Part 17

It is fair to ask, why even immigrant laborers put up with such conditions? To the minds of the men, for two very good and sufficient reasons. The houses were near the mill and rents were cheap. The ledge of land along the foot of Mt. Washington affords few building sites; and the Painter's Mill section is, perhaps, the extreme example of the general housing-shortage of the South Side. Men who work in heat, work ten or twelve hours a day, and work at night alternate fortnights, want to live near the mill. Especially is this true of day laborers who work on repair gangs and cleaning-up work, and who may be called out at any time. This is as true of the mill towns, as of the working force of such a plant as Painter's Mill, in the heart of the city. On the other hand, the mill management wants these men there, for just such emergency calls. The rents in Painter's Row averaged $2.40 a room monthly,--cheaper by far than these laborers could secure accommodations from ordinary landlords in many other sections of Pittsburgh; and that is a dominating consideration to a man with a family, earning $1.65 a day, or a single immigrant whose whole purpose in coming to America is to make money and who will stomach any personal ills to hold on to it. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these rents aggregated the company over $7,000 a year. Such an item is a bagatelle in the balance sheet of the United States Steel Corporation; and it would be foolish to suppose that the rows were rented out to their employes as a money making scheme. They were rented out on easy terms to keep laborers within call at any hour of the day or night, and the fact that Painter's Mill is an old plant and likely to be abandoned, no doubt influenced the management in holding the housing property as it stood without rehabilitation. But the fact remains that these rentals amounted to a sum nearly sufficient to pay the whole taxes on the Painter's Mill property, mill, equipment, land and houses.

To-day, the situation in Painter's Row is very different. Three rows of houses have been torn down, and radical improvements made to others. A variety of factors entered into this change and the story is worth the telling. The evolution of social consciousness is interesting, whether in an individual or a corporation. The initial factor in such a development may be one of several,--motives of self-interest, the weight of public opinion or the letting of light into dark places. Motives of self-interest did not suffice to make the Carnegie Steel Company a good landlord in the present instance. In other words, the company had not recognized it to be worth while as a business consideration to house its human machinery with a view of maintaining such machinery at its highest state of efficiency. Its mills, with their equipment, were repaired and improved in order to increase the quality and quantity of their output. But common laborers were too easily replaced for an effort to be made to conserve their health or well-being by repairing or improving these houses in which they lived. If ten men fell out, ten more were ready to step in and fill their places.

But Painter's Row was not the only instance of bad housing in Pittsburgh. Other landlords were equally indifferent, and evil housing conditions were found all over the city. In March, a preliminary report on general housing conditions in Pittsburgh was published by the Pittsburgh Survey. One paragraph dealt with conditions in Painter's Row. The fact that the responsibility for the situation there could be fixed directly upon one of the great corporations enhanced the value of the paragraph as a quotable news item, and _Collier's Weekly_ seized upon it as a text for an editorial. The editorial brought it under the eye of a New England stockholder whose New England conscience was stirred. His protest at the United States Steel headquarters in New York brought from there a communication so favorable to the company that he felt justified in criticising the editors of _Collier's_ for their apparently unwarranted statements; and they, in turn, called upon the Survey to substantiate the quotation. In support of this paragraph, which was but a few lines long in the published report, the full details of how things stood at Painter's Row, as I have put them down here, were transmitted by the editors to the inquiring stockholder. He was aroused, convinced and in position to lodge another protest, this time with the facts behind it. Light had been let in.

Meanwhile, pressure was brought to bear upon the owners of Painter's Row from a second quarter. The health authorities were insistent that all houses occupied by three or more families should be altered so as to conform to the requirements of the tenement house law, thus making mandatory the installation of sinks and water-closets in such houses. This also involved the cutting of windows in half a dozen gloomy cellar rooms in one building, in order to procure the required amount of light and ventilation, a structural change which would have so weakened the supporting walls of the building as to have rendered it unsafe. The windows were not cut, the sinks and closets were not installed; instead, the building was razed to the ground,--the best possible thing that could have happened. Two other rows of two-family houses were also demolished. They were old, ramshackle, frame buildings, not worth repairing.

Last fall, I inspected Painter's Row for the second time. I found the noise as incessant, the smoke and dust as penetrating, as nine months before. The children were as grimy but they were fewer in number, for as a result of these changes the settlement had been reduced to twenty-eight families. When I reached the topmost row of houses on the hillside, my inspection partook of the nature of a triumphal progress. Some of the tenants remembered me. Gleefully they showed me their sinks with drinking water in every apartment, and told of the closets that had been installed in the basement. Every fixture was clean and in perfect condition,--a refutation of the old argument that such people unaccustomed to these conveniences in the old country will not care for them when supplied.

I found a like state of affairs in another building formerly occupied as a tenement, now housing but two families. Here also sinks and inside water-closets had been installed.

By so much, then, had life in Painter's Row been made more tolerable. Two rows of one-family brick houses remained untouched. The families living in these houses continued to get along without drinking water on the premises and continued to use outside privy vaults; a few were occupying cellar kitchens. In one row, waste water and garbage were still emptied down wooden chutes leading to open drains through the yards. The result was odorous and unhealthy.

Much had been accomplished, something still remained to be done. The company which had gone beyond the requirement of the law in some things still fell short in others. Sooner or later, the health authorities would force the removal of the privy vaults. The old pump had served Painter's Row loyally and well, and would continue to serve it as long as the bucket brigade moved back and forth between these remaining houses and the mill-yard for their water. Sometimes a little child trudged along with a great pail half filled. Again, it was the man of the family, tired after a hard day, who brought in the ration of water.

In a way, that big, grimy pump with its old iron handle and primitive spoutings, summed up the Painter's Row situation,--of an industry of great mechanics who could overhaul an old plant and make it pay, but had not brought water a few paces up the hill, or dropped a sewer a few paces down to the river below that men and women and children might live like men and women and children.

LITTLE JIM PARK

LEROY SCOTT

AUTHOR OF TO HIM THAT HATH, ETC.

I had taken a car over to Painter's Mill and Painter's Row and got off at the farther end of the dingy, smoke-hung settlement. I went through and about the houses which the great Carnegie Company leases to its workers (with no trouble about collecting the rent, for that is taken from their wages),--houses so close to the mill, some even wall to wall with it, that they share almost equally with the mill its smoke and grime and clangor,--houses which had been as unsanitary and disease-breeding as any I have ever seen offered the poor even by hardened slum landlords. And then, after I had gone through the rows of houses, at the end of the settlement nearest Pittsburgh, I came upon a sudden contrast. It was an open space, with a portion of it canopied, and over the canopy this black-lettered sign:

* * * * *

LITTLE JIM PARK

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It wasn't much of a park,--just a little bit of ground, in area hardly more than an average city lot, with a second-hand iron fence around it, with rough benches, a pavement of tan-bark and a few flowerbeds bordered with whitewashed bricks. A poor, pitiably insignificant little place,--yet startlingly pleasant when compared with its surroundings. On the one side, with a row of dreary houses between, rumbled and belched the mill; at its back was a littered waste; at its front, across the street, was a steep hill topped by the ramshackle houses of Stewart's Row, and this hill was muddy, stubbled over with lank dead weeds, gullied with foul-looking, foul-smelling streams of waste water and garbage.

I entered the park, sat down beneath the canopy, and my imagination proceeded to explain how the park had been established. Its name was a certain clue. "Little Jim Park,"--that fairly reeked with ultra-sentimentality. Some rich woman had been emotionally stirred by the stories of the cheerless life of tenement children,--the Little Jims and the Little Rosies; she had chanced to see how especially cheerless the life of the children of Painter's Row; she had established the park, and given it as title the more or less generic name by which tenement children are known to sentiment, "Little Jim."

I had just credited the park to my Lady Bountiful,--had just finished with Romance,--when Realism sauntered into the park and took the other end of my bench. He was a working man, whose decent clothes and white collar told me this was his day off. His coat collar was turned up, his slouch hat pulled down. One jaw stood out with a quid of tobacco, and his face was deeply wrinkled. He was perhaps twenty-one.

"Won't you tell me," I asked, "who gave this park to Painter's Row?"

He smiled good-naturedly at me. "Who give it? Nobody give it."

"Then how did you get it?"

"We took it," said he.

"Took it! But the name,----?"

"Oh, we just took that, too."

Here was something new in the park-building line. I drew nearer. "I wish you'd tell me about it," I asked.

"Sure, I'll tell," said he, and I could detect pride in the park in both the young fellow's tone and manner. He tossed his quid down upon the tan-bark. "Used to be a little old church standing here. Little Jim church they called it, Queer name for a church, wasn't it? Damned if I know why they named it that. For the last five or six years it wasn't used at all, and last spring it just collapsed. The Hunkies come scramblin' over it and carried away all the wood to burn, and what was left was certainly a mess.

"Well, I don't know just who started the idea,--I guess it was John Donohue and Jim Leary (they works around the rolls in the mill),--but pretty soon a lot of us guys had decided it would be great if we could clear up the place and make a park. So we started at the job, and when any of us was laid off over at the mill we was workin' here. The iron fence we got when they tore down part of Painter's Row,--it was just old junk you know; the bricks 'round the flower beds were some left over from buildin' a brewery down the street, we just helped ourselves to 'em; the arch over the gate we made out of an old pipe; the flag-pole there used to be a pump handle of a barge pump down on the river,--we swiped that; the ball on top of the flag-pole a carpenter give us. We chipped in and bought this tent, and we chipped in and bought a flag. The first one was whipped to pieces by the wind and we had to chip in and buy another before the summer was over. Then we set out some flowers, splashed around with some paint and whitewash, and the park was done. The name of the church seemed sorter to belong to the place, so we called it 'Little Jim Park.'

"The park was what you might say opened on Decoration Day when the kids come in and sang and performed. It was a great place for the kids to play all summer, and a fine place for us to sit around of evenings and chin and sing. Never had nothin' of the sort here before, you know. But the big show here at Little Jim Park was Old Home Week, when we had it all fixed up with buntin' and had it lit up of nights. I guess the park ain't much to look at just now, for the geraniums have all been took up, and the fellows are takin' care of 'em in their houses through the winter. But in summer, when the flowers are out, and things are fixed up, I tell you what Little Jim Park looks mighty good to Painter's Row!"

* * * * *

Somehow, when he had finished, this little park, a park _by_ the people, seemed to be a thousand fold more beautiful, a thousand fold more significant. It and the great mill stood there in striking contrast; the mill and the houses expressing the indifference of the company to its human machines, the park the spontaneous expression of a great native desire, though choked down by long hours and the general oppressive dinginess,--the up-reaching, outreaching desire of the people for light, for air, for natural happiness, for development.

THE MILL TOWN COURTS AND THEIR LODGERS

MARGARET F. BYINGTON

FORMER DISTRICT AGENT, BOSTON ASSOCIATED CHARITIES

From the cinder path beside a railroad that crosses the level part of Homestead, you enter an alley, bordered on one side by stables and on the other by shabby two-story frame houses. The doors of the houses are closed, but dishpans and old clothes decorating their exterior, mark them as inhabited. You turn from the alley through a narrow passageway, and find yourself in a small court, on three sides of which are smoke-grimed houses, on the fourth, low stables. The open space teems with life and movement. Children, dogs and hens make it lively under foot; overhead long lines of flapping clothes are to be dodged. A group of women stand gossiping in one corner waiting their turn at the pump,--this pump being one of the two sources of water supply for the twenty families who live here. Another woman is dumping the contents of her washtubs upon the paved ground, and the greasy, soapy water runs into an open drain a few feet from the pump. In the center of the court, a circular wooden building with ten compartments opening into one vault, flushed only by this waste water, constitutes the toilet facilities for over a hundred people. For the sixty-three rooms in the houses about the court shelter a group of twenty families, Polish, Slavic, and Hungarian, Jewish and even Negro; and twenty-seven little children find in this crowded brick-paved space their only playground.

The cinder path has led us to the heart of the sanitary evils of the steel town. For this court typifies those conditions which result when there crowd in upon an industrial district, hundreds of unskilled immigrant laborers, largely single men, largely country people, who want a place to sleep for the least possible cash. Most of the petty local landlords who provide quarters care nothing for the condition of their places, and regard the wages of these transients as legitimate spoils.

To determine the extent of such congestion, I made a study of the twenty-one courts in the second ward of Homestead, where yards, toilets, and water supply are used in common. In these courts lived 239 families, 102 of whom took lodgers. Even of those who lived in two-room tenements, a half took lodgers. Fifty-one families, including sometimes four or five people, lived in one-room tenements. One-half the families used their kitchens as sleeping rooms. Only three houses had running water inside, and in at least three instances over 110 people were dependent on one yard-hydrant for water. These are but fragmentary indications, but the situation seemed serious enough to warrant an intensive study, with the help of an interpreter, of these courts.

The background of life in this section is a gloomy one. The level land forming the second ward, cut off from the river by the mill and from the country by the steep hill behind, forms a pocket where the smoke settles heavily. Here, on the original site of the town, gardens as well as alleys have been utilized for building small frame houses. The space is nearly covered. In some instances these houses are built in haphazard fashion on the lots; more often they surround a court, such as I have described. Though they vary in character, these groups usually consist of four or six two-story houses facing the street and a similar number facing the alley. Between these rows is a small court connected with the street by a narrow passage. Fifty-eight per cent of the houses have only four rooms, and only four have more than six. The former class usually shelters two families, one having the two rooms on the street and the other the two on the court. In summer, to give some through ventilation to the stifling rooms, doors leading to the stairway between the front and rear rooms are left open. As the families are often friends and fellow countrymen, this opportunity for friendly intercourse is not unwelcome. Indeed, the cheerful gossip that enlivens wash day, like the card-playing in the court on a summer evening, suggests the friendliness of village days.

Nothing in the surroundings of these festivities, however, bears out the suggestion. 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. Dreary as is the exterior, however, the greatest evils to the dwellers in the court arise from other things, from inadequate water supply, from meager toilet facilities, from overcrowding.

The conditions as to water supply are very serious. In all the twenty-one courts only three families had running water in their houses, and even the hydrants in the courts were not for individual families. In no court were fewer than five families using one hydrant or pump, while in exceptional instances there were as many as nineteen, twenty and twenty-one families. As waste water pipes are also wanting in the houses, the heavy tubs of water must be carried out as well as in. In this smoky town a double amount of washing and cleaning must be done. The wash is a heavy one, and when the weather permits, it is done in the yard. This addition of tubs, wringers, clothes baskets, and soapy water on the pavement to the already populous court makes it no very serviceable playground for children.

The toilet accommodations, while possibly more adequate than the water supply, are unsatisfactory in consequence of the lack of running water. There is not a single indoor closet in any of these courts. The streets of Homestead all have sewers, and by a borough ordinance, even the outside vaults must be connected with them. These are, however, ordinarily flushed only by the waste water, which flows from the yards directly into them; when conditions become intolerable, the tenants wash them out with a hose attached to the hydrant. As long as they are in the yards, this totally inadequate device is apparently the only one possible. The closets, moreover, which are usually in the center of the courts only a few yards from the kitchen doors, create from the point of view either of sanitation or decency an intolerable condition. While occasionally three or four families must use one compartment, usually only two families need do so. But even this means that often they are not locked and that no one has a special sense of responsibility, in consequence of which they are frequently filthy. It is not perhaps surprising that this state of affairs is tolerated by people who have lived on farms and were used to meager toilet facilities; but the discomfort and danger here are infinitely greater than in the country, and here the conditions are remediable.

The overcrowding within the houses shown by the accompanying chart makes the water and toilet conditions more unendurable. Half the families who do not take lodgers and eighty-five per cent of those who do, average more than two persons to the room,--a number indicative, generally, of conditions which do not permit moral or physical well being.

FAMILIES CLASSIFIED AS TO AVERAGE NUMBER OF PERSONS PER ROOM.

Number of persons per room 1 2 3 4 5 5 plus

Families without lodgers, total, 137. percentage 13.8 35.7 38 9.7 1.4 1.4

With lodgers, Total 102, percentage 5.8 8.8 42 30.4 6.8 5.8

Let us consider first the causes of such congestion in so small a town, next its nature and results, and finally the possibility of improvement.

Three factors are involved in producing this state of affairs, the growth of the mill and town, the low wage of the laborer, and his ambition. The mill has developed fast, and in spite of improved machinery has rapidly increased the number of its employes. In 1892, at the time of the strike, 4,000 men were employed; now nearly 7,000, exclusive of the clerical force. Moreover at each addition to the size of the mill, homes are destroyed to give it place. And further, the steep slopes of a hill hinder the growth of the town. Although suburbs are gradually building beyond this hill, car-fare is an item to be considered when a man earns $1.60 a day, and as there have not been, except during the hard times of 1908, a sufficient number of cheap houses for rent, the people accustomed to small quarters have crowded together along these alleys. The lowest paid workingmen are naturally the ones that inhabit them. Of 220 men, eighty-eight per cent were unskilled workers receiving less than two dollars a day. This figure is usual among the Slavs, since of the 3,602 employed in the mill, eighty-five per cent are unskilled.

That the greatest overcrowding is in the families taking lodgers, shows a general tendency to economize in this way rather than by crowding the family into too small a tenement. The three dollars a month which the lodgers pay for their room might seem a small return for the labor and loss of privacy of home life; but in more than three-quarters of the families taking lodgers the income from them covered the rent, while in one-fifth of the families it was twice the rent or even more.