The Battle with the SlumRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Battle with the Slum
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
And here upon my table lies a letter from the head-worker of the
University Settlement, which the postman brought half an hour ago, that
lets more daylight in, it seems to me, than all the rest. He has been
thinking, he writes, of how to yoke the public school and the social
settlement together, and the conviction that comes to everybody who
thinks to solve problems, has come to him, too, that the way to do a
thing is to do it. So he proposes, since they need another house over at
the West Side branch, to acquire it by annexing the public school and
turning "all the force and power that is in the branch into the bare
walls of the school, there to develop a social spirit and an enthusiasm"
among young and old that shall make of the school truly the neighborhood
house and soul. And he asks us all to fall in.
I say it lets daylight in, because we have all felt for some time that
something like this was bound to come, only how was not clear yet. Here
is this immense need of a tenement house population of more than two
million souls: something to take the place, as far as anything can, of
the home that isn't there, a place to meet other than the saloon; a
place for the young to do their courting--there is no room for it in the
tenement, and the street is not the place for it, yet it has got to be
done; a place to make their elders feel that they are men and women,
something else than mere rent-paying units. Why, it was this very need
that gave birth to the social settlement among us, and we see now that
with the old machinery it does not supply it and never can. "I can reach
the people of just about two blocks about me here," said this same head
worker of the same settlement to me an evening or two ago, "and that is
all." But there are hundreds of blocks filled with hungry minds and
souls. A hundred settlements would be needed where there is one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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