THE USE AND AHUSE OF CITY STREETS 



and gutters in their play and find in resurrecting the 

 rejected belongings of the neighborhood an unfailing 

 source of amusement. 



This is all wrong. From a public health standpoint 

 the cleanness of a street should be in direct, not reverse, 

 proportion to the congestion of population. There 

 should be no such difference as now exists between the 

 inside and outside of well-kept houses in respect to 

 cleanliness. In tenement districts the sanitary condi- 

 tion of the streets should give the pattern for the houses. 



There is an impression that the sum of money spent 

 in cleaning the streets of the average American city is 

 generally quite out of proportion to the results Reason8 for 

 accomplished. There is much truth in this Extravagance 



. . and Ineffici- 



belief. Of all the work which the municipal ency in street 

 government is called upon to perform that 

 of street cleaning is done in the most irrational and 

 extravagant manner. 



In spite of praiseworthy efforts here and there, the 

 streets of but few cities are kept in a satisfactorily clean 

 condition. There are almost always large parts of even 

 the cleanest cities which are very dirty. In reading the 

 descriptions of street cleaning in this book, it must 

 clearly be understood that what is said refers as a rule 

 to the cleanest and best parts, not to the whole, of any 

 city. 



One of the reasons for the unsatisfactory condition of 

 city streets lies in the fact that the business of keeping 

 a city clean is rarely understood by the public or by the 

 officials in charge of the streets. Street cleaning has 

 not yet emerged from the state of a nondescript kind of 

 emergency undertaking to the position of an effective 

 art. In American cities of small size it is still custo- 



11 



