THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS
That was Gotham Court. It was first on the list, and the Mott Street Barracks came next, when, as executive officer of the Good Government Clubs, I helped the Board of Health put the law to the test the following year. The Health Department kept a list of 66 old houses, with a population of 5460 tenants, in which there had been 1313 deaths in a little over five years (1889-94). From among them we picked our lot, and the department drove the tenants out. The owners went to law, one and all; but, to their surprise and dismay, the courts held with the health officers. The moral effect was instant and overwhelming. Rather than keep up the fight, with no rent coming in, the landlords surrendered at discretion. In consideration of this, compensation was allowed them at the rate of about a thousand dollars a house, although they were really entitled only to the value of the old material. The buildings all came under the head of "wholly unfit." Gotham Court, with its sixteen buildings, in which, thirty-five years ago, a health inspector counted 146 cases of sickness, including "all kinds of infectious disease," was bought for $19,750, and Mullen's Court, adjoining, for $7251. They had been under civilized management since, but nothing decent could be made out of them. To show the character of all, let two serve; in each case it is the official record, upon which seizure was made, that is quoted:—
No. 98 Catherine Street: "The floor in the apartments and the wooden steps leading to the second-floor apartment are broken, loose, saturated with filth. The roof and eaves gutters leak, rendering the apartments wet. The two apartments on the first floor consist of one room each, in which the tenants are compelled to cook, eat, and sleep. The back walls are defective; the house wet and damp, and unfit for human habitation. It robs the surrounding houses of light."
"The sunlight never enters" was the constant refrain.
No. 17 Sullivan Street: "Occupied by the lowest whites and negroes, living together. The houses are decayed from cellar to garret, and filthy beyond description,—the filthiest, in fact, we have ever seen. The beams, the floors, the plaster on the walls, where there is any plaster, are rotten and alive with vermin. They are a menace to the public health, and cannot be repaired. Their annual death rate in five years was 41.38."
The sunlight enters where these stood, at all events, and into 58 other yards that once were plague spots. Of 94 rear tenements seized that year, 60 have been torn down, 33 of them voluntarily by the owners; 29 were remodeled and allowed to stand, chiefly as workshops; 5 other houses were standing empty, and yielding no rent, in March, 1899. The worst of them all, the Mott Street Barracks, are yet in the courts; but all the judges and juries in the land have no power to put them back. It is a case of "They can't put you in jail for that"—"Yes, but I am in jail." They are gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they ought to go, before the Appellate Division called a halt. In 1888 I counted 360 tenants in these tenements, front and rear, all Italians, and the infant death rate of the Barracks that year was 325 per 1000. There were forty babies, and one in three of them had to die. The general infant death rate for the whole tenement house population that year was 88.38. In the four years following, during which the population and the death rate of the houses were both reduced with an effort, fifty-one funerals went out of the Barracks. With entire fitness, a cemetery corporation held the mortgage upon the property. The referee allowed it the price of opening one grave, in the settlement, gave one dollar to the lessee and one hundred and ten dollars to the landlord, who refused to collect, and took his case to the Court of Appeals, where it is to be argued this summer. The only interest that attaches to it, since the real question has been decided by the wrecker ahead of time, is the raising of the constitutional point, perchance, and the issue of that is not doubtful. The law has been repeatedly upheld, and in Massachusetts, where similar action has been taken since, the constitutionality of it has in no case been attacked, so far as I know.
I have said before that I do not believe in paying the slum landlord for taking his hand off our throats, when we have got the grip on him in turn. Mr. Roger Foster, who as a member of the Tenement House Committee drew the law, and as counsel for the Health Department fought the landlords successfully in the courts, holds to the opposite view. I am bound to say that instances turned up in which it did seem a hardship to deprive the owners of even such property. I remember especially a tenement in Roosevelt Street, which was the patrimony and whole estate of two children. With the rear house taken away, the income from the front would not be enough to cover the interest on the mortgage. It was one of those things that occasionally make standing upon abstract principle so very uncomfortable. I confess I never had the courage to ask what was done in their case. I know that the tenement went, and I hope—Well, never mind what I hope. It has nothing to do with the case. The house is down, and the main issue decided upon its merits.