lots upon which they are built. Although the canvass in this downtown district covers only a small territory, it is believed to be typical of a large part of this neighborhood.'

Of the fifteen lots canvassed, seven were less than 80 per cent covered by buildings, five were from 80 per cent to 90 per cent, and three over 90 per cent. These figures show that so far as congestion is indicated by the percentage of the lot covered, this district is less rather than more crowded than the Lower North district. The type of building, however, is different; we are not dealing with low frame buildings such as housed the Italians on Gault Court. All but one of these buildings were brick, and all that were used as dwellings were at least three stories high. Four of the buildings contained over 10 apartments, one of them as many as 16. In all, there were 123 apartments, 36 of which were in the rear of the building, and 23 in the middle. These brick buildings were in an even more dilapidated condition than the frame buildings of the North Side district; not one was reported by the investigators as in good repair. This is in part due to the fact that there were no new-law houses in the block, that is, no houses that had been built since 1902. In the rear of the lots were a few buildings not used as dwellings; two of these belonged to the fire department; the others were sheds or stables. Two rear buildings were used as dwellings, each having three apartments; the remainder of the buildings faced the street. In one was a store, and in another a saloon; the others were used as residences only. Table XII gives the location of the apartments.

Only 8 per cent of the apartments were found to be basement apartments, and there were no cellar apartments. This is in contrast with the Lower North district, where 15 per cent of all the apartments were in basements or cellars. It will be remembered, however, that the large number of basement apartments there was accounted for by the grading of the street.

The district of segregated vice which has now been moved south to Twentysecond Street and the adjoining territory formerly centered in Custom House Place, a block west of Plymouth Court. This whole neighborhood was disreputable, and old maps show that several of the buildings canvassed, where these Italians are now living, were originally houses of prostitution.

As is perhaps to be expected, the toilet conditions in the block could not well be worse. In only two apartments were there private water-closets; 85 families were dependent upon 22 closets in the halls; the rest upon 12 yard closets. These 36 closets were the only accommodations for 628 people. found which was clean or in good repair; some of them were indescribably filthy. One closet which was used by five families was in an outhouse, very dirty and in bad repair and with no door, so that there was absolutely no privacy about it. The hall closets were

TABLE XII

Not one yard closet was

nearly as public and insanitary as the yard closets. In nearly all cases they were dirty, in bad repair, dark, and poorly ventilated. In one building 11 families, 41 persons in all, were using one of these hall closets; in another case 15 families, 73 persons in all, were dependent upon one such closet. Under such conditions it would be impossible for the closets to be in any degree cleanly or sanitary. It would be difficult to overestimate the menace to the health of the people dependent upon them. That there is moral danger as well, especially to the children, was mentioned earlier in this article; it is impossible to describe the conditions in this neighborhood, so much worse even than those found in the Lower North district, without again emphasizing the grave moral dangers to which the children especially are subjected.

In the Italian district on the North Side, it was found that while bath tubs were of course exceptional (103 were found in all) nearly every family had a sink, and could, except in the more or less frequent cases where the pipes were frozen or the plumbing out of

order, avail itself of the opportunities for cleanliness and decency given by running water. In the block on Plymouth Court this was not the case; 81 apartments, 66 per cent of the entire number, were without sinks.

The composition of the population of the district canvassed is shown in Table XIII.

It is interesting to compare this table with Table II, which gave the block population for the five blocks on the Lower North Side. We find here a slightly larger percentage of lodgers, and a considerably larger percentage of children-40 per cent instead of 31 per cent. Even the 31 per cent of children is high when compared with that found in the other districts investigated. We have then in this group of buildings 250 children living in quarters which cannot fail to be demoralizing; and we have throughout this downtown neighborhood a population with a large percentage of children growing up under conditions similar to those we are describing.

Although the lodgers formed only 11 per cent of the population, they were living in one-fourth of the households. With one exception they were all men, frequently newly arrived immigrants who were either unmarried or had left their families in Italy. In one three-room apartment, a woman who had recently moved away had kept twelve lodgers. In a seven-room basement apartment in which an Italian railroad laborer lived with his wife and two children were fourteen men lodgers, six of whom slept in one poorly ventilated room. In thirteen cases, the lodgers were sharing their bedrooms with one, or more than one, member of the family.

It will be remembered that "children" as used here does not mean minors, but boys and girls under twelve years.

Table XIV shows that in this district the apartments are much smaller than in the others investigated. Here it is the two-room rather than the four-room apartment which is typical, while only 23 of the apartments have as many as four rooms, as against 69 per cent in the Twenty-second Ward district.

TABLE XIV

APARTMENTS HAVING SPECIFIED NUMBER OF ROOMS. PLYMOUTH COURT DISTRICT

In a one-room apartment in an adjoining block were living an Italian family with six children, the eldest a sixteen-year-old girl. The building was one of the handsome old brick residences originally used by a single family but now converted into a tenement. Except for the Italian family of eight, living in their one room in the rear of the second floor, the house was occupied entirely by Chinese. The toilet was situated in the hall and used by both the Chinese men and the Italian children. Such crowded living conditions, setting aside the question of race, must have a demoralizing influence upon the children, who live much in the streets in a neighborhood where street influences are dangerous.

The rent per apartment is higher in this block than in the Lower North district if the number of rooms is taken into consideration. In Table XV are given the monthly rentals together with the number of rooms.

It is perhaps hardly fair to make use of the median rental for four-room apartments, since we have the facts for only 20 such apartments. If this is done, however, the median is found to be between $9.00 and $9.50, higher than that for the Lower North district or for most of the other districts canvassed. If the two