“From and after the passage of this act, it shall be unlawful, and is hereby forbidden, for any person or persons to throw waste paper, sweepings, ashes, household waste, nails, or rubbish of any kind into any street in any city, borough, or township in this Commonwealth, or to interfere with, scatter, or disturb the contents of any receptacle or receptacles containing ashes, garbage, household waste, or rubbish which shall be placed upon any of said paved streets or sidewalks for the collection of the contents thereof.
“Any person or persons who shall violate any of the provisions of this act shall, upon conviction thereof before any magistrate, be sentenced to pay the cost of prosecution and to forfeit and pay a fine not exceeding $10 for each offense, and in default of the payment thereof shall be committed and imprisoned in the county jail of the proper county for a period not exceeding ten days.”
In a report on infant mortality to the registrar general of Ontario, 1910, Dr. Helen MacMurchy says: “Improve the water supply, the sewerage system, and the system of disposing of refuse; introduce better pavements, such as asphalt, and at once there is a decline in infantile mortality.” All these are sanitary features in need of great improvement in Johnstown, and unquestionably a lowered infant mortality rate would reward any efforts for their betterment.
HOUSING
In Johnstown the so-called “double” house predominates, usually frame. The double house is in reality two semidetached houses built upon a single lot. Rows of three or more houses of two, three, or four rooms each are common, and they are known locally as three-family, or six-family houses, as the case may be. Sometimes these are “rear houses,” that is, they are built behind other houses that face the street, on the same lots and in fact are approached by way of a narrow alley running alongside the house that has its frontage directly on the street. For this type of house water-closets or privies are often in rows in the yard or court that is used in common by all families. (See Plates Q and R.) In some places they are too few in number to permit each family to have the exclusive use of one.
Johnstown has three or four comparatively high-grade apartment houses, and in several office buildings rooms are rented to families for housekeeping. These are generally taken by native families.
In one of these office buildings the two lower floors are used for business purposes and the two upper floors are given over entirely to tenement purposes. From 40 to 50 families live here, many of whom have but one room. To serve the 20 or 25 families on each floor there is one bath and toilet room for men and another for women. Adjoining the toilet rooms is a small room containing garbage cans and trash receptacles for the use of the tenants.
The sanitary conditions in some of the best tenements or apartments, however, are not up to the standards of other cities, and in those occupied by the poorer people conditions are much worse than are usually permitted to exist in cities having large tenement houses in great numbers, where a tenement-house problem is recognized as such and active efforts are made by the municipality to improve conditions.
An absolute measure of the importance of each single housing defect in a high mortality rate can not be secured from this study. But it is not without interest to note that in homes where water is piped into the house the infant mortality rate was 117.6 per thousand, as compared with a rate of 197.9 in homes where the water had to be carried in from outdoors. Or that in the homes of 496 live-born babies where bathtubs were found the infant mortality rate was 72.6, while it was more than double, or 164.8, where there were no bathtubs. Desirable as a bathtub and bodily cleanliness may be, this does not prove that the lives of the babies were saved by the presence of the tub or the assumed cleanliness of the persons having them. In a city of Johnstown’s low housing standards, the tub is an index of a good home, a suitable house from a sanitary standpoint, a fairly comfortable income, and all the favorable conditions that go with such an income.
The same trend of a high infant mortality rate in connection with other housing defects is noted in the next table.