Was that good sense? No, it was not. That came later when a man came into Mulberry Street, where “the gang” was beginning to make serious trouble, and wanted to know if the boys would join a club he was forming. Would they join, those boys? They fell over one another to get there. The whole block joined with a rush. That was the good sense of the new day that lets the boys in, instead of forever warning them off from everything and everywhere. His club was a marching club (see illustration facing page [138]) and with their wooden guns on their shoulders, that man could lead those boys where and how far he chose; they would go with him wherever he went. Just remember that it is one of two things, a gun on the shoulder or stripes on the back, where the home interposes no barrier. It is because of the killing off of that home that our jails are filled with young men from the big cities.
Joining “The Club”
From alleys where “the sunlight never enters” comes that growing procession that fills our prisons; where the sunlight does not enter, deeds of darkness naturally belong. When at last we fully understood this, we began to tear down the worst of the rookeries that had murdered the home. Nearly the worst of them all was the Mott Street barracks. There were some six hundred Italians living in that row when it was at its worst, and it was one of the few places I have known in which the rent actually rose as you went up-stairs. There was a little sunlight up there, but only darkness and dirt down below. The yard between the front and rear tenement—think of calling such a crack a yard—was five feet, ten inches wide. I remember that well. Theodore Roosevelt held one end of the tape line when we measured it, and I the other. By the time we had got up indignation enough to settle with the barracks, he had come into the municipal government of our city and made things go. The showing upon which we arraigned the barracks was, that during a season when we watched it, one-third of the babies there had died, killed by the house. So we tore down the rear tenements, and when we did we found that the mortgage on the property, with its awful baby death rate, was held by a cemetery corporation!
To me the barracks seemed as nearly hell on earth as could be; but let me give you a glimpse of the veritable hell here below. Whatever you may think of the one hereafter, you need not doubt its existence here. One night, when I went through one of the worst dives I ever knew, my camera caught and held this scene that I set before you. (See illustration facing page [140].) When I look upon that unhappy girl’s face, I think that the grace of God can reach that “lost woman” in her sins; but what about the man who made a profit on the slum that gave her up to the street? She did not sleep home, that was where the mischief began. What about us who let that slum grow unchallenged, and who took from those in it, with the home on earth the hope of heaven? We need the grace of God, if any one does. That is our fight—for the home in which the girl may sleep securely, in which she will want to stay; thank God! we are winning it at last.
Hell on Earth
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
For see: these tenements have homes in them. (See illustration facing page [142].) They were built by the City and Suburban Homes Company with money subscribed by Christian men and women. Foremost among them all that good woman to whom we owe so much in this new day of ours, the wife of Bishop Potter. They are called the Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, and stand in West 68th and 69th Streets, in that neighborhood where the “social ideals minted themselves upon the lives of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The plan of the City and Suburban Homes Company is that of philanthropy and five per cent. They limit their income to five per cent., and have so far received four. Their tenants are happy, as well they may be, and the owners have good cause to be the same. They have done us a very notable service in their work; since those houses were built, others have been added and provision made for some fifteen or sixteen hundred families. Four per cent. on such an investment is enough to settle it in the sight of us all that real homes can be provided for the multitude even on Manhattan Island, and therefore must be; also, that the slum landlord must stop building houses that kill his tenants; that murder is murder, whether it is done with an axe or with a house.
The City and Suburban Homes Company’s Model Tenements The Alfred Corning Clark Block
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.