In a Baxter Street Yard
Shanty Dwellings in a Tenement Yard
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
To this tenement (see illustration facing page [100]) my business as a police reporter led me. A home had been murdered there: a drunken husband had killed his wife. I know it is a common belief that drunkenness accounts for pretty nearly all the poverty there is. I do not find it so. It did in this case and there are enough such and to spare; but I think the verdict of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, once upon a time, came nearer the truth, namely, that forty per cent. of the helpless poverty was due to drunkenness, or the drunkenness due to the poverty. I forget the exact way they put it, but that was the sense of it, and it was good sense. Suppose you had to live in such a place as this! (See illustration facing page [102].) Do you think human life would seem especially precious or sacred, and don’t you think you would run to the saloon as, by comparison, far the more decent and human spot in that place? I know I would; and I think that one of our worst offenses against the brother is, after letting him be robbed of his home to leave him at the mercy of the saloon as the one place of human companionship for him, the one humanly decent spot in all his environment. I said “letting him be robbed.” There lies on my table a report of the Health Department of the year 1869, and it opens at the page upon which is recorded the result of a tour of the Sanitary Committee through the tenement-house districts that year. They found that the landlords kept those houses “as a business and generally as a speculation. He was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent. and frequently exceeded thirty—the complaint was universal among the tenants that they were entirely uncared for—the agent’s instructions were simple but emphatic: collect the rents in advance, or, failing, eject the occupant.” You see the scheme of the robbery. It is plain enough.
Washing in an Italian Flat; the Tea Kettle Used as a Wash Boiler
Out of such conditions came little Antonia Candia, stripped by an inhuman stepmother and beaten with a red-hot poker until her body was one mass of burns and bruises. That stepmother went to jail a long while since, but we have need still of the services of the Children’s Society that has thrown a strong and watchful arm around more than one hundred thousand little ones in the slum where the home had been wrecked. They are the ones that need our care, if only because (I have said it before and I shall have yet to say it many times) they are our own to-morrow. I remember the case of a bright little lad in an East-side tenement whose home had given him up to the street, as do those homes right along. All day he carried the growler from the shop where his father worked to the saloon on the corner, and when evening came he was missing. It was Saturday and he did not come home that night. They sought him all day Sunday in vain. Monday morning when they opened the shop, they found him in the cellar where he had crept after drinking of the beer, and where the rats had found him. Not even his mother could recognize him.
These are the ones to look out for; and the aged and helpless. Nor need we marvel much if those whose lives have been spent in the crowds turn their backs upon the country, upon the woods and the fields, when we offer them a refuge there. The tenement has robbed them of their resources, of the individuality that makes a man good company for himself. It is only a man who can think that is at home in the fields. The slum never thinks; it is all the time trying to forget. There is nothing good to think of, nothing worth remembering.
