[13]. Total live births less than 50; base therefore considered too small to use in computing an infant mortality rate.
To learn where the babies die is perhaps the first step in solving the infant mortality problem. The modern health officer recognizes this and generally has in his office a wall map upon which are indicated sections, wards, city blocks, and sometimes even houses. As infant deaths are reported, pins are stuck in the map in the proper places, a density of pins on any part of the map indicating, of course, where deaths are most numerous, although the percentage of infant deaths may not be the highest.
The highest infant mortality rate, 271, is found in the eleventh ward, known as Woodvale, although this is neither the most populous ward nor the one having the largest number of births. The infant mortality rate here, however, is double the rate for the city as a whole and more than five times as great as it is for the most favorable ward.
This is where the poorest, most lowly persons of the community live—families of men employed to do the unskilled work in the steel mills and the mines. They are for the most part foreigners, 78 per cent. of the mothers interviewed in this ward being foreign born.
Through Woodvale runs the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. To the north of the tracks rises a steep hill, toward the top of which is Woodvale Avenue, the principal street north of the railroad. (See plate A.) Sewer connection is possible for the houses along this avenue, as a sewer main has recently been installed, but the people have not in all cases gone to the expense of having the connection made, and in other cases where they have done so sometimes only the sinks are connected with the sewer and the yard privy is retained.
On the streets above Woodvale Avenue dwellings are more scattered and the appearance is more rural. A few of the families still have to depend upon more or less distant springs for their water, although city water is quite generally available throughout Woodvale.
The streets near the bottom of the hill, as Plum Street, for example, are so much below the level of the sewer mains that they can not be properly drained into the sewer. Private drain pipes from houses are buried a few feet below the surface and protrude from the sides of the hills, dripping with house drainage which flows slowly into ditches and forms slimy pools. (See Plates B and C.)
None of the streets on the north side of the railroad track are paved; sidewalks and gutters are lacking. In cold weather the streets are icy and slippery and even dangerous on account of the grade. In warm weather they are frequently slippery and slimy with mud.
Maple Avenue is the principal street of that part of Woodvale lying to the south of the railroad tracks, and it is the only properly paved and graded street in Woodvale. The streets on this side of the tracks, however, are not in as bad a condition as those to the north, nor are the drainage and general sewerage conditions as offensive as north of the tracks, but many of the streets are nevertheless muddy and filthy. (See Plate D.)
Prospect ranks next to Woodvale in infant mortality, having a rate of 200. This section, lying along a steep hill and above one of the big plants of the steel company, has not a single properly graded, drained, and paved street. The sewers are of the open-ditch type, and the natural slope of the land toward the river is depended upon for carrying off the surface water that does not seep into the soil. The closets are generally in the yard and are either dry privies or they are situated over cesspools. Some of the people who live on the lower part of the slope have wells sunk directly in the course of the drainage from above. (See Plate E.)