The main thoroughfare is respectable and non-committal. It offers but
one clue to the melodrama, the violence and misfortune, which its brick
fronts so innocently conceal. This clue is a narrow, dusty alley-way,
which cuts through the brick fronts, runs back about eighty feet, and
then turns sharply to the left and takes unto itself the name of Ewing
street. Ewing street runs along the edge of a valley called Skunk
Hollow. It pursues a serpentine course between two irregular rows of
shacks,--the one back to back with the preoccupied brick houses, the
other balancing itself uncertainly on the edge of the valley,--and
finally ends in a number of branching foot-paths. This street and Skunk
Hollow below it, both effectively shut off and concealed from casual
inspection by the row of brick houses, are bound up into a pocket
edition of civic neglect.
One cannot tell, without inquiry, whether the shacks on Ewing street
are for horses, cows, or human beings; it is said that the owners
do not care, so long as the rent is paid. But whether it is the
desirability of being in a "dead-head row" commanding a view of the
valley, or the advantage of having a house which while showing but one
or two stories above the street, takes a private drop of one story in
the rear and accommodates itself to the abrupt decline of the cliff,
there is no doubt that the cliff-edge structures are far more popular
than their stunted neighbors across the way. In them one finds the
most desirable clinical material for a study of Pittsburgh's ills,
all in one well packed group of abnormalities. Do you wish to see the
housing problem? You need only follow Ewing street its short length of
a city block and observe. The level of one side of Ewing street and
the characteristic drop of the other, have brought out two typical
forms of Pittsburgh architecture described by a resident small boy as
"squatters" and "clingers." Together they form the nondescript shelters
of a parasitical class of persons, white and colored, unassorted.
In such fantastic and general dilapidation are these rows of unpainted
shelters that some of them are falling to the ground without the
formality of condemnation proceedings. Most of them have running water
in the kitchens; a very few have sanitary toilets and shout the fact on
black and white rental signs. Cellar rooms abound and are often used
as sleeping rooms; in those houses built together into a block they
are windowless. The toilets back of them are in the old boxed battery
style, unflushed, and send their contamination down the grooves of the
slope to Skunk Hollow at the bottom.
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON SKUNK HOLLOW.