The End Justified the Means: Boarding and Rooming in a City of Homes, 1890-1951

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, many people, and quite a number of families, accommodated themselves by lodging in someone else's home.1 The arrangement suited everyone. Lodgers got inexpensive housing while hosts supplemented their often meagre incomes. Before the turn of the century, however, attitudes hardened against the practise. Reformers, most of whom were middle class, worried about the physical effects of overcrowding and the moral consequences of strangers sharing private family space. Many hosts apparently shared this concern, and aspired to greater privacy. At the same time some lodgers sought freedom to lead their own lives without feeling that they were being watched. Scholars have agreed that, after the turn of the century, rising incomes combined with changing attitudes to bring about the decline and social marginalization of lodging. Higher incomes, of course, made it possible for more lodgers and hosts to live apart. As lodging went into a decline, its social character is supposed to have changed. Relations between lodger and host became more distant. Instead of boarding, lodgers increasingly roomed.2 Hosts enjoyed greater privacy as lodgers ate, socialized, and had their clothes cleaned elsewhere. Indeed, it has been said that lodgers preferred not to stay in private homes but instead clustered in dedicated rooming houses. Here they found a peer culture that permitted greater freedom of action. This freedom was enhanced as small, converted dwellings were replaced by larger purpose-built lodging houses and, from the 1920s, by cheap apartment buildings.3 Lodging houses and apartment buildings undermined any tendency for occupational groups of lodgers to cluster and associate. At the same time the growth of apartments provided a preferable alternative to lodgings, so that only the socially marginal-the transient poor-were left in rooming houses. The result was anonymity and anomie. This interpretation of the social history of lodging's decline is plausible. Indeed, in the long run and in at least some respects, it is undeniably valid. But, especially as it pertains to the first half of this century, it is largely speculative. We do not know when, and at what pace, rooming supplanted boarding. Evidence that distinguishes between roomers and boarders is scarce, and has rarely been presented.4 The anonymous nature of lodging has probably been overemphasized. Contemporary observers and historians of lodging have concentrated upon the situation in the larger cities, notably Boston and Chicago, where larger rooming houses (and, later, apartments) were most common and where anonymity reached its extreme. At the same time, most have focused upon one half of the overall picture: either the family home and the household economy, or the larger rooming house and the urban subculture that it made possible.5 In so doing they have made it difficult to make truly comparative statements about the relative importance of the private home as a source of lodging accommodation. Most seriously, they have confined their attention largely to the nineteenth century when lodging was in its heyday. As a result, the social history of lodging's decline