Footnote 1:The draft riots of 1863.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 2:"The experiment has been long tried on a large scale, with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from early infancy, you allow human beings tolivelike brutes, you can degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human hearts."—Report on the Health of British Towns.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 3:Satire III, Juvenal.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 4:Satire III, Juvenal.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 5:Report of Select Committee of Assembly. New York, 1857.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 6:York Health Department Report, 1866, Appendix A, p. 6.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 7:Report of Board of Health, New York, 1869, p. 346.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 8:Council of Hygiene's Report, 1866.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 9:Health Department Report, 1870, p. 111.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 10:They had "health wardens" in the old days, and the Council of Hygiene tells of the efficient way two of them fought the smallpox. One stood at the foot of the stairs and yelled to those minding a patient in the next story to "put pieces of camphor about the clothes of the sick and occasionally throw a piece on the hot stove." The other summoned the occupants of a smallpox smitten tenement to the hall door and cautioned them to say nothing about it to any one, or he would send them all to the pest-house![Back to Main Text]
Footnote 11:The Adler Tenement House Committee of 1884. It was the first citizens' commission. The legislative inquiry of 1856 was conducted by a Select Committee of the Assembly.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 12:The Small Parks law of 1887 allowed the expenditure of a million dollars a year for the making of neighborhood parks; but only as payment for work done or property taken. If not used in any one year, that year's appropriation was lost.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 13:The first school census was taken in 1895 by order of the legislature. It showed that there were 50,069 children of school age in New York City out of school and unemployed. The number had been variously estimated from 5000 to 150,000.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 14:1898, when Roosevelt was elected Governor after a fierce fight with Tammany.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 15:Up to that time I wrote of Tammany as "she"; but I dropped it then as an outrage upon the sex. "It" it is and will remain hereafter. I am ashamed of ever having put the stigma on the name of woman.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 16:Report of Tenement House Commission, 1900.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 17:Tenement house census of 1900: Manhattan and the Bronx boroughs (the old city), 46,993 tenements, with a population of 1,701,643. The United States census of the two boroughs gave them a population of 2,050,600. In the Greater New York there are 82,000 tenements, and two-thirds of our nearly four millions of people live in them.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 18:Police census of 1900, block bounded by Canal, Hester, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets: size 375 × 200, population 2969, rate per acre 1724. Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge streets: size 200 × 300, population 2609, rate per acre 1894.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 19:There is an advanced outpost of blacks as far up as One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street, but the main body lingers yet among the sixties.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 20:That was, however, a reduction of 236 since 1898, when the census showed 2379 rear houses.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 21:Report of Gilder Tenement House Commission, 1894.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 22:"Municipal Government in Continental Europe," by Albert Shaw.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 23:Report of the Tenement House Committee of 1900. The secretary of that body said: "Well might those maps earn for New York the title of the City of the Living Death."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 24:Report of Tenement House Commission of 1900.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 25:"The Making of an American."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 26:Since reading this proof I have been over and verified my diagnosis. The trouble must have been with me. The soup and the mutton and the pie had each its proper savor, and the cook is all right. So is the lunch. There is no fifty-cent lunch in the city that I know of which is better.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 27:Superintendent Maxwell inMunicipal Affairs, December, 1900.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 28:According to the register of the United Hebrew Charities, between October 1, 1884, and June 1, 1902, the number was 539,067, and it is again on the increase. The year 1902 will probably show an increase in this class of immigration over 1901 of quite 15,000.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 29:The following is the declaration of principles of the National Consumers' League:—
Sec.1. That the interests of the community demand that all workers shall receive fair living wages, and that goods shall be produced under sanitary conditions.
Sec.2. That the responsibility for some of the worst evils from which producers suffer rests with the consumers who seek the cheapest markets regardless how cheapness is brought about.
Sec.3. That it is, therefore, the duty of consumers to find out under what conditions the articles they purchase are produced and distributed, and insist that these conditions shall be wholesome, and consistent with a respectable existence on the part of the workers.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 30:The following is from the New YorkHeraldof April 8, 1902: One of the strangest sandwich complications so far recorded occurred in a saloon in Columbia Street, Brooklyn, on Sunday. A boy rushed into the Amity Street police station at noon, declaring that two men in the saloon were killing each other. Two policemen ran to the place, and found the bartender and a customer pummelling each other on the floor. When the men had been separated the police learned that the trouble had arisen from the attempt of the customer to eat the sandwich which had been served with his drink. The barkeeper objected, and, finding remonstrance in vain, resorted to physical force to rescue the sandwich from the clutches of the hungry stranger. The police restored the sandwich to the bartender and made no arrests.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 31:In the first Greater New York election.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 32:"Year-Book of Elmira State Reformatory," 1901. The statistics deal with 10,538 prisoners received there in twenty-seven years. The social stratum whence they came is sufficiently indicated by the statement that 15.96 per cent were illiterates, and 47.59 percent were able to read and write with difficulty; 32.39 per cent had an ordinary common school education; 4.06 per cent came out of high schools or colleges.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 33:Mrs. A. A. Anderson.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 34:June 26, 1901.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 35:The name bestowed upon it by the older toughs before the fact, not after.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 36:To be sure, it did nothing else. When the people asked for $5000 to fit up one playground. Mayor Van Wyck replied with a sneer that "Vaudeville destroyed Rome."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 37:Up to June, 1902.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 38:After two attempts that were not shining successes, the politicians at Albany and New York calmly dropped the matter, and for four years ignored the law. The Superintendent of Schools is at this writing (June, 1902) preparing to have the police take the child census, without which it is hard to see how he can know the extent of the problem he is wrestling with. Half-day classes are a fair index of the number of those anxious to get in; but they tell us nothing of the dangerous class who shun the schools.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 39:On May 31, 1902, there were 10,036 class teachers in elementary schools in the Greater New York, exclusive of principals and the non-teaching staffs, and of the high school teachers. With these, the total number was 11,570, with a register of 445,964 pupils.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 40:The managers of the New York Public Library have found a way, and have maintained twenty-seven home libraries during the past year (1901): little cases of from fifteen to forty books entrusted to the care of some family in the tenement. Miss Adeline E. Brown, who is in charge of the work, reports a growing enthusiasm for it. The librarian calls weekly. "We come very near to the needs of these families," she writes, "the visit meaning more to them than the books. In nearly every case we allow the books to be given out at any time by the child who glories in the honor of being librarian. In one wretched tenement, on the far East Side, we are told that the case of books is taken down into the yard on Sunday afternoon, and neighbors and lodgers have the use of them." It is satisfactory to know that the biggest of the home libraries is within stone's throw of Corlear's Hook, which the "Hook Gang" terrorized with rapine and murder within my recollection.
Miss Brown adds that "the girls prefer bookcases with doors of glass, as they like to scrub it with sapolio, but the boys are more interested in the lock and key."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 41:On the day it was published the newspapers reported the killing in the streets of three children by trucks.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 42:The Astor, Lenox, and Tilden foundations represent a total of some seven millions of dollars. The great central library, erected by the city, is to cost five millions, and the fifty branches for which the city gives the sites and Andrew Carnegie the buildings, $5,200,000. The city's contribution for maintenance will be over half a million yearly.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 43:The first year's record was 186 lectures and 22,149 hearers. Last winter (1901-1902) there were 3172 lectures in over 100 places, and the total attendance was 928,251. This winter there will be 115 centres. It is satisfactory to know that churches and church houses fall in with the plan more and more where there are no schools to serve as halls.[Back to Main Text]