The United States Steel Corporation owns property on the South Side
of Pittsburgh just beyond the Point Bridge. Here is located the old
Painter's Mill, which is one of the plants of the Carnegie Steel
Company, which in turn is one of the constituent companies of the
United States Steel Corporation; and here, also, stands what remains of
Painter's Row, where the company has housed certain of its employes,
mostly immigrants. When the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's
Mill, it renovated the plant so as to turn out the sort and quantity
of output which the Carnegie name stands for. When it took over
Painter's Row, it did nothing. When, a little over a year ago, and
several years after the purchase of the property, I made a detailed
investigation of the place, I found half a thousand people living there
under conditions that were unbelievable,--back-to-back houses with no
through ventilation; cellar kitchens; dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated,
overcrowded sleeping rooms, no drinking water supply on the premises;
and a dearth of sanitary accommodations that was shameful.
Painter's Row was originally a succession of six rows, some brick,
some frame, built on the side of a hill that slopes from the foot of a
lofty palisade down to the Ohio. Houses and mills immediately adjoin
and tenants are even housed in an old brick building, in another part
of which some of the mill offices are located. Sluggish clouds of
thick smoke hang over the cluster of roofs and the air is full of soot
and fine dust. Noise presses in from every quarter,--from the roaring
mill, from the trolley cars clattering and clanging through the narrow
street which divides mill and rows into two sections, from the trains
on the through tracks above the topmost row and from the sidings which
separate the lowest row from the river bank and which are in constant
use for the hauling of freight to and from the mills.
* * * * *
(The story of Painter's Row should be considered in its
bearings. The United States Steel Corporation is building a
remarkable new town at Gary, Indiana; its subsidiary companies
have promoted house building along original lines, notably
at Vandergrift, Ambridge and Lorain, and the Carnegie Steel
Company has fair, low rental houses at Munhall and elsewhere.
On the other hand, other Pittsburgh corporations own company
houses which have been equally as bad as Painter's Row; and a
similar story could be written of a shack at one time owned
by one of the foremost Protestant churches of Pittsburgh, and
razed to the ground only because the headworker of Kingsley
House had the courage to publish its picture and the name of
the owner.
We have no animosity in singling out one corporation; but
we have a very serious purpose in detailing the facts as to
this row of company houses. There is ground for difference of
opinion from a business as well as a social point of view,
as to whether it is desirable for an industrial corporation
to own and rent homes to its employes. But if industrial
chairmen, presidents and superintendents become landlords,
they must bear the responsibilities of landlords; and only as
the public holds them up to these responsibilities as stiffly
as their stockholders hold them up to dividends, will they
be in position to devise and carry out policies which, as
individuals, we may assume they would act upon. This story
of one high-spirited New England stockholder and 500 company
tenants indicates, moreover, that some investors are willing to
lead the public in such demands.
With the standards it is setting at Gary, the United States
Steel Corporation cannot afford to be responsible for
such conditions as these at Painter's Row, whether in the
Pennsylvania steel district, at its mines in Northern Michigan,
or at its plants in the South. For the Survey to have selected
a lesser, independent company for criticism, would have been to
lay ourselves open to the charge of fear of the big offender;
for us to have found a more humanly destructive group of bad
houses, would have been impossible.