Memoirs of a millionaire

by Lucia True Ames Mead

Just now I am buried deep in tenement house problems. I have had two or three conclaves of all the wiseacres I could get together, and I have been considering their criticisms and suggestions, until now the details of my scheme are pretty nearly complete, and I sign the papers with my architect and builder to-night.

You know about the plan for coöperative cooking which I used to discourse upon to you to your infinite amusement. Well, half of the people here opposed it at first just as you did. They said, for one thing, that no one under heaven would be able to provide the kind of food that would suit all tastes. There would be Jews who would want to have meat killed after their own fashion; the Italians would want horrid messes of garlic; the Irish would find fault if they didn’t have the finest white bread and the strongest of tea, and not a blessed one of them would eat oatmeal, the coarse cereals, nutritious soups, or any of the suitable things that they ought to eat.

All of which is more or less true, as I had wit enough to know myself beforehand; but I don’t mean to let it daunt me. I shall let all my tenants have an Atkinson kerosene stove in their rooms, if they wish to pay for it, and on this they can do an endless amount of cooking at a trifling cost for fuel, and a great saving of space as well as of heat in summer.

I have engaged one of the graduates of Mrs. Lincoln’s cooking school to take my first kitchen in charge. Meantime, until the buildings are ready, I am going to send her to study the system of marketing and cooking for hotels; also the kinds of food which each nationality likes, and the methods of its preparation.

The kitchen will be arranged under her special supervision. She will engage her own assistants and be the responsible head. She will have a schedule of cooked dishes, with prices of each displayed on a bulletin in the corridors. Special dishes will be cooked by request, and orders for food can be sent in the day before. Of course at first there may be a little waste until she gets familiar with the people and can anticipate their wants; but she is a smart Yankee girl, and has a good-natured, merry way with her which I am sure will win recognition. I have told her to make it her first point to please the people, and when that is accomplished she can gradually teach them to drink milk instead of tea, and to eat brown bread instead of soda crackers.

One objection which was brought up was that children would have no chance to learn cooking, never seeing their mothers cook; but I said, that not one woman in ten of those I have in mind knows how to cook either in a cleanly or economical way. They have but little variety in their cooking, moreover, and I thought the loss of the instruction which might be imparted would be largely counterbalanced by the knowledge which would be gained as to what well-cooked food tasted like.

The modus operandi of getting the food will be something like this. At half-past six, Biddy Flanigan, who has to go out scrubbing at seven o’clock, will deposit a dime with her teapot and an empty dish in the dumb-waiter; she will call up through the speaking-tube that she wants tea, fried potatoes, and three rolls; and in about seventy seconds the dish full of potatoes done to a turn, and not soaked in fat, and a pot full of tea will be at her elbow. From these and the nice home-made rolls, neither burned nor sour nor underdone, she and little Patsy and Maggie will have a hot breakfast.

Then Maggie will wash the dishes with the hot water running at the sink; there will have been no ashes to dump, or clinkers to pick out; no fuel to be brought, or fire made; and Biddy can put on her hood and depart, knowing that the children will not open all the draughts and waste the coal, or set themselves on fire, or let the fire go out, and come home from school to a dinner of cold scraps, with the necessity of building up the fire again at night. For with a nickel in the dumb-waiter at noon, and a tin can containing two big bowls full of hot soup, the children will be well provided for.

I have some little plans for the arrangements of rooms which I hope will work well. The beds of the tenement houses have always been a great trouble to me. Of all clumsy and unsanitary arrangements for sleeping when one is obliged to sleep with four or five others in a small room, ordinary bedsteads seem to me the worst. Now in order to introduce all the improvements that I want, I am obliged to economize space. The people must be crowded together, there is no other way out of that; so, for the children, I mean to put up single beds, berth-fashion, over each other. Strong iron sockets fastened to the wall will hold an iron frame on which a little mattress with bedclothes will be strapped. In the daytime these will be turned up, one under the other, and hooked against the wall, out of the way, and a neat little curtain fastened to the upper one will hang down and conceal both as if they were a set of hanging shelves. At night the youngster in the upper berth will be protected from all danger of falling out by two or three leather straps fastened on to the upper part of the berth and hooked firmly to the lower edge of the framework. I have thought all the details out one by one as various objections were made to my scheme.

I think this plan a fine solution for the dirt and vermin question. Besides, the mattresses, being so small, could be very much more easily aired and turned than if they were larger. But an agent, to whom I explained it, protested, saying she wouldn’t encourage such an idea at all. “People ought to live properly, in regular fashion, and not get used to putting up with any such makeshifts as that. It wouldn’t be living naturally.”