[THE MILL TOWN COURTS AND THEIR LODGERS]
MARGARET F. BYINGTON
FORMER DISTRICT AGENT, BOSTON ASSOCIATED CHARITIES
From the cinder path beside a railroad that crosses the level part of Homestead, you enter an alley, bordered on one side by stables and on the other by shabby two-story frame houses. The doors of the houses are closed, but dishpans and old clothes decorating their exterior, mark them as inhabited. You turn from the alley through a narrow passageway, and find yourself in a small court, on three sides of which are smoke-grimed houses, on the fourth, low stables. The open space teems with life and movement. Children, dogs and hens make it lively under foot; overhead long lines of flapping clothes are to be dodged. A group of women stand gossiping in one corner waiting their turn at the pump,—this pump being one of the two sources of water supply for the twenty families who live here. Another woman is dumping the contents of her washtubs upon the paved ground, and the greasy, soapy water runs into an open drain a few feet from the pump. In the center of the court, a circular wooden building with ten compartments opening into one vault, flushed only by this waste water, constitutes the toilet facilities for over a hundred people. For the sixty-three rooms in the houses about the court shelter a group of twenty families, Polish, Slavic, and Hungarian, Jewish and even Negro; and twenty-seven little children find in this crowded brick-paved space their only playground.
The cinder path has led us to the heart of the sanitary evils of the steel town. For this court typifies those conditions which result when there crowd in upon an industrial district, hundreds of unskilled immigrant laborers, largely single men, largely country people, who want a place to sleep for the least possible cash. Most of the petty local landlords who provide quarters care nothing for the condition of their places, and regard the wages of these transients as legitimate spoils.
To determine the extent of such congestion, I made a study of the twenty-one courts in the second ward of Homestead, where yards, toilets, and water supply are used in common. In these courts lived 239 families, 102 of whom took lodgers. Even of those who lived in two-room tenements, a half took lodgers. Fifty-one families, including sometimes four or five people, lived in one-room tenements. One-half the families used their kitchens as sleeping rooms. Only three houses had running water inside, and in at least three instances over 110 people were dependent on one yard-hydrant for water. These are but fragmentary indications, but the situation seemed serious enough to warrant an intensive study, with the help of an interpreter, of these courts.
The background of life in this section is a gloomy one. The level land forming the second ward, cut off from the river by the mill and from the country by the steep hill behind, forms a pocket where the smoke settles heavily. Here, on the original site of the town, gardens as well as alleys have been utilized for building small frame houses. The space is nearly covered. In some instances these houses are built in haphazard fashion on the lots; more often they surround a court, such as I have described. Though they vary in character, these groups usually consist of four or six two-story houses facing the street and a similar number facing the alley. Between these rows is a small court connected with the street by a narrow passage. Fifty-eight per cent of the houses have only four rooms, and only four have more than six. The former class usually shelters two families, one having the two rooms on the street and the other the two on the court. In summer, to give some through ventilation to the stifling rooms, doors leading to the stairway between the front and rear rooms are left open. As the families are often friends and fellow countrymen, this opportunity for friendly intercourse is not unwelcome. Indeed, the cheerful gossip that enlivens wash day, like the card-playing in the court on a summer evening, suggests the friendliness of village days.
Nothing in the surroundings of these festivities, however, bears out the suggestion. Accumulations of rubbish and broken brick pavements, render the courts as a whole untidy and unwholesome. Some of the houses have little porches that might give a sense of homelikeness, but for the most part they are bare and dingy. As they are built close to the street with only this busy court behind, the owner can hardly have that bit of garden so dear to the heart of former country dwellers. Only, here and there, a little bed of lettuce with its note of delicate green or the vivid red of a geranium blossom brightens the monotony. Dreary as is the exterior, however, the greatest evils to the dwellers in the court arise from other things, from inadequate water supply, from meager toilet facilities, from overcrowding.
The conditions as to water supply are very serious. In all the twenty-one courts only three families had running water in their houses, and even the hydrants in the courts were not for individual families. In no court were fewer than five families using one hydrant or pump, while in exceptional instances there were as many as nineteen, twenty and twenty-one families. As waste water pipes are also wanting in the houses, the heavy tubs of water must be carried out as well as in. In this smoky town a double amount of washing and cleaning must be done. The wash is a heavy one, and when the weather permits, it is done in the yard. This addition of tubs, wringers, clothes baskets, and soapy water on the pavement to the already populous court makes it no very serviceable playground for children.