Between Nineteenth Street and Twenty-fifth
and from Avenue E to the tip of Constable Hook,
is the dwelling place of these people. They live
packed in ramshackle tenements, many of them
wooden, in three and four-room flats, for which
they pay outrageous rents. Often a man, wife,
six children and nine “boarders” will live in
three rooms—the “boarders” working in three
different shifts, one rising from his. filthy pile of
rags to go to work just when the other comes in
worn out from his shift. There are no sanitary
arrangements whatever in most of these places,
except a common shed in the back yard; water is
procured from a nearby common pump. The
best flat I saw in the Hook itself had four rooms,
a common toilet in the hall, one cold water tap
in the parlor—and cost S2O a month.
These driven cattle, unable to speak English,
unable even to communicate with each others
forced to the last desperate remedy by hopeless
debt and slowly tightening starvation, went on
strike. Ihey were forbidden by the police to hold
Thursday, November 9, 1916..
