Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/687

 A MODEL MUNICIPAL DEPARTMENT 663

even more carefully inspected, and would fill a long-felt want. The municipal baths and laundries of Glasgow 1 have been an inestimable boon to the tenement dwellers of that city, and even if the less efficient civil-service system of Nevv York rendered their financial success more doubtful in this country, they would be of incalculable benefit to the city's poor.

As for municipal markets, the present administration has been so successful in compelling the owners of private markets and abattoirs to put these in first-class sanitary condition that there would seem to be much less need for city ownership and control.

Those who were responsible for the organization and methods of the new Tenement House Department in New York city lay much emphasis on what they consider a superior system for the investigation of citizens' complaints to that practiced by the Department of Health. Says Mr. Lawrence Veiller, the first deputy commissioner of the new department:

In the past, such complaints in the Health Department were given directly to the inspector, who would take the original paper out with him in the field, and have it in his possession when he went to investigate the cause of the complaint at the tenement house. The result was that the housekeeper, the owner, or the janitor, would see it, so that it became the universal practice for landlords to dispossess any tenant who complained to the Health Department of unsanitary conditions. The effect of this was to discourage tenants from complaining when unsanitary conditions existed, and, therefore, resulted in the increase and growth of such conditions. 2

The Tenement House Department has sought to avoid these alleged defects in the methods of the Board of Health. As soon as a citizen's complaint is received, it is given a serial number, entered in the complaint book of the department, and a tran- script of the complaint made in typewriting and handed to the inspector, with the name of the original complainant omitted. This card copy the inspector takes with him to the field, makes his investigation, and writes his report in ink at the time upon the card. Then he returns the card to the office the next day, and if there is cause for the complaint, he so states, and files a violation. The complaint clerks now make out an appropriate

1 SHAW, op. cit., pp. 108-10.

3 Engineering Review, April, 1898, pp. 2, 3.