of Hygiene, and New York heard
the truth for once.

"Not only," it ran, "does filth, overcrowding, lack of privacy and
domesticity, lack of ventilation and lighting, and absence of
supervision and of sanitary regulation still characterize the greater
number of the tenements; but they are built to a greater height in
stories; there are more rear houses built back to back with other
buildings, correspondingly situated on parallel streets; the courts and
alleys are more greedily encroached upon and narrowed into unventilated,
unlighted, damp, and well-like holes between the many-storied front and
rear tenements; and more fever-breeding wynds and _culs-de-sac_ are
created as the demand for the humble homes of the laboring poor
increases."[8] The Council, which was composed of sixteen of New York's
most distinguished physicians, declared that by ordinary sanitary
management the city's death-rate should be reduced thirty per cent. Its
judgment has been more than borne out. In the thirty-five years that
have passed since, it has in fact been reduced over fifty per cent.

[Footnote 8: Council of Hygiene's Report, 1866.]

Men and women were found living in cellars deep down under the ground.
One or two of those holes are left still in Park Street near the Five
Points Mission, but they have not been used as living-rooms for a
generation. In cellars near the river the tide rose and fell, compelling
the tenants "to keep the children in bed till ebb-tide." The plumber had
come upon the field, but his coming brought no relief. His was not a
case of conscience. "Untrapped soil pipes opened into every floor and
poisoned the tenants."

Where the "dens of death" were in Baxter Street, big barracks crowded
out the old shanties. More came every day. I remember the story of those
shown in the picture. They had been built only a little while when
complaint came to the Board of Health of smells in the houses. A
sanitary inspector was sent to find the cause. He followed the smell
down in the cellar and, digging there, discovered that the waste pipe
was a blind. It had simply been run three feet into the ground and was
not connected with the sewer.

The houses were built to sell. That they killed the tenants was no
concern of builder's. His name, by the way, was Buddensiek. A dozen
years after, when it happened that a row of tenements he was building
fell down ahead of time, before they were finished and sold, and killed
the workmen,