EPILOGUE

The expiration of the emergency rent laws was not a problem for “the gentlemen from Essex, Chautauqua or St. Lawrence counties.” But what about the gentlemen from New York City? What about the mayor and the members of the Board of Aldermen and Board of Estimate, the vast majority of whose constituents were tenants? For them the political fallout of the legislature's decision was a source of great concern. To deal with it, Alderman Charles H. McGillick, a Democrat from Harlem, introduced a bill in late May to impose rent control in New York after June 1. Drafted by Assemblyman Louis A. Cuvillier, the bill was designed to prevent the “unjust, unreasonable and oppressive agreements” that were “now being enacted by landlords from tenants,” creating “a public emergency” and “endangering the public welfare.” It provided that if a landlord sued a tenant for nonpayment of rent, the rent would be deemed unreasonable if it was higher than it was a year earlier. Under the bill the landlord was also required to file a bill of particulars. If it showed he was earning 8 percent or more, the judge was authorized to dismiss the case. Although some lawyers had doubts about the bill's constitutionality, its supporters contended that it was “well within the home-rule powers of the city.”1

McGillick's bill generated a good deal of support from tenants groups, among them the Harlem Tenants League. Afraid that the landlords would soon start raising the rents in Harlem—where there were very few vacant apartments and virtually none that rented for less than five dollars a room per month and not many that rented for ten dollars a room, and where many apartments were “unfit for human occupancy”—Richard B. Moore, the league's president, led a parade and mass meeting on June 1. “Down with disease-breeding tenements and high rents,” read one of banners. “Down with segregation and discrimination against colored tenants,” said another. Also in favor of the bill were the Socialists, notably Norman Thomas, the former mayoral candidate, who called on city officials to pass a rent control law forthwith. According to reports, Tammany Hall intended to enact rent control eventually, Thomas said. “If eventually, why not now?” “Why give the landlords in Harlem and other districts a chance to add to the overcrowding and extortion that now prevail? Why, indeed, unless Tammany wants to please the landlords by the rents and the tenants by a belated and largely ineffective law?” Thomas also urged the city fathers to set up a municipal housing authority and empower it to build decent homes for working people.2

But McGillick's bill also aroused a good deal of opposition, especially from the real estate interests. There may have been “a semblance of justification” to enact the emergency rent laws in 1920, the Greater New York Taxpayers Association declared. But there was no “vestige of such justification” to reenact them now. “The reports of fact finding committees and commissions have left no doubt that the emergency, which could be the only possible excuse for such a measure, long ago ceased to exist,” added the Real Estate Board. Pointing out that the Walker administration “knows that there is no emergency,” the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide denounced the proposed ordinance as “the saddest exhibition of political jugglery that one can conceive.” The Times agreed. In an editorial entitled “An Imaginary ‘Emergency'” it claimed that “there is no excuse for further extension of the emergency rent laws,” not with more than 50,000 apartments available at less than eight dollars a room and more than 10,000 available at less than five dollars a room. The Sun and the Herald were also critical of McGillick's bill. So was the Post, which wrote that while the Board of Aldermen “may not know much about rents it knows a lot about politics. Especially does it know that there is an election of Mayor and other city officials this fall.”³

Concerned that some of the provisions of McGillick's bill would not survive judicial scrutiny, Mayor Walker instructed his bill-drafting commissioner, William J. Cahill, to eliminate what the Times called “its more radical features.” As revised, the bill deleted any reference to an 8 percent return, exempted new apartment houses, and provided that the restrictions would expire on May 31, 1930. McGillick filed the revised version on June 11. At the same time the mayor sent an emergency message to the Board of Aldermen certifying “the necessity for the [bill's] immediate passage.” The board promptly approved it by a unanimous vote. Alderman Edward W. Curley, a Bronx Democrat who pointed out that that the landlords were demanding huge rent hikes and that the courts were flooded with landlord-tenant disputes, was delighted. But the real estate men were dismayed. Speaking for the Real Estate Board, Edward P. Doyle protested that the ordinance was not limited to apartments that rented for ten dollars a room. “Under the terms of this bill, as I understand it,” he said, “tenants paying $20,000 a year can take their landlords into court and bargain with them.” Calling the ordinance “absolutely ridiculous,” Louis H. Pounds, president of the Brooklyn Real Estate Board, said that there were now more than 100,000 vacant apartments in New York City. “Do you suppose landlords would dare increase rents when all the aggrieved tenant has to do is to move into another apartment?” he asked.⁴

On June 13 the Board of Estimate held a public hearing on the McGillick bill, a hearing, wrote the Times, that was “packed to suffocation.” Testifying against it were Doyle and other spokesmen for New York's taxpayers, property owners, and real estate organizations, all of whom insisted that there was no housing shortage and thus no need for rent control. Speaking in favor of it were Alderman Edward W. Curley and other representatives of the tenants leagues, community councils, and welfare groups, one of whom pointed out that since the rent laws had expired many landlords had raised the rent 25 to 60 percent and brought scores of summary proceedings. Walker was sympathetic to the tenants. “We are simply trying to protect [them] against grasping landlords who intend to take advantage of the lapse of the State law,” he said. What harm would the bill do if the landlords have no intention of raising rents? he asked. In response to what the Times called “a storm of protest” from representatives of high-rent apartment houses, he held “a whispered conference” with Cahill, Curley, Controller Charles W. Berry, and Joseph V. McKee, president of the Board of Aldermen, out of which emerged an amendment that limited the bill to apartments whose rents had been fifteen dollars a room or less on May 31, 1929. The board adopted the amendment. It then passed the bill—which, it was estimated, would cover one-third of the city's tenants, most of whom lived on the Lower East Side and in other low-rent neighborhoods.5

The amended bill aroused mixed feelings. “We are pretty well satisfied,” said Peter W. Grimm, president of the Real Estate Board, most of whose members dealt with apartments that rented for much more than fifteen dollars a room. But the West Side Taxpayers Association was not satisfied. Nor was the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, most of whose members owned the old-law tenements on the Lower East Side that were covered by the law. It was not fair to impose rent control on some landlords and not on others, a man who claimed to speak for “the poor landlords” shouted at the hearing. “This bill ought to be passed to include all classes of landlords,” he said. Frank Mann, a former Tenement House Commissioner and now a spokesman for low-income tenants, thought the amended bill was acceptable. So did most of the tenants who attended the hearing, scores of whom “broke into applause,” wrote the Times, when the mayor announced that it had passed. But Norman Thomas, who was nominated as the Socialist Party's candidate for mayor a few days later, was extremely critical of the bill. He called the decision to limit it to apartments that rented for fifteen dollars a room or less “a surrender to the real estate interests,” another of the many outrages that Mayor Walker had “perpetrated against the workers of the city.” By failing to provide protection to tenants who were paying slightly more than fifteen dollars a room, the mayor has condemned “hundreds of thousands of families to live in old-law tenements unfit for human habitation,” Thomas declared.⁶

The bill was sent back to the Board of Aldermen, where it was supported not only by McGillick and Curley, who told his colleagues that many landlords were “lying in ambush, waiting for the State rent law to expire,” but also by two other powerful aldermen, Peter J. McGuinness of Brooklyn and William P. Sullivan of the Bronx, both of whom insisted that “a real emergency existed.” Under an emergency message from Mayor Walker, who wanted the issue resolved before the summer recess, the board passed the bill on June 18. A week later the mayor held a hearing at which both sides hammered away at the familiar points, with spokesmen for the landlords arguing that the housing emergency was long over and spokesmen for the tenants contending that the rapacious landlords had to be restrained. In support of the landlords’ position, two briefs were filed, one by Joseph F. Mann on behalf of the Building Owners and Managers Association of New York and the other by Joseph A. Keenan on behalf of the real estate boards of Brooklyn, Jamaica, Staten Island, and New York, the last of which had apparently changed its mind about the bill. In support of the tenants’ position, half a dozen women showed the mayor notices of rent hikes of 25 to 100 percent, accompanied, wrote the Times, by “written threats of eviction in the event of non-compliance.” Afterward McGillick told the mayor that these six women were only a few of the many thousands who were being threatened by their landlords. If they had all showed up, they would have filled City Hall plaza, he said.7

Walker had intended to announce his decision immediately after the hearing. But feeling obliged to look at the briefs filed in opposition to the bill, he decided to hold off. It made no difference; and as expected, he signed the bill on June 27. The real estate interests were disappointed, to say the least. Speaking for the Real Estate Board, Executive Vice-President Jones Wilder Mersereau wrote that under the McGillick Law it would be impossible for builders to erect apartment houses, charge low rents, and still earn a fair return on their investment. “To be sure,” he went on, “there is a shortage of good apartments at five to ten dollars a room.” But there is also a shortage of “'two-for-five’ cigars, and two dollar orchestra seats, and of two-cent a mile railroad travel, and five dollars a quart champagne … none of which will be restored by legislative action.” Speaking for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, Isidor Berger blamed the enactment of the McGillick Law on “political expediency” and above all on the upcoming election. With “an utter disregard for conditions as they actually exist” and with “the one and sole aim of pleasing the mass of voters,” the Walker administration had “sacrificed [the landlords] to the great idol of politics. “Thus,” he wrote, “with practically one stroke were the opinions of the Governor, the State Legislature, and the State Housing Commission brushed aside.” Thus was rent control reimposed in New York City.⁸

No sooner had McGillick introduced his bill than the Greater New York Taxpayers Association informed the Board of Aldermen that it would challenge the bill in court. In an attempt to head off its passage, the Real Estate Board and several other property owners’ organizations issued a similar threat. Their spokesmen were confident that the measure would be found unconstitutional. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, they pointed out, rent control was valid only during an emergency. And as the State Board of Housing had reported, the emergency was over. Also, under the home rule amendment of the New York State Constitution, the city officials did not have the authority to regulate rents, much less to revise summary proceedings; only the state legislature did. By mid-June, when it appeared that the McGillick bill was likely to be enacted, the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, Real Estate Board, and United Real Estate Owners Association all began making plans to challenge it on constitutional grounds. Believing that the measure could not withstand judicial scrutiny, they pressed ahead after Mayor Walker signed what would henceforth be known as Local Law No. 9. Before long two cases were pending in the state courts, one of which was brought by the Greater New York Taxpayers Association on behalf of a Bronx landlord named Gussie Zelmanowitz and the other by Ernest N. Adler, the owner of an apartment house on East 93rd Street and treasurer of the United Real Estate Owners Association. Several other cases were also pending in the municipal courts.9

By far the most important of these cases was Gennis v. Milano. The first to be decided, it pitted Ladi Gennis, who owned an apartment house on East 116th Street, against Edward Milano, a holdover tenant whose rent had been raised from $23 to $35 a month as soon as the emergency rent laws expired. When Milano refused to pay, Gennis brought summary proceedings in Manhattan's Eighth District Court. The case was heard by Joseph S. Fontanelli, who had recently been appointed by Mayor Walker to fill in for an ailing judge. The facts were not in dispute. The apartment was used for dwelling purposes, the tenant was paying less than fifteen dollars a room, and the landlord had served the required thirty days’ notice. What was in dispute was whether Local Law No. 9, on which Milano based his defense, was constitutional. Fontanelli held that it was and therefore denied Gennis's request for a final order. “The court,” he wrote, “believes that the elective legislative body of the city of New York, whose members are most intimately acquainted with the housing conditions of their local constituents, are in the best position to know whether emergency legislation is necessary.” A landlord, he added, was akin to “a quasi-public utility which affects the very life, safety and health of the tenant.” And high rents create “a problem alike to an emergency.” Local Law No. 9 does not deprive the landlord of his property, but merely requires “fair play and reasonable profit”—and only until May 1930, by which time further legislation may be unnecessary.¹⁰

Gennis appealed. In a unanimous decision, which was handed down on November 19, the Appellate Term reversed Fontanelli, awarded Gennis possession of the apartment, and, as the Times observed, set a precedent that was almost certain to “be followed in the previous cases still undecided.” Writing for the court, Nathan Bijur pointed out that the issue at hand was whether Local Law No. 9, which was “substantially a re-enactment of the state housing laws as they existed [when they expired] on June 1, 1929,” was valid under the City Home Rule Law. It was, he acknowledged, very difficult to draw a distinction between “state affairs” and “city affairs.” But citing a recent opinion by Benjamin N. Cardozo, chief justice of the Court of Appeals, he argued that among the affairs that fell exclusively under the state's jurisdiction were affairs “of contracts.” And, he went on, “the relation of landlord and tenant is plainly contractual, and the attempt to interfere between them after the amount of rental has been agreed upon, and [to] base it upon what the court may deem just and reasonable, is clearly a measure which alters the very essence of contract.” Nor, he held, did the city have the authority to interfere with the law of summary proceedings, which involves “the remedies and procedure provided by the Legislature for the entire State.”11

Peter W. Grimm hailed the decision. So did the Times, though it noted that in light of the recent stock market crash—or what it referred to as “certain resounding events in Wall Street”—the timing might have been better. The Times predicted the case would be taken to the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals. But on November 20, Corporation Counsel Arthur J. W. Hilly, who had appeared as amicus curiae in Gennis v. Milano, announced that the city did not intend to appeal Bijur's ruling. With this announcement by the former chair of the Mayor's Committee on Rent Profiteering, rent control came to an end in New York City. In the words of T. S. Eliot, who wrote The Hollow Men five years earlier, it ended “not with a bang but a whimper.” First imposed by the state legislature in the aftermath of World War I—“a war baby,” in Edith Elmer Wood's words—rent control would later be reimposed by the U.S. Office of Price Administration as part of the federal government's effort to curb inflation during World War II.¹² But that is another story—and, as fascinating as it is, one for another historian.