In 1905 was published one of the most interesting books ever written about New York. It was a study by Elsa Herzfeld of twenty-four working-class families living on Manhattan’s West Side. All too briefly, yet with many tantalizing quotations and anecdotes, she discussed a whole series of themes that most previous students of New York life had taken for granted, or perhaps regarded as too trivial to be worth recording: the pictures people had on their walls, the music they liked, relations between spouses and between parents and children, beliefs about good and bad luck, funeral customs, and attitudes to physicians and hospitals. The families all included at least two generations, the older of which was predominantly European born. Most were of Irish or German descent. The purpose of the volume was to identify the distinguishing characteristics of what it termed Tenement-House Man’. There is thus a tendency to stress what is common to the families studied, and to suggest a shared pattern of life. Time and time again, though, there are hints that religion was a differentiating factor within this allegedly homogeneous culture. In particular there are frequent references to Catholics as in some sense a group apart—a very large group apart, as they made up about 40 per cent of the city’s population at that time.
Housing conditions in St. Louis