I tell you these things that you may understand the setting of the home in the greatest of American cities. Two millions of people in New York live in such tenements. Do you see those narrow slits in the roof? They are the air-shafts, two feet four inches wide, sixty or seventy feet deep, through which light and air are supposed, in the landlord’s theory, to come down to the tenants. We have just upset that theory and forbidden those double-deckers with that kind of air-shaft. There are to be courts, hereafter, so that the tenant may have light enough within the house, to make out his neighbor. You will look in vain for a yard for the children to play in, and I was going to say you will look in vain for a bath-tub in that block, but I was wrong there. There is one and I will show it to you. It is remarkable enough to make a note of.
It is upon such tenements as these that the sweat-shop got its grip, that grip which we have been trying with such effort to shake off, for the protection of home and of childhood. Directly across the street from there, I found a sick man using for his pillow a bundle of half-finished trousers that were being made in the flat. The man had scarlet fever. The label on the trousers showed that they came from the shop of a Broadway clothier, upon whose counters, but for our coming, they would have been displayed without warning that the death warrant of the purchaser or of some little child in his family was basted in the lining. We are brothers, whether we own it or not, we of the avenue and they of the alley.
Here hangs the bath-tub I spoke of. (See illustration facing page [128].) The landlord did not provide it; it was brought in by a tenant with ambitions, an immigrant, who thought to find here the equality of man with man, of which he had heard. He found the air-shaft in the slum tenement. Suppose now he grows political ideals to correspond with it; who is to blame?
The Only Bathtub in the Block
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
It was in one of the after swells of the great awakening that a man stood up in a meeting of church people of all denominations, gathered to find an answer to the question how to bring those multitudes back to the old altars, and cried: “How shall these people understand the love of God you speak of, when all about them they see only the greed of man?” He was a builder, a Christian builder, and he forthwith set about erecting in Brooklyn a row of tenements such as a Christian man could build with a clear conscience. The Riverside tenements stand there to-day unrivaled. (See illustration facing page [130].) It is much better to live on the yard there than in front, because you have a garden and you have flowers and even a band-stand where the band plays sometimes at the landlord’s expense. The tenants are happy and contented. So is the landlord. He told me himself that he has had six and six and a half and even as high as seven per cent. on his investment, and he said with scorn that the talk about the tenants “coming up to their opportunities” was the veriest humbug. “They are there now,” he said, “a long way ahead of the landlord.” Seven per cent. is good interest on any investment. It almost looks, does it not, as if it were a question then whether a man will take seven per cent. in providing for his brother and save his soul, or twenty-five per cent. and lose it? It is odd that there should be people willing to make the latter bargain; but, since there are such, you might almost say that our fight with the slum is a kind of missionary effort to compel them to take seven per cent. and save their souls in spite of themselves.
The Riverside Tenements
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
Alfred T. White’s tenants have homes: he has made it possible for them. Humble homes to be sure, but furniture and show do not make the home of which I am thinking, the home that is the prop of the Republic. Look, now, upon this flat in an East-side block and tell me if you think that that is a proper setting for American citizenship. (See illustration facing.) That is one of the piggeries I have spoken of, and there are too many of them. Thirteen persons slept in that room where the law allowed only three. In that neighborhood I counted forty-three families in a tenement where the original builder had made room for seventeen. Do you think that is safe? And what must be the effect upon the growing generation of such an environment as that?
One day I found two boys in a back yard—for a wonder there was a back yard—practicing their writing lesson on the fence, and this is what they wrote: “Keep off the grass.” I was thinking the other day when I read about Pompeii and Martinique that who knows but that some time this boasted civilization of ours may be engulfed in such a catastrophe. Then, perhaps a couple of thousand years hence, when the scientific men of that day are digging down to our buried city, they will come upon one of those signs and fetch it up; and they will put their heads together and consult and expound, and then they will turn to the waiting world and announce that “the men of that day worshipped grass”; and they will not be so far out of the way, either. I have seen, in my day, the grass held to be tremendously sacred, while no one cared about the boy. A little more of that, and the slum will have set a stamp upon those children which it will be hard work to wipe out.