Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

Franklin Court. Yard Conditions When Property Was Bought, For Five Front and Thirteen Rear Back-to-Back Houses, Huddled Together on Adjoining Alleys.

Franklin Court After Renovation. The Rear Houses Thrown Together and Now Rented in Sets of One, Two or Three Rooms. Suggestive of What May Be Done to Give Better Light and Air and Sanitary Conditions in Similar Houses.

Ordinarily it is not the great crises of life and death that confront the sympathetic rent-collector. But she never can tell what will meet her round the corner. Here sits a man who was for years a baker, and he is utterly forlorn. His sister bustles cheerfully about the room, making as brave a pretence of keeping a home as she can with some sorry sticks of furniture and a few cracked dishes. The ailing brother has just come back from the hospital, and there is a package wrapped in a bit of Polish newspaper on the table before him. The rent-collector unwraps from it a brown bottle of medicine bearing the label of the Polish doctor to whom he had gone straight from the contrary hospital advice, to secure a nostrum for his heart-trouble. He insists that he never will return to that hospital which kept him in bed so long and did nothing for him. He will never be able to work again, he reiterates monotonously.

Those who have labored in France among soldiers blinded in war, to restore a hopeful mood in which a man takes hold on life again, know what means a wise, kind woman will use with a discouraged man who finds his cross too heavy to carry and has succumbed to a melancholy listlessness. She brings him round by degrees to a more rational frame of mind, and in place of the closed door she shows him an open window. Was not the result worth tarrying for, a few minutes? Even from the commercial point of view is anything gained by having tenants who are at odds with destiny, or anæmic, if not acutely ill, from bad air, bad smells, foul vaults and cellars, surface drainage and contaminated food? Was not Miss Hill entirely right when she declared that tenants and their surroundings must be improved together?

Here was another trouble to be adjusted by the patient universal arbiter. Italian children sat on Polish steps and refused to be dislodged. Out of a cloud no bigger than a child’s uplifted hand came a storm that threatened to destroy the peace of the street. Five nations presently swept into the melee. No great matter, you say—but even so the world-war started.

Wagon drivers for the meat packers’ distributing houses struck for a dollar a week more. A little butcher couldn’t afford to let his chopping block stay idle. He borrowed a push-cart and a neighbor helped him and he fetched the meat himself, running the gauntlet of the angry teamsters. But that is the reason, if you please, that he hasn’t the rent today. There is so often the slenderest margin between a sufficiency and dire distress in the case of the poor. To most of us a strike is in the newspapers. To them a strike is in their lives—it may come like a bolt of lightning crashing through the roof to disrupt a home.

Perhaps the reckless joy-rider or motor-truck driver will never know how many little children are kept within doors by their mothers for fear they will be run over if they play in the street. But the rent-collector knows. There are so many children shrieking and sprawling over the cobbles already that it doesn’t seem as though there could be any left in any of the houses. But there are always plenty more. Here are some, too tiny to be allowed to go to the city swimming-baths. In the heat of summer they wear scarcely any clothes, and their puny limbs stick out from their tattered garments like twigs from a bird’s nest. They sit here in the darkened room where their mother is sewing on trousers which she “finishes” at nine cents a pair. The mother explains that she doesn’t dare let them go out into the street—they might get run over. So here they sit, listless, pale, forlorn. They laugh outright when you play a child’s game on your fingers for them, and are loath to have you go.

In another house sits a fair-haired girl with blue eyes, one of them sadly atwist, and a scrofulous disfigurement marking what is almost a pretty face. She is perhaps fourteen years old. You start to talk to her and you find she is deaf and dumb. She has been at a school for such unfortunates, the rent-collector explains, and this is her summer vacation. It is certainly vacant enough.