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A TEN YEARS' WAR
AN ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE
WITH THE SLUM IN
NEW YORK
BY JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES"
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY JACOB A. RIIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO THE FAINT-HEARTED AND THOSE OF LITTLE
FAITH THIS VOLUME IS REPROACHFULLY
INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration: COLONEL GEORGE E. WARING, JR.]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM 1
II. THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT 30
III. THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT 68
IV. THE TENANT 104
V. THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 139
VI. LETTING IN THE LIGHT 169
VII. JUSTICE FOR THE BOY 204
VIII. REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 239
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
COLONEL GEORGE E. WARING, JR. _Frontispiece_
POLICE STATION LODGING ROOM ON EAST SIDE 18
THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS 74
ALFRED CORNING CLARK BUILDINGS--_Model Tenements
Of City And Suburban Homes Company_ 84
EVENING IN ONE OF THE COURTS OF MILLS HOUSE NO. 1 94
BONE ALLEY 134
MULBERRY BEND PARK 180
LETTER H PLAN OF PUBLIC SCHOOL NO. 165 (SHOWING
FRONT ON WEST 109TH STREET) 214
PLAYGROUND ON ROOF OF NEW EAST BROADWAY SCHOOLHOUSE
(AREA 8,348 SQUARE FEET) 220
A TAMMANY-SWEPT EAST SIDE STREET BEFORE WARING 242
THE SAME EAST SIDE STREET WHEN COLONEL WARING
WIELDED THE BROOM 248
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 262
A TEN YEARS' WAR
I
THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
The slum is as old as civilization. Civilization implies a race, to get
ahead. In a race there are usually some who for one cause or another
cannot keep up, or are thrust out from among their fellows. They fall
behind, and when they have been left far in the rear they lose hope and
ambition, and give up. Thenceforward, if left to their own resources,
they are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a
bad master. They drag one another always farther down. The bad
environment becomes the heredity of the next generation. Then, given the
crowd, you have the slum ready-made.
The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it her
enemy. It was a losing fight until conscience joined forces with fear
and self-interest against it. When common sense and the golden rule
obtain among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. The two have
not always been classed together, but here they are plainly seen to
belong together. Justice to the individual is accepted in theory as the
only safe groundwork of the commonwealth. When it is practiced in
dealing with the slum, there will shortly be no slum. We need not wait
for the millennium, to get rid of it. We can do it now. All that is
required is that it shall not be left to itself. That is justice to it
and to us, since its grievous ailment is that it cannot help itself.
When a man is drowning, the thing to do is to pull him out of the water;
afterward there will be time for talking it over. We got at it the other
way in dealing with our social problems. The doctrinaires had their day,
and they decided to let bad enough alone; that it was unsafe to
interfere with "causes that operate sociologically," as one survivor of
these unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that
cost the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate
sociologically" are the opportunity of the political and every other
kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the
slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless in the fight
against them. We have not done yet paying the bills he ran up for us.
Some time since we turned to, to pull the drowning man out, and it was
time. A little while longer, and we should have been in danger of being
dragged down with him.
The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes
which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom,
brought on an acute attack which threatened to become fatal. Too many of
us had supposed that, built as our commonwealth was on universal
suffrage, it would be proof against the complaints that harassed older
states; but in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that.
Having solemnly resolved that all men are created equal and have certain
inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, we shut our eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was
as if a man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to bed
with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula was all right, but
merely repeating it worked no cure. When, after a hundred years, we
opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the
working-woman in our cities; upon "knee pants" at forty cents a dozen
for the making; upon the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city life,
ten per cent, each year for the trench, truly the Lost Tenth of the
slum. Our country had grown great and rich; through our ports was poured
food for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets multitudes
huddled in ignorance and want. The foreign oppressor had been
vanquished, the fetters stricken from the black man at home; but his
white brother, in his bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had
in it a distinct note of menace. Political freedom we had won; but the
problem of helpless poverty, grown vast with the added offscourings of
the Old World, mocked us, unsolved. Liberty at sixty cents a day set
presently its stamp upon the government of our cities, and it became the
scandal and the peril of our political system.
So the battle began. Three times since the war that absorbed the
nation's energies and attention had the slum confronted us in New York
with its challenge. In the darkest days of the great struggle it was the
treacherous mob; later on, the threat of the cholera, which found swine
foraging in the streets as the only scavengers, and a swarming host, but
little above the hog in its appetites and in the quality of the shelter
afforded it, peopling the back alleys. Still later, the mob, caught
looting the city's treasury with its idol, the thief Tweed, at its head,
drunk with power and plunder, had insolently defied the outraged
community to do its worst. There were meetings and protests. The rascals
were turned out for a season; the arch-thief died in jail. I see him
now, going through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as a
newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high as
ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile prison
was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old gates
preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the memory
of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration of the
fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure with
in the Sixth Ward. He never "squealed," and he was "so good to the
poor"--evidence that the slum is not laid by the heels by merely
destroying Five Points and the Mulberry Bend. There are other fights to
be fought in that war, other victories to be won, and it is slow work.
It was nearly ten years after the great robbery before decency got the
upper grip in good earnest. That was when the civic conscience awoke in
1879.
In that year the slum was arraigned in the churches. The sad and
shameful story was told of how it grew and was fostered by avarice, that
saw in the homeless crowds from over the sea only a chance for business,
and exploited them to the uttermost, making sometimes a hundred per
cent, on the capital invested,--always most out of the worst houses,
from the tenants of which "nothing was expected" save that they pay the
usurious rents; how Christianity, citizenship, human fellowship, shook
their skirts clear of the rabble that was only good enough to fill the
greedy purse, and how the rabble, left to itself, improved such
opportunities as it found after such fashion as it knew; how it ran
elections merely to count its thugs in, and fattened at the public crib;
and how the whole evil thing had its root in the tenements, where the
home had ceased to be sacred,--those dark and deadly dens in which the
family ideal was tortured to death, and character was smothered; in
which children were "damned rather than born" into the world, thus
realizing a slum kind of foreordination to torment, happily brief in
many cases. The Tenement House Committee long afterward called the worst
of the barracks "infant slaughter houses," and showed, by reference to
the mortality lists, that they killed one in every five babies born in
them.
The story shocked the town into action. Plans for a better kind of
tenement were called for, and a premium was put on every ray of light
and breath of air that could be let into it. Money was raised to build
model houses, and a bill to give the health authorities summary powers
in dealing with tenements was sent to the legislature. The landlords
held it up until the last day of the session, when it was forced
through by an angered public opinion. The power of the cabal was broken.
The landlords had found their Waterloo. Many of them got rid of their
property, which in a large number of cases they had never seen, and
tried to forget the source of their ill-gotten wealth. Light and air did
find their way into the tenements in a half-hearted fashion, and we
began to count the tenants as "souls." That is one of our milestones in
the history of New York. They were never reckoned so before; no one ever
thought of them as "souls." So, restored to human fellowship, in the
twilight of the air shaft that had penetrated to their dens, the first
Tenement House Committee was able to make them out "better than the
houses" they lived in, and a long step forward was taken. The Mulberry
Bend, the wicked core of the "bloody Sixth Ward," was marked for
destruction, and all slumdom held its breath to see it go. With that
gone, it seemed as if the old days must be gone too, never to return.
There would not be another Mulberry Bend. As long as it stood, there was
yet a chance. The slum had backing, as it were.
The civic conscience was not very robust yet, and required many and
protracted naps. It slumbered fitfully eight long years, waking up now
and then with a start, while the politicians did their best to lull it
back to its slumbers. I wondered often, in those years of delay, if it
was just plain stupidity that kept the politicians from spending the
money which the law had put within their grasp; for with every year that
passed a million dollars that could have been used for small park
purposes was lost. But they were wiser than I. I understood when I saw
the changes which letting in the sunshine worked. We had all believed
it, but they knew it all along. At the same time, they lost none of the
chances that offered. They helped the landlords, who considered
themselves greatly aggrieved because their property was thereafter to
front on a park instead of a pigsty, to transfer the whole assessment of
half a million dollars for park benefit to the city. They undid in less
than six weeks what it had taken considerably more than six years to do;
but the park was cheap at the price. We could afford to pay all it cost
to wake us up. When finally, upon the wave of wrath excited by the
Parkhurst and Lexow disclosures, reform came with a shock that dislodged
Tammany, it found us wide awake, and, it must be admitted, not a little
astonished at our sudden access of righteousness.
The battle went against the slum in the three years that followed, until
it found backing in the "odium of reform" that became the issue in the
municipal organization of the greater city. Tammany made notes. Of what
was done, how it was done, and why, during those years, I shall have
occasion to speak further in these pages. Here I wish to measure the
stretch we have come since I wrote "How the Other Half Lives," ten years
ago. Some of it we came plodding, and some at full speed; some of it in
the face of every obstacle that could be thrown in our way, wresting
victory from defeat at every step; some of it with the enemy on the run.
Take it altogether, it is a long way. Most of it will not have to be
traveled over again. The engine of municipal progress, once started as
it has been in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the
engineer; it may even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made
to work backward. Even Tammany knows that, and is building the schools
she so long neglected, and so is hastening the day when she shall be but
an unsavory memory.
How we strove for those schools, to no purpose! Our arguments, our
anger, the anxious pleading of philanthropists who saw the young on the
East Side going to ruin, the warning year after year of the
superintendent of schools that the compulsory education law was but an
empty mockery where it was most needed, the knocking of uncounted
thousands of children for whom there was no room,--uncounted in sober
fact; there was not even a way of finding out how many were
adrift,--brought only the response that the tax rate must be kept down.
Kept down it was. "Waste" was successfully averted at the spigot; at the
bunghole it went on unchecked. In a swarming population like that you
must have either schools or jails, and the jails waxed fat with the
overflow. The East Side, that had been orderly, became a hotbed of child
crime. And when, in answer to the charge made by a legislative committee
that the father forced his child into the shop, on a perjured age
certificate, to labor when he ought to have been at play, that father,
bent and heavy-eyed with unceasing toil, flung back the charge with the
bitter reproach that we gave him no other choice, that it was either the
street or the shop for his boy, and that perjury for him was cheaper
than the ruin of the child, we were mute. What, indeed, was there to
say? The crime was ours, not his. That was but yesterday. To-day we can
count the months to the time when every child who knocks shall find a
seat in our schools. We have a school census to tell us of the need. In
that most crowded neighborhood in all the world, where the
superintendent lately pleaded in vain for three new schools, five have
been built, the finest in this or any other land,--great, light, and
airy structures, with playgrounds on the roof; and all over the city the
like are going up. The briefest of our laws, every word of which is like
the blow of a hammer driving the nails home in the coffin of the bad old
days, says that never one shall be built without its playground. So the
boy is coming to his rights.
The streets are cleaned,--not necessarily clean just now; Colonel Waring
is dead, with his doctrine of putting a man instead of a voter behind
every broom, killed by politics, he and his doctrine both,--but cleaned.
The slum has even been washed. We tried that on Hester Street years ago,
in the age of cobblestone pavements, and the result fairly frightened
us. I remember the indignant reply of a well-known citizen, a man of
large business responsibility and experience in the handling of men, to
whom the office of street-cleaning commissioner had been offered, when I
asked him if he would accept. "I have lived," he said, "a blameless life
for forty years, and have a character in the community. I cannot
afford--no man with a reputation can afford--to hold that office; it
will surely wreck it." That was then. It made Colonel Waring's
reputation. He took the trucks from the streets. Tammany, in a brief
interregnum of vigor under Mayor Grant, had laid the axe to the
unsightly telegraph poles and begun to pave the streets with asphalt,
but it left the trucks and the ash barrels to Colonel Waring as
hopeless. Trucks have votes; at least their drivers have. Now that they
are gone, the drivers would be the last to bring them back; for they
have children, too, and the rescued streets gave them their first
playground. Perilous, begrudged by policeman and storekeeper, though it
was, it was still a playground.
But one is coming in which the boy shall rule unchallenged. The Mulberry
Bend Park kept its promise. Before the sod was laid in it two more were
under way in the thickest of the tenement house crowding, and each,
under the law which brought them into existence, is to be laid out in
part as a playground. They are not yet finished, but they will be; for
the people have taken to the idea, and the politician has made a note of
the fact. He saw a great light when the play piers were opened. In half
a dozen localities where the slum was striking its roots deep into the
soil such piers are now being built, and land is being acquired for
small parks. We shall yet settle the "causes that operated
sociologically" on the boy with a lawn mower and a sand heap. You have
got your boy, and the heredity of the next one, when you can order his
setting.
Even while I am writing, a bill is urged in the legislature to build in
every senatorial district in the city a gymnasium and a public bath. It
matters little whether it passes at this session or not. The important
thing is that it is there. The rest will follow. A people's club is
being organized, to crowd out the saloon that has had a monopoly of the
brightness and the cheer in the tenement streets too long. The labor
unions are bestirring themselves to deal with the sweating curse, and
the gospel of less law and more enforcement sits enthroned at Albany.
Theodore Roosevelt will teach us again Jefferson's forgotten lesson,
that "the whole art of government consists in being honest." With a back
door to every ordinance that touched the lives of the people, if indeed
the whole thing was not the subject of open ridicule or the vehicle of
official blackmail, it seemed as if we had provided a perfect municipal
machinery for bringing the law into contempt with the young, and so for
wrecking citizenship by the shortest cut.
Of free soup there is an end. It was never food for free men. The last
spoonful was ladled out by yellow journalism with the certificate of the
men who fought Roosevelt and reform in the police board that it was
good. It is not likely that it will ever plague us again. Our experience
has taught us a new reading of the old word that charity covers a
multitude of sins. It does. Uncovering some of them has kept us busy
since our conscience awoke, and there are more left. The worst of them
all, that awful parody on municipal charity, the police station lodging
room, is gone, after twenty years of persistent attack upon the foul
dens,--years during which they were arraigned, condemned, indicted by
every authority having jurisdiction, all to no purpose. The stale beer
dives went with them and with the Bend, and the grip of the tramp on our
throat has been loosened. We shall not easily throw it off altogether,
for the tramp has a vote, too, for which Tammany, with admirable
ingenuity, has found a new use, since the ante-election inspection of
lodging houses has made them less available for colonization purposes
than they were. Perhaps I should say a new way of very old use. It is
simplicity itself. Instead of keeping tramps in hired lodgings for weeks
at a daily outlay, the new way is to send them all to the island on
short commitments during the canvass, and vote them from there _en bloc_
at the city's expense. Time and education must solve that, like so many
other problems which the slum has thrust upon us. They are the forces
upon which, when we have gone as far as our present supply of steam will
carry us, we must always fall back; and this we may do with confidence
so long as we keep stirring, if it is only marking time, as now. It is
in the retrospect that one sees how far we have come, after all, and
from that gathers courage for the rest of the way. Twenty-nine years
have passed since I slept in a police station lodging house, a lonely
lad, and was robbed, beaten, and thrown out for protesting; and when the
vagrant cur that had joined its homelessness to mine, and had sat all
night at the door waiting for me to come out,--it had been clubbed away
the night before,--snarled and showed its teeth at the doorman, raging
and impotent I saw it beaten to death on the step. I little dreamed then
that the friendless beast, dead, should prove the undoing of the
monstrous wrong done by the maintenance of these evil holes to every
helpless man and woman who was without shelter in New York; but it did.
It was after an inspection of the lodging rooms, when I stood with
Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the police board, in the one where
I had slept that night, and told him of it, that he swore they should
go. And go they did, as did so many another abuse in those two years of
honest purpose and effort. I hated them. It may not have been a very
high motive to furnish power for municipal reform; but we had tried
every other way, and none of them worked. Arbitration is good, but there
are times when it becomes necessary to knock a man down and arbitrate
sitting on him, and this was such a time. It was what we started out to
do with the rear tenements, the worst of the slum barracks, and it would
have been better had we kept on that track. I have always maintained
that we made a false move when we stopped to discuss damages with the
landlord, or to hear his side of it at all. His share in it was our
grievance; it blocked the mortality records with its burden of human
woe. The damage was all ours, the profit all his. If there are damages
to collect, he should foot the bill, not we. Vested rights are to be
protected, but no man has a right to be protected in killing his
neighbor.
[Illustration: POLICE STATION LODGING ROOM ON EAST SIDE]
However, they are down, the worst of them. The community has asserted
its right to destroy tenements that destroy life, and for that cause. We
bought the slum off in the Mulberry Bend at its own figure. On the rear
tenements we set the price, and set it low. It was a long step. Bottle
Alley is gone, and Bandits' Roost. Bone Alley, Thieves' Alley, and
Kerosene Row,--they are all gone. Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Gap have
acquired standards of decency; Poverty Gap has risen even to the height
of neckties. The time is fresh in my recollection when a different kind
of necktie was its pride; when the boy murderer--he was barely
nineteen--who wore it on the gallows took leave of the captain of
detectives with the cheerful invitation to "come over to the wake. They
will have a high old time." And the event fully redeemed the promise.
The whole Gap turned out to do the dead bully honor. I have not heard
from the Gap, and hardly from Hell's Kitchen, in five years. The last
news from the Kitchen was when the thin wedge of a column of negroes, in
their uptown migration, tried to squeeze in, and provoked a race war;
but that in fairness should not be laid up against it. In certain local
aspects it might be accounted a sacred duty; as much so as to get drunk
and provoke a fight on the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne. But
on the whole the Kitchen has grown orderly. The gang rarely beats a
policeman nowadays, and it has not killed one in a long while.
So, one after another, the outworks of the slum have been taken. It has
been beaten in many battles; but its reserves are unimpaired. More
tenements are being built every day on twenty-five-foot lots, and
however watchfully such a house is planned, if it is to return to the
builder the profit he seeks, it will have that within it which, the
moment the grasp of official sanitary supervision is loosened, must
summon up the ghost of the slum. The common type of tenement to-day is
the double-decker, and the double-decker is hopeless. In it the crowding
goes on at a constantly increasing rate. This is the sore spot, and as
against it all the rest seems often enough unavailing. Yet it cannot
be. It is true that the home, about which all that is to work for
permanent progress must cluster, is struggling against desperate odds in
the tenement, and that the struggle has been reflected in the morals of
the people, in the corruption of the young, to an alarming extent; but
it must be that the higher standards now set up on every hand, in the
cleaner streets, in the better schools, in the parks and the clubs, in
the settlements, and in the thousand and one agencies for good that
touch and help the lives of the poor at as many points, will tell at no
distant day, and react upon the homes and upon their builders. To any
one who knew the East Side, for instance, ten years ago, the difference
between that day and this in the appearance of the children whom he sees
there must be striking. Rags and dirt are now the exception rather than
the rule. Perhaps the statement is a trifle too strong as to the dirt;
but dirt is not harmful except when coupled with rags; it can be washed
off, and nowadays is washed off where such a thing would have been
considered affectation in the days that were. Soap and water have
worked a visible cure already, that must go more than skin-deep. They
are moral agents of the first value in the slum. And the day must come
when rapid transit will cease to be a football between contending forces
in a city of three million people, and the reason for the outrageous
crowding will cease to exist with the scattering of the centres of
production to the suburb. That day may be a long way off, measured by
the impatience of the philanthropist, but it is bound to come.
Meanwhile, philanthropy is not sitting idle and waiting. It is building
tenements on the humane plan that wipes out the lines of the
twenty-five-foot lot, and lets in sunshine and air and hope. It is
putting up hotels deserving of the name for the army that but just now
had no other home than the cheap lodging houses which Inspector Byrnes
fitly called "nurseries of crime." These also are standards from which
there is no backing down, even if coming up to them is slow work: and
they are here to stay, for they pay. That is the test. Not charity, but
justice,--that is the gospel which they preach.
Flushed with the success of many victories, we challenged the slum to a
fight to the finish a year ago, and bade it come on. It came on. On our
side fought the bravest and best. The man who marshaled the citizen
forces for their candidate had been foremost in building homes, in
erecting baths for the people, in directing the self-sacrificing labors
of the oldest and worthiest of the agencies for improving the condition
of the poor. With him battled men who had given lives of patient study
and effort to the cause of helping their fellow men. Shoulder to
shoulder with them stood the thoughtful workingman from the East Side
tenement. The slum, too, marshaled its forces. Tammany produced her
notes. She pointed to the increased tax rate, showed what it had cost to
build schools and parks and to clean house, and called it criminal
recklessness. The issue was made sharp and clear. The war cry of the
slum was characteristic: "To hell with reform!" We all remember the
result. Politics interfered, and turned victory into defeat. We were
beaten. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through
the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a
starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat
in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. Hard faces I had not
seen for years showed themselves about the dives. The mob made merry
after its fashion. The old days were coming back. Reform was dead, and
decency with it.
A year later, I passed that same way on the night of election. The scene
was strangely changed. The street was unusually quiet for such a time.
Men stood in groups about the saloons, and talked in whispers, with
serious faces. The name of Roosevelt was heard on every hand. The dives
were running, but there was no shouting, and violence was discouraged.
When, on the following day, I met the proprietor of one of the oldest
concerns in the Bowery,--which, while doing a legitimate business,
caters necessarily to its crowds, and therefore sides with them,--he
told me with bitter reproach how he had been stricken in pocket. A
gambler had just been in to see him, who had come on from the far West,
in anticipation of a wide-open town, and had got all ready to open a
house in the Tenderloin. "He brought $40,000 to put in the business, and
he came to take it away to Baltimore. Just now the cashier of ---- Bank
told me that two other gentlemen--gamblers? yes, that's what you call
them--had drawn $130,000 which they would have invested here, and had
gone after him. Think of all that money gone to Baltimore! That's what
you've done!"
I went over to police headquarters, thinking of the sad state of that
man, and in the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to "the commissioner." The older was a hunchback
girl, who led her younger brother (he could not have been over five or
six years old) by the hand. They explained their case to me. They came
from Allen Street. Some undesirable women tenants had moved into the
tenement, and when complaint was made that sent the police there, the
children's father, who was a poor Jewish tailor, was blamed. The tenants
took it out of the boy by punching his nose till it bled. Whereupon the
children went straight to Mulberry Street to see the commissioner and
get justice. It was the first time in twenty years that I had known
Allen Street to come to police headquarters for justice; and in the
discovery that the new idea had reached down to the little children I
read the doom of the slum, despite its loud vauntings.
No, it was not true that reform was dead, with decency. It was not the
slum that had won; it was we who had lost. We were not up to the
mark,--not yet. But New York is a many times cleaner and better city
to-day than it was ten years ago. Then I was able to grasp easily the
whole plan for wresting it from the neglect and indifference that had
put us where we were. It was chiefly, almost wholly, remedial in its
scope. Now it is preventive, constructive, and no ten men could gather
all the threads and hold them. We have made, are making headway, and no
Tammany has the power to stop us. She knows it, too, and is in such
frantic haste to fill her pockets while she has time that she has
abandoned her old ally, the tax rate, and the pretense of making bad
government cheap government. She is at this moment engaged in raising
taxes and assessments at one and the same time to an unheard-of figure,
while salaries are being increased lavishly on every hand. We can afford
to pay all she charges us for the lesson we are learning. If to that we
add common sense, we shall discover the bearings of it all without
trouble. Yesterday I picked up a book,--a learned disquisition on
government,--and read on the title-page, "Affectionately dedicated to
all who despise politics." That was not common sense. To win the battle
with the slum, we must not begin by despising politics. We have been
doing that too long. The politics of the slum is apt to be like the slum
itself, dirty. Then it must be cleaned. It is what the fight is about.
Politics is the weapon. We must learn to use it so as to cut straight
and sure. That is common sense, and the golden rule as applied to
Tammany.
Some years ago, the United States government conducted an inquiry into
the slums of great cities. To its staff of experts was attached a
chemist, who gathered and isolated a lot of bacilli with fearsome Latin
names, in the tenements where he went. Among those he labeled were the
_Staphylococcus pyogenes albus_, the _Micrococcus fervidosus_, the
_Saccharomyces rosaceus_, and the _Bacillus buccalis fortuitus_. I made
a note of the names at the time, because of the dread with which they
inspired me. But I searched the collection in vain for the real bacillus
of the slum. It escaped science, to be identified by human sympathy and
a conscience-stricken community with that of ordinary human selfishness.
The antitoxin has been found, and is applied successfully. Since justice
has replaced charity on the prescription the patient is improving. And
the improvement is not confined to him; it is general. Conscience is not
a local issue in our day. A few years ago, a United States Senator
sought reelection on the platform that the decalogue and the golden rule
were glittering generalities that had no place in politics, and lost. We
have not quite reached the millennium yet, but to-day a man is governor
in the Empire State who was elected on the pledge that he would rule by
the ten commandments. These are facts that mean much or little,
according to the way one looks at them. The significant thing is that
they are facts, and that, in spite of slipping and sliding, the world
moves forward, not backward. The poor we shall have always with us, but
the slum we need not have. These two do not rightfully belong together.
Their present partnership is at once poverty's worst hardship and our
worst fault.
II
THE TENEMENT HOUSE BLIGHT
In a Stanton Street tenement, the other day, I stumbled upon a Polish
capmaker's home. There were other capmakers in the house, Russian and
Polish, but they simply "lived" there. This one had a home. The fact
proclaimed itself the moment the door was opened, in spite of the
darkness. The rooms were in the rear, gloomy with the twilight of the
tenement, although the day was sunny without, but neat, even cosy. It
was early, but the day's chores were evidently done. The teakettle sang
on the stove, at which a bright-looking girl of twelve, with a pale but
cheery face, and sleeves brushed back to the elbows, was busy poking up
the fire. A little boy stood by the window, flattening his nose against
the pane and gazing wistfully up among the chimney pots where a piece of
blue sky about as big as the kitchen could be made out. I remarked to
the mother that they were nice rooms.
"Ah yes," she said, with a weary little smile that struggled bravely
with hope long deferred, "but it is hard to make a home here. We would
so like to live in the front, but we can't pay the rent."
I knew the front with its unlovely view of the tenement street too well,
and I said a good word for the air shaft--yard or court it could not be
called, it was too small for that--which rather surprised myself. I had
found few virtues enough in it before. The girl at the stove had left
off poking the fire. She broke in the moment I finished, with eager
enthusiasm: "Why, they have the sun in there. When the door is opened
the light comes right in your face."
"Does it never come here?" I asked, and wished I had not done so, as
soon as the words were spoken. The child at the window was listening,
with his whole hungry little soul in his eyes.
Yes, it did, she said. Once every summer, for a little while, it came
over the houses. She knew the month and the exact hour of the day when
its rays shone into their home, and just the reach of its slant on the
wall. They had lived there six years. In June the sun was due. A
haunting fear that the baby would ask how long it was till June--it was
February then--took possession of me, and I hastened to change the
subject. Warsaw was their old home. They kept a little store there, and
were young and happy. Oh, it was a fine city, with parks and squares,
and bridges over the beautiful river,--and grass and flowers and birds
and soldiers, put in the girl breathlessly. She remembered. But the
children kept coming, and they went across the sea to give them a better
chance. Father made fifteen dollars a week, much money; but there were
long seasons when there was no work. She, the mother, was never very
well here,--she hadn't any strength; and the baby! She glanced at his
grave white face, and took him in her arms. The picture of the two, and
of the pale-faced girl longing back to the fields and the sunlight, in
their prison of gloom and gray walls, haunts me yet. I have not had the
courage to go back since. I recalled the report of an English army
surgeon, which I read years ago, on the many more soldiers that
died--were killed would be more correct--in barracks into which the sun
never shone than in those that were open to the light.
The capmaker's case is the case of the nineteenth century, of
civilization, against the metropolis of America. The home, the family,
are the rallying points of civilization. But long since the tenements of
New York earned for it the ominous name of "the homeless city." In its
40,000 tenements its workers, more than half of the city's population,
are housed. They have no other chance. There are, indeed, wives and
mothers who, by sheer force of character, rise above their environment
and make homes where they go. Happily, there are yet many of them. But
the fact remains that hitherto their struggle has been growing ever
harder, and the issue more doubtful.
The tenement itself, with its crowds, its lack of privacy, is the
greatest destroyer of individuality, of character. As its numbers
increase, so does "the element that becomes criminal for lack of
individuality and the self-respect that comes with it." Add the
shiftless and the weak who are turned out by the same process, and you
have its legitimate crop. In 1880 the average number of persons to each
dwelling in New York was 16.37; in 1890 it was 18.52. In 1895, according
to the police census, 21.2. The census of 1900 will show the crowding to
have gone on at an equal if not at a greater rate. That will mean that
so many more tenements have been built of the modern type, with four
families to the floor where once there were two. I shall not weary the
reader with many statistics. They are to be found, by those who want
them, in the census books and in the official records. I shall try to
draw from them their human story. But, as an instance of the unchecked
drift, let me quote here the case of the Tenth Ward, that East Side
district known as the most crowded in all the world. In 1880, when it
had not yet attained that bad eminence, it contained 47,554 persons, or
432.3 to the acre. In 1890 the census showed a population of 57,596,
which was 522 to the acre. The police census of 1895 found 70,168
persons living in 1514 houses, which was 643.08 to the acre. Lastly, the
Health Department's census for the first half of 1898 gave a total of
82,175 persons living in 1201 tenements, with 313 inhabited buildings
yet to be heard from. This is the process of doubling up,--literally,
since the cause and the vehicle of it all is the double-decker
tenement,--which in the year 1895 had crowded a single block in that
ward at the rate of 1526 persons per acre, and one in the Eleventh Ward
at the rate of 1774.[1] It goes on not in the Tenth Ward or on the East
Side only, but throughout the city. When, in 1897, it was proposed to
lay out a small park in the Twenty-Second Ward, up on the far West Side,
it was shown that five blocks in that section, between Forty-Ninth and
Sixty-Second streets and Ninth and Eleventh avenues, had a population of
more than 3000 each. The block between Sixty-First and Sixty-Second
streets, Tenth and Eleventh avenues, harbored 3580, which meant 974.6
persons to the acre.
[Footnote 1: Police census of 1895: Block bounded by Canal, Hester,
Eldridge, and Forsyth streets: size 375 x 200, population 2628, rate per
acre 1526. Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge
streets: size 200 x 300, population 2244, rate per acre 1774.]
If we have here to do with forces that are beyond the control of the
individual or the community, we shall do well at least to face the
facts squarely and know the truth. It is no answer to the charge that
New York's way of housing its workers is the worst in the world to say
that they are better off than they were where they came from. It is not
true, in most cases, as far as the home is concerned: a shanty is better
than a flat in a cheap tenement, any day. Even if it were true, it would
still be beside the issue. In Poland my capmaker counted for nothing.
Nothing was expected of him. Here he ranks, after a few brief years,
politically equal with the man who hires his labor. A citizen's duty is
expected of him, and home and citizenship are convertible terms. The
observation of the Frenchman who had watched the experiment of herding
two thousand human beings in eight tenement barracks in Paris, that the
result was the "exasperation of the tenant against society," is true the
world over. We have done as badly in New York. Social hatefulness is not
a good soil for citizenship to grow in, where political equality rules.
Nor will the old lie about the tenants being wholly to blame cover the
ground. It has long been overworked in defense of landlord usury.
Doubtless there are bad tenants. In the matter of renting houses, as in
everything else, men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of
them, good or bad; but as a class the tenants have been shown all along
to be superior to their surroundings. "Better than the houses they live
in," said the first Tenement House Commission; and the second gave as
its verdict that "they respond quickly to improved conditions." That is
not an honest answer. The truth is that if we cannot check the indraught
to the cities, we can, if we choose, make homes for those who come, and
at a profit on the investment. Nothing has been more clearly
demonstrated in our day, and it is time that it should be said so that
everybody can understand. It is not a case of transforming human nature
in the tenant, but of reforming it in the landlord builder. It is a
plain question of the per cent. he is willing to take.
So that we may get the capmaker's view and that of his fellow
tenants,--for, after all, that is the one that counts; the state and the
community are not nearly so much interested in the profits of the
landlord as in the welfare of the workers,--suppose we take a stroll
through a tenement house neighborhood and see for ourselves. We were in
Stanton Street. Let us start there, then, going east. Towering barracks
on either side, five, six stories high. Teeming crowds. Push-cart men
"moved on" by the policeman, who seems to exist only for the purpose.
Forsyth Street: there is a church on the corner, Polish and Catholic, a
combination that strikes one as queer here on the East Side, where
Polish has come to be synonymous with Jewish. I have cause to remember
that corner. A man killed his wife in this house, and was hanged for it.
Just across the street, on the stoop of that brown stone tenement, the
tragedy was reenacted the next year; only the murderer saved the county
trouble and expense by taking himself off, also. That other stoop in the
same row witnessed a suicide. Why do I tell you these things? Because
they are true. The policeman here will bear me out. They belong to the
ordinary setting of life in a crowd such as this. It is never so little
worth living, and therefore held so cheap along with the fierce,
unceasing battle that goes on to save it. You will go no further unless
I leave it out? Very well; I shall leave out the murder after we have
passed the block yonder. The tragedy of that is of a kind that comes too
close to the every-day life of tenement house people to be omitted. The
house caught fire in the night, and five were burned to death,--father,
mother, and three children. The others got out; why not they? They
stayed, it seems, to make sure none was left; they were not willing to
leave one behind, to save themselves. And then it was too late; the
stairs were burning. There was no proper fire escape. That was where the
murder came in; but it was not all chargeable to the landlord, nor even
the greater part. More than thirty years ago, in 1867, the state made it
law that the stairs in every tenement four stories high should be
fireproof, and forbade the storing of any inflammable material in such
houses. I do not know when the law was repealed, or if it ever was. I
only know that in 1892 the Fire Department, out of pity for the tenants
and regard for the safety of its own men, forced through an amendment to
the building law, requiring the stairs of the common type of five-story
tenements to be built of fireproof material, and that to-day they are of
wood, just as they always were. Only last spring I looked up the
Superintendent of Buildings and asked him what it meant. I showed him
the law, which said that the stairs should be "built of slow-burning
construction or fireproof material;" and he put his finger upon the
clause that follows, "as the Superintendent of Buildings shall decide."
The law gave him discretion, and that is how he used it. "Hard wood
burns slowly," said he.
The fire of which I speak was a "cruller fire," if I remember rightly,
which is to say that it broke out in the basement bakeshop, where they
were boiling crullers (doughnuts) in fat, at four A. M., with a hundred
tenants asleep in the house above them. The fat went into the fire, and
the rest followed. I suppose that I had to do with a hundred such fires,
as a police reporter, before, under the protest of the Tenement House
Committee and the Good Government Clubs, the boiling of fat in tenement
bakeshops was forbidden. The chief of the Fire Department, in his
testimony before the committee, said that "tenements are erected mainly
with a view of returning a large income for the amount of capital
invested. It is only after a fire in which great loss of life occurs
that any interest whatever is taken in the safety of the occupants." The
Superintendent of Buildings, after such a fire in March, 1896, said that
there were thousands of tenement fire-traps in the city. My reporter's
notebook bears witness to the correctness of his statement, and it has
many blank leaves that are waiting to be put to that use yet. The
reckoning for eleven years showed that, of 35,844 fires in New York,
53.18 per cent. were in tenement houses, though they were only a little
more than 31 per cent. of all the buildings, and that 177 occupants were
killed, 523 maimed, and 625 rescued by the firemen. Their rescue cost
the lives of three of these brave men, and 453 were injured in the
effort. And when all that is said, not the half is told. A fire in the
night in one of those human beehives, with its terror and woe, is one of
the things that live in the recollection ever after as a terrible
nightmare. Yet the demonstration of the Tenement House Committee, that
to build tenements fireproof from the ground up would cost little over
ten per cent. more than is spent upon the firetrap, and would more than
return the interest on the extra outlay in the saving of insurance and
repairs, and in the better building every way, has found no echo in
legislation or in the practice of builders. That was the fire chief's
way to avoid "the great destruction of life;" but he warned the
committee that it would "meet with strong opposition from the different
interests, should legislation be requested." The interest of the man who
pays the rent will not be suspected in this, so he must have meant the
man who collects it.
Here is a block of tenements inhabited by poor Jews. Most of the Jews
who live over here are poor; and the poorer they are, the higher rent do
they pay, and the more do they crowd to make it up between them. "The
destruction of the poor is their poverty." It is only the old story in a
new setting. The slum landlord's profits were always the highest. He
spends nothing for repairs, and lays the blame on the tenant. The
"district leader" saves him, in these days of Tammany rule come back,
unless he is on the wrong side of the political fence, in which case
the Sanitary Code comes handy to chase him into camp. A big "order" on
his house is a very effective way of making a tenement house landlord
discern political truth on the eve of an important election. Just before
the last, when the election of Theodore Roosevelt was threatened, the
sanitary force displayed such activity as it has not since, up to the
raid on the elevated roads, in the examination of tenements belonging
very largely, as it happened, to sympathizers with the gallant Rough
Rider's cause; and those who knew did not marvel much at the large vote
polled by the Tammany candidate in the old city.