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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
Tenement of 1863

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

  1. 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-