The lodging house problem in Boston

Front matter

.ssssissssa*

HOUSING ASSOCIATION OF

METROPOLITAN BOSTON INC.

Preface

The material for this monograph was collected during a residence of two years as Harvard Fellow at the South End House, Boston, 1902-04. The writer wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Woods and to Mr. William M. Prest of the South End House, to Prof. J. Rose Colby of Normal, III, to Prof. W. Z. Ripley of Harvard, and especially to Prof. T. N. Carver, editor of this series, for reading the manuscript and offering valuable criticism. For whatever errors there may be, and for shortcomings in the results obtained, the writer and the extremely difficult conditions of investigation must alone be held responsible. If he has blazed a way into a problem which others will attack, in Boston and elsewhere, with resources more nearly in proportion to the task before them, he will deem his labor well spent.

Oberlin, November 12, 1906.

Contents

I. Introduction i

II. The historical evolution of the South End lodging-house section . . 1 1

III The lodging-house districts of Boston 20

Chapter I

In this study the term lodging-house is used both in a general and in specific senses. Generically it means any sort of habitation, hotels excepted, where a person can obtain lodging, whether for a night, a week, or a month. Specifically it has two different applications : first to the cheap lodging-house of the Bowery type, secondly to a class of dwellings often known in other cities as rooming-houses or furnished-room houses. This investigation deals with the rooming-house only, and with the mercantile employees and skilled mechanics whom it shelters. The distinction between the cheap, transient lodging-house and the rooming-house lies in the class of patrons, in prices charged, and in method of payment. The lodgers in a rooming-house pay by the week or month, those in a cheap lodging-house by the night. The ''roomers" pay from one to seven dollars a week, and are both men and women; the patron of the cheap lodging-house pays from five to twenty-five cents a night, and is generally a man, although there are in the larger cities cheap lodging-houses for women also. The rooming-house may receive transients, but generally at a rate not below fifty cents, and often as high as one dollar a night. Inasmuch as this investigation deals almost exclusively with Boston, and as the term rooming-house is rarely or never heard there, it seems best to use the term lodging-house in these pages rather than the more specific terms rooming-house or furnished- room house. It should be understood at once, then, that the term lodging-house as used here, unless indicated otherwise, covers the class of dwellings in which live the great middle class of clerks, salesmen, skilled mechanics, and miscellaneous industrial workers, who for the most part are unmarried and without other abiding-place in the city — dwellings where men and women are lodged upon payment of a sum of money weekly or monthly.1

The lodging-house of any sort has claimed comparatively little attention in the literature of the housing question, and the rooming-house specifically has fared still worse. The only definition we have been able to find, outside the dictionaries, is the following: "A lodging-house shall be taken to mean and include any house or building or portion thereof in which persons are harbored, or received, or lodged for hire, for a single night or for less than a week at one time, or any part of which is let for any person to sleep in for any term less than a week." 2 This is the definition given in the original New York tenement-house law of 1867 (chap. 908, sec. 17), and it has been continued through all the subsequent acts without change. It excludes the rooming-house, where the ordinary rental period is a week or a month, but which is commonly called a lodging-house, and in some cities is never called anything else. A definition so at variance with common usage is obviously defective, and may be positively misleading.

The cheap dormitories furnishing a bed at from five to twenty-five cents a night, which fall under the Tenement-House Act definition, have given the health officials and other authorities in American and European cities much trouble, and it is perhaps not unnatural that the official use of the term should differ from the broader popular use. European cities have long had large municipal lodging-houses for the shelter of transients who at the time can afford nothing more, and even of whole families in need over considerable periods of time. Municipal lodging-houses for dealing with the vagrant problem have also had some significance in this country, notably in New York and in Chicago.3 In England most, if not all, of the municipal lodging-houses are merely publicly owned "common lodging-houses," a type which perhaps corresponds most

1 The common term in Philadelphia is furnished-room house; in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis, rooming-house.

2 De Forest and Veiller, The Tenement House Problem, vol. ii, p. 331. See also E. R. L. Gould, Housing of the Working People, Eighth Special Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor, 1895, p. 27.

3 Municipal lodging-houses now exist in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Washington, New Haven, Syracuse, and Chicago. — Zueblin, American Municipal Progress, p. 102.

nearly to the cheap lodging-houses covered by the New York Tenement Law definition. In Great Britain, and on the Continent as well, common lodging-houses are of considerable importance in the housing question.1

In England, also, some large employers maintain lodging- or boarding-houses where their employees are compelled to live — a practice known as "Hving-in." At least such was the case in the north of England a decade ago.2 We may be thankful that this is

1 Of Great Britain we are told: "A very large section of the community knows no other home than that afforded by the common lodging-houses of our large towns and cities. This section includes a very considerable proportion of single men and women, who, either on account of the precarious nature of their work or the desire for the society which such a lodging-house provides, make no provision of a more permanent nature. As the places of work and the wages earned vary from time to time, so the situation and the character of their lodging change. Moreover, a verv large proportion are ' tramps,' whose course is from one centre to another, and whose hotel is the common lodging-house, or very often the workhouse ward or tramp cell. Of the married people with families, who use the accommodation of the 'padden ken,' by far the greater proportion belong to the tramp class." These houses are subject to inspection and license. The Public Health Act regulates them and provides "that no house shall be registered as a common lodging-house until it has been inspected and improved for the purpose by some officer of the Local Authority." — Bowmaker, The Housing of the Working Classes, pp. 102, 103 (London, 1895). See alsoW. S. McNeill, Die Aufgaben der Siadtgemeinden in der Wohnungsfrage, Berlin, 1902, p. 24; and Fabian Essays in Socialism, pp. 49, 52.

2 See Dilke, Bulley, and Whitley, Women's Work, London, 1894, pp. 58, 59. "Another matter with regard to which discontent is rapidly spreading is the system of compulsory ' living-in ' which prevails widely in drapery and large outfitting establishments. ... A drapery firm in the North of England, for example, employs 300 assistants of both sexes, and all are obliged to live in the house provided by the employer. In shops where 'living-in' is compulsory, board and lodging is usually valued at £40 per annum. It is a common complaint, however, among assistants that if after some years' service they obtain the privilege of living 'out' they only receive an allowance of £15 to £20 per annum. . . . For the sum charged by the employer the inmates of a large house ought to be comfortably fed and housed; but though in some cases the arrangements are all that could be desired, yet against the majority grave accusations are made with regard to overcrowding, bad food, and uncomfortable household arrangements. The bedroom accommodation is said to be insufficient, and the furniture scanty; the food provided is often poor, and sometimes uneatable. Sundry small filchings in the shape of blacking boots, use of piano and library, are also strongly resented. There is seldom any provision for social life, perhaps because there would be no time to enjoy it. Usually the two sexes are lodged apart, but some boarding-houses are apparently mixed, for in one set of house-rules it is stated that talking in the dining-room during meals is 'strictly prohibited,' that young men are one type of lodging we have escaped in this country. While it is possible to define the lodging- or rooming-house in a specific sense, it is impossible to find a good definition that will be descriptive of all the forms of habitations or institutions to which the term lodging-house is applied, even in the United States. The various varieties of lodging-house merge into one another so gradually that no hard and sharp line of demarkation can be drawn. At one extreme are the cheap, transient houses for men, already mentioned, often dens of "yeggmen" and other criminals; and at the other the comfortable, highly respectable, and oftentimes luxurious bachelor apartments which are to be found in every large city. Between these extremes is the rooming-house or (as called in Boston) the lodging-house, which in the United States has become a great distinct type in itself. While there may be difficulty in classifying certain houses, the lodging-house of this study is a fairly distinct type, and the most important one in numbers and in social and economic influence.

The problem of the middle-class lodger or roomer, however, is wider than the realm of the out and out lodging- or rooming-house. Many persons living in apartments let certain rooms to cut down expenses. The same is true of many tenement families, but here of course we merge into another problem, that of the tenementlodger evil, which in cities of compact tenement districts like New York and Boston, is one of the serious sides of the whole tenement-house problem. This is true also in England and on the Continent, especially in Germany, as is attested by the attention given the evil

not permitted to enter the young ladies' sitting-room, and visitors are not allowed in the house. At most establishments only twenty minutes or half an hour is allowed for dinner, and the assistants are liable to be called off if required in the shop. . . .

"When Sunday comes round a diametrically opposite policy is followed, and after being kept in close confinement during six days of the week the unhappy assistant finds himself or herself put outside the door on the seventh. Either the boarders are given to understand that their presence is not desired within doors, or else no meals are provided, and the assistants are left to shift for themselves as best they may. No doubt the best-conducted houses are careful of their assistants' comfort on Sundays. Extreme cases in which the assistants are absolutely shut out are probably rare; but some are known to exist, and the tendency to make Sunday an uncomfortable day for those who remain indoors appears to be pretty general. The disastrous consequences of throwing female assistants — often mere girls — upon their own resources upon the day of the week when respectable means of shelter and refreshment are least accessible can easily be imagined."

in German housing-question literature. In Boston, this particular evil, while not so great, is still serious. "Frequently lodgers are crowded into tenement- rooms of scant dimensions. Small rooms with no outside windows and even parts of rooms are let for lodgers, and in this way a single man can get sleeping accommodations for fifty cents a week." 1 The lodger evil of the tenements, a part of the tenement-house problem, will not be touched upon by us. But lodgers in apartment suites and in private families where only a room or two is rented are to be found in considerable numbers and should be taken account of in a full consideration ol the lodging-house problem.

The lodging-house must be distinguished once for all from the boarding-house. The lodging-house never gives board. The lodger is not a boarder. The boarder eats and sleeps in the same place. The lodger or "roomer" sleeps in one place and "takes his meals out."2 The lodging-house must also be distinguished from the apartment-house on the one hand, and from the tenement on the other. Both the apartment and the tenement are family houses, their rooms are rented in suites and are fitted for housekeeping; but the lodging-house is cut up into separate rooms to be rented to single men and women or to childless married couples of limited means, who are willing to undergo the inconveniences of life in one room and meals at a corner "cafe." 3

Neither the apartment dweller nor the lodger (or roomer) has been the subject of much study. The voluminous English, Continental, and American literature on the housing question deals almost exclusively with the tenement and the tenement classes. The great army of mercantile employees and skilled mechanics — the

1 Bushee, Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston, p. 34. See also The City Wilderness, pp. 34, 35.

2 In England lodgers have meals served in their rooms, but the strenuous life of the American does not permit of such indulgence.

3 While the point does not strictly concern us here it may be of interest to remark upon the difference between the tenement-house and the apartment-house. While the distinction is a broad one it is one of degree rather than of kind, and it is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to draw a sharp line between the two. The difference is usually fixed more or less arbitrarily, according to the number of rooms in a suite, the rental rate, sanitary equipment, and the like. In practice the distinction very often turns on the presence or absence of a bathroom for each suite.

clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, stenographers, dressmakers, milliners, barbers, restaurant-keepers, policemen, nurses, and the unmarried journeymen carpenters, painters, machinists, electricians, etc., are commonly supposed to live in wholesome surroundings. As a matter of fact little is really known of the life of the "unattached " men and women, and still less has been put in published form. Something has been written concerning the shop-girl, but generally to the effect that she lives at home, receives "subsidiary wages" or " pin-money" for her work, and thus renders the lot of the girl who has to earn all her own living very hard. Then the latter girl is forgotten, and it is thoughtlessly supposed that because the mercantile employee dresses presentably, and the skilled mechanic gets high day- or piece-wages, the conditions in which they live when not at work are presumably not bad. A few persons have long known that the lodging-house and the life of the lodging-house population, in Boston at least, constitute a grave and far-reaching social problem. But the exact nature of that problem, its extreme complexity, and its numerous ramifications have not been precisely clear, nor have data been at hand upon which to judge what solution, if any, can be found.

The lodging-house population is an appreciable part of the total city population. The "boarders and lodgers" of Boston ten years ago numbered over 54,000/ and the number now must be between 70,000 and 80,000. This includes boarders and lodgers of all classes anywhere within the corporation limits of Boston. The population of the thirteen precincts covering the South End lodging-house district — the one in which this investigation is centred — is shown in the following table:

Table i. population of the south end lodging-house dis-

1 Massachusetts State Census, 1895, vol. ii, p. 554.

2 31s* Annual Report Mass. Bureau oj Statistics of Labor, 1900, pp. 58, 59.

3 Population and Legal Voters, Census oj Mass., 1905, — pamphlet issued by the Bureau of Labor, pp. 9-1 1.

TPJCT, BY PRECINCTS, I9OO AND 1905

Ward 9 Precinct 5 Ward 9 Precinct 6 Ward 10 Precinct 3

1900 1

3,°73 2,849 2,161

1905 3

2,951 2,894

2,129 2,028

1,688 1,342

2,065 !>947

3,633 2.953

3,024 2,468

2,276 2,640

3,405 2,610

2,779 2,971

4,910 4,453

3,614 3,643

Just how many of these people live in lodging-houses it is impossible to state, since there are a number of short tenement-house streets and a few apartment-houses and private residences in the district. On the whole it is probable that the lodging-house population of these thirteen precincts by itself would aggregate between 25,000 and 30,000; but this must be taken only as a rough estimate. It is evident that a district of so large a population, and one the inner life of which is so little known, is worthy of study. Furthermore, while this study will apply specifically to the lodging-house district of the South End of Boston, the conditions found must be taken in the main as typical of conditions existing or rapidly coming into existence in nearly every large city.

The extent of the lodging-house population, as well as the dangers to which it is subject, is undoubtedly closely connected with

1 The decline of nearly 3000 (7.8 %) in the population of these thirteen precincts in five years comes as a surprise. The Bureau of Labor, in a personal communication, attributes it "to the fact that these wards [wards 9, 10, and 12] are becoming more and more devoted to business purposes, and residences are being demolished or transformed into business offices." It is true that the first stories of houses on the lower part of Columbus Avenue (below Massachusetts Avenue) are being remodeled into stores in considerable numbers, and that a similar though much less noticeable movement is in progress on Tremont Street (between Dover Street and Massachusetts Avenue) — a movement similar to that which is transforming Boylston Street and Huntington Avenue, and which will undoubtedly attack other Back Bay streets, but as yet it scarcely seems that this can be sufficient cause for the noticeable decline in population. The fact that one census is Federal, the other State, probably must be taken into account. And it may be, also, that a greater number of persons who have to board or lodge are finding accommodations in suburban districts than was the case five or six years ago. Boston's constantly improving transit service would help toward this end; and if such a movement is going on, however slowly, it is a hopeful sign.

the trend of population from the country and smaller towns to the metropolitan centres. The mobility of our American population, ' and this tendency to flock to the cities, are well- recognized phenomena.1

The strength of this great movement is apparent when we remember that there has been an increase since 1890 in urban population, for the country as a whole, of very nearly 37 per cent, as compared with an increase in total population during the same period (ten years) of not quite 21 per cent.2 The large number of new-comers in Boston at any given time is indicated by the fact that in 1895 there were on May 1, 10,861 persons ten years of age and over who had lived in Boston only six months or less. About half of this number were foreigners, the rest were native-born Americans.3 The State Census shows that the recruits to city life are chiefly over twenty years old, and that the number of native-born migrants is far in excess of the foreign-born. In Appendix B will be found an analysis of the nativity of the population of Boston for the years 1885, 1895, an^ 1900. The large percentage of the population of great cities not native to the city named is shown in the following table:

Table 2. nativity of population of the five largest cities4 the U. S.

but not

For-

born

city

in city

eign-

outside

named.

named.

born

of city.

New York

8.0%

Chicago

45-3

20.1%

34-6%

54-7%

Philadelphia

65.3%

22.8%

34-7%

55-8%

24-8%

19-4%

44-2%

14.0%

1 See, for example, the Twelfth U. S. Census, Population, part i, pp. lxxxi-xc. Cf. also, Webber, Growth of Cities ; Ross, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 331-333 and passim ; and for German theory and conditions, Hansen, Die Drei Bevolkerrungsstufen, 1889, Amnion, Die natiirliche Auslese beim Menschen, 1893, Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natiirlichen Grundlagen, 1895, and Kuczynski, Der Zug nach der Stadt, 1897.

2 Twelfth U. S. Census, Pop., part i, p. lxxxvii.

3 Massachusetts State Census, 1895, vol. ii, pp. 790, 791.

4 Compiled from the Twelfth U. S. Census, Pop., part :, pp. clxvii-clxix.

Nearly one half the present population of Boston, it appears, was born outside the city. It is impossible to say what proportion of these new-comers find their way to boarding- or lodging-houses, but the lodging-house class is recruited chiefly from them, and the more pronounced the movement from country to city, the larger will be the lodging class, and the more pressing the lodging-house problem.

The very fact, however, that the movement from country to city has seemed so commonplace and natural has been well calculated to leave us with little appreciation of its significance until the statisticians put it before us in precise figures. Even then the corollary — that in the lives of a very large part of these young people who are drifting cityward the lodging-house, for a long time at least, supplants the home — has escaped recognition at anything like its full importance. But it is not alone the young men and women who come to the cities for the first time to work who help fill the lodging-houses. Both one of the causes and one of the results of the wonderful economic efficiency of modern industrial organization lies in the large number of skilled mechanics who are ever ready to be up and moving to some other place on short notice, — literally " journeymen" with no fixed place of abode, no strong family ties, little effective social instinct. So strong is this tendency that some trade-unions, notably the cigar- makers, have revived the old custom of providing an insurance fund for men out of work and traveling from one place to another (" going on tramp," as it used to be called) in search of employment. The skilled mechanic, in many trades, is likely to be sent almost anywhere. Especially is this true in building- trades, transportation, and certain kinds of domestic and personal service. Modern industry demands large sacrifices of home and comfort on the part of its servants.

The movement toward the cities has been regarded as mainly economic in its motive.1 It will not do, however, to throw too exclusive an emphasis upon purely economic forces. "Opportunity," which every city seems to spell in capital letters, must be taken in a wider sense than that for employment merely. Sentimental considerations cannot be left out of account. Men and women flock to the cities to work and to live. To those who come for industrial reasons must be added those who come driven by dreams of "liv-

Cf. Richard T.'Ely, The Coming City, p. 26.

ing in the city," and to these in turn all the students, the tourists, and the great number of old and shipwrecked persons who seem naturally to gravitate thither. Opportunities for work, and for amusement, excitement, and variety, the attractive force of the unknown, the hypnotic influence of the color and movement and energy of the crowd, all help to draw men and women to the cities.

Primarily, nevertheless, the reasons for the existence of the lodger or roomer are economic. The world's work has to be done and people flock to the cities to do it. To the lodging-house increasing . numbers of the middle class gravitate in those years of struggle which in ever lengthening array must elapse between the time they leave the home of their fathers and reach the home of their own. ' It is the lodging-house (or rooming-house if it is so called in your city) which shelters these young people while they gain an education or a "footing" and earn their own living. Certain causes thus produce in the city a multitude of homeless persons who must have some place to eat and sleep.

The demand thus created affords a means of livelihood to a second class of persons, chiefly women, who could be economically productive in scarcely any other way than by keeping lodgers. The lodging-house keeper, or, as she is familiarly known, the "landlady," constitutes a class of her own. Her economic and social status are considered at length in chapter vm.

The third element in the lodging-house question is a real-estate problem. Large population migrations from one urban district to another take place in the history of every city. The expansion of business districts, changes in lines of transportation, improvements in suburbs, and, more potent and least explicable of all, changes in the fashionableness of various districts, may depopulate a fine residence section, and leave there a vast area of old dwellings which become forthwith white elephants on the hands of their owners. Still too good to be "made down" into tenements, the invariable fate of these houses is to be turned over to the tender mercies of the lodging- or boarding-house keeper.

The combination of the problem of these three classes, the lodger, the landlady, and the owner, forms the groundwork of the economic, social, and moral conditions with which the following chapters will have to deal.