The Lung Block

The Lung Block was the name the young writer Ernest Poole gave in 1903 to the tenement block bounded by Cherry, Catharine, Hamilton and Market Streets, near the East River. Writing for the Charity Organization Society's committee on tuberculosis, Poole counted nearly four thousand people on the block, about four hundred of them babies, and two hundred and sixty-five reported cases of tuberculosis in nine years, a number he believed was only half the true one. Some four hundred rooms were dark, lit only from narrow air shafts or not at all. One five-storey building, known as the Ink Pot, had twenty-six cases on its own. Poole wrote that the block had well earned its name. The label outlived the conditions that earned it.

By 1908 the city's Tenement House Department was calling it a misnomer, because repairs had brought the houses up to code, and by the 1920s the block was a largely Italian neighbourhood. In the early 1930s the developer Fred F. French revived the old name while seeking federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation money to clear it. Demolition began in October 1933, and Knickerbocker Village, a brick courtyard complex of about sixteen hundred apartments, opened over the site in 1934. Most of the families displaced moved into other old tenements nearby. Hamilton Street, which formed one side of the block, was erased, so the Lung Block can no longer be walked around. Poole went on to win the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1918.