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Y2K a breeze compared to life in 1900 when our city had no 'h'
Friday, December 31, 1999 By Diana Nelson Jones, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Let's say the nervous Nellies don't know the half of it and we actually plummet 100 years back down the timeline after midnight.
The inconveniences we anticipate from the Y2K bug would pale in comparison to a time when the average life span was dragged down to 46 years because so many died in childhood; when 97 percent of laborers, without unions, worked long hours for little pay in often dangerous conditions; when human and animal waste was mixed with drinking water; and when the whole family shared the bath water in a wash tub.
Those of us who worry that our next light bill might be due 100 years ago should bear this in mind: Few homes in 1900 were even wired.
It might be worth a quick trip back to glimpse a 1900 that really would instill fear -- Pittsburgh without its 'h,' where mills emptied wastewater into open drains along neighborhood streets, where doctors prescribed soda water to palliate hunger, where in boarding houses, a day-shift man climbed into the bed a night-shift man had just vacated.
If you decide to come along, bring some bottled water: Pittsburg 1900 is Typhoid Central.
It lies filthy under an oppressive gray sky, this modern Pittsburg of 321,616 people. In a nation of 76 million, it has assembled so quickly in recent decades that it can't count the children who should be in school. It hasn't even tried.
The foreign-born and their children outnumber everyone else. Fifteen thousand people will arrive from Europe this year. Next year, too. And the next, and the next.
They may have read an immigrant guidebook that advised, "Forget your customs and your ideals. Select a goal and pursue it with all your might. You will experience a bad time, but sooner or later you will achieve your goal. If you are neglectful, beware the wheel of fortune turns fast."
In November, President McKinley would win re-election on the slogan, "The dinner pail is full." America was emerging as a nation of great opportunity. People all over the world abandoned dire futures in old countries, often facing persecution or desperate poverty. Here, expectations flourished. Even the most underpaid immigrant was doing better than he ever hoped to do, and some could even send money home to those who stayed behind.
But to we time-travelers from 1999, the prosperity of 1900 is relative. We arrive to this city of our past in shock.
Most people live packed together like Pringles in a can, and they're all working, working, working, even many of the children. The lowest wage goes to the Slav, who underbids his competitors for a daily wage of 13 1/2 cents -- the cost of a dozen eggs.
Across the nation, reformers have begun championing the rights of the exploited and demanding government oversight of industry. In league with muckraking journalists, they will prompt the writing of many federal regulations, providing for such things as inspections of meat and housing.
Pittsburg, in its shroud of filth, remains largely insulated from these pressures.
In the Jan. 6, 1900, edition of The Bulletin, a homespun Pittsburg weekly, a columnist known as The Rambler writes of longing for the day "of full emancipation from the grimy hand of the tyrant Carbon, [for the day when] the sun will shine as it does in every city."
It's not just the air that's foul.
Pittsburg leads every other city by more than double in the number of typhoid cases and typhoid deaths. A corrupt city government greets every reformist push for water filtration with a harder push against.
Even as late as 1909, when the city had begun to clean its drinking water, one doctor reported that typhoid was striking half of all the young foreign-born within two years of their arrival.
In 1900, official Pittsburg has no plans for urban progress. It is not troubled by the needs of the poor or the laborer. For every man who fails, another stands ready to take his job. The city is not thinking about playgrounds. Children play in the streets. At the new year, some skate on the rivers.
People in South Side row houses lean their elbows on the sills of open windows, their mouths curved down by gravity. Sooty water trickles along the dirt street beside a bare-footed boy who pushes a toy wheel barrow. In the background, spindly-legged kids sit on their haunches over an object of curiosity, their hair sticking out from under Old World caps.
When a father dies, a mother may have to beg for money to keep the family together, or go to work in a cracker factory for $2.50 a week. There is no public agency to help her. Her neighbors may be benevolent but unable. If she were a man with a vote, she might go to the ward boss for a favor. She might have to try anyway, were it not for the Salvation Army.
A log of complaints against the police brims with reports of drunkenness and sleeping on duty. Sometimes, an officer is fined.
The Bulletin carries announcements of the rich off on steamer holidays and of college sons and daughters back home on break. From the wedding announcements, readers can picture departing carriages rattling over the cobblestones trailing tin cans and tea kettles.
A ticket to a Pirates game at Exposition Park in Allegheny is 50 cents, but alas! we're visiting in winter. Besides, vaudeville is the real national pastime, appealing to an expanse of cultures with something for everyone -- singers, dancers, comic cross-dressers, misshapen people, slapstick antics, daredevils, stunts and ethnic and racial humor. Movies are a thing of the future.
Days of disease
Amid the noise and clamor of a city on the rise, an old Scotland-born man awakens to a bitterly cold Jan. 1 in McKeesport. Robert Cornell has been tending his bedridden wife Martha for going on two years and reports in his leather-bound journal "a very quiet New Year."
His book of days bears methodical recitations of an anxious life.
Day after day, he writes, "I staid home to take care of her."
The men at the mines he once supervised no longer expect him to report, but every day in his journal, he attends to his work in spirit, fretting about time lost for want of rail cars, chronicling the tonnage of coal run and the level of the rivers.
He alters little his daily course and offers so few personal notes, his entry of Jan. 30 nearly serves as a reader's reward: "This is my birthday. I am 78 years old."
After two years of restlessness, unpleasantness and pain, Martha dies on Nov. 2. If the doctor who has appeared occasionally in the journal names Martha's ailment, Cornell does not record it.
Pneumonia and influenza lead the day as causes of death, and people still worry about the bubonic plague, which breaks out in San Francisco later in the year.
A leading plague of 1999 was unusual in 1900. In October of that year, a friend of Robert McClelland, a physician in Pittsburgh, writes to him of her mother's passing: "They call it cancer."
McClelland practiced homeopathic medicine and ordered supplies from the Homeopathic Pharmacy on Smithfield Street, Downtown. He and his family -- his brother James, also a physician, and James' family -- lived at what was the family home for more than a century. The last McClelland died in 1982, and the house at Fifth and Wilkins, Shadyside, is now the Sunnyledge Boutique Hotel.
The McClellands show another face of 1900 Pittsburg. The doctors paid $5 annual dues to the American Institute of Homeopathy and a whopping $41.75 every three months to rent a phone exchange. One receipt shows they spent $3.50 for a case of Moerleins beer. Even with the dollar-off rebate for returned bottles, $2.50 was a weekly wage for many.
The family bought several kinds of meat nearly every day, and, at the end of the month, the grocer would send them the long, handwritten list of their purchases. Store credit was common, but such a long list was not.
In 1900 and the first days of the 20th century, the middle class was nascent, decades from claiming the culture and sensibilities we know as America today. It would be the most swiftly transforming century ever, ending tomorrow, unless you're pesky about it really starting at '01. But from the perspective of our little jaunt through time, it looks like a pretty long road.
If we don't get back to the present soon, one of us will have to get up in the morning and stoke the coal stove.
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