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Updated: October 25, 2025
At first the crowd was a mystery to him, so orderly, quiet, and inoffensive did it appear, although composed largely of the very dregs of the slums. The crackling, roaring flames, devouring tenement-houses, were equally mysterious. No one was seeking to extinguish them, although the occupants of the houses were escaping for their lives, dragging out their humble effects.
A bill was introduced by the Cigar-Makers' Union to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses. I was appointed one of a committee of three to investigate conditions in the tenement-houses and see if legislation should be had.
The original object was to clear out the slums and infected places after the last plague, to tear down blocks of rotten and filthy tenement-houses and erect new buildings on the ground; to widen the streets, to let air and light into moldering, festering sink holes of poverty, vice and wretchedness; to lay sewers and furnish a water supply, and to redeem and regenerate certain portions of the city that were a menace to the public health and morals.
But thinkin' I must be sociable, I says, "Your aunt Eunice is well, I s'pose?" "She is a moulderin' in jail," says she. "In jail? Eunice Keeler in jail?" "Yes, in jail." And Dorlesky's tone wus now like wormwood, wormwood and gall. "You know, she owns a big property in tenement-houses, and other buildings, where she lives.
As she walked slowly along past the stores and the crowded tenement-houses, swinging her little letter-basket on her arm, and dreaming away with her great brown eyes, as such young eyes will always dream upon a summer's day, there suddenly struck upon that happy thought of hers a mournful sound. It was a human groan.
For example, in the vicinity of our large towns and cities will be seen spacious mansions inhabited by professed followers of Jesus Christ, each surrounded by ornamented grounds. Not far from them will be seen small tenement-houses, abounding with children, each house having about as many square yards of land as the large houses have square acres.
The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under their noses.
These conditions rendered it impossible for the families of the tenement-house workers to live so that the children might grow up fitted for the exacting duties of American citizenship. I visited the tenement-houses once with my colleagues of the committee, once with some of the labor union representatives, and once or twice by myself.
Yet the present wage-rate makes decent homes impossible; and though Brooklyn and Boston have a few model tenement-houses, New York has none, the experiment of making over in part a few old ones hardly counting save in intention. Into these homes respectable, ambitious, hard-working girls and women are compelled to go.
She and her husband, who is still in my employ, own half a dozen tenement-houses. One day, on the first of the month, I met her in the street with a large hand-bag and a dignified mien. She was out collecting rent. IT was the spring of 1910. The twenty-fifth anniversary of my coming to America was drawing near. The day of an immigrant's arrival in his new home is like a birthday to him.
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