Various

“ A widespread contagion of it is what Pittsburgh needs more than anything else. In this the city must find its chief resource for bringing about and continuing a better order. The response of the churches to the sickening series of breaches of trust, to bribe giving and bribe-taking, to the overwork that means debauchery, to the mill-owners' Sabbath-breaking that breaks the mill-worker's body and soul,—must be a bold relaxing from tradition and letting their dynamic go free. ”

“ Located close to the homes of a very large population from whom the country is far removed, it offers long, level stretches of greensward where good trees cast grateful shadows, with walks that one may use even when on business, with numberless benches that are never empty on summer days and evenings, a little lake at one place and now and again a fountain where the splash of cool water gives ceaseless entertainment. It is a pity that this park was deprived of nearly half its former area, that the railroad might have a convenient path. ”

“ For centuries, until a very recent time, everybody walked to business, and the poorest classes as well as some of the wealthy do still. The reason why so many have to live at a distance from their work is not the mere growth of cities, but our universal disregard of scientific town planning as practiced notably in Germany. We usually crowd most of our business into one center, and then have to ride a long way to get enough room for a single house. But congestion on transit lines is just awakening us to the fact that the common radial plan for a city is neither wholly necessary nor desirable. ”

“ Starting at the lowest level, let us formulate our initial axiom in terms of dollars. A sound man can do more work than a sick man. Therefore he can make more money. A sound city can do more work than a sick city. Therefore, in the long run, it can accumulate more wealth. Public health is a public asset. This is a truth which, in her single-minded purpose of commercial and industrial expansion, Pittsburgh long ago forgot, if, indeed, she ever stopped to realize it. ”

“ Altogether, it is not a matter for wonder that the public is a unit against the railway.
The whole fare system of Pittsburgh needs careful scrutiny. Should workmen's fares be introduced, to give every family a chance to live where it can find the best house, the most congenial neighbors, and the desirable surroundings, and yet get to work without exorbitant car fares? The London County Council, from its workmen's homes, seven miles out in the suburbs, gives a ride to the city, with a seat for every passenger, for two cents at the rush hour. ”

“ As nature has given to Pittsburgh one of the most picturesque city sites in the world, so she has done what she could to circle the city with lovely suburbs. With sane and artistic planning, popular co-operation, and a degree of patience, the beautiful suburb with winding roads, entrancing views, individual privacy and communal neighborliness, might have been secured much oftener than it has been and it might have been brought within the financial reach of much greater numbers. ”

“ Unused, waste space, in fact, reflects more seriously upon a city's business enterprise than does the humanitarian or aesthetic use of it; and there is no better place for a park designed as a breathing space for shut-in workers, than a river bank with its inevitable current of air.
The crowding of Pittsburgh's business district has resulted in exceedingly high land values. In the whole downtown section no open space, save the plaza before the Union Station, has been preserved for the use of the people. ”

“ The conception of a direct community of interest between employer and workman, particularly if the workman is a leader in his craft, begins to be visible as in a few streaks of dawn. But the mass of the unintelligible Hungarians and Slavs must be reached by the more generous and democratic sense of responsibility on the part of employers and the more prosperous classes generally. The work of the next decade is to bring them on a really large scale into the circle of American citizenship and up to the essential standards of American home life. ”

“ But, as the system works out in Pittsburgh to-day, it for the most part achieves no such end and is a reproach to the community. For Pittsburgh has been a city too busy for introspection. A crowded center echoing with the thunder of steel mills, vast industries giving employment to alien laborers, the insistent cry of "tonnage" and the absorbing demands of business, have offered little opportunity for social study or civic experiment. It is not that Pittsburgh is derelict ”

“ Applying this latter test to the children of Pittsburgh's slums, we shall find cause to [Pg 945] wonder whether, in a sense, the deaths are not too few rather than too many. Would it not be better for the unfortunate and innocent victims themselves, and certainly for the community at large, that this puny, helpless breed of hunger, filth, and misery which creeps about the city's man-made jungles, should succumb in infancy to the conditions that bred but cannot support them? For there are certain phases of existence in which a high death rate is less to be feared than a high birth rate. ”

“ The historic sense newly awakened by the recent sesquicentennial celebration of the origin of the town; the downright, ingenuous pride of the people in its unexampled achievements; the inquiring attitude of an ever increasing number of citizens; their inner assurance that the city will match its prosperity with civic well-being; a beginning on the part of the moral reserve force of the city, on the one hand, and its practical organizing power, on the other, to seek a new common outlet; these provide momentum, amid many counter-currents, for an ample hope. ”

“ Such a magical achievement for the refinements of life has been made once in Pittsburgh through the surpassing initiative of a single citizen. It now needs to be repeated and outdone by the main action of the body of responsible citizens, carrying with them representatives of every grade and type of the people, in the united, elated march of a great civic and human welfare movement. Strange as it may sound, this is the sort of social phenomenon that American city life is next going to present ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sluggish clouds of thick smoke hang over the cluster of roofs and the air is full of soot and fine dust. Noise presses in from every quarter,—from the roaring mill, from the trolley cars clattering and clanging through the narrow street which divides mill and rows into two sections, from the trains on the through tracks above the topmost row and from the sidings which separate the lowest row from the river bank and which are in constant use for the hauling of freight to and from the mills. ”

“ This is strong testimony from a German economist who is a careful student in the field of social economics, and who lives in a country which has a splendid system of municipal savings banks. But if one looks beyond Prussia and Saxony into the province of Posen he sees great stretches of neglected territory. And in this country if one looks beyond Massachusetts, with its much praised trustee savings system, into New York and Pennsylvania he sees much to be desired,—and if he looks still further west he finds a sadder neglect than the neglect of free popular education in darkest Russia. ”

“ The mother wishes there was some better place for the children to play.
Up to this point one feels that this is a settlement of mill-ends; mill-ends of people, living in mill-ends of houses, on mill-end jobs, if they work at all. It does not seem possible that anyone could come to live on Ewing street from deliberate choice. With something of a start one finds, in this row of demoralization, a home just vacated by a charitable agency for the help of colored children. ”

“ There is ground for difference of opinion from a business as well as a social point of view, as to whether it is desirable for an industrial corporation to own and rent homes to its employes. But if industrial chairmen, presidents and superintendents become landlords, they must bear the responsibilities of landlords; and only as the public holds them up to these responsibilities as stiffly as their stockholders hold them up to dividends, will they be in position to devise and carry out policies which, as individuals, we may assume they would act upon. ”

“ It seems a very grave question if a radiating city like Pittsburgh can support such a subway as proposed, to say nothing of a system serving adequately all parts of the city. Subways have usually turned out to be very poor investments, as many companies have learned to their cost, in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Berlin. The New York subway pays only for about half its length, a considerable part of the dividends coming out of the surplus obtained from the elevated roads. Boston can afford subways, because they are mere short links in an extensive system. ”

“ But the time to improve suburbs is before, not after, the rush thither begins. The suburbs must act as quickly as must the East End, the playground supporters, the designers of an educational center, and the builders of an adequate East End approach. In all that Pittsburgh is to do for civic improvement she must act at once, generously and with comprehensive grasp. ”

“ With every recession of the floods, man crowds the streams, only to be driven back when they reassert their suzerainty. Whatever can be done therefore, to tame their caprices, to equalize their flow, either by lowering the flood crests or increasing the low water stages, adds to the well-being and prosperity of men who work at forge and furnace, or go with the barges,—men whose living is from day to day, and to whom the idle day brings want. ”

“ Consequently, at a time when all the other great American cities have organized their forces thoroughly and are waging battle, with greater or less scientific skill, against that most potent of all destroyers, the germ, this mighty aggregation of half a million human beings has only just declared war, and has barely established its outposts. After two years of preparation to meet conditions which have been half a century in forming and solidifying, Pittsburgh's little regular army of defence now faces the most complicated problem of municipal betterment to be found in American hygiene. ”

“ Along with the detailed, patient, comprehensive work that is needed to build up a moralized democracy, the industrial and commercial leaders of the community, including those who are the responsible representatives of absentee capitalists and landlords, must rise to a far more generous, not to say discerning, conception of their opportunity. Big men of a generation ago said, "After us the deluge,"—they cut the forests off the Alleghenies, and Pittsburgh literally suffers the curse in destructive floods once or twice every year. ”

“ There are seldom signs on the street to show just where cars stop, whereas in Europe every stopping place has a printed sign. The signs on the cars are often too dim to read, and half the time show only where the car came from, not where it is going to. The routes of the cars are seldom given as they should be. The Berlin sign system with its route numbers instead of confusing colors, and such completeness that no stranger need ask a question to find his way about is urgently needed. Every stopping place in Pittsburgh needs to be called out, as in Boston. ”

“ Where from so many different points one sees the involved panorama of the rivers, the various long ascents and steep bluffs, the visible signs everywhere of movement, of immense forces at work,—the pillars of smoke by day, and at night the pillars of fire against the background of hillsides strewn with jets of light,—one comes to have the convincing sense of a city which in its ensemble is quite as real a thing as are the separate forces which go to make it up. ”

“ To put it plainly the Survey has only revealed again that in the whole field of outdoor relief there must be a deeper realization of the fact that as umpires in the discrimination of causes, as workers in the right forms of treatment, and as educators in revealing true conditions, there is a very heavy responsibility which all who in any way deal with the dependent or neglected in their homes, must feel. It is because their work brings them into the homes that the responsibility is the greater. ”

“ What would have been the one most effectual check upon the city's mortality, the wiping out of those death-in-life conditions of housing which make for tuberculosis, the active contagions, and above all the undermined vitality represented in Pittsburgh statistics under every division from general debility to suicide,—that the gubernatorial veto has effectually blocked. So certain large and small owners of slum property have an extension of immunity for their rentals drawn, at the worst, from premises where they wouldn't house their pigs,—particularly if they designed to eat the pigs afterward. ”