CHAPTER IX.

Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Dear Alice: What an age it seems since I left Boston and exchanged the peace and quiet of my dear old attic room for all this turmoil and whirl of excitement! I have done more thinking in the last two months than ever before in my life, and sometimes I feel as though every idea had been squeezed out of my brain. If it were not that I insist upon getting some hours every week for a canter in the park, I fear I should be in a state of nervous collapse. However, I am beginning to see my way clear, and hope to get away in a month or so and be off to the West. Then when I get a conscience tolerably clear I shall run riot like a school-boy out of school.

Just now I am buried deep in tenement house problems. I have had two or three conclaves of all the wiseacres I could get together, and I have been considering their criticisms and suggestions, until now the details of my scheme are pretty nearly complete, and I sign the papers with my architect and builder to-night.

You know about the plan for coöperative cooking which I used to discourse upon to you to your infinite amusement. Well, half of the people hereopposed it at first just as you did. They said, for one thing, that no one under heaven would be able to provide the kind of food that would suit all tastes. There would be Jews who would want to have meat killed after their own fashion; the Italians would want horrid messes of garlic; the Irish would find fault if they didn’t have the finest white bread and the strongest of tea, and not a blessed one of them would eat oatmeal, the coarse cereals, nutritious soups, or any of the suitable things that they ought to eat.

All of which is more or less true, as I had wit enough to know myself beforehand; but I don’t mean to let it daunt me. I shall let all my tenants have an Atkinson kerosene stove in their rooms, if they wish to pay for it, and on this they can do an endless amount of cooking at a trifling cost for fuel, and a great saving of space as well as of heat in summer.

I have engaged one of the graduates of Mrs. Lincoln’s cooking school to take my first kitchen in charge. Meantime, until the buildings are ready, I am going to send her to study the system of marketing and cooking for hotels; also the kinds of food which each nationality likes, and the methods of its preparation.

The kitchen will be arranged under her special supervision. She will engage her own assistants and be the responsible head. She will have a schedule of cooked dishes, with prices of each displayed on a bulletin in the corridors. Specialdishes will be cooked by request, and orders for food can be sent in the day before. Of course at first there may be a little waste until she gets familiar with the people and can anticipate their wants; but she is a smart Yankee girl, and has a good-natured, merry way with her which I am sure will win recognition. I have told her to make it her first point to please the people, and when that is accomplished she can gradually teach them to drink milk instead of tea, and to eat brown bread instead of soda crackers.

One objection which was brought up was that children would have no chance to learn cooking, never seeing their mothers cook; but I said, that not one woman in ten of those I have in mind knows how to cook either in a cleanly or economical way. They have but little variety in their cooking, moreover, and I thought the loss of the instruction which might be imparted would be largely counterbalanced by the knowledge which would be gained as to what well-cooked food tasted like.

Themodus operandiof getting the food will be something like this. At half-past six, Biddy Flanigan, who has to go out scrubbing at seven o’clock, will deposit a dime with her teapot and an empty dish in the dumb-waiter; she will call up through the speaking-tube that she wants tea, fried potatoes, and three rolls; and in about seventy seconds the dish full of potatoes done to a turn, and not soaked in fat, and a pot full of tea will be at her elbow. From these and the nice home-made rolls,neither burned nor sour nor underdone, she and little Patsy and Maggie will have a hot breakfast.

Then Maggie will wash the dishes with the hot water running at the sink; there will have been no ashes to dump, or clinkers to pick out; no fuel to be brought, or fire made; and Biddy can put on her hood and depart, knowing that the children will not open all the draughts and waste the coal, or set themselves on fire, or let the fire go out, and come home from school to a dinner of cold scraps, with the necessity of building up the fire again at night. For with a nickel in the dumb-waiter at noon, and a tin can containing two big bowls full of hot soup, the children will be well provided for.

I have some little plans for the arrangements of rooms which I hope will work well. The beds of the tenement houses have always been a great trouble to me. Of all clumsy and unsanitary arrangements for sleeping when one is obliged to sleep with four or five others in a small room, ordinary bedsteads seem to me the worst. Now in order to introduce all the improvements that I want, I am obliged to economize space. The people must be crowded together, there is no other way out of that; so, for the children, I mean to put up single beds, berth-fashion, over each other. Strong iron sockets fastened to the wall will hold an iron frame on which a little mattress with bedclothes will be strapped. In the daytime these will be turned up, one under the other, and hooked against the wall, out of the way, and a neat littlecurtain fastened to the upper one will hang down and conceal both as if they were a set of hanging shelves. At night the youngster in the upper berth will be protected from all danger of falling out by two or three leather straps fastened on to the upper part of the berth and hooked firmly to the lower edge of the framework. I have thought all the details out one by one as various objections were made to my scheme.

I think this plan a fine solution for the dirt and vermin question. Besides, the mattresses, being so small, could be very much more easily aired and turned than if they were larger. But an agent, to whom I explained it, protested, saying she wouldn’t encourage such an idea at all. “People ought to live properly, in regular fashion, and not get used to putting up with any such makeshifts as that. It wouldn’t be living naturally.”

“You old bigot!” said I inwardly, “your grandmother, I suppose, would have protested against sleeping-cars and elevators and dumb-waiters as being unnatural and artificial!”

I am amazed every day to see how densely stupid some sensible people are. I know a Frenchwoman who has always slept at home on a bed four feet high, canopied and enshrouded with curtains. It is half a day’s work to make it, and she feels out in the cold and all forlorn when put into one of our little, open, low, brass bedsteads. I suppose she would think it quite as unhomelike and as demoralizing in its tendency as my agent thought my berth beds would be.

The other day I explained the idea to a poor woman in a tenement house, who with the greatest difficulty was trying to sweep under two good-sized bedsteads in a tiny room. At first she did not seem to comprehend, but when she did, she smiled and nodded and said, “I like that, Mees; easy to sweep; children no kick each other all time; my children sleep four in one bed—too much kick and cry.”

I have thought of another thing, that is, of having low, stationary settees made in suitable places against the wall, and having the seat a cover which would turn up on hinges, showing space underneath where clothes and all sorts of things could be kept out of sight, instead of being put into trunks or left to lie around in an untidy way. I shall have no closets, as I find that space can be better saved and cleanliness more readily enforced by building stationary wardrobes, each with a drawer underneath and shelves above extending to the ceiling. Closets, I find, are rarely swept.

On these shelves, which can be protected by a curtain, things not in frequent use can be laid away, and every inch of space to the ceiling utilized. I know you will not approve of this. You think closets are asine qua non; all of which is well enough if you are dealing with people who are sure to keep them swept clean, and where room is not so precious. But in this case I am planning to economize space to the utmost, and at the same time give the number of hooks for hanging clothes that there is in the ordinary closet.

The rooms are to be only seven feet high, thereby saving much space and making it possible for me to put on another story to the building. Without this, by the closest planning, I could not afford all the conveniences that I want and get my four per cent. interest, which, for the success of the experiment, I feel bound to make.

Of course these low-studded rooms would give too little air were it not that I have taken extraordinary pains about the ventilation. I have been using all my feminine ingenuity to devise all possible means to provide the greatest amount of comfort and convenience for the smallest possible amount of money and space. Understand that I am aiming to provide a decent home for the very poorest, who cannot afford to pay more than five dollars a month for rent. I mean to give them as much room as they have now in their dirty, dark alleys and attics, and in addition to that, warmth, pure air, cleanliness, and the saving of countless steps.

I find my architects strangely unsuggestive about all this; they have not enough imagination to put themselves in the place of a tired ignorant woman who has to spend all her life in two rooms with her husband and four or five untidy, restless children.

Knowing how much afraid of the dark many of my North End people used to be, and remembering how they used to keep a lamp burning all night in their sleeping-rooms, where the windows were shut tight, I have planned to have the uppereight inches of the walls of the room bordering on the hall, of glass, which can be opened like a transom, to admit air and much light at night from the lights in the hall, which I shall myself provide. I mean also to have in every room, fastened against the wall, a stationary table that can be put up or let down like an ordinary table-leaf.

I am going to have some experienced woman oversee all these little details, for I never yet saw a builder who could not learn a great deal from a practical housekeeper.

In the basement there are to be bath-rooms and a barber’s shop, while in some part of the building I shall have a large room which can be divided by sliding-doors. One part shall be a nursery, where mothers who want to go out can leave their children in good charge for a trifling fee, and the other half of the room shall be used as a kindergarten.

In the evening these rooms will be occupied by the grown people for club meetings and a reading-room. When desired, both rooms can be thrown together for a lecture or entertainment.

I have in mind sewing schools and gymnastic classes and all sorts of good things, for which this will be the centre.

I am more and more convinced that the quickest way to revolutionize whatever needs revolutionizing in this world is to get at the hearts and souls of people. Open a man’s heart, give him an idea, in other words, convert him, and self-respect, industry, and good manners will soon appear.

I think I have found just the right man and woman to help me make my scheme feasible. They are a couple about fifty years old, Pennsylvania Quakers, whose daughter has just been graduated from Professor Adler’s kindergarten training school, and who is bubbling over with zeal to begin her work. All three are to live in the building and give their whole time to the work that may be needed, each one having his or her separate department to attend to, and being responsible for everything in that department. For all this a good salary will be paid to each of the three.

I have found that my original plan has grown on my hands, and as it is often easier to do a thing on a large scale than on a small one, I have decided to put up four large buildings around a hollow square, each one to contain one hundred sets of tenements of from one to four rooms. Each house will accommodate perhaps four or five hundred people. Most of the suites will contain two rooms suitable for a family of four. But I shall have also many single rooms for bachelors, there being a good demand for them, I find.

You know my enthusiasm for our Puritan history. Behold my opportunity to indulge my taste in that direction! I am going to christen these hobbies of mine, so long a dream, now so soon to be materialized, by bestowing upon them some good old names that ought never to be forgotten. These four are to be called the “Pilgrim Homes.” One will be named Scrooby, another Leyden, onePlymouth, and one the Mayflower. If these prove successful I shall have four more, named Bradford, Brewster, Carver, and Winslow. However, I must not romance, for that perhaps will be far in the future.

You have no idea of the endless details I have had to consider. I have been over every single model tenement I could find in New York and Brooklyn, which is not saying much, for there are not many. Now, although not a stone is yet laid, I feel as if a load had rolled off my shoulders and the thing were nearly complete.

I shall watch with the greatest anxiety the outcome of this experiment. If it can be shown, as I think it can, that the lowest poor can be comfortably housed at the prices which they now pay for their wretched slums, and if it can be demonstrated, as I think it can, that health and happiness increase and vice decreases in proportion to the opportunity which is offered for decent living, then I shall be ready to devote a goodly number of my millions to what seems to me about the best use that can be made of them.

As soon as it can be fully proved just what needs to be done, if a state or city loan can be obtained, I mean to try to persuade some of these wealthy men and women whom I have been meeting of late to join with me and engage in the work of tenement house reform on a gigantic scale. There is no good reason why the crying evils which now exist should be perpetuated another year. Since planning allthis I have been greatly interested to learn of what Glasgow has recently been doing in this direction; buying up and destroying a mass of vile old rookeries, and building sanitary homes for the poor in place of them.

There is money enough, brains enough, and good will enough in this city to abolish these hideous conditions of life by which thousands of lives are wrecked every year. I am very doubtful about much state socialism; but municipal socialism to this extent seems to me the only rational thing in view of the present evils. A century hence we shall look back with wonder that our mania for individualism and dread of governmental interference should have led us to tolerate these things a day. I was never more convinced of anything than of this, and never more terribly in earnest about anything in my life. Meanwhile my agents are buying up and cleansing some of the worst old tenement houses in the city, and I am searching in every direction for the right person to put in charge of them. I find that this is the most important feature of it all. There must be constant, tireless supervision, and I find that it really pays to give one good tenant his rent free on condition that he keep the building clean and orderly. He must, of course, be one who has enough moral power to enforce all necessary rules.

These details must sound very prosaic to you, I fear, in comparison with all the delightful things which you are studying; but just at present I amfinding the subject of dumb-waiters and ash-shoots quite as fascinating as I ever used to find Correggios or cryptogamia.

By the way, I am going to see a beautiful private car which is to be sold. I am thinking of buying it and taking aunt Madison and some delightful people whom I know on a trip to the Yellowstone Park and Puget Sound this summer. What do you say to joining us? By the time you have finished at the Annex you will be ready to drop, and will be quite unfit to think of getting up your trousseau. Tell that impatient young professor that he must wait for three months, and give you a chance to know how sweet it is to get a love-letter when it comes three thousand miles....

Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York,Apr. 10.

ToChas. W. Turner, Esq., Boston, Mass.

Dear Sir,—Your letter has come to hand with the inclosed deed for the eight lots on Huntington Avenue, each twenty-three by one hundred feet.

I will now write you in detail about the buildings which I wish to put upon those lots. I want you to understand my plans exactly, together with my reasons for them, as I shall ask you to take the responsibility of carrying them out.

I want to try an experiment that I have long had in mind. I hope to have it pay a fair per cent. and at the same time serve as a hint toward the solution of some of the difficulties in the problems of modern housekeeping.

For the last twenty years we have been blundering our way toward better methods of meeting the exigencies of our modern city life, but with indifferent success.

However, one thing is certain. In our great cities, where land is growing more and more expensive, and where people are swarming in constantly increasing numbers, building their houses higher and higher into the air, something must be done to readjust the methods of living, if life is to remain anything but drudgery to a large majority of wives and mothers.

The modern system of “flats” is a step in the right direction, but thus far it has meant cramped quarters, great expense, and many disadvantages, and I am convinced that it is a long way from being the city home of the future.

What I propose is to put up some houses where all the rooms in each suite of apartments shall be on the same floor, but which shall in no other particular resemble any “flats” that I have seen.

I have found none where the rooms were spacious and all directly lighted and ventilated from the outer air, unless they were at a price quite beyond the income of a man who must live on three thousand dollars’ salary. Even the best I have seen, although they are elegantly frescoed and finished, are sure to have some small dark rooms, and give much less good space for living purposes than a house bearing the same rental.

Now I think there is no reason for this,—thatis to say, no necessary reason; nothing more in fact than that the demand for “flats” exceeds the supply, and landlords make more on an investment in that direction.

The never ceasing trouble with servants, the burden of entertaining company, the fearful strain of the stairs incident to living in a house where there are only two good rooms on a floor,—all these and other things are more and more compelling people of moderate means either to board or live in a “flat,” where one servant can do the work for which, in an ordinary house, two would be required.

I think the continual increase of boarding-houses marks a sign of decadence in American social and home life, and yet I do not blame delicate women for longing for freedom from the details of work, which is often done at a great disadvantage, and for immunity from the back-breaking stairs and other things that are the cause of so much invalidism.

Seeing these domestic problems and the wear and tear of the nervous system contingent on the ordinary methods of city housekeeping, I have determined to try in this experiment to see if for a moderate cost, say nine or ten hundred dollars rental, it may not be possible to supply a family with twelve good-sized rooms all on one floor, and with the back yard of a size which is usual to an ordinary house.

One great objection to the ordinary flat is the absence of a back yard where clothes can be dried, and children can play. Families with children find but little freedom and comfort in the ordinary flat, and I propose to remedy this in the simplest way in the world,—at least, it seems perfectly simple and feasible to me. If the architect you engage makes any objections to the scheme, let me know what they are.

Taking the eight lots which you have purchased, each one hundred feet deep, let us devote say sixty feet to the back yards. This will admit of flowerbeds, and a little playground, a very important item with a mother of young children. These dimensions are the same as those of hundreds of South End lots and houses.

Then there will be left for the building of the eight homes an area of eight lots, each forty feet deep and twenty-three feet wide.

According to our ordinary wasteful system in the building of houses vertically there would be eight sets of stone steps, eight doors and lobbies, and allowing four stories to each house, there would be four halls and three staircases, one over the other, in each of the eight houses. Each hall would involve more or less expense in carpeting, much time in sweeping and keeping clean; and beside, much physical energy would be wasted in simply getting from dining-room to parlor and from parlor to bedroom.

Now it seems to me that instead of building these eight houses side by side vertically, like so many bricks set up on end, we can do much better.We can abolish seven of our doorsteps and entrance ways and use one entrance for all, making it thereby much handsomer, and, if we choose, seven times more expensive. Then instead of eight times three flights of stairs we shall have simply three, one over the other, in a broad central hall which will run from the street to the back yard, having four tenements on either side of it, one tenement for each story. The floors separating the tenements will be made as impervious to sound as the partitions in houses built in the usual vertical fashion. The central hall can be divided into two parts: a front hall containing a passenger elevator and a handsome flight of stairs, and a back hall with another flight of stairs and another elevator, the latter for servants and freight. With the same amount of money that would have been required for building and carpeting the extra stairs, these halls and staircases can be made handsomer and absolutely fireproof. On the top story, instead of the inconvenient ladder and trap-door leading to the roof, which is usual in our vertically built tenements, there can be a comfortable staircase, covered at the point where it reaches the roof and giving exit through a door upon the roof, which can be thoroughly guarded by a parapet or iron fence, thus affording a safe playground for children.

This will cost something, of course, but no more I think than would be expended in the ordinary, wasteful method of building to which we resort at present.

Now perhaps you will say that with the exception of the back yards this is not different from the ordinary apartment hotel; but wait a bit. What I propose to do is to give to each person a suite of rooms equal in cubical contents to what he would have had in his vertical four-story house, and I shall arrange these rooms so that he shall have a frontage on the street, not of twenty-three feet, but of ninety-two feet minus ten feet which he will allow for the central hall. As his neighbor across the hall will have the same frontage and also allow ten feet for the hall, the latter, you see, will be a spacious apartment twenty feet in width.

Think of a flat having eighty-two feet of front, and with a set of four back yards at the rear of each home, which is an area of sixty by eighty-two feet! To be sure each one cannot use all that area. He will have only one fourth of it for his special use, but it will be worth something to have all that space ostensibly his own, and the outlook a little different from each room.

Of course your first question will be as to how these yards are to be reached.

My first purpose is to have these eight families who dwell under the same roof use nothing but their halls and staircases in common. So in the basement each family shall have a space at the rear of the house, twenty-three feet in width, each having its own exit into its own yard from the laundry and store-rooms which will be situated there. In the front part of the basement, where in the averageBoston house the coal and furnace are usually found, will be the heating appliances for the whole building, and heat will be provided in the different stories as it is in the ordinary hotel.

There will be speaking-tubes, of course, connecting each laundry with its kitchen above, so that the mistress on the fourth floor can communicate with her Bridget in the laundry, and the only disadvantage will be that once a week the Bridget living on the top story will have to descend four flights in the elevator to reach her laundry instead of running down one flight of stairs, as she would do in the house of the ordinary type.

Although I prefer to leave the arrangement of rooms in the suites to the taste of the architect, I will inclose a plan—the simplest possible one which, so far as I know, will be thoroughly convenient. The only objection to it that I can discover is, that it is rather stiff and monotonous; but, as the same thing must be said of our houses as at present constructed, I do not think this a very formidable objection. However, I send a second plan, which will show how it is possible to introduce considerable variety in the arrangement of rooms. In this, as you see, the parlor is placed at the end of the hall, and is thirty-eight feet long, being lighted at both ends. If it should be thought best, half of the suites,i. e., the four on one side of the hall, can be built after this second plan.

The central passage-way running between the rooms in each suite will receive light through transoms and glass doors, and will be lighter than the halls in the average city house.

As the kitchen does not communicate with this central passage-way, the odors of cooking will not be so likely to permeate the house as they usually do in the average Boston house with a basement dining-room.

If I have made myself clear, I think you will see that, according to this extremely simple plan of construction, the chief advantages of the average flat and the average separate block house may be combined, and the disadvantages of each nearly eliminated.

The care of the sidewalk, stairs, central hall, and the management of the heating apparatus, will be in the charge of a janitor, as is customary in the ordinary apartment hotel, thus almost doing away with the work of one servant in each family. In addition to the great advantage of having all the rooms on one floor, these rooms will be larger and more airy than in the ordinary block house. Then, too, they will not only be more in number than those in the average flat, but they will be more than in the vertical house of the same cubical contents. For the space heretofore devoted to stairs can now be utilized for living-rooms, and by simply opening the doors and windows a draught of air can sweep straight through from front to back of the house. There will be neither dark rooms nor rooms opening into a dismal brick air-well, as in most of our modern flats, and, consequently, noneof that cramped, confined feeling that one always experiences when going into their tiny rooms which seem designed for a family of three members only, and where children have no right to be.

Now I propose to offer this horizontal dwelling, with its eighty-two feet front, and its yard at the back, with all its economy of space and expense and physical exertion, forprecisely the same rentalthat the vertical house with its twenty-three feet of front would cost.

And, as I want permanent tenants, and desire to make them practically the same offer as a sale of the property would be, you may give, to any one who desires it, a lease for fifteen or twenty years.

Doubtless before that time has expired we shall come to see that our methods of living must be modified still more, and separate kitchens and laundries will be relegated to the country, while some system of coöperation will come into vogue in our cities. If so, such a house as I propose to build can be easily modified to suit the new order of things. The kitchens above could be metamorphosed into bedrooms, and part of the space in the basement turned into a cooking centre for all the families.

If this experiment should prove a success,—and I can see no reason now why it should not,—this will be but the beginning of what I intend to do on a large scale. I think I can do no better service for the hurried, overworked wives and mothers of our great cities, than to simplify and lighten the burdens of housekeeping, by adding to their comfort without adding to their expense.

I want very little frescoing and gilding in these houses, but there must be fire-escapes at the rear, and every device for convenience that is available.

In regard to their outward appearance I have but one suggestion to make. I should like to have the windows very broad and very low. It has always seemed to me ridiculous to note the pains which is taken to cut a hole in the wall and then immediately cover up two thirds of it in the most elaborate manner with lambrequins and two or three sets of curtains, all of which are never raised above the middle sash except when the servant washes the glass. If it is desirable to admit a little subdued light near the top of the room, this might be done by a few panes of stained or ground glass, which would not be covered by a curtain. On the exterior the bricks or stone, arranged in the form of an arch over each window, would add much to the beauty of effect.

If a window were five feet wide by three and a half high, the top being no more than six and a half feet from the floor, the curtain question would be somewhat simplified and our rooms made sunnier and more beautiful. However, I leave this to the architect to decide.

You will, I think, get my idea from the accompanying sketches.

Yours sincerely,Mildred Brewster.

Yours sincerely,

Mildred Brewster.

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