Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Housing in Washington

In Washington, D. C., the housing problem has been forced upon the attention of Congress which has shown gross neglect all these years in its care of the national capital’s population and especially of the negroes there. The voteless citizens of the capital and their sympathizers from outside attempted for a long time to secure remedial activity in the city of Washington whose alleys and slums were a national disgrace from the standpoint of health, morals and crime. Booklets and reports were published and organizations formed for the purpose of bringing pressure to bear upon Congress to improve housing conditions.

President Roosevelt had appointed a Homes Commission to study and report on the alley dwellings but nothing had resulted from this except possibly the conversion of Willow Tree Alley into an interior park. Women and men felt that such an apparent remedy might cause still greater evils by leaving many of the poor altogether homeless, and the agitation was pushed the harder for the creation of a system of minor streets created out of the alleys.

Last year two pamphlets of a vigorous nature were published by the Monday Evening Club and by the Women’s Welfare Department of the National Civic Federation. Public meetings were arranged by the Civic Federation and conferences of social workers in Washington were called, one of the biggest of these being held at the White House last winter—an evidence of the interest taken by the wife of President Wilson in the housing of the people in Washington.

Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, who had been aroused by visits made to the alleys under the guidance of Mrs. Archibald Hopkins and Mrs. Ernest Bicknell, piloted senators and congressmen into the bad areas to make them see and feel the need of change. As a consequence of this work, bills were introduced into both houses of Congress for some solution of the alley problem. How much progress would have been made with the bills it is difficult to know but the significant thing is that Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, in almost her last conscious breath, made an appeal for the passing of that legislation. Her husband, the President, fortunately, sent word that such was her dying wish and out of sentiment for the “first lady of the land” this much needed legislation was hurriedly passed by the Senate of the United States, the lower house promising to add its approval. Mrs. Wilson was told the good news before she died.

In a case where neither the men of the district involved nor the women were voters, apparently an affecting sentimental situation saved the day for the poor families herded in their misery in dark alleys. Certainly up until this time, congressional land speculators in Washington had turned a deaf ear to the pleas of the women and the men who sought help for the slum dwellers.

In commenting on the situation in Washington, The Survey said:

Washington has long enjoyed the reputation of being the best planned city in America, the one large city in the world which from the day of its foundation has been built more or less consistently along the lines of a carefully thought-out plan. Only recently has it been realized that from the beginning this plan has been incomplete. While it provided for great public buildings and for dwellings of the wealthy and the well-to-do, it not only failed to provide homes for wage-earners, but actually offered temptations to house these wage-earners in an unwholesome manner. The magnificent wide avenues designed by Major L’Enfant, bordered along a great part of their distance by very deep lots, led inevitably to the construction of winding, branching alleys and the erection of hidden houses which had no place in the original plan.

Modern city planning lays the emphasis less on public buildings and boulevards and more on providing sites for homes. So the original plan of Washington must be supplemented by a modern plan providing a system of minor streets to let the wholesome light of publicity into the hidden slums of Washington and to provide economic use for the backs of the overdeep lots that line the avenues. They will do away with the present temptation to keep the old shacks standing or to build houses fronting on the avenues, but extending so far back that their middle rooms are dark and airless. Halfway measures at this time may wipe out the alley slums of the Capital only to give in place of them a far more difficult problem, the deep, unlighted and unventilated multiple dwelling.