"A man becomes hardened to the sights I see," he said in answer to my
glance, "but I can scarcely keep the tears from my eyes when I see a
child like this in such a place; for, you see, I know what a life it is
growing up to."
This wretched place Mr. Finn told us was one of the best of all the bed
houses. He proved his assertion by conducting us to one out of which we
beat a hasty retreat. The night air never seemed so pure to me as it did
as I came out of the vile den into the clear starlight. I could scarcely
breathe in the fearful hole we had just been in, and yet it was rapidly
filling up with people who were to pass the night there. There were men,
women and children, but they were all huddled together in one room.
There was no such thing as privacy. Some of the lodgers were simply
unfortunate, some were vagrants, and others were criminals.
I do not believe that all the sanitary measures in the world could ever
make these places clean or healthy. The atmosphere is always too foul
and dense to be breathed by any but lungs accustomed to it. When the
cellars are crowded with lodgers, and the heat of the stove adds to the
poison, it must be appalling. The poor wretches who seek shelter here
are more than half stupefied by it, and pass the night in this condition
instead of in a healthful sleep. They pay from ten to twenty-five cents
for their lodgings, and if they desire a supper or breakfast, are given a
cup of coffee and a piece of bread, or a bowl of soup for a similar sum.
As a matter of course only vagrants and those who have gone down into the
depths of poverty come here. They must choose between the cellars and
the streets, and the beds offered them here are warmer and softer than
the stones of the street.
"Have we seen the worst?" I asked Mr. Finn, as we came out of the last
place.
"No," he replied, "there are worse places yet. But I'll not take you
there."
The reader will readily credit this assertion, after reading the
following account of a visit of the Health Officers to one of a number of
similar cellars in Washington Street, on the west side of the city:
"The place next visited was No. 27 Washington street. This building is
also owned by 'Butcher Burke,' and is one of the most filthy and horrible
places in the city. We passed under an old tumble-down doorway that
seemed to have no earthly excuse for standing there, and into a dismal,
dark entry, with a zig-zag wall covered with a leprous slime, our
conductor crying out all the time: 'Steady, gentlemen, steady, keep to
your left; place is full of holes.'
"Presently we emerged into a yard with a detestable pavement of broken
bricks and mud, with high, towering houses surmounting it all around, and
a number of broken outhouses and privies covering a large portion of the
ground surface of the yard. Turning around, we could see the back of the
tenement house from whose entry we had just emerged, with its numberless
and wretched windows, shutting out the sky, or the fog, which was the
only thing visible above us, and a cloud of clothes-lines stretched
hither and thither, like a spider's web.
"There were eight privies in the yard, and we entered them. The night
soil was within a _foot and a half_ of the seats, and the odor was
terrible. From these privies a drain passed under the surface of the
muddy, sloppy yard, to the margin of the building, where a descent of
perhaps four feet was obtained, at the bottom of which the basement floor
was level with the windows, giving a sickly light, but no air or
ventilation whatever, to the inhabitants of the cellar. But the worst is
yet to be told. The drain from the privies connecting with the sewer in
the street had a _man-hole_, which was open, at the place where the yard
was broken for a descent into this infernal cellar. This man-hole was
about four feet wide and three feet deep, forming a small table for a
cataract of night soil and other fecal matter, which poured over this
artificial table in a miniature and loathsome Niagara and into a cesspool
at the bottom, and from thence was conducted under the rotten boards of
the cellar through a brick drain, a few inches below the board flooring,
to the main sewer in the street. The bottom of the windows in this house
are on a dead level with this horrid cesspool, so that a man sitting on a
chair at the window would not have only the odor, but also the view of
this loathsome matter circulating at his feet in the pool below. We
entered the back cellar after knocking at the door a few minutes, and a
man, poverty-stricken and wretched in appearance, of the laboring class,
came with a candle to let us in. The room was in a filthy condition, ten
by twenty-two and a half feet, with a ceiling of six feet three inches
elevation from the floor. A woman, wretched and woe-begone as the man,
rose suddenly from a dirty bed at the back of the room, and bade us
welcome civilly enough, in her night clothing, which was scanty.
"'And are yees the Boord of Helth, sure. Well it isn't much we have to
show thin, but yees can see it all without any charge at all, at all.'
"'How much rent do you pay here?' asked the writer of the man with the
candle.
"'Is it rint ye mane? Nyah, its $6 a munth, shure, and glad to get it,
and if we don't pay it, it's the little time we'll get from Burke, but
out on the street wid us, like pigs, and the divil resave the bit of
sattysfaction we'll get from him than ye would from the Lord
Palmershtown, Nyah!'
"'How do you live?'
"'Shure, I put in coal now and thin, whin I can get it to put, and that's
not often, God knows, alanna!'
"'How much do you earn?'
"'Is it earn d'ye say? Sometimes fifty cents a day, sometimes two
dollars a week; and thin it's good times wid me.'
"The Woman of the House.--'Don't mind him, man, what he's saying. Shure
he niver earns two dollars a week at all. That id be a good week faix
for me. Two dollars indade!'
"'Have you any children?'
"'We have one dauther, a girl--a fine, big girl.'
"'How old is she?'
"'Well, I suppose she's twenty-two next Mikilmas.'
"Woman.--'Indade she's not, shure. She's only a slip of a gerrul,
fifteen or sixteen years of age, goin' on.'
"While the parents were arguing the age of their daughter, who, it seems,
worked as a servant girl in some private residence, and only slept here
when out of employment, the Health Officer was testing the condition of
the walls by poking his umbrella at the base under the window and
directly over the cess-pool. The point of the umbrella, which was tipped
with a thin sheet of brass, made ready entrance into the walls, which
were so soft and damp that the point of the umbrella when drawn out left
each time a deep circular mark behind, as if it had been drawn from a
rotten or decomposed cheese in summer.
"'Take up a board from the floor,' said the Health Officer. The man, who
informed us that his name was William McNamara, 'from Innis, in the
County Clare, siventeen miles beyand Limerick,' readily complied, and
taking an axe dug up a board without much trouble, as the boards were
decayed, and right underneath we found the top of the brick drain, in a
bad state of repair, the fecal matter oozing up with a rank stench.
Every one stooped down to look at this proof of sanitary disregard, and
while this entire party were on their knees, looking at the broken drain,
two large rats ran across the floor, and nestling in a rather familiar
manner between the legs of Mr. McNamara for an instant, frisked out of
the dreary, dirty room into the luxurious cesspool.
"The physician asked, 'Are those rats?' of Mr. McNamara.
"'Rats is it? endade they were. It's nothing out of the way here to see
thim. Shure some of thim are as big as cats. And why wouldn't
they--they have no wurrok or nothing else to do.'"