London's way with the tenant we adopted at last in New York with the
slum landlord. He was "druv into decency." We had to. Moral suasion had
been stretched to the limit. The point had been reached where one
knock-down blow outweighed a bushel of arguments. It was all very well
to build model tenements as object lessons to show that the thing could
be done; it had become necessary to enforce the lesson by demonstrating
that the community had power to destroy houses which were a menace to
its life. The rear tenements were chosen for this purpose.

They were the worst, as they were the first, of New York's tenements.
The double-deckers of which I have spoken had, with all their evils, at
least this to their credit, that their death-rate was not nearly as
high as that of the old houses. That was not because of any virtue
inherent in the double-deckers, but because the earlier tenements were
old, and built in a day that knew nothing of sanitary restrictions, and
cared less. Hence the showing that the big tenements had much the lowest
mortality. The death-rate does not sound the depths of tenement-house
evils, but it makes a record that is needed when it comes to attacking
property rights. The mortality of the rear tenements had long been a
scandal. They are built in the back yard, generally back to back with
the rear buildings on abutting lots. If there is an open space between
them, it is never more than a slit a foot or so wide, and gets to be the
receptacle of garbage and filth of every kind; so that any opening made
in these walls for purposes of ventilation becomes a source of greater
danger than if there were none. The last count that was made, in 1900,
showed that among the 44,850 tenements in Manhattan and the Bronx there
were still 2143 rear houses left.[20] Where they are the death-rate
rises, for reasons that are apparent. The sun cannot reach them. They
are damp and dark, and the tenants, who are always the poorest and most
crowded, live "as in a cage open only toward the front." A canvass made
of the mortality records by Dr. Roger S. Tracy, the registrar of
records, showed that while in the First Ward (the oldest), for instance,
the death-rate in houses standing singly on the lot was 29.03 per 1000
of the living, where there were rear houses it rose to 61.97. The infant
death-rate is a still better test; that rose from 109.58 in the single
tenements of the same ward to 204.54 where there were rear houses.[21]
O