The Battle with the Slum - Chapters IV-V



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.

   "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."(1) 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.(2) 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.(3) 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.

   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. Towering 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 reenacted the next year; 
only the murderer saved the country 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 over-flowing 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.

   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 first 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 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 × 8½ 
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."

   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.

   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?

   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,(4) 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.

   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?

(1. Report of Tenement House Commission, 1900)

(2. 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)

(3. Police census of 1900, block bounded by Canal, Hester, Eldridge, and 
Forsyth streets: size 375 x 200, population 2969, rate per acre 1724. 
Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets: size 200 x 
300, population 2609, rate per acre 1894)

(4. 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)



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 
today. 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 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 out-weighed 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.(1) 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. Rodger 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.(2) 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.

   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.

   "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 vermin. They are a menace to the public health, and 
cannot be repaired. Their annual death-rate in five years was 41.38."

   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 land-lord 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.(3) Does any one 
ask yet why we fight the slum in Berlin and New York? The Barracks in 
those days suggested the first kind.

   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 sun-stroke, 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.

   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.

   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, fire-proof 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 bread-winner 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."

   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."(4)

   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 years 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.

   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."(5) 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.

   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.

   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.

(1. That was, however, a reduction of 236 since 1898, when the census 
showed 2379 rear houses)

(2. Report of Gilder Tenement House Commission, 1894)

(3. "Municipal Government in Continental Europe," by Albert Shaw)

(4. Report of the Tenement House Commission 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.")

(5. Report of Tenement House Commission of 1900)