thing takes time.

[Footnote 9: Health Department Report, 1870, p. 111.]

[Illustration: Green Dragon Yard, London.]

Going through Whitechapel, London, about the time we were making ready
to deal with Gotham Court as it deserved, I photographed Green Dragon
yard as typical of what I saw about me. Compare the court and the yard
and see the difference between our slum problem and that of Old World
cities. Gotham Court contained 142 families when I made a canvass of it
in the old days, comprising over 700 persons, not counting the vagrants
who infested the cellars. The population of Green Dragon Yard was
greater than the sight of it would lead you to expect, for in
Whitechapel one-room flats were the rule; but with its utmost crowding
it came nowhere near the court. Sullen discontent was the badge of it.
Gotham Court was in an active state of warfare at all hours, for its
population was evenly divided between Irish and Italians, with only two
German families, who caught it from both sides. But there was hope in
that, for they were on the move; before the court was torn down,
one-third of its tenants were Greeks. Their slum over yonder is dead,
black, given over to smoky chimneys and bad draughts, with red-eyed and
hopeless men and women forever blowing the bellows on ineffectual fires.
Ours is alive if it _is_ with fighting. There is yeast in it, and bright
skies without, if not within. I don't believe there is a bellows to be
had in New York. Our slum, with its greater crowd, has more urgent need
of sharp attention, chiefly because of the overflow of theirs which it
receives. But after all, even that represents what still had courage and
manhood enough to make it want to get away and do better. We shall "get
there" if we don't give up. It sometimes seems to me that _their_ only
hope is to get here.

[Illustration: Flagged Hallway in the "Big Flat."]

Speaking of the fair beginning of Gotham Court reminds me of the Big
Flat in Mott Street, a mighty tenement with room for a hundred families
that was another instance of reform still-born; by which I mean that it
came before we were ready for it, and willing to back it up; also before
we knew just how. That house was built by the philanthropists of those
days on such a generous scale that it reached clear through the block to
Elizabeth Street. It had not occurred to the builders that the
neighborhood was one in which such an arrangement might prove of special
conve