,000 cases of well-developed
and recognized tuberculosis, and in addition a large number of obscure
and incipient cases. The connection between tuberculosis and the
character of the tenement houses in which the poor people live is of the
very closest."[23]

[Footnote 23: Report of the Tenement House Committee of 1900. The
secretary of that body said: "Well might those maps earn for New
York the title of the City of the Living Death."]

[Illustration: A Typical East Side Block.]

A model was shown of a typical East Side block, containing 2781 persons
on two acres of land, nearly every bit of which was covered with
buildings. There were 466 babies in the block (under five years), but
not a bath-tub except one that hung in an air shaft. Of the 1588 rooms
441 were dark, with no ventilation to the outer air except through other
rooms; 635 rooms gave upon twilight "air shafts." In five year 32 cases
of tuberculosis had been reported from that block, and in that time 660
different families in the block had applied for charity. The year
before the Bureau of Contagious Diseases had registered 13 cases of
diphtheria there. However, the rent-roll was all right. It amounted to
$113,964 a year.

[Illustration: Robert W. de Forest, Chairman of the Tenement House
Commission of 1900.]

Those facts told. New York--the whole country--woke up. More than 170
architects sent in plans in the competition for a humane tenement that
should be commercially profitable. Roosevelt was governor, and promptly
appointed a Tenement House Commission, the third citizen body appointed
for such purposes by authority of the state. Mr. Robert de Forest, a
distinguished lawyer and a public-spirited man, who had been at the head
of the Charity Organization Society and of the relief efforts I spoke
of, in time became its chairman, and commissioner of the new Tenement
House Department that was created by the new charter of the city to
carry into effect the law the commission drew up. At this writing, with
the department not yet fully organized, it is too early to say with any
degree of certainty exactly how far the last two years have set us
ahead; but this much is certain:

"Discretion" is dead--at last. In Manhattan, no superintendent of
buildings shall have leave after this to pen tenants in a building with
stairs of wood because he thinks with luck it might burn slowly; nor in
Brooklyn shall a deputy commissioner rate a room with a window