.37; in 1890 it was 18.52; in 1900,
according to the United States census, the average in the old city was
20.4. It all means that there are so many more and so much bigger
tenements, and four families to the floor where there were two before.
Statistics are not my hobby. I like to get their human story out of
them. Anybody who wants them can get the figures in the census books.
But as an instance of the unchecked drift--unchecked as yet--look at
this record of the Tenth Ward, the "most crowded spot in the world." In
1880, when it had not yet attained to that bad eminence, it contained
47,554 persons, or 432.3 to the acre. In 1890 the census showed a
population of 57,596, which was 522 to the acre. The police census of
1895 found 70,168 persons living in 1514 houses, which was 643.08 to the
acre. The Health Department's census for the first half of 1898 gave a
total of 82,175 persons living in 1201 tenements, with 313 inhabited
buildings yet to be heard from. This is the process of doubling
up,--literally, since the cause and the vehicle of it all is the
double-decker tenement,--which in the year 1900 had crowded a single
block in that ward at the rate of 1724 persons per acre, and one in the
Eleventh Ward at the rate of 1894.[18] It goes on not in the Tenth Ward
or on the East Side only, but throughout the city. When, in 1897, it was
proposed to lay out a small park in the Twenty-second Ward, up on the
far West Side, it was shown that five blocks in that section, between
Forty-ninth and Sixty-second streets and Ninth and Eleventh avenues,
had a population of more than 3000 each. The block between Sixty-first
and Sixty-second streets and Tenth and Eleventh avenues harbored 4254
when the police made a count in 1900, which meant 1158 persons to the
acre.

[Footnote 16: Report of Tenement House Commission, 1900.]

[Footnote 17: Tenement house census of 1900: Manhattan and the Bronx
boroughs (the old city), 46,993 tenements, with a population of
1,701,643. The United States census of the two boroughs gave them a
population of 2,050,600. In the Greater New York there are 82,000
tenements, and two-thirds of our nearly four millions of people live
in them.]

[Footnote 18: Police census of 1900, block bounded by Canal, Hester,
Eldridge, and Forsyth streets: size 375 x 200, population 2969, rate
per acre 1724. Block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and
Ridge streets: size 200