CITY OF SARDINES

Taranaki Daily News, 17 January 1920, Page 9

CITY OF SARDINES

NEW YORK CONGESTED. TERRORS OP "MOVING DAY." EAST SIDE LIFE ON THE PAVEMENT.

(By Adam McCay, in the Christchurch Sun.)

"I have moved right out of the city," said one New Worker. "I was living in a six-roomed apartment not far from 110 th Street, but mv landlord raised the rent from SIOOO to SISOO a year, and so I went." Curiosity made the Austral inn visitor look at some modest furnished apartments in a good locality. They were on Madison Avenue, somewhere about 70th Street. A negro caretaker unlocked the doors to show th« rooms. A cramped bedroom, sitting-room and bath-room, created by partitioning one good-sized room into these three separate boxes, could be got for SISOO a year in the front or SI2OO at the back. Among the vacancies was one "house-keeping" suite provided with a small kitchen in addition to its bedroom, living-room and din-' ing-room. The diiiing-room and kitchen bathroom were narrow rectangles, which had once been a backstairs corridor. This compartment rabbit-hutch, at the lack of the bouse, was to be had for $2300 a year.

Nearly all its furnitnre was shabby, and some of it was even slovenly. Such quarters, rented in New York' at just about ,ClO a week, could be got in Sydney at three guineas at most, and then they would be better furnished.

ABNORMAL CONDITIONS. But New York is in an abnormal condition. Its own inhabitants are gasping at the congestion of their city, at the huge rents which the middle-class man has to pay. Men of moderate incomes and status, who in Melbourne or Sydney would be seeking a suburban cottage at from ±'Bo to £IOO a year, are scrambling in New York to find three or four rooms for which they need not. pay more than £2OO or so.

The blame falls, as usual, on "war conditions."

When the timo came for America to enter the war. sew building in the big city was suspended. The steel, the concrete and tho labor were all wanted to fi;;ht Fritz. At the same time the city's population leapt upwards. Into the industrial quarter of America, which is the north-eastern division of the country, came labor from all other corners. War trade and War manufacture, with War shipping and War ship-building, brought maybe an extra half million people into New York. And there wa.s nowhere to put them, in a city whose buildings even before the influx scarcely hold the persons desirous of living in them.

LANDLORD'S PARADISE. Then was the great time entirely for the landlords. Rents began to jump. They kept on jumping. They are jumping stillHappy is the tenant who has a long lease of his apartment and cannot be kicked out of it to make room for one who will pay higher rent. I dined with one of these, half an hour, from his downtown address; he lived in a big block of flats in n. good street near the subway stop at 128t.1i. He paid SIOOO a year for the rooms unfurnished, and thought himself lucky. So he was; for the rooms would have been worth more than half that much in Sydney or San Fran.- ! Cisco. He spoke of sorrowful things which were happening' to persons less fortunate than hp.

One of his acquaintances had a lease of rooms in nnothcr apartment house, and would not get out; neither would he agree to a voluntary increase of rent.. He was the only long-term tenant left in the building, and thought that he hnd the advantage of the position. He was wrong.

It takes more than position to beat an astute landlord, and this landlord had recourse to tactics.' lie began to let other apartments to tenants of a new 'sort—newly arrived Dagoes. fresh-ly-emancipated Yiddishes and the like. They were given short leases, by the week or month. The proud tenant saw himself socially engulfed in a little Bowery planted uptown by the Machiavellian landlord. He had' to fly or to surrender, and he surrendered. JPive hundred dollars a year was added to his j rent.

RENTS FOR SWELLS. Prices leap fast as you go upward in the scale of luxury or comfort—wherein Now York shows a marked difference from cities smaller and less Take Sydney. Whether yon rent flats or mansions, once you have reached a rent of £3OO a year you have a very spacious choice before you reach £SOO. But in New York you may pay a rent of £IOOO a year, and if you want to go into similar quarters in a region just a shade more "select" yon must make a jump perhaps to £ISOO, which gives yon what you could easily get in Sydney for les3 than £4OO, The price becomes hotter the higher von socially asoend.

I Having secured "your little dutch of dog-kennel rooms for a mere five or six pounds a week, not wholly out of convenient reach of the city's centre, it is not impossible for you' to obtain domestic help. If you move farther out for the .sake of space or cheapness, you may find yourself whistling in vain "for a maidservant, white or black. Closer into town, however, a colored lady or a Scandinavian immigrant may deign to lend you a hand for 40 or 'r>o dollars a month—say £2 10s a week. At this price she often "sleeps home," hut takes her meals with you; and the experienced say that she costs you the amount of her wages over again when you pay for her keep. Clothes given out to a laundry cost not much more than in a big Australian city; but if von want Mrs Murphv to come for "a day's washing" she will charge more than twice as much, and generally (as I am told) will refuse the privilege of ironing after the wash.

I givp these domestic details for the information of Australian housekeepers who complain of the difficulty and cost of service in their own country. A sojourn in America would make them realise that things might be much worse.

"I SHAN'T KICK." A passenger said on the boat coming home to Sydney: "I nm an American who has been in Australia for nine years, and this is my first trip home in that time. One thing I am certain of, by gum! I'll never kick again at the prices I pay for anything in Australia, and neither will my wife'' And he may keop his word —even his wife's word.

When I tried to gather from the very obliging clerk of a very high-class real estate aaeiit what became of the people who could pay only two or three pounc'« d' week in rent, the clerk assured me that he did not know where such people

went to live. He added that lie had no acquaintance with localities wherein J apartments could be rented for less than S2OOO a year. ( went away wondering whether land-agents' clerks in New York were paid by the thousand or by the million dollars. "Hpw much does it cost to live well, really to live well, in New York?" I asked the editor of a big newspaper there. "Don't know," he answered. "Whoever can afford to live well in New York lives out of it."

J THE WORKING MILLIONS. 1 But if you cannot find out how the moderately-incomed people house themselves in New York, you can easily see the housing of the polyglot working millions on the Fast Side. Get off at Grand Street, and walk east, or drive along Orchard and Riving Streets, in a "rubber-neck" bus if you like. Those tenement houses show the Sardine City with the sardines packed to their very closest. Nowhere else save in Chinese cities can tenement houses teem with so much life, adult and infant.

In these streets there is at every window not a face, but a group of faces. On every balcony every evening the gaily colored laundry of a whole family drie* ni preparation for to-morrow's wear The very fire escapes are populated. i m a hot night without rain the gasping tenants come out to sleep on footpaths and doorsteps. Myriads of children squeal, jest and satire and insult at the passer-by. Along the whole length of many streets are stalls displaying every kind of shop ware. 'Die population is Italian, Jewish, Polish and heaven knows what.

Congestion? It is more than conges'a eom pression, concentration, scientific packing. Families spend their whole lives stuck almost as close together as the visitors to a theatre.

GASPING CORPORATIONS.

Since these five, six, ,or seven million people want to bo always moving, the transit system of New York does its best to carry them above or below the ground. For a nickel (five cents) you go as far as you like on any street railway or subway, whether you travel 100 yards or 15 miles. The fare was fixed in years long past, and with wages and material at. their modern cost it is utterly impossible to do the work at the price.

Almost every American city is having the same experience. The five-cent, fare won't pay the cost of running. Either it must be raised or the corporations will go broke.

In Camden City, New Jersey, they raised the tare to seven cents, one mornin"- in September. That morning an incensed public threw the trolley-ears off the track, stoned the conductors, and then boycotted the cars for weeks. In New York the transit cars are all in the bands of a, receiver, who periodically announces the nmount by which tlicy have failed to meet their working expenses. The Mayor of New York, Mr. Hylan, is periodically entreated to move the city to grant a higher fare. But Mr. Ilylan is a Socialist an;', a wild Radical, and merely watches the lines stagger into bankruptcy. The theory is that soon the private scrip-holders will be forced to sell out to the municipality at great loss. ' This is scandalous public injustice, but nobody minds. As for the envious municipality, if it docs get the roads it will hare to raise the fares anyI way, and the public will be no better off.

The Sardine City does not know when it is going to be relieved of its congestion. It thinks that the miracle will probably never happen. So the individual sardines keep on paying their rent, and try to get their wages and salaries raised in proportion.

ON "MOVING DAY." It is the fashion of the well-to-do in Xew York to clear out of the city in the summer and return in the fall, w.'ien the gaiety of opera and dance season is beginning, While they are absent they lease out their apartments, and nearly every lease is made to expire on October 1. This date is therefore known in New York as "Moving Day "

The hotels in New York in October are filled not only with visitors, but with Mew Yorkers who have had to leave their apartments, and have no chance whatever of finding new .ones. On the dismal "Moving Day" many a landlord makes a hard squeeze; and then along comes the furniture shifter to claim his slice of the rich melon. Everybody wants him at once, and so his price goes up and up. This year fur:Mi« citizens wrote to the Xew York papers to complain that the demands of the carriers had risen as high as SSO an hour (on some jobs! The .carriers made a [great song of the cost of petrol and the high wages (hey had to pay, but their "case" was not convincing. When the profiteer digs a good sharp fork into the sardines he does twist their litle insides.