Gashouse District

Area: 14th St. on the south to 27th St. on the north; from 1st Ave. (14th to 18th
St.), 3d Ave. (18th to 23d St.), and 4th Ave. (23d to 27th St.) east to East River.

The "gashouse district" today is largely a reminiscent term. Though
four large tanks still rise near the East River, their domination of the
neighborhood is passing, and the notorious gashouse gangs have gone.
The area now is a drab extension of the Lower East Side, a district of
". . . powerful ugliness and devastation . . . with its wasteland rusts and
rubbish, its slum-like streets of rickety tenement and shabby brick, its vast
raw thrust of tank, glazed glass and factory building . . . lifted by a
powerful rude exultancy of light and sky and sweep and water such as is
found only in America." So Thomas Wolfe remembered this neighbor-
hood, particularly that part near the East River.

The first of these great gashouses was raised in 1842 at the foot of
East Twenty-first Street; and before long a cluster of giant structures, the
skyscrapers of their day, overshadowed the landscape. "Their tracery of
iron, against an occasional clear lemon-green sky at sunrise," writes Lewis
Mumford, "was one of the most pleasant aesthetic elements in the new
order."

Another element in the new order, however, was its disregard for
human comfort and health. Gas, leaking from the tanks, made the neigh-
borhood a pesthole. Only the poorest families—at first predominantly
Irish, later joined by Germans and Jews—could be drawn into the district,
and flimsy tenements were built to accommodate them. The young men
reared in this slum environment formed gangs that terrorized the Gas-
house district for half a century. In their lighter moments they organized
courageous volunteer fire companies and dallied with "the girls with the
swinging handbags" who inspired the song, the Belle of Avenoo A.

One of the original plants—now called the O'Connell Plant in
honor of an employee of seventy-two years service—is still standing,
though bigger units have been built in other parts of the city. Slovaks
and other East Europeans have largely replaced the earlier settlers. Al-
though old-law tenements are still in the majority and the public baths at
Avenue A and Twenty-third Street are still the only bathing facilities
available to many, an increasing number of modern apartment houses are
being erected and many of the more substantial older buildings are being
renovated.

This district, like the adjoining Stuyvesant Square, con-