ABSTRACT
These excerpts draw mainly from Chapter 15, which describes the social environment of the African American community, with special attention to their housing conditions and social class stratification. The analysis of their overcrowded and deplorable housing conditions was reminiscent of the depictions of New York City tenement housing by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives(1890). Just as in New York, Philadelphia tenement buildings were often crowded into rear lots and back yards, and ill-equipped with fresh water and toilet facilities. Criminality and prostitution, it was observed, congregated in rear lot housing. The overcrowding was partly an outcome of the comparatively high rents, and high rent-to-income ratios endured by African Americans in the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood that gave them relative proximity to central-city employment opportunities in the homes, hotels, and businesses of the white community. There was considerable subletting of rooms; in some rooming houses the rents were quite predatory for the quality of housing and plumbing. Black segregation in the Seventh Ward was enforced by racial discrimination in banking and the wider housing market. African Americans also gravitated to the neighborhood because of the historic churches.
