pied by the proprietor or lessee of the building as a liquor store and partly sublet to several Irish families. A covered alleyway led to the rear of the building. This was a double frame house of three stories in height. It stood in the center of the yard, ranged next the fence, where a number of pigsties and stables had surrounded the yard on three sides. From the quantity of filth, liquid and otherwise, thus caused, the ground, I suppose, had been rendered almost impassable, and to remedy this, the yard had been completely boarded over so that the earth could nowhere be seen. These boards were partially decayed, and by a little pressure, even in dry weather, a thick, greenish, fluid could be forced up through the crevices.'

These evils were not confined, however, to the foreignborn population. The living conditions of the sewing women, a large majority of whom were American-born, were thus described by the New York Tribune, in the same year 1845:

These women generally "keep house"-that is, they rent a single room, or perhaps two small rooms, in the upper story of some poor, ill-constructed, unventilated house in a filthy street, constantly kept so by the absence of back yards and the neglect of the street inspectorwhere a sickening and deadly miasma pervades the atmosphere and in summer renders it totally unfit to be inhaled by human lungs depositing the seeds of debility and disease with every inspiration In these rooms all the processes of cooking, eating, sleeping, washing,. working, and living are indiscriminately performed.❜

Bad as these conditions were, they were not the worst. The wages of Irish laborers in Brooklyn were so low that they could not afford to pay any rent at all, so "they were allowed to build miserable shanties on ground allotted them by the contractors on the plot occupied by them in performing the work."3

In the '60's there was a "shanty population" of about 20,000 on the upper west side of Manhattan Island. It was composed of Germans and Irish. They were largely 1 Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., pp. 452-453.

Helen L. Sumner: Report of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. ix., p. 135.

3 Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. viii., pp. 225226; quoting from New York Weekly Tribune, May 2, 1846, p. 3, col. 3.

day laborers, employed by contractors in grading, paving, and sewering the streets, and in the removal of rock, or in excavating for public purposes. In a typical shanty, according to an inspector of the council of hygiene, "domiciliary and personal cleanliness is almost impossible. In one room are found the family, chairs, usually dirty and broken, cooking utensils, stove, often a bed, a dog or cat, and sometimes more or less poultry. On the outside, by the door in many cases, are pigs and goats and additional poultry. There is no sink or drainage, and the slops are thrown upon the ground."

Gloomy pictures of the housing conditions which prevailed in the '60's are drawn in contemporary reports of medical inspectors. They speak in general terms of "the contracted alleys; the underground, murky, and pestilential cellars; the tenement house, with its hundreds of occupants where each cooks, eats, and sleeps in a single room without light or ventilation, surrounded with filth, in an atmosphere foul, fetid, and deadly."2

The Thirteenth Ward was densely crowded with working classes, the majority of whom were Irish; Germans ranked next, and Americans last. . . . The ward showed a high rate of sickness and mortality, owing to the over-crowded and ill-ventilated dwellings and to the ignorant and careless habits of the people themselves. . From Fortieth to Fiftieth Street the foreign population was mainly Irish or of Irish descent, packed in filthy tenements and of the most unclean and degraded personal habits. . . . The tenement houses in which most of the foreign population found their homes were certainly little calculated to develop high social and moral types, and indeed brought to bear influences working directly the other way.3

The following description of the tenements in Sheriff Street, which was then settled by Germans, is quoted from contemporary sources:

The attic rooms are used to deposit the filthy rags and bones as they are taken from the gutters and slaughterhouses. The yards are filled with dirty rags hung up to dry, sending forth their stench to all the

I

2

Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 457. a Ibid., p. 454.

3 Ibid., p. 458.

neighborhood. . . . The tenants are all Germans. . . . They are exceedingly filthy in person and their bedclothes are as dirty as the floors they walk on. Their food is of the poorest quality, and their feet and hands, doubtless their whole bodies are suffering from what they call rheumatism, but which in reality is a prostrate nervous system, the result of foul air and inadequate supply of nutritious food. . . . The yards are all small and the sinks running over with filth. . . . Not one decent sleeping apartment can be found on the entire premises and not one stove properly arranged. The carbonic-acid gas, in conjunction with the other emanations from bones, rags, and human filth, defies description. The rooms are 6 by 10 feet; bedrooms 5 by 6 feet. The inhabitants lead a miserable existence, and their children wilt and die in their infancy.1

When at length the tenement dwellers crowded the old one-family residences to the utmost limit of their capacity, the further growth of population led to the utilization of the back yards, for building purposes. A special type of rear tenement came into existence. The terrible conditions that arose from lack of ventilation and sanitary conveniences are vividly depicted in a report of a city inspector concerning a square of front and rear tenements which were occupied mostly by Irish:

In a majority of rear tenements . . . the apartments are dirty, dark, and often reeking with filth, the walls wholly innocent of whitewash, and the atmosphere impregnated with the disagreeable odor so peculiar to tenant houses. In some the sun never shines, and the apartments are so dark that unless seated near the window it is impossible to read ordinary type; and yet the inspector often hears the hackneyed expression, "We have no sickness, thank God," uttered by those whose sunken eyes, pale cheeks, and colorless lips speak more eloquently than words of the anæmic condition inevitably resulting from the absence of pure, fresh air, and the general light of the sun. . . . The tenants seem to wholly disregard personal cleanliness, if not the very first principles of decency, their general appearance and actions corresponding with their wretched abodes. This indifference to personal and domiciliary cleanliness is doubtless acquired from a long familiarity with the loathsome surroundings, wholly at variance with all moral or social improvements, as well as the first principles of hygienic science.2

1

The fundamental cause of congestion with all its attend

1 Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 461. Ibid., p. 456.

ant evils is the fact that wage-workers must live within an accessible distance from their places of work. This necessity puts the owners of real estate in the factory district in a position of advantage over the tenants.

The landlord took the utmost advantage of the situation by charging the highest possible prices for the poorest possible accommodations, and disregarding every law of health and decency in erecting big barracks meant for occupation by the poor.

An inspector for the council of hygiene in 1864 thus reports the landlords' methods with regard to repairs:

Every expenditure of money which the law does not enforce to make is refused; and blinds half swung and ready to fall and crash with the first strong wind; doors long off their hinges, which open and shut by being taken up bodily and put out of or in the way; chimneys as apt to conduct the smoke into the room as out of it; stagnant, seething, overflowing privies, left uncleansed through the hot months of summer, though pestilence itself should breed from them; hydrants out of repair and flooding sink and entry; stairs which shake and quiver with every step as you ascend them; and all this day after day, month after month, year in and year out.1

Such were the housing conditions to which the "old immigrants" of Teuton and Celtic stock submitted for more than a quarter of a century, at a time when the population of New York was but a fraction of its present size, and there was still an abundance of unimproved land in the upper part of Manhattan Island. These conditions are a thing of the past. The typical tenement house in the Jewish and Italian sections of New York to-day is a decided improvement upon the dwellings of the Irish and the Germans in the same sections a generation or two ago. "The visitor of 1900 could go about dry-shod, at least, in tenement yards and courts where thirty-five years before the accumulation of what should have gone off in sewers and drains made access almost impossible. "2

The causes of the present congestion in New York City

1 Report of the Industrial Commission, vol. xv., p. 459,

2 Ibid., p. 488.

have been the subject of an exhaustive investigation by Professor Pratt, of the New York School of Philanthropy. Although believing that restriction of immigration would have "salutary results in different directions," he found from the mass of statistical evidence collected by him, that congestion is produced by industrial factors which are not related to immigration and over which the immigrants have no control. We must abstain, for want of space, from quoting his statistics. His conclusions are reproduced in condensed form, yet, as nearly as possible verbatim, in the following abstract1:

"New York City is the great mart of, the American continent. Every company or corporation of any size or importance has offices, usually its principal offices, in New York City. The New York market, therefore, is an exceedingly important factor in the concentration of manufacturers in that city. The fact that New York City is large and commercially great, makes it a desirable place in which to locate a manufacturing enterprise. A very large and increasing importance should be attached to this element as a factor in the congestion of manufactures in New York City. During the last half century New York has been changing from a purely commercial city to a manufacturing center as well. The value of manufactured products has increased nearly tenfold. The great bulk of the manufacturing in greater New York is carried on in Manhattan below Fourteenth Street, on that small but immensely valuable one-hundredth of the city's total land area. the whole number of workers engaged in manufactures in Manhattan, 321,488, or 66.8 per cent, work in factories below Fourteenth Street, while only 160,368 or 33.2 per cent work in the much larger area above Fourteenth Street. The problem of congestion of population, then, seems to be closely linked with that of congestion of industries.

Of

"Population must live within an accessible distance of its place of work. Hence, it is scarcely necessary to point out how important a cause of congestion of population the concentration of industry, trade, and commerce becomes.

'Edward Ewing Pratt: Industrial Causes of Congestion of Population in New York City, pp. 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 39, 42, 94, 97, 138, 145, 146, 155, 166, 167, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 204.