12
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.
rooms in that attic, and together they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage, in a pleasant part of Brooklyn. The third instance was that of a colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent.
![Tenement of 1863](../../I/Tenement_of_1863.png.webp)
TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT.[1]
D, dark. L, light. H, halls.
There was just one excuse for the early tenement-house builders, and their successors may plead it with nearly as good right for what it is worth.
"Such," says an official report, "is the lack of house-room in the city that any kind of tenement can immediately crowded with be lodgers, if there is space offered." Thousands were living in cellars. There were
- ↑ 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 speci-