rarest to find is the home of the olden days, even as it was in the
shanty on the rocks. "No home, no family, no morality, no manhood, no
patriotism!" said the old Frenchman. Seventy-seven per cent. of their
young prisoners, say the managers of the state reformatory, have no
moral sense, or next to none. "Weakness, not wickedness, ails them,"
adds the prison chaplain; no manhood, that is to say. Years ago, roaming
through the British Museum, I came upon an exhibit that riveted my
attention as nothing else had. It was a huge stone arm, torn from the
shoulder of some rock image, with doubled fist and every rigid muscle
instinct with angry menace. Where it came from or what was its story I
do not know. I did not ask. It was its message to us I was trying to
read. I had been spending weary days and nights in the slums of London,
where hatred grew, a noxious crop, upon the wreck of the home. Lying
there, mute and menacing, the great fist seemed to me like a shadow
thrown from the gray dawn of the race into our busy day with a purpose,
a grim, unheeded warning. What was it? In the slum the question haunts
me yet. They perished, the empires those rock-hewers built, and the
governments reared upon their ruins are long since dead and forgotten.
They were born to die, for they were not built upon human happiness, but
upon human terror and greed. We built ours upon the bed rock, and its
cornerstone is the home. With this bitter mockery of it that makes the
slum, can it be that the warning is indeed for us?
III
THE TENEMENT: CURING ITS BLIGHT
I stood at Seven Dials and heard the policeman's account of what it used
to be. Seven Dials is no more like the slum of old than is the Five
Points to-day. The conscience of London wrought upon the one as the
conscience of New York upon the other. A mission house, a children's
refuge, two big schools, and, hard by, a public bath and a wash house
stand as the record of the battle with the slum, which, with these
forces in the field, has but one ending. The policeman's story rambled
among the days when things were different. Then it was dangerous for an
officer to go alone there at night.
Around the corner there came from one of the side streets a procession
with banners, parading in honor and aid of some church charity. We
watched it pass. In it marched young men and boys with swords and
battle-axes, and upon its outskirts skipped a host of young roughs--so
one would have called them but for the evidence of their honest
employment--who rattled collection boxes, reaping a harvest of pennies
from far and near. I looked at the battle-axes and the collection boxes,
and thought of forty years ago. Where were the Seven Dials of that day,
and the men who gave it its bad name? I asked the policeman.
"They were druv into decency, sor," he said, and answered from his own
experience the question ever asked by faint-hearted philanthropists. "My
father, he done duty here afore me in '45. The worst dive was where that
church stands. It was always full of thieves,"--whose sons, I added
mentally, have become collectors for the church. The one fact was a
whole chapter on the slum.
London's way with the tenant we adopted at last in New York with the
slum landlord. He was "druv into decency." We had to. Moral suasion had
been stretched to the limit. The point had been reached where one
knock-down blow outweighed a bushel of arguments. It was all very well
to build model tenements as object lessons to show that the thing could
be done; it had become necessary to enforce the lesson by demonstrating
that the community had power to destroy houses which were a menace to
its life. The rear tenements were chosen for this purpose.
They were the worst as they were the first of New York's tenements. The
double-deckers of which I have spoken had, with all their evils, at
least this to their credit, that their death rate was not nearly as high
as that of the old houses. That was not because of any virtue inherent
in the double-deckers, but because the earlier tenements were old, and
built in a day that knew nothing of sanitary restrictions, and cared
less. Hence the showing that the big tenements had much the lowest
mortality. The death rate does not sound the depths of tenement house
evils, but it makes a record that is needed when it comes to attacking
property rights. The mortality of the rear tenements had long been a
scandal. They are built in the back yard, generally back to back with
the rear buildings on abutting lots. If there is an open space between
them, it is never more than a slit a foot or so wide, and gets to be
the receptacle of garbage and filth of every kind; so that any opening
made in these walls for purposes of ventilation becomes a source of
greater danger than if there were none. The last count that was made, in
1898, showed that among the 40,958 tenements in New York there were
still 2379 rear houses left. Where they are the death rate rises, for
reasons that are apparent. The sun cannot reach them. They are damp and
dark, and the tenants, who are always the poorest and most crowded, live
"as in a cage open only toward the front," said the Tenement House
Committee. A canvass made of the mortality records by Dr. Roger S.
Tracy, the registrar of records, showed that while in the First Ward
(the oldest), for instance, the death rate in houses standing singly on
the lot was 29.03 per 1000 of the living, where there were rear houses
it rose to 61.97. The infant death rate is a still better test: that
rose from 109.58 in the single tenements of the same ward to 204.54
where there were rear houses. One in every five babies had to die, that
is to say; the house killed it. No wonder the committee styled the rear
tenements "slaughter houses," and called upon the legislature to root
them out, and with them every old, ramshackle, disease-breeding tenement
in the city.
A law which is in substance a copy of the English act for destroying
slum property was passed in the spring of 1895. It provides for the
seizure of buildings that are dangerous to the public health or unfit
for human habitation, and their destruction upon proper proof, with
compensation to the owner on a sliding scale down to the point of entire
unfitness, when he is entitled only to the value of the material in his
house. Up to that time, the only way to get rid of such a house had been
to declare it a nuisance under the sanitary code; but as the city could
not very well pay for the removal of a nuisance, to order it down seemed
too much like robbery; so the owner was allowed to keep it. It takes
time and a good many lives to grow a sentiment such as this law
expressed. The Anglo-Saxon respect for vested rights is strong in us,
also. I remember going through a ragged school in London, once, and
finding the eyes of the children in the infant class red and sore.
Suspecting some contagion, I made inquiries, and was told that a collar
factory next door was the cause of the trouble. The fumes from it
poisoned the children's eyes.
"And you allow it to stay, and let this thing go on?" I asked, in
wonder.
The superintendent shrugged his shoulders. "It is their factory," he
said.
I was on the point of saying something that might not have been polite,
seeing that I was a guest, when I remembered that, in the newspaper
which I carried in my pocket, I had just been reading a plea of some
honorable M. P. for a much-needed reform in the system of counsel fees,
then being agitated in the House of Commons. The reply of the solicitor
general had made me laugh. He was inclined to agree with the honorable
member, but still preferred to follow precedent by referring the matter
to the Inns of Court. Quite incidentally, he mentioned that the matter
had been hanging fire in the House two hundred years. It seemed very
English to me then; but when we afterward came to tackle our rear
tenements, and in the first batch there was a row which I knew to have
been picked out by the sanitary inspector, twenty-five years before, as
fit only to be destroyed, I recognized that we were kin, after all.
[Illustration: THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS]
That was Gotham Court. It was first on the list, and the Mott Street
Barracks came next, when, as executive officer of the Good Government
Clubs, I helped the Board of Health put the law to the test the
following year. The Health Department kept a list of 66 old houses, with
a population of 5460 tenants, in which there had been 1313 deaths in a
little over five years (1889-94). From among them we picked our lot, and
the department drove the tenants out. The owners went to law, one and
all; but, to their surprise and dismay, the courts held with the health
officers. The moral effect was instant and overwhelming. Rather than
keep up the fight, with no rent coming in, the landlords surrendered at
discretion. In consideration of this, compensation was allowed them at
the rate of about a thousand dollars a house, although they were really
entitled only to the value of the old material. The buildings all came
under the head of "wholly unfit." Gotham Court, with its sixteen
buildings, in which, thirty-five years ago, a health inspector counted
146 cases of sickness, including "all kinds of infectious disease," was
bought for $19,750, and Mullen's Court, adjoining, for $7251. They had
been under civilized management since, but nothing decent could be made
out of them. To show the character of all, let two serve; in each case
it is the official record, upon which seizure was made, that is
quoted:--
No. 98 Catherine Street: "The floor in the apartments and the wooden
steps leading to the second-floor apartment are broken, loose, saturated
with filth. The roof and eaves gutters leak, rendering the apartments
wet. The two apartments on the first floor consist of one room each, in
which the tenants are compelled to cook, eat, and sleep. The back walls
are defective; the house wet and damp, and unfit for human habitation.
It robs the surrounding houses of light."
"The sunlight never enters" was the constant refrain.
No. 17 Sullivan Street: "Occupied by the lowest whites and negroes,
living together. The houses are decayed from cellar to garret, and
filthy beyond description,--the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen.
The beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, where there is any
plaster, are rotten and alive with vermin. They are a menace to the
public health, and cannot be repaired. Their annual death rate in five
years was 41.38."
The sunlight enters where these stood, at all events, and into 58 other
yards that once were plague spots. Of 94 rear tenements seized that
year, 60 have been torn down, 33 of them voluntarily by the owners; 29
were remodeled and allowed to stand, chiefly as workshops; 5 other
houses were standing empty, and yielding no rent, in March, 1899. The
worst of them all, the Mott Street Barracks, are yet in the courts; but
all the judges and juries in the land have no power to put them back. It
is a case of "They can't put you in jail for that"--"Yes, but I am in
jail." They are gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they
ought to go, before the Appellate Division called a halt. In 1888 I
counted 360 tenants in these tenements, front and rear, all Italians,
and the infant death rate of the Barracks that year was 325 per 1000.
There were forty babies, and one in three of them had to die. The
general infant death rate for the whole tenement house population that
year was 88.38. In the four years following, during which the population
and the death rate of the houses were both reduced with an effort,
fifty-one funerals went out of the Barracks. With entire fitness, a
cemetery corporation held the mortgage upon the property. The referee
allowed it the price of opening one grave, in the settlement, gave one
dollar to the lessee and one hundred and ten dollars to the landlord,
who refused to collect, and took his case to the Court of Appeals, where
it is to be argued this summer. The only interest that attaches to it,
since the real question has been decided by the wrecker ahead of time,
is the raising of the constitutional point, perchance, and the issue of
that is not doubtful. The law has been repeatedly upheld, and in
Massachusetts, where similar action has been taken since, the
constitutionality of it has in no case been attacked, so far as I know.
I have said before that I do not believe in paying the slum landlord
for taking his hand off our throats, when we have got the grip on him in
turn. Mr. Roger Foster, who as a member of the Tenement House Committee
drew the law, and as counsel for the Health Department fought the
landlords successfully in the courts, holds to the opposite view. I am
bound to say that instances turned up in which it did seem a hardship to
deprive the owners of even such property. I remember especially a
tenement in Roosevelt Street, which was the patrimony and whole estate
of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the
front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was
one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract
principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to
ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I
hope--Well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do with the case.
The house is down, and the main issue decided upon its merits.
In the 94 tenements (counting the front houses in; they cannot be
separated from the rear tenements in the death registry) there were in
five years 956 deaths, a rate of 62.9 at a time when the general city
death rate was 24.63. It was the last and heaviest blow aimed at the
abnormal mortality of a city that ought, by reason of many advantages,
to be one of the healthiest in the world. With clean streets, pure milk,
medical school inspection, antitoxin treatment of deadly diseases, and
better sanitary methods generally; with the sunlight let into its slums,
and its worst plague spots cleaned out, the death rate of New York came
down from 26.32 per 1000 inhabitants in 1887 to 19.53 in 1897. Inasmuch
as a round half million was added to its population within the ten
years, it requires little figuring to show that the number whose lives
were literally saved by reform would people a city of no mean
proportions. The extraordinary spell of hot weather, two years ago,
brought out the full meaning of this. While many were killed by
sunstroke, the population as a whole was shown to have acquired, in
better hygienic surroundings, a much greater power of resistance. It
yielded slowly to the heat. Where two days had been sufficient, in
former years, to send the death rate up, it now took five; and the
infant mortality remained low throughout the dreadful trial. Perhaps the
substitution of beer for whiskey as a summer drink had something to do
with it; but Colonel Waring's broom and unpolitical sanitation had more.
Since it spared him so many voters, the politician ought to have been
grateful for this; but he was not. Death rates are not as good political
arguments as tax rates, we found out. In the midst of it all, a
policeman whom I knew went to his Tammany captain to ask if Good
Government Clubs were political clubs within the meaning of the law,
which prohibits policemen from joining such. The answer he received set
me to thinking: "Yes, the meanest, worst kind of political clubs, they
are." Yet they had done nothing worse than to save the babies, the
captain's with the rest.
The landlord read the signs better. He learned his lesson quickly. All
over the city, he made haste to set his house to rights, lest it be
seized or brought to the bar in other ways. The Good Government Clubs
did not rest content with their first victory. They made war upon the
dark hall in the double-decker, and upon the cruller bakery. They
opened small parks, exposed the abuses of the civil courts, the "poor
man's courts," urged on the building of new schools, compelled the
cleaning of the Tombs prison and hastened the demolition of the wicked
old pile, and took a hand in evolving a sensible and humane system of
dealing with the young vagrants who were going to waste on free soup.
The proposition to establish a farm colony for their reclamation was met
with the challenge at Albany that "we have had enough reform in New York
city," and, as the event proved, for the time being we had really gone
as far as we could. But even that was a good long way. Some things had
been nailed that could never again be undone; and hand in hand with the
effort to destroy had gone another to build up, that promised to set us
far enough ahead to appeal at last successfully to the self-interest of
the builder, if not to his humanity; or, failing that, to compel him to
decency. If that promise has not been kept, the end is not yet. I
believe it will be kept.
The movement for reform, in the matter of housing the people, had
proceeded upon a clearly outlined plan that apportioned to each of
several forces its own share of the work. At a meeting held under the
auspices of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor,
early in the days of the movement, the field had been gone over
thoroughly. To the Good Government Clubs fell the task, as already set
forth, of compelling the enforcement of the existing tenement house
laws. D. O. Mills, the philanthropic banker, declared his purpose to
build hotels which should prove that a bed and lodging as good as any
could be furnished to the great army of homeless men at a price that
would compete with the cheap lodging houses, and yet yield a profit to
the owner. On behalf of a number of well-known capitalists, who had been
identified with the cause of tenement house reform for years, Robert
Fulton Cutting, the president of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor, offered to build homes for the working people
that should be worthy of the name, on a large scale. A company was
formed, and chose for its president Dr. Elgin R. L. Gould, author of the
government report on the Housing of the Working People, the standard
work on the subject. A million dollars were raised by public
subscription, and operations were begun at once.
Two ideas were kept in mind as fundamental: one, that charity that will
not pay will not stay; the other, that nothing can be done with the
twenty-five-foot lot. It is the primal curse of our housing system, and
any effort toward better things must reckon with it first. Nineteen lots
on Sixty-Eighth and Sixty-Ninth streets, west of Tenth Avenue, were
purchased of Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, who took one tenth of the
capital stock of the City and Suburban Homes Company; and upon these was
erected the first block of tenements. This is the neighborhood toward
which the population has been setting with ever increasing congestion.
Already in 1895 the Twenty-Second Ward contained nearly 200,000 souls.
Between Forty-Ninth and Sixty-Second streets, west of Ninth Avenue,
there are at least five blocks with more than 3000 tenants in each, and
the conditions of the notorious Tenth Ward are certain to be reproduced
here, if indeed they are not exceeded. In the Fifteenth Assembly
District, some distance below, but on the same line, the first
sociological canvass of the Federation of Churches had found the
churches, schools, and other educational agencies marshaling a frontage
of 756 feet on the street, while the saloon fronts stretched themselves
over nearly a mile; so that, said the compiler of these pregnant facts,
"saloon social ideals are minting themselves in the minds of the people
at the ratio of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought." It
would not have been easy to find a spot better fitted for the experiment
of restoring to the home its rights.
[Illustration: ALFRED CORNING CLARK BUILDINGS
_Model Tenements of City and Suburban Homes Co._]
The Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, as they were called in recognition
of the support of this public-spirited woman, have been occupied a year.
When I went through them, the other day, I found all but five of the 373
apartments they contain occupied, and a very large waiting list of
applicants for whom there was no room. The doctor alone, of all the
tenants, had moved away, disappointed. He had settled on the estate,
hoping to build up a practice among so many; but he could not make a
living. The plan of the buildings, for which Ernest Flagg, a young
and energetic architect, with a very practical interest in the welfare
of the Other Half, has the credit, seems to me to realize the ideal of
making homes under a common roof. The tenants appeared to take the same
view of it. They were a notably contented lot. Their only objection was
to the use of the common tubs in the basement laundry,--a sign that, to
my mind, was rather favorable than otherwise, though it argued ill for
the scheme of public wash houses on the Glasgow plan that has seemed so
promising. They were selected tenants as to trustworthiness and
desirability on that score, but they were all of the tenement house
class. The rents are a little lower than for much poorer quarters in the
surrounding tenements. The houses are built around central courts, with
light and air in abundance, with fireproof stairs and steam-heated
halls. There is not a dark passage anywhere. Within, there is entire
privacy for the tenant; the partitions are deadened, so that sound is
not transmitted from one apartment to another. Without, the houses have
none of the discouraging barrack look. The architecture is distinctly
pleasing. The few and simple rules laid down by the management have been
readily complied with, as making for the benefit of all. A woman
collects the rents, which are paid weekly in advance. The promise that
the property will earn the five per cent. to which the company limits
its dividends seems certain to be kept. There is nothing in sight to
prevent it, everything to warrant the prediction.
The capital stock has since been increased to $2,000,000, and the
erection has been begun of a new block of buildings in East Sixty-Fourth
Street, within hail of Battle Row, of anciently warlike memory. James E.
Ware & Son, the architects who, in the competition of 1879, won the
prize for the improved tenements that marked the first departure from
the boxlike barracks of old, drew the plans, embodying all the good
features of the Clark Buildings with attractions of their own. A
suburban colony is being developed by the company, in addition. It is
not the least promising feature of its work that a very large proportion
of its shareholders are workingmen, who have invested their savings in
the enterprise, thus bearing witness to their faith and interest in it.
Of the entire number of shareholders at the time of the first annual
report, forty-five per cent, held less than ten shares each.