The beginning of a weeks-long expose of housing conditions endured by Harlem renters in the Daily Worker starting in April, 1929 has Sol Auerbach (James S. Allen) visit various apartment buildings, investigating the landlords and talking to tenants. Each day, a new locations is visited, work lives and living situations are discussed, often with names, ending with the dwellers of 242 W. 144th Street, who have begun the Harlem Tenants League and preparations for a rent strike. Aside from its political lessons, the series is a rich work of social history. Below is the first week; Richard B. Moore will take up the story of the Tenants League following.

‘Housing in Harlem: Negro Workers are Plundered by Landlords’ by Sol Auerbach (James S. Allen) from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 28. April 8, 1929.

N.Y. State Commission Admits It Will Do Nothing for Tenants

How is the worker housed?

After a day in the factory, in the shop, on the building operation, in a digging gang-what is the home like to which he comes for rest?

Under what conditions must his wife and children live?

After being exploited in industry how is he exploited by the landlords?

What Pay?

The average pay of the factory worker is said to be about $20 per week in New York City. This means that by far the greater majority of workers get $20 or lower for a weeks’ work if they work full time and are employed.

According to even the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, dwellings which are half decent are beyond the rent-paying ability of two-thirds of the population.

The same commission reports that rents are still rising.

The commission also reports that living conditions are awful in the tenement districts where the population of the large cities is concentrated, where the workers live.

Workers Robbed by Bosses and Landlords.

A state commission of one form or another has been investigating tenement conditions in New York City since 1842. Their findings have always been the same. Intolerable living conditions, high rents, a state of affairs menacing “public welfare.” They have made some suggestions and the legislature passed some laws.

Conditions Worse.

But tenement conditions have been getting steadily worse since 1842 and today the working class districts of New York City are hell-holes, corralled off from the high-class business sections and residential sections–a dumping ground for the workers removed from the delicate nostrils of Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive.

The same conditions prevail in other large cities, let alone the numerous company-owned towns and villages scattered over the industrial field, and the unbearable huts and hovels of the poor farmers and Negro croppers.

The commissions which have been appointed by New York State administration to remove the “menace to public welfare” have written lengthy reports every year and suggested regional planning as a “permanent solution” of the housing problem. According to these reports themselves, even if these suggestions were put into effect they would relieve that part of the population which needs no relief. The new houses which are suggested would rent at a rate above anything two-thirds of the tenants could possibly pay.

No Relief.

Even the chairman of that commission has to admit that there is no possible relief for the workers in the tenements.

“There is no solution to that problem,” he said. “It is a social one.” And that settled the matter for him and the capitalist state. To hell with two-thirds of the population!

In order to pile up votes republican and democratic politicians have had housing bills introduced into the state legislature. These bills mean nothing to the working class tenants. They are only political hooks to play around with in the state assembly.

The rent emergency laws, which were introduced supposedly to prevent rent speculation, had a catch to them, as do all laws passed by a capitalist government in relation to the workers. It applied only to old tenants, not to those who had moved in during or after the year they were passed. In spite of them rents continued to rise after 1922, as they did before, for city officials take graft and the landlord can afford to pay a little drinking money which he squeezes out ten-fold from the tenants.

The last of these laws-applying to all flats which rent at $10 per room per month or below-will expire May 31. The landlords are even more unrestricted now.

Rents To Leap.

In New York City rents will leap.

As a result there will be dispossesses. Workers, their families and household goods will find themselves on the street more often than previously.

The Tammany and republican politicians are only interested in the tenement districts during election. Their promises are lies. They intend to do nothing for the working class tenants.

In Reading and Milwaukee where so-called socialists lead the municipal governments, similar conditions prevail.

In the meantime, while politicians promise and take their graft, while more honest investigators for the capitalist government say that there is no solution to the problem and give it up, millions of toilers return to the dumping grounds every night from a hard-days work, where they have been sweated with speed-up and given a starvation wage.

They come to tenements which have been condemned as far back as 1901, some as far back as 1864-dwellings which are surrounded by filth, which are fire-traps, for which they pay an unbelievable high rent.

Negroes Greatest Victims.

That is not all. In every city Negro workers are made to go to a “dumping ground” especially designed for them.

We will see that segregation brings the landlord lots of dollars. Negro workers can find lodgings only in certain districts. In many cases they must pay rents higher than in any other sections.

We do not believe that this problem cannot be solved. The problem can be solved by the working class tenants themselves–colored and white. Mass pressure can wring concessions from even a brutal ruling class and when the time comes can take them.

We have gone into the working class districts and spoken to the workers and their wives. In New York City we have gone into Harlem especially, for there can be seen all the evil products of segregation.

Details to Follow.

The results of this investigation will be published in the Daily Worker from day to day. The first part of the series will deal with the conditions of the Negro tenants in Harlem, another part will deal with the Latin American tenants who have also been segregated in the southern part of Harlem. There also will be reports of housing conditions in other cities. The series will include a program for working class tenants.

A Block in Harlem–Flimsy, Disease-Festering, Common Toilets, Robber Landlords. April 9, 1929.

Blind Negro Worker Making Only $10 a Week Pays $35 for Rooms

THERE is a Fifth Avenue in Harlem, too. It is not a broad sweeping street, oily with traffic nor stretching skyward in stories of luxurious business offices and high class apartment stores.

This Fifth Avenue is bumpy and cobbled in some places. It extends towards the sky in five or six story buildings, which offer a menacing front, for they look as though they might give up aspiring toward the sky and crumble. Fire-escapes zigzag their fronts, and dingy stores line the pavement. There are corner fruit stands and some peddlars carts buzzing with flies.

Cross this Harlem Fifth Avenue and walk east along 134th Street. Beware of the slop and muddy puddles on the sidewalk, as you turn to look at the gloomy candy factory across the street and at the row of dark warehouses at your side. It had been raining and the brick sidewalks ooze water into rivulets and baby lakes. Refuse cans and garbage pails line the street. Here and there a bundle of slop has broken open and coughed out its contents on the pavement.

This slough-tray which is called a street has been turned into a playground by Negro children. A group of girls with jumping ropes, shouting and laughing, plats flying, jump past you. You catch a glimpse of black stockings torn at the knee, turned over shoes, and coats coming out at the elbows.

Slapped in beside the warehouses there is a row of red-brick house fronts. A brick extends its jagged edge here and there. There is a gaping hole where bricks once rested. The mortar has become so decayed that it looks like ridges of bed-rock. The windows are lop-sided; sashes all out of joint; corners of glass missing; window ledges are weather-beaten and worm-eaten.

On the Fifth Avenue, of the rich, fronts rise smooth and straight as the glistening roadway itself. Here, off the Fifth Avenue of Harlem, the sloppy street is continued into the house fronts.

Doors, hanging loose on their hinges, are wide open. You step up two wobbly steps, past a vestibule door with glass missing and you are in No. 16 East 134th Street.

IF you had come here to find anyone in particular you would have to knock at every one of the eight “apartments” in the four story house, for there are no doorbells and the mail boxes look like pigeon’s nests. And if there were mail boxes and bells with names on them you would not be able to see them for lack of light.

You enter a gloomy hallway. There is a gas jet jerked away in the corner but no light. You have a sense of walls which were once painted green. You know that, not because you can see the actual color of the paint thru the grime, but because you see patches of plaster with the edges of peeling paint sticking out into the dim light from the doorway.

On the hall floor you scrape pieces of paper along as you walk. You grope your way up a narrow wooden stairway. The steps creak painfully, and their edges are worn smooth and round.

You see the hint of a light thru the glass panes of a door at the end of the hall on the second floor. As you walk towards it the stench which you have just caught as you entered becomes more pronounced. You trace it unmistakably to a door half open at the end of the hall, between two closed doors which lead to apartments.

It is the community toilet.

There are no windows to this cubby-hole. The floor is slimy and scattered with paper which has been used. The seat of the toilet is broken. The drain does not work right and water rises to the very brim when you pull the string. This has apparently not been cleaned for some time and not repaired for years.

You knock at the door to your right.

You are introduced into the home of a Negro worker in Harlem, in the largest city of the most “prosperous” country in the world.

You enter the kitchen in the home of Mrs. Ethel Williams, the wife of a Negro worker.

Mrs. Williams is a tall lanky woman, and you get to know her and her surrounding better when she lights the small oil lamp on the table. “We have gas,” she says, pointing to an iron-pipe fixture dropping into the room from the ceiling. “But I only use the gas when I want to warm up some milk quickly for my baby.”

Gas is too expensive when the coal stove burns.

The walls of the kitchen are no different than the walls in the hall. She points out places on the wall and ceiling near the water pipes, where the dirt-green paint has come off and the plaster is crumbling. On the floor, propped up on some pillows is an infant playing with his brother who is only a few years older. An older girl is pottering around over the coal stove which takes up the most part of a wall. Mrs. Williams knows that she lives in no place and is indignant at the condition of this hovel of five rooms for which she pays a rental of $33 per month.

She, her husband and four children have lived here for three years. She sublets a part of her “apartment” to a couple. Eight people live in this five-roomed coop.

The apartment runs the length of the house.

There are two windows in the kitchen and two in the front room. The intervening rooms must be illuminated by a flickering gas jet or an oil lamp since there are no windows in them. The condition of the walls are the same throughout. There is hardly any ventilation at all. It is easy to understand how there are so many deaths from coal gas and illuminating gas in the tenements when it is bitter cold outside and the wind roars through the flimsy walls.

The kitchen window overlooks a desolate back yard which is spotted with papers and dirt. An old rusty and very narrow fire escape runs along the back of the house. This is about the only attempted compliance with the law in the whole building.

Garbage? There are no dumbwaiters here. The garbage must be tied up in bundles and carried cut into the street by the tenants themselves.

Baths? Mrs. Williams laughs. No, there are no baths here.

Have there been any renovations lately? Three years ago the landlord repainted the kitchen by smearing dark green paint over the cracky walls. It didn’t make any difference, said Mrs. Williams, for instead of painting it in light colors, the room remained as dark and gloomy as before. The walls are actually crumbling.

“The landlord won’t do anything. He says that if we want repairs we will have to take a rent raise.”

We were to hear that repeated again and again.

WILLIAM WILLIAMS has not had steady employment for the last three months. “He worked at the Knickerbocker Cement and Supply Company for five years,” Mrs. Williams said. “Then they decided to cut hands so he lost his job about three months ago. Since then he has been working at the docks, but not steady. He leaves about four or five o’clock every morning to look for a job, and if he finds one he makes about $5 a day. He has to get re-hired every day. Many days he doesn’t find any work.”

It was already after six o’clock and Williams had not yet returned.

Williams has to go rustling for a job every morning at about four or five and if he is lucky enough to find work he doesn’t return until late in the evening.

When he returns he comes home through a slough-tray which is called a street, walks up a smelly and crumbling hallway, into his hovel for which he pays $33 per month.

Here is a fellow worker who slaves thru the day–when he is given a chance to for a meagre pay, comes to that section of the city where his employer and others like him have told him he must live, to a hovel which is called a home and for which he pays a high rent to persons in the same class as his employer.

There are many other workers like him.

The same conditions prevail in the whole row of eight houses on East 134th Street. Holmes and his wife and three others live in an apartment at No. 18. Although the apartment is even worse than the one we just described he pays $35 for five rooms. Both Holmes and his wife are blind. He works at a broom and mop shop downtown and works piece-work. The brooms are made by machine and there is much speed-up.

Holmes makes an average from $10 to $12 a week.

The ceiling is coming down, there are large holes in the walls near the plumbing, gas light, coal stove, no baths, community toilet, no garbage disposal, dark, unventilated.

In an apartment in the next house lives D.W. Heddleston, lamed Negro veteran of the Spanish-American war. He pays $30 for his five rooms, and has gotten the few dollars grace over the other tenants because he lived there for the last 11 years. When he first moved in in 1917 he paid $15. His rent has been doubled since then. In these eleven years there had been no improvements to speak of in any of these houses. They were allowed to go from awful to worse while the landlord raised the rent.

Heddleston sits in one place and moves his legs with difficulty. He served in the quartermasters department which was located at Tampa, Florida, until a severe epidemic of yellow fever forced the headquarters to move. He was lamed in an accident. He does not get a pension because the army department reported they could not find his name on the roll.

“The more I think of that war,” said Heddleston, “the more I think it was a big money making proposition.”

The apartment houses we have just described are known as “double-decker dumbell tenements.” The clever architect who designed them obtained first prize for planning such an inexpensive cage back in 1879. The tenement law of 1901 condemned this type of building. Now, in 1929, they are still being used for housing Negro workers.

The lodgings we have just described are not isolated instances but are fairly numerous. Nor are they the worse. If you continue following the Daily Worker investigator into other sections of Harlem, you will see almost unbelievable conditions. Tomorrow we will go to a “higher-class” apartment, and see what terrible crowding the Negro workers must suffer for the privilege of having a dumbwaiter which does not work, and a hot-water supply which is only present in the lease.

Republican Politician Robs Negro Tenants of “Higher Class” Harlem Apartments. April 10, 1929.

Vermin-Infested Rooms, Dumbwaiters That Don’t Work, High Rents

A. JOHNSON, who ran for congress on the republican party ticket last November, owns a block of houses on the odd side of the 2300’s on Seventh Avenue.

We will have to call the tenants living in the five-story tenements between 2323 and 2337, by letters X, Y, Z, because they have been so intimidated by the landlord that none of them would pose for pictures. “The landlord will raise my rent if he recognizes me in that picture,” said Mrs. X.

The specific picture we wished to get was one of Mrs. X bending down and removing a whole wooden panel from the wall, to show the dilapidated condition of the walls. When we had asked her whether the landlord had made any improvements in the apartment recently she bent down and pulled the wall apart.

He’d Die First.

“He’d die before he would do anything here. If you will accept a $10 raise then he’ll do something.”

This same republican politician, who makes a living by exploiting the Negro tenants to the limit, was full of promises to the Negro workers while campaigning in Harlem.

Mrs. X lives in a seven-room apartment in the old law tenement at 2337. An old law tenement is one built before the Tenement Law of 1901 went into effect. According to this law this row of houses should have been condemned long ago.

But that only shows the uselessness of laws passed by a capitalist legislature controlled by the landlords, the real estate men and others of that kind.

This row of houses is nothing but a fire-trap. There is an “excuse” for fire escapes, but no fire escapes. In the rear of the building there is an iron balcony for each floor, but there is no way of getting from one balcony to another since no steps connect them. In case of fire all the tenants would be trapped, for the main staircase in the hall is narrow, made of wood, and actually rotting.

Must Take Lodgers.

To add to the danger, the floors are rotten and dried up, none of the rooms are fire-proof, and the walls are about ready to fall apart.

For seven rooms in this house Mrs. X pays $52 per month. She has lived there for 10 years, which is probably an inducement for the landlord for he has not raised the rent recently as he threatened to do. In order to be able to pay this rent, Mrs. X., who works as a servant

in some rich man’s house, rents out most of her rooms to lodgers. In these seven rooms there live at least 10 persons. Mrs. X. probably sleeps in the “parlor.”

The only rooms which have access to the open air are the front and back rooms. The intervening rooms have small windows opening out on a narrow shaftway. The shaftway is only about a yard wide and you can step across from the window of one apartment to the room of the apartment next door.

Imagine all the air that can steal into these rooms, by hook or crook, through a shaftway that runs the length of five stories. True, the law says that there must be adequate ventilation, and it also says that there must be adequate fire precautions, but that law is only a scrap of paper. The landlord is the real boss.

THERE is an “improvement” here over the tenement houses we took you to yesterday. This “improvement” is a dumbwaiter–a dumbwaiter which has not worked for years. We saw the dumbwaiter fastened at the top of the dumbwaiter shaft when we went up on the roof left there like so much junk. It costs too much to fix it, says the landlord.

The tenants are forced to throw their garbage down the dumbwaiter shaftway. You can hear it rustling and bumping its way down past the whole tier of apartments, slop spilling and cans rattling. By the end of the day it reaches above the second story.

As a result the house is smelly and infested with rats and other vermin–just the place for disease. No wonder there is such a high rate of infant mortality in Harlem and so many deaths from consumption.

Seventh Avenue is not a bad looking street, but no sooner do you enter the door of one of these tenement houses than you forget there is any such thing as sunshine and fresh air. It is dark and gloomy, disease-festering and intolerably uncomfortable.

There is a great deal of garbage lying about in the shaftway separating the two houses and heaped in the back yards.

Bells haven’t worked for years and the letter boxes are no more than a series of holes in the wall.

At 2323 lives Mrs. Y. We had better not mention her name for she has just received a five dollar rent raise and now pays $57 for her seven rooms. Nine live in this apartment.

Conditions are about the same here as in Mrs. X’s place.

IF a Negro worker wishes to avoid such a place as East 134th Street, he goes to the west side Harlem, pays higher rents, but has to sublet nearly all the rooms in the apartment. The result is more over-crowding here than in worse located tenements, and more danger to the health of the tenants because of the absolute neglect of the houses by the landlord.

Go to a “higher class” apartment and the condition is just as bad. The rent is higher, the worker must work harder, his wife, his children must work, he must take in lodgers.

It is in this class of apartments–those renting at about $10 per room per month–that you will find tremendous overcrowding, terrible housing conditions, rooms in state of decay and the landlords, creeping around like so many slimy snakes sucking the very life blood out of the workers with their continual demand for rent raises and their persistent refusal to make any improvements.

The worse the houses the higher rents. The more tenants in Harlem, the higher the rents. Laws or no laws, the landlords, sitting on the backs of the Negro workers have made a gold mine out of Harlem for themselves.

Segregation–a virtual prison system, a system of bars and chains–has helped the landlords. Race oppression, added to oppression of the Negroes as workers, means more dollars for the landlords. By forcing Negroes to live in a put-aside section, the value of the land and houses rises out of all proportion. The real estate men and landlords speculate to their heart’s content. To these parasites dollars are the measure of humanity.

So, you see that segregation in housing is a matter of dollars for the landlords, just as it is for the bosses of factories, and a barbed-wire fence for the Negro workers, catching and tearing their flesh.

“Elevator” Apartments in Harlem on Eighth Ave.; Tenants Live Next to IRT. April 11, 1929.

Negro Workers Have Markets at Their Door-steps; Plenty of Noise

THERE are “elevator” apartments in Harlem, too. These elevators rush along the streets past the second stories of the tenements on Eighth Avenue.

The elevated trains roar over the Eighth Avenue tracks, shooting dust and grime into the windows of the tenements, leaving a black coat over the house-fronts.

The dirt from the road-bed also comes down in plentiful showers on the rows of stands making up the open market that sprawls along Eighth Avenue up above 138th Street. Fruits, vegetables, fish are all doused with good supply of dirt before they find their way into the kitchens behind the sooty fronts.

What a Playground.

When the weather becomes hotter, flies buzz around the stands and insects, carrying disease germs, add their deadly work to the elevator dirt. In the evenings, after a day of busy marketing, the street looks like a dump, with refuse and papers piled ankle high.

Imagine what a fine “playground” this is for the children, or what a fine boulevard this Eighth Avenue is for workers and their wives, after a day’s work, for taking a little stroll in a summer evening!

Quite different than for those “tenants” living on River- side Drive, who have a river and a park all to themselves. Compare this Eighth Avenue with Grammercy Park in the center of the city, which is carefully locked except for the nurses of those delicate little children who have the keys to the gates. You need no key to get into Eighth Avenue. You must be a Negro to have the “privilege” of living in these “elevator” apartments.

Tenants Intimidated.

THE landlords have carried on an organized campaign of intimidation against Harlem tenants, and nowhere was this so evident as in some of the tenements on Eighth Avenue.

At 2666 Eighth Avenue none of the tenants, except one, would speak. They were afraid that we were landlord’s agents sent to feel around and see if the ground was ripe for another rent raise.

The tenants we did get to speak, a laborer on a subway construction gang, his name must not be mentioned–had just moved in and had accepted a rent raise over the old tenants from the very beginning.

We got to Tom Z. only after stumbling thru a dark and dirty entrance hall, falling over our feet in the dark corridors and knocking at many doors.

In answer to our inquiries one woman said she was not at home, another that she was not the lady who lived there, and so on. They were evidently afraid.

At Mercy of Landlords.

As a rule old tenants live in fear of a rent raise. The policy of the landlords is not to have a uniform rental in any one house. One tenant pays $35, another pays $37, still another pays $40. When a new tenant comes he must pay the highest of them all. In this way rents are constantly kept on the upgrade, and the tenants are obsolutely at the mercy of the landlords.

Finally we succeeded in reaching Tom, his wife and three children in their apartment of four small, unaired rooms, stuck away at the end of a dark corridor.

For these small four rooms, with the added entertainment of the elevator wheels and the buzzing of the flies, Tom pays $45 a month. He moved in last June and since then has been raised $5.

How Does He Provide?

You can picture the interior of this tenement and the apartment from what we have told you before. The same rotten conditions of walls and floors, old and defective plumbing, very little ventilation and air. The only difference is that you must speak a little louder when a train rumbles by.

Tom works on subway construction. His employment is irregular. When he works he makes 80 cents an hour, but is usually employed only part time. He averages about $28 per week.

Out of this sum he must provide for his wife and three children and pay the enormous rental of $45.

Dumbwaiter Slop-Cans.

AT 2658 Eighth Avenue, on the fourth floor, overlooking the wide expanse of elevator tracks, we found Mr. Q. He also pays $45 for his flat and the condition of the house is about the same. He has two children and works as a street-paver for the city.

When he works he makes 97c per hour. The work is very irregular. His stomach depends on the weather. When it rains for a whole week he has nothing to bring home. During the last 10 months he has averaged about between $25 and $30 a week.

Here, too, the garbage is thrown down the dumbwaiter by the tenants because the dumbwaiter has needed repairs for years. This causes a smell around the house at all times, especially in the summer, and attracts plenty of rats and vermin.

These are the Harlem “elevator” apartments. There are many like them. Negro workers, making even less then the two we have introduced you to, live here with their wives and families, intimidated by the landlords–Negro and white–having as intimate neighbors the I.R.T. and the avenue market.

Courts Work with Landlords in Keeping Rents High for Negro Workers in Harlem.  April 12, 1929.

18 Tenants in One House Raised About $10 Following a Recent Raise

“WE WON’T do anything to this apartment unless you accept a $10 raise,” said the landlord to Mrs. Pearl Williams who lives in a five-story tenement at 72 West 133rd Street.

Mrs. Williams has lived there for 10 years. From the time she first moved in she has been raised at the rate of $1 a year and now pays $42 for the five-room apartment which she shares with another family.

The raises were toned down somewhat because Mrs. Williams is a fighter. Every time he wanted to raise her rent, she would take him to court and fight the raise. This court fight is not very effective, as you can see for yourselves.

Court and Landlord.

In the first place it is expensive. Last time she went to court she had to employ a lawyer and pay him $25. It did not help. The raise came anyhow.

That is the usual occurrence. When a landlord knows the tenant will go to court he will ask for an exorbitant raise and the judge will usually grant him a raise a little lower than what he asks for. In that way the judge makes a pretense of helping the tenant.

When the case comes to court a compromise is struck, if the raise seems too exorbitant, and the landlord gets what he wants. In many cases the judge is a friend of the landlord and will do him a good turn. The tenant, of course, is left in the cold.

There is no getting away from it. The courts serve the landlords just as the state legislature and the petty Harlem politicians–both Negro and white–do.

Birds of a Feather.

When the raise is granted or just simply demanded, and the worker living in the tenement cannot pay his rent, he is put out into the street with his family and all his belongings.

That is called dispossession. Rent raises and dispossession go together. Landlords, courts, legislatures, rent raises and dispossession all go together.

If the tenants of Harlem want to fight rent raises and dispossession then they will have to fight the courts and legislature as well as the landlords.

The way to do this is to go together. To go together, we must have an organization that will be our own, and not belong to some petty politician. An organization which is the voice of the tenants who are workers is the Harlem Tenants’ League.

Mrs. Williams knows that so she is a fighting member of this League.

Falling Ceiling.

MRS. WILLIAMS lives in an apartment which has been neither cleaned nor repaired since 1924. We will only remind you of what we have found in the other apartments we have already visited to give you an idea of what this “higher class” apartment is.

Nearly every year the ceiling falls down. Once the bathroom ceiling fell upon Mrs. Williams. In most instances she has had to fix it herself. Once when the landlord actually sent someone to repair it at his expense, the job was so badly done, that Mrs. Williams had to get someone to go over it.

The same trouble with the dumbwaiters.

Ashes on Kitchen Table.

“It’s just great when you are sitting in your kitchen eating and ashes and all sorts of stuff comes down that shaftway right down on the table you’re eating from,” remarked Mrs. Williams.

Eight years ago everything seems to have stopped working in this tenement. The sound of a bell is never heard here. One is lucky to find letters left for him in the mailbox.

“And lots of times we can’t get any water at all. The water supply is low. If the water suddenly decides to stop when there is a fire, then we are all just out of luck.”

There is no use repeating. What one describes of one tenement generally holds good for the others, with a few additions here and there.

18 At a Shot.

TO GIVE you a further example of what rent raises mean and how they are being handed out wholesale. At 241 W. 141st Street there is a large tenement. At present the tenants are paying about $55 for five rooms, which are just as dilapidated as the others. The same story–no repairs unless you will accept a raise, the tenants pay for their own renovations.

About the end of 1928 eighteen families living in this house were notified of rent raises ranging from five to ten dollars, some of them even more than $10. These raises are to be effective without improvements.

Take the case of Mrs. Bailey. She has been living there for 13 years and paid $34 when she first moved in. She now pays $55 and is expecting another raise at any moment. In her apartment the plumbing is so rotten that the walls and ceiling leak, there is a mouldy smell around the place, the ceiling falls periodically, there are plenty of holes in the wall and rats are abundant. The rooms are so bad that she cannot rent them out to lodgers.

Mrs. Stevens lives above her. When she first moved in 14 years ago she paid $35 for five rooms. Last January she was already paying $51, today she pays $56. She pays for her own painting and papering. On February 1 of this year the landlord notified her that the rent from then on would be $65.

This is only an example of how rents have been rising all over Harlem. In back of these rent raises there is always the threat of dispossession. And to move means to pay a still higher rent, for the landlords always take advantage of new tenants, charge them more than anyone else in the building and thus pave the way for a general massacre.

How Negro-Worker Tenants Are Preparing Rent Strike. April 14, 1929.

Vicious Landlord Wants 80 Per Cent Raise for Doing Nothing

DO NOT get the idea that all the tenants in Harlem are submissive to the will of the landlord. With the appearance of the Harlem Tenants’ League on the field, taking up the fight of working class tenants as it does, Negro workers are beginning to put up a stiff fight.

In order for this fight to be successful and benefit not only the individual tenants involved but all the working class tenants in Harlem, this league must be turned into a big and strong organization that will be able to resist rent raises and dispossessions effectively and force the landlords to make the houses fit to live in.

This is exactly what ten tenants, all living at 242 W. 144th Street, are trying to do. This is the story of the fight they are now carrying on.

Workers vs. Landlord.

Mrs. Ferguson, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, and Mrs. Isaacs, are all leading spirits in this fight. The other tenants are equally militant. In this house the landlord is especially vicious. His purpose is to throw out the old tenants-a total of 14 families–and replace them with new tenants who will pay the excessive rent asked.

With this end in view the landlord has wired the house and put in steam heat. When he put in the steam heat he got a rent raise of $5 which was paid. But after wiring the house he refused to put in the fixtures for the tenants unless they accepted a rent raise of about 80 per cent.

Watch the 10.

Of the 35 tenants in the tenement, all the old ones have been forced out with the exception of 14. Of these 14, four compromised by agreeing to pay a raise of $10. The remaining ten tenants are all organized in a house committee and are members of the Harlem Tenants’ League.

The apartments of these ten tenants have not been renovated by the landlord for 10 years. They are forced to have their apartments cleaned themselves and pay for it.

They have lived there from 5 to 10 years. They are all workers. Their apartments suffer from all the evils that go together with the robbery of the landlords who have as running-mates the legislature, the politicians and the courts.

More Than Robbery.

The flooring is coming apart, the garbage is thrown down the shaftway, the ceilings and walls are splitting due to the defective plumbing. If the bell were to ring you would think it was a fire alarm, the windows must be propped up on sticks, the garbage can be smelled all over the house, the sinks are as old-fashioned as a spinning-wheel, the bathtub is nothing but a bit of tin coiled over wooden side-boards. For these sties which are called apartments the landlord wants a rent raise of 80 per cent.

Mr. Labor Faker, Landlord and Boss.

THE FERGUSONS at present pay $32 for their four rooms. Ferguson is a compositor. Due to the chauvinistic and reactionary character of the officialdom of the Typographical Union he is not permitted to become a member of that union because he is a Negro.

The open-shop printing bosses can therefore, with the help of these reactionary officials, doubly exploit the Negro workers. Ferguson, a compositor, makes $28 a week.

“Don’t Live Like Lady.”

The landlord wants a raise of $18. He wants to have $50 for this apartment.

“We cannot pay that,” said Mrs. Ferguson. “We must live, too. And I have two children and I want to give them a chance.”

“You shouldn’t want to live like a lady,” said the landlord to Mrs. Ferguson.

This landlord is a white woman capitalist. Should not both Negro and white working women throw this class of parasites from power?

$20 for Rats.

MRS. ISAACS pays $30 for her four rooms. She works as a housekeeper from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for $15 per week. She has two children. Last Christmas they rolled up their sleeves and papered and painted the apartment. The place looks just as bad now because the leaking plumbing rots the walls away.

She uses oil for light, as do many of the other tenants, because gas is too expensive, when the coal stove is being used for cooking. The apartment is in such a state and the landlord is such a parasite that Mrs. Isaacs had to go out to a second-hand store and buy a seat for the toilet.

“Rats gallop in and out in this place like war-horses,” said Mrs. Isaacs.

The landlord wants a $20 raise.

Pay for Cold Pipes.

THE JENKINS live in three rooms for which they pay $26. The apartment is equally as bad. As in the other places, the steam system installed last year, is a joke. It gives no heat. Hot water is present only in the lease. For the privilege of having cold steam-pipes decorating the rooms the families accept a rent-raise of $5.

“We once raised a kick about the letter boxes,” related Jenkins. “The boss fixed them and then charged 50 cents a-piece for the keys. Nobody paid the 50 cents. Everybody broke open their boxes to get their mail.”

The landlord wants a raise of $14.

Landlord Plays Politics.

ABOUT the same holds true for the other old tenants in the building.

The new tenants get along by renting their rooms to lodgers as a result of which there is great overcrowding. Some of the new tenants manage what are known as “buffet apartments,” where women and drinks are sold, to provide for rent.

The ten tenants, who have decided to fight it out together with the aid of the Harlem Tenants’ League, have not yet paid the raise, of which they were notified on January 1 and which was to be effective February 1. They have continued paying their old rents.

The landlord has not taken the case to court because she is waiting for June 1, when the last of the Emergency Rent Laws for the apartments renting at the rate of $10 per room per month or below, expires. Then, she figures, she will be able to get what she wants or dispossess the tenants. In the meantime she is getting her old rent.

Tenants Talk Strike.

The tenants are thinking: “Why should we continue paying her rent? If she wins the case she will throw us out.”

The course of action that these tenants are considering is a RENT STRIKE. No rent to this robber landlord!

The Harlem Tenants’ League supports them. We will keep you informed of what happens when this rent strike goes into effect.

If, during the course of the rent strike the landlord attempts to dispossess the tenants, it will be the time to RESIST DISPOSSESSION.

Join the Fight.

In order for both the rent and dispossession strikes to be effective as many tenants as possible must join the Harlem Tenants’ League and support the tenants not only in this house, but in all others where rent raises and dispossessions are pending.

That is the only way tenants can protect themselves against the vicious attacks and robbery of the landlords. They can do it right now. And it will work.

Have no pity on these vicious landlords. They are out to rob us, and we must treat them as robbers.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.