Weller, Charles Frederick. Neglected neighbors :stories of life in the alleys, tenements and shanties of the national capital. Philadelphia : J.C. Winston, 1909. Is available online at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/3370011. It does the whole city. However the author appears to be concerned solely with white occupants of slum housing.
2 thoughts on “1909 book on alleys and crappy DC housing”
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This book is great! I love reading old urban books. It seems that he was concerned about showing that people tended to think it was it was just the coloreds that lived in the alleys, and he was trying to show that the # of whites living in alleys actually increased since the last census. It seems he was trying to enlighten and raise awareness to people who had no idea what was going on in the alleys
I was just looking at TOC and noticed a mention of whites and didn’t see a mention of negroes or ‘colored’.
Looking over the cataloge of slum housing books there was a lot of ‘awareness’ writing around the turn of the century. The annoying thing is even in the middle of the century in the 50s there are still homes in Shaw with no indoor plumbing. Now, it seems if the house has no electricity or water it’s just some nutter, or a vacant shell.