hardly be satisfied to accept money from any sort of house without
knowing or caring how it is obtained. Several times in the experience of
the Association the owners of houses which had descended to base uses
were shocked and grieved inexpressibly to learn of it. In one instance a
good lady residing in England who had never seen the property managed by
her agents in Philadelphia couldn’t believe the tales that were told her
concerning its condition. The agents themselves were unaware of the
facts until the Association reported to them the lively horrors. Owner
and agents alike were glad to have the houses pass into the control of
the Association, which at once converted them into dwellings which no
longer were a blot on the ’scutcheon of the City of Homes.
The question of repairs, when the tenants make their requests or the
rent-collector’s inspection discovers places where they may be needed,
is a matter determined by urgency, and by the amount of money already
expended on the property, and by the evinced cooperative spirit of the
tenant. It stands to reason that slovenly and destructive occupants are
not accorded the same attention that is given to the representatives of
those who are clean and careful and prompt in their payments. What a
difference there may be on opposite sides of a thin partition-wall! On
this side of the wall is a family inclined to dirt and disorder, because
of its unperfected social education. On the other side of the wall, only
a few inches away, the floor, neatly carpeted, is spotless. The
center-table holds a gaudy lamp, or a vase of dried grasses, or lurid
paper flowers. There are pictures on the walls, of saints or landscapes
or the family, in crayon,—perhaps the bridal couple arm-in-arm, or the
head of the house in the gorgeous uniform of a Polish benefit
association.
One may find the bureau turned into a shrine, with a crucifix and
candles; or perhaps the royal family of Italy is a prized possession in
a glorious flamboyancy of colors.
The rent-collector refers all-important questions of improvements to the
superintendent for his decision. Part of her special care it is to see
that the plumbing is in good order. The Octavia Hill Association is
largely responsible for the considerable reduction of the number of
cases in which six or eight or a dozen families in a court live off the
same hydrant. In one court visited, a pet dog had been giving
considerable trouble, since he had learned to turn on the water himself,
and would leave it running.
Garbage and ashes come under the rent-collector’s supervision, too. When
the former is thrown where the latter should be, it becomes necessary to
inquire more particularly who had watermelon for dinner, who had
chicken, and who had corn-ears—perhaps at a dollar a dozen. In one case
where an orthodox Jewish family was blamed by neighbors, the supposed
culprits were exonerated by the discovery of a ham-bone in the can when
the lid was lifted.
Just as the work of a Red Cross nurse in a war-hospital is a different
matter from a debutante’s dream of it, so the inspection by the
rent-collector may become a very plain and prosaic, undecorative
business indeed. She has to see, to think, to know. Nothing is too small
for her attention.
The “Conditions of Tenancy” printed in the monthly rent book which the
collector carries for receipts, gives the rules she must enforce. All
rents must be paid promptly in advance. The tenant will be required to
pay for any damage due to his or her own carelessness. The tenant must
replace glass broken in the windows, if it is the tenant’s fault.
Lodgers must not be taken nor rooms sublet without the collector’s
written permission. Cellars and yards are to be kept free from rubbish,
and no animals are allowed in the premises. Garbage and ashes must be
kept separate, and rubbish and paper must have their own receptacles.
Tenants must keep the sidewalk clean and free from obstruction, and must
attend to the removal of ice and snow. Nails or hooks must not be driven
in the woodwork without permission, and nothing is to be built in the
yard. Each tenant is responsible for a set of keys, which must be
surrendered upon vacating. In tenement houses each tenant must do his or
her share in cleaning halls, stairs and yards.
There are also explicit suggestions for the care of bathrooms, kitchens,
plumbing and garbage cans. There is a brief direction printed on the
inside of the cover for the collector’s ready reference, giving the
addresses and the office-hours of various dispensaries, hospitals and
other institutions which may be a present help in time of need to the
tenants.
A colored woman on her knees scrubbing a floor that already seemed
clean, explained that one couldn’t be too “pertickler about them germs.”
The germs, she explained, were so small you couldn’t see them, but they
certainly could raise a dreadful rumpus inside a person or a home. She
did not know of Metchnikoff or Pasteur or Lister, but she grasped the
important idea.
A janitor for a house or a group of houses may be appointed by the
Association from among the tenants, at a nominal fee—taking the form,
perhaps, of a dollar a month subtracted from the rent. The janitor takes
charge of the garbage and the ashcans, and cleans out the houses that
are to be rented. She sees to it that the tenants sweep their rooms and
hallways and stairs, each doing a part of the premises used in common.
The janitor is encouraged to consider herself a working partner of the
Association, and she is usually proud of her post.
An important part of the collector’s duty is to ascertain and report
damage done to plumbing. The plumber also notifies the Association of
any damage that is to be traced to the tenant, and the latter defrays
part of the cost of repairs by instalments till the whole amount has
been paid.
Careful calculation showed that in a group of 140 families, for one
year, the cost of repairs for plumbing due to the tenants’ carelessness
was $32. The real estate officer of a large trust company declared this
an excellent record.
As the rent-collector of tact and insight makes her rounds the
mechanical transaction of requesting and receipting for the rent is
accomplished frictionlessly and with dispatch in the great majority of
instances. The services of the constable, at a cost of $2.00, to
dispossess a family are rarely and very regretfully called into
requisition. But the Association stands for no shillyshallying. It
requires prompt payment. It insists that those who occupy its houses
shall fulfil the few simple regulations it has established. It does not
hesitate to invoke the arm of the law when the need arises, and the
tenants soon become aware of the fact. Most of them, happy to be under a
fair and considerate landlord, are punctual, peaceful and contented.
“I’ll never get another landlord like you,” said an old Jew, compelled
for reasons of his own to move, as he trudged dolefully away wagging his
beard.
The cases in which the Association has to proceed to the extreme penalty
of eviction may be similar to that of the woman who represented herself
as a widow with four children. The children were mythical. She took in
four male boarders, in flagrant defiance of the strict rule that forbids
taking boarders or subletting without the Association’s consent. There
was nothing to do but to put her out, inexorably.
The rent-collector takes with her wherever she goes her moneybag,
containing a small card-catalogue to check off payments, which are
entered in the office ledgers, receipt-books, blank forms for leases,
and paper for memoranda. Sometimes tenants who fail to have the sum
ready when the call is made promise to bring it to the office, and
rarely do they fail to keep their word. Italians are particularly
punctilious in their payments. The man who after an absence of two
months came back and paid up for the whole time, though there were a few
days he was not, bound to pay for, saying proudly, “I am an honorable
gentleman,” was merely typical of his compatriots.
[Illustration:
FRANKLIN COURT. YARD CONDITIONS WHEN PROPERTY WAS BOUGHT, FOR FIVE
FRONT AND THIRTEEN REAR BACK-TO-BACK HOUSES, HUDDLED TOGETHER ON
ADJOINING ALLEYS.
]
[Illustration:
FRANKLIN COURT AFTER RENOVATION. THE REAR HOUSES THROWN TOGETHER AND
NOW RENTED IN SETS OF ONE, TWO OR THREE ROOMS. SUGGESTIVE OF WHAT
MAY BE DONE TO GIVE BETTER LIGHT AND AIR AND SANITARY CONDITIONS IN
SIMILAR HOUSES.
]
Ordinarily it is not the great crises of life and death that confront
the sympathetic rent-collector. But she never can tell what will meet
her round the corner. Here sits a man who was for years a baker, and he
is utterly forlorn. His sister bustles cheerfully about the room, making
as brave a pretence of keeping a home as she can with some sorry sticks
of furniture and a few cracked dishes. The ailing brother has just come
back from the hospital, and there is a package wrapped in a bit of
Polish newspaper on the table before him. The rent-collector unwraps
from it a brown bottle of medicine bearing the label of the Polish
doctor to whom he had gone straight from the contrary hospital advice,
to secure a nostrum for his heart-trouble. He insists that he never will
return to that hospital which kept him in bed so long and did nothing
for him. He will never be able to work again, he reiterates
monotonously.
Those who have labored in France among soldiers blinded in war, to
restore a hopeful mood in which a man takes hold on life again, know
what means a wise, kind woman will use with a discouraged man who finds
his cross too heavy to carry and has succumbed to a melancholy
listlessness. She brings him round by degrees to a more rational frame
of mind, and in place of the closed door she shows him an open window.
Was not the result worth tarrying for, a few minutes? Even from the
commercial point of view is anything gained by having tenants who are at
odds with destiny, or anæmic, if not acutely ill, from bad air, bad
smells, foul vaults and cellars, surface drainage and contaminated food?
Was not Miss Hill entirely right when she declared that tenants and
their surroundings must be improved together?
Here was another trouble to be adjusted by the patient universal
arbiter. Italian children sat on Polish steps and refused to be
dislodged. Out of a cloud no bigger than a child’s uplifted hand came a
storm that threatened to destroy the peace of the street. Five nations
presently swept into the melee. No great matter, you say—but even so the
world-war started.
Wagon drivers for the meat packers’ distributing houses struck for a
dollar a week more. A little butcher couldn’t afford to let his chopping
block stay idle. He borrowed a push-cart and a neighbor helped him and
he fetched the meat himself, running the gauntlet of the angry
teamsters. But that is the reason, if you please, that he hasn’t the
rent today. There is so often the slenderest margin between a
sufficiency and dire distress in the case of the poor. To most of us a
strike is in the newspapers. To them a strike is in their lives—it may
come like a bolt of lightning crashing through the roof to disrupt a
home.
Perhaps the reckless joy-rider or motor-truck driver will never know how
many little children are kept within doors by their mothers for fear
they will be run over if they play in the street. But the rent-collector
knows. There are so many children shrieking and sprawling over the
cobbles already that it doesn’t seem as though there could be any left
in any of the houses. But there are always plenty more. Here are some,
too tiny to be allowed to go to the city swimming-baths. In the heat of
summer they wear scarcely any clothes, and their puny limbs stick out
from their tattered garments like twigs from a bird’s nest. They sit
here in the darkened room where their mother is sewing on trousers which
she “finishes” at nine cents a pair. The mother explains that she
doesn’t dare let them go out into the street—they might get run over. So
here they sit, listless, pale, forlorn. They laugh outright when you
play a child’s game on your fingers for them, and are loath to have you
go.
In another house sits a fair-haired girl with blue eyes, one of them
sadly atwist, and a scrofulous disfigurement marking what is almost a
pretty face. She is perhaps fourteen years old. You start to talk to her
and you find she is deaf and dumb. She has been at a school for such
unfortunates, the rent-collector explains, and this is her summer
vacation. It is certainly vacant enough.
Here are houses just about to be transferred to the Association.
Italians, mostly, occupy them. Notice the English sparrow that flutters
into a crevice of the bricks, where it wholly disappears as it finds its
nest. There is the common phenomenon of one hydrant outside, for
half-a-dozen families. In a dark angle of a yard, behind a woodshed
cluttered and foul, there is a pool of stinking black water out of which
you can fish rotten burlap and odds and ends of the social history of
all the houses. The curious children have turned pale green, like
sprouts in a cellar, and their arms are thin as pipestems. The stench
that emanates from the pool seems to have something to do with it. The
mother says—somewhat proudly—that a doctor has said that her children
have sluggish livers. She looks at you with a furrowed brow as she wipes
her hands in her apron. She is wondering whether there is any hope of
anything better in the way you are looking at her. “The landlord,” she
says, not knowing of the change to another regime that is imminent,
“never does nothin’ to the place but just collect the rent.”
A few years ago behind the rear wall of a large church there was a
pocket that those who praised God on the other side of the wall knew
nothing about. It adjoined a court of nine houses which the Octavia Hill
Association had acquired and improved. Through the court the inmates of
the four evil and invisible dwellings made their hasty escape to the
street when the law was on the trail that the gospel never found. The
owner was a well-to-do negro, who was content to take his money from an
agent and ask no questions. The agent was appealed to, again and again,
to put an end to the bedlam of drink and gambling, of fighting and
obscenity that made night hideous on the premises. Providentially the
owner died and the houses were bought by a friend of the Association who
turned them over to its care. There was nothing to do but to evict the
tenants. Polish immigrants of the poorest were put in. In the first year
after the change the rent-collector was able to show every cent
collected. In the second year the result was the same. In the meantime
the Association received its usual 7½ per cent. commission for
collecting the rents and the owners received in the first year 6.4 per
cent. and in the second year 6.5 per cent. on the investment.
Another striking object-lesson among many that might be cited as to the
value of the quiet influence of the rent-collector—an influence that
permeates as subtly as yeast—is to be seen in the group of houses for
the negro population on Naudain Street near the offices of the
Association, to which reference has already been made. One of these
houses, since it is given over to single old women, has come to be
called the “Old Ladies’ Home.” Would one find exemplary contentment let
him talk with an old crippled, blind woman who lives on the top floor.
“She is able to iron a shirt-waist without a wrinkle,” says the friendly
rent-collector. The order and the cleanliness of these rooms is
remarkable. There are stories of the plantation-life to be heard at the
lips of the old-time “Mammy” of Dixieland. There are the manners of the
great houses that have become historic landmarks, and of the days before
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was written. The whole House of Bishops of the A. M.
E. Church has to find room on the walls somewhere, and you will discover
that devout communicants are on their knees every night for the younger
generation who may fall a prey to the lures of the Devil along the Great
Black Way of South Street.
As for the all-important role of the Superintendent, it is hard to see
where his work begins or ends. There are just as many troubles as he
will give ear to. Here is a Jewish woman who turns loose a flood of
appeal and interrogation and never stops, when either the rent-collector
or the superintendent comes in sight. All she wants is all there is to
want; only a “blue sky” concession would satisfy her claims. But behind
all this importunity is maternal ambition. A piano in the house, and the
daughter’s lessons, mean stinting for all the rest, as in the case of a
home—not controlled by the Association—where a druggist’s clerk lives
and we find the kitchen range, the dinner-table and a Steinway
baby-grand crowded together in one small room.
The Association has its own force of mechanics, for work old and new,
and the superintendent is their “boss.” They have a repair shop in the
basement of the office at 613–15 Lombard Street for any work that is not
to be done on the premises. There they keep supplies of small hardware,
paint and lumber to be used as the call comes.
These mechanics attend to everything except the plumbing, the
roof-repairs, and the larger operations that involve considerable
plastering and brickwork. The plumbing is always as simple as it can be,
and when it is once installed the maintenance chiefly means keeping the
drains to the sinks and toilets in working order.
When houses are taken over for alteration, galvanized sinks with slate
backs are put in, except that in the better houses one-piece enameled
iron sinks are used. The water supply, run through galvanized pipe,
issues at brass spigots. Not much lead pipe is used—it is tempting to
thieves. The sink taps are iron.
One of the first things to do to an old house toward its rehabilitation
is to scrape off the paper. The Association has no love of many
thicknesses of paper concealing long neglect and the insidious lairs of
insects, and it generally applies paint or calcimine instead. Ten or
twelve coats of paper are common, and as many as twenty-seven have been
removed from the walls of one room. When the walls are scraped the
breaks in the plaster are likely to be alive with the vermin. The walls
are painted or calcimined in light tones that make an agreeable contrast
with the woodwork. Many tenants want paper, but they can be taught in
time the sanitary advantage of the alternative.
The exterior brickwork, frequently buckling and crumbling, requires much
attention, and often many feet of new wall must be built, or a wall
entirely replaced. Broken doors and rotting window-frames and sashes are
frequent items of expense. It is a mistake to renew glass in a sash too
weak to hold it. A new sash is a truer economy in the long run than one
that is patched up “to do.”
It might look as though in the case of a wrecked window-blind (usually
blinds are not found on Association houses) or a worn-out washer for a
spigot the tenant might display sufficient initiative to attend to the
necessary repairs himself; but there are so many ways of doing things
wrong and of damaging Association property that the Superintendent
actually prefers to have the tenants let things alone till he and his
own men can come.
A three story house at 1326 Kenilworth Street might be chosen as an apt
example of the superintendent’s reconstructive work. The rental of the
house before the Association took charge was $16 a month. It was sublet
to negro tenants who paid in all about $50 a month for their quarters.
It is now being rearranged for two-room apartments, one on each floor,
which will rent for eight dollars a floor per month, the rent payable in
weekly instalments. There is a toilet on each floor, and there is a sink
in each kitchen. Superfluous partitions that prevented the free
circulation of light and air have been taken out. A gesture of the
superintendent’s arms, as though he were lashing out in a gymnastic
exercise, told one more than his words. “I must get light and air,” he
said; and one thought of Octavia Hill’s insistence on this point.
One of a row of little houses in the rear is $8 a month. The former
owner put in a few cheap articles of furniture and collected $20 a
month. Under the Association the furniture is that of the tenants.
Improvements now being installed will add a dollar a month to the rent.
These little houses are called “one, two, three houses,” because they
are of three rooms only, one over another.
What an oasis we find here, as we look from the upper windows! The
houses round about—not Association property—have ruinous shacks at the
rear that hold broken boxes and barrels, superannuated chairs and
bedding and broken-down baby carriages. There is no clear space to sit
under a shade-tree, or plant morning-glories, or put a sandpile. One
longs to see the workmen who are paving the Octavia Hill courtyard below
turn their attention to the whole vicinity.
In the case of the property at 948–952 North Third Street, from six
privy-wells in the court, which extended partly under the kitchens, one
hundred barrels of filth in each case were taken. From another well, ten
feet in diameter and twenty-five in depth, 275 barrels were taken. The
figures convey some slight idea of the superintendent’s task as sanitary
engineer. The men, overcome by the stench of these vaults which had not
been thoroughly cleaned—it is said—in eighty years, worked in relays to
obtain the necessary breathing-spells.
There were disreputable tenants when the Association came to this court;
tenants who had influence with powers political and defied the new
administration to oust them. A law unto themselves, they made night both
hideous and dangerous to respectable neighbors. The drinking, brawling,
immoral occupants had to go, and today’s tenants are a very different
sort.
A Serb who inhabits one of the houses in the cement-paved court at the
rear is secretary of his lodge, and describes with pride the school for
thirty Serbian children which he and his countrymen have started at
Third and Brown Streets near by. In another house a woman is making some
embroidery to be sold for her church. She has been working on stems for
artificial leaves to trim hats, and she has made $3.50 to $5.00 a week
laboring from dawn to dark, at two cents and a half for a gross of
stems. But she is happy because she has a good husband, and this is
pin-money. The children of another house have taken a cast-iron bath-tub
and made for themselves a joyous swimmingpool with a few feet of hose
provided by their father. No wonder is it that former residents who
recently returned to the court to visit failed to recognize the place,
and were about to retreat abashed as trespassers. At the back of the
court is a good example of the wire fence installed in many places in
place of the solid board fence, to permit of the free circulation of
air. It should be noted that the solid blinds of old-time Philadelphia
dwellings are similar undesirable barriers to the medicinal
out-of-doors. So many tenants need to be taught the therapeutic virtues
of fresh air!
[Illustration:
COURT OF 948–952 NORTH THIRD STREET PROPERTY, BEFORE ALTERATIONS.
SURFACE DRAINAGE, ONE HYDRANT FOR SIX FAMILIES. TOILET NOT
UNDERDRAINED AND OVERFLOWING AT TIME OF PURCHASE.
]
[Illustration:
COURT OF 948–952 NORTH THIRD STREET PROPERTY, AFTER ALTERATIONS. EACH
HOUSE HAS 4 ROOMS, WATER IN KITCHEN, GAS, TOILET. RENT, $8.50 PER
MONTH.
]
Damp walls constitute a serious problem for the superintendent. Tenants
constantly complain of leakage into cellars. Often the water collecting
against the sashes of cellar windows or seeping under them rots the
sashes. If plastering is done directly on brick walls, the dampness will
come through in cold weather and appear in the form of “sweating” on the
inside. Much experimentation has developed the fact that the cheapest
and most satisfactory procedure is to give the walls several
applications of the substance known as tunlin. In some places this has
been in use three years on the walls and still keeps the moisture from
coming through.
By paying cash or by discounting its bills the Association has become a
desired customer, and the superintendent keeps his eye out for a rise in
prices or the possibility of a good bargain.
For instance, in the Kenilworth Street houses we note that the new
window-sashes are of bass wood, a good-looking and easily-handled
material. It now costs considerable more than it did a little while ago.
We find that the superintendent, before the price soared, bought a
quantity for $15 that would now cost $200 at least. It is, he explains,
soft enough to work in, old enough to have dried out, and the best
possible material for satisfactory mitre-joints.