The Peril and the Preservation of the Home / Being the William L. Bull Lectures for the Year 1903

by Jacob A. Riis

Gotham Court
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Midnight in Gotham Court
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.

But, as I said, they did the best with the Court that could be done. The best was bad, and therefore it had to go. Yet, in comparison with what it had been, life even in Double Alley had become comparatively decent before the wreckers boarded up the entrance to it. There were homes in that alley where the word had been as a mockery before. I knew of some; I will tell you the story of Susie Rocco and her home. And we had learned something there; we had added to good intentions the knowledge of the facts, which is the first and most important ingredient in good sense when you come to deal with things. I am going now to show you some of the pictures I promised you, and you shall have more hereafter. Think not that any of them are irrelevant because they are of things that were. Those things are but shadows of what may come again, if we lose our grip and once more let our conscience fall asleep, believing we have done so much that all is well. To avoid that, keep ever a firm grasp of the facts. You will fight in vain for the people’s homes till you know what afflicts them. The glory of our present-day Christianity is that at last it plants itself squarely on the facts—seeks them out first and then applies the remedy. Never fear them. If they clash in any way with scholastic theory or even theology, make sure that they are the facts, then seek the fault in your theory. And always remember that human souls live in bodies. If you want to reach the soul, you must reckon with the man in the body; or your preaching will be vain.

The Alderman’s Tenements

Here, now, is one of the Five Points in the day of its worst disgrace (see illustration facing page [90]), but the Point itself was by no means the worst of that neighborhood. These adjoining buildings, I suppose you would call them shanties, and I do not know that I should object to the term, give a general idea of the character of that vicious slum. They were houses surviving from a much earlier day, built for the occupation of one family, and no doubt in that day there were homes in them as good as might be found anywhere. It was when they came to contain from ten to twenty families each that the slum moved in. With four families keeping house in one room—that was the record made by a missionary who had that district in charge—short work was made of the home. I used to laugh at that missionary’s story of how, when he asked in hopeless bewilderment how they managed to get along, one of the tenants said, “Well enough until one of the other three took a boarder, then trouble began.”

But there was little enough to laugh at; less still, when the big buildings sprang up that you see behind the shanties. They are the double-deckers of to-day. They were supposed to be a “way out,” for at least they had room for the teeming populations; but it turned out the other way. They gave the home the hardest blow of all, and to-day they are the curse that cleaves to us for our sins of the past, and with which we will have to struggle while we live. I have said a good deal so far, and shall have more to say before I am done, about murder. It is not a nice word, but right here is an instance of what I mean. The particular houses that show in the picture were built by one Buddensiek, whose name we all came to know in the after years. I heard of it first when I went with the health inspector to investigate a complaint of foul stenches that was made by the tenants in those houses. The explanation proved simple. The builder had merely run the soil-pipe three feet or so into the ground without connecting it with the sewer. That time he escaped indictment. It is somehow not so easy to bring a man to book who poisons his tenants with bad plumbing as the one who sticks a knife into his neighbor. Some years after when, grown bold, he neglected to put lime in his mortar and his tenements fell down and killed his workmen before the tenants got into them, the jail claimed him at last on a charge of manslaughter.