On September 22, 1903, Emily W. Dinwiddie, who had been a City Inspector of the Tenement House Department of New York, began an investigation in behalf of the Association and under its direction,—an investigation that lasted nearly a year. The cost was defrayed by special contributions. It resulted in a report which is in all ways a model for the emulation of others engaged in social research. The Bureau of Building Inspection and the Board of Health granted her every facility and permitted her freely to accompany their inspectors. Her report, entitled “Housing Conditions in Philadelphia,” embraced the results of her thorough personal examination of 600 houses. For every dwelling-place investigated a card of minutely particularized details was filled out, of which facsimiles are presented, together with telling pictures, maps, and tables of simple and explicit arrangement giving according to nationality the statistics of every phase of the living conditions ascertained.
Miss Hannah Fox was chairman of the directing and assisting committee of the Association; the other members were Dr. Frances C. Van Gasken, Helen L. Parrish, Robert P. Shick, Dr. George Woodward, E. Spencer Miller. Lawrence Veiller of New York, with his wide official experience of tenement problems, was of much assistance.
Italian Tenement Known as Casa Ravello. Thirty Apartments of Two and Four Rooms Each. First Floor Arranged for Stores.
The three areas studied were distributed and representative. One was the block between Eighth and Ninth Streets, Carpenter and Christian. A second was the segment of North American and of Newmarket Streets lying between Vine and Callowhill. The third took in the block bounded by Sixteenth, Eighteenth, Lombard and Rodman Streets.
Here are some of the things Miss Dinwiddie found:—
“One tenement visited was a three story house, without fire-escapes, containing a grocery store, a fish stand and a meat shop on the first floor. Above in the seventeen living rooms of all kinds—kitchens, bed-rooms and dining rooms—were eight families, consisting of thirty-three persons. A goat was kept in the room back of the grocery, and three dogs upstairs.
“A row of houses faced on an alley whose width varied from three feet two inches to three feet eleven and a half inches.
“Five houses on one court, of which four were occupied, had cellars flooded with sewage from a leaking soil pipe, the foul water standing about a foot deep in all but one of the buildings.... Beds and bedding, said to have been cast aside because someone had died upon them, and it was ‘bad luck’ to use them again, were not infrequently found in cellars.”
In a certain alley “one hydrant was the only fixture for eleven families in ten houses.” A colored woman in one of the foul courts said: “I’m sorry to have you see my house lookin’ dis way, lady, but ’tain’ no use tryin’ to be clean; we ain’t got but one hydrant for dese yere five houses, an’ we ain’ had no water for a week, since de pump busted.”