Imperial Progressivism: Reordering the Lower East Side during the Depression of 1893

From 1893 to 1895, two elite friends advanced urban reform projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side amidst economic crisis: Richard Watson Gilder led the Tenement House Committee’s investigations into slum conditions, and Stanford White designed the grand, neo-classical, Bowery Savings Bank building on the corner of Bowery and Grand Streets. Superficially, these enterprises seem quite different. By his own account, Gilder “wallowed in misery” for the entire summer of 1894; White set a pile of marble atop it.

Both projects, however, channeled progressive intentions through imperial methods, reinforcing the fractious class relations and inequality they claimed to redress. Gilder’s team of experts invaded tenements like a conquering army, marching into homes and demanding intimate information from residents, leaving resentment in their wake. The report compiled from their conclusions succeeded in obtaining stricter regulation of tenant behavior, but did little to address patterns of absentee landlordism and disinvestment at the root of the neighborhood’s appalling conditions. White’s Bowery Savings Bank, meanwhile, established a triumphalist symbol of white American empire at the heart of immigrant America – in the name of thrift. Worse, the bank drained capital from the neighborhood by investing residents’ deposits in lucrative uptown real estate, thus exacerbating the Lower East Side’s deterioration. This paper explores a contradiction latent in many reform initiatives, past and present: the desire to alleviate capitalism’s crises through a progressivism that draws its logic, methods, and operations from capitalism itself.