The Dangerous Classes of New York Part 3

Among these public influences on the young, it has been often a question with some, whether the Public Schools did not educate the daughters of the poor too much, and thus make them discontented with their condition, and exposed to temptation.

It is said that these working-girls, seeing such fine dresses about them, and learning many useless accomplishments, have become indifferent to steady hand-labor, and have sought in vice for the luxuries which they have first learned to know in the public schools. My own observation, however, leads me to doubt whether this occurs, unless as an exceptional fact. The influence of discipline and regular instruction is against the style of character which makes the prost.i.tute. Where there is a habit of work, there are seldom the laziness and shiftlessness which especially cause or stimulate s.e.xual vice. Some working-girls do, no doubt, become discontented with their former condition, and some rise to a much higher, while some fall; but this happens everywhere in the United States, and is not to be traced especially to the influence of our Free Schools.

We have spoken of the greater tendency of large cities, as compared with villages, in breaking up vicious families. There is another advantage of cities in this matter. The especial virtue of a village community is the self-respect and personal independence of its members. No benefits of charity or benevolent a.s.sistance and dependence could ever outweigh this. But this very virtue tends to keep a wicked or idle family in its present condition. The neighbors are not in the habit of interfering with it; no one advises or warns it. The children grow up as other people's children do, in the way the parents prefer; there is no machinery of charity to lift them out of the slime; and if any of their wealthier neighbors, from motives of benevolence, visited the house, and attempted to improve or educate the family, the effort would be resented or misconstrued. The whole family become a kind of _pariahs_; they are morally tabooed, and grow up in a vicious atmosphere of their own, and really come out much worse than a similar family in the city. This phenomenon is only a natural effect of the best virtues of the rural community.

In a large town, on the other hand, there exist machinery and organization through which benevolent and religious persons can approach such families, and their good intentions not be suspected or resented.

The poor people themselves are not so independent, and accept advice or warning more readily; they are not so stamped in public repute with a bad name; less is known of them, and the children, under new influences, break off from the vicious career of their parents, and grow up as honest and industrious persons. Moreover, the existence of so much charitable organization in the cities brings the best talent and character of the fortunate cla.s.ses to bear directly on the unfortunate, far more than is the fact in villages.

CHAPTER V.

THE CAUSES OF CRIME.

OVERCROWDING.

The source of juvenile crime and misery in New York, which is the most formidable, and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to remove, is the _overcrowding_ of our population. The form of the city-site is such--the majority of the dwellings being crowded into a narrow island between two water-fronts--that s.p.a.ce near the business-portion of the city becomes of great value. These districts are necessarily sought for by the laboring and mechanic cla.s.ses, as they are near the places of employment. They are avoided by the wealthy on account of the population which has already occupied so much of them. The result is, that the poor must live in certain wards; and as s.p.a.ce is costly, the landlords supply them with (comparatively) cheap dwellings, by building very high and large houses, in which great numbers of people rent only rooms, instead of dwellings.

Were New York a city radiating from a centre over an almost unlimited s.p.a.ce--as Philadelphia, for instance--the laborers or the mechanics might take up their abode anywhere, and land would be comparatively cheap, so that the highest blessing of the laboring cla.s.s would be attainable--of separate homes for each family. But, on this narrow island, business is so peculiarly concentrated, and population is so much forced to one exit--towards the north--and the poor have such a singular objection to living beyond a ferry, that s.p.a.ce will inevitably continue very dear in New York, and the laboring cla.s.ses will be compelled to occupy it.

To add to the unavoidable costliness of ground-room on this island, has come in the effect of bad government.

It is one of the most unpleasant experiences of the student of political economy, that the axioms of his science can so seldom be understood by the ma.s.ses, though their interests be vitally affected by them. Thus, every thoughtful man knows that each new "job" among city officials, each act of plunder of public property by members of the munic.i.p.al government, every loss of income or mal-appropriation or extravagance in the city's funds, must be paid for by taxation, and that taxation always falls heaviest on labor. The laboring cla.s.ses of the city rule it, and through their especial leaders are the great public losses and wastefulness occasioned.

Yet they never know that they themselves continually pay for these in increased rents. Every landlord charges his advanced taxation in rent, and probably a profit on that. The tenant pays more for his room, the grocer more for his shop, the butcher and tailor and shoemaker, and every retailer have heavier expenses from the advance in rents, and each and all charge it on their customers. The poor feel the final pressure.

The painful effect has been, that the expense for rent has arisen enormously with the laboring cla.s.ses of this city during the last five years, while many of the other living expenses have nearly returned to the standard before the war.

The influence of high rents is to force more people into a given s.p.a.ce, in order to economize and divide expense.

The latest trustworthy statistics on this important subject are from the excellent Reports of the Metropolitan Board of Health for 1866. From these, it appears that the Eleventh Ward of this city, with a population of 58,953, has a rate of population of 196,510 to the square mile, or 16 1/10 square yards to each person; the Tenth Ward, with 31,587 population, has a rate of 185,512 to the square mile, or 17 1/10 square yards to each; the Seventeenth Ward, with 79,563, has the rate of 153,006; the Fourteenth, with 23,382, has a rate of 155,880; the Thirteenth, with 26,388, has 155,224; and so on with others, though in less proportion.

The worst districts in London do not at all equal this crowding of population. Thus, East London shows the rate of 175,816 to the square mile; the Strand, 141,556; St. Luke's, 151,104; Holborn, 148,705; and St. Jame's, Westminster, 144,008.

If particular districts of our city be taken, they present an even greater ma.s.sing of human beings than the above averages have shown.

Thus, according to the Report of the Council of Hygiene in 1865, the tenant-house and cellar population of the Fourth Ward numbered 17,611 packed in buildings over a s.p.a.ce less than thirty acres, exclusive of streets, which would make the fearful rate of 290,000 to the square mile.

In the Seventeenth Ward, the Board of Health reports that in 1868, 4,120 houses contained 95,091 inhabitants, of whom 14,016 were children under five years. In the same report, the number of tenement-houses for the whole city is given at 18,582, with an estimate of one-half the whole population dwelling in them--say 500,000.

We quote an extract from a report of Mr. Dupuy, Visitor of the Children's Aid Society of the First Ward, describing the condition of a tenement-house:

"What do you think of the moral atmosphere of the home I am about to describe below? To such a home two of our boys return nightly.

"In a dark cellar filled with smoke, there sleep, all in one room, with no kind of part.i.tion dividing them, two men with their wives, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, two men and a large boy of about seventeen years of age, a mother with two more boys, one about ten years old, and one large boy of fifteen; another woman with two boys, nine and eleven years of age--in all, _fourteen persons._

"This room I have often visited, and the number enumerated probably falls below, rather than above the average that sleep there."

It need not be said that with overcrowding such as this, there is always disease, and as naturally, crime. The privacy of a home is undoubtedly one of the most favorable conditions to virtue, especially in a girl.

If a female child be born and brought up in a room of one of these tenement-houses, she loses very early the modesty which is the great shield of purity. Personal delicacy becomes almost unknown to her.

Living, sleeping, and doing her work in the some apartment with men and boys of various ages, it is well-nigh impossible for her to retain any feminine reserve, and she pa.s.ses almost unconsciously the line of purity at a very early age.

In these dens of crowded humanity, too, other and more unnatural crimes are committed among those of the same blood and family.

Here, too, congregate some of the worst of the dest.i.tute population of the city--vagrants, beggars, nondescript thieves, broken-down drunken vagabonds, who manage as yet to keep out of the station-houses, and the lowest and most bungling of the "sharpers." Naturally, the boys growing up in such places become, as by a law of nature, petty thieves, pickpockets, street-rovers, beggars, and burglars. Their only salvation is, that these dens become so filthy and haunted with vermin, that the lads themselves leave them in disgust, preferring the barges on the breezy docks, or the boxes on the side-walk, from which eventually they are drawn into the neat and comfortable Boys' Lodging-houses, and there find themselves imperceptibly changed into honest and decent boys. This is the story of thousands every year.

The cellar-population alone of this city is a source of incessant disease and crime.

And with the more respectable cla.s.s of poor who occupy the better kind of tenement-houses, the packing of human beings in those great caravansaries is one of the worst evils of this city. It sows pestilence and breeds every species of criminal habits.

From the eighteen thousand tenement-houses comes seventy-three per cent.

[In 1865, the deaths in tenement-houses were 14,500 out of 19,813, the total for the city. The death-rate has, however, been brought down by sanitary improvements from 76 per cent., in 1866, to about 66 per cent, in 1871, or a gain of 2,900 lives in these wretched houses.] of the mortality of our population, and we have little doubt as much as ninety per cent. of the offenses against property and person.

Over-crowding is the one great misfortune of New York. Without it, we should be the healthiest large city in the world, [Our annual death-rate is now 28.79 per 1,000, while some of the clean wards show 15 per 1,000, or about the rate of the Isle of Wight. The rate of London is about 34, Liverpool has been as high as 40, but is more healthy now, owing to sanitary improvements. Our Sixth Ward reaches 48, and "Gotham Court," in Cherry Street, attains the horrible maximum of 195 per 1,000.] and a great proportion of the crimes which disgrace our civilization would be nipped in the bud. While this continues as it does now, there is no possibility of a thorough sanitary, moral, and religious reform in our worst wards.

Few girls can grow up to maturity in such dens as exist in the First, Sixth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Wards and be virtuous; few boys can have such places as homes and not be thieves and vagabonds. In such places typhus and cholera will always be rife, and the death-rate will reach its most terrible maximum. While the poorest population dwell in these cellars and crowded attics, neither Sunday-schools, nor churches, nor charities, can accomplish a thorough reform.

What, then, is to be done to remedy this terrible evil?

Experience has proved that our remedial agencies can, in individual cases cure even the evils resulting from this unnatural condensing of population. That is, we can point to thousands of lads and young girls who were born and reared in such crowded dens of humanity, but who have been transformed into virtuous, well-behaved, and industrious young men and women, by the quiet daily influence of the charitable organization I am about to describe.

Still, these cases of reform are, in truth, exceptions. The natural and legitimate influence of such ma.s.sing of population is all in the direction of immorality and degeneracy. Whatever would lessen that, would at once, and by a necessary law, diminish crime and poverty and disease.

REMEDIES.

The great remedies are to be looked for in broad, general provisions for distributing population. Thus far, the means of communication between business New York and the suburbs have been singularly defective. An underground railway with cheap workman's trains, or elevated railways with similar conveniences, connecting Westchester County and the lower part of the city, or suburbs laid out in New Jersey or on Long Island expressly for working people, with cheap connections with New York and Brooklyn, would soon make a vast difference in the concentration of population in our lower wards. It is true that English experience would show that laboring-men, after a heavy day's work, cannot bear the jar of railway traveling. There must be, however, many varieties of labor--such as work in factories and the like--where a little movement in a railroad-train at the close of a day would be a refreshment.

Then, as the laboring cla.s.s was concentrated in suburban districts, the various occupations which attend them, such as grocers, shoemakers, tailors, and others, would follow, and be established near them. Many nationalities among our working cla.s.s have an especial fondness for gardens and bits of land about their houses. This would be an additional attraction to such settlements; and with easy and cheap communications we might soon have tens of thousands of our laborers and mechanics settled in pleasant and healthy little suburban villages, each, perhaps having his own small house and garden, and the children growing up under far better influences, moral and physical, than they could possibly enjoy in tenement-houses. There are many districts within half an hour of New York, where such plots could be laid out with lots at $500 each, which would pay a handsome profit to the owner, or where a cottage could be let with advantage for the present rent of a tenement attic.

Improved communications have already removed hundreds and thousands of the middle cla.s.s from the city to all the surrounding neighborhood, to the immense benefit both of themselves and their families. Equal conveniences suited to the wants of the laboring cla.s.s will soon cause mult.i.tudes of these to live in the suburban districts. The obstacle, however, as in all efforts at improvement for the working people, is in their own ignorance and timidity, and their love of the crowd and bustle of a city.

More remote even, than relief by improved communications, is a possible check to high rents by a better government. A cheap and honest government of the ma.s.ses in New York would at once lower taxation and bring down rents. The enormous prices demanded for one or two small rooms in a tenement-house are a measure (in part) of the cost of our city government.

Another alleviation to our over crowding has often been proposed, but never vigorously acted upon, as we are persuaded it might be, and that is the making the link between the demand for labor in our country districts and the supply in New York, closer. The success of the charity which we are about describing in the transfer of dest.i.tute and homeless children to homes in the West, and of the Commissioners of Emigration in their "Labor Exchange," indicate what might be accomplished by a grand organized movement for transferring our unemployed labor to the fields of the West. It is true, this would not carry away our poorest cla.s.s, yet it would relieve the pressure of population here on s.p.a.ce, and thus give more room and occupation for all.

But admitting that we cannot entirely prevent the enormous ma.s.sing of people, such as prevails in our Eleventh and Seventeenth Wards, we can certainly control it by legislation. The recent Sanitary Acts of New York attempt to hold in check the mode of building tenement-houses, requiring certain means of ventilation and exit, forbidding the filling-up of the entire s.p.a.ce between the houses with dwellings, and otherwise seeking to improve the condition of such tenement-houses.

There only needs two steps farther in imitation of the British Lodging-house Acts--one removing altogether the cellar-population, when under certain unhealthy conditions; and the other limiting by law the number who can occupy a given s.p.a.ce in a tenement-room. The British Acts a.s.sign 240 cubic feet as the lowest s.p.a.ce admissible for each tenant or lodger, and if the inspector finds less s.p.a.ce than that occupied, he at once enters a complaint, and the owner or landlord is obliged to reduce the number of his occupants, under strict penalties. A provision of this nature in our New York law would break up our worst dens, and scatter their tenants or lodgers. The removal of the cellar-population from a large proportion of their dwellings should also be made. Liverpool removed 20,000 cellar-occupants in one year (1847), to the immense gain, both moral and sanitary, of the city. New York needs the reform quite as much. There would be no real hardship in such a measure, as the tenants could find accommodations in other parts of the city or the suburbs; and some would perhaps emigrate to the country.

One often-proposed remedy for the ills of our tenement-house system--the "Model Lodging-house"--has never been fairly tried here. The theory of this agency of reform is, that if a tenement-house can be constructed on the best sanitary principles, with good ventilation, with limited number of tenants, no overcrowding, and certain important conveniences to the lodgers, all under moral supervision (so that tenants of notoriously bad character are excluded), and such a house can be shown to pay, say seven per cent. net, this will become a "model" to the builders of tenement-houses; some building after the same style, because public opinion and their own conscience require it, others because compet.i.tion compels it. Thus, in time, the mode of structure and occupancy of all the new tenement-houses would be changed. But to attain this desirable end, the model houses must first pay a profit, and a fair one. So long as they do not succeed in this, they are a failure, however benevolent their object and comfortable their arrangements. In this point of view, the "Waterloo Houses," in London, are a success, and do undoubtedly influence the mode of building and management of private tenement-houses; in this, also, the "Peabody Houses" are not a success, and will have no permanent influence.

The Model Houses in London for lodging single men have, as the writer has witnessed, changed and elevated the whole cla.s.s of similar private lodging-houses.

The experiment ought to be tried here, on a merely business basis, by some of our wealthy men. The evil of crowded tenement-houses might be immensely alleviated by such a remedy.