Part 1

GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS A STUDY OF THE AIMS AND THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 1896–1917

_By_ FULLERTON L. WALDO

PHILADELPHIA: THE HARPER PRESS 1012–20 CHANCELLOR STREET

1917

COPYRIGHT 1917 BY HARPER PRINTING COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I PAGE FOREWORD 7

II OCTAVIA HILL 11

III THE ASSOCIATION 21

IV DAYS AFIELD 77

V DOES IT PAY? 103

VI APPENDICES 111–121

INDEX 123

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Portrait of Octavia Hill Frontispiece

A court improved 20

Calling for a change 23

Montrose Street 29

Casa Ravello 35

Monroe Street 41

Workman Place 45

Workman Place—Interior view of yard 47

Interior view of Workman Place 49

East Rittenhouse St., Germantown 53

East Rittenhouse St., rear, after improvement 55

New Houses—East Rittenhouse St. property 57

Plan of dwellings for the Philadelphia Model Homes Company 61

Plans of Richmond Houses 62–64

Houses of the Richmond Group—Playground in the rear 67

Gaul St. houses, Richmond Group 69

Chart showing the increase in the number of properties owned by the Octavia Hill Association from 1896 to 1915 73

Philadelphia homes altered to tenement houses 79

Franklin Court before renovation 87

Franklin Court after renovation 89

Court of North Third St. property before renovation 97

Court of North Third St. property after renovation 99

I FOREWORD

Philadelphia is called the City of Homes with good reason. Come into her ample confines from any point you please and you see row upon row of little two-story, stone-stepped houses of red brick, perhaps with a grass-plot front or rear, shade trees in a singular variety, and a certain distinctive contentment and prosperity in the very air above the myriad simmering chimneys.

For all her malodorous misgovernment of time past, whose survivals are being eradicated step by step, with a long stride forward for each disheartening setback, it is a crowning glory of Philadelphia that thousands upon thousands of these little houses have held their own all these years, instead of the teeming, noisome rookeries that are the bane of many another metropolis.

A million people—more than half the population—live in single dwellings.

There are tenements, of recent origin: there is in prospect a tenement problem. But the satisfaction of the developed instinct of the home-builders and housekeepers of Philadelphia does not lie in the direction of the sky-scraping multiple dwelling, which replaces a front porch with a fire-escape, makes a box of geraniums or a rubber-plant do duty for a garden, festoons the vista between towering walls with “the short and simple flannels of the poor,” and suspends the growing child like Mahomet’s coffin half-way between a clouded heaven of grimy skylight or gravelled roof and the cluttered inferno of the pavement far below.

Philadelphia families, accustomed to think of health and comfort largely in terms of the upgrowing generation, prefer privacy to promiscuity, and love their own vine and fig-tree, rising from the ground level, with the tenacious affection that attaches to a patriarchal inheritance. Where the individual home is an impossible luxury, the multiple dwelling that is reared must recognize the right of the family to every procurable blessing and convenience of the single house.

The pages that follow describe the effort of a thoughtful group of Philadelphians to provide cleanly homes and a healthy environment for families in modest circumstances or in self-respecting poverty. This effort—now twenty-one years old—has outgrown the stage of experiment, but it never will deny new light nor wholly abandon, however it may adapt, the ideals that are Octavia Hill’s own spiritual legacy. Who this great and good woman was and what she did for humanity are explained in the opening chapter. The life-story of the work in Philadelphia that perpetuates her name and her influence is next set forth. The reader is then taken into the places where the Association has labored to clean out and to build up in order that sun and air and running water may perform their medicinal offices for body and soul together; that germs and vermin may be routed with the dirt that breeds them; that babies may have a chance to grow into decent and useful citizens; that a sense of neighborliness and interdependence may be fostered even among those whose nationality, religion and language are diverse.

From first to last this is an enterprise of business, and not of charitable dole. We therefore are given to see the “friendly rent-collector” going from door to door, gently but firmly insisting upon payment when the stipulated sum falls due. We find her lending an ear as “guide, philosopher and friend” to a wide category of troubles great and small—none too large and none too minute for her fearless and sympathetic consideration. She does not give alms. She makes no vague and lavish promises of benefits to fall like manna from the skies. She bestows aid upon those who help themselves. She is a walking delegate, not of insurrection and discontent but of courage and self-respect, and the inculcation of thrift and cleanliness and personal responsibility.

We are taken on his rounds with the Superintendent, whose function is the oversight of the work of tearing down and building up, of constructing and of reconstructing, in all its phases. We see that a great deal of the effort of the bricklayer and the carpenter, the plasterer and the plumber, under this shrewd and constant oversight goes to the rebuilding of old houses, and the adaptation of decadent dwellings to the modern advantage of those who have suffered under conscienceless and grinding owners, mindful of profit only.

The work of the Association in the capacity of agent for properties it does not hold is set forth, and the question of the worth-whileness of the undertaking is finally considered.

The writer has been aided without stint at every turn by those whose names appear in the text, and whose self-effacement precludes a proper acknowledgment of their help. He will remember always the mothers and fathers and children met in the course of his social exploration from house to house. He has merely written this little book: they have been the making of it.

PHILADELPHIA, September 1, 1917

II OCTAVIA HILL

December 3, 1838–August 13, 1912.

“Let us be gentle, because we know so little.”

—Letter to my Fellow-Workers, 1879.

“But, if you let one touch of terror dim your sight, and flinch before the most terrible upheaval of rampant force, or threat; if, for popular favor, or seat at board, or success on platform, you hesitate to speak what you know to be true, then shall your cowardice and your ambition be indeed answerable for consequences which you little dream of.”

—Ibid, 1889.

Many a Browning Society has little to do with Browning, and many a reading circle takes Shakespeare’s name in vain: but in the case of the Octavia Hill Association there is so close a correspondence between the work and the practical idealism of the woman whose name it bears that a study of her career of service to humanity in England and thus throughout the world sheds light upon the organized and incorporated effort in Philadelphia.

Octavia Hill was the eighth daughter among eleven children of James Hill of Peterborough. Her mother was the third wife of Mr. Hill, who inherited his father’s successful business as corn-merchant and upon the proceeds came to grief as a banker. Altruist, reformer and book-lover, the financial panics of 1825 and 1840 were too much for him. Upon his mental and physical collapse, Octavia’s mother took her daughters to a cottage at Finchley, provided by her father, Dr. Southwood Smith, the noted sanitarian.

When Octavia was thirteen, her mother removed to London to become manager of a Guild for the employment of women. One of the workers at the Guild lent Octavia books and pamphlets on the life of the poor, which so greatly depressed her that “she began to think that all laughter or amusement was wicked.”

But she was cured of that delusion when she was given an active part in the work of the Guild, and found how necessary fun and frolic are to relieve the monotony of working lives.

The little Octavia was put in charge of a work-room in which girls of about her own age made toys. Since she was poor herself, she realized to the full their lives of drudgery and hardship, and she did all she could to make them happy. Some years later she wrote of this period: “We were so very, very poor, and home was like a little raft in a dark storm, where the wonder every day was whether we could live through it; and now the sea looks calm, even if there are waves; and we have leisure to look at the little boat in which we sail. I wonder if it will ever be painted with high colors.”

It was at about this time that Octavia asked Ruskin to teach her drawing; and his assent brought a new and a constraining influence to bear on all her life. “I would give years,” she wrote after the meeting, “if I could bring to Ruskin ‘the peace which passeth all understanding.’” Ruskin told her she was “far more accurate” than any of his college pupils. No wonder Ruskin, the artist and ameliorist at once, found her an apt pupil, taking fire from the gleam of his own restless inspiration.

An address by Kingsley, delivered before an association of women created to promote sanitary reform, helped Octavia, at twenty, to visualize her objective. Kingsley adverted to the fact that small houses were passing more and more into the possession of individuals, and declared that legislation must recognize the fact. “He was not going into the question here; it would have to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off. Therefore he hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the possessors of the house, and influence people of ‘our own class.’”

In this, her summary of the speaker’s somewhat vague and not over-optimistic conclusions with regard to the possibility of legislative action, Octavia seems to be feeling a challenge to the deepest in her nature, and to a maturing if not a finally fixed conviction.

At the end of 1860, just after Octavia’s twenty-second birthday, came an event of moment—one of the great crises in her life, her biographer styles it—in the removal to 14 Nottingham Place. She arranged to have poor women come to the house weekly to sew. One night a woman fainted, and Miss Hill’s sympathetic inquiry elicited the fact that she had not slept the previous night; she had been washing clothes and rocking the baby’s cradle at the same time with her foot.

Miss Hill called at the poor woman’s home next day, and found that it was a damp, unsanitary kitchen.

She then tried to find other and better quarters, but there was no place where they would take the children. She was given in her quest to realize that at her very door there were squalid, teeming homes like those from which the little toy-workers came; and she brooded upon the sorrowful fact.

Under the cloud she came to Ruskin to bring him some of her drawings. She found him in a pessimistic frame of mind.

“I paint, take my mother for a drive, dine with friends, or answer these correspondents,” he said, as he pulled out some letters from his pocket, “but one longs to be doing something more satisfying.”

“Most of us feel like that at times,” ventured the devoted pupil.

“Well, what would you like to be doing?” was Ruskin’s reply.

“Something to provide better homes for the poor,” was the girl’s answer.

Ruskin wheeled sharply about in his chair.

“Have you a business plan?” was his challenge.

Then and there Octavia Hill’s life-work was born.

Ruskin told her he had no time to attend to the details of management as landlord, but he said he would buy a tenement house if she would run it for him.

He wanted five per cent. on his investment. He didn’t care for the money, he said, but he thought others would be far more likely to follow the example set if the enterprise were put on a business basis from the start.

“Who will ever hear of what I do?” exclaimed Octavia.

But she entered whole-heartedly into the fulfilment of the suggestion, and said she would do her best to make the scheme pay.

Then began the long, long search for a house, with a garden, where she might create modest and wholesome apartments for the poor. Landlords and agents as soon as they learned what she was after interposed all manner of objections.

In answer to one of these heartless rebuffs Octavia exclaimed: “Where, then, _are_ the poor to live?”

“I don’t know,” said the agent. “I only know they’ve got to keep away from the St. John’s Wood Estate.”

In the spring of 1865, she was able to announce triumphantly that Ruskin had bought for her, for a term of fifty-six years, three houses in a court close by. The tenants came with the houses. She had schemes for the recreation of the children, and she meant to secure a playground for them. “The plan promises to pay; but of this I say very little; so very much depends on management, and the possibility of avoiding bad debts.” To Mrs. Shaen, wife of the lawyer who negotiated the sale, she wrote presently: “The money part is very regular and simple, just so much paid into Ruskin’s bank each quarter; but to me the work is of engrossing interest. We have three houses, each with six rooms; and we have managed gradually to get the people to take two rooms, in many cases.” The garden had come with Ruskin’s enthusiastic purchase of six more houses; and the cup of the busy landlady’s satisfaction is filled to overflowing. “The children seem to have so few joys, and they spring to meet any suggestion of employment with such eagerness, instead of fighting and sitting in the gutter, with dirty faces and listless, vacant expression. I found an eager little crowd threading beads last time I was in the playground. We hope to get some tiny gardens there; and Ruskin has promised some seats. I hope to teach them to draw a little; singing we have already introduced. On the whole, I am so thankful, so glad, so hopeful in it all; and, when I remember the old days when I seemed so powerless, I am almost awed.”

Here we see in embryo several present day social movements of wide outreach, all at once:—the suggestion and direction of children’s games; the cultivation of home and school gardens; community singing.

The new owner found the houses occupied—to quote her own words—“by a desperate and forlorn set of people; wild, dirty, violent, ignorant as ever I have seen.”

“I worked on quite alone about it,” she tells us, “preferring power and responsibility and work, to committees, and their slow, dull movements.”

But as soon as she let her friends know what she was doing, they rallied in force to her assistance.

Presently in the crowding multiplicity of detail her life became, she tells us, “a fight for mere existence. References, notices, rents, repairs, the dry necessary matters of business, take up almost all time and thought; only”—and here comes the saving clause—“as, after all, we are human beings, and not machines, people round, and all we see and hear, leave a kind of mark on us; an impression of awe, or pity and wonder, or sometimes love.”

“Here I am,” she writes in another letter of about the same date, “head and ears deep in notices about dustmen, requests for lawyers to send accounts, etc., etc.... I’ve just come in from a round of visits to the nine houses; and somehow it’s been a day of small worries about all sorts of repairs, and things of that kind. It is only when the detail is really managed on as great principles as the whole plan, that a work becomes really good.” That last sentence holds the vital germ of Octavia Hill’s own philosophy, living on in the work of the Association that bears her name.

Instead of giving alms she gave herself. The student of her work cannot fail to note how sedulously she refrained from handing out money when that would have been the easiest thing to do. In 1869 she had read a paper before the Social Science Association on “The Importance of Aiding the Poor Without Alms-giving,” and on this point she was obdurate. Even her strong champion Ruskin was unwilling to go all the way with her in this policy, and he shrank from contact with the ugliness that she met to give it battle day after day.

The Artisans’ Dwelling Act in 1875 was a great parliamentary victory for housing reform, and it was in large part Miss Hill’s victory. Moreover, the Committee which investigated the operation of the Act five years later owed much to Miss Hill’s continued cooperation. This is the period of the specialized effort of Miss Hill in behalf of Open Spaces. When the bill for the artisans’ houses came up for its second reading in the House Miss Hill was present, tremulously eager of course to behold its reception and to know its fate. Suddenly, to her intense gratification, a speaker brought forward an article she had written for Macmillan’s Magazine.

“Instead of quoting dry facts and figures, he read aloud from it the description of the wonderful delight it gave me to see the courts laid open to the light and air.”

It may be remarked that no compilation of facts and figures will ever convey a fair idea of the work of Miss Hill or the work of the Octavia Hill Association.

By 1877 Miss Hill’s work had grown till it concerned the welfare of 3,500 tenants and the prudent husbandry of some $200,000 in trust funds. Lord Pembroke gave Miss Hill $30,000 to buy houses, and paid a worker. Then she had to go away to rest, and the years from 1878 to 1880 were spent chiefly in travel, that took her to the Levant, though she kept in contact with her ruling passion by intimate and affectionate correspondence.

Upon her final return she was asked by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to undertake the management of much of their property in Southwark. She accepted the charge. She began the successful movement which lasted six years, from 1883 to 1889, to add Parliament Hill, and a tract adjoining, to Hampstead Heath. This achievement must stand among her greatest benefactions to humanity. It meant obtaining $1,500,000 by private gift and municipal appropriation, and not merely saving a great playground of the poor but doubling its area.

She took charge of forty-eight houses in Deptford, in South London, in 1884, and in 1885 accepted the responsibility for seventy-eight more in the same region. In 1887 the number of tenants had increased to 5,000. The Red Cross Cottages and Garden in Southwark opened in June of this year are salient examples of Miss Hill’s magic wand in ousting ugliness and creating graciousness and beauty in its place. The hall, designed for music and other neighborhood entertainment, has unusual decorations by Walter Crane, representing just such actions of peaceful heroism as any one of us, at any time, might be called on to perform. The first picture was that of Alice Ayres, a servant girl, who saved children from a fire in Southwark. Since the heroine came from their own walk in life, and was known to some of them, the tenants felt a living link of interest with the painting.

The burden of the Deptford Cottages was progressively taken over by an enlarging number of assistants. Though many of these were volunteers, since Miss Hill never surrendered her belief in the system that brought women of refinement and leisure into contact with those whose lot was toiling poverty, the desirability of the service of professional supervisors was recognized, and over each group of houses as served by the volunteer assistants there was set a paid worker to direct the collection of the rents and all the diversified effort for the welfare of the tenants.

After a time these head women and their charges, while they never ceased to look to Miss Hill for guidance and inspiration, became more and more independent of her actual oversight, and as they gained confidence and knowledge the work became progressively decentralized.

Miss Hill was one of the pillars of the Kyrle Society, created by her sister Miranda, which sought to bring beauty into the lives of the poor, to secure open spaces, and to convert city burial grounds in congested areas to the uses of the living. She was a prime mover in the Charity Organization Society, earnestly striving to keep before that body the paramount importance of personality in charity, and the influence of enthusiastic and warmhearted individual effort for individuals. She was a member of the Women’s University Settlement in Blackfriars’ Road. She was one of the founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. She saved land along the banks of the River Wandle from desecration, for the perennial joy of the poor. After her “Homes of the London Poor” had been translated into German by Princess Alice, the Octavia Hill Verein was formed in Berlin. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee took counsel with her, and installed her methods in groups of houses municipally controlled. The housing system in Amsterdam was influenced by her work, and traces of it are to be found in Sweden. Students of her methods came from near and far to be instructed. The effort of such women as Ellen Collins and Josephine Shaw Lowell in New York gladly acknowledged the impress of Miss Hill’s ideals.

Aside from her personal correspondence, the record of beneficent activity is to be found in her two volumes, “Homes of the London Poor,” and “Our Common Land,” and in the series of annual “Letters to My Fellow-workers,” privately circulated, which began in 1873 and continued until December, 1911.

“The main tone of action,” she affirms, in “Homes of the London Poor,” “must be severe. There is much of rebuke and repression needed, although a deep and silent under-current of sympathy and pity may flow beneath. If the rent is not ready, notice to quit must be served.”

An all-important factor is the “friendly rent-collector” who, while firm in her insistence upon prompt payment of the rent, forms a living link of sympathy and perception between the landlord or landlady and the tenant, and among the tenants themselves. The thorough training of this collector is essential, and for this training Miss Hill left minute prescriptions.

In her Letter for 1879, Miss Hill says,—and she repeats the passage in the Letter for 1896,—“All the smoky chimneys, broken water-pipes, tiresome neighbors, drunken husbands, death, disease, poverty, sin, call not only for your sympathy but for your action.”