Once, when I was taking pictures about Hell's Kitchen, I was
confronted by a wild-looking man with a club, who required me to
subscribe to a general condemnation of reporters as "hardly fit to
be flayed alive," before he would let me go; the which I did with
a right good will, though with somewhat of a mental reservation in
favor of my rivals in Mulberry Street, who just then stood in need
of special correction.
What with one thing and another, and in spite of all obstacles, I
got my pictures, and put some of them to practical use at once. I
recall a midnight expedition to the Mulberry Bend with the sanitary
police that had turned up a couple of characteristic cases of
overcrowding. In one instance two rooms that should at most have
held four or five sleepers were found to contain fifteen, a week-old
baby among them. Most of them were lodgers and slept there for "five
cents a spot." There was no pretence of beds. When the report was
submitted to the Health Board the next day, it did not make much
of an impression--these things rarely do, put in mere words--until
my negatives, still dripping from the dark-room, came to reenforce
them.
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