With inhumane work conditions and paltry wages, they were consigned to live in the city’s “tenant houses”—a term that morphed into “tenements”—dark, sooty, airless spaces crammed with hungry families. The Dickensian conditions of Manhattan’s tenements were an eerie precursor to Dasani’s life at Auburn. “One young immigrant described how his family of eight managed in a one-room residence,” writes the scholar Karen M. Staller.
