[Illustration: A FIRMLY ENTRENCHED SHANTY, FRONTING ON NO ROAD BUT
GUARDED BELLIGERENTLY BY ITS COLORED OWNER.]
The hollow, reached by sewage through winding crevices in rubbish, and
by goats and dogs over hills of tin cans and refuse, is reached by the
people themselves down flights of decaying steps. In the street at
the bottom, a wooden surface drain goes companionably along side by
side with the foot-path. Occasionally a trickling stream from the hill
joins forces with it and the whole falls at last through a basket-drop
into an open sewer. The disheveled exterior which gives Ewing street
the personality of a gang-leader with his hat on one side, is not so
marked in the hollow. The hollow has a kind of sullen reticence. Here
sanitary conditions are, if possible, of graver aspect. It is literally
a cesspool.
In this cesspool is a strong and dangerous community life. Till now you
have been absorbed in the setting of the neighborhood, but now, as you
begin to observe the people who slouch past you, you note that they
correspond to their environments. The rakish aspect of Ewing street,
and the morbid silence of the hollow are reflected in the manners of
their respective inhabitants.
On Ewing street, one of the first houses you visit is reached by a
drop of five or six broken steps, and looks like a bowling alley
shack. It is long, narrow, and has two small windows and a door in the
street end. On the porch is a notorious colored woman, raided out of
the worst houses in Pittsburgh, ready to toss out her fine and pass
on, when temporarily hindered by arrest. Tacked to her piazza is a
sign informing the passerby that religious services are held within,
and pasted around the dilapidated smokestack is the sign "To let."
"Nobody came as long as it was a mission," said the patrolman, "they do
come now. Always booze on Sundays there; nothing but crime." The old
colored aunty, who owns a little cabin next door in the rear, tells
you later with bulging eyes and darkey gesticulation, that the real
trouble is that the ghost of Charlie Barber who died there two years
ago, comes back nights and by flinging up the windows and banging the
door, breaks up both services and carousels. She says he has driven
most of the colored ladies "plumb spiritualistic" and that "Mrs. K----,
a white, Irish lady in the next house but one, goes to meetings in
the city three times a week and spends so much for collections that
her children have no shoes to wear to school." Sure enough you find
the children shut up in the house; the father, a laborer, out of
work; the mother doing a washing. "Truant officers? What are they?"
she asks. In the back yard of this home lives a red-turbaned colored
scold, owner of a much coveted hydrant upon which four families are
dependent for water. Her house is a fenced-in triangle on a trackless
waste of rubbish. It is to be approached only by original methods. The
neighbors, however, say that it is on "Christian street." They say that
the owner sells out little plots here and there on the hillside for
a hundred or so dollars apiece. Most of the houses are owned by the
tenants, the lots having been sold to them unimproved by old Pittsburgh
estates. Building permits for frame dwellings have been refused,
and, as the owners cannot afford to build with brick they stay on in
shanties too far gone to improve. No sword wielded in defense of a
feudal castle was ever more keen than the tongue of the turbaned owner
of this estate on Christian street as she raises her black fist over
the fence and dares you to swing her gate!
[Illustration: A SKUNK HOLLOW DAIRY.
The cows live in the boarded up shed. The surface drains running beside
the walk, empty into the well from which the people draw water.]
Next to her is a burnt-out shell of a four-family house; no attempt is
being made to prop it up or tear it down, and it hangs there towards
the street with uncertain intentions. The owner will tell you that it
"was fired on a dark night,--not by a friend," and then he will shrug
his shoulders and mutter something about the neighborhood. He sits on
his little stoop all day, this owner does, in his Sunday suit and best
hat, replete with darkey respectability. Crutches are beside him and
his feet are bandaged. Sitting near him, like a jack-knife on the point
of snapping shut, is an old black mammy, her eyes glazed with coming
blindness. She wears Prunella gaiters, a calico gown, and a sunbonnet
with a wide limp frill, and is as much a personification of the old
South as the man is of the new. She points fondly over her shoulder to
her two stuffy rooms, crammed with knick-knacks, and tells you they
must go under the hammer next week unless she can get help. This young
man here would pay her a rent of eight dollars a month for three rooms,
but he is just out of the hospital and unable to work. His leg was
crushed in the steel mill six weeks ago and not one penny has been sent
him yet by his bosses. Both of them are living on credit and hope. The
neighborhood isn't very bad, they say, "although there are some very
disbelieving people in it." But they don't know a better, where folks
would let out to niggers.
So far then we have found instances of bad streets, unsanitary housing,
trade accidents and the race problem.
Then one comes to a house, one story high at the street two at the
rear, which has two rooms opening in front and two toward the hollow.
In these rooms live an Irish widower and his two children of ten and
twelve years, together with a miscellaneous lot of colored people. They
quarrel, and have to be watched by the police.
A step farther we meet a Scottish mill laborer out of work. He proudly
points to the playhouse he has built for his two little girls "to keep
'em off the street." It is set up against the toilet, but that can't be
helped. The mixed family next door pick rags "and carry on" in the shed
hard by. The woman there has "chronic tonsilitis" which is dangerous
for the children. The mother wishes there was some better place for the
children to play.
Up to this point one feels that this is a settlement of mill-ends;
mill-ends of people, living in mill-ends of houses, on mill-end jobs,
if they work at all. It does not seem possible that anyone could come
to live on Ewing street from deliberate choice. With something of a
start one finds, in this row of demoralization, a home just vacated
by a charitable agency for the help of colored children. It was a
temporary home for boys and girls and babies, occupying the ground
floor and basement of a house unsanitary and dark, having no gas, no
running water, and no yard, only a rickety back stoop, offering an
unparalleled view of Skunk Hollow. In a middle room, dark except for
one outer window and one cut through into the back room, slept eight or
ten children two in a bed, feet to feet, boys and girls from infancy to
twelve years. The institution has gone now to a better neighborhood.
This particular house hasn't a bad name; it was the one further down
that was raided last month. Two under-age girls were found there, but
the madam got off with a fine and the girls disappeared. Some other
people of doubtful credentials are moving in; maybe they are good and
maybe not. They are carrying in their household goods now. They do not
look unlike the others of the neighborhood. A thin colored woman stands
off and watches, rocking her baby in her arms. She is seized with a fit
of coughing, and turns into the dark doorway of her shack. One does not
need to follow her to know that she represents one more city problem.
The vantage point for a view of Skunk Hollow seems to be the back
stoops of the clingers on the edge of the basin. Here one becomes aware
that the hollow is a public dumping ground of ashes and tin cans. As
wagons drive up and drop their contents the air itself becomes full of
refuse. An occasional thin stream of water trickling down from where
you stand. This is the Ewing street sewage making its way to the bottom
of the valley.
[Illustration: INSTITUTIONAL CHARITY IN SKUNK HOLLOW.]
The hollow seems to follow the bed of an old river; it winds away
around a huge hill of gravel where two railroads lie. On a delta
between the railroad tracks, the boys have improvised a playground.
Farther along there is a straggling bunch of houses. You notice a
little girl washing clothes on one of the back piazzas. A little boy
runs out and cuffs her until she runs into the house crying, and a man
comes out and chases the boy. The boy climbs a neighbor's fence and
vanishes. A colored woman and a white woman are seen on the path that
winds through this settlement; they go into one of the houses and shut
the door. An Italian comes out of the same door a minute later, and
walks off down the railway track. The rears of these houses present
another solid line of reeking, broken-down toilets with box vaults,
unflushed, on platforms built level with the rear floor of the houses.
Tucked in between disreputable families of the lowest type are, here
and there, bright faced thrifty Italians. Two families have been
brought to Skunk Hollow from respectable neighborhoods because of the
hard times. In one of their houses renting for nine dollars a month,
the rear room is a ten by six, cubicle, with a two by two window in it
directly opposite and two feet away from the doorway of the toilet.
The air? Well, the window has a solid shutter and when that is closed
the air isn't so bad and keeps out disease. As the mother talks, two
little chained dogs bark at the babies loaded on her arms, and on the
edge of the railing, which prevents the unwary from stepping off the
platform into a landslide of rubbish below, fruit and clothes are
drying, macaroni is soaking, and busybody flies are hurrying from one
thing to another. Any typhoid? Oh yes, the grandmother died with it,
and one of the children had it, but was taken to a hospital and got
well.
Towards the end of Neville street, in the heart of the hollow, we come
to a back yard. The house, for its own reasons, prefers to front on the
railroad. In the yard is a large shed patched with odds and ends of all
sorts of boards, layer upon layer. The people in the house,--most of
whom are "women boarders",--say it is used just to put things in. As a
venture you suggest cows? Yes, there are cows there, three, the milk is
sold for the babies in the neighborhood. The man says the cows "graze
upon the hills around the hollow." He glances at the hills and laughs.
It is true the cows haven't grazed there this summer, and in the winter
it is best for them to be in a warm dark shed.
As we climb back up the stairs in the late afternoon, we meet the lamp
lighter going down with his ladder. Early? Yes, but it is not well
to go into the Hollow as late as dusk. There are only sixteen lamps
there,--soon lighted, but people have their own reasons for turning
them off and few of them burn till morning. The hollow doesn't wish the
light. At the end of Ewing street, by the alley of entrance, stand two
patrolmen. They are side by side looking meditatively down into the
valley. They are watching for the little boy who climbed the fence.
"He's a Juvenile Court boy named Matthew S----," they say. "He's home
on probation. It's a queer thing about the Juvenile Court, it takes
children away and locks 'em up because the neighborhood's bad, and then
it sends 'em home on probation." These men, without knowing it, were
asking for a single judge for the Juvenile Court. "He promises to do
right," one of them continued, "but they ain't enough probation women
to see that he does keep straight and he's the worst one we've got on
the beat." This one was asking for an adequate number of probation
officers. "Now, do you see that tight, brick house down there beyond?"
they asked. "That's a colored disorderly house,--run for booze. That
little white girl who's washing on them steps goes there all the time.
She stays out nights,--away from home. The father works hard and brings
home all his money; but the woman,--she don't care. Ain't the Juvenile
Court no way of catching the mother? She ought to go to the workhouse."
He was asking for an enforcement of the adult delinquency law. The
conversation ran on and the patrolman told more of the affairs of
Skunk Hollow. He told of speak-easies, and hang-outs of all kinds,
masked under the appearance of small grocery shops. At the foot of
the stairs, he said, an Italian interpreter was found dead within the
year, struck from behind by an Irish-American. The man smoking there
and talking to the little girl over the fence had done it, but there
was no evidence. Two little children belonging to the colored woman who
keeps the disorderly house were playing in the dust. The patrolmen were
letting them stay home until they could get them in a raid. "Where do
you suppose they'll bring up?" one of them said. "The mother won't get
more than a fine and she can pay it."
"Now watch the boys!" said the other. "Here comes a freight." The
train wound slowly into a nest of little boys playing ball. After it
had passed there was not a boy to be seen. "Catching rides" said the
patrolman with an appreciative chuckle. "They'll go round the hill and
come back by way of the main street. Then I'll chase 'em in for playing
where they ain't no right, and back they'll come to Skunk Hollow. I
wish I had some other place to send them." The playground problem again!
On the skyline around the hollow the church spires stood out blacker
than the smoke in which the valley was shrouded. An American flag waved
from the school house on the main thoroughfare, and the fanciful towers
of Luna Park peered jeeringly into this pest hole of neglect. "Shame,
ain't it?" said one of the patrolmen.
[Illustration]