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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 8331323, member: 110350&quot;][USER=108806]@Alwin[/USER], I read all 15(!) or so blog posts by M. Gaspard Landau about the Passage St. Pierre, where my grandfather was born in 1887, at the link you provided. It certainly seems that it was even worse than I imagined, given statements like these:</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Until its end, the Saint-Pierre passage was devoid of sewers, and the question of the flow and disposal of waste water will greatly contribute to giving it its reputation for insalubrity.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Regarding a neighboring building:</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Families included, more than fifty people lived in the building (56 counted in 1896 and 50 in 1900). In the 1880s, the two two-room dwellings on the 3rd floor where the widow Bazot and the widow Bulot had lived were divided in two to accommodate more tenants, and the 17 dwellings in the building, as well as the tavern under the vault, had a single water station on the ground floor. In the corridors of each floor and on the stairs, openings in the descents allowed the tenants to evacuate their waste water, and there was only one toilet.</p><p><br /></p><p>As everywhere else in the Passage Saint-Pierre, which had no sewer network, the evacuation of waste water was done here too by three gutters, two of which were uncovered, which flowed into the passage.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Perhaps not surprisingly, the first person to die in the Paris cholera epidemic of 1884 was a young man who worked in a laundry in the Passage St. Pierre.</p><p><br /></p><p>I doubt things were any worse in the tenements on the Lower East Side where the family lived after emigrating to the USA.</p><p><br /></p><p>The blog had three different photos showing, at different times in the late 19th century up to about 1913, the building at No. 1 Passage St. Pierre where my grandfather lived with his parents and older sister for the first 13 months of his life. In each photo, it&#039;s the first door to the immediate right in the foreground of the photo, after one emerges from the vault covering the entrance to the Passage from the Rue St. Antoine:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1476822[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1476823[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1476824[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>The third photo was by Atget, circa 1900. The first seems to have</p><p>been taken in 1913. I don&#039;t know the date of the second.</p><p>or the identity of the photographer.</p><p><br /></p><p>I was surprised to learn that the building at No. 1, as well as the one next to it, actually survived (with different entrances) the tear-down of the Passage St. Pierre and its other buildings. They lasted until the 1950s, when they were finally demolished. The history of the building at No. 1&nbsp; (which already existed in 1796) is specifically discussed in detail at <a href="https://ruebeautreillis.blog/2019/03/30/histoires-de-quartier-la-rue-neuve-saint-pierre-et-lancien-passage-saint-pierre-9-le-passage-saint-pierre-cote-impair-1/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://ruebeautreillis.blog/2019/03/30/histoires-de-quartier-la-rue-neuve-saint-pierre-et-lancien-passage-saint-pierre-9-le-passage-saint-pierre-cote-impair-1/" rel="nofollow">https://ruebeautreillis.blog/2019/03/30/histoires-de-quartier-la-rue-neuve-saint-pierre-et-lancien-passage-saint-pierre-9-le-passage-saint-pierre-cote-impair-1/</a>.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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