I found no shape or size of tenement but this. There was always the
one room, where the inmates lived by day, and the one den, where they
slept by night, apparently all in the same bed, though probably the
children were strewn about the floor. If the tenement were high up the
living-room had more light and air than if it were low down; but the
sleeping-hole never had any light or air of its own. My calls were
made on one of the mild days which fell before last Christmas, and
so I suppose I saw these places at their best; but what they must be
when the summer is seven times heated without, as it often is in New
York, or when the arctic cold has pierced these hapless abodes and the
inmates huddle together for their animal heat, the reader must imagine
for himself. The Irish-Americans had flaming stoves, even on that soft
day, but in the Hebrew tenements I found no fire. They were doubtless
the better for this, and it is one of the comical anomalies of the
whole affair that they are singularly healthy. The death rate among
them is one of the lowest in the city, though whether for their final
advantage it might not better be the highest, is one of the things
one must not ask one’s self. In their presence I should not dare to
ask it, even in my deepest thought. They are then so like other human
beings and really so little different from the best, except in their
environment, that I had to get away from this before I could regard
them as wild beasts.
I suppose there are and have been worse conditions of life, but if I
stopped short of savage life I found it hard to imagine them. I did not
exaggerate to myself the squalor that I saw, and I do not exaggerate
it to the reader. As I have said, I was so far from sentimentalizing
it that I almost immediately reconciled myself to it, as far as its
victims were concerned. Still, it was squalor of a kind which, it
seemed to me, it could not be possible to outrival anywhere in the life
one commonly calls civilized. It is true that the Indians who formerly
inhabited this island were no more comfortably lodged in their wigwams
of bark and skins than these poor New-Yorkers in their tenements.
But the wild men pay no rent, and if they are crowded together upon
terms that equally forbid decency and comfort in their shelter, they
have the freedom of the forest and the prairie about them; they have
the illimitable sky and the whole light of day and the four winds
to breathe when they issue into the open air. The New York tenement
dwellers, even when they leave their lairs, are still pent in their
high-walled streets, and inhale a thousand stenches of their own and
others’ making. The street, except in snow and rain, is always better
than their horrible houses, and it is doubtless because they pass so
much of their time in the street that the death rate is so low among
them. Perhaps their domiciles can be best likened for darkness and
discomfort to the dugouts or sod huts of the settlers on the great
plains. But these are only temporary shelters, while the tenement
dwellers have no hope of better housing; they have neither the prospect
of a happier fortune through their own energy as the settlers have,
nor any chance from the humane efforts and teachings of missionaries,
like the savages. With the tenement dwellers it is from generation to
generation, if not for the individual, then for the class, since no
one expects that there will not always be tenement dwellers in New York
as long as our present economical conditions endure.