Cooper's Clarksburg register. [volume] (Clarksburg, Va. [W. Va.]) 1851-1861, 1853-03-16
Abodes ofvice and Misery in New

York.
A writer in the Courier and Enquirer
who has recently devoted considerable time
to explorations of the Abodes of Vice and
Misery in this City, thus indicates some of
his discoveries
"We could tell of one room. twelve
feet by twelve, in which were five resi-
dent families. comprising twenty persons
of both sexes and all ages, with onl y two
beds, without partition or screen or chair
or table, aud all these dependent for their
miserable support upon the sale of chips,
CLEANED from the streets, at four cents
basket-of another, still smaller and still
more destitute, inhabited by man, a wo-
man. two little girls and boy, who were
supported by permitting the room to be
used as a rendezvous by the abandon wo-
men of the street-of another, an attic
room seven feet by five containing scarce
ly an article of furniture but bed, on
which lay fine looking man in a raging
fever, without medicine or drink or sllta
BILE food, his toil-worn wife engaged in
in cleaning dirt from the floor, and his
little child asleep on a bundle of rags IN
the corner-of another Of the same dimen-
sions, in which we found seated on low
boxes around candle placed on a keg,
a woman and her oldest daughter. (the
latter girl of fifteen, and, as we were
told, pro- titute) sewing on shirts. for the
making of which they were paid four
cents apiece, and even ct that price. out
of which they had to support two small
children, they could not get supply of
work-of another of about the same size
occupied by street rag picker and his
family, the income of whose industry was
eight dollars month-of another. scarce
ly larger, into which we were drawn by
the terrific screams of drunken man
beating his wife. containing no article of
! furniture whatever-another warmed on
ly by tin pail Of lighted charcoal placed
| in the centre of the room, over which bent
blind man endeavoring to warm himself,
around him were three or four men and
woman swearing and quarreling in one
corner on the floor d women. who had died
the day previous of disease, and in ano-
ther two or three children sleeping on a
pile OF rags in regard to this room we
may say that its occupants were colored
people. and from them but few days
previous had been taken and adopted by
one OF our benevolent citizens a beautiful
little white girl four or nYe years OF age.
whose father was dead and whose mother
was at Blackwell's Island, another from
which not long since twenty persons sicl
with fever were taken to the Hospital and
every individual of them died. But why
extended the catalogue ? Or why at
tempt to convey to the imagination BY
words the hideous squalor and the deadly
ef1uvia, the dim undrained courts oozing
with pollution. the dark narrow stairway:
decaying with age, reeking with filth and
overrun with vermin, the rotted floors
ceiling begrimed. crumbling. ofttilnes toe
low to permit you to stand upright, and
windows stuffed with rags or why try tc
portray the gaunt shivering forms ant
wild ghasty faces in these beetling a
bodies wherein from cellar to garret
l-Aulife dies, death lives and nature breed
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigiOus thi ngs,
Abominable, unutterable.