New York City has one hundred thousand people who, under unfavorable conditions, work with their fingers for so little money that they are understood, even by the uninitiated general public, to form a class by themselves. These are by some called sewing-machine workers, by others tenement toilers, and by still others sweatshop employees; but, in a general sense, the term, tenement workers, includes them all. They form a great section in one place, and in others little patches, ministered to by storekeepers and trade agents who are as much underpaid and nearly as hard-working as they themselves. Go into any one of these areas and you will encounter a civilization that is as strange and un-American as if it were not included in this land at all. Pushcarts and market-stalls are among the most distinctive features. Little stores and grimy windows are also characteristic of these sections. There is an atmosphere of crowdedness and poverty which goes with both. Any one can see that these people are living energetically. There is something about the hurry and enthusiasm of their life that reminds you of ants.
If you stay and turn your attention from the traffic proper, the houses begin to attract your attention. They are nearly all four-story or five-story buildings, with here and there one of six, and still another of seven stories; all without elevators, and all, with the exception of the last,86 exceedingly old. There are narrow entrance-ways, dingy and unlighted, which lead up dark and often rickety stairs. There are other alley-ways, which lead, like narrow tunnels, to rear tenements and back shops. Iron fire escapes descend from the roof to the first floor, in every instance, because the law compels it. Iron stairways sometimes ascend, where no other means of entrance is to be had. There are old pipes which lead upward and carry water. No such thing as sanitary plumbing exists. You will not often see a gas-light in a hall in as many as two blocks of houses. You will not see one flat in ten with hot and cold water arrangements. Other districts have refrigerators and stationary washstands, and bath tubs as a matter of course, but these people do not know what modern conveniences mean. Steam heat and hot and cold water tubs and sinks have never been installed in this area.
The houses are nearly all painted a dull red, and nearly all are divided in the most unsanitary manner. Originally they were built five rooms deep, with two flats on a floor, but now the single flats have been subdivided and two or three, occasionally four or five, families live and toil in the space which was originally intended for one. There are families so poor, or so saving and unclean, that they huddle with other families, seven or eight persons in two rooms. Iron stands covered by plain boards make a bed which can be enlarged or reduced at will. When night comes, four, five, six, sometimes seven such people stretch out on these beds. When morning comes the bedclothes, if such they may be called, are cleared away and the board basis is used as a table. One room87 holds the stove, the cooking utensils, the chairs, and the sewing machine. The other contains the bed, the bed-clothing, and various kinds of stored material. Eating, sleeping, and usually some washing are done there.
I am giving the extreme instances, unfortunately common to the point of being numerous. In the better instances three or four people are housed in two rooms. How many families there are that live less closely quartered than this would not be very easy to say. On the average, five people live in two rooms. A peddler or a pushcart man who can get to where he can occupy two rooms, by having his wife and children work, is certain that he is doing well. Fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, go out to work. If the father cannot get work and the mother can, then that is the order of procedure. If the daughter cannot get work and the mother and father can, it is the daughter’s duty to take care of the house and take in sewing. If any of the boys and girls are too young to go out and enter the shops, duty compels them to help on the piecework that is taken into the rooms. Everything is work, in one form or another, from morning until night.
As for the people themselves, they are a strange mixture of all races and all creeds. Day after day you will see express wagons and trucks leaving the immigration station at the Battery, loaded to crowding with the latest arrivals, who are being taken as residents to one or another colony of this crowded section. There are Greeks, Italians, Russians, Poles, Syrians, Armenians and Hungarians. Jews are so numerous that they have to be88 classified with the various nations whose language they speak. All are poverty-stricken, all venturing into this new world to make their living. The vast majority have absolutely nothing more than the ten dollars which the immigration inspectors are compelled to see that they have when they arrive. These people recruit the territory in question.
In the same hundred thousand, and under the same tenement conditions, are many who are not foreign-born. I know personally of American fathers who have got down to where it is necessary to work as these foreigners work. There are home-grown American mothers who have never been able to lift themselves above the conditions in which they find themselves to-day. Thousands of children born and reared in New York City are growing up under conditions which would better become a slum section of Constantinople.
I know a chamber in this section where, at a plain wooden bench or table, sits a middle-aged Hungarian and his wife, with a fifteen-year-old daughter, sewing. The Hungarian is perhaps not honestly Gentile, for he looks as if he might have Hebrew blood in his veins. The mother and the daughter partake of a dark olive tinge, more characteristic of the Italian than of anything else. It must be a coincidence, however, for these races rarely mix. Between them and upon a nearby chair are piled many pairs of trousers, all awaiting their labor. Two buckles and a button must be sewed on every one. The rough edges at the bottom must be turned up and basted,89 and the inside about the top must be lined with a kind of striped cotton which is already set loosely in place. It is their duty to sew closely with their hands what is already basted. No machine worker can do this work, and so it is sent out to such as these, under the practice of tenement distribution. Their duty is to finish it.
 
Toilers of the Tenements
There would be no need to call attention to these people except that in this instance they have unwittingly violated the law. Tenement workers, under the new dispensation, cannot do exactly as they please. It is not sufficient for them to have an innate and necessitous desire to work. They must work under special conditions. Thus, it is now written that the floors must be clean and the ceilings whitewashed. There must not be any dirt on the walls. No room in which they work must have such a thing as a bed in it, and no three people may ever work together in one room. Law and order prescribe that one is sufficient. These others—father and daughter, or mother and daughter, or mother and father—should go out into the shops, leaving just one here to work. Such is the law.
These three people, who have only these two trades, have complied with scarcely any of these provisions. The room is not exactly as clean as it should be. The floor is dirty. Overhead is a smoky ceiling, and in one corner is a bed. The two small windows before which they labor do not give sufficient ventilation, and so the air in the chamber is stale. Worst of all, they are working three in a chamber, and have no license.
“How now,” asks an inspector, opening the door—for there is very little civility of manner observed by90 these agents of the law who constantly regulate these people—“any pants being finished here?”
“How?” says the Hungarian, looking purblindly up. It is nothing new to him to have his privacy thus invaded. Unless he has been forewarned and has his door locked, police and detectives, to say nothing of health inspectors and other officials, will frequently stick their heads in or walk in and inquire after one thing or another. Sometimes they go leisurely through his belongings and threaten him for concealing something. There is a general tendency to lord it over and browbeat him, for what reason he has no conception. Other officials do it in the old country; perhaps it is the rule here.
“So,” says the inspector, stepping authoritatively forward, “finishing pants, eh? All three of you? Got a license?”
“Vot?” inquires the pale Hungarian, ceasing his labor.
“Where is your license—your paper? Haven’t you got a paper?”
The Hungarian, who has not been in this form of work long enough to know the rules, puts his elbows on the table and gazes nervously into the newcomer’s face. What is this now that the gentleman wants? His wife looks her own inquiry and speaks of it to her daughter.
“What is it he wants?” says the father to the child.
“It is a paper,” returns the daughter in Hungarian. “He says we must have a license.”
“Paper?” repeats the Hungarian, looking up and shaking his head in the negative. “No.”
91 “Oh, so you haven’t got a license then? I thought so. Who are you working for?”
The father stares at the child. Seeing that he does not understand, the inspector goes on: “The boss, the boss! What boss gave you these pants to finish?”
“Oh,” returns the little girl, who understands somewhat better than the rest, “the boss, yes. He wants to know what boss gave us these pants.” This last in a foreign tongue to her father.
“Tell him,” says the mother in Hungarian, “that the name is Strakow.”
“Strakow,” repeats the daughter.
“Strakow, eh?” says the inspector. “Well, I’ll see Mr. Strakow. You must not work on these any more. Do you hear? Listen, you,” and he turns the little girl’s face up to him, “you tell your father that he can’t do any more of this work until he gets a license. He must go up to No. 1 Madison Avenue and get a paper. I don’t know whether they’ll give it to him or not, but he can go and ask. Then he must clean this floor. The ceiling must be whitewashed—see?”
The little girl nods her head.
“You can’t keep this bed in here, either,” he adds. “You must move the bed out into the other room if you can. You mustn’t work here. Only one can work here. Two of you must go out into the shop.”
All the time the careworn parents are leaning forward eagerly, trying to catch the drift of what they cannot possibly understand. Both interrupt now and then with a “What is it?” in Hungarian, which the daughter has no time to heed. She is so busy trying to understand92 half of it herself that there is no time for explanation. Finally she says to her parents:
“He says we cannot all work here.”
“Vot?” says the father. “No vork?”
“No,” replies the daughter. “Three of us can’t work in one room. It’s against the law. Only one. He says that only one can work in this room.”
“How!” he exclaims, as the little girl goes on making vaguely apparent what these orders are. As she proceeds the old fellow’s face changes. His wife leans forward, her whole attitud............