Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

Here are houses just about to be transferred to the Association. Italians, mostly, occupy them. Notice the English sparrow that flutters into a crevice of the bricks, where it wholly disappears as it finds its nest. There is the common phenomenon of one hydrant outside, for half-a-dozen families. In a dark angle of a yard, behind a woodshed cluttered and foul, there is a pool of stinking black water out of which you can fish rotten burlap and odds and ends of the social history of all the houses. The curious children have turned pale green, like sprouts in a cellar, and their arms are thin as pipestems. The stench that emanates from the pool seems to have something to do with it. The mother says—somewhat proudly—that a doctor has said that her children have sluggish livers. She looks at you with a furrowed brow as she wipes her hands in her apron. She is wondering whether there is any hope of anything better in the way you are looking at her. “The landlord,” she says, not knowing of the change to another regime that is imminent, “never does nothin’ to the place but just collect the rent.”

A few years ago behind the rear wall of a large church there was a pocket that those who praised God on the other side of the wall knew nothing about. It adjoined a court of nine houses which the Octavia Hill Association had acquired and improved. Through the court the inmates of the four evil and invisible dwellings made their hasty escape to the street when the law was on the trail that the gospel never found. The owner was a well-to-do negro, who was content to take his money from an agent and ask no questions. The agent was appealed to, again and again, to put an end to the bedlam of drink and gambling, of fighting and obscenity that made night hideous on the premises. Providentially the owner died and the houses were bought by a friend of the Association who turned them over to its care. There was nothing to do but to evict the tenants. Polish immigrants of the poorest were put in. In the first year after the change the rent-collector was able to show every cent collected. In the second year the result was the same. In the meantime the Association received its usual 7½ per cent. commission for collecting the rents and the owners received in the first year 6.4 per cent. and in the second year 6.5 per cent. on the investment.

Another striking object-lesson among many that might be cited as to the value of the quiet influence of the rent-collector—an influence that permeates as subtly as yeast—is to be seen in the group of houses for the negro population on Naudain Street near the offices of the Association, to which reference has already been made. One of these houses, since it is given over to single old women, has come to be called the “Old Ladies’ Home.” Would one find exemplary contentment let him talk with an old crippled, blind woman who lives on the top floor. “She is able to iron a shirt-waist without a wrinkle,” says the friendly rent-collector. The order and the cleanliness of these rooms is remarkable. There are stories of the plantation-life to be heard at the lips of the old-time “Mammy” of Dixieland. There are the manners of the great houses that have become historic landmarks, and of the days before “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was written. The whole House of Bishops of the A. M. E. Church has to find room on the walls somewhere, and you will discover that devout communicants are on their knees every night for the younger generation who may fall a prey to the lures of the Devil along the Great Black Way of South Street.

As for the all-important role of the Superintendent, it is hard to see where his work begins or ends. There are just as many troubles as he will give ear to. Here is a Jewish woman who turns loose a flood of appeal and interrogation and never stops, when either the rent-collector or the superintendent comes in sight. All she wants is all there is to want; only a “blue sky” concession would satisfy her claims. But behind all this importunity is maternal ambition. A piano in the house, and the daughter’s lessons, mean stinting for all the rest, as in the case of a home—not controlled by the Association—where a druggist’s clerk lives and we find the kitchen range, the dinner-table and a Steinway baby-grand crowded together in one small room.

The Association has its own force of mechanics, for work old and new, and the superintendent is their “boss.” They have a repair shop in the basement of the office at 613–15 Lombard Street for any work that is not to be done on the premises. There they keep supplies of small hardware, paint and lumber to be used as the call comes.

These mechanics attend to everything except the plumbing, the roof-repairs, and the larger operations that involve considerable plastering and brickwork. The plumbing is always as simple as it can be, and when it is once installed the maintenance chiefly means keeping the drains to the sinks and toilets in working order.

When houses are taken over for alteration, galvanized sinks with slate backs are put in, except that in the better houses one-piece enameled iron sinks are used. The water supply, run through galvanized pipe, issues at brass spigots. Not much lead pipe is used—it is tempting to thieves. The sink taps are iron.

One of the first things to do to an old house toward its rehabilitation is to scrape off the paper. The Association has no love of many thicknesses of paper concealing long neglect and the insidious lairs of insects, and it generally applies paint or calcimine instead. Ten or twelve coats of paper are common, and as many as twenty-seven have been removed from the walls of one room. When the walls are scraped the breaks in the plaster are likely to be alive with the vermin. The walls are painted or calcimined in light tones that make an agreeable contrast with the woodwork. Many tenants want paper, but they can be taught in time the sanitary advantage of the alternative.

The exterior brickwork, frequently buckling and crumbling, requires much attention, and often many feet of new wall must be built, or a wall entirely replaced. Broken doors and rotting window-frames and sashes are frequent items of expense. It is a mistake to renew glass in a sash too weak to hold it. A new sash is a truer economy in the long run than one that is patched up “to do.”

It might look as though in the case of a wrecked window-blind (usually blinds are not found on Association houses) or a worn-out washer for a spigot the tenant might display sufficient initiative to attend to the necessary repairs himself; but there are so many ways of doing things wrong and of damaging Association property that the Superintendent actually prefers to have the tenants let things alone till he and his own men can come.