The failure of the Howland Mill Village experiment may have been the final straw for New Bedford mill owners. By the end of the 19th century, they had decided to get out of the landlord business. Along with the financial and management burden of rental properties, by the 1890s housing reformers began to note the “squalid” and “pestiferous” conditions of the city’s mill-owned tenements, mounting pressure to improve workers’ living conditions. At the same time, advances in loom technology reduced the number of skilled workers, and the need for mill owners to provide incentives to attract them. By the beginning of the twentieth century, contractors built most tenements on speculation, selling them to landlord-investors who rented units to peripatetic working-class tenants. The building form they chose was the iconic New England three-decker tenement. Three-deckers first appeared in the 1850s in New England mill cities like Worcester, Providence, and Fall River. Potomska Mills built what were probably New Bedford’s first three-deckers (now demolished) in the 1870s at the intersections of Rivet and First and Second Streets. In its most basic form, a three-decker consists of three floors with a separate residence on each level, connected by a common entrance and staircase. By 1876, at least one three-decker in New Bedford included stacked front porches, a feature that characterized this form of housing by the beginning of the 20th century. Mill construction peaked in New Bedford in the first decade of the 20th century, along with a pressing need to house French Canadian workers flooding into the city. Between 1908 and 1913, 1,079 three-deckers sprung up throughout New Bedford, mostly in the North and South Ends where the majority of the mills were located. The early flat-roof and gable end forms gave way to the pyramidal hip-roofed version, which is now ubiquitous throughout the city. The typical three-decker utilizes an elongated floor plan, with the kitchen and bathroom in the rear, a multi-purpose work and eating space in the middle, and a sitting room—and sometimes a parlor—in the front. Bedrooms were on one side or the other. Outside, a narrow side yard led to the back stairs, punctuated at intervals by small laundry porches on each floor. The back stairs served as the main entrance for most three-decker occupants. The three-deckers’ most identifiable feature—the stacked front porches, or piazzas, tucked against a protruding three-story bay—may have been the space least utilized by the tenements’ occupants. Seemingly useless embellishments on houses meant for the working poor, developers and reformers envisioned the piazzas as symbols of respectability. Their architectural detail evoked middle class housing, and their visibility would allow residents to monitor the behavior of their children, and of each other. Impractical for a class of people that had little leisure time, these porches may have proved most useful for storage. The age of the three-decker was brief. By the mid-teens, they had been singled out by reformers as a form of immoral cohabitation and inferior to single-family housing, and by xenophobes who deplored three-deckers as storehouses of immigrants. A 1916 city ordinance restricted wood frame housing to two stories, ostensibly for fire safety, but in reality, to limit the stigma of overcrowded immigrant worker housing. Today, about 1,200 three-deckers survive in New Bedford. Many of them no longer have their front porches, a result of the expense of repair and replacement and the reluctance of insurers to indemnify recent owners from the supposed hazard of three floors of open-air piazzas. In addition, the succeeding waves of Polish, Portuguese, and Central American immigrants may have prioritized other elements of these buildings—vegetable gardens and basement kitchens, for example—as a means to retain elements of their own cultures.
]]>Listen closely and you might hear the footsteps of hundreds of mill workers who lived in tenements on the block bounded by Rivet, Potomska, Second, and First Streets. Only two remain, but there once existed a complex of ten six-tenement buildings erected by the Potomska Mills for its workers.
Built in 1871 on South Water Street, Potomska Mills produced shades, umbrellas, jeans, and print cloth, rather than the sheets and shirts produced at Wamsutta. Potomska was the first textile manufactory established after the Wamsutta Mills more than twenty years earlier, but the two companies were not in competition. They produced different goods and shared the same president. Potomska also shared Wamsutta’s need to attract workers by providing suitable rental housing. Potomska worker housing took cues from the design of Wamsutta tenements on Hazard, State, and Austin Streets. Potomska constructed six “four-tenements” with four-room apartments stacked on two sides of the building and additional sleeping rooms on a smaller third floor. The buildings featured flanking entries surmounted by doorway hoods and modest Italianate-style brackets at the rooflines. As Potomska Mills expanded, its owners added four additional four-tenements to the original six, forming a quadrangle surrounding an unpaved laundry yard. Diagonally adjacent to the four-tenements, Potomska constructed six three-deckers, with single apartments on each floor and perhaps stacked front porches, which later defined this building form. Built in 1871, these may have been the first corporate-owned three-deckers in New Bedford. Potomska likely reserved them for the families of skilled workers, while unskilled workers lived in the ten four-tenements across the street, and in an additional sixteen Potomska four-tenements scattered throughout the area. Despite this tenement building-boom, by the 1890s the housing demand from the influx of immigrant mill workers outstripped available supply, and families often took in boarders to earn extra income. Potomska failed to adequately maintain the buildings, and in 1894, the New Bedford Daily Mercury referred to the “squalor” of the Potomska tenements. In 1898, the New York Evening Journal claimed they were "more filthy than any New York tenement." The Potomska Mills were demolished in 1935, and the area they occupied between Potomska and Blackmer Streets is now largely vacant. The three-deckers built by Potomska for their skilled workers were moved in 1900 to make way for a new public school to serve the children of this largely immigrant neighborhood. The whereabouts of these buildings is unknown. Out of the group of ten four-tenements, only two survive, in differing states of repair. Once surrounded by a dense residential neighborhood, they are now accompanied only by a behavioral health center, parking lots, and a silent vestige of their former courtyard.
]]>“Ever Since I Can Remember, I’ve Been Working”—Alfred Benoit
Alfred Benoit was one of many youths who spent their childhood laboring in the brutal, unforgiving mills of New Bedford. Born September 3, 1900, Alfred began working in 1912 as a floor sweeper but became skilled at repairing the looms that sustained the New Bedford textile industry.
We know of Alfred partly from photographs taken by social worker and labor activist Lewis Hine, who came to New Bedford to document the conditions in the mills for his work with the National Child Labor Committee. The work of Hines and other reformers like Jacob Riis helped to change harsh child labor policies, which had allowed children under sixteen years-old to work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions for more than ten hours a day. In January, 1912, Hine photographed part of the Benoit family in their rented tenement on North Front Street. He jotted this note:
Slovenly kitchen living-room of family of Alfred Beniot [sic], 191 N. Front St., a sweeper in Bennett Mill; has been there for two months. Mother works in the same mill; father is a canvasser (and shiftless). Said, “I’m de father of 11 children.” The baby in the girl’s arms is one they are keeping for another woman. The mother would not get in the photo. Alfred had bad eyes this morning (influenza apparently) and mopping them with a filthy rag. One of the little ones had the same trouble. Another had a boil on his face.
When Hine took this photograph in 1912, three of Alfred’s siblings had already died, and Hine observed the poor health of the Benoit children.
Alfred’s father, Archille, came to New Bedford from Canada around 1905. He worked as a weaver, moving between New Bedford, Fall River, and Waltham, and briefly returned to Canada, following rumors of economic opportunity. By 1912, Archille was employed as a canvasser, going door-to-door selling goods and services. Hine considered him to be lazy, but it is possible that Archille was worn down by years of hard labor.
The Benoit house at 191 North Front Street was likely a three-decker tenement. A 1911 map of New Bedford indicated that the property was owned by M. Rogers. Behind the house was the New Bedford Day Nursery, and a block away was the St. Rose School, but it is unlikely that the Benoit children were able to take advantage of these facilities.
Alfred married his wife, Nora, in 1923, and together they raised seven children. Alfred’s grandchildren remember him as “a man who truly enjoyed life.” His granddaughter Nancy, the first of the Benoit family to graduate college, recalls that Alfred “wasn’t an overachiever. He enjoyed what he had.” Alfred enjoyed lawn bowling and sometimes traveled to Canada to compete in checkers tournaments. He spent time at the Brown Jug, a neighborhood bar owned by Francis Lawler, who served a New Bedford’s mayor in the late 1950s. Alfred and Lawler became good friends.
The three-decker on North Front Street was demolished to make way for Interstate 195, but still standing is the house on Clark Street where Alfred lived with his own family and the Brown Jug, a North End institution. Alfred’s son in law, Romeo Pothier, recalls him as a man with many friends. Asked if Alfred ever spoke of his childhood, Pothier recalled, “He once told me, ‘Ever since I can remember, I’ve been working.’”
]]>On January 3, 1791, Ann Arnold walked into the newly founded Slater Mill and onto the pages of history as one of the first nine employees hired by the mill. She was probably about ten years old.
As the industrial revolution swept across the western world, many factories, including Slater Mill, capitalized on child labor. Pliable young children could be easily taught the skills needed to operate the mill’s spinning frames, could be paid less than adults, and were less likely to incite trouble than adult workers. Some factories hired children as young as four years old. At Slater Mill, Ann Arnold joined a workforce made up of boys and girls between the ages of seven and twelve who worked six days a week – twelve hours a day in the winter, sixteen hours a day in the summer. They spent more than twice the amount of time that today’s kids spend in school working at the mill each day.
Ann Arnold and her fellow workers picked cotton clean and worked the mill’s carding and spinning machines. The roar of the Blackstone River and hum of the water-powered machinery filled the air. Fine cotton lint coated the floor, clung to the workers' clothes, and clogged their throats. If the mill supervisor thought the children were not working hard enough, the children were fined, further reducing the small paycheck that they took home each week. The children were expected to spend Sundays, their one day of rest, at a mill-sponsored Sunday school where Brown University students provided basic schooling.
For her hard work, Ann Arnold brought home a regular salary: a luxury compared to farm life. The rest of her family toiled all day on the family farm, working just as hard as Ann did in the factory, but without the assurance of a regular paycheck.
As Slater Mill expanded, more workers were needed to run the carding and spinning equipment. Mill operators adopted the “Rhode Island System” of labor where entire families were hired to work together in the factories. Nonetheless, children remained a key source of labor. In 1830, fifty-five percent of all millworkers in Rhode Island were still children.
Long after Slater Mill closed its doors in 1895, child labor continued to be a contested issue. In the early 1900s, organizations such as the Consumer's League of Rhode Island fought to limit child labor. Early legislation restricted the number of hours that children could work and set age requirements for factory work – unscrupulous mill owners seldom enforced these rules. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act made it illegal to employ any child under the age of twelve in the United States. However, children like Ann still work in factories throughout the world today, enduring harsh conditions to support themselves and their family.
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