into tenement houses, with far fewer features and amenities. Novelist Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) wrote of an Irish tenement neighborhood characterized by poverty and violence:"Eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobble and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags, and bottles. In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners. A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels."Tenements were cheap and easy to build, and filled up almost the entire lot. There were typically five story walk-ups, with four separate apartments on each floor. There was minimal air circulation and sunlight. Until the Tenement House Act of 1879, newly built tenements lacked running water or indoor toilets. A law in 1901 required indoor plumbing be retrofitted to older tenements. Garbage pickup was erratic until late in the 19th century. Rent was cheap for those who could endure the dust, clutter, smells and noises; the only cheaper alternatives were squalid basement rooms in older buildings. Most of the tenements survived until the urban renewal movement of the 1950s.Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920 (1985) pp 47-52 Neighborhoods Pre-war steam ferries had already made Brooklyn Heights into a bedroom community for affluent professionals on Wall Street and other urban areas. Elevated railroads, operated by the Manhattan Railway Company, and other new public transport expanded the commuter area of New York, allowing development of suburbs for commuters of more modest means in Upper West Side and other distant areas. Plans were made for subways to still more remote exurbs such as Harlem and the West Bronx. In the late 19th century, the island's schist bedrock encouraged the early skyscrapers whose successors characterize its skyline today. The Great Blizzard of 1888 exposed the vulnerability of