Italians (see illustration facing page 108); but they are here by our
permission, dead set on becoming American citizens, and tremendously
impressed with the privileges of that citizenship. So anxious are they
to become citizens that, if they can get there by a shorter cut than the
law allows, you need not wonder at their taking the chance. The slum
teaches them nothing that discovers a moral offense in that. But not
even the slum can wipe out in me the memory of little Pietro, who sat
writing and writing with his maimed hand, trying to learn the letters of
the alphabet and how to put them together in words, so that he might be
the link of communication between his people and the old home in Italy.
He was a poor little maimed boy with a sober face, and it wrings my
heart now, the recollection of the look he gave me when I plumped out:
“Pietro, do you ever laugh?”
“I did wonst,” he said.
The sweaters’ fruitful soil is here: poverty, over-time and under-pay,
all the conditions that go to make child labor and to break up the home.
But these also are our own, if they came from a foreign land. The
Chinaman we have banished because he would not make his home with us,
but remained ever a stranger. That was the reason, and it was a good
reason. But what sense is there in refusing one immigrant entry because
he will not accept an American home, and giving to the one who will
accept it the slum tenement—to his undoing and to ours?
[Illustration:
THE OPEN TRENCH IN THE POTTER’S FIELD]
The children are the ones to look out for while it is yet time: the
young and the helpless. I spoke of the foundling babies that come from
no one knows where. The city could not keep them, try as it might; but
there was one whose great heart found a way. Long years ago she sent
them by hundreds to the homes far and near where open hearts were
yearning to receive them. It is one of the things that make a man
believe in human nature, that make him see God in it in spite of all,
the fact that there are so many homes of that kind. Not in a single
instance since the joint committee of the two charitable societies in
New York, of whose great work I have already spoken, began that work,
has a child in their care passed the age of two years without being
permanently provided for. And they take no chances, but insist upon the
child’s being a whole year in its new home before they permit its
adoption. Sister Irene was the one with the great heart. There she
stands among her little ones. (See illustration facing page 110.) She
was a Roman Catholic, and I was born a Lutheran. We could not very well
be farther apart on this earth; but, if the heaven upon which my gaze is
fixed has not room for both of us—if I shall not find her there with my
sainted mother, why, it is not the place I am looking for, and I do not
want to go.
I have preached my sermon to the text of the wrecked home. I know of no
more pitiful spot on earth than the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island
where, when last I was there, I saw seventeen hundred old women,
homeless and hopeless in their great age, waiting for their last ride up
the Sound in the “charity boat” to the grave that was waiting for them
in the Potter’s Field. I know of nothing more hopeless, to all human
sight, unless it be that open trench itself. (See illustration facing
page 112.) Thank God that there is the Christian’s hope. Even the
trench, with its darkness and gloom and surrender, cannot keep that
which is born in heaven and which, despite the slum and its vauntings,
is at home there with God.
I showed you the Five Points in its old iniquity and told you to bear it
in mind, that I would come back to it. I showed you the “old church
tenements” and told you what they stood for. Yet, in its disgrace, it
was that wicked slum, it was the outrage of that bad day, that showed us
the way out. Where those tenements stood, to-day the doors of the Five
Points Mission swing daily to let in nearly one thousand children who
are taught the better way there. (See illustration facing page 114.) The
Point itself has become Paradise Park, a playground for the children;
and across the park another mission, the Five Points House of Industry,
has registered the self-sacrificing labors of Christian men and women
for fifty years. So that on earth there is hope, too. That is the way
out. Wherever the Gospel and the sunlight go hand in hand in the battle
with the slum, there it is already won; there is an end of it at once.
[Illustration:
“THE WAY OUT”—BED-TIME IN THE FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY NURSERY
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT
IN our last talk, I brought you to the point, the turning point, where
our conscience awoke in the defense of the imperiled home in the
metropolis. We had had one or two false starts before we finally got
there; as, for instance, when a cholera invasion was threatened just
after the war. It was that which brought the Council of Hygiene into
existence. There was the human disposition to lie down under the
“visitation of God” and groan, which simply means that we are all as
lazy as circumstances will let us be. For utter uselessness, commend me
to the man who sits and prays to the Lord to avert the mischief and
never lends a hand himself. I used to laugh at an old deacon out in my
town on Long Island, who had borne a masterful hand in dealing with the
law-breakers there in the early days, and who when he got excited over
the recollection of the wickedness of the past said, “but then me and
the Lord we took hold;” but the good deacon was all right on the record.
He did his part, stoutly maintaining that it was the Lord’s work. I
would rather have one such around than a thousand of the other kind. The
Council of Hygiene told these people bluntly that just then was a time
to pray, broom in hand; and the cholera danger was met.
The real awakening came a quarter of a century ago, when the churches
came to the rescue in a body. Out of that movement grew the first
genuine model tenement building company and the plan of “philanthropy
and five per cent.”—that plan which must ever be the way out. In the
business of building homes for your brother there must be no taint of
the alms-giving that is miscalled charity, more is the pity. It must be
an honest business between man and man, if it is to succeed. Out of that
movement came our Octavia Hill, Miss Ellen Collins, who planted homes,
in the true sense of the word, in the very slum of slums, down in Water
Street, where the word home had not been heard for so long that the
children had fairly forgotten it—planted them, too, right in the very
devil’s preserves, and beat him out of sight—brothel, dance-hall, dive,
and all—single-minded and whole-hearted little woman that she is! “An
outlay of thought,” she told the Tenement House Committee of 1894, “pays
better than an outlay of money.” She gave her thought freely, and her
heart into the bargain; and when, the other day, the longing for rest
came to her and she thought of letting some one else take her place,
there came a deputation from Water Street, from that benighted
neighborhood that was, and begged her to stay, which was a whole volume
of cheer on our way; for it showed that hearts throbbed there in
response and that Water Street had a soul, the slum to the contrary
notwithstanding. A deputation that recalled that other one, of which
Colonel Kilbourne told at the National Conference of Employer and
Employee, held last fall in Minneapolis. The Colonel is the manager of a
company “between which and its employees no disagreement of any kind has
ever arisen.” It was in the dark days of the panic of 1893 that a
deputation of workmen, with serious looks on their faces, filed into
Colonel Kilbourne’s office and asked to have a word with him. And this
was their errand, as put by the spokesman:
“We know that times are bad. We know that your warehouses are filling up
with goods which you cannot sell, and that you cannot get your pay for
the goods you have sold. And yet you keep us at work. We do not know
what your circumstances are, but you have stood by us and we have come
to stand by you. Some of us have been here a few years, some of us many.
We have had good pay; we have been able to save up some money, and here
it is. It is all yours to do with as you please, if you need it in the
business.”
Who, brethren, gave you and me the right to sit in judgment on these, or
to despair of them? When you hear men prate wisely about “the poor
coming up to their opportunities,” ask Miss Collins what she thinks
about it and hear what she will say. The Water Street houses had been a
veritable hell before she took hold there. The dark halls were a
favorite hiding-place for criminals when chased by the police. It used
to be said that if a thief once got into the hallways of these buildings
there was no use of further effort to catch him. The buildings were
unspeakably filthy. The saloon on the ground floor had finally been
closed after one of the bloody fights that were the rule of the
neighborhood. Yet practically the same tenants are there to-day and have
been these twenty years. It was the landlord who was changed and
furnished opportunities for the tenants to come up to. Miss Collins
brought back the home, and her houses became good and decent; the whole
neighborhood took a turn for the better, tried to come up to the ideal
that she set before it. Miss Collins came out of that awakening, and she
is a mile-post forever on the road out of the slum.
St. George’s came out of it, with broken towers it is true, but with
that which is better than spires pointing skyward: the out-and-out
declaration that they might stay broken forever while there were men and
women to be saved. “All the money we can gather, for flesh and blood;
not a dollar, for brick and mortar!” Out of it came that call for men
and women that has stirred our city and the whole country from end to
end and has given us in New York forty social settlements where then
there was not one.
The movements for better schools, for neighborhood service, for decent
tenements, for playgrounds for the children, are ripples of that great
awakening. New York became a harder town to die in and a better town to
live in. We hear no more of fashionable women giving Christmas parties
to their lap dogs; and the day is at hand when no tenement mother shall
need to bemoan the birth of a daughter because of the perils and the
shame that await her. That was the cry that came to us from that
East-side a year ago; and that was why we fought to win; for it was that
or perish. Out of that awakening came the new day that reckons with the
tenants as “souls,” and which in a score of years has wrought a change
with us, in spite of the odds we are battling against, that caused an
eastern newspaper to say truly the other day that “New York is teaching
her sister cities by her old tenements how not to build, and by her new
how to build.” It all began there, the fight for the people’s homes; and
now let us look and see how the battle goes to-day.
Here let me show you a tenement house block on the East-side to-day,
typical of a hundred such and more. (See illustration facing page 126.)
There were two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one persons living in
it when a census was made of it two years ago, four hundred and
sixty-six of them babies in arms. There were four hundred and forty-one
dark rooms with no windows at all and six hundred and thirty-five rooms
that opened upon the air-shaft. An army of mendicants was marching forth
from that block: in five years six hundred and sixty different families
in it had applied for public relief. In that time it had harbored
thirty-two reported cases of tuberculosis and probably at least three
times as many more in all stages that were not reported. The year
before, the Health Department had recorded thirteen cases of diphtheria
there. However, the rent roll was all right, it amounted to $113,964 a
year.
[Illustration:
A TYPICAL TENEMENT HOUSE BLOCK]
I tell you these things that you may understand the setting of the home
in the greatest of American cities. Two millions of people in New York
live in such tenements. Do you see those narrow slits in the roof? They
are the air-shafts, two feet four inches wide, sixty or seventy feet
deep, through which light and air are supposed, in the landlord’s
theory, to come down to the tenants. We have just upset that theory and
forbidden those double-deckers with that kind of air-shaft. There are to
be courts, hereafter, so that the tenant may have light enough within
the house, to make out his neighbor. You will look in vain for a yard
for the children to play in, and I was going to say you will look in
vain for a bath-tub in that block, but I was wrong there. There is one
and I will show it to you. It is remarkable enough to make a note of.
It is upon such tenements as these that the sweat-shop got its grip,
that grip which we have been trying with such effort to shake off, for
the protection of home and of childhood. Directly across the street from
there, I found a sick man using for his pillow a bundle of half-finished
trousers that were being made in the flat. The man had scarlet fever.
The label on the trousers showed that they came from the shop of a
Broadway clothier, upon whose counters, but for our coming, they would
have been displayed without warning that the death warrant of the
purchaser or of some little child in his family was basted in the
lining. We _are_ brothers, whether we own it or not, we of the avenue
and they of the alley.
Here hangs the bath-tub I spoke of. (See illustration facing page 128.)
The landlord did not provide it; it was brought in by a tenant with
ambitions, an immigrant, who thought to find here the equality of man
with man, of which he had heard. He found the air-shaft in the slum
tenement. Suppose now he grows political ideals to correspond with it;
who is to blame?
[Illustration:
THE ONLY BATHTUB IN THE BLOCK
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
It was in one of the after swells of the great awakening that a man
stood up in a meeting of church people of all denominations, gathered to
find an answer to the question how to bring those multitudes back to the
old altars, and cried: “How shall these people understand the love of
God you speak of, when all about them they see only the greed of man?”
He was a builder, a Christian builder, and he forthwith set about
erecting in Brooklyn a row of tenements such as a Christian man could
build with a clear conscience. The Riverside tenements stand there
to-day unrivaled. (See illustration facing page 130.) It is much better
to live on the yard there than in front, because you have a garden and
you have flowers and even a band-stand where the band plays sometimes at
the landlord’s expense. The tenants are happy and contented. So is the
landlord. He told me himself that he has had six and six and a half and
even as high as seven per cent. on his investment, and he said with
scorn that the talk about the tenants “coming up to their opportunities”
was the veriest humbug. “They are there now,” he said, “a long way ahead
of the landlord.” Seven per cent. is good interest on any investment. It
almost looks, does it not, as if it were a question then whether a man
will take seven per cent. in providing for his brother and save his
soul, or twenty-five per cent. and lose it? It is odd that there should
be people willing to make the latter bargain; but, since there are such,
you might almost say that our fight with the slum is a kind of
missionary effort to compel them to take seven per cent. and save their
souls in spite of themselves.
[Illustration:
THE RIVERSIDE TENEMENTS
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
Alfred T. White’s tenants have homes: he has made it possible for them.
Humble homes to be sure, but furniture and show do not make the home of
which I am thinking, the home that is the prop of the Republic. Look,
now, upon this flat in an East-side block and tell me if you think that
that is a proper setting for American citizenship. (See illustration
facing.) That is one of the piggeries I have spoken of, and there are
too many of them. Thirteen persons slept in that room where the law
allowed only three. In that neighborhood I counted forty-three families
in a tenement where the original builder had made room for seventeen. Do
you think that is safe? And what must be the effect upon the growing
generation of such an environment as that?
One day I found two boys in a back yard—for a wonder there was a back
yard—practicing their writing lesson on the fence, and this is what they
wrote: “Keep off the grass.” I was thinking the other day when I read
about Pompeii and Martinique that who knows but that some time this
boasted civilization of ours may be engulfed in such a catastrophe.
Then, perhaps a couple of thousand years hence, when the scientific men
of that day are digging down to our buried city, they will come upon one
of those signs and fetch it up; and they will put their heads together
and consult and expound, and then they will turn to the waiting world
and announce that “the men of that day worshipped grass”; and they will
not be so far out of the way, either. I have seen, in my day, the grass
held to be tremendously sacred, while no one cared about the boy. A
little more of that, and the slum will have set a stamp upon those
children which it will be hard work to wipe out.
[Illustration:
LODGERS AT “FIVE CENTS A SPOT”
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
As yet you can do it with soap and water and patience. Take them out
into the open, set them among the daisies, and see the change. When they
return, it is as if windows had been opened for their souls, through
which they could look out and see God. They could not before. That is
the offense of the slum which kills the home, that it will not let
either the one Who is in it or the one who built it see God. Windows for
their souls! No need of wondering at that if you saw the window giving
upon the dark air-shaft through which those children looked out all the
days of their lives when they were at home! When I stood there with that
harassed mother, I asked thoughtlessly if the five children I saw about
me were all she had. She reddened a little and there was a sob in her
voice as she said: “Yes, all but Mary; she doesn’t like to sleep home.”
Mary was seventeen. You would not have wondered that she did not like to
“sleep home” if you had been there. What does that tell us of one of the
horrid problems with which we have to do in our cities? It all comes to
the wreck of the home.
Poverty Gap was one of the black spots that stand out as I look back
over twenty-five years of wrestling with the slum. I have seldom seen a
more hopeless place. It was there that “the gang” murdered the one “good
boy” there was in the block, for the offense of earning an honest
living. Yet the hope there _was_ in it all, was with these very
children. There came a kindergarten that way and opened our eyes. That
is one of the functions of the kindergarten, you know. It is the great
miracle-worker of our day; it has power to move mountains of
indifference, of sloth and wretchedness, of human inefficiency and
despair, for it is backed by the eternal forces of faith and hope and
love, however much they may look to you or to me like soap and water and
toilsome effort. The kindergarten came that way and, when we saw the Gap
through its eyes, we were ashamed and set about tearing it down. It was
then that an inspiration came to a good woman who had happened upon a
pile of sand in the neighborhood. She had it brought in and put upon the
site of the old Gap, with wheelbarrows and pails and shovels for the
boys and swings for the girls, and the children on the West-side got
their first playground. “The gang” went out of business that summer and
the Gap that had been violent became orderly.
Its steam had been penned up before and that is bad. What would you
think of a yard as wide as an ordinary bedroom, with signs in it
forbidding the boys to play ball there and giving warning that “all boys
caught in this yard will be delt with accordin’ to law”? I can show you
such yards, and wherever they are, gang violence breaks out, for the
street is the only alternative. There are no homes in such slums as
those.
I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements and there I trod
upon a baby. It is the regular means of introduction to a tenement house
baby in the old dark houses, but I never have been able to get used to
it. I went off and got my camera and photographed that baby standing
with its back against the public sink in a pool of filth that overflowed
on the floor. I do not marvel much at the showing of the Gilder Tenement
House Committee that one in five of the children in the rear tenements
into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house. It seemed
strange, rather, that any survived. But they do, and as soon as they are
able, they take to the street, which is thenceforward their training
ground.
Some years ago, the Gerry Society picked up two boys that “lived
nowhere,” so they said. (See illustration facing page 136.) They were
brothers with a drunken father and no mother. Some one was curious
enough to try to find out their moral and religious status. The older of
the two had heard of the Lord’s Prayer as something that it was lucky to
say over at night before one went to sleep, so as to have good luck the
next day pitching pennies; his younger brother knew the name of the
Saviour as something to swear by. These were our home heathen, growing
up in the Christian city of New York. That is one way of looking at it.
There is another for which we have to wait only a few years: then these
lads come to the polls with their ballots, and there develops the
citizen equality over which their father puzzled in his air-shaft. Ask
yourself the question again, is it safe?
[Illustration:
THEY “LIVED NOWHERE”
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
These boys belong to the street and they learn its lessons: gambling,
pilfering, and by and by robbery. A little further along on the road
they are traveling are the Rogues’ Gallery and the jail. At thirteen,
fourteen, fifteen and sixteen they are thieves, little and big,
house-breakers, and highway robbers. One year when I kept a census of
the child criminals I had to deal with in Mulberry Street, I found them
beginning their careers at four and six years. The very little ones were
useful to their elders to “crawl through a hole” into the place that was
to be robbed.
Was that good sense? No, it was not. That came later when a man came
into Mulberry Street, where “the gang” was beginning to make serious
trouble, and wanted to know if the boys would join a club he was
forming. Would they join, those boys? They fell over one another to get
there. The whole block joined with a rush. That was the good sense of
the new day that lets the boys in, instead of forever warning them off
from everything and everywhere. His club was a marching club (see
illustration facing page 138) and with their wooden guns on their
shoulders, that man could lead those boys where and how far he chose;
they would go with him wherever he went. Just remember that it is one of
two things, a gun on the shoulder or stripes on the back, where the home
interposes no barrier. It is because of the killing off of that home
that our jails are filled with young men from the big cities.
[Illustration:
JOINING “THE CLUB”]