The features Eliot identifies probably point to a somewhat run-down
area, but not by the wildest stretch of the imagination could those
features point to a slum -- at least for anyone who has ever seen the
conditions of an actual slum. If he were describing a slum the smells
would be of garbage, sour milk, excrement. As late as the 1940s there
were residential areas in cities that had no indoor toilests. I picked
this up by an article in some magazine, Colliers perhaps, on a young man
who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Italy, and it mentioned
that the tenement in which he grew up in Pittsburgh had an outdoor
toilet in the back yard.

Moreover, almost _all_ neighborhoods, except the very wealthiest, tend
to have a mixture of residents, so even in a real slum there would be a
scattering of apartments where someone had an income that allowed steaks
once in a while. Housing in u.s. cities has always been so abominable
that there would be people with a decent job who _still_ couldn't afford
decent housing.

Carrol