1910) pp. 281-309.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]
CHAPTER XIII
PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS
One of the striking features of our neighborhood twenty years
ago, and one to which we never became reconciled, was the
presence of huge wooden garbage boxes fastened to the street
pavement in which the undisturbed refuse accumulated day by day.
The system of garbage collecting was inadequate throughout the
city but it became the greatest menace in a ward such as ours,
where the normal amount of waste was much increased by the
decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek
fruit peddlers, and by the residuum left over from the piles of
filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought
to the homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and washing.
The children of our neighborhood twenty years ago played their
games in and around these huge garbage boxes. They were the
first objects that the toddling child learned to climb; their
bulk afforded a barricade and their contents provided missiles in
all the battles of the older boys; and finally they became the
seats upon which absorbed lovers held enchanted converse. We are
obliged to remember that all children eat everything which they
find and that odors have a curious and intimate power of
entwining themselves into our tenderest memories, before even the
residents of Hull-House can understand their own early enthusiasm
for the removal of these boxes and the establishment of a better
system of refuse collection.
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