By F. Elisabeth Crowell, Former Superintendent, St. Anthony's
Hospital, Pensacola, Florida. From Charities and the Commons,
6 February 1909.
The United States Steel Corporation owns property on
the South Side of Pittsburgh just beyond the Point Bridge. Here is located
the old Painter's Mill, which is one of the plants of the Carnegie Steel
Company, which in turn is one of
the constituent companies of the United States Steel Corporation; and
here, also, stands what remains of Painter's Row, where the company has
housed certain of its employees, mostly immigrants. When the Carnegie Steel
Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated
the plant so as to turn out the sort and quantity of output which
the Carnegie name stands for. When it took over Painter's Row, it did
nothing. When, a little over a year ago, and several years after the
purchase of the property, I made a detailed investigation of the
place, I found half a thousand people living there
under conditions that were unbelievable--back-to-back houses with no
through ventilation; cellar kitchens; dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated,
overcrowded sleeping rooms, no drinking water supply on the premises, and
a dearth of sanitary accommodations that was shameful.
Painter's Row was originally a succession of six rows, some brick,
some frame, built on the side of a hill that slopes from the foot of a
lofty palisade down to the Ohio. Houses and mills immediately adjoin and
tenants are even housed in an old brick building, in another part of
which some of the mill offices are located.
Sluggish clouds of thick smoke hang over the cluster of roofs and the air
is full of soot and fine dust. Noise presses in from every quarter,--from
the roaring mill, from the trolley cars clattering and clanging through
the narrow street which divides mill
and rows into two sections, from the trains on the through tracks above
the topmost row and from the sidings which separate the lowest row from
the river bank and which are in constant use for the hauling of freight
to and from the mills.
Dirt and noise are inseparable adjuncts to life in a mill
district, deplorable, but unavoidable; but workers in the mills need not
necessarily be deprived of sufficient light and air such as it is, and
water, and the common decencies of life. In the winter of 1908, I spent
several days in Painter's Row. I watched grimy
little children at play. I talked with the women, the home-makers; I saw
men who had been working on the night shift lying like fallen logs,
huddled together in small, dark, stuffy rooms, sleeping the sleep of
exhaustion that follows in the wake of heavy
physical labor. Above all, I sought to learn how the tenants fared in
these three things: ventilation and water and sanitary conveniences.
In the two rows nearest the river, there were twenty-eight houses
divided from cellar to roof by a party wall, so that the rooms in each
apartment were arranged one above the other; the result was that there
was no through ventilation, and consequently the rooms were ill-smelling
at all times and stiflingly close in summer. There were in the different
rows, twenty-seven cellar and basement kitchens, dark, unsanitary,
ill-ventilated. Besides these, there were six cellar rooms more than
halfway below the ground level, that were occupied solely as sleeping
rooms. The windows of these cellars were small and the little light and
air that could gain admittance under the best of circumstances was
obstructed by a row of ramshackle sheds which bordered the narrow area
upon which these windows opened.
There were many other gloomy rooms which it would be but repetition to
describe. But the tale of dark, ill-ventilated sleeping quarters would be
incomplete without passing mention of a space under a staircase that had
been walled off and that was entered
from a kitchen. Into this hole in the wall a bed had been squeezed by
some hook or crook, and there two boarders stowed their bodies at night.
I found the worst overcrowding in the row at the top of the hill. In one
apartment, a man, his wife, and
baby and two boarders slept in one room and five boarders occupied two
beds in an adjoining room. In another apartment of three rooms, the man,
his wife and baby slept in the kitchen, their two boarders in a second
room; and the third room was sub-let and
occupied as a living and sleeping room by five persons,--a man, his wife
and child and two boarders. This last room was a small one, containing two
beds, a stove, table, trunk and chairs.
Once inside, there was scarcely room to turn comfortably.
Not one house in the entire settlement had any provision for supplying
drinking water to its tenants. Mill water was piped out to the
rows,--an ugly, dirty fluid, which, however tired or thirsty they were, the
people would not put to their lips. I asked the question at every doorstep
and got the same reply. They went to an
old pump in the mill yard, 360 steps from the farthest apartment, down
seventy-five stairs. This "town pump" was the sole supply of drinking
water within reach of ninety-one households, comprising 568
persons.
The water pumped from the mill was used for cleansing purposes.
When the pressure was low, there was none even of that to be had. In only
two cases was this wash water piped directly into the house. Tenants in
the other houses carried it from bent pipes
that emptied into open drains running between the rows, or into troughs at
the end of the buildings, whence it had to be carried up two or three
flights of stairs if they happened to live in the upper stories. From
these same apartments the waste water had to be carried out and down and
emptied into the drains. The marvel was
not that some of the homes were dirty; the wonder was that any of them
were clean,--for against such obstacles cleanliness was to be secured only
at the expense of tired muscles and
aching backs. I talked with one mother whose two rooms on the top floor
were spotless, and whose children were well looked after. Day after day,
and many times a day, she carried the water up and down that her home and
her children might be kept decent and clean. I looked at her bent
shoulders, gaunt arms and knotted hands.
Work a-plenty,--necessary work,--there was and always will be for her to do,
but those shoulders and arms and hands had to strain laboriously over
unnecessary work as well. "God! Miss, but them stairs is bad," she said.
As was said at the beginning, when the Carnegie Steel Company took
over Painter's Mill, it renovated the equipment of the plant; when it
took over Painter's Row, it did nothing.
One row of four houses had waste sinks in the apartments and
another row of one-family houses had a curious wooden chute arrangement on
the back porches, down which waste water was poured that ran through open
wooden drains in the rear yard to the open drain between this row of
houses and the next. A similar arrangement
had been made for the convenience of six families living in the second
story of the row of tenement houses, where two wooden chutes from the
porch above carried the waste water down to the curb at Carson street.
They carried other things besides waste water,--filth of every
description was emptied down these chutes,--for
these six families, and three families below on the first floor had no
closet accommodation and were living like animals. Some families disposed
of slops and excreta in the way
just indicated; others used a bucket containing ashes, which was emptied
into a wooden garbage bin on the street at the end of the row of
houses.
Officials of the mill company, when this condition of affairs was
pointed out to them, replied that the vault in the rear of this row of
houses was built for the use of these families as well as for the other
nineteen families in these two rows, and that they could secure a key to
a closet compartment by applying for it
at the offices. As a matter of fact these people had never been offered
keys and they volunteered the statement to the investigator that they had
no closets. The vault just mentioned was half-way up the hill between
these two rows of houses.
To reach it, anyone living in an end apartment in the second story front
would be obliged to walk half the length of the second story porch to
where the inside stairs led down to the street, then along the street (for
the sidewalk was but two and a half feet wide, and completely covered
with old lumber and debris of every
description), then up a difficult flight of outside stairs, steep and with
narrow treads, then two or three steps on the level, then more stairs, and
so on until one had taken a hundred and eighty-six steps, sixty-five of
which were stairs. This was called "closet accommodations" for want of a
better term.
Equally bad conditions prevailed in the row of houses nearest the
river. Closets for these houses were formerly located across the railroad
tracks on the edge of the bank. During the flood in the spring of 1907,
these were swept away and had never been replaced. The twelve families
living in this row also used buckets and
emptied the contents into the river. One family in the next row of houses
claimed that they had never been given a closet key. In all, twenty-two of
the ninety-one families were living
without the first elementary conveniences that make for sanitation. The
full evil of this state of affairs is not really clear until one remembers
that these families were occupying two- and three-room apartments, nearly
all of them having several children, and anywhere from two to five
boarders each.
It is fair to ask, why even immigrant laborers put up with such
conditions? To the minds of the men, for two very good and sufficient
reasons. The houses were near the mill and rents were cheap. The ledge of
land along the foot of Mt. Washington affords few building sites; and the
Painter's Mill section is, perhaps, the
extreme example of the general housing-shortage of the South Side. Men who
work in heat, work ten or twelve hours a day, and work at night alternate
fortnights, want to live near the mill. Especially is this true of day
laborers who work on repair gangs and
cleaning-up work, and who may be called out at any time. This is as true
of the mill towns, as of the working force of such a plant as Painter's
Mill, in the heart of the city. On the other hand, the mill management
wants these men there, for just such
emergency calls. The rents in Painter's Row averaged $2.40 a room
monthly,--cheaper by far than these laborers could secure accommodations
from ordinary landlords in many other sections
of Pittsburgh; and that is a dominating consideration to a man with a
family, earning $1.65 a day, or a single immigrant whose whole purpose in
coming to America is to make money and who will stomach any personal ills
to hold on to it. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these
rents aggregated the company over $7,000 a year. Such an item is a
bagatelle in the balance sheet of the United States Steel Corporation; and it
would be foolish to suppose that the rows were rented out to their
employees as a money making scheme. They were rented out on easy terms to
keep laborers within call at any hour of the
day or night, and the fact that Painter's Mill is an old plant and likely
to be abandoned, no doubt influenced the management in holding the housing
property as it stood without rehabilitation.
But the fact remains that these rentals amounted to a sum nearly
sufficient to pay the whole taxes on the Painter's Mill property, mill,
equipment, land and houses.
To-day, the situation in Painter's Row is very different. Three
rows of houses have been torn down, and radical improvements made to
others. A variety of factors entered into this change and the story is
worth the telling. The evolution of social consciousness is interesting,
whether in an individual or a corporation. The
initial factor in such a development may be one of several,--motives of
self-interest, the weight of public opinion or the letting of light into
dark places. Motives of self-interest did
not suffice to make the Carnegie Steel Company a good landlord in the
present instance. In other words, the company had not recognized it to be
worth while as a business consideration to house its human machinery with
a view of maintaining such machinery
at its highest state of efficiency. Its mills, with their equipment, were
repaired and improved in order to increase the quality and quantity of
their output. But common laborers were too easily replaced for an effort
to be made to conserve their health or wellbeing by repairing or improving
these houses in which they lived. If
ten men fell out, ten more were ready to step in and fill their
places.
But Painter's Row was not the only instance of bad housing in
Pittsburgh. Other landlords were equally indifferent, and evil housing
conditions were found all over the city. In March, a preliminary report on
general housing conditions in Pittsburgh was published by the
Pittsburgh Survey. One paragraph dealt with conditions in
Painter's Row. The fact that the responsibility for the situation there
could be fixed directly upon one of the great corporations enhanced the
value of the paragraph as a quotable news item, and Collier's Weekly
seized upon it as a text for an editorial. The editorial brought it under
the eye of a New England
stockholder whose New England conscience was stirred. His protest at the
United States Steel headquarters in New York brought from there a
communication so favorable to the company that he felt justified in
criticising the editors of Collier's for their
apparently unwarranted statements; and they, in turn, called upon the
Survey to substantiate the quotation. In support of this paragraph, which
was but a few lines long in the published report, the full details of how
things stood at Painter's Row, as I have
put them down here, were transmitted by the editors to the inquiring
stockholder. He was aroused, convinced and in position to lodge another
protest, this time with the facts behind it. Light had been let in.
Meanwhile, pressure was brought to bear upon the owners of Painter's Row from a second quarter: The health authorities were insistent that all houses occupied by three or more families should be altered so as to conform to the requirements of the tenement house law, thus making mandatory the installation of sinks and water-closets in such houses. This also involved the cutting of windows in half a dozen gloomy cellar rooms in one building, in order to procure the required amount of light and ventilation, a structural change which would have so weakened the supporting walls of the building as to have rendered it unsafe. The windows were not cut, the sinks and closets were not installed; instead, the building was razed to the ground,--the best possible thing that could have happened. Two other rows of two-family houses were also demolished. They were old, ramshackle, frame buildings, not worth repairing.
Last fall, I inspected Painter's Row for the second time. I found
the noise as incessant, the smoke and dust as penetrating, as nine months
before. The children were as grimy but they were fewer in number, for as a
result of these changes the settlement had been reduced to twenty-eight
families. When I reached the topmost row
of houses on the hillside, my inspection partook of the nature of a
triumphal progress. Some of the tenants remembered me. Gleefully they
showed me their sinks with drinking water in every apartment, and told of
the closets that had been installed in the
basement. Every fixture was clean and in perfect condition, a refutation
of the old argument that such people unaccustomed to these conveniences in
the old country will not care for them when supplied.
I found a like state of affairs in another building formerly
occupied as a tenement, now housing but two families. Here also sinks and
inside water-closets had been installed.
By so much, then, had life in Painter's Row been made more
tolerable. Two rows of one-family brick houses remained untouched. The
families living in these houses continued to get along without drinking
water on the premises and continued to use outside privy vaults; a few
were occupying cellar kitchens. In one row, waste water
and garbage were still emptied down wooden chutes leading to open drains
through the yards. The result was odorous and unhealthy.
Much had been accomplished, something still remained to be done.
The company which had gone beyond the requirement of the law in some
things still fell short in others. Sooner or later, the health authorities
would force the removal of the privy vaults. The old pump had served
Painter's Row loyally and well, and would continue
to serve it as long as the bucket brigade moved back and forth between
these remaining houses and the mill-yard for their water. Sometimes a
little child trudged along with a great pail half filled. Again, it was
the man of the family, tired after a hard
day, who brought in the ration of water.
In a way, that big, grimy pump with its old iron handle and
primitive spoutings, summed up the Painter's Row situation,--of an industry
of great mechanics who could overhaul an old plant and make it pay, but
had not brought water a few paces up the hill,
or dropped a sewer a few paces down to the river below
that men and women and children might live like men and women and
children.
Transcribed by sla.
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