Slum clearance

“ The responsibility for the slum can be divided between money-grasping property owners and an indifferent puerile civic administration. The immigrant finds the tenements and the slums already established when he arrives and is the victim and not the cause of them. ”

“ In fifty years how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the Assembly Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system. "Forgetfulness of the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It comes to the same thing. Whether seen from the point of view of the citizen, the philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest investment a city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade. ”

“ PIETRO AND THE JEW
We have seen that the problem of the tenement is to make homes for the people, out of it if we can, in it if we must. Now about the tenant. How much of a problem is he? And how are we to go about solving it?
The government "slum inquiry," of which I have spoken before, gave us some facts about him. In New York it found 62.58 per cent of the population of the slum to be foreign-born, whereas for the whole city the percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. While the proportion of illiteracy in all was only as 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 per cent. ”

“ It must have been the experience of many whose work has taken them not only into slums but into prisons and police-courts, that the oppressive sense of Evil triumphant, strong and proud of itself, has weighed more heavily upon them in the prison and in the police-court than in the slum; for the slum only represents the neglect of Society, but the administration of our penal code represents its stereotyped preoccupation (with sympathy and understanding almost entirely eliminated) on a problem which nothing but sympathy and understanding will ever solve. ”

“ While every grade of dwelling may be found among foreign-born agriculturists, from the wretched hovel of the Italian market gardener to the home of the Swedish farmer of the Northwest which ranks with the finest in the land, yet the alien who takes up his abode in the country has, in many respects, removed himself from the general problem of the immigrant, and his living conditions can, with a reasonable degree of safety, be left to look after themselves. Yet it has been abundantly proved that slum conditions can exist even in the country, and in small towns. ”

“ POLICE STATION LODGING ROOM ON EAST SIDE
However, they are down, the worst of them. The community has asserted its right to destroy tenements that destroy life, and for that cause. We bought the slum off in the Mulberry Bend at its own figure. On the rear tenements we set the price, and set it low. It was a long step. Bottle Alley is gone, and Bandits' Roost. Bone Alley, Thieves' Alley, and Kerosene Row,—they are all gone. Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Gap have acquired standards of decency; Poverty Gap has risen even to the height of neckties. ”

“ I put this emphasis on the need of searching out the wrongs of the poor, because I am satisfied that one of the greatest factors in the present tenement-house situation is the ignorance and indifference of the people as to the condition of things in the slum tenement house. I am sure that nothing but good can come from an honest attempt to "let in the light of day upon the landlordism of the slums, as you have let it in upon Mormonism, and other hateful things that prefer darkness rather than light." ”

“ By that time the whole battle with the slum had evolved itself out of the effort to clean one pig-sty, and, as for my own share in it, to settle for one dead dog. It was raging all along the line with demands for tenement-house reform and the destruction of the old rookeries; for parks for the people who were penned up in the slum; for playgrounds for their children; for decent teaching and decent schools. There were too many dark spots in New York where we had neither. ”

“ Nobody is trying to abolish it, because nobody believes it can be done. We believe the Negro breeds the slum—instead of the slum breeding many of the Negro’s defects. Everywhere else people are re-creating the slum-dweller by abolishing the slum. We make no effort, partly because, as yet, few of us know of the widespread struggle for better housing the Negro is himself making. ”

“ Even if he has money in his pocket, it is difficult to say whether he is not in as grave danger, moral and sanitary, if forced to be a lodger in some already overcrowded home, as if forced into the common lodging-house. Like a sponge, a slum neighbourhood sucks up by overcrowding in winter those who in summer obtain varied occupation far and wide. ”

“ Unsafest of all is any thing or deed that strikes at the home, for from the people's home proceeds citizen virtue, and nowhere else does it live. The slum is the enemy of the home. Because of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called "The Homeless City." When this people comes to be truly called a nation without homes there will no longer be any nation. ”

“ While I am writing a Tuberculosis Committee is at work sifting the facts of tenement-house life as they bear on that peril. A Child Labor Committee is preparing to attack the slum in its centre, as we stopped the advance guard when we made the double-decker unprofitable. The factory inspector is gathering statistics of earnings and hours of labor in sweat shop and tenement to throw light on the robbery that goes on there. When they have told us what they have to tell, it may be that we shall be able to say to the manufacturer: "You shall not send out goods to be made in sweat shop or tenement. ”

“ The unfortunates, regardless of race, who are exposed to the hardships of the tenement and temptations of the slum, may be expected to furnish the largest proportion of inmates for our penal and charitable institutions. ”

“ Bound up with this is the fact that around the common lodging-houses in each large town is growing up silently a great evil, a network of single "furnished rooms," which are the last refuge of evicted householders, but also the home of immorality. The insufficient provision of the common lodging-house is being silently largely supplemented by these. These evils are flagrant. Yet they cannot be suppressed. The homeless must have somewhere to go. The crowding of slum areas by "lodgers" is as grave an evil. ”

“ The slum can never be eradicated by erecting model dwellings, however well planned, nor by any other superficial method alone. The foundation of the slum rests in the social and economic relations of society, and can be effectually attacked only through them.
In the foregoing quotations, frequent reference is made to the filthy condition in which the dwellings of the foreign-born are kept. It is the current idea among a large class of people that extreme uncleanliness characterizes the great majority of immigrant homes. ”

“ Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities. Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. ”

“ They have their ways, and we have ours, and each has something to learn from the other. We copied our law that enabled us to tear down slum tenements from the English statute under which they cleared large areas over yonder long before we got to work. And yet in their poor streets—in "Christian Street" of all places—I found families living in apartments entirely below the sidewalk grade. I found children poisoned by factory fumes in a charitable fold, and people huddled in sleeping-rooms as I had never seen it in New York. ”

“ A sweeping tenement house reform can do more than any number of settlements; a settlement can do more than the Army slum post; but neither the tenement reform nor the settlement does the work that a slum post does. Probably the work done by other organizations most nearly allied to that of the Army slum post is that done by the various organizations of church deaconesses, which have been growing rapidly in late years, in which women are employed by the churches to visit the poor in their homes, and nurse the sick, besides other duties. ”

“ Up-town or down-town, as the tenements grow taller, the thing that is rarest to find is the home of the olden days, even as it was in the shanty on the rocks. "No home, no family, no manhood, no patriotism!" said the old Frenchman. Seventy-seven per cent of their young prisoners, say the managers of the state reformatory, have no moral sense, or next to none. "Weakness, not wickedness, ails them," adds the prison chaplain; no manhood, that is to say. It is the stamp of the home that is lacking, and we need to be about restoring it, if we would be safe. ”

“ It is charged against this Italian immigrant that he is dirty, and the charge is true. He lives in the darkest of slums, and pays rent that ought to hire a decent flat. To wash, water is needed; and we have a law which orders tenement landlords to put it on every floor, so that their tenants may have the chance. ”

“ Almost the only actively assimilating agency with which the slum dweller comes into immediate relationship is the public school, and this lacks much of its value as an assimilating force in districts which are so largely foreign that the pupils meet few, if any, children of native-born parents. Any practical program for solving the immigration problem must attack the slum boldly. In the words of Mr. Frederic Almy, “You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and you cannot make an American citizen out of a tenement slum. The slum must go. If you spare the slum, you will spoil the child.” ”

“ Scarce an hour within the gate, they were no longer a problem. The country needs these men of strong arms and strong courage. It is in the city the shoe pinches. What can we do to relieve it?
Much could be done with effective inspection on the other side, to discourage the blind immigration that stops short in the city's slums. They come to better themselves, and it is largely a question (p. 208) of making it clear to them that they do not better themselves and make us to be worse off by staying there, whereas their going farther would benefit both. ”

“ Justice to the individual is accepted in theory as the only safe groundwork of the commonwealth. When it is practiced in dealing with the slum, there will shortly be no slum. We need not wait for the millennium, to get rid of it. ”

“ Light and air acquired a legal claim, and where the sun shines into the slum, the slum is doomed. The worst tenements were destroyed; parks were opened, schools built, playgrounds made. The children's rights were won back for them. The slum denied them even the chance to live, for it was shown that the worst rear tenements murdered the babies at the rate of one in five. The Commission made it clear that the legislation that was needed was "the kind that would root out every old ramshackle disease-breeding tenement in the city." ”

“ The slum population, however, is not wholly composed of such persons as I have spoken of. Large numbers of honest, temperate, industrious people are forced by poverty, and by the necessity of being near their work, into the dismal fate of living in the slums. ”

“ The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom, brought on an acute attack which threatened to become fatal. ”

“ We shall pull down slum after slum, not to rehouse the present inhabitants, but to drive them into still closer and closer contact, until we have massed together a huge army of famished and desperate men and women, ready, in the 'wild hour' that must sooner or later come, to burst their barriers at last, and to declare open and violent war against law and order and property. ”

“ Thus the slum becomes the great sifting ground of the foreign-born, and tends to become more and more the abode of the poorest classes of our population. Not only is there a progression of individuals through the slum, but some of our cities have witnessed a most interesting and significant succession of races along the same course. The natives were displaced by the Irish; they in turn were crowded out by the Italians and Jews, and now the Greeks, Syrians, and allied races are driving out the Italians. Races may come and races may go, but the slum goes on—forever? ”

“ I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the man as evidence that the slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of the boy. The experience that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a chance of better things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. One has to have resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the fields. We have seen what resources the slum has at its command. ”

“ The powers vested in the State or in local bodies for dealing with slum areas are obviously either not sufficient or not sufficiently put to use. Not, of course, that any quick or light-hearted transformation can be expected; the roots of this evil are too tortuously coiled in economies and natural selfishness. ”

“ When we have learned to smile and weep with the poor, we shall have mastered our problem. Then the slum will have lost its grip and the boss his job.
Until then, while they are in possession, our business is to hold taut and take in slack right along; never letting go for a moment.
[1] Police census of 1895: Block bounded by Canal, Hester, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets: size 375 × 200, population 2628, rate per acre 1526. Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets: size 200 × 300, population 2244, rate per acre 1774. ”