Tenements

Spying flames vomiting from a Manhattan tenement one night last week, a scavenging junkman named Roderick Good turned in an alarm. In their beds in the five-story rookery lay more than 100 tenants. The fire, starting on the third floor, shot up the stair well, down the hallways and through the flimsy walls and doors as if they were paper. By the time the fire department arrived the whole interior was roaring like a blast furnace. Seven tenants were cooked alive. Week before in New York City six persons were incinerated in tenements. Week before that ten were burned alive. Since Jan. 1, 48 persons have died in 25 tenement fires. After one fire last month in a notorious slum area in which eight lives were lost, 700 tattered moppets marched down to the City Hall bearing banners: "We Don't Want'to Burn to Death." Under New York law a tenement is any building housing three families or more. But to a New Yorker tenements mean those built under the lax laws existing prior to 1901. All but four of the 48 deaths in recent tenement fires occurred in "old law" buildings of which New York City has 67,000, most of them dating back to the Civil War. One-half of them are equipped with rusty vertical ladder escapes long since outlawed. Hundreds have no fire escapes at all. Some of them were condemned nearly 50 years ago. Grouped in great blighted areas around the shores of Manhattan Island and in some of the more desolate districts of Brooklyn, these '"old-law" tenements (with a scattering of new) constitute the New York City slums--the worst of any big city in the world with the possible exception of Shanghai, Istanbul, London, Port Said and Bombay. In these plague spots live some 1,500,000 people. Two, three, four families pack into one flat. In summer the heat is stifling. In winter icicles from burst plumbing form on the hall ceilings. Refuse piles up in airshafts 15 feet deep. Basements are cluttered with rags and tinder. The better tenements have one toilet to a floor, but when one block was recently razed, the only sanitary facility discovered was a row of holes in a board in the backyard. Garbage is tossed out windows. In some, a match struck in the halls will illumine the foul air as if it were a fog. Death, pestilence, starvation and crime scurry unchecked through the dank rookeries of the Ghetto, Red Hook, Harlem and San Juan Hill. Slums have been a festering social problem for more than a century but Manhattan's death roster of the last few months has rubbed the public conscience raw. Pure economics always blocked slum-clearance, but in the open-handed lending policies of the New Deal crusaders have seen an opportunity to solve the problem once & for all. So far no one has been able to surmount the fact that new tenements cannot be built to rent so cheaply as the old. The two chief factors in rentals are: 1) the interest rate on borrowed money; 2) the price of land. Land in the depths of Manhattan's slums costs $8 per sq. ft. Even with government money apartments built on this land will rent for $9.75 per room per month. With land at $6 per foot the rental can be cut to $8.75. Yet plenty of stinking flats are available today at $2 or $3 per room. Poor people can afford no more. If one slum area is cleared, its residents crowd into another, and higher-income groups move into the nice new buildings. When Fred F. French razed the infamous "Lung Block" near Alfred Emanuel Smith's birthplace on the Lower East Side, 360 of the 386 evicted families promptly settled down in squalor within two blocks of their old homes. If whole areas are reclaimed, slumdwellers swarm into whole new areas, blighting them like locusts. Nevertheless, the PWA has earmarked $25,000,000 for Manhattan slum-clearance --a very small drop in a billion-dollar bucket. The State has authorized the setting up of a Municipal Housing Authority and 5,000 CWA workers in an exhaustive survey spent the winter slumming. No plans have yet been adopted. The Housing Authority has the power of eminent domain but in Manhattan courts fat awards in condemnation proceedings are the rule. Vast areas of the slums are held by small real estate speculators, many of them onetime slumdwellers who have made a little money. Langdon W. Post, able young tenement house commissioner and chairman of the Housing Authority, last week lashed this capitalization of misery thus: "In the last 25 years there has been more speculation in New York City real estate than there has been in any other nation. We must send this speculation to the Stock Exchange . . . and not tolerate it in land dealing.''

In his drive on fire traps, Commissioner Post recently swore he would compel all landlords, many of whom cannot pay taxes, to make their properties safe and sanitary. Vincent Astor countered with an offer to sell his slum holdings for their assessed value ($800,000). Other large slum owners like the Stuyvesants. Folsams and Columbia University chimed in with offers to cooperate. But for true low-cost housing even the assessed valuation is too high. Everybody wants slum-clearance including the landlords and the mortgage holders. But the landlords and the mortgage holders want their money first. A recent Manhattan Tenement House Commissioner, a realistic Tammany jobholder, estimated that thorough slum-clearance in New York would take 250 years.

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