Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New ...

Gerald Stewart worked as shipping clerk, Judith as a domestic servant, and Edward as a book packer.

A nuclear family and lodgers who had no ostensible relationship to either the members of the nuclear family or, in most cases, each other constituted the most common type of household. Richard Critten, a twenty-six-year-old waiter from Virginia, is an example of a lodger living with a nuclear family. Critten belonged to the Wood household, headed by Charles Wood of North Carolina. This household had seven members: Wood, his wife, their son, and four lodgers. Two of the lodgers, Rose and Walter Holmes, were a married couple; the remaining lodgers—Harris Williams and Critten—were unmarried men. In the ideal arrangement, the two married couples, the son, and the two male lodgers would have each had a room, totaling five bedrooms. Such an arrangement, however, was unlikely. While it is impossible to know how many rooms were in the apartment, it was improbable that the Woods had five bedrooms. It was more likely that Harris Williams, Richard Critten, and perhaps even the son, shared a room. Perhaps Williams and Critten shared a bed, a practice common in lodger situations. Called the hotbed system, families offered lodgers accommodations where night workers and day workers shared a bed.¹⁹

The lodging system in Harlem allowed the host family to pay exorbitant rents and provide housing for individuals who could not find lodgings in other parts of the city, all the while adding to the problem of congestion. One hundred and thirty, or over half of the residents in 2460 Seventh Avenue, were lodgers whose income helped pay rental fees ranging from $35 to $90 per month.²⁰ It exacerbated unsanitary, overcrowded conditions and created an environment where a lack of privacy and social estrangement were pervasive.²¹ When having a conversation with his friend about housing and roomers in Harlem, Langston Hughes' character Jesse B. Semple, a personality in scores of short stories about Harlem, states that “roomers dip into a man's