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THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
[Illustration: Editor's logo.]
[Illustration: Author.]
THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF "THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN," "HOW THE
OTHER HALF LIVES," ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1902
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1902,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1902.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
Three years ago I published under the title "A Ten Years' War" a series
of papers intended to account for the battle with the slum since I wrote
"How the Other Half Lives." A good many things can happen in three
years. So many things have happened in these three, the fighting has
been so general all along the line and has so held public attention,
that this seems the proper time to pass it all in review once more. That
I have tried to do in this book, retaining all that still applied of the
old volume and adding as much more. The "stories" were printed in the
_Century Magazine_. They are fact, not fiction. If the latter, they
would have no place here.
"The Battle with the Slum" is properly the sequel to "How the Other Half
Lives," and tells how far we have come and how. "With his usual
hopefulness," I read in the annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science of my book three years ago, "the author is still
looking forward to better things in the future." I was not deceived
then. Not in the thirty years before did we advance as in these three,
though Tammany blocked the way most of the time. It is great to have
lived in a day that sees such things done.
J. A. R.
RICHMOND HILL,
August 27, 1902.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction. What the Fight is about 1
CHAPTER
I. Battling against Heavy Odds 9
II. The Outworks of the Slum taken 36
III. The Devil's Money 63
IV. The Blight of the Double-decker 76
V. "Druv into Decency" 113
VI. The Mills House 154
VII. Pietro and the Jew 175
VIII. On whom shall we shut the Door? 202
IX. The Genesis of the Gang 227
X. Jim 256
XI. Letting in the Light 264
XII. The Passing of Cat Alley 310
XIII. Justice to the Boy 341
XIV. The Band begins to play 385
XV. "Neighbor" the Password 396
XVI. Reform by Humane Touch 413
XVII. The Unnecessary Story of Mrs. Ben Wah and Her Parrot 441
Index 451
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Theodore Roosevelt _Frontispiece_
PAGE
One of the Five Points Fifty Years Ago 12
The "Old Church" Tenement 15
An Old Wooster Street Court 17
A Fourth Ward Colony in the Bad Old Days 18
Dens of Death 21
Gotham Court 24
Green Dragon Yard, London 26
A Flagged Hallway in the "Big Flat" 28
Jersey Street Rookeries 32
The Survival of the Unfittest 33
The Rear Tenement grows up 38
Professor Felix Adler 39
A Cellar Dive in the Bend 41
It costs a Dollar a Month to sleep in these Sheds 46
Mulberry Street Police Station. Waiting for the Lodging to open 49
Night in Gotham Court 52
A Mulberry Bend Alley 55
"In the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to the 'Commissioner'" 58
"With his whole hungry little soul in his eyes" 78
One Family's Outlook on the Air Shaft. The Mother said, "Our
daughter does not care to come home to sleep" 93
The only Bath-tub in the Block. It hangs in the Air Shaft 103
The Old Style of Tenements, with Yards 106
As a Solid Block of Double-deckers, lawful until now, would
appear 106
Richard Watson Gilder 117
The Mott Street Barracks 122
R. Fulton Cutting 128
Alfred Corning Clark Buildings 131
The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn 141
A Typical East Side Block 146
Robert W. de Forest 147
Plan of a Typical Floor of the Competition in the C. O. S.
Plans of Model Tenements 150
Plans of Tenements 151
A Seven-cent Lodging House in the Bowery 155
They had a Mind to see how it looked 157
Doorway of the Mills House, No. 1 159
Evening in One of the Courts in the Mills House, No. 1 163
Lodging Room in the Leonard Street Police Station 168
Women's Lodging Room in Eldridge Street Police Station 169
A "Scrub" and her Bed--the Plank 171
What a Search of the Lodgers brought forth 173
Bedroom in the New City Lodging Houses 177
"Are we not young enough to work for him?" 179
The Play School. Dressing Dolls for a Lesson 189
Label of Consumers' League 197
Josephine Shaw Lowell 198
One Door that has been opened: St. John's Park in Hudson
Street, once a Graveyard 203
Dr. Jane Elizabeth Robbins 205
One Way of bringing the Children into Camp: Basket-weaving in
Vacation School 210
The Children's Christmas Tree 219
Jacob Beresheim 229
Heading off the Gang. Vacation Playground near Old Frog Hollow 237
Craps 242
Children's Playground. Good Citizenship at the Bottom of this
Barrel 245
The Gang fell in with Joyous Shouts 253
"Oh, mother! you were gone so long" 261
Keep off the Grass 266
Colonel George E. Waring, Jr. 269
A Tammany-swept East Side Street before Colonel Waring's Day 272
The Same Street when Colonel Waring wielded the Broom 273
The Mulberry Bend 277
Bone Alley 280
Mulberry Bend Park 289
Roof Playground on a Public School 291
Kindergarten on the Recreation Pier at the Foot of East 24th
Street 297
The East River Park 301
The Seward Park 303
The Seward Park on Opening Day 305
In the Roof Garden of the Hebrew Educational Alliance 306
Bottle Alley, Whyó Gang's Headquarters 308
The First Christmas Tree in Gotham Court 312
The Mouth of the Alley 317
The Wrecking of Cat Alley 327
Trilby 331
Old Barney 334
The Old and the New 343
Public School No. 177, Manhattan 347
Letter H Plan of Public School No. 165 352
Public School No. 153, The Bronx 356
Girls' Playground on the Roof 360
The New Idea: a Stairway of Public School No. 170 363
Truck Farming on the Site of Stryker's Lane 367
Doorway of Public School No. 165 370
Main Entrance of Public School No. 153 375
Superintendent C. B. J. Snyder 381
"The fellows and papa and mamma shall be invited in yet" 392
The "Slide" that was the Children's only Playground once 394
A Cooking Lesson in Vacation School 401
"Such a ball-room!" 408
Teaching the Girls to swim 411
Athletic Meets in Crotona Park 415
Flag Drill in the King's Garden 437
Mrs. Ben Wah 444
THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM
WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT
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 practised 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 wise men 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 hardly have escaped 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 put that very freedom in jeopardy. 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;[1] 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-chief 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 a
good upper grip. That was when the civic conscience awoke in 1879.
[Footnote 1: The draft riots of 1863.]
And after all that, the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness of
a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly
upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell,"
and the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party
of organized robbery, at the door of which it was all laid, that he was
"in politics, working for his own pocket all the time, same as you and
everybody else!"
Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle has got to be fought,
and fought out. For it is one thing or the other: either we wipe out the
slum, or it wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It cannot
be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and surrender means the end of
government by the people.
If any one believes this to be needless alarm, let him think a moment.
Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to
govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. The slum
stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath.
This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference,
self-seeking, greed. It is human nature. We are brothers whether we own
it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we
shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue.
When the slum flourishes unchallenged in the cities, their wharves may,
indeed, be busy, their treasure-houses filled,--wealth and want go so
together,--but patriotism among their people is dead.
As long ago as the very beginning of our republic, its founders saw that
the cities were danger-spots in their plan. In them was the peril of
democratic government. At that time, scarce one in twenty-five of the
people in the United States lived in a city. Now it is one in three. And
to the selfishness of the trader has been added the threat of the slum.
Ask yourself then how long before it would make an end of us, if let
alone.
Put it this way: you cannot let men live like pigs when you need their
votes as freemen; it is not safe.[2] You cannot rob a child of its
childhood, of its home, its play, its freedom from toil and care, and
expect to appeal to the grown-up voter's manhood. The children are our
to-morrow, and as we mould them to-day so will they deal with us then.
Therefore that is not safe. Unsafest of all is any thing or deed that
strikes at the home, for from the people's home proceeds citizen virtue,
and nowhere else does it live. The slum is the enemy of the home.
Because of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called "The
Homeless City." When this people comes to be truly called a nation
without homes there will no longer be any nation.
[Footnote 2: "The experiment has been long tried on a large scale,
with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from
early infancy, you allow human beings to _live_ like brutes, you can
degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more
intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human
hearts."--_Report on the Health of British Towns._]
Hence, I say, in the battle with the slum we win or we perish. There is
no middle way. We shall win, for we are not letting things be the way
our fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to
be won in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep
on fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits
upon the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the
brotherhood. As a man does in dealing with his brother so it is the
way of God that his children shall reap, that through toil and tears we
may make out the lesson which sums up all the commandments and alone can
make the earth fit for the kingdom that is to come.
CHAPTER I
BATTLING AGAINST HEAVY ODDS
The slum I speak of is our own. We made it, but let us be glad we have
no patent on the manufacture. It is not, as one wrote with soul quite
too patriotic to let the Old World into competition on any terms, "the
offspring of the American factory system." Not that, thank goodness! It
comes much nearer to being a slice of original sin which makes right of
might whenever the chance offers. When to-day we clamor for air and
light and water as man's natural rights because necessary to his being,
we are merely following in the track Hippocrates trod twenty-five
centuries ago. How like the slums of Rome were to those of New York any
one may learn from Juvenal's Satires and Gibbon's description of Rome
under Augustus. "I must live in a place where there are no fires, no
nightly alarms," cries the poet, apostle of commuters. "Already is
Ucalegon shouting for water, already is he removing his chattels; the
third story in the house you live in is already in a blaze. You know
nothing about it. For if the alarm begin from the bottom of the stairs,
he will be the last to be burned whom a single tile protects from the
rain where the tame pigeons lay their eggs." (Clearly they had no
air-shafts in the Roman tenements!) "Codrus had a bed too small for his
Procula; six little jugs, the ornament of his sideboard, and a little
can, besides, beneath it.... What a height it is from the lofty roofs
from which a potsherd tumbles on your brains. How often cracked and
chipped earthenware falls from the windows.... Pray and bear about with
you the miserable wish that they may be contented with throwing down
only what the broad basins have held.... If you can tear yourself away
from the games in the circus, you can buy a capital house at Sora, or
Fabrateria, or Frasino, for the price at which you are now hiring your
dark hole for one year. There you will have your little garden ... live
there enamoured of the pitchfork.... It is something to be able in any
spot to have made oneself proprietor even of a single lizard.... None
but the wealthy can sleep in Rome."[3]
[Footnote 3: Satire III, Juvenal.]
One reads with a grim smile of the hold-ups of old: "'Where do you come
from?' he (policeman?) thunders out. 'You don't answer? Speak or be
kicked! Say, where do you hang out?' It is all one whether you speak or
hold your tongue; they beat you just the same, and then, in a passion,
force you to give bail to answer for the assault.... I must be off. Let
those stay ... for whom it is an easy matter to get contracts for
building temples, clearing rivers, constructing harbors, cleansing
sewers, etc."[4] Not even in the boss and his pull can we claim
exclusive right.
[Footnote 4: Satire III, Juvenal.]
Rome had its walls, as New York has its rivers, and they played a like
part in penning up the crowds. Within space became scarce and dear, and
when there was no longer room to build in rows where the poor lived,
they put the houses on top of one another. That is the first chapter of
the story of the tenement everywhere. Gibbon quotes the architect
Vitruvius, who lived in the Augustan age, as complaining of "the common
though inconvenient practice of raising houses to a considerable height
in the air. But the loftiness of the buildings, which often consisted of
hasty work and insufficient material, was the cause of frequent and
fatal accidents, and it was repeatedly enacted by Augustus as well as by
Nero that the height of private dwellings should not exceed the measure
of seventy feet above the ground."
"Repeatedly" suggests that the jerry-builder was a hard nut to crack
then as now. As to Nero's edict, New York enacted it for its own
protection in our own generation.
[Illustration: One of the Five Points Fifty Years ago.]
Step now across eighteen centuries and all the chapters of the dreary
story to the middle of the century we have just left behind, and look
upon this picture of the New World's metropolis as it was drawn in
public reports at a time when a legislative committee came to New York
to see how crime and drunkenness came to be the natural crop of a
population "housed in crazy old buildings, crowded, filthy tenements in
rear yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and
stables converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter
brutes," or in towering tenements, "often carried up to a great height
without regard to the strength of the foundation walls." What matter?
They were not intended to last. The rent was high enough to make up for
the risk--to the property. The tenant was not considered. Nothing was
expected of him, and he came up to the expectation, as men have a trick
of doing. "Reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance
were left to work out their inevitable results, until the entire
premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but
sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering,
water-rotted roofs, or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars."[5]
[Footnote 5: Report of Select Committee of Assembly. New York,
1857.]
We had not yet taken a lesson from Nero. That came later. But otherwise
we were abreast. No doubt the Roman landlord, like his New York brother
of a later day, when called to account, "urged the filthy habits of his
tenants as an excuse for the condition of the property." It has been the
landlord's plea in every age. "They utterly forgot," observes the
sanitarian who was set to clean up, "that it was the tolerance of those
habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were
alone responsible."[6]
[Footnote 6: York Health Department Report, 1866, Appendix A, p. 6.]
Those days came vividly back to me last winter, when in a Wisconsin
country town I was rehearsing the story of the long fight, and pointing
out its meaning to us all. In the audience sat a sturdy, white-haired,
old farmer who followed the recital with keen interest, losing no word.
When he saw this picture of one of the Five Points, he spoke out loud:
"Yes! that is right. I was there." It turned out that he and his sister
had borne a hand in the attack upon that stronghold of the slum by the
forces of decency, in 1849 and 1850, which ended in the wiping out of
the city's worst disgrace. It was the first pitched battle in the fight.
Soon after he had come west and taken homestead land; but the daily
repetition during a lifetime of the message to men, which the woods and
the fields and God's open sky have in keeping, had not dulled his ears
to it, and after fifty years his interest in his brothers in the great
city was as keen as ever, his sympathies as quick. He had driven twenty
miles across the frozen prairie to hear my story. It is his kind who win
such battles, and a few of them go a long way.
[Illustration: The "Old Church" Tenement.]
A handful of Methodist women made the Five Points decent. To understand
what that meant, look at the "dens of death" in Baxter Street, which
were part of it, "houses," says the health inspector,[7] "into which the
sunlight never enters ... that are dark, damp, and dismal throughout all
the days of the year, and for which it is no exaggeration to say that
the money paid to the owners as rent is literally the 'price of blood.'"
It took us twenty-four years after that to register the conviction in
the form of law that that was good cause for the destruction of a
tenement in cold blood; but we got rid of some at that time in a fit of
anger. The mortality officially registered in those "dens of death" was
17.5 per cent of their population. We think now that the death-rate of
New York is yet too high at 19 or 20 in a thousand of the living.
[Footnote 7: Report of Board of Health, New York, 1869, p. 346.]
A dozen steps away in Mulberry Street, called "Death's Thoroughfare" in
the same report, were the "Old Church Tenements," part of the Five
Points and nearly the worst part. "One of the largest contributors to
the hospitals," this repulsive pile had seen the day when men and women
sat under its roof and worshipped God. When the congregation grew rich,
it handed over its house to the devil and moved up-town. That is not
putting it too strong. Counting in the front tenements that shut out
what little air and sunshine might otherwise have reached the wretched
tenants, it had a population of 360 according to the record, and a
mortality of 75 per thousand!
[Illustration: An Old Wooster Street Court.]
The sketches of the Fourth Ward and Wooster Street barracks are
reproduced from an old report of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor. They rightly made out, those early missionaries,
that the improvement must begin with the people's homes, or not at all,
and allowed no indifference on the part of the public to turn them from
their path. It is worth the while of Chicago and the other Western
cities that are growing with such joyful metropolitan ambitions, to
notice that their slums look to-day very much as New York's did then. In
fifty years how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the
Assembly Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system.
"Forgetfulness of the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It
comes to the same thing. Whether seen from the point of view of the
citizen, the philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest
investment a city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade. In a
Mississippi river town, when pleading for the turning over to the
people's use of some vacant land on the river-shore that would make a
fine breathing space, I was told that by and by they would consider it.
Just now it was too valuable for factory purposes. When the city had
grown opulent, in say twenty-five years, they would be willing to hand
it over. Fatal delusion! Men do not grow that kind of sense as they grow
rich. The land will be always "too valuable." When we in New York were
scandalized at last into making a park of the Mulberry Bend, it cost us
a million and a half, and it had made the slum a fixture, not to be
dislodged. No! the way to fight the slum is to head it off. It is like
fighting a fire. Chasing it up is hard and doubtful work; the chances
are that you will not overtake it till the house is burned down.
[Illustration: A Fourth Ward Colony in the Bad Old Days.]
There were those who thought when the Civil War was over, that a big
fire would not be the worst thing that could happen to New York; and,
if it could have burned sense into men's minds as it burned up the
evidence of their lack of it, they would have been right. But forty per
cent--the rent some of the barracks brought--is a powerful damper on
sense and conscience, even with the cholera at the door. However, the
fear of it gave us the Citizens' Council of Hygiene, and New York heard
the truth for once.
"Not only," it ran, "does filth, overcrowding, lack of privacy and
domesticity, lack of ventilation and lighting, and absence of
supervision and of sanitary regulation still characterize the greater
number of the tenements; but they are built to a greater height in
stories; there are more rear houses built back to back with other
buildings, correspondingly situated on parallel streets; the courts and
alleys are more greedily encroached upon and narrowed into unventilated,
unlighted, damp, and well-like holes between the many-storied front and
rear tenements; and more fever-breeding wynds and _culs-de-sac_ are
created as the demand for the humble homes of the laboring poor
increases."[8] The Council, which was composed of sixteen of New York's
most distinguished physicians, declared that by ordinary sanitary
management the city's death-rate should be reduced thirty per cent. Its
judgment has been more than borne out. In the thirty-five years that
have passed since, it has in fact been reduced over fifty per cent.
[Footnote 8: Council of Hygiene's Report, 1866.]
Men and women were found living in cellars deep down under the ground.
One or two of those holes are left still in Park Street near the Five
Points Mission, but they have not been used as living-rooms for a
generation. In cellars near the river the tide rose and fell, compelling
the tenants "to keep the children in bed till ebb-tide." The plumber had
come upon the field, but his coming brought no relief. His was not a
case of conscience. "Untrapped soil pipes opened into every floor and
poisoned the tenants."
Where the "dens of death" were in Baxter Street, big barracks crowded
out the old shanties. More came every day. I remember the story of those
shown in the picture. They had been built only a little while when
complaint came to the Board of Health of smells in the houses. A
sanitary inspector was sent to find the cause. He followed the smell
down in the cellar and, digging there, discovered that the waste pipe
was a blind. It had simply been run three feet into the ground and was
not connected with the sewer.
The houses were built to sell. That they killed the tenants was no
concern of builder's. His name, by the way, was Buddensiek. A dozen
years after, when it happened that a row of tenements he was building
fell down ahead of time, before they were finished and sold, and killed
the workmen, he was arrested and sent to Sing Sing for ten years, for
manslaughter.
[Illustration: Dens of Death.]
That time he had forgotten to put lime in the mortar. It was just sand.
When the houses fell in the sight of men, the law was at last able to
make him responsible. It failed in the matter of the soil pipe. It does
sometimes to this very day. Knocking a man in the head with an axe, or
sticking a knife into him, goes against the grain. Slowly poisoning a
hundred so that the pockets of one be made to bulge may not even banish
a man from respectable society. We are a queer lot in some things.
However, that is hardly quite fair to society. It is a fact that that
part of it which would deserve the respect of its fellow-citizens has
got rid of its tenement-house property in recent years. It speculates in
railway shares now.
Twenty cases of typhoid fever from a single house in one year was the
record that had gone unconsidered. Bedrooms in tenements were dark
closets, utterly without ventilation. There couldn't be any. The houses
were built like huge square boxes, covering nearly the whole of the lot.
Some light came in at the ends, but the middle was always black. Forty
thousand windows, cut by order of the Health Board that first year, gave
us a daylight view of the slum: "damp and rotten and dark, walls and
banisters sticky with constant moisture." Think of living babies in such
hell-holes; and make a note of it, you in the young cities who can still
head off the slum where we have to wrestle with it for our sins. Put a
brand upon the murderer who would smother babies in dark holes and
bedrooms. He is nothing else. Forbid the putting of a house five stories
high, or six, on a twenty-five foot lot, unless at least thirty-five per
cent of the lot be reserved for sunlight and air. Forbid it absolutely,
if you can. It is the devil's job, and you will have to pay his dues in
the end, depend on it.
And while you are about it make a note of a fact we let go unheeded too
long to our harm, and haven't grasped fully yet. The legislative
committee of 1857 said it: "to prevent drunkenness provide every man
with a clean and comfortable home." Call it paternalism, crankery, any
other hard name you can think of, all the same it goes down underneath
the foundation of things. I have known drunkards to wreck homes a plenty
in my time; but I have known homes, too, that made drunkards by the
shortest cut. I know a dozen now--yes, ten dozen--from which, if I had
to live there, I should certainly escape to the saloon with its
brightness and cheer as often and as long as I could to brood there
perhaps over the fate which sowed desolation in one man's path that
another might reap wealth and luxury. That last might not be my way, but
it is a human way, and it breeds hatred which is not good mortar for us
to build with. It does not bind. Let us remember that and just be
sensible about things, or we shall not get anywhere.
[Illustration: Gotham Court.]
By which I do not mean that we are not getting anywhere; for we are.
Look at Gotham Court, described in the health reports of the sixties as
a "packing-box tenement" of the hopeless back-to-back type, which meant
that there was no ventilation and could be none. The stenches from the
"horribly foul cellars" with their "infernal system of sewerage" must
needs poison the tenants all the way up to the fifth story. I knew the
court well, knew the gang that made its headquarters with the rats in
the cellar, terrorizing the helpless tenants; knew the well-worn rut of
the dead-wagon and the ambulance to the gate, for the tenants died there
like flies in all seasons, and a tenth of its population was always in
the hospital. I knew the story of how it had been built by a Quaker with
good intentions, but without good sense, for the purpose of rescuing
people from the awful cellar-holes they burrowed in around there,--this
within fifty-one years of the death of George Washington, who lived just
across the street on the crest of Cherry Hill when he was
President,--and how in a score of years from the time it was built it
had come to earn the official description, "a nuisance which, from its
very magnitude, is assumed to be unremovable and irremediable."[9] That
was at that time. But I have lived to see it taken in hand three times,
once by the landlord under compulsion of the Board of Health, once by
Christian men bent upon proving what could be done on their plan with
the worst tenement house. And a good deal was accomplished. The
mortality was brought below the general death-rate of the city, and the
condition of the living was made by comparison tolerable. Only the best
was bad in that spot, on account of the good Quaker's poor sense, and
the third time the court was taken in hand it was by the authorities,
who destroyed it, as they should have done a generation before. Oh, yes,
we are getting there; but that sort of thing takes time.
[Footnote 9: Health Department Report, 1870, p. 111.]
[Illustration: Green Dragon Yard, London.]
Going through Whitechapel, London, about the time we were making ready
to deal with Gotham Court as it deserved, I photographed Green Dragon
yard as typical of what I saw about me. Compare the court and the yard
and see the difference between our slum problem and that of Old World
cities. Gotham Court contained 142 families when I made a canvass of it
in the old days, comprising over 700 persons, not counting the vagrants
who infested the cellars. The population of Green Dragon Yard was
greater than the sight of it would lead you to expect, for in
Whitechapel one-room flats were the rule; but with its utmost crowding
it came nowhere near the court. Sullen discontent was the badge of it.
Gotham Court was in an active state of warfare at all hours, for its
population was evenly divided between Irish and Italians, with only two
German families, who caught it from both sides. But there was hope in
that, for they were on the move; before the court was torn down,
one-third of its tenants were Greeks. Their slum over yonder is dead,
black, given over to smoky chimneys and bad draughts, with red-eyed and
hopeless men and women forever blowing the bellows on ineffectual fires.
Ours is alive if it _is_ with fighting. There is yeast in it, and bright
skies without, if not within. I don't believe there is a bellows to be
had in New York. Our slum, with its greater crowd, has more urgent need
of sharp attention, chiefly because of the overflow of theirs which it
receives. But after all, even that represents what still had courage and
manhood enough to make it want to get away and do better. We shall "get
there" if we don't give up. It sometimes seems to me that _their_ only
hope is to get here.
[Illustration: Flagged Hallway in the "Big Flat."]
Speaking of the fair beginning of Gotham Court reminds me of the Big
Flat in Mott Street, a mighty tenement with room for a hundred families
that was another instance of reform still-born; by which I mean that it
came before we were ready for it, and willing to back it up; also before
we knew just how. That house was built by the philanthropists of those
days on such a generous scale that it reached clear through the block to
Elizabeth Street. It had not occurred to the builders that the
neighborhood was one in which such an arrangement might prove of special
convenience to the lawbreakers with which it swarmed. Thieves and thugs
made it a runway, and decent people shunned it. Other philanthropists,
with the will but without the wisdom that was needed, took it up and
tried to make a workingwoman's home of it; but that end was worse than
the beginning. The women would have none of the rules that went with
the philanthropy, and the Big Flat lapsed back among the slum tenements
and became the worst of a bad lot. I speak of it here because just now
the recollection of it is a kind of a milestone in the battle with the
slum. Twenty years after, A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince, set
another in the Park Avenue Hotel which he intended for his
working-girls; and that was a worse failure than the first, for it never
served the purpose he intended for it. And now, just as I am writing
this, they are putting the finishing touches to a real woman's hotel
up-town which will not be a failure, though it will hardly reach the
same class which the remodellers of the Big Flat had in mind. However,
we shall get there, too, now we know the way.
Slowly, with many setbacks, we battled our way into the light. A Board
of Health had come with the cholera panic in 1866. The swine that ran at
large in the streets, practically the only scavengers, were banished.
The cholera and the yellow fever that had ravaged the city by turns
never came back. The smallpox went its way, too,[10] and was heard of
again only once as an epidemic, till people had forgotten what it was
like,--enough to make them listen to the anti-vaccination cranks,--and
politics had the health department by the throat again and held the gate
open. We acquired tenement house laws, and the process of education that
had begun with the foraging ground of the swine was extended step by
step to the citizen's home. Short steps and cautious were they. Every
obstacle which the landlord's cunning and the perversion of the
machinery of the law to serve his interests could devise was thrown in
the way. It was a new doctrine to that day that any power should
intervene between him and the tenants who represented his income, and it
was held to be a hardship if not downright robbery. The builder took the
same view. Every tenement house plan was the subject of hot debate
between the Health Board and the builder, or his architect. The smallest
air-shaft had to be wrung out of him, as it were, by main strength. The
church itself was too often on the side of the enemy, where its material
interests were involved. Trinity, the wealthiest church corporation in
the land, was in constant opposition as a tenement house landlord, and
finally, to save a few hundred dollars, came near upsetting the whole
structure of tenement law that had been built up in the interest of the
toilers and of the city's safety with such infinite pains. The courts
were reluctant. Courts in such matters record rather than lead the state
of the public mind, and now that the immediate danger of an epidemic was
over, the public mind had a hard time grasping the fact that bettering
the housing of the poor was simple protection for the community. When
suit was brought against a bad landlord, judges demanded that the
department must prove not only that a certain state of soil saturation,
for instance, was dangerous to health, but that some one had been
actually made sick by that specified nuisance. Fat-boilers,
slaughter-house men, and keepers of other nuisances made common cause
against the new decency, and with these obstacles in front, the
Sanitarians found the enemy constantly recruited from the rear. With the
immense immigration that poured in after the Civil War, the evil with
which they were struggling grew enormously. Economic problems other than
the old one of rent came to vex us. The sweater moved into the East Side
tenements. Child-labor grew and swelled.
[Footnote 10: They had "health wardens" in the old days, and the
Council of Hygiene tells of the efficient way two of them fought the
smallpox. One stood at the foot of the stairs and yelled to those
minding a patient in the next story to "put pieces of camphor about
the clothes of the sick and occasionally throw a piece on the hot
stove." The other summoned the occupants of a smallpox smitten
tenement to the hall door and cautioned them to say nothing about it
to any one, or he would send them all to the pest-house!]
The tenement had grown its logical crop. In the sweating conspiracy it
is a prime factor. Its extortionate rates make the need, and the need of
the poor was ever the opportunity of their oppressor. What they have to
take becomes the standard of all the rest. Sweating is only a modern
name for it. The cause is as old as the slum itself.
[Illustration: Jersey Street Rookeries.]
However, the new light was not without its allies. Chief among them was
the onward march of business that wiped out many a foul spot which had
sorely, tried the patience of us all. A carriage factory took the place
of the Big Flat when it had become a disgusting scandal. Jersey Street,
a short block between Mulberry and Crosby streets, to which no
Whitechapel slum could hold a candle, became a factory-street. No one
lives there now. The last who did was murdered by the gang that grew as
naturally out of its wickedness as a toadstool grows on a rotten log. He
kept the saloon on the corner of Crosby Street. Saloon and tenements are
gone together. Where they were are rows of factories, empty and silent
at night. A man may go safely there now at any hour. I should not have
advised strangers to try that when it was at its worst, though Police
Headquarters was but a block away.
[Illustration: The Survival of the Unfittest.]
I photographed that phase of the battle with the slum just before they
shut in the last tenement in the block with a factory building in its
rear. It stood for a while after that down in a deep sort of pocket with
not enough light struggling down on the brightest of days to make out
anything clearly in the rooms,--truly a survival of the unfittest; but
the tenants stayed. They had access through a hallway on Crosby Street;
they had never been used to a yard; as for the darkness, that they had
always been used to. They were "manured to the soil," in the words of
Mrs. Partington. But at length business claimed the last foot of the
block, and peace came to it and to us.
All the while we were learning. It was emphatically a campaign of
education. When the cholera threatened there was the old disposition to
lie down under the visitation and pray. The council pointed to the
fifteen hundred cases of smallpox ferreted out by its inspectors "in a
few days," and sternly reminded the people of Lord Palmerston's advice
to those who would stay an epidemic with a national fast, that they had
better turn to and clean up. We pray nowadays with broom in hand, and
the prayer tells. Do not understand me as discouraging the prayer; far
from it. But I would lend an edge to it with the broom that cuts. That
kind of foolishness we got rid of; the other kind that thinks the
individual's interest superior to the public good--that is the thing we
have got to fight till we die. But we made notches in that on which to
hang arguments that stick. Human life then counted for less than the
landlord's profits; to-day it is weighed in the scale against them.
Property still has powerful pull. "Vested rights" rise up and confront
you, and no matter how loudly you may protest that no man has the right
to kill his neighbor, they are still there. No one will contradict you,
but they won't yield--till you make them. In a hundred ways you are made
to feel that vested rights are sacred, if human life is not. But the
glory is that you _can_ make them yield. You couldn't then.
We haven't reached the millennium yet. But let us be glad. A hundred
years ago they hanged a woman on Tyburn Hill for stealing a loaf of
bread. To-day we destroy the den that helped make her a thief.