed because they proved too expensive for the poor immigrants, and served to raise the prices of nearby dwellings ^[14]. 

Of course, there were those who could not even afford the apartments in run down tenements. By 1850, there were 10,000 inmates in New York’s almshouses ^[15]. The Bowery, formerly an elegant neighborhood considered one of New York’s greatest streets, became associated with tramps, panhandlers, prostitutes, and vagrants. Lodging houses, or “flophouses,” where the destitute could sleep for as little as five cents a night, lined the streets, and no houses of worship were built in the Bowery after 1800. By the dawn of the 20th century, the Bowery was “so infamous as a place of squalor, alcoholism, and crime that females avoided it altogether, and even prostitutes gravitated towards other neighborhoods” ^[16]. Not only was the Bowery a slum, it was synonymous with all slums, in the same way that Fifth Avenue was synonymous with shopping or Madison Avenue was synonymous with advertising ^[17]. Itwas much a part of the city’s image as Broadway or Wall Street.

Much like the New York City of today, panhandlers were unavoidable. At the turn of the century an estimated six to eight thousand panhandlers begged in New York City. Yet beggars were not scorned as they are today. In fact, they were tolerated members of immigrant communities. Professional Jewish beggars, or schnorrers in Yiddish, were viewed as men “‘who have found themselves, though ill-health or old age, unable to cope with the strange conditions of this new land’ ” ^[18]. Blue-collar workers were more likely to give money to beggars than their bourgeoisie counterparts because they themselves were only barely removed from poverty. However, the middle class did not disdain beggars and romantically viewed them as “shabby gentiles,” essentially good people who were struck by misfortune. As Zeisloft explains “here, as elsewhere, does he ^{[the mendicant]} contribute variously the picturesqueness and perils of urban thoroughfares – sometimes as an interesting landmark sometimes as an eyesore or a menace, and sometimes as all three” ^[19]. Although beggars were considered an annoyance, they were seen as a part of the New York landscape.