"DRUV INTO DECENCY"
I stood at Seven Dials and heard the policeman's account of what it used
to be. Seven Dials is no more like the slum of old than is the Five
Points to-day. The conscience of London wrought upon the one as the
conscience of New York upon the other. A mission house, a children's
refuge, two big schools, and, hard by, a public bath and a wash-house,
stand as the record of the battle with the slum, which, with these
forces in the field, has but one ending. The policeman's story rambled
among the days when things were different. Then it was dangerous for an
officer to go alone there at night.
Around the corner there came from one of the side streets a procession
with banners, parading in honor and aid of some church charity. We
watched it pass. In it marched young men and boys with swords and
battle-axes, and upon its outskirts skipped a host of young roughs--so
one would have called them but for the evidence of their honest
employment--who rattled collection boxes, reaping a harvest of pennies
from far and near. I looked at the battle-axes and the collection
boxes, and thought of forty years ago. Where was the Seven Dials of that
day, and the men who gave it its bad name? I asked the policeman.
"They were druv into decency, sor," he said, and answered from his own
experience the question ever asked by faint-hearted philanthropists. "My
father, he done duty here afore me in '45. The worst dive was where that
church stands. It was always full of thieves,"--whose sons, I added
mentally, have become collectors for the church. The one fact was a
whole chapter on the slum.
London's way with the tenant we adopted at last in New York with the
slum landlord. He was "druv into decency." We had to. Moral suasion had
been stretched to the limit. The point had been reached where one
knock-down blow outweighed a bushel of arguments. It was all very well
to build model tenements as object lessons to show that the thing could
be done; it had become necessary to enforce the lesson by demonstrating
that the community had power to destroy houses which were a menace to
its life. The rear tenements were chosen for this purpose.
They were the worst, as they were the first, of New York's tenements.
The double-deckers of which I have spoken had, with all their evils, at
least this to their credit, that their death-rate was not nearly as
high as that of the old houses. That was not because of any virtue
inherent in the double-deckers, but because the earlier tenements were
old, and built in a day that knew nothing of sanitary restrictions, and
cared less. Hence the showing that the big tenements had much the lowest
mortality. The death-rate does not sound the depths of tenement-house
evils, but it makes a record that is needed when it comes to attacking
property rights. The mortality of the rear tenements had long been a
scandal. They are built in the back yard, generally back to back with
the rear buildings on abutting lots. If there is an open space between
them, it is never more than a slit a foot or so wide, and gets to be the
receptacle of garbage and filth of every kind; so that any opening made
in these walls for purposes of ventilation becomes a source of greater
danger than if there were none. The last count that was made, in 1900,
showed that among the 44,850 tenements in Manhattan and the Bronx there
were still 2143 rear houses left.[20] Where they are the death-rate
rises, for reasons that are apparent. The sun cannot reach them. They
are damp and dark, and the tenants, who are always the poorest and most
crowded, live "as in a cage open only toward the front." A canvass made
of the mortality records by Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the registrar of
records, showed that while in the First Ward (the oldest), for instance,
the death-rate in houses standing singly on the lot was 29.03 per 1000
of the living, where there were rear houses it rose to 61.97. The infant
death-rate is a still better test; that rose from 109.58 in the single
tenements of the same ward to 204.54 where there were rear houses.[21]
One in every five babies had to die; that is to say, the house killed
it. No wonder the Gilder commission styled the rear tenements
"slaughter-houses," and called upon the legislature to root them out,
and with them every old, ramshackle, disease-breeding tenement in the
city.
[Footnote 20: That was, however, a reduction of 236 since 1898, when
the census showed 2379 rear houses.]
[Footnote 21: Report of Gilder Tenement House Commission, 1894.]
A law which is in substance a copy of the English act for destroying
slum property was passed in the spring of 1895. It provided for the
seizure of buildings that were dangerous to the public health or unfit
for human habitation, and their destruction upon proper proof, with
compensation to the owner on a sliding scale down to the point of entire
unfitness, when he might claim only the value of the material in his
house. Up to that time, the only way to get rid of such a house had been
to declare it a nuisance under the sanitary code; but as the city could
not very well pay for the removal of a nuisance, to order it down seemed
too much like robbery; so the owner was allowed to keep it. It takes
time and a good many lives to grow a sentiment such as this law
expressed. The Anglo-Saxon respect for vested rights is strong in us
also. I remember going through a ragged school in London, once, and
finding the eyes of the children in the infant class red and sore.
Suspecting some contagion, I made inquiries, and was told that a collar
factory next door was the cause of the trouble. The fumes from it
poisoned the children's eyes.
[Illustration: Richard Watson Gilder, Chairman of the Tenement House
Commission of 1894.]
"And you allow it to stay, and let this thing go on?" I asked, in
wonder.
The superintendent shrugged his shoulders. "It is their factory," he
said.
I was on the point of saying something that might not have been polite,
seeing that I was a guest, when I remembered that, in the newspaper
which I carried in my pocket, I had just been reading a plea of some
honorable M. P. for a much-needed reform in the system of counsel fees,
then being agitated in the House of Commons. The reply of the solicitor
general had made me laugh. He was inclined to agree with the honorable
member, but still preferred to follow precedent by referring the matter
to the Inns of Court. Quite incidentally, he mentioned that the matter
had been hanging fire in the House two hundred years. It seemed very
English to me then; but when we afterward came to tackle our rear
tenements, and in the first batch there was a row which I knew to have
been picked out by the sanitary inspector twenty-five years before as
fit only to be destroyed, I recognized that we were kin, after all.
That was Gotham Court. It was first on the list, and the Mott Street
Barracks came next, when, as executive officer of the Good Government
Clubs, I helped the Board of Health put the law to the test the
following year. Roosevelt was Police President and Health Commissioner;
nobody was afraid of the landlord. The Health Department kept a list of
66 old houses, with a population of 5460 tenants, in which there had
been 1313 deaths in a little over five years (1889-94). From among them
we picked our lot, and the department drove the tenants out. The owners
went to law, one and all; but, to their surprise and dismay, the courts
held with the health officers. The moral effect was instant and
overwhelming. Rather than keep up the fight, with no rent coming in, the
landlords surrendered at discretion. In consideration of this,
compensation was allowed them at the rate of about a thousand dollars a
house, although they were really entitled only to the value of the old
bricks. The buildings all came under the head of "wholly unfit." Gotham
Court, with its sixteen buildings, in which, many years before, a health
inspector counted 146 cases of sickness, including "all kinds of
infectious disease," was bought for $19,750, and Mullen's Court,
adjoining, for $7251. To show the character of all, let two serve; in
each case it is the official record, upon which seizure was made, that
is quoted:
No. 98 Catherine Street: "The floor in the apartments and the wooden
steps leading to the second-floor apartment are broken, loose, saturated
with filth. The roof and eaves gutters leak, rendering the apartments
wet. The two apartments on the first floor consist of one room each, in
which the tenants are compelled to cook, eat, and sleep. The back walls
are defective, the house wet and damp, and unfit for human habitation.
It robs the surrounding houses of light."
"The sunlight never enters" was the constant refrain.
No. 17 Sullivan Street: "Occupied by the lowest whites and negroes,
living together. The houses are decayed from cellar to garret, and
filthy beyond description,--the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen.
The beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, where there is any
plaster, are rotten, and alive with vermin. They are a menace to the
public health, and cannot be repaired. Their annual death-rate in five
years was 41.38."
[Illustration: The Mott Street Barracks.]
The sunlight enters where these stood, at all events, and into 58 other
yards that once were plague spots. Of 94 rear tenements seized that
year, 60 were torn down, 33 of them voluntarily by the owners; 29 were
remodelled and allowed to stand, chiefly as workshops; 5 other houses
were standing empty, and yielding no rent, when I last heard of them. I
suppose they have been demolished since. The worst of them all, the Mott
Street Barracks, were taken into court by the owner; but all the judges
and juries in the land had no power to put them back when it was decided
upon a technicality that they should not have been destroyed offhand. It
was a case of "They can't put you in jail for that."--"Yes, but I am in
jail." They were gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they
ought to go, before the Appellate Division called a halt. We were not in
a mood to trifle with the Barracks, or risk any of the law's delays. In
1888 I counted 360 tenants in these tenements, front and rear, all
Italians, and the infant death-rate of the Barracks that year was 325
per 1000. There were forty babies, and one in three of them had to die.
The general infant death-rate for the whole tenement-house population
that year was 88.38. In the four years following, during which the
population and the death-rate of the houses were both reduced with an
effort, fifty-one funerals went out of the Barracks. With entire
fitness, a cemetery corporation held the mortgage upon the property. The
referee allowed it the price of opening one grave, in the settlement,
gave one dollar to the lessee, and one hundred and ten dollars to the
landlord, who refused to collect and took his case into the courts. We
waited to see the landlord attack the law itself on the score of
constitutionality, but he did not. The Court of Appeals decided that it
had not been shown that the Barracks might not have been used for some
other purpose than a tenement and that therefore we had been hasty. The
city paid damages, but it was all right. It was emphatically a case of
haste making for speed. So far the law stands unchallenged, both here
and in Massachusetts, where they destroyed twice as many unfit houses as
we did in New York and stood their ground on its letter, paying the
owners the bare cost of the old timbers.
As in every other instance, we seized only the rear houses at the
Barracks; but within a year or two the front houses were also sold and
destroyed too, and so disappeared quite the worst rookery that was left
on Manhattan Island. Those of us who had explored it with the "midnight
police" in its worst days had no cause to wonder at its mortality. In
Berlin they found the death-rate per thousand to be 163.5 where a family
occupied one room, 22.5 where it lived in two rooms, 7.5 in the case of
three-room dwellers, and 5.4 where they had four rooms.[22] Does any one
ask yet why we fight the slum in Berlin and New York? The Barracks in
those days suggested the first kind.
[Footnote 22: "Municipal Government in Continental Europe," by
Albert Shaw.]
I have said before that I do not believe in paying the slum landlord for
taking his hand off our throats, when we have got the grip on him in
turn. Mr. Roger Foster, who as a member of the Tenement House Committee
drew the law, and as counsel for the Health Department fought the
landlords successfully in the courts, holds to the opposite view. I am
bound to say that instances turned up in which it did seem a hardship to
deprive the owners of even such property. I remember especially a
tenement in Roosevelt Street, which was the patrimony and whole estate
of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the
front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was
one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract
principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to
ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I
hope--well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do with the case.
The house is down, and the main issue decided upon its merits.
In the 94 tenements (counting the front houses in; they cannot be
separated from the rear tenements in the death registry) there were in
five years 956 deaths, a rate of 62.9 at a time when the general city
death-rate was 24.63. It was the last and heaviest blow aimed at the
abnormal mortality of a city that ought, by reason of many advantages,
to be one of the healthiest in the world. With clean streets, pure milk,
medical school inspection, antitoxin treatment of deadly diseases, and
better sanitary methods generally; with the sunlight let into its slums,
and its worst plague spots cleaned out, the death-rate of New York came
down from 26.32 per 1000 inhabitants in 1887 to 19.53 in 1897. Inasmuch
as a round half million was added to its population within the ten
years, it requires little figuring to show that the number whose lives
were literally saved by reform would people a city of no mean
proportions. The extraordinary spell of hot weather in the summer of
1896, when the temperature hung for ten consecutive days in the
nineties, with days and nights of extreme discomfort, brought out the
full meaning of this. While many were killed by sunstroke, the
population as a whole was shown to have acquired, in better hygienic
surroundings, a much greater power of resistance. It yielded slowly to
the heat. Where two days had been sufficient, in former years, to send
the death-rate up, it now took five; and the infant mortality remained
low throughout the dreadful trial. Perhaps the substitution of beer for
whiskey as a summer drink had something to do with it; but Colonel
Waring's broom and unpolitical sanitation had more. Since it spared him
so many voters, the politician ought to have been grateful for this; but
he was not. Death-rates are not as good political arguments as tax
rates, we found out. In the midst of it all, a policeman whom I knew
went to his Tammany captain to ask if Good Government Clubs were
political clubs within the meaning of the law which forbade policemen
joining such. The answer he received set me to thinking: "Yes, the
meanest, worst kind of political clubs, they are." Yet they had done
nothing worse than to save the babies, the captain's with the rest.
The landlord read the signs better, and ran to cover till the storm
should blow over. Houses that had hardly known repairs since they were
built were put in order with all speed. All over the city, he made
haste to set his house to rights, lest it be seized or brought to the
bar in other ways. The Good Government Clubs had their hands full that
year (1896-97). They made war upon the dark hall in the double-decker,
and upon the cruller bakery. They compelled the opening of small parks,
or the condemnation of sites for them anyway, exposed the abuses of the
civil courts, the "poor man's courts," urged on the building of new
schools, cleaned up in the Tombs prison and hastened the demolition of
the wicked old pile, and took a hand in evolving a sensible and humane
system of dealing with the young vagrants who were going to waste on
free soup. The proposition to establish a farm colony for their
reclamation was met with the challenge at Albany that "we have had
enough reform in New York City," and, as the event proved, for the time
being we had really gone as far as we could. But even that was a good
long way. Some things had been nailed that could never again be undone;
and hand in hand with the effort to destroy had gone another to build
up, that promised to set us far enough ahead to appeal at last
successfully to the self-interest of the builder, if not to his
humanity; or, failing that, to compel him to decency. If that promise
has not been all kept, the end is not yet. I believe it will be kept.
[Illustration: R. Fulton Cutting, Chairman of the Citizens' Union.]
The movement for reform, in the matter of housing the people, had
proceeded upon a clearly outlined plan that apportioned to each of
several forces its own share of the work. At a meeting held under the
auspices of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor,
early in the days of the movement, the field had been gone over
thoroughly. To the Good Government Clubs fell the task, as already set
forth, of compelling the enforcement of the existing tenement-house
laws. D. O. Mills, the philanthropic banker, declared his purpose to
build hotels which should prove that a bed and lodging as good as any
could be furnished to the great army of homeless men at a price that
would compete with the cheap lodging houses, and yet yield a profit to
the owner. On behalf of a number of well-known capitalists, who had been
identified with the cause of tenement-house reform for years, Robert
Fulton Cutting, the president of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor, offered to build homes for the working people
that should be worthy of the name, on a large scale. A company was
formed, and chose for its president Dr. Elgin R. L. Gould, author of the
government report on the "Housing of the Working People," the standard
work on the subject. A million dollars was raised by public
subscription, and operations were begun at once.
Two ideas were kept in mind as fundamental: one, that charity that will
not pay will not stay; the other, that nothing can be done with the
twenty-five-foot lot. It is the primal curse of our housing system, and
any effort toward better things must reckon with it first. Nineteen lots
on Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth streets, west of Tenth Avenue, were
purchased of Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, who took one tenth of the
capital stock of the City and Suburban Homes Company; and upon these was
erected the first block of tenements. This is the neighborhood toward
which the population has been setting with ever increasing congestion.
Already in 1895 the Twenty-second Ward contained nearly 200,000 souls. I
gave figures in the previous chapter that showed a crowding of more than
1100 persons per acre in some of the blocks here where the conditions of
the notorious Tenth Ward are certain to be reproduced, if indeed they
are not exceeded. In the Fifteenth Assembly District, some distance
below, but on the same line, the first sociological canvass of the
Federation of Churches had found the churches, schools, and other
educational agencies marshalling a frontage of 756 feet on the street,
while the saloon fronts stretched themselves over nearly a mile; so
that, said the compiler of these pregnant facts, "saloon social ideals
are minting themselves on the minds of the people at the ratio of seven
saloon thoughts to one educational thought." It would not have been easy
to find a spot better fitted for the experiment of restoring the home to
its place.
[Illustration: Alfred Corning Clark Buildings.]
The Alfred Corning Clark buildings, as they were called in recognition
of the effort of this public-spirited woman, have at this writing been
occupied five years. They harbor nearly four hundred families, as
contented a lot as I ever saw anywhere. The one tenant who left in
disgust was a young doctor who had settled on the estate, thinking he
could pick up a practice among so many. But he couldn't. They were not
often sick, those tenants. Last year only three died, and they were all
killed while away from home. So he had good cause of complaint. The rest
had none, and having none, they stay, which is no mean blow struck for
the home in the battle with the slum. The home feeling can never grow
where people do not stay long enough to feel at home, any more than the
plant can which the child is pulling up every two or three days to
"see if it has roots."
Half the tenement house population--and I am not sure that I ought not
to say the whole of it--is everlastingly on the move. Dr. Gould quotes
as an instance of it the experience of an assembly district leader in
distributing political circulars among the people in a good tenement
neighborhood. In three months after the enrolment lists had been made
out, one-third of the tenants had moved. No doubt the experience was
typical. How can the one who hardly knows what a home means be expected
to have any pride or interest in his home in the larger sense: the city?
And to what in such men is one to appeal in the interests of civic
betterment? That is why every effort that goes to help tie the citizen
to one spot long enough to give him the proprietary sense in it which is
the first step toward civic interest and pride, is of such account. It
is one way in which the public schools as neighborhood houses in the
best sense could be of great help, and a chief factor in the success of
the social settlement. And that is why model tenements, which pay and
foster the home, give back more than a money interest to the community.
They must pay, for else, as I said, they will not stay. These pay four
per cent, and are expected to pay five, the company's limit. So it is
not strange that the concern has prospered. It has since raised more
than one million of dollars, and has built another block, with room for
338 families, on First Avenue and on Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth
streets, within hail of Battle Row, of anciently warlike memory. Still
another block is going up at Avenue A and Seventy-eighth Street, and in
West Sixty-second Street, where the colored population crowds, the
company is erecting two buildings for negro tenants, where they will
live as well as their white fellows do in _their_ model tenements,--a
long-delayed act of justice, for as far back as any one can remember the
colored man has been paying more and getting less for his money in New
York than whites of the same grade, who are poorer tenants every way.
The Company's "city homes" come as near being that as any can. There is
light and air in abundance, steam heat in winter in the latest ones,
fireproof stairs, and deadened partitions to help on the privacy that is
at once the most needed and hardest to get in a tenement. The houses do
not look like barracks. Any one who has ever seen a row of factory
tenements that were just houses, not homes, will understand how much
that means. I can think of some such rows now, with their ugly brick
fronts, straight up and down without a break and without a vine or a
window-box of greens or flowers, and the mere thought of them gives me
the blues for the rest of the day. There is nothing of that about these
tenements, unless it be the long play-yard between the buildings in
Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth streets. It is too narrow to have anything
in it but asphalt. But the rest makes up for it in part.
All together, the company has redeemed its promise of real model
tenements; and it has had no trouble with its tenants. The few and
simple rules are readily understood as being for the general good, and
so obeyed. It is the old story, told years and years ago by Mr. Alfred
T. White when he had built his Riverside tenements in Brooklyn. The
tenants "do not have to come up" to the landlord's standard. They are
more than abreast of him in his utmost endeavor, if he will only use
common sense in the management of his property. They do that in the City
and Suburban Homes Company's buildings. They give their tenants
shower-baths and a friend for a rent-collector, their children playrooms
and Christmas parties, and the whole neighborhood feels the stimulus of
the new and humane plan. In all Battle Row there has not been a scrap,
let alone an old-time shindy, since the "accommodation flats" came upon
the scene. That is what they call them. It is an everyday observation
that the Row has "come up" since some of the old houses have been
remodelled. The new that are being built aim visibly toward the higher
standard.
The company's rents average a dollar a week per room, and are a trifle
higher than those of the old tenements round about; but they have so
much more in the way of comfort that the money is eagerly paid; nor is
the difference so great that the "picking of tenants" amounts to more
than the putting of a premium on steadiness, sobriety, and cleanliness,
which in itself is a service to render. One experience of the management
which caused some astonishment, but upon reflection was accepted as an
encouraging sign, was the refusal of the tenants to use the common
wash-tubs in the laundry. They are little used to this day. The women
will use the drying racks, but they object to rubbing elbows with their
neighbors while they wash their clothes. It is, after all, a sign that
the tenement that smothers individuality left them this useful handle,
and if the experience squashed the hopes of some who dreamed of
municipal wash-houses on the Glasgow plan, there is nothing to grieve
over. Every peg of personal pride rescued from the tenement is worth a
thousand theories for hanging the hope of improvement on.
With $2,300,000 invested by this time, the company has built city homes
for 1450 families, and has only made a beginning. All the money that is
needed for going on with its work is in sight. Nor are the rich the only
investors. Of the 400 stockholders 250 have small lots, ten shares and
less each, a healthy sign that the company is holding the confidence of
the community. It has fairly earned it. No one could have done a greater
and better thing for the metropolis than to demonstrate that it is
possible to build homes for the toilers as a business and net a business
interest upon the investment.
The statement is emphasized by the company's experience with the
suburban end of its work. It bought sites for two or three hundred
little cottages out on Long Island, but within the greater city, and
only half an hour by trolley or elevated from the City Hall. A hundred
houses were built, neat and cosey homes of brick and timber, each in its
own garden; and a plan was devised under which the purchaser had twenty
years to pay for the property. A life insurance policy protected the
seller and secured the house to the widow should the breadwinner die.
The plan has worked well in Belgium under the eyes of the government,
but it failed to attract buyers here. Of those whom it did attract at
the outset, not a few have given up and gone away. When I went out to
have a look at the place the year after Homewood had been settled,
seventy-two houses had found owners under the company's plans. After
four years fifty-six only are so held, ten have been bought outright,
and three sold under contract. Practically the company has had to give
up its well-thought-out plan and rent as many of the houses as it could.
Nine were vacant this last spring.
So what we all thought the "way out" of the slum seems barred for the
time being. For there is no other explanation of the failure than that
the people will not go "among the stumps." Lack of facilities for
getting there played a part, possibly, but a minor one, and now there is
no such grievance. The simple fact is that the home-feeling that makes a
man rear a home upon the soil as the chief ambition of his life was not
there. The tenement and the flat have weakened that peg among the class
of workers for whom Homewood was planned. I hate to say that they have
broken the peg, for I do not believe it. But it has been hurt without
doubt. They longed for the crowds. The grass and the trees and the birds
and the salt breath of the sea did not speak to them in a language they
understood. The brass bands and the hand-organs, the street cries and
the rush and roar of the city, had made them forget their childhood's
tongue. For the children understood, even in the gutter.
"It means, I suppose," said Dr. Gould to me, when we had talked it all
over, "that we are and always shall be a tenement house city, and that
we have got to reckon with and plan for that only."
I think not. I believe he is mistaken. And yet I can give no other
ground for my belief than my unyielding faith that things will come
right yet, if it does take time. They are not right as they are. Man is
not made to be born and to live all his life in a box, packed away with
his fellows like so many herring in a barrel. He is here in this world
for something that is not attained in that way; but is, if not attained,
at least perceived when the daisies and the robins come in. If to help
men perceive it is all we can do in our generation, that is a good deal.
But I believe that before our children have come to the divide, perhaps
before we are gone, we shall see the tide of the last century's drift to
the cities turn, under the impulse of the new forces that are being
harnessed for man's work, and Homewood come to its rights, I say I
believe it I wish I could say I knew; but then you would ask for my
proofs, and I haven't any. For all that, I still believe it.
Meanwhile Dr. Gould's advice is good sense. If he is right, it is of the
last importance; if I am right, it is still the way to proving me so by
holding on to what is left of the home in the tenement and making the
most of it. That we have taken the advice is good ground for hope, in
the face of the fact that New York has still the worst housing in the
world. We can now destroy what is not fit to stand. We have done it, and
the republic yet survives. The slum landlord would have had us believe
that it must perish with his rookeries. We are building model tenements
and making them pay. Alfred T. White's Riverside tenements are as good
to-day as when they were built a dozen years ago--better if anything,
for they were honestly built--and in all that time they have paid five
and six per cent, and even more. Dr. Gould found that only six per cent
of all the great model housing operations which he examined for the
government here and abroad had failed to pay. All the rest were
successful. And by virtue of the showing we have taken the
twenty-five-foot lot itself by the throat.
Three years ago, speaking of it as the one thing that was in the way of
progress in New York, I wrote: "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."
[Illustration: The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn.]
That duty has been done since; let me tell how. Popular sentiment,
taking more and more firmly hold of the fact that there is a direct
connection between helpless poverty and bad housing, shaped itself in
1898 into a volunteer Tenement House Committee which, as an effective
branch of the Charity Organization Society, drew up and presented to the
municipal authorities a reform code of building ordinances affecting the
dwellings of the poor. But Tammany was back, and they would not listen
at the City Hall. Seeing which, the committee made up its mind to appeal
to the people themselves in such fashion that it should be heard. That
was the way the Tenement House Exhibition of the winter of 1900 came
into existence.
Rich and poor came to see that speaking record of a city's sorry plight,
and at last we all understood. Not to understand after one look at the
poverty and disease maps that hung on the wall was to declare oneself a
dullard. The tenements were all down in them, with the size of them and
the air space within, if there was any. Black dots upon the poverty maps
showed that for each one five families in that house had applied for
charity within a given time. There were those that had as many as
fifteen of the ominous marks, showing that seventy-five families had
asked aid from the one house. To find a tenement free from the taint one
had to search long and with care. Upon the disease maps the scourge of
tuberculosis lay like a black pall over the double-decker districts. A
year later the State Commission, that continued the work then begun,
said: "There is hardly a tenement house in which there has not been at
least one case of pulmonary tuberculosis within the last five years, and
in some houses there have been as many as twenty-two different cases of
this terrible disease. There are over 8000 deaths a year in New York
City from this disease alone, at least 20,000 cases of well-developed
and recognized tuberculosis, and in addition a large number of obscure
and incipient cases. The connection between tuberculosis and the
character of the tenement houses in which the poor people live is of the
very closest."[23]
[Footnote 23: Report of the Tenement House Committee of 1900. The
secretary of that body said: "Well might those maps earn for New
York the title of the City of the Living Death."]
[Illustration: A Typical East Side Block.]
A model was shown of a typical East Side block, containing 2781 persons
on two acres of land, nearly every bit of which was covered with
buildings. There were 466 babies in the block (under five years), but
not a bath-tub except one that hung in an air shaft. Of the 1588 rooms
441 were dark, with no ventilation to the outer air except through other
rooms; 635 rooms gave upon twilight "air shafts." In five year 32 cases
of tuberculosis had been reported from that block, and in that time 660
different families in the block had applied for charity. The year
before the Bureau of Contagious Diseases had registered 13 cases of
diphtheria there. However, the rent-roll was all right. It amounted to
$113,964 a year.
[Illustration: Robert W. de Forest, Chairman of the Tenement House
Commission of 1900.]
Those facts told. New York--the whole country--woke up. More than 170
architects sent in plans in the competition for a humane tenement that
should be commercially profitable. Roosevelt was governor, and promptly
appointed a Tenement House Commission, the third citizen body appointed
for such purposes by authority of the state. Mr. Robert de Forest, a
distinguished lawyer and a public-spirited man, who had been at the head
of the Charity Organization Society and of the relief efforts I spoke
of, in time became its chairman, and commissioner of the new Tenement
House Department that was created by the new charter of the city to
carry into effect the law the commission drew up. At this writing, with
the department not yet fully organized, it is too early to say with any
degree of certainty exactly how far the last two years have set us
ahead; but this much is certain:
"Discretion" is dead--at last. In Manhattan, no superintendent of
buildings shall have leave after this to pen tenants in a building with
stairs of wood because he thinks with luck it might burn slowly; nor in
Brooklyn shall a deputy commissioner rate a room with a window opening
on a hall, or a skylight covered over at the top, "the outer air."[24]
Of these things there is an end. The air shaft that was a narrow slit
between towering walls has become a "court," a yard big enough for
children to run in. Thirty per cent of the tenement-house lot must be
open to the sun. The double-decker has had its day, and it is over. A
man may still build a tenement on a twenty-five-foot lot if he so
chooses, but he can hardly pack four families on each floor of it and
keep within the law. He can do much better, and make an ample profit, by
crossing the lot line and building on forty or fifty feet; in
consequence of which, building being a business, he does so. In a lot of
half a hundred tenement plans I looked over at the department yesterday,
there were only two for single houses, and they had but three families
on the floor.
[Footnote 24: Report of Tenement House Commission of 1900.]
So it seems as if the blight of the twenty-five-foot lot were really
wiped out with the double-decker. And no one is hurt. The speculative
builder weeps--for the poor, he says. He will build no more, he avers,
and rents will go up, so they will have to sleep on the streets. But I
notice the plans I spoke of call for an investment of three millions of
dollars, and that they are working overtime at the department to pass on
them, so great is the rush. Belike, then, they are crocodile tears.
Anyway, let him weep. He has laughed long enough.
[Illustration:
1. Old Knickerbocker dwelling.
2. The same made over into a tenement.
3. The rear tenement caves.
4. Packing-box tenement built for revenue only.
5. The limit; the air shaft--first concession to tenant.
6. The double-decker, where the civic conscience
began to stir in 1879.
7. Evolution of double-decker up to date.
8. Prize plan of Tenement House Exhibition, 1900
(fifty-foot lot).]
[Illustration: Plan of a Typical Floor in Class First of the Competition
in the C. O. S. Plans of Model Tenements.
Rentable area 2724.94^o = 54.70% of lot
Free air-space (courts) 1500.25^o = 30.01% of lot
Walls, partitions, and public space 764.81^o = 15.29% of lot
Total 5000.00^o = 100.00% = lot
3 two-room apartments
3 three-room apartments
2 four-room apartments
8 apartments. 23 rooms]
As for the rents, he will put them as high as he can, no doubt. They
were too high always, for what they bought. In the case of the builder
the state can add force to persuasion, and so urge him along the path of
righteousness. When it comes to the rent collector the case is
different. It may yet be necessary for the municipality to enter the
field as a competing landlord on the five-per-cent basis; but I would
rather we, as a community, learned first a little more of the art of
governing ourselves without scandal. With Tammany liable to turn up at
any moment--no, no! Political tenements might yet add a chapter to the
story of our disgrace to make men weep. I have not forgotten the use
Tammany made of the people's baths erected in the Hamilton Fish Park on
the East Side--the Ham-fish, locally. They were shut from the day
they were opened, I came near saying; I mean from the day they should
have been opened; and two stalwart watchmen drew salaries for sitting in
the door to keep the people out. That was a perfectly characteristic use
of the people's money, and is not lightly to be invited back. Rather
wait awhile yet, and see what our bridges and real rapid transit, and
the "philanthropy and five per cent" plan, will do for us. When that
latter has been grasped so by the tenant that a little extra brass and
plate-glass does not tempt him over into the enemy's camp, the usurious
rents may yet follow the double-decker, as they have clung to it in the
past.
But if the city may not be the landlord of tenements, I have often
thought it might with advantage manage them to the extent of building
them to contain so many tenements on basis of air space, and no more.
The thing was proposed when the tenement house question first came up
for discussion, but was dropped then. The last Tenement House Commission
considered it carefully, but decided to wait and see first how the new
department worked. The whole expense of that, with its nearly two
hundred inspectors, might easily be borne by the collection of a license
fee so small that even the tenement house landlord could not complain.
Lodging houses are licensed, and workshops in the tenements likewise,
to secure efficient control of them. If that is not secured in the case
of the workshops, as it is not, it is no fault of the plan, but of the
working out of it. I do not expect the licensing of tenements to dispose
of all the evils in them. No law or system will ever do that. But it
ought to make it easier to get the grip on them that has been wanting
heretofore, to our hurt.