But these landlords "of the highest character" not only owned, and regularly collected rents from, tenement houses which filled the cemeteries, but they also resorted to the profitable business of leasing certain tenements to middlemen who guaranteed them by lease a definite and never-failing annual rental. Once having done this, the landlords did not care what the middlemen did—how much rent they exacted, or in what condition they allowed the tenements. "The middlemen," further reported the Metropolitan Board of Heath,
are frequently of the most heartless and unscrupulous character and make large profits by sub-letting. They leave no space unoccupied: they rent sheds, basements and even cellars to families and lodgers; they divide rooms by partitions, and then place a whole family in a single room, to be used for living, cooking, and sleeping purposes. In the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Fourteenth Wards may be found large, old fashioned dwellings originally constructed for one family, subdivided and sublet to such an extent that even the former sub-cellars are occupied by two or more families. There is a cellar population of not less than 20,000 in New York City.
Here, again, shines forth with blinding brightness that superior morality of the propertied classes. There is no record of a single landlord who refused to pocket the great gains from the ownership of tenement houses. Great, in fact, excessive gains they were, for the landowning class considered tenements "magnificent investments" (how edifying a phrase!) and all except one held on to them. That one was William Waldorf Astor of the present generation, who, we are told, "sold a million dollars worth of unpromising tenement house property in 1890."14 What fantasy of action was it that caused William Waldorf Astor to so depart from the