FORCING THE GOOSE TO LAY MORE DOLLARS
“Twelve persons and two dogs living in three small rooms, and one of
those a dark kitchen. How packed with sound—humanity and sound!” That
is, provided greed be an inalienable attribute of humanity.
It was greed, and greed alone, that forced those twelve persons and two
dogs to live in such well-nigh insupportable conditions. The story as
told me was like this:
At the time that Congress declared that a state of war existed between
this country and Germany, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Bruno, both American born,
and their four children, lived in the flat in which I afterward found
them. At that time their flat consisted of a dark kitchen, a front room
with two windows looking on Second Avenue, and two twilight bedrooms,
each with a window looking on a by-courtesy court no wider than a well.
One of these twilight bedrooms was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Bruno, the
other by their grown daughter and her schoolgirl sister. The two sons,
one at work and the other at school, slept on a couch-bed in the front
room.
“We was thinking about getting a flat with more room,” Mrs. Bruno
explained to me. “Both my boy and girl was making good wages. When I
told them I’d found a place, they both told me they was thinking of
marryin’. No use movin’ and havin’ an extra room on your hands when your
boy and girl marry.”
Both did marry and both young husbands enlisted. As a consequence when
they were called to camp both young wives came to live with Mr. and Mrs.
Bruno. In time both young wives gave birth to a baby.
All went well until the owner of the flat-house determined to get higher
rents. Five dollars a month was the raise charged the Bruno family.
Though the old man grumbled he paid the raise.
Two months later he received notice of a ten-dollar-a-month raise—the
cost of living was so high, the owner explained, that she had to have
more money. A few months more and yet another raise. This notice was
served just after the birth of one baby and before the birth of the
other. With one young woman just home from the hospital and the other
expecting to go any day, the family was in no condition to move.
With Mr. Bruno the only worker in the family, for the allotment due each
of the young wives had not been paid, ten dollars more rent meant
starvation. The two children, boy and girl, were taken out of school and
put to work. Their wages made up the needed ten dollars a month and gave
something over to meet the rise in the cost of all the necessities of
life.
Shortly after the birth of the second baby the tenement-owner made a
tour of inspection, looked over her property. As described by the
occupants of her tenement she was a large, “fleshy” lady. All agreed
that her clothes, furs, diamonds, and automobile were “grand.” As an
additional evidence of her grandeur, besides her chauffeur there was
seated another grown man in uniform, whose only duty, so far as the
women and children living in her tenement could understand, was to hop
out when the automobile stopped and hold open the door.
When collecting the next rent the agent of this property-owner informed
each tenement that at a certain time the house was to be repaired and
the flats made over. Six flats were to be made on each floor where
before there had been four. Each flat was to be sharer of one dark room,
so that the new flats were to contain two rooms each, a kitchen and
bedroom.
On being questioned the agent declared that he had not been told
anything about rent. But the tenants, convinced that by giving up a room
they would lower their rent, submitted to the alterations.
When rent-day came the same amount was required of them. Those who
objected were made to leave. Mrs. Bruno, before expressing her
indignation, went out to find a flat into which to move her family. She
told me that she looked for two weeks, paid car-fare, and almost wore a
pair of good shoes out without finding anything better, or so good.
“Father got an offer of night-work—it wasn’t easy for him, beginnin’ at
his age—but the pay was better, and him sleepin’ days give us more room
nights,” she said. Then with a shake of the head she added: “We thought
rents had gone as high as they could go, seein’ that folks had begun to
kick about ’em. Jesus! Less than three months the agent comes round
again and serves another notice of a raise—we had to pay more’n double
for these three rooms what we’d paid for four when we moved in.”
A few days after this raise in rent Lucretia, the daughter, learned that
her husband had been killed somewhere in France. Work being plentiful
she got a night job—pay was better and it left more room in the beds at
night for those of the family employed during the day.
The cost of living continuing to soar, the son’s wife got a job to
supplement the government allotment. Because of the higher pay she too
took night-work. Within a short time she was back in the hospital, both
she and her baby sick. The doctor forbade her working at night. Urged by
her mother, Lucretia also got a day job.
At the end of the war the son came back, and Mrs. Bruno once more
started out to look for a flat, a home for her son and his family. Until
such a home was found it was deemed wisest for the son to go with his
father, take night-work. Just when the old woman gave up her search for
a flat as a useless waste of time, her son’s “buddie” came sailing into
New York harbor with his French wife, soon to become a mother.
With true Italian hospitality young Bruno not only brought his “buddie”
and his French wife home, but included their dog. The young Frenchwoman
went to Bellevue, her husband found work, and Mrs. Bruno set out to find
them a living place, anything in the way of a roof-tree from a cellar to
a garret.
When I last called on the Bruno dog the hunt for a flat, a room, a
cellar, was still being made. While Mrs. Bruno was doing her best to
find a vacancy she told me that because of the money she would be sorry
to have “buddie” and his little family go.
“It’s the rent,” she told me. “Everybody’s workin’ exceptin’ me and
Marie. She hasn’t been out the hospital long, and there’s her baby to
feed. All gets good wages. Why, my youngest girl gets twenty a week. I’m
as careful as I knows how, but the rent— She’s chargin’ us four times as
much for these three rooms as we used to pay for four.”
Any one who believes that tender-heartedness means woman, or that all
women are tender of heart and conscience, had best never investigate the
ownership of tenement-house property in the slums of New York City. The
filthiest, most dilapidated tenement-houses I entered were the property
of a woman, a human slug who, from the cradle to the grave, never did
anything more than dress and eat.
“I don’t know what this city’s coming to,” she once said to me as she
waved an opened letter. “Here’s the Health Department ordering me to put
toilets in my houses. Why, I scarcely get enough to live on from those
houses as it is.”
“You live at an expensive hotel and dress rather expensively,” I
suggested. “If, when you go off this summer——”
“I won’t do anything of the sort. Why should I sacrifice myself to
provide a lot of filthy foreigners with luxuries. Besides, they don’t
want them,” she asserted positively. “They’ve never been accustomed to
such conveniences; they’d as soon go in the yard.”
“Ever ask them?” I inquired. She was old enough to be my grandmother, so
I didn’t wish to hurt her feelings, though I did long to get her to look
at the matter from the tenant’s point of view. “How long since you’ve
gone through those houses, seen the condition with your own eyes? How
long?”
“Not since mother’s death. We used to live in the front house, you know.
East Third Street was fashionable then.” She gave a list of neighbors
and friends who had owned homes within a few blocks of her property,
most of them names prominent in the history of the city. “Mother and I
used to live on those houses, had money to do as we pleased. Now they
order me to put in toilets. I’ll do no such thing—unless they force me
to.”
She was forced to. After getting estimates from several contractors she
finally got a bid which she considered “reasonable.” Acting against the
advice of her renting-agent, she accepted this bid. The man did the
work, she paid his bill, and a few weeks later was notified that all the
toilets had dropped through the floor. One of them in falling struck one
of the tenants, who threatened a suit for damages.
That is the first cause of the slums of New York City—property-owners
like that woman.
In my district as inspector of dog licenses I met with one
tenement-owner who did not increase his rent during the housing crisis
in New York. He owned ten or more houses of six or ten flats each in the
lower part of my district, and between First Avenue and the river. They
were so much better kept than the property surrounding them that the
instant I put my foot in the door I recognized them as belonging to this
man.
The last time I called on the dogs in those houses I was assured by the
janitor and the tenants that they had not had a raise in rent for more
than ten years. In several of this man’s houses tenants and janitors
told me there hadn’t been a change in more than twenty years. One
janitor who had cared for one of his houses for thirty years said she
hadn’t had as many as a dozen new tenants in all that time.
Though I tried several times to see this house-owner for the sake of
asking him how he managed to make money when every other real-estate
owner was piling on rent, I never got any nearer him than his sister,
who lives with him. This woman assured me that her brother did make his
tenement property pay, pay well.
Her brother had found, she told me, that keeping his houses in good
repair, and under the care of a courteous, clean janitor, insured his
keeping respectable tenants. By respectable, she explained, her brother
meant persons who held down their jobs, paid their rent promptly, and
did not make a business of destroying the property. He took in any
nationality so long as they were the right sort of persons.
The enormous increase of crime, the so-called “crime wave,” was brought
about by congestion in the tenement districts more than by any other one
cause. Children and young people, being forced out of their homes by
over-crowding, spent their evenings on the streets, or in any public
place open to an empty pocketbook.
It was impossible for parents to keep track of their children, boys or
girls, once the child got large enough to go around alone. Often this
was a relief to the mother of the family, especially when her brood did
not get on harmoniously.
“I’m glad to see ’em go,” one tenement mother confided to me. “Yet I
can’t tell youse how anxious I am until I gits ’em back. There ain’t no
room for ’em here, scrappin’ and all but fightin’ like they does; but
once they’re out of my sight I dunno who’ll git ’old of ’em, or where
they’ll go.”
In the upper part of my district I crossed the trail of at least a dozen
different bands of juvenile thieves. One band when it first came to my
notice was made up of two girls, neither of them fourteen years old, and
both daughters of respectable, hard-working parents.
These two children began by playing hooky from school, climbing
fire-escapes, and taking small articles from flats where the windows had
been carelessly left unfastened. Growing bolder, they would strip a flat
and lug the contents, bedding, clothing, and small articles, across the
roofs to a different street, thence to a corner in a cellar which they
had found temporarily unused.
Both of these children were noticeably good-looking, and the day I met
them carefully and comfortably dressed. It was in a tenement-house in
which the janitor lived on the top floor. Being a bit out of breath
after climbing five flights of steep stairs, I halted in the passageway
before knocking at the door of the janitor’s flat.
As I stood there the door leading to the roof opened, and two girls
entered, each with a bundle wrapped in a sheet. The house was profoundly
quiet, and they were more than half-way down the stairs before they saw
me.
“Our mother sent us to carry home this wash,” one of them said to me,
and she indicated the bundles.
“What were you doing on the roof?” I asked, more puzzled by her
explanation than I had been by their appearance.
“We live on the top floor,” she replied, and without the slightest
hesitation. “It’s easier than going down so many stairs.”
“H’m!” the older girl sniffed. “Who likes to carry bundles like these
through the street? Folks laugh at us.”
Stepping aside I let them pass. Then as I watched them make that flight
I called down to them:
“Tell your mother next time not to make your bundles so heavy. Let you
make two turns. Neither of you are strong enough for that load.”
The janitor proved to be an old acquaintance—this being my third or
fourth call on the dogs in her house. She was a gossipy Italian woman,
and since she last saw me many things of importance to her had happened.
She insisted on my coming in and sitting down.
After inspecting her new baby and admiring the photograph of her brother
in an Italian uniform, among other subjects I chanced to mention was the
hope that she would not allow her little girls to tote huge bundles of
wash across roofs. I then told of the two children who had passed me in
the hall.
“Jesus!” she exclaimed excitedly. “They break in Angelina’s flat last
week and stole all her fine clothes. Day before they break in a flat on
the avenue and steal a man’s watch.”
The story in a nutshell was that the two children had, within six days,
entered and robbed two flats. When I saw them they were evidently
escaping with plunder from a third.
“I tell my man,” the janitor added, after giving me the details of the
two robberies, “he must get my dog license. My dog more use than the
police. What the police do for me?—way down on the street—my dog he stay
here. When I go I tell him: ‘You stay.’ Nobody come in when my dog’s
here.”
Later I heard of these two girl robbers at least a dozen times.
According to later reports they had annexed, or been annexed by, two
young men. One report was to the effect that the parents of one of them
had taken the matter up with the police in the hope of finding their
child and inducing her to return home.
In some of the best built and cared for tenement-houses in that section
of my district, there was not a door that had not been jimmied. Janitor
and tenants agreed that most of this was done by boys, scarcely more
than children. They also agreed that a dog was the best and only
protection against these thieves.
Crossing the back yard on my way to a rear tenement in the lower
gas-house district, I once noticed a lot of writing on a fence. It was
in chalk, and had the appearance of being freshly done.
“Mary will go too” and “Seen you was” were two sentences that attracted
my attention.
While waiting for my knock at the door of the rear tenement to be
answered, I saw a young man, a lad, saunter into the yard, read the
writing, and then hurry out. As I was leaving, having seen the dog’s
license, another boy sauntered in, read the writing, and hurried out.
The dog-owner, on catching sight of the second boy as he entered, drew
back and out of his sight. When I asked for an explanation, she assured
me that the writing was the work of a gang of young crooks. She said
everybody in the two houses knew about their writing signals on that
fence, but dare not interfere. When I proposed to rub off the writing,
she became alarmed and implored me not to touch it, not to walk on that
side of the yard, or show that I saw it.
Not being a very gullible woman, I set about questioning janitors and
dog-owners in that vicinity. According to these persons that gang was
only one of many infesting that section. Several of them told me that
she was in hourly dread of learning that her own son or daughter was a
member of such a gang, and a criminal. Always the wail was:
“I can’t keep track of ’em. We had to take a boarder in to help us pay
rent. Evenin’s there ain’t room here for us all to set down, much less
have company. Young folks must have company.”
The persons responsible for these conditions, the tenement-owners, were
ninety-nine out of every hundred well-to-do if not hugely rich. Their
claim that it was the high cost of labor and materials that forced them
to raise rents, in my district at least, was a lie.
During the last nine months of my service as inspector of dog licenses I
made a point of asking in every tenement-house I entered, what repairs
had been made during the past six months. According to my diary I found
ninety-two houses where painting or repairs had been made at the expense
of the landlord—ninety-two in the thousands, and tens of thousands, of
tenement-houses in my district.
The vast majority of them not only made no repairs of any sort, but they
cut down expenses. One nice little trick was to discharge a janitor to
whom they had been paying a few dollars above the rent of her cellar or
basement flat. After forcing her out or making her pay rent for her
quarters, the agent would pick out a tenant, usually one with a small
family, and notify the woman that she was to do the janitor’s work,
scrubbing, sweeping, and keeping track of tenants, and her husband must
do the repairs. For this they would be allowed five or six dollars a
month on their rent.
It was either do it or get out of the house. As there were no flats to
be had, the man and wife had to do as they were bid.
In one case of this sort the price offered was six dollars a month taken
off the rent, and the husband, a plumber, was not only to do all repairs
in the house, but was to furnish his own material.