THE BLIGHT OF THE DOUBLE-DECKER
In a Stanton Street tenement, the other day, I stumbled upon a Polish
capmaker's home. There were other capmakers in the house, Russian and
Polish, but they simply "lived" there. This one had a home. The fact
proclaimed itself the moment the door was opened, in spite of the
darkness. The rooms were in the rear, gloomy with the twilight of the
tenement although the day was sunny without, but neat, even cosey. It
was early, but the day's chores were evidently done. The tea-kettle sang
on the stove, at which a bright-looking girl of twelve, with a pale but
cheery face, and sleeves brushed back to the elbows, was busy poking up
the fire. A little boy stood by the window, flattening his nose against
the pane, and gazed wistfully up among the chimney pots where a piece of
blue sky about as big as the kitchen could be made out. I remarked to
the mother that they were nice rooms.
[Illustration: "With his whole hungry little soul in his eyes."]
"Ah yes," she said, with a weary little smile that struggled bravely
with hope long deferred, "but it is hard to make a home here. We
would so like to live in the front, but we can't pay the rent."
I knew the front with its unlovely view of the tenement street too well,
and I said a good word for the air-shaft--yard or court it could not be
called, it was too small for that--which rather surprised myself. I had
found few virtues enough in it before. The girl at the stove had left
off poking the fire. She broke in the moment I finished, with eager
enthusiasm: "Why, they have the sun in there. When the door is opened
the light comes right in your face."
"Does it never come here?" I asked, and wished I had not done so, as
soon as the words were spoken. The child at the window was listening,
with his whole hungry little soul in his eyes.
Yes, it did, she said. Once every summer, for a little while, it came
over the houses. She knew the month and the exact hour of the day when
its rays shone into their home, and just the reach of its slant on the
wall. They had lived there six years. In June the sun was due. A
haunting fear that the baby would ask how long it was till June--it was
February then--took possession of me, and I hastened to change the
subject. Warsaw was their old home. They kept a little store there, and
were young and happy. Oh, it was a fine city, with parks and squares,
and bridges over the beautiful river,--and grass and flowers and birds
and soldiers, put in the girl breathlessly. She remembered. But the
children kept coming, and they went across the sea to give them a better
chance. Father made fifteen dollars a week, much money; but there were
long seasons when there was no work. She, the mother, was never very
well here,--she hadn't any strength; and the baby! She glanced at his
grave white face, and took him in her arms. The picture of the two, and
of the pale-faced girl longing back to the fields and the sunlight, in
their prison of gloom and gray walls, haunts me yet. I have not had the
courage to go back since. I recalled the report of an English army
surgeon, which I read years ago, on the many more soldiers that
died--were killed would be more correct--in barracks into which the sun
never shone than in those that were open to the light. They have yet two
months to the sun in Stanton Street.
The capmaker's case is the case of the nineteenth century of
civilization against the metropolis of America. The home, the family,
are the rallying points of civilization. The greatness of a city is to
be measured, not by its balance sheets of exports and imports, not by
its fleet of merchantmen, or by its miles of paved streets, nor even by
its colleges, its art museums, its schools of learning, but by its
homes. New York has all these, but its people live in tenements where
"all the conditions which surround childhood, youth, and womanhood make
for unrighteousness."[16] This still, after forty years of battling,
during which we have gone on piling layer upon layer of human beings and
calling _that_ home! The 15,309 tenements the Council of Hygiene found
in 1864 have become 47,000, and their population of 495,592 has swelled
into nearly a million and three-quarters.[17] There were four flights of
stairs at most in the old days. Now they build tenements six and seven
stories high, and the street has become a mere runway. It cannot take up
the crowds for which it was never meant. Go look at those East Side
streets on a summer evening or on any fair Sunday when, at all events,
some of the workers are at home, and see what they are like. In 1880 the
average number of persons to each dwelling in New York, counting them
all in, the rich and the poor, was 16.37; in 1890 it was 18.52; in 1900,
according to the United States census, the average in the old city was
20.4. It all means that there are so many more and so much bigger
tenements, and four families to the floor where there were two before.
Statistics are not my hobby. I like to get their human story out of
them. Anybody who wants them can get the figures in the census books.
But as an instance of the unchecked drift--unchecked as yet--look at
this record of the Tenth Ward, the "most crowded spot in the world." In
1880, when it had not yet attained to that bad eminence, it contained
47,554 persons, or 432.3 to the acre. In 1890 the census showed a
population of 57,596, which was 522 to the acre. The police census of
1895 found 70,168 persons living in 1514 houses, which was 643.08 to the
acre. The Health Department's census for the first half of 1898 gave a
total of 82,175 persons living in 1201 tenements, with 313 inhabited
buildings yet to be heard from. This is the process of doubling
up,--literally, since the cause and the vehicle of it all is the
double-decker tenement,--which in the year 1900 had crowded a single
block in that ward at the rate of 1724 persons per acre, and one in the
Eleventh Ward at the rate of 1894.[18] It goes on not in the Tenth Ward
or on the East Side only, but throughout the city. When, in 1897, it was
proposed to lay out a small park in the Twenty-second Ward, up on the
far West Side, it was shown that five blocks in that section, between
Forty-ninth and Sixty-second streets and Ninth and Eleventh avenues,
had a population of more than 3000 each. The block between Sixty-first
and Sixty-second streets and Tenth and Eleventh avenues harbored 4254
when the police made a count in 1900, which meant 1158 persons to the
acre.
[Footnote 16: Report of Tenement House Commission, 1900.]
[Footnote 17: Tenement house census of 1900: Manhattan and the Bronx
boroughs (the old city), 46,993 tenements, with a population of
1,701,643. The United States census of the two boroughs gave them a
population of 2,050,600. In the Greater New York there are 82,000
tenements, and two-thirds of our nearly four millions of people live
in them.]
[Footnote 18: Police census of 1900, block bounded by Canal, Hester,
Eldridge, and Forsyth streets: size 375 × 200, population 2969, rate
per acre 1724. Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and
Ridge streets: size 200 × 300, population 2609, rate per acre 1894.]
These are the facts. The question is, are they beyond our control? Let
us look at them squarely and see. In the first place, it is no answer to
the charge that New York's way of housing its workers is the worst in
the world to say that they are better off than they were where they came
from. It is not true, in most cases, as far as the home is concerned; a
shanty is better than a flat in a slum tenement, any day. Even if it
were true, it would still be beside the issue. In Poland my capmaker
counted for nothing. Nothing was expected of him. Here he ranks, after a
few brief years, politically equal with the man who hires his labor. A
citizen's duty is expected of him, and home and citizenship are
convertible terms. The observation of the Frenchman who had watched the
experiment of herding two thousand human beings in eight tenement
barracks over yonder, that the result was the "exasperation of the
tenant against society," is true the world over. We have done as badly
in New York. Social hatefulness is not a good soil for citizenship to
grow in, where political equality rules.
Nor is it going to help us any to charge it all to the tenant "who
_will_ herd." He herds because he has no other chance; because it puts
money into some one's pockets to let him. We never yet have passed a law
for his relief that was not attacked in the same or the next legislature
in the interest of the tenement-house builder. Commission after
commission has pointed out that the tenants are "better than the houses
they live in"; that they "respond quickly to improved conditions." Those
are not honest answers. The man who talks that way is a fool, or worse.
The truth is that if we cannot stop the crowds from coming, we _can_
make homes for those who come, and at a profit on the investment. That
has been proved, is being proved now every day. It is not a case of
transforming human nature in the tenant, but of reforming it in the
landlord builder. It is a plain question of the per cent he is willing
to take.
So then, we have got it on the moral ground where it belongs. Let the
capmaker's case be ever so strong, we shall yet win. We shall win his
fight and our own together; they are one. This is the way it stands at
the outset of the twentieth century: New York's housing is still the
worst in the world. We have the biggest crowds. We have been killing
the home that is our very life at the most reckless rate. But, badly as
we are off and shall be off for years to come,--allowing even that we
are getting worse off in the matter of crowding,--we know now that we
can do better. We have done it. We are every year wresting more light
and air from the builder. He no longer dares come out and fight in the
open, for he knows that public sentiment is against him. The people
understand--to what an extent is shown in a report of a Tenement House
Committee in the city of Yonkers, which the postman put on my table this
minute. The committee was organized "to prevent the danger to Yonkers of
incurring the same evils that have fallen so heavily upon New York and
have cost that city millions of money and thousands of lives." It sprang
from the Civic League, was appointed by a Republican mayor and indorsed
by a Democratic council! That is as it should be. So, we shall win.
In fact, we are winning now, backed by this very understanding. The
double-decker is doomed, and the twenty-five-foot lot has had its day.
We are building tenements in which it is possible to rear homes. We are
at last in a fair way to make the slum unprofitable, and that is the
only way to make it go. So that we may speed it the more let us go with
the capmaker a while and get his point of view. After all, that is the
one that counts; the community is not nearly as much interested in the
profits of the landlord as in the welfare of the workers.
That we may get it fairly, suppose we take a stroll through a
tenement-house neighborhood and see for ourselves. We were in Stanton
Street. Let us start there, then, going east. Towering barracks on
either side, five, six stories high. Teeming crowds. Push-cart men
"moved on" by the policeman, who seems to exist only for the purpose.
Forsyth Street: there is a church on the corner, Polish and Catholic, a
combination that strikes one as queer here on the East Side, where
Polish has come to be synonymous with Jewish. I have cause to remember
that corner. A man killed his wife in this house, and was hanged for it.
Just across the street, on the stoop of that brown-stone tenement, the
tragedy was reënacted the next year; only the murderer saved the county
trouble and expense by taking himself off also. That other stoop in the
same row witnessed a suicide.
Why do I tell you these things? Because they are true. The policeman
here will bear me out. They belong to the ordinary setting of life in a
crowd such as this. It is never so little worth living, and therefore
held so cheap along with the fierce, unceasing battle that goes on to
save it. You will go no further unless I leave it out? Very well; I
shall leave out the murder after we have passed the block yonder. The
tragedy of that is of a kind that comes too close to the everyday life
of tenement-house people to be omitted. The house caught fire in the
night, and five were burned to death,--father, mother, and three
children. The others got out; why not they? They stayed, it seems, to
make sure none was left; they were not willing to leave one behind, to
save themselves. And then it was too late; the stairs were burning.
There was no proper fire escape. That was where the murder came in; but
it was not all chargeable to the landlord, nor even the greater part.
More than thirty years ago, in 1867, the state made it law that the
stairs in every tenement four stories high should be fireproof, and
forbade the storing of any inflammable material in such houses. I do not
know when the law was repealed, or if it ever was. I only know that in
1892 the Fire Department, out of pity for the tenants and regard for the
safety of its own men, forced through an amendment to the building law,
requiring the stairs of the common type of five-story tenements to be
built of fireproof material, and that they are still of wood, just as
they always were. Ninety-seven per cent of the tenements examined by the
late Tenement House Commission (1900) in Manhattan had stairs of wood.
In Brooklyn they were _all_ of wood. Once, a couple of years ago, I
looked up the Superintendent of Buildings and asked him what it meant. I
showed him the law, which said that the stairs should be "built of
slow-burning construction or fireproof material"; and he put his finger
upon the clause that follows, "as the Superintendent of Buildings shall
decide." The law gave him discretion, and that is how he used it. "Hard
wood burns slowly," said he.
The fire of which I speak was a "cruller fire," if I remember rightly,
which is to say that it broke out in the basement bakeshop, where they
were boiling crullers (doughnuts) in fat, at 4 A.M., with a hundred
tenants asleep in the house above them. The fat went into the fire, and
the rest followed. I suppose that I had to do with a hundred such fires,
as a police reporter, before, under the protest of the Gilder Tenement
House Commission and the Good Government Clubs, the boiling of fat in
tenement bakeshops was forbidden. The Chief of the Fire Department, in
his testimony before the commission, said that "tenements are erected
mainly with a view of returning a large income for the amount of capital
invested. It is only after a fire in which great loss of life occurs
that any interest whatever is taken in the safety of the occupants." The
Superintendent of Buildings, after such a fire in March, 1896, said that
there were thousands of tenement firetraps in the city. My reporter's
notebook bears witness to the correctness of his statement, and it has
many blank leaves that are waiting to be put to that use yet. The
reckoning for eleven years showed that, of 35,844 fires in New York,
53.18 per cent were in tenement houses, though they were only a little
more than 31 per cent of all the buildings, and that 177 occupants were
killed, 523 maimed, and 625 rescued by the firemen. Their rescue cost
the lives of three of these brave men, and 453 were injured in the
effort. And when all that is said, not the half is told. A fire in the
night in one of those human beehives, with its terror and woe, is one of
the things that live in the recollection ever after as a terrible
nightmare. The fire-chief thought that every tenement house should be
fireproof, but he warned the commission that such a proposition would
"meet with strong opposition from the different interests, should
legislation be requested." He was right. It is purely a question of the
builder's profits. Up to date we have rescued the first floor from him.
That must be fireproof. We shall get the whole structure yet if we pull
long enough and hard enough, as we will.
Here is a block of tenements inhabited by poor Jews. Most of the Jews
who live over here are poor; and the poorer they are, the higher rent do
they pay, and the more do they crowd to make it up between them. "The
destruction of the poor is their poverty." It is only the old story in a
new setting. The slum landlord's profits were always the highest. He
spends nothing for repairs, and lays the blame on the tenant. The
"district leader" saves him, when Tammany is at the helm, unless he is
on the wrong side of the political fence, in which case the Sanitary
Code comes handy, to chase him into camp. A big "order" on his house is
a very effective way of making a tenement-house landlord discern
political truth on the eve of an important election. Just before the
election which put Theodore Roosevelt in the Governor's chair at Albany
the sanitary force displayed such activity as had never been known till
then in the examination of tenements belonging very largely, as it
happened, to sympathizers with the gallant Rough Rider's cause; and
those who knew did not marvel much at the large vote polled by the
Tammany candidate in the old city.
The halls of these tenements are dark. Under the law there should be a
light burning, but it is one of the rarest things to find one. The thing
seems well-nigh impossible of accomplishment. When the Good Government
Clubs set about backing up the Board of Health in its efforts to work
out this reform, which comes close to being one of the most necessary of
all,--such untold mischief is abroad in the darkness of these
thoroughfares,--the sanitary police reported 12,000 tenement halls
unlighted by night, even, and brought them, by repeated orders, down to
less than 1000 in six months. I doubt that the light burned in 1000 of
them all a month after the election that brought Tammany back. It is so
easy to put it out when the policeman's back is turned. Gas costs money.
Let what doesn't take care of itself.
We had a curious instance, at the time, of the difficulties that
sometimes beset reform. Certain halls that were known to be dark were
reported sufficiently lighted by the policeman of the district, and it
was discovered that it was his standard that was vitiated. He himself
lived in a tenement, and was used to its gloom. So an order was issued
defining darkness to the sanitary police: if the sink in the hall could
be made out, and the slops overflowing on the floor, and if a baby could
be seen on the stairs, the hall was light; if, on the other hand, the
baby's shrieks were the first warning that it was being trampled upon,
the hall was dark. Some days later the old question arose about an
Eldridge Street tenement. The policeman had reported the hall light
enough. The President of the Board of Health, to settle it once for all,
went over with me, to see for himself. The hall was very dark. He sent
for the policeman.
"Did you see the sink in that hall?" he asked.
The policeman said he did.
"But it is pitch dark. How did you see it?"
"I lit a match," said the policeman.
Four families live on these floors, with heaven knows how many children.
It was here the police commissioners were requested, in sober earnest,
some years ago, by a committee of very practical woman philanthropists,
to have the children tagged, as they do in Japan, I am told, so as to
save the policeman wear and tear in taking them back and forth between
the Eldridge Street police station and headquarters, when they got lost.
If tagged, they could be assorted at once and taken to their homes.
Incidentally, the city would save the expense of many meals. It was
shrewdly suspected that the little ones were lost on purpose in a good
many cases, as a way of getting them fed at the public expense.
[Illustration: One Family's Outlook on the Air Shaft. The Mother said,
"Our Daughter does not care to come Home to Sleep."]
That the children preferred the excitement of the police station, and
the distinction of a trip in charge of a brass-buttoned guardian, to the
Ludlow Street flat is easy enough to understand. A more unlovely
existence than that in one of these tenements it would be hard to
imagine. Everywhere is the stench of the kerosene stove that is forever
burning, serving for cooking, heating, and ironing alike, until the last
atom of oxygen is burned out of the close air. Oil is cheaper than
coal. The air shaft is too busy carrying up smells from below to bring
any air down, even if it is not hung full of washing in every story, as
it ordinarily is. Enterprising tenants turn it to use as a refrigerator
as well. There is at least a draught of air, such as it is. When fire
breaks out, this draught makes of the air shaft a flue through which the
fire roars fiercely to the roof, so transforming what was meant for the
good of the tenants into their greatest peril. The stuffy rooms bring
to mind this denunciation of the tenement builder of fifty years ago by
an angry writer, "He measures the height of his ceilings by the shortest
of the people, and by thin partitions divides the interior into as
narrow spaces as the leanest carpenter can work in." Most decidedly,
there is not room to swing the proverbial cat in any one of them. In one
I helped the children, last holiday, to set up a Christmas tree, so that
a glimpse of something that was not utterly sordid and mean might for
once enter their lives. Three weeks after, I found the tree standing yet
in the corner. It was very cold, and there was no fire in the room. "We
were going to burn it," said the little woman, whose husband was then in
the insane asylum, "and then I couldn't. It looked so kind o'
cheery-like there in the corner." My tree had borne the fruit I wished.
It remained for the New York slum landlord to assess the exact value of
a ray of sunlight,--upon the tenant, of course. Here are two
back-to-back rear tenements, with dark bedrooms on the south. The flat
on the north gives upon a neighbor's yard, and a hole two feet square
has been knocked in the wall, letting in air and sunlight; little enough
of the latter, but what there is is carefully computed in the lease. Six
dollars for this flat, six and a half for the one with the hole in the
wall. Six dollars a year per ray. In half a dozen houses in this block
have I found the same rate maintained. The modern tenement on the corner
goes higher: for four front rooms, "where the sun comes right in your
face," seventeen dollars; for the rear flat of three rooms, larger and
better every other way, but always dark, like the capmaker's, eleven
dollars. From the landlord's point of view, this last is probably a
concession. But he is a landlord with a heart. His house is as good a
one as can be built on a twenty-five-foot lot. The man who owns the
corner building in Orchard Street, with the two adjoining tenements, has
no heart. In the depth of last winter I found a family of poor Jews
living in a coop under his stairs, an abandoned piece of hallway, in
which their baby was born, and for which he made them pay eight dollars
a month. It was the most outrageous case of landlord robbery I had ever
come across, and it gave me sincere pleasure to assist the sanitary
policeman in curtailing his profits by even this much. The hall is not
now occupied.
The Jews under the stairs had two children. The shoemaker in the cellar
next door had three. They were fighting and snarling like so many dogs
over the coarse food on the table before them, when we looked in. The
baby, it seems, was the cause of the row. He wanted it all. He was a
very dirty and a very fierce baby, and the other two children were no
match for him. The shoemaker grunted fretfully at his last, "Ach, he is
all de time hungry!" At the sight of the policeman, the young imp set up
such a howl that we beat a hasty retreat. The cellar "flat" was
undoubtedly in violation of law, but it was allowed to pass. In the main
hall, on the ground floor, we counted seventeen children. The facts of
life here suspend ordinary landlord prejudices to a certain extent.
Occasionally it is the tenant who suspends them. The policeman laughed
as he told me of the case of a mother who coveted a flat into which she
well knew her family would not be admitted; the landlord was particular.
She knocked, with a troubled face, alone. Yes, the flat was to let; had
she any children? The woman heaved a sigh. "Six, but they are all in
Greenwood." The landlord's heart was touched by such woe. He let her
have the flat. By night he was amazed to find a flock of half a dozen
robust youngsters domiciled under his roof. They had indeed been in
Greenwood; but they had come back from the cemetery to stay. And stay
they did, the rent being paid.
High rents, slack work, and low wages go hand in hand in the tenements
as promoters of overcrowding. The rent is always one-fourth of the
family income, often more. The fierce competition for a bare living
cuts down wages; and when loss of work is added, the only thing left is
to take in lodgers to meet the landlord's claim. The Jew usually takes
them singly, the Italian by families. The midnight visit of the sanitary
policeman discloses a state of affairs against which he feels himself
helpless. He has his standard: 400 cubic feet of air space for each
adult sleeper, 200 for a child. That in itself is a concession to the
practical necessities of the case. The original demand was for 600 feet.
But of 28,000 and odd tenants canvassed in New York, in the slumming
investigation prosecuted by the general government in 1894, 17,047 were
found to have less than 400 feet, and of these 5526 slept in
unventilated rooms with no windows. No more such rooms have been added
since; but there has come that which is worse.
It was the boast of New York, till a few years ago, that at least that
worst of tenement depravities, the one-room house, too familiar in the
English slums, was practically unknown here. It is not so any longer.
The evil began in the old houses in Orchard and Allen streets, a bad
neighborhood, infested by fallen women and the thievish rascals who prey
upon their misery,--a region where the whole plan of humanity, if plan
there be in this disgusting mess, jars out of tune continually. The
furnished-room house has become an institution here, speeded on by a
conscienceless Jew who bought up the old buildings as fast as they came
into the market, and filled them with a class of tenants before whom
charity recoils, helpless and hopeless. When the houses were filled, the
crowds overflowed into the yard. In one, I found, in midwinter, tenants
living in sheds built of odd boards and roof tin, and paying a dollar a
week for herding with the rats. One of them, a red-faced German, was a
philosopher after his kind. He did not trouble himself to get up, when I
looked in, but stretched himself in his bed,--it was high
noon,--responding to my sniff of disgust that it was "sehr schoen! ein
bischen kalt, aber was!" His neighbor, a white-haired old woman, begged,
trembling, not to be put out. She would not know where to go. It was out
of one of these houses that Fritz Meyer, the murderer, went to rob the
poor box in the Redemptorist Church, the night when he killed policeman
Smith. The policeman surprised him at his work. In the room he had
occupied I came upon a brazen-looking woman with a black eye, who
answered the question of the officer, "Where did you get that shiner?"
with a laugh. "I ran up against the fist of me man," she said. Her
"man," a big, sullen lout, sat by, dumb. The woman answered for him that
he was a mechanic.
"What does he work at?" snorted the policeman, restraining himself with
an effort from kicking the fellow.
She laughed scornfully, "At the junk business." It meant that he was a
thief.
Young men, with blotched faces and cadaverous looks, were loafing in
every room. They hung their heads in silence. The women turned their
faces away at the sight of the uniform. They cling to these wretches,
who exploit their starved affections for their own ease, with a grip of
desperation. It is their last hold. Women have to love something. It is
their deepest degradation that they must love these. Even the wretches
themselves feel the shame of it, and repay them by beating and robbing
them, as their daily occupation. A poor little baby in one of the rooms
gave a shuddering human touch to it all.
The old houses began it, as they began all the tenement mischief that
has come upon New York. But the opportunity that was made by the
tenant's need was not one to be neglected. In some of the newer
tenements, with their smaller rooms, the lodger is by this time provided
for in the plan, with a special entrance from the hall. "Lodger" comes,
by an easy transition, to stand for "family." One winter's night I went
with the sanitary police on their midnight inspection through a row of
Elizabeth Street tenements which I had known since they were built,
seventeen or eighteen years ago. That is the neighborhood in which the
recent Italian immigrants crowd. In the house which we selected for
examination, in all respects the type of the rest, we found forty-three
families where there should have been sixteen. Upon each floor were four
flats, and in each flat three rooms that measured respectively 14 × 11,
7 × 11, and 7 × 8-1/2 feet. In only one flat did we find a single
family. In three there were two to each. In the other twelve each room
had its own family living and sleeping there. They cooked, I suppose, at
the one stove in the kitchen, which was the largest room. In one big bed
we counted six persons, the parents and four children. Two of them lay
crosswise at the foot of the bed, or there would not have been room. A
curtain was hung before the bed in each of the two smaller rooms,
leaving a passageway from the hall to the room with the windows. The
rent for the front flats was twelve dollars; for that in the rear ten
dollars. The social distinctions going with the advantage of location
were rigidly observed, I suppose. The three steps across a tenement
hall, from the front to "the back," are often a longer road than from
Ludlow Street to Fifth Avenue.
They were sweaters' tenements. But I shall keep that end of the story
until I come to speak of the tenants. The houses I have in mind now.
They were Astor leasehold property, and I had seen them built upon the
improved plan of 1879, with air shafts and all that. There had not been
water in the tenements for a month then, we were told by the one tenant
who spoke English that could be understood. The cold snap had locked the
pipes. Fitly enough, the lessee was an undertaker, an Italian himself,
who combined with his business of housing his people above and below the
ground also that of the padrone, to let no profit slip. He had not taken
the trouble to make many or recent repairs. The buildings had made a
fair start; they promised well. But the promise had not been kept. In
their premature decay they were distinctly as bad as the worst. I had
the curiosity to seek out the agent, the middleman, and ask him why they
were so. He shrugged his shoulders. With such tenants nothing could be
done, he said. I have always held that Italians are most manageable, and
that, with all the surface indications to the contrary, they are really
inclined to cleanliness, if cause can be shown, and I told him so. He
changed the subject diplomatically. No doubt it was with him simply a
question of the rent. They might crowd and carry on as they pleased,
once that was paid; and they did. It used to be the joke of Elizabeth
Street that when the midnight police came, the tenants would keep them
waiting outside, pretending to search for the key, until the surplus
population of men had time to climb down the fire-escape. When the
police were gone they came back. We surprised them all in bed.
Like most of the other tenements we have come across on our trip, these
were double-deckers. That is the type of tenement that is responsible
for the crowding that till now has gone on unchecked. For twenty years
it has been replacing the older barracks everywhere, as fast as they
rotted or were torn down.
This double-decker was thus described by the Tenement House Commission
of 1894: "It is the one hopeless form of tenement construction. It
cannot be well ventilated, it cannot be well lighted; it is not safe in
case of fire. It is built on a lot 25 feet wide by 100 or less in depth,
with apartments for four families in each story. This necessitates the
occupation of from 86 to 90 per cent of the lot's depth. The stairway,
made in the centre of the house, and the necessary walls and partitions
reduce the width of the middle rooms (which serve as bedrooms for at
least two people each) to 9 feet each at the most, and a narrow light
and air shaft, now legally required in the centre of each side wall,
still further lessens the floor space of these middle rooms. Direct
light is only possible for the rooms at the front and rear. The middle
rooms must borrow what light they can from dark hallways, the shallow
shafts, and the rear rooms. Their air must pass through other rooms or
the tiny shafts, and cannot but be contaminated before it reaches them.
A five-story house of this character contains apartments for eighteen or
twenty families, a population frequently amounting to 100 people, and
sometimes increased by boarders or lodgers to 150 or more."
[Illustration: The only Bath-tub in the Block: it hangs in the Air
Shaft.]
The commission, after looking in vain through the slums of the Old World
cities for something to compare the double-deckers with, declared that,
in their setting, the separateness and sacredness of home life were
interfered with, and evils bred, physical and moral, that "conduce to
the corruption of the young." "Make for unrighteousness" said the
commission of 1900, six years later.
Yet it is for these that the "interests" of which the fire-chief spoke
have rushed into battle at almost every session of the legislature,
whenever a step was taken to arraign them before the bar of public
opinion. No winter has passed, since the awakening conscience of the
people of New York City manifested itself in a desire to better the lot
of the other half, that has not seen an assault made, in one shape or
another, on the structure of tenement-house law built up with such
anxious solicitude. Once a bill to exempt from police supervision, by
withdrawing them from the tenement-house class, the very worst of the
houses, whose death-rate threatened the community, was sneaked through
the legislature all unknown, and had reached the executive before the
alarm was sounded. The Governor, put upon his guard, returned the bill,
with the indorsement that he was unable to understand what could have
prompted a measure that seemed to have reason and every argument against
it and none for it.
But the motive is not so obscure, after all. It is the same old one of
profit without conscience. It took from the Health Department the
supervision of the light, ventilation, and plumbing of the tenements,
which by right belonged there, and put it in charge of a compliant
Building Department, "for the convenience of architects and their
clients, and the saving of time and expense to them." For the
convenience of the architect's client, the builder, the lot was
encroached upon, until of one big block which the Gilder Commission
measured only 7 per cent was left open to the air; 93 per cent of it was
covered with brick and mortar. Rear tenements, to the number of nearly
100, have been condemned as "slaughter-houses," with good reason, but
this block was built practically solid. The average of space covered in
34 tenement blocks was shown to be 78.13 per cent. The law allowed only
65. The "discretion" that penned tenants in a burning tenement with
stairs of wood for the builder's "convenience" cut down the chance of
life of their babies unmoved. Sunlight and air mean just that, where
three thousand human beings are packed into a single block. That was why
the matter was given into the charge of the health officials, when
politics was yet kept out of their work.
[Illustration: The Old Style of Tenements, with Yards.]
Of such kind are the interests that oppose betterment of the worker's
hard lot in New York, that dictated the appointment by Tammany of a
commission composed of builders to revise its code of tenement laws, and
that sneered at the "laughable results of the Gilder Tenement House
Commission." Those results made for the health and happiness and safety
of a million and a half of souls, and were accounted, on every humane
ground, the longest step forward that had been taken by this community.
For the old absentee landlord, who did not know what mischief was afoot,
we have got the speculative builder, who does know, but does not care,
so long as he gets his pound of flesh. Half of the just laws that have
been passed for the relief of the people he has paralyzed with his
treacherous discretion clause, carefully nursed in the school of
practical politics to which he gives faithful adherence. The thing has
been the curse of our city from the day when the earliest struggle
toward better things began. Among the first manifestations of that was
the prohibition of soap factories below Grand Street by the Act of 1797,
which created a Board of Health with police powers. The act was passed
in February, to take effect in July; but long before that time the same
legislature had amended it by giving the authorities discretion in the
matter. And the biggest soap factory of them all is down there to this
day, and is even now stirring up a rumpus among the latest immigrants,
the Syrians, who have settled about it. No doubt it is all a question of
political education; but is not a hundred years enough to settle this
much, that compromise is out of place where the lives of the people are
at stake, and that it is time our years of "discretion" were numbered?
[Illustration: As a Solid Block of Double-deckers. Lawful until now,
would appear.]
At last there comes for the answer an emphatic yes. This year the law
has killed the discretionary clause and spoken out plainly. No more
stairs of wood; no more encroachment on the tenants' sunlight; and here,
set in its frame of swarming tenements, is a wide, open space, yet to be
a real park, with flowers and grass and birds to gladden the hearts of
those to whom such things have been as tales that are told, all these
dreary years, and with a playground in which the children of yonder big
school may roam at will, undismayed by landlord or policeman. Not all
the forces of reaction can put back the barracks that were torn down as
one of the "laughable results" of that very Tenement House Commission's
work, or restore to the undertaker his profits from Bone Alley of horrid
memory. It was the tenant's turn to laugh, that time. Half a dozen
blocks away, among even denser swarms, is another such plot, where there
will be football and a skating pond before another season. They are
breaking ground to-day. Seven years of official red tape have we had
since the plans were first made, and it isn't all unwound yet; but it
will be speedily now, and we shall hear the story of those parks and
rejoice that the day of reckoning is coming for the builder without a
soul. Till then let him deck the fronts of his tenements with bravery of
plate glass and brass to hide the darkness within. He has done his
worst.
We can go no farther. Yonder lies the river. A full mile we have come,
through unbroken ranks of tenements with their mighty, pent-up
multitudes. Here they seem, with a common impulse, to overflow into the
street. From corner to corner it is crowded with girls and children,
dragging babies nearly as big as themselves, with desperate endeavor to
lose nothing of the show. There is a funeral in the block. Unnumbered
sewing-machines cease for once their tireless rivalry with the flour
mill in the next block, that is forever grinding in a vain effort to
catch up. Heads are poked from windows. On the stoops hooded and shawled
figures have front seats. The crowd is hardly restrained by the
policeman and the undertaker in holiday mourning, who clear a path by
main strength to the plumed hearse. The eager haste, the frantic rush to
see,--what does it not tell of these starved lives, of the quality of
their aims and ambitions? The mill clatters loudly; there is one mouth
less to fill. In the midst of it all, with clamor of urgent gong, the
patrol wagon rounds the corner, carrying two policemen precariously
perched upon a struggling "drunk," a woman. The crowd scatters,
following the new sensation. The tragedies of death and life in the slum
have met together.
Many a mile I might lead you along these rivers, east and west, through
the island of Manhattan, and find little else than we have seen. The
great crowd is yet below Fourteenth Street, but the northward march
knows no slackening of pace. As the tide sets up-town, it reproduces
faithfully the scenes of the older wards, though with less of their
human interest than here, where the old houses, in all their ugliness,
have yet some imprint of the individuality of their tenants. Only on
feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on
holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the
unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the
up-town streets, it is hard to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient
wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its rocks and its goats and
shanties. Since the negroes took possession it is only dull, except
when, once in a while, the remnant of the Irish settlers make a stand
against the intruders. Vain hope! Perpetual eviction is their destiny.
Negro, Italian, and Jew, biting the dust with many a bruised head under
the Hibernian's stalwart fist, resistlessly drive him before them,
nevertheless, out of house and home. The landlord pockets the gate
money. The old robbery still goes on. Where the negro pitches his tent,
he pays more rent than his white neighbor next door, and is a better
tenant. And he is good game forever. He never buys the tenement, as the
Jew or the Italian is likely to do when he has scraped up money enough
to reënact, after his own fashion, the trick taught him by his
oppressor. The black column has reached the hundredth street on the East
Side, and the sixties on the West,[19] and there for the present it
halts. Jammed between Africa, Italy, and Bohemia, the Irishman has
abandoned the East Side up-town. Only west of Central Park does he yet
face his foe, undaunted in defeat as in victory. The local street
nomenclature, in which the directory has no hand,--Nigger Row, Mixed Ale
Flats, etc.,--indicates the hostile camps with unerring accuracy.
[Footnote 19: There is an advanced outpost of blacks as far up as
One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street, but the main body lingers yet
among the sixties.]
Up-town or down-town, as the tenements grow taller, the thing that is
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 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. It is the stamp of the home that
is lacking, and we need to be about restoring it, if we would be safe.
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?