Part 3
From year to year the list of properties owned, or managed by agency, has lengthened. The Casa Ravello, owned by Dr. George Woodward and operated by the Association, was opened in 1903 for the special benefit of Italians. It stands at the corner of Seventh and Catharine Streets, and right on the corner, in a store-space that could be rented for $40 a month, is a most valuable outpost of the Starr Centre Association which shows poor mothers what to do for their babies. In June, 1917, 219 different babies under two years of age were brought here for consultation. Nearly all were Italians. There were a few Jews and one colored child. “History cards” are kept, and the fluctuation of weight is traced by a graphic curve. There are home visits by nurses, and two doctors keep office-hours.
The Casa Ravello has four stories of brick, the windows made attractive by their gay boxes of geraniums, and air and light are at every window through the liberal space the courtyard leaves. The iron stairways come up through fire-towers, and there are netted verandahs safe and roomy for the youngsters of the family and the mothers resting or at work. On the roof in July and August is a playground, and a summer school for the children. Of these there are 79 in the building, and in midsummer, 1917, there was an average attendance of 45 in the school. They wear little red tags with their names, that the stranger may distinguish tiny black-eyed Domenico from the toddling frolicsome Bettina.
The mothers use the roof too—for gossiping, embroidery, for hanging clothes, for the baby’s nap in a preferred location of the hammock. There is a swing for larger children, and—safely shut away between-whiles in a cement-floored bin—there is a piano for the dance-lovers of Italy, great and small. All this for thirty-four families, at a rate which at its maximum is $14 for one of the three four-roomed apartments that boast a bath-tub.
On September 22, 1903, Emily W. Dinwiddie, who had been a City Inspector of the Tenement House Department of New York, began an investigation in behalf of the Association and under its direction,—an investigation that lasted nearly a year. The cost was defrayed by special contributions. It resulted in a report which is in all ways a model for the emulation of others engaged in social research. The Bureau of Building Inspection and the Board of Health granted her every facility and permitted her freely to accompany their inspectors. Her report, entitled “Housing Conditions in Philadelphia,” embraced the results of her thorough personal examination of 600 houses. For every dwelling-place investigated a card of minutely particularized details was filled out, of which facsimiles are presented, together with telling pictures, maps, and tables of simple and explicit arrangement giving according to nationality the statistics of every phase of the living conditions ascertained.
Miss Hannah Fox was chairman of the directing and assisting committee of the Association; the other members were Dr. Frances C. Van Gasken, Helen L. Parrish, Robert P. Shick, Dr. George Woodward, E. Spencer Miller. Lawrence Veiller of New York, with his wide official experience of tenement problems, was of much assistance.
The three areas studied were distributed and representative. One was the block between Eighth and Ninth Streets, Carpenter and Christian. A second was the segment of North American and of Newmarket Streets lying between Vine and Callowhill. The third took in the block bounded by Sixteenth, Eighteenth, Lombard and Rodman Streets.
Here are some of the things Miss Dinwiddie found:—
“One tenement visited was a three story house, without fire-escapes, containing a grocery store, a fish stand and a meat shop on the first floor. Above in the seventeen living rooms of all kinds—kitchens, bed-rooms and dining rooms—were eight families, consisting of thirty-three persons. A goat was kept in the room back of the grocery, and three dogs upstairs.
“A row of houses faced on an alley whose width varied from three feet two inches to three feet eleven and a half inches.
“Five houses on one court, of which four were occupied, had cellars flooded with sewage from a leaking soil pipe, the foul water standing about a foot deep in all but one of the buildings.... Beds and bedding, said to have been cast aside because someone had died upon them, and it was ‘bad luck’ to use them again, were not infrequently found in cellars.”
In a certain alley “one hydrant was the only fixture for eleven families in ten houses.” A colored woman in one of the foul courts said: “I’m sorry to have you see my house lookin’ dis way, lady, but ’tain’ no use tryin’ to be clean; we ain’t got but one hydrant for dese yere five houses, an’ we ain’ had no water for a week, since de pump busted.”
Animals kept on the premises are a serious evil. In a tenement visited, “two rooms on the top floor were given up to the raising of fowls, and the floors and parts of the walls were covered with filth; in another house the door from the inside cellar stairs was pushed open during an inspection and a goat stalked in; in yet another, chickens were kept in a fenced-up corner of a third story room, used at the same time as a kitchen and a bedroom. Under a shop in one dwelling-house, white mice and rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and dogs were kept for sale. At about the time of the festival of Yom Kippur, many yards and shed rooms in the Russian-Jewish neighborhoods were seen covered with blood and refuse of slaughtered fowls. The worst case found was that of a slaughter house and dwelling in one building. About thirty sheep were kept in the second story, which was reached by an inclined runway from the narrow side alley, giving entrance from the street to the rear of the house. Down stairs a room was used for slaughtering, and from 30 to 100 sheep were killed daily. The butcher and his family lived in the house, having a kitchen on the ground floor and attractively furnished rooms upstairs at the front. There were also dwellings adjoining on every side.”
Travellers in Tibet have described the ridges of filth that accumulate in the middle of village streets and freeze in winter. Tibet is on the other side of the world, and those whose complacency is not to be disturbed like to believe that we have nothing so abhorrent here. But listen to Miss Dinwiddie. “The condition of the sidewalk varies with the seasons. In winter the alleys and parts of the sidewalk are often covered with frozen refuse of various kinds and ice from surface drainage. The writer has seen the occupants of an alley obliged, for several weeks, to climb over a hard frozen mass about two feet high, blocking up the entire outer end of the court. In summer, on the other hand, garbage accumulates rapidly, and the odors from the decomposition of such matter and from the pools of drainage water are offensive. As a visitor from ‘uptown’ remarked while taking an alley picture, ‘If one could photograph the smells, it might be possible to give an idea of this place.’”
Among the heads of the 843 families, there was represented every occupation from that of card-sharp to that of minister or rabbi; in the social strata rag-pickers, scrub-women and organ-grinders were at the bottom, while opticians, pharmacists and machinists stood at the top. Of unskilled laborers the total number showed 39 per cent., and there was an equal proportion of skilled laborers. Commercial pursuits were represented by 16 per cent., and the remaining 6 per cent. followed special occupations. The bankers, musicians, organ-grinders, street cleaners, candy makers and boot-blacks were in all cases Italians; of the 37 fruit, candy and fish dealers and rag-pickers all but two were Italians. The worst instance of the sweating evil was found in an Italian tailor shop. Laundry work at home was confined to the colored district. Rag-picking (among Italians only), dress making, tailoring, cobbling, cigar making, fish cake making, herb brewing, plain sewing, scissors sharpening and umbrella mending were the other occupations carried on in living rooms. Fruit, vegetables and candy sold by trucksters were often stored in living rooms over night. The fire risk does not need to be emphasized in the case of one house, occupied by two families, in which a marionette show took place nightly on the ground floor, where smoking was permitted. Fish stores, bakeries and dance halls were adjuncts of other crowded dwelling-places.
The families living in apartments paid on the average $5.63 a month for rent; those in one family dwellings paid $10.36—almost twice as much.
In her full and simple suggestions for remedial action, Miss Dinwiddie urged virtually the program of the Octavia Hill Association. There should be strictly enforced regulations concerning congestion, water supply and toilet accommodations, air and light. Cellars and basements must not be used for sleeping purposes, nor should animals be kept and slaughtered on the premises. Ignorance and indifference on the part of landlord and tenant alike, the investigator held, is the great obstacle in the way of reform. The personal worker who will see clearly and report frankly and fearlessly is indispensable. Such workers, it is clear, are provided by the superintendence and the friendly rent-collection of the Octavia Hill Association.
The fruit of Miss Dinwiddie’s long and conscientious labor with the Committee’s cooperation was a comprehensive legislative measure embodying the ten years’ experience of the Association and dealing with the adaptation to the purposes of three or more families of houses originally built for one. An earlier law, of 1895, made the building of tenement houses, as such, so costly that few since that time have been built for families of small incomes. Its present day application is almost wholly to the erection of high-class apartment houses. The new measure prepared and backed by the Association came before the legislature of 1905, and the selfish interests that would have suffered by its passage fought it tooth and nail. Undismayed, the Association and its friends rallied and returned to the attack, and in 1907, to their great satisfaction, it became a law. In the meantime, in 1906, two ordinances were put before the city Councils by the Association through its Committee: one providing for underdrainage where a sewer connection was feasible; the other prescribing improved water facilities, for court and alley houses in particular. These ordinances did not pass, but in the agitation of the matters upon which they focussed the attention of the City Fathers and to some extent of the public at large, a useful educational result was reached, for models illustrating the conditions the Association sought to remedy were put on view at Horticultural Hall, meetings were held, and the councilmen were taken to see how the other half lived and to be impressed by the necessity for drastic changes.
When in 1907 the act providing for the licensing and inspection of tenement houses was passed, the Director of Public Health and Charities asked the Association to help him frame the rules to govern the work of the new division of tenement house inspection. The aid of the Association was given without stint, and upon the Committee’s recommendation Miss Caroline Manning was appointed as the first inspector.
It thus appears that the Association was prime mover in bringing the municipal administration to take action for the systematic examination and regulation of living conditions to ensure the health and comfort of the occupants of houses in hitherto neglected areas. Out of this instigation grew, as an arc of an ever-widening circle, the specialized activity of the Philadelphia Housing Commission, now known as the Housing Association.
Delegates from forty social and philanthropic agencies met in the Mayor’s reception room September 9, 1909, and organized the Commission. A particular function of the organization has been to obtain and enforce enlightened and equitable laws, and, with that end in view, to appraise the public of its effort and secure a distributive popular support. The Housing Association is performing a service of inestimable usefulness in its study of the direct relation between an evil domestic environment and the character and physical condition of those who are constantly exposed to it. It receives and acts upon thousands of complaints each year, and carries on extensive and intensive campaigns of public education by literature, illustrated lectures, and exhibits.
Resuming our examination of typical properties in the care of the Octavia Hill Association, we find one of the most inspiring examples in the group of houses at Workman Place.
This large and picturesque court is situated on Front street between Pemberton and Fitzwater. In Colonial days several of the houses belonged to the Mifflin family; later they became part of the Workman estate, and finally Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Clark acquired the group by instalments and turned it over to the Association to manage.
There are twenty-two houses in all, built of red brick. Five of these face on Front Street, and these, with one on Pemberton Street, have several occupants each. Behind the Front Street dwellings, surrounding the ample open space of what was once a large garden, are the remaining houses, in groups, conveying a delightful impression of an island of peace and privacy in the midst of the sweltering sea of humanity in this loud and crowded foreign quarter. In the houses that face on Front Street there are wainscotted halls, carved balustrades and mantelpieces with elaborate designs of ships and grapes and fluting that bespeak the past glories of the more deliberate day of minuet and sedanchair and the soft light of candles. Even the ancient windowpulleys were made of mahogany. One has only to read the itemized list of the household goods owned in 1754 by George Mifflin, Jr., as given in the Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, to realize the difference between that day and the present, wherein the Polish seamstress bends above her work in a room still haunted by the ancestral presences of those who were as deft in turning the heel of a stocking as in pouring tea. In the smaller houses there will be found Irish tenants who survive the Polish invasion of the neighborhood.
On Pemberton Street there are two small vine-clad cottages with “G. M. 1748” set out in black bricks against the red, betokening George Mifflin’s ownership. These houses were doubtless occupied by his servants. They are not unlike the little “Letitia Cottage” of Penn in Fairmount Park. The Association set above windows and doorways slight projections that enhance the aspect. Betwixt these cottages an iron gateway admits to the large enclosure shaded by great trees, on which all the tiny gardens of the houses surrounding abut. The base of each tree is rimmed by a seat. There is abundant room for clothes-lines, not infringing on the space for the children’s play. A pavilion is at one side. On the Fitzwater Street exposure is a temporary shelter to impound homeless animals till the S. P. C. A. wagon comes to claim them.
At the corner of Front and Fitzwater Streets, through the generous initiative of a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Clark, is Workman Place House, a Settlement of such demonstrated value to the region round about that it deserves more than passing mention.
It is conducted by the Alpha Pi Fraternity of young women alumnæ of the Agnes Irwin School. The Matron has taken hundreds of mothers and children of the neighborhood during the summer into the country, which is as novel and startling to many of these people as America was to the sailors of Columbus. The great fact of Fairmount Park itself is news to an incredible number. University of Pennsylvania students have taken the boys to summer camps. There has been supervised play in summer, and in the winter months there is a carefully scheduled and well-attended routine of classes and meetings for young and old. All these people have a racial affiliation with the dance, and even after the Mothers’ meetings in the Good Neighbors’ Club, dancing to the pianola is an exuberantly joyful exercise. Christmas parties are red-letter events. The entire admirable enterprise is sustained by bazaars, sales of old clothing, and gifts in cash and in kind.
The little vegetable and flower gardens at the rear or in the forecourt of each of the Workman Place houses are sources of not inconsiderable pride to the occupants. Anyone who saw the central area before the Association took hold here must be amazed at the transformation. The solid board fences that dissected the space in all directions have been removed, the rubbish has been carted away, wells and cesspools have been filled, and the houses themselves—in a deplorably decrepit state—have been renovated from top to bottom. The generous owners have not sought an income from the property. Any returns have been left in the hands of the Association, as the contracting agency, for improvements or for the acquisition of other houses.
A heartening example of the civic spirit generated in this region by the presence of this great object-lesson of Workman Place under the wise and watchful rule of the Association was the flag-raising that occurred in midsummer, 1917, on the Fitzwater Street side of the courtyard. Benjamin Barton, a resident of the block, went from house to house inducing his neighbors to scrub the steps and the cobbles till they shone with the lustrousness of Spotless Town; then they all, at his suggestion, hung out brave new flags, the eagles of Poland on their red and white field prominent among them. Little Maria Barton, dressed as the Goddess of Liberty, stood on the rear seat of the hard-working Ford car belonging to the Association and released the Star-Spangled Banner over the street, midway of the block. Mr. Barton and others made speeches, and Fitzwater Street is still talking of its great day.
The playground at Workman Place, the use of the roof of the Casa Ravello, the Hector McIntosh Playground at Front and League Streets and playgrounds in Richmond and Germantown in connection with properties about to be described, are noteworthy examples of the manner in which the Association is realizing Octavia Hill’s own insistent prescription of open spaces. The Hector McIntosh Playground, to which we have already referred, carries the name of the devoted second President of the Association. It dates from 1902, when two friends of the Association gave the land. Small as it is, even after the addition of the site of 957 South Front Street, it has played a most useful part in the lives of its patrons, young and old. Stockholders have generously subscribed funds for its maintenance, and during certain summers, in addition to the fun of the swings and games and sandpile, and the work of the morning kindergarten, there has been a series of seven or eight concerts of harp and violin costing a dollar apiece on the average, and bringing out a delighted throng to sing and to dance with the diminutive orchestra. The Board of Recreation and the Playground Association, always in sympathy with the objects of the Octavia Hill Association, have liberally cooperated in this work, in such ways as planting trees or providing a teacher.
In January, 1911, the Association was requested by a physician to turn a noisome group of houses, breeding-places of pestilence and notorious hospital-feeders, on East Rittenhouse Street in Germantown, into something that would not be a standing rebuke to the community and the worst possible advertisement of the thriving and progressive suburb. After a meeting at the house of Mrs. Elizabeth Lean Head, residents of Germantown subscribed for stock in the Association to the amount of $20,825, on the understanding that the fund would be wholly devoted to the purpose specified.
The Association thereupon acquired Nos. 523 and 531 to 551 inclusive, with a total frontage of 210 feet on East Rittenhouse Street and a depth of 165 feet. The houses, near the Reading Railroad, were occupied by Italians. There were 25 houses, some of them run-down and filthy beyond the power of words to portray. There was no underdrainage and two hydrants provided all the water there was. Externally there were gaptoothed sections of picket fence flat on the ground or sagging drunkenly; smashed boxes and wrecked barrels were the least, repulsive feature of the promiscuous clutter under the heavyladen clothes-lines. One building, a mere outhouse, rented for 50 cents a month, and its wretched occupant had just been removed in a dying condition from tuberculosis. Within were the old, familiar features of ruin and decay and smells unholy. Three houses were at once torn down. Others were renovated from attic skylight to cellar floor, with the installation of modern toilet facilities; and two new brick buildings—two stories high, well lighted and well ventilated—were built with apartments for 14 families. The two-room apartments rent for $6.50 per month, and the four-room apartments for $11.00. In the entire operation there are quarters for 35 families, and at the rear is a large space available for a general playground and for tenants’ gardens. There was much stone-work, and the difficult site necessitated a great deal of blasting in the solid rock.
It has not been a triumphant progress from strength to strength with these Germantown houses and their untrained and ignorant Neapolitan and Sicilian occupants. Many of the men are unskilled laborers for the city, content to earn a little and spend the money in long seasons of idleness. Two volunteer rent-collectors, speaking Italian, have been of great assistance, and the summer playground, a visiting nurse, and garden allotments have strengthened the hold of the Association upon the tenants.
The transformation wrought by the summer of 1917 was truly wonderful. In place of the abomination of desolation described in the front yards of 1911, corn waved, and beanvines flourished. Besides the gardens thriftily cultivated by each householder where lettuce, celery and tomatoes grew in abundance, there was a large community garden with a square plot for each tenant, kept carefully weeded. From the windows giving upon the street the flag of Italy flew, and on the steps the mothers of little Italy sewed and gossiped and watched their bambini at play. In the pavilion of the ample central yard were happy families enjoying the shade, the children playing games, the babies napping in their tiny hammocks swung from the eaves. The whole offered as charming a picture of contentment in a congenial environment as one would care to see.