Jim Tasker- Dover Street Slums

Dover Street is a noisy thoroughfare cut through a South End slum.

Turn down any street in the slums, at random, and call it by whatever name you please, you will observe there the same fashions of life, death, and endurance. Every one of those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged humanity, and it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of soapsuds to clean it out.

Dover Street is the heart of the South End ghetto. Its multitudinous population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters and the side streets, pushing in and out all day long, and half the night besides. Rarely as this neighborhood is caught asleep, even more rarely is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. For although the tenements may be scrubbed to their remotest corners, on this one occasion, the cleansing stops at the curbstone. A great deal of the filthy rubbish accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often through the windows.

The City Fathers provide soap and water for the slums, in the form of excellent schools and branch libraries. There are no parks, and almost no playgrounds. And there they stop: at the curbstone of the people's life.