In the pre-war days a good neighborhood was usually sufficiently large to permit of extensive walks in it. To-day in New York even a very expensive neighborhood is as frequently as not an oasis of a block or two, or even an apartment house or two, in the midst of a desert of dreary and depressing slums. The rookery quarters of a medieval city[Pg 49] may be picturesque. The slums of New York are merely drab and sordid. To those accustomed to a house or even to the spaciousness of a better-class Paris apartment the usual New York apartment seems hopelessly cramped and lacking in all character and dignity. The rooms seem almost to open into one another and the family to be always on top of one another, whether taking their baths or entertaining guests. And guests are infinitely more of a problem than they ever were. Overnight guests are out of the question for most people of moderate means. It is hard enough to get an apartment which affords decent living for the family, not to speak of a guest room. The lack of service, the dependence upon one maid, when any, instead of upon the invariable cook and waitress of even the modest families of twenty years back, has made entertaining a genuine and not seldom an insoluble problem for families living on such incomes as before the War would have made hospitality merely an easy and gracious function of household life. Moreover, within the family itself, the close quarters of the modern apartment afford infinitely more opportunity for friction of tempers and temperaments than the old homes. A third-story front bedroom as an escape from the family sitting-room two stories below had almost the aloofness of a mountain peak. The unsatisfactory character of the new homes, or the unsatisfied natures of their tenants, are proved beyond dispute by the restlessness engendered. Last October (1928) in New York alone a hundred thousand families, involving at the lowest estimate three hundred thousand people, moved from one apartment to another. What memories can cluster about his “childhood home” for a child who is thus annually dragged from one set of rooms[Pg 50] to another by parents in search of cheaper rents or the latest installations in the way of electric iceboxes or garbage incinerators? Perhaps sunshine, air, quiet, spaciousness, decency of neighborhood, dignity, privacy are aristocratic requirements, vestiges of a now lost mode of comely and gracious living. At any rate, they are now the most expensive “things” to acquire, when they can be acquired at all, in a great modern city. Yet two decades ago even in New York and Brooklyn they were readily obtainable on such modest incomes as $3000 or $4000 a year. V