[Illustration:
OCTAVIA HILL _From a Painting by Sargent_
]
GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS
A STUDY OF THE AIMS AND THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE
OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION
1896–1917
_By_
FULLERTON L. WALDO
PHILADELPHIA:
THE HARPER PRESS
1012–20 CHANCELLOR STREET
1917
COPYRIGHT 1917
BY
HARPER PRINTING COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I
PAGE
FOREWORD 7
II
OCTAVIA HILL 11
III
THE ASSOCIATION 21
IV
DAYS AFIELD 77
V
DOES IT PAY? 103
VI
APPENDICES 111–121
INDEX 123
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Portrait of Octavia Hill Frontispiece
A court improved 20
Calling for a change 23
Montrose Street 29
Casa Ravello 35
Monroe Street 41
Workman Place 45
Workman Place—Interior view of yard 47
Interior view of Workman Place 49
East Rittenhouse St., Germantown 53
East Rittenhouse St., rear, after improvement 55
New Houses—East Rittenhouse St. property 57
Plan of dwellings for the Philadelphia Model Homes Company 61
Plans of Richmond Houses 62–64
Houses of the Richmond Group—Playground in the rear 67
Gaul St. houses, Richmond Group 69
Chart showing the increase in the number of properties
owned by the Octavia Hill Association from 1896 to 1915 73
Philadelphia homes altered to tenement houses 79
Franklin Court before renovation 87
Franklin Court after renovation 89
Court of North Third St. property before renovation 97
Court of North Third St. property after renovation 99
I
FOREWORD
Philadelphia is called the City of Homes with good reason. Come into her
ample confines from any point you please and you see row upon row of
little two-story, stone-stepped houses of red brick, perhaps with a
grass-plot front or rear, shade trees in a singular variety, and a
certain distinctive contentment and prosperity in the very air above the
myriad simmering chimneys.
For all her malodorous misgovernment of time past, whose survivals are
being eradicated step by step, with a long stride forward for each
disheartening setback, it is a crowning glory of Philadelphia that
thousands upon thousands of these little houses have held their own all
these years, instead of the teeming, noisome rookeries that are the bane
of many another metropolis.
A million people—more than half the population—live in single dwellings.
There are tenements, of recent origin: there is in prospect a tenement
problem. But the satisfaction of the developed instinct of the
home-builders and housekeepers of Philadelphia does not lie in the
direction of the sky-scraping multiple dwelling, which replaces a front
porch with a fire-escape, makes a box of geraniums or a rubber-plant do
duty for a garden, festoons the vista between towering walls with “the
short and simple flannels of the poor,” and suspends the growing child
like Mahomet’s coffin half-way between a clouded heaven of grimy
skylight or gravelled roof and the cluttered inferno of the pavement far
below.
Philadelphia families, accustomed to think of health and comfort largely
in terms of the upgrowing generation, prefer privacy to promiscuity, and
love their own vine and fig-tree, rising from the ground level, with the
tenacious affection that attaches to a patriarchal inheritance. Where
the individual home is an impossible luxury, the multiple dwelling that
is reared must recognize the right of the family to every procurable
blessing and convenience of the single house.
The pages that follow describe the effort of a thoughtful group of
Philadelphians to provide cleanly homes and a healthy environment for
families in modest circumstances or in self-respecting poverty. This
effort—now twenty-one years old—has outgrown the stage of experiment,
but it never will deny new light nor wholly abandon, however it may
adapt, the ideals that are Octavia Hill’s own spiritual legacy. Who this
great and good woman was and what she did for humanity are explained in
the opening chapter. The life-story of the work in Philadelphia that
perpetuates her name and her influence is next set forth. The reader is
then taken into the places where the Association has labored to clean
out and to build up in order that sun and air and running water may
perform their medicinal offices for body and soul together; that germs
and vermin may be routed with the dirt that breeds them; that babies may
have a chance to grow into decent and useful citizens; that a sense of
neighborliness and interdependence may be fostered even among those
whose nationality, religion and language are diverse.
From first to last this is an enterprise of business, and not of
charitable dole. We therefore are given to see the “friendly
rent-collector” going from door to door, gently but firmly insisting
upon payment when the stipulated sum falls due. We find her lending an
ear as “guide, philosopher and friend” to a wide category of troubles
great and small—none too large and none too minute for her fearless and
sympathetic consideration. She does not give alms. She makes no vague
and lavish promises of benefits to fall like manna from the skies. She
bestows aid upon those who help themselves. She is a walking delegate,
not of insurrection and discontent but of courage and self-respect, and
the inculcation of thrift and cleanliness and personal responsibility.
We are taken on his rounds with the Superintendent, whose function is
the oversight of the work of tearing down and building up, of
constructing and of reconstructing, in all its phases. We see that a
great deal of the effort of the bricklayer and the carpenter, the
plasterer and the plumber, under this shrewd and constant oversight goes
to the rebuilding of old houses, and the adaptation of decadent
dwellings to the modern advantage of those who have suffered under
conscienceless and grinding owners, mindful of profit only.
The work of the Association in the capacity of agent for properties it
does not hold is set forth, and the question of the worth-whileness of
the undertaking is finally considered.
The writer has been aided without stint at every turn by those whose
names appear in the text, and whose self-effacement precludes a proper
acknowledgment of their help. He will remember always the mothers and
fathers and children met in the course of his social exploration from
house to house. He has merely written this little book: they have been
the making of it.
PHILADELPHIA,
September 1, 1917
II
OCTAVIA HILL
December 3, 1838–August 13, 1912.
“Let us be gentle, because we know so little.”
—Letter to my Fellow-Workers, 1879.
“But, if you let one touch of terror dim your sight, and flinch before
the most terrible upheaval of rampant force, or threat; if, for
popular favor, or seat at board, or success on platform, you hesitate
to speak what you know to be true, then shall your cowardice and your
ambition be indeed answerable for consequences which you little dream
of.”
—Ibid, 1889.
Many a Browning Society has little to do with Browning, and many a
reading circle takes Shakespeare’s name in vain: but in the case of the
Octavia Hill Association there is so close a correspondence between the
work and the practical idealism of the woman whose name it bears that a
study of her career of service to humanity in England and thus
throughout the world sheds light upon the organized and incorporated
effort in Philadelphia.
Octavia Hill was the eighth daughter among eleven children of James Hill
of Peterborough. Her mother was the third wife of Mr. Hill, who
inherited his father’s successful business as corn-merchant and upon the
proceeds came to grief as a banker. Altruist, reformer and book-lover,
the financial panics of 1825 and 1840 were too much for him. Upon his
mental and physical collapse, Octavia’s mother took her daughters to a
cottage at Finchley, provided by her father, Dr. Southwood Smith, the
noted sanitarian.
When Octavia was thirteen, her mother removed to London to become
manager of a Guild for the employment of women. One of the workers at
the Guild lent Octavia books and pamphlets on the life of the poor,
which so greatly depressed her that “she began to think that all
laughter or amusement was wicked.”
But she was cured of that delusion when she was given an active part in
the work of the Guild, and found how necessary fun and frolic are to
relieve the monotony of working lives.
The little Octavia was put in charge of a work-room in which girls of
about her own age made toys. Since she was poor herself, she realized to
the full their lives of drudgery and hardship, and she did all she could
to make them happy. Some years later she wrote of this period: “We were
so very, very poor, and home was like a little raft in a dark storm,
where the wonder every day was whether we could live through it; and now
the sea looks calm, even if there are waves; and we have leisure to look
at the little boat in which we sail. I wonder if it will ever be painted
with high colors.”
It was at about this time that Octavia asked Ruskin to teach her
drawing; and his assent brought a new and a constraining influence to
bear on all her life. “I would give years,” she wrote after the meeting,
“if I could bring to Ruskin ‘the peace which passeth all
understanding.’” Ruskin told her she was “far more accurate” than any of
his college pupils. No wonder Ruskin, the artist and ameliorist at once,
found her an apt pupil, taking fire from the gleam of his own restless
inspiration.
An address by Kingsley, delivered before an association of women created
to promote sanitary reform, helped Octavia, at twenty, to visualize her
objective. Kingsley adverted to the fact that small houses were passing
more and more into the possession of individuals, and declared that
legislation must recognize the fact. “He was not going into the question
here; it would have to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off.
Therefore he hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the
possessors of the house, and influence people of ‘our own class.’”
In this, her summary of the speaker’s somewhat vague and not
over-optimistic conclusions with regard to the possibility of
legislative action, Octavia seems to be feeling a challenge to the
deepest in her nature, and to a maturing if not a finally fixed
conviction.
At the end of 1860, just after Octavia’s twenty-second birthday, came an
event of moment—one of the great crises in her life, her biographer
styles it—in the removal to 14 Nottingham Place. She arranged to have
poor women come to the house weekly to sew. One night a woman fainted,
and Miss Hill’s sympathetic inquiry elicited the fact that she had not
slept the previous night; she had been washing clothes and rocking the
baby’s cradle at the same time with her foot.
Miss Hill called at the poor woman’s home next day, and found that it
was a damp, unsanitary kitchen.
She then tried to find other and better quarters, but there was no place
where they would take the children. She was given in her quest to
realize that at her very door there were squalid, teeming homes like
those from which the little toy-workers came; and she brooded upon the
sorrowful fact.
Under the cloud she came to Ruskin to bring him some of her drawings.
She found him in a pessimistic frame of mind.
“I paint, take my mother for a drive, dine with friends, or answer these
correspondents,” he said, as he pulled out some letters from his pocket,
“but one longs to be doing something more satisfying.”
“Most of us feel like that at times,” ventured the devoted pupil.
“Well, what would you like to be doing?” was Ruskin’s reply.
“Something to provide better homes for the poor,” was the girl’s answer.
Ruskin wheeled sharply about in his chair.
“Have you a business plan?” was his challenge.
Then and there Octavia Hill’s life-work was born.
Ruskin told her he had no time to attend to the details of management as
landlord, but he said he would buy a tenement house if she would run it
for him.
He wanted five per cent. on his investment. He didn’t care for the
money, he said, but he thought others would be far more likely to follow
the example set if the enterprise were put on a business basis from the
start.
“Who will ever hear of what I do?” exclaimed Octavia.
But she entered whole-heartedly into the fulfilment of the suggestion,
and said she would do her best to make the scheme pay.
Then began the long, long search for a house, with a garden, where she
might create modest and wholesome apartments for the poor. Landlords and
agents as soon as they learned what she was after interposed all manner
of objections.
In answer to one of these heartless rebuffs Octavia exclaimed: “Where,
then, _are_ the poor to live?”
“I don’t know,” said the agent. “I only know they’ve got to keep away
from the St. John’s Wood Estate.”
In the spring of 1865, she was able to announce triumphantly that Ruskin
had bought for her, for a term of fifty-six years, three houses in a
court close by. The tenants came with the houses. She had schemes for
the recreation of the children, and she meant to secure a playground for
them. “The plan promises to pay; but of this I say very little; so very
much depends on management, and the possibility of avoiding bad debts.”
To Mrs. Shaen, wife of the lawyer who negotiated the sale, she wrote
presently: “The money part is very regular and simple, just so much paid
into Ruskin’s bank each quarter; but to me the work is of engrossing
interest. We have three houses, each with six rooms; and we have managed
gradually to get the people to take two rooms, in many cases.” The
garden had come with Ruskin’s enthusiastic purchase of six more houses;
and the cup of the busy landlady’s satisfaction is filled to
overflowing. “The children seem to have so few joys, and they spring to
meet any suggestion of employment with such eagerness, instead of
fighting and sitting in the gutter, with dirty faces and listless,
vacant expression. I found an eager little crowd threading beads last
time I was in the playground. We hope to get some tiny gardens there;
and Ruskin has promised some seats. I hope to teach them to draw a
little; singing we have already introduced. On the whole, I am so
thankful, so glad, so hopeful in it all; and, when I remember the old
days when I seemed so powerless, I am almost awed.”
Here we see in embryo several present day social movements of wide
outreach, all at once:—the suggestion and direction of children’s games;
the cultivation of home and school gardens; community singing.
The new owner found the houses occupied—to quote her own words—“by a
desperate and forlorn set of people; wild, dirty, violent, ignorant as
ever I have seen.”
“I worked on quite alone about it,” she tells us, “preferring power and
responsibility and work, to committees, and their slow, dull movements.”
But as soon as she let her friends know what she was doing, they rallied
in force to her assistance.
Presently in the crowding multiplicity of detail her life became, she
tells us, “a fight for mere existence. References, notices, rents,
repairs, the dry necessary matters of business, take up almost all time
and thought; only”—and here comes the saving clause—“as, after all, we
are human beings, and not machines, people round, and all we see and
hear, leave a kind of mark on us; an impression of awe, or pity and
wonder, or sometimes love.”
“Here I am,” she writes in another letter of about the same date, “head
and ears deep in notices about dustmen, requests for lawyers to send
accounts, etc., etc.... I’ve just come in from a round of visits to the
nine houses; and somehow it’s been a day of small worries about all
sorts of repairs, and things of that kind. It is only when the detail is
really managed on as great principles as the whole plan, that a work
becomes really good.” That last sentence holds the vital germ of Octavia
Hill’s own philosophy, living on in the work of the Association that
bears her name.
Instead of giving alms she gave herself. The student of her work cannot
fail to note how sedulously she refrained from handing out money when
that would have been the easiest thing to do. In 1869 she had read a
paper before the Social Science Association on “The Importance of Aiding
the Poor Without Alms-giving,” and on this point she was obdurate. Even
her strong champion Ruskin was unwilling to go all the way with her in
this policy, and he shrank from contact with the ugliness that she met
to give it battle day after day.
The Artisans’ Dwelling Act in 1875 was a great parliamentary victory for
housing reform, and it was in large part Miss Hill’s victory. Moreover,
the Committee which investigated the operation of the Act five years
later owed much to Miss Hill’s continued cooperation. This is the period
of the specialized effort of Miss Hill in behalf of Open Spaces. When
the bill for the artisans’ houses came up for its second reading in the
House Miss Hill was present, tremulously eager of course to behold its
reception and to know its fate. Suddenly, to her intense gratification,
a speaker brought forward an article she had written for Macmillan’s
Magazine.
“Instead of quoting dry facts and figures, he read aloud from it the
description of the wonderful delight it gave me to see the courts laid
open to the light and air.”
It may be remarked that no compilation of facts and figures will ever
convey a fair idea of the work of Miss Hill or the work of the Octavia
Hill Association.
By 1877 Miss Hill’s work had grown till it concerned the welfare of
3,500 tenants and the prudent husbandry of some $200,000 in trust funds.
Lord Pembroke gave Miss Hill $30,000 to buy houses, and paid a worker.
Then she had to go away to rest, and the years from 1878 to 1880 were
spent chiefly in travel, that took her to the Levant, though she kept in
contact with her ruling passion by intimate and affectionate
correspondence.
Upon her final return she was asked by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners
to undertake the management of much of their property in Southwark. She
accepted the charge. She began the successful movement which lasted six
years, from 1883 to 1889, to add Parliament Hill, and a tract adjoining,
to Hampstead Heath. This achievement must stand among her greatest
benefactions to humanity. It meant obtaining $1,500,000 by private gift
and municipal appropriation, and not merely saving a great playground of
the poor but doubling its area.
She took charge of forty-eight houses in Deptford, in South London, in
1884, and in 1885 accepted the responsibility for seventy-eight more in
the same region. In 1887 the number of tenants had increased to 5,000.
The Red Cross Cottages and Garden in Southwark opened in June of this
year are salient examples of Miss Hill’s magic wand in ousting ugliness
and creating graciousness and beauty in its place. The hall, designed
for music and other neighborhood entertainment, has unusual decorations
by Walter Crane, representing just such actions of peaceful heroism as
any one of us, at any time, might be called on to perform. The first
picture was that of Alice Ayres, a servant girl, who saved children from
a fire in Southwark. Since the heroine came from their own walk in life,
and was known to some of them, the tenants felt a living link of
interest with the painting.
The burden of the Deptford Cottages was progressively taken over by an
enlarging number of assistants. Though many of these were volunteers,
since Miss Hill never surrendered her belief in the system that brought
women of refinement and leisure into contact with those whose lot was
toiling poverty, the desirability of the service of professional
supervisors was recognized, and over each group of houses as served by
the volunteer assistants there was set a paid worker to direct the
collection of the rents and all the diversified effort for the welfare
of the tenants.
After a time these head women and their charges, while they never ceased
to look to Miss Hill for guidance and inspiration, became more and more
independent of her actual oversight, and as they gained confidence and
knowledge the work became progressively decentralized.
Miss Hill was one of the pillars of the Kyrle Society, created by her
sister Miranda, which sought to bring beauty into the lives of the poor,
to secure open spaces, and to convert city burial grounds in congested
areas to the uses of the living. She was a prime mover in the Charity
Organization Society, earnestly striving to keep before that body the
paramount importance of personality in charity, and the influence of
enthusiastic and warmhearted individual effort for individuals. She was
a member of the Women’s University Settlement in Blackfriars’ Road. She
was one of the founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic
Interest or Natural Beauty. She was a member of the Royal Commission on
the Poor Laws. She saved land along the banks of the River Wandle from
desecration, for the perennial joy of the poor. After her “Homes of the
London Poor” had been translated into German by Princess Alice, the
Octavia Hill Verein was formed in Berlin. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee
took counsel with her, and installed her methods in groups of houses
municipally controlled. The housing system in Amsterdam was influenced
by her work, and traces of it are to be found in Sweden. Students of her
methods came from near and far to be instructed. The effort of such
women as Ellen Collins and Josephine Shaw Lowell in New York gladly
acknowledged the impress of Miss Hill’s ideals.
Aside from her personal correspondence, the record of beneficent
activity is to be found in her two volumes, “Homes of the London Poor,”
and “Our Common Land,” and in the series of annual “Letters to My
Fellow-workers,” privately circulated, which began in 1873 and continued
until December, 1911.
“The main tone of action,” she affirms, in “Homes of the London Poor,”
“must be severe. There is much of rebuke and repression needed, although
a deep and silent under-current of sympathy and pity may flow beneath.
If the rent is not ready, notice to quit must be served.”
An all-important factor is the “friendly rent-collector” who, while firm
in her insistence upon prompt payment of the rent, forms a living link
of sympathy and perception between the landlord or landlady and the
tenant, and among the tenants themselves. The thorough training of this
collector is essential, and for this training Miss Hill left minute
prescriptions.
In her Letter for 1879, Miss Hill says,—and she repeats the passage in
the Letter for 1896,—“All the smoky chimneys, broken water-pipes,
tiresome neighbors, drunken husbands, death, disease, poverty, sin, call
not only for your sympathy but for your action.”
“You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately. The
principle on which the whole work rests, is that the inhabitants and
their surroundings must be improved together,” she writes in “Homes of
the London Poor.”
Miss Hill wanted trees planted and vines trained against the houses, and
gardens wherever possible. She cites with approval the example of
children who thrust flowers in a crevice in the wall, to make it, as
they said, “like it was the day we had the May-pole.” “A bunch of
flowers brought on purpose,” is mentioned among the gifts that are not
destructive of independence, and that assist what she beautifully calls
the “return to the old fellowship between rich and poor.” “She takes
them flowers” is part of her commendation of one of her friends who went
tactfully among her people. In a touching Letter she speaks of widows
who came home from a country outing with wild flowers to surprise the
children when they woke in the morning.
She pleads for organized, directed play, in behalf of children “wholly
ignorant of games,” who “have hardly self-control enough to play at any
which have an object or require effort.” She holds that there must be
play supervisors for a playground she has started, and “these I hope to
find more and more.”
In one of the Letters she asks for public music definitely planned and
schooled. “I hope that we may have a more organized body of singers, led
by a conductor whom they know, and ready to sing in out-of-the-way
places.” In another Letter she refers to the value of uplifting music on
Sundays, and of a violin class.
Of a cadet corps for the boys she heartily approved. “There is no
organization which I have found influence so powerfully for good the
boys in such a neighborhood.” The Boy Scouts of today would have been to
her a cause for devout thanksgiving.
In the Letter for 1907 she gives it as her belief that the work of
agency in the management of properties for others is destined to expand
significantly. This, of course, has become a most important part of the
work of the Octavia Hill Association.
With each of the Letters there appears a financial balancesheet reduced
to simplest terms of receipts and expenditure. Behind these items, she
declares, are “trembling hopes and fears about each individual.”
The book “Our Common Land” sets forth chiefly Miss Hill’s views on the
vital issue of open spaces,—“open air sitting-rooms” she called them.
She yearns to bring the people at large into the air and the light of
day. The two great wants in the life of the poor are the want of space
and the want of beauty. She has much to say of the mortmain of the city
graveyard that keeps the living out of an available breathing space.
The last decade of Miss Hill’s life saw the fruition of the years of
anxiety and uncertainty, but there was no cessation of labor. “Up to
within three days of her death,” writes her biographer, “she continued
to see her friends and fellow-workers, using to the utmost her failing
strength, and endeavoring to arrange for the efficient carrying on of
the many works in which she took such a keen interest.” When they told
her that the end must be, she said, thinking only of her work, “I might
have given it a few more touches, but I think it is nearly all planned
now, very well.” On the night of August 13, 1912, in the words of her
beloved Chaucer, her “spirit changed house.”
“O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam—
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.”
[Illustration:
A COURT IMPROVED.
]
III
THE ASSOCIATION
Any enterprise of social amelioration has its doubting Thomases and its
Job’s comforters to contend with at the beginning, and the Octavia Hill
Association has not been exempt from the need of explaining why it
should exist, and why good citizens should uphold its ministration.
There are terrible homes for the underworld of Vienna called
“Massenhotels.” It is a common experience to find twenty or thirty
people of both sexes living in one room, each occupant paying ten cents
a week for a quarter of a bed. Sometimes the room is windowless. Disease
is rife, and the stench of the filthy bodies and the filthy clothing
that clutters the rotting walls is intolerable.
“Thank God we have nothing like that here in Philadelphia!” exclaimed a
good woman, throwing up her hands at this description. “It’s too bad
that they can’t have the Octavia Hill Association in cities that need it
more.”
But these festering, sweltering Poles, Jews, Slovaks and Croats of
darkest Vienna are the submerged ones of a capital whose municipal motto
is “On with the Dance;” whose name is the synonym of gayety and folly.
These miserable folk, who call a little thin potato soup and a
thimbleful of bad brandy a square meal, may have reached a lower stratum
of existence than most Americans have seen. Does that excuse a
complacency that takes it for granted that whatever is out of sight
under the lid in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago or New Orleans is
all right?
Philadelphia has a Civic Club that has been a blessing to the city in
its work for the reign of law, through the virtuous energizing of good
women. It has battled for everything that makes for better conditions of
housing and of living in a city. The list of good works it has brought
out of dreamland into the light of common day is as diversified as the
life of the great city which the persistent effort of this Club has
sweetened and ennobled. It was but natural that the Octavia Hill
Association should have its genesis among friends in council who met in
the hospitable quarters of the Club in the winter and spring of 1895–96
to study the large and many-angled problem of fair play for the
metropolitan poor.
There had been previous efforts, such as that of the Benevolent Building
Association of 1865, to provide bright and cleanly dwellings for
families of limited earning capacity. In 1885 a lending library for
children, in the heart of a negro district at Seventh and St. Mary
Streets, brought home to its benevolent promoters the need of a new and
improved order of living in the hovels where the books were circulated.
It was plain that a transformation was not to be wrought merely by the
magic of good books. People must take hold of people; life must come
into stimulating contact with life; the socially uplifted must discover
that the economically downtrodden were their neighbors. Mr. Theodore
Starr had already made an inspiring beginning near at hand. He had
bought and razed horrid eyesores of dwellings and had put up in their
place rows of well-built houses that appealed to a better class of
tenants. The result of his enterprise was felt throughout the region.
With the name of Theodore Starr, honoris causa, must be associated those
of Edith Wright Gifford and Hannah Fox. The latter not merely bought and
improved dwellings in this St. Mary Street district but personally
undertook their management upon the successful plan of Octavia Hill
which she so intimately understood. When she had studied the local
problem in its practical aspects for several years, she met the beloved,
untiring altruist, Mrs. William F. Jenks and others in the conferences
mentioned, and in these sessions a report was discussed and prepared.
They then went before the Civic Club with the report, and asked for its
sanction and its furtherance. The Civic Club responded instantly and
whole-heartedly, and the Octavia Hill Association was formed as an
independent organization, to have for its specialized concern the
provision of homes of the right sort, for families of modest means.
[Illustration:
CALLING FOR A CHANGE.
]
Cooperation became corporation, under the laws of Pennsylvania, June 25,
1896. Nathaniel B. Crenshaw was the first President; Frank H. Taylor was
chosen Treasurer, and Mrs. Thomas S. Kirkbride became Secretary. The
original Board of Directors comprised Miss Fox, Mr. Crenshaw, Mrs.
Jenks, Mrs. Kirkbride, and Mr. Taylor.
Mrs. Kirkbride—a tower of strength and of consecrated purpose in this
work as in all movements for the greater good of the greater number in
Philadelphia—expressed so perfectly the purpose of the new organization
in her first report as secretary, (January 1, 1897) that we cannot do
better than to use her statement here:
“The object of the Civic Club,” she wrote, “is ‘to promote by education
and active cooperation a higher public spirit and a better social
order.’ The Octavia Hill Association, although an independent
organization, works for the same higher spirit and better order, on its
own definite and restricted, but most important, lines. It sees in
insanitary, dilapidated, and overcrowded dwellings, influences which
lower the moral and the physical health of Philadelphia. Against these
evil influences it aims to enlist the cooperation of citizens who, well
housed themselves, desire the same advantage for less fortunate
Philadelphians. This cooperation is solicited on strict business
conditions, and it is believed that a safe investment of capital and a
fair rate of interest are offered.”
This first report announced that the modus operandi of the Association
would be “to refit old properties and small houses, first of all putting
in modern plumbing and so far as possible removing all unhealthful
surroundings.” The report then described that ideal of the community of
interest between landlord and tenant, realized through the friendly
rent-collector as the intermediary, which is the central and the most
inspiring feature of the personal phase of the undertaking. It was also
announced that the Association stood ready to assume the kindly
oversight of private property, to buy houses offered at a figure which
would not be prohibitive of moderately profitable purchase and
renovation, and to issue stock to subscribers. “The Association’s
strongest claim upon the confidence of the community,” it was declared,
“lies in the fact that its philanthropic interests are founded on true
business principles; its business interests upon the principles of a
sound philanthropy.”
Upon this platform devised twenty-one years ago, the Association has
stood, and continues to stand.
The stock company, empowered by its charter to hold, sell and lease real
estate, fixed the par value of the stock at the low figure of $25, so
that a great many persons might have a share and an active sustaining
interest therewith. The distribution of profits would thus be effected
easily, in the form of dividends on the capital stock. These dividends
for the first two years were 4½ per cent. per annum; the annual dividend
since that time has been 4 per cent. At the end of 1916 the outstanding
capital stock was $221,475, with an authorized capital of $300,000.
There was a surplus of about $16,000, and the usual dividend of 4 per
cent. was declared, payable February 1, 1917.
At the time of its incorporation as a stock company, the Association had
a capital of $20,000. Many of the original group of stockholders were
members of the Civic Club, who not merely subscribed but induced their
friends to subscribe, thus giving an effectual assistance in the
expansion of the Association that is beyond evaluation. At a special
meeting in November, 1898, it was voted to increase the capital stock to
$50,000. At the same meeting the number of directors was enlarged from
five to seven, and Miss Helen L. Parrish and R. Francis Wood were added
to the Board. In 1911, Miss Parrish became the secretary. She had
studied the work of Miss Hill in London at first hand for some months,
so that her experience has created a personal link across the seas
between the work of the altruist in London and that of the Association
here.
Again and again, since the original purchases were made, individual
members of the Board of Directors have assumed the management of
properties, and have found a keen personal satisfaction in collecting
the rents themselves and thus obtaining a first hand insight into the
work that could be obtained in no other way. They have accordingly
brought to the council-table a practical and detailed knowledge such as
few philanthropic administrators have gained from within. Each of the
directors is in active service on one of the Committees, which are those
of finance, new property, office-administration and rent-collecting,
construction, inspection. As the work grew out of the day of small
things, the increasing burden of executive supervision demanded the
whole time of a personal representative of the Board, and in 1908 a
superintendent was employed. Frederick C. Feld, a man of tact,
enthusiasm and technical knowledge, now fills this all-important office.
Miss Garrison, the chief rent-collector, has two regular and several
volunteer assistants, and brings to her work a rare combination of
sympathetic interest and the requisite firmness with the saving sense of
humor wherein philanthropists and reformers are so often—rightly or
wrongly—declared deficient.
The Association gladly accepts intelligent volunteer assistance, but it
believes also in the engagement of salaried employees who follow the
assured routine of professional occupation. There are a bookkeeper, a
stenographer, who has charge of the office, and a varying number of
mechanics in the jurisdiction of the superintendent. When the
Association began its work, the collectors depended for their stipend
upon a commission of 5 per cent. from the rents collected. The clerical
work was distributed among the directors and the treasurer’s office. The
first salaried employee was engaged in 1901; the employment of the
bookkeeper dates from 1907. It will be seen that the business affairs of
the Association rest upon a foundation not dependent on the continued
proffer of unremunerated aid. This is the basis which seems best, if the
system is to be universally applied and standardized. The problems of
housing and sanitation are day-in and day-out problems that require a
constant vigilance and not a divided interest or a sporadic enthusiasm
that can detach itself at pleasure from the object of its concern. The
work of volunteers is by no means undervalued in its unselfish service
to this Association. They have done, and are doing, admirable work. It
is a great relief to these volunteers themselves to feel that if they
must miss certain times and seasons, or withdraw altogether, the bottom
will not fall out of the beneficent enterprise with which they have been
identified.
Furthermore, if the Association is understood to be an honest and
legitimate competitor in the open market with other real estate
operators whose business is plain business, with no tincture of
philanthropy, it does not seem expedient to rely upon gratuitous service
in work for which the ordinary operator must carry a pay-roll. Such a
procedure, if the influence of an object-lesson is sought, does not
convince the dealer who is without philanthropic assistance that he can
live up to the standards of decency, comfort, and cheapness his
benevolent rival sets and still make a satisfactory profit.
It does not fall within the scope of this discussion to follow from
street to street or from one congested area to another each of the
separate acquisitions in the long list of purchases and leases which the
Association in the twenty-one years of its history has made, or to
recapitulate all the managerial responsibilities which, to the
gratification of the owners, it has from time to time assumed. But to
the acquisition and development of certain typical properties we may
profitably devote our attention, as symptomatic of what has taken place
with the entire number. We must bear in mind, moreover, the wise
principles of selection that have guided the Association in deciding
where to employ its little army of busy hands in tearing down and
building up, in redeeming foulness to fairness, in letting air and light
enter where these had long been strangers.
The Association has stipulated that the properties it took over should
be in need of reconstruction and improvement; that the price should be
sufficiently low to allow of the necessary repairs and still leave a
fair return on the sum invested; that the group dealt with should be
large enough to present a conspicuous object-lesson to the community.
Many a neighborhood must be—and is—a little ashamed to look itself in
the face, after regarding the spick-and-span aspect of the Association
improvement adjoining its unseemliness.
In the properties acquired by the Association in the older parts of the
city, these three types, speaking generally, are to be distinguished—the
house that was built for one family and is now occupied by several
families; the small, one family house on the narrow street or alley,
having a yard of its own; the three-room rear dwelling, set in rows of
from two to perhaps ten houses behind a house fronting upon a recognized
thoroughfare. With the latter type there may be two facing rows, at the
rear of two or three front lots. Or there may be a courtyard built round
three sides. In the control of the Association as agent are several
model tenements. It has erected a few small new houses, and will build
more of these in future, to an indeterminate extent. It has built one
large group of model houses for one or two families.
[Illustration:
MONTROSE STREET. TYPICAL GROUP IN CONGESTED ITALIAN QUARTER. BRICK
HOUSES IN FRONT REPLACED FRAME HOUSES BEYOND REPAIR. BEFORE
RENOVATION TENANTS WERE DEPENDENT ON OPEN PRIVY VAULTS WITH
INSUFFICIENT WATER SUPPLY AND THE EXTREME CONDITIONS OF NEGLECT AND
DISREPUTE.
]
If the people living in an old house acquired by the Association are
law-abiding and respectable they are not disturbed. Sometimes it is
necessary to oust occupants whose room proves better than their company.
In July, 1896, title was taken to the first of its properties by the
Association—five houses near Seventh and South Streets. Four were small
houses, one was a several-family dwelling. These properties, after being
set in order, were profitably managed, and it would have been possible
to pay a dividend, but it was decided that it was better business for
the first year to establish a surplus with the proceeds.
In May, 1897, eight small houses on Fairhill Street and one on Lombard
were added to the Association’s property. The Fairhill Street houses
were in a colored neighborhood. In February, 1899, seventeen houses on
League Street came into the possession of the Association. These houses
needed and promptly received new plaster, new woodwork and paint. The
Association had League Street put on the city plan, and obtained the
introduction of an ordinance to secure proper drainage. As a result of
its purchase a kindergarten was started, with an average attendance of
thirty pupils, for the swarms of children in the neighborhood. It was
conducted by the Social Science Department of the Civic Club, with which
the name of Mrs. Edward Longstreth, a devoted servant of the public
weal, will ever be associated. Fairhill Street was repaved in 1899, no
doubt to keep pace with the new and progressive ownership of the eight
houses, and the water supply was increased by new pipe lines. Ten houses
of the Theodore Starr Estate—one a large dwelling with eight two-room
apartments—were put under Association management in this year.
Miss Parrish has made a study, “The Improvement of a Street,” published
as a tract by the Association, which describes the League Street
development. League Street formerly bore the somewhat significant name
of Reckless Street. It is between Front and Water Streets, and many of
the men—largely Irish—are boatmen, fishermen on the Delaware, or
longshoremen on the wharves. They have long slack seasons when they are
exposed to the loafer’s temptation of the gin-mill. In this neighborhood
the beautiful little Old Swedes’ Church, built in 1900 on the site of an
earlier block-house, is a landmark. In the green God’s acre of the
Episcopal sanctuary, with its quaint old parish buildings and the
sexton’s house, Alexander Wilson the famous ornithologist lies buried.
But ancient history or present picturesqueness meant little to the
brawling population outside the gate of the churchyard, where
switching-engines chugged along the docks and factory chimneys clogged
the air and iridescent surface drainage meandered from yard to yard and
made alleys pestilential. Foul privy-wells undermined the yards and the
foundations of the houses; the rafters had in many places rotted away;
the cellars were repositories of rubbish.
There was fine raw material here among the boys and men for a hand of
guidance and an inspiring personal presence—but most of it was very raw
indeed. The drink wrought mischief among the womenfolk too; the children
ran at large; the gangs of hoodlum boys played hide-and-seek with the
policemen to steal lead pipe, to shatter windows, to break into the
vacant houses and despoil them. Six of the houses taken by the
Association were unoccupied. Each house was in a deplorable condition.
The expenditure on these houses by the Association averaged $186.
The brickwork had to be painted; plumbing, painting, carpentering and
plastering were necessary. At first the tenants were often unruly and
irresponsible; fights were of frequent occurrence. Though the rents were
low—$6.50 to $10.00 a month—the tenants often fell behind in payment,
and there were many unprofitable “unlets.”
But with unwearied patience the Association strove to create among the
people in its houses a sense of thrift, of honor, of self-respect, even
of community spirit. It did not permit itself to be discouraged by
backsliding or ungratefulness. It fought on for the sake of the
regeneration not merely of seventeen houses but of a community, and in
1905 it was able to offer the remarkable result of $1432.00 paid in
rents out of $1445.50 due, with a return of 7½ per cent. on the
investment, after paying to the Association a commission of the same
percentage on the rents collected. A constant demand was created for the
houses. The average period of occupancy of the present tenants is seven
years and five months. The average net revenue has been nearly 6 per
cent. The result is as forceful evidence as could be presented of the
influence of the regular visits of the friendly rent-collectors. The
Southwark Settlement—a fine and flourishing organization doing a
splendid work near by—grew out of a play room and a Mother’s Club of the
Octavia Hill Association. In 1916 the Association bought, under-drained
and repaired the five remaining houses of the street.
But the Association did not confine its work within four walls. It took
a bare, depressing, ash-heap area 20 by 80 feet, added to it the site of
a house pulled down, and filled the vacancy—now known as the Hector
McIntosh Playground—with swings, games and a sandpile. An ice-water
fountain was placed on the sidewalk. The women said that pitchers which
once went out for beer came back after that filled with ice-water
instead.
One example of this kind is worth no end of homily. It is an epitome of
the successful effort of the Association.
From year to year the list of properties owned, or managed by agency,
has lengthened. The Casa Ravello, owned by Dr. George Woodward and
operated by the Association, was opened in 1903 for the special benefit
of Italians. It stands at the corner of Seventh and Catharine Streets,
and right on the corner, in a store-space that could be rented for $40 a
month, is a most valuable outpost of the Starr Centre Association which
shows poor mothers what to do for their babies. In June, 1917, 219
different babies under two years of age were brought here for
consultation. Nearly all were Italians. There were a few Jews and one
colored child. “History cards” are kept, and the fluctuation of weight
is traced by a graphic curve. There are home visits by nurses, and two
doctors keep office-hours.
The Casa Ravello has four stories of brick, the windows made attractive
by their gay boxes of geraniums, and air and light are at every window
through the liberal space the courtyard leaves. The iron stairways come
up through fire-towers, and there are netted verandahs safe and roomy
for the youngsters of the family and the mothers resting or at work. On
the roof in July and August is a playground, and a summer school for the
children. Of these there are 79 in the building, and in midsummer, 1917,
there was an average attendance of 45 in the school. They wear little
red tags with their names, that the stranger may distinguish tiny
black-eyed Domenico from the toddling frolicsome Bettina.
The mothers use the roof too—for gossiping, embroidery, for hanging
clothes, for the baby’s nap in a preferred location of the hammock.
There is a swing for larger children, and—safely shut away
between-whiles in a cement-floored bin—there is a piano for the
dance-lovers of Italy, great and small. All this for thirty-four
families, at a rate which at its maximum is $14 for one of the three
four-roomed apartments that boast a bath-tub.