tenements has had the desired effect of encouraging other attempts in
the same direction. They represent the best that can be done in fighting
the slum within the city. Homewood, the City and Suburban Homes
Company's settlement in the country, stands for the way out that must
eventually win the fight. That is the track that must be followed, and
will be when we have found in rapid transit the key to the solution of
our present perplexities. "In the country" hardly describes the site of
the colony. It is within the Greater City, on Long Island, hardly an
hour's journey by trolley from the City Hall, and only a short walk from
the bay. Here the company has built a hundred cottages, and has room for
two or three hundred more. Of the hundred houses, seventy-two had been
sold when I was there last winter. They are handsome and substantial
little houses, the lower story of brick, the upper of timber and
stucco, each cottage standing in its own garden. The purchaser pays for
the property in monthly payments extending over twenty years. A plan of
life insurance, which protects the family and the company alike in the
event of the death of the bread-winner, is included in the arrangement.
The price of the cottages which so far have found owners has averaged
about $3100, and the monthly installment, including the insurance
premium, a trifle over $25. It follows that the poorest have not moved
to Homewood. Its settlers include men with an income of $1200 or $1500 a
year,--policemen, pilots, letter carriers, clerks, and teachers. This is
as it should be. They represent the graduating class, as it were, from
the city crowds. It is the province of the philanthropic tenement to
prepare the next lot for moving up and out. Any attempt to hasten the
process by taking a short cut could result only in failure and
disappointment. The graduating class is large enough, however, to
guarantee that it will not be exhausted by one Homewood. Before the
houses were contracted for, without advertising or effort of any kind to
make the thing known, more than eight hundred wage earners had asked to
have their names put on the books as applicants for suburban homes.
Others had built model tenements and made them pay, but it was left to
Mr. D. O. Mills to break ground in the field which Lord Rowton had
filled with such signal success in London. The two Mills Houses, in
Bleecker and Rivington streets, are as wide a departure as could well be
imagined from the conventional type of lodging houses in New York. They
are large and beautiful structures, which, for the price of a cot in one
of the Bowery barracks, furnish their lodgers with as good a bed in a
private room as the boarder in the Waldorf-Astoria enjoys. Indeed, it is
said to be the very same in make and quality. There are baths without
stint, smoking and writing rooms and games, and a free library; a
laundry for those who can pay for having their washing done, and a
separate one for such as prefer to do it themselves. There is a
restaurant in the basement, in which a regular dinner of good quality is
served at fifteen cents. The night's lodging is twenty cents. The
dearest Bowery lodging houses charge twenty-five cents. The bedrooms
are necessarily small, but they are clean and comfortable, well lighted
and heated. The larger house, No. 1, in Bleecker Street, has room for
1554 guests; No. 2, in Rivington Street, for 600. Though this represents
more than twelve per cent, of the capacity of all the cheap lodging
houses in the city, both have been filled since they were opened, and
crowds have often been turned away. The Bowery "hotels" have felt the
competition. Their owners deny it, but the fact is apparent in efforts
at improvements with which they were not justly chargeable before. Only
the lowest, the ten-cent houses, are exempt from this statement. These
attract a class of custom for which the Mills Houses do not compete. The
latter are intended for the large number of decent mechanics, laborers,
and men of small means, hunting for work, who are always afloat in a
large city, and who neither seek nor wish charity. The plan and purpose
of the builder cannot be better put than in his own words at the opening
of the first house.
"No patron of the Mills Hotel," he said, "will receive more than he pays
for, unless it be my hearty goodwill and good wishes. It is true that I
have devoted thought, labor, and capital to a very earnest effort to
help him, but only by enabling him to help himself. In doing the work on
so large a scale, and in securing the utmost economies in purchases and
in administration, I hope to give him a larger equivalent for his money
than has hitherto been possible. He can, without scruple, permit me to
offer him this advantage; but he will think better of himself, and will
be a more self-reliant, manly man and a better citizen, if he knows that
he is honestly paying for what he gets."
Mr. Mills's faith that the business of housing the homeless crowds in
decency and comfort could be made to pay just as well as that of housing
families in model tenements has been justified. Besides providing a fund
sufficient for deterioration and replacement, the two houses have made a
clear three per cent. profit on the investment of $1,500,000 which they
represent. Beyond this, they have borne, and will bear increasingly,
their own hand in settling with the saloon, which had no rival in the
cheerlessness of the cheap lodging house or the boarding house back
bedroom. Every philanthropic effort to fight it on that ground has drawn
renewed courage and hope from Mr. Mills's work and success.
While I am writing, subscriptions are being made to the capital stock of
a Woman's Hotel Company, that will endeavor to do for the
self-supporting single women of our own city what Mr. Mills has done for
the men. It is proposed to erect, at a cost of $800,000, a hotel capable
of sheltering over 500 guests, at a price coming within reach of women
earning wages as clerks, stenographers, nurses, etc. The number of women
whose needs an establishment of the kind would meet is said to exceed
40,000. The Young Women's Christian Association alone receives every
year requests enough for quarters to fill a score of such hotels, and
can only refer the applicants to boarding houses. Experience in other
cities shows that a woman's hotel or club can be managed and made
profitable, and there seems to be little doubt that New York will be the
next to furnish proof of it. It was the dream of A. T. Stewart, the
merchant prince, to do this service for his city, just as he planned
Garden City for a home colony for his clerks. It came out differently.
The Long Island town became a cathedral city, and the home of wealth and
fashion; his woman's hoarding house a great public hotel, far out of the
reach of those he sought to benefit. It may be that the success of the
banker's philanthropy will yet realize the dream of the merchant before
the end of the century that saw his wealth, his great business, his very
name, vanish as if they had never been, and even his bones denied, by
ghoulish thieves, a rest in the grave. I like to think of it as a kind
of justice to his memory, more eloquent than marble and brass in the
empty crypt. Mills House No. 1 stands upon the site of Mr. Stewart's old
home, where he dreamed his barren dream of benevolence to his kind.
Of all these movements the home is the keynote. That is the cheerful
sign that shows light ahead. To the home it comes down in the end,--good
government, bad government, and all the rest. As the homes of a
community are, so is the community. New York has still the worst housing
system in the world. Eight fifteenths of its people live in tenements,
not counting the better class of flats, though legally they come under
the definition. The blight of the twenty-five-foot lot remains, with the
double-decker. But we can now destroy what is not fit to stand; we have
done it, and our republic yet survives. The slum landlord would have had
us believe that it must perish with his rookeries. We knew that to build
decently improved a neighborhood, made the tenants better and happier,
and reduced the mortality. Model tenement house building is now proving
daily that such houses can be built safer and better every way for less
money than the double-decker, by crossing the lot line. The dark hall is
not a problem in the tenement built around a central court, for there is
no common hall. The plan of the double-decker is shown to be wasteful of
space and wall and capital. The model tenement pays, does not
deteriorate, and keeps its tenants. After the lapse of ten years, I was
the other day in Mr. A. T. White's Riverside Buildings in Brooklyn,
which are still the best I know of, and found them, if anything, better
houses than the day they were built. The stone steps of the stairways
were worn: that was all the evidence of deterioration I saw. These, and
Mr. White's other block of buildings on Hicks Street, which was built
more than twenty years ago,--occupied, all of them, by distinctly poor
tenants,--have paid their owner over five per cent. right along.
Practically, every such enterprise has the same story to tell. Dr. Gould
found that only six per cent. of all the great model housing operations
had failed to pay. All the rest were successful. That was the showing of
Europe. It is the same here. Only the twenty-five-foot lot is in the way
in New York.
[Illustration: EVENING IN ONE OF THE COURTS IN MILLS HOUSE No. 1]
It will continue to be in the way. A man who has one lot will build on
it: it is his right. The state, which taxes his lot, has no right to
confiscate it by forbidding him to make it yield him an income, on the
plea that he might build something which would be a nuisance. But it can
so order the building that it shall not be a nuisance: that is not only
its right, but its duty. The best which can be made out of a
twenty-five-foot lot is not good, but even that has not been made out of
it yet. I have seen plans drawn by two young women architects in this
city, the Misses Gannon and Hands, and approved by the Building
Department, which let in an amount of light and air not dreamed of in
the conventional type of double-decker, while providing detached stairs
in a central court. It was not pretended that it was an ideal plan,--far
from it; but it indicated clearly the track to be followed in dealing
with the twenty-five-foot lot, seeing that we cannot get rid of it. The
demand for light and air space must be sharpened and rigidly held to,
and "discretion" to cut it down on any pretext must be denied, to the
end of discouraging at least the building of double-deckers by the
speculative landlord who has more than one lot, but prefers to build in
the old way, in order that he may more quickly sell his houses, one by
one.
With much evidence to the contrary in the big blocks of tenements that
are going up on every hand, I think still we are tending in the right
direction. I come oftener, nowadays, upon three tenements built on four
lots, or two on three lots, than I used to. Indeed, there was a time
when such a thing would have been considered wicked waste, or evidence
of unsound mind in the builder. Houses are built now, as they were then,
for profit. The business element must be there, or the business will
fail. Philanthropy and five per cent. belong together in this field; but
there is no more reason for allowing usurious interest to a man who
makes a living by providing houses for the poor than for allowing it to
a lender of money on security. In fact, there is less; for the former
draws his profits from a source with which the welfare of the
commonwealth is indissolubly bound up. The Tenement House Committee
found that the double-deckers yield the landlord an average of ten per
cent., attack the home, and are a peril to the community. Model
tenements pay a safe five per cent., restore the home, and thereby
strengthen the community. It comes down, then, as I said, to a simple
question of the per cent. the builder will take. It should help his
choice to know, as he cannot now help knowing, that the usurious profit
is the price of good citizenship and human happiness, which suffer in
the proportion in which the home is injured.
The problem of rent should be solved by the same formula, but not so
readily. In the case of the builder the state can add force to
persuasion, and so urge him along the path of righteousness. The only
way to reach the rent collector would be for the municipality to enter
the field as a competing landlord. Doubtless relief could be afforded
that way. The Tenement House Committee found that the slum landlord
charged the highest rents, sometimes as high as twenty-five per cent. He
made no repairs. Model tenement house rents are lower, if anything, than
those of the double-decker, with more space and better accommodations.
Such a competition would have to be on a very large scale, however, to
avail, and I am glad that New York has shown no disposition to undertake
it yet. I would rather we, as a community, learned first a little more
of the art of governing ourselves without scandal. Present relief from
the burden that taxes the worker one fourth of his earnings for a roof
over his head must be sought in the movement toward the suburbs that
will follow the bridging of our rivers, and real rapid transit. On the
island rents will always remain high, on account of the great land
values. But I have often thought that if the city may not own new
tenements, it might with advantage manage the old to the extent of
licensing them to contain so many tenants on the basis of the air space,
and no more. The suggestion was made when the tenement house question
first came up for discussion, thirty years ago, but it was rejected
then. The same thing is now proposed for rooms and workshops, as the
means of getting the best of the sweating nuisance. Why not license the
whole tenement, and with the money collected in the way of fees pay for
the supervision of them by night and day? The squad of sanitary
policemen now comprises for the Greater City some ninety men. Forty-one
thousand tenements in the Borough of Manhattan alone, at three dollars
each for the license, would pay the salaries of the entire body, and
leave a margin. Seeing that their services are going exclusively to the
tenements, it would not seem to be an unfair charge upon the landlords.
The home is the key to good citizenship. Unhappily for the great cities,
there exists in them all a class that has lost the key or thrown it
away. For this class, New York, until three years ago, had never made
any provision. The police station lodging rooms, of which I have spoken,
were not to be dignified by the term. These vile dens, in which the
homeless of our great city were herded, without pretense of bed, of
bath, of food, on rude planks, were the most pernicious parody on
municipal charity, I verily believe, that any civilized community had
ever devised. To escape physical and moral contagion in these crowds
seemed humanly impossible. Of the innocently homeless lad they made a
tramp by the shortest cut. To the old tramp they were indeed ideal
provision, for they enabled him to spend for drink every cent he could
beg or steal. With the stale beer dive, the free lunch counter, and the
police lodging room at hand, his cup of happiness was full. There came
an evil day, when the stale beer dive shut its doors and the free lunch
disappeared for a season. The beer pump, which drained the kegs dry and
robbed the stale beer collector of his ware, drove the dives out of
business; the Raines law forbade the free lunch. Just at this time
Theodore Roosevelt shut the police lodging rooms, and the tramp was
literally left out in the cold, cursing reform and its fruits. It was
the climax of a campaign a generation old, during which no one had ever
been found to say a word in defense of these lodging rooms; yet nothing
had availed to close them.
The city took lodgers on an old barge in the East River, that winter,
and kept a register of them. We learned something from that. Of nearly
10,000 lodgers, one half were under thirty years old and in good
health,--fat, in fact. The doctors reported them "well nourished." Among
100 whom I watched taking their compulsory bath, one night, only two
were skinny; the others were stout, well-fed men, abundantly able to do
a man's work. They all insisted that they were willing, too; but the
moment inquiries began with a view of setting such to work as really
wanted it, and sending the rest to the island as vagrants, their number
fell off most remarkably. From between 400 and 500 who had crowded the
barge and the pier sheds, the attendance fell on March 16, the day the
investigation began, to 330, on the second day to 294, and on the third
day to 171; by March 21 it had been cut down to 121. The problem of the
honestly homeless, who were without means to pay for a bed even in a
ten-cent lodging house, and who had a claim upon the city by virtue of
residence in it, had dwindled to surprisingly small proportions. Of 9386
lodgers, 3622 were shown to have been here less than sixty days, and 968
less than a year. The old mistake, that there is always a given amount
of absolutely homeless destitution in a city, and that it is to be
measured by the number of those who apply for free lodging, had been
reduced to a demonstration. The truth is that the opportunity furnished
by the triple alliance of stale beer, free lunch, and free lodging at
the police station was the open door to permanent and hopeless vagrancy.
A city lodging house was established, with decent beds, baths, and
breakfast, and a system of investigation of the lodger's claim that is
yet to be developed to useful proportions. The link that is missing is a
farm school, for the training of young vagrants to habits of industry
and steady work, as the alternative of the workhouse. Efforts to forge
this link have failed so far, but in the good time that is coming, when
we shall have learned the lesson that the unkindest thing that can be
done to a young tramp is to let him go on tramping, and when magistrates
shall blush to discharge him on the plea that "it is no crime to be poor
in this country," they will succeed, and the tramp also we shall then
have "druv into decency." When I look back now to the time, ten or
fifteen years ago, when, night after night, with every police station
filled, I found the old tenements in the "Bend" jammed with a reeking
mass of human wrecks that huddled in hall and yard, and slept, crouching
in shivering files, all the way up the stairs to the attic, it does seem
as if we had come a good way, and as if all the turmoil and the bruises
and the fighting had been worth while.
IV
THE TENANT
We have considered the problem of the tenement. Now about the tenant.
How much of a problem is he? And how are we to go about solving his
problem?
The government "slum inquiry," of which I have spoken before, gave us
some facts about him. In New York it found 62.58 per cent. of the
population of the slum to be foreign-born, whereas for the whole city
the percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. While the proportion of
illiteracy in all was only as 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 per
cent. That, with nearly twice as many saloons to a given number, there
should be three times as many arrests in the slum as in the city at
large need not be attributed to nationality, except indirectly in its
possible responsibility for the saloons. I say "possible" advisedly.
Anybody, I should think, whose misfortune it is to live in the slum
might be expected to find in the saloon a refuge. I shall not quarrel
with the other view of it. I am merely stating a personal impression.
The fact that concerns us here is the great proportion of the
foreign-born. Though the inquiry covered only a small section of a
tenement district, the result may be accepted as typical.
We shall not, then, have to do with an American element in discussing
this tenant, for even of the "natives" in the census, by far the largest
share is made up of the children of the immigrant. Indeed, in New York
only 4.77 per cent. of the slum population canvassed were shown to be of
native parentage. The parents of 95.23 per cent. had come over the sea,
to better themselves, it may be assumed. Let us see what they brought
us, and what we have given them in return.
The Italians were in the majority where this census taker went. They
were from the south of Italy, avowedly the worst of the Italian
immigration which in the eight years from 1891 to 1898 gave us more than
half a million of King Humbert's subjects. The exact number, as
registered by the Emigration Bureau, was 502,592. In 1898, 58,613 came
over, 36,086 of them with New York as their destination. The official
year ends with June. In the six months from July 1 to December 31, the
immigrants were sorted out upon a more intelligent plan than previously.
The process as applied to the 30,470 Italians who were landed during
that term yielded this result: from northern Italy, 4762; from southern
Italy, 25,708. Of these latter a number came from Sicily, the island of
the absentee landlord, where peasants die of hunger. I make no apology
for quoting here the statement of an Italian officer, on duty in the
island, to a staff correspondent of the "Tribuna" of Rome, a paper not
to be suspected of disloyalty to United Italy. I take it from the
"Evening Post:"--
"In the month of July I stopped on a march by a threshing floor where
they were measuring grain. When the shares had been divided, the one who
had cultivated the land received a single _tumolo_ (less than a half
bushel). The peasant, leaning on his spade, looked at his share as if
stunned. His wife and their five children were standing by. From the
painful toil of a year this was what was left to him with which to feed
his family. The tears rolled silently down his cheeks."
These things occasionally help one to understand. Over against this
picture there arises in my memory one from the Barge Office, where I had
gone to see an Italian steamer come in. A family sat apart, ordered to
wait by the inspecting officer; in the group an old man, worn and
wrinkled, who viewed the turmoil with the calmness of one having no
share in it. The younger members formed a sort of bulwark around him.
"Your father is too old," said the official.
Two young women and a boy of sixteen rose to their feet at once. "Are
not we young enough to work for him?" they said. The boy showed his
strong arms.
It is charged against this Italian immigrant that he is dirty, and the
charge is true. He lives in the darkest of slums, and pays rent that
ought to hire a decent flat. To wash, water is needed; and we have a law
which orders tenement landlords to put it on every floor, so that their
tenants may have the chance. And it is not yet half a dozen years since
one of the biggest tenement house landlords in the city, the wealthiest
church corporation in the land, attacked the constitutionality of this
statute rather than pay a couple of hundred dollars for putting water
into two old buildings, as the Board of Health had ordered, and came
near upsetting the whole structure of tenement house law upon which our
safety depends. He is ignorant, it is said, and that charge is also
true. I doubt if one of the family in the Barge Office could read or
write his own name. Yet would you fear especial danger to our
institutions, to our citizenship, from these four? He lives cheaply,
crowds, and underbids even the Jew in the sweatshop. I can myself
testify to the truth of these statements. Only this spring I was the
umpire in a quarrel between the Jewish tailors and the factory inspector
whom they arraigned before the Governor on charges of inefficiency. The
burden of their grievance was that the Italians were underbidding them
in their own market, which of course the factory inspector could not
prevent. Yet, even so, the evidence is not that the Italian always gets
the best of it. I came across a family once working on "knee-pants."
"Twelve pants, ten cents," said the tailor, when there was work. "Ve
work for dem sheenies," he explained. "Ven dey has work, ve gets some;
ven dey hasn't, ve don't." He was an unusually gifted tailor as to
English, but apparently not as to business capacity. In the Astor
tenements, in Elizabeth Street, where we found forty-three families
living in rooms intended for sixteen, I saw women finishing "pants" at
thirty cents a day. Some of the garments were of good grade, and some of
poor; some of them were soldiers' trousers, made for the government; but
whether they received five, seven, eight, or ten cents a pair, it came
to thirty cents a day, except in a single instance, in which two women,
sewing from five in the morning till eleven at night, were able, being
practiced hands, to finish forty-five "pants" at three and a half cents
a pair, and so made together over a dollar and a half. They were
content, even happy. I suppose it seemed wealth to them, coming from a
land where a Parisian investigator of repute found three lire (not quite
sixty cents) _per month_ a girl's wages.