Part 5

Here is a young man with a moral inheritance that the friendly rent-collector knows by heart. He has a job slicing bacon with a meat-packing concern. Today is a holiday, he explains. Query: will he hold down the job, or go on drifting? The fever of the wandering ne’er-do-weel burns in his veins. His father is a dipsomaniac, who runs amuck periodically with a carving-knife and finds his foes in his own household. He once killed a man and escaped to an adjoining State. Detectives caught him and he was lodged in the “Pen.” He blamed his wife for it, and sent her letters demanding $80 for a shyster lawyer to get him out. He sent her pictures of caskets, as portents of her fate when he should finally emerge from durance vile.

At last she raised the money and got him out. He wept on the doorstep—the neighbors, whose heads were at all the windows, said he shed buckets—and she took pity on him and abandoned her design of procuring a separation. He has been home for a few days, and on this particular day husband and wife are off on a picnic together. The son knows all the story. How long is the peace to last? Will the boy in time follow in the erratic footsteps of the father?

Here is another sinister family history that faces the visitor. The mother is feeble-minded. There are five children. Two of the boys and two of the girls inherit the maternal defect. The other child, a girl, is normal. The father works by fits and starts. A former source of income to the family was a woman boarder of bad character. The Society for Organizing Charity and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children have interested themselves in these derelicts, and the Octavia Hill Association is trying to help.

Another kind of trouble constantly cropping up is that of the victims of rascally insurance-agents. They turned over their books to the agents to keep. The agents took the money and either did not enter the sums or recorded them incorrectly. In some cases those who expected an old-age pension or at least their burial expenses will not get a cent.

“But,” someone may ask, “what has this humanitarian effort to do with rents and dividends? Couldn’t the money be obtained and no questions asked, no advice given, no ‘hard-luck stories’ heard? Business is business. Let the charitable societies, the soup kitchens, the Salvation Army or what you will, look out for the other side of the matter.”

The answer to this contention is that a conscientious landlord can hardly be satisfied to accept money from any sort of house without knowing or caring how it is obtained. Several times in the experience of the Association the owners of houses which had descended to base uses were shocked and grieved inexpressibly to learn of it. In one instance a good lady residing in England who had never seen the property managed by her agents in Philadelphia couldn’t believe the tales that were told her concerning its condition. The agents themselves were unaware of the facts until the Association reported to them the lively horrors. Owner and agents alike were glad to have the houses pass into the control of the Association, which at once converted them into dwellings which no longer were a blot on the ’scutcheon of the City of Homes.

The question of repairs, when the tenants make their requests or the rent-collector’s inspection discovers places where they may be needed, is a matter determined by urgency, and by the amount of money already expended on the property, and by the evinced cooperative spirit of the tenant. It stands to reason that slovenly and destructive occupants are not accorded the same attention that is given to the representatives of those who are clean and careful and prompt in their payments. What a difference there may be on opposite sides of a thin partition-wall! On this side of the wall is a family inclined to dirt and disorder, because of its unperfected social education. On the other side of the wall, only a few inches away, the floor, neatly carpeted, is spotless. The center-table holds a gaudy lamp, or a vase of dried grasses, or lurid paper flowers. There are pictures on the walls, of saints or landscapes or the family, in crayon,—perhaps the bridal couple arm-in-arm, or the head of the house in the gorgeous uniform of a Polish benefit association.

One may find the bureau turned into a shrine, with a crucifix and candles; or perhaps the royal family of Italy is a prized possession in a glorious flamboyancy of colors.

The rent-collector refers all-important questions of improvements to the superintendent for his decision. Part of her special care it is to see that the plumbing is in good order. The Octavia Hill Association is largely responsible for the considerable reduction of the number of cases in which six or eight or a dozen families in a court live off the same hydrant. In one court visited, a pet dog had been giving considerable trouble, since he had learned to turn on the water himself, and would leave it running.

Garbage and ashes come under the rent-collector’s supervision, too. When the former is thrown where the latter should be, it becomes necessary to inquire more particularly who had watermelon for dinner, who had chicken, and who had corn-ears—perhaps at a dollar a dozen. In one case where an orthodox Jewish family was blamed by neighbors, the supposed culprits were exonerated by the discovery of a ham-bone in the can when the lid was lifted.

Just as the work of a Red Cross nurse in a war-hospital is a different matter from a debutante’s dream of it, so the inspection by the rent-collector may become a very plain and prosaic, undecorative business indeed. She has to see, to think, to know. Nothing is too small for her attention.

The “Conditions of Tenancy” printed in the monthly rent book which the collector carries for receipts, gives the rules she must enforce. All rents must be paid promptly in advance. The tenant will be required to pay for any damage due to his or her own carelessness. The tenant must replace glass broken in the windows, if it is the tenant’s fault. Lodgers must not be taken nor rooms sublet without the collector’s written permission. Cellars and yards are to be kept free from rubbish, and no animals are allowed in the premises. Garbage and ashes must be kept separate, and rubbish and paper must have their own receptacles. Tenants must keep the sidewalk clean and free from obstruction, and must attend to the removal of ice and snow. Nails or hooks must not be driven in the woodwork without permission, and nothing is to be built in the yard. Each tenant is responsible for a set of keys, which must be surrendered upon vacating. In tenement houses each tenant must do his or her share in cleaning halls, stairs and yards.

There are also explicit suggestions for the care of bathrooms, kitchens, plumbing and garbage cans. There is a brief direction printed on the inside of the cover for the collector’s ready reference, giving the addresses and the office-hours of various dispensaries, hospitals and other institutions which may be a present help in time of need to the tenants.

A colored woman on her knees scrubbing a floor that already seemed clean, explained that one couldn’t be too “pertickler about them germs.” The germs, she explained, were so small you couldn’t see them, but they certainly could raise a dreadful rumpus inside a person or a home. She did not know of Metchnikoff or Pasteur or Lister, but she grasped the important idea.

A janitor for a house or a group of houses may be appointed by the Association from among the tenants, at a nominal fee—taking the form, perhaps, of a dollar a month subtracted from the rent. The janitor takes charge of the garbage and the ashcans, and cleans out the houses that are to be rented. She sees to it that the tenants sweep their rooms and hallways and stairs, each doing a part of the premises used in common. The janitor is encouraged to consider herself a working partner of the Association, and she is usually proud of her post.

An important part of the collector’s duty is to ascertain and report damage done to plumbing. The plumber also notifies the Association of any damage that is to be traced to the tenant, and the latter defrays part of the cost of repairs by instalments till the whole amount has been paid.

Careful calculation showed that in a group of 140 families, for one year, the cost of repairs for plumbing due to the tenants’ carelessness was $32. The real estate officer of a large trust company declared this an excellent record.

As the rent-collector of tact and insight makes her rounds the mechanical transaction of requesting and receipting for the rent is accomplished frictionlessly and with dispatch in the great majority of instances. The services of the constable, at a cost of $2.00, to dispossess a family are rarely and very regretfully called into requisition. But the Association stands for no shillyshallying. It requires prompt payment. It insists that those who occupy its houses shall fulfil the few simple regulations it has established. It does not hesitate to invoke the arm of the law when the need arises, and the tenants soon become aware of the fact. Most of them, happy to be under a fair and considerate landlord, are punctual, peaceful and contented. “I’ll never get another landlord like you,” said an old Jew, compelled for reasons of his own to move, as he trudged dolefully away wagging his beard.

The cases in which the Association has to proceed to the extreme penalty of eviction may be similar to that of the woman who represented herself as a widow with four children. The children were mythical. She took in four male boarders, in flagrant defiance of the strict rule that forbids taking boarders or subletting without the Association’s consent. There was nothing to do but to put her out, inexorably.

The rent-collector takes with her wherever she goes her moneybag, containing a small card-catalogue to check off payments, which are entered in the office ledgers, receipt-books, blank forms for leases, and paper for memoranda. Sometimes tenants who fail to have the sum ready when the call is made promise to bring it to the office, and rarely do they fail to keep their word. Italians are particularly punctilious in their payments. The man who after an absence of two months came back and paid up for the whole time, though there were a few days he was not, bound to pay for, saying proudly, “I am an honorable gentleman,” was merely typical of his compatriots.

Ordinarily it is not the great crises of life and death that confront the sympathetic rent-collector. But she never can tell what will meet her round the corner. Here sits a man who was for years a baker, and he is utterly forlorn. His sister bustles cheerfully about the room, making as brave a pretence of keeping a home as she can with some sorry sticks of furniture and a few cracked dishes. The ailing brother has just come back from the hospital, and there is a package wrapped in a bit of Polish newspaper on the table before him. The rent-collector unwraps from it a brown bottle of medicine bearing the label of the Polish doctor to whom he had gone straight from the contrary hospital advice, to secure a nostrum for his heart-trouble. He insists that he never will return to that hospital which kept him in bed so long and did nothing for him. He will never be able to work again, he reiterates monotonously.

Those who have labored in France among soldiers blinded in war, to restore a hopeful mood in which a man takes hold on life again, know what means a wise, kind woman will use with a discouraged man who finds his cross too heavy to carry and has succumbed to a melancholy listlessness. She brings him round by degrees to a more rational frame of mind, and in place of the closed door she shows him an open window. Was not the result worth tarrying for, a few minutes? Even from the commercial point of view is anything gained by having tenants who are at odds with destiny, or anæmic, if not acutely ill, from bad air, bad smells, foul vaults and cellars, surface drainage and contaminated food? Was not Miss Hill entirely right when she declared that tenants and their surroundings must be improved together?

Here was another trouble to be adjusted by the patient universal arbiter. Italian children sat on Polish steps and refused to be dislodged. Out of a cloud no bigger than a child’s uplifted hand came a storm that threatened to destroy the peace of the street. Five nations presently swept into the melee. No great matter, you say—but even so the world-war started.

Wagon drivers for the meat packers’ distributing houses struck for a dollar a week more. A little butcher couldn’t afford to let his chopping block stay idle. He borrowed a push-cart and a neighbor helped him and he fetched the meat himself, running the gauntlet of the angry teamsters. But that is the reason, if you please, that he hasn’t the rent today. There is so often the slenderest margin between a sufficiency and dire distress in the case of the poor. To most of us a strike is in the newspapers. To them a strike is in their lives—it may come like a bolt of lightning crashing through the roof to disrupt a home.

Perhaps the reckless joy-rider or motor-truck driver will never know how many little children are kept within doors by their mothers for fear they will be run over if they play in the street. But the rent-collector knows. There are so many children shrieking and sprawling over the cobbles already that it doesn’t seem as though there could be any left in any of the houses. But there are always plenty more. Here are some, too tiny to be allowed to go to the city swimming-baths. In the heat of summer they wear scarcely any clothes, and their puny limbs stick out from their tattered garments like twigs from a bird’s nest. They sit here in the darkened room where their mother is sewing on trousers which she “finishes” at nine cents a pair. The mother explains that she doesn’t dare let them go out into the street—they might get run over. So here they sit, listless, pale, forlorn. They laugh outright when you play a child’s game on your fingers for them, and are loath to have you go.

In another house sits a fair-haired girl with blue eyes, one of them sadly atwist, and a scrofulous disfigurement marking what is almost a pretty face. She is perhaps fourteen years old. You start to talk to her and you find she is deaf and dumb. She has been at a school for such unfortunates, the rent-collector explains, and this is her summer vacation. It is certainly vacant enough.

Here are houses just about to be transferred to the Association. Italians, mostly, occupy them. Notice the English sparrow that flutters into a crevice of the bricks, where it wholly disappears as it finds its nest. There is the common phenomenon of one hydrant outside, for half-a-dozen families. In a dark angle of a yard, behind a woodshed cluttered and foul, there is a pool of stinking black water out of which you can fish rotten burlap and odds and ends of the social history of all the houses. The curious children have turned pale green, like sprouts in a cellar, and their arms are thin as pipestems. The stench that emanates from the pool seems to have something to do with it. The mother says—somewhat proudly—that a doctor has said that her children have sluggish livers. She looks at you with a furrowed brow as she wipes her hands in her apron. She is wondering whether there is any hope of anything better in the way you are looking at her. “The landlord,” she says, not knowing of the change to another regime that is imminent, “never does nothin’ to the place but just collect the rent.”

A few years ago behind the rear wall of a large church there was a pocket that those who praised God on the other side of the wall knew nothing about. It adjoined a court of nine houses which the Octavia Hill Association had acquired and improved. Through the court the inmates of the four evil and invisible dwellings made their hasty escape to the street when the law was on the trail that the gospel never found. The owner was a well-to-do negro, who was content to take his money from an agent and ask no questions. The agent was appealed to, again and again, to put an end to the bedlam of drink and gambling, of fighting and obscenity that made night hideous on the premises. Providentially the owner died and the houses were bought by a friend of the Association who turned them over to its care. There was nothing to do but to evict the tenants. Polish immigrants of the poorest were put in. In the first year after the change the rent-collector was able to show every cent collected. In the second year the result was the same. In the meantime the Association received its usual 7½ per cent. commission for collecting the rents and the owners received in the first year 6.4 per cent. and in the second year 6.5 per cent. on the investment.

Another striking object-lesson among many that might be cited as to the value of the quiet influence of the rent-collector—an influence that permeates as subtly as yeast—is to be seen in the group of houses for the negro population on Naudain Street near the offices of the Association, to which reference has already been made. One of these houses, since it is given over to single old women, has come to be called the “Old Ladies’ Home.” Would one find exemplary contentment let him talk with an old crippled, blind woman who lives on the top floor. “She is able to iron a shirt-waist without a wrinkle,” says the friendly rent-collector. The order and the cleanliness of these rooms is remarkable. There are stories of the plantation-life to be heard at the lips of the old-time “Mammy” of Dixieland. There are the manners of the great houses that have become historic landmarks, and of the days before “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was written. The whole House of Bishops of the A. M. E. Church has to find room on the walls somewhere, and you will discover that devout communicants are on their knees every night for the younger generation who may fall a prey to the lures of the Devil along the Great Black Way of South Street.

As for the all-important role of the Superintendent, it is hard to see where his work begins or ends. There are just as many troubles as he will give ear to. Here is a Jewish woman who turns loose a flood of appeal and interrogation and never stops, when either the rent-collector or the superintendent comes in sight. All she wants is all there is to want; only a “blue sky” concession would satisfy her claims. But behind all this importunity is maternal ambition. A piano in the house, and the daughter’s lessons, mean stinting for all the rest, as in the case of a home—not controlled by the Association—where a druggist’s clerk lives and we find the kitchen range, the dinner-table and a Steinway baby-grand crowded together in one small room.

The Association has its own force of mechanics, for work old and new, and the superintendent is their “boss.” They have a repair shop in the basement of the office at 613–15 Lombard Street for any work that is not to be done on the premises. There they keep supplies of small hardware, paint and lumber to be used as the call comes.

These mechanics attend to everything except the plumbing, the roof-repairs, and the larger operations that involve considerable plastering and brickwork. The plumbing is always as simple as it can be, and when it is once installed the maintenance chiefly means keeping the drains to the sinks and toilets in working order.

When houses are taken over for alteration, galvanized sinks with slate backs are put in, except that in the better houses one-piece enameled iron sinks are used. The water supply, run through galvanized pipe, issues at brass spigots. Not much lead pipe is used—it is tempting to thieves. The sink taps are iron.

One of the first things to do to an old house toward its rehabilitation is to scrape off the paper. The Association has no love of many thicknesses of paper concealing long neglect and the insidious lairs of insects, and it generally applies paint or calcimine instead. Ten or twelve coats of paper are common, and as many as twenty-seven have been removed from the walls of one room. When the walls are scraped the breaks in the plaster are likely to be alive with the vermin. The walls are painted or calcimined in light tones that make an agreeable contrast with the woodwork. Many tenants want paper, but they can be taught in time the sanitary advantage of the alternative.

The exterior brickwork, frequently buckling and crumbling, requires much attention, and often many feet of new wall must be built, or a wall entirely replaced. Broken doors and rotting window-frames and sashes are frequent items of expense. It is a mistake to renew glass in a sash too weak to hold it. A new sash is a truer economy in the long run than one that is patched up “to do.”

It might look as though in the case of a wrecked window-blind (usually blinds are not found on Association houses) or a worn-out washer for a spigot the tenant might display sufficient initiative to attend to the necessary repairs himself; but there are so many ways of doing things wrong and of damaging Association property that the Superintendent actually prefers to have the tenants let things alone till he and his own men can come.

A three story house at 1326 Kenilworth Street might be chosen as an apt example of the superintendent’s reconstructive work. The rental of the house before the Association took charge was $16 a month. It was sublet to negro tenants who paid in all about $50 a month for their quarters.

It is now being rearranged for two-room apartments, one on each floor, which will rent for eight dollars a floor per month, the rent payable in weekly instalments. There is a toilet on each floor, and there is a sink in each kitchen. Superfluous partitions that prevented the free circulation of light and air have been taken out. A gesture of the superintendent’s arms, as though he were lashing out in a gymnastic exercise, told one more than his words. “I must get light and air,” he said; and one thought of Octavia Hill’s insistence on this point.

One of a row of little houses in the rear is $8 a month. The former owner put in a few cheap articles of furniture and collected $20 a month. Under the Association the furniture is that of the tenants. Improvements now being installed will add a dollar a month to the rent. These little houses are called “one, two, three houses,” because they are of three rooms only, one over another.

What an oasis we find here, as we look from the upper windows! The houses round about—not Association property—have ruinous shacks at the rear that hold broken boxes and barrels, superannuated chairs and bedding and broken-down baby carriages. There is no clear space to sit under a shade-tree, or plant morning-glories, or put a sandpile. One longs to see the workmen who are paving the Octavia Hill courtyard below turn their attention to the whole vicinity.