A Court Improved.
III
THE ASSOCIATION
Any enterprise of social amelioration has its doubting Thomases and its Job’s comforters to contend with at the beginning, and the Octavia Hill Association has not been exempt from the need of explaining why it should exist, and why good citizens should uphold its ministration.
There are terrible homes for the underworld of Vienna called “Massenhotels.” It is a common experience to find twenty or thirty people of both sexes living in one room, each occupant paying ten cents a week for a quarter of a bed. Sometimes the room is windowless. Disease is rife, and the stench of the filthy bodies and the filthy clothing that clutters the rotting walls is intolerable.
“Thank God we have nothing like that here in Philadelphia!” exclaimed a good woman, throwing up her hands at this description. “It’s too bad that they can’t have the Octavia Hill Association in cities that need it more.”
But these festering, sweltering Poles, Jews, Slovaks and Croats of darkest Vienna are the submerged ones of a capital whose municipal motto is “On with the Dance;” whose name is the synonym of gayety and folly. These miserable folk, who call a little thin potato soup and a thimbleful of bad brandy a square meal, may have reached a lower stratum of existence than most Americans have seen. Does that excuse a complacency that takes it for granted that whatever is out of sight under the lid in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago or New Orleans is all right?
Philadelphia has a Civic Club that has been a blessing to the city in its work for the reign of law, through the virtuous energizing of good women. It has battled for everything that makes for better conditions of housing and of living in a city. The list of good works it has brought out of dreamland into the light of common day is as diversified as the life of the great city which the persistent effort of this Club has sweetened and ennobled. It was but natural that the Octavia Hill Association should have its genesis among friends in council who met in the hospitable quarters of the Club in the winter and spring of 1895–96 to study the large and many-angled problem of fair play for the metropolitan poor.
There had been previous efforts, such as that of the Benevolent Building Association of 1865, to provide bright and cleanly dwellings for families of limited earning capacity. In 1885 a lending library for children, in the heart of a negro district at Seventh and St. Mary Streets, brought home to its benevolent promoters the need of a new and improved order of living in the hovels where the books were circulated. It was plain that a transformation was not to be wrought merely by the magic of good books. People must take hold of people; life must come into stimulating contact with life; the socially uplifted must discover that the economically downtrodden were their neighbors. Mr. Theodore Starr had already made an inspiring beginning near at hand. He had bought and razed horrid eyesores of dwellings and had put up in their place rows of well-built houses that appealed to a better class of tenants. The result of his enterprise was felt throughout the region. With the name of Theodore Starr, honoris causa, must be associated those of Edith Wright Gifford and Hannah Fox. The latter not merely bought and improved dwellings in this St. Mary Street district but personally undertook their management upon the successful plan of Octavia Hill which she so intimately understood. When she had studied the local problem in its practical aspects for several years, she met the beloved, untiring altruist, Mrs. William F. Jenks and others in the conferences mentioned, and in these sessions a report was discussed and prepared. They then went before the Civic Club with the report, and asked for its sanction and its furtherance. The Civic Club responded instantly and whole-heartedly, and the Octavia Hill Association was formed as an independent organization, to have for its specialized concern the provision of homes of the right sort, for families of modest means.
