Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.
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| convenience of the architect’s client, the builder, the lot was encroached upon, until of one big block which the Gilder Commission measured only 7 per cent was left open to the air; 93 per cent of it was covered with brick and mortar. Rear tenements, to the number of nearly 100, have been condemned as “slaughter-houses,” with good reason, but this block was built practically solid. The average of space covered in 34 tenement blocks was shown to be 78.13 per cent. The law allowed only 65. The “discretion” that penned tenants in a burning tenement with stairs of wood for the builder’s “convenience” cut down the chance of life of their babies unmoved. Sunlight and air mean just that, where three thousand human beings are packed into a single block. That was why the matter was given into the charge of the health officials, when politics was yet kept out of their work. |
| Of such kind are the interests that oppose betterment of the worker’s hard lot in New York, that dictated the appointment by Tammany of a commission composed of builders to revise its code of tenement laws, and that sneered at the “laughable results of the Gilder Tenement House Commission.” Those results made for the health and happiness and safety of a million and a half of souls, and were accounted, on every humane ground, the longest step forward that had been taken by this community. |