[1] Tweed was born and bred in a Fourth Ward tenement.

[2] Forty per cent. was declared by witnesses before a Senate Committee to be a fair average interest on tenement property. Instances were given of its being one hundred per cent. and over.

[3] It was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the built-up portions of the city.

[4] This “unventilated and fever-breeding structure” the year after it was built was picked out by the Council of Hygiene, then just organized, and presented to the Citizens’ Association of New York as a specimen “multiple domicile” in a desirable street, with the following comment: "Here are twelve living-rooms and twenty-one bedrooms, and only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the admission of light and air, excepting through the family sitting- and living-room; being utterly dark, close, and unventilated. The living-rooms are but 10 × 12 feet; the bedrooms 6½ × 7 feet.“

[5] “A lot 50 × 60, contained twenty stables, rented for dwellings at $15 a year each; cost of the whole $600.”

[6] The Sheriff Street Colony of rag-pickers, long since gone, is an instance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during years of hard work in squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a township in a Western State, and the whole colony moved out there in a body. There need be no doubt about their thriving there.

[7] The process can be observed in the Italian tenements in Harlem (Little Italy), which, since their occupation by these people, have been gradually sinking to the slum level.

[8] The term child means in the mortality tables a person under five years of age. Children five years old and over figure in the tables as adults.

[9] See City Mission Report, February, 1890, page 77.

[10] Inspector Byrnes on Lodging-houses, in the North American Review, September, 1889.

[11] Deduct 69,111 women lodgers in the police stations.

[12] Report of Eastern Dispensary for 1889.

[13] I refer to the Tenth Ward always as typical. The district embraced in the discussion really includes the Thirteenth Ward, and in a growing sense large portions of the Seventh and contiguous wards as well.

[14] An invention that cuts many garments at once, where the scissors could cut only a few.

[15] I was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by one of their own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission. Without that precaution my errand would have been fruitless; even with him it was often nearly so.

[16] The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in victory, raised their wages considerably, at least for the time being.

[17] Suspicions of murder, in the case of a woman who was found dead, covered with bruises, after a day’s running fight with her husband, in which the beer jug had been the bone of contention, brought me to this house, a ramshackle tenement on the tail-end of a lot over near the North River docks. The family in the picture lived above the rooms where the dead woman lay on a bed of straw, overrun by rats, and had been uninterested witnesses of the affray that was an everyday occurrence in the house. A patched and shaky stairway led up to their one bare and miserable room, in comparison with which a white-washed prison-cell seemed a real palace. A heap of old rags, in which the baby slept serenely, served as the common sleeping-bunk of father, mother, and children—two bright and pretty girls, singularly out of keeping in their clean, if coarse, dresses, with their surroundings. The father, a slow-going, honest English coal-heaver, earned on the average five dollars a week, “when work was fairly brisk,” at the docks. But there were long seasons when it was very “slack,” he said, doubtfully. Yet the prospect did not seem to discourage them. The mother, a pleasant-faced woman, was cheerful, even light-hearted. Her smile seemed the most sadly hopeless of all in the utter wretchedness of the place, cheery though it was meant to be and really was. It seemed doomed to certain disappointment—the one thing there that was yet to know a greater depth of misery.

[18] Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Case 42,028, May 16, 1889.

[19] Colonel Auchmuty’s own statement.

[20] This very mother will implore the court with tears, the next morning, to let her renegade son off. A poor woman, who claimed to be the widow of a soldier, applied to the Tenement-house Relief Committee of the King’s Daughters last summer, to be sent to some home, as she had neither kith nor kin to care for her. Upon investigation it was found that she had four big sons, all toughs, who beat her regularly and took from her all the money she could earn or beg; she was “a respectable woman, of good habits,” the inquiry developed, and lied only to shield her rascally sons.

[21] “The percentage of foreign-born prisoners in 1850, as compared with that of natives, was more than five times that of native prisoners, now (1880) it is less than double.”—American Prisons in the Tenth Census.

[22] In printing-offices the broken, worn-out, and useless type is thrown into the “hell-box,” to be recast at the foundry.

[23] Dr. Louis L. Seaman, late chief of staff of the Blackwell’s Island hospitals: “Social Waste of a Great City,” read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1886.

[24] Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. 1887.

[25] In 1869, a tenement was a house occupied by four families or more

[26] In 1888, a tenement was a house occupied by three families or more

[27] These figures represent less than two hundred of the worst tenements below Houston Street.