e of Elizabeth
Street that when the midnight police came, the tenants would keep them
waiting outside, pretending to search for the key, until the surplus
population of men had time to climb down the fire-escape. When the
police were gone they came back. We surprised them all in bed.

Like most of the other tenements we have come across on our trip, these
were double-deckers. That is the type of tenement that is responsible
for the crowding that till now has gone on unchecked. For twenty years
it has been replacing the older barracks everywhere, as fast as they
rotted or were torn down.

This double-decker was thus described by the Tenement House Commission
of 1894: "It is the one hopeless form of tenement construction. It
cannot be well ventilated, it cannot be well lighted; it is not safe in
case of fire. It is built on a lot 25 feet wide by 100 or less in depth,
with apartments for four families in each story. This necessitates the
occupation of from 86 to 90 per cent of the lot's depth. The stairway,
made in the centre of the house, and the necessary walls and partitions
reduce the width of the middle rooms (which serve as bedrooms for at
least two people each) to 9 feet each at the most, and a narrow light
and air shaft, now legally required in the centre of each side wall,
still further lessens the floor space of these middle rooms. Direct
light is only possible for the rooms at the front and rear. The middle
rooms must borrow what light they can from dark hallways, the shallow
shafts, and the rear rooms. Their air must pass through other rooms or
the tiny shafts, and cannot but be contaminated before it reaches them.
A five-story house of this character contains apartments for eighteen or
twenty families, a population frequently amounting to 100 people, and
sometimes increased by boarders or lodgers to 150 or more."

[Illustration: The only Bath-tub in the Block: it hangs in the Air
Shaft.]

The commission, after looking in vain through the slums of the Old World
cities for something to compare the double-deckers with, declared that,
in their setting, the separateness and sacredness of home life were
interfered with, and evils bred, physical and moral, that "conduce to
the corruption of the young." "Make for unrighteousness" said the
commission of 1900, six years later.

Yet it is for these that the "interests" of which the fire-chief spoke
have rushed into battle at almost every session of the legislature,