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Page 6
In some of the older and poorer tenements, many families live on the same
floor; they are crowded together in the most dreadful manner, and instead
of having plenty of light, air, and water to help make them endurable,
they have little or none of any of these necessary things.
In these houses the want of water is one of the greatest evils. Instead of
giving each tenement a nice sink, and a water-boiler at the back of the
stove, so that people can have hot and cold water all the time, there is
no water put into any of the rooms.
Outside on the landing there is water, and a rough sink, which the tenants
of each floor use in common. They have to go into the hall to fetch every
drop of water they use, and this is the only place they have to empty the
dirty water away.
In some houses the sinks are not on every floor, and in these, the poor
women have to drag their heavy buckets of water up and down the stairs.
The tenements are not heated. Each tenant has to keep his own rooms warm.
Every drop of warm water they need for cooking or washing has first to be
boiled over the stove, and so the poor are forced to use a great deal more
coal than more well-to-do people need.
It is not because they don't pay the landlords enough rent that the poor
have no comforts in their homes. So many families can be packed into one
floor, that landlords find tenement-houses pay them extremely well.
Many of the tenement-houses have been allowed to get so dilapidated, that
the Board of Health has taken the matter in hand, and has been trying to
make the landlord have them properly drained, and cleaned, and repaired.
It came to the knowledge of this board that there were some rear tenements
in Mott Street, which were in a frightful condition.
They had been built at the back of some houses fronting on Mott
Street--in fact, they had been put in the little spot of ground that had
been the yard belonging to the front houses.
They came up so close to the front buildings that, by stretching out your
arms, you could almost touch the front wall of one house and the back wall
of the other. The actual distance apart was a little over seven feet.
This would have been bad enough, but worse was to come. After a time,
warehouses were built over the surrounding back yards, and at last these
poor tenements had brick walls round their sides and backs, to within
eight inches of the windows, and all the light they got was given them by
the seven-foot court that divided them from the houses in front.
Just imagine the darkness and the stuffiness of these rooms. Think how
awful they must have been in the summer, with not a breath of air reaching
them from any quarter. The tenants were obliged to go up to the roof and
sleep there, for the rooms were unbearable.
The people who lived on the lower floors paid less rent than those on the
top, because when you got up to the top floor there was a faint glimmer of
daylight.
The tenants were put to the expense of burning lights all day long,
because neither sun nor light could reach them.
When the Board of Health found out about these horrible places, and
learned that little children were being born and brought up in them, an
order was at once given that the rear tenements should be torn down.
But the owner objected. He tried to pretend that his houses were fit for
people to live in, and went to law to prevent the Board of Health from
interfering.
This was last September. Ever since then the matter has been in the courts
before the judge.
People have still been living in these awful dens, getting sick, and
losing their children, and spending more money for doctors and medicine
than would have paid their car-fare to healthier and more comfortable
homes.
The court has at last decided that these rear tenements are dangerous and
unhealthy, and the Board of Health will have them pulled down in a very
short time.
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