"In the Fourth ward, the tenant-house population is crowded at the
rate of two hundred and ninety thousand inhabitants to the square mile.
Such packing was probably never equaled in any other city. Were the
buildings occupied by these miserable creatures removed, and the people
placed by each other, there would be but one and two ninths of a square
yard for each, and this unparalleled packing is _increasing_. Two
hundred and twenty-four families in the ward live below the sidewalk,
many of them _below high-water mark_. Often in very high tide they are
driven from their cellars or lie in bed until the tide ebbs. Not one
half of the houses have any drain or connection with the sewer. The
liquid refuse is emptied on the sidewalk or into the street, giving
forth sickening exhalations, and uniting its fetid streams with others
from similar sources. There are more than four hundred families in
this ward whose homes can only be reached by wading through a disgusting
deposit of filthy refuse. 'In one tenant-house one hundred and forty-six
were sick with small-pox, typhus fever, scarlatina, measles, marasmus,
phthisis pulmonalis, dysentery, and chronic diarrhea.
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