The Washington herald., 1908-06-21
While Slunr Districts Are Rapidly Disappearing,
Congestion Problem of Big Cities Still Remains

Fifty years have wrought great changes
| in New York. and Five Points. the center
OF the old "slum district" is no more. A
beautiful park. with its baths and play
grounds. occupies the site and makes
many happy. The same is true Of like
districts in Boston and other cities. vet in
the popular mind the thoughts Of slums
and Summing have taken such a decided
hold and have been pictured so wildly by
snapshot photographers connected with
our papers that il is hard for them "a
realize that Dickens descriptions of the
s.ums of New York are not true to-day.
says f. Stagg Whlten. in the New York
Tribune.
New York is not static; IT is ever-grow-
ing and changing There is a double
movement-one of absorption Of outlying
districts and the shifting Of Industrial To-
calities Its peoples are divided among
many races. each having a distinct center.
and some OF these are divided again into
native village communities. There are
also districts, Ike the Bowery and the
Tenderloin, where vice reigns. a vice
which is as much the result OF misused
wealth as of poverty. These districts are
the real slums Of New York. and the SEN
sational writer's who apply the term
''slum" 10 the foreign districts Of the city
simply show how out OF touch they are
with the real lives OF the people who dwell
in them.
The district which lies east Of the Bow
cry and below Fourteenth street used 70
be the habitation Of the Irish in their less
prosperous days. when they were the i'm
migrant class. To-day they have gone
uptown to better things" For a long
while they left behind them their dregs.
which are known from the popular ac-
counts Of the rowing East Side gangs.
well typifed by Monk Eastman" and the
rest Monk and his kind are up
State"-their gangs are no more
The Jew has come in and displaced the
Irishman in practically all the East Side.
| say the jew as II ne were an individual
type, but he Is not. He is made I'D OF a
dozen races. speaking q dozen dialects
and with different customs and traditions;
some even are pure Russians, having alb
solutely no Palestine blood in their veins.
Each year $4,000 immigrants come into the
district; each year 10000 so-called Ameri-
cans go out and scatter themselves over
the outlying districts OF Brownsville and
Harlem, where q new type is being
formed. AS Mr.. Watchorn. commissioner
or immigration for New York, will surely
bear testimony, these immigrants are not
criminal nor vicious nor diseased, nor the
scum Of Russia. but fugitives from a land
OF terrorism, where they have received
a good education and learned the art Of
thrift TO a degree ths Anglo-SaXon might
Well initiate Even In their ideals, crude
as their religious conceptions and notions
are, they have a ruggedness which stands
aghast at the "high-type civilization" into
which they come!
These refugees are crowded together on
the East Side, not because they could not
go elsewhere, but because they do not
want 10 go elsewhere, They come to Join
their friends in communities which are
grouped around a synagogue which has
been transplanted directly from their Rus