One House
Which I Visited Was Approached From An Entry, And Contained Ten Rooms,
Which Were Let To Different Individuals And Families.
On the lowest floor
was an old Irish widow, who had a cataract in one eye, and, being without
any means of supporting herself, subsisted upon a small allowance made to
her by her son, who was a carter.
She was clean, but poorly dressed, and
the room was scantily furnished. Except those who are rendered poor by
their idleness and vices, it might have been difficult to find a poorer
person in the city, I was told. Much sympathy was expressed for her, and
for those who, like her, lived in this poor quarter. Yet the room was
tolerably large, lofty, and airy, and had a window of the ordinary size of
those in English dwelling-houses. For this room she paid four dollars or
16s. per month, a very high rent. It was such a room as in London many a
respectable clerk, with an income of 150l. a year, would think himself
fortunate in possessing.
I could not enter into the feelings of the benevolent people of New York
when they sympathised with the denizens of this locality. I only wished
that these generous people could have seen the dens in which thousands of
our English poor live, with little light and less water, huddled together,
without respect to sex or numbers, in small, ill-ventilated rooms. Yet New
York has a district called the Five Points, fertile in crime, fever, and
misery, which would scarcely yield the palm for vice and squalor to St.
Giles's in London, or the Saltmarket in Glasgow.
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