Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.
Page 23
| And while you are about it make a note of a fact we let go unheeded too long to our harm, and haven’t grasped fully yet. The legislative committee of 1857 said it: “to prevent drunkenness provide every man with a clean and comfortable home.” Call it paternalism, crankery, any other hard name you can think of, all the same it goes down underneath the foundation of things. I have known drunkards to wreck homes a plenty in my time; but I have known homes, too, that made drunkards by the shortest cut. I know a dozen now—yes, ten dozen—from which, if I had to live there, I should certainly escape to the saloon with its brightness and cheer as often and as long as I could to brood there perhaps over the fate which sowed desolation in one man’s path that another might reap wealth and luxury. That last might not be my way, but it is a human way, and it breeds hatred which is not good mortar for us to build with. It does not bind. Let us remember that and just be sensible about things, or we shall not get anywhere. |
| By which I do not mean that we are not getting anywhere; for we are. Look at Gotham Court, described in the health reports of the sixties as a “packing-box tenement” of the hopeless back-to-back type, which meant that there was no ventilation and could be none. The stenches from the |