o be a worse
peril than what had gone before. But what we got was according to our
sense. At least the will was there. Money was raised to build model
houses, and a bill to give the health authorities summary powers in
dealing with tenements was sent to the legislature. The landlords held
it up until the last day of the session, when it was forced through by
an angered public opinion, shorn of its most significant clause, which
proposed the licensing of tenements and so their control and effective
repression. However, the landlords had received a real set-back. Many of
them got rid of their property, which in a large number of cases they
had never seen, and tried to forget the source of their ill-gotten
wealth. Light and air did find their way into the tenements in a
half-hearted fashion, and we began to count the tenants as "souls."
That is another of our milestones in the history of New York. They were
never reckoned so before; no one ever thought of them as "souls." So,
restored to human fellowship, in the twilight of the air-shaft that had
penetrated to their dens, the first Tenement House Committee[11] was
able to make them out "better than the houses" they lived in, and a long
step forward was taken. The Mulberry Bend, the wicked core of the
"bloody Sixth Ward," was marked for destruction, and all slumdom held
its breath to see it go. With that gone, it seemed as if the old days
must be gone too, never to return. There would not be another Mulberry
Bend. As long as it stood, there was yet a chance. The slum had backing,
as it were.

[Footnote 11: The Adler Tenement House Committee of 1884. It was the
first citizens' commission. The legislative inquiry of 1856 was
conducted by a Select Committee of the Assembly.]

[Illustration: Professor Felix Adler.]

What was it like? says a man at my elbow, who never saw it. Like nothing
I ever saw before, or hope ever to see again. A crooked three-acre lot
built over with rotten structures that harbored the very dregs of
humanity. Ordinary enough to look at from the street, but pierced by a
maze of foul alleys, in the depths of which skulked the tramp and the
outcast thief with loathsome wrecks that had once laid claim to the name
of woman. Every foot of it reeked with incest and murder. Bandits'
Roost, Bottle Alley, were names synonymous with robbery and red-handed
outrage. By night, in its worst days, I have gone poking about their
shuddering haunts with a pol