On January 9, 1918, barely a week after taking office, Mayor John F. Hylan declared that New York was facing the worst crisis in its history. With more than two months of winter ahead, the city was running out of coal, the fuel that supplied nearly all its heat, light, and power. A coal shortage was not something New Yorkers ordinarily worried about. But in April 1917 the United States had entered World War I. Seven months later, after the first cold snap of the season, many landlords found that they had very little coal in their cellars and, wrote the New York Call, the city's Socialist newspaper, no idea “where the next lot of fuel is coming from.” “We are in no position to deliver what we haven't got,” said one coal dealer. Holding on to wooden carts and baby carriages lined with newspapers, housewives lined up “at dawn to wait for the opening of coal offices and to plead with distracted dealers for a few pounds of the precious fuel.” All too often they were still waiting when the dealers posted the sign “No more orders taken.” By mid-December the city's coal supply was “dangerously low,” wrote the Call. “What,” it asked, “can be said of a social and commercial system that will bring [New York] face to face with the first great snowstorm of the winter with empty coal bins?” By the end of the year a spokesman for the Retail Coal Dealers Association warned that the city had less than one day's supply on hand. Fully one-third of the city's apartment houses had no coal at all. “The situation is as bad as it has ever been,” wrote the counsel for the Greater New York Coal Dealers in early February. New York was “on the verge of a complete fuel famine,” warned the Call.1
Hylan's claim notwithstanding, the coal shortage was not the worst crisis in the city's history. It was not as bad as the cholera epidemic of 1849, much less the yellow fever outbreak of 1798, which had carried off nearly 5 percent of the population. But it was bad enough. As the temperature fell in the winter of 1918, many New Yorkers found themselves with little or no heat and hot water. Life in the tenements was “beyond description,” said a social worker. “Gas is frozen, homes are dark, no water in the toilets, sanitary conditions unspeakable, faces blue and pinched from the bitter cold and ever so many kiddies down with pneumonia.” Many people went to bed to stay warm, often with overcoats on. Hundreds suffered from frostbite, some losing fingers, toes, and ears. Thousands died of pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. The situation got so bad that some New Yorkers waited all night in front of the coal yards and then, “with shawls wrapped around their heads,” wrote the Bronx Home News, “stood in line for hours, begging for coal.” When Tuttle and Son of Williamsburg, a working-class district in Brooklyn, announced that it had run out of coal, three thousand women stormed the yard. Several children were trampled before the police restored order. Another coal riot erupted in nearby Brownsville. In Manhattan children scavenged the streets, reported the Call, looking for pieces of coal, wood, or “anything that can possibly be used for fuel.” Even the well-to-do were vulnerable. The businessmen and professionals who lived at “The Imperator,” an apartment house at Riverside Drive and 150th Street that was exposed on three sides to the wintry blasts off the Hudson River, went without heat and hot water for weeks at a time. Even John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had to move from his posh home in Manhattan to his father's six-thousand-acre estate in Tarrytown when the central heating system that he depended on shut down for lack of coal.2
For most New Yorkers the new year was anything but happy. As the Call wrote:
Up from the tenements, with the accumulation of dust and dirt and their defenselessness against the icy blasts of winter, the cry is swelling—“Coal!” Up from the houses of the middle-class comes the echo—“Coal!” And now from even the inhabitants of the apartments of Riverside Drive, West End Avenue, and other thoroughfares of the well-to-do, and the rich, the cry is commencing to be heard—“Coal!”
But there was so little coal that before long, the city was taking steps that would once have been unthinkable. Several high schools sent students home, as did dozens of elementary schools. Some settlement houses closed, and a few hospitals were on the verge of shutting down. Subways, els, and streetcars ran without heat—and, in some cases, stopped running. A few criminal courts shut down as well. Manhattan District Attorney Edward Swann and his staff read by candlelight. And inmates of the Tombs, an old prison in Lower Manhattan, were wrapped in blankets and sent to bed. To conserve fuel, office buildings banked their fires and turned off the lights at 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays. Employees of Chase Manhattan Bank, one of Wall Street's leading financial institutions, worked in overcoats. Hotels, clubs, and restaurants shut off outside lights. Even the Waldorf-Astoria, a Midtown Manhattan hotel that catered to the very wealthy, urged guests to turn off the lights when leaving the rooms. In addition to “meatless” and “wheatless” days, two wartime innovations of U.S. Food Administrator (and future president) Herbert C. Hoover, New Yorkers now had to get used to “lightless” nights.3
By mid-January the coal shortage was a national crisis. It left thousands dead and thousands more unemployed not only in New York, but also in Boston, Chicago, and other cities all over the Northeast and Midwest. It also jeopardized the war effort. Freighters sat idly in ports up and down the East Coast, unable to deliver sorely needed munitions and other military supplies to the Allied forces. With no relief in sight—and with rail traffic brought to a standstill by a blizzard that dumped four feet of snow on Chicago—U.S. Fuel Administrator Harry A. Garfield, son of the late president James A. Garfield, took what a New York Times reporter called a “revolutionary” step. He ordered virtually all factories east of the Mississippi River to close from January 18 to January 22—and on Mondays for the next month and a half. He later extended the order to department stores and retail shops other than grocery and drug stores. The order aroused “a storm of protest,” the likes of which “I have never seen,” wrote one of President Woodrow Wilson's closest advisers. It even spurred an attempt by some congressmen to wrest control of the war effort from the White House and place it in the hands of a non-partisan war cabinet. The Wilson administration weathered the storm. And businesses complied with Garfield's order. Even the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors. But if the order eased the tie-up at the ports, it did not relieve the shortage in the cities. By early February New York had received so little coal that the Bronx, whose residences and businesses normally consumed five thousand tons a day, was down to its last thousand. As one of its many long-suffering tenants told a reporter, “We have had no heat all winter, except what was turned on in the mornings to keep the pipes from bursting.”4
For as long as most Americans could remember, coal had been plentiful. And it remained so even after the European powers went to war in August 1914. Although the demand for coal rose steadily, so did the supply, which increased by more than one-third over the next two and a half years. But after the United States entered the war, the mines could not keep up with the soaring demand. With the American military mobilizing and the American economy booming, the mines could not supply enough coal to keep the nation's railroads, ships, and factories running, much less to keep its homes and shops warm and well lit. To make matters worse, the railroads were hard-pressed to carry the coal from the mines to the cities. The rail system—if system is an appropriate word for the hodge-podge of companies that ran the trains—could not cope with the sudden 50 percent increase in orders. So severe was the shortage of rolling stock, the result in part of the Wilson administration's decision to push American manufacturers to supply sorely needed locomotives and cars to France and Russia, and so monumental were the traffic jams, that in the summer and fall of 1917 some mines closed because they could not get the coal to the market. The situation became so grave that in late December the federal government took control of the railroads, placing them in the hands of the U.S. Railroad Administration, which was headed by Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo.5
By the time the Railroad Administration began work, winter had arrived in the Northeast and Midwest. And what a winter it was. Early in December the temperature in New York fell to ten degrees. It was so cold, reported the Times, that “the few vessels that came into port were sheathed in an armor of ice.” Three weeks later the temperature plunged to thirteen below zero, breaking the previous record of twelve below set in 1886. It was the lowest reading since New York's Weather Bureau had started keeping records in 1871. The temperature averaged nine degrees below normal in December. And there was no relief in January. On only two days did the temperature reach as high as thirty degrees, the average daily temperature for that time of year. The weather was as cold in Boston and even colder in Chicago, where one day in mid-January the temperature plummeted to twenty-five below. Exacerbating the cold were the strong northwesterly winds. Blowing out of Canada and driving across the Midwest, they hit New York at speeds of thirty and forty miles an hour, with gusts of seventy and eighty one day in mid-December. Along with the frigid temperatures and blustery winds came heavy snow. In the month after the federal government began running the railroads, five blizzards struck the Northeast and Midwest, one of which left Chicago paralyzed. Nearly twelve inches of snow fell on New York in December and more than thirteen in January, roughly twice as much as normal. By early February it was clear that the winter would be one of the worst on record.6
The arctic weather did more than increase the demand for coal. It also reduced the supply. Ordinarily it took twenty-one days to get coal from the mines to the yards. But not this winter. As engines, switches, and water stations froze and tracks were buried under snowbanks three and four feet high, traffic came to a standstill for days at a time over much of the Northeast and Midwest. When the trains finally arrived at the terminals in New Jersey, the coal was often “frozen solid and covered with snow,” wrote the Times. It had to be thawed out before it could be “dumped into barges and brought to the city.” From the docks in Jersey City, Bayonne, and South Amboy to the yards in Manhattan and Brooklyn was less than a mile. But with much of New York harbor clogged with ice—more ice, said shippers and seamen, than at any time in the past thirty years—it was too risky for tugboats and barges to make the trip. Dozens of vessels were already caught in the floes. Finally, with tugs and other ships provided by the railroad companies and the U.S. Navy, efforts were made to break through the ice. In early January, for example, four tugs, linked by a giant hawser, opened a one-hundred-foot channel that allowed 100,000 tons of coal to be shipped from the Reading Railroad's terminals in South Amboy. But it was hard going. In early February, after yet another bout of frigid weather, so much ice piled up in the harbor that there was “a practical embargo on shipping,” wrote the Times. What, the paper asked, did it say about the competence of federal and local officials that with so much coal sitting in New Jersey “such wretched driblets of it reach New York?”7
Although cities all over the Northeast and Midwest had been hard hit by the coal shortage, none were hit harder than New York. What made New York so vulnerable was not that it consumed so much coal, roughly twenty million tons a year. Rather, the Times explained, it was that even in normal times it had very little coal on hand. Its surplus was so small as to be “without a parallel among the large cities of the world.” People imagine, said the paper, that “there are vast places, somewhere around [the city], for the storage of coal.” They were wrong. As the manager of a leading trade publication put it, “There is no place to store a large surplus of coal in New York.” Land values were so high it made no sense to buy or rent space to store such a bulky commodity. Thus not even the largest of New York's coal yards carried much of a surplus. Its giant utility companies seldom had more than one or two months’ supply on hand. Most apartment houses needed a delivery every few days—or at least once a week. Many factories required weekly deliveries too. And many hotels, including some of the most palatial, bought coal every day. In the event of a shortage, wrote the Times, the city “would begin to feel the pinch [within a week].” And in the winter of 1917–1918 the coal shortage dragged on for months.8
As the temperature fell, many tenants grew desperate. Aside from bundling up and staying in bed or, as the Call wrote, “gathering around the scanty fires of more fortunate neighbors,” what could they do? What good would it do to line up for hours when there was no coal in the yards? Or to go scavenging when there was no coal or wood in the streets? The tenants pleaded with the landlords for heat and hot water. But more often than not, they responded that there was no coal. Many tenants were skeptical. (If some landlords had no coal, they believed, it was because they were unwilling to buy when prices were so high or refusing to burn it to save money.) But there was not much they could do. Some tenants, among them the residents of “The Imperator,” many of whom paid more rent in a month than most New Yorkers paid in a year, threatened to sue their landlords for breach of contract and ask the courts for damages. But the chances of a favorable verdict were slim. Running out of ideas, a group of tenants of a five-story apartment house on West 137th Street turned to the Harlem Police Court in early January. “We have been living a life of hell in this house,” said the spokeswoman, an elderly widow who had lived there for over ten years. For two weeks the tenants had no heat or hot water; now that the pipes were frozen, they had no cold water either. If we return to our homes under these conditions, she told the court, “we will freeze to death.” The magistrate was sympathetic, but said he could not help. All he could do was suggest that the tenants bring the matter to the attention of the mayor.9
Whether it would do much good to appeal to Hylan—or, for that matter, other elected officials—was far from clear. But as far as the tenants were concerned, it was worth a try. Early in February a delegation of twenty-one men and women who represented ten thousand tenants met with the mayor, who had formed two citizens’ committees to help the poor deal with the rising price of coal and urged local fuel administrators to prevent coal dealers from gouging small consumers. Although Hylan took note of their complaints, he made no promises. More responsive than the mayor was Democratic alderman Clarence Y. Palitz. At the behest of tenants, he introduced two ordinances. One would have compelled landlords to inform tenants how much of the rent was for heat and hot water, a measure that would have helped them figure out how much to withhold if the landlord failed to provide either or both. The other would have authorized New York City to set up a municipal heating plant to supply steam to apartment houses and other dwellings, a measure that had been adopted in Cleveland and several European cities. Another politician who was supportive of the tenants was Assemblyman Samuel Orr. On behalf of the Socialist minority in the lower house, he filed a bill that would have required landlords to keep steam-heated apartments at a minimum of sixty-eight degrees from October through April—though only during those hours when the tenants were, as the Times put it, “up and about.” If a landlord failed to do so, the tenants would be allowed to deduct from the rent a sum equal to what they spent on heaters and fuel. Under another bill introduced by Orr, a delinquent landlord was liable to a $200 fine, ten days in jail, or both.10
The tenants did their utmost to drum up support for these legislative measures. Besides meeting with elected officials, they held large rallies, one of which was sponsored by the newly formed Washington Heights Tenants League at Blaney's Hall on 181st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. “Have you been sufficiently abused this winter through lack of steam heat and hot water?” the announcements asked. “How About Next Winter?” Under the auspices of the Socialist Party and the Bronx Tenants League, some tenants even went to Albany to attend committee hearings on Assemblyman Orr's bills. (The oldest of the tenant associations, the Bronx Tenants League, had been organized the previous winter by residents of Crotona Park, most of whom were working-class, Russian Jewish immigrants who had gone on a rent strike to protest the landlords’ failure to supply heat and hot water.) Not all the tenants were content to leave matters up to the elected officials. Before long hundreds, even thousands, many of whom were well-off, took a step that was bound to infuriate the landlords. To protect their families from the cold, they bought oil or gas heaters—and the fuel to run them. A case in point was Austin J. Wall, manager of the British government's Allied Food Bureau, who lived with his wife and child on West 129th Street. After bearing up with no heat from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on several days and no heat at all from December 26 to December 31, his wife bought a gas heater. It cost $3.95, said Wall, and so far he had spent another 96 cents on gas. When the rent came due, Wall and other tenants informed their landlords that they would not pay the full amount.11
Some elected officials endorsed the tenants’ position and, in the case of Palitz and Orr, incorporated it into legislative proposals. “Shelter is a fundamental requisite of life,” said Palitz, a lawyer who had represented hundreds of Bronx tenants who were threatened with eviction for nonpayment of rent. And shelter included heat (and sometimes hot water). In the past many tenants could heat their apartments by burning wood or coal. But now, Palitz pointed out, five out of six tenants in Manhattan and the Bronx relied exclusively on steam heat, a form of central heating that could only be provided by the landlords. The landlords included heat and hot water in the rent, said Palitz. And without it, the tenants were not getting what they were paying for. Due to the cold weather, the coal shortage, and not least of all the landlords’ greed, many apartments were now uninhabitable. Although suffering “great discomfort,” the tenants were showing admirable restraint, Palitz insisted. They were not suing for damages, which was their right. Nor were they refusing to pay rent. All they were doing was demanding a reduction in the rent equal to the amount they were spending to heat one or two rooms to a temperature at which their families could survive the winter.12
The landlords saw things differently. Most landlords were willing to pay any price for coal, said Morris Morganstern, one of the largest landlords in the Bronx and president of the Federation of Bronx Real Estate Owners, an organization he and other landlords had formed to counter the “altogether unjust criticism” to which they were now being subjected. Most landlords were even willing “to cart it [the coal] away from the yards in their own trucks at their own expense.” A “very small minority” may have tried to capitalize on the coal shortage, Morganstern conceded. But in the “vast majority of cases the failure to provide heat and hot water was due to circumstances beyond the control of the landlord[s],” who, he said, were no more to blame for rationing fuel than restaurant owner were for refusing to serve wheat on “wheatless” days and meat on “meatless” days. Even so, said Morganstern, he was not averse to reducing the rent for tenants whose homes had no heat and hot water. In the case of a typical five-story walk-up with five apartments on a floor, he estimated that the cost of coal came to 30 cents per room per month. Hence a fair reduction would be $1.20 a month for a four-room apartment or $1.50 a month for a five-room apartment. But, Morganstern pointed out, many tenants were demanding half or even a full month's rent, even when the heat and hot water had been off for only a couple of days. The result was a growing antagonism between landlords and tenants, an antagonism he blamed on the “professional agitator,” who deliberately misleads otherwise reasonable tenants, and the “ ‘deadbeat,’ who sees in these abnormal times an opportunity to dodge the rent and ‘put one over’ on the landlord.”13
Some landlords favored Morganstern's approach. Roughly six months before the coal shortage, one property owners’ association recommended that each landlord insert in the lease a provision stating that if he were unable to provide heat and hot water through no fault of his own the tenants would be allowed to deduct 10 percent of the per diem rent for each day on which heat and hot water were not furnished. Of the 10 percent, 8 percent was for heat, 2 percent for hot water. (As an inducement to the landlords to make this concession, the lease provided that the tenants could not sue for breach of contract if the landlord could not get coal and that they would pay extra if the price of coal rose by more than 25 percent over the current market price.) Other landlords took a more aggressive stance. Speaking for the Greater New York Taxpayers Association, an organization that had been set up in 1908 to promote the interests of property owners on the Lower East Side, Harold Phillips held that landlords had no obligation to provide heat or hot water; their cost was not included in the rent. In cases where the tenants had a lease that entitled them to heat and hot water, Phillips urged the landlords to rewrite it and, in the words of historian Jared N. Day, “absolve themselves of any responsibility.” An alternative was to issue an ultimatum to the tenants stating, “Your rent pays for the rooms you occupy. Not for steam heat or hot water. Agree to this or vacate.” Notice to this effect went out to four thousand tenants in the Bronx in early February.14
With the threat of eviction hanging over their heads, many tenants paid the rent. Others withheld part of it to cover what they had spent on heaters and fuel. Still others refused to pay any rent until the landlord restored heat and hot water. By mid-winter a host of rent strikes, many of them organized by the Socialist Party and the newly formed tenant associations, were under way in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In the face of this resistance, some landlords attempted to work out a compromise. Unable to get coal, the owner of a tenement on West 122nd Street offered to reduce the rent by five dollars a month, and the lessee of a building on East 97th Street proposed a two-dollar-a-month reduction. But most landlords refused to give in and, in the words of the Home News, told their tenants, “If you don't like it, you can move.” When the striking tenants ignored the ultimatum, many landlords proceeded to evict them. One option available to them was the common law remedy of ejectment. But as one authority on landlord–tenant law pointed out, ejectment was a very complicated, long drawn out, and expensive process. Hence the landlords usually resorted to the statutory remedy of summary proceedings, a “simple, expeditious, and inexpensive remedy,” wrote two other authorities on landlord–tenant law, that had been provided by the state legislature in 1920. It worked as follows. If a tenant did not pay his rent (or stayed after his term expired), the landlord could serve notice telling him to vacate the premises. (For a tenant who rented month-to-month, five days’ notice was required; a tenant who rented for an indefinite term, even if he paid by the month, was entitled to thirty days.) If the tenant refused, the landlord could ask the court for a precept, ordering the tenant to show cause why the premises should not be delivered to the landlord. Unless the tenant could show cause—unless, that is, he could prove the complaint was unfounded—the judge had no choice but to issue a final order awarding the premises to the landlord. The judge could grant a stay, giving the tenant up to five days to find another place to live. But if after five days he refused to vacate, the judge had to issue a warrant authorizing the city marshals to remove him and his belongings from the premises. By mid-February more than thirty thousand summary proceedings had been brought in New York.15
The landlords were confident that the courts would rule in their favor if they brought summary proceedings against a tenant who refused to pay the rent or move out when the lease expired. And, observed one New Yorker, they had good reason. Writing in the early 1890s, after a year in which 24,000 tenants had been evicted in New York, almost four times as many as in all of Ireland, he pointed out that under the law, “The courts must see that the rent is paid or that the tenant goes into the street. What becomes of the tenant afterward is nobody's business unless the police have occasion to look after him or the morgue-keeper fixes him in a deal [a fir or pine] box for interment in the home of the desolate on Hart's Island—Potter's Field.” Things did not change much over the next twenty-five years, wrote the Call. “When it comes to a squabble between them [the tenants] and the landlord they haven't got as much chance as a wax candle on a stove.” The residents of Crotona Park learned this the hard way in the winter of 1916–1917. At the urging of the Socialist Women's Consumers’ League, nearly a thousand tenants refused to pay their rent until the landlords, two large Manhattan real estate firms, provided heat and hot water. They then formed the Bronx Tenants League, which started a strike fund and set up a picket line. The landlords promptly took the tenants to court. Although some tenants gave in when the landlords reduced the rent hike from two dollars to one dollar a month, others refused to back down. At trial their lawyer, a Socialist named Leon Malkiel, argued that the tenants had an oral agreement that bound the landlords to supply heat and hot water. This the landlords denied. Judge Michael J. Scanlan sided with them, saying that in the absence of a written lease the tenants had no choice but to pay or move. When the landlords threatened to bring in the marshals, the strike collapsed.16
Despite Scanlan's ruling, some lawyers held that the landlords’ confidence was misplaced. Tenants, they argued, were not as much at the mercy of landlords as they had once been. A few decades ago—when, said a Manhattan lawyer, “it was a standing joke that a lease should leave nothing to the tenant except to breathe and pay rent”—a tenant had no right to heat unless it was explicitly called for in the lease. He had to pay rent even if the landlord did not furnish heat. (Except in the case of an infestation of rats or another nuisance so intolerable as to constitute what was known as a “constructive eviction,” the tenant had to pay the rent even if he vacated the premises.) Pointing to several cases decided in the recent past, these lawyers argued that nowadays landlords had to supply heat even if it was not stipulated in the lease. The provision of heat was “an implied, if not an expressed, obligation,” wrote the Times. As Harold G. Aron, a professor of real property law at New York Law School, explained, the modern apartment building was so designed that the heating system was entirely under the landlord's control. Now that central heating was commonplace, few apartments were provided with fireplaces or other heating facilities of their own. Thus even if coal was in short supply, it was up to the landlord to furnish heat even if he had only an oral agreement with the tenant. If he failed to do so, the tenant could leave, stop paying rent, and sue for damages. A landlord could escape this obligation only if he provided another way by which the tenant could heat the apartment and stipulated in the lease that he had to do so.17
Much as Aron and others expected, some judges ruled against the landlords. Explaining why he refused to issue a final order against three striking Brooklyn tenants, Jacob S. Strahl said, “Contracts were made providing that they should be furnished with heat and hot water and the evidence here shows that the contracts have not been kept. They [the tenants] have been put to the trouble of buying their own heaters, and something should be done for them.” In the case of Austin J. Wall, whose lease included a provision that the landlord would provide heat and hot water, Judge George L. Genung reduced the rent five dollars to cover what Wall had spent on a heater and fuel. The landlord's lawyer made the argument that the lease included a provision that Wall would pay the rent “without any deduction,” but Genung dismissed it on the grounds that the tenant was not getting what he was paying for. A Brooklyn judge refused to issue a final order against twenty tenants who had gone on strike because the landlord had failed to furnish heat and hot water. And a Bronx judge granted a 10 percent reduction to twelve tenants who had rejected the landlord's offer of a two-dollar-a-month reduction in rent. More disheartening to the landlords was a decision handed down by the Appellate Term of the New York Supreme Court. Affirming a ruling by Manhattan's Seventh District Court, it held that even in the absence of a written agreement a tenant could pay less than the full rent if the landlord failed to supply heat. The Home News hailed these decisions, noting that the courts were beginning to realize that tenants “must be protected from avaricious landlords.” Even the staid New York Times saw no reason “why landlords should not have to bear, in the shape of decreased rents, their share of the woes produced by [the coal shortage].”18
Although sympathetic to the tenants’ plight, other judges felt compelled to rule in favor of the landlords. Attorney Morris Gisnet, counsel for the Bronx Tenants League, protested that in many of the more than one hundred cases he handled in the Second District Court he proved that the landlords who failed to provide heat and hot water had plenty of coal. Yet the judge “invariably ruled in favor of the landlords, declaring that he was bound to follow the law as it is and that the law of today favors the landlords.” Noting that the law was written long before the advent of steam heat, Gisnet urged the legislators to change it, a position shared by Judge John R. Davies, who presided over one of Manhattan's busiest courts. Still other judges tried to find a compromise that was acceptable to both sides. A case in point was Peter A. Sheil, who sat on the Bronx Second District Court. In mid-February the landlords of an apartment house on Washington Avenue brought summary proceedings against thirty-two tenants for nonpayment of rent. Henry J. Soffer, another counsel to the Bronx Tenants League, responded that his clients were willing to pay, but only after 20 percent was deducted for the landlords’ failure to provide heat and hot water. Sheil said he was prepared to reduce the rent by as much as 15 percent in cases where no heat had been furnished for a whole month. In this case, where it had been furnished for part of the month, he would not go as high as 10 percent. With the judge's help, the two sides reached a compromise. As part of the settlement, the landlords also promised to provide sufficient heat and hot water and withdrew a threat to evict the ringleaders of the strike.19
Before long the landlords realized that some judges would evict tenants for nonpayment of rent if their apartment had no heat and hot water, and others would not. But with about fifty municipal court judges sitting in twenty-four courthouses—and not always in the same one—the landlords could not be sure to whom the case would be assigned. Given this uncertainty, some landlords were inclined to compromise with the tenants. Rather than press ahead with an effort to evict a dozen striking tenants on East 136th Street, one landlord allowed them to deduct five dollars for a five-room apartment and four dollars for a four-room apartment and promised to provide as much heat as possible. To avoid going to trial, another Harlem landlord reached a settlement with several striking tenants by agreeing to reduce the rent 15 percent. Other landlords attempted instead to evict their tenants on grounds other than nonpayment of rent. A noteworthy example occurred in the Bronx, when tenants at 1345 Washington Avenue complained about the lack of heat and hot water and formed an association to do something about it. Although the tenants paid the next month's rent, the landlord refused it, saying “he would not take $1,000 a month from them,” and brought summary proceedings on the grounds that the tenants were “undesirable.” Under the law a tenant was “undesirable” if the landlord deemed him so. No proof was needed, and the judges had no authority to allow tenants to offer evidence to the contrary. In short order, eight tenants were evicted. When two of them could not find another apartment in the five days given them, their families were ousted and their furniture put on the sidewalk.20
By late winter the coal shortage was over. The miners were digging hard, the railroads were running on time, and as the ice floes melted in New York harbor, the barges had no trouble making deliveries. As a prominent coal dealer said in late February, “New York is in pretty fair shape now. We are receiving coal in our Bronx yards for the first time since the trouble started.” Although state and local officials still urged conservation, they eased the “lightless” night regulations, which had applied to every day but Saturday. Effective March 1, only Thursdays and Sundays would be dark. As Garfield's order expired, factories and stores resumed normal schedules. With the coming of mild weather, landlords were able to furnish enough heat and hot water, albeit at a price they thought too high. Another sign that the worst was over was that public officials began to look ahead to next winter. To ensure that New York would not run short of coal again, they suggested that dealers find a place to store enough coal to tide the city over in the event of another harsh winter. One possibility was Central Park. But it was unlikely, said one coal dealer, that the public would allow the park to be used to store coal. (That spring a public outcry had forced the Liberty Loan Committee to shelve its plan to boost fundraising for the war effort by building symbolic trenches in the park.) Public officials also urged New Yorkers to stock up on coal in the summer so they would have enough in the winter, to overhaul their furnaces and clean their flues, and, if need be, to get accustomed to washing dishes in cold water and taking cold baths. If appropriate measures were adopted, said Harry T. Peters, chair of the Coal Conservation Commission, the city would not be faced with so severe a crisis again.21
Still another sign that the worst was over was that elected officials were losing interest. The Board of Aldermen took no action on Palitz's bill to establish a muni-cipal heating plant. Nor did it act on his bill requiring landlords to inform tenants how much of the rent was for heat and hot water. Nothing came of Palitz's more drastic proposal to compel landlords to equip every apartment with a dual heating system—so that if the landlords could not get coal the tenants could heat their homes with gas or other fuel. Nor did anything come of a proposal by Commissioner of Public Markets Jonathan Day that the city go into the coal business. Tenant advocates made no headway in the state legislature either. In the face of strong opposition from the Real Estate Board, the city's oldest and most influential property owners’ association, the upper house shelved a bill introduced by Senator Edward J. Dowling that would have allowed a tenant to withhold part of the rent in the event that a landlord who had agreed to furnish heat failed to do so. And the lower house killed the bill introduced by Assemblyman Orr that would have required landlords to keep their apartments at sixty-eight degrees and, if they failed to, allowed tenants to deduct from the rent what they spent on heaters and fuel. The Assembly also shelved Orr's bill penalizing delinquent landlords. Aside from the Board of Estimate's decision to appropriate $50,000 to purchase fuel and food for sale to the poor, the elected officials did virtually nothing to help the tenants. They were reluctant to antagonize the powerful real estate interests. And they saw no need to now that the coal shortage was over and, it was widely assumed, landlord-tenant relations would soon return to normal.22
But it was far from clear that landlord-tenant relations would soon return to normal. The tenants were furious with the landlords not only for failing to furnish heat and hot water, but also for exploiting the coal shortage to raise the rent. While these profiteers boast of their patriotism, said one tenant, women and little children “suffer untold agonies.” The tenants were also fed up with the arrogance of the landlords, who told long-term residents, “if you don't like it you can move” and, when they withheld part of the rent, brought summary proceedings against them. How much lower could a man sink, the tenants asked, than to hire marshals to oust families with small children and throw their belongings onto the sidewalk? The landlords were as angry as the tenants. As one complained, “Tenants control our property, move in and out of it as they please, pay rent or withhold it as they please and treat with the landlords or ignore them as they please.” All over the city, said Morris Morganstern, professional agitators “appealed to the worst instincts of ordinarily peaceable and law-abiding tenants,” inciting them not only to withhold the rent, but also to vandalize the apartments. When landlords were forced to go to court, they were “held up for public derision and ridicule,” Morganstern lamented. “It would seem that ownership of real estate carried with it the sacrifice of all sense of decency and morality [and stripped a man] of all human feeling.”23
In view of this deep-seated antagonism, it was even possible that landlord-tenant relations might take a turn for the worse. Consider what happened on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. In late winter and early spring about one hundred tenants from a few adjacent tenement houses started a rent strike not so much because their landlord, a Manhattan doctor named Benedict Weissman, had failed to supply hot water and make necessary repairs as because he had raised the rent $1.00 to $1.50 a month. A highly militant bunch, the striking tenants not only withheld their rent, but also called on the Moving Van Workers’ Union to refuse to move new tenants into the houses and even attacked new tenants who moved into the building. Weissman served notice on eleven of the striking tenants. But shortly before the case came to trial in Brooklyn's Second District Court, he reached a settlement with the tenants’ counsel, Joseph E. Klein, a young Brooklyn Socialist, by which he agreed not only to provide hot water and make necessary repairs, but also to put off the rent hike for five months, to raise the rent only fifty cents in the sixth month, and to raise it not at all in the next twelve months. Before the Myrtle Avenue rent strike, it was clear that many tenants would fight a rent hike if the landlords did not provide heat and hot water. Afterward it was possible, even probable, that they might go on strike to stop the landlords from raising the rent too.24