The Battle with the Slum
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Title: The Battle with the Slum
Author: Jacob A. Riis
Release date: March 1, 2009 [eBook #28228]
Language: English
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THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
[Illustration: Editor's logo.]
[Illustration: Author.]
THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF "THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN," "HOW THE
OTHER HALF LIVES," ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1902
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1902,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1902.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
Three years ago I published under the title "A Ten Years' War" a series
of papers intended to account for the battle with the slum since I wrote
"How the Other Half Lives." A good many things can happen in three
years. So many things have happened in these three, the fighting has
been so general all along the line and has so held public attention,
that this seems the proper time to pass it all in review once more. That
I have tried to do in this book, retaining all that still applied of the
old volume and adding as much more. The "stories" were printed in the
_Century Magazine_. They are fact, not fiction. If the latter, they
would have no place here.
"The Battle with the Slum" is properly the sequel to "How the Other Half
Lives," and tells how far we have come and how. "With his usual
hopefulness," I read in the annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science of my book three years ago, "the author is still
looking forward to better things in the future." I was not deceived
then. Not in the thirty years before did we advance as in these three,
though Tammany blocked the way most of the time. It is great to have
lived in a day that sees such things done.
J. A. R.
RICHMOND HILL,
August 27, 1902.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction. What the Fight is about 1
CHAPTER
I. Battling against Heavy Odds 9
II. The Outworks of the Slum taken 36
III. The Devil's Money 63
IV. The Blight of the Double-decker 76
V. "Druv into Decency" 113
VI. The Mills House 154
VII. Pietro and the Jew 175
VIII. On whom shall we shut the Door? 202
IX. The Genesis of the Gang 227
X. Jim 256
XI. Letting in the Light 264
XII. The Passing of Cat Alley 310
XIII. Justice to the Boy 341
XIV. The Band begins to play 385
XV. "Neighbor" the Password 396
XVI. Reform by Humane Touch 413
XVII. The Unnecessary Story of Mrs. Ben Wah and Her Parrot 441
Index 451
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Theodore Roosevelt _Frontispiece_
PAGE
One of the Five Points Fifty Years Ago 12
The "Old Church" Tenement 15
An Old Wooster Street Court 17
A Fourth Ward Colony in the Bad Old Days 18
Dens of Death 21
Gotham Court 24
Green Dragon Yard, London 26
A Flagged Hallway in the "Big Flat" 28
Jersey Street Rookeries 32
The Survival of the Unfittest 33
The Rear Tenement grows up 38
Professor Felix Adler 39
A Cellar Dive in the Bend 41
It costs a Dollar a Month to sleep in these Sheds 46
Mulberry Street Police Station. Waiting for the Lodging to open 49
Night in Gotham Court 52
A Mulberry Bend Alley 55
"In the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to the 'Commissioner'" 58
"With his whole hungry little soul in his eyes" 78
One Family's Outlook on the Air Shaft. The Mother said, "Our
daughter does not care to come home to sleep" 93
The only Bath-tub in the Block. It hangs in the Air Shaft 103
The Old Style of Tenements, with Yards 106
As a Solid Block of Double-deckers, lawful until now, would
appear 106
Richard Watson Gilder 117
The Mott Street Barracks 122
R. Fulton Cutting 128
Alfred Corning Clark Buildings 131
The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn 141
A Typical East Side Block 146
Robert W. de Forest 147
Plan of a Typical Floor of the Competition in the C. O. S.
Plans of Model Tenements 150
Plans of Tenements 151
A Seven-cent Lodging House in the Bowery 155
They had a Mind to see how it looked 157
Doorway of the Mills House, No. 1 159
Evening in One of the Courts in the Mills House, No. 1 163
Lodging Room in the Leonard Street Police Station 168
Women's Lodging Room in Eldridge Street Police Station 169
A "Scrub" and her Bed--the Plank 171
What a Search of the Lodgers brought forth 173
Bedroom in the New City Lodging Houses 177
"Are we not young enough to work for him?" 179
The Play School. Dressing Dolls for a Lesson 189
Label of Consumers' League 197
Josephine Shaw Lowell 198
One Door that has been opened: St. John's Park in Hudson
Street, once a Graveyard 203
Dr. Jane Elizabeth Robbins 205
One Way of bringing the Children into Camp: Basket-weaving in
Vacation School 210
The Children's Christmas Tree 219
Jacob Beresheim 229
Heading off the Gang. Vacation Playground near Old Frog Hollow 237
Craps 242
Children's Playground. Good Citizenship at the Bottom of this
Barrel 245
The Gang fell in with Joyous Shouts 253
"Oh, mother! you were gone so long" 261
Keep off the Grass 266
Colonel George E. Waring, Jr. 269
A Tammany-swept East Side Street before Colonel Waring's Day 272
The Same Street when Colonel Waring wielded the Broom 273
The Mulberry Bend 277
Bone Alley 280
Mulberry Bend Park 289
Roof Playground on a Public School 291
Kindergarten on the Recreation Pier at the Foot of East 24th
Street 297
The East River Park 301
The Seward Park 303
The Seward Park on Opening Day 305
In the Roof Garden of the Hebrew Educational Alliance 306
Bottle Alley, Whyó Gang's Headquarters 308
The First Christmas Tree in Gotham Court 312
The Mouth of the Alley 317
The Wrecking of Cat Alley 327
Trilby 331
Old Barney 334
The Old and the New 343
Public School No. 177, Manhattan 347
Letter H Plan of Public School No. 165 352
Public School No. 153, The Bronx 356
Girls' Playground on the Roof 360
The New Idea: a Stairway of Public School No. 170 363
Truck Farming on the Site of Stryker's Lane 367
Doorway of Public School No. 165 370
Main Entrance of Public School No. 153 375
Superintendent C. B. J. Snyder 381
"The fellows and papa and mamma shall be invited in yet" 392
The "Slide" that was the Children's only Playground once 394
A Cooking Lesson in Vacation School 401
"Such a ball-room!" 408
Teaching the Girls to swim 411
Athletic Meets in Crotona Park 415
Flag Drill in the King's Garden 437
Mrs. Ben Wah 444
THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT
The slum is as old as civilization. Civilization implies a race to get
ahead. In a race there are usually some who for one cause or another
cannot keep up, or are thrust out from among their fellows. They fall
behind, and when they have been left far in the rear they lose hope and
ambition, and give up. Thenceforward, if left to their own resources,
they are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a
bad master. They drag one another always farther down. The bad
environment becomes the heredity of the next generation. Then, given the
crowd, you have the slum ready-made.
The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it her
enemy. It was a losing fight until conscience joined forces with fear
and self-interest against it. When common sense and the golden rule
obtain among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. The two have
not always been classed together, but here they are plainly seen to
belong together. Justice to the individual is accepted in theory as the
only safe groundwork of the commonwealth. When it is practised in
dealing with the slum, there will shortly be no slum. We need not wait
for the millennium, to get rid of it. We can do it now. All that is
required is that it shall not be left to itself. That is justice to it
and to us, since its grievous ailment is that it cannot help itself.
When a man is drowning, the thing to do is to pull him out of the water;
afterward there will be time for talking it over. We got at it the other
way in dealing with our social problems. The wise men had their day, and
they decided to let bad enough alone; that it was unsafe to interfere
with "causes that operate sociologically," as one survivor of these
unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost
the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically"
are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who
trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge
of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them. We have not
done yet paying the bills he ran up for us. Some time since we turned
to, to pull the drowning man out, and it was time. A little while
longer, and we should hardly have escaped being dragged down with him.
The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes
which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom,
brought on an acute attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too
many of us had supposed that, built as our commonwealth was on universal
suffrage, it would be proof against the complaints that harassed older
states; but in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that.
Having solemnly resolved that all men are created equal and have certain
inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, we shut our eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was
as if a man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to bed
with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula was all right, but
merely repeating it worked no cure. When, after a hundred years, we
opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the
working-woman in our cities; upon "knee pants" at forty cents a dozen
for the making; upon the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city life,
ten per cent each year for the trench, truly the Lost Tenth of the slum.
Our country had grown great and rich; through our ports was poured food
for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets multitudes huddled
in ignorance and want. The foreign oppressor had been vanquished, the
fetters stricken from the black man at home; but his white brother, in
his bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a distinct
note of menace. Political freedom we had won; but the problem of
helpless poverty, grown vast with the added offscourings of the Old
World, mocked us, unsolved. Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently
its stamp upon the government of our cities, and it became the scandal
and the peril of our political system.
So the battle began. Three times since the war that absorbed the
nation's energies and attention had the slum confronted us in New York
with its challenge. In the darkest days of the great struggle it was the
treacherous mob;[1] later on, the threat of the cholera, which found
swine foraging in the streets as the only scavengers, and a swarming
host, but little above the hog in its appetites and in the quality of
the shelter afforded it, peopling the back alleys. Still later, the mob,
caught looting the city's treasury with its idol, the thief Tweed, at
its head, drunk with power and plunder, had insolently defied the
outraged community to do its worst. There were meetings and protests.
The rascals were turned out for a season; the arch-chief died in jail. I
see him now, going through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as
a newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high
as ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile
prison was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old
gates preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the
memory of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration
of the fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure
with in the Sixth Ward. He never "squealed," and he was "so good to the
poor"--evidence that the slum is not laid by the heels by merely
destroying Five Points and the Mulberry Bend. There are other fights to
be fought in that war, other victories to be won, and it is slow work.
It was nearly ten years after the Great Robbery before decency got a
good upper grip. That was when the civic conscience awoke in 1879.
[Footnote 1: The draft riots of 1863.]
And after all that, the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness of
a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly
upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell,"
and the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party
of organized robbery, at the door of which it was all laid, that he was
"in politics, working for his own pocket all the time, same as you and
everybody else!"
Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle has got to be fought,
and fought out. For it is one thing or the other: either we wipe out the
slum, or it wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It cannot
be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and surrender means the end of
government by the people.
If any one believes this to be needless alarm, let him think a moment.
Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to
govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. The slum
stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath.
This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference,
self-seeking, greed. It is human nature. We are brothers whether we own
it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we
shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue.
When the slum flourishes unchallenged in the cities, their wharves may,
indeed, be busy, their treasure-houses filled,--wealth and want go so
together,--but patriotism among their people is dead.
As long ago as the very beginning of our republic, its founders saw that
the cities were danger-spots in their plan. In them was the peril of
democratic government. At that time, scarce one in twenty-five of the
people in the United States lived in a city. Now it is one in three. And
to the selfishness of the trader has been added the threat of the slum.
Ask yourself then how long before it would make an end of us, if let
alone.
Put it this way: you cannot let men live like pigs when you need their
votes as freemen; it is not safe.[2] You cannot rob a child of its
childhood, of its home, its play, its freedom from toil and care, and
expect to appeal to the grown-up voter's manhood. The children are our
to-morrow, and as we mould them to-day so will they deal with us then.
Therefore that is not safe. Unsafest of all is any thing or deed that
strikes at the home, for from the people's home proceeds citizen virtue,
and nowhere else does it live. The slum is the enemy of the home.
Because of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called "The
Homeless City." When this people comes to be truly called a nation
without homes there will no longer be any nation.
[Footnote 2: "The experiment has been long tried on a large scale,
with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from
early infancy, you allow human beings to _live_ like brutes, you can
degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more
intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human
hearts."--_Report on the Health of British Towns._]
Hence, I say, in the battle with the slum we win or we perish. There is
no middle way. We shall win, for we are not letting things be the way
our fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to
be won in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep
on fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits
upon the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the
brotherhood. As a man does in dealing with his brother so it is the
way of God that his children shall reap, that through toil and tears we
may make out the lesson which sums up all the commandments and alone can
make the earth fit for the kingdom that is to come.
CHAPTER I
BATTLING AGAINST HEAVY ODDS
The slum I speak of is our own. We made it, but let us be glad we have
no patent on the manufacture. It is not, as one wrote with soul quite
too patriotic to let the Old World into competition on any terms, "the
offspring of the American factory system." Not that, thank goodness! It
comes much nearer to being a slice of original sin which makes right of
might whenever the chance offers. When to-day we clamor for air and
light and water as man's natural rights because necessary to his being,
we are merely following in the track Hippocrates trod twenty-five
centuries ago. How like the slums of Rome were to those of New York any
one may learn from Juvenal's Satires and Gibbon's description of Rome
under Augustus. "I must live in a place where there are no fires, no
nightly alarms," cries the poet, apostle of commuters. "Already is
Ucalegon shouting for water, already is he removing his chattels; the
third story in the house you live in is already in a blaze. You know
nothing about it. For if the alarm begin from the bottom of the stairs,
he will be the last to be burned whom a single tile protects from the
rain where the tame pigeons lay their eggs." (Clearly they had no
air-shafts in the Roman tenements!) "Codrus had a bed too small for his
Procula; six little jugs, the ornament of his sideboard, and a little
can, besides, beneath it.... What a height it is from the lofty roofs
from which a potsherd tumbles on your brains. How often cracked and
chipped earthenware falls from the windows.... Pray and bear about with
you the miserable wish that they may be contented with throwing down
only what the broad basins have held.... If you can tear yourself away
from the games in the circus, you can buy a capital house at Sora, or
Fabrateria, or Frasino, for the price at which you are now hiring your
dark hole for one year. There you will have your little garden ... live
there enamoured of the pitchfork.... It is something to be able in any
spot to have made oneself proprietor even of a single lizard.... None
but the wealthy can sleep in Rome."[3]
[Footnote 3: Satire III, Juvenal.]
One reads with a grim smile of the hold-ups of old: "'Where do you come
from?' he (policeman?) thunders out. 'You don't answer? Speak or be
kicked! Say, where do you hang out?' It is all one whether you speak or
hold your tongue; they beat you just the same, and then, in a passion,
force you to give bail to answer for the assault.... I must be off. Let
those stay ... for whom it is an easy matter to get contracts for
building temples, clearing rivers, constructing harbors, cleansing
sewers, etc."[4] Not even in the boss and his pull can we claim
exclusive right.
[Footnote 4: Satire III, Juvenal.]
Rome had its walls, as New York has its rivers, and they played a like
part in penning up the crowds. Within space became scarce and dear, and
when there was no longer room to build in rows where the poor lived,
they put the houses on top of one another. That is the first chapter of
the story of the tenement everywhere. Gibbon quotes the architect
Vitruvius, who lived in the Augustan age, as complaining of "the common
though inconvenient practice of raising houses to a considerable height
in the air. But the loftiness of the buildings, which often consisted of
hasty work and insufficient material, was the cause of frequent and
fatal accidents, and it was repeatedly enacted by Augustus as well as by
Nero that the height of private dwellings should not exceed the measure
of seventy feet above the ground."
"Repeatedly" suggests that the jerry-builder was a hard nut to crack
then as now. As to Nero's edict, New York enacted it for its own
protection in our own generation.
[Illustration: One of the Five Points Fifty Years ago.]
Step now across eighteen centuries and all the chapters of the dreary
story to the middle of the century we have just left behind, and look
upon this picture of the New World's metropolis as it was drawn in
public reports at a time when a legislative committee came to New York
to see how crime and drunkenness came to be the natural crop of a
population "housed in crazy old buildings, crowded, filthy tenements in
rear yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and
stables converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter
brutes," or in towering tenements, "often carried up to a great height
without regard to the strength of the foundation walls." What matter?
They were not intended to last. The rent was high enough to make up for
the risk--to the property. The tenant was not considered. Nothing was
expected of him, and he came up to the expectation, as men have a trick
of doing. "Reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance
were left to work out their inevitable results, until the entire
premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but
sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering,
water-rotted roofs, or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars."[5]
[Footnote 5: Report of Select Committee of Assembly. New York,
1857.]
We had not yet taken a lesson from Nero. That came later. But otherwise
we were abreast. No doubt the Roman landlord, like his New York brother
of a later day, when called to account, "urged the filthy habits of his
tenants as an excuse for the condition of the property." It has been the
landlord's plea in every age. "They utterly forgot," observes the
sanitarian who was set to clean up, "that it was the tolerance of those
habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were
alone responsible."[6]
[Footnote 6: York Health Department Report, 1866, Appendix A, p. 6.]
Those days came vividly back to me last winter, when in a Wisconsin
country town I was rehearsing the story of the long fight, and pointing
out its meaning to us all. In the audience sat a sturdy, white-haired,
old farmer who followed the recital with keen interest, losing no word.
When he saw this picture of one of the Five Points, he spoke out loud:
"Yes! that is right. I was there." It turned out that he and his sister
had borne a hand in the attack upon that stronghold of the slum by the
forces of decency, in 1849 and 1850, which ended in the wiping out of
the city's worst disgrace. It was the first pitched battle in the fight.
Soon after he had come west and taken homestead land; but the daily
repetition during a lifetime of the message to men, which the woods and
the fields and God's open sky have in keeping, had not dulled his ears
to it, and after fifty years his interest in his brothers in the great
city was as keen as ever, his sympathies as quick. He had driven twenty
miles across the frozen prairie to hear my story. It is his kind who win
such battles, and a few of them go a long way.
[Illustration: The "Old Church" Tenement.]
A handful of Methodist women made the Five Points decent. To understand
what that meant, look at the "dens of death" in Baxter Street, which
were part of it, "houses," says the health inspector,[7] "into which the
sunlight never enters ... that are dark, damp, and dismal throughout all
the days of the year, and for which it is no exaggeration to say that
the money paid to the owners as rent is literally the 'price of blood.'"
It took us twenty-four years after that to register the conviction in
the form of law that that was good cause for the destruction of a
tenement in cold blood; but we got rid of some at that time in a fit of
anger. The mortality officially registered in those "dens of death" was
17.5 per cent of their population. We think now that the death-rate of
New York is yet too high at 19 or 20 in a thousand of the living.
[Footnote 7: Report of Board of Health, New York, 1869, p. 346.]
A dozen steps away in Mulberry Street, called "Death's Thoroughfare" in
the same report, were the "Old Church Tenements," part of the Five
Points and nearly the worst part. "One of the largest contributors to
the hospitals," this repulsive pile had seen the day when men and women
sat under its roof and worshipped God. When the congregation grew rich,
it handed over its house to the devil and moved up-town. That is not
putting it too strong. Counting in the front tenements that shut out
what little air and sunshine might otherwise have reached the wretched
tenants, it had a population of 360 according to the record, and a
mortality of 75 per thousand!
[Illustration: An Old Wooster Street Court.]
The sketches of the Fourth Ward and Wooster Street barracks are
reproduced from an old report of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor. They rightly made out, those early missionaries,
that the improvement must begin with the people's homes, or not at all,
and allowed no indifference on the part of the public to turn them from
their path. It is worth the while of Chicago and the other Western
cities that are growing with such joyful metropolitan ambitions, to
notice that their slums look to-day very much as New York's did then. In
fifty years how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the
Assembly Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system.
"Forgetfulness of the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It
comes to the same thing. Whether seen from the point of view of the
citizen, the philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest
investment a city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade. In a
Mississippi river town, when pleading for the turning over to the
people's use of some vacant land on the river-shore that would make a
fine breathing space, I was told that by and by they would consider it.
Just now it was too valuable for factory purposes. When the city had
grown opulent, in say twenty-five years, they would be willing to hand
it over. Fatal delusion! Men do not grow that kind of sense as they grow
rich. The land will be always "too valuable." When we in New York were
scandalized at last into making a park of the Mulberry Bend, it cost us
a million and a half, and it had made the slum a fixture, not to be
dislodged. No! the way to fight the slum is to head it off. It is like
fighting a fire. Chasing it up is hard and doubtful work; the chances
are that you will not overtake it till the house is burned down.
[Illustration: A Fourth Ward Colony in the Bad Old Days.]
There were those who thought when the Civil War was over, that a big
fire would not be the worst thing that could happen to New York; and,
if it could have burned sense into men's minds as it burned up the
evidence of their lack of it, they would have been right. But forty per
cent--the rent some of the barracks brought--is a powerful damper on
sense and conscience, even with the cholera at the door. However, the
fear of it gave us the Citizens' Council of Hygiene, and New York heard
the truth for once.
"Not only," it ran, "does filth, overcrowding, lack of privacy and
domesticity, lack of ventilation and lighting, and absence of
supervision and of sanitary regulation still characterize the greater
number of the tenements; but they are built to a greater height in
stories; there are more rear houses built back to back with other
buildings, correspondingly situated on parallel streets; the courts and
alleys are more greedily encroached upon and narrowed into unventilated,
unlighted, damp, and well-like holes between the many-storied front and
rear tenements; and more fever-breeding wynds and _culs-de-sac_ are
created as the demand for the humble homes of the laboring poor
increases."[8] The Council, which was composed of sixteen of New York's
most distinguished physicians, declared that by ordinary sanitary
management the city's death-rate should be reduced thirty per cent. Its
judgment has been more than borne out. In the thirty-five years that
have passed since, it has in fact been reduced over fifty per cent.
[Footnote 8: Council of Hygiene's Report, 1866.]
Men and women were found living in cellars deep down under the ground.
One or two of those holes are left still in Park Street near the Five
Points Mission, but they have not been used as living-rooms for a
generation. In cellars near the river the tide rose and fell, compelling
the tenants "to keep the children in bed till ebb-tide." The plumber had
come upon the field, but his coming brought no relief. His was not a
case of conscience. "Untrapped soil pipes opened into every floor and
poisoned the tenants."
Where the "dens of death" were in Baxter Street, big barracks crowded
out the old shanties. More came every day. I remember the story of those
shown in the picture. They had been built only a little while when
complaint came to the Board of Health of smells in the houses. A
sanitary inspector was sent to find the cause. He followed the smell
down in the cellar and, digging there, discovered that the waste pipe
was a blind. It had simply been run three feet into the ground and was
not connected with the sewer.
The houses were built to sell. That they killed the tenants was no
concern of builder's. His name, by the way, was Buddensiek. A dozen
years after, when it happened that a row of tenements he was building
fell down ahead of time, before they were finished and sold, and killed
the workmen, he was arrested and sent to Sing Sing for ten years, for
manslaughter.
[Illustration: Dens of Death.]
That time he had forgotten to put lime in the mortar. It was just sand.
When the houses fell in the sight of men, the law was at last able to
make him responsible. It failed in the matter of the soil pipe. It does
sometimes to this very day. Knocking a man in the head with an axe, or
sticking a knife into him, goes against the grain. Slowly poisoning a
hundred so that the pockets of one be made to bulge may not even banish
a man from respectable society. We are a queer lot in some things.
However, that is hardly quite fair to society. It is a fact that that
part of it which would deserve the respect of its fellow-citizens has
got rid of its tenement-house property in recent years. It speculates in
railway shares now.
Twenty cases of typhoid fever from a single house in one year was the
record that had gone unconsidered. Bedrooms in tenements were dark
closets, utterly without ventilation. There couldn't be any. The houses
were built like huge square boxes, covering nearly the whole of the lot.
Some light came in at the ends, but the middle was always black. Forty
thousand windows, cut by order of the Health Board that first year, gave
us a daylight view of the slum: "damp and rotten and dark, walls and
banisters sticky with constant moisture." Think of living babies in such
hell-holes; and make a note of it, you in the young cities who can still
head off the slum where we have to wrestle with it for our sins. Put a
brand upon the murderer who would smother babies in dark holes and
bedrooms. He is nothing else. Forbid the putting of a house five stories
high, or six, on a twenty-five foot lot, unless at least thirty-five per
cent of the lot be reserved for sunlight and air. Forbid it absolutely,
if you can. It is the devil's job, and you will have to pay his dues in
the end, depend on it.
And while you are about it make a note of a fact we let go unheeded too
long to our harm, and haven't grasped fully yet. The legislative
committee of 1857 said it: "to prevent drunkenness provide every man
with a clean and comfortable home." Call it paternalism, crankery, any
other hard name you can think of, all the same it goes down underneath
the foundation of things. I have known drunkards to wreck homes a plenty
in my time; but I have known homes, too, that made drunkards by the
shortest cut. I know a dozen now--yes, ten dozen--from which, if I had
to live there, I should certainly escape to the saloon with its
brightness and cheer as often and as long as I could to brood there
perhaps over the fate which sowed desolation in one man's path that
another might reap wealth and luxury. That last might not be my way, but
it is a human way, and it breeds hatred which is not good mortar for us
to build with. It does not bind. Let us remember that and just be
sensible about things, or we shall not get anywhere.
[Illustration: Gotham Court.]
By which I do not mean that we are not getting anywhere; for we are.
Look at Gotham Court, described in the health reports of the sixties as
a "packing-box tenement" of the hopeless back-to-back type, which meant
that there was no ventilation and could be none. The stenches from the
"horribly foul cellars" with their "infernal system of sewerage" must
needs poison the tenants all the way up to the fifth story. I knew the
court well, knew the gang that made its headquarters with the rats in
the cellar, terrorizing the helpless tenants; knew the well-worn rut of
the dead-wagon and the ambulance to the gate, for the tenants died there
like flies in all seasons, and a tenth of its population was always in
the hospital. I knew the story of how it had been built by a Quaker with
good intentions, but without good sense, for the purpose of rescuing
people from the awful cellar-holes they burrowed in around there,--this
within fifty-one years of the death of George Washington, who lived just
across the street on the crest of Cherry Hill when he was
President,--and how in a score of years from the time it was built it
had come to earn the official description, "a nuisance which, from its
very magnitude, is assumed to be unremovable and irremediable."[9] That
was at that time. But I have lived to see it taken in hand three times,
once by the landlord under compulsion of the Board of Health, once by
Christian men bent upon proving what could be done on their plan with
the worst tenement house. And a good deal was accomplished. The
mortality was brought below the general death-rate of the city, and the
condition of the living was made by comparison tolerable. Only the best
was bad in that spot, on account of the good Quaker's poor sense, and
the third time the court was taken in hand it was by the authorities,
who destroyed it, as they should have done a generation before. Oh, yes,
we are getting there; but that sort of thing takes time.
[Footnote 9: Health Department Report, 1870, p. 111.]
[Illustration: Green Dragon Yard, London.]
Going through Whitechapel, London, about the time we were making ready
to deal with Gotham Court as it deserved, I photographed Green Dragon
yard as typical of what I saw about me. Compare the court and the yard
and see the difference between our slum problem and that of Old World
cities. Gotham Court contained 142 families when I made a canvass of it
in the old days, comprising over 700 persons, not counting the vagrants
who infested the cellars. The population of Green Dragon Yard was
greater than the sight of it would lead you to expect, for in
Whitechapel one-room flats were the rule; but with its utmost crowding
it came nowhere near the court. Sullen discontent was the badge of it.
Gotham Court was in an active state of warfare at all hours, for its
population was evenly divided between Irish and Italians, with only two
German families, who caught it from both sides. But there was hope in
that, for they were on the move; before the court was torn down,
one-third of its tenants were Greeks. Their slum over yonder is dead,
black, given over to smoky chimneys and bad draughts, with red-eyed and
hopeless men and women forever blowing the bellows on ineffectual fires.
Ours is alive if it _is_ with fighting. There is yeast in it, and bright
skies without, if not within. I don't believe there is a bellows to be
had in New York. Our slum, with its greater crowd, has more urgent need
of sharp attention, chiefly because of the overflow of theirs which it
receives. But after all, even that represents what still had courage and
manhood enough to make it want to get away and do better. We shall "get
there" if we don't give up. It sometimes seems to me that _their_ only
hope is to get here.
[Illustration: Flagged Hallway in the "Big Flat."]
Speaking of the fair beginning of Gotham Court reminds me of the Big
Flat in Mott Street, a mighty tenement with room for a hundred families
that was another instance of reform still-born; by which I mean that it
came before we were ready for it, and willing to back it up; also before
we knew just how. That house was built by the philanthropists of those
days on such a generous scale that it reached clear through the block to
Elizabeth Street. It had not occurred to the builders that the
neighborhood was one in which such an arrangement might prove of special
convenience to the lawbreakers with which it swarmed. Thieves and thugs
made it a runway, and decent people shunned it. Other philanthropists,
with the will but without the wisdom that was needed, took it up and
tried to make a workingwoman's home of it; but that end was worse than
the beginning. The women would have none of the rules that went with
the philanthropy, and the Big Flat lapsed back among the slum tenements
and became the worst of a bad lot. I speak of it here because just now
the recollection of it is a kind of a milestone in the battle with the
slum. Twenty years after, A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince, set
another in the Park Avenue Hotel which he intended for his
working-girls; and that was a worse failure than the first, for it never
served the purpose he intended for it. And now, just as I am writing
this, they are putting the finishing touches to a real woman's hotel
up-town which will not be a failure, though it will hardly reach the
same class which the remodellers of the Big Flat had in mind. However,
we shall get there, too, now we know the way.
Slowly, with many setbacks, we battled our way into the light. A Board
of Health had come with the cholera panic in 1866. The swine that ran at
large in the streets, practically the only scavengers, were banished.
The cholera and the yellow fever that had ravaged the city by turns
never came back. The smallpox went its way, too,[10] and was heard of
again only once as an epidemic, till people had forgotten what it was
like,--enough to make them listen to the anti-vaccination cranks,--and
politics had the health department by the throat again and held the gate
open. We acquired tenement house laws, and the process of education that
had begun with the foraging ground of the swine was extended step by
step to the citizen's home. Short steps and cautious were they. Every
obstacle which the landlord's cunning and the perversion of the
machinery of the law to serve his interests could devise was thrown in
the way. It was a new doctrine to that day that any power should
intervene between him and the tenants who represented his income, and it
was held to be a hardship if not downright robbery. The builder took the
same view. Every tenement house plan was the subject of hot debate
between the Health Board and the builder, or his architect. The smallest
air-shaft had to be wrung out of him, as it were, by main strength. The
church itself was too often on the side of the enemy, where its material
interests were involved. Trinity, the wealthiest church corporation in
the land, was in constant opposition as a tenement house landlord, and
finally, to save a few hundred dollars, came near upsetting the whole
structure of tenement law that had been built up in the interest of the
toilers and of the city's safety with such infinite pains. The courts
were reluctant. Courts in such matters record rather than lead the state
of the public mind, and now that the immediate danger of an epidemic was
over, the public mind had a hard time grasping the fact that bettering
the housing of the poor was simple protection for the community. When
suit was brought against a bad landlord, judges demanded that the
department must prove not only that a certain state of soil saturation,
for instance, was dangerous to health, but that some one had been
actually made sick by that specified nuisance. Fat-boilers,
slaughter-house men, and keepers of other nuisances made common cause
against the new decency, and with these obstacles in front, the
Sanitarians found the enemy constantly recruited from the rear. With the
immense immigration that poured in after the Civil War, the evil with
which they were struggling grew enormously. Economic problems other than
the old one of rent came to vex us. The sweater moved into the East Side
tenements. Child-labor grew and swelled.
[Footnote 10: They had "health wardens" in the old days, and the
Council of Hygiene tells of the efficient way two of them fought the
smallpox. One stood at the foot of the stairs and yelled to those
minding a patient in the next story to "put pieces of camphor about
the clothes of the sick and occasionally throw a piece on the hot
stove." The other summoned the occupants of a smallpox smitten
tenement to the hall door and cautioned them to say nothing about it
to any one, or he would send them all to the pest-house!]
The tenement had grown its logical crop. In the sweating conspiracy it
is a prime factor. Its extortionate rates make the need, and the need of
the poor was ever the opportunity of their oppressor. What they have to
take becomes the standard of all the rest. Sweating is only a modern
name for it. The cause is as old as the slum itself.
[Illustration: Jersey Street Rookeries.]
However, the new light was not without its allies. Chief among them was
the onward march of business that wiped out many a foul spot which had
sorely, tried the patience of us all. A carriage factory took the place
of the Big Flat when it had become a disgusting scandal. Jersey Street,
a short block between Mulberry and Crosby streets, to which no
Whitechapel slum could hold a candle, became a factory-street. No one
lives there now. The last who did was murdered by the gang that grew as
naturally out of its wickedness as a toadstool grows on a rotten log. He
kept the saloon on the corner of Crosby Street. Saloon and tenements are
gone together. Where they were are rows of factories, empty and silent
at night. A man may go safely there now at any hour. I should not have
advised strangers to try that when it was at its worst, though Police
Headquarters was but a block away.
[Illustration: The Survival of the Unfittest.]
I photographed that phase of the battle with the slum just before they
shut in the last tenement in the block with a factory building in its
rear. It stood for a while after that down in a deep sort of pocket with
not enough light struggling down on the brightest of days to make out
anything clearly in the rooms,--truly a survival of the unfittest; but
the tenants stayed. They had access through a hallway on Crosby Street;
they had never been used to a yard; as for the darkness, that they had
always been used to. They were "manured to the soil," in the words of
Mrs. Partington. But at length business claimed the last foot of the
block, and peace came to it and to us.
All the while we were learning. It was emphatically a campaign of
education. When the cholera threatened there was the old disposition to
lie down under the visitation and pray. The council pointed to the
fifteen hundred cases of smallpox ferreted out by its inspectors "in a
few days," and sternly reminded the people of Lord Palmerston's advice
to those who would stay an epidemic with a national fast, that they had
better turn to and clean up. We pray nowadays with broom in hand, and
the prayer tells. Do not understand me as discouraging the prayer; far
from it. But I would lend an edge to it with the broom that cuts. That
kind of foolishness we got rid of; the other kind that thinks the
individual's interest superior to the public good--that is the thing we
have got to fight till we die. But we made notches in that on which to
hang arguments that stick. Human life then counted for less than the
landlord's profits; to-day it is weighed in the scale against them.
Property still has powerful pull. "Vested rights" rise up and confront
you, and no matter how loudly you may protest that no man has the right
to kill his neighbor, they are still there. No one will contradict you,
but they won't yield--till you make them. In a hundred ways you are made
to feel that vested rights are sacred, if human life is not. But the
glory is that you _can_ make them yield. You couldn't then.
We haven't reached the millennium yet. But let us be glad. A hundred
years ago they hanged a woman on Tyburn Hill for stealing a loaf of
bread. To-day we destroy the den that helped make her a thief.
CHAPTER II
THE OUTWORKS OF THE SLUM TAKEN
I said that we got our grip when the civic conscience awoke in 1879. In
that year the slum was arraigned in the churches. The sad and shameful
story was told of how it grew and was fostered by avarice that saw in
the homeless crowds from over the sea only a chance for business, and
exploited them to the uttermost; how Christianity, citizenship, human
fellowship, shook their skirts clear of the rabble that was only good
enough to fill the greedy purse, and how the rabble, left to itself,
improved such opportunities as it found after such fashion as it knew;
how it ran elections merely to count its thugs in, and fattened at the
public crib; and how the whole evil thing had its root in the tenements,
where the home had ceased to be sacred,--those dark and deadly dens in
which the family ideal was tortured to death, and character was
smothered; in which children were "damned rather than born" into the
world, thus realizing a slum kind of foreordination to torment, happily
brief in many cases. The Tenement House Commission long afterward
called the worst of the barracks "infant slaughter houses," and showed,
by reference to the mortality lists, that they killed one in every five
babies born in them.
[Illustration: The Rear Tenement grows up. An Alley condemned by the
Council of Hygiene.]
The story shocked the town into action. Plans for a better kind of
tenement were called for, and a premium was put on every ray of light
and breath of air that could be let into it. It was not much, for the
plans clung to the twenty-five-foot lot which was the primal curse, and
the type of tenement evolved, the double-decker of the "dumb-bell"
shape, while it seemed at the time a great advance upon the black, old
packing-box kind, came with the great growth of our city to be a worse
peril than what had gone before. But what we got was according to our
sense. At least the will was there. Money was raised to build model
houses, and a bill to give the health authorities summary powers in
dealing with tenements was sent to the legislature. The landlords held
it up until the last day of the session, when it was forced through by
an angered public opinion, shorn of its most significant clause, which
proposed the licensing of tenements and so their control and effective
repression. However, the landlords had received a real set-back. Many of
them got rid of their property, which in a large number of cases they
had never seen, and tried to forget the source of their ill-gotten
wealth. Light and air did find their way into the tenements in a
half-hearted fashion, and we began to count the tenants as "souls."
That is another of our milestones in the history of New York. They were
never reckoned so before; no one ever thought of them as "souls." So,
restored to human fellowship, in the twilight of the air-shaft that had
penetrated to their dens, the first Tenement House Committee[11] was
able to make them out "better than the houses" they lived in, and a long
step forward was taken. The Mulberry Bend, the wicked core of the
"bloody Sixth Ward," was marked for destruction, and all slumdom held
its breath to see it go. With that gone, it seemed as if the old days
must be gone too, never to return. There would not be another Mulberry
Bend. As long as it stood, there was yet a chance. The slum had backing,
as it were.
[Footnote 11: The Adler Tenement House Committee of 1884. It was the
first citizens' commission. The legislative inquiry of 1856 was
conducted by a Select Committee of the Assembly.]
[Illustration: Professor Felix Adler.]
What was it like? says a man at my elbow, who never saw it. Like nothing
I ever saw before, or hope ever to see again. A crooked three-acre lot
built over with rotten structures that harbored the very dregs of
humanity. Ordinary enough to look at from the street, but pierced by a
maze of foul alleys, in the depths of which skulked the tramp and the
outcast thief with loathsome wrecks that had once laid claim to the name
of woman. Every foot of it reeked with incest and murder. Bandits'
Roost, Bottle Alley, were names synonymous with robbery and red-handed
outrage. By night, in its worst days, I have gone poking about their
shuddering haunts with a policeman on the beat, and come away in a
ferment of anger and disgust that would keep me awake far into the
morning hours planning means of its destruction. That was what it was
like. Thank God, we shall never see another such!
[Illustration: A Cellar Dive in the Bend.]
That was the exhibit that urged us on. But the civic conscience was not
very robust yet, and required many and protracted naps. It slumbered
fitfully eight long years, waking up now and then with a start, while
the Bend lay stewing in its slime. I wondered often, in those years of
delay, if it was just plain stupidity that kept the politicians from
spending the money which the law had put within their grasp; for with
every year that passed, a million dollars that could have been used for
small park purposes was lost.[12] But they were wiser than I. I
understood when I saw the changes which letting in the sunshine worked.
They were not of the kind that made for their good. We had all believed
it, but they knew it all along. At the same time, they lost none of the
chances that offered. They helped the landlords in the Bend, who
considered themselves greatly aggrieved because their property was
thereafter to front on a park instead of a pigsty, to transfer the whole
assessment of half a million dollars for park benefit to the city. They
undid in less than six weeks what it had taken considerably more than
six years to do; but the park was cheap at the price. We could afford to
pay all it cost to wake us up. When finally, upon the wave of wrath
excited by the Parkhurst and Lexow disclosures, reform came with a shock
that dislodged Tammany, it found us wide awake, and, it must be
admitted, not a little astonished at our sudden access of righteousness.
[Footnote 12: The Small Parks law of 1887 allowed the expenditure of
a million dollars a year for the making of neighborhood parks; but
only as payment for work done or property taken. If not used in any
one year, that year's appropriation was lost.]
The battle went against the slum in the three years that followed, until
it found backing in the "odium of reform" that became the issue in the
municipal organization of the greater city. Tammany made notes. The cry
meant that we were tired of too much virtue. Of what was done, how it
was done, and why, during those years, I shall have occasion to speak
further in these pages. Here I wish to measure the stretch we have come
since I wrote "How the Other Half Lives," thirteen years ago. Some of it
we came plodding, and some at full speed; some of it in the face of
every obstacle that could be thrown in our way, wresting victory from
defeat at every step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all
together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled
over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been
in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may
even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward.
Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a
certificate of character. In the last election (1901) she laid loud
claim to having built many new schools, though she had done little more
than to carry out the plans of the previous reform administration,
where they could not be upset. As a matter of fact we had fallen behind
again, sadly. But even the claim was significant.
How long we strove for those schools, to no purpose! Our arguments, our
anger, the anxious pleading of philanthropists who saw the young on the
East Side going to ruin, the warning year after year of the
superintendent of schools that the compulsory education law was but an
empty mockery where it was most needed, the knocking of uncounted
thousands of children for whom there was no room,--uncounted in sober
fact; there was not even a way of finding out how many were
adrift,[13]--brought only the response that the tax rate must be kept
down. Kept down it was. "Waste" was successfully averted at the spigot;
at the bunghole it went on unchecked. In a swarming population like that
you must have either schools or jails, and the jails waxed fat with the
overflow. The East Side, that had been orderly, became a hotbed of child
crime. And when, in answer to the charge made by a legislative committee
(1895) that the father forced his child into the shop, on a perjured age
certificate, to labor when he ought to have been at play, that father,
bent and heavy-eyed with unceasing toil, flung back the charge with the
bitter reproach that we gave him no other choice, that it was either the
street or the shop for his boy, and that perjury for him was cheaper
than the ruin of the child, we were mute. What, indeed, was there to
say? The crime was ours, not his. That was seven years ago. Once since
then have we been where we could count the months to the time when every
child that knocked should find a seat in our schools; but Tammany came
back. Once again, now, we are catching up. Yesterday Mayor Low's reform
government voted six millions of dollars for new schools. The school
census law that was forgotten almost as soon as made (the census was to
be taken once in two years, but was taken only twice) is to be enforced
again so that we know where we stand. In that most crowded neighborhood
in all the world, where the superintendent lately pleaded in vain for
three new schools, half a dozen have been built, the finest in this or
any other land,--great, light, and airy structures, with playgrounds on
the roof; and all over the city the like are going up. The briefest of
our laws, every word of which is like the blow of a hammer driving the
nails home in the coffin of the bad old days, says that never one shall
be built without its playground.
[Footnote 13: The first school census was taken in 1895 by order of
the legislature. It showed that there were 50,069 children of school
age in New York City out of school and unemployed. The number had
been variously estimated from 5000 to 150,000.]
And not for the child's use only. The band shall play there yet and
neighbor meet neighbor in such social contact as the slum has never
known to its undoing. Even as I write this the band is tuning up and the
children dancing to its strains with shouts of joy. The president of the
board of education and members of the board lead in the revolt against
the old. Clergymen applaud the opening of the school buildings on Sunday
for concerts, lectures, and neighborhood meetings. Common sense is
having its day. The streets are cleaned.
The slum has even been washed. We tried that on Hester Street years ago,
in the age of cobblestone pavements, and the result fairly frightened
us. I remember the indignant reply of a well-known citizen, a man of
large business responsibility and experience in the handling of men, to
whom the office of street-cleaning commissioner had been offered, when I
asked him if he would accept. "I have lived," he said, "a blameless life
for forty years, and have a character in the community. I cannot
afford--no man with a reputation can afford--to hold that office; it
will surely wreck it." It made Colonel Waring's reputation. He took the
trucks from the streets. Tammany, in a brief interregnum of vigor under
Mayor Grant, had laid the axe to the unsightly telegraph poles and
begun to pave the streets with asphalt, but it left the trucks and the
ash barrels to Colonel Waring as hopeless. Trucks have votes; at least
their drivers have. Now that they are gone, the drivers would be the
last to bring them back; for they have children, too, and the rescued
streets gave them their first playground. Perilous, begrudged by
policeman and storekeeper, though it was, it was still a playground.
[Illustration: It costs a Dollar a Month to sleep in these Sheds.]
But one is coming in which the boy shall rule unchallenged. The Mulberry
Bend Park kept its promise. Before the sod was laid in it two more were
under way in the thickest of the tenement house crowding, and though the
landscape gardener has tried twice to steal them, he will not succeed.
Play piers and play schools are the order of the day. We shall yet
settle the "causes that operated sociologically" on the boy with a
lawn-mower and a sand heap. You have got your boy, and the heredity of
the next one, when you can order his setting.
Social halls for the older people's play are coming where the saloon has
had a monopoly of the cheer too long. The labor unions and the reformers
work together to put an end to sweating and child-labor. The gospel of
less law and more enforcement acquired standing while Theodore Roosevelt
sat in the governor's chair rehearsing to us Jefferson's forgotten
lesson that "the whole art and science of government consists in being
honest." With a back door to every ordinance that touched the lives of
the people, if indeed the whole thing was not the subject of open
ridicule or the vehicle of official blackmail, it seemed as if we had
provided a perfect municipal machinery for bringing the law into
contempt with the young, and so for wrecking citizenship by the shortest
cut.
Of free soup there is an end. It was never food for free men. The last
spoonful was ladled out by yellow journalism with the certificate of the
men who fought Roosevelt and reform in the police board that it was
good. It is not likely that it will ever plague us again. Our experience
has taught us a new reading of the old word that charity covers a
multitude of sins. It does. Uncovering some of them has kept us busy
since our conscience awoke, and there are more left. The worst of them
all, that awful parody on municipal charity, the police station lodging
room, is gone, after twenty years of persistent attack upon the foul
dens,--years during which they were arraigned, condemned, indicted by
every authority having jurisdiction, all to no purpose. The stale beer
dives went with them and with the Bend, and the grip of the tramp on our
throat has been loosened. We shall not easily throw it off altogether,
for the tramp has a vote, too, for which Tammany, with admirable
ingenuity, found a new use, when the ante-election inspection of lodging
houses made them less available for colonization purposes than they had
been. Perhaps I should say a new way of very old use. It was simplicity
itself. Instead of keeping tramps in hired lodgings for weeks at a daily
outlay, the new way was to send them all to the island on short
commitments during the canvass, and vote them from there _en bloc_ at
the city's expense.
[Illustration: Mulberry Street Police Station. Waiting for the Lodging
to open.]
Time and education must solve that, like so many other problems which
the slum has thrust upon us. They are the forces upon which, when we
have gone as far as our present supply of steam will carry us, we must
always fall back; and this we may do with confidence so long as we keep
stirring, if it is only marking time, when that is all that can be done.
It is in the retrospect that one sees how far we have come, after all,
and from that gathers courage for the rest of the way. Thirty-two years
have passed since I slept in a police station lodging house, a lonely
lad, and was robbed, beaten, and thrown out for protesting; and when the
vagrant cur that had joined its homelessness to mine, and had sat all
night at the door waiting for me to come out,--it had been clubbed away
the night before,--snarled and showed its teeth at the doorman, raging
and impotent I saw it beaten to death on the step. I little dreamed then
that the friendless beast, dead, should prove the undoing of the
monstrous wrong done by the maintenance of these evil holes to every
helpless man and woman who was without shelter in New York; but it did.
It was after an inspection of the lodging rooms, when I stood with
Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the police board, in the one where
I had slept that night, and told him of it, that he swore they should
go. And go they did, as did so many another abuse in those two years of
honest purpose and effort. I hated them. It may not have been a very
high motive to furnish power for municipal reform; but we had tried
every other way, and none of them worked. Arbitration is good, but there
are times when it becomes necessary to knock a man down and arbitrate
sitting on him, and this was such a time. It was what we started out to
do with the rear tenements, the worst of the slum barracks, and it
would have been better had we kept on that track. I have always
maintained that we made a false move when we stopped to discuss damages
with the landlord, or to hear his side of it at all. His share in it was
our grievance; it blocked the mortality records with its burden of human
woe. The damage was all ours, the profit all his. If there are damages
to collect, he should foot the bill, not we. Vested rights are to be
protected, but, as I have said, no man has a right to be protected in
killing his neighbor.
[Illustration: Night in Gotham Court.]
However, they are down, the worst of them. The community has asserted
its right to destroy tenements that destroy life, and for that cause. We
bought the slum off in the Mulberry Bend at its own figure. On the rear
tenements we set the price, and set it low. It was a long step. Bottle
Alley is gone, and Bandits' Roost. Bone Alley, Thieves' Alley, and
Kerosene Row,--they are all gone. Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Gap have
acquired standards of decency; Poverty Gap has risen even to the height
of neckties. The time is fresh in my recollection when a different kind
of necktie was its pride; when the boy-murderer--he was barely
nineteen--who wore it on the gallows took leave of the captain of
detectives with the cheerful invitation to "come over to the wake.
They'll have a hell of a time." And the event fully redeemed the
promise. The whole Gap turned out to do the dead bully honor. I have not
heard from the Gap, and hardly from Hell's Kitchen, in five years. The
last news from the Kitchen was when the thin wedge of a column of
negroes, in their up-town migration, tried to squeeze in, and provoked a
race war; but that in fairness should not be laid up against it. In
certain local aspects it might be accounted a sacred duty; as much so as
to get drunk and provoke a fight on the anniversary of the battle of the
Boyne. But on the whole the Kitchen has grown orderly. The gang rarely
beats a policeman nowadays, and it has not killed one in a long while.
So, one after another, the outworks of the slum have been taken. It has
been beaten in many battles; even to the double-decker tenement on the
twenty-five-foot lot have we put a stop. But its legacy is with us in
the habitations of two million souls. This is the sore spot, and as
against it all the rest seems often enough unavailing. Yet it cannot be.
It is true that the home, about which all that is to work for permanent
progress must cluster, is struggling against desperate odds in the
tenement, and that the struggle has been reflected in the morals of the
people, in the corruption of the young, to an alarming extent; but it
must be that the higher standards now set up on every hand, in the
cleaner streets, in the better schools, in the parks and the clubs, in
the settlements, and in the thousand and one agencies for good that
touch and help the lives of the poor at as many points, will tell at no
distant day, and react upon the homes and upon their builders. In fact,
we know it is so from our experience last fall, when the summons to
battle for the people's homes came from the young on the East Side. It
was their fight for the very standards I spoke of, their reply to the
appeal they made to them.
To any one who knew that East Side ten years ago, the difference
between that day and this in the appearance of the children whom he sees
there must be striking. Rags and dirt are now the exception rather than
the rule. Perhaps the statement is a trifle too strong as to the dirt;
but dirt is not harmful except when coupled with rags; it can be washed
off, and nowadays is washed off where such a thing would have been
considered affectation in the days that were. Soap and water have worked
a visible cure already that goes more than skin-deep. They are moral
agents of the first value in the slum. And the day is coming soon now,
when with real rapid transit and the transmission of power to suburban
workshops the reason for the outrageous crowding shall cease to exist.
It has been a long while, a whole century of city packing, closer and
more close; but it looks as if the tide were to turn at last. Meanwhile,
philanthropy is not sitting idle and waiting. It is building tenements
on the humane plan that lets in sunshine and air and hope. It is putting
up hotels deserving of the name for the army that but just now had no
other home than the cheap lodging houses which Inspector Byrnes fitly
called "nurseries of crime." These also are standards from which there
is no backing down, even if coming up to them is slow work: and they are
here to stay, for they pay. That is the test. Not charity, but
justice,--that is the gospel which they preach.
[Illustration: A Mulberry Bend Alley.]
Flushed with the success of many victories, we challenged the slum to a
fight to the finish in 1897, and bade it come on. It came on. On our
side fought the bravest and best. The man who marshalled the citizen
forces for their candidate had been foremost in building homes, in
erecting baths for the people, in directing the self-sacrificing labors
of the oldest and worthiest of the agencies for improving the condition
of the poor. With him battled men who had given lives of patient study
and effort to the cause of helping their fellow-men. Shoulder to
shoulder with them stood the thoughtful workingman from the East Side
tenement. The slum, too, marshalled its forces. Tammany produced its
notes. It pointed to the increased tax rate, showed what it had cost to
build schools and parks and to clean house, and called it criminal
recklessness. The issue was made sharp and clear. The war cry of the
slum was characteristic: "To hell with reform!" We all remember the
result. Politics interfered, and turned victory into defeat. We were
beaten. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through
the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a
starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat
in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. Hard faces I had not
seen for years showed themselves about the dives. The mob made merry
after its fashion. The old days were coming back. Reform was dead, and
decency with it.
[Illustration: "In the hallway I ran across two children, little tots,
who were inquiring their way to 'the commissioner.'"]
A year later, I passed that same way on the night of election.[14] The
scene was strangely changed. The street was unusually quiet for such a
time. Men stood in groups about the saloons, and talked in whispers,
with serious faces. The name of Roosevelt was heard on every hand. The
dives were running, but there was no shouting, and violence was
discouraged. When, on the following day, I met the proprietor of one of
the oldest concerns in the Bowery,--which, while doing a legitimate
business, caters necessarily to its crowds, and therefore sides with
them,--he told me with bitter reproach how he had been stricken in
pocket. A gambler had just been in to see him, who had come on from the
far West, in anticipation of a wide-open town, and had got all ready to
open a house in the Tenderloin. "He brought $40,000 to put in the
business, and he came to take it away to Baltimore. Just now the cashier
of ---- Bank told me that two other gentlemen--gamblers? yes, that's
what you call them--had drawn $130,000 which they would have invested
here, and had gone after him. Think of all that money gone to Baltimore!
That's what you've done!"
[Footnote 14: 1898, when Roosevelt was elected Governor after a
fierce fight with Tammany.]
I went over to police headquarters, thinking of the sad state of that
man, and in the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to "the commissioner." The older was a hunchback
girl, who led her younger brother (he could not have been over five or
six years old) by the hand. They explained their case to me. They came
from Allen Street. Some "bad ladies" had moved into the tenement, and
when complaint was made that sent the police there, the children's
father, who was a poor Jewish tailor, was blamed. The tenants took it
out of the boy by punching his nose till it bled. Whereupon the children
went straight to Mulberry Street to see "the commissioner" and get
justice. It was the first time in twenty years that I had known Allen
Street to come to police headquarters for justice and in the discovery
that the legacy of Roosevelt had reached even to the little children I
read the doom of the slum, despite its loud vauntings.
No, it was not true that reform was dead, with decency. We had our
innings four years later and proved it; of which more farther on. It was
not the slum that had won; it was we who had lost. We were not up to the
mark,--not yet. We may lose again, more than once, but even our losses
shall be our gains, if we learn from them. And we are doing that. New
York is a many times cleaner and better city to-day than it was twenty
or even ten years ago. Then I was able to grasp easily the whole plan
for wresting it from the neglect and indifference that had put us where
we were. It was chiefly, almost wholly, remedial in its scope. Now it is
preventive, constructive, and no ten men could gather all the threads
and hold them. We have made, are making, headway, and no Tammany has the
power to stop us. They know it, too, at the Hall, and were in such
frantic haste to fill their pockets this last time that they abandoned
their old ally, the tax rate, and the pretence of making bad government
cheap government. Tammany dug its arms into the treasury fairly up to
the elbows, raising taxes, assessments, and salaries all at once, and
collecting blackmail from everything in sight. Its charges for the
lesson it taught us came high; but we can afford to pay them. If to
learning it we add common sense, we shall discover the bearings of it
all without trouble. Yesterday I picked up a book,--a learned
disquisition on government,--and read on the title-page, "Affectionately
dedicated to all who despise politics." That was not common sense. To
win the battle with the slum, we must not begin by despising politics.
We have been doing that too long. The politics of the slum are apt to be
like the slum itself, dirty. Then they must be cleaned. It is what the
fight is about. Politics are the weapon. We must learn to use it so as
to cut straight and sure. That is common sense, and the golden rule as
applied to Tammany.
Some years ago, the United States government conducted an inquiry into
the slums of great cities. To its staff of experts was attached a
chemist, who gathered and isolated a lot of bacilli with fearsome Latin
names, in the tenements where he went. Among those he labelled were the
_Staphylococcus pyogenes albus_, the _Micrococcus fervidosus_, the
_Saccharomyces rosaceus_, and the _Bacillus buccalis fortuitis_. I made
a note of the names at the time, because of the dread with which they
inspired me. But I searched the collection in vain for the real
bacillus of the slum. It escaped science, to be, identified by human
sympathy and a conscience-stricken community with that of ordinary human
selfishness. The antitoxin has been found, and it is applied
successfully. Since justice has replaced charity on the prescription the
patient is improving. And the improvement is not confined to him; it is
general. Conscience is not a local issue in our day. A few years ago, a
United States senator sought reëlection on the platform that the
decalogue and the golden rule were glittering generalities that had no
place in politics, and lost. We have not quite reached the millennium
yet, but since then a man was governor in the Empire State, elected on
the pledge that he would rule by the ten commandments. These are facts
that mean much or little, according to the way one looks at them. The
significant thing is that they are facts, and that, in spite of slipping
and sliding, the world moves forward, not backward. The poor we shall
have always with us, but the slum we need not have. These two do not
rightfully belong together. Their present partnership is at once
poverty's worst hardship and our worst blunder.
CHAPTER III
THE DEVIL'S MONEY
That was what the women called it, and the name stuck and killed the
looters. The young men of the East Side began it, and the women finished
it. It was a campaign of decency against Tammany, that one of 1901 of
which I am going to make the record brief as may be, for we all remember
it; and also, thank God, that decency won the fight.
If ever inhuman robbery deserved the name, that which caused the
downfall of Tammany surely did. Drunk with the power and plunder of four
long unchallenged years, during which the honest name of democracy was
pilloried in the sight of all men as the active partner of blackmail and
the brothel, the monstrous malignity reached a point at last where it
was no longer to be borne. Then came the crash. The pillory lied.
Tammany is no more a political organization than it is the benevolent
concern it is innocently supposed to be by some people who never learn.
It neither knows nor cares for principles. "Koch?" said its President of
the Health Department when mention was made in his hearing of the
authority of the great German doctor, "who is that man Koch you are
talking about?" And he was typical of the rest. His function was to
collect the political revenue of the department, and the city was
overrun with smallpox for the first time in thirty years. The police
force, of whom Roosevelt had made heroes, became the tools of robbers.
Robbery is the business of Tammany. For that, and for that only, is it
organized. Politics are merely the convenient pretence. I do not mean
that every Tammany man is a thief. Probably the great majority of its
adherents honestly believe that it stands for something worth fighting
for,--for personal freedom, for the people's cause,--and their delusion
is the opportunity of scoundrels. They have never understood its
organization or read its history.
For a hundred years that has been an almost unbroken record of fraud and
peculation. Its very founder, William Mooney, was charged with being a
deserter from the patriot army to the British forces. He was later on
removed from office as superintendent of the almshouse for swindling the
city. Aaron Burr plotted treason within its councils. The briefest
survey of the administration of the metropolis from his day down to that
of Tweed shows a score of its conspicuous leaders removed, indicted, or
tried, for default, bribe-taking, or theft; and the fewest were
punished. The civic history of New York to the present day is one long
struggle to free itself from its blighting grip. Its people's parties,
its committees of seventy, were ever emergency measures to that end, but
they succeeded only for a season. There have been decent Tammany mayors,
but not for long. There have been attempts to reform the organization
from within, but they have been failures. You cannot reform an
"organized appetite" except by reforming it away. And then there would
be nothing left of the organization.
For whatever the rank and file have believed, the organization has never
been anything else but the means of satisfying the appetite that never
will be cloyed. Whatever principles it has professed, they have served
the purpose only of filling the pockets of the handful of men who rule
its inner councils and use it to their own enrichment and our loss and
disgrace. We have heard its most successful leader testify brazenly
before the Mazet legislative committee that he was in politics working
for his own pocket all the time. That was his principle. And his
followers applauded till the room rang.
That is the Tammany which has placed murderers and gamblers in its high
seats. That is the Tammany which you have to fight at every step when
battling with the slum; the Tammany which, unmasked and beaten by the
Parkhurst and Lexow disclosures, came back with the Greater New York to
exploit the opportunity reform had made for itself, and gave us a lesson
we will not soon forget. For at last it dropped all pretence and showed
its real face to us.
Civil service reform was thrown to the winds; the city departments were
openly parcelled out among the district leaders: a $2000 office to
one,--two $1000 to another to even up. That is the secret of the
"organization" which politicians admire. It does make a strong body. How
it served the city in one department, the smallpox epidemic bore
witness. That department, the pride of the city and its mainstay in days
of danger, was wrecked. The first duty of the new president, when the
four years were over and Tammany out again, was to remove more than a
hundred and fifty useless employees. Their only function had been to
draw the salaries which the city paid. The streets that had been clean
became dirty--the "voter" was back "behind the broom"--and they swarmed
once more with children for whom there was no room in school. Officials
who drew big salaries starved the inmates of the almshouse on weak tea
and dry bread, and Bellevue, the poor people's hospital, became a public
scandal. In one night there were five drunken fights, one of them
between two of the attendants who dropped the corpse they were
carrying to the morgue and fought over it. The tenements were plunged
back into the foulness of their worst day; the inspectors were
answerable, not to the Health Board, but to the district leader, and the
landlord who stood well with him thumbed his nose at them and at their
orders to clean up. The neighborhood parks, acquired at such heavy
sacrifice, lay waste. Tammany took no step toward improving them. One it
did take up at Fort George; and though the property only cost the city
$600,000, the bills for taking it were $127,467. That is the true
Tammany style. In the Seward Park, where the need of relief was
greatest, Tammany election district captains built booths, rent free,
for the sale of dry goods and fish. That was "their share." Wealthy
corporations were made to pay heavily for "peace"; timid storekeepers
were blackmailed. One, a Jew, told his story: he was ordered to pay five
dollars a week for privilege of keeping open Sundays. He paid, and they
asked ten. When he refused, he was told that it would be the worse for
him. He closed up. The very next week he was sued for a hundred dollars
by a man of whom he had never borrowed anything. He did not defend the
suit, and it went against him. In three days the sheriff was in his
store. He knew the hopelessness of it then, and went out and mortgaged
his store and paid the bill. The next week another man sued him for a
hundred dollars he did not owe. He went and threw himself on his mercy,
and the man let him off for the costs.
He was one of the many thousands of toilers who look with fear to the
approaching summer because it is then the hot tenement kills their
babies. Their one chance of life then depends upon the supply of ice
that is hawked from door to door in small pieces, since tenements have
rarely other refrigerator than the draughty air-shaft. The greed of
politicians plotted to deprive them of even this chance. They had
control of docks and means of transportation and they cornered the
supply, raising the price from thirty to sixty cents a hundred pounds
and suppressing the five-cent piece. Some of them that sat in high
official station grew rich, but the poor man's babies died and he saw at
last the quality of the friendship Tammany professed for him. The
push-cart pedlers, blackmailed and driven from pillar to post, saw it.
They had escaped from unbearable tyranny in their old home to find a
worse where they thought to be free; for to their oppressors yonder at
least their women were sacred.
It is difficult to approach calmly what is left of the diabolical
recital. The police, set once more to collecting blackmail from saloon
keepers, gambling hells, policy shops, and houses of ill fame, under a
chief who on a policeman's pay became in a few short years fairly
bloated with wealth, sank to the level of their occupation or into
helpless or hopeless compliance with the apparently inevitable. The East
Side, where the home struggled against such heavy odds, became a
sinkhole of undreamt-of corruption. The tenements were overrun with lewd
women who paid the police for protection and received it. Back of them
the politician who controlled all and took the profits. This newspaper
arraignment published in January, 1901, tells the bald truth:
"Imagine, if you can, a section of the city territory completely
dominated by one man, without whose permission neither legitimate
nor illegitimate business can be conducted; where illegitimate
business is encouraged and legitimate business discouraged; where
the respectable residents have to fasten their doors and windows
summer nights and sit in their rooms with asphyxiating air and
one hundred degrees temperature, rather than try to catch the
faint whiff of breeze in their natural breathing places--the
stoops of their homes; where naked women dance by night in the
streets, and unsexed men prowl like vultures through the darkness
on "business" not only permitted, but encouraged, by the police;
where the education of infants begins with the knowledge of
prostitution and the training of little girls is training in the
arts of Phryne; where American girls brought up with the
refinements of American homes are imported from small towns
up-state, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and kept
as virtually prisoners as if they were locked up behind jail bars
until they have lost all semblance of womanhood; where small boys
are taught to solicit for the women of disorderly houses; where
there is an organized society of young men whose sole business in
life is to corrupt young girls and turn them over to bawdy
houses; where men walking with their wives along the street are
openly insulted; where children that have adult diseases are the
chief patrons of the hospitals and dispensaries; where it is the
rule, rather than the exception, that murder, rape, robbery, and
theft go unpunished--in short, where the premium of the most
awful forms of vice is the profit of the politicians.
"There is no 'wine, woman, and song' over there. The 'wine' is
stale beer, the 'woman' is a degraded money-making machine, and
the 'song' is the wail of the outraged innocent. The political
backers have got it down to what has been called a
'cash-register, commutation-ticket basis,' called so from the
fact that in some of these places they issued tickets, on the
plan of a commutation meal-ticket, and had cash registers at the
entries."
Lest some one think the newspaper exaggerating after all, let me add
Bishop Potter's comment before his Diocesan Convention. He will not be
suspected of sensationalism:
"The corrupt system, whose infamous details have been steadily
uncovered to our increasing horror and humiliation, was brazenly
ignored by those who were fattening on its spoils; and the world
was presented with the astounding spectacle of a great
municipality whose civic mechanism was largely employed in
trading in the bodies and souls of the innocent and defenceless.
What has been published in this connection is but the merest hint
of what exists--and exists, most appalling of all, as the
evidence has come to me under the seal of confidence in
overwhelming volume and force to demonstrate--under a system of
terrorism which compels its victims to recognize that to denounce
it means the utter ruin, so far as all their worldly interests
are concerned, of those who dare to do so. This infamous
organization for making merchandise of girls and boys, and
defenceless men and women, has adroitly sought to obscure a
situation concerning which all honest people are entirely clear,
by saying that vice cannot be wholly suppressed. Nobody has made
upon the authorities of New York any such grotesque demand. All
that our citizens have asked is that the government of the city
shall not be employed to protect a trade in vice, which is
carried on for the benefit of a political organization. The case
is entirely clear. No Mephistophelian cunning can obscure it, and
I thank God that there is abundant evidence that the end of such
a condition of things is not far off."
It was, indeed, coming. But Tammany, gorged with power and the lust of
it, neither saw nor heeded. At a meeting of young men on the East Side,
one of them, responding to an address by Felix Adler, drew such a
heart-rending picture of the conditions prevailing there that the echoes
of the meeting found its way into the farthest places: "Now you go," he
said, "to your quiet home in a decent street where no harm comes to you
or your wife or children in the night, for it is their home. And we--we
go with our high resolves, the noble ambitions you have stirred, to our
tenements where evil lurks in the darkness at every step, where
innocence is murdered in babyhood, where mothers bemoan the birth of a
daughter as the last misfortune, where virtue is sold into a worse
slavery than ever our fathers knew, and our sisters betrayed by paid
panders; where the name of home is as a bitter mockery, for alas! we
have none. These are the standards to which we go from here." And then
followed the whole amazing story of damning conspiracy between power and
vice in those tenements before which a whole city stood aghast.
A meeting was called the following day by Dr. Adler, of men and women
who had the welfare of their city at heart, and when they had heard the
story, they resolved that they would not rest till those things were no
longer true. One of their number was the Rev. Robert Paddock, the priest
in charge of Bishop Potter's Pro-Cathedral, right in the heart of it all
in Stanton Street. He set about gathering evidence that would warrant
the arraignment of the evil-doers in his district; but when he brought
it to the police he was treated with scorn and called liar.
The measure was nearly full. Bishop Potter came back from the East,
where he had been travelling, and met his people. Out of that meeting
came the most awful arraignment of a city government which the world has
ever heard. "Nowhere else on earth," the Bishop wrote to the Mayor of
New York, "certainly not in any civilized or Christian community, does
there exist such a situation as defiles and dishonors New York to-day."
"In the name of these little ones," his letter ran, "these weak and
defenceless ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues,
but homes in which God is feared and His law revered, and virtue and
decency honored and exemplified, I call upon you, sir, to save these
people, who are in a very real way committed to your charge, from a
living hell, defiling, deadly, damning, to which the criminal supineness
of the constituted authorities set for the defence of decency and good
order, threatens to doom them."
The Mayor's virtual response was to put the corrupt Chief of Police in
practically complete and irresponsible charge of the force. Richard
Croker, the boss of Tammany Hall, had openly counselled violence at the
election then pending (1900), and the Chief in a general order to the
force repeated the threat. But they had reckoned without Governor
Roosevelt. He compelled the Mayor to have the order rescinded, and
removed the District Attorney who had been elected on the compact
platform "to hell with reform." The whole city was aroused. The Chamber
of Commerce formed a Committee of Fifteen which soon furnished evidence
without stint of the corruption that was abroad. The connection between
the police and the gambling dens was demonstrated, and also that the
police were the mere tools of "politics." In 237 tenements that were
investigated 290 flats were found harboring prostitutes in defiance of
law. The police were compelled to act. The "Cadets," who lived by
seducing young girls and selling them to their employer at $25 a head,
were arrested and sent to jail for long terms. They showed fight, and it
developed that they had a regular organization with political
affiliations.
The campaign of 1901 approached. Judge Jerome went upon the stump and
rattled the brass checks from the cash-register that paid for the virtue
of innocent girls, the daughters of his hearers. The mothers of the East
Side, the very Tammany women themselves, rose and denounced the devil's
money, and made their husbands and brothers go to the polls and vote
their anger.[15] The world knows the rest. The "Red Light" of the East
Side damned Tammany to defeat. Seth Low was elected mayor. Decency once
more moved into the City Hall and into the homes of the poor. Croker
abdicated and went away, and a new day broke for our harassed city.
[Footnote 15: Up to that time I wrote of Tammany as "she"; but I
dropped it then as an outrage upon the sex. "It" it is and will
remain hereafter. I am ashamed of ever having put the stigma on the
name of woman.]
That, in brief, is the story of the campaign that discharged the devil
as paymaster, and put his money out of circulation--for good, let us all
hope.
CHAPTER IV
THE BLIGHT OF THE DOUBLE-DECKER
In a Stanton Street tenement, the other day, I stumbled upon a Polish
capmaker's home. There were other capmakers in the house, Russian and
Polish, but they simply "lived" there. This one had a home. The fact
proclaimed itself the moment the door was opened, in spite of the
darkness. The rooms were in the rear, gloomy with the twilight of the
tenement although the day was sunny without, but neat, even cosey. It
was early, but the day's chores were evidently done. The tea-kettle sang
on the stove, at which a bright-looking girl of twelve, with a pale but
cheery face, and sleeves brushed back to the elbows, was busy poking up
the fire. A little boy stood by the window, flattening his nose against
the pane, and gazed wistfully up among the chimney pots where a piece of
blue sky about as big as the kitchen could be made out. I remarked to
the mother that they were nice rooms.
[Illustration: "With his whole hungry little soul in his eyes."]
"Ah yes," she said, with a weary little smile that struggled bravely
with hope long deferred, "but it is hard to make a home here. We
would so like to live in the front, but we can't pay the rent."
I knew the front with its unlovely view of the tenement street too well,
and I said a good word for the air-shaft--yard or court it could not be
called, it was too small for that--which rather surprised myself. I had
found few virtues enough in it before. The girl at the stove had left
off poking the fire. She broke in the moment I finished, with eager
enthusiasm: "Why, they have the sun in there. When the door is opened
the light comes right in your face."
"Does it never come here?" I asked, and wished I had not done so, as
soon as the words were spoken. The child at the window was listening,
with his whole hungry little soul in his eyes.
Yes, it did, she said. Once every summer, for a little while, it came
over the houses. She knew the month and the exact hour of the day when
its rays shone into their home, and just the reach of its slant on the
wall. They had lived there six years. In June the sun was due. A
haunting fear that the baby would ask how long it was till June--it was
February then--took possession of me, and I hastened to change the
subject. Warsaw was their old home. They kept a little store there, and
were young and happy. Oh, it was a fine city, with parks and squares,
and bridges over the beautiful river,--and grass and flowers and birds
and soldiers, put in the girl breathlessly. She remembered. But the
children kept coming, and they went across the sea to give them a better
chance. Father made fifteen dollars a week, much money; but there were
long seasons when there was no work. She, the mother, was never very
well here,--she hadn't any strength; and the baby! She glanced at his
grave white face, and took him in her arms. The picture of the two, and
of the pale-faced girl longing back to the fields and the sunlight, in
their prison of gloom and gray walls, haunts me yet. I have not had the
courage to go back since. I recalled the report of an English army
surgeon, which I read years ago, on the many more soldiers that
died--were killed would be more correct--in barracks into which the sun
never shone than in those that were open to the light. They have yet two
months to the sun in Stanton Street.
The capmaker's case is the case of the nineteenth century of
civilization against the metropolis of America. The home, the family,
are the rallying points of civilization. The greatness of a city is to
be measured, not by its balance sheets of exports and imports, not by
its fleet of merchantmen, or by its miles of paved streets, nor even by
its colleges, its art museums, its schools of learning, but by its
homes. New York has all these, but its people live in tenements where
"all the conditions which surround childhood, youth, and womanhood make
for unrighteousness."[16] This still, after forty years of battling,
during which we have gone on piling layer upon layer of human beings and
calling _that_ home! The 15,309 tenements the Council of Hygiene found
in 1864 have become 47,000, and their population of 495,592 has swelled
into nearly a million and three-quarters.[17] There were four flights of
stairs at most in the old days. Now they build tenements six and seven
stories high, and the street has become a mere runway. It cannot take up
the crowds for which it was never meant. Go look at those East Side
streets on a summer evening or on any fair Sunday when, at all events,
some of the workers are at home, and see what they are like. In 1880 the
average number of persons to each dwelling in New York, counting them
all in, the rich and the poor, was 16.37; in 1890 it was 18.52; in 1900,
according to the United States census, the average in the old city was
20.4. It all means that there are so many more and so much bigger
tenements, and four families to the floor where there were two before.
Statistics are not my hobby. I like to get their human story out of
them. Anybody who wants them can get the figures in the census books.
But as an instance of the unchecked drift--unchecked as yet--look at
this record of the Tenth Ward, the "most crowded spot in the world." In
1880, when it had not yet attained to that bad eminence, it contained
47,554 persons, or 432.3 to the acre. In 1890 the census showed a
population of 57,596, which was 522 to the acre. The police census of
1895 found 70,168 persons living in 1514 houses, which was 643.08 to the
acre. The Health Department's census for the first half of 1898 gave a
total of 82,175 persons living in 1201 tenements, with 313 inhabited
buildings yet to be heard from. This is the process of doubling
up,--literally, since the cause and the vehicle of it all is the
double-decker tenement,--which in the year 1900 had crowded a single
block in that ward at the rate of 1724 persons per acre, and one in the
Eleventh Ward at the rate of 1894.[18] It goes on not in the Tenth Ward
or on the East Side only, but throughout the city. When, in 1897, it was
proposed to lay out a small park in the Twenty-second Ward, up on the
far West Side, it was shown that five blocks in that section, between
Forty-ninth and Sixty-second streets and Ninth and Eleventh avenues,
had a population of more than 3000 each. The block between Sixty-first
and Sixty-second streets and Tenth and Eleventh avenues harbored 4254
when the police made a count in 1900, which meant 1158 persons to the
acre.
[Footnote 16: Report of Tenement House Commission, 1900.]
[Footnote 17: Tenement house census of 1900: Manhattan and the Bronx
boroughs (the old city), 46,993 tenements, with a population of
1,701,643. The United States census of the two boroughs gave them a
population of 2,050,600. In the Greater New York there are 82,000
tenements, and two-thirds of our nearly four millions of people live
in them.]
[Footnote 18: Police census of 1900, block bounded by Canal, Hester,
Eldridge, and Forsyth streets: size 375 × 200, population 2969, rate
per acre 1724. Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and
Ridge streets: size 200 × 300, population 2609, rate per acre 1894.]
These are the facts. The question is, are they beyond our control? Let
us look at them squarely and see. In the first place, it is no answer to
the charge that New York's way of housing its workers is the worst in
the world to say that they are better off than they were where they came
from. It is not true, in most cases, as far as the home is concerned; a
shanty is better than a flat in a slum tenement, any day. Even if it
were true, it would still be beside the issue. In Poland my capmaker
counted for nothing. Nothing was expected of him. Here he ranks, after a
few brief years, politically equal with the man who hires his labor. A
citizen's duty is expected of him, and home and citizenship are
convertible terms. The observation of the Frenchman who had watched the
experiment of herding two thousand human beings in eight tenement
barracks over yonder, that the result was the "exasperation of the
tenant against society," is true the world over. We have done as badly
in New York. Social hatefulness is not a good soil for citizenship to
grow in, where political equality rules.
Nor is it going to help us any to charge it all to the tenant "who
_will_ herd." He herds because he has no other chance; because it puts
money into some one's pockets to let him. We never yet have passed a law
for his relief that was not attacked in the same or the next legislature
in the interest of the tenement-house builder. Commission after
commission has pointed out that the tenants are "better than the houses
they live in"; that they "respond quickly to improved conditions." Those
are not honest answers. The man who talks that way is a fool, or worse.
The truth is that if we cannot stop the crowds from coming, we _can_
make homes for those who come, and at a profit on the investment. That
has been proved, is being proved now every day. It is not a case of
transforming human nature in the tenant, but of reforming it in the
landlord builder. It is a plain question of the per cent he is willing
to take.
So then, we have got it on the moral ground where it belongs. Let the
capmaker's case be ever so strong, we shall yet win. We shall win his
fight and our own together; they are one. This is the way it stands at
the outset of the twentieth century: New York's housing is still the
worst in the world. We have the biggest crowds. We have been killing
the home that is our very life at the most reckless rate. But, badly as
we are off and shall be off for years to come,--allowing even that we
are getting worse off in the matter of crowding,--we know now that we
can do better. We have done it. We are every year wresting more light
and air from the builder. He no longer dares come out and fight in the
open, for he knows that public sentiment is against him. The people
understand--to what an extent is shown in a report of a Tenement House
Committee in the city of Yonkers, which the postman put on my table this
minute. The committee was organized "to prevent the danger to Yonkers of
incurring the same evils that have fallen so heavily upon New York and
have cost that city millions of money and thousands of lives." It sprang
from the Civic League, was appointed by a Republican mayor and indorsed
by a Democratic council! That is as it should be. So, we shall win.
In fact, we are winning now, backed by this very understanding. The
double-decker is doomed, and the twenty-five-foot lot has had its day.
We are building tenements in which it is possible to rear homes. We are
at last in a fair way to make the slum unprofitable, and that is the
only way to make it go. So that we may speed it the more let us go with
the capmaker a while and get his point of view. After all, that is the
one that counts; the community is not nearly as much interested in the
profits of the landlord as in the welfare of the workers.
That we may get it fairly, suppose we take a stroll through a
tenement-house neighborhood and see for ourselves. We were in Stanton
Street. Let us start there, then, going east. Towering barracks on
either side, five, six stories high. Teeming crowds. Push-cart men
"moved on" by the policeman, who seems to exist only for the purpose.
Forsyth Street: there is a church on the corner, Polish and Catholic, a
combination that strikes one as queer here on the East Side, where
Polish has come to be synonymous with Jewish. I have cause to remember
that corner. A man killed his wife in this house, and was hanged for it.
Just across the street, on the stoop of that brown-stone tenement, the
tragedy was reënacted the next year; only the murderer saved the county
trouble and expense by taking himself off also. That other stoop in the
same row witnessed a suicide.
Why do I tell you these things? Because they are true. The policeman
here will bear me out. They belong to the ordinary setting of life in a
crowd such as this. It is never so little worth living, and therefore
held so cheap along with the fierce, unceasing battle that goes on to
save it. You will go no further unless I leave it out? Very well; I
shall leave out the murder after we have passed the block yonder. The
tragedy of that is of a kind that comes too close to the everyday life
of tenement-house people to be omitted. The house caught fire in the
night, and five were burned to death,--father, mother, and three
children. The others got out; why not they? They stayed, it seems, to
make sure none was left; they were not willing to leave one behind, to
save themselves. And then it was too late; the stairs were burning.
There was no proper fire escape. That was where the murder came in; but
it was not all chargeable to the landlord, nor even the greater part.
More than thirty years ago, in 1867, the state made it law that the
stairs in every tenement four stories high should be fireproof, and
forbade the storing of any inflammable material in such houses. I do not
know when the law was repealed, or if it ever was. I only know that in
1892 the Fire Department, out of pity for the tenants and regard for the
safety of its own men, forced through an amendment to the building law,
requiring the stairs of the common type of five-story tenements to be
built of fireproof material, and that they are still of wood, just as
they always were. Ninety-seven per cent of the tenements examined by the
late Tenement House Commission (1900) in Manhattan had stairs of wood.
In Brooklyn they were _all_ of wood. Once, a couple of years ago, I
looked up the Superintendent of Buildings and asked him what it meant. I
showed him the law, which said that the stairs should be "built of
slow-burning construction or fireproof material"; and he put his finger
upon the clause that follows, "as the Superintendent of Buildings shall
decide." The law gave him discretion, and that is how he used it. "Hard
wood burns slowly," said he.
The fire of which I speak was a "cruller fire," if I remember rightly,
which is to say that it broke out in the basement bakeshop, where they
were boiling crullers (doughnuts) in fat, at 4 A.M., with a hundred
tenants asleep in the house above them. The fat went into the fire, and
the rest followed. I suppose that I had to do with a hundred such fires,
as a police reporter, before, under the protest of the Gilder Tenement
House Commission and the Good Government Clubs, the boiling of fat in
tenement bakeshops was forbidden. The Chief of the Fire Department, in
his testimony before the commission, said that "tenements are erected
mainly with a view of returning a large income for the amount of capital
invested. It is only after a fire in which great loss of life occurs
that any interest whatever is taken in the safety of the occupants." The
Superintendent of Buildings, after such a fire in March, 1896, said that
there were thousands of tenement firetraps in the city. My reporter's
notebook bears witness to the correctness of his statement, and it has
many blank leaves that are waiting to be put to that use yet. The
reckoning for eleven years showed that, of 35,844 fires in New York,
53.18 per cent were in tenement houses, though they were only a little
more than 31 per cent of all the buildings, and that 177 occupants were
killed, 523 maimed, and 625 rescued by the firemen. Their rescue cost
the lives of three of these brave men, and 453 were injured in the
effort. And when all that is said, not the half is told. A fire in the
night in one of those human beehives, with its terror and woe, is one of
the things that live in the recollection ever after as a terrible
nightmare. The fire-chief thought that every tenement house should be
fireproof, but he warned the commission that such a proposition would
"meet with strong opposition from the different interests, should
legislation be requested." He was right. It is purely a question of the
builder's profits. Up to date we have rescued the first floor from him.
That must be fireproof. We shall get the whole structure yet if we pull
long enough and hard enough, as we will.
Here is a block of tenements inhabited by poor Jews. Most of the Jews
who live over here are poor; and the poorer they are, the higher rent do
they pay, and the more do they crowd to make it up between them. "The
destruction of the poor is their poverty." It is only the old story in a
new setting. The slum landlord's profits were always the highest. He
spends nothing for repairs, and lays the blame on the tenant. The
"district leader" saves him, when Tammany is at the helm, unless he is
on the wrong side of the political fence, in which case the Sanitary
Code comes handy, to chase him into camp. A big "order" on his house is
a very effective way of making a tenement-house landlord discern
political truth on the eve of an important election. Just before the
election which put Theodore Roosevelt in the Governor's chair at Albany
the sanitary force displayed such activity as had never been known till
then in the examination of tenements belonging very largely, as it
happened, to sympathizers with the gallant Rough Rider's cause; and
those who knew did not marvel much at the large vote polled by the
Tammany candidate in the old city.
The halls of these tenements are dark. Under the law there should be a
light burning, but it is one of the rarest things to find one. The thing
seems well-nigh impossible of accomplishment. When the Good Government
Clubs set about backing up the Board of Health in its efforts to work
out this reform, which comes close to being one of the most necessary of
all,--such untold mischief is abroad in the darkness of these
thoroughfares,--the sanitary police reported 12,000 tenement halls
unlighted by night, even, and brought them, by repeated orders, down to
less than 1000 in six months. I doubt that the light burned in 1000 of
them all a month after the election that brought Tammany back. It is so
easy to put it out when the policeman's back is turned. Gas costs money.
Let what doesn't take care of itself.
We had a curious instance, at the time, of the difficulties that
sometimes beset reform. Certain halls that were known to be dark were
reported sufficiently lighted by the policeman of the district, and it
was discovered that it was his standard that was vitiated. He himself
lived in a tenement, and was used to its gloom. So an order was issued
defining darkness to the sanitary police: if the sink in the hall could
be made out, and the slops overflowing on the floor, and if a baby could
be seen on the stairs, the hall was light; if, on the other hand, the
baby's shrieks were the first warning that it was being trampled upon,
the hall was dark. Some days later the old question arose about an
Eldridge Street tenement. The policeman had reported the hall light
enough. The President of the Board of Health, to settle it once for all,
went over with me, to see for himself. The hall was very dark. He sent
for the policeman.
"Did you see the sink in that hall?" he asked.
The policeman said he did.
"But it is pitch dark. How did you see it?"
"I lit a match," said the policeman.
Four families live on these floors, with heaven knows how many children.
It was here the police commissioners were requested, in sober earnest,
some years ago, by a committee of very practical woman philanthropists,
to have the children tagged, as they do in Japan, I am told, so as to
save the policeman wear and tear in taking them back and forth between
the Eldridge Street police station and headquarters, when they got lost.
If tagged, they could be assorted at once and taken to their homes.
Incidentally, the city would save the expense of many meals. It was
shrewdly suspected that the little ones were lost on purpose in a good
many cases, as a way of getting them fed at the public expense.
[Illustration: One Family's Outlook on the Air Shaft. The Mother said,
"Our Daughter does not care to come Home to Sleep."]
That the children preferred the excitement of the police station, and
the distinction of a trip in charge of a brass-buttoned guardian, to the
Ludlow Street flat is easy enough to understand. A more unlovely
existence than that in one of these tenements it would be hard to
imagine. Everywhere is the stench of the kerosene stove that is forever
burning, serving for cooking, heating, and ironing alike, until the last
atom of oxygen is burned out of the close air. Oil is cheaper than
coal. The air shaft is too busy carrying up smells from below to bring
any air down, even if it is not hung full of washing in every story, as
it ordinarily is. Enterprising tenants turn it to use as a refrigerator
as well. There is at least a draught of air, such as it is. When fire
breaks out, this draught makes of the air shaft a flue through which the
fire roars fiercely to the roof, so transforming what was meant for the
good of the tenants into their greatest peril. The stuffy rooms bring
to mind this denunciation of the tenement builder of fifty years ago by
an angry writer, "He measures the height of his ceilings by the shortest
of the people, and by thin partitions divides the interior into as
narrow spaces as the leanest carpenter can work in." Most decidedly,
there is not room to swing the proverbial cat in any one of them. In one
I helped the children, last holiday, to set up a Christmas tree, so that
a glimpse of something that was not utterly sordid and mean might for
once enter their lives. Three weeks after, I found the tree standing yet
in the corner. It was very cold, and there was no fire in the room. "We
were going to burn it," said the little woman, whose husband was then in
the insane asylum, "and then I couldn't. It looked so kind o'
cheery-like there in the corner." My tree had borne the fruit I wished.
It remained for the New York slum landlord to assess the exact value of
a ray of sunlight,--upon the tenant, of course. Here are two
back-to-back rear tenements, with dark bedrooms on the south. The flat
on the north gives upon a neighbor's yard, and a hole two feet square
has been knocked in the wall, letting in air and sunlight; little enough
of the latter, but what there is is carefully computed in the lease. Six
dollars for this flat, six and a half for the one with the hole in the
wall. Six dollars a year per ray. In half a dozen houses in this block
have I found the same rate maintained. The modern tenement on the corner
goes higher: for four front rooms, "where the sun comes right in your
face," seventeen dollars; for the rear flat of three rooms, larger and
better every other way, but always dark, like the capmaker's, eleven
dollars. From the landlord's point of view, this last is probably a
concession. But he is a landlord with a heart. His house is as good a
one as can be built on a twenty-five-foot lot. The man who owns the
corner building in Orchard Street, with the two adjoining tenements, has
no heart. In the depth of last winter I found a family of poor Jews
living in a coop under his stairs, an abandoned piece of hallway, in
which their baby was born, and for which he made them pay eight dollars
a month. It was the most outrageous case of landlord robbery I had ever
come across, and it gave me sincere pleasure to assist the sanitary
policeman in curtailing his profits by even this much. The hall is not
now occupied.
The Jews under the stairs had two children. The shoemaker in the cellar
next door had three. They were fighting and snarling like so many dogs
over the coarse food on the table before them, when we looked in. The
baby, it seems, was the cause of the row. He wanted it all. He was a
very dirty and a very fierce baby, and the other two children were no
match for him. The shoemaker grunted fretfully at his last, "Ach, he is
all de time hungry!" At the sight of the policeman, the young imp set up
such a howl that we beat a hasty retreat. The cellar "flat" was
undoubtedly in violation of law, but it was allowed to pass. In the main
hall, on the ground floor, we counted seventeen children. The facts of
life here suspend ordinary landlord prejudices to a certain extent.
Occasionally it is the tenant who suspends them. The policeman laughed
as he told me of the case of a mother who coveted a flat into which she
well knew her family would not be admitted; the landlord was particular.
She knocked, with a troubled face, alone. Yes, the flat was to let; had
she any children? The woman heaved a sigh. "Six, but they are all in
Greenwood." The landlord's heart was touched by such woe. He let her
have the flat. By night he was amazed to find a flock of half a dozen
robust youngsters domiciled under his roof. They had indeed been in
Greenwood; but they had come back from the cemetery to stay. And stay
they did, the rent being paid.
High rents, slack work, and low wages go hand in hand in the tenements
as promoters of overcrowding. The rent is always one-fourth of the
family income, often more. The fierce competition for a bare living
cuts down wages; and when loss of work is added, the only thing left is
to take in lodgers to meet the landlord's claim. The Jew usually takes
them singly, the Italian by families. The midnight visit of the sanitary
policeman discloses a state of affairs against which he feels himself
helpless. He has his standard: 400 cubic feet of air space for each
adult sleeper, 200 for a child. That in itself is a concession to the
practical necessities of the case. The original demand was for 600 feet.
But of 28,000 and odd tenants canvassed in New York, in the slumming
investigation prosecuted by the general government in 1894, 17,047 were
found to have less than 400 feet, and of these 5526 slept in
unventilated rooms with no windows. No more such rooms have been added
since; but there has come that which is worse.
It was the boast of New York, till a few years ago, that at least that
worst of tenement depravities, the one-room house, too familiar in the
English slums, was practically unknown here. It is not so any longer.
The evil began in the old houses in Orchard and Allen streets, a bad
neighborhood, infested by fallen women and the thievish rascals who prey
upon their misery,--a region where the whole plan of humanity, if plan
there be in this disgusting mess, jars out of tune continually. The
furnished-room house has become an institution here, speeded on by a
conscienceless Jew who bought up the old buildings as fast as they came
into the market, and filled them with a class of tenants before whom
charity recoils, helpless and hopeless. When the houses were filled, the
crowds overflowed into the yard. In one, I found, in midwinter, tenants
living in sheds built of odd boards and roof tin, and paying a dollar a
week for herding with the rats. One of them, a red-faced German, was a
philosopher after his kind. He did not trouble himself to get up, when I
looked in, but stretched himself in his bed,--it was high
noon,--responding to my sniff of disgust that it was "sehr schoen! ein
bischen kalt, aber was!" His neighbor, a white-haired old woman, begged,
trembling, not to be put out. She would not know where to go. It was out
of one of these houses that Fritz Meyer, the murderer, went to rob the
poor box in the Redemptorist Church, the night when he killed policeman
Smith. The policeman surprised him at his work. In the room he had
occupied I came upon a brazen-looking woman with a black eye, who
answered the question of the officer, "Where did you get that shiner?"
with a laugh. "I ran up against the fist of me man," she said. Her
"man," a big, sullen lout, sat by, dumb. The woman answered for him that
he was a mechanic.
"What does he work at?" snorted the policeman, restraining himself with
an effort from kicking the fellow.
She laughed scornfully, "At the junk business." It meant that he was a
thief.
Young men, with blotched faces and cadaverous looks, were loafing in
every room. They hung their heads in silence. The women turned their
faces away at the sight of the uniform. They cling to these wretches,
who exploit their starved affections for their own ease, with a grip of
desperation. It is their last hold. Women have to love something. It is
their deepest degradation that they must love these. Even the wretches
themselves feel the shame of it, and repay them by beating and robbing
them, as their daily occupation. A poor little baby in one of the rooms
gave a shuddering human touch to it all.
The old houses began it, as they began all the tenement mischief that
has come upon New York. But the opportunity that was made by the
tenant's need was not one to be neglected. In some of the newer
tenements, with their smaller rooms, the lodger is by this time provided
for in the plan, with a special entrance from the hall. "Lodger" comes,
by an easy transition, to stand for "family." One winter's night I went
with the sanitary police on their midnight inspection through a row of
Elizabeth Street tenements which I had known since they were built,
seventeen or eighteen years ago. That is the neighborhood in which the
recent Italian immigrants crowd. In the house which we selected for
examination, in all respects the type of the rest, we found forty-three
families where there should have been sixteen. Upon each floor were four
flats, and in each flat three rooms that measured respectively 14 × 11,
7 × 11, and 7 × 8-1/2 feet. In only one flat did we find a single
family. In three there were two to each. In the other twelve each room
had its own family living and sleeping there. They cooked, I suppose, at
the one stove in the kitchen, which was the largest room. In one big bed
we counted six persons, the parents and four children. Two of them lay
crosswise at the foot of the bed, or there would not have been room. A
curtain was hung before the bed in each of the two smaller rooms,
leaving a passageway from the hall to the room with the windows. The
rent for the front flats was twelve dollars; for that in the rear ten
dollars. The social distinctions going with the advantage of location
were rigidly observed, I suppose. The three steps across a tenement
hall, from the front to "the back," are often a longer road than from
Ludlow Street to Fifth Avenue.
They were sweaters' tenements. But I shall keep that end of the story
until I come to speak of the tenants. The houses I have in mind now.
They were Astor leasehold property, and I had seen them built upon the
improved plan of 1879, with air shafts and all that. There had not been
water in the tenements for a month then, we were told by the one tenant
who spoke English that could be understood. The cold snap had locked the
pipes. Fitly enough, the lessee was an undertaker, an Italian himself,
who combined with his business of housing his people above and below the
ground also that of the padrone, to let no profit slip. He had not taken
the trouble to make many or recent repairs. The buildings had made a
fair start; they promised well. But the promise had not been kept. In
their premature decay they were distinctly as bad as the worst. I had
the curiosity to seek out the agent, the middleman, and ask him why they
were so. He shrugged his shoulders. With such tenants nothing could be
done, he said. I have always held that Italians are most manageable, and
that, with all the surface indications to the contrary, they are really
inclined to cleanliness, if cause can be shown, and I told him so. He
changed the subject diplomatically. No doubt it was with him simply a
question of the rent. They might crowd and carry on as they pleased,
once that was paid; and they did. It used to be the joke of Elizabeth
Street that when the midnight police came, the tenants would keep them
waiting outside, pretending to search for the key, until the surplus
population of men had time to climb down the fire-escape. When the
police were gone they came back. We surprised them all in bed.
Like most of the other tenements we have come across on our trip, these
were double-deckers. That is the type of tenement that is responsible
for the crowding that till now has gone on unchecked. For twenty years
it has been replacing the older barracks everywhere, as fast as they
rotted or were torn down.
This double-decker was thus described by the Tenement House Commission
of 1894: "It is the one hopeless form of tenement construction. It
cannot be well ventilated, it cannot be well lighted; it is not safe in
case of fire. It is built on a lot 25 feet wide by 100 or less in depth,
with apartments for four families in each story. This necessitates the
occupation of from 86 to 90 per cent of the lot's depth. The stairway,
made in the centre of the house, and the necessary walls and partitions
reduce the width of the middle rooms (which serve as bedrooms for at
least two people each) to 9 feet each at the most, and a narrow light
and air shaft, now legally required in the centre of each side wall,
still further lessens the floor space of these middle rooms. Direct
light is only possible for the rooms at the front and rear. The middle
rooms must borrow what light they can from dark hallways, the shallow
shafts, and the rear rooms. Their air must pass through other rooms or
the tiny shafts, and cannot but be contaminated before it reaches them.
A five-story house of this character contains apartments for eighteen or
twenty families, a population frequently amounting to 100 people, and
sometimes increased by boarders or lodgers to 150 or more."
[Illustration: The only Bath-tub in the Block: it hangs in the Air
Shaft.]
The commission, after looking in vain through the slums of the Old World
cities for something to compare the double-deckers with, declared that,
in their setting, the separateness and sacredness of home life were
interfered with, and evils bred, physical and moral, that "conduce to
the corruption of the young." "Make for unrighteousness" said the
commission of 1900, six years later.
Yet it is for these that the "interests" of which the fire-chief spoke
have rushed into battle at almost every session of the legislature,
whenever a step was taken to arraign them before the bar of public
opinion. No winter has passed, since the awakening conscience of the
people of New York City manifested itself in a desire to better the lot
of the other half, that has not seen an assault made, in one shape or
another, on the structure of tenement-house law built up with such
anxious solicitude. Once a bill to exempt from police supervision, by
withdrawing them from the tenement-house class, the very worst of the
houses, whose death-rate threatened the community, was sneaked through
the legislature all unknown, and had reached the executive before the
alarm was sounded. The Governor, put upon his guard, returned the bill,
with the indorsement that he was unable to understand what could have
prompted a measure that seemed to have reason and every argument against
it and none for it.
But the motive is not so obscure, after all. It is the same old one of
profit without conscience. It took from the Health Department the
supervision of the light, ventilation, and plumbing of the tenements,
which by right belonged there, and put it in charge of a compliant
Building Department, "for the convenience of architects and their
clients, and the saving of time and expense to them." For the
convenience of the architect's client, the builder, the lot was
encroached upon, until of one big block which the Gilder Commission
measured only 7 per cent was left open to the air; 93 per cent of it was
covered with brick and mortar. Rear tenements, to the number of nearly
100, have been condemned as "slaughter-houses," with good reason, but
this block was built practically solid. The average of space covered in
34 tenement blocks was shown to be 78.13 per cent. The law allowed only
65. The "discretion" that penned tenants in a burning tenement with
stairs of wood for the builder's "convenience" cut down the chance of
life of their babies unmoved. Sunlight and air mean just that, where
three thousand human beings are packed into a single block. That was why
the matter was given into the charge of the health officials, when
politics was yet kept out of their work.
[Illustration: The Old Style of Tenements, with Yards.]
Of such kind are the interests that oppose betterment of the worker's
hard lot in New York, that dictated the appointment by Tammany of a
commission composed of builders to revise its code of tenement laws, and
that sneered at the "laughable results of the Gilder Tenement House
Commission." Those results made for the health and happiness and safety
of a million and a half of souls, and were accounted, on every humane
ground, the longest step forward that had been taken by this community.
For the old absentee landlord, who did not know what mischief was afoot,
we have got the speculative builder, who does know, but does not care,
so long as he gets his pound of flesh. Half of the just laws that have
been passed for the relief of the people he has paralyzed with his
treacherous discretion clause, carefully nursed in the school of
practical politics to which he gives faithful adherence. The thing has
been the curse of our city from the day when the earliest struggle
toward better things began. Among the first manifestations of that was
the prohibition of soap factories below Grand Street by the Act of 1797,
which created a Board of Health with police powers. The act was passed
in February, to take effect in July; but long before that time the same
legislature had amended it by giving the authorities discretion in the
matter. And the biggest soap factory of them all is down there to this
day, and is even now stirring up a rumpus among the latest immigrants,
the Syrians, who have settled about it. No doubt it is all a question of
political education; but is not a hundred years enough to settle this
much, that compromise is out of place where the lives of the people are
at stake, and that it is time our years of "discretion" were numbered?
[Illustration: As a Solid Block of Double-deckers. Lawful until now,
would appear.]
At last there comes for the answer an emphatic yes. This year the law
has killed the discretionary clause and spoken out plainly. No more
stairs of wood; no more encroachment on the tenants' sunlight; and here,
set in its frame of swarming tenements, is a wide, open space, yet to be
a real park, with flowers and grass and birds to gladden the hearts of
those to whom such things have been as tales that are told, all these
dreary years, and with a playground in which the children of yonder big
school may roam at will, undismayed by landlord or policeman. Not all
the forces of reaction can put back the barracks that were torn down as
one of the "laughable results" of that very Tenement House Commission's
work, or restore to the undertaker his profits from Bone Alley of horrid
memory. It was the tenant's turn to laugh, that time. Half a dozen
blocks away, among even denser swarms, is another such plot, where there
will be football and a skating pond before another season. They are
breaking ground to-day. Seven years of official red tape have we had
since the plans were first made, and it isn't all unwound yet; but it
will be speedily now, and we shall hear the story of those parks and
rejoice that the day of reckoning is coming for the builder without a
soul. Till then let him deck the fronts of his tenements with bravery of
plate glass and brass to hide the darkness within. He has done his
worst.
We can go no farther. Yonder lies the river. A full mile we have come,
through unbroken ranks of tenements with their mighty, pent-up
multitudes. Here they seem, with a common impulse, to overflow into the
street. From corner to corner it is crowded with girls and children,
dragging babies nearly as big as themselves, with desperate endeavor to
lose nothing of the show. There is a funeral in the block. Unnumbered
sewing-machines cease for once their tireless rivalry with the flour
mill in the next block, that is forever grinding in a vain effort to
catch up. Heads are poked from windows. On the stoops hooded and shawled
figures have front seats. The crowd is hardly restrained by the
policeman and the undertaker in holiday mourning, who clear a path by
main strength to the plumed hearse. The eager haste, the frantic rush to
see,--what does it not tell of these starved lives, of the quality of
their aims and ambitions? The mill clatters loudly; there is one mouth
less to fill. In the midst of it all, with clamor of urgent gong, the
patrol wagon rounds the corner, carrying two policemen precariously
perched upon a struggling "drunk," a woman. The crowd scatters,
following the new sensation. The tragedies of death and life in the slum
have met together.
Many a mile I might lead you along these rivers, east and west, through
the island of Manhattan, and find little else than we have seen. The
great crowd is yet below Fourteenth Street, but the northward march
knows no slackening of pace. As the tide sets up-town, it reproduces
faithfully the scenes of the older wards, though with less of their
human interest than here, where the old houses, in all their ugliness,
have yet some imprint of the individuality of their tenants. Only on
feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on
holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the
unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the
up-town streets, it is hard to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient
wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its rocks and its goats and
shanties. Since the negroes took possession it is only dull, except
when, once in a while, the remnant of the Irish settlers make a stand
against the intruders. Vain hope! Perpetual eviction is their destiny.
Negro, Italian, and Jew, biting the dust with many a bruised head under
the Hibernian's stalwart fist, resistlessly drive him before them,
nevertheless, out of house and home. The landlord pockets the gate
money. The old robbery still goes on. Where the negro pitches his tent,
he pays more rent than his white neighbor next door, and is a better
tenant. And he is good game forever. He never buys the tenement, as the
Jew or the Italian is likely to do when he has scraped up money enough
to reënact, after his own fashion, the trick taught him by his
oppressor. The black column has reached the hundredth street on the East
Side, and the sixties on the West,[19] and there for the present it
halts. Jammed between Africa, Italy, and Bohemia, the Irishman has
abandoned the East Side up-town. Only west of Central Park does he yet
face his foe, undaunted in defeat as in victory. The local street
nomenclature, in which the directory has no hand,--Nigger Row, Mixed Ale
Flats, etc.,--indicates the hostile camps with unerring accuracy.
[Footnote 19: There is an advanced outpost of blacks as far up as
One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street, but the main body lingers yet
among the sixties.]
Up-town or down-town, as the tenements grow taller, the thing that is
rarest to find is the home of the olden days, even as it was in the
shanty on the rocks. "No home, no family, no manhood, no patriotism!"
said the old Frenchman. Seventy-seven per cent of their young prisoners,
say the managers of the state reformatory, have no moral sense, or next
to none. "Weakness, not wickedness, ails them," adds the prison
chaplain; no manhood, that is to say. It is the stamp of the home that
is lacking, and we need to be about restoring it, if we would be safe.
Years ago, roaming through the British Museum, I came upon an exhibit
that riveted my attention as nothing else had. It was a huge stone arm,
torn from the shoulder of some rock image, with doubled fist and every
rigid muscle instinct with angry menace. Where it came from or what was
its story I do not know. I did not ask. It was its message to us I was
trying to read. I had been spending weary days and nights in the slums
of London, where hatred grew, a noxious crop, upon the wreck of the
home. Lying there, mute and menacing, the great fist seemed to me like a
shadow thrown from the gray dawn of the race into our busy day with a
purpose, a grim, unheeded warning. What was it? In the slum the question
haunts me yet. They perished, the empires those rock-hewers built, and
the governments reared upon their ruins are long since dead and
forgotten. They were born to die, for they were not built upon human
happiness, but upon human terror and greed. We built ours upon the bed
rock, and its cornerstone is the home. With this bitter mockery of it
that makes the slum, can it be that the warning is indeed for us?
CHAPTER V
"DRUV INTO DECENCY"
I stood at Seven Dials and heard the policeman's account of what it used
to be. Seven Dials is no more like the slum of old than is the Five
Points to-day. The conscience of London wrought upon the one as the
conscience of New York upon the other. A mission house, a children's
refuge, two big schools, and, hard by, a public bath and a wash-house,
stand as the record of the battle with the slum, which, with these
forces in the field, has but one ending. The policeman's story rambled
among the days when things were different. Then it was dangerous for an
officer to go alone there at night.
Around the corner there came from one of the side streets a procession
with banners, parading in honor and aid of some church charity. We
watched it pass. In it marched young men and boys with swords and
battle-axes, and upon its outskirts skipped a host of young roughs--so
one would have called them but for the evidence of their honest
employment--who rattled collection boxes, reaping a harvest of pennies
from far and near. I looked at the battle-axes and the collection
boxes, and thought of forty years ago. Where was the Seven Dials of that
day, and the men who gave it its bad name? I asked the policeman.
"They were druv into decency, sor," he said, and answered from his own
experience the question ever asked by faint-hearted philanthropists. "My
father, he done duty here afore me in '45. The worst dive was where that
church stands. It was always full of thieves,"--whose sons, I added
mentally, have become collectors for the church. The one fact was a
whole chapter on the slum.
London's way with the tenant we adopted at last in New York with the
slum landlord. He was "druv into decency." We had to. Moral suasion had
been stretched to the limit. The point had been reached where one
knock-down blow outweighed a bushel of arguments. It was all very well
to build model tenements as object lessons to show that the thing could
be done; it had become necessary to enforce the lesson by demonstrating
that the community had power to destroy houses which were a menace to
its life. The rear tenements were chosen for this purpose.
They were the worst, as they were the first, of New York's tenements.
The double-deckers of which I have spoken had, with all their evils, at
least this to their credit, that their death-rate was not nearly as
high as that of the old houses. That was not because of any virtue
inherent in the double-deckers, but because the earlier tenements were
old, and built in a day that knew nothing of sanitary restrictions, and
cared less. Hence the showing that the big tenements had much the lowest
mortality. The death-rate does not sound the depths of tenement-house
evils, but it makes a record that is needed when it comes to attacking
property rights. The mortality of the rear tenements had long been a
scandal. They are built in the back yard, generally back to back with
the rear buildings on abutting lots. If there is an open space between
them, it is never more than a slit a foot or so wide, and gets to be the
receptacle of garbage and filth of every kind; so that any opening made
in these walls for purposes of ventilation becomes a source of greater
danger than if there were none. The last count that was made, in 1900,
showed that among the 44,850 tenements in Manhattan and the Bronx there
were still 2143 rear houses left.[20] Where they are the death-rate
rises, for reasons that are apparent. The sun cannot reach them. They
are damp and dark, and the tenants, who are always the poorest and most
crowded, live "as in a cage open only toward the front." A canvass made
of the mortality records by Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the registrar of
records, showed that while in the First Ward (the oldest), for instance,
the death-rate in houses standing singly on the lot was 29.03 per 1000
of the living, where there were rear houses it rose to 61.97. The infant
death-rate is a still better test; that rose from 109.58 in the single
tenements of the same ward to 204.54 where there were rear houses.[21]
One in every five babies had to die; that is to say, the house killed
it. No wonder the Gilder commission styled the rear tenements
"slaughter-houses," and called upon the legislature to root them out,
and with them every old, ramshackle, disease-breeding tenement in the
city.
[Footnote 20: That was, however, a reduction of 236 since 1898, when
the census showed 2379 rear houses.]
[Footnote 21: Report of Gilder Tenement House Commission, 1894.]
A law which is in substance a copy of the English act for destroying
slum property was passed in the spring of 1895. It provided for the
seizure of buildings that were dangerous to the public health or unfit
for human habitation, and their destruction upon proper proof, with
compensation to the owner on a sliding scale down to the point of entire
unfitness, when he might claim only the value of the material in his
house. Up to that time, the only way to get rid of such a house had been
to declare it a nuisance under the sanitary code; but as the city could
not very well pay for the removal of a nuisance, to order it down seemed
too much like robbery; so the owner was allowed to keep it. It takes
time and a good many lives to grow a sentiment such as this law
expressed. The Anglo-Saxon respect for vested rights is strong in us
also. I remember going through a ragged school in London, once, and
finding the eyes of the children in the infant class red and sore.
Suspecting some contagion, I made inquiries, and was told that a collar
factory next door was the cause of the trouble. The fumes from it
poisoned the children's eyes.
[Illustration: Richard Watson Gilder, Chairman of the Tenement House
Commission of 1894.]
"And you allow it to stay, and let this thing go on?" I asked, in
wonder.
The superintendent shrugged his shoulders. "It is their factory," he
said.
I was on the point of saying something that might not have been polite,
seeing that I was a guest, when I remembered that, in the newspaper
which I carried in my pocket, I had just been reading a plea of some
honorable M. P. for a much-needed reform in the system of counsel fees,
then being agitated in the House of Commons. The reply of the solicitor
general had made me laugh. He was inclined to agree with the honorable
member, but still preferred to follow precedent by referring the matter
to the Inns of Court. Quite incidentally, he mentioned that the matter
had been hanging fire in the House two hundred years. It seemed very
English to me then; but when we afterward came to tackle our rear
tenements, and in the first batch there was a row which I knew to have
been picked out by the sanitary inspector twenty-five years before as
fit only to be destroyed, I recognized that we were kin, after all.
That was Gotham Court. It was first on the list, and the Mott Street
Barracks came next, when, as executive officer of the Good Government
Clubs, I helped the Board of Health put the law to the test the
following year. Roosevelt was Police President and Health Commissioner;
nobody was afraid of the landlord. The Health Department kept a list of
66 old houses, with a population of 5460 tenants, in which there had
been 1313 deaths in a little over five years (1889-94). From among them
we picked our lot, and the department drove the tenants out. The owners
went to law, one and all; but, to their surprise and dismay, the courts
held with the health officers. The moral effect was instant and
overwhelming. Rather than keep up the fight, with no rent coming in, the
landlords surrendered at discretion. In consideration of this,
compensation was allowed them at the rate of about a thousand dollars a
house, although they were really entitled only to the value of the old
bricks. The buildings all came under the head of "wholly unfit." Gotham
Court, with its sixteen buildings, in which, many years before, a health
inspector counted 146 cases of sickness, including "all kinds of
infectious disease," was bought for $19,750, and Mullen's Court,
adjoining, for $7251. To show the character of all, let two serve; in
each case it is the official record, upon which seizure was made, that
is quoted:
No. 98 Catherine Street: "The floor in the apartments and the wooden
steps leading to the second-floor apartment are broken, loose, saturated
with filth. The roof and eaves gutters leak, rendering the apartments
wet. The two apartments on the first floor consist of one room each, in
which the tenants are compelled to cook, eat, and sleep. The back walls
are defective, the house wet and damp, and unfit for human habitation.
It robs the surrounding houses of light."
"The sunlight never enters" was the constant refrain.
No. 17 Sullivan Street: "Occupied by the lowest whites and negroes,
living together. The houses are decayed from cellar to garret, and
filthy beyond description,--the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen.
The beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, where there is any
plaster, are rotten, and alive with vermin. They are a menace to the
public health, and cannot be repaired. Their annual death-rate in five
years was 41.38."
[Illustration: The Mott Street Barracks.]
The sunlight enters where these stood, at all events, and into 58 other
yards that once were plague spots. Of 94 rear tenements seized that
year, 60 were torn down, 33 of them voluntarily by the owners; 29 were
remodelled and allowed to stand, chiefly as workshops; 5 other houses
were standing empty, and yielding no rent, when I last heard of them. I
suppose they have been demolished since. The worst of them all, the Mott
Street Barracks, were taken into court by the owner; but all the judges
and juries in the land had no power to put them back when it was decided
upon a technicality that they should not have been destroyed offhand. It
was a case of "They can't put you in jail for that."--"Yes, but I am in
jail." They were gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they
ought to go, before the Appellate Division called a halt. We were not in
a mood to trifle with the Barracks, or risk any of the law's delays. In
1888 I counted 360 tenants in these tenements, front and rear, all
Italians, and the infant death-rate of the Barracks that year was 325
per 1000. There were forty babies, and one in three of them had to die.
The general infant death-rate for the whole tenement-house population
that year was 88.38. In the four years following, during which the
population and the death-rate of the houses were both reduced with an
effort, fifty-one funerals went out of the Barracks. With entire
fitness, a cemetery corporation held the mortgage upon the property. The
referee allowed it the price of opening one grave, in the settlement,
gave one dollar to the lessee, and one hundred and ten dollars to the
landlord, who refused to collect and took his case into the courts. We
waited to see the landlord attack the law itself on the score of
constitutionality, but he did not. The Court of Appeals decided that it
had not been shown that the Barracks might not have been used for some
other purpose than a tenement and that therefore we had been hasty. The
city paid damages, but it was all right. It was emphatically a case of
haste making for speed. So far the law stands unchallenged, both here
and in Massachusetts, where they destroyed twice as many unfit houses as
we did in New York and stood their ground on its letter, paying the
owners the bare cost of the old timbers.
As in every other instance, we seized only the rear houses at the
Barracks; but within a year or two the front houses were also sold and
destroyed too, and so disappeared quite the worst rookery that was left
on Manhattan Island. Those of us who had explored it with the "midnight
police" in its worst days had no cause to wonder at its mortality. In
Berlin they found the death-rate per thousand to be 163.5 where a family
occupied one room, 22.5 where it lived in two rooms, 7.5 in the case of
three-room dwellers, and 5.4 where they had four rooms.[22] Does any one
ask yet why we fight the slum in Berlin and New York? The Barracks in
those days suggested the first kind.
[Footnote 22: "Municipal Government in Continental Europe," by
Albert Shaw.]
I have said before that I do not believe in paying the slum landlord for
taking his hand off our throats, when we have got the grip on him in
turn. Mr. Roger Foster, who as a member of the Tenement House Committee
drew the law, and as counsel for the Health Department fought the
landlords successfully in the courts, holds to the opposite view. I am
bound to say that instances turned up in which it did seem a hardship to
deprive the owners of even such property. I remember especially a
tenement in Roosevelt Street, which was the patrimony and whole estate
of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the
front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was
one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract
principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to
ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I
hope--well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do with the case.
The house is down, and the main issue decided upon its merits.
In the 94 tenements (counting the front houses in; they cannot be
separated from the rear tenements in the death registry) there were in
five years 956 deaths, a rate of 62.9 at a time when the general city
death-rate was 24.63. It was the last and heaviest blow aimed at the
abnormal mortality of a city that ought, by reason of many advantages,
to be one of the healthiest in the world. With clean streets, pure milk,
medical school inspection, antitoxin treatment of deadly diseases, and
better sanitary methods generally; with the sunlight let into its slums,
and its worst plague spots cleaned out, the death-rate of New York came
down from 26.32 per 1000 inhabitants in 1887 to 19.53 in 1897. Inasmuch
as a round half million was added to its population within the ten
years, it requires little figuring to show that the number whose lives
were literally saved by reform would people a city of no mean
proportions. The extraordinary spell of hot weather in the summer of
1896, when the temperature hung for ten consecutive days in the
nineties, with days and nights of extreme discomfort, brought out the
full meaning of this. While many were killed by sunstroke, the
population as a whole was shown to have acquired, in better hygienic
surroundings, a much greater power of resistance. It yielded slowly to
the heat. Where two days had been sufficient, in former years, to send
the death-rate up, it now took five; and the infant mortality remained
low throughout the dreadful trial. Perhaps the substitution of beer for
whiskey as a summer drink had something to do with it; but Colonel
Waring's broom and unpolitical sanitation had more. Since it spared him
so many voters, the politician ought to have been grateful for this; but
he was not. Death-rates are not as good political arguments as tax
rates, we found out. In the midst of it all, a policeman whom I knew
went to his Tammany captain to ask if Good Government Clubs were
political clubs within the meaning of the law which forbade policemen
joining such. The answer he received set me to thinking: "Yes, the
meanest, worst kind of political clubs, they are." Yet they had done
nothing worse than to save the babies, the captain's with the rest.
The landlord read the signs better, and ran to cover till the storm
should blow over. Houses that had hardly known repairs since they were
built were put in order with all speed. All over the city, he made
haste to set his house to rights, lest it be seized or brought to the
bar in other ways. The Good Government Clubs had their hands full that
year (1896-97). They made war upon the dark hall in the double-decker,
and upon the cruller bakery. They compelled the opening of small parks,
or the condemnation of sites for them anyway, exposed the abuses of the
civil courts, the "poor man's courts," urged on the building of new
schools, cleaned up in the Tombs prison and hastened the demolition of
the wicked old pile, and took a hand in evolving a sensible and humane
system of dealing with the young vagrants who were going to waste on
free soup. The proposition to establish a farm colony for their
reclamation was met with the challenge at Albany that "we have had
enough reform in New York City," and, as the event proved, for the time
being we had really gone as far as we could. But even that was a good
long way. Some things had been nailed that could never again be undone;
and hand in hand with the effort to destroy had gone another to build
up, that promised to set us far enough ahead to appeal at last
successfully to the self-interest of the builder, if not to his
humanity; or, failing that, to compel him to decency. If that promise
has not been all kept, the end is not yet. I believe it will be kept.
[Illustration: R. Fulton Cutting, Chairman of the Citizens' Union.]
The movement for reform, in the matter of housing the people, had
proceeded upon a clearly outlined plan that apportioned to each of
several forces its own share of the work. At a meeting held under the
auspices of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor,
early in the days of the movement, the field had been gone over
thoroughly. To the Good Government Clubs fell the task, as already set
forth, of compelling the enforcement of the existing tenement-house
laws. D. O. Mills, the philanthropic banker, declared his purpose to
build hotels which should prove that a bed and lodging as good as any
could be furnished to the great army of homeless men at a price that
would compete with the cheap lodging houses, and yet yield a profit to
the owner. On behalf of a number of well-known capitalists, who had been
identified with the cause of tenement-house reform for years, Robert
Fulton Cutting, the president of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor, offered to build homes for the working people
that should be worthy of the name, on a large scale. A company was
formed, and chose for its president Dr. Elgin R. L. Gould, author of the
government report on the "Housing of the Working People," the standard
work on the subject. A million dollars was raised by public
subscription, and operations were begun at once.
Two ideas were kept in mind as fundamental: one, that charity that will
not pay will not stay; the other, that nothing can be done with the
twenty-five-foot lot. It is the primal curse of our housing system, and
any effort toward better things must reckon with it first. Nineteen lots
on Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth streets, west of Tenth Avenue, were
purchased of Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, who took one tenth of the
capital stock of the City and Suburban Homes Company; and upon these was
erected the first block of tenements. This is the neighborhood toward
which the population has been setting with ever increasing congestion.
Already in 1895 the Twenty-second Ward contained nearly 200,000 souls. I
gave figures in the previous chapter that showed a crowding of more than
1100 persons per acre in some of the blocks here where the conditions of
the notorious Tenth Ward are certain to be reproduced, if indeed they
are not exceeded. In the Fifteenth Assembly District, some distance
below, but on the same line, the first sociological canvass of the
Federation of Churches had found the churches, schools, and other
educational agencies marshalling a frontage of 756 feet on the street,
while the saloon fronts stretched themselves over nearly a mile; so
that, said the compiler of these pregnant facts, "saloon social ideals
are minting themselves on the minds of the people at the ratio of seven
saloon thoughts to one educational thought." It would not have been easy
to find a spot better fitted for the experiment of restoring the home to
its place.
[Illustration: Alfred Corning Clark Buildings.]
The Alfred Corning Clark buildings, as they were called in recognition
of the effort of this public-spirited woman, have at this writing been
occupied five years. They harbor nearly four hundred families, as
contented a lot as I ever saw anywhere. The one tenant who left in
disgust was a young doctor who had settled on the estate, thinking he
could pick up a practice among so many. But he couldn't. They were not
often sick, those tenants. Last year only three died, and they were all
killed while away from home. So he had good cause of complaint. The rest
had none, and having none, they stay, which is no mean blow struck for
the home in the battle with the slum. The home feeling can never grow
where people do not stay long enough to feel at home, any more than the
plant can which the child is pulling up every two or three days to
"see if it has roots."
Half the tenement house population--and I am not sure that I ought not
to say the whole of it--is everlastingly on the move. Dr. Gould quotes
as an instance of it the experience of an assembly district leader in
distributing political circulars among the people in a good tenement
neighborhood. In three months after the enrolment lists had been made
out, one-third of the tenants had moved. No doubt the experience was
typical. How can the one who hardly knows what a home means be expected
to have any pride or interest in his home in the larger sense: the city?
And to what in such men is one to appeal in the interests of civic
betterment? That is why every effort that goes to help tie the citizen
to one spot long enough to give him the proprietary sense in it which is
the first step toward civic interest and pride, is of such account. It
is one way in which the public schools as neighborhood houses in the
best sense could be of great help, and a chief factor in the success of
the social settlement. And that is why model tenements, which pay and
foster the home, give back more than a money interest to the community.
They must pay, for else, as I said, they will not stay. These pay four
per cent, and are expected to pay five, the company's limit. So it is
not strange that the concern has prospered. It has since raised more
than one million of dollars, and has built another block, with room for
338 families, on First Avenue and on Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth
streets, within hail of Battle Row, of anciently warlike memory. Still
another block is going up at Avenue A and Seventy-eighth Street, and in
West Sixty-second Street, where the colored population crowds, the
company is erecting two buildings for negro tenants, where they will
live as well as their white fellows do in _their_ model tenements,--a
long-delayed act of justice, for as far back as any one can remember the
colored man has been paying more and getting less for his money in New
York than whites of the same grade, who are poorer tenants every way.
The Company's "city homes" come as near being that as any can. There is
light and air in abundance, steam heat in winter in the latest ones,
fireproof stairs, and deadened partitions to help on the privacy that is
at once the most needed and hardest to get in a tenement. The houses do
not look like barracks. Any one who has ever seen a row of factory
tenements that were just houses, not homes, will understand how much
that means. I can think of some such rows now, with their ugly brick
fronts, straight up and down without a break and without a vine or a
window-box of greens or flowers, and the mere thought of them gives me
the blues for the rest of the day. There is nothing of that about these
tenements, unless it be the long play-yard between the buildings in
Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth streets. It is too narrow to have anything
in it but asphalt. But the rest makes up for it in part.
All together, the company has redeemed its promise of real model
tenements; and it has had no trouble with its tenants. The few and
simple rules are readily understood as being for the general good, and
so obeyed. It is the old story, told years and years ago by Mr. Alfred
T. White when he had built his Riverside tenements in Brooklyn. The
tenants "do not have to come up" to the landlord's standard. They are
more than abreast of him in his utmost endeavor, if he will only use
common sense in the management of his property. They do that in the City
and Suburban Homes Company's buildings. They give their tenants
shower-baths and a friend for a rent-collector, their children playrooms
and Christmas parties, and the whole neighborhood feels the stimulus of
the new and humane plan. In all Battle Row there has not been a scrap,
let alone an old-time shindy, since the "accommodation flats" came upon
the scene. That is what they call them. It is an everyday observation
that the Row has "come up" since some of the old houses have been
remodelled. The new that are being built aim visibly toward the higher
standard.
The company's rents average a dollar a week per room, and are a trifle
higher than those of the old tenements round about; but they have so
much more in the way of comfort that the money is eagerly paid; nor is
the difference so great that the "picking of tenants" amounts to more
than the putting of a premium on steadiness, sobriety, and cleanliness,
which in itself is a service to render. One experience of the management
which caused some astonishment, but upon reflection was accepted as an
encouraging sign, was the refusal of the tenants to use the common
wash-tubs in the laundry. They are little used to this day. The women
will use the drying racks, but they object to rubbing elbows with their
neighbors while they wash their clothes. It is, after all, a sign that
the tenement that smothers individuality left them this useful handle,
and if the experience squashed the hopes of some who dreamed of
municipal wash-houses on the Glasgow plan, there is nothing to grieve
over. Every peg of personal pride rescued from the tenement is worth a
thousand theories for hanging the hope of improvement on.
With $2,300,000 invested by this time, the company has built city homes
for 1450 families, and has only made a beginning. All the money that is
needed for going on with its work is in sight. Nor are the rich the only
investors. Of the 400 stockholders 250 have small lots, ten shares and
less each, a healthy sign that the company is holding the confidence of
the community. It has fairly earned it. No one could have done a greater
and better thing for the metropolis than to demonstrate that it is
possible to build homes for the toilers as a business and net a business
interest upon the investment.
The statement is emphasized by the company's experience with the
suburban end of its work. It bought sites for two or three hundred
little cottages out on Long Island, but within the greater city, and
only half an hour by trolley or elevated from the City Hall. A hundred
houses were built, neat and cosey homes of brick and timber, each in its
own garden; and a plan was devised under which the purchaser had twenty
years to pay for the property. A life insurance policy protected the
seller and secured the house to the widow should the breadwinner die.
The plan has worked well in Belgium under the eyes of the government,
but it failed to attract buyers here. Of those whom it did attract at
the outset, not a few have given up and gone away. When I went out to
have a look at the place the year after Homewood had been settled,
seventy-two houses had found owners under the company's plans. After
four years fifty-six only are so held, ten have been bought outright,
and three sold under contract. Practically the company has had to give
up its well-thought-out plan and rent as many of the houses as it could.
Nine were vacant this last spring.
So what we all thought the "way out" of the slum seems barred for the
time being. For there is no other explanation of the failure than that
the people will not go "among the stumps." Lack of facilities for
getting there played a part, possibly, but a minor one, and now there is
no such grievance. The simple fact is that the home-feeling that makes a
man rear a home upon the soil as the chief ambition of his life was not
there. The tenement and the flat have weakened that peg among the class
of workers for whom Homewood was planned. I hate to say that they have
broken the peg, for I do not believe it. But it has been hurt without
doubt. They longed for the crowds. The grass and the trees and the birds
and the salt breath of the sea did not speak to them in a language they
understood. The brass bands and the hand-organs, the street cries and
the rush and roar of the city, had made them forget their childhood's
tongue. For the children understood, even in the gutter.
"It means, I suppose," said Dr. Gould to me, when we had talked it all
over, "that we are and always shall be a tenement house city, and that
we have got to reckon with and plan for that only."
I think not. I believe he is mistaken. And yet I can give no other
ground for my belief than my unyielding faith that things will come
right yet, if it does take time. They are not right as they are. Man is
not made to be born and to live all his life in a box, packed away with
his fellows like so many herring in a barrel. He is here in this world
for something that is not attained in that way; but is, if not attained,
at least perceived when the daisies and the robins come in. If to help
men perceive it is all we can do in our generation, that is a good deal.
But I believe that before our children have come to the divide, perhaps
before we are gone, we shall see the tide of the last century's drift to
the cities turn, under the impulse of the new forces that are being
harnessed for man's work, and Homewood come to its rights, I say I
believe it I wish I could say I knew; but then you would ask for my
proofs, and I haven't any. For all that, I still believe it.
Meanwhile Dr. Gould's advice is good sense. If he is right, it is of the
last importance; if I am right, it is still the way to proving me so by
holding on to what is left of the home in the tenement and making the
most of it. That we have taken the advice is good ground for hope, in
the face of the fact that New York has still the worst housing in the
world. We can now destroy what is not fit to stand. We have done it, and
the republic yet survives. The slum landlord would have had us believe
that it must perish with his rookeries. We are building model tenements
and making them pay. Alfred T. White's Riverside tenements are as good
to-day as when they were built a dozen years ago--better if anything,
for they were honestly built--and in all that time they have paid five
and six per cent, and even more. Dr. Gould found that only six per cent
of all the great model housing operations which he examined for the
government here and abroad had failed to pay. All the rest were
successful. And by virtue of the showing we have taken the
twenty-five-foot lot itself by the throat.
Three years ago, speaking of it as the one thing that was in the way of
progress in New York, I wrote: "It will continue to be in the way. A man
who has one lot will build on it; it is his right. The state, which
taxes his lot, has no right to confiscate it by forbidding him to make
it yield him an income, on the plea that he might build something which
would be a nuisance. But it can so order the building that it shall not
be a nuisance; that is not only its right, but its duty."
[Illustration: The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn.]
That duty has been done since; let me tell how. Popular sentiment,
taking more and more firmly hold of the fact that there is a direct
connection between helpless poverty and bad housing, shaped itself in
1898 into a volunteer Tenement House Committee which, as an effective
branch of the Charity Organization Society, drew up and presented to the
municipal authorities a reform code of building ordinances affecting the
dwellings of the poor. But Tammany was back, and they would not listen
at the City Hall. Seeing which, the committee made up its mind to appeal
to the people themselves in such fashion that it should be heard. That
was the way the Tenement House Exhibition of the winter of 1900 came
into existence.
Rich and poor came to see that speaking record of a city's sorry plight,
and at last we all understood. Not to understand after one look at the
poverty and disease maps that hung on the wall was to declare oneself a
dullard. The tenements were all down in them, with the size of them and
the air space within, if there was any. Black dots upon the poverty maps
showed that for each one five families in that house had applied for
charity within a given time. There were those that had as many as
fifteen of the ominous marks, showing that seventy-five families had
asked aid from the one house. To find a tenement free from the taint one
had to search long and with care. Upon the disease maps the scourge of
tuberculosis lay like a black pall over the double-decker districts. A
year later the State Commission, that continued the work then begun,
said: "There is hardly a tenement house in which there has not been at
least one case of pulmonary tuberculosis within the last five years, and
in some houses there have been as many as twenty-two different cases of
this terrible disease. There are over 8000 deaths a year in New York
City from this disease alone, at least 20,000 cases of well-developed
and recognized tuberculosis, and in addition a large number of obscure
and incipient cases. The connection between tuberculosis and the
character of the tenement houses in which the poor people live is of the
very closest."[23]
[Footnote 23: Report of the Tenement House Committee of 1900. The
secretary of that body said: "Well might those maps earn for New
York the title of the City of the Living Death."]
[Illustration: A Typical East Side Block.]
A model was shown of a typical East Side block, containing 2781 persons
on two acres of land, nearly every bit of which was covered with
buildings. There were 466 babies in the block (under five years), but
not a bath-tub except one that hung in an air shaft. Of the 1588 rooms
441 were dark, with no ventilation to the outer air except through other
rooms; 635 rooms gave upon twilight "air shafts." In five year 32 cases
of tuberculosis had been reported from that block, and in that time 660
different families in the block had applied for charity. The year
before the Bureau of Contagious Diseases had registered 13 cases of
diphtheria there. However, the rent-roll was all right. It amounted to
$113,964 a year.
[Illustration: Robert W. de Forest, Chairman of the Tenement House
Commission of 1900.]
Those facts told. New York--the whole country--woke up. More than 170
architects sent in plans in the competition for a humane tenement that
should be commercially profitable. Roosevelt was governor, and promptly
appointed a Tenement House Commission, the third citizen body appointed
for such purposes by authority of the state. Mr. Robert de Forest, a
distinguished lawyer and a public-spirited man, who had been at the head
of the Charity Organization Society and of the relief efforts I spoke
of, in time became its chairman, and commissioner of the new Tenement
House Department that was created by the new charter of the city to
carry into effect the law the commission drew up. At this writing, with
the department not yet fully organized, it is too early to say with any
degree of certainty exactly how far the last two years have set us
ahead; but this much is certain:
"Discretion" is dead--at last. In Manhattan, no superintendent of
buildings shall have leave after this to pen tenants in a building with
stairs of wood because he thinks with luck it might burn slowly; nor in
Brooklyn shall a deputy commissioner rate a room with a window opening
on a hall, or a skylight covered over at the top, "the outer air."[24]
Of these things there is an end. The air shaft that was a narrow slit
between towering walls has become a "court," a yard big enough for
children to run in. Thirty per cent of the tenement-house lot must be
open to the sun. The double-decker has had its day, and it is over. A
man may still build a tenement on a twenty-five-foot lot if he so
chooses, but he can hardly pack four families on each floor of it and
keep within the law. He can do much better, and make an ample profit, by
crossing the lot line and building on forty or fifty feet; in
consequence of which, building being a business, he does so. In a lot of
half a hundred tenement plans I looked over at the department yesterday,
there were only two for single houses, and they had but three families
on the floor.
[Footnote 24: Report of Tenement House Commission of 1900.]
So it seems as if the blight of the twenty-five-foot lot were really
wiped out with the double-decker. And no one is hurt. The speculative
builder weeps--for the poor, he says. He will build no more, he avers,
and rents will go up, so they will have to sleep on the streets. But I
notice the plans I spoke of call for an investment of three millions of
dollars, and that they are working overtime at the department to pass on
them, so great is the rush. Belike, then, they are crocodile tears.
Anyway, let him weep. He has laughed long enough.
[Illustration:
1. Old Knickerbocker dwelling.
2. The same made over into a tenement.
3. The rear tenement caves.
4. Packing-box tenement built for revenue only.
5. The limit; the air shaft--first concession to tenant.
6. The double-decker, where the civic conscience
began to stir in 1879.
7. Evolution of double-decker up to date.
8. Prize plan of Tenement House Exhibition, 1900
(fifty-foot lot).]
[Illustration: Plan of a Typical Floor in Class First of the Competition
in the C. O. S. Plans of Model Tenements.
Rentable area 2724.94^o = 54.70% of lot
Free air-space (courts) 1500.25^o = 30.01% of lot
Walls, partitions, and public space 764.81^o = 15.29% of lot
Total 5000.00^o = 100.00% = lot
3 two-room apartments
3 three-room apartments
2 four-room apartments
8 apartments. 23 rooms]
As for the rents, he will put them as high as he can, no doubt. They
were too high always, for what they bought. In the case of the builder
the state can add force to persuasion, and so urge him along the path of
righteousness. When it comes to the rent collector the case is
different. It may yet be necessary for the municipality to enter the
field as a competing landlord on the five-per-cent basis; but I would
rather we, as a community, learned first a little more of the art of
governing ourselves without scandal. With Tammany liable to turn up at
any moment--no, no! Political tenements might yet add a chapter to the
story of our disgrace to make men weep. I have not forgotten the use
Tammany made of the people's baths erected in the Hamilton Fish Park on
the East Side--the Ham-fish, locally. They were shut from the day
they were opened, I came near saying; I mean from the day they should
have been opened; and two stalwart watchmen drew salaries for sitting in
the door to keep the people out. That was a perfectly characteristic use
of the people's money, and is not lightly to be invited back. Rather
wait awhile yet, and see what our bridges and real rapid transit, and
the "philanthropy and five per cent" plan, will do for us. When that
latter has been grasped so by the tenant that a little extra brass and
plate-glass does not tempt him over into the enemy's camp, the usurious
rents may yet follow the double-decker, as they have clung to it in the
past.
But if the city may not be the landlord of tenements, I have often
thought it might with advantage manage them to the extent of building
them to contain so many tenements on basis of air space, and no more.
The thing was proposed when the tenement house question first came up
for discussion, but was dropped then. The last Tenement House Commission
considered it carefully, but decided to wait and see first how the new
department worked. The whole expense of that, with its nearly two
hundred inspectors, might easily be borne by the collection of a license
fee so small that even the tenement house landlord could not complain.
Lodging houses are licensed, and workshops in the tenements likewise,
to secure efficient control of them. If that is not secured in the case
of the workshops, as it is not, it is no fault of the plan, but of the
working out of it. I do not expect the licensing of tenements to dispose
of all the evils in them. No law or system will ever do that. But it
ought to make it easier to get the grip on them that has been wanting
heretofore, to our hurt.
CHAPTER VI
THE MILLS HOUSES
Sitting by my window the other day, I saw a boy steering across the
street for my little lad, who was laying out a base-ball diamond on the
lawn. It seems that he knew him from school.
"Hey," he said, as he rounded to at the gate, "we've got yer dad's book
to home; yer father was a bum onct."
[Illustration: A Seven-cent Lodging House in the Bowery.]
Proof was immediately forthcoming that whatever the father might have
been, his son was able to uphold the family pride, and I had my revenge.
Some day soon now my boy will read his father's story[25] himself, and I
hope will not be ashamed. They read it in their way in the other boy's
house, and got out of it that I was a "bum" because once I was on the
level of the Bowery lodging house. But if he does not stay there, a man
need not be that; and for that matter, there are plenty who do whom it
would be a gross injury to call by such a name. There are lonely men,
who, with no kin of their own, prefer even such society as the cheap
lodging house has to offer to the desolation of the tenement; and there
are plenty of young lads from the country, who, waiting in the big city
for the something that is sure to turn up and open their road to
fortune, get stranded there. Beginning, perhaps, at the thirty-cent
house, they go down, down, till they strike the fifteen or the ten cent
house, with the dirty sheets and the ready club in the watchman's hand.
And then some day, when the last penny is gone, and the question where
the next meal is going to come from looms larger than the Philippine
policy of the nation, a heavy-browed man taps one on the shoulder with
an offer of an easy job--easy and straight enough in the mood the fellow
is in just then; for does not the world owe him a living? It is one of
the devil's most tempting baits to a starving man that makes him feel
quite a moral hero in taking that of which his more successful neighbor
has deprived him. The heavy-browed fellow is a thief, who is out
recruiting his band which the police have broken up in this or some
other city. By and by his victim will have time, behind prison bars, to
make out the lie that caught him. The world owes no man a living except
as the price of honest work. But, wrathful and hungry, he walks easily
into the trap.
[Footnote 25: "The Making of an American."]
That was what Inspector Byrnes meant by calling the cheap lodging houses
nurseries of crime. I have personally, as a police reporter, helped
trace many foul crimes to these houses where they were hatched. They
were all robberies to begin with, but three of them ended in murder.
Most of my readers will remember at least one of them, the Lyman S.
Weeks murder in Brooklyn, a thoroughly characteristic case of the kind I
have described. A case they never heard of, because it was nipped in the
bud, was typical of another kind. Two young Western fellows had come on,
on purpose to hold up New York, and were practising in their lodging,
but not, it seems, with much success, for the police pulled them in at
their second or third job. When searched, a tintype, evidently of Bowery
make, was found in the pocket of one, showing them at rehearsal. They
grinned when asked about it. "We done a fellow up easy that way," they
said, "and we'd a mind to see how it looked." They were lucky in being
caught so soon. A little while, and the gallows would have claimed them,
on the road they were travelling.
[Illustration: They had a Mind to see how it looked.]
I mention this to show the kind of problem we have in our Bowery lodging
houses, with their army of fifteen or sixteen thousand lodgers, hanging
on to the ragged edge most of them, and I have only skimmed the surface
of it at that. The political boss searches the depths of it about
election time when he needs votes; the sanitary policeman in times of
epidemic, when smallpox or typhus fever threatens. All other efforts to
reach it had proved unavailing when D. O. Mills, the banker, built his
two "Mills Houses," No. 1 in Bleecker Street for the West Side and No. 2
in Rivington Street for the homeless of the East Side. They did reach
it, by a cut 'cross lots as it were, by putting the whole thing on a
neighborly basis. It had been just business before, and, like the
keeping of slum tenements, a mighty well-paying one. The men who ran it
might well have given more, but they didn't. It was the same thing over
again: let the lodgers shift as they could; their landlord lived in
style on the avenue. What were they to him except the means of keeping
it up?
[Illustration: Doorway of the Mills House, No. 1]
The Mills Houses do not neglect the business end. Indeed, they insist
upon it. "No patron," said Mr. Mills at the opening, "will receive more
than he pays for, unless it be my hearty good-will and good wishes. It
is true that I have devoted thought, labor, and capital to a very
earnest effort to help him, but only by enabling him to help himself. In
doing the work on so large a scale, and in securing the utmost economies
in purchases and in administration, I hope to give him a larger
equivalent for his money than has hitherto been possible. He can,
without scruple, permit me to offer him this advantage; but he will
think better of himself, and will be a more self-reliant, manly man and
a better citizen, if he knows that he is honestly paying for what he
gets." That had the right ring to it, and from the beginning so have
the houses had. Big, handsome hotels, as fine as any, with wide marble
stairs for the dark hole through which one dived into the man-traps of
old. Mr. Mills gave to the lodger a man's chance, if he _is_ poor. His
room is small, but the bed for which he pays twenty cents is clean and
good. Indeed, it is said that the spring in it was made by the man who
made the springs for the five-dollar beds in the Waldorf-Astoria, and
that it is just the same. However that may be, it is comfortable enough,
as comfortable as any need have it in Bleecker Street or on Fifth
Avenue. The guest at the Mills House has all the privileges the other
has, except to while away the sunlit hours in his bed. Then he is
expected to be out hustling. At nine o'clock his door is barred against
him, and is not again opened until five in the afternoon. But there are
smoking and writing rooms, and a library for his use; games if he
chooses, baths when he feels like taking one, and a laundry where he may
wash his own clothes if he has to save the pennies, as he likely has to.
It is a good place to do it, too, for he can sleep comfortably and have
two square meals a day for fifty cents all told. There is a restaurant
in the basement where his dinner costs him fifteen cents.
I will not say that the dinner is as savory as the one they would serve
at Delmonico's, but he comes to it probably with a good deal better
appetite, and that is the thing after all. I ate with him once, and here
is the bill of fare of that day. I kept it.
Soup One Meat Dish Two Vegetables
Dessert Tea, Coffee or Milk
15 cents
* * * * *
SOUPS
Consommé with Noodles Purée of Tomatoes
HOT MEATS
Roast Turkey, Cranberry Sauce
Roast Beef, Dish Gravy
Fricasseed Spring Lamb with Mushrooms
COLD MEAT
Boiled Fresh Beef Tongue
FISH
Fried Smelts, Tartare Sauce
Boiled Cod, Egg Sauce
VEGETABLES
Boiled Sweet Potatoes Mashed Potatoes
Cauliflower, Hollandaise Sauce Fried Egg Plant
Celery Salad
DESSERT
Plum Pudding, Hard or Lemon Sauce
Pumpkin Pie Baked Apples
Tea Coffee Milk
I will own the turkey seemed to me to taste of codfish and the codfish
of turkey, as if it were all cooked in one huge dish; but there was
enough of it, and it was otherwise good. And the fault may have been
with my palate, probably was. It is getting to be quite the thing for
clubs with a social inquiry turn to meet and take their dinners at Mills
House No. 1 in Bleecker Street, so it must be all right. Perhaps I
struck the cook's off day.[26]
[Footnote 26: Since reading this proof I have been over and verified
my diagnosis. The trouble must have been with me. The soup and the
mutton and the pie had each its proper savor, and the cook is all
right. So is the lunch. There is no fifty-cent lunch in the city
that I know of which is better.]
[Illustration: Evening in One of the Courts in the Mills House, No. 1.]
No. 1 is the largest, with rooms for 1554 guests, and usually there are
1554 there. No. 2 in Rivington Street has 600 rooms. Together they are
capable of housing about twelve per cent of all who nightly seek the
cheap lodging houses, not counting the Raines law hotels, which are
chiefly used for purposes of assignation. The Bowery houses have felt
the competition, and have been compelled to make concessions that profit
the lodger. The greatest gain to him is the chance of getting away from
there. At the Mills Houses he is reasonably safe from the hold-up man
and the recruiting thief. Though the latter often gives the police the
Bleecker Street house as his permanent address on the principle that
makes the impecunious seeker of a job conduct his correspondence from
the Fifth Avenue Hotel or the Savoy, he is rarely found there, and if
found, is not kept long. If he does get in, he is quiet and harmless
because he has to be. Crooks in action seek crooked houses kept by
crooked men, and they find them along the Bowery more readily than
anywhere. There are the shows and the resorts that draw the young lads,
who, away from home, are all too easily drawn, to their undoing. The
getting them out of their latitude is the greatest gain, and this
service the Mills House performs, to a salutary extent. The more readily
since its fame has gone abroad, and the Mills House has become a type.
There is scarcely a mail now that does not bring me word from some city
in the West or East that a Mills House has been started there in the
effort to grapple with the problem of the floating population. The fear
that their reputation may help increase that problem by drawing greater
crowds from the country is rather strained, it seems to me. The
objection would lie against free shelters, but hardly against a business
concern that simply strives to give the poor lodger his money's worth.
As to him, the everlasting pessimist predicted, when the Mills
Houses were opened, that they would have to "make bathing compulsory."
The lodger has given him the lie; the average has been over 400 bathers
per day,--one in five,--and the record has passed 1000. No doubt soap
may be cheap and salvation dear, but on the other hand cleanliness does
and must ever begin godliness when fighting the slum, and no one who
ever took a look into one of the old-style lodging houses will doubt
that we are better off by so much. The Mills houses have paid four, even
five, per cent on their owner's investment of a million and a half. It
follows that the business will attract capital, which means that there
will be an end of the old nuisance. Beyond this, they have borne and
will bear increasingly a hand in settling with the saloon with which
they compete on its strong ground--that of social fellowship. It has no
rival in the Bowery house or in the boarding-house back bedroom. Every
philanthropic effort to fight it on that ground has drawn renewed
courage and hope from Mr. Mills's work and success.
Many years ago a rich merchant planned to do for his working women the
thing Mr. Mills has done for lonely men. Out on Long Island he built a
town for his clerks that was to be their very own. But it came out
differently. The Long Island town became a cathedral city and the home
of wealth and fashion; his woman's boarding house a great public hotel
far beyond the reach of those he sought to benefit. The passing years
saw his great house, its wealth, its very name, vanish as if they had
never been, and even his bones denied by ghoulish thieves rest in the
grave. There is no more pathetic page in the history of our city than
that which records the eclipse of the house of Alexander T. Stewart,
merchant prince. I like to think of the banker's successful philanthropy
as a kind of justice to the memory of the dead merchant, more eloquent
than marble and brass in the empty crypt. Mills House No. 1 stands upon
the site of Mr. Stewart's old home, where he dreamed his barren dream of
benevolence to his kind.
His work lies undone yet. While I am writing this, they are putting the
roof on a great structure in East Twenty-ninth Street that is to be the
"Woman's Hotel" of the city and bear the name of Martha Washington. It
is intended for business and professional women who can pay from seven
or eight dollars a week up to almost anything for their board and
lodging, and it is expected to fill so great a need as to be
commercially profitable at once. That will be well, and we shall all be
glad. But who will build the Mills House for lonely girls and women who
cannot pay seven or eight dollars a week, and would not go to the
Woman's Hotel if they could? The social cleft between Madison Avenue
and Bleecker Street is too wide to be bridged by the best intentions of
a hotel company. I doubt if they would know where to go in that strange
up-town country. When as an immigrant I paid two dollars a day for board
that was not worth fifty cents, in a Greenwich Street house, I might
have lodged in comfort in a Broadway hotel for less money, had I only
known where. There are hosts of half-starved women and girls living in
cheerless back rooms,--or, rather, they do not live, they exist on weak
coffee or tea, laying up an evil day for the generation of which they
are to be the mothers,--to whom such a house would be home, freedom, and
life. Ask any working girls' vacation society whence the need of their
labor early and late, if not to put a little life and vigor into those
ill-nourished bodies. Ask the priest, or any one who knows the
temptations of youth, how much that bald and dreary life of theirs
counts for in the fight he has on hand. Who will build the working
women's hotel somewhere between Stewart's old store and Twenty-third
Street, east of Broadway, that shall give them their sadly needed
chance? And while about it, let him add a wing, or build a separate
house, such as they have in Glasgow, for widows with little children,
that shall answer another of our perplexing problems,--a house, this
latter, with nursery, kindergarten, and laundry, where the mother might
know her child safe while she provided for it with her work. Who will be
the D. O. Mills of these helpless ones?
[Illustration: Lodging Room in the Leonard Street Police Station.]
Or is there but one Mills? I have heard it said that he has been
waiting, asking the same question. Let him wait no longer, then, if he
would put the finishing touch to a practical philanthropy that will rank
in days to come with the great benefactions to mankind.
[Illustration: Women's Lodging Room in Eldridge Street Police Station.]
I have dwelt upon the need of bracing up the home, or finding something
to replace it as nearly like it as could be, where that had to be done,
because the home is the key to good citizenship. Unhappily for the
great cities, there exists in them all a class that has lost the key or
thrown it away. For this class, New York, until three years ago, had
never made any provision. The police station lodging rooms, of which I
have spoken, were not to be dignified by the term. These vile dens, in
which the homeless of our great city were herded, without pretence of
bed, of bath, of food, on rude planks, were the most pernicious parody
on municipal charity, I verily believe, that any civilized community had
ever devised. To escape physical and moral contagion in these crowds
seemed humanly impossible. Of the innocently homeless lad they made a
tramp by the shortest cut. To the old tramp they were indeed ideal
provision, for they enabled him to spend for drink every cent he could
beg or steal. With the stale beer dive, the free lunch counter, and the
police lodging room at hand, his cup of happiness was full. There came
an evil day, when the stale beer dive shut its doors and the free lunch
disappeared for a season. The beer pump, which drained the kegs dry and
robbed the stale beer collector of his ware, drove the dives out of
business; the Raines law forbade the free lunch. Just at this time
Theodore Roosevelt shut the police lodging rooms, and the tramp was
literally left out in the cold, cursing reform and its fruits. It was
the climax of a campaign a generation old, during which no one had ever
been found to say a word in defence of these lodging rooms; yet nothing
had availed to close them.
[Illustration: A "Scrub" and her Bed--the Plank.]
The city took lodgers on an old barge in the East River, that winter
(1896), and kept a register of them. We learned something from that. Of
nearly 10,000 lodgers, one-half were under thirty years old and in good
health--fat, in fact. The doctors reported them "well nourished." Among
100 whom I watched taking their compulsory bath, one night, only two
were skinny; the others were stout, well-fed men, abundantly able to do
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