[Illustration: THE "TOWN PUMP."
Drinking water supply for 568 people living in Painter's Row; and for
the operatives in the mill.]
In the two rows nearest the river, there were twenty-eight houses
divided from cellar to roof by a party wall, so that the rooms in
each apartment were arranged one above the other; the result was that
there was no through ventilation, and consequently the rooms were
ill-smelling at all times and stiflingly close in summer. There were in
the different rows, twenty-seven cellar and basement kitchens, dark,
unsanitary, ill-ventilated. Besides these, there were six cellar
rooms more than halfway below the ground level, that were occupied
solely as sleeping rooms. The windows of these cellars were small, and
the little light and air that could gain admittance under the best
of circumstances was obstructed by a row of ramshackle sheds which
bordered the narrow area upon which these windows opened. There were
many other gloomy rooms which it would be but repetition to describe.
But the tale of dark, ill-ventilated sleeping quarters would be
incomplete without passing mention of a space under a staircase that
had been walled off and that was entered from a kitchen. Into this
"hole in the wall" a bed had been squeezed by some hook or crook, and
there two boarders stowed their bodies at night. I found the worst
overcrowding in the row at the top of the hill. In one apartment, a
man, his wife, and baby and two boarders slept in one room, and five
boarders occupied two beds in an adjoining room. In another apartment
of three rooms, the man, his wife and baby slept in the kitchen,
their two boarders in a second room; and the third room was sub-let
and occupied as a living and sleeping room by five persons,--a man,
his wife and child and two boarders. This last room was a small one,
containing two beds, a stove, table, trunks and chairs. Once inside,
there was scarcely room to turn comfortably.
Not one house in the entire settlement had any provision for supplying
drinking water to its tenants. Mill water was piped out to the
rows,--an ugly, dirty fluid, which, however tired or thirsty they were,
the people would not put to their lips. I asked the question at every
doorstep and got the same reply. They went to an old pump in the mill
yard,--360 steps from the farthest apartment, down seventy-five stairs.
This "town pump" was the sole supply of drinking water within reach of
ninety-one households, comprising 568 persons.
[Illustration: PIPE EMPTYING MILL-WATER INTO OPEN DRAIN BETWEEN ROWS.]
The water pumped from the mill was used for cleansing purposes. When
the pressure was low, there was none even of that to be had. In only
two cases was this wash water piped directly into the house. Tenants
in the other houses carried it from bent pipes that emptied into open
drains running between the rows, or into troughs at the end of the
buildings, whence it had to be carried up two or three flights of
stairs if they happened to live in the upper stories. From these same
apartments the waste water had to be carried out and down and emptied
into the drains. The marvel was not that some of the homes were dirty;
the wonder was that any of them were clean,--for against such obstacles
cleanliness was to be secured only at the expense of tired muscles and
aching backs. I talked with one mother whose two rooms on the top floor
were spotless, and whose children were well looked after. Day after
day, and many times a day, she carried the water up and down that her
home and her children might be kept decent and clean. I looked at her
bent shoulders, gaunt arms and knotted hands. Work aplenty,--necessary
work,--there was and always will be for her to do, but those shoulders
and arms and hands had to strain laboriously over unnecessary work as
well. "God! Miss, but them stairs is bad," she said.
As was said at the beginning, when the Carnegie Steel Company took over
Painter's Mill, it renovated the equipment of the plant; when it took
over Painter's Row, it did nothing.
One row of four houses had waste sinks in the apartments and another
row of one-family houses had a curious wooden chute arrangement on
the back porches, down which waste water was poured that ran through
open wooden drains in the rear yard to the open drain between this row
of houses and the next. A similar arrangement had been made for the
convenience of six families living in the second story of the row of
tenement houses, where two wooden chutes from the porch above carried
the waste water down to the curb at Carson street. They carried other
things besides waste water,--filth of every description was emptied
down these chutes,--for these six families, and three families below
on the first floor had no closet accommodation and were living like
animals. Some families disposed of slops and excreta in the way just
indicated; others used a bucket containing ashes, which was emptied
into a wooden garbage bin on the street at the end of the row of houses.
Officials of the mill company, when this condition of affairs was
pointed out to them, replied that the vault in the rear of this row
of houses was built for the use of these families as well as for the
other nineteen families in these two rows, and that they could secure
a key to a closet compartment by applying for it at the offices. As
a matter of fact these people had never been offered keys and they
volunteered the statement to the investigator that they had no closets.
The vault just mentioned was halfway up the hill between these two
rows of houses. To reach it, anyone living in an end apartment in the
second story front would be obliged to walk half the length of the
second story porch to where the inside stairs led down to the street,
then along the street (for the sidewalk was but two and a half feet
wide, and completely covered with old lumber and debris of every
description), then up a difficult flight of outside stairs, steep
and with narrow treads, then two or three steps on the level, then
more stairs, and so on until one had taken a hundred and eighty-six
steps, sixty-five of which were stairs. This was called "closet
accommodations" for want of a better term.
[Illustration: WOODEN CHUTE FROM A SECOND STORY GALLERY, DUMPING ITS
FILTH AT THE CURB ON CARSON STREET.]
[Illustration: THE LOWER ROWS IN 1907.
Showing frame two-family dwellings between Carson street and the river.
Open drain between the rows; bad surface drainage. Twelve families at
right had no toilets.]
[Illustration: ONE YEAR LATER: THE ROWS TORN DOWN.]
Equally bad conditions prevailed in the row of houses nearest the
river. Closets for these houses were formerly located across the
railroad tracks on the edge of the bank. During the flood in the spring
of 1907, these were swept away and had never been replaced. The twelve
families living in this row also used buckets and emptied the contents
into the river. One family in the next row of houses claimed that they
had never been given a closet key. In all, twenty-two of the ninety-one
families were living without the first elementary conveniences that
make for sanitation. The full evil of this state of affairs is not
really clear until one remembers that these families were occupying
two-and three-room apartments, nearly all of them having several
children, and anywhere from two to five boarders each.
It is fair to ask, why even immigrant laborers put up with such
conditions? To the minds of the men, for two very good and sufficient
reasons. The houses were near the mill and rents were cheap. The
ledge of land along the foot of Mt. Washington affords few building
sites; and the Painter's Mill section is, perhaps, the extreme example
of the general housing-shortage of the South Side. Men who work in
heat, work ten or twelve hours a day, and work at night alternate
fortnights, want to live near the mill. Especially is this true of day
laborers who work on repair gangs and cleaning-up work, and who may be
called out at any time. This is as true of the mill towns, as of the
working force of such a plant as Painter's Mill, in the heart of the
city. On the other hand, the mill management wants these men there,
for just such emergency calls. The rents in Painter's Row averaged
$2.40 a room monthly,--cheaper by far than these laborers could
secure accommodations from ordinary landlords in many other sections
of Pittsburgh; and that is a dominating consideration to a man with
a family, earning $1.65 a day, or a single immigrant whose whole
purpose in coming to America is to make money and who will stomach any
personal ills to hold on to it. On the other hand, it must be borne
in mind that these rents aggregated the company over $7,000 a year.
Such an item is a bagatelle in the balance sheet of the United States
Steel Corporation; and it would be foolish to suppose that the rows
were rented out to their employes as a money making scheme. They were
rented out on easy terms to keep laborers within call at any hour of
the day or night, and the fact that Painter's Mill is an old plant and
likely to be abandoned, no doubt influenced the management in holding
the housing property as it stood without rehabilitation. But the fact
remains that these rentals amounted to a sum nearly sufficient to pay
the whole taxes on the Painter's Mill property, mill, equipment, land
and houses.
[Illustration: DARK COVERED PASSAGE WAY THROUGH WHICH WOMEN AND
CHILDREN WERE OBLIGED TO GO TO REACH PUMP IN MILL YARD.]
To-day, the situation in Painter's Row is very different. Three rows of
houses have been torn down, and radical improvements made to others.
A variety of factors entered into this change and the story is worth
the telling. The evolution of social consciousness is interesting,
whether in an individual or a corporation. The initial factor in such
a development may be one of several,--motives of self-interest, the
weight of public opinion or the letting of light into dark places.
Motives of self-interest did not suffice to make the Carnegie Steel
Company a good landlord in the present instance. In other words,
the company had not recognized it to be worth while as a business
consideration to house its human machinery with a view of maintaining
such machinery at its highest state of efficiency. Its mills, with
their equipment, were repaired and improved in order to increase the
quality and quantity of their output. But common laborers were too
easily replaced for an effort to be made to conserve their health or
well-being by repairing or improving these houses in which they lived.
If ten men fell out, ten more were ready to step in and fill their
places.
[Illustration: PAINTER'S ROW TO-DAY.
Privy and open drain. Stagnant waste water, garbage, and mill building
of the United States Steel Corporation.]
But Painter's Row was not the only instance of bad housing in
Pittsburgh. Other landlords were equally indifferent, and evil housing
conditions were found all over the city. In March, a preliminary report
on general housing conditions in Pittsburgh was published by the
Pittsburgh Survey. One paragraph dealt with conditions in Painter's
Row. The fact that the responsibility for the situation there could be
fixed directly upon one of the great corporations enhanced the value of
the paragraph as a quotable news item, and _Collier's Weekly_ seized
upon it as a text for an editorial. The editorial brought it under
the eye of a New England stockholder whose New England conscience was
stirred. His protest at the United States Steel headquarters in New
York brought from there a communication so favorable to the company
that he felt justified in criticising the editors of _Collier's_ for
their apparently unwarranted statements; and they, in turn, called upon
the Survey to substantiate the quotation. In support of this paragraph,
which was but a few lines long in the published report, the full
details of how things stood at Painter's Row, as I have put them down
here, were transmitted by the editors to the inquiring stockholder. He
was aroused, convinced and in position to lodge another protest, this
time with the facts behind it. Light had been let in.
Meanwhile, pressure was brought to bear upon the owners of Painter's
Row from a second quarter. The health authorities were insistent that
all houses occupied by three or more families should be altered so as
to conform to the requirements of the tenement house law, thus making
mandatory the installation of sinks and water-closets in such houses.
This also involved the cutting of windows in half a dozen gloomy cellar
rooms in one building, in order to procure the required amount of light
and ventilation, a structural change which would have so weakened
the supporting walls of the building as to have rendered it unsafe.
The windows were not cut, the sinks and closets were not installed;
instead, the building was razed to the ground,--the best possible thing
that could have happened. Two other rows of two-family houses were
also demolished. They were old, ramshackle, frame buildings, not worth
repairing.
Last fall, I inspected Painter's Row for the second time. I found the
noise as incessant, the smoke and dust as penetrating, as nine months
before. The children were as grimy but they were fewer in number,
for as a result of these changes the settlement had been reduced to
twenty-eight families. When I reached the topmost row of houses on the
hillside, my inspection partook of the nature of a triumphal progress.
Some of the tenants remembered me. Gleefully they showed me their sinks
with drinking water in every apartment, and told of the closets that
had been installed in the basement. Every fixture was clean and in
perfect condition,--a refutation of the old argument that such people
unaccustomed to these conveniences in the old country will not care for
them when supplied.
I found a like state of affairs in another building formerly occupied
as a tenement, now housing but two families. Here also sinks and inside
water-closets had been installed.
By so much, then, had life in Painter's Row been made more tolerable.
Two rows of one-family brick houses remained untouched. The families
living in these houses continued to get along without drinking water
on the premises and continued to use outside privy vaults; a few were
occupying cellar kitchens. In one row, waste water and garbage were
still emptied down wooden chutes leading to open drains through the
yards. The result was odorous and unhealthy.
Much had been accomplished, something still remained to be done. The
company which had gone beyond the requirement of the law in some things
still fell short in others. Sooner or later, the health authorities
would force the removal of the privy vaults. The old pump had served
Painter's Row loyally and well, and would continue to serve it as long
as the bucket brigade moved back and forth between these remaining
houses and the mill-yard for their water. Sometimes a little child
trudged along with a great pail half filled. Again, it was the man of
the family, tired after a hard day, who brought in the ration of water.
In a way, that big, grimy pump with its old iron handle and primitive
spoutings, summed up the Painter's Row situation,--of an industry of
great mechanics who could overhaul an old plant and make it pay, but
had not brought water a few paces up the hill, or dropped a sewer a few
paces down to the river below that men and women and children might
live like men and women and children.
[Illustration: THE "HOLE IN THE WALL."]
[Illustration]