The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds. Not without opposition obstacles were thrown in the way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added expense to diminish their income from the rent on the other side by the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there. The saw had a job all that summer by early fall nearly all the orders had been carried out.
HALF LIFE 2 AWAKENING WINDOWS
In that year the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilationfor little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways. The dark bedroom fell under the ban first. A thorough canvass of the tenements had been begun already in the previous year but the cholera first, and next a scourge of small-pox, delayed the work, while emphasizing the need of it, so that it was 1869 before it got fairly under way and began to tell.
A citizens movement resulted in the organization of a Board of Health and the adoption of the Tenement-House Act of 1867, the first step toward remedial legislation. T HE dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowledge of the harvest field that awaited the plague in New Yorks slums, pricked the conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the war.