the life of workers living in hotels back around 1890 - 1940's

[green papaya]

in cities like San Francisco:

Bargain eating shops filled the interstices of the South of Market. Near cheap lodging houses workers always found the most reasonably priced food.

A few large lodging houses had inexpensive eateries in them and offered American plan rates to their residents. Most lodging house tenants at the turn of the century, however, relied on saloon fare and the cheapest 5-cent to 15-cent lunchrooms available.

For breakfast, San Francisco's Bolz Coffee Parlor promised "three of the largest doughnuts ever fried and the biggest cup of coffee in the world" for 10 cents. Coffee Dan's advertised "one thousand beans with bread, butter, and coffee" for 15 cents.

On a crash economy program, a man or a woman could eat three meager meals a day for as little as 30 cents in the mid-1920s. One elderly man gave this minimum-price daily menu:

Breakfast: "coffee and," 5 cents; sometimes with mush, 5 cents extra
Noon: hash, soup, bread, and coffee, 10 cents
Supper: stew, bread, and coffee, 15 cents

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p0wf;chunk.id=d0e4165;doc.view=print


look at these old Harbor Hotel rates in San Francisco, wonder how old those prices are? what era?

ROOMS

$2.00 per week and Up

35 cents per night and Up

STEAM HEAT in EVERY ROOM

ALL MODERN CONVENIENCES

 

[green papaya]

 

[LizzieMaine]

look at these old Harbor Hotel rates in San Francisco, wonder how old those prices are? what era?

ROOMS

$2.00 per week and Up

35 cents per night and Up

STEAM HEAT in EVERY ROOM

ALL MODERN CONVENIENCES

That's about right for a flophouse c. 1935 or so. You could get a room at the YMCA for a dollar a week, with fewer bugs in the bed.

 

[Stanley Doble]

In the 1890s apartments were a rather new idea. A lot of people lived in cheap hotels and rooming houses or boarding houses.

Lowest cost, respectable living might be a room in a hotel or rooming house and a meal ticket. A meal ticket cost $2 or $3 and entitled the bearer to a week's worth of meals at a certain restaurant. After each meal the cashier punched the ticket, when all the spaces were punched the value was used up.

For a laborer in that day, it was easy to get a job and it was easy for employers to hire and fire. No workmen's comp, unemployment insurance or paper work. Workers could be hired by the day with no formalities and no obligation other than to pay the agreed wage.

A worker might keep a job for a day, a week or a month. He might have 20 or 30 jobs in the course of a year, and if work dried up, had to be ready to move at a moment's notice. Putting down roots was a luxury the casual laborer could not afford.

Even better established, skilled workers did not have the job security and social safety net we take for granted today.

 

[Stanley Doble]

That is obviously a very old sign. You can see where it was covered by a billboard and partly painted over, then exposed when the billboard was torn down.

From the style of lettering it was probably painted about 1920.

 

[Shangas]

As Stanley touched upon, social welfare as we would know it today (or the "Welfare State" as some will call it), is a very new concept.

Until fairly recently, there was no such thing as unemployment insurance, social security, pensions...workman's comp of a sort did exist, but companies (as always) were looking out for themselves. So even if it was available, it wouldn't be easy to obtain.

The working poor and labouring classes would've lived in rented accommodation. Boarding-houses, cheap hotels, flophouses. It was common for families or couples or single women to take in lodgers. If you had a spare room in your house, it wasn't for storage, it was for lodgers. It was a way to make some money, and a way for people to get cheap, clean living spaces of their own.

Relying on the government/state was not honestly an option. And there was very little regulation. In London at the same time (1890s-1930s/40s), people relied on doss-houses (cheap, filthy rooming houses...EXTREMELY cheap. 4d a night), or on the dreaded workhouses.

A Victorian view of such things was very VERY different to how we see things today. The fact that you couldn't support yourself or couldn't get a job had nothing to do with the economy or your disability (if you had one) or the fact that you couldn't work due to age or some other infirmity or injury. It was your moral corruption that had caused this. And anything else was just you laying blame and whinging and whining about your own failings. The idea that your current situation might be caused by things OUTSIDE YOUR CONTROL was never, or rarely, considered. Collecting a pension was seen as shameful and humiliating and degrading.

Attitudes to social welfare didn't finally start changing until the 1920s and 30s. Partially, I suspect due to the Depression, and the thousands of men struggling to find work during the 1920s and 30s because of the First World War.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A Victorian view of such things was very VERY different to how we see things today. The fact that you couldn't support yourself or couldn't get a job had nothing to do with the economy or your disability (if you had one) or the fact that you couldn't work due to age or some other infirmity or injury. It was your moral corruption that had caused this. And anything else was just you laying blame and whinging and whining about your own failings. The idea that your current situation might be caused by things OUTSIDE YOUR CONTROL was never, or rarely, considered. Collecting a pension was seen as shameful and humiliating and degrading.

Attitudes to social welfare didn't finally start changing until the 1920s and 30s. Partially, I suspect due to the Depression, and the thousands of men struggling to find work during the 1920s and 30s because of the First World War.

Attitudes in the United States had begun to change during the "Progressive Era" of the first two decades of the twentieth century -- it was then that authors like Jacob Riis and Jane Addams were emphasizing the view that poverty is not a result of moral failing but of injustices inherent in the economic system. These views built steadily thru the teens and twenties, largely under the auspices of socially-activist churches and labor unions, before reaching their peak in the New Deal era. But everything to come out of that era owed a debt to the early Progressives and their campaigns against the evils of their time.

 

[CaramelSmoothie]

What did these laborers do about health insurance? What happened if they got sick? Surely they couldn't afford emergency procedures such as one for appendicitis,no?

 

[Shangas]

I don't know if this applies to the United States, but in London at this time, there existed (and still does exist) the London Hospital (today the Royal London Hospital).

It was a charity hospital established in 1700s for treating the destitute and poor of the industrial East End of London (a NOTORIOUS slum by the 1890s). Prominent West End physicians volunteered their time at the hospital to treat patients suffering everything from alcoholism, rape, attempted suicide, attempted murder, industrial accidents, measles and everything else in between. From the everyday to the emergency.

Treatment was free. The hospital was funded by charitable donations until after WWII, I believe.

 

[Tomasso]

The major urban centers of America had a healthy stock of SRO housing back in the day which was decimated in the 60s and 70s by way of "urban renewal".

As for social safety nets the Community Chest was a prominent charity found in most large cities. Of course there were also the various programs operated by religious groups as well, such as Catholic Charities.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What did these laborers do about health insurance? What happened if they got sick? Surely they couldn't afford emergency procedures such as one for appendicitis,no?

In a lot of cases they simply got sick and died. There were "charity hospitals," but they were understaffed and poorly-funded, and were a lot like modern emergency rooms in that you might find yourself waiting for many long hours just to talk to a nurse. And in many communities even that option didn't exist -- my mother is deaf in one ear because of a childhood ear infection her parents couldn't afford to have treated.

Health insurance didn't become widely available thru employers in the United States until the creation of Blue Cross in the thirties, but the AMA bitterly opposed it every step of the way, along with the idea of a New Deal universal health care system, and that was the end of that. It wasn't until the sixties that more than half of all workers had health insurance thru their jobs.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Patent medicines were popular. You could consult the druggist free of charge, and try what he recommended. There were amateur doctors who treated people free or for very small fees. Granny doctors, herb doctors, neighborhood midwives, shading into trained professionals like Swedish massage specialists, chiropractors, osteopaths, and natural health and homeopathic practitioners.

With the high cost of medical care and the growing difficulty of getting insurance under Obamacare, no doubt the "alternative health" people will make a comeback.

 

[sheeplady]

I don't think this is just a golden era occurrence. One of my childhood friends lived in a "hotel" which was basically a run down building that used to be the village's hotel from the 1800s until the 1950s. They had a single room where she, her sister, and father lived. The bathroom was down the hall- there was one per floor. They had a small sink in their room. There were several school aged kids I new that lived in the hotel.

It's not uncommon where I used to live that old hotels and motels have been converted into places you can rent by the week. I believe when I was in school it was $40 a week to rent a room in the hotel where my friend lived. Since the small apartments tended to start at $250 to $300 a month, $40 a week was much cheaper. Plus you could pay by the week rather than the month.

 

[green papaya]

the Chinese probably went to the herbalist & acupuncture doctor in chinatown before they went to a regular hospital for care, I would guess it was less expensive

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's not uncommon where I used to live that old hotels and motels have been converted into places you can rent by the week. I believe when I was in school it was $40 a week to rent a room in the hotel where my friend lived. Since the small apartments tended to start at $250 to $300 a month, $40 a week was much cheaper. Plus you could pay by the week rather than the month.

We have a place like that right here in town, a rooms-by-the-week place populated by a rather dangerous crowd of drifters, troublemakers, drunks, and dope addicts. You don't walk by there after dark if you know what's good for you.

 

[sheeplady]

We have a place like that right here in town, a rooms-by-the-week place populated by a rather dangerous crowd of drifters, troublemakers, drunks, and dope addicts. You don't walk by there after dark if you know what's good for you.

Ours was seedy too- I always felt a bit sorry for my girl friend- she moved out of that place and down to Florida when her father went (back?) to jail. The hotel is still there. They tried to have it condemned at one point, but somehow it passed after the guy had it resided with vinyl. I doubt it was updated inside. Having grown up in the Adirondacks, there are plenty of old motels and hotels that no longer attract tourists that have been converted.

It as (and is) a bustling village of under 200 people- and this place had about 12 rooms- I'd bet 15% of the village's population lived in that place. I imagine that all sorts of unsavories lived there, but I remember feeling most sorry that my friend had to share a twin bed with her sister and didn't have a stove- just a hotpot. I guess it was better than living out of their car (I knew some kids who did that) but I always felt so sorry for the kids that lived there when they were at the bus stop. Lots of windows in the place were broken and "fixed" with duct tape.

The guy that owned that place is going to rot in hell for not making it decent for his tenants. He made enough money to keep the place fixed up a little bit decent.

ETA: We have a few places like that here in Syracuse, but we're also a city with a lot more people in it. It seemed every tiny village had it's "hotel." Strange to think that 10-20% of the people living in each of those villages lived in places like that.

 

[Shangas]

For most people, calling a doctor was expensive. And visiting a doctor even moreso. That's why doctors used to do house-calls. If a person was sick, they most likely relied on the local pharmacist, whose services wee cheaper/free, and at whose establishment, you could purchase almost anything.

Of course, there were home help-guides. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. Cassell's Book of the House...the list goes on. These weren't just cookbooks - they were books on domestic life. And they were extremely detailed. I saw an antique copy of Mrs. B's in a bookshop about a month ago. It was the size of a bloody paving stone!