THE PROBLEM OF PAUPERISM 151 



authorities could not well reach old dwellings 

 that were built for other purposes and that were 

 subsequently converted into tenement houses ; 

 such buildings always had a large proportion of 

 dark inside rooms. The division of land in our 

 city is very unfortunate. The blocks are four 

 hundred feet long by two hundred feet deep ; the 

 streets are sixty feet wide, and ninety per cent, of 

 each one-hundred-foot lot could be covered. The 

 buildings were usually put up five stories high, 

 and the landlord usually tried to provide for four 

 families on a floor. You can imagine in our cli- 

 mate, from May until the last of September, the 

 condition of the occupants of a large proportion 

 of the inside rooms, with for two months the tem- 

 perature averaging over eighty degrees." Indeed, 

 no city suffers more from overcrowding than New 

 York, The tenth ward has a density of 243,000 

 to the square mile. A space of less than thirty 

 acres in the fourth ward shelters 17,611 persons, 

 nearly 600 to a plot two hundred feet square. 

 Sixteen families in a single twenty-five-foot dwell- 

 ing is a common arrangement. One hundred 

 souls in a single tenement of that size is not 

 unusual, and in some cases this number is 

 doubled. It is said that there are 94,000 families 

 in Berlin who live with a single room to a family, 



