be said roughly to extend from Harrison Street on the south to Washington Boulevard on the north, and from Halsted Street on the east to Ashland Boulevard on the west. There are, however, many houses just outside the limits set by these boundaries. In this section the north-and-south streets are less important than those going east and west, with of course the single exception of Halsted Street which serves as a kind of lurid boundary line, making a constant appeal to those who live either east or west of it. Here are the great West Side theaters, the big, showy saloons, dance halls, "nickel shows," hotels, peddler's carts, the rush of "through cars," and the ever-present possibility of excitement furnished by the city street on which life and business begin early and seemingly never cease. Traffic is greater on the east-and-west streets and the houses are in general better than those on the north-and-south streets. On Washington Boulevard, for example, most of the buildings are either large stone-front blocks, extending sometimes half the way from one street to another, or old and rather elegant residences, with imposing French windows, porches with iron railings, yards, and carriage sheds. Some of the houses are left much as they were in their better days, while others are patched and made over grotesquely. On the other hand, there are few houses which were homes of comfort in the past to be found on the north-andsouth streets. Of these streets, Morgan and Sangamon perhaps rank first in dingy, unrelieved poverty; Peoria and Green streets which are parallel are also dingy and forlorn, but here vice is mixed with poverty.

Madison is the great east-and-west street of the West Side. Passing as it does through the heart of the "furnished-rooms" district, it is more inviting even than Halsted Street to the people who live there. East of Halsted Street toward the river is the territory which is given over to miserable, unemployed men. Here are the cheap lodging-houses and restaurants, the labor agencies, and the army recruiting stations which are all alike the resort of the shiftless "casual." Many of these idle and unfortunate men drift into the "furnished-rooms" territory and encourage the cheap theaters, saloons, and more vicious forms.

of amusement that flourish there. West of Halsted, Madison Street is apparently given over to business or commercialized amusements, for the cheap theater and the saloon, the low hotel and the restaurant also flourish there. The buildings there are high, and many of the stores are in three- and four-story buildings in which there are apartments above the first floor. On the parallel streets, south of Madison-Monroe, Adams, Van Buren, and Harrison-stores were numerous in the eastern part near Halsted Street, but westward toward Ashland Boulevard, they decrease in number. There are many types of houses hereframe cottages raised on brick basements, brick blocks built for tenement use, and the old-fashioned residences which have degenerated into furnished rooming-houses. Well over toward Ashland Boulevard are the bona fide apartment houses, more ambitious but scarcely less monotonous than the tenement houses farther east. This commercialization of the old and dignified, the unrelieved monotony of the tenement block, the dilapidated houses of some of the north-and-south streets, and, more than all, the fact that this whole district is known to be honeycombed with vice, makes it extremely depressing.

The problem of furnished rooms has long been connected. with the city problems of vice and immorality. Booth points out that in the "city wilderness" the furnished room, especially when let by the day as well as by the week, affords a convenient meeting-place for people of loose habits, and there can be no doubt that furnished rooms in this country are often put to the lowest uses. Very near, often indeed adjoining, the houses which are used by men and women of immoral character are houses in which the rooms furnished with housekeeping necessities are let to poor families. On the South Side a large section from Seventeenth to Twenty-fourth Street, and from State Street to the river, is segregated and devoted to the purposes of organized and commercialized vice. On the West Side from the river to Curtis Street, and between Lake and VanBuren streets is another section of tolerated vice, a considerable part of which, as the map on the opposite page shows, is included in the furnished-rooms district. Because this toleration does not amount

to thorough segregation as on the South Side, respectability and vice in its worst forms live side by side.3

We are not concerned here with the furnished roominghouse in so far as it provides cheap lodgings for single men and women, or with the question of the degeneration of the rooming-house into a place of vice. The purpose of this study is rather a discussion of the problems growing out of the fact that in all of these districts large numbers of families with children also make their home in furnished rooms. Perhaps the most interesting questions that arise are (1) the sanitary condition of households readjusted from their original purpose in the manner described; (2) the probable degradation of the family through the lack of privacy and dignity and the general irresponsibility of their mode of life; and (3) the inevitable familiarity with vice.

Attention has already been called to the fact that what is now the furnished-rooms district on the West Side was once a fashionable neighborhood. On the corner of Adams and Aberdeen streets is the old Schuettler residence, a large, rambling brick house still surrounded by a wide "lawn." This and the once handsome gray-stone residence on the adjoining lot were for some years given over to "light housekeeping," but the

"When an attempt at reform was recently being made as a result of an exposure of conditions in the West Side district, the daily papers published orders from the chief of police which were meant to effect an improvement of conditions. The following extracts from these orders illustrate the demoralizing influences to which the families within the district referred to are subjected:

"1. Permit no soliciting, either on the streets, in doorways, from windows, or in saloons.

....

"2. Permit no signs, lights, colors, or other devices to be anywhere displayed indicative of the character of the premises, occupied as a house of ill repute. . . . "4. No person between the ages of three and eighteen years will be permitted in the district, or to enter the premises, under any circumstances, messenger and delivery boys included.

....

"8. There shall be no swinging doors or double doors, and doors at all times to be closed.

9. The establishment of disorderly houses shall not be permitted outside of certain districts, and under no conditions shall they be established within two blocks of a school, church, hospital, or any public institution,

"10. There shall be no disorderly house on any street having a street car line."-Chicago Tribune, October 11, 1909.

difficulty of heating the spacious rooms with their high ceilings was very great, and the Schuettler house was evidently so ill adapted to the needs of poor families seeking "furnished rooms," that it has more recently degenerated into the "Palace Boarding Stable." A few blocks further north a Scandinavian landlady, who told us of tenants "full to the eyes" and her drastic methods of dealing with them, occupied a house which was once the home of the Crane family. Another house near by, also taken over for furnished rooms, is one in which the widow of Abraham Lincoln is said to have made her home for some years. In these houses the high ceilings, walnut stairways, hardwood floors, marble fireplaces, large rooms connected through double doors, are evidences of their luxurious past. In front of the marble fireplace one finds today an airtight cooking and heating stove, with the stovepipe fitted into the old fireplace chimney. The "double doors" are now permanently closed, and since there are no closets in the room, clothes are hung against them, concealed sometimes by curtains. Not only the old marble fireplace but sometimes old pieces of furniture are left. In a fine old house on Washington Boulevard, in an attic apartment in which the paper was hanging in great pieces from the ceiling, and the stove stood propped on bricks, a large oil painting, an unmistakable relic of former prosperity, was hanging on the wall. In a basement apartment on Peoria Street, where the floors were warped and the furniture cheap and dilapidated, the Polish tenants were using the heavy old walnut bureau which obviously belonged to the early history of the house.

It is unnecessary to point out that these old-fashioned houses can never be properly adapted to tenement use. A single room is often as large as an apartment of two or three rooms in an ordinary tenement, but if this room is made into several, some of them will be windowless. The result is the one-room apartment. Attempts to remodel such houses are sometimes found,

Sixty-one light-housekeeping apartments, occupied by families, were visited; of these, twenty-seven were one-room apartments and twenty-eight two-room apartments; only three apartments had three rooms, one had four rooms, and in two cases no report was made as to the number.

but the remodeling is not part of a carefully planned scheme to make the house a suitable or convenient living-place for the new class of tenants. It consists instead of some makeshift alterations, which will turn the large rooms into smaller ones and make possible a larger monthly rental. In one house on South Peoria Street, part of a large hall has been made into an additional room, leaving for a hall a totally dark passage twenty inches wide. Through this hall one of the tenant families has the only access to its room, and two other families are obliged to use it to get water from the sink, which is in a dark corner at the end of the passage.

Although the rooms are large and ceilings high, there is very often an insufficient amount of air. In 15 per cent of the sixtysix sleeping rooms visited, there was a violation of the legal requirement of 400 cubic feet of air for adults, and 200 for children. The rooms, however, were usually light. In only 5 per cent of all the rooms visited was the window space not equal to 10 per cent of the floor space.

The plumbing in these houses is sure to be very defective. The ordinance governing new tenements, that is, tenements erected since 1901, requires one water-closet for every apartment of more than two rooms, and one water-closet for every two apartments when the apartments consist of one or two rooms. But the requirement for old houses, that is, those erected before 1901, providing merely that accommodations shall be adequate, is singularly indefinite and, therefore, quite unenforce

6

6 Tolman, Municipal Code, sec. 420: "No room in any tenement house shall be so occupied that the allowance of air to each person living or sleeping in such room shall at any time be less than 400 cubic feet for each such person more than twelve years old, and 200 cubic feet for each such person of the age of twelve years or under."

Ibid., sec. 434: "In every new tenement house there shall be a separate water-closet in a separate compartment within each apartment, accessible to each apartment, without passing through any other apartment, provided that where there are apartments consisting of only one or two rooms there shall be at least one water-closet for every two apartments."

'Ibid., sec. 1225: "Every person who shall be the owner, lessee, or keeper or manager of any tenement, boarding-house, lodging-house, or manufactory shall provide or cause to be provided for the accommodation thereof and for