Various

Drawn by Joseph Stella.

Drawn by Joseph Stella.

PAINTER'S ROW AS IT STOOD IN THE SPRING OF 1908.

PAINTER'S ROW

THE UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION AS A PITTSBURGH LANDLORD

F. ELISABETH CROWELL

FORMER SUPERINTENDENT, ST. ANTHONY'S HOSPITAL, PENSACOLA, FLORIDA.

The United States Steel Corporation owns property on the South Side of Pittsburgh just beyond the Point Bridge. Here is located the old Painter's Mill, which is one of the plants of the Carnegie Steel Company, which in turn is one of the constituent companies of the United States Steel Corporation; and here, also, stands what remains of Painter's Row, where the company has housed certain of its employes, mostly immigrants. When the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated the plant so as to turn out the sort and quantity of output which the Carnegie name stands for. When it took over Painter's Row, it did nothing. When, a little over a year ago, and several years after the purchase of the property, I made a detailed investigation of the place, I found half a thousand people living there under conditions that were unbelievable,—back-to-back houses with no through ventilation; cellar kitchens; dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated, overcrowded sleeping rooms, no drinking water supply on the premises; and a dearth of sanitary accommodations that was shameful.

Painter's Row was originally a succession of six rows, some brick, some frame, built on the side of a hill that slopes from the foot of a lofty palisade down to the Ohio. Houses and mills immediately adjoin and tenants are even housed in an old brick building, in another part of which some of the mill offices are located. Sluggish clouds of thick smoke hang over the cluster of roofs and the air is full of soot and fine dust. Noise presses in from every quarter,—from the roaring mill, from the trolley cars clattering and clanging through the narrow street which divides mill and rows into two sections, from the trains on the through tracks above the topmost row and from the sidings which separate the lowest row from the river bank and which are in constant use for the hauling of freight to and from the mills.

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(The story of Painter's Row should be considered in its bearings. The United States Steel Corporation is building a remarkable new town at Gary, Indiana; its subsidiary companies have promoted house building along original lines, notably at Vandergrift, Ambridge and Lorain, and the Carnegie Steel Company has fair, low rental houses at Munhall and elsewhere. On the other hand, other Pittsburgh corporations own company houses which have been equally as bad as Painter's Row; and a similar story could be written of a shack at one time owned by one of the foremost Protestant churches of Pittsburgh, and razed to the ground only because the headworker of Kingsley House had the courage to publish its picture and the name of the owner.

We have no animosity in singling out one corporation; but we have a very serious purpose in detailing the facts as to this row of company houses. There is ground for difference of opinion from a business as well as a social point of view, as to whether it is desirable for an industrial corporation to own and rent homes to its employes. But if industrial chairmen, presidents and superintendents become landlords, they must bear the responsibilities of landlords; and only as the public holds them up to these responsibilities as stiffly as their stockholders hold them up to dividends, will they be in position to devise and carry out policies which, as individuals, we may assume they would act upon. This story of one high-spirited New England stockholder and 500 company tenants indicates, moreover, that some investors are willing to lead the public in such demands.

With the standards it is setting at Gary, the United States Steel Corporation cannot afford to be responsible for such conditions as these at Painter's Row, whether in the Pennsylvania steel district, at its mines in Northern Michigan, or at its plants in the South. For the Survey to have selected a lesser, independent company for criticism, would have been to lay ourselves open to the charge of fear of the big offender; for us to have found a more humanly destructive group of bad houses, would have been impossible.

DIRECTOR OF THE SURVEY.)

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WEST CARSON STREET AT TIME OF FIRST INSPECTION.

Tenements of Painter's Row at left; nine families on first and second floors without toilet accommodations. One-family houses at right.

WHERE THE TENEMENTS WERE TORN DOWN.

Present site of row shown in picture on opposite page. Closets and sinks installed in topmost row, tenants of which formerly had to go 360 steps to get water.

Dirt and noise are inseparable adjuncts to life in a mill district, deplorable, but unavoidable; but workers in the mills [Pg 899]
[Pg 900]
[Pg 901]
[Pg 902]need not necessarily be deprived of sufficient light and air such as it is, and water, and the common decencies of life. In the winter of 1908, I spent several days in Painter's Row. I watched grimy little children at play. I talked with the women, the home-makers; I saw men who had been working on the night shift lying like fallen logs, huddled together in small, dark, stuffy rooms, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion that follows in the wake of heavy physical labor. Above all, I sought to learn how the tenants fared in these three things: ventilation and water and sanitary conveniences.

CELLAR BED ROOM.

Windows entirely below passage level, showing how some households maintain standards against difficulties.

PASSAGE AND AREA.

Showing below at right windows of cellar bed room shown above.

THE "TOWN PUMP."

Drinking water supply for 568 people living in Painter's Row; and for the operatives in the mill.

In the two rows nearest the river, there were twenty-eight houses divided from cellar to roof by a party wall, so that the rooms in each apartment were arranged one above the other; the result was that there was no through ventilation, and consequently the rooms were ill-smelling at all times and stiflingly close in summer. There were in the different rows, twenty-seven cellar and basement kitchens, dark, unsanitary, ill-ventilated. Besides these, there were six cellar [Pg 903]
[Pg 904]rooms more than halfway below the ground level, that were occupied solely as sleeping rooms. The windows of these cellars were small, and the little light and air that could gain admittance under the best of circumstances was obstructed by a row of ramshackle sheds which bordered the narrow area upon which these windows opened. There were many other gloomy rooms which it would be but repetition to describe. But the tale of dark, ill-ventilated sleeping quarters would be incomplete without passing mention of a space under a staircase that had been walled off and that was entered from a kitchen. Into this "hole in the wall" a bed had been squeezed by some hook or crook, and there two boarders stowed their bodies at night. I found the worst overcrowding in the row at the top of the hill. In one apartment, a man, his wife, and baby and two boarders slept in one room, and five boarders occupied two beds in an adjoining room. In another apartment of three rooms, the man, his wife and baby slept in the kitchen, their two boarders in a second room; and the third room was sub-let and occupied as a living and sleeping room by five persons,—a man, his wife and child and two boarders. This last room was a small one, containing two beds, a stove, table, trunks and chairs. Once inside, there was scarcely room to turn comfortably.

Not one house in the entire settlement had any provision for supplying drinking water to its tenants. Mill water was piped out to the rows,—an ugly, dirty fluid, which, however tired or thirsty they were, the people would not put to their lips. I asked the question at every doorstep and got the same reply. They went to an old pump in the mill yard,—360 steps from the farthest apartment, down seventy-five stairs. This "town pump" was the sole supply of drinking water within reach of ninety-one households, comprising 568 persons.

PIPE EMPTYING MILL-WATER INTO OPEN DRAIN BETWEEN ROWS.

The water pumped from the mill was used for cleansing purposes. When the pressure was low, there was none even of that to be had. In only two cases was this wash water piped directly into the house. Tenants in the other houses carried it from bent pipes that emptied into open drains running between the rows, or into troughs at the end of the buildings, whence it had to be carried up two or three flights of stairs if they happened to live in the upper stories. From these same apartments the waste water had to be carried out and down and emptied into the drains. The marvel was not that some of the homes were dirty; the wonder was that any of them were clean,—for against such obstacles cleanliness was to be secured only at the expense of tired muscles and aching backs. I talked with one mother whose two rooms on the top floor were spotless, and whose children were well looked after. Day after day, and many times a day, she carried the water up and down that her home and her children might be kept decent and clean. I looked at her bent shoulders, gaunt arms and knotted hands. Work aplenty,—necessary work,—there was and always will be for her to do, but those shoulders and arms and hands had to strain laboriously over unnecessary work as well. "God! Miss, but them stairs is bad," she said.

As was said at the beginning, when the Carnegie Steel Company took over Painter's Mill, it renovated the equipment of the plant; when it took over Painter's Row, it did nothing.

One row of four houses had waste sinks in the apartments and another row of one-family houses had a curious wooden chute arrangement on the back porches, down which waste water was poured that ran through open wooden drains in the rear yard to the open drain between this row of houses and the next. A similar arrangement had been made for the convenience of six families living in the second story of the row of tenement houses, where two wooden chutes from the porch above carried the waste water down to the curb at Carson street. They carried other things besides waste water,—filth of every description was emptied down these chutes,—for these six families, and three families below on the first floor had no closet accommodation and were living like animals. Some families disposed of slops and excreta in the way just indicated; others used a bucket containing ashes, which was emptied into a wooden garbage bin on the street at the end of the row of houses.

Officials of the mill company, when this condition of affairs was pointed out to them, replied that the vault in the rear of this row of houses was built for the use of these families as well as for the other nineteen families in these two rows, and that they could secure a key to a closet compartment by applying for it at the offices. As a matter of fact these people had never been offered keys and they volunteered the statement to the investigator that they had no closets. The vault just mentioned was halfway up the hill between these two rows of houses. To reach it, anyone living in an end apartment in the second story front would be obliged to walk half the length of the second story porch to where the inside stairs led down to the street, then along the street (for the sidewalk was but two and a half feet wide, and completely covered with old lumber and debris of every description), then up a difficult flight of outside stairs, steep and with narrow treads, then two or three steps on the level, then more stairs, and so on until one had taken a hundred and eighty-six steps, sixty-five of which were stairs. This was called "closet accommodations" for want of a better term.

Equally bad conditions prevailed in the row of houses nearest the river. Closets for these houses were formerly located across the railroad tracks on the edge of the bank. During the flood in the spring of 1907, these were swept away and had never been replaced. The twelve families living in this row also used buckets and emptied the contents into the river. One family in the next row of houses claimed that they had never been given a closet key. In all, twenty-two of the ninety-one families were living without the first elementary conveniences that make for sanitation. The full evil of this state of affairs is not really clear until one remembers that these families were occupying two-and three-room apartments, nearly all of them having several children, and anywhere from two to five boarders each.

It is fair to ask, why even immigrant laborers put up with such conditions? To the minds of the men, for two very good and sufficient reasons. The houses were near the mill and rents were cheap. The ledge of land along the foot of Mt. Washington affords few building sites; and the Painter's Mill section is, perhaps, the extreme example of the general housing-shortage of the South Side. Men who work in heat, work ten or twelve hours a day, and work at night alternate fortnights, want to live near the mill. Especially is this true of day laborers who work on repair gangs and cleaning-up work, and who may be called out at any time. This is as true of the mill towns, as of the working force of such a plant as Painter's Mill, in the heart of the city. On the other hand, the mill management wants these men there, for just such emergency calls. The rents in Painter's Row averaged $2.40 a room monthly,—cheaper by far than these laborers could secure accommodations from ordinary landlords in many other sections of Pittsburgh; and that is a dominating consideration to a man with a family, earning $1.65 a day, or a single immigrant whose whole purpose in coming to America is to make money and who will stomach any personal ills to hold on to it. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these rents aggregated the company over $7,000 a year. Such an item is a bagatelle in the balance sheet of the United States Steel Corporation; and it would be foolish to suppose that the rows were rented out to their employes as a money making scheme. They were rented out on easy terms to keep laborers within call at any hour of the day or night, and the fact that Painter's Mill is an old plant and likely to be abandoned, no doubt influenced the management in holding the housing property as it stood without rehabilitation. But the fact remains that these rentals amounted to a sum nearly sufficient to pay the whole taxes on the Painter's Mill property, mill, equipment, land and houses.

To-day, the situation in Painter's Row is very different. Three rows of houses have been torn down, and radical improvements made to others. A variety of factors entered into this change and the story is worth the telling. The evolution of social consciousness is interesting, whether in an individual or a corporation. The initial factor in such a development may be one of several,—motives of self-interest, the weight of public opinion or the letting of light into dark places. Motives of self-interest did not suffice to make the Carnegie Steel Company a good landlord in the present instance. In other words, the company had not recognized it to be worth while as a business consideration to house its human machinery with a view of maintaining such machinery at its highest state of efficiency. Its mills, with their equipment, were repaired and improved in order to increase the quality and quantity of their output. But common laborers were too easily replaced for an effort to be made to conserve their health or well-being by repairing or improving these houses in which they lived. If ten men fell out, ten more were ready to step in and fill their places.

But Painter's Row was not the only instance of bad housing in Pittsburgh. Other landlords were equally indifferent, and evil housing conditions were found all over the city. In March, a preliminary report on general housing conditions in Pittsburgh was published by the Pittsburgh Survey. One paragraph dealt with conditions in Painter's Row. The fact that the responsibility for the situation there could be fixed directly upon one of the great corporations enhanced the value of the paragraph as a quotable news item, and Collier's Weekly seized upon it as a text for an editorial. The editorial brought it under the eye of a New England stockholder whose New England conscience was stirred. His protest at the United States Steel headquarters in New York brought from there a communication so favorable to the company that he felt justified in criticising the editors of Collier's for their apparently unwarranted statements; and they, in turn, called upon the Survey to substantiate the quotation. In support of this paragraph, which was but a few lines long in the published report, the full details of how things stood at Painter's Row, as I have put them down here, were transmitted by the editors to the inquiring stockholder. He was aroused, convinced and in position to lodge another protest, this time with the facts behind it. Light had been let in.

Meanwhile, pressure was brought to bear upon the owners of Painter's Row from a second quarter. The health authorities were insistent that all houses occupied by three or more families should be altered so as to conform to the requirements of the tenement house law, thus making mandatory the installation of sinks and water-closets in such houses. This also involved the cutting of windows in half a dozen gloomy cellar rooms in one building, in order to procure the required amount of light and ventilation, a structural change which would have so weakened the supporting walls of the building as to have rendered it unsafe. The windows were not cut, the sinks and closets were not installed; instead, the building was razed to the ground,—the best possible thing that could have happened. Two other rows of two-family houses were also demolished. They were old, ramshackle, frame buildings, not worth repairing.

Last fall, I inspected Painter's Row for the second time. I found the noise as incessant, the smoke and dust as penetrating, as nine months before. The children were as grimy but they were fewer in number, for as a result of these changes the settlement had been reduced to twenty-eight families. When I reached the topmost row of houses on the hillside, my inspection partook of the nature of a triumphal progress. Some of the tenants remembered me. Gleefully they showed me their sinks with drinking water in every apartment, and told of the closets that had been installed in the basement. Every fixture was clean and in perfect condition,—a refutation of the old argument that such people unaccustomed to these conveniences in the old country will not care for them when supplied.

I found a like state of affairs in another building formerly occupied as a tenement, now housing but two families. Here also sinks and inside water-closets had been installed.

By so much, then, had life in Painter's Row been made more tolerable. Two rows of one-family brick houses remained untouched. The families living in these houses continued to get along without drinking water on the premises and continued to use outside privy vaults; a few were occupying cellar kitchens. In one row, waste water and garbage were still emptied down wooden chutes leading to open drains through the yards. The result was odorous and unhealthy.

Much had been accomplished, something still remained to be done. The company which had gone beyond the requirement of the law in some things still fell short in others. Sooner or later, the health authorities would force the removal of the privy vaults. The old pump had served Painter's Row loyally and well, and would continue to serve it as long as the bucket brigade moved back and forth between these remaining houses and the mill-yard for their water. Sometimes a little child trudged along with a great pail half filled. Again, it was the man of the family, tired after a hard day, who brought in the ration of water.

In a way, that big, grimy pump with its old iron handle and primitive spoutings, summed up the Painter's Row situation,—of an industry of great mechanics who could overhaul an old plant and make it pay, but had not brought water a few paces up the hill, or dropped a sewer a few paces down to the river below that men and women and children might live like men and women and children.