“Counting little bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens (and they are pretty nearly indistinguishable), Mr. Daniels tells us that half the Polish families in Buffalo, or 40,000 people, average two occupants to a room. There are beds under beds (trundle beds, by the way, were once quite respectable), and mattresses piled high on one bed during the day will cover all the floors at night. Lodgers in addition to the family are in some sections almost the rule rather than the exception. Under such conditions privacy of living, privacy of sleeping, privacy of dressing, privacy of toilet, privacy for study, are all impossible, especially in the winter season; and those who have nerves, which are not confined to the rich in spite of an impression to the contrary, are led near to insanity. Brothers and sisters sleep together far beyond the age of safety. It begins so, and parents do not realize how fast children grow, or how dangerous it all is.”[204] Even in Buffalo, the congestion problem is not limited to the Poles. The author just quoted describes the Italians as tending to establish residences in old hotels, warehouses, and abandoned homesteads, and says, “As late as 1906 we found Italians living in large rooms, subdivided by head-high partitions of rope and calico, with a separate family in each division.” In Milwaukee there are three foci of the tenement evil, the Italian quarter, the Polish quarter, and the Jewish quarter. While there are not the large tenement houses that prevail in larger cities, there are the same evil conditions in the small cottages of the laboring class. The following paragraphs give a vivid picture of some of the conditions in each of these three sections. In the Italian district, “Entering one of these dwellings we had to duck our heads to escape a shower bath from leaking pipes above the door. Incidentally, we had to dodge a crowd of the canine family which did not seem to be particularly pleased with our visit. The rooms were dark. Something, which I supposed was food or intended for food, was bubbling on a little stove. A friendly goat was playing with the baby on the floor, and the pigeons cooed cheerily near by. Through the door of the kitchen we got the odor of the stable. The horses had the best room. In the middle room, which was absolutely dark, on a bed of indescribable filth, lay an aged woman, groaning with pain from what I judged to be ulcerated teeth, but which for aught she knew might have been a more malignant disease. In this single dwelling, which is not unlike many we saw, there lived together in ignorant misery one man, two women, ten children, six dogs, two goats, five pigeons, two horses, and other animal life which escaped our hurried observation.”