If you take a quick look at a dictionary, it will tell you that a tenement is a large
building divided into apartments – and this appears, at first glance, of good character.
But it may go on to inform you that they are usually associated with the poor of a city
and overcrowding. In our consciousness tenements summon to mind images of an
urban dystopia that the word ‘apartment’ does not. Suffice to say that as the
United States industrialized rapidly in the 19th Century, tenements - which comprised
large buildings subdivided into multiple small spaces to rent – attracted immigrant
families searching for work and accommodation in the growing cities.
Purpose built ‘tenement houses’, could be up to six storeys in the cities
and home to several families on each floor. Tenements, overcrowding and poor
sanitation became synonymous with the slums of major US cities
– particularly so for New York which, in the 19th Century, simultaneously acted
as a magnet for immigration and developed at high density. That’s not to say that
tenements and poor living conditions were characteristic only of New York, Boston
or Chicago. The poor suffered similar living conditions in many smaller cities across
the States. In this video we go back in time to Evansville, Indiana and to a first-hand
account of life in its tenements. This is told in the words of Albion Fellows Bacon
(1865-1933) - a social reformer – who grew up in an altruistic family in Evansville.
She was later to fight tirelessly for housing improvement and tenement reform for the
working classes of Indiana. In her autobiography ‘Beauty for Ashes’ published
in 1914, she gave a raw and uncomfortable account of Poverty, Vice and Disease
in Evansville at the turn of the 20th Century. You can find out more about her work
to rid the slums of sickness and poor sanitation in our video
‘The White Death’ – see link in the description.
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Accompanied by the secretary of a charity for the Poor, Miss Caroline Rein,
we join Albion Fellows Bacon as she makes her first visit to a tenement in Evansville
– an experience that would open her eyes to the plight of those afflicted by poverty
and set her on a journey to improve the squalid living conditions they suffered: -
“We haven’t any slums in Evansville, have we?” I ventured. “Not the real sure enough
ones with those terrible conditions that Jacob Riis writes about in New York?”
“Yes,” answered Miss Rein , thoughtfully, “we have very bad conditions, real slums,
I think,” she said slowly; “it is safe to say that we have, in a lesser degree,
every bad condition that you will find in the slums of New York, except the congestion.”
This was more than fifteen years ago, when it was commonly accepted
that only great cities had slums. Yet this clear-eyed woman saw our conditions and
realised their significance. Leaving the car, we walked several blocks toward the river
crossed a network of railroad tracks, and turned in at a big gate to what seemed to be
a park. “This is Old St. Mary’s,” said Miss Rein , “one of the largest tenements in the
city.” It had been the old marine hospital, at one time a fine building, and stood in a
noble space of ground that sloped down to the river.
There were great trees on the grounds, but the shrubbery had run wild,
and made a jungle with the tall grass and weeds.
We approached the building in company with a dozen ragged, dirty children,
who met us at the gate. On the broad flight of worn steps were ranged other children,
equally dirty and ragged, mostly barefooted, even the babies. A half-dozen untidy
women stood about on the old piazza, with babies in their arms or dragging at their
skirts. Ragged quilts and old clothing hung to air on the railings. Old men, rough and
unshaven, lounged in the sun, chewing or smoking. Frowsy heads were thrust out
at windows along the piazza, as women leaned their elbows on the sills and
surveyed us frankly. There was no hostility in the stare.
Miss Rein was an old friend, and when she introduced me as her friend they vied in
hospitality, dusted chairs and offered them. Little dirty hands were tucked into
Miss Rein’s, or tugged at her dress, to draw her away to “our room.”
For each family had but one room! I remembered that Jacob Riis said the
one-room slum was the very worst of all, and New York once boasted that it had
none of them. There were more babies in the wide, dirty hall and on the big central
stairway that rose to the third floor. Half-clad boys were sliding down the banisters
and girls of all sizes, hair in eyes, stood looking on. By the first inner doorway
a boy was sitting on the floor. He looked up with a sickening leer as we entered.
Miss Rein took a proffered chair, and I followed her example, trying to seem not to
be looking at anything, yet seeing all. Seeing! The word is too passive.
Sights and smells rose and assaulted me, choked and gashed me,
and the scars remain yet. They will remain until my dying day.
I had never dreamed that people lived like that in our city. Since then I have seen
places much worse, for these rooms were large and airy, and had not the horror of
the darkness and dampness. But it was the first time I had taken a square look
at Poverty, and its sordid misery, its bare ugliness, were overpowering.
The first impression of the rooms was of bareness and disorder, the next of a general
greyness that scarred roughness of the old walls and uncovered floors.
Every room had its “safe,” its beds, and its cook stove, upon which was boiling coffee
or cabbage, and often a kettle of wash. There were coarse dishes and coarse food
upon the mean tables, but no sign of a table-cloth anywhere. Many of the beds had
no sheets, only a filthy ticking; on some lay a sick child, with flies thick upon its face.
Old clothing lay about in piles, or hung from large nails driven into the cracked
plastering. Not one line or spot of beauty was there in all that mass of hopeless
ugliness. And the people had the same hopeless look, not a gleam of inspiration on
a single face. Some were sad, more were sullen. There was a curious similarity
in their expression and in their clothing that corresponded to the rooms,
and made all seem under the same blighting spell. There was not the least
attempt at privacy. Children swarmed in and out, men and women put their heads in at
the door, heavy feet passed noisily down the corridor; boys fought on the stairway;
old hags scolded, babies cried. To think of living amid all that!
A young girl with great starry eyes went downstairs with us, hushing the clamour of
the children as she went. I could but notice the grace of her slender figure
that her coarse gown could not conceal. We left her at the steps and went on down the
grass-grown drive. “She is just back from the reform school,” said Miss Rein simply.
Near the gate the long arm of an old scraggly rose bush caught my gown and
held me fast. Bending to undo it, I noticed a delicate bud, half unfolded, but worm eaten
whose imperfect beauty reminded me of the young girl we had just left.
I did not know then that the sorrows of the poor had laid hold upon my heart,
as with the clutch of thorns. We walked on in a silence full of unspoken questions that
crashed and roared against my ear drums. “We have another visit to make,
if you can stand it,” said Miss Rein quietly, and I nodded assent.
I had little idea of how far we walked until we stopped at a long low brick house.
The building was flush with the pavement, the floor on the same level.
Several open doorways offered entrance. The doors were either missing or sagging
against the wall. Here the same general impressions rushed out to meet me,
the mean, shabby ugliness of the place, the overwhelming number of women
and children, who boiled over out of every window and door, even onto the pavement,
in a most surprising way. I felt somehow that the dinginess related people to house,
as if either it shared their human deterioration, or they its physical decay
— which was it? A problem formulated in the back of my mind: “Let the people be
represented by P and the house by H; would their condition be expressed by P h or H p?”
The absurd idea stayed in my sub-consciousness, and gave me a grudge
against the house, as if it were a cause of the misery of the people.
There was no time to work out any problems, because we were so soon inside,
looking down into a half dozen pairs of round bright eyes.
I reached out my hand to steady one toddling baby going down the uneven step,
and to pat another that put its little grey hand on my knee, and looked up confidingly
into my face. They were grey all over, those babies, from creeping about the dirty floors,
and out on the dusty pavement; faces, hands, bare feet and clothes grey,
like the stray kittens that patrolled our ash bins. Detaching ourselves from group
after group, I followed Miss Rein up the shaky stairs.
Out on a rickety back porch a woman was washing. One could see at a glance
that she was different from the bold-faced women downstairs. There was an air of
refinement about her and about her sweet-faced daughter, who was helping her.
As we stood and talked, I looked down into the back yard, littered with broken crockery,
cinders and tin cans, and strewn with garbage, over which hovered swarms of
flies. There were clumps of great weeds, as high as a man’s head,
and among them puddles of old suds. In one place a slimy stream oozed away
to the alley. Dilapidated sheds stood at the rear of the yard.
A sickening odour of old vaults, sour suds and decayed garbage rose to our nostrils.
“We must get some decent place to move to,” the woman was saying,
with tears in her eyes. “It’s awful here. We’ve always lived in the country,
and here we are right on the street, where we hear people passing by,
and there are so many that go by here cursing and swearing.
The men come in drunk at all hours of the night. There’s no lock on the door.
We push the bed against it, but we’re too frightened to sleep. And then,
these hot nights, that dreadful smell comes up from the yard
and we have to shut the window. My God, such a place!”
In one of the rooms downstairs a boy was lying ill with tuberculosis. His burning eyes
turned solemnly upon us, as we entered, and held us with their gaze.
To my relief Miss Rein did not sit down, but stood a moment, talking with the old
mother. How hard that miserable cot must be, I thought, noticing the thin lumpy
mattress, and the emaciation of the boy, as he raised on his elbow to cough
An unmistakeable odour of mould filled the room. “Aren’t those floors damp?”
I asked the mother. For answer she raised a piece of old carpet, white with mould,
and showed me where the floor had rotted through until the wet earth
beneath was visible. Once out on the street, I turned to Miss Rein.
“Do those people have to live that way?” I asked.
“Couldn’t they fix things up and make them better and more decent?”
“It’s little they could do,” she replied. “They can’t afford paint or wall paper.
They can’t afford tools or lumber to repair with, and they are too unskilled to use them,
if they had them. They are too poor to have the trash and ashes hauled away, and,
of course, the yard was full when they moved in. Besides, these houses need more
than a few simple repairs. So many families use one cistern that water is scarce,
and there is no place to pour the waste water except in the yard or in the alley.
But why should these people be expected to repair the house any more than other
tenants, especially as it was out of repair when they took it?
It’s the landlord’s duty to make it fit to live in.” “Then, why don’t the landlords attend to
these things?” I asked. “Have you told them how bad they are?”
“Yes,” she answered, “but they refuse to do anything, and there’s no law by which they
can be forced to.” Then the whole situation was hopeless. But it seemed to me that the
people who were making laws and attending to such things ought to see about
that law. I went home with bowed head and lagging feet, seeing before me all the time
those awful rooms, those babies of the slums. My children were on the steps,
and I gathered them both into my arms, with a deep sob. Then I held them back,
to look at them. Oh, the wonder of their clear white skin, their shining hair,
their soft white dresses! What if —! I drew them close again, as if they had just
escaped some dreadful doom. At night I sang bedtime songs a long while,
after the light was turned out and the fire burned low.
When they were asleep I went out and tried to read, but the scenes
of the day came between me and the page like a palpable shadow. Several times in
the night I got up and went to the children, to smooth their hair and their limbs,
and feel of their soft garments. My first visit to the poor haunted me.