How slowly moral sentiment grows in a large city is shown by the years that elapsed before active measures were taken to redeem what was known as a plague spot, a menace to the body politic, a constant source of moral degeneracy.
The Citizens' Association, organized in 1864, through its Council of Hygiene and Public Health, districted the city for special investigation by sanitary experts. One of these gives a large part of his report to Gotham Court, and presents sectional drawings to show the impossibility of securing proper sanitary conditions for the people living in the notorious houses. It seems incredible that these conditions once known should not have aroused public interest to the point of action. Nothing was done. The physical and moral degeneracy continued until 1880, when a few private individuals made the experiment of redemption. Even this came when the houses had gone beyond the point of reclaiming. On the site of the old buildings rises a new business building.
Not far away two of the most brutal and atrocious murders of recent years in New York have occurred. In July, 1901, three blocks from the old buildings, in broad daylight, a man known to be the collecting agent for property in the neighborhood was robbed by three members of a well-known gang. The children are thin, precocious. Their language, even in their play, is vulgar, coarse, profane. Babies have at their command strange oaths, probably never heard elsewhere. The streets are neglected, the sidewalks uneven and broken. For almost half a century this region has had a reputation peculiar to itself. Efforts have been made to reach the people, but they have not been persistent. Even the church efforts are perfunctory, as though faith as to the redemptive power in this people did not exist.
This fact remains: within the boundaries of this region lives a community that is shaping the political control of New York City and State, and will for years to come. It has its traditions of loyalty; it has fixed standards of its own peculiar privileges; its standards of rights. The very police of the region expect certain things to occur; misdemeanors of a certain character that would bring punishment anywhere else are passed by here; they are part of the civilization of the region. Snuggled down under the shadow of the bridge and the elevated road, a center of business interests which the moral standards of the residents do not affect, because their activities, other than of the muscles, are not exercised until carts, drays, drivers, clerks, proprietors have gone northward or across the river. The community lives within itself, has created its own standards, and is New York in its own estimation.
Writing of the people in this section in 1865, a sanitary expert quotes with an apology a medical term common in the hospitals and dispensaries as a disease of the people in this section, "tenement-house rot." The term has, perhaps, in the interests of civilization, died out; but no one can walk through these streets, observing the faces of the people, and not realize that the old, unsanitary, germ-laden tenements of this section have produced a physical condition peculiar to this region, as it has a moral degeneracy that is peculiarly its own. The section, as a whole, has not attracted the philanthropist. He is wise in his day and generation and puts forth his efforts where the tide of humanity is rising, and not falling, even though it means three or four generations before the tide is out.
New York has a gospel all its own. Work where the crowds are greatest, that the printed reports may count people in great numbers, for ye gain dollars thereby. New York counts the remnant only at the polls, and ignores the penalty her indifference imposes on her own advancement.
The opening years of the century hold promise that there is at least a partial realization of the solidarity of the interest of the people. That conditions make for degradation in the homes means degradation of citizens; and this means burdens laid, not on the sections where the homes and the citizens are found, but on the whole city. What altruism has not accomplished, selfishness may. It may be that where all else has failed, intelligent politics may redeem, and the section again may be the center of the moral as well as commercial activity.