s, the plaster on the walls, where there is any
plaster, are rotten, and alive with vermin. They are a menace to the
public health, and cannot be repaired. Their annual death-rate in five
years was 41.38."

[Illustration: The Mott Street Barracks.]

The sunlight enters where these stood, at all events, and into 58 other
yards that once were plague spots. Of 94 rear tenements seized that
year, 60 were torn down, 33 of them voluntarily by the owners; 29 were
remodelled and allowed to stand, chiefly as workshops; 5 other houses
were standing empty, and yielding no rent, when I last heard of them. I
suppose they have been demolished since. The worst of them all, the Mott
Street Barracks, were taken into court by the owner; but all the judges
and juries in the land had no power to put them back when it was decided
upon a technicality that they should not have been destroyed offhand. It
was a case of "They can't put you in jail for that."--"Yes, but I am in
jail." They were gone, torn down under the referee's decision that they
ought to go, before the Appellate Division called a halt. We were not in
a mood to trifle with the Barracks, or risk any of the law's delays. In
1888 I counted 360 tenants in these tenements, front and rear, all
Italians, and the infant death-rate of the Barracks that year was 325
per 1000. There were forty babies, and one in three of them had to die.
The general infant death-rate for the whole tenement-house population
that year was 88.38. In the four years following, during which the
population and the death-rate of the houses were both reduced with an
effort, fifty-one funerals went out of the Barracks. With entire
fitness, a cemetery corporation held the mortgage upon the property. The
referee allowed it the price of opening one grave, in the settlement,
gave one dollar to the lessee, and one hundred and ten dollars to the
landlord, who refused to collect and took his case into the courts. We
waited to see the landlord attack the law itself on the score of
constitutionality, but he did not. The Court of Appeals decided that it
had not been shown that the Barracks might not have been used for some
other purpose than a tenement and that therefore we had been hasty. The
city paid damages, but it was all right. It was emphatically a case of
haste making for speed. So far the law stands unchallenged, both here
and in Massachusetts, where they destroyed twice as many unfit houses as
we did in New York a