light burning, but it is one of the rarest things to find one. The thing
seems well-nigh impossible of accomplishment. Two years ago, when the
Good Government Clubs set about backing up the Board of Health in its
efforts to work out this reform, which comes close to being one of the
most necessary of all,--such untold mischief is abroad in the darkness
of these thoroughfares,--the sanitary police reported 12,000 tenement
halls unlighted by night, even, and brought them, by repeated orders,
down to less than 1000 in six months. I do not believe the light burns
in 1000 of them all to-day. It is so easy to put it out when the
policeman's back is turned, and save the gas.
We had a curious instance at the time of the difficulties that sometimes
beset reform. Certain halls that were known to be dark were reported
sufficiently lighted by the policeman of the district, and it was
discovered that it was his standard that was vitiated. He himself lived
in a tenement, and was used to its gloom. So an order was issued
defining darkness to the sanitary police: if the sink in the hall could
be made out, and the slops overflowing on the floor, and if a baby could
be seen on the stairs, the hall was light; if, on the other hand, the
baby's shrieks were the first warning that it was being trampled upon,
the hall was dark. Some days later, the old question arose about an
Eldridge Street tenement. The policeman had reported the hall light
enough. The president of the Board of Health, to settle it once for all,
went over with me, to see for himself. The hall was very dark. He sent
for the policeman.
"Did you see the sink in that hall?" he asked.
The policeman said he did.
"But it is pitch dark. How did you see it?"
"I lit a match," said the policeman.
Four families live on these floors, with Heaven knows how many children.
It was here the police commissioners were requested, in sober earnest,
some years ago, by a committee of very practical women philanthropists,
to have the children tagged, so as to save the policemen wear and tear
in taking them back and forth between the Eldridge Street police station
and headquarters, when they got lost. If tagged, they could be assorted
at once and taken to their homes. Incidentally, the city would save the
expense of many meals. It was shrewdly suspected that the little ones
were lost on purpose in a good many cases, as a way of getting them fed
at the public expense.
That the children preferred the excitement of the police station, and
the distinction of a trip in charge of a brass-buttoned guardian, to
the Ludlow Street flat is easy enough to understand. A more unlovely
existence than that in one of these tenements it would be hard to
imagine. Everywhere is the stench of the kerosene stove that is forever
burning, serving for cooking, heating, and ironing alike, until the last
atom of oxygen is burned out of the close air. Oil is cheaper than coal.
The air shaft is too busy carrying up smells from below to bring any air
down, even if it is not hung full of washing in every story, as it
ordinarily is. Enterprising tenants turn it to use as a refrigerator as
well. There is at least a draught of air, such as it is. When fire
breaks out, this draught makes of the air shaft a flue through which the
fire roars fiercely to the roof, so transforming what was meant for the
good of the tenants into their greatest peril. The stuffy rooms seem as
if they were made for dwarfs. Most decidedly, there is not room to swing
the proverbial cat in any one of them. In one I helped the children,
last holiday, to set up a Christmas tree, so that a glimpse of something
that was not utterly sordid and mean might for once enter their lives.
Three weeks after, I found the tree standing yet in the corner. It was
very cold, and there was no fire in the room. "We were going to burn
it," said the little woman, whose husband was then in the insane asylum,
"and then I couldn't. It looked so kind o' cheery-like there in the
corner." My tree had borne the fruit I wished.
It remained for the New York slum landlord to assess the exact value of
a ray of sunlight,--upon the tenant, of course. Here are two
back-to-back rear tenements, with dark bedrooms on the south. The flat
on the north gives upon a neighbor's yard, and a hole two feet square
has been knocked in the wall, letting in air and sunlight; little enough
of the latter, but what there is is carefully computed in the lease. Six
dollars for this flat, six and a half for the one with the hole in the
wall. Six dollars a year per ray. In half a dozen houses in this block
have I found the same rate maintained. The modern tenement on the corner
goes higher: for four front rooms, "where the sun comes right in your
face," seventeen dollars; for the rear flat of three rooms, larger and
better every other way, but always dark, like the capmaker's, eleven
dollars. From the landlord's point of view, this last is probably a
concession. But he is a landlord with a heart. His house is as good a
one as can be built on a twenty-five-foot lot. The man who owns the
corner building in Orchard Street, with the two adjoining tenements, has
no heart. In the depth of last winter, I found a family of poor Jews
living in a coop under his stairs, an abandoned piece of hallway, in
which their baby was born, and for which he made them pay eight dollars
a month. It was the most outrageous case of landlord robbery I had ever
come across, and it gave me sincere pleasure to assist the sanitary
policeman in curtailing his profits by even this much. The hall is not
now occupied.
The Jews under the stairs had two children. The shoemaker in the cellar
next door has three. They were fighting and snarling like so many dogs
over the coarse food on the table before them, when we looked in. The
baby, it seems, was the cause of the row. He wanted it all. He was a
very dirty and a very fierce baby, and the other two children were no
match for him. The shoemaker grunted fretfully at his last, "Ach, he is
all de time hungry!" At the sight of the policeman, the young imp set up
such a howl that we beat a hasty retreat. The cellar "flat" was
undoubtedly in violation of law, but it was allowed to pass. In the main
hall, on the ground floor, we counted seventeen children. The facts of
life here suspend ordinary landlord prejudices to a certain extent.
Occasionally it is the tenant who suspends them. The policeman laughed
as he told me of the case of a mother who coveted a flat into which she
well knew her family would not be admitted; the landlord was particular.
She knocked, with a troubled face, alone. Yes, the flat was to let; had
she any children? The woman heaved a sigh. "Six, but they are all in
Greenwood." The landlord's heart was touched by such woe. He let her
have the flat. By night he was amazed to find a flock of half a dozen
robust youngsters domiciled under his roof. They had indeed been in
Greenwood; but they had come back from the cemetery to stay. And stay
they did, the rent being paid.
High rents, slack work, and low wages go hand in hand in the tenements
as promoters of overcrowding. The rent is always one fourth of the
family income, often more. The fierce competition for a bare living cuts
down wages; and when loss of work is added, the only thing left is to
take in lodgers to meet the landlord's claim. The Jew usually takes them
singly, the Italian by families. The midnight visit of the sanitary
policeman discloses a state of affairs against which he feels himself
helpless. He has his standard: 400 cubic feet of air space for each
adult sleeper, 200 for a child. That in itself is a concession to the
practical necessities of the case. The original demand was for 600 feet.
But of 28,000 and odd tenants canvassed in New York, in the slumming
investigation prosecuted by the general government in 1894, 17,047 were
found to have less than 400 feet, and of these 5526 slept in
unventilated rooms with no windows. No more such rooms have been added
since; but there has come that which is worse.
It was the boast of New York, till a few years ago, that at least that
worst of tenement depravities, the one-room house, too familiar in the
English slums, was practically unknown here. It is not so any longer.
The evil began in the old houses in Orchard and Allen streets, a bad
neighborhood, infested by fallen women and the thievish rascals who prey
upon their misery,--a region where the whole plan of humanity, if plan
there be in this disgusting mess, jars out of tune continually. The
furnished-room house has become an institution here, speeded on by a
conscienceless Jew who bought up the old buildings as fast as they came
into the market, and filled them with a class of tenants before whom
charity recoils, helpless and hopeless. When the houses were filled, the
crowds overflowed into the yard. In one case, I found, in midwinter,
tenants living in sheds built of odd boards and roof tin, and paying a
dollar a week for herding with the rats. One of them, a red-faced
German, was a philosopher after his kind. He did not trouble himself to
get up, when I looked in, but stretched himself in his bed,--it was high
noon,--responding to my sniff of disgust that it was "sehr schoen! ein
bischen kalt, aber was!" His neighbor, a white-haired old woman, begged,
trembling, not to be put out. She would not know where to go. It was
out of one of these houses that Fritz Meyer, the murderer, went to rob
the poorbox in the Redemptorist Church, the night when he killed
policeman Smith. The policeman surprised him at his work. In the room he
had occupied I came upon a brazen-looking woman with a black eye, who
answered the question of the officer, "Where did you get that shiner?"
with a laugh. "I ran up against the fist of me man," she said. Her
"man," a big, sullen lout, sat by, dumb. The woman answered for him that
he was a mechanic.
"What does he work at?" snorted the policeman, restraining himself with
an effort from kicking the fellow.
She laughed scornfully. "At the junk business." It meant that he was a
thief.
Young men, with blotched faces and cadaverous looks, were loafing in
every room. They hung their heads in silence. The women turned their
faces away at the sight of the uniform. They cling to these wretches,
who exploit their starved affections for their own ease, with a grip of
desperation. It is their last hold. Women have to love something. It is
their deepest degradation that they must love these. Even the wretches
themselves feel the shame of it, and repay them by beating and robbing
them, as their daily occupation. A poor little baby in one of the rooms
gave a shuddering human touch to it all.
The old houses began it, as they began all the tenement mischief that
has come upon New York. But the opportunity that was made by the
tenant's need was not one to be neglected. In some of the newer
tenements, with their smaller rooms, the lodger is by this time provided
for in the plan, with a special entrance from the hall. "Lodger" comes,
by an easy transition, to stand for "family." Only the other night I
went with the sanitary police on their midnight inspection through a row
of Elizabeth Street tenements which I had known since they were built,
fifteen or sixteen years ago. That is the neighborhood in which the
recent Italian immigrants crowd. In the house which we selected for
examination, in all respects the type of the rest, we found forty-three
families where there should have been sixteen. Upon each floor were four
flats, and in each flat three rooms that measured respectively 14 x 11,
7 x 11, and 7 x 8-1/2 feet. In only one flat did we find a single
family. In three there were two to each. In the other twelve each room
had its own family living and sleeping there. They cooked, I suppose, at
the one stove in the kitchen, which was the largest room. In one big bed
we counted six persons, the parents and four children. Two of them lay
crosswise at the foot of the bed, or there would not have been room. A
curtain was hung before the bed in each of the two smaller rooms,
leaving a passageway from the hall to the main room. The rent for the
front flats was twelve dollars; for that in the rear ten dollars. The
social distinctions going with the advantage of location were rigidly
observed, I suppose. The three steps across a tenement hall, from the
front to "the back," are often a longer road than from Ludlow Street to
Fifth Avenue.
They were sweaters' tenements. But I shall keep that end of the story
until I come to speak of the tenants. The houses I have in mind now.
They were Astor leasehold property, and I had seen them built upon the
improved plan of 1879, with air shafts and all that. There had not been
water in the tenements for a month then, we were told by the one tenant
who spoke English that could be understood. The cold snap had locked the
pipes. Fitly enough, the lessee was an undertaker, an Italian himself,
who combined with his business of housing his people above and below the
ground that of the padrone, to let no profit slip. He had not taken the
trouble to make many or recent repairs. The buildings had made a fair
start; they promised well. But the promise had not been kept. In their
premature decay they were distinctly as bad as the worst. I had the
curiosity to seek out the agent, the middleman, and ask him why they
were so. He shrugged his shoulders. With such tenants nothing could be
done, he said. I have always held that Italians are most manageable, and
that, with all the surface indications to the contrary, they are really
inclined to cleanliness, if cause can be shown, and I told him so. He
changed the subject diplomatically. No doubt it was with him simply a
question of the rent. They might crowd and carry on as they pleased,
once that was paid; and they did. It used to be the joke of Elizabeth
Street that when the midnight police came, the tenants would keep them
waiting outside, pretending to search for the key, until the surplus
population of men had time to climb down the fire escape. When the
police were gone they came back. We surprised them all in bed.
Like most of the other tenements we have come across on our trip, these
were double-deckers. That is the type of tenement that is responsible
for the crowding that goes on unchecked. It is everywhere replacing the
older barracks, as they rot or are torn down.
This double-decker was thus described by the Tenement House Committee of
1894: "It is the one hopeless form of tenement construction. It cannot
be well ventilated, it cannot be well lighted; it is not safe in case of
fire. It is built on a lot 25 feet wide by 100 or less in depth, with
apartments for four families in each story. This necessitates the
occupation of from 86 to 90 per cent. of the lot's depth. The stairway,
made in the centre of the house, and the necessary walls and partitions
reduce the width of the middle rooms (which serve as bedrooms for at
least two people each) to 9 feet each at the most, and a narrow light
and air shaft, now legally required in the centre of each side wall,
still further lessens the floor space of these middle rooms. Direct
light is only possible for the rooms at the front and rear. The middle
rooms must borrow what light they can from dark hallways, the shallow
shafts, and the rear rooms. Their air must pass through other rooms or
the tiny shafts, and cannot but be contaminated before it reaches them.
A five-story house of this character contains apartments for eighteen or
twenty families, a population frequently amounting to 100 people, and
sometimes increased by boarders or lodgers to 150 or more."
The committee, after looking in vain through the slums of the Old World
cities for something to compare the double-deckers with, declared that,
in their setting, the separateness and sacredness of home life were
interfered with, and evils bred, physical and moral, that "conduce to
the corruption of the young." The statement needs no argument to
convince.
Yet it is for these that the "interests" of which the fire chief spoke
rush into battle at almost every session of the legislature, whenever a
step, no matter how short and conservative, is to be taken toward their
improvement. No winter has passed, since the awakening conscience of the
people of New York city manifested itself in a desire to better the lot
of the other half, that has not seen an assault made, in one shape or
another, on the structure of tenement house law built up with such
anxious solicitude. Once a bill to exempt from police supervision, by
withdrawing them from the tenement house class, the very worst of the
houses, whose death rate threatened the community, was sneaked through
the legislature all unknown, and had reached the executive before the
alarm was sounded. The governor, put upon his guard, returned the bill,
with the indorsement that he was unable to understand what could have
prompted a measure that seemed to have reason and every argument against
it, and none for it. But the motive is not so obscure, after all. It is
the same old one of profit without conscience. It took from the Health
Department the supervision of the light, ventilation, and plumbing of
the tenements, which by right belonged there, and put it in charge of a
compliant Building Department, "for the convenience of architects and
their clients, and the saving of time and expense to them." For the
convenience of the architect's client, the builder, the lot was
encroached upon, until of one big block which the Tenement House
Committee measured only 7 per cent. was left uncovered for the air to
struggle through; 93 per cent. of it was covered with brick and mortar.
Rear tenements, to the number of nearly 100, have been condemned as
"slaughter houses," with good reason, but this block was built
practically solid. The average of space covered in 34 tenement blocks
was shown to be 78.13 per cent. The law allowed only 65. The
"discretion" that pens tenants in a burning tenement with stairs of wood
for the builder's "convenience" cut down the chance of life of their
babies unmoved. Sunlight and air mean just that, where three thousand
human beings are packed into a single block. That was why the matter was
given into the charge of the health officials, when politics was yet
kept out of their work.
Of such kind are the interests that oppose betterment of the worker's
hard lot in New York; that dictated the appointment by Tammany of a
commission composed of builders to revise its code of building laws, and
that sneer at the "laughable results of the late Tenement House
Committee." Those results made for the health and happiness and safety
of a million and a half of souls, and were accounted, on every humane
ground, the longest step forward that had yet been taken by this
community. For the old absentee landlord, who did not know what mischief
was afoot, we have got the speculative builder, who does know, but does
not care so long as he gets his pound of flesh. Half of the just laws
that have been passed for the relief of the people he has paralyzed with
his treacherous discretion clause, carefully nursed in the school of
practical politics to which he gives faithful adherence. The thing has
been the curse of our city from the day when the earliest struggle
toward better things began. Among the first manifestations of that was
the prohibition of soap factories below Grand Street by the act of 1797,
which created a Board of Health with police powers. The act was passed
in February, to take effect in July; but long before that time the same
legislature had amended it by giving the authorities discretion in the
matter. And the biggest soap factory of them all is down there to this
day, and is even now stirring up a rumpus among the latest immigrants,
the Syrians, who have settled about it. No doubt it is all a question of
political education; but are not a hundred years enough to settle this
much, that compromise is out of place where the lives of the people are
at stake, and that it is time our years of "discretion" were numbered?
And, please God, the time is at hand. Here, set in its frame of swarming
tenements, is a wide open space, some time, when enough official red
tape has been unwound, to be a park, with flowers and grass and birds to
gladden the hearts of those to whom such things have been as tales that
are told, all these dreary years, and with a playground in which the
children of yonder big school may roam at will, undismayed by landlord
or policeman. Not all the forces of reaction can put back the barracks
that were torn down as one of the "laughable results" of that very
Tenement House Committee's work, or restore to the undertaker his
profits from Bone Alley of horrid memory. It was the tenant's turn to
laugh, that time. Down half a dozen blocks, among even denser swarms, is
another such plot, where football and a skating pond are being planned
by the children's friends. We shall hear the story of these yet, and
rejoice that the day of reckoning is coming for the builder without a
soul. Till then let him deck the fronts of his tenements with bravery of
plate glass and brass to hide the darkness within. He has done his
worst.
We can go no further. Yonder lies the river. A full mile we have come,
through unbroken ranks of tenements with their mighty, pent-up
multitudes. Here they seem, with a common impulse, to overflow into the
street. From corner to corner it is crowded with girls and children
dragging babies nearly as big as themselves, with desperate endeavor to
lose nothing of the show. There is a funeral in the block. Unnumbered
sewing-machines cease for once their tireless rivalry with the flour
mill in the next block, that is forever grinding in a vain effort to
catch up. Heads are poked from windows. On the stoops hooded and shawled
figures have front seats. The crowd is hardly restrained by the
policeman and the undertaker in holiday mourning, who clear a path by
force to the plumed hearse. The eager haste, the frantic rush to
see,--what does it not tell of these starved lives, of the quality of
their aims and ambitions? The mill clatters loudly: there is one mouth
less to fill. In the midst of it all, with clamor of urgent gong, the
patrol wagon rounds the corner, carrying two policemen precariously
perched upon a struggling "drunk," a woman. The crowd scatters,
following the new sensation. The tragedies of death and life in the slum
have met together.
Many a mile I might lead you along these rivers, east and west, through
the island of Manhattan, and find little else than we have seen. The
great crowd is yet below Fourteenth Street, but the northward march
knows no slackening of pace. As the tide sets uptown, it reproduces
faithfully the scenes of the older wards, though with less of their
human interest than here where the old houses, in all their ugliness,
have yet some imprint of the individuality of their tenants. Only on
feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on
holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the
unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the
uptown streets, it is hard to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient
wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its rocks and its goats and
shanties. Since the negroes took possession it is only dull, except
when, as happened last summer, the remnant of the Irish settlers make a
stand against the intruders. Vain hope! Perpetual eviction is their
destiny. Negro, Italian, and Jew, biting the dust with many a bruised
head under the Hibernian's stalwart fist, resistlessly drive him before
them, nevertheless, out of house and home. The landlord pockets the gate
money. The old robbery still goes on. Where the negro pitches his tent,
he pays more rent than his white neighbor next door, and is a better
tenant. And he is good game forever. He never buys the tenement, as the
Jew or the Italian is likely to do, when he has scraped up money enough
to reenact, after his own fashion, the trick taught him by his
oppressor. The black column has reached the hundredth street on the East
Side, and the sixties on the West,[2] and there for the present it
halts. Jammed between Africa, Italy, and Bohemia, the Irishman has
abandoned the East Side uptown. Only west of Central Park does he yet
face his foe, undaunted in defeat as in victory. The local street
nomenclature, in which the directory has no hand,--Nigger Row, Mixed Ale
Flats, etc.,--indicates the hostile camps with unerring accuracy.
[Footnote 2: There is an advanced outpost of blacks as far up as One
Hundred and Forty-Fifth Street, but the main body lingers yet among the
sixties.]