y calling the cheap lodging houses
nurseries of crime. I have personally, as a police reporter, helped
trace many foul crimes to these houses where they were hatched. They
were all robberies to begin with, but three of them ended in murder.
Most of my readers will remember at least one of them, the Lyman S.
Weeks murder in Brooklyn, a thoroughly characteristic case of the kind I
have described. A case they never heard of, because it was nipped in the
bud, was typical of another kind. Two young Western fellows had come on,
on purpose to hold up New York, and were practising in their lodging,
but not, it seems, with much success, for the police pulled them in at
their second or third job. When searched, a tintype, evidently of Bowery
make, was found in the pocket of one, showing them at rehearsal. They
grinned when asked about it. "We done a fellow up easy that way," they
said, "and we'd a mind to see how it looked." They were lucky in being
caught so soon. A little while, and the gallows would have claimed them,
on the road they were travelling.

[Illustration: They had a Mind to see how it looked.]

I mention this to show the kind of problem we have in our Bowery lodging
houses, with their army of fifteen or sixteen thousand lodgers, hanging
on to the ragged edge most of them, and I have only skimmed the surface
of it at that. The political boss searches the depths of it about
election time when he needs votes; the sanitary policeman in times of
epidemic, when smallpox or typhus fever threatens. All other efforts to
reach it had proved unavailing when D. O. Mills, the banker, built his
two "Mills Houses," No. 1 in Bleecker Street for the West Side and No. 2
in Rivington Street for the homeless of the East Side. They did reach
it, by a cut 'cross lots as it were, by putting the whole thing on a
neighborly basis. It had been just business before, and, like the
keeping of slum tenements, a mighty well-paying one. The men who ran it
might well have given more, but they didn't. It was the same thing over
again: let the lodgers shift as they could; their landlord lived in
style on the avenue. What were they to him except the means of keeping
it up?

[Illustration: Doorway of the Mills House, No. 1]

The Mills Houses do not neglect the business end. Indeed, they insist
upon it. "No patron," said Mr. Mills at the opening, "will receive more
than he pays for, unless it be my hearty good-will and good wishes. It
is true that