Underground dwelling

“ Ground, in the country, being the cheapest item which the farmer can devote to building purposes, his object should be to spread over, rather than to go deeply into it, or climb high in the air above it. We repudiate cellar kitchens, or under-ground rooms for house work, altogether, as being little better than a nuisance—dark, damp, unhealthy, inconvenient, and expensive. The several rooms of a farm dwelling house should be compact in arrangement, and contiguous as may be to the principally-occupied apartments. Such arrangement is cheaper, more convenient, and labor-saving ”

“ Between brick walls we thread our way, and begin descending into the abysmal darkness; the tapers, without which it were impossible to proceed with safety, burn feebly in the double night of the subterranean tenements. Most of the habitable quarters under the ground are like so many pigeon-houses indiscriminately heaped together. ”

“ The roof and eaves gutters leak, rendering the apartments wet. The two apartments on the first floor consist of one room each, in which the tenants are compelled to cook, eat, and sleep. The back walls are defective, the house wet and damp, and unfit for human habitation. It robs the surrounding houses of light. ”

“ The only open aperture in the weird and forbidden dwelling is the entrance, breathing filth and the sour odor of poverty. Crowding close to the tenement is an almost cavernous fodder and feed store, its broken, soiled windows half-hidden behind shattered boards and laths from which remnants of bill-posters, stained and ragged, flutter now and then. ”

“ A horde of dirty children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it: it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums; this their home. From the great highway overhead, along which throbs the life-tide of two great cities, one might drop a pebble into half a dozen such alleys.
At the Cradle of the Tenement.—Doorway of an Old-Fashioned Dwelling on Cherry Hill. One yawns just across the street ”

“ It is the pulling down of area after area for the purpose of building large warehouses and railway-stations, and that sort of thing, which is, of course, at the root of the overcrowding. The accommodation becomes more limited year after year, and the property built as dwelling-houses under the Artisans' Dwellings Act does not, as I have pointed out before, offer any accommodation to the class displaced. ”

“ A long narrow passage, dark as pitch, and redolent of unsavory odors, leads to the several apartments, which are separated from each other by thick walls of turf, each having also its own roof, so that the peasant’s dwelling is in fact a conglomeration of low huts, which sometimes receive their light through small windows in the front, but more frequently through holes in the roof, covered with a piece of glass or skin. ”

“ Up these stairs every pail of water must be carried from the yard, whereas in new blocks water is laid on to every floor. And though such a modern building may not be tenanted mainly by the poorest classes, they reap some benefit. When their miserable old homes are destroyed, they move into the houses vacated by the working people, who eagerly compete for rooms in the new block. ”

“ One was a half-modernised feudal dwelling, lying in a wooded hollow—a large concavity filled with a delightful old park. The house had a long grey façade and half a dozen towers, and the usual supply of ivy and of clustered chimneys relieved against a background of rook-haunted elms. But the windows were all closed and the avenue was untrodden; the house was the property of a lady who could not afford to live in it in becoming state and who had let it, furnished, to a rich young man, “for the shooting.” ”

“ Beyond the church, by the roadside, were the dwelling-houses. Some of them were a tangle of rafters mixed up with heaps of brick and miscellaneous rubbish—stoves, pots and pans, chair-legs, pictures, bedding, boxes, and all kinds of household articles. Others had been dispersed around. Others seemed to have been tipped up bodily, so that all their contents had been spilt into the street, and then to have been dropped back again with such an impact that they had collapsed on their own foundations. ”

“ The process of converting dwelling-houses into warehouses, or business offices, or for trade or manufactures was in full swing—a constant force—and so the number of houses for people to live in became ever fewer.
And the “tenement houses,” in which the great bulk of the working classes lived, became more and more crowded; houses wherein “each holding or tenement, though very often consisting but of a single small room, receives its inmates without available restriction as to their sex or number, and without registration of the accommodation requisite for cleanliness, decency, and health.” ”

“ Apartment houses—regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that—shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hack berries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. ”

“ Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day, when they cleared the tenants out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry Street, and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley against them. Never did the world move faster or surer toward a better day than when the wretched slum was seized by the health officers as a nuisance unfit longer to disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep in the deserted passageways, and the vacant floors are given over to evil smells, and to the rats that forage in squads, burrowing in the neglected sewers. ”

“ Each court and blind alley has the same characteristics—the same look of utter poverty, the same want of air and light, the same blank aspect of dingy wall and sunken doorsteps, the same square areas surrounded by hovels with clothes'-lines stretched from house to house, almost unstirred by any breeze that blows, shut in as they are in close caverns, only to be entered by narrow passages between blank walls. ”

“ They walked, occasionally losing their way and being put on it by chance encounters, through the maze of new and distressingly decorous avenues, some finished, others petering out, after a few houses, into placarded building lots or waste land; a wilderness not of the smug villa-dom of old-established suburbs, but of a queer bungalow-dom assertive, in its distinctive architecture, of unreal pursuit of Aspirations in capital letters. ”

“ Such was the tenant, who, wearied of her dull suburban home, a red brick house in the middle of a row of red brick houses; tired of the loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty, for green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesque-ness of Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village rusticity ”

“ Come to such a place this evening; all the neighbourhood will be there; we are going to redistribute the dwelling-houses. If you are tired of your slum-garret, come and choose one of the flats of five rooms that are to be disposed of, and when you have once moved in you shall stay, never fear. The people are up in arms, and he who would venture to evict you will have to answer to them. ”

“ If any accident should bring you in sight of the dwelling, you will know our rooms by the three smoky vanes that whiffle about its pointed roof, and also, by the windows in that story being occasionally open. Opposite to our windows, at the distance of half a mile, is a retired unfrequented ruin, concealed, in a great measure, from observation by a wood, and affording none of the best accommodations, it is true, but shelter in some of its vaults or apartments. ”

“ The tenants go through the next house. No matter if they are cramped; by and by they will have room. By and by comes the spring, and with it the steamer. Does not the green branch speak of spring and of hope? The policeman on the beat hears their hammers beat a joyous tattoo past midnight, far into Christmas morning. Who shall say its message has not reached even them in their slum?
Where the noisy trains speed over the iron highway past the second-story windows of Allen street, a cellar door yawns darkly in the shadow of one of the pillars that half block the narrow sidewalk. ”

“ The dwelling-houses also are nearly all detached, standing each one in an allotment of its own, so that the residential part of the town straggles over an immense area, stretching out in fragmentary streets for miles from the main city. ”

“ At first the horror of wrecked apartment-houses and big shops laid open makes one waste energy in anger. It is not seemly that rooms should be torn out of the sides of buildings as one tears the soft heart out of English bread; that villa roofs should lie across iron gates of private garages, or that drawing-room doors should flap alone and disconnected between two emptinesses of twisted girders. ”

“ They are crowded together in houses situate in Off-alley, the courts and alleys opening from Bedfordbury, Rose-street, Angel-court, courts and alleys opening from Drury-lane and the Strand, and even in places fitted up under the Adelphi arches; even the unventilated and damp underground kitchens are tenanted. Of course the tenants are never free from fevers and diarrhœa, and the mortality is great. The last class live, for the most part, in lodging-rooms, where shelter is obtained, with a bed or straw, for from 2d. ”

“ There can be no health without daylight, and sunlight, and fresh air, but the electric light is good enough to make money by.
To a greater or less extent, throughout London the height of the houses has been gradually raised, and the available curtilage has been built upon. This is seen in the dwellings of the rich, and there is no doubt that the conditions which lead to overcrowding are all intensified in the poorer quarters. ”

“ The rock-dwelling was commodious, dry, warm in winter and cool in summer, and it cost him no trouble to fashion it, or keep it in repair. He had not the prophetic eye to look forward to the arm-chair and the coal fire. Indeed, at all periods, down to the present day, those who desire to lead the simple life, and those who have been reared in these nature-formed dwelling-places, feel no ambition to occupy stone-built houses. ”

“ In any long railway journey we pass through town after town, and see these dismal rows without a vestige of greenery about them, only characterised by their meanness and by their deadly monotony. When such homes are overcrowded, and only have two bedrooms, it is impossible, or next to impossible, to live decently, especially when the family is grown up. ”

“ The vaults and sewers which are to carry off the filth of one hundred and twenty-six families have grated openings in the alleys, and doorways in the cellars, through which the deadly miasma penetrates and poisons the air of the house and courts. The water-closets for the whole vast establishment are a range of stalls, without doors, and accessible not only from the building, but even from the street. ”

“ On being taken the other day through a large and costly residence, with the thoroughness that only the owner of a new house has the cruelty to inflict on his victims, not allowing them to pass a closet or an electric bell without having its particular use and convenience explained, forcing them to look up coal-slides, and down air-shafts and to visit every secret place, from the cellar to the fire-escape, I noticed that a peculiar arrangement of the rooms repeated itself on each floor, and several times on a floor. ”

“ Originally it had a level cutting running into the hill until a face of rock was won in which to make a door and hew an underground apartment.
"The hollow of this cutting has been raised, the banks rounded down, the roof over the door has fallen; the hand of destruction has worked back into the cave, and all evidence of the door and its whereabouts has vanished. The floor is loaded with sand and blocks fallen from the roof. The floor being so buried renders it difficult perfectly to judge of the depth of the apartment." What a habitation for a rheumatic hermit! ”

“ But it so happened that several hundred families belonging to the metal-working guilds, who knew the underground passages to the mines as foresters know the pathless wood, had taken refuge in the vast underground caverns with all the goods they could carry. Poor deluded creatures! they thought that this sudden coming of the winter blast, of the blinding snow and vast floating fields of ice, was but a freak of nature, and that in a few months the old warmth and the old sunshine would come back again. ”

“ Apartments originally intended for cellars, and occupied as such until lately, are now inhabited by large families, and the only opening for light and air is the door, which when shut encloses the poor creatures in a tainted atmosphere and in total darkness. ”

“ Skilled and well-paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement even in spite of the open door, and usually soon supplies the missing bell. Gas-houses, slaughter-houses and the docks, that attract the roughest crowds and support the vilest saloons, invariably form slum-centres. ”

“ For this purpose, an under-ground dwelling, defended from the penetration of the frost by a roof of moss and earth, with an additional coating of a bed of snow, and preserved from the entrance of the piercing wind by a long subterranean tunnel, without the possibility of being annoyed by any draught of air, but what is voluntarily admitted—forms one of the best contrivances which, considering the limited resources, and the unenlightened state of these people, could possibly have been adopted. ”