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People who are interested in the comfort of the poor of New York are very glad to know that some dreadful rear tenement houses in Mott Street are to be taken away by order of the Board of Health.

We all read about tenement houses, and we all feel sorry that many of the houses for the poor to live in are not as comfortably built as they might be.

Very few of us know the discomforts that the poor have to endure, who are obliged to live in the old, badly planned tenement-houses.

Poor people must live near their work, because they cannot afford to pay car-fares back and forth every day.  So the tenement-houses are generally built in neighborhoods where the work is being done, and people have to take them clean or dirty, well or badly built, because they must make their home in that neighborhood.

In some of the older and poorer tenements, many families live on the same floor; they are crowded together in the most dreadful manner, and instead of having plenty of light, air, and water to help make them endurable, they have little or none of any of these necessary things.

In these houses the want of water is one of the greatest evils.  Instead of giving each tenement a nice sink, and a water-boiler at the back of the stove, so that people can have hot and cold water all the time, there is no water put into any of the rooms.

Outside on the landing there is water, and a rough sink, which the tenants of each floor use in common.  They have to go into the hall to fetch every drop of water they use, and this is the only place they have to empty the dirty water away.

In some houses the sinks are not on every floor, and in these, the poor women have to drag their heavy buckets of water up and down the stairs.

The tenements are not heated.  Each tenant has to keep his own rooms warm.

Every drop of warm water they need for cooking or washing has first to be boiled over the stove, and so the poor are forced to use a great deal more coal than more well-to-do people need.

It is not because they don’t pay the landlords enough rent that the poor have no comforts in their homes.  So many families can be packed into one floor, that landlords find tenement-houses pay them extremely well.

Many of the tenement-houses have been allowed to get so dilapidated, that the Board of Health has taken the matter in hand, and has been trying to make the landlord have them properly drained, and cleaned, and repaired.

It came to the knowledge of this board that there were some rear tenements in Mott Street, which were in a frightful condition.

They had been built at the back of some houses fronting on Mott Street—­in fact, they had been put in the little spot of ground that had been the yard belonging to the front houses.

They came up so close to the front buildings that, by stretching out your arms, you could almost touch the front wall of one house and the back wall of the other.  The actual distance apart was a little over seven feet.