In regard to lighting and ventilation, the facts are less easily grouped. The buildings being seldom of a depth to encroach seriously upon the yards, we find, with the exception of a very few of the higher houses, that nearly all of the kitchens and general living-rooms open upon the yard or street and are thus adequately lighted. In the converted dwellings, and in all houses occupied by but one family on each floor, a large proportion of bedrooms also are open to the outer air. But in the three or four-story buildings erected originally for tenement uses, and furnishing accommodations for two families or more on a floor, a light bedroom is more nearly the exception than the rule. The typical interior room is lighted by a window to the outer living-room or a public hall, these windows seldom having more than five square feet of glazed surface, and more frequently an area of from three to four square feet. One thousand and eighty-four such rooms were noted in the course of the investigation; while—a still more serious evil—399 rooms were found which had no window at all, and in most cases not even a transom opening into another room.
Light and air-shafts were found in only a small proportion of the tenement houses investigated; and a light and air-shaft which is more than the merest travesty of its respectable name is emphatically an exception. The typical shaft is a triangular or oblong niche in the outer wall, with an area of from five to twenty square feet; an occasional variation being found in a square shaft of about the same area, let into the interior of the house and covered in most cases by a skylight. Below the top story such shafts furnish practically no light, while tenants bore almost unvarying witness that windows upon them were uniformly kept closed. A single whiff of the pent-up air within their narrow walls is quite sufficient to convince one of the wisdom of such disregard of their presence; and one feels no surprise in reading the evidence of chemists and physicians as to the positive injury to health wrought by pretended ventilation of this sort—evidence which has led to the giving of the suggestive name of culture tubes to such shafts. Among evils of sanitation only a few of the most serious can be touched upon. Most conspicuous and widespread of all is that of the foul and ill-smelling privy vault. Seventy-five per cent of the houses investigated furnish no toilet accommodations save these objectionable structures in the yard. The vaults are in the main sewer-connected, one block and part of another in District III being the only sections in which no street sewer is laid, though unsewered vaults were found in small numbers elsewhere. But a sewer connection is in a large proportion of cases a most illusory blessing. The great mass of solid matter frequently remains after the liquids have run off to the sewer, and its decomposition renders the air of the yard, upon which the rear rooms depend, many times almost intolerable. In two cases school-sinks—modified privies, with metal vaults in which water stands—were discovered in cellars; but as the water was changed, according to the testimony of tenants, but once a week, these cannot be said to offer many advantages over the ordinary privy. Among the 368 water-closets in use in the remaining houses, the old and objectionable pan closets number sixty-one; while numerous water-closet compartments are either entirely unventilated or have windows only to halls or rooms, and in a number of cases, especially on the top floor of five-story buildings, the water-flush is wholly inadequate to cleanse the bowl.
A serious evil is also found in the location and condition of household sinks. In seventy of the houses investigated all such sinks were located in the public hall, while in fifty-five other houses sinks were so located on one or more floors. Nearly every such sink is used by two families. In one block, chosen at haphazard from those of the Italian district, sixty apartments were found whose occupants were obliged so to share their sink; while fifteen other apartments were provided with but one sink to every three or four apartments. Furthermore, eight houses were found in which, in flat defiance of a city ordinance, no water at all was furnished indoors. One row of four such houses, containing in all twenty-two apartments, was provided with but two hydrants in the common yard, one hydrant serving for ten, the other for twelve apartments.
The collection of statistics as to the plumbing of sinks was not at first attempted, but was taken up as the result of an observation of conditions in the earlier blocks investigated. Eleven hundred and sixty-two sinks, located in four blocks of District I, and in the six blocks of Districts II and III, were examined. Of these only 10 per cent were properly trapped and vented; 68 per cent were trapped but not vented—a far from satisfactory state of affairs, especially where as in many cases traps were so small or otherwise defective as to be practically useless; 10 per cent were neither trapped nor vented, the pipes thus offering free passage to the contaminated sewer air; 12 per cent were boarded up solidly, so that the waste-pipes could not be examined—an almost sure sign that the concealed plumbing is of the oldest and worst type.
One serious element in the insanitary conditions of the districts investigated, which, unlike those just mentioned, cannot primarily be charged to the householder, is found in the character of the land upon which a large part of lower Jersey City is built. Only six of the sixteen blocks investigated are composed entirely of original solid ground. Five blocks in District I were in greater or less degree formed by the filling in of marsh land or the extension of the water front. All of District II, and nearly all of two blocks of District III, were so formed.[[13]]
The significance of these facts appears when we realize that land so made is largely intermingled with refuse matter, and, still more important, is generally damp and is subject to periodic risings of tidewater. In a large proportion of the houses built upon such land, observations of the investigator, supplemented by the testimony of tenants, proves that the water in cellars unprotected, as are nearly all, by water-proof flooring, stands at times to a depth of several inches. Sewage is thus frequently washed back into yards and cellars, first floor apartments are rendered damp and unhealthful, and nauseating odors suggest the serious danger to health which such a condition brings upon the entire house. Fortunately the cellar-dwelling evil is not a prevalent one in Jersey City; yet one instance is recalled where a family paying for four rooms in the basement and first floor had been obliged to vacate the lower two rooms entirely—the men of the family wading through water knee-deep to rescue the kitchen stove.
One of the most serious evils from which the poorer classes suffer is that of overcrowded apartments. As was anticipated from the facts brought to light by investigations in other American cities, this evil was found to be most prevalent among the poorest foreign population, especially the Poles and Italians, and is largely due to the custom of taking so called boarders—really, in most cases, lodgers, who provide their own bedding and pay in the neighborhood of two dollars a month.
There are two ways of measuring overcrowding in apartments; by number of individuals per room, and by cubic air space per individual. To secure perfectly accurate results, it is of course necessary to discover just how many rooms in a given apartment are occupied for sleeping purposes and how many persons sleep in each. This may seem a simple matter, but in practice reliable results are not only very difficult, but in many cases impossible to secure, save by a night inspection. Not only must allowance be made for very general under-statement of the number of boarders taken, but in a large proportion of cases either no answers at all or wholly unsatisfactory answers can be obtained to questions as to the distribution of members of the family and of boarders at night. Under these circumstances it has seemed best, instead of attempting to state the number of individuals sleeping in each room and the precise cubic air space afforded by that room to each, to give the ratio of number of occupants to entire number of rooms in each apartment, and the cubic air space per individual afforded by that apartment as a whole. Only rough indications of the degree of overcrowding at night are of course given by this method, but it has at least the advantage of greater accuracy so far as it goes than could fairly be claimed for one seemingly more precise.
Applying the method of measurement by cubic air space to the 2,154 apartments investigated, we find that in 65 per cent of them each occupant has an allowance of 600 cubic feet of air or more. Living conditions in most of these apartments are fair, and in many good; yet some of the most disgraceful cases of overcrowding were found among them—as in one apartment, where in a single large room two little girls of about twelve years slept, together with a varying number of male boarders. The remaining 35 per cent of apartments afford less than 600 cubic feet of air space per occupant. This means in nearly all cases a serious degree of overcrowding; since if bedrooms alone are occupied at night such an allowance for the whole apartment means actually on an average less than 400 cubic feet, and often less than 300 or even 200 cubic feet for each person; while if the crowding compels the use of the kitchen for sleeping purposes, other evils hardly less serious are added to those of limited air space. Such being the meaning of the figures given, it becomes evident that in the 199 apartments, 9 per cent of all, in which there were found to be less than 400 cubic feet of air space to each occupant in the apartment as a whole, very serious danger to health exists. It is below the limit of 400 cubic feet per adult, with a smaller allowance for children, that government interference has generally been authorized, where authorized at all; as is notably the case in Glasgow, where the law is enforced by an especially efficient system of night inspection, and among American cities in New York.
The other test of overcrowding, by ratio of number of persons to number of rooms, while a less accurate means of estimating effect on health, furnishes a more accurate indication of the relation of overcrowding to standards of decency. An example typical of many cases met with will make this distinction clear. Suppose two large high-ceiled rooms with a total cubic contents of 3,500 cubic feet, occupied by eight people. Each person has then more than the minimum of 400 cubic feet; yet the absence of any possibility of privacy or decency of living involved where men and women boarders, parents and growing children make up the eight, need not be dwelt upon. It is evident that four rooms with an aggregate contents of less than 3,200 cubic feet might be occupied by the same eight persons with perhaps greater danger to health from limited breathing space, but with certainly better opportunities for separation by sexes.