Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1883 — Easy Road To Wealth. [ARTICLE]

Easy Road To Wealth.

With a million to begin with, anybody might soon get as wealthy as Vanderbilt. So says a correspondent. He describes a building in Forsyth street: It is on a lot twenty-five feet wide by 100 deep. An alleyway of five feet runs down on one side, and on this the tenements face. The whole house, consequently, is twenty feet wide and 100 deep. It is five stories high, and is divided into five sections, or houses, each twenty feet square. The apartments for a family consist of a living room, thirteen feet square, a dark sxlo bedroom in the rear, and two closets barely large enough to contain two cots for children. There is only one window, and it looks out upon the narrow, filthy alley, so that light and ventilation are both scant. There is no water in these houses, the tenants lowering buckets from the windows by ropes, and filling them at a hydrant which is surrounded by foul pools. A drain is choked with rotten vegetables and other refuse. But the uncleanliness is not essential to the success of the writer’s proposed enterprise. What he wishes to call particular attention to is the smallness of the homes and the relative largeness of the rentals. The prices range from $8 a month on the ground floor to $5 on the top, or an average of $7 from each of twenty-four families. There is a groggery in the tenement opening on the street, and this raises the gross income to $10,500 a year. By covering a block with these compact and cheaply constructed houses, about 15 per cent, clear could be realized on the investment. But that is not all. “1 would reserve the exclusive privilege of selling supplies to the tenants,” says the schemer; “no other groceries or saloons than mine should be opened in the territory covered by the houses. I went into a Forsyth street store and saw women buying coal at 11 cents a bucketful or about $lO a ton. Flour was retailing in small quantit es at a rate equal to sl4 a barrel. For all of tlieir eatables these poor devils pay on the whole 50 per cent, more than can be got from rich folks. Counting in drinkables, don’t you see what a fortune could be made out of an acre or two of tenements full of wretchedness.” — New York Sun.