The Children of the PoorRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Children of the Poor
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Child welfare -- New York (State) -- New York; Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
The Italian who comes here gravitates naturally to the oldest and most
dilapidated tenements in search of cheap rents, which he doesn't find. The
Jew has another plan, characteristic of the man. He seeks out the biggest
ones and makes the rent come within his means by taking in boarders,
"sweating" his flat to the point of police intervention. That that point
is a long way beyond human decency, let alone comfort, an instance from
Ludlow Street, that came to my notice while writing this, quite clearly
demonstrates. The offender was a tailor, who lived with his wife, two
children, and two boarders in two rooms on the top floor. [It is always
the top floor; in fifteen years of active service as a police reporter I
have had to climb to the top floor five times for every one my business
was further down, irrespective of where the tenement was or what kind of
people lived in it. Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to
bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to
poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble. The deepest poverty is
at home in the attic.] But this tailor; with his immediate household,
including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The
other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his
wife; which couple, following his example as their opportunities allowed,
divided the bedroom in two by hanging a curtain in the middle, took
one-half for themselves and let the other half to still another tailor
with a wife and child. A midnight inspection by the sanitary police was
followed by the arrest of the housekeeper and the original tailor, and
they were fined or warned in the police-court, I forget which. It doesn't
much matter. That the real point was missed was shown by the appearance of
the owner of the house, a woman, at Sanitary Headquarters, on the day
following, with the charge against the policeman that he was robbing her
of her tenants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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