VOL. XIV

NO. 2

66 ET in the light!" is the slogan of the men and women engaged in tenement-house reform in New York. It is hard to believe, but it is nevertheless a fact, that on February 13, 1903, there were in that city 101,277 absolutely windowless rooms, most of them bedrooms, inhabited by the poorer classes, those who pay rent of three to sixteen dollars a month.

Because of the strenuous efforts of the Tenement House Committee of the Charity Organization Society in securing and enforcing the tenement house law, the number of windowless rooms has been reduced to about 90,000.

Think of it, you dwellers in spacious, sunny suburban villas-ninety-thousand rooms without any sunlight, whatsoever, save that which enters, by the door that admits the person who goes into it to eat, to sleep, to work, or to sit about and enjoy himself as best he can!

Some of these ninety thousand rooms are in cellars, some in attics, and others are distributed about on intermediate floors, according to the fearful and wonderful designs of that most hopeless of all human habitations, the dumb-bell or double-deck tenement house.

Most hopeless? Yes, because the man. who lives in a cave can at least enjoy

privacy and silence and air that is not contaminated by the exhalations and nuisances of his fellows; the man who lives in a tent can pull back the flap and get air; and the man who lives in an igloo can cut as many vents in its walls as he chooses and have as much light and air as he wants and at any time that he wants it. To the majority of tenement dwellers fresh air is scarcely anything more than a myth.

We are wont to think of London as a city where miserable millions are crowded into uncouth and unsanitary quarters, but London's greatest density of population is less than six hundred to the acre, while in New York there are blocks and blocks where the density is one thousand to fifteen hundred human beings in that space.

In Chicago, the number of people in the Polish quarter, according to Robert Hunter's report, is three times that of the most crowded portions of Tokio, Calcutta, or of other Asiatic cities, where, we have always been taught, the population is appallingly congested, and yet the density rarely reaches five hundred to the acre, or only one-third to one-half that of New York's packed-in population.

Both New York and Chicago have far worse tenement-house conditions than

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London, the worst congested city in Europe. While each of these American cities still permits the building of the deadly double-decker, which in New York is more often the sextuple-decker, allowing a density of thirteen hundred people to the acre, with rooms as small as seven by ten feet in size, London is insisting upon model tenements such as the Waterlow Buildings, which house thirty thousand people, among whom the annual death rate is but ten to the thousand.

With all the efforts to reform the New York tenements and to let in the light, the death rate in some of the more congested blocks is over one-half higher than that of the city as a whole, or about twenty-five to the thousand-two and one-half times that of the model London tenements.

The death rate per thousand in New York as a whole in 1908 was 16.5, in Chicago 14.1, in London 13.8. But these figures double themselves in densely populated quarters, as it is a well-established fact that the greater the overcrowding the higher the death rate.

Nearly every large city in America

has what is called its "housing problem." For a particularly large city, Philadelphia has less tenement-house trouble than any other city in the country, for there the dumb-bell tenement is practically unknown. The city prides itself upon its neat rows of workingmen's cottages, its low buildings and the consequent small density of population to the acre and comparative freedom from the evils of insufficient light and ventilation that are the curse of other large cities.

But not in Baltimore, not in St. Louis, not in Cincinnati, not, as we have seen, in Chicago, not in any other American city, save Boston, is there anything that approximates the frightful state of affairs that one finds in New York, and in Boston the bad state of the tenements is not so much due to tall tenement buildings as to the filth and general unsanitary conditions that have been permitted in all classes of tenements, resulting in a death rate as high as 19.1 to the thousand.

But now as to the New York people who live in the dark-those who occupy the ninety thousand absolutely windowless rooms and the hundreds of thou

sands of rooms that are "lighted" by windows opening into other rooms that front upon gloomy little air shaftswhat of them? Well, most of them are of the factory-working class who receive from $6 to $12 a week. They are poorly clothed, miserably fed and they pay, in proportion to the accommodations they receive, the highest rent of any people on the face of the globe.

This rent is the heaviest tax upon their earnings. Its high cost is the direct result of the excessive price of the land, caused by the shape and situation of Manhattan Island, the city proper, and the extravagant type of house which has resulted from the shape and size of the lot, nearly always twenty-five by one hundred feet.

Ernest Flagg, the well-known New York architect, declares that the division of blocks into lots of this size was the greatest evil that ever befell New York, and that "no other disaster can for a moment be compared with it." Sharply critical words that are to the point.

One cannot build a house six stories in height on a lot twenty-five by one hundred feet and make that house habitable

without sacrificing valuable ground space, and this the landlords have always refused to do. It works out in this way: In the building up of a block of such houses after the detestable dumb-bell plan, each house to accommodate four families to the floor, the ideal number from the landlord's point of view, there would be twenty families in each building and 768 families in the block.

But floors intended for four families are often made to accommodate five to seven, hence the frightful congestion against which no effort of the reformers seem to avail. Such houses are found on "San Juan Hill" and in other parts of the city, and when one enters one of them one finds unspeakable conditions, the worst of which, from a purely sanitary viewpoint, is the absence of light. For sunlight, the radiant energy upon which mankind exists, is the greatest of all microbicides. In the dark the germs of diseases are quickly hatched and quickly spread.

About the landlords? Well, they are, indeed, a craven lot, taking them as a whole, though here and there you will find a self-respecting one. To character

cloak their non-compliance with the law or to defer the work and the incidental expense, which, in some cases, would be slight. Not only that, but they have banded together to set at naught the provisions of the law or to introduce new, or retroactive, and, in all cases, abominable legislation.

This concerted action has not been merely with respect to the lighting of dark rooms, but to all other tenementhouse reforms.

"Every year, the Tenement House Committee," as it states in its report, "has been obliged to oppose objectionable housing bills. During the last session of the legislature twenty-five different measures amending the tenementhouse law were introduced. The committee, with the co-operation of various organizations interested in in tenement house conditions, succeeded, as in previous years, in preventing the enactment of any dangerous tenement-house Jegislation."

"Two bills will serve as examples of measures defeated. One of these would have permitted dangerous bakeries in tenement houses without adequate fire protection, and would even have allowed communications from bakerooms to the public halls and stairways used by all

A SLEEPING ROOM UNDER THE SIDEWALK.