The Evening World

EXTRA.
2 O'CLOCK.
WEEKS OF NEGLECT.

As a Result Columbia Street Is in a Deplorable Condition.

Gutters Full of Mud and the Roadway Littered with Rubbish.

Great Muck Heaps Garnished with Rotting Vegetables.

The Department Systematically Ignores These Thickly Populated Districts, and Why?

Diogenes, lantern in hand, groped about the streets of ancient Athens, vainly searching for an honest man.

Father Knickerbocker, with the aid of the modern electric light and the best pair of magnifying spectacles in America, might encounter equal difficulty in finding a clean street in what is proudly styled the "Empire City of the Western World."

Columbia might blush in crimson shame at one glance at the street that bears her name.

It runs half a mile, from Grand to Houston street, and though it is not a street thronged and dirtied by the traffic that passes through the city, it is one of the most disgraceful exhibits made by the Anti-Street-Cleaning Department of the City of New York.

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IN FRONT OF 260 RIVINGTON.

Coming down the street from Houston street, the wayfarer's nostrils are assailed by ten thousand sickening odors from garbage, heaped and scattered from curb to curb. His eyes are annoyed by the presence there on the narrow pavement of discarded tinware, broken beds, old clothes, broken boxes and other bric-a-brac of an offensive sort.

S. Friener and his good wife, standing before their door at 109, gazed ruefully up and down the street.

"I was just saying to my wife," said Friener, as an Evening World "investigator" approached, "that it would be nice for us to live away uptown in One Hundred and Third or One Hundred and Fourth street, where I was yesterday. It was so sweet and clean up there. We sweep up every day before our house, and many of our neighbors do, but the street-cleaners seldom trouble themselves about Columbia street. We are all too poor and too politically powerless.

"Count for yourself. Before these three houses alone are three old shoes, an old hat, two tin pans, a basin of garbage and ashes, barrel hoops, a bustle-bag and a bushel of nasty black mud, besides the stagnant, slimy water that half fills the mud-gutters, in spite of our efforts to keep it swept out."

The pool in the gutter ran clear to Stanton street, No. 99, and J. Lee, laundryman at No. 105, declared that he had been half-sick all Summer long, and believed that it was due to the filth in the street.

S. Weltman, grocer at No. 31, was vehement in his denunciation of the trick of the Street-Cleaning Department of sending sweepers to waste their time heaping up the accumulations of muck to lie on the street for weeks—for no carts ever came to remove it, he said.

There was a particularly bad section opposite Nos. 73, 75, 75½ and 77, and S. Klein, shoe dealer at No. 75, said:

AT 97 COLUMBIA STREET.

"I have been talking with my neighbors and we are going to complain to the Board of Health. We sweep the filth out of the mud-gutter, but it is never taken away. The cleaners have not been on this block in three weeks, and previous to their last visit there was a stretch of six weeks of neglect."

Joseph Engel, of No. 75½, assented to this and added:

"Great Scott! I can't remember when they were here last. When they do come it is only a farce—a dismal farce for us, who live or do business here.

"The garbage men come nearly every day, but they never bother about what runs over the barrel and upon the sidewalk. They let it rip, and pass on with a high and mighty air, as if they couldn't see it.

"Look at my sidewalk! I sweep it twice a day, but the children and others track on it from the filthy road, and it looks now as if it hadn't been swept in a month, though I polished it clean an hour ago."

Scattered sheet-iron pans, buckets and coal-scuttles. The gutter was full of mud and water, garbage and rubbish.

Joe Van Steenburgh, tobacconist at No. 69, declared that the Department never cleaned the street.

"They sweep the dirt in heaps once every week or ten days, but never take it away, and that's the way they squander away the people's money without producing an iota of good. A rain now and then cleanses Columbia street a little, but it smells bad enough to knock a man down most of the time.

IN FRONT OF 109 COLUMBIA.

"A dead cat lay right over the way in a gutter for four days, and until somebody paid a boy a dime to carry it away."

There was a muck heap two feet high in front of No. 27 and another in front of No. 28. They were made by the sweepers two weeks before, and no carts had yet come to take them away."

At the china store, No. 39, a lady said that it was exactly fourteen days since the sweepers visited the street. The garbage-men had again and again passed those heaps, and had not even deigned a glance at them, though their carts were not always full.

Looking west from Columbia street towards Sheriff street, the view in Stanton street is anything but beautiful. The pavement is stuccoed and studded with decaying vegetables, scattered rubbish of all sorts and general street dirt. The parallel block in Rivington street is even worse.

Morganroth, the dry-goods man at Rivington and Columbia streets, said lugubriously:

"The street-sweepers don't come here every day. I am only too sorry that my business compels me to stay down in this section of the city."

And so on every side the reporters hear the common expression, "We have the dirtiest block in the city. Our street is neglected that some other section of the city may be polished like a marble floor," and the reporters are still industriously searching for that highly famed but mythical section of the city streets that is kept clean by the Street-Cleaning Department.