of the Tenement House Department of New York, began an investigation in
behalf of the Association and under its direction,—an investigation that
lasted nearly a year. The cost was defrayed by special contributions. It
resulted in a report which is in all ways a model for the emulation of
others engaged in social research. The Bureau of Building Inspection and
the Board of Health granted her every facility and permitted her freely
to accompany their inspectors. Her report, entitled “Housing Conditions
in Philadelphia,” embraced the results of her thorough personal
examination of 600 houses. For every dwelling-place investigated a card
of minutely particularized details was filled out, of which facsimiles
are presented, together with telling pictures, maps, and tables of
simple and explicit arrangement giving according to nationality the
statistics of every phase of the living conditions ascertained.
Miss Hannah Fox was chairman of the directing and assisting committee of
the Association; the other members were Dr. Frances C. Van Gasken, Helen
L. Parrish, Robert P. Shick, Dr. George Woodward, E. Spencer Miller.
Lawrence Veiller of New York, with his wide official experience of
tenement problems, was of much assistance.
[Illustration:
ITALIAN TENEMENT KNOWN AS CASA RAVELLO. THIRTY APARTMENTS OF TWO AND
FOUR ROOMS EACH. FIRST FLOOR ARRANGED FOR STORES.
]
The three areas studied were distributed and representative. One was the
block between Eighth and Ninth Streets, Carpenter and Christian. A
second was the segment of North American and of Newmarket Streets lying
between Vine and Callowhill. The third took in the block bounded by
Sixteenth, Eighteenth, Lombard and Rodman Streets.
Here are some of the things Miss Dinwiddie found:—
“One tenement visited was a three story house, without fire-escapes,
containing a grocery store, a fish stand and a meat shop on the first
floor. Above in the seventeen living rooms of all kinds—kitchens,
bed-rooms and dining rooms—were eight families, consisting of
thirty-three persons. A goat was kept in the room back of the grocery,
and three dogs upstairs.
“A row of houses faced on an alley whose width varied from three feet
two inches to three feet eleven and a half inches.
“Five houses on one court, of which four were occupied, had cellars
flooded with sewage from a leaking soil pipe, the foul water standing
about a foot deep in all but one of the buildings.... Beds and bedding,
said to have been cast aside because someone had died upon them, and it
was ‘bad luck’ to use them again, were not infrequently found in
cellars.”
In a certain alley “one hydrant was the only fixture for eleven families
in ten houses.” A colored woman in one of the foul courts said: “I’m
sorry to have you see my house lookin’ dis way, lady, but ’tain’ no use
tryin’ to be clean; we ain’t got but one hydrant for dese yere five
houses, an’ we ain’ had no water for a week, since de pump busted.”
Animals kept on the premises are a serious evil. In a tenement visited,
“two rooms on the top floor were given up to the raising of fowls, and
the floors and parts of the walls were covered with filth; in another
house the door from the inside cellar stairs was pushed open during an
inspection and a goat stalked in; in yet another, chickens were kept in
a fenced-up corner of a third story room, used at the same time as a
kitchen and a bedroom. Under a shop in one dwelling-house, white mice
and rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and dogs were kept for sale. At about
the time of the festival of Yom Kippur, many yards and shed rooms in the
Russian-Jewish neighborhoods were seen covered with blood and refuse of
slaughtered fowls. The worst case found was that of a slaughter house
and dwelling in one building. About thirty sheep were kept in the second
story, which was reached by an inclined runway from the narrow side
alley, giving entrance from the street to the rear of the house. Down
stairs a room was used for slaughtering, and from 30 to 100 sheep were
killed daily. The butcher and his family lived in the house, having a
kitchen on the ground floor and attractively furnished rooms upstairs at
the front. There were also dwellings adjoining on every side.”
Travellers in Tibet have described the ridges of filth that accumulate
in the middle of village streets and freeze in winter. Tibet is on the
other side of the world, and those whose complacency is not to be
disturbed like to believe that we have nothing so abhorrent here. But
listen to Miss Dinwiddie. “The condition of the sidewalk varies with the
seasons. In winter the alleys and parts of the sidewalk are often
covered with frozen refuse of various kinds and ice from surface
drainage. The writer has seen the occupants of an alley obliged, for
several weeks, to climb over a hard frozen mass about two feet high,
blocking up the entire outer end of the court. In summer, on the other
hand, garbage accumulates rapidly, and the odors from the decomposition
of such matter and from the pools of drainage water are offensive. As a
visitor from ‘uptown’ remarked while taking an alley picture, ‘If one
could photograph the smells, it might be possible to give an idea of
this place.’”
Among the heads of the 843 families, there was represented every
occupation from that of card-sharp to that of minister or rabbi; in the
social strata rag-pickers, scrub-women and organ-grinders were at the
bottom, while opticians, pharmacists and machinists stood at the top. Of
unskilled laborers the total number showed 39 per cent., and there was
an equal proportion of skilled laborers. Commercial pursuits were
represented by 16 per cent., and the remaining 6 per cent. followed
special occupations. The bankers, musicians, organ-grinders, street
cleaners, candy makers and boot-blacks were in all cases Italians; of
the 37 fruit, candy and fish dealers and rag-pickers all but two were
Italians. The worst instance of the sweating evil was found in an
Italian tailor shop. Laundry work at home was confined to the colored
district. Rag-picking (among Italians only), dress making, tailoring,
cobbling, cigar making, fish cake making, herb brewing, plain sewing,
scissors sharpening and umbrella mending were the other occupations
carried on in living rooms. Fruit, vegetables and candy sold by
trucksters were often stored in living rooms over night. The fire risk
does not need to be emphasized in the case of one house, occupied by two
families, in which a marionette show took place nightly on the ground
floor, where smoking was permitted. Fish stores, bakeries and dance
halls were adjuncts of other crowded dwelling-places.
The families living in apartments paid on the average $5.63 a month for
rent; those in one family dwellings paid $10.36—almost twice as much.
In her full and simple suggestions for remedial action, Miss Dinwiddie
urged virtually the program of the Octavia Hill Association. There
should be strictly enforced regulations concerning congestion, water
supply and toilet accommodations, air and light. Cellars and basements
must not be used for sleeping purposes, nor should animals be kept and
slaughtered on the premises. Ignorance and indifference on the part of
landlord and tenant alike, the investigator held, is the great obstacle
in the way of reform. The personal worker who will see clearly and
report frankly and fearlessly is indispensable. Such workers, it is
clear, are provided by the superintendence and the friendly
rent-collection of the Octavia Hill Association.
The fruit of Miss Dinwiddie’s long and conscientious labor with the
Committee’s cooperation was a comprehensive legislative measure
embodying the ten years’ experience of the Association and dealing with
the adaptation to the purposes of three or more families of houses
originally built for one. An earlier law, of 1895, made the building of
tenement houses, as such, so costly that few since that time have been
built for families of small incomes. Its present day application is
almost wholly to the erection of high-class apartment houses. The new
measure prepared and backed by the Association came before the
legislature of 1905, and the selfish interests that would have suffered
by its passage fought it tooth and nail. Undismayed, the Association and
its friends rallied and returned to the attack, and in 1907, to their
great satisfaction, it became a law. In the meantime, in 1906, two
ordinances were put before the city Councils by the Association through
its Committee: one providing for underdrainage where a sewer connection
was feasible; the other prescribing improved water facilities, for court
and alley houses in particular. These ordinances did not pass, but in
the agitation of the matters upon which they focussed the attention of
the City Fathers and to some extent of the public at large, a useful
educational result was reached, for models illustrating the conditions
the Association sought to remedy were put on view at Horticultural Hall,
meetings were held, and the councilmen were taken to see how the other
half lived and to be impressed by the necessity for drastic changes.
When in 1907 the act providing for the licensing and inspection of
tenement houses was passed, the Director of Public Health and Charities
asked the Association to help him frame the rules to govern the work of
the new division of tenement house inspection. The aid of the
Association was given without stint, and upon the Committee’s
recommendation Miss Caroline Manning was appointed as the first
inspector.
It thus appears that the Association was prime mover in bringing the
municipal administration to take action for the systematic examination
and regulation of living conditions to ensure the health and comfort of
the occupants of houses in hitherto neglected areas. Out of this
instigation grew, as an arc of an ever-widening circle, the specialized
activity of the Philadelphia Housing Commission, now known as the
Housing Association.
Delegates from forty social and philanthropic agencies met in the
Mayor’s reception room September 9, 1909, and organized the Commission.
A particular function of the organization has been to obtain and enforce
enlightened and equitable laws, and, with that end in view, to appraise
the public of its effort and secure a distributive popular support. The
Housing Association is performing a service of inestimable usefulness in
its study of the direct relation between an evil domestic environment
and the character and physical condition of those who are constantly
exposed to it. It receives and acts upon thousands of complaints each
year, and carries on extensive and intensive campaigns of public
education by literature, illustrated lectures, and exhibits.
[Illustration:
MONROE STREET. A TYPICAL COURT AFTER RENOVATION. THREE-ROOM HOUSES
WITH CELLAR AND SEPARATE TOILET. RUNNING WATER IN KITCHENS. RENT
$8.00 PER MONTH.
]
Resuming our examination of typical properties in the care of the
Octavia Hill Association, we find one of the most inspiring examples in
the group of houses at Workman Place.
This large and picturesque court is situated on Front street between
Pemberton and Fitzwater. In Colonial days several of the houses belonged
to the Mifflin family; later they became part of the Workman estate, and
finally Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Clark acquired the group by instalments and
turned it over to the Association to manage.
There are twenty-two houses in all, built of red brick. Five of these
face on Front Street, and these, with one on Pemberton Street, have
several occupants each. Behind the Front Street dwellings, surrounding
the ample open space of what was once a large garden, are the remaining
houses, in groups, conveying a delightful impression of an island of
peace and privacy in the midst of the sweltering sea of humanity in this
loud and crowded foreign quarter. In the houses that face on Front
Street there are wainscotted halls, carved balustrades and mantelpieces
with elaborate designs of ships and grapes and fluting that bespeak the
past glories of the more deliberate day of minuet and sedanchair and the
soft light of candles. Even the ancient windowpulleys were made of
mahogany. One has only to read the itemized list of the household goods
owned in 1754 by George Mifflin, Jr., as given in the Pennsylvania
Historical Magazine, to realize the difference between that day and the
present, wherein the Polish seamstress bends above her work in a room
still haunted by the ancestral presences of those who were as deft in
turning the heel of a stocking as in pouring tea. In the smaller houses
there will be found Irish tenants who survive the Polish invasion of the
neighborhood.
On Pemberton Street there are two small vine-clad cottages with “G. M.
1748” set out in black bricks against the red, betokening George
Mifflin’s ownership. These houses were doubtless occupied by his
servants. They are not unlike the little “Letitia Cottage” of Penn in
Fairmount Park. The Association set above windows and doorways slight
projections that enhance the aspect. Betwixt these cottages an iron
gateway admits to the large enclosure shaded by great trees, on which
all the tiny gardens of the houses surrounding abut. The base of each
tree is rimmed by a seat. There is abundant room for clothes-lines, not
infringing on the space for the children’s play. A pavilion is at one
side. On the Fitzwater Street exposure is a temporary shelter to impound
homeless animals till the S. P. C. A. wagon comes to claim them.
At the corner of Front and Fitzwater Streets, through the generous
initiative of a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Clark, is Workman Place House,
a Settlement of such demonstrated value to the region round about that
it deserves more than passing mention.
It is conducted by the Alpha Pi Fraternity of young women alumnæ of the
Agnes Irwin School. The Matron has taken hundreds of mothers and
children of the neighborhood during the summer into the country, which
is as novel and startling to many of these people as America was to the
sailors of Columbus. The great fact of Fairmount Park itself is news to
an incredible number. University of Pennsylvania students have taken the
boys to summer camps. There has been supervised play in summer, and in
the winter months there is a carefully scheduled and well-attended
routine of classes and meetings for young and old. All these people have
a racial affiliation with the dance, and even after the Mothers’
meetings in the Good Neighbors’ Club, dancing to the pianola is an
exuberantly joyful exercise. Christmas parties are red-letter events.
The entire admirable enterprise is sustained by bazaars, sales of old
clothing, and gifts in cash and in kind.
The little vegetable and flower gardens at the rear or in the forecourt
of each of the Workman Place houses are sources of not inconsiderable
pride to the occupants. Anyone who saw the central area before the
Association took hold here must be amazed at the transformation. The
solid board fences that dissected the space in all directions have been
removed, the rubbish has been carted away, wells and cesspools have been
filled, and the houses themselves—in a deplorably decrepit state—have
been renovated from top to bottom. The generous owners have not sought
an income from the property. Any returns have been left in the hands of
the Association, as the contracting agency, for improvements or for the
acquisition of other houses.
[Illustration:
WORKMAN PLACE. STREET SIDE OF SMALL HOUSES. BUILT 1748. SUPPOSED TO
HAVE BEEN SERVANTS’ QUARTERS OF THE MIFFLIN MANSION.
]
[Illustration:
WORKMAN PLACE. INTERIOR VIEW OF YARDS NOW ARRANGED IN ONE LARGE OPEN
SPACE WITH PLAYGROUND, SAND PILES, SWINGS, ETC.
]
[Illustration:
INTERIOR VIEW OF WORKMAN PLACE, SHOWING SHELTER HOUSE AND PLAYGROUND.
]
A heartening example of the civic spirit generated in this region by the
presence of this great object-lesson of Workman Place under the wise and
watchful rule of the Association was the flag-raising that occurred in
midsummer, 1917, on the Fitzwater Street side of the courtyard. Benjamin
Barton, a resident of the block, went from house to house inducing his
neighbors to scrub the steps and the cobbles till they shone with the
lustrousness of Spotless Town; then they all, at his suggestion, hung
out brave new flags, the eagles of Poland on their red and white field
prominent among them. Little Maria Barton, dressed as the Goddess of
Liberty, stood on the rear seat of the hard-working Ford car belonging
to the Association and released the Star-Spangled Banner over the
street, midway of the block. Mr. Barton and others made speeches, and
Fitzwater Street is still talking of its great day.
The playground at Workman Place, the use of the roof of the Casa
Ravello, the Hector McIntosh Playground at Front and League Streets and
playgrounds in Richmond and Germantown in connection with properties
about to be described, are noteworthy examples of the manner in which
the Association is realizing Octavia Hill’s own insistent prescription
of open spaces. The Hector McIntosh Playground, to which we have already
referred, carries the name of the devoted second President of the
Association. It dates from 1902, when two friends of the Association
gave the land. Small as it is, even after the addition of the site of
957 South Front Street, it has played a most useful part in the lives of
its patrons, young and old. Stockholders have generously subscribed
funds for its maintenance, and during certain summers, in addition to
the fun of the swings and games and sandpile, and the work of the
morning kindergarten, there has been a series of seven or eight concerts
of harp and violin costing a dollar apiece on the average, and bringing
out a delighted throng to sing and to dance with the diminutive
orchestra. The Board of Recreation and the Playground Association,
always in sympathy with the objects of the Octavia Hill Association,
have liberally cooperated in this work, in such ways as planting trees
or providing a teacher.
In January, 1911, the Association was requested by a physician to turn a
noisome group of houses, breeding-places of pestilence and notorious
hospital-feeders, on East Rittenhouse Street in Germantown, into
something that would not be a standing rebuke to the community and the
worst possible advertisement of the thriving and progressive suburb.
After a meeting at the house of Mrs. Elizabeth Lean Head, residents of
Germantown subscribed for stock in the Association to the amount of
$20,825, on the understanding that the fund would be wholly devoted to
the purpose specified.
The Association thereupon acquired Nos. 523 and 531 to 551 inclusive,
with a total frontage of 210 feet on East Rittenhouse Street and a depth
of 165 feet. The houses, near the Reading Railroad, were occupied by
Italians. There were 25 houses, some of them run-down and filthy beyond
the power of words to portray. There was no underdrainage and two
hydrants provided all the water there was. Externally there were
gaptoothed sections of picket fence flat on the ground or sagging
drunkenly; smashed boxes and wrecked barrels were the least, repulsive
feature of the promiscuous clutter under the heavyladen clothes-lines.
One building, a mere outhouse, rented for 50 cents a month, and its
wretched occupant had just been removed in a dying condition from
tuberculosis. Within were the old, familiar features of ruin and decay
and smells unholy. Three houses were at once torn down. Others were
renovated from attic skylight to cellar floor, with the installation of
modern toilet facilities; and two new brick buildings—two stories high,
well lighted and well ventilated—were built with apartments for 14
families. The two-room apartments rent for $6.50 per month, and the
four-room apartments for $11.00. In the entire operation there are
quarters for 35 families, and at the rear is a large space available for
a general playground and for tenants’ gardens. There was much
stone-work, and the difficult site necessitated a great deal of blasting
in the solid rock.
[Illustration:
EAST RITTENHOUSE STREET, GERMANTOWN.
NO SUPERVISION ON THE PART OF OWNERS OR AGENTS PRODUCES THESE
CONDITIONS.
]
[Illustration:
EAST RITTENHOUSE STREET, REAR, AFTER IMPROVEMENT.
]
[Illustration:
NEW HOUSES, EAST RITTENHOUSE STREET PROPERTY, GERMANTOWN.
HOUSING SEVEN FAMILIES. RENTAL, $6.50 FOR 2–ROOM FLAT, $9.00 FOR
3–ROOM FLAT, $11.50 FOR A 4–ROOM HOUSE. SEPARATE ENTRANCE, TOILET,
CELLAR, WATER SUPPLY FOR EACH FAMILY.
]
It has not been a triumphant progress from strength to strength with
these Germantown houses and their untrained and ignorant Neapolitan and
Sicilian occupants. Many of the men are unskilled laborers for the city,
content to earn a little and spend the money in long seasons of
idleness. Two volunteer rent-collectors, speaking Italian, have been of
great assistance, and the summer playground, a visiting nurse, and
garden allotments have strengthened the hold of the Association upon the
tenants.
The transformation wrought by the summer of 1917 was truly wonderful. In
place of the abomination of desolation described in the front yards of
1911, corn waved, and beanvines flourished. Besides the gardens
thriftily cultivated by each householder where lettuce, celery and
tomatoes grew in abundance, there was a large community garden with a
square plot for each tenant, kept carefully weeded. From the windows
giving upon the street the flag of Italy flew, and on the steps the
mothers of little Italy sewed and gossiped and watched their bambini at
play. In the pavilion of the ample central yard were happy families
enjoying the shade, the children playing games, the babies napping in
their tiny hammocks swung from the eaves. The whole offered as charming
a picture of contentment in a congenial environment as one would care to
see.
A group of new houses in the district known as Richmond, an entire block
of model dwellings for workingmen, represent a distinct departure from
the policy to which the Association adhered for many years. But the
enterprise, to which the Board gave most of its time and thought in
1914, recommended itself to the deliberate judgment of the members for
two leading reasons—first, that it was becoming constantly harder to
find old downtown houses for renovation which could be bought and
altered at a cost permissive of a dividend, and, second, that the demand
is waxing day by day for carefully designed and suitably equipped
low-priced dwellings, since the operative builder is unaffected by
philanthropy, and is building to sell or else to rent his houses for at
least $15 a month.
The Property Committee of the Board obtained an option on a tract in
Richmond and was about to close the bargain when the rude hand of war,
that has paralyzed so many efforts for the world’s good, descended on
the market and made it prudent to defer action until the spring of 1915.
Then the more cheerful financial prospect seemed to justify a resumption
of the task. A lot adjoining the one originally chosen, measuring 212 by
165 feet and fronting on Cambria Street, was obtained. The total cost of
the land and the dwellings that were put on it was $63,000.
“The Philadelphia Model Homes Company” was created by the Board as a
separate corporation to finance the undertaking, to own and operate the
dwellings, and to continue its work in the future for any similar group
it might be deemed wise to create if the first venture justified itself.
The new corporation started with a nominal capital of $2,000. This sum
was presently raised to $20,000; and the capital stock was entirely
taken by the Octavia Hill Association, which named the directors and
entered into absolute control. The rest of the cost of the
operation—$43,500, or about two-thirds of the whole—was obtained by the
sale of first mortgages, each secured on a particular lot and dwelling,
and yielding 4.4 per cent. interest. The Finance Committee devised the
scheme because, in the first place, it would limit the financial
liability of the Association to the $20,000 of its actual investment,
and in the second place the first mortgages at fixed interest on
specific properties would more readily secure takers than dividends on
the stock of the corporation.