The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-02-14

floor: water must be carried up from the when the family wash is to be done, the smallest amount of water possible is used. When a family lives in one of two rooms there is very little chance for laundry work and still less desire to do 1t. There need be no surprise that the children are dirty in person and in their clothing. It is well known that dirty clothes are the favorite resort of disease germs. A public laundry where the wash could be done quickly would be civic economy, because it would lessen the need of official health inspection
 Dr. Frederick Griffith. whose hospital work at Bellevue and St. Vincent's has taken him into many of the city's tene- ment-house homes, has also been abroad during the summer and has come back much impressed with the desirability of public laundries. Suppose you are a poor woman in Edinburgh" he says. "On Monday morning you pack your soiled linen into a basket or a perambulator, get your children dressed and start for the nearest washhouse, your basket un- der one arm and child on the other: possibly a couple more closely following You reach the laundry and turn them over to a nurse, who takes care of them for you till your washing is done. You have every convenience for your work more than the best equipped private laundry in New York can boast.
 A Marked Contrast.
 "But if you belong to the same class in Manhatten what happens? You live in tall tenement. with small. dimly lighted rooms. with your family-your husband and several children, you know all sleeping, cooking, eating in one or two small rooms. You have. perhaps a leaky tub. a dilapidated washboard. small ketle. an aged wringer, a boiler which has outlived its usefulness. Some where outside. the window, surrounded by grimy buildings there Is a tall pole. Your clothesline runs to it. but the pull ley Is everlastingiy getting out of order and leaving you helpless to get in your clothes. so you prefer to string your line over the fire escape or from door to win dow and dry your washing so.
 There are two or three children cling ing to your skirts while you are trying to wash. fretting you and themselves, begging for care and attention. in con- tinual danger from a possible overturned boiler. or from a hot iron lnsecurely perched and likely to fall, or from the fire If your back is turned for a second, hampering you in your work and ex- hausting your nervous energy as well as their own. The wet, sloppy work drags on all day He comes home wanting his dinner. It isn't ready and If 1t is 1t isn't fit to eat. The rooms are so sloppy and smelly and generally uninhabitable that he takes refuge in the nearest sa- loon. He spends the money that Is so sorely needed there. He's a decent fel- low at heart, but he comes home with the drink in him'-and the devil. If one of the children so much as peeps he flares into rage. If you try to protect 1t he turns on you"
 The fact that the longshoremen of Par Is want to wash their clothes is not en- tirely incredible to those who have fol- lowed the experiences of the Philadel- phia washhouse. It has been even more successful than it's projectors hoped. It was put up by the Public Bath associa- tion of Philadelphia, on Gaskill street, near the centre of a block, so that it could be reached easily from different directions. The association carries on its work not a charity, but as a business. Its customers 1t views purely as patrons and everything possible is done to make them feel that they are not objects of charity, but customers, whose patronage is desired. The wash-house was put in- to the basement as rather an uncertain proposition. But from the moment that a colored boy who came in took of his clothes and washed them, they knew that 1t was going to take. This one was the forsrunner of dozens of men and boys who had only the one suit of under wear and the shirt they had on.
 But the women refused to use the wash-house if the men were allowed to even on separate days. And so the board decided to devote the place solely to wo- men, and to build a separate wash-house for men just opposite the existing Ga,s- kill street bath and wash-house. There is a very great demand for a place of this sort in Philadelphia, and the report reads: While its patrons are very large ly on the tramp classC)-and it is prob ably hopeless to expect to do very much in the way of reforming this sort of men it yet seems quite worth while to give them an opportunity of being clean and of washing their clothes if they so de- sire"