Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 January 1894 — New York’s Overflowing Tenements. [ARTICLE]

New York’s Overflowing Tenements.

Nowhere in the world is there a denser population to the square mile than in the tenement house district of New York. In six wards there is an average population cf 252,83-1 to the square mile, and in the Tenth Ward the ratio is 357,888 to the square mile. This congested district embraces scarcely one-twenty-fifth of the whole city’s area, but it furnishes “homes” for nearly one-quarter of the city’s population, and incidentally provides 10,000 yearly of the 40,000 deaths and 80 per cent, of the criminals. Instances of the crowding of from seven to twelve persons in two small rooms are not unusual discoveries, and all the conventionalities of civilization and the very instincts of common decency are necessarily wiped out. Morality and cleanliness, under such circumstances, are of course impossible. The most thickly populated district of Old London is credited with only 175,816 to the square mile, and none of the continental cities approach the terrifying congestion of New York’s ’ “Teeming Tenth."