The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

The housekeepers in this section differ essentially in their relation to the tenants from those of the more heterogeneous population of the East Side of the city. One resemblance is recognized—the effect of the character of the housekeeper. Here, as on the East Side, to a very large degree, the comfort, health, peace and good-will of the tenants in every house depends on the character and the spirit of the woman who controls the property for the landlord.

The law of natural selection holds good. The housekeeper holds the tenants who are satisfied with the conditions she creates. They, especially the children, develop in habits of cleanliness, in care of property, in respect for the rights of others, as the rules of the house enforced by the housekeeper compel. It is in her power to get rid of those who do not accept her dictates, let them be what they may—just or unjust. The housekeeper will make her presence felt. If she violates the law in the disposal of garbage outside of the house, tenants will violate the law she makes for them in the care and disposal of garbage inside the house. If she is compelled to obey the law, she will compel tenants to obey the law. It is this that makes the morale of the Department of Street Cleaning so important. If the part of the house which in renting tenants agree to keep clean is not kept clean, the observer will discover that the housekeeper does not keep her part of the agreement in keeping the entrance clean.

A large factor in the tenement house for character building or destroying is the housekeeper who has charge of it. Where she is well paid she makes the property valuable. She cares for it, for the character of the tenants. Tenants remain in the house because of the advantages her offices control for the poor man and his wife anxious to provide for their children's best welfare. Property under this type of woman resists decay. She holds it in spite of the decay about it. The characterless, slovenly, indifferent housekeeper is a factor in destroying property, because of the destructive character of the tenants who will tolerate her and her methods.

The house that is the property of the man with "a pull" is an obstruction to civilization almost impossible to overcome. By connivance the law is inoperative. If pushed, such an owner can easily rid himself of the tenants who attempt, or have attempted for them, efforts to compel the owners to repair the property. A mill owner on the water front on the lower East Side owned three three-story and basement houses adjoining the mill property. They had been built for one family each. The basements were altered into stores, and the floors above altered at the least cost to accommodate one or two families. This meant two inside bedrooms absolutely without ventilation. The tenants of this property and all in the neighborhood were tormented by the smoke and gas from the chimney of the mill. When the wind blew directly toward the houses, windows were kept closed for hours in the warmest weather. All the tenants dried their clothes on pulley lines. Frequently the soot made the clothes unwearable, and they had to be washed the second time. Ten years of effort have failed to compel the building of the chimney of that mill to the legal height.

The houses the mill owner owned were in a disgraceful condition. The closets in the yards had no flow of water. The engineer of the mill was required to carry a hose from the mill over the fences to the closets to flush them. Sometimes he forgot to turn the water off, and the yards were flooded and made disgusting. Sometimes he forgot for days at a time to flush the closets, when the conditions were even worse. Only people who were helpless or hopeless would endure such conditions. One of the workers of the College Settlement discovered the conditions in these houses. She took immediate steps to compel the necessary improvements. The owner discovered that the wife and children of one of the tenants went to clubs at the Settlement, and he ordered that family to move. Before the mother moved her education had begun, and she imparted to her neighbors the information that the conditions were unlawful and could be changed if they would fight for it. The man exacted his rent on the first of the month; he was hard and unyielding; the tenants continued the warfare until he had evicted every one who spoke English and filled his houses with foreigners. One of the stores is used for storing and sorting rags and paper; next door is a meat shop. The fight was given up. The owner had "a pull," and the law is defied to this day on that property.

All the land on the river front in this neighborhood for blocks is made land, filled in by the city refuse, on which houses were built years ago. This kind of property extends back from the North River for three, and at one point four, blocks. In some of the houses near the river the high tides of spring and fall rise in the cellars. The College Settlement workers who visited families in one of these houses had been distressed by the amount of illness in it. Malaria had attacked every family. Spring and fall wages were lost at times by as many as three wage-earners in one family for two and three days each week. In addition to loss of wages, there was the expense of medicine and doctors. At last came the urgent request that a worker should call on a girl of sixteen who was dying of consumption on the first floor. This consisted of four rooms, two being inside bedrooms, each of which would hold a three-quarter bed and a chair between the bed and the wall. One was absolutely unventilated, except through the doors. It was, in fact, a passageway between the front and rear rooms. This plan is the usual plan in houses altered from residences for one family to a tenement house.

The door of the other bedroom, which opened into the large room, was closed at night because the large room was used as a bedroom by the male members of the family and one lodger. The girl of sixteen had slept with two others in that room for eight years. The floors of the four rooms were covered with carpets. The odor was sickening. The visitor asked the tenant who brought her to the sick girl what caused the odor perceptible in the hall, with front and rear windows always open, unbearable in the rooms where doors and windows were closed.

"Oh, that! The water has been in the cellar now for two or three weeks. The tides are high now." A visit to the cellar showed the water at the height of the second step of the cellar stairs; also a sewer pipe that had burst. Visits were made to the proper city department once a week for eleven weeks. The clerk, on the last visit, evidently intending to be facetious, said: "Say, what's the matter with those people taking baths in that cellar? They ain't got no bathtubs."

The owner of the property had "pull" enough to escape even an investigation by the department. It was years before the cellar of that house was concreted and the necessary connections of pipes and sewers made. It was done when the property had changed hands and a man comparatively poor and wholly free from political affiliations became the owner.

The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption. Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law.