take two apartments if we could find a fourth person to share the expense, as this was $8 dollars more than we had expected to pay. We asked the agent to hold these apartments till Monday. This was on Saturday afternoon and Sunday intervened, one of the best business days of the week for house agents in this neighborhood. Once more, but falteringly, we ventured to say who we were and tried to make him see the advantage of having tenants who would do no cooking in the house, would take good care of the rooms and would turn them over at the expiration of their stay in as good condition as they found them. The reply to this was: "You pay your money, we don't care what you do with the rooms." After some further persuasion he promised to do as we asked, but we had little faith in his word.

Before nine o'clock on Monday morning we had found our fourth person and presented ourselves at the building only to discover that one of the two apartments we desired had been rented. When reproached for breaking his promise the agent curtly told us that if people gave him money to hold rooms they got the preference. After repeated visits and much persuading we succeeded in securing rooms on the floor below. The rent was $1 more, $29 for six rooms, and we paid $10 to hold them. After taking them we began to doubt. They were not so light as the rooms above, but when we remarked this to the landlord he quickly said: “If you don't want these rooms say so, there are plenty waiting who will pay $30 for what you are getting for $29." We meekly said we wanted them and departed fully appreciating the privilege that was ours.

What did we get for our $29? Let me describe one of these two apartments. There was a front room eleven feet six inches wide by nine feet six inches long which contained a tiny wardrobe. The middle room or kitchen, eleven feet six inches wide by eleven feet long. had no range, therefore no hot water. But there were laundry tubs and a sink with a cupboard above for dishes and cooking utensils, but it was so high that only one shelf could be reached from the floor. back room was the family bedroom. This was seven feet wide by nine feet nine inches long, had no closet and opened on the air shaft.

The

On the first of October we moved in and proceeded to make the place as homelike and attractive as possible. The two kitchens we turned into sitting rooms by screening off the tubs and sink. The other rooms were used for bedrooms until the bad air from the shaft made it impossible to sleep in the rear room. Then we made a couch in the middle room do duty for a bed and, with its cover and bright cushions, it passed for a piece of sitting-room furniture in the day time.

We had none too much space in our six rooms, yet we knew one family of seven in the same house who occupied half that number, and our house had the reputation of having no large families. Several took boarders. This means of helping out with the rent is commonly resorted to, no matter how few the

rooms.

There were many evidences of the most careless building: things which would not be tolerated by owners in a different locality. Workmen had used one of our rooms for their tools, nails had been driven where they ought not to be, walls had been

soiled, and paint had been spattered everywhere. For a time the floors seemed hopeless with great splashes of paint and plaster, but by degrees we got them scraped and stained. A board under the sink had been re

moved to admit a pipe and had not been replaced. The gas fixtures were poor and ill fitted, so that we had a constant leakage which was both expensive and far from healthful. Doors and windows were so loose that it was impossible to sleep comfortably because of the rattling noise and the draughts. And here, perhaps, is a good place to speak of the draughts in a tenement house.

Up to the time of living in one we could not understand why our neighbors so carefully closed all their windows if the weather grew the least bit cool. Never have I felt such draughts as those which tormented us in that house. They came from all directions, out of the walls, up from the floor, through the crevices about the doors and windows, circling around us in eddies. We were all fond of fresh air, but little by little we fell into the ways of our neighbors and began closing windows until we grew ashamed of our bad habits and in sheer desperation covered our heads and opened the windows. Will some investigator explain this? think it is bad building; nothing was well joined in our house.

We

It would be difficult to remember the number of trips made to the landlord to have only the necessary things done. After repeated efforts the nails were withdrawn from a window sash into which twenty large ones had been driven, but we never succeeded in having the holes filled and painted. They remain a testimony to the way things are done and left undone in a big tenement. We

asked to have the walls cleaned, but were told they would be painted in the spring so we submitted.

A Yiddish carpenter, who could speak no English, appeared one morning with a box of tools and the single word "washtubs." Wondering what he could want with our washtubs I admitted him; he walked to the tubs and drove a nail without an apparent thought as to where he was driving it or why. He then started to go, when it flashed through my mind that he might have been sent to put in the board under the sink; taking him by the sleeve and turning him back I pointed under the sink. A look of intelligence came into his face. He fell on his knees and began chopping wood on our stained floor. With many gesticulations I got him into the hall to do his chopping and sawing, and, after directions conveyed by motions, the board was put in.

Before we left the building the landlord came in and told us he would do anything he could for our comfort. This was a great surprise and shows that it would be real missionary work for friends of the cause of better tenements to live for a time in such houses and demand that the landlords do their duty, which surely is to make as comfortable as possible the people from whom they collect their rents.

We remained in the house seven months. We feel that they were well spent, but we have no desire to continue the experiment. We found many difficulties in the way of comfortable living. Though the house was new, the odors soon became insufferable and the air from the shaft, as I have mentioned before, but which may well be repeated, became so foul that we could not sleep in

the rooms opening on it without feeling that we were taking a great risk. The stairs were usually so dirty that it was unpleasant to use them, and clothing was constantly being soiled with the contact. But how could this be helped? There was the traffic of twenty-two families, where the children had to run most of the errands, and they, of course, spilled things on their various journeys. And how could we hope to live quietly with the noise from these twenty-two families, with children. running overhead and through the halls and crying, with furniture being moved about over bare floors, with the housekeeper scolding careless tenants, and so on? So dark were the rooms that the gas had to be lighted at three o'clock and yet this house was called a light one.

From our short trial of living in a tenement house we are ready to plead for the greatest effort toward better homes for our working people, with larger rooms for the rent, and more pure air and sunlight, which should be free.

The annual meeting of the Emanu-el Sisterhood was held November 26. The report of the section on the sick and needy showed that 1,310 cases were treated by this section. At the application bureau there were 1,115 applications during the year; 865 were helped to employment, 102 were referred to the United Hebrew Charities, and 46 were not placed. Addresses were made by Prof. Franklin H. Giddings and Hon. John W. Keller, president of the Department of Public Charities.

TENEMENT-HOUSES.

(From the New York Sun.) The Tenement-House Commission has begun a series of public hearings, to get at the state of the public mind regarding the tenement question and to prepare support for such legislation as the commission may propose at Albany this winter.

The first of these hearings had for its subject tuberculosis, the scourge of the tenement. Experience has shown its suppression anywhere to be largely a matter of stringent official regulation. A thickening of population increases the difficulties of regulation, but prevention, nevertheless, is a question of effective sanitary supervision, and therefore not hopeless.

For months past the Commission has been receiving testimony on this score from builders, sanitary experts, and reformers, with opinions. A string of questions touching every debatable point was submitted to everybody interested. The answers received range from the complacent acceptance of the inefficient and obstructed fire escape as ample provision against disaster, to the demand for all-fireproof tenements that brooks no compromise; from the doubting Thomas to whom the great unwashed are unwashed from choice, to the believer in his fellow man who will have nothing less than a bathtub to every tenement flat. They embrace the view, somewhat belated, which hails the airshaft as a deliverer and that other which condemns it as a chief nuisance of evil contrivance. The man who looks upon the whole problem as a practical question of enforcement of existing law has had his say with the one who would wipe the laws all out

with one fell blow, if it takes all the money in the treasury, and make a fresh start. They have all spoken their mind.

The commission can

not complain that it has not had advice enough.

It has studied, besides, the tenement-house laws that mark the successive steps in the fifty years' struggle with this Frankenstein, and the housing conditions in all the big American and European cities, some good, some bad, all so different from those of New York that profitable comparison is made very difficult. It is satisfactory to know that Philadelphia requires all tenements over four stories high to be built fireproof throughout; but Philadelphia has no tenements over four stories high, and mighty few as high as that, if it has any. It adds to the beauty of Washington and to the comfort of her people that Nero's enactment for Rome, setting seventy feet to the height of her tenements, is in force there; dwelling houses are no higher than the street is wide. But Washington has hardly a hundred houses, according to the committee's report, that would come into the category of tenements as understood in New York, namely, that harbor three or more families living independently.

The Greater New York has more than eighty-six thousand tenements, with two and a quarter million tenants living in them. Nevertheless, until quite recently New York, too, had followed the lead of ancient Rome. It may be that as the bridges that will span her rivers let the crowds out to other fields she will return to the Roman practice and cease climbing up.

The commission has power to examine, besides the houses, the morals of those who live in them and "all

other phases of the tenement-house question that can affect the public welfare." It has sifted very thoroughly the question of safety against fire, and the facts are set forth in a report now in print. Nearly half of all the fires in the city occur in tenement-houses, and a very large proportion of these in the night.

It is then that the airshaft, transformed into a chimney flue, becomes a source of great and instant peril to the tenants. There is room for serious consideration of every suggestion that aims at making tenements safe against this danger.

The moral question which is now agitating the city will receive special consideration at a future hearing. It is not a new one. The Council of Hygiene puzzled over it in 1864, and the Gilder Tenement-House Commission recommended, five years ago, legislation which should punish with greater severity both landlord and tenant found guilty of contaminating tenement-house premises, as being public enemies. The suggestion was not acted on then despite the showing of the commission that the evil was rapidly increasing. The time would seem ripe for such action

now.

The subject goes back ever to over-crowding as the great difficulty. How is it to be prevented? How are the evils inherent in the twenty-fivefoot lot to be minimized? Stringent ordinances, ordinances, midnight inspections, have been tried and the crowds have gone on increasing. Six hundred cubic feet per sleeper was made the rule; the "demands of the situation" brought it down in practice to 400. All measures alike have failed, and to-day forty Italian families may be found camping in flats intended for sixteen. It is suggestive that the

plan brought forward now was the one urged by the first citizens' tenement-house committee, that of licensing the house to hold so many and no more. The plan has the clear advantage of compelling at once the effective registration of all tenements, vainly attempted before, and of enabling the tenement police to keep tab on their tenants as well as on the landlords.

It is for the commission and for the community to discourage bad tenement-house builders. The question was raised before the last commission, and may be raised again before this one whether the community may not also encourage good builders by a rebate of taxes without incurring censure for undue paternalism. Vienna has tried the scheme and the outcome of the experiment will be looked for with interest. The early reports were that building had been overstimulated to the loss instead of the gain of the builder. It is the history of radical propositions of the sort that they lie over, after having been raised, to allow public sentiment to catch up with them if there is good in them. That is the sense of having a tenement-house commission every five years to go over the ground.

New York's housing problem is the problem of its metropolitan growth, not easy to solve, but to be solved at any cost, for at bottom it is the question of the home from which proceeds citizenship, good or bad as the home may be. Governor Roosevelt was right in saying, when he appointed the commission, that its task was more important than that of the Charter Revision Commission. It may not say the last word in this matter; but it should be possible for it to say a sensible and helpful one.

That model tenements can be built in New York city with a reasonable commercial return to investors is abundantly proved by the fact that the City and Suburban Homes Company, now in its third year of operation, has raised its dividend rate to four per cent per annum, and has issued a circular to stockholders inviting subscription to an issue of $500,000 additional capital stock, to carry into effect a plan to build tenements on the land immediately adjoining the company's First avenue estate. This will mean the covering of almost an entire city block with model tenements. More than onehalf of the $500,000 was subscribed within a week by stockholders alone.