FLORENCE LARRABEE LATTIMORE

MEMBER INVESTIGATING STAFF, RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION

The main thoroughfare is respectable and non-committal. It offers but one clue to the melodrama, the violence and misfortune, which its brick fronts so innocently conceal. This clue is a narrow, dusty alley-way, which cuts through the brick fronts, runs back about eighty feet, and then turns sharply to the left and takes unto itself the name of Ewing street. Ewing street runs along the edge of a valley called Skunk Hollow. It pursues a serpentine course between two irregular rows of shacks,—the one back to back with the preoccupied brick houses, the other balancing itself uncertainly on the edge of the valley,—and finally ends in a number of branching foot-paths. This street and Skunk Hollow below it, both effectively shut off and concealed from casual inspection by the row of brick houses, are bound up into a pocket edition of civic neglect.

One cannot tell, without inquiry, whether the shacks on Ewing street are for horses, cows, or human beings; it is said that the owners do not care, so long as the rent is paid. But whether it is the desirability of being in a "dead-head row" commanding a view of the valley, or the advantage of having a house which while showing but one or two stories above the street, takes a private drop of one story in the rear and accommodates itself to the abrupt decline of the cliff, there is no doubt that the cliff-edge structures are far more popular than their stunted neighbors across the way. In them one finds the most desirable clinical material for a study of Pittsburgh's ills, all in one well packed group of abnormalities. Do you wish to see the housing problem? You need only follow Ewing street its short length of a city block and observe. The level of one side of Ewing street and the characteristic drop of the other, have brought out two typical forms of Pittsburgh architecture described by a resident small boy as "squatters" and "clingers." Together they form the nondescript shelters of a parasitical class of persons, white [Pg 891]
[Pg 892]and colored, unassorted. In such fantastic and general dilapidation are these rows of unpainted shelters that some of them are falling to the ground without the formality of condemnation proceedings. Most of them have running water in the kitchens; a very few have sanitary toilets and shout the fact on black and white rental signs. Cellar rooms abound and are often used as sleeping rooms; in those houses built together into a block they are windowless. The toilets back of them are in the old boxed battery style, unflushed, and send their contamination down the grooves of the slope to Skunk Hollow at the bottom.

The hollow, reached by sewage through winding crevices in rubbish, and by goats and dogs over hills of tin cans and refuse, is reached by the people themselves down flights of decaying steps. In the street at the bottom, a wooden surface drain goes companionably along side by side with the foot-path. Occasionally a trickling stream from the hill joins forces with it and the whole falls at last through a basket-drop into an open sewer. The disheveled exterior which gives Ewing street the personality of a gang-leader with his hat on one side, is not so marked in the hollow. The hollow has a kind of sullen reticence. Here sanitary conditions are, if possible, of graver aspect. It is literally a cesspool.

In this cesspool is a strong and dangerous community life. Till now you have been absorbed in the setting of the neighborhood, but now, as you begin to observe the people who slouch past you, you note that they correspond to their environments. The rakish aspect of Ewing street, and the morbid silence of the hollow are reflected in the manners of their respective inhabitants.

On Ewing street, one of the first houses you visit is reached by a drop of five or six broken steps, and looks like a bowling alley shack. It is long, narrow, and has two small windows and a door in the street end. On the porch is a notorious colored woman, raided out of the worst houses in Pittsburgh, ready to toss out her fine and pass on, when temporarily hindered by arrest. Tacked to her piazza is a sign informing the passerby that religious services are held within, and pasted around the dilapidated smokestack is the sign "To let." "Nobody came as long as it was a mission," said the patrolman, "they do come now. Always booze on Sundays there; nothing but crime." The old colored aunty, who owns a little cabin next door in the rear, tells you later with bulging eyes and darkey gesticulation, that the real trouble is that the ghost of Charlie Barber who died there two years ago, comes back nights and by flinging up the windows and banging the door, breaks up both services and carousels. She says he has driven most of the colored ladies "plumb spiritualistic" and that "Mrs. K——, a white, Irish lady in the next house but one, goes to meetings in the city three times a week and spends so much for collections that her children have no shoes to wear to school." Sure enough you find the children shut up in the house; the father, a laborer, out of work; the mother doing a washing. "Truant officers? What are they?" she asks. In the back yard of this home lives a red-turbaned colored scold, owner of a much coveted hydrant upon which four families are dependent for water. Her house is a fenced-in triangle on a trackless waste of rubbish. It is to be approached only by original methods. The neighbors, however, say that it is on "Christian street." They say that the owner sells out little plots here and there on the hillside for a hundred or so dollars apiece. Most of the houses are owned by the tenants, the lots having been sold to them unimproved by old Pittsburgh estates. Building permits for frame dwellings have been refused, and, as the owners cannot afford to build with brick they stay on in shanties too far gone to improve. No sword wielded in defense of a feudal castle was ever more keen than the tongue of the turbaned owner of this estate on Christian street as she raises her black fist over the fence and dares you to swing her gate!

Next to her is a burnt-out shell of a four-family house; no attempt is being made to prop it up or tear it down, and it hangs there towards the street with uncertain intentions. The owner will tell you that it "was fired on a dark night,—not by a friend," and then he will shrug his shoulders and mutter something about the neighborhood. He sits on his little stoop all day, this owner does, in his Sunday suit and best hat, replete with darkey respectability. Crutches are beside him and his feet are bandaged. Sitting near him, like a jack-knife on the point of snapping shut, is an old black mammy, her eyes glazed with coming blindness. She wears Prunella gaiters, a calico gown, and a sunbonnet with a wide limp frill, and is as much a personification of the old South as the man is of the new. She points fondly over her shoulder to her two stuffy rooms, crammed with knick-knacks, and tells you they must go under the hammer next week unless she can get help. This young man here would pay her a rent of eight dollars a month for three rooms, but he is just out of the hospital and unable to work. His leg was crushed in the steel mill six weeks ago and not one penny has been sent him yet by his bosses. Both of them are living on credit and hope. The neighborhood isn't very bad, they say, "although there are some very disbelieving people in it." But they don't know a better, where folks would let out to niggers.

So far then we have found instances of bad streets, unsanitary housing, trade accidents and the race problem.

Then one comes to a house, one story high at the street two at the rear, which has two rooms opening in front and two toward the hollow. In these rooms live an Irish widower and his two children of ten and twelve years, together with a miscellaneous lot of colored people. They quarrel, and have to be watched by the police.

A step farther we meet a Scottish mill laborer out of work. He proudly points to the playhouse he has built for his two little girls "to keep 'em off the street." It is set up against the toilet, but that can't be helped. The mixed family next door pick rags "and carry on" in the shed hard by. The woman there has "chronic tonsilitis" which is dangerous for the children. The mother wishes there was some better place for the children to play.

Up to this point one feels that this is a settlement of mill-ends; mill-ends of people, living in mill-ends of houses, on mill-end jobs, if they work at all. It does not seem possible that anyone could come to live on Ewing street from deliberate choice. With something of a start one finds, in this row of demoralization, a home just vacated by a charitable agency for the help of colored children. It was a temporary home for boys and girls and babies, occupying the ground floor and basement of a house unsanitary and dark, having no gas, no running water, and no yard, only a rickety back stoop, offering an unparalleled view of Skunk Hollow. In a middle room, dark except for one outer window and one cut through into the back room, slept eight or ten children two in a bed, feet to feet, boys and girls from infancy to twelve years. The institution has gone now to a better neighborhood. This particular house hasn't a bad name; it was the one further down that was raided last month. Two under-age girls were found there, but the madam got off with a fine and the girls disappeared. Some other people of doubtful credentials are moving in; maybe they are good and maybe not. They are carrying in their household goods now. They do not look unlike the others of the neighborhood. A thin colored woman stands off and watches, rocking her baby in her arms. She is seized with a fit of coughing, and turns into the dark doorway of her shack. One does not need to follow her to know that she represents one more city problem.

The vantage point for a view of Skunk Hollow seems to be the back stoops of the clingers on the edge of the basin. Here one becomes aware that the hollow is a public dumping ground of ashes and tin cans. As wagons drive up and drop their contents the air itself becomes full of refuse. An occasional thin stream of water trickling down from where you stand. This is the Ewing street sewage making its way to the bottom of the valley.

The hollow seems to follow the bed of an old river; it winds away around a huge hill of gravel where two railroads lie. On a delta between the railroad tracks, the boys have improvised a playground. Farther along there is a straggling bunch of houses. You notice a little girl washing clothes on one of the back piazzas. A little boy runs out and cuffs her until she runs into the house crying, and a man comes out and chases the boy. The boy climbs a neighbor's fence and vanishes. A colored woman and a white woman are seen on the path that winds through this settlement; they go into one of the houses and shut the door. An Italian comes out of the same door a minute later, and walks off down the railway track. The rears of these houses present another solid line of reeking, broken-down toilets with box vaults, unflushed, on platforms built level with the rear floor of the houses. Tucked in between disreputable families of the lowest type are, here and there, bright faced thrifty Italians. Two families have been brought to Skunk Hollow from respectable neighborhoods because of the hard times. In one of their houses renting for nine dollars a month, the rear room is a ten by six, cubicle, with a two by two window in it directly opposite and two feet away from the doorway of the toilet. The air? Well, the window has a solid shutter and when that is closed the air isn't so bad and keeps out disease. As the mother talks, two little chained dogs bark at the babies loaded on her arms, and on the edge of the railing, which prevents the unwary from stepping off the platform into a landslide of rubbish below, fruit and clothes are drying, macaroni is soaking, and busybody flies are hurrying from one thing to another. Any typhoid? Oh yes, the grandmother died with it, and one of the children had it, but was taken to a hospital and got well.

Towards the end of Neville street, in the heart of the hollow, we come to a back yard. The house, for its own reasons, prefers to front on the railroad. In the yard is a large shed patched with odds and ends of all sorts of boards, layer upon layer. The people in the house,—most of whom are "women boarders",—say it is used just to put things in. As a venture you suggest cows? Yes, there are cows there, three, the milk is sold for the babies in the neighborhood. The man says the cows "graze upon the hills around the hollow." He glances at the hills and laughs. It is true the cows haven't grazed there this summer, and in the winter it is best for them to be in a warm dark shed.

As we climb back up the stairs in the late afternoon, we meet the lamp lighter going down with his ladder. Early? Yes, but it is not well to go into the Hollow as late as dusk. There are only sixteen lamps there,—soon lighted, but people have their own reasons for turning them off and few of them burn till morning. The hollow doesn't wish the light. At the end of Ewing street, by the alley of entrance, stand two patrolmen. They are side by side looking meditatively down into the valley. They are watching for the little boy who climbed the fence. "He's a Juvenile Court boy named Matthew S——," they say. "He's home on probation. It's a queer thing about the Juvenile Court, it takes children away and locks 'em up because the neighborhood's bad, and then it sends 'em home on probation." These men, without knowing it, were asking for a single judge for the Juvenile Court. "He promises to do right," one of them continued, "but they ain't enough probation women to see that he does keep straight and he's the worst one we've got on the beat." This one was asking for an adequate number of probation officers. "Now, do you see that tight, brick house down there beyond?" they asked. "That's a colored disorderly house,—run for booze. That little white girl who's washing on them steps goes there all the time. She stays out nights,—away from home. The father works hard and brings home all his money; but the woman,—she don't care. Ain't the Juvenile Court no way of catching the mother? She ought to go to the workhouse." He was asking for an enforcement of the adult delinquency law. The conversation ran on and the patrolman told more of the affairs of Skunk Hollow. He told of speak-easies, and hang-outs of all kinds, masked under the appearance of small grocery shops. At the foot of the stairs, he said, an Italian interpreter was found dead within the year, struck from behind by an Irish-American. The man smoking there and talking to the little girl over the fence had done it, but there was no evidence. Two little children belonging to the colored woman who keeps the disorderly house were playing in the dust. The patrolmen were letting them stay home until they could get them in a raid. "Where do you suppose they'll bring up?" one of them said. "The mother won't get more than a fine and she can pay it."

"Now watch the boys!" said the other. "Here comes a freight." The train wound slowly into a nest of little boys playing ball. After it had passed there was not a boy to be seen. "Catching rides" said the patrolman with an appreciative chuckle. "They'll go round the hill and come back by way of the main street. Then I'll chase 'em in for playing where they ain't no right, and back they'll come to Skunk Hollow. I wish I had some other place to send them." The playground problem again!

On the skyline around the hollow the church spires stood out blacker than the smoke in which the valley was shrouded. An American flag waved from the school house on the main thoroughfare, and the fanciful towers of Luna Park peered jeeringly into this pest hole of neglect. "Shame, ain't it?" said one of the patrolmen.