ver so little worth living, and therefore
held so cheap along with the fierce, unceasing battle that goes on to
save it. You will go no further unless I leave it out? Very well; I
shall leave out the murder after we have passed the block yonder. The
tragedy of that is of a kind that comes too close to the everyday life
of tenement-house people to be omitted. The house caught fire in the
night, and five were burned to death,--father, mother, and three
children. The others got out; why not they? They stayed, it seems, to
make sure none was left; they were not willing to leave one behind, to
save themselves. And then it was too late; the stairs were burning.
There was no proper fire escape. That was where the murder came in; but
it was not all chargeable to the landlord, nor even the greater part.
More than thirty years ago, in 1867, the state made it law that the
stairs in every tenement four stories high should be fireproof, and
forbade the storing of any inflammable material in such houses. I do not
know when the law was repealed, or if it ever was. I only know that in
1892 the Fire Department, out of pity for the tenants and regard for the
safety of its own men, forced through an amendment to the building law,
requiring the stairs of the common type of five-story tenements to be
built of fireproof material, and that they are still of wood, just as
they always were. Ninety-seven per cent of the tenements examined by the
late Tenement House Commission (1900) in Manhattan had stairs of wood.
In Brooklyn they were _all_ of wood. Once, a couple of years ago, I
looked up the Superintendent of Buildings and asked him what it meant. I
showed him the law, which said that the stairs should be "built of
slow-burning construction or fireproof material"; and he put his finger
upon the clause that follows, "as the Superintendent of Buildings shall
decide." The law gave him discretion, and that is how he used it. "Hard
wood burns slowly," said he.

The fire of which I speak was a "cruller fire," if I remember rightly,
which is to say that it broke out in the basement bakeshop, where they
were boiling crullers (doughnuts) in fat, at 4 A.M., with a hundred
tenants asleep in the house above them. The fat went into the fire, and
the rest followed. I suppose that I had to do with a hundred such fires,
as a police reporter, before, under the protest of the Gilder Tenement
House Commission and the Good Government Clubs, the boiling of fat in