How did the little girl live? She looks like she‘s about to be hung by whatever is around her neck.

Well that was depressing.

>A woman and a girl fall from a collapsing fire escape

FTFY

That woman is the child’s godmother and she did all the dying for the family here. Baby landed on Gommie and survived the day

Ooof that's so sad. What I'm getting from this is that even 50 years ago Boston was famous for not maintaining things.

The building was on fire and unsafe thanks to the slumlord who owned it. They were seconds from being rescued when the fire escape collapsed.

>The tillerman of the first fire engine to arrive at the scene, Robert O'Neill, asked 19-year-old Bryant to lift her two-year-old goddaughter Jones to him on the roof, but Bryant was unable to do so and O'Neill jumped down to help before the ladder could reach them. O'Neill had one arm around Bryant and one hand on a rung of the ladder when the fire escape collapsed. O'Neil managed to hang by one hand and was rescued, but Bryant and Jones fell approximately 50 feet (15 meters). Bryant sustained multiple head and body injuries and died hours later. Jones survived the fall as she had landed on Bryant, softening the impact.[2] A helicopter pilot, Joe Green, who provided traffic reports and landed on a nearby roof, reportedly offered to pick up Bryant and Jones, but got no response from the firefighter.[4]

>Police obtained an arrest warrant for the building's owner, Fred Durham, for trash fires behind the building.[4] A police complaint charged Durham with keeping an unlicensed lodging house.[4] Three trash fires behind the building were reported in the weeks preceding the accident.[4]

-wiki

Imagine a rooming house on Marlborough Street. Not unusual in the 1970s when the South End and Charlestown were still full of rooming houses, even some in Back Bay. Are there any rooming houses left anywhere? All these buildings are now private houses again or expensive condos. No wonder people are out in the street; the rooming house at $15 / week for room with hotplate and bathroom down the hall is an extinct species.

Bostonian here. Yes in the 40s to late 90s the South End was mostly single room occupancy, inhabited by grizzled bachelors and lonely spinsters and widows, and a slew of drunks and druggies who spent their day trudging from scutwork job to liquor store to drunken stupor. But the neighborhood wasn’t built for them but for the upper working class of Boston. Cycles, everything cycles from new to used to used for something else. People who performatively despair of conditions should know this.

Yes-- but in the South End, considerably earlier than the 1940s. Here's a description from the 1906 publication, the Lodging House Problem in Boston.

"Every effort was made to make the district attractive. The houses were extremely well built for the period and no expense seems to have been spared to make them elegant, and in many instances even luxurious. Provision was made for parks, and some of the prettiest places in Boston to-day are the little parks and "squares" of the South End lodging house district. Especially may be mentioned West Chester Park, Worcester Square, and Union Park. For almost a quarter of a century liveried coachmen and white-capped nursemaids airing their charges were a common sight on Tremont Street and other thoroughfares, while the cross streets were gay with the voices of children. The South End, then, was once a city of private homes; now it is a wilderness of factories, tenements and lodging houses. Fully five sixths of the old residences are now rooming houses."

The writer says that as Back Bay was filled in, South End people began building houses there. Wealthy families trickled out of the South End gradually in the 1870s then got out like rats through the '80s. By 1890 the movement was finished and the South End was predominantly lodging houses.

As singalong says.