The following 1910 article, (cut down for space) was written for Technical World Magazine. It is about New York. But as I've explained elsewhere on the Tighsolas website, Montreal's slums at the time were second to none in the Western World when it comes to squalor. In fact,  one area, (St Henri) had the highest infant mortality in the West. According to "The Anatomy of Poverty," by Terry Copp, 1974, one of the rare books describing Montreal's 1910 working class, the situation was so bad,  the city  had to pass a law making windowless rooms illegal.  Both Marion and Flora taught in schools serving these slums, St. Henri and Griffintown. Tighsolas, the name of their home in Richmond, means "House of Light" in Gaelic. Ironic, no? The house did have lots and lots of windows! Click here to read about Montreal tenements and 1912, Child Welfare Exhibit.

Bailey Millard

"Let in the light," is the slogan of men and women engaged in tenement house reform in New York.  It is hard to believe, but nevertheless a fact, that on February 13, 1908, there were in that city 101, 277 absolutely windowless rooms, most of them bedrooms inhabited by the poorer classes, those who pay rent of 3 to 16 dollars a month. Because of the strenuous efforts of the tenement house committee, the number of such rooms has been reduced to 90,000.

Think of it, you dwellers in spacious suburban villas, ninety thousand rooms without any sunlight, whatsoever, save that which enters by the door.  Some of these ninety thousand rooms are in cellars, some in attics, and some are scattered about on intermediate floors, according to the fearful and wonderful designs of that most hopeless of all human habitations, the dumb-bell or double decked tenement house.

Most hopeless? Yes, because the man who lives in a cave can at least enjoy privacy and silence and air that is not contaminated by the exhalations and nuisances of his fellows; the man who lives in a tent can pull back the flap and get fresh air. To the majority of tenement dwellers, fresh air is scarcely anything but a myth.

We are wont to think of London as a city were miserable millions are crowded into uncouth and unsanitary quarters, but London's greatest density of population is less than six hundred to an acre, while in New York there are blocks and blocks where the density is one thousand to fifteen hundred.

With all the efforts to reform the New York tenements and to let in the light, the death rate in some of the more congested blocks is over one-half higher than that of the city as a whole…. A cellar bedroom only five by ten feet in size, occupied by two factory workers, and man and his wife, was found on Lexington Avenue. The only strong light  that ever entered the room was that of the flashlight of the photographer who took the picture of this underground kennel….but it is just as dark and almost as unsanitary in some of the upstairs rooms of the tenements. The halls in all the houses are more or less dark, even during the brightest part of the day. ..