Latest / How the Other Half Lives / How the Other Half Lives

Transcript

How the Other Half Lives · How the Other Half Lives

• 0:00
  Preface. The belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to the
• 0:06
  community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be,
• 0:11
  so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work,
• 0:16
  made me begin this book with the result before him. The reader can
• 0:21
  judge for himself now whether or not I was right, right or wrong.
• 0:27
  The many and exacting duties of a newspaper man's life would hardly have allowed me
• 0:32
  to bring it to an end. But for the frequent friendly lifts given me
• 0:37
  by willing hands to the President of the Board of Health, mister Charles G.
• 0:42
  Wilson, and to Chief Inspector Burns of the Police Force, I am
• 0:47
  indebted for much kindness. The patient friendship of doctor Roger S. Tracy,
• 0:53
  the Registrar of vital Statistics, has done for me what I never could have
• 0:58
  done for myself, for I know nothing of tables, statistics, and percentages,
• 1:04
  while there is nothing about them that he does not know. Most of
• 1:07
  all I owe in this, as in all things else, to the womanly
• 1:11
  sympathy and the loving companionship of my dear wife, ever, my chief helper,
• 1:18
  my wisest Counselor and my gentlest critic, and a preface How the Other
• 1:25
  Half Lives by Jacob Ries, Chapter one, Genesis of the Tenement, The
• 1:34
  first tenement New York knew, bore the mark of Cain from its birth,
• 1:38
  though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered. It was the quote rear
• 1:44
  house end quote infamous ever after in our city's history. There had been tenant
• 1:51
  houses before, but they were not built for the purpose. Nothing would probably
• 1:55
  have shocked their original owners more than the idea of their harboring up promiscuous crowd,
• 2:00
  For they were the decorous homes of the old knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy
• 2:07
  of Manhattan in the early days. It was the stir and bustle of trade,
• 2:13
  together with the tremendous emigration that followed upon the War of eighteen twelve,
• 2:16
  that dislodged them. In thirty five years, the city of less than a
• 2:22
  hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom holmes had to
• 2:27
  be found within the memory of men not yet in their prime. Washington had
• 2:32
  moved from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be
• 2:36
  easily reached Now the old residents followed his example, but they moved in a
• 2:40
  different direction, and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings in the once
• 2:46
  fashionable streets along the East River front fell into the hands of real estate agents
• 2:53
  and boarding house keepers. And here says the report to the Legislature of eighteen
• 2:58
  fifty seven, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm quote in its beginning,
• 3:06
  the tenant house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor,
• 3:10
  whose small earnings limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops, stores,
• 3:16
  or about the warehouses and thoroughfares render a near residence of much importance end quote.
• 3:24
  Not for long, however, as business increased and the city grew with
• 3:29
  rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors,
• 3:36
  and the stamp was set upon. The old houses suddenly become valuable,
• 3:40
  which the best thought and effort of a later age have vainly struggled to efface.
• 3:46
  Their large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones without regard to light or
• 3:54
  ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or heighten from
• 4:00
  the street, and They soon became filled from cellar to garret, with a
• 4:03
  class of tenantry, living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident
• 4:10
  inhabits, degraded and squalid as beggary itself end quote. It was thus the
• 4:16
  dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities came into the world. It was destined
• 4:24
  to survive the old houses in their new role, says the old report,
• 4:29
  eloquent in its indignant denunciation of quote evils more destructive than wars end quote quote.
• 4:38
  They were not intended to last. Rents were fixed high enough to cover
• 4:43
  damage and abuse from this class, from whom nothing was expected, and the
• 4:46
  most was made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order cleanliness were never
• 4:53
  dreamed of in connection with the tenant house system as it spread its localities from
• 4:58
  year to year, while rec less slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance
• 5:02
  were left to work out their invariable results until the entire premises reached the level
• 5:09
  of tenantele's dilapidation, containing but sheltering, not the miserable hordes that crowded beneath
• 5:15
  moldering water, rotted roofs, or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars end
• 5:21
  quote. Yet so illogical is human greed that at a later day, when
• 5:28
  called to account quote, the proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants
• 5:33
  as an excuse for the condition of their property, utterly losing sight of the
• 5:39
  fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil,
• 5:44
  and that for this they themselves were alone responsible. End quote. Still,
• 5:49
  the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in the old garden,
• 5:54
  where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages, a rear house
• 5:59
  was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first presently was carried
• 6:04
  up another story and another Where two families had lived ten moved in. The
• 6:12
  front house followed suit. If the brick walls were strong enough. The question
• 6:16
  was not always asked, judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness that the
• 6:23
  old buildings were quote often carried up to a great height without regard to the
• 6:28
  strength of the foundation walls end quote. It was rent the owner was after
• 6:34
  nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort of the
• 6:39
  tenants. The garden gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges. The shell
• 6:46
  paved walk had become an alley. What the rear house had left of the
• 6:49
  garden a quote court end quote Plenty such are yet to be found in the
• 6:56
  fourth ward with here and there one of the original reared tenements. Worse was
• 7:02
  to follow. It was quote soon perceived by a state owners and agents of
• 7:08
  property that a greater percentage of profits could be realized by the conversion of houses
• 7:14
  and blocks into barracks and dividing their space into smaller proportions capable of containing human
• 7:20
  life within four walls. Blocks were rented of real estate owners, or purchased
• 7:27
  on time, or taken in charge at a percentage, and held for underletting.
• 7:33
  With the appearance of the middleman wholly irresponsible and utterly reckless and unrestrained,
• 7:41
  began the era of tenement building, which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court,
• 7:46
  where, in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean words, the
• 7:50
  tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety five to the thousand of
• 7:56
  population, which forced the general mortality of the city up from one in forty
• 8:01
  one point eight three and eighteen fifteen to one in twenty seven point thirty three
• 8:07
  and eighteen fifty five, a year of unusual freedom from epidemic disease, and
• 8:13
  which wrung from the early organizers of the Health Department this whale quote. There
• 8:20
  are numerous examples of tenement houses in which are lodged several hundred people that have
• 8:24
  a pro rata allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards upon the
• 8:31
  city lot, courtyards and all included end quote. The tenement house population had
• 8:39
  swelled to half a million souls by that time, and on the east side,
• 8:43
  in what is still the most densely populated district in all the world China
• 8:48
  not excluded, it was packed at the rate of two hundred ninety thousand to
• 8:52
  the square mile, a state of affairs wholly unexampled the utmost of other lands,
• 9:01
  and other days had never contrived to herd much more than half that number
• 9:05
  within the same space. The greatest crowding of Old London was at the rate
• 9:11
  of one hundred seventy five thousand, eight hundred sixteen swine, ros and gutters
• 9:16
  as their principal scavengers. Footnote. It was not until the winter of eighteen
• 9:24
  sixty seven that owners of swine were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at
• 9:28
  large in the built up portions of the city. End of footnote. The
• 9:35
  death of a child in a tenement was registered at the Bureau of Vital Statistics
• 9:39
  as quote plainly due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment end
• 9:46
  quote. And the senators who had come down from Albany to find out what
• 9:50
  was the matter with New York reported that there are annually cut off from the
• 9:56
  population by disease and death, enough human beings to people a city, and
• 10:03
  enough human labor to sustain it end quote. And yet experts had testified that,
• 10:11
  as compared with uptown, rents were from twenty five to thirty percent higher
• 10:16
  in the worst slums of the Lower Wards, with such accommodations as were enjoyed,
• 10:20
  for instance, by a quote family with borders end quote in Cedar Street
• 10:26
  who fed hogs in the cellar that contained eight or ten loads of manure.
• 10:31
  Or quote one room twelve by twelve with five families living in it, comprising
• 10:37
  twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds without partition
• 10:43
  screen chair, or table end quote. The rate of rent has been successfully
• 10:50
  maintained to the present day, though the hog at least has been eliminated.
• 10:56
  Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that
• 11:01
  is happily passed and may safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very
• 11:07
  recent instances of tenement house life that came under my notice. One was the
• 11:13
  burning of a rear house in Mott Street. From appearances, one of the
• 11:16
  original tenant houses that made their owners rich. The fire made homeless ten families
• 11:22
  who had paid an average of five dollars a month for their mean, little
• 11:26
  cubby holes. The owner himself told me that it was fully insured for eight
• 11:33
  hundred dollars, though it brought him in six hundred a year rent. He
• 11:37
  evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property. Another
• 11:45
  was the case of a hard working family of man and wife, young people
• 11:48
  from the old country, who took poison together and a Crosby Street tenement because
• 11:54
  they were quote tired end quote. There was no other explaination, and none
• 12:01
  was needed. When I stood in the room in which they had lived,
• 12:05
  it was in the attic, with sloping ceiling and a single window so far
• 12:09
  out on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all.
• 12:15
  With scarcely room enough to turn around in, they had been compelled to
• 12:18
  pay five dollars and a half a month in advance. There were four such
• 12:24
  rooms in that attic, and together they brought in as much as many a
• 12:28
  handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of Brooklyn. The third instance was that
• 12:33
  of a colored family of husband, wife and baby, and a wretched rear
• 12:37
  rookery in West third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for
• 12:45
  a single room on the top story, so small that I was unable to
• 12:48
  get a photograph of it. Even by placing the camera outside the open door,
• 12:54
  three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent. There
• 13:00
  was just one excuse for the early tenement house builders, and their successors may
• 13:05
  plead it with nearly as good right for what it is worth. Quote such
• 13:09
  says an official report is the lack of house room in the city. That
• 13:13
  any kind of tenement can be immediately crowded with lodgers if there is space offered.
• 13:22
  Thousands were living in cellars. There were three hundred underground lodging houses in
• 13:28
  the city when the Health Department was organized. Some fifteen years before that,
• 13:33
  the old Baptist Church in Mulberry Street, just off Chatham Street had been sold
• 13:39
  and the rear half of the frame structure had been converted into tenements that,
• 13:43
  with their swarming population, became the scandal. Even of that reckless age,
• 13:50
  the wretched pile harbored no less than forty families, and the annual rate of
• 13:54
  deaths to the population was officially stated to be seventy five in one thousand.
• 14:01
  These tenements were an extreme type of very many, for the big barracks had
• 14:05
  by this time spread east and west and far up the island into the sparsely
• 14:11
  settled wards. Whether or not the title was clear to the land upon which
• 14:16
  they were built was of less account than that the rents were collected. If
• 14:20
  there were damages to pay, the tenant had to foot them. Cases were
• 14:26
  quote very frequent when property was in litigation and two or three different parties were
• 14:31
  collecting rents end quote. Of course, under such circumstances quote no repairs were
• 14:37
  ever made end quote. The climax had been reached the situation was summed up
• 14:46
  by the Society for the Improvement of the condition of the poor, and these
• 14:48
  words quote crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements, in filthy yards, dark
• 14:56
  damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables footnote converted into
• 15:03
  dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations of thousands of our
• 15:09
  fellow beings in this wealthy Christian city end quote. Footnote this quote unventilated and
• 15:20
  fever breeding structure end quote. The year after it was built was picked out
• 15:24
  by the Council of Hygiene, then just organized and presented to the Citizens Association
• 15:31
  of New York as a specimen. Quote multiple domicile quote in a desirable street,
• 15:37
  with the following comment quote, here are twelve living rooms and twenty one
• 15:41
  bedrooms, and only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the
• 15:46
  admission of light and air, accepting the family sitting and living room being utterly
• 15:52
  dark, close and unventilated. The living rooms are but ten by twelve feet,
• 15:58
  the bedrooms six and a half seven feet. End quote quote. A
• 16:03
  lot fifty by sixty contained twenty stables rented for dwellings at fifteen dollars a year
• 16:10
  each costed the whole six hundred dollars end quote end a footnote. Quote the
• 16:18
  city, says its historian, Missus Martha Lamb, commenting on the era of
• 16:25
  aqueduct building between eighteen thirty five and eighteen forty five. Quote was a general
• 16:30
  asylum for vagrance end quote young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such quote home
• 16:37
  and quote conditions overran the streets. Juvenile crime increased fearfully year by year.
• 16:45
  The Children's Aid Society and Kindred philanthropic organizations were yet unborn, but in the
• 16:52
  city directory was to be found the address of the quote American Society for the
• 16:57
  Promotion of Education in Africa end of Section one, Chapter two. The awakening
• 17:11
  the dread of advancing cholera with the guilty knowledge of the harvest field that awaited
• 17:15
  the plague in New York's slums, pricked the conscience of the community into action.
• 17:21
  Soon after the close of the war, a citizen's movement resulted in the
• 17:26
  organization of a Board of Health and the adoption of the Tenement House Act of
• 17:30
  eighteen sixty seven, the first step toward remedial legislation. A thorough canvas of
• 17:37
  the tenements had been begun already in the previous year, but the cholera first
• 17:42
  and next a scourge of smallpox, delayed the work while emphasizing the need of
• 17:48
  it, so that it was eighteen sixty nine before it got fairly under way
• 17:52
  and began to tell. The dark bedroom fell under the ban first. In
• 17:59
  that year, the board ordered the cutting of more than forty six thousand windows
• 18:03
  in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation, for little or no light was to
• 18:08
  be had from the dark hallways. Air shafts were unknown. The saw had
• 18:14
  a job all that summer. By early fall, nearly all the orders had
• 18:18
  been carried out, not without opposition. Obstacles were thrown in the way of
• 18:23
  the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw
• 18:27
  in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added expense to
• 18:33
  diminish their income from the rent. On the other side, by the tenants
• 18:37
  themselves, who had sunk after a generation of unavailing protest to the level of
• 18:42
  their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there. The tenements had
• 18:48
  bred their nemesis, a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their
• 18:53
  crowds, already at taxed the city heavily for the support of its jails and
• 18:59
  cheroses. The basis of opposition, curiously enough, was the same at both
• 19:04
  extremes. Owner and tenant alike considered official interference an infringement of personal rights and
• 19:11
  a hardship. It took long years of weary labor to make good the claim
• 19:17
  of the sunlight to such corners of the dens as it could reach at all.
• 19:22
  Not until five years after did the Department succeed at last in ousting the
• 19:26
  cave dwellers, enclosing some five hundred and fifty cellars south of Houston Street,
• 19:32
  many of them below tide water that had been used as living apartments, and
• 19:37
  many instances the police had to drag the tenants out by force. The work
• 19:42
  went on, but the need of it only grew with the effort. The
• 19:47
  sanitarians were following up an evil that grew faster than they went, Like a
• 19:52
  fire, it could only be headed off, not chased with success. Official
• 19:56
  reports read in the Churches and Ate teen seventy nine characterized the younger criminals as
• 20:03
  victims of low social conditions of life, and unhealthy, overcrowded lodgings brought up
• 20:08
  in an atmosphere of actual darkness, moral and physical. This after the saw
• 20:15
  had been busy in the dark corners ten years. If we could see the
• 20:19
  air breathed by these poor creatures in their tenements, set a well known physician,
• 20:25
  it would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters.
• 20:30
  Little improvement was apparent despite all that had been done. The new tenements that
• 20:34
  have been recently built have been usually as badly planned as the old, with
• 20:40
  dark and unhealthy rooms, often over wet cellars where extreme overcrowding is permitted,
• 20:47
  was the verdict of one authority. These are the houses that today perpetuate the
• 20:52
  worst traditions of the past, and they are counted by thousands. The Five
• 20:56
  Points had been cleansed as far as the immediate neighborhood was concerned, but the
• 21:02
  Mulberry Street bend was fast out doing it in foulness not a stone's throw away,
• 21:07
  and new centers of corruption were continually springing up and getting the upper hand
• 21:11
  whenever vigilance was relaxed for ever so short a time. It is one of
• 21:17
  the curses of the tenement house system, that the worst houses exercise a leveling
• 21:22
  influence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a school room
• 21:26
  will spoil the whole class. It is one of the ways the evil that
• 21:32
  was the result of forgetfulness of the poor, as the Council of Hygiene mildly
• 21:37
  put it, has of avenging itself. The determined effort to head it off
• 21:41
  by laying a strong hand upon the tenement builders that has been the chief business
• 21:47
  of the Health Board of recent years, dates from this period. The era
• 21:51
  of the air shaft has not solved the problem of housing the poor, but
• 21:56
  it has made good use of limited opportunities of the new houses. Sanitary law
• 22:02
  exercises full control, but the old remain. They cannot be summarily torn down,
• 22:07
  though in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. The outrageous overcrowding
• 22:15
  two remains. It is characteristic of the tenements poverty, their badge and typical
• 22:22
  condition invites compels it. All efforts to abate it result only in temporary relief.
• 22:30
  As long as they exist, it will exist with them, and the
• 22:33
  tenements will exist in New York forever. Today. What is a tenement?
• 22:40
  The law defines it as a house occupied by three or more families, living
• 22:45
  independently and doing their cooking on the premises, or by more than two families
• 22:51
  on a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the
• 22:55
  halls, stairways, yards, et cetera. That is the legal meaning,
• 23:00
  and includes flats and apartment houses with which we have nothing to do In its
• 23:04
  narrower sense. The typical tenement was thus described when last raigned before the Bar
• 23:10
  of Public Justice. It is generally a brick building from four to six stories
• 23:15
  high on the street, frequently with a store on the first floor, which,
• 23:19
  when used for the sale of liquor, has a side opening for the
• 23:23
  benefit of the inmates and to evade the Sunday law. Four families occupy each
• 23:30
  floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets used
• 23:34
  as bedrooms, with a living room twelve feet by ten The staircase is too
• 23:40
  often a dark well in the center of the house, and no direct through
• 23:44
  ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently
• 23:51
  the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories high,
• 23:55
  with two families on a floor. The picture is nearly as true today as
• 24:00
  ten years ago, and will be for a long time to come. The
• 24:04
  dim light admitted by the air shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tenements
• 24:11
  are still good property, and the poverty of the poor man his destruction a
• 24:17
  barrack downtown where he has to live because he is poor, brings them a
• 24:22
  third more rent than a decent flat house in Harlem. The statement once made
• 24:26
  a sensation that between seventy and eighty children had been found in one tenement.
• 24:32
  It no longer excites even passing attention. When the sanitary police report counting one
• 24:37
  hundred one adults and ninety one children in a Crosby Street house, one of
• 24:42
  twins built together the children in the other, if I am not mistaken,
• 24:48
  numbered eighty nine, a total of one hundred eighty for two tenements, or
• 24:52
  when a midnight inspection in Mulberry Street on earths one hundred and fifty lodgers sleeping
• 24:57
  on filthy floors and two buildings spite of brownstone trimmings, plate glass, and
• 25:03
  mosaic vegetable floors. The water does not rise in summer to the second story,
• 25:10
  while the beer flows unchecked to the all night picnics on the roof the
• 25:14
  saloon with the side door, and the landlord divide the prosperity of the place
• 25:18
  between them and the tenant. In sullen submission foots the bills, where are
• 25:25
  the tenements of today? Say? Rather, where are they not? In
• 25:30
  fifty years they have crept up from the fourth ward slums and the five points
• 25:33
  the whole length of the island, and have polluted the Annex district to the
• 25:37
  Westchester line, crowding all the lower wards wherever business leaves a foot of ground
• 25:44
  unclaimed. Strung along both rivers like ball and chain, tied to the foot
• 25:48
  of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent up multitudes,
• 25:55
  they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York. Hold
• 25:59
  them at their m in the day of mob rule and wrath. The bulletproof
• 26:03
  shutters, the stacks of hand grenades, and the gatling guns of the sub
• 26:07
  treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected.
• 26:14
  The tenements today are New York harboring three fourths of its population. When
• 26:19
  another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast
• 26:25
  army of workers held captive by poverty. The very name of home shall be
• 26:29
  as a bitter mockery. What will the harvest be? End of Section two,
• 26:37
  Chapter three, The mixed crowd. When once I asked the agent of
• 26:44
  a notorious fourth Ward alley how many people might be living in it, I
• 26:48
  was told one hundred and forty families, one hundred Irish, thirty eight Italian,
• 26:56
  and two that spoke the German tongue. Barring the agent herself, there
• 27:02
  was not a native born individual in the court. The answer was characteristic of
• 27:07
  the cosmopolitan character of Lower New York, very nearly so of the whole of
• 27:12
  it. Wherever it runs to alleys and courts, one may find for the
• 27:18
  asking an Italian, a German, a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian,
• 27:23
  Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony. Even the Arab who
• 27:30
  peddles Holy Earth from the battery as a direct importation from Jerusalem as his exclusive
• 27:37
  preserves at the lower end of Washington Street. The one thing you shall vainly
• 27:41
  ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community. There
• 27:48
  is none, certainly not among the tenements. Where have they gone? To
• 27:52
  the old inhabitants? I put the question to one who might fairly be presumed
• 27:59
  to be of the number, since I had found him sighing for the good
• 28:02
  old days, when the legend no Irish need apply was familiar in the advertising
• 28:08
  columns of the newspapers. He looked at me with a puzzled air. I
• 28:14
  don't know, he said, I wish I did. Some went to California
• 28:19
  in forty nine, some to the war and never came back. The rest,
• 28:25
  I expect have gone to heaven or somewhere. I don't see them round
• 28:29
  here. Whatever the merit of the good man's conjectures, his eyes did not
• 28:34
  deceive him. They are not here. In their place has come this queer
• 28:40
  conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements, ever striving and working like whisky and water in
• 28:45
  one glass, and with the like result final union and a prevailing taint of
• 28:52
  whisky. The once unwelcome Irishman has been followed in his turn by the Italian,
• 28:57
  the Russian Jew, and the Chinaman, and has himself taken a hand
• 29:03
  at opposition quite as bitter and quite as ineffectual against these later hoardes. Wherever
• 29:10
  these have gone. They have crowded him out, possessing the block, the
• 29:14
  street, the ward with their denser swarms. But the Irishman's revenge is complete.
• 29:21
  Victorious in defeat over his recent as over his more ancient foe, the
• 29:26
  one who opposed his coming no less than the one who drove him out,
• 29:30
  he dictates to both their politics, and, secure in possession of the offices,
• 29:37
  returns the native his greeting with interest. While collecting the rents of the
• 29:41
  Italian whose house he has bought with the profits of his saloon. As a
• 29:47
  landlord, he is picturesquely autocratic. An amusing instance of his methods came under
• 29:52
  my notice while writing these lines. An inspector of the health department found an
• 29:57
  Italian family paying a man with a Celtic name twenty five dollars a month for
• 30:03
  three small rooms and a ramshackle rear tenement, more than twice what they were
• 30:08
  worth, and expressed his astonishment to the tenant, an ignorant Sicilian laborer,
• 30:15
  He replied that he had once asked the landlord to reduce the rent, but
• 30:21
  he would not do it. Well, what did he say, asked the
• 30:26
  inspector. Damn a man he said, if you speak of that away to
• 30:33
  me, I fire you and your things in the STREETA and the frightened Italian
• 30:37
  paid the rent in justice to the Irish landlord. It must be said that,
• 30:42
  like an apt pupil, he was merely showing forth the result of the
• 30:47
  schooling he had received, re enacting in his own way the scheme of the
• 30:52
  tenements. It is only his frankness that shocks. The Irishman does not naturally
• 30:57
  take kindly to tenement life, though with characteristic versatility he adapts himself to his
• 31:03
  conditions at once. It does violence, nevertheless, to the best that is
• 31:08
  in him, and for that very reason, of all who come within its
• 31:12
  sphere, soonest corrupts him. The result is a sediment, the product of
• 31:18
  more than a generation in the city's slums, that, as distinguished from the
• 31:22
  large body of his class, justly ranks at the foot of tenement dwellers,
• 31:27
  the so called low Irish. It is not to be assumed, of course,
• 31:33
  that the whole body of the population living in the tenements of which New
• 31:37
  Yorkers are in the habit of speaking vaguely as the poor, or even the
• 31:41
  larger part of it, is to be classed as vicious or as poor in
• 31:45
  the sense of verging on beggary. New York's wage earners have no other place
• 31:52
  to live. More is the pity they are truly poor for having no better
• 31:56
  homes, waxing poorer and purse as the exorbitant rents to which they are tied,
• 32:01
  as ever was served to soil keep rising. The wonder is that they
• 32:07
  are not all corrupted and speedily by their surroundings, if, on the contrary,
• 32:14
  there be a steady working up, if not out of the sleugh The
• 32:17
  fact is a powerful argument for the optimists belief that the world is after all
• 32:22
  growing better, not worse, and would go far toward disarming apprehension. Right
• 32:29
  not for the steadier growth of the sediment of the slums and its constant menace
• 32:35
  such an impulse towards better things. There certainly is the German ragpicker of thirty
• 32:40
  years ago quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor is the thrifty
• 32:45
  tradesman or prosperous farmer of today. Footnote the sheriff's street colony of ragpickers,
• 32:54
  long since gone, is an instance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up
• 33:00
  money during years of hard work and squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a
• 33:05
  township in a western state, and the whole colony moved out there in a
• 33:09
  body. There need be no doubt about their thriving there end footnote. The
• 33:17
  Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit
• 33:23
  stands, while his black eyed boy monopolizes the bootblacking industry, in which a
• 33:29
  few years ago he was an intruder. The Irish hod carrier in the second
• 33:35
  generation has become a bricklayer, if not the alderman of his ward, while
• 33:39
  the Chinese coolie is an almost exclusive possession of the laundry business. The reason
• 33:45
  is obvious. The poorest emigrant comes here with the purpose and ambition to better
• 33:51
  himself, and given half a chance, might be reasonably expected to make the
• 33:55
  most of it. To the false plea that he prefer defers the squalid homes
• 34:00
  in which his kinder housed, there could be no better answer. The truth
• 34:06
  is his half chance has too long been wanting, and for the bad result
• 34:10
  he has been unjustly blamed. As immigration from east to west follows the latitude,
• 34:17
  so does the foreign influx in New York distribute itself along certain well defined
• 34:22
  lines that waver and break only under the stronger pressure of a more gregarious race
• 34:29
  or the encroachment of anexorable business. A feeling of dependence upon mutual effort natural
• 34:36
  to strangers in a strange land unacquainted with its language and customs sufficiently accounts for
• 34:43
  this. The Irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant, all pervading. He shares
• 34:51
  his lodging with perfect impartiality with the Italian, the Greek, and the Dutchman,
• 34:55
  yielding only to sheer force of numbers, and object equally to them all.
• 35:01
  A map of the city coloured to designate nationalities would show more stripes than
• 35:07
  on the skin of a zebra, and more colours than any rainbow. The
• 35:13
  city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the
• 35:16
  Irish prevailing in the west side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on
• 35:22
  the east side. But intermingled with these ground colours would be an odd variety
• 35:28
  of tents that would give the hole the appearance of an extraordinary crazy quilt.
• 35:32
  From down in the sixth ward upon the site of the old collect pond that
• 35:37
  in the days of the fathers, drained the hills which are no more.
• 35:42
  The red of the Italian would be seen forcing its way northward along the line
• 35:45
  of Mulberry Street to the quarter of the French Purple on Bleeker Street and south
• 35:51
  Fifth Avenue, to lose itself and reappear after a lapse of miles in the
• 35:57
  little Italy of Harlem. East of sec Aue, dashes of red, sharply
• 36:02
  defined would be seen strung through the annexed district northward to the city line.
• 36:09
  On the west side, the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa of
• 36:14
  Thompson Street, pushing the black of the Negro rapidly up down against querulous but
• 36:21
  unavailing protests, occupying his home, his church, his trade, and all
• 36:27
  with merciless impartiality. There is a church in Mulberry Street that has stood for
• 36:32
  two generations as a sort of milestone of these migrations. Built originally for the
• 36:38
  worship of stayed New Yorkers of the old Stock, it was engulfed by the
• 36:44
  colored tide when the draft riots drove the Negroes out of reach of Cherry Street
• 36:49
  in the five Points. Within the past decade, the advance wave of the
• 36:52
  Italian onset reached it, and to day the arms of United Italy adorn its
• 36:59
  front. The Negroes have made a stand at several points along Seventh and eighth
• 37:04
  Avenues, but their main body, still pursued by the Italian foe, is
• 37:09
  on the march yet, and the black mark will be found overshadowing to day
• 37:14
  many blocks on the east side, with one hundredth Street as the center,
• 37:20
  where colonies of them have settled recently, hardly less aggressive than the Italian,
• 37:25
  The Russian and Polish jew having overrun the district between Rivington and Division Streets east
• 37:32
  of the Bowery to the point of suffocation, is filling the tenements of the
• 37:37
  old Seventh ward to the river front, and disputing with the Italian every foot
• 37:42
  of available space in the back alleys of Mulberry Street. The two races,
• 37:47
  differing hopelessly and much, have this in common. They carry their slums with
• 37:53
  them wherever they go, if allowed to do it. Little Italy already rivals
• 37:59
  its errant the Bend and Foulness. Other nationalities that begin at the bottom make
• 38:06
  a fresh start when crowded up. The latter Happily, both are manageable,
• 38:10
  the one by rabbinacle, the other by the civil law. Between the dull
• 38:15
  gray of the jew his favorite color, and the Italian red would be seen
• 38:21
  squeezed in on the map, a sharp streak of yellow marking the narrow boundaries
• 38:25
  of Chinatown, dove tailed in with the German population. The poor but thrifty
• 38:31
  Bohemian might be picked out by the somber hue of his life, as of
• 38:36
  his philosophy, struggling against heavy odds in the big human beehives of the east
• 38:42
  side. Colonies of his people extend northward with long lapses of space from below
• 38:47
  the Cooper Institute more than three miles. The Bohemian is the only foreigner with
• 38:53
  any considerable representation in the city who counts no wealthy man of his race,
• 39:00
  none who has not to work hard for a living, or has got beyond
• 39:04
  the reach of the tenement down near the battery. The West Side Emerald would
• 39:08
  be soiled by a dirty stain spreading rapidly like a splash of ink on a
• 39:14
  sheet of blotting paper. Headquarters of the Arab tribe that in a single year
• 39:19
  has swelled from the original dozen to twelve hundred, intent every mother's son on
• 39:24
  trade and barter. Dots and dashes of color here and there would show where
• 39:30
  the Finnish sailors worship their Dumala god, the Greek peddlers the ancient name of
• 39:37
  their race, and the Swiss the goddess of thrift, and so on to
• 39:42
  the end of the long register. All toiling together in the galling fetters of
• 39:46
  the tenement, were the question raised. Who makes the most of life?
• 39:52
  Thus mortgaged? Who resists most stubbornly its leveling tendency? Knows how to drag
• 39:58
  even the barracks upward of part of the way, at least toward the ideal
• 40:01
  plane of the home. The palm must be unhesitatingly awarded. The Teuton,
• 40:07
  the Italian, and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman does
• 40:13
  not rise at all here, as at home he simply remains stationary. The
• 40:19
  Irishman's genius runs to public affairs rather than domestic life. Wherever he is mustered
• 40:25
  in forced. The saloon is the gorgeous center of political activity. The German
• 40:30
  struggles vainly to learn his trick. His Teutonic wit is too heavy, and
• 40:36
  the political ladder he raises from his saloon, usually too short or too clumsy
• 40:40
  to reach the desired goal. The best part of his life is lived at
• 40:45
  home, and he makes himself a home independent of the surroundings, giving the
• 40:51
  lie to the saying unhappily become a maxim of social truth that pauperism and drunkenness
• 40:58
  naturally grow in the tenements. He makes the most of his tenement. And
• 41:02
  it should be added that whenever and as soon as he can save up bunny
• 41:06
  enough, he gets out and never crosses the threshold of one again. End
• 41:13
  of Section three, Chapter four, the Downtown Back Alleys, Part one.
• 41:21
  Down below Chatham Square, in the old fourth ward, where the cradle of
• 41:24
  the tenement stood, we shall find New York's other half at home, receiving
• 41:30
  such as care to call, and are not afraid, not all of it,
• 41:34
  to be sure, there is not room for that, but a fairly
• 41:37
  representative gathering, representative of its earliest and worst traditions. There is nothing to
• 41:44
  be afraid of in this metropolis. Let it be understood there is no public
• 41:50
  street where the stranger may not go safely by day and by night, provided
• 41:53
  he knows how to mind his own business and is sober his coming and going
• 41:58
  will excite little interest, unless he is suspected of being a truant officer,
• 42:02
  in which Casey will be impressed with the truth of the observation that the American
• 42:07
  stock is dying out for want of children. If he escapes this suspicion and
• 42:12
  the risk of trampling upon or being himself run down by the bewildering swarms of
• 42:15
  youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere, as the exigency and their quick scent of
• 42:21
  danger direct, he will see no reason for dissenting from that observation. Glimpses
• 42:27
  caught of the parents watching the youngsters play from windows or open doorways will soon
• 42:31
  convince him that the native stock is in no way involved. Leaving the elevated
• 42:37
  railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen
• 42:42
  steps will take us where we wish to go, with its rush and roar
• 42:46
  echoing. Yet in our ears we have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty.
• 42:52
  We stand upon the domain of the tenement, in the shadow of the
• 42:55
  great stone abutments. The old Knickerbocker houses linger like ghosts of a departed day
• 43:01
  down the winding slope of Cherry Street, proud and fashionable Cherry Hill that was.
• 43:07
  Their broad steps, sloping roofs, and dormer windows are easily made out,
• 43:12
  all the more easily for the contrast with the ugly barracks that elbowed them
• 43:15
  right and left. These never had other design than to shelter at as little
• 43:21
  outlay as possible, the great crowds out of which rent could be rung.
• 43:25
  They were the bad afterthought of a heedless day. The years have brought to
• 43:30
  the old house's unhonored age, a querulous second childhood that is out of tune
• 43:35
  with the time their tenants, the neighbors, and cries out against them and
• 43:39
  against you in fretful protest in every step on their rotten floors or squeaky stairs.
• 43:45
  Good cause have they for their fretting? This one, with its shabby
• 43:51
  front and poorly patched roof, What glowing firesides, what happy children may at
• 43:57
  once have owned? Heavy feet two off and with unsteady step, for the
• 44:01
  pothouse is next door? Where is it not next door? In these slums
• 44:06
  have worn away the brown stone steps, since the broken columns at the door
• 44:10
  have rotted away at the base of the handsome cornice, barely a trace is
• 44:15
  left. Dirt and desolation rain in the wide hallway, and danger lurks on
• 44:21
  the stairs. Rough pine boards fence off the roomy fireplaces, where coal is
• 44:25
  bought by the pail at a rate of twelve dollars a ton. These have
• 44:29
  no place. The arched gateway leads no longer to a shady bower on the
• 44:34
  banks of the rushing stream, inviting to day dreams with its gentle repose,
• 44:38
  but to a dark and nameless alley, shut in by high brick walls,
• 44:43
  cheerless as the lives of those they shelter. The wolf knocks loudly at the
• 44:47
  gate, and the troubled dreams that come to this alley echoes of the day's
• 44:52
  cares. A horde of dirty children play around the dripping hydrant, the only
• 44:57
  thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make them mo most
• 45:00
  of it. It is the best it can do. These are the children
• 45:04
  of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums. This their home.
• 45:08
  From the great highway overhead, along which throbs the life tide of two great
• 45:14
  cities, one might drop a pebble into half a dozen of such alleys one
• 45:19
  yonns just across the street, not very broadly, but it is not to
• 45:22
  blame. The builder of the old gateway had no thought of its ever becoming
• 45:27
  a public thoroughfare. Once inside, it widens, but only to make room
• 45:31
  for a big box like building with the worn and greasy look of the slum
• 45:35
  tenement that is stamped alike on the houses and their tenants down here, even
• 45:39
  on the homeless cur that romps with the children in yonder building lot, with
• 45:44
  an air of expectant interest, plainly betraying the forlorn hope that at some stage
• 45:47
  of the game a meat bone may show up in the role of it vain
• 45:52
  hope. Truly, nothing more appetizing than a bare legged ragamuffin appears. Meat
• 45:59
  bones not long since picked clean are as scarce in blind Man's alley as elbow
• 46:04
  room in any fourth ward back yard. The shouts of the children come hushed
• 46:08
  over the housetops, as if apologizing for the intrusion. Few glad noises make
• 46:14
  this old alley ring morning and evening. It echoes with a gentle groping tap
• 46:19
  of the blind man's staff as he feels his way to the street. Blind
• 46:23
  Man's alley bears its name for a reason. Until little more than a year
• 46:29
  ago, its dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars, tenants of a
• 46:32
  blind landlord, Old Daniel Murphy, whom every child in the ward knows if
• 46:37
  he never heard of the President of the United States. Old Dan made a
• 46:43
  big fortune, he told me once, four hundred thousand dollars out of his
• 46:46
  alley and the surrounding tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age,
• 46:52
  sharing in the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings, whose thought
• 46:54
  he had stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth. Even when
• 47:00
  the Board of Health at last compelled him to repair and clean up the worst
• 47:04
  of the old buildings under threat of driving out the tenants and locking the doors
• 47:07
  behind them. The work was accomplished against the old man's angry protests. He
• 47:13
  appeared in person before the board to argue his case, and his argument was
• 47:15
  characteristic. I have made my will, he said. My monument stands waiting
• 47:22
  for me in Calvary. I stand on the very brink of the grave,
• 47:24
  blind and helpless, and now here the pathos of the appeal was swept under
• 47:30
  in a burst of angry indignation. Do you want me to build and get
• 47:34
  skinned? Skinned? These people are not fit to live in a nice house.
• 47:38
  Let them go where they can and let my house stand. In spite
• 47:44
  of the genuine anguish of the appeal, it was downright amusing to find that
• 47:46
  his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of luxury on his tenants than
• 47:52
  by distrust of his own kind. The builder. He knew intuitively what to
• 47:55
  expect. The results showed that mister Murphy had gaged his tenants correctly. The
• 48:00
  cleaning up process apparently destroyed the home feeling of the alley. Many of the
• 48:05
  blind people moved away and did not return. Some remained, however, and
• 48:08
  the name has clung to the place. Some idea of what is meant by
• 48:13
  a sanitary cleaning up in these slums may be gained from the account of a
• 48:16
  mishap I met with once. In taking a flashlight picture of a group of
• 48:21
  blind beggars in one of the tenements down here, with unpracticed hands, I
• 48:24
  managed to set fire to the house. When the blinding effect of the flash
• 48:29
  had passed away and I could see once more, I discovered that a lot
• 48:32
  of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze. There were six
• 48:37
  of us, five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger,
• 48:40
  and myself in an attic room, with a dozen crooked, rickety stairs between
• 48:45
  us and the street, and as many households as helpless as the one whose
• 48:49
  guest I was all about us. The thought how were they ever to be
• 48:52
  got out? Made my blood run cold as I saw the flames creeping up
• 48:57
  the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt for them the street and
• 49:00
  shout for help. The next was the smother the fire, myself and I
• 49:05
  did with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came down to
• 49:08
  the street, I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some reason,
• 49:13
  he thought it a rather good joke, and laughed immoderately at my concern.
• 49:15
  Lest even then sparks should be burning in the rotten wall, that might
• 49:19
  yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that were in it.
• 49:22
  He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. Why
• 49:27
  don't you know? He said, that house is the dirty spoon. It
• 49:30
  caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn't burn. The dirt was
• 49:35
  so thick on the walls it smothered the fire, which, if true,
• 49:38
  shows that water and dirt, not usually held to be harmonious elements, worked
• 49:44
  together for the good of those who insure houses. Sundless and joyless though it
• 49:49
  be, Blindman's Alley has that which has come peers of the slums vainly yearned
• 49:52
  for. It has a pay day once a year. Sunlight shines into the
• 49:58
  lies of its forlorn crew, past and present. In June, when the
• 50:02
  Superintendent of Outdoor Poor distributes the twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by
• 50:07
  the city in half hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them,
• 50:13
  blind Man's Alley takes a day off and goes to see mister Blake. That
• 50:17
  night, it is noisy with unwonted merriment. There is scraping of squeaky fiddles
• 50:22
  in the dark rooms, and cracked old voices seeing long forgotten songs. Even
• 50:27
  the blind landlord rejoices, for much of the money goes into his coffers.
• 50:31
  From their perch up along the rafters. Missus Gallagher's blind boorders might hear,
• 50:36
  did they listen the tramp of the policemen always on duty in Gotham Court,
• 50:40
  half a stone's throw away. His beat. Though it takes in but a
• 50:45
  small portion of a single block, is quite as lively as most larger patrol
• 50:50
  rounds. A double row of five story tenements back to back under a common
• 50:54
  roof, extending back from the street two hundred and thirty four feet, with
• 50:59
  barred open in the dividing wall, so that the tenants may see but cannot
• 51:02
  get at each other from the stairs, makes the court alleys one wider by
• 51:08
  a couple of feet than the other, whence the distinction single and double alley
• 51:14
  skirt the barracks on either side. Such briefly is the tenement that has challenged
• 51:19
  public attention more than any other in the whole city, and tested the power
• 51:22
  of sanitary law and rule for forty years. The name of the pile is
• 51:28
  not down in the city directory, but in the public records it holds an
• 51:30
  unenviable place. It was here the mortality rose during the last Great Cholera epidemic
• 51:37
  to the unprecedented rate of one hundred ninety five in one thousand inhabitants. In
• 51:42
  its worst days, a full thousand could not be packed into the court,
• 51:45
  though the number did probably not fall short of it. Even now, under
• 51:50
  the management of men of conscience and an agent a King's daughter, whose practical
• 51:54
  energy, kindliness, and good sense have done much to redeem its foul reputation,
• 52:00
  worms at shelters would make more than one fair sized country village. The
• 52:04
  mixed character of the population by this time about equally divided between the Celtic and
• 52:08
  the Italian stock, accounts for the iron bars and the policemen. It was
• 52:13
  an eminently Irish suggestion that the latter was to be credited to the presence of
• 52:16
  two German families in the court who made trouble all the time. A Chinaman,
• 52:22
  whom I questioned as he hurried past the iron gate of the alley,
• 52:24
  put the matter in a different light. Lem Eilish VILLI bad, he said.
• 52:30
  Gotham Court has been the entering wedge for the Italian hordes, which until
• 52:34
  recently had not attained a foothold in the fourth Ward, but are now trailing
• 52:37
  across Chatham Street from their stronghold in the Bend in ever increasing numbers, seeking
• 52:44
  according to their wont the lowest level. It is curious to find that this
• 52:47
  notorious block, whose name was so long synonymous with all that was desperately bad,
• 52:52
  was originally built in eighteen fifty one by a benevolent Quaker for the express
• 52:58
  purpose of rescuing the poor people from the dreadful rookeries they were then living in.
• 53:02
  How long it continued a model tenement is not on record. It could
• 53:06
  not have been very long, for already in eighteen sixty two, ten years
• 53:09
  after it was finished, a sedentary official counted one hundred forty six cases of
• 53:14
  sickness in the court, including all kinds of infectious disease from small pox down,
• 53:20
  and reported that of one hundred thirty eight children born in less than three
• 53:23
  years, sixty one had died, mostly before they were one year old.
• 53:29
  Seven years later, the inspector of the district reported to the Board of Health
• 53:31
  that nearly ten percent of the population is sent to the public hospitals each year.
• 53:37
  When the alley was finally taken in hand by the authorities, and as
• 53:39
  a first step towards reclamation, the entire population was driven out by the police.
• 53:45
  Experience dictated as one of the first improvements to be made, the putting
• 53:49
  in of a kind of sewer grating so constructed, as the official report patiently
• 53:52
  puts it, as to prevent the ingress of people disposed to make a hiding
• 53:57
  place of the sewer and the cellars into which they opened. The fact was
• 54:01
  that the big vaulted sewers had long been a runway for thieves the swamps angels
• 54:06
  who threw them easily escaped when chased by the police, as well as a
• 54:09
  storehouse for their plunder. The sewers are there to day. In fact,
• 54:14
  the two alleys are nothing but the roofs of these enormous tunnels, in which
• 54:16
  a man may walk upright the full distance of the block and inted the Cherry
• 54:21
  Street sewer if he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats. Could
• 54:24
  their grimy walls speak. The big canals might tell many a startling tale,
• 54:30
  but they are silent enough, and so were most of those whose secrets they
• 54:32
  might betray. The flood gates connecting with the Cherry Street main are closed now
• 54:37
  except when the water is drained off. Then there were no gates, and
• 54:42
  it is on record that the sewers were chosen as a short cut habitually by
• 54:45
  residents of the court whose business lay on the line of them near manhole,
• 54:50
  perhaps in Cherry Street, or at the river mouth of the Big Pipe,
• 54:52
  when it was clear at low tide. Me Jimmy, said one wrinkled old
• 54:58
  dame who looked in while we were nos about under double alley. He used
• 55:01
  to go to work along down Cherry Street that way every morning and come back
• 55:05
  at night. The associations must have been congenial. Probably Jimmy fitted himself into
• 55:10
  the landscape and of Section four, Chapter four the Downtown back Alleys, Part
• 55:17
  two. Half way back from this street. In this latter alley is a
• 55:22
  tenement facing the main building on the west side of the way, that was
• 55:25
  not originally part of the court proper. It stands there a curious monument to
• 55:30
  a Quaker's revenge, a living illustration of the power of hate to perpetuate its
• 55:35
  bitter fruit beyond the grave. The lot upon which it is built was the
• 55:38
  property of John Wood, brother of Silas, the builder of Gotham Court.
• 55:44
  He sold the Cherry Street front to a man who built upon a detenement with
• 55:47
  entrance only from the street. Mister Wood afterward quarreled about the partition line with
• 55:52
  his neighbor Alderman Mullins, who had put up a long tenement barrack on his
• 55:57
  block. After the style of the court and the Aldermen knocked him down.
• 56:01
  Tradition records that the Quaker picked himself up with the quiet remark, I will
• 56:06
  pay thee for that friend Alderman, and went his way. His manner of
• 56:09
  paying was to put up the big building in the rear of thirty four Cherry
• 56:13
  Street with an immense blank wall right in front of the windows of Alderman Mullen's
• 56:17
  tenements, shutting out effectually light and air from them. But as he had
• 56:22
  no access to the street from his building, for many years, it could
• 56:25
  not be let or used for anything, and remained vacant until it passed under
• 56:30
  the management of the Gotham Court Property. Mullins's Court is there yet, and
• 56:35
  so is the Quaker's vengeful wall that has cursed the lives of thousands of innocent
• 56:37
  people since At its farther end, the alley between the two that begins inside
• 56:43
  the Cherry Street tenement, six or seven feet wide, narrows down to less
• 56:47
  than two feet. It is barely possible to squeeze through, but few care
• 56:52
  to do it. For The rift leads to the jail of the Oak Street
• 56:54
  Police station, and therefore is not popular with the growing youth of the district.
• 57:00
  There is a crape on the door of the Alderman's court as we pass
• 57:01
  out, and upstairs in one of the tenements, preparations are being made for
• 57:06
  a wake. A man lies dead in the hospital who was cut to pieces
• 57:09
  in a can racket in the alley on Sunday. The sway of the excise
• 57:14
  Law is not extended to these back alleys. It would matter little if it
• 57:17
  were. There are secret byways, and some it is not held worth while
• 57:22
  to keep secret along which the growler wanders at all hours and seasons unmolested.
• 57:28
  It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder resulted.
• 57:32
  It is nothing unusual on Cherry Street, nothing to make a fuss about.
• 57:37
  Not a week before, two or three blocks up the street, the police
• 57:40
  felt called upon to interfere in one of these can rackets at two o'clock in
• 57:45
  the morning to secure peace for the neighborhood. The interference took the form of
• 57:49
  a general fusilade, during which one of the disturbers fell off the roof and
• 57:52
  was killed, there was the usual wake, and nothing more was heard of
• 57:57
  it. What, indeed was there to say? The Rock of Ages is
• 58:01
  the name over the door of a low saloon that blocks the entrance to another
• 58:06
  alley, if possible, more forlorn and dreary than the rest. As we
• 58:09
  pass out of the Alderman's court, it sounds like a jeer from the days
• 58:14
  happily passed when the wickedest man in New York lived around the corner a little
• 58:19
  way and boasted of his title. One cannot take many steps in Cherry Street
• 58:23
  without encountering some relic of past or present prominence in the ways of crime.
• 58:29
  Scarce one that does not turn up specimen bricks of the coming thief. The
• 58:34
  Cherry Street, though, is all pervading, asked Superintendent Murray, who,
• 58:37
  as captain of the Oak Street Squad, in seven months secured convictions for theft,
• 58:43
  robbery and murder, aggravating no less than five hundred and thirty years of
• 58:46
  penal servitude. And he will tell you his opinion that the Fourth Ward,
• 58:51
  even in the last twenty years, has turned out more criminals than all the
• 58:54
  rest of the city together. But though the swamp angels have to their reward,
• 59:00
  their successors carry on business at the old stand as successfully, if not
• 59:05
  as boldly. There goes one who was once a shining light in thiefdom.
• 59:09
  He has reformed since, they say. The policeman on the corner, who
• 59:14
  is addicted to professional unbelief in reform of any kind, will tell you that
• 59:17
  while on the island, once he sailed away on a shutter, paddling along
• 59:22
  until he was picked up in Hellgate by a schooner's crew, whom he persuaded
• 59:25
  that he was a fanatic performing some sort of religious penance. By his singular
• 59:30
  expedition over yonder Tweed, the arch thief worked in a brush shop and earned
• 59:36
  an honest living before he took to politics. As we stroll from one narrow
• 59:40
  street to another, the odd contrast between the low, old looking houses in
• 59:45
  front and the towering tenements in the back yards grows even more striking, perhaps
• 59:50
  because we expect and are looking for it. Nobody who was not would suspect
• 59:53
  the presence of the beer houses, though they have been there long enough.
• 59:58
  Here is one seven story high behind one with only three floors. Take a
• 1:00:02
  look into Roosevelt Street Alley, just about one step wide with a five story
• 1:00:07
  house on one side that gets its light and air. God help us for
• 1:00:10
  pitiful mockery from this slit between brick walls. There are no windows in the
• 1:00:15
  wall. On the other side, it is perfectly blank. The fire escapes
• 1:00:21
  of the long tenement fairly touch it, but the rays of the sun rising,
• 1:00:24
  setting or at high noon never do. It. Never shone into the
• 1:00:29
  alley from the day the devil plan and man built it. There was once
• 1:00:32
  an English doctor who experimented with the sunlight in the soldier's barracks, and found
• 1:00:37
  that on the side that was shut off altogether from the sun, the mortality
• 1:00:39
  was one hundred percent greater than on the light side, where its rays had
• 1:00:44
  free access. But then the soldiers are, of some account, have a
• 1:00:47
  fixed value, if not a very high one. The people who live here
• 1:00:52
  have not. The horse that pulls the dirt cart one of these labour's loads
• 1:00:57
  and unloads, is of ever so much more account to the employer of his
• 1:01:00
  labor than he and all that belongs to him. Ask the owner, he
• 1:01:05
  will not attempt to deny it. If the horse is worth anything, the
• 1:01:08
  man too knows it. It is the one thought that occasionally troubles the owner
• 1:01:14
  of the horse, and the enjoyment of his prosperity built of and upon the
• 1:01:17
  successful assertion of the truth that all men are created equal with What a shock
• 1:01:23
  did the story of Yonder Madison Street Alley come home to New Yorkers one morning
• 1:01:28
  eight or ten years ago, when a fire that broke out after the men
• 1:01:31
  had gone to their work, swept up those narrow stairs and burned up women
• 1:01:36
  and children to the number of a full half score. There were fire escapes,
• 1:01:39
  yes, but so placed that they could not be reached. The firemen
• 1:01:44
  had to look twice before they could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare
• 1:01:47
  a stout man would never venture in. Some wonderfully heroic rescues were made at
• 1:01:52
  that fire by people living in the adjoining tenements. Danger and trouble of the
• 1:01:58
  imminent kind, not the every day sort that excites neither interest nor commiseration,
• 1:02:02
  run even this common clay into heroic molds on occasion, occasions that help us
• 1:02:08
  to remember that the gap that separates the man with the patched coat from his
• 1:02:12
  wealthy neighbor is, after all, perhaps but a tenement. Yet what a
• 1:02:17
  gap, and of whose making? Here? As we stroll along Madison Street,
• 1:02:22
  workmen are busy putting the finishing touches to the brownstone front of a tall
• 1:02:27
  new tenement. This one will probably be called an apartment house. They are
• 1:02:31
  carving satters heads in the stone, with a crowd of gaping youngsters looking on
• 1:02:36
  in admiring wonder. Next door are two other tenements likewise with brownstone fronts fair
• 1:02:43
  to look at. The youngest of the children in the group is not too
• 1:02:45
  young to remember how their army of tenants was turned out by the health officials,
• 1:02:50
  because the houses have been condemned as unfit for human beings to live in.
• 1:02:54
  The owner was a wealthy builder who stood high in the community. Is
• 1:02:59
  it only in our fancy that the sardonic leer on the stone faces seems to
• 1:03:04
  list that way? Or is it an introspective grin We will not ask.
• 1:03:08
  If the new house belongs to the same builder, he too may have reformed.
• 1:03:14
  We have crossed the boundary of the seventh ward Penitentiary Row suggestive name for
• 1:03:19
  a block of Cherry Street tenements is behind us. Within recent days it has
• 1:03:23
  become peopled wholly with Hebrews. The overflow from Jewtown adjoining pedlars and tailors,
• 1:03:29
  all of them. It is odd to read this legend from the other days.
• 1:03:32
  Over the door. No pedlars allowed in this house. These thrifty people
• 1:03:37
  are not only crowding into the tenements of this once exclusive district, they are
• 1:03:42
  buying them. The Jew runs to real estate as soon as he can save
• 1:03:45
  up enough for a deposit to clinch the bargain. As fast as the old
• 1:03:50
  houses are torn down, towering structures go up in their place, and Hebrews
• 1:03:54
  are found to be the builders. Here is a whole alley nicknamed after the
• 1:03:59
  intruder Jews alley. But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite
• 1:04:03
  with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time. He
• 1:04:09
  knows from experience both sweet and bitter, that all things come to those who
• 1:04:13
  wait, including the houses and lands of their persecutors. Here comes a pleasure
• 1:04:18
  party as gay as any on the avenue. Though the carryall is an ash
• 1:04:23
  cart. The father is the driver, and he has taken his brown legged
• 1:04:27
  boy for a ride. How proud and happy they both look up there on
• 1:04:30
  their perch the queer old building they have halted in front of is the ship,
• 1:04:35
  famous for fifty years as a ramshackle tenement filled with the oddest crowd.
• 1:04:40
  No one knows why it is called the ship, though there is a tradition
• 1:04:44
  that once the river came clear up here to Hamilton Street and boats were moored
• 1:04:47
  alongside it. More likely it is because it is as bewildering inside as a
• 1:04:53
  crazy old ship, with its ups and downs of ladders parading as stairs,
• 1:04:58
  and its unexpected pitfalls. But Hamilton Street, like Water Street, is not
• 1:05:02
  what it was. The missions drove from the latter, the worst of its
• 1:05:06
  dives. A sailor's mission has lately made its appearance in Hamilton Street, But
• 1:05:11
  there are no dives there, nothing worse than the ubiquitous saloon and tough tenements,
• 1:05:16
  enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look into one, no Cherry Street,
• 1:05:23
  be a little careful, please. The hall is dark, and you
• 1:05:26
  might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there, not that it would hurt
• 1:05:30
  them. Kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else here
• 1:05:34
  Where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness, is a step, and
• 1:05:38
  again another a flight of stairs. You can feed your way if you cannot
• 1:05:44
  see it close? Yes, what would you have? All the fresh air
• 1:05:47
  that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall door that is forever slamming,
• 1:05:51
  and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their
• 1:05:56
  sole supply of the elements God meant to be free. But man deals out
• 1:06:00
  with such niggardly hand. That was a woman filling her pale by the hydrant
• 1:06:03
  you just bumped against. The sinks are in the hallway, that all the
• 1:06:08
  tenants may have access, and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches.
• 1:06:12
  Hear the pump squeak. It is the lullaby of tenement house babes in summer,
• 1:06:16
  when a thousand thirsty throats panned for a cooling drink. In this block,
• 1:06:20
  it is worked in vain. But the saloon whose open door you passed
• 1:06:25
  in the hall is always there. The smell of it has followed you up
• 1:06:29
  Here is a door. Listen that short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless
• 1:06:33
  wail. What do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white
• 1:06:39
  you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell, Oh,
• 1:06:43
  a sadly familiar story. Before the day is at an end, the child
• 1:06:47
  is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived, but
• 1:06:50
  it had none. That dark bedroom killed it. It was took all of
• 1:06:56
  a sudden, said the mother, soothing the throbbing little body which hands.
• 1:07:00
  There is no unkindness in the rough voice of the man in the jumper,
• 1:07:03
  who sits by the window, grimly smoking a clay pipe, with the little
• 1:07:08
  life ebbing out of his sight, bitter as his words sound, Hush,
• 1:07:12
  Mary, if we cannot keep the baby, need we complain? Such as
• 1:07:15
  we? Such as we? What if the words ring in your ears as
• 1:07:20
  we grope our way up the stairs and down from floor to floor, listening
• 1:07:25
  to the sounds behind the closed doors, some of quarreling, some of coarse
• 1:07:29
  songs, more of profanity. They are true. When the summer heats come
• 1:07:33
  with their suffering, they have meaning more terrible than words can tell. Come
• 1:07:38
  over here, step carefully over this baby. It is a baby spite of
• 1:07:43
  its rags and dirt. Under these iron bridges called fire escapes, but loaded
• 1:07:46
  down despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken household goods, with
• 1:07:51
  wash tubs and barrels over which no man could climb from a fire. This
• 1:07:57
  gap between dingy brick walls is the yard. That strip of smoke colored sky
• 1:08:01
  up there is the heaven of these people. Do you wonder the name does
• 1:08:05
  not attract them to the churches? That baby's parents live in the rear tenement
• 1:08:10
  Here she is at least as clean as the steps we are now climbing.
• 1:08:14
  There are plenty of houses, with half a hundred such in the tenement is
• 1:08:18
  much like the one in front we just left, only fowler, closer,
• 1:08:23
  darker. We will not say more cheerless. The word is a mockery.
• 1:08:27
  A hundred thousand people lived in rear tenements in New York last year. Here
• 1:08:30
  is a room neater than the rest. The woman, a stout matron with
• 1:08:34
  hard lines of care in her face, is at the wash tub. I
• 1:08:39
  tried to keep the childer clean, she says, apologetically, but with a
• 1:08:42
  hopeless glance around. The spice of hot soap SuDS is added to the air,
• 1:08:46
  already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage of rags and uncleanliness all about,
• 1:08:53
  it makes an overpowering compound. It is Thursday, but patched linen is
• 1:08:58
  hung upon the pulley line from the window there is no Monday cleaning in the
• 1:09:01
  tenements. It is wash day all the week round, for change of clothing
• 1:09:05
  is scarce among the poor. They are poverty's honest badge, these perennial lines
• 1:09:11
  of rags hung out to dry those that are not the washerwoman's professional shingle.
• 1:09:15
  The true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty is the clothes line.
• 1:09:20
  With it begins the effort to be clean. That is the first and
• 1:09:24
  the best evidence of a desire to be honest. What sort of answer think
• 1:09:29
  you would come from these tenements to the question is life worth living? Were
• 1:09:32
  they hurt at all in the discussion? It may be that this cut from
• 1:09:38
  the last report, but one of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition
• 1:09:41
  of the Poor, a long name for very weary task, has a suggestion
• 1:09:45
  of it. In the depth of winter, the attention of the Association was
• 1:09:49
  called to a Protestant family living in a garret in a miserable tenement in Cherry
• 1:09:54
  Street. The family's condition was most deplorable. The man, his wife and
• 1:10:00
  very small children shivering in one room, through the roof of which the pitiless
• 1:10:02
  winds of winter whistled The room was almost barren of furniture. The parents slept
• 1:10:09
  on the floor, the elder children in boxes, and the baby was swung
• 1:10:12
  in an old shawl attached to the rafters by cords by way of a hammock.
• 1:10:16
  The father, a seaman, had been obliged to give up that calling
• 1:10:19
  because he was in consumption and was unable to provide either bread or fire for
• 1:10:25
  his little ones. Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case,
• 1:10:30
  but one that came to my notice some months ago in a seventh War tenement
• 1:10:32
  was typical enough to escape that reproach. There were nine in the family,
• 1:10:38
  husband, wife, an aged grandmother, and six children. Honest, hard
• 1:10:42
  working Germans, scrupulously neat but poor. All nine lived in two rooms,
• 1:10:47
  one about ten feet square that served as parlor, bedroom and eating room,
• 1:10:51
  the other a small hall room made into a kitchen. The rent was seven
• 1:10:56
  dollars and a half a month, more than a week's wages for the husband
• 1:10:59
  and fire, who was the only breadwinner in the family. That day,
• 1:11:02
  the mother had thrown herself out of the window and was carried up from the
• 1:11:06
  street dead. She was discouraged, said some of the other women from the
• 1:11:11
  tenement. Who had come in to look after the children, while the messenger
• 1:11:14
  carried the news to the father at the shop. They went stolidly about their
• 1:11:17
  task, although they were evidently not without feeling for the dead woman. No
• 1:11:23
  doubt she was wrong in not taking life philosophically, as did the four families
• 1:11:27
  the city missionary found housekeeping in the four corners of one room. They got
• 1:11:30
  along well enough together until one of the families took a border and made trouble.
• 1:11:35
  Philosophy, according to my optimistic friend, naturally inhabits the tenements. The
• 1:11:41
  people who live there come to look upon death in a different way from the
• 1:11:44
  rest of us, do not take it as hard. He has never found
• 1:11:47
  time to explain how the fact fits into the general theory that life is not
• 1:11:51
  unbearable in the tenements. Unhappily, for the philosophy of the slums, it
• 1:11:56
  is too apt to be of the kind that readily recognizes the saloon, always
• 1:12:00
  handy, as the refuge from every trouble, and shapes its practice. According
• 1:12:04
  to the discovery end of section five, chapter five, the Italian in New
• 1:12:10
  York, certainly a picturesque, if not very tidy, element has been added
• 1:12:15
  to the population in the quote assisted close quote. Italian immigrant who claims so
• 1:12:21
  large a share of public attention, partly because he keeps coming at such a
• 1:12:26
  tremendous rate, but chiefly because he elects to stay in New York are near
• 1:12:30
  enough for it to serve as his base of operations, and here promptly reproduces
• 1:12:35
  conditions of destitution and disorder, which, set in the framework of Mediterranean exuberants,
• 1:12:43
  are the delight of the artist, but in a matter of fact American
• 1:12:46
  community become its danger and reproach. The reproduction is made easier in New York
• 1:12:53
  because he finds the material ready to hand in the worst of the slum tenements,
• 1:13:00
  but even where it is not, he soon reduces what he does find
• 1:13:03
  to his own level, if allowed to follow his natural bent footnote. The
• 1:13:09
  process can be observed in the Italian tenements in Harlem, Little Italy, which
• 1:13:15
  since their occupation by these people, have been gradually sinking to the slum level.
• 1:13:20
  In footnote, the Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the
• 1:13:26
  generation that came over the sea, he stays there. In the slums.
• 1:13:30
  He is welcomed as a tenant who quote makes less trouble close quote than the
• 1:13:35
  contentious Irishman, or the ardor loving German, that is to say, is
• 1:13:41
  content to live in a pig sty, and submits to robbery at the hands
• 1:13:45
  of the rent collector without murmur. Yet this very tractability makes of him in
• 1:13:50
  good hands when firmly and intelligently managed a really desirable tenet. But it is
• 1:13:57
  not his good fortune often to fall in with a hospitality upon his coming than
• 1:14:01
  that which brought him here for its own profit. And he has no idea
• 1:14:05
  of letting go its grip upon him, as long as there is a scent
• 1:14:10
  to be made out of him. Recent congressional inquiries have shown the nature of
• 1:14:16
  the quote assistance close quote he receives from greedy steamship agents and bankers who persuade
• 1:14:25
  him by false promises to mortgage his home, his few belongings, and his
• 1:14:30
  wages for months to come for a ticket to the land where plenty of work
• 1:14:35
  is to be had at princely wages. The padrone the banker is nothing else,
• 1:14:42
  having made his ten percent out of him all route receives him at the
• 1:14:45
  landing, and turns him to double account as a wage earner and a rent
• 1:14:49
  payer. In each of these roles. He is made to yield a profit
• 1:14:55
  to his unscrupulous countrymen, whom he trusts implicitly with the instinct of utter helplessness.
• 1:15:01
  The man is so ignorant that, as one of the sharpers who prey
• 1:15:05
  upon him put it once, it would be downright sinful not to take him.
• 1:15:10
  In his ignorance and unconquerable suspicion of strangers dig the pit into which he
• 1:15:16
  falls. He not only knows no word of English, but he does not
• 1:15:21
  know enough to learn. Rarely, only can he write his own language.
• 1:15:27
  Unlike the German who begins learning English the day he lands as a matter of
• 1:15:31
  duty, or the Polish Jew, who takes it up as soon as he
• 1:15:35
  is able as an investment, the Italian learns slowly, if at all.
• 1:15:41
  Even his boy born here often speaks his native tongue indifferently. He is forced,
• 1:15:46
  therefore, to have constant recourse to the middleman, who makes him pay
• 1:15:50
  handsomely at every turn. He hires him out to the railroad contractor, receiving
• 1:15:56
  a commission from the employer as well as from the labor, and repeats the
• 1:16:00
  performance monthly as often as he can have him dismissed in the city. He
• 1:16:06
  contracts for his lodging, subletting to him space in the violess tenements at extortionate
• 1:16:14
  rents, and sets an example that does not lack imitators. The princely wages
• 1:16:20
  close quote have vanished with his coming, and in their place hardships and a
• 1:16:27
  dollar a day behefed. With the padrones merciless mortgage confront him bred to even
• 1:16:33
  worse fare, he takes both as a matter of course, and applying the
• 1:16:38
  maxim that it is not what one makes, but what he saves that makes
• 1:16:42
  him rich, manages to turn the very dirt of the streets into a horde
• 1:16:46
  of gold, with which he either returns to his southern home or brings over
• 1:16:51
  his family to join in his work and in his fortunes. The next season,
• 1:16:57
  the discovery was made by earlier explorers that there is money in New York's
• 1:17:01
  ash barrel, but it was left to the genius of the Padrone to develop
• 1:17:09
  the full resources of the mine that has become the exclusive preserve of the Italian
• 1:17:14
  immigrant. Only a few years ago, when rank picking was carried on in
• 1:17:18
  a desultry and irresponsible sort of way, the city hired gangs of men to
• 1:17:24
  trim the ash scows before they were sent out to sea. The trimming consisted
• 1:17:29
  in leveling out the dirt as it was dumped from the courts, so that
• 1:17:32
  the scowl might be evenly loaded. The men were paid a dollar and a
• 1:17:36
  half a day, kept what they found that was worth having, and allowed
• 1:17:42
  the swarms of Italians that hung about the dumps to do the heavy work for
• 1:17:45
  them, letting them have their pick of the loads for their trouble. Today
• 1:17:50
  Italian's contract for the work, paying large sums to be permitted to do it.
• 1:17:56
  The city received not less than eighty thousand dollars last year for the sale
• 1:18:00
  of this privilege to the contractors, who, in addition, have to pay
• 1:18:04
  gangs of their countrymen for sorting out the bones, rags, tin cans and
• 1:18:10
  other waste that are found in the ashes and form the staples of their trade
• 1:18:14
  and their sources of revenue. The effect has been vastly to increase the power
• 1:18:18
  of the padrone or his ally, the contractor, by giving him exclusive control
• 1:18:25
  of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly an independent dealer, and
• 1:18:30
  reducing him literally to the plane of the dump. Whenever the back of the
• 1:18:34
  sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the filthy burrows,
• 1:18:40
  where he works by day, sleeping and eating his meals under the dump,
• 1:18:45
  on the edge of slimy depths and amidst surroundings full of unutterable horror. The
• 1:18:50
  city did not bargain to Howe's, though it is content to board him as
• 1:18:56
  long as he can make the ash barrels yield the food to keep him alive.
• 1:19:00
  And a vigorous campaign is carried on at intervals against these unlicensed dump settlements,
• 1:19:06
  but the temptation of having to pay no rent is too strong, and
• 1:19:12
  they are driven from one dump only to find lodgment under another a few blocks
• 1:19:16
  further up or down the river. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage
• 1:19:21
  of the dumps by rival factions represented by opposing contractors, and it has happened
• 1:19:29
  that the defeated party has endeavored to capture by strategy what he failed to carry
• 1:19:34
  by assault. It augurs unsuspected adaptability in the Italian to our system of self
• 1:19:41
  government that these rivalries have more than once been suspected of being behind this sharpening
• 1:19:46
  of city ordinances that were apparently made in good faith to prevent meddling with the
• 1:19:53
  refuse in the air, sparrows or intransit did the Italian always adapt himself as
• 1:19:59
  readily to the opera ration of the civil law as to the manipulation of political
• 1:20:02
  pull on occasion, he would save himself a good deal of unnecessary trouble.
• 1:20:09
  Ordinarily, he is easily enough governed by authority, always excepting Sunday, when
• 1:20:14
  he settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions.
• 1:20:19
  Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His soul is
• 1:20:25
  in the game from the moment the cards are on the table, and very
• 1:20:29
  frequently his knife is in it too, before the game is ended. No
• 1:20:32
  Sunday has passed in New York since the Bend became a suburb of Naples without
• 1:20:39
  one or more of these murderous aphrays coming to the notice of the police.
• 1:20:44
  As a rule, that happens only when the man the game went against is
• 1:20:47
  either dead or so badly wounded as to require instant surgical help. As to
• 1:20:54
  the other, unless he is caught red handed, the chances that the police
• 1:20:58
  will ever get him are slight. Indeed, the wounded man can seldom be
• 1:21:02
  persuaded to betray him, He wards off all inquiries with a wicked quote,
• 1:21:08
  I fix him myself close quote. And there the matter rests until he either
• 1:21:12
  dies or recovers. If the latter, the community hears after a while of
• 1:21:16
  another Italian efray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying,
• 1:21:21
  and the police know that he has been fixed, and the account squared.
• 1:21:27
  With all his conspicuous faults, the swarthy Italian immigrant has his redeeming traits.
• 1:21:33
  He is as honest as he is hot headed. There are no Italian burglars
• 1:21:38
  in the rogues gallery. The ext brigand toils peacefully with pickaxe and shovel on
• 1:21:43
  American ground. His boy occasionally shows as a pickpocket, the results of his
• 1:21:48
  training with the tufts of the sixth Ward slums. The only criminal business to
• 1:21:54
  which the father occasionally lends his hand outside of murder is a bunco game,
• 1:22:00
  of which his confiding countrymen, returning with their hoard to their native land are
• 1:22:04
  the victims. The women are faithful wives and devoted mothers. Their vivid and
• 1:22:11
  picturesque costumes lend a tinge of color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums
• 1:22:15
  they inhabit. The Italian is gay, light hearted, and if his fur
• 1:22:20
  is not stroked the wrong way, in offensive as a child. His worst
• 1:22:25
  defense is that he keeps the stale beer dives where his headquarters is in the
• 1:22:30
  Mulberry Street bend. These vile dens flourish and gather about them all the wrecks,
• 1:22:36
  the utterly wretched, the hopelessly lost, on the lowest slope of depraved
• 1:22:42
  humanity, and out of their misery he makes a prophet in the section six,
• 1:22:48
  chapter six. The bend where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail
• 1:22:56
  of the old depravity of the five points is the bin foul core of New
• 1:23:01
  York's slums. Long years ago, the cows coming home from the pasture,
• 1:23:06
  trod a path over this hill. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still,
• 1:23:12
  but they do not call up memories of green meadows in summer fields. They
• 1:23:17
  proclaim the homecoming of the rag picker's cart. In the memory of man.
• 1:23:23
  The old cowpath has never been other than a vast human pig sty. There
• 1:23:29
  is but one bend in the world, and it is enough. The city
• 1:23:33
  authorities, moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort have
• 1:23:39
  decided that it is too much and must come down. Another paradise park will
• 1:23:44
  take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transformations as at
• 1:23:49
  the five points around the corner of the next block. Never was change more
• 1:23:55
  urgently needed around the Bend cluster. The bulk of the tenement that are stamped
• 1:24:00
  as altogether bad, even by the optimists of the Health Department, incessant raids
• 1:24:06
  cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of
• 1:24:12
  back alleys, of stable lanes, and hidden by ways of which the rent
• 1:24:16
  collectors alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford
• 1:24:23
  with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash barrels of the city.
• 1:24:30
  Here too, shunning the light skulks, the unclean beasts of dishonest idleness.
• 1:24:35
  The Bend is the home of the tramp as well as the ragpicker.
• 1:24:40
  It is not much more than twenty years since a census of the Bend District
• 1:24:45
  returned only twenty four of the six hundred and nine tenements as in decent condition.
• 1:24:51
  Three fourths of the population of the Bloody sixth toward werein Irish. The
• 1:24:58
  army of tramps that grew up after the disbandment of the armies in the field,
• 1:25:02
  and has kept up its muster roll, together with the inrush of the
• 1:25:06
  Italian tide, have ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to all efforts at permanent
• 1:25:13
  improvement. The more that has been done, the less it has seemed to
• 1:25:17
  accomplish in the way of rear relief, until it has at last become clear
• 1:25:23
  that nothing short of entire demolition will ever prove of radical benefit. Corruption could
• 1:25:30
  not have chosen ground for its stand with better promise of success. The whole
• 1:25:34
  district is a maze of narrow, often unsuspected passageways, necessarily for there is
• 1:25:41
  scarce a lot that has not two, three or four tenements upon it,
• 1:25:45
  swarming with unwholesome crowds. What a bird's eye view of the Bend would be
• 1:25:50
  like is a matter of bewildering conjecture. Its every day appearance, as seen
• 1:25:56
  from the corner of Bayard Street on a sunny day, is one of the
• 1:26:00
  sights of New York. Bayard Street is the high road to jew Town.
• 1:26:05
  Across the bowery, picketed from end to end with outposts of Israel, Hebrew
• 1:26:12
  faces, Hebrew signs, and incessant chatter in the queer lingo that passes for
• 1:26:17
  Hebrew on the east side. Attend the curious wanderer to every corner of Mulberry
• 1:26:23
  Street. But the moment he turns the corner, the scene changes abruptly.
• 1:26:29
  Before him lies spread out what might better be the market place in some town
• 1:26:33
  in southern Italy that a street in New York. All but the houses.
• 1:26:38
  They are still the same old tenements of the unromantic type, but for once
• 1:26:43
  they do not make the foreground in a slum picture from the American metropolis.
• 1:26:48
  The interest centers not in them, but in the crowd. They shelter only
• 1:26:53
  when the street is not preferable, and that with the Italian is only when
• 1:26:57
  it rains or he is sick. When the sun shines, the entire population
• 1:27:02
  seeks the street, carrying on its household work, its bargaining, its love
• 1:27:08
  making on street or sidewalk, are idling there when it has nothing better to
• 1:27:13
  do. With the reverse of the impulse that makes the Polish Jew coop himself
• 1:27:18
  up in his den with the thermometer at stewing heat. Along the curb,
• 1:27:24
  women sit in rows, young and old alike, with the odd head covering
• 1:27:28
  pad or turbine. That is their badge of servitude, hers to bear the
• 1:27:32
  burden as long as she lives, haggling over baskets of frowsy weeds, some
• 1:27:39
  sort of salad, probably stale tomatoes and oranges not above suspicion. Ash barrels
• 1:27:45
  serve them as counters, and not infrequently does the arrival of the official cart
• 1:27:50
  en route for the dump cause a temporary suspension of trade until the barrels have
• 1:27:57
  been emptied and restored. Hucksters peddler's carts make two rows of booths in the
• 1:28:02
  street itself and along the houses. Is still another, a perpetual market doing
• 1:28:09
  a very lively trade in its own queer staples found nowhere on American ground,
• 1:28:15
  save in the bend. Two old hags camping on the pavement are dispensing stale
• 1:28:21
  bread, baked not in loaves, but in the shape of big wreaths,
• 1:28:27
  like exaggerated crawlers, out of bags of dirty bedtick. There is no use
• 1:28:32
  disguising the fact they look like and they probably are, old mattresses mustered into
• 1:28:39
  surface under the pressure of a rush of trade. Stale bread was the one
• 1:28:45
  article the health officers after a raid on the market, once reported as quote
• 1:28:50
  not unwholesome close quote, it was only disgusting. Here is a brawny butcher,
• 1:28:58
  sleeves rolled up above the elbows and clay pipe and mouth skinning a kid
• 1:29:02
  that hangs from his hook. They will tell you with a laugh at the
• 1:29:06
  Elizabeth Street police station that only a few days ago, when a dead goat
• 1:29:12
  had been reported lying in Pell Street, it was mysteriously missing. By the
• 1:29:16
  time the oval cart came to take it away. It turned out that an
• 1:29:21
  Italian had carried it off in his sack to awake or feast of some sort
• 1:29:27
  in one of the back alleys on either side of the narrow entrance to Bandits
• 1:29:31
  Roost. One of the most notorious of these is a shop that is a
• 1:29:35
  fair sample of the sort of invention necessity is the mother of in the Bend.
• 1:29:41
  It is not enough that trucks and ash barrels have provided four distinct lines
• 1:29:46
  of shops that are not down on the insurance maps to accommodate the crowds.
• 1:29:51
  Here have the very hallways been made into shops three feet wide by four deep.
• 1:29:59
  They have just room for one the shopkeeper, who himself within does his
• 1:30:04
  business outside, his wares displayed on a board hung across what was once the
• 1:30:11
  hall door. Back of the rear door of this unique shop, a hole
• 1:30:15
  has been punched from the hall into the alley, and the tenants go that
• 1:30:18
  way. One of the shops is a tobacco bureau, presided over by an
• 1:30:25
  unknown saint, done in yellow and red. There is not a shop,
• 1:30:29
  a stand or an ash barrel doing duty as a counter that has not its
• 1:30:34
  patron saint. The other is a fish stand full of slimy, odd looking
• 1:30:40
  creatures, fish that never swam in American waters, or if they did,
• 1:30:44
  were never seen on an American fish stand, and snails, big awkward sausages,
• 1:30:50
  anything but appetizing, hanging in the grocer's doorway, knocking against the customer's
• 1:30:57
  head, as if to remind him that they are there waiting to be bought.
• 1:31:00
  What they are I never had the courage to ask. Down the street
• 1:31:04
  comes a file of women carrying enormous bundles of firewood on their heads, loads
• 1:31:10
  of decaying vegetables from the market wagons and their aprons, and each a baby
• 1:31:15
  at the breast, supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling
• 1:31:18
  down. The women do all the carrying, all the work one sees going
• 1:31:24
  on in the men. The men sit or stand in the streets, on
• 1:31:29
  trucks, or in the open doors of the saloons, smoking black clay pipes,
• 1:31:32
  talking and gesticulating as if forever on the point of coming to blows.
• 1:31:38
  Near a particularly boisterous group, a really pretty girl with a string of amber
• 1:31:44
  beads twisted artlessly in the knot of her raven hair, has been bargaining long
• 1:31:48
  and earnestly with an old granny who presides over a wheelbarrow load of second hand
• 1:31:55
  stockings and faded cotton yorn industriously darned the biggest holes. While she extols the
• 1:32:01
  virtues of her stock, one of the rude swains with patched overalls tucked into
• 1:32:08
  his boots, to whom the girl's eyes have strayed more than once, steps
• 1:32:13
  up and gallantly offers to pick her out the handsomest pair, whereas she laughs
• 1:32:17
  and pushes him away with a gesture which she interprets as an invitation to stay
• 1:32:23
  and he does, evidently to the satisfaction of the beldame, who forthwith raises
• 1:32:29
  her prices fifty percent without being detected by the girl. Red bandannas and yellow
• 1:32:34
  kerchiefs are everywhere, So is the Italian tongue, infinitely sweeter than the harsh
• 1:32:42
  gutturals of the Russian jew around the corner. So are the restaurantes of innumerable
• 1:32:47
  pasqualies. Half of the people in the bend or christened pasqually, or get
• 1:32:54
  the name in some other way. When the police do not know the name
• 1:32:57
  of an escaped murderer, they guess at husqually and send the name out on
• 1:33:00
  alarm. In nine cases out of ten, it fits. So are the
• 1:33:06
  banks that hang out their shingle as tempting bait. On every hand. There
• 1:33:12
  are half a dozen in the single block, steamship agencies, employment offices,
• 1:33:17
  and saving banks, all in one. So are the toddling youngsters bow legged
• 1:33:23
  half of them, and so are no end of mothers present in perspective,
• 1:33:28
  some of them scarce yet in their teens. Those who are not in the
• 1:33:31
  street are hanging half way out of the windows shouting at someone below. All
• 1:33:38
  the bend must be if not altogether at least half out of doors. When
• 1:33:42
  the sun shines in the street where the city wheels the broom, there is
• 1:33:46
  at least an effort at cleaning up. There has to be, or it
• 1:33:50
  would be swamped in filth over running from the courts and alleys where the ragpickers
• 1:33:56
  live. It requires more than ordinary courage to explore these on a hot day.
• 1:34:00
  The undertaker has to do it. Then the police always right here in
• 1:34:05
  this tenement, on the east side of the street, they found little Antonia
• 1:34:11
  Candia, victim of fiendish cruelty. Quote covered clothes, quote said the account
• 1:34:16
  found in the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children quote
• 1:34:21
  with sores and her hair matted with dried blood. Close quote. Abuse is
• 1:34:27
  the normal condition of the Bend. Murder its everyday crop, with the tenants
• 1:34:32
  not always the criminals. In this block between Bayard Park, Mulberry and Baxter
• 1:34:39
  Streets the Bend proper. The Late Tenement House Commission counted one hundred fifty five
• 1:34:45
  deaths of children. Footnote the term child means in the mortality tables a person
• 1:34:51
  under five years of age. Children five years old and over figure in the
• 1:34:57
  tables as adult into footnote. In a specimen year eighteen eighty two, their
• 1:35:03
  percentage of total mortality in the bloc was sixty eight point twenty eight, while
• 1:35:09
  for the whole city the proportion was only forty six point twenty. The infant
• 1:35:14
  mortality in any city or place, as compared with the whole number of deaths,
• 1:35:18
  is justly considered a good barometer of its general sanitary condition. Here in
• 1:35:25
  this tenement number fifty eight and half, next to bandits roost, fourteen persons
• 1:35:30
  died that year, and eleven of them were children. In number sixty one,
• 1:35:35
  eleven and eight of them not yet five years old. According to the
• 1:35:40
  records in the Bureau of Vital Statistics, only thirty nine people lived in number
• 1:35:45
  fifty nine and a half in the year eighteen eighty eight, nine of them
• 1:35:49
  little children. There were five baby funerals in that house the same year.
• 1:35:56
  Out of the alley itself, number fifty nine nine dead were carried in eighteen
• 1:36:00
  eighty eight, five in baby coffins. Here is the record of the year
• 1:36:05
  for the whole block, as furnished by the Registrar of Vital Statistics, doctor
• 1:36:12
  Roger S. Tracy. Population population five years old and over Baxter Street one
• 1:36:18
  thousand, nine hundred eighteen, Mulberry Street two thousand, seven hundred eighty eight
• 1:36:24
  total four thousand, seven hundred and six under five years Baxter Street three hundred
• 1:36:30
  and fifteen, Mulberry Street six hundred and twenty nine total nine hundred and forty
• 1:36:35
  four total. Baxter Street two thousand, two hundred and thirty three, Mulberry
• 1:36:43
  Street three thousand, four hundred seventeen total five thousand, six hundred fifty deaths
• 1:36:50
  five years old and over Baxter Street twenty six, Mulberry Street forty four total
• 1:36:57
  seventy under five years Baxter Street forty six, Mulberry Street eighty six total one
• 1:37:02
  hundred thirty two total, Baxter Street seventy two, Mulberry Street one hundred thirty
• 1:37:10
  total two hundred two death rate five years old and over Baxter Street thirteen point
• 1:37:17
  fifty six, Mulberry Street fifteen point seventy eight total fourteen point eighty seven under
• 1:37:25
  five years Baxter Street one hundred forty six point zero two, Mulberry Street one
• 1:37:30
  hundred thirty six point seventy total one hundred thirty nine point eight three general Baxter
• 1:37:38
  Street thirty two point twenty four Mulberry Street thirty eight point zero five total thirty
• 1:37:45
  five point seventy five. The general death rate for the whole city that year
• 1:37:49
  was twenty six point twenty seven. These figures speak for themselves when it is
• 1:37:56
  shown that in the model tenement across the way at numbers forty eight and fifty,
• 1:38:01
  where the same class of people live in greater swarms one hundred and sixty
• 1:38:05
  one according to the record, but under good management and in decent quarters,
• 1:38:11
  the hearst called that year only twice, once for a baby. The agent
• 1:38:16
  of the Christian people who built that tenement will tell you that Italians are good
• 1:38:20
  tenants, while the owner of the alley will oppose every order to put his
• 1:38:26
  property in repair with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot.
• 1:38:30
  Both are right from their different standpoints. It is the standpoint that makes
• 1:38:34
  the difference, and the tenant. What if I were to tell you that
• 1:38:39
  this alley and more tenement properly in the bend, all of it, notorious
• 1:38:44
  for years as the vilest and worst to be found anywhere, stood associated on
• 1:38:49
  the text books, all through the long struggle to make its owners responsible,
• 1:38:54
  which has at last resulted in a qualified victory for the law, with the
• 1:38:59
  name of an honored family, one of the oldest and best, rich in
• 1:39:03
  possessions and in influence, and high in the councils of the city's government.
• 1:39:10
  It would be but the plain truth, Nor would it be the only instance,
• 1:39:15
  by very many that stand recorded on the Health Department's books of a kind
• 1:39:19
  that has come near to making the name of landlord as odious in New York
• 1:39:25
  as it has become in Ireland. Bottle Alley is around the corner in Baxter
• 1:39:30
  Street, but it is a fair specimen of its kind wherever found. Look
• 1:39:35
  into any of these houses. Everywhere the same piles of rags, of melodorous
• 1:39:41
  bones, and musty paper, all of which the sanitary police flatter themselves they
• 1:39:45
  have banished to the dumps and the warehouses. Here is a quote flat close
• 1:39:51
  quote of quote, parlor close quote, and two pitch dark coops called bedrooms.
• 1:40:00
  Truly, the bed is all there is room for the family. TEA
• 1:40:02
  kettle is on the stove, doing duty for the time being as a wash
• 1:40:08
  boiler. By night it will have returned to its proper use again. A
• 1:40:12
  practical illustration of how poverty in the bend makes both ends meet one two,
• 1:40:17
  three beds are there? If the old boxes and heaps of foul straw can
• 1:40:21
  be called by that name. A broken stove with crazy pipe, from which
• 1:40:27
  the smoke leaks at every joint. A table of rough boards propped up on
• 1:40:31
  boxes, piles of rubbish in the corner. The closeness and smell are appalling.
• 1:40:38
  How many people sleep here? The woman with the red bandana shakes her
• 1:40:43
  head sullenly. But the bare legged girl with a bright face counts on her
• 1:40:46
  fingers five six, six, sir, six strong people and five children.
• 1:40:51
  Only five, she says, with a smile, swathing the little one on
• 1:40:56
  her lap in its cruel bandage. There is another in the cradle, actually
• 1:41:00
  a cradle, And how much the rent? Nine and a half? And
• 1:41:04
  please, sir, he won't put the paper on, he is the landlord.
• 1:41:09
  The paper hangs in musty shreds on the wall. Well do I recollect
• 1:41:13
  the visit of a health inspector to one of these tenements on the July day
• 1:41:17
  when the thermometer outside was climbing high in the nineties. But inside, in
• 1:41:23
  that awful room with half a dozen persons washing, cooking, and starting rags
• 1:41:29
  lay the dying baby alongside the stove, where the doctor's thermometer ran up to
• 1:41:34
  one hundred and fifteen degrees, perishing for the want of a breath of fresh
• 1:41:40
  air in this city of untold charities. Did not the manager of the fresh
• 1:41:45
  Air fund write to the pasture of an Italian church only last year too that
• 1:41:50
  quote, No one asked for Italian children close quote, and hence he could
• 1:41:56
  not send any to the country. Half a dozen blocks up most street there
• 1:42:00
  is a ragpicker's settlement, a sort of overflow from the bend that exists today
• 1:42:06
  in all its pristine nastiness. Something like forty families are packed into five old
• 1:42:13
  two story and attic houses that were built to hold five, and out in
• 1:42:17
  the yards. Additional crowds are, or were until very recently, accommodated in
• 1:42:23
  sheds built of all sorts of old boards and used as drying racks for the
• 1:42:29
  Italian tenants stock. I found them empty when I visited the settlement while writing
• 1:42:33
  this. The last two tenants had just left. Their fate was characteristics the
• 1:42:40
  quote old man close quote, who lived in the corner coop with barely roomed
• 1:42:45
  to crouch beside the stove. There would not have been room for him to
• 1:42:48
  sleep had not age crooked his frame to fit. His house had been taken
• 1:42:54
  to the crazy house, and the woman who was his neighbor and had lived
• 1:42:58
  in her shed for years had simply disappeared. The agent and the other tenants
• 1:43:03
  guessed doubtless correctly that she might be found on the quote island close quote.
• 1:43:11
  But she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism end quote, not much good close quote.
• 1:43:15
  And no one took the trouble to inquire for her. They had all
• 1:43:19
  they could do, attending to their own business and raising the rent. No
• 1:43:24
  wonder I found that for one front room and two quote bedrooms close quote in
• 1:43:30
  the shameful old wrecks of buildings, the tenant was paying ten dollars a month
• 1:43:35
  for the back room and one bedroom nine dollars, and for the attic rooms
• 1:43:41
  according to size from three dollars to seventy five cents to five dollars and fifty
• 1:43:46
  cents. There was a standing quarrel between the professional I mean now the official
• 1:43:53
  sanitarian and the unsalaried agitator for sanitary reform over the question of over crime tenements.
• 1:44:00
  The one puts the number a little vaguely at four or five hundred,
• 1:44:04
  while the other asserts that there are thirty two thousand the whole number of houses
• 1:44:10
  classed as tenements at the census of two years ago, taking no account of
• 1:44:15
  the better kind of flats. It depends on the angle from which one sees
• 1:44:19
  it, which is right at best. The term overcrowding is a relative one,
• 1:44:25
  and the scale of official measurement conveniently sliding under the pressure of the Italian
• 1:44:30
  influx. The standard of breathing space required for an adult by the health officers
• 1:44:36
  has been cut down from six to four hundred cubic feet. The quote needs
• 1:44:42
  of the situation close quote is their plea, and no more perfect argument could
• 1:44:47
  be advanced for the reformer's position. It is in the bend the sanitary policeman
• 1:44:54
  locates the bulk of his four hundred, and the sanitary reformer gives up the
• 1:44:59
  task in despair of its vast homeless crowds. The census takes no account.
• 1:45:04
  It is their instinct to shun the light, and they cannot be corralled in
• 1:45:09
  one place long enough to be counted. But the houses can. And the
• 1:45:14
  last count showed that in the Bend district between Broadway and the Bowery and Canal
• 1:45:19
  and Chatham Streets, in a total of four thousand, three hundred and sixty
• 1:45:25
  seven quote apartments close quote, only nine were for the moment vacant. While
• 1:45:30
  in the Old Africa west of Broadway that receives the overflow from Mulberry Street and
• 1:45:36
  is rapidly changing its character, the notice quote standing room only close quote is
• 1:45:43
  up. Not a single vacant room was found there. Nearly a one hundred
• 1:45:46
  and fifty quote lodgers close quote were driven out of two adjoining Mulberry Street tenements,
• 1:45:53
  one of them abstutely named the House of Blazes during that census. What
• 1:45:59
  squalor and degradation and habit these dens the health officers know Through the long summer
• 1:46:04
  days, their carts patrol, the men scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes,
• 1:46:11
  and sinks in cellars and hidden hovels where the tramp burrows from midnight till far
• 1:46:16
  into the small hours of the morning. The policeman's thundering rap unclosed doors is
• 1:46:23
  heard with his stern command a priport on his rounds, gathering evidence of illegal
• 1:46:29
  overcrowding. The doors are opened unwillingly enough, but the ardor means business,
• 1:46:34
  and the tenant knows it, even if he understands no word of English.
• 1:46:40
  Upon such scenes as the one presented in the picture. It was photographed by
• 1:46:44
  flashlight on just such a visit. In a room not thirteen feet either way,
• 1:46:49
  slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a
• 1:46:54
  sort of alcove. The rest are the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly
• 1:47:00
  in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals to their quote
• 1:47:05
  beds. Close quote, for it was only just past midnight. A baby's
• 1:47:11
  fretful wail came from an adjoining hall room, where in the semi darkness,
• 1:47:15
  three recumbent figures could be made out. The apartment was one of three and
• 1:47:21
  two adjoining buildings we had found within half an hour, similarly crowded. Most
• 1:47:28
  of the men were lodgers, who slept there for five since a spot.
• 1:47:31
  Another room on the top floor that had been examined a few nights before was
• 1:47:36
  comparatively empty. There were only four persons in it, two men, an
• 1:47:41
  old woman, and a young girl. The landlord opened the door with alacrity,
• 1:47:45
  and exhibited with a proud sweep of his hand the sacrifice he had made
• 1:47:49
  of his personal interests to satisfy the law. Our visit had been anticipated.
• 1:47:56
  The policeman's back was probably no sooner turned, and the room was reopened for
• 1:48:00
  business. End of Section seven, Chapter seven A raid on the stale beer
• 1:48:09
  dives. Midnight roll call was over in the Elizabeth Street police station, but
• 1:48:15
  the reserves were held under orders. A raid was on foot, But whether
• 1:48:19
  on the Chinese fan Tan games, or the opium joints of Mott and Pell
• 1:48:23
  Streets, or on dens of even worse character, was a matter of guess
• 1:48:27
  work in the men's room. When the last patrolman had come in from his
• 1:48:30
  beat, all doubt was dispelled by the brief order to the bend. The
• 1:48:36
  stale beer dives were the object of the raid. The policemen buckled their belts
• 1:48:41
  tighter, and with expressive grunts of disgust, took up their march toward Mulberry
• 1:48:45
  Street, past the heathen temples of Mott Street. There was some fun to
• 1:48:50
  be gotten out of a raid. There. They trooped into the bend,
• 1:48:56
  sending here and there a belated tramp scurrying in fright towards healthier quarters, and
• 1:49:00
  halted at the mouth of one of the hidden alleys. Squads were told off
• 1:49:05
  and sent to make a simultaneous descent on all the known tramp's burrows in the
• 1:49:09
  block. Led by the sergeant. Ours I went along as a kind of
• 1:49:14
  war correspondent, groped its way in single file through the narrow rift between slimy
• 1:49:19
  walls to the tenements in the rear. Twice during our trip we stumbled over
• 1:49:24
  tramps, both women asleep in the passage. They were quietly passed to the
• 1:49:29
  rear, receiving sundry prods and punches on the trip, and headed for the
• 1:49:33
  station in the grip of a policeman as a sort of advance guard of the
• 1:49:36
  coming army. After what seemed half a mile of groping in the dark,
• 1:49:42
  we emerged finally into the alley proper, where light escaping through the cracks of
• 1:49:46
  closed shutters on both sides enabled us to make out the contour of three rickety
• 1:49:50
  framed tenements. Snatches of ribald songs and peals of coarse laughter reached us.
• 1:49:57
  From now this now that of the unseen bird school is in, said the
• 1:50:01
  sergeant dryly. As we stumbled down the worn steps of the next cellar way,
• 1:50:05
  a kick of his boot heel sent the door flying into the room,
• 1:50:11
  a room perhaps a dozen feet square, with walls and ceiling that might once
• 1:50:14
  have been clean. Assuredly the floor had not in the memory of man,
• 1:50:18
  if indeed there was other floor than hard trodden mud, but were now covered
• 1:50:24
  with a brown crust that touched with the end of a club came off in
• 1:50:27
  shuddering showers of crawling bugs, revealing the blacker filth. Beneath grouped about a
• 1:50:33
  beer keg that was propped on the wreck of a broken chair. A foul
• 1:50:36
  and ragged host of men and women on boxes, benches, and stools.
• 1:50:42
  Tomato cans filled at the keg were passed from hand to hand. In the
• 1:50:45
  center of the group, a sallow, wrinkled hag, evidently the ruler of
• 1:50:49
  the feast, dealt out the hideous stuff. A pile of copper coins rattled
• 1:50:55
  in her apron, the very pennies received with such showers of blessings upon the
• 1:50:59
  giver that afternoon. The faces of some of the women were familiar enough from
• 1:51:03
  the streets as those of beggars forever whining for a penny to keep a family
• 1:51:08
  from starving. Their wine and boisterous hilarity were alike hushed now in sullen cowed
• 1:51:15
  submission. They sat, evidently knowing what to expect. At the first glimpse
• 1:51:19
  of the uniform in the open door. Some in the group, customers with
• 1:51:24
  a record probably had turned their heads away to avoid the searching glance of the
• 1:51:27
  officer, while a few less used to such scenes stared defiantly. A single
• 1:51:33
  stride took the sergeant into the middle of the room, and with a swinging
• 1:51:36
  blow of his club, he knocked the faucet out of the keg and the
• 1:51:40
  half filled can from the boss Hag's hand. As the contents of both splashed
• 1:51:44
  upon the floor, half a dozen of the group made a sudden dash,
• 1:51:47
  and, with shoulders humped above their heads to shield their skulls against the dreaded
• 1:51:50
  locust, broke for the door they had not counted upon the policemen outside.
• 1:51:57
  There was a brief struggle, two or three heavy thumps, and the runaways
• 1:52:00
  were brought back to where their comrades crouched in dogged silence. Thirteen called the
• 1:52:06
  sergeant, completing his survey take them out revolvers, all but one good for
• 1:52:13
  six months on the island, the whole lot. The exception was a young
• 1:52:16
  man, not much if any over twenty, with a hard look of dissipation
• 1:52:20
  on his face. He seemed less unconcerned than the rest, but tried hard
• 1:52:26
  to make up for it by putting on the bolest air He could come down
• 1:52:30
  early, commented the officer, shoving him along with his stick. There is
• 1:52:33
  need of it. They don't last long at this. That stuff is brewed
• 1:52:38
  to kill at long range. At the head of the cellar steps we encountered
• 1:52:44
  a similar procession from farther back in the alley, where still another was forming
• 1:52:48
  to take up its march to the station. Out in the street was heard
• 1:52:51
  the tramp of the hosts, already pursuing that well trodden path. As with
• 1:52:56
  a fresh compliment of men, we entered the next stale beer alley. There
• 1:53:00
  were four dives in one cellar. Here the filth and the stench were utterly
• 1:53:04
  unbearable. Even the sergeant turned his back and fled. After scattering the crowd
• 1:53:09
  with his club and starting them toward the door. The very dog in the
• 1:53:13
  alley preferred the cold flags for a berth to the stifling cellar. We found
• 1:53:16
  it lying outside. Seventy five tramps, male and female were arrested in the
• 1:53:21
  four small rooms. In one of them, where the air seemed thick enough
• 1:53:26
  to cut with a knife, we found a woman, a mother with a
• 1:53:29
  new born babe, on a heap of dirty straw. She was asleep and
• 1:53:33
  was left until an ambulance could be called to take her to the hospital.
• 1:53:39
  Returning to the station with this patch, we found every window in the building
• 1:53:43
  thrown open to the cold October wind, and the men from the sergeant down
• 1:53:46
  smoking the strongest cigars that could be obtained by way of disinfecting the place.
• 1:53:50
  Two hundred and seventy five tramps had been jammed into the cells to be arraigned
• 1:53:55
  next morning in the police court on the charge of vagrancy, with a certain
• 1:53:59
  prospect of six months on the island of the sentence. At least they were
• 1:54:03
  sure as to the length of the men's stay. The experienced official at the
• 1:54:08
  desk was skeptical, it being then within a month of an important election.
• 1:54:14
  If tramps have nothing else to call their own, they have votes, and
• 1:54:16
  votes that are for sale cheap for cash. About election time. This gives
• 1:54:21
  them a poll, at least by proxy. The sergeant observed, as if
• 1:54:26
  it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had more than
• 1:54:29
  once seen the same tramp sent to Blackwell's Island twice in twenty four hours for
• 1:54:33
  six months at a time. As a thief never owns to his calling,
• 1:54:40
  however, devoid of moral scruples, preferring to style himself a speculator. So
• 1:54:44
  this real home product of the slums, the stale beer dive, is known
• 1:54:47
  about the Bend by the more dignified name of the two cent restaurant. Usually,
• 1:54:54
  as in this instance, it is in some cellar giving on a back
• 1:54:57
  alley. Doctored unlicensed is its chief ware. Sometimes a cup of coffee in
• 1:55:02
  a stale roll may be had for two cents. The men pay the score
• 1:55:08
  to the women unutterable horror of the suggestion the place is free. The beer
• 1:55:14
  is collected from the kegs put on the sidewalk by the saloon keeper to await
• 1:55:17
  the brewer's cart, and is touched up with drugs to put a froth on
• 1:55:20
  it. The privilege to sit all night on a chair, or sleep on
• 1:55:25
  a table or in a barrel goes with each round of drinks, generally an
• 1:55:30
  Italian, sometimes a Negro, occasionally a woman runs the dive. Their customers
• 1:55:35
  alike. Homeless and hopeless in their utter wretchedness are the professional tramps, and
• 1:55:42
  these only the meanest thief is infinitely above the stale beer level. Once upon
• 1:55:47
  that plain, there is no escape to sink below. It is impossible.
• 1:55:51
  No one ever rose from it. One night spent in a stale beer dive
• 1:55:57
  is like the traditional putting on of the uniform of the cast the discarded rags
• 1:56:00
  of an old tramp that style. Once crossed, the lane has no longer
• 1:56:05
  a turn, and contrary to the proverb, it is usually not long either.
• 1:56:12
  With the gravitation of the Italian tramp landlord toward the old stronghold of the
• 1:56:15
  African on the west side, a share of the stale beer traffic has left
• 1:56:19
  the bend, but its headquarters will always remain there, the real home of
• 1:56:25
  Tramptum, just as fourteenth Street is its limit. No real tramp crosses that
• 1:56:30
  frontier after nightfall and in the daytime, only to beg repulsive. As the
• 1:56:34
  business is, its profits to the Italian dive keeper are considerable. In fact,
• 1:56:40
  barring a slight outlay in the ingredients that served to give life to the
• 1:56:43
  beer dregs, it is all profit. The banker who curses the Italian colony
• 1:56:48
  does not despise taking a hand in it, and such a thing as a
• 1:56:51
  stale beer trust on a Mulberry Street scale may yet be among the possibilities.
• 1:56:58
  One of these bankers, who was once known to the police as the keeper
• 1:57:00
  of one notorious stale beer dive and the active backer of others, is today
• 1:57:04
  an extensive manufacturer of macaroni, the owner of several big tenements and other real
• 1:57:10
  estate, and the capital, it is said, has all come out of
• 1:57:13
  his old business. Very likely, it is true. On hot summer nights,
• 1:57:19
  it is no rare experience when exploring the worst of the tenements in the
• 1:57:23
  Bend, to find the hallways occupied by rows of sitters, tramps whom laziness
• 1:57:28
  or hard luck has prevented from earning enough by their day's labor to pay the
• 1:57:31
  admission fee to a stale beer dive, and who have their reasons for declining
• 1:57:35
  the hospitality of the police station. Lodging rooms huddled together in loathsome files.
• 1:57:41
  They squat there overnight or until an inquisitive policeman breaks up the congregation with this
• 1:57:45
  club, which in Mulberry Street has always free swing. At that season,
• 1:57:51
  the woman tramp predominates the men. Some of them at least take to the
• 1:57:56
  railroad track and to camping out when the nights grow warm, returning in the
• 1:58:00
  to prey on the city and to recruit their ranks from the lazy, the
• 1:58:02
  shiftless, and the unfortunate. Like a foul loadstone, the bend attracts and
• 1:58:08
  brings them back, no matter how far they have wandered for next to idleness.
• 1:58:13
  The tramp loves rum next to rum stale beer its equivalent of the gutter,
• 1:58:19
  and the first and last go best together. As sitters. They occasionally
• 1:58:25
  find a job in the saloons about Chatham and Pearl Streets on cold winter nights
• 1:58:30
  when the hallway is not practicable that enables them to pick up a charity drink
• 1:58:33
  now and then and a bite of an infrequent sandwich. The barkeeper permits them
• 1:58:39
  to sit about the stove and, by shivering, invite the sympathy of transient
• 1:58:42
  customers. The dodge works well, especially about Christmas and election time, and
• 1:58:47
  the sitters are able to keep comfortably filled up to the advantage of their host.
• 1:58:53
  But to look thoroughly miserable, they must keep awake. A tramp placidly
• 1:58:57
  dozing at the fire would not be an object of sympathy. To make sure
• 1:59:00
  that they do keep awake, the wily bartender makes them sit constantly, swinging
• 1:59:04
  one foot like the pendulum of a clock. When it stops, the slothful
• 1:59:09
  sitter is roused with a kick and fired out. It is said by those
• 1:59:14
  who profess to know that habit has come to the rescue of over sleepy tramps,
• 1:59:18
  and that the old rounders can swing hand or foot in their sleep without
• 1:59:21
  betraying themselves. In some saloon, sitters are let in at these seasons in
• 1:59:27
  fresh batches every hour. On one of my visits to the Bend, I
• 1:59:31
  came across a particularly ragged and disreputable tramp who sat smoking his pipe on the
• 1:59:35
  rung of a ladder with such evident philosophic contentment in the busy labor of a
• 1:59:40
  score of ragpickers all about him, that I bade him sit for a picture,
• 1:59:44
  offering him ten cents for the job. He accepted the offer with hardly
• 1:59:48
  a nod, and sat patiently watching me from his perch until I got ready
• 1:59:53
  for work. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth and put it
• 1:59:56
  in his pocket, calmly declaring that it was not included in the contract,
• 2:00:00
  and that it was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture.
• 2:00:03
  The pipe, by the way, was of clay, and of the two
• 2:00:06
  for a cent kind. But I had to give in the man scarce ten
• 2:00:12
  seconds employed at honest labor, even at sitting down, at which he was
• 2:00:15
  an undoubted expert, had gone on strike. He knew his rights and the
• 2:00:19
  value of work, and was not to be cheated out of either. Whence
• 2:00:25
  these tramps and why the tramping are questions oftener asked than answered ill applied.
• 2:00:30
  Charity and idleness answer the first query. They are the whence, and to
• 2:00:35
  a large extent, the why. Also. Once started on the career of
• 2:00:40
  a tramp, the man keeps to it because it is the laziest. Tramps
• 2:00:45
  and tufts profess the same doctrine that the world owes them a living, but
• 2:00:49
  from standpoints that tend in different directions. The tough does not become a tramp,
• 2:00:55
  save in rare instances when old and broken down. Even then, usually
• 2:01:00
  he is otherwise disposed of. The devil has various ways of taking care of
• 2:01:04
  his own. Nor is the tramp's army recruited from any certain class. All
• 2:01:10
  occupations and most grades of society yield to it their contingent of idleness. Occasionally,
• 2:01:15
  from one cause or another, a recruit of a better stamp is forced
• 2:01:19
  into the ranks. But the first acceptance of alms puts a brand on the
• 2:01:23
  able bodied man, which his moral nature rarely holds out to a face.
• 2:01:28
  He seldom recovers his lost caste. The evolution is gradual, keeping step with
• 2:01:32
  the increasing shabbiness of his clothes and corresponding loss of self respect, until he
• 2:01:38
  reaches the bottom in the bend of the tough The tramp. Doctrine that the
• 2:01:43
  world owes him a living makes a thief of the tramp a coward. Numbers
• 2:01:48
  only make him bold unless he has to do with defenseless women in the city.
• 2:01:54
  The policemen keep him straight enough. The women rob an occasional clothes line
• 2:01:58
  when no one else is looking, or steal the pale and scrubbing brush with
• 2:02:01
  which they are set to clean up in the station house lodging rooms after their
• 2:02:04
  night's sleep at the police station. The roads of the tramp and the tuff
• 2:02:09
  again converge in midwinter. On the coldest nights, the sanitary police corral the
• 2:02:14
  tramps here and in their lodging houses, and vaccinate them, despite their struggles
• 2:02:18
  and many oaths that they have recently been scraped. The station house is the
• 2:02:24
  sieve that sifts out the chaff from the wheat, if there be any wheat
• 2:02:27
  there. A man goes from his first night's sleep on the hard slab of
• 2:02:31
  a police station lodging room, to a deckhand's berth on an outgoing steamer,
• 2:02:36
  to the recruiting office, to any work that is honest, or he goes
• 2:02:42
  to the devil or the dives. Same thing, says my friend the sergeant
• 2:02:45
  who knows end of Section eight, Chapter eight, the cheap lodging houses.
• 2:02:56
  When it comes to the question of numbers with this tramp's army, another factor
• 2:03:00
  of serious portent has to be taken into account. The cheap lodging houses and
• 2:03:06
  the care of answeries that line Chatham Street in the bowery, harboring nightly a
• 2:03:12
  population as large as that of many a thriving town. A homemade article of
• 2:03:16
  tramp and thief is turned out that is attracting the increasing attention of the police,
• 2:03:21
  and offers a field for the missionaries labors. Besides which most others seem
• 2:03:27
  of slight account. Within a year they have been stamped as nurseries of crime
• 2:03:32
  by the Chief of the Secret Police. Footnote Inspector Burns on lodging houses in
• 2:03:39
  the North American Review, September eighteen eighty nine end footnote the sort of crime
• 2:03:46
  that feeds especially on idleness, and lies ready to the hand of fatal opportunity.
• 2:03:53
  In the same strain, one of the justices on the Police court bench
• 2:03:57
  sums up his long experience as a comitad magistrate. Quote the ten cent lodging
• 2:04:02
  houses more than counterbalance the good done by the free reading rooms, lectures,
• 2:04:09
  and all other agencies of reform. Such lodging houses have caused more destitution,
• 2:04:15
  more beggary and crime than any other agency I know of. End quote.
• 2:04:21
  A very slight acquaintance with the subject is sufficient to convince the observer that neither
• 2:04:27
  authority overstates the fact. The two officials had reference, however, to two
• 2:04:31
  different grades of lodging houses. The cost of a night's lodging makes the difference.
• 2:04:38
  There is a wider gap between the quote hotel end quote. They are
• 2:04:43
  all hotels that charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a
• 2:04:47
  dime, than between the bridal suite and the everyday hall bedroom of the ordinary
• 2:04:54
  hostelry. The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the
• 2:05:00
  off It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague idea
• 2:05:04
  that they can get along here, if anywhere, that something is bound to
• 2:05:09
  turn up among so many, Nearly all our young men unsettled in life,
• 2:05:15
  many most of them, perhaps fresh from good homes, beyond a doubt,
• 2:05:19
  with honest hopes of getting the start in the city and making a way for
• 2:05:25
  themselves. Few of them have much money to waste while looking around, and
• 2:05:30
  the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object. Fewer still know anything about
• 2:05:34
  the city and its pitfalls. They have come in search of crowds of quote
• 2:05:41
  life end quote, and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery, the great democratic
• 2:05:46
  highway of the city, where the twenty five cent lodging houses take them in.
• 2:05:53
  In the alleged reading rooms of these great barracks that often have accommodations such
• 2:05:58
  as they are for or even four hundred guests. They encounter three distinct classes
• 2:06:03
  of associates, the great mass adventurers like themselves, waiting there for something to
• 2:06:10
  turn up. A much smaller class of respectable clerks or mechanics, who too
• 2:06:15
  poor or too lonely to have a home of their own, lived this way
• 2:06:18
  from year to year. And lastly the thief, in search of recruits for
• 2:06:24
  his trade. The sights of the young stranger sees and the company he keeps
• 2:06:29
  in the bowery are not of a kind to strengthen any moral principle he may
• 2:06:33
  have brought away from home. And by the time his money is gone,
• 2:06:38
  with no work yet in sight, and he goes down a step, a
• 2:06:42
  long step, to the fifteen cent lodging house, he is ready for the
• 2:06:46
  tempter, whom he finds waiting for him. There. Reinforced by the contingent
• 2:06:51
  of ex convicts returning from the prisons after having served out their sentences for robbery
• 2:06:58
  or theft. And it is that the something he has been waiting for turns
• 2:07:02
  up. The police returns have the record of it. Quote in nine cases
• 2:07:08
  out of ten, says Inspector Burns, he turns out a thief or a
• 2:07:13
  burglar if indeed he does not sooner or later become a murderer. End As
• 2:07:19
  a matter of fact, some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been
• 2:07:24
  the result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses, and so frequent in
• 2:07:29
  bold have become the depredations of the lodging house thieves that the authorities have been
• 2:07:33
  compelled to make a public demand for more effective laws that shall make them subject
• 2:07:39
  at all times to police regulation. Inspector Burns observes that in the last two
• 2:07:45
  or three years at least four hundred young men have been arrested for petty crimes
• 2:07:48
  that originated in the lodging houses, and that in many cases it was their
• 2:07:54
  first step in crime. He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that three
• 2:07:59
  fourths of the young men called on to plead to generally petty offenses in the
• 2:08:03
  courts are under twenty years of age, poorly clad, and without means.
• 2:08:09
  The bearing of the remark is obvious. One of the to the police well
• 2:08:15
  known thieves who lived went out of jail at the Windsor House a well known
• 2:08:20
  lodging house in the Bowery, went to Johnstown after the flood and was shot
• 2:08:24
  and killed there while robbing the dead. An idea of just how this particular
• 2:08:31
  scheme of corruption works with an extra touch of infamy thrown in, may be
• 2:08:35
  gathered from the story of David Smith, the New York fagin end quote,
• 2:08:41
  who was convicted and sent to prison last year through the instrumentality of the Society
• 2:08:46
  for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here is the account from the Society's
• 2:08:52
  last report quote. The boy Edward mulhern, fourteen years old, had run
• 2:09:00
  away from his home in Jersey City, thinking he might find work and friends
• 2:09:03
  in New York. He may have been a trifle wild. He met Smith
• 2:09:09
  on the Bowery and recognized him as an acquaintance. When Smith offered him a
• 2:09:15
  supper and bed, he was only too glad to accept. Smith led the
• 2:09:18
  boy to a vile lodging house on the Bowery, where he introduced him to
• 2:09:24
  his pals and swore he would make a man of him before he was a
• 2:09:28
  week older. Next day, he took the unsuspecting Edward all over the Bowery
• 2:09:33
  and Grand Street, showed him the sights and drew his attention to the careless
• 2:09:39
  way the ladies carried their bags and purses, and the easy thing it was
• 2:09:43
  to get them. He induced Edward to try his hand. Edward tried and
• 2:09:48
  won. He was richer by three dollars. It did seem easy, of
• 2:09:54
  course, it is said his companion. From that time, Smith took the
• 2:09:58
  boy in a number of thieving raids, but he never seemed to become adept
• 2:10:03
  enough to be trusted out of range of the fagin's watchful eye. When he
• 2:10:07
  went out alone, he generally returned empty handed. This did not suit Smith.
• 2:10:13
  It was then he conceived the idea of turning this little inferior thief into
• 2:10:20
  a superior beggar. He took the boy into his room and burned his arms
• 2:10:24
  with a hot iron. The boy screamed and entreated in vain. The merciless
• 2:10:30
  wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh, and afterwards applied acid to
• 2:10:35
  the raw wound. Thus prepared, with his arm inflamed, swollen, and
• 2:10:41
  painful, Edward was sent out every day by this fiend, who never let
• 2:10:46
  him out of his sight, and threatened to burn his arm off if he
• 2:10:50
  did not beg money enough, he was instructed to tell people the wound had
• 2:10:54
  been caused by acid falling upon his arm at the works. Edward was now
• 2:10:58
  too much under the man's influence to resist or disobey him. He begged hard
• 2:11:05
  and handed smith the pennies faithfully. He received in return bad food and worse
• 2:11:11
  treatment. The reckoning came when the wretch encountered the boy's father in search of
• 2:11:18
  his child and the bowery, and fell under suspicion of knowing more than he
• 2:11:22
  pretended of the lad's whereabouts. He was found in his den with a half
• 2:11:26
  dozen of his chums, reveling on the proceeds of the boy's begging for the
• 2:11:31
  day. The twenty five cent lodging house keeps up the pretense of a bedroom,
• 2:11:37
  though the head high partition in closing a space just large enough to hold
• 2:11:41
  a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes,
• 2:11:46
  is the shallowest of pretenses. The fifteen cent bed stands boldly forth without
• 2:11:52
  screen, in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as
• 2:11:56
  foul. At the ten cent level, the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears
• 2:12:03
  there is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and
• 2:12:07
  there is nothing to lock up save on general principles. The lodger usually that
• 2:12:13
  ten and seven cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination. Some sort
• 2:12:18
  of an apology for a bed with mattress and blanket represents the aristocratic purchase of
• 2:12:24
  the tramp, who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the
• 2:12:28
  chance of an empty box or ash barrel for shelter on the quality floor of
• 2:12:35
  one of these hotels. A strip of canvas strung between rough timbers, without
• 2:12:41
  covering of any kind does for the couch of the seven cent lodger, who
• 2:12:46
  prefers the questionable comfort of a red hot stove close to his elbow to the
• 2:12:52
  revelry of the stale beer dive. It is not the most secure perch in
• 2:12:56
  the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off its intervals, but they have not far
• 2:13:01
  to fall to the next tier of bunks, and the commotion that ensues is
• 2:13:05
  speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when
• 2:13:11
  every bunk had its tenant. I have stood in such lodging room more than
• 2:13:16
  once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of
• 2:13:20
  an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight.
• 2:13:24
  Imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very real nausea of sea sickness. The
• 2:13:33
  one thing that did not favor the deception was the heir. Its character could
• 2:13:37
  not be mistaken. The proprietor of one of these seven cent houses was known
• 2:13:43
  to me as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. He quote ran three
• 2:13:48
  such establishments and made, it is said, eight thousand a year clear profit
• 2:13:54
  on his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish
• 2:13:58
  precincts of Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not suspected. A
• 2:14:05
  notice that was posted on the wall of the lodger's room suggested at least an
• 2:14:09
  effort to maintain his uptown standing in the slums. It read, quote no
• 2:14:16
  swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock end quote before nine. No exceptions were
• 2:14:22
  taken to the natural vulgarity of the place, but that was the limit.
• 2:14:28
  There are no licens, lodging houses known to me which charged less than seven
• 2:14:31
  cents, or even such a bed as this canvas strip, though there are
• 2:14:35
  unlicensed ones enough where one may sleep on the floor for five cents a spot,
• 2:14:41
  or squat in a sheltered hallway for three. The police station lodging house,
• 2:14:46
  where the soft side of a plank is the regulation couch is next in
• 2:14:52
  order. The manner in which the police bed is quote made up end quote
• 2:14:56
  is interesting in its simplicity. The loose planks that make the platform are simply
• 2:15:03
  turned over, and the job is done with an occasional coat of whitewash thrown
• 2:15:07
  in too sweeten things. I know of only one easier way, but so
• 2:15:13
  far as I am informed, it has never been introduced in this country.
• 2:15:18
  It used to be practiced, if reports spoke truly. In certain old country
• 2:15:22
  towns, the bed was represented by clothes lines stretched across the room, upon
• 2:15:28
  which the sleepers hung by the armpits for a penny a night. In the
• 2:15:33
  morning, the boss woke them up by simply untying the line at one end
• 2:15:37
  and letting it go with its sload. A labor saving device, certainly and
• 2:15:43
  highly successful in attaining the desired end. According to the police figures, four
• 2:15:50
  million, nine hundred seventy four thousand and twenty five separate lodgings were furnished last
• 2:15:54
  year by these dormitories between two and three hundred in numbers, and adding the
• 2:16:01
  one hundred and forty seven thousand, six hundred and thirty four lodgings furnished by
• 2:16:05
  the station houses, the total number of homeless army was five million, one
• 2:16:11
  hundred and twenty one thousand, six hundred and fifty nine, an average of
• 2:16:16
  over fourteen thousand homeless men. Footnote deduct sixty nine thousand, one hundred eleven
• 2:16:22
  women lodgers in the police stations end footnote for every night in the year.
• 2:16:28
  The health officers professional optimists always in matters that Trench upon their official jurisdiction,
• 2:16:35
  insists that the number is not quite so large as you are given. But
• 2:16:39
  apart from any slight discrepancy in the figures, the more important fact remains that
• 2:16:45
  last year's record of lodgers is an all round increase over the previous years of
• 2:16:50
  over three hundred thousand, and that this has been the ratio of growth of
• 2:16:54
  the business during the last three years, the period of which Inspector Burns complaints
• 2:17:01
  as turning out so many young criminals with the lodging house stamp upon them.
• 2:17:05
  More than half of the lodging houses are in the Bowery district, that is
• 2:17:09
  to say, the fourth, sixth and tenth wards, and they harbor nearly
• 2:17:15
  three fourths of their crowds. The calculation that more than nine thousand homeless young
• 2:17:20
  men lodge nightly along Chatham Street and the Bowery between the City Hall and the
• 2:17:24
  Cooper Union is probably not far out of the way. The city missionary finds
• 2:17:31
  them there far less frequently than the thief in need of helpers. Appropriately Enough,
• 2:17:37
  nearly one fifth of all the pawnshops in the city and one sixth of
• 2:17:41
  all the saloons are located here, while twenty seven percent of all the arrests
• 2:17:46
  on the police books have been credited to the district for the last two years.
• 2:17:52
  About election time, especially in presidential elections, the lodging houses come out
• 2:17:58
  strong on the side of the political boss who has the biggest quote barrel end
• 2:18:03
  quote the victory and political contests in the three words I have mentioned, of
• 2:18:09
  all others is distinctly to the general with the strongest battalions, and the lodging
• 2:18:15
  houses are his favorite recruiting ground. The colonization of voters is an evil of
• 2:18:20
  the first magnitude, nonetheless, because both parties smirch their hands with it,
• 2:18:26
  and for that reason, next to hopeless, honors are easy where the two
• 2:18:31
  quote machines end quote, entrenched in their strongholds, outbid each other across the
• 2:18:37
  bowery in open rivalry as to who shall commit the most flagrant frauds at the
• 2:18:43
  poles. Semi Occasionally a champion offender is caught and plenished, as was not
• 2:18:48
  long ago the proprietor of one of the biggest Bowery lodging houses. But such
• 2:18:54
  scenes are largely spectacular, if not prompted by some hidden motive of revel that
• 2:19:00
  survives from the contest beyond a doubt. Inspector Burns speaks by the card when
• 2:19:05
  he observes that quote. Usually this work is done in the interest of some
• 2:19:11
  local political boss who stands by the owner of the house in case the latter
• 2:19:16
  gets into trouble. Endote for standing by read twisting the machinery of outraged justice
• 2:19:22
  so that its hands shall fall not too heavily upon the culprit or miss him
• 2:19:28
  altogether. One of the houses that achieved profitable notoriety in this way in many
• 2:19:33
  successive elections. A notorious tramps resort in Houston Street was lately given up and
• 2:19:39
  has most appropriately been turned into a bar factory, thus still contributing, though
• 2:19:46
  in changed form, to the success of quote the cause end quote. It
• 2:19:52
  must be admitted that the black tramp who herds in the West Side hotels is
• 2:19:56
  more discriminating in this manner of electioneering d than his white brother. He at
• 2:20:01
  least exhibits some real loyalty in invariably selling his vote to the Republican bidder for
• 2:20:07
  a dollar, while he charges the Democratic boss a dollar and a half.
• 2:20:13
  In view of the well known facts, there is a good deal of force
• 2:20:16
  in the remark made by a friend of ballot reform during the recent struggle over
• 2:20:20
  that hotly contested issue, that real ballot reform will do more to knock out
• 2:20:24
  cheap lodging houses than all the regulations of police and health officers together. The
• 2:20:31
  experiment made by a well known stove manufacturer a winter or two ago in the
• 2:20:37
  way of charity might have thrown much desired light on the question of the number
• 2:20:41
  of tramps in the city. Could it have been carried to a successful end.
• 2:20:46
  He opened a sort of breakfast shop for the idle and unemployed in the
• 2:20:50
  region of Washington Square, offering to all who had no money a cup of
• 2:20:54
  coffee and a roll for nothing. The first morning he had a dozen counsutsustomers,
• 2:21:01
  the next about two hundred. The number kept growing until one morning,
• 2:21:05
  at the end of two weeks, found by actual count two thousand and fourteen
• 2:21:09
  shivering creatures in line waiting their turn for a seat at his tables. The
• 2:21:15
  shop was closed that day. It was one of the rare instances of too
• 2:21:20
  great a rush of custom wrecking a promising business, and the great problem remained
• 2:21:24
  unsolved. End of Section nine, Chapter nine, Chinatown, between the tabernacles
• 2:21:35
  of Jewelry and the shrines of the bend joins chiefly planted his pagan worship of
• 2:21:41
  idols, chief among which are the celestial worshiper's own gain and lusts. Whatever
• 2:21:46
  may be said about the Chinaman being a thousand years behind the age on his
• 2:21:50
  own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful scheming to
• 2:21:56
  quote, make it pay. It is doubtful if there is anything he does
• 2:22:01
  not turn to a pain account from his religion down or up as one prefers
• 2:22:09
  at the risk of distressing some well meaning but I fear too trustful people.
• 2:22:13
  I stated in advance as my opinion, based on the steady observation of years,
• 2:22:18
  that all attempts to make an effective Christian of John Chinaman will remain abortive
• 2:22:24
  in this generation of the next. I have, if anything, less hope.
• 2:22:31
  Ages of senseless idolatry a mere grub worship have left him without the essential
• 2:22:37
  qualities for appreciating the gentle teachings of a faith whose motive and unselfish spirit are
• 2:22:41
  alike beyond his grasp. He lacks the handle of a strong faith in something,
• 2:22:48
  anything, however wrong, to catch him by. There is nothing strong
• 2:22:52
  about him except his passions when aroused. I am convinced that he adopts Christianity
• 2:23:00
  when he adopts it at all, as he puts on American clothes with what
• 2:23:03
  the politicians would call an ulterior motive, some sort of gain in the near
• 2:23:09
  prospect washing a Christian wife, perhaps anything he happens to rate for the moment
• 2:23:16
  above his cherished pig tail. It may be that I judge him too harshly.
• 2:23:22
  Exceptions may be found, indeed, for the credit of the race.
• 2:23:26
  I hope there are such, but I am bound to say my hope is
• 2:23:30
  not backed by lively faith. Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing next door neighbor
• 2:23:37
  to the Bend. It has little of its outdoor stir in life, none
• 2:23:41
  of its gaily colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty. Mott Street is clean
• 2:23:48
  to distraction. The laundry stamp is on it, though The houses are chiefly
• 2:23:52
  of the conventional tenement house type, with nothing to rescue them from the every
• 2:23:56
  day dismal dreariness of their kind, save here and there a splash of dull
• 2:24:01
  red or yellow A sign hung endways with the streamers of red flannel tacked on,
• 2:24:07
  that announces in Chinese characters that doctor che Yung Chong sells Chinese herb medicines,
• 2:24:15
  or that one Long and Company queer contradiction take in washing or deal out
• 2:24:20
  tea and groceries. There are some jim cracks in the second story fire escape
• 2:24:26
  of one of the houses, signifying that Joss or a club has a habitation
• 2:24:31
  there. An American patent medicine concern has seized the opportunity to decorate the background
• 2:24:37
  with its cabalistic trade mark that in this company looks as foreign as the rest.
• 2:24:43
  Doubtless, the privilege was bought for cash. It will buy anything in
• 2:24:48
  Chinatown. Jos himself included, as indeed, why should it not. He
• 2:24:54
  was bought for cash across the sea, and came here under the law that
• 2:24:58
  shuts out the live Chinaman but lets in his dead God on payment of the
• 2:25:01
  statutory duty on bric a brac. Red and yellow are the holiday colors of
• 2:25:07
  Chinatown as of the Bend. But they do not lend brightness in Mott Street
• 2:25:13
  as around the corner in Mulberry. Rather, they seem to descend to the
• 2:25:16
  level of general dulness and glower at you from doors and windows, from the
• 2:25:22
  telegraph pole that is the official organ of Chinatown, and from the store signs
• 2:25:26
  with blank unmeaning stare suggesting nothing, asking no questions, and answering none.
• 2:25:35
  Fifth Avenue is not duller on a rainy day than Mott Street to one in
• 2:25:39
  search of excitement. Whatever is on foot goes on behind closed doors. Stealth
• 2:25:46
  and secretiveness are as much a part of the Chinaman New York as the catlike
• 2:25:52
  tread of his felt shoes. His business as his domestic life shuns the light
• 2:25:58
  less because there is anything to conceal than because that is the way of the
• 2:26:03
  man. Perhaps the attitude of American civilization towards the stranger whom it invited in
• 2:26:09
  has taught him that way. At any rate, the very doorways of his
• 2:26:15
  offices and shops are fenced off by queer forbidding partitions suggestive of a continual state
• 2:26:20
  of siege. The stranger who enters through the crooked approach is received with sudden
• 2:26:26
  silence, a sullen stare, and an angry fought u vant that breathes annoyance
• 2:26:33
  and distrust. Trust not him who trusts. No one is as safe a
• 2:26:41
  rule in Chinatown as out of it. Were not Mott Street overawed in its
• 2:26:46
  isolation, it would not be safe to descend this open cellar way, through
• 2:26:50
  which come the pungent odor of burning opium and the clink of copper coins on
• 2:26:54
  the table. As it is, though saved, it is not profitable to
• 2:27:01
  intrude. At the first footfall of leather shoes on the steps, the hum
• 2:27:05
  of talk ceases, and the group of celestials crouching over their game of fan
• 2:27:11
  Tan stop playing and watch the comer with ugly looks. Fantan is their ruling
• 2:27:16
  fashion. The average Chinaman, the police will tell you, but rather gamble
• 2:27:22
  than eat any day, and they have ample experience to back them. Only
• 2:27:28
  the fellow in the bunk smokes away, indifferent to all else but his pipe
• 2:27:33
  and his own enjoyment. It is a mistake to assume that Chinatown is honeycombed
• 2:27:37
  with opium joints. There are a good many more outside of it than in
• 2:27:41
  it. The celestials do not monopolize the pipe in Mott Street. There is
• 2:27:48
  no need of them. Not a Chinese home or burrow there but has its
• 2:27:52
  bunk and its layout where they can be enjoyed, safe from police interference.
• 2:27:58
  The Chinaman smokes opium as Caucasians smoke tobacco, and apparently with little worse effect
• 2:28:03
  upon himself, but woe unto the white victim upon which its pitiless drug gets
• 2:28:09
  its grip. The blouse peddlers, who with arms buried half to the elbow
• 2:28:16
  in their trousers pockets, lounge behind their stock of watermelon seed and sugar cane
• 2:28:22
  cut in lengths to suit the purse of the buyer disdained to offer the barbarian
• 2:28:26
  their wares. Chinatown, that does most things by contraries, rules its holiday
• 2:28:33
  style to carry its hands in its pockets, and its denizens follow the fashion,
• 2:28:37
  whether in blue blouse, in gray or in brown, with shining and
• 2:28:43
  braided pigtail dangling below the knees, or with hair crop short above a coat
• 2:28:48
  collar of melkin cut. All kinds of men are met, but no women,
• 2:28:54
  not at least with almond eyes. The reason is simple. There are
• 2:29:01
  a few, of very few Chinese merchants have wives of their own color,
• 2:29:05
  but they are seldom or never seen in the street. The wives of Chinatown
• 2:29:11
  are of different stock that comes closer to hall from the teeming tenements to the
• 2:29:18
  right and left of it come the white slaves of its dens of vice and
• 2:29:22
  their infernal drug that have infused into the bloody sixth ward a subtler poison than
• 2:29:28
  ever the stale beard dives new or the sudden death of the old brewery.
• 2:29:35
  There are houses, dozens of them, in Mott and Pell streets that are
• 2:29:39
  literally jammed from the joint in the cellar to the attic with these hapless victims
• 2:29:45
  of a passion which, once acquired demands the sacrifice of every instinct of decency
• 2:29:52
  to its insatiate desire. There is a church in Mott Street, at the
• 2:29:56
  entrance to Chinatown that stands as a barrier be between it and the tenements beyond.
• 2:30:01
  Its young men have waged unceasing war upon the monstrous wickedness for years,
• 2:30:07
  but with very little real results. I have in mind a house in Pell
• 2:30:11
  Street that has been rated no end of times by the police, and its
• 2:30:16
  population emptied upon Blackwell's Island or into the reformatories. It is to day honeycombed
• 2:30:22
  with scores of conventional households of the Chinese quarter. The men worshippers of Joss.
• 2:30:28
  The women, all white girls, hardly yet grown to womanhood, worshiping
• 2:30:35
  nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them body and soul. Easily Tempted from
• 2:30:39
  homes that have no claim upon the name, they rarely or never returned.
• 2:30:46
  Mott Street gives up its victims, owing to the Charity hospital or the Potter's
• 2:30:50
  Field. Of the depth of their fall. No one is more thoroughly aware
• 2:30:54
  than these girls themselves, no one less concerned about it. A calmness with
• 2:31:00
  which they discussed it, while insisting illogically upon the fiction of a marriage that
• 2:31:05
  deceives no one is disheartening. Their misery is peculiarly fond of company, and
• 2:31:11
  an amount of visiting goes on in these households. It makes it extremely difficult
• 2:31:16
  for the stranger to untangle them. I came across a company of them quote
• 2:31:22
  hitting the pipe end quote together on a tour through their dens one night with
• 2:31:26
  the police Captain the precinct. The girls knew him, called him by name,
• 2:31:31
  offered him a pipe, and chatted with him about the incidents of their
• 2:31:35
  acquaintance, how many times he had quote sent them up end quote, and
• 2:31:39
  their chances of lasting much longer. There was no shade of regret in their
• 2:31:45
  voices, nothing but the utter indifference and surrender. One thing about them was
• 2:31:52
  conspicuous, their scrupulous neatness. It is distinguishing mark of Chinatown outwardly and physically.
• 2:32:01
  Is not altogether by chance. The Chinaman has chosen the laundry as this
• 2:32:05
  distinctive field. He is by nature as clean as the cat, which he
• 2:32:09
  resembles in his traits of cruel, cunning and savage fury. When aroused on
• 2:32:16
  this point of cleanliness, he insists in his domestic circle, yielding in others
• 2:32:20
  with crafty submissiveness to the caprice of the girls who boss him in a very
• 2:32:26
  independent manner, fretting vengefully under the yoke they loathe, but which they know
• 2:32:31
  right well they can never shake off. Once they have put the pipe to
• 2:32:35
  their lips and given mont Street a mortgage upon their souls for all time to
• 2:32:41
  the priest, whom they call in when the poison racks the body. They
• 2:32:46
  pretend that they are yet their own masters, but he knows that it is
• 2:32:50
  an idle boast, least of all believed by themselves. As he walks with
• 2:32:54
  them the few short steps to the potter's field, he hears the sad story
• 2:33:00
  he has heard told over and over again. A father, mother, home,
• 2:33:05
  and friends, given up for the accursive pipe, and stands hopeless and
• 2:33:09
  helpless before the colossal evil for which he knows no remedy. The frequent assertions
• 2:33:16
  of the authorities that at least no girls under age are wrecked on this Chinese
• 2:33:20
  shoal are disproved by the observation of those who go frequently among these dens.
• 2:33:26
  Though the smallest girl will invariably, and usually without being asked, insist that
• 2:33:31
  she is sixteen and so of aged to choose the company she keeps. Such
• 2:33:37
  assertions are not to be taken seriously. Even while I am writing the morning
• 2:33:41
  returns from one of the precincts that pass through my hands report the arrest of
• 2:33:46
  a Chinaman for quote in vaguling little girls into his laundry end quote. One
• 2:33:52
  of the one hundred outposts of Chinatown that are scattered all over the city as
• 2:33:56
  the outer threads of the spider's web that holds its prey. Fast reference to
• 2:34:03
  case number thirty nine thousand, four hundred ninety nine in this year's Report of
• 2:34:07
  the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children will discover one of the much
• 2:34:11
  traveled roads to Chinatown. The girl whose story it tells was thirteen and one
• 2:34:18
  of six children abandoned by a dissipated father. She had been discharged from an
• 2:34:22
  Eighth Avenue store where she had been employed as a cash girl. Being afraid
• 2:34:28
  to tell her mother, floated about until she landed in a Chinese laundry.
• 2:34:33
  The judge heeded her tearful prayer and sent her home with her mother, but
• 2:34:37
  she was back again in a little while. Despite all promises of reform.
• 2:34:43
  Her tyrant knows well that she will come, and patiently bides his time.
• 2:34:46
  When her struggles in the web have ceased. At last, he rules no
• 2:34:50
  longer with a gloved hand. A specimen of celestial logic from the Home Circle
• 2:34:56
  at this period came home to me with a personal application. One evening,
• 2:35:00
  when I attempted with a policeman to stop a Chinaman whom we found beating his
• 2:35:05
  white wife with a broom handle in a Mott Street cellar. He was angry
• 2:35:11
  at our interference and declared vehemently that she was bad. Suppose your wife be
• 2:35:16
  bad? You know, licky her? He asked, as if there could
• 2:35:20
  be no appeal from such a common sense of proposition as that. My assurance
• 2:35:26
  that I did not, that such a thing could not occur to me struck
• 2:35:30
  him dumb with amazement. He eyed me awhile, in stupid silence, poked
• 2:35:35
  the linen in his tub, stole another look, and made up his mind.
• 2:35:39
  A gleam of intelligence shone in his eye, and pity and contempt struggled
• 2:35:43
  in his voice. Then I guess she licky you, he said. No
• 2:35:50
  small commotion was caused in Chinatown once upon the occasion of an expedition I undertook,
• 2:35:56
  accompanied by a couple of police detectives, to photograph jos Some conscienceless wag
• 2:36:03
  spread the report after we were gone that his picture was wanted for the rogues
• 2:36:07
  gallery at headquarters. The insult was too gross to be passed over without atonement
• 2:36:13
  of some sort. Two rose pigs made matters all right with his offended Majesty
• 2:36:18
  of mont Street and with his attendant priests, who bare a very practical hand
• 2:36:22
  in the worship. By serving as the divine stomach, as it were,
• 2:36:26
  they eat the good things set before their rice paper master, unless, as
• 2:36:31
  once happened, some sacrilegious tramp sneaks in and gets ahead of them. The
• 2:36:37
  practical way in which these people combined worship with business is certainly admirable. I
• 2:36:41
  was told that the scrawl covering the wall on both sides of the shrine stood
• 2:36:46
  for the names of the pillars of the church or club. The Joss House
• 2:36:50
  is both, that they might have the reward in this world, no matter
• 2:36:54
  what happened to them in the next. There was another inscription overhead that needed
• 2:36:58
  no interpret in familiar English letters copied bodily from the trade Dollar was the sentiment
• 2:37:05
  in God we trust. The priest pointed to it with undisguised pride, and
• 2:37:11
  attempted an explanation, from which I gathered that the inscription was intended as a
• 2:37:16
  diplomatic courtesy, a delicate international compliment to the melekan Jos the almighty Dollar.
• 2:37:24
  Chinatown has enlisted the telegraph for the dissemination of public intelligence, but has got
• 2:37:30
  hold of the contrivance by the wrong end. As the wires serve us at
• 2:37:33
  newspaper making, so the Chinaman makes use of the poll for the same purpose.
• 2:37:39
  The telegraph poll of which I spoke, as the real official organ of
• 2:37:43
  Chinatown, stands not far from the Joss House in Mott Street, in full
• 2:37:48
  view from Chatham Square. In its centers the real life of the colony its
• 2:37:54
  gambling news. Every day, yellow and red notices are posted upon it by
• 2:37:58
  unseen hands announcing that in such and such a cellar a fan tan game will
• 2:38:03
  be running that night, or warning the faithful that a raid is intended on
• 2:38:07
  this or that game through the machination of a rival interest. A constant stream
• 2:38:13
  of plotting and counterplotting makes up the round of Chinese social and political existence.
• 2:38:20
  I do not pretend to understand the exact political structure of the colony or its
• 2:38:24
  internal government. Even discarding as idle the stories of a secret cabal with power
• 2:38:31
  over life and death, and authority to enforce its decrees, there is evidence
• 2:38:35
  enough that the Chinese consider themselves subject to the laws of the land only when
• 2:38:39
  submission is unavoidable, and that they are governed by a code of their own,
• 2:38:45
  the very essence of which is rejection of all authority, except under compulsion.
• 2:38:52
  If now and then some horrible crime in the Chinese colony, a murder
• 2:38:56
  of such hideous ferocity as one I have very vivid recollection of, where the
• 2:39:01
  murderers stabbed as victim both chinamen, of course, in the back with a
• 2:39:05
  meat knife, plunging it into the hilt no less than seventeen times, arouses
• 2:39:11
  the popular prejudice to a suspicion that it was ordered. Only the suspected themselves
• 2:39:18
  are to blame, for they appear to rise up as one man to shield
• 2:39:20
  the criminal. The difficulty of tracing the motive of the crime and the murderer
• 2:39:26
  is extreme, and it is the rarest of all results that the police get
• 2:39:31
  on the track of either the obstacles in the way of hunting down an Italian
• 2:39:35
  murderer are as nothing to the opposition encountered in Chinatown. Nor is the failure
• 2:39:41
  of the preserve only to be ascribed to the familiar fact that, to caucasionize
• 2:39:46
  quote, all Chinamen look alike end quote, but rather to their acting alike
• 2:39:52
  in a body to defeat discovery at any cost withal The police give the Chinese
• 2:40:35
  the name of being the quote quietest people down there end quote, meaning in
• 2:40:41
  the notoriously turbulent sixth ward, and they are the one thing they desire above
• 2:40:46
  all else is to be let alone, a very natural wish, perhaps,
• 2:40:50
  considering all the circumstances. If it were laudable, or even an allowable ambition
• 2:40:56
  that prompts it, they might be humored, with advantage, probably to both
• 2:41:01
  sides. But the facts show too plainly that it is not, and that
• 2:41:05
  in their very exclusiveness and reserve, they are a constant and terrible menace to
• 2:41:11
  society wholly, regardless of their influence upon the industrial problems which their presence confuses.
• 2:41:18
  The severest official scrutiny, the harshest repressive measures are justifiable in Chinatown orderly
• 2:41:26
  as it appears on the surface, even more than in the bend, and
• 2:41:30
  the case is infinitely more urgent to the peril that threatens there. All the
• 2:41:35
  senses are alert, whereas the poison that proceeds from Mott Street puts mind and
• 2:41:39
  body to sleep to work out its deadly purpose in the corruption of the soul.
• 2:41:46
  This again may be set down as a harsh judgment. I may be
• 2:41:50
  accused of inciting persecution of an unoffending people. Far from it, granted that
• 2:41:56
  the Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, that they
• 2:42:01
  serve no useful purpose here, whatever they may have done elsewhere in other days.
• 2:42:07
  Yet to this it is sufficient answer that they are here, and that
• 2:42:11
  having let them in, we must make the best of it. This is
• 2:42:15
  a time for very plain speaking on this subject. Rather than banish the Chinaman,
• 2:42:20
  I would have the door opened wider for his wife, make it a
• 2:42:26
  condition of his coming or staying that he bring his wife with him. Then
• 2:42:30
  at least he might not be what he now is and remains a homeless stranger
• 2:42:35
  among us. Upon this hinges the real Chinese question in our city. At
• 2:42:41
  all events, as I see it, to assert that the victims of his
• 2:42:46
  drug and his base passions would go to the bad. Anyhow is begging the
• 2:42:50
  question. They might, and they might not. The chance is the span
• 2:42:54
  between life and death from any other form of dissipation than that for which Chinatown
• 2:43:01
  stands. There is recovery for the victims of any other vice hope For these
• 2:43:07
  there is neither hope nor recovery, nothing but death, moral, mental,
• 2:43:13
  and physical death. End of Section ten, Chapter ten, jew Town.
• 2:43:20
  The tenements grow taller, and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly as
• 2:43:24
  we crossed the Bowery, and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind, invade
• 2:43:30
  the Hebrew quarter. Baxter Street, with its interminable rows of old clothes shops
• 2:43:35
  and its brigades of pullers, in nicknamed the bay in honor perhaps of the
• 2:43:41
  Tars who lay to there after a cruise to stock up their togs, or
• 2:43:46
  maybe after these schooners of beer plentifully bespoke in that latitude. Bayard Street,
• 2:43:50
  with its synagogues and its crowds, gave us a foretaste of it. No
• 2:43:56
  need in asking here where we are. The jargon of the street, the
• 2:44:01
  signs of the sidewalk, the manner of dress of the people. Their unmistakable
• 2:44:05
  physiognomy betray the race at every step. Men with queer skull caps, venerable
• 2:44:13
  beard, and the outlandish long skirted caftan of the Russian jew elbow the ugliest
• 2:44:18
  and the handsomest women in the land. The contrast is startling. The old
• 2:44:24
  women are hags. The young orris wives and mothers. At sixteen, at
• 2:44:30
  thirty, they are old. So thoroughly has the Chosen people crowded out the
• 2:44:35
  gentiles in the Tenth War, that when the great Jewish holidays come round every
• 2:44:39
  year, the public schools in the district have practically to close up. Of
• 2:44:43
  the thousands of pupils, scarce a handful come to school. Nor is there
• 2:44:48
  any suspicion that the rest are playing hooky. They stay honestly home to celebrate.
• 2:44:54
  There is no mistaking it. We are in jew town. It is
• 2:44:58
  said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together on a square
• 2:45:03
  miles. Here, the average five story tenement adds a story or two to
• 2:45:09
  its stature in Ludlow Street, and an extra building on the rear lot.
• 2:45:13
  And yet the sign to let is the rarest of all there here is one
• 2:45:20
  seven stories high. The sanitary policemen whose beat this is will tell you that
• 2:45:24
  it contains thirty six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here
• 2:45:30
  and on the avenues. In this house, where a case of smallpox was
• 2:45:35
  reported, there were fifty eight babies and thirty eight children that were over five
• 2:45:41
  years of age. In Essex Street, two small rooms and a six story
• 2:45:46
  tenement were made to hold a family of father and mother, twelve children and
• 2:45:52
  six borders. The border plays as important a part in the domestic economy of
• 2:45:56
  Jewtown as the lodger in the Olberry Street bend. These are samples of the
• 2:46:03
  packing of the population that has run up the record here to the rate of
• 2:46:07
  three hundred and thirty thousand per square mile. The densest crowding of Old London,
• 2:46:11
  I pointed out before, never got beyond a hundred and seventy five thousand.
• 2:46:18
  Even the alley is crowded out through dark hallways and filthy cellars, crowded
• 2:46:24
  as is every foot of the street with dirty children. These settlements in the
• 2:46:26
  rear are reached. These know how to find them when pursued by the police
• 2:46:33
  and the tramps that sneak in on chilly nights to fight for the warm spot
• 2:46:37
  in the yard over some baker's oven. They are out of place in this
• 2:46:41
  eivee of busy industry, and they know it. It is nothing in common
• 2:46:45
  with them, or with their philosophy of life that the world owes the idler.
• 2:46:50
  A living life here means the hardest kind of work, almost from the
• 2:46:54
  cradle the world. As a debtor has no credit in Jewtown, must to
• 2:47:00
  pay. Wouldn't buy one of the old hats that are hawked about Hester Street
• 2:47:05
  unless backed by security, representing labor done at lowest market rates. But this
• 2:47:09
  army of workers must have bread. It is cheap and filling, and bakeries
• 2:47:16
  abound wherever they are in the tenements. The tramp will skulk in if he
• 2:47:20
  can. There are such tramps roost in the rear of a tenement near the
• 2:47:24
  lower end of Ludlow Street that is never without its tenants in winter. By
• 2:47:28
  a judicious practice of flopping over on the stone pavements at intervals, and thus
• 2:47:35
  warming one side at a time, and with an empty box to put the
• 2:47:39
  feet in, it is possible to keep reasonably comfortable there, even on a
• 2:47:43
  rainy night in summer, the yard is the only one in the neighborhood that
• 2:47:46
  does not do duty as a public dormitory. Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown,
• 2:47:54
  as of its people the world over. It is at once its strength
• 2:47:58
  and its fatal weakness. Its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace become an overmastering
• 2:48:05
  passion With these people who come here and droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution
• 2:48:09
  from which freedom could be bought only with gold. It has enslaved them in
• 2:48:13
  bondage worse than that from which they fled. Money is their god. Life
• 2:48:20
  itself is of little value compared with even the leanest bank account. In no
• 2:48:24
  other spot does life wear so intensely bald and materialistic an aspect as in Ludlow
• 2:48:31
  Street. Over and over again I have met with instances of these Polish or
• 2:48:37
  Russian Jews deliberately starving themselves to the point of physical exhaustion, while working night
• 2:48:43
  and day at a tremendous pressure to save a little money and avenging Nemesis pursues
• 2:48:50
  this hatlong hunt for wealth. There is no worst paid class anywhere. I
• 2:48:54
  once put the question to one of their own people, who being a pawnbroker,
• 2:48:58
  and an unusually intelligent and charitable one certainly enjoyed the advantage of a practical
• 2:49:05
  view of the situation. Whence the many wretchedly poor people in such a colony
• 2:49:11
  of workers, where poverty from a misfortune has become a reproach dreaded as the
• 2:49:16
  plague he said, quote, emigration brings us a lot. In five years,
• 2:49:22
  it has averaged twenty five thousand a year, of which more than seventy
• 2:49:26
  percent have stayed in New York. Half of them require and receive aid from
• 2:49:31
  the Hebrew charities from the very start lest they starve. That is one explanation.
• 2:49:37
  There is another class than the one that cannot get work, those who
• 2:49:41
  have had too much of it, who have worked and hoarded and lived crowded
• 2:49:46
  together like pigs on the scantiest fare, and the worst to be got bound
• 2:49:52
  to save whatever their earnings until worn out they could work no longer. Then
• 2:49:56
  their hordes were soon exhausted. That their story close quote, and I knew
• 2:50:01
  that what he said was true. Penury and poverty are wetted everywhere to dirt
• 2:50:07
  and disease, and Jewtown is no exception. It could not well be otherwise
• 2:50:13
  in such crowds, considering especially their low intellectual status. The managers of Eastern
• 2:50:20
  Dispensary, which is in the very heart of their district, told the whole
• 2:50:24
  story when they said, quote, the diseases these people suffer from are not
• 2:50:28
  due to intemperance or immorality, but to ignorance, want of suitable food,
• 2:50:33
  and the foul air in which they live and work. Close quote the homes
• 2:50:39
  of the Hebrew Quarter are its workshops. Also reference will be made to the
• 2:50:43
  economic conditions under which they work in a succeeding chapter. Here we are concerned
• 2:50:50
  simply with the fact you are made fully aware of it before you have traveled
• 2:50:54
  the length of a single block in any of these East side streets. By
• 2:50:58
  the war, were of a thousand sewing machines worked at high pressure from earliest
• 2:51:03
  to dawn till mind and muscle give out. Together. Every member of the
• 2:51:07
  family, from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand shut in the
• 2:51:13
  kuami rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried. Besides the
• 2:51:18
  livelong day, it is not unusual to find a dozen persons, men,
• 2:51:22
  women and children at work in a single small room. The fact accounts for
• 2:51:28
  the contrast that strikes with wonder the observer who comes across from the bend Over
• 2:51:33
  there, the entire population seems possessed of an uncontrollable impulse to get out into
• 2:51:41
  the street. Here, all its energies appear to be bent upon keeping in
• 2:51:45
  and away from it. Not that the streets are deserted. The overflow from
• 2:51:48
  these tenements is enough to make a crowd anywhere. The children alone would do
• 2:51:54
  it, not old enough to work in no room to play, that is
• 2:51:58
  their story. In the home, the child's place is usurped by the lodger,
• 2:52:03
  who performs the service of the irishman's pig pays the rent. In the
• 2:52:07
  street, the army of hucksters crowded him out. Typhus, fever and smallpox
• 2:52:13
  are bred here and help solve the question what to do with him filled diseases
• 2:52:18
  both they sprout naturally among the hordes that bring the germs with them from across
• 2:52:22
  the sea, and whose first instinct is to hide their sick lest the authorities
• 2:52:28
  carry them off to the hospital to be slaughtered. As they firmly believe.
• 2:52:33
  The health officers are on constant and sharp lookout for hidden fever nests. Considering
• 2:52:39
  that half of the ready made clothes that are sold in the big stores,
• 2:52:43
  if not a good deal more than half, are made in these tenement rooms,
• 2:52:48
  this is not excessive caution. It has happened more than once that a
• 2:52:52
  child recovering from smallpox and in the most contagious stage of the disease, has
• 2:52:58
  been found crawling among heaps of half finished clothing that the next day would be
• 2:53:03
  offered for sale on the counter of a Broadway store. Or that a typhus
• 2:53:07
  fever patient has been discovered in a room, whence perhaps a hundred coats had
• 2:53:13
  been sent home that week, each one with the wearest death warrant, unseen
• 2:53:16
  and unsuspected basted in the lining. The health officers call the tenth the Typhus
• 2:53:24
  ward. In the office where deaths are registered, it passes as the suicide
• 2:53:28
  ward for reasons not hard to understand, and among the police as the crooked
• 2:53:33
  Ward, on account of the number of crooks, patty thieves and their allies,
• 2:53:39
  the fences receivers of stolen goods, who find the dense crowds congenial.
• 2:53:45
  The nearness of the bowery the great thieves Highway helps to keep up the supply
• 2:53:48
  of these. But Jewtown does not support its dives. Its troubles with the
• 2:53:54
  police are the characteristic crop of its intense business rivalries. Oppression, persecution have
• 2:54:01
  not shun the Jew of his native combatness. One wit, he is ready
• 2:54:05
  to fight for his rights, or what he considers his rights in a business
• 2:54:09
  transaction, synonymous generally with his advantage, as if he had been robbed of
• 2:54:16
  them for eighteen hundred years. One strong impression survives with him from his days
• 2:54:22
  of bondage, the power of the law. On the slightest provocation, he
• 2:54:28
  rushes off to invoke it for his protection. Doubtless the sensation is novel to
• 2:54:33
  him and therefore pleasing. The police at the Elridge Street Station are in a
• 2:54:37
  constant turmoil over these everlasting fights. Somebody is always denouncing somebody else and getting
• 2:54:46
  his enemy or himself locked up, frequently both for the prisoner, when brought
• 2:54:50
  in, has generally as plausible a story to tell as his accuser, and
• 2:54:56
  as much of a charge to make. The day closes on a while conflict
• 2:55:00
  of rival interests. Another dawns with a prisoner in court but no complainant.
• 2:55:05
  Overnight the case has been settled on a business basis, and the police dismiss
• 2:55:11
  their prisoner in deep disgust. These quarrels have sometimes a comic aspect. Thus
• 2:55:16
  with the numerous dancing schools that are scattered among the synagogues, often keeping them
• 2:55:22
  company in the same tenement. They are generally kept by some man who works
• 2:55:26
  in the daytime at tailoring, cigar making, or something else. The young
• 2:55:31
  people in jewtown are inordinately fond of dancing, and after their day's hard work,
• 2:55:35
  will flock to these schools for a night's recreation. But even to their
• 2:55:41
  fund they carry their business preferences, and it happens that a school adjourns in
• 2:55:45
  a body to make a general raid on the rival establishment across the street,
• 2:55:50
  without the ceremony of paying the admission fee. Then the dance breaks up in
• 2:55:54
  a general fight, in which likely enough someone is badly hurt. The police
• 2:55:58
  come in as usual and ring down the curtain. Bitter as are his private
• 2:56:05
  feuds. It is not until his religious life is invaded that a real inside
• 2:56:09
  view is obtained of this Jew, whom the history of Christian civilization has taught
• 2:56:16
  nothing but fear and hatred. There are two or three missions in the district,
• 2:56:20
  conducting a hopeless propagandism for the Messiah, whom the tenth ward rejects.
• 2:56:24
  And they attract occasional crowds who come to hear the Christian preacher, as the
• 2:56:30
  Jews of old gather to hear the apostles expound the new doctrine. The result
• 2:56:35
  is often strikingly similar. For once said a certain well known minister of an
• 2:56:41
  uptown church to me, after such an experience, I felt justified in comparing
• 2:56:46
  myself to Paul preaching salvation to the Jews. They kept still until I spoke
• 2:56:52
  of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Then they got up and fell
• 2:56:56
  to arguing amongst themselves into threatening me, and till it looked as if they
• 2:57:01
  meant to take me out to Ilster Street and Stoney as at Jerusalem. The
• 2:57:05
  chief captain was happily at hand with his centurions in the person of a sergeant
• 2:57:09
  and three policemen, and the preacher was rescued. So in all matters pertaining
• 2:57:15
  to their religious life that tinges all their customs, they stand these east side
• 2:57:20
  Jews, where the new day that dawn dun Calvary left them standing stubbornly refusing
• 2:57:26
  to see the light. A visit to a Jewish house of mourning is like
• 2:57:31
  bridging the gap of two thousand years. The inexpressibly sad and sorrowful wail for
• 2:57:37
  the dead, as it swells and rises in the hush of all sounds of
• 2:57:41
  life, comes back from the ages, like a mournful echo of the voice
• 2:57:46
  of Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are
• 2:57:50
  not attached to many of the synagogues, which among the poorest Jews, frequently
• 2:57:56
  consists of a scantily furnished room in a tenement with a few wooden stools or
• 2:58:01
  benches for the congregation, or telmudic schools that absorb a share of the growing
• 2:58:07
  youth. The schoolmaster is not rarely a man of some attainments who has been
• 2:58:13
  stranded there, his native instincts from money making having been smothered in the process
• 2:58:18
  that has made of him a learned man. It was of such a school
• 2:58:22
  in Elridge Street that the wicked Isaac Jacob, who killed his enemy, his
• 2:58:28
  wife and himself in one day, was janitor. But the majority of the
• 2:58:33
  children seek the public schools, where they are received sometimes with some misgivings on
• 2:58:37
  the part of the teachers, who find it necessary to inculcate lessons of cleanliness
• 2:58:43
  in the worst cases by practical demonstration with wash bowl and soap. Quote.
• 2:58:50
  He took hold of the soap as if it were some animal. Close quote,
• 2:58:54
  said one of these teachers to me, after such an experiment, upon
• 2:58:58
  a new pupil vote, and wiped three fingers across his face. He called
• 2:59:03
  that washing close. Quote. In the Allen Street Public School, the experienced
• 2:59:09
  principle has embodied among the elementary lessons to keep constantly before the children the duty
• 2:59:16
  they clearly lies next to their hands. A characteristic exercise, the question is
• 2:59:22
  asked daily from the teacher's desk, what must I do to be healthy?
• 2:59:26
  And the whole school responds, I must keep my skin clean, wear clean
• 2:59:31
  clothes, breathe pure air, and live in the sunlight. It seems little
• 2:59:37
  less than biting sarcasms to hear them say it, For to not a few
• 2:59:43
  of them, all these things are known only by name. In their every
• 2:59:46
  day life. There is nothing even to suggest any of them. Only the
• 2:59:50
  demand of religious custom has power to make their parents clean up at stated intervals,
• 2:59:56
  and the young naturally are no better as scholars. The children of the
• 3:00:01
  most ignorant Polish jew keep fairly abreast of their more favored playmates until it comes
• 3:00:07
  to mental arithmetic, when they leave them behind with a bound. It is
• 3:00:13
  surprising to see how strong the instinct of dollars and cents is in them.
• 3:00:18
  They can count and correctly almost before they can talk. Within a few years,
• 3:00:24
  the police captured on the East Side a band of firebugs who made a
• 3:00:26
  business of setting fire to tenements for the insurance on their furniture. There has,
• 3:00:33
  unfortunately been some evidence in the past year that another such conspiracy is on
• 3:00:37
  foot. The danger to which these fiends exposed their fellow tenants is appalling.
• 3:00:43
  A fire panic at night in a tenement by no means among the rare experiences
• 3:00:48
  in New York, with the surging, half smothered crowds on stairs, and
• 3:00:54
  fire escapes, the frantic mothers and crying children, the wildest struggle to save
• 3:00:58
  the little that it is there, all is a horror that has few parallels
• 3:01:03
  in human experience. I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in
• 3:01:07
  a First Avenue tenement. It was in the middle of the night the fire
• 3:01:13
  had swept up with sudden fury from a restaurant on the street floor, cutting
• 3:01:18
  off escape Men and women threw themselves from the windows or were carried down senseless
• 3:01:24
  by the firemen. Thirteen half clad, apparently lifeless bodies were laid on the
• 3:01:30
  floor of an adjoining coal office, and the ambulance surgeons worked over them with
• 3:01:35
  sleeves rolled up to their elbows. A half grown girl with the baby in
• 3:01:39
  her arms, walked about among the dead and dying with a stunned, vacant
• 3:01:45
  look, singing in a low, scared voice to the child. One of
• 3:01:48
  the doctors took her arm to lead her out, and patted the cheek of
• 3:01:52
  the baby soothingly. It was cold. The baby had been smothered with its
• 3:01:58
  father and mother, but the girl her sister, did not know it.
• 3:02:03
  Her reason had fled. Thursday night and Friday morning are bargain days in the
• 3:02:09
  pig market. Then is the time to study the ways of this peculiar people
• 3:02:13
  to the best advantage. A common pulse beats in the quarters of the Polish
• 3:02:18
  Jews and in the Mulberry Bend, though they have little else in common.
• 3:02:22
  Life over yonder in fine weather is a perpetual holiday. Here a veritable treadmill
• 3:02:28
  of industry. Friday brings out all the latent color and picturesqueness of the Italians.
• 3:02:35
  As of these semites, the crowds in the common poverty are the bonds
• 3:02:39
  of sympathy between them. The pig market is in Hester Street, extending either
• 3:02:46
  way from Ludlow Street and up and down the side streets two or three blocks,
• 3:02:50
  as the state of trade demands. The name was given it probably in
• 3:02:54
  derision, for pork is the one ware that is not on sale in the
• 3:02:58
  pig market. There is scarcely anything else that can be hawked from a wagon
• 3:03:03
  that is not to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. Bandanas and
• 3:03:07
  ten cups at two cents, peaches at a cent a quart, damaged eggs
• 3:03:13
  for a song, hats for a quarter, and spectacles warranted to suit the
• 3:03:18
  eye at the opticians who has open shop on a Hester Street doorstep for thirty
• 3:03:22
  five cents, frowsy looking chickens and half plucked geese hung by the neck and
• 3:03:30
  protesting with wildly strutting feet even in death against the outrage or the great staple
• 3:03:35
  of the market. Half or a quarter of a chicken can be bought here
• 3:03:39
  by those who coulnot afford a hole. It took more than ten years of
• 3:03:43
  persistent effort on the part of the sanitary authorities to drive the trade in live
• 3:03:48
  fowl from the streets to the foul market on Gouvernor's Slip, where the killing
• 3:03:52
  is now done according to Jewish rite by priests, detail for the purpose by
• 3:03:58
  the chief Rabbi. Since then they have had a characteristic rumpus that involved the
• 3:04:03
  entire Jewish community over the fees for killing and the mode of collecting them.
• 3:04:09
  Here is a woman churning harsh Radish on a machine she has chained and padlocked
• 3:04:16
  to a tree on the sidewalk lest some one steal it. Beside her a
• 3:04:20
  butcher's stand with cuts at prices the avenue never dreamed of. Old coats are
• 3:04:26
  hawked for fifty cents as good as new, and pants. There are no
• 3:04:31
  trousers in Jewtown, only pants at anything that can be got. There is
• 3:04:35
  a knot of half a dozen pants peddlers in the middle of the street,
• 3:04:39
  twice as many men of their own race, fingering their wares and plucking at
• 3:04:43
  the seams with the anxious scrutiny of would be buyers, though none of them
• 3:04:48
  has the least idea of investing in a pair. Yes, stop, This
• 3:04:52
  baker, fresh from his trough, bare headed and with bare arms, has
• 3:04:58
  made and offered for this pair thirty cents a dollar, and forty was the
• 3:05:03
  price asked. The peddler shrugs his shoulders, then turns up his hands with
• 3:05:07
  a half pitying holy indignant air. What does the baker take him for such
• 3:05:13
  pants? The baker has turned to go with a jump like a panther's.
• 3:05:18
  The man with the pants has him by the sleeve. Will he give eighty
• 3:05:22
  cents sixty fifty so help him? They are dirt cheap at that lose?
• 3:05:28
  Will he, on the trade lose all the profit of his day's pedaling.
• 3:05:33
  The baker goes on unmoved. Forty then what not forty? Take them then
• 3:05:39
  for thirty and wreck the life of a poor man. And the baker takes
• 3:05:43
  them and goes well, knowing that at least twenty cents of the thirty two
• 3:05:48
  hundred percent were clear profit. If indeed the pants cost the peddler anything,
• 3:05:54
  The suspender peddler is the mystery of the pig market. Only present and unfathomable.
• 3:06:01
  He is met at every step with his wares dangling over his shoulder,
• 3:06:05
  down his back, and in front. Millions of suspenders thus perambulate jew Town
• 3:06:11
  all day on a sort of dress parade. Why suspenders is the puzzle?
• 3:06:18
  And where do they all go to? The pants of Jewtown hang down with
• 3:06:22
  a common accord, as if they had never known the support of suspenders.
• 3:06:28
  It appears to be as characteristic a trait of the race as the long beard
• 3:06:33
  and the sabbath silk hat of ancient cateigree. I have asked again and again.
• 3:06:37
  No one has ever been able to tell me what becomes of the suspenders
• 3:06:41
  of Jewtown. Perhaps they are hung up as bricker brack in his homes,
• 3:06:46
  are laid away and saved up as the equivalent of cash. I cannot tell.
• 3:06:50
  I only know that more suspenders are hawked about the pig market every day
• 3:06:56
  than would supply the whole of New York for a year, where they all
• 3:06:58
  bought and turned to use. The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons
• 3:07:05
  and about the sidewalk shops, where a gutter plank on two ash barrels does
• 3:07:11
  duty for a counter pushing, struggling, babbling and shouting in foreign tongues,
• 3:07:16
  A veritable babble of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear, almost
• 3:07:22
  with a sense of shock, as something unexpected and strange. In the midst
• 3:07:28
  of it all, there is a sudden, wild scattering, a hustling of
• 3:07:31
  things from the street into dark cellars, into backyards and byways. A slamming
• 3:07:37
  and locking of doors hidden under the improvised shelves encounters the health officer's cart is
• 3:07:43
  coming down the street, preceded and followed by stalwart policemen who shovel up with
• 3:07:50
  scant ceremony. The eatables musty bread, decayed fish, and stale vegetables,
• 3:07:56
  indifferent to the curses that are showered on them from stoops and windows, and
• 3:08:01
  carry them off to the dump. In the wake of the wagon as it
• 3:08:03
  makes its way to the east River. After the raid follow a line of
• 3:08:07
  despoiled huckster's shouting defiance from a safe distance. Their clamor dies away with the
• 3:08:13
  noise of the market. The endless panorama of the tenements rows upon rows between
• 3:08:20
  stony streets, stretches to the north, to the south, and to the
• 3:08:24
  west, as far as the eye reaches into section eleven. Recording by phil
• 3:08:31
  Shinever beat Roue's Louisiana, Chapter twelve, The Sweaters of Jewtown. Anything like
• 3:08:37
  an exhaustive discussion of the economical problem presented by the tenth Ward is beset by
• 3:08:43
  difficulties that increase in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them.
• 3:08:50
  Footnote I referred to the tenth Ward always as typical. The district embraced in
• 3:08:56
  the discussion really includes the thirteenth Ward, and in a growing sense, large
• 3:09:01
  portions of the seventh and contiguous Wards as well. End footnote I have too
• 3:09:07
  vivid a recollection of weary days and nights spent in those stewing tenements trying to
• 3:09:13
  get to the bottom of the vexatious question, only to find myself in the
• 3:09:16
  end as far from the truth as at the beginning, asking, with rising
• 3:09:22
  wrath, pilots question, what is truth? To attempt to weary the reader
• 3:09:28
  by dragging him with me over that sterile and unprofitable ground. Nor are these
• 3:09:33
  pages the place for such a discussion in it? Let me confess it at
• 3:09:37
  once and have done with it. I should be like the blind leading the
• 3:09:41
  blind between the real and apparent poverty, the hidden hordes, and the unhesitating
• 3:09:48
  mendacity of these people where they conceive their interests to be concerned in one way
• 3:09:52
  or another, the reader and I would fall together into the ditch of doubt
• 3:09:58
  and conjecture in which I have found company before. The facts that lie on
• 3:10:03
  the surface indicate the causes as clearly as the nature of the trouble. In
• 3:10:09
  effect, both have been already stated. A friend of mine, who manufactures
• 3:10:13
  cloth, once boasted to me that nowadays on cheap clothing, New York beats
• 3:10:20
  the world. To what I asked, do you attribute it to the cutter's
• 3:10:24
  long knife footnote? An invention that cuts many garments at once, where the
• 3:10:30
  scissors would cut only a few end footnote and the Polish Jew? He said,
• 3:10:37
  which of the two has cut deepest into the workmen's wages is not a
• 3:10:41
  doubtful question. Practically, the Jew has monopolized the business since the battle between
• 3:10:46
  East Broadway and Broadway ended in a complete victory for the East Side and cheap
• 3:10:52
  labor, and transferred it to the control of the trade in cheap clothing.
• 3:10:58
  Yet, not satisfied with having won the field, he strives as hotly with
• 3:11:03
  his own for the profit of half a cent, as he fought with his
• 3:11:07
  Christian competitor for the dollar. If the victory is a barren one, the
• 3:11:11
  blame is his own. His price is not what he can get, but
• 3:11:15
  the lowest he can live for and underbid his neighbor. Just what that means,
• 3:11:20
  we shall see. The manufacturer knows it, and is not slow to
• 3:11:24
  take advantage of his knowledge. He makes him hungry for work by keeping it
• 3:11:30
  from him as long as possible, then drives the closest bargain he can with
• 3:11:35
  the sweater. Many harsh things have been said of the sweater that really apply
• 3:11:41
  to the system in which he is a necessary logical link. He can't at
• 3:11:46
  least be said of him that he is no worse than the conditions that created
• 3:11:50
  him. The sweater is simply the middleman, the subcontractor, a workman like
• 3:11:54
  his fellows, perhaps with the single distinction from the rest that he knows a
• 3:12:00
  little English. Perhaps not even that, but with the accidental possession of two
• 3:12:05
  or three sewing machines, are of credit enough to hire them as his capital.
• 3:12:11
  Who drums up work among the clothing houses. A workman he can always
• 3:12:16
  get enough every ship load from German ports, bringing them to his door in
• 3:12:22
  droves, clamoring for work. The sun sets upon the day of the arrival
• 3:12:26
  of many a Polish Jew, finding him at work in an east side tenement,
• 3:12:31
  threading the machine and learning the trade. Often there are two, sometimes
• 3:12:37
  three sets of Sweaters on one job. They work with the rest when they
• 3:12:41
  are not drumming up trade, driving their hands as they drive their machine for
• 3:12:46
  all they are worth, and making a profit on their work, of course,
• 3:12:50
  though in most cases not nearly as extravagant a percentage probably as is often
• 3:12:56
  supposed, if it resolves itself into a margin of five or six cents,
• 3:13:01
  are even less on a dozen pairs of boy's trousers, for instance. It
• 3:13:05
  is nevertheless enough to make the contractor, with his thrifty instincts independent. The
• 3:13:11
  workman growls not at the hard labor or poor pay, but over the pennies
• 3:13:16
  another is coining out of his sweat, and on the first opportunity, turns
• 3:13:22
  Sweater himself and takes his revenge by driving an even closer bargain than his rival
• 3:13:28
  tyrant, thus reducing his profits. The sweater knows well that the isolation of
• 3:13:33
  the workmen in his helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done
• 3:13:39
  what he could with merciless severity where he could, to smother every symptom of
• 3:13:45
  awakening intelligence in his slaves. In this effort to perpetuate his despotism, he
• 3:13:52
  has had the effectual assistance of his own system, and the sharp competition that
• 3:13:58
  keeps the men on starvation wages of their constitutional greed that will not permit the
• 3:14:05
  sacrifice of temporary advantage, however, slight for permanent good, and above all
• 3:14:11
  of the hungry hordes of emigrants, to whom no argument appeals save the cry
• 3:14:16
  for bread. Within very recent times, he has, however, been forced
• 3:14:22
  to partial surrender by the organization of the men to a considerable extent into trade
• 3:14:26
  unions, and by experiments in co operation under intelligent leadership that presage the sweater's
• 3:14:33
  doom. But as long as the ignorant crowds continue to come and to herd
• 3:14:39
  in these tenements, his grip can never be shaken off, and the supply
• 3:14:45
  across the seas is apparently inexhaustible. Every fresh persecution of the Russian or Polish
• 3:14:52
  Jew on his native soil starts greater hordes hitherward to confound economical problems and recruit
• 3:15:00
  the sweater's failanx, the curse of bigotry and ignorance reaches half way across the
• 3:15:05
  world to sow its bitter seed in fertile soil in the east side tenements.
• 3:15:13
  If the Jew himself was to blame for the resentment he aroused over there,
• 3:15:18
  he is amply punished. He gathers the first fruits of the harvest. Here.
• 3:15:22
  The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the tenements, which the
• 3:15:26
  law that regulates factory labor does not reach to the factories themselves, that are
• 3:15:31
  taking the place of the rear tenements and rapidly growing numbers, letting in bigger
• 3:15:37
  day crowds than those the health officers banished. The tenement shops serve as a
• 3:15:43
  supplement through which the law is successfully evaded. Ten hours is the legal work
• 3:15:48
  day in the factories, and nine o'clock the closing hour, at the latest
• 3:15:52
  forty five minutes at least must be allowed for dinner, and children under sixteen
• 3:15:58
  must not be employed unless they can read and write English, none at all
• 3:16:03
  under fourteen. The very fact that such a law should stand on the statute
• 3:16:09
  book shows how desperate the plight of these people. But the tenement has defeated
• 3:16:15
  its benevolent purpose. In it the child works unchallenged from the day he is
• 3:16:20
  old enough to pull a thread. There is no such thing as a dinner
• 3:16:24
  hour. Men and women eat while they work, and the day is lengthened
• 3:16:31
  at both ends far into the night. Factory hands take their work with them
• 3:16:35
  at the close of the lawful day, to eke out their scanty earnings by
• 3:16:39
  working overtime at home. Little chance on this ground for the campaign of education
• 3:16:46
  that alone can bring the needed relief. Small wonder that there are whole settlements
• 3:16:52
  on this east side where English is practically an unknown tongue, though the people
• 3:16:58
  be both willing and anxious to lear. When shall we find time to learn?
• 3:17:03
  Asks one of them of me. Once I owe him the answer.
• 3:17:07
  Yet, take the second Avenue elevated railroad at Chatham Square and ride up half
• 3:17:13
  a mile through the Sweaters District. Every open window of the big tenements that
• 3:17:20
  stands like a continuous brick wall on both sides of the way gives you a
• 3:17:24
  glimpse of one of these shops. As the train speeds by men and women
• 3:17:31
  bending over their machines or ironing, clothed at the window. Half naked.
• 3:17:35
  Proprieties do not count. On the east side, nothing counts that cannot be
• 3:17:41
  converted into hard cash. The road is like a big gangway through an endless
• 3:17:46
  work room, where vast multitudes are forever laboring morning, noon and night.
• 3:17:54
  It makes no difference. The scene is always the same. At Rivington Street.
• 3:18:00
  Let us get off and continue our trip on foot. It is Sunday
• 3:18:03
  evening west of the Bowery. Here, under the rule of Mosaic law,
• 3:18:09
  the week of work is under full headway, its first day fort spent.
• 3:18:13
  The huckster's wagons are absent or stand idle at the curb. These saloons admit
• 3:18:20
  the thirsty crowds through the side door labeled family entrance. A ten sign in
• 3:18:26
  a store window announces that a Sunday school gathers in stray children of the new
• 3:18:31
  dispensation. But beyond these things there is little to suggest. The Christian sabbath
• 3:18:37
  men stagger along the sidewalk, groaning under heavy burdens of unsown garments. Are
• 3:18:43
  enormous black bags stuffed full of finished coats and trousers, let us follow one
• 3:18:50
  to his home and see how Sunday passes. In a Ludlow Street tenement,
• 3:18:54
  up two flights of dark stairs, three four with new smells of ca babbage
• 3:19:00
  of onions of frying fish on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors,
• 3:19:07
  betraying what goes on within. To the door that opens to admit the
• 3:19:11
  bundle and the man a sweater. This in a small way. Five men
• 3:19:16
  and a woman, Two young girls not fifteen, and a boy who says
• 3:19:22
  unasked that he is fifteen and lies in saying it, are at the machines
• 3:19:26
  sewing knickerbockers knee pants. In the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered
• 3:19:33
  ankle deep with half sewn garments. In the alcove on a couch of many
• 3:19:39
  dozens of pants ready for the finisher, a bare legged baby with pinched face
• 3:19:45
  is asleep. A fence of piled up clothing keeps him from rolling off on
• 3:19:50
  the floor. The faces, hands and arms to the elbows of everyone in
• 3:19:54
  the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working.
• 3:20:00
  The boy and the woman alone look up at our entrants. The girls
• 3:20:03
  shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning look from the man with the bundle,
• 3:20:09
  they tread their machines more energetically than ever. The men do not appear
• 3:20:13
  to be aware even of the presence of a stranger. They are learners,
• 3:20:18
  all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the wife of
• 3:20:22
  the boss, and have come over only a few weeks ago. She is
• 3:20:28
  disinclined to talk at first, but a few words in her own tongue from
• 3:20:31
  our guide footnote. I was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by one
• 3:20:37
  of their own people, who knew of and sympathized with my mission. Without
• 3:20:43
  that precaution, my errand would have been fruitless. Even with him, it
• 3:20:48
  was often nearly so. In footnote set her fears whatever they are at rest,
• 3:20:52
  and she grows almost talkative. The learners work for week's wages. She
• 3:20:58
  says, how much they earn? She shrugs her shoulders with an expressive gesture.
• 3:21:05
  The workers themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently, as
• 3:21:09
  though the question were of no interest, from two to five dollars. The
• 3:21:13
  children, there are, four of them, are not old enough to work.
• 3:21:18
  The oldest is only six they turn out one hundred and twenty dozen knee
• 3:21:22
  pants a week, for which the manufacturer prays seventy cents a dozen. Five
• 3:21:28
  cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own and her husband's work
• 3:21:33
  brings the family earnings up to twenty five dollars a week when they have work
• 3:21:39
  all the time, but often half the time is put in looking for it.
• 3:21:43
  They work no longer than to nine o'clock at night. From daybreak.
• 3:21:48
  There are ten machines in the room. Six are hired at two dollars a
• 3:21:52
  month for the two shabby, smoke begrimed rooms, one somewhat larger than ordinary.
• 3:21:58
  They pay twent tiny tea dollars a month. She does not complain,
• 3:22:01
  though quote times are not what they were, and it costs a good deal
• 3:22:05
  to live close quote eight dollars a week for the family of six and two
• 3:22:11
  boarders. How do they do it? She laughs as she goes over the
• 3:22:16
  bill of fare at the silly question. Bread fifteen cents a day, of
• 3:22:20
  milk two quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat
• 3:22:24
  for dinner at twelve cents, butter one pound a week at quote eight cents
• 3:22:30
  a quarter of a pound, clothes, quote, coffee, potatoes, and
• 3:22:33
  pickles complete the list at the least calculation. Probably this sweater's family hoards up
• 3:22:41
  thirty dollars a month and in a few years will own a tenaments somewhere in
• 3:22:46
  profit by the example set by their landlord in rent collecting. It is the
• 3:22:50
  way the savings of Jewtown are universally invested, and with the natural talent of
• 3:22:56
  its people for commercial speculation, the investment is enormously profitable. On the next
• 3:23:03
  floor, in a dimly lighted room with big red hot stoves to keep the
• 3:23:07
  pressing irons ready for use, is a family of man, wife, three
• 3:23:11
  children, and a boarder. Knee Pants are made there too, of a
• 3:23:16
  still lower grade. Three cents and a half is all he clears, says
• 3:23:20
  the man, and lies, probably out of at least two cents. The
• 3:23:26
  wife makes a dollar and a half, finishing the man about nine dollars at
• 3:23:31
  the machine. The border pays sixty five cents a week. He is really
• 3:23:35
  only a lodger getting his meals outside. The rent is two dollars and twenty
• 3:23:41
  five cents a week. Cost of living five dollars. Every floor has at
• 3:23:46
  least two sometimes four such shops. Here is one with a young family,
• 3:23:50
  for which life is bright with promise. Husband and wife work together. Just
• 3:23:56
  now, the latter, a comely young woman, is eating her dib of
• 3:24:00
  dry bread and green pickles. Pickles are favorite food in jewtown. They are
• 3:24:05
  filling and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have stomachs like
• 3:24:09
  ostriches thrive in spite of them, and grow strong, plain proof that they
• 3:24:15
  are good to eat. The rest well they die, says our guide dryly.
• 3:24:20
  No thought of untimely death comes to disturb this family, with life all
• 3:24:24
  before it. In a few years the man will be a prosperous sweater.
• 3:24:28
  Already he employs an old man as ironer at three dollars a week, and
• 3:24:33
  a sweet faced little Italian girl as a finisher at a dollar and a half.
• 3:24:39
  She is twelve, she says, and can neither read nor write,
• 3:24:43
  will probably never learn, how should she. The family clears from ten to
• 3:24:48
  eleven dollars a week in brisk times, more than half of which goes into
• 3:24:54
  the bank. A companion picture from across the hall. The man works on
• 3:24:58
  the machine for his twelve hours a day, turning out three dozen knee pants
• 3:25:03
  for which he receives forty two cents a dozen. The finisher who works with
• 3:25:09
  him gets ten, and the ironer eight cents a dozen. Buttonholes are extra
• 3:25:15
  at eight to ten cents a hundred. This operator has four children at his
• 3:25:18
  home in Stanton Street, none old enough to work, and a sick wife.
• 3:25:24
  His rent is twelve dollars a month, his wages for a hard week's
• 3:25:28
  work less than eight dollars. Such as he, with their consuming desire for
• 3:25:33
  money, thus smothered, recruit the ranks of the anarchists won over by the
• 3:25:37
  promise of a general divide, and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose
• 3:25:43
  at the vicious foreigner, for whose perverted notions there is no room in this
• 3:25:48
  land of plenty. Turning the corner into Hester Street, we stumble upon a
• 3:25:54
  nest of cloak makers in their busy season six months of the year. The
• 3:25:58
  cloakmaker is idle are nearly so now is his harvest. Seventy five cents a
• 3:26:05
  cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. The cloak is
• 3:26:09
  of cheap plush, and might sell for eight or nine dollars over the store
• 3:26:13
  counter. Seven dollars is the weekly wage of this man with wife and two
• 3:26:18
  children, and nine dollars and a half rent to pay per month. A
• 3:26:24
  boarder pays about a third of it. There was a time when he made
• 3:26:28
  ten dollars a week and thought himself rich. But wages have come down fearfully
• 3:26:33
  in the last two years. Think of it. Come down to this.
• 3:26:37
  The other cloak makers of air that they can make as much as twelve dollars
• 3:26:43
  a week when they are employed by taking their work home and sewing till midnight.
• 3:26:48
  One exhibits his account book with a Ludlow Street sweater. It shows that
• 3:26:52
  he and his partner, working on first class garments for a Broadway house,
• 3:26:58
  in the four busiest weeks of the season, made together from fifteen dollars fifteen
• 3:27:03
  cents to nineteen dollars twenty cents a week by striving from six a m to
• 3:27:09
  eleven p m. That is to say, from seven dollars fifty eight cents
• 3:27:15
  to nine dollars sixty cents each. Footnote. The strike of the cloak maker's
• 3:27:20
  last summer that ended in victory raised their wages considerably, at least for the
• 3:27:26
  time being. In footnote these sweater on this work probably made as much as
• 3:27:33
  fifty percent, at least on their labor. Not far away as a factory
• 3:27:37
  in a rear yard, where the factory inspector reports teams of tailors making men's
• 3:27:43
  coats at an average of twenty seven cents a coat, all complete except buttons
• 3:27:48
  and button holes. Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement in Ludlow
• 3:27:54
  Street owned by a well known Jewish liquor dealer and politician, a triple combination
• 3:28:01
  that bodes ill for his tenants. As a matter of fact, the cheapest
• 3:28:07
  apartment, three rear rooms on the sixth floor, only one of which deserves
• 3:28:11
  the name, is rented for thirteen dollars a month. Here is a reminder
• 3:28:16
  of the bend. A hallway turned into a shoemaker's shop. Two hallways side
• 3:28:22
  by side in adjoining tenements would be sinful waist in jewtown, when one would
• 3:28:26
  do as well by knocking a hole in the wall. But this shoemaker knows
• 3:28:31
  the trick. The Italian's ingenuity did not suggest he has his flat as well
• 3:28:37
  as his shop. There a curtain hung back of his stool in the narrow
• 3:28:41
  passage half conceals his bed that fills it entirely from wall to wall. To
• 3:28:46
  get into it, he has to crawl over the floor board and he must
• 3:28:50
  come out the same way. Expedients more odd than this are born of the
• 3:28:56
  east Side crowding. In one of the houses we left, the coal bin
• 3:29:01
  of a family on the fourth floor was on the roof of the adjoining tenement.
• 3:29:05
  A quarter of a ton of coal was being dumped there while we talked
• 3:29:09
  to the people. We have reached Broome Street. The hum of industry in
• 3:29:16
  this sixth store tenement on the corner leaves no doubt of the aspect Sunday wears
• 3:29:20
  within it. One flight up we knock at the nearest door. The grocer
• 3:29:24
  who keeps the store lives on the stoop the first floor. In east Side
• 3:29:30
  parlance, in this room a suspender maker sleeps and works with his family of
• 3:29:35
  wife and four children for a wonder There are no boarders. His wife and
• 3:29:39
  eighteen years old daughter share in the work, but the girl's eyes are giving
• 3:29:43
  out from the strain. Three months in the year, when work is very
• 3:29:48
  brisk, the family makes by unified efforts as high as fourteen and fifteen dollars
• 3:29:54
  a week. The other nine months it averages from three to four dollars.
• 3:30:00
  The oldest boy a young man earns from four to six dollars in an Archard
• 3:30:05
  Street factory when he has work. The rent is ten dollars a month for
• 3:30:09
  the room and a miserable little coop of a bedroom where the old folks sleep.
• 3:30:15
  The girl makes her bed on the lounge in the front room. The
• 3:30:18
  big boys and the children sleep on the floor. Coal at ten cents,
• 3:30:22
  a small pail meat at twelve cents a pound, one and a half pounds
• 3:30:26
  of butter a week at thirty six cents, and a quarter of a pound
• 3:30:30
  of tea in the same space of time are items of their housekeeping account,
• 3:30:35
  as given by the daughter. Milk at four and five cents a quart,
• 3:30:39
  according to quality. The sanitary authorities know what that means. Know how miserably
• 3:30:46
  inadequate is the fine of fifty or one hundred dollars for the murder done in
• 3:30:52
  cold blood by the wretches who poison the bathes of these tenements with the stuff
• 3:30:56
  that is half water or swill. Their defense is that the demand is for
• 3:31:01
  cheap milk scarcely a wonder that this suspender maker will hardly be able to save
• 3:31:07
  up the dot for his daughter, without which she stands no chance of marrying
• 3:31:11
  in jewtown. Even with her face that would be pretty headed a healthier tinge
• 3:31:18
  up on the roof, three men are making boys jackets at twenty cents a
• 3:31:22
  piece, of which the sewer takes eight the hour and or three, the
• 3:31:26
  finisher five cents, and the buttonhole maker two and a quarter, leaving a
• 3:31:31
  cent and three quarters to pay for the drumming up, the fetching and bringing
• 3:31:35
  back of the goods. They bump together in a room for which they pay
• 3:31:39
  eight dollars a month. All three are single here, that is, their
• 3:31:45
  wives are on the other side, yet waiting for them to earn enough to
• 3:31:48
  send for them. Their breakfast, eaten at the work bench consists of a
• 3:31:52
  couple of rolls at a cent apiece, and a draft of water milk.
• 3:31:58
  When business has been very good, a square meal at noon in a restaurant,
• 3:32:03
  and the morning meal over again at night. This square meal, that
• 3:32:07
  is the evidence of a very liberal disposition on the part of the consumer,
• 3:32:11
  is an affair of more than ordinary note. It may be justly called an
• 3:32:16
  institution. I know of a couple of restaurants at the lower end of Orchard
• 3:32:20
  Street, that our favorite resorts for the Polish Jews, who remember the injunction
• 3:32:26
  that the ox that treadeth out the corn shall not be muzzled. Being neighbors,
• 3:32:31
  they are rivals, of course, and cutting under. When I was
• 3:32:35
  last there, one gave a dinner a soup, meat, stew, bread,
• 3:32:39
  pie, pickles, and a schooner of beer for thirteen cents. The
• 3:32:43
  other charged fifteen cents for a similar dinner, but with two schooners of beer
• 3:32:50
  and a cigar or a cigarette as the extra inducement. The two cents had
• 3:32:54
  won the day, however, and the thirteen cent restaurant did such a thriving
• 3:32:58
  beer business that it was about to spread out into the adjoining store to accommodate
• 3:33:03
  the crowds of customers. At this rate, the lodger of Jewtown can live
• 3:33:09
  like a lord, as he says himself, for twenty five cents a day,
• 3:33:13
  including the price of his bed that ranges all the way from thirty to
• 3:33:18
  forty and fifty cents a week, and save money no matter what his earnings.
• 3:33:22
  He does it too, so long as work is to be had at
• 3:33:26
  any price, and by the standard he sets up Jewtown must allide it has
• 3:33:31
  thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to pay its extortionate rents. At night,
• 3:33:37
  there is scarce a room in all the district that has not one or
• 3:33:41
  more of them, some above half a score, sleeping on cots or on
• 3:33:46
  the floor. It is idle to speak of privacy in these homes. The
• 3:33:50
  term carries no more meeting with it than would a lecture on social ethics to
• 3:33:56
  an audience of hottentots. The picture is not overdrawn. In fact, in
• 3:34:01
  presenting the home life of these people, I have been at some pains to
• 3:34:05
  avoid the extreme of privation, taking the cases just as they came to hand
• 3:34:11
  on the safer middle ground of average earnings. Yet even the direst apparent poverty
• 3:34:16
  in jew Town, unless dependent on absolute lack of work, would would the
• 3:34:22
  truth be known? In nine cases out of ten have a silver lining in
• 3:34:26
  the shape of a margin in bank. These are the economical conditions that enable
• 3:34:31
  my manufacturing friend to boast that New York can beat the world on cheap clothing.
• 3:34:39
  In support of his claim, he told me that a single Bowery firm
• 3:34:43
  last year sold fifteen thousand suits at one dollar ninety five cents that averaged in
• 3:34:50
  costs one dollar twelve and a half cents, with the material at fifteen cents
• 3:34:56
  a yard. He said, children suits of as sordid soun can be sold
• 3:35:01
  at wholesale for seventy five cents, and boys cape overcoats at the same price.
• 3:35:07
  They are the same conditions that have perplexed the Committee of Benevolent Hebrews,
• 3:35:11
  in charge of Baron de Hirsch's munificent gift of ten thousand dollars a month for
• 3:35:16
  the relief of the Jewish poor in New York, to find proper channels through
• 3:35:22
  which to pour this money, so that it shall affect its purpose without pauperizing
• 3:35:26
  and without perpetuating the problem it is sought to solve by attracting still greater swarms.
• 3:35:33
  Is indeed no easy task. Colonization has not in the past been a
• 3:35:39
  success with these people. The great mass of them are too gregarious to take
• 3:35:43
  kindly deforming, and their strong commercial instinct hampers the experiment to herd them in
• 3:35:50
  model tenements. Though it relieved the physical suffering in a measure would be to
• 3:35:56
  treat a symptom of the disease rather than strike at its route. Even if
• 3:36:01
  land could be got cheap enough where they gathered to build on a sufficiently large
• 3:36:05
  scale to make the plan a success, trade schools for manual training could hardly
• 3:36:11
  be made to reach the adults, who, in addition, would have to
• 3:36:13
  be supported for months while learning for the young. This device has proved most
• 3:36:20
  excellent under the wise management of the United Hebrew Charities, an organization that gathers
• 3:36:26
  to its work the best thought and effort of many of our most public spirited
• 3:36:30
  citizens. One or all of these plans may be tried, probably will I
• 3:36:35
  state, But the misgivings as to the result of some of the practical minds
• 3:36:41
  that have busied themselves with the problem its keynote evidently is the ignorance of the
• 3:36:46
  immigrants. They must be taught the language of the country they have chosen as
• 3:36:50
  their home, as the first and most necessary step. Whatever may follow,
• 3:36:56
  that is essential, absolutely vital. That done, it may well be that
• 3:37:03
  the case, in its new aspect will not be nearly so hard to deal
• 3:37:07
  with. Evening has worn into night as we take up our homeward journey through
• 3:37:11
  the streets, now no longer silent, the thousands of lighted windows in the
• 3:37:16
  tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall. From every door.
• 3:37:22
  Multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half hour's rest in
• 3:37:26
  the open air before sleep closes the eyes, weary with incessant working. Crowds
• 3:37:33
  of half naked children, tumbled in the street and on the sidewalk are dose
• 3:37:37
  fretfully on the stone steps. As we stop in front of a tenement to
• 3:37:43
  watch one of these groups, a dirty baby in a single brief garment,
• 3:37:48
  yet a sweet human little baby, despite its dirt and tatters, tumbles off
• 3:37:52
  the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg with unconscious grip,
• 3:37:58
  and goes to sleep on the flag stones, its curly head pillowed on my
• 3:38:01
  foot. End of Section twelve, Chapter twelve, The Bohemians Tenement House Cigar
• 3:38:09
  making evil as is the part which the tenement plays in jew Town as the
• 3:38:16
  pretext for circumventing the law that was made to benefit and relieve the tenant.
• 3:38:20
  We have not far to go to find it in even a worse role.
• 3:38:24
  If the tenement is here continually dragged into the eye of public condemnation and scorn,
• 3:38:31
  it is because in one way or another it is found directly responsible for
• 3:38:37
  or intimately associated with three fourths of the miseries of the poor in the Bohemian
• 3:38:43
  Quarter. It has made the vehicle for enforcing upon a proud race a slavery
• 3:38:48
  as real as any that ever disgraced the South. Not content with simply robbing
• 3:38:54
  the tenant, the owner, in the dual capacity of landlord and employer,
• 3:39:00
  reduces him to virtual serfdom by making his becoming his tenant on such terms as
• 3:39:05
  he sees fit to make the condition of employment at wages likewise of his own
• 3:39:11
  making. It does not help the case that this landlord employer, almost always
• 3:39:16
  a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty Polish race just described. Perhaps the
• 3:39:22
  Bohemian Quarter is hardly the proper name to give to the colony, for though
• 3:39:26
  it has distinct boundaries, it is scattered over a wide area on the east
• 3:39:31
  side, in wedge like streaks that relieve the monotony of the solid German population
• 3:39:37
  by their strong contrasts. The two races mingle no more on this side of
• 3:39:43
  the Atlantic than on the rugged slopes of the Bohemian Mountains. The echoes of
• 3:39:48
  the Thirty Years war ring in New York after two centuries and a half with
• 3:39:52
  as fierce a hatred as the gigantic combat bred among the vanquished checks. A
• 3:39:58
  chief reason for this is, doubtless the complete isolation of the bohemian immigrant.
• 3:40:05
  Several causes operate to bring this about. His singularly harsh and unattractive language,
• 3:40:11
  which he can neither easily himself unlearned, nor import to others, his stubborn
• 3:40:16
  pride of race, and a popular prejudice which has forced upon him the unjust
• 3:40:22
  stigma of a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor.
• 3:40:28
  I greatly mistrust that the bohemian on our shores is a much abused man.
• 3:40:33
  To his producer, who casts up anarchism against him, he replies that the
• 3:40:39
  last census eighteen eighty shows his people to have the fewest criminals of all in
• 3:40:45
  proportion to numbers in New York. A Bohemian criminal is such a rarity that
• 3:40:50
  the case of two firebugs of several years ago is remembered with damaging distinctness.
• 3:40:56
  The accusation that he lives like the rat he is cutting down wages by his
• 3:41:01
  underpaid labor, he throws back in the teeth of the trades unions, with
• 3:41:07
  the counter charge that they are the first cause of his attitude to the labor
• 3:41:11
  question. A little way above Houston Street, the first of his colonies is
• 3:41:16
  encountered in fifth Street, and thereabouts then for a mile and a half,
• 3:41:20
  scarce a Bohemian is to be found until thirty eighth Street is reached. Fifty
• 3:41:26
  fourth and seventy third Streets, in their turn, are the centers of populous
• 3:41:31
  Bohemian settlements. The location of the cigar factories upon which he depends for a
• 3:41:37
  living, determines his choice of home, though there is less choice about it
• 3:41:41
  than with any other class in the community, save perhaps the colored people.
• 3:41:46
  Probably more than half of all the bohemians in the city or cigar makers.
• 3:41:50
  And it is the herding of these in great numbers in the so called tenement
• 3:41:54
  factories, where the cheapest grade of work is done at the lowest wages,
• 3:42:00
  that constitutes at once their greatest hardship and the chief grudge of other workmen against
• 3:42:05
  them. The manufacturer, who owns, say, from three or four to
• 3:42:09
  a dozen or more tenements contiguous to his shop, fills them up with these
• 3:42:13
  people, charging them outrageous rents and demanding often even a preliminary deposit of five
• 3:42:20
  dollars. Key money deals them out tobacco by the week, and devotes the
• 3:42:24
  rest of his energies to the powering down of wages to within a peg or
• 3:42:28
  two of the point where the tenant rebels in desperation. When he does rebel,
• 3:42:33
  he has given the alternative of submission or eviction with entire loss of employment.
• 3:42:39
  His needs determine the issue. Usually he is not in a position to
• 3:42:45
  hesitate long. Unlike the Polish jew whose example of untiring industry he emulates,
• 3:42:50
  he has seldom much laid up against a rainy day. He is fond of
• 3:42:56
  a glass of beer, and likes to live as well as his means will
• 3:42:58
  permit. These shop triumphs and fetters, more galling than ever are forged for
• 3:43:03
  the tenant. In the opposite case, the newspapers have to record the throwing
• 3:43:09
  upon the street of a small army of people with pitiful cases of destitution and
• 3:43:15
  family misery. Men, women and children worked together seven days in the week
• 3:43:20
  in these cheerless tenements to make a living for the family, from the break
• 3:43:24
  of day till far into the night. Often the wife is the original cigar
• 3:43:28
  maker from the old home, the husband having adopted her trade here as a
• 3:43:33
  matter of necessity, because knowing no word of English, he could get no
• 3:43:37
  other work. As they state the cause of the bitter hostility of the trades
• 3:43:41
  unions, she was the primary bone of contention in the day of the early
• 3:43:46
  Bohemian emigration. The unions refused to admit women, and as the support of
• 3:43:52
  the family depended upon her to a large extent, such terms as were offered
• 3:43:56
  had to be accepted. The manufact has ever since industriously fanned the antagonism between
• 3:44:05
  the unions and his hands for his own advantage. The victory rests with him,
• 3:44:09
  since the Court of Appeals decided that the law passed a few years ago
• 3:44:15
  to prohibit cigar making in tenements was unconstitutional and thus put an end to the
• 3:44:20
  struggle. While it lasted, all sorts of frightful stories were told of the
• 3:44:26
  shocking conditions under which people lived and worked in these tenements from a sanitary point
• 3:44:31
  of view especially, and a general impression survives to this day that they are
• 3:44:37
  particularly desperate. The Board of Health, after a careful canvass, did not
• 3:44:43
  find them, so then I am satisfied from personal inspection at a much later
• 3:44:48
  day, guided in a number of instances by the union cigar makers themselves to
• 3:44:54
  the tenements which they consider the worst. That the accounts were greatly exaggerated.
• 3:44:58
  Doubtless, the people are poor, in many cases very poor, but they
• 3:45:03
  are not uncleanly. Rather the reverse, They live much better than the clothing
• 3:45:07
  makers in the teadwar, and in spite of their sallow look that may be
• 3:45:11
  due to the all pervading smell of tobacco, they do not appear to be
• 3:45:16
  less healthy than other indoor workers. I found on my tours of investigations several
• 3:45:22
  cases of consumption, of which one at least was said by the doctor to
• 3:45:26
  be due to the constant inhalation of tobacco fumes. But an examination of the
• 3:45:31
  death records in the health department does not support the claim that the Bohemian cigar
• 3:45:37
  makers are particularly prone to that disease. On the contrary, the Bohemian percentage
• 3:45:43
  of deaths from consumption appears to be quite low. This, however, is
• 3:45:46
  a line of scientific inquiry which I leave to others to pursue, along with
• 3:45:52
  the more involved problem whether the falling off in the number of children, sometimes
• 3:45:58
  quite noticeable in the Boneohemian settlements is, as has been suggested, dependent upon
• 3:46:03
  the character of the parrot's work. The sore grievances I found were the miserable
• 3:46:09
  wages and the enormous rents extracted for the minimum of accommodation. And surely these
• 3:46:16
  stand for enough of suffering. Take a row of houses in East tenth Street
• 3:46:20
  as an instance. They contained thirty five families of cigar makers, with probably
• 3:46:26
  not half a dozen persons in the whole lot of them outside of the children
• 3:46:30
  who could speak a word of English, though many had been in the country
• 3:46:33
  half a lifetime. This room, with two windows giving on the street,
• 3:46:37
  and a rear attachment without windows, called a bedroom by courtesy, is rented
• 3:46:43
  at twelve dollars twenty five cents a month. In the front room, a
• 3:46:48
  man and wife work at the bench from six in the morning till nine at
• 3:46:52
  night. They make a team stripping the tobacco leaves together. Then he makes
• 3:46:58
  the filler and she rolls the rack oparon and finishes a cigar. For a
• 3:47:03
  thousand they receive three dollars seventy five cents and can turn out together three thousand
• 3:47:09
  cigars a week. The point has been reached where the rebellion comes in.
• 3:47:13
  And the workers in these tenements are just now on a strike, demanding five
• 3:47:16
  dollars and five dollars fifty cents for their work, the manufacturer having refused,
• 3:47:24
  they are expecting hourly to be served with notice to quit their homes. And
• 3:47:28
  the going of a stranger among them excites their resentment until his errand is explained.
• 3:47:33
  While we were in the house. The ultimatum of the boss is received.
• 3:47:39
  He will give three dollars seventy five cents a thousand, not another cent.
• 3:47:43
  Our host is a man of seeming intelligence, yet he has been nine
• 3:47:48
  years in New York and knows neither English nor German. Three bright little children
• 3:47:54
  play about the floor. His neighbor on the same floor has been here fifteen
• 3:47:58
  years, but shakes his head. When asked if he can speak English.
• 3:48:03
  He answers in a few broken syllables. When they dressed in German. With
• 3:48:07
  eleven dollars seventy five cents rent to pay for like accommodation, he has the
• 3:48:11
  advantage of his oldest boy's work beside his wife's at the bench. Three properly
• 3:48:18
  make a team, and these three can turn out four thousand cigars a week
• 3:48:22
  at three dollars seventy five cents. This bohemian has a large family. There
• 3:48:28
  are four children too small to work to be cared for. A Comparison of
• 3:48:33
  the domestic bills of fare in Tith and in Ludlow Streets results in the discovery
• 3:48:39
  that this bohemian's butcher bill for the week with meat at twelve cents a pound
• 3:48:43
  as in Ludlow Street, is from two dollars and a half to three dollars.
• 3:48:48
  The Polish Jew fed as big a family on one pound of meat a
• 3:48:52
  day. The difference proves to be typical. Here is a suite of three
• 3:48:56
  rooms, two dark, three flights up. The ceiling is partly down in
• 3:49:01
  one of the rooms. Quote it is three months since we ask the landlord
• 3:49:05
  to fix it. Clothes quote says the oldest son, a very intelligent lad
• 3:49:11
  who has learned English in the evening school. His father has not had that
• 3:49:15
  advantage and has sat at his bench, deaf and dumb to the world about
• 3:49:20
  him except his son. For six years he has improved his time and become
• 3:49:24
  an expert at his trade. Father, mother and son together a full team,
• 3:49:28
  make from fifteen to sixteen dollars a week. A man with venerable beard
• 3:49:35
  and keen eyes answers our questions through an interpreter in the next house. Very
• 3:49:39
  few brighter faces would be met in a day's walk among America's mechanics. Yet
• 3:49:46
  he has in nine years learned no syllable of English German. He probably does
• 3:49:50
  not want to learn. His story supplies the explanation, as did the stories
• 3:49:56
  of the others. In all that time he has working grubbing to earn bread.
• 3:50:01
  Wife and he, by constant labor, make three thousand cigars a week,
• 3:50:07
  earning eleven dollars in twenty five cents, when there is no lack of
• 3:50:11
  material. When in winter they received from the manufacturer tobacco for only two thousand,
• 3:50:16
  The rent of ten dollars for two rooms practically one with a dark alcove
• 3:50:22
  has nevertheless to be paid in full, and six mouths to be fed.
• 3:50:28
  He was a blacksmith in the old country, but cannot work at his trade
• 3:50:31
  here because he does not understand Ingliska. If he could, he says,
• 3:50:35
  with a bright look, he could do better work than he sees done here.
• 3:50:39
  It would seem happiness to him to knock off at six o'clock instead of
• 3:50:43
  working as he now often has to do till midnight. But how he knows
• 3:50:48
  of no bohemian blacksmith who can understand him. He should starve here with his
• 3:50:54
  wife he can make a living at least, I says she, turning from
• 3:50:58
  listening to her household duties. It would be nice, for sure to have
• 3:51:03
  father work at his trade. Then when a home she could make for them,
• 3:51:05
  and how happy they would be. Here is an unattainable ideal, indeed,
• 3:51:11
  of a workman in the most prosperous city in the world. There is
• 3:51:15
  genuine, if unspoken pathos in the soft tap she gives her husband's hand as
• 3:51:20
  she goes about her work with a half suppressed little sigh. The very ash
• 3:51:24
  barrels that stand in front of the big rows of tenements in seventy first and
• 3:51:28
  seventy third Streets advertise the business that is carried on within. They are filled
• 3:51:35
  to the brim with stems of stripped tobacco leaves. The rank smell that waited
• 3:51:39
  for us on the corner of the block follows us into the hallways, penetrates
• 3:51:43
  every nook and cranny of the houses. As in the settlement further downtown.
• 3:51:48
  Every room here has its work bench with its snumpy knife and queer pouch of
• 3:51:54
  bedtick, worn brown and greasy, fastened in front the whole length of the
• 3:51:58
  bench to receive the scraps of waste. This landlord employer, at all events
• 3:52:03
  gives three rooms for twelve dollars fifty cents if to be dark, one holly
• 3:52:09
  in the other getting some light from the front room. The mother of the
• 3:52:13
  three barefooted little children, and we met on the stairs, was taken to
• 3:52:16
  the hospital the other day when she could no longer work. She will never
• 3:52:20
  come out alive. There is no waste in these tenements. Lives, like
• 3:52:24
  clothes, are worn through and out before put aside. Her place at the
• 3:52:28
  bench is taken already by another who divides with the head of the household his
• 3:52:33
  earnings of fifteen dollars fifty cents a week. He has just come out successfully
• 3:52:39
  of a strike that brought the pay of these tenements up to four dollars fifty
• 3:52:43
  cents per thousand cigars. Notice to quip had already been served on them when
• 3:52:48
  the employer decided to give in. Frightened by the prospective loss of rent,
• 3:52:54
  asked how long he works. The man says, quote from they can see
• 3:52:58
  till bed time. Bedtime proves to be eleven o'clock, seventeen hours a day,
• 3:53:05
  seven days in the week, at thirteen cents an hour for the two
• 3:53:09
  six cents and half for each good. Average earnings for a tenement house cigar
• 3:53:15
  maker in summer. In winter, it is at least one fourth less.
• 3:53:20
  In spite of it, all the rooms are cleanly kept. After the bedroom.
• 3:53:24
  For this back, the woman brings out a pile of moist tobacco leaves
• 3:53:28
  to be stripped. They are kept there under cover lest they dry and crack
• 3:53:33
  from Friday to Friday, when an accounting is made and fresh supplies given out.
• 3:53:37
  The people sleep there too, but the smell, offensive to the unfamiliar
• 3:53:41
  nose, does not bother them. They are used to it. In a
• 3:53:46
  house around the corner that is not a factory. Tenement lives now the cigar
• 3:53:50
  maker I spoke of as suffering from consumption, which the doctor said was due
• 3:53:54
  to the tobacco fumes. Perhaps the lack of healthy exercise had as much to
• 3:53:58
  do with it. His case is interesting from its own standpoint. He too
• 3:54:03
  is one with a for a Bohemian, large family six children sit at his
• 3:54:09
  table. By trade a shoemaker. For thirteen years he helped his wife make
• 3:54:13
  cigars in the manufacturer's tenement. She was a very good hand, and until
• 3:54:20
  his health gave out two years ago, they were able to make from seventeen
• 3:54:24
  to twenty five dollars a week by lengthening the day at both ends. Now
• 3:54:28
  that he can work no more, the family, under the doctor's orders,
• 3:54:33
  has moved away from the smell of tobacco. The burden of its support has
• 3:54:37
  fallen upon her alone, for none of the children is old enough to help.
• 3:54:41
  She has work in the shop at eight dollars a week, and this
• 3:54:43
  must go round. It is all there is, happily, this being a
• 3:54:48
  tenement for revenue only unmixed with cigars, the rent is cheaper seven dollars for
• 3:54:54
  two bright rooms on the top floor. No housekeeping is attempted. A woman
• 3:55:00
  in seventy second Street supplies their meals, which the wife and mother fetches in
• 3:55:05
  a basket, her husband being too weak. Breakfast of coffee and hearttack are
• 3:55:09
  black bread at twenty cents for the whole eight a good many, the little
• 3:55:13
  woman says, with a brave patient smile, and there is seldom anything to
• 3:55:18
  spare. But the invalid is listening, and the sentence remains unfinished. What
• 3:55:24
  of dinner? One of the children brings it from the cook. Oh,
• 3:55:28
  it is a good dinner, meat, soup, greens and bread, all
• 3:55:31
  for thirty cents. It is the principal family meal. Does she come home
• 3:55:35
  for dinner? No? She cannot leave the shop, but gets a bite
• 3:55:39
  at her bench the question, a bite of what seems as merciless as the
• 3:55:43
  surgeon's knife, and she winces under it as one shrinks from physical pain.
• 3:55:50
  Bread. Then, but at night they all have suppered together sausage and bread
• 3:55:54
  for ten cents. They can eat all they want, can they not?
• 3:55:58
  She says, broking the hair of the little boy at her knee. His
• 3:56:01
  eyes glistened hungrily at the thought, as he nods stoutly in support of his
• 3:56:07
  mother. Only, she adds, though weak, the rent is due.
• 3:56:09
  They have to shorten rations to pay the landlord. But what of his being
• 3:56:13
  an anarchist to this bohemian and infidel, I hear somebody say, Almost one
• 3:56:18
  might be persuaded by such facts as these, And they are everyday facts,
• 3:56:24
  not fancy to retort. What more natural, with every hand raised against him
• 3:56:30
  in the old land and the new, in the land of his hope for
• 3:56:33
  freedom, What more logical than that his should be turned against society that seems
• 3:56:39
  to exist only for his oppression. But the charge is not half true.
• 3:56:45
  Naturally, the Bohemian loves peace as he loves music and song. As someone
• 3:56:50
  has said, he does not seek war, but when attacked, knows better
• 3:56:54
  how to die than how to surrender. The check is the irishman of Central
• 3:56:58
  Europe, with alle all his genius and his strong passions, with the same
• 3:57:03
  bitter traditions of landlord robbery perpetuated here where he thought to forget them, like
• 3:57:09
  him, ever, and on principle, in the opposition again the government wherever
• 3:57:13
  he goes among such people ground by poverty, until their songs have died in
• 3:57:20
  curses upon their oppressors. Hopelessly isolated and ignorant of our language and our laws,
• 3:57:26
  it would not be hard for bad men at any time to lead a
• 3:57:30
  few astray, And this is what has been done. Yet, even with
• 3:57:35
  the occasional noise made by the few, the criminal statistics already alluded to quite
• 3:57:41
  dispose of the charge that they inclined to turbulence and riot. So it is
• 3:57:46
  with the infidel propaganda, the legacy perhaps of the fierce contention through hundreds of
• 3:57:50
  years between Catholics and Protestants on Bohemian soil, of bad faith and savage persecutions
• 3:57:58
  in the name of the Christian's God, let disgrace its history. The Bohemian
• 3:58:01
  clergyman, who spoke for his people at the Christian conference held in Chickering Hall
• 3:58:07
  two years ago, took even stronger ground. Quote they are Roman Catholics by
• 3:58:13
  birth, Infidels by necessity, and Protestants by history and inclination. Close quote
• 3:58:18
  he said. Yet he added his testimony in the same breath to the fact
• 3:58:24
  that though the freethinkers had started two schools in the immediate neighborhood of his church
• 3:58:28
  to counteract its influence, his flock had grown in a few years from a
• 3:58:33
  mere handful of the start to proportions far beyond his hopes gathering in both anarchists
• 3:58:39
  and freethinkers and making good church members of them. Thus the whole matter resolves
• 3:58:45
  itself once more into a question of education, all the more urgent because these
• 3:58:50
  people are poor, miserably poor, almost to a man, said one of
• 3:58:54
  them, who knew thoroughly what he was speaking of. Quote. There is
• 3:58:58
  not one of them all who, if he were to sell all he was
• 3:59:01
  worth tomorrow, would have the money enough to buy a house and lot in
• 3:59:05
  the country. End Section thirteen. The color line in New York. The
• 3:59:11
  color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture its proper shading.
• 3:59:16
  The landlord does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretense,
• 3:59:20
  a frankness of despotism that is nothing if not brutal. The Tsar of all
• 3:59:26
  the Rushes is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord.
• 3:59:31
  In his dealings with colored tenants. Where he permits them to live,
• 3:59:35
  they go where he shuts the door, stay out. By his grace,
• 3:59:37
  they exist at all in certain localities. His u case banishes them from others.
• 3:59:43
  He accepts the responsibility when laid at his door with unruffled complacency. It
• 3:59:50
  is business, he will tell you, And it is he makes the prejudice
• 3:59:54
  in which he traffics. Pay him well, And that as he thinks it,
• 3:59:58
  quite superpluously, I tell you, is what he is there for that
• 4:00:01
  his pencil does not make quite as black a mark as it did, that
• 4:00:07
  the hand that wields it does not bear down as hard as only a short
• 4:00:11
  half dozen years ago, is the hopeful sign of an awakening public conscience,
• 4:00:15
  under the stress of which the line shows signs of wavery. But for this
• 4:00:20
  the landlord deserves no credit. It has come is coming about despite him.
• 4:00:26
  The line may not be wholly effaced. While the name of the Negro,
• 4:00:30
  alone among the world's races, is spelled with a small inn natural selection will
• 4:00:35
  have more or less to do beyond a doubt in every age. With dividing
• 4:00:39
  the races, only so it may be, can they work out together their
• 4:00:43
  highest destiny. But with a despotism that deliberately assigns to the defenseless black the
• 4:00:50
  lowest level for the purpose of robbing him. There that has nothing to do
• 4:00:54
  of such slavery, different only in degree from the other kind that held him
• 4:00:58
  as chattel to be sold or bordered at the will of his master. This
• 4:01:03
  century, if signs fail not, will see the end. In New York.
• 4:01:09
  Ever since the war, New York has been receiving the overflow of colored
• 4:01:13
  population from the southern cities. In the last decade, this migration has grown
• 4:01:18
  to such proportions that it is estimated that our blacks have quite doubled in number
• 4:01:24
  since the tenth census. Whether the exchange has been of advantage to the negro
• 4:01:28
  may well be questioned. Trades of which he had practical control in his southern
• 4:01:33
  home are not open to him here. I know that it may be answered
• 4:01:37
  that there is no industrial proscription of color. That is a matter of choice.
• 4:01:43
  Perhaps so at all events he does not choose. Then, how many
• 4:01:48
  colored carpenters are masons? Has anyone seen at work in New York? In
• 4:01:52
  the South? There are enough of them, And if the testimony of the
• 4:01:56
  most intelligent of their people is worth anything, plenty of them have come here.
• 4:02:00
  As a matter of fact, the colored man takes in New York without
• 4:02:03
  a struggle, a lower level of menial service, for which his past traditions
• 4:02:09
  and natural love of ease perhaps as yet fit him best. Even the colored
• 4:02:13
  barber is rapidly getting to be a thing of the past. Along shore,
• 4:02:18
  at any unskilled labor, he works unmolested, but he does not appear to
• 4:02:24
  prefer the job. His sphere thus defined, he naturally takes his stand among
• 4:02:28
  the poor and in the homes of the poor. Until very recent times.
• 4:02:33
  The years since a change has wrought can be counted on the fingers of one
• 4:02:37
  hand. He was practically restricted in the choice of a home to a narrow
• 4:02:41
  section on the west side that nevertheless had a social top and bottom to it.
• 4:02:48
  The top in the tenements on the line of Seventh Avenue as far north
• 4:02:52
  as thirty second Street, where he was allowed to occupy the houses of unsavory
• 4:02:56
  reputation which the police had cleared and for which decent white tenants could not be
• 4:03:01
  found. The bottom in the vile rookeries of Thompson Street and South fifth Avenue.
• 4:03:07
  The old Africa that is now fast becoming a modern Italy. Today there
• 4:03:13
  are black colonies in Yorkville and Morrisania. The encroachment of business and the Italian
• 4:03:18
  below, and the swelling of the population above, have been the chief agents
• 4:03:24
  in working out his second emancipation, a very real one, for with his
• 4:03:28
  cutting loose from the old tenements, there has come a distinct and gratifying improvement
• 4:03:35
  in the tenant that argues louder than theories or speeches. The influence of vile
• 4:03:39
  surroundings in debasing the man the colored citizen whom this year's sins this man found
• 4:03:45
  in his ninety ninth Street flat, is a very different individual from the nigger
• 4:03:50
  his predecessor counted in the black and tan slums of Thomson and Sullivan Streets.
• 4:03:56
  There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement
• 4:04:01
  of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.
• 4:04:05
  Cleanliness is the characteristic of the Negro in his new surroundings, as it
• 4:04:11
  was his virtue in the old. In this respect, he is immensely the
• 4:04:15
  superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews,
• 4:04:20
  below whom he has been classified in the past in the Teneth's scale. Nevertheless,
• 4:04:26
  he has always had to pay higher rents than even those for the poorest
• 4:04:30
  and most stinted rooms. The exceptions I have come across in which the rents,
• 4:04:35
  though high, have seemed more nearly on a level with what was asked
• 4:04:39
  for the same number and size of rooms in the average tenement, were in
• 4:04:43
  the case of tumble down rookeries in which no one else would live, and
• 4:04:46
  were always coupled with the condition that the landlord should make no repairs. It
• 4:04:52
  can readily be seen that his profits were scarcely curtailed by his humanity. The
• 4:04:58
  reason advanced for the systematic robbery is that white people will not live in the
• 4:05:03
  same house with colored tenants, or even in a house recently occupied by negroes,
• 4:05:09
  and that consequently its selling value is injured. The prejudice undoubtedly exists,
• 4:05:16
  but it is not lessened by the house agents who have set up the maxim.
• 4:05:20
  Once a colored house, always a colored house. There is a method
• 4:05:24
  in the maxim, as shown by an inquiry made last year by the Real
• 4:05:28
  Estate Record. It proved agents to be practically unanimous in the endorsement of the
• 4:05:33
  negro as a clean, orderly and profitable tenant. Here is the testimony of
• 4:05:39
  one of the largest real estate firms in the city. Quote, we would
• 4:05:43
  rather have Negro tenants in our poorest class of tenements than the lower grades of
• 4:05:48
  foreign white people. We people find the farmer cleaner than the latter, and
• 4:05:52
  they do not destroy the property so much. We also get higher prices.
• 4:05:58
  We have a tenement on nineteen kenth Street where we get ten dollars for two
• 4:06:01
  rooms, which we could not get more than seven dollars and fifty cents for
• 4:06:05
  from white tenants. Previously, we have a four story tenement on our books
• 4:06:11
  on thirty third Street between sixth and seventh Avenues, with four rooms per floor,
• 4:06:16
  a parlor, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. We get twenty dollars
• 4:06:20
  for the first floor, twenty four for the second, twenty three dollars for
• 4:06:24
  the third, and twenty dollars for the fourth. In all eighty seven dollars
• 4:06:30
  or one thousand, forty four dollars per annum. The size of the building
• 4:06:35
  is only twenty one plus fifty five close quote. Another firm declared that in
• 4:06:39
  a specified instance they had saved fifteen to twenty percent of the gross rentals since
• 4:06:46
  they changed from white to colored tenants. Since another gave the following case of
• 4:06:50
  a front and rear tenement that had formerly been occupied by tenants of eight low
• 4:06:54
  European type who had been turned out on account of filthy habits and poor pay.
• 4:07:01
  The Negros proved cleaner, better and steadier tenants, instead, however,
• 4:07:05
  having their rents reduced in consequence. The comparison stood as follows. Rents under
• 4:07:11
  white tenants per month front first floor store etcetera. Twenty one dollars, second
• 4:07:18
  floor, thirteen dollars, third floor, thirteen dollars, fourth floor, and
• 4:07:22
  rear twenty one dollars. Rear second floor, twelve dollars, third floor,
• 4:07:28
  twelve dollars fourth floor, see front rear house first floor, eight dollars,
• 4:07:33
  second floor, ten dollars, third floor, nine dollars, fourth floor eight
• 4:07:37
  dollars. Total one hundred twenty seven dollars. Rents under colored tenants per month.
• 4:07:45
  Front, first floor, store, etcetera. Twenty one dollars, second
• 4:07:48
  floor, fourteen dollars, third floor, fourteen dollars, fourth floor fourteen dollars,
• 4:07:54
  rear second floor twelve dollars, third floor, thirteen dollars, fourth floor
• 4:07:58
  three thirteen dollars. Rear house first floor ten dollars, second floor, twelve
• 4:08:05
  dollars, third floor, eleven dollars, fourth floor ten dollars. Total one
• 4:08:09
  hundred and forty four dollars, an increased rental of seventeen dollars per month or
• 4:08:15
  two hundred and four dollars a year, and an advance of nearly thirteen and
• 4:08:20
  one half percent on the gross rental in favor of the colored tenant profitable.
• 4:08:24
  Surely I have quoted these cases at length in order to let in light on
• 4:08:30
  the quality of this landlord despotism that has purposely confused the public mind and for
• 4:08:35
  its own selfish ends in propping up a waning prejudice. It will be cause
• 4:08:39
  for congratulation if indeed its time has come at last within a year, I
• 4:08:45
  am told by one of the most intelligent and best informed of our colored citizens,
• 4:08:50
  there has been evidence, simultaneous with the colored Hitjyra from the low downtown
• 4:08:54
  tenements, of a movement towards less exorbitant rents. I cannot passed from this
• 4:09:00
  subject without adding a leaf from my own experience that deserves a place in this
• 4:09:05
  record, though for the credit of humanity I hope as an extreme case.
• 4:09:11
  It was last Christmas that I had occasion to visit the home of an old
• 4:09:15
  colored woman in sixteenth Street, as the almoner of generous friends out of town
• 4:09:18
  who wished me to buy her at Christmas dinner. The old woman lived in
• 4:09:22
  a wretched chanty, occupying two mean, dilapidated rooms at the top of a
• 4:09:28
  sort of hand ladder that went by the name of stairs. For these she
• 4:09:31
  paid ten dollars a month out of her hard earned wages as a scrub woman.
• 4:09:37
  I did not find her in, and, being informed that she was
• 4:09:39
  at the agent's, went round to hunt her up. The agent's wife appeared
• 4:09:45
  to report that Anne was out. Being in a hurry, it occurred to
• 4:09:48
  me that I might save time by making her employer the purveyor of my friend's
• 4:09:52
  bounty, and proposed to intrust the money two dollars to her, to be
• 4:09:56
  expended for Old Anne's benefit. She fell in with the suggestion at once and
• 4:10:01
  confided to me in the fullness of her heart, that she liked the plant
• 4:10:07
  insomuch as I generally find her at Christmas dinner myself, and this money she
• 4:10:11
  owes mister her husband, the agent, a lot of rent. Needless to
• 4:10:16
  say, that there was a change of program then and there, and that
• 4:10:20
  Anne was saved from the sort of Christmas cheer that woman's charity would have spread
• 4:10:24
  before her. When I had the old soul comfortably installed in her own den,
• 4:10:30
  with a chicken and fixings and a bright fire in her stove, I
• 4:10:33
  asked her how much she owed of her rent. Her answer was that she
• 4:10:37
  did not really owe anything, her muth not being quite up, but that
• 4:10:41
  the amount yet unpaid was two dollars. Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike,
• 4:10:48
  the negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness. His philosophy is of the kind that
• 4:10:54
  has no room for repining, whether he lives in an eighth ward barrack or
• 4:10:58
  in a tenement with a brown stone front and pretensions to the title of flat.
• 4:11:03
  He looks at the sunny side of life and enjoys it. He loves
• 4:11:07
  fine clothes and good living, a good deal more than he does a bank
• 4:11:09
  account. The proverbial rainy day, it would be rank and gratitude from his
• 4:11:15
  point of view, to look for when the sun shines unclouded in a clear
• 4:11:18
  sky. His home surroundings, except when he is utterly depraved, reflects his
• 4:11:24
  blithsome temper. The poorest negro housekeeper's room in New York is bright with gaily
• 4:11:31
  colored prints of his beloved Abe Lincolm, General Grant, President Garfield, Missus
• 4:11:35
  Cleveland, and other national celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds.
• 4:11:41
  In the art of putting the best foot foremost disguising his poverty by making a
• 4:11:46
  little go a long way. Our negro has no equal when a fair share
• 4:11:50
  of prosperity is his. He knows how to make life and home very pleasant
• 4:11:56
  to those about him. Pianos and parlor furniture abound in the uptown homes of
• 4:12:00
  colored tenants, and give them a very prosperous air. But even when the
• 4:12:05
  wolf howls at the door, he makes a bold and gorgeous front. The
• 4:12:09
  amount of style displayed on fine Sundays on sixth and seventh Avenues by colored holidaymakers
• 4:12:15
  would turn a pessimist black with wrath. The negro's great ambition is to rise
• 4:12:20
  in the social scale to which his color has made him a stranger and an
• 4:12:24
  outsider, and he is quite willing to accept the shadow for the substance where
• 4:12:28
  that is the best he can get. The clawhammer coat and the white tie
• 4:12:33
  of a waiter in a first class summer hotel, with the chance of taking
• 4:12:37
  his ease in six months of winter, or to him the next best thing
• 4:12:41
  to mingling with the white quality. He serves on equal terms his festive gatherings
• 4:12:46
  pre eminently his cake walks, at which a sugared and frosted cake is the
• 4:12:50
  proud prize of the couple with the most aristocratic step in carriage are comic mixtures
• 4:12:56
  of elaborate ceremonial and the joyous abandoned of the natural man. With all his
• 4:13:01
  ludicrous incongruities, his sensuality and his lack of moral accountability, his superstition,
• 4:13:09
  and other faults that are the effect of temperament and of centuries of slavery.
• 4:13:13
  He has his eminently good points. He is loyal to the backbone, proud
• 4:13:18
  of being an American and of his newfound citizenship. He is at least as
• 4:13:22
  easily molded for good as for evil. His churches are crowded to the doors
• 4:13:26
  on Sunday nights when the colored colony turns out to worship. His people own
• 4:13:31
  church property in the city upon which they have paid half a million dollars out
• 4:13:35
  of the depth of their poverty, with comparatively little assistance from their white brethren.
• 4:13:41
  He is both willing and anxious to learn, and his intellectual status is
• 4:13:45
  distinctly improving. If his emotions are not very deeply rooted, they are at
• 4:13:50
  least sincere while they last, and until the tempter gets the upper hand again.
• 4:13:54
  Of all the temptations that beset him, the one that troubles him and
• 4:13:58
  the police most is his passion for gambling. The game of policy is a
• 4:14:03
  kind of unlawful penny lottery, specially adapted to his means, but patronized extensively
• 4:14:11
  by poor white players as well. It is the meanest of swindles, but
• 4:14:15
  reaps for its backers rich fortunes. Wherever colored people congregate, between the fortune
• 4:14:20
  teller and the policy shop, closely allied frauds. Always the wages of many
• 4:14:26
  a hard day's work are wasted by the Negro, but the loss causes him
• 4:14:31
  few regrets. Penniless, but with undaunted faith in his ultimate luck, he
• 4:14:35
  looks forward to the time when he shall once more be able to take a
• 4:14:39
  hand at beating policy. When periodically the Negro's lucky numbers four eleven, forty
• 4:14:45
  four come out on the slips of the alleged daily drawings that are supposed to
• 4:14:50
  be held in some far off western town, intense excitement reigns in Thompson Street
• 4:14:56
  and along the Avenue, where some one is always the An immense impetus is
• 4:15:01
  given then to the bogus business that has no existence outside of the cigar stores
• 4:15:07
  and candy shops, where it hides from the law, save in some cunning
• 4:15:11
  bowery broker's back office, where the slips are printed and the winnings apportioned daily
• 4:15:16
  with due regard to the backer's interests. It is a question whether Africa has
• 4:15:22
  been improved by the advent of the Italian with the tramp from the Mulberry Street
• 4:15:26
  bend in his train. The moral turpitude of Thompson Street has been notorious for
• 4:15:31
  years, and the mingling of the three elements does not seem to have wrought
• 4:15:35
  any change for the better. Deep border land, where the white and black
• 4:15:39
  races meet in common debauche, the aptly named Black and Tanned Saloon has never
• 4:15:46
  been debatable ground. From a moral standpoint, it has always been the worst
• 4:15:50
  of the desperately bad than this commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes,
• 4:15:56
  white and black. On such ground there can be no greater roo abomination.
• 4:16:00
  Usually it is some foul cellar dive, perhaps run by the political leader of
• 4:16:06
  the district, who is in with the police. In any event, it
• 4:16:11
  gathers to itself all the law breakers and all the human wrecks within reach.
• 4:16:15
  When a fight breaks out during the dance, a dozen razors are handy in
• 4:16:21
  as many boot legs, and there is always a job for the surgeon and
• 4:16:25
  the ambulance. The black tuf is as handy with the razor in a fight
• 4:16:30
  as his peaceably inclined brother is with it in pursuit of honest trade. As
• 4:16:34
  the Chinaman hides his knife in his sleeve at the Italian his stiletto in his
• 4:16:40
  bosom. So the Negro goes to the ball with the razor in his boot
• 4:16:44
  leg, and on occasion does as much execution with it as both of the
• 4:16:48
  others together. More than three fourths of the business the police have with the
• 4:16:52
  colored people in New York arises in the Black and Tan district, now no
• 4:16:56
  longer fairly representative of their color. I have touched briefly upon such facts in
• 4:17:02
  the Negro's life as may serve to throw light on the social condition of his
• 4:17:06
  people in New York. If, when the account is made up between the
• 4:17:10
  races, it shall be claimed that he falls short of the result to be
• 4:17:14
  expected from twenty five years of freedom, it may be well to turn to
• 4:17:18
  the other side of the ledger and see how much of the blame is borne
• 4:17:22
  by the prejudice and greed that have kept him from rising under a burden of
• 4:17:26
  responsibility to which he could hardly be equal. And in this view he may
• 4:17:30
  be seen to have advanced much farther and faster than before suspected, and to
• 4:17:36
  promise, after all, with fair treatment, quite as well as the rest
• 4:17:40
  of us, his white skinned fellow citizens had any right to expect. In
• 4:17:45
  the section fourteen, Chapter fourteen, The Common Herd, Part one, there
• 4:17:55
  is another line, not always so readily drawn in the tenements. Yet the
• 4:17:59
  real boundary line of the other half is the one that defines the flat.
• 4:18:04
  The law does not draw it at all, accounting all flats tenement without distinction.
• 4:18:11
  The health officer draws it from observation, lumping all those which, in
• 4:18:15
  his judgment, have nothing or not enough to give them claim upon the name
• 4:18:19
  with the common Herd, and his way is perhaps on the whole, the
• 4:18:25
  surest and best. The outside of the building gives no valuable clue. Brass
• 4:18:30
  and brownstone go well, sometimes with dense crowds in dark and dingy rooms,
• 4:18:36
  but the first attempt to enter helps draw the line with tolerable distinctness. A
• 4:18:41
  locked door is a strong point in favor of the flat. It argues that
• 4:18:45
  the first step has been taken to secure privacy, the absence of which is
• 4:18:49
  the chief curse of the tenement behind a locked door. The hoodlum is not
• 4:18:53
  at home unless there be a jailer in place of a janitor to guard it.
• 4:19:00
  The janitor and the door bell are infallible. There may be a tenement
• 4:19:03
  behind a closed door, but never a flat without it. The hall that
• 4:19:08
  is a highway for all the world by night and by day, is the
• 4:19:12
  tenement's proper badge. The other half, ever, receives with open doors.
• 4:19:18
  With this introduction, we shall not seek it long anywhere in the city.
• 4:19:23
  Below Houston Street. The door bell in our age is as extinct as the
• 4:19:27
  dodo east of Second Avenue and west of Ninth Avenue. As far up as
• 4:19:33
  the park, it is practically an unknown institution. The nearer the river and
• 4:19:37
  the great workshops, the more numerous the tenements. The kind of work carried
• 4:19:42
  on in any locality, to a large extent, determines their character. Skilled
• 4:19:48
  and well paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement even in spite of the
• 4:19:52
  open door, and usually soon supplies the missing bell. Gas Houses, slaughter
• 4:19:57
  houses and the dock that attract the roughest crowds and support. The violest saloons
• 4:20:03
  invariably form slum centers. The city is full of such above the line of
• 4:20:08
  fourteenth Street that is erroneously supposed by some to fence off the good from the
• 4:20:14
  bad, separate the chaff from the wheat. There is nothing below that line
• 4:20:18
  that can outdo in wickedness Hell's Kitchen in the region of three cent whisky,
• 4:20:23
  or its counterpoise at the other end of thirty ninth Street on the East River,
• 4:20:29
  the home of the infamous rag Gang Cherry Street is not tougher than Battle
• 4:20:33
  Row in East sixty third Street, or the village at twenty ninth Street and
• 4:20:38
  First Avenue, where stores of broken bricks ammunition for the nightly conflicts with the
• 4:20:44
  police are part of the regulation outfit of every tenement. The Mulberry Street bend
• 4:20:51
  is scarce dirtier than Little Italy in Harlem, even across the Harlem River.
• 4:20:56
  Frog Hollow challenges the admiration of the earlier slums for the boldness and pernicious activity
• 4:21:02
  of its home gang. There are enough of these sore spots we shall yet
• 4:21:07
  have occasion to look into the social conditions of some of them. Were I
• 4:21:11
  to draw a picture of them here as they are the subject I fear would
• 4:21:15
  outgrow alike the limits of this book and the reader's patience. It is true
• 4:21:21
  that they tell only one side of the story. That there is another to
• 4:21:25
  tell, a story of thousands of devoted lives laboring earnestly to make the most
• 4:21:30
  of their scant opportunities for good, of heroic men and women striving patiently against
• 4:21:36
  fearful odds, and by their very courage, coming off victors in the battle
• 4:21:40
  with the tenement of womanhood, pure and undefiled, that it should blossom in
• 4:21:45
  such an atmosphere as one of the unfathomable mysteries of life. And yet it
• 4:21:51
  is not an uncommon thing to find sweet and innocent girls singularly untouched by the
• 4:21:56
  evil around them, true wives and faithful mother literally like jewels in a swine's
• 4:22:02
  snout, in the worst of the infamous barracks. It is the experience of
• 4:22:07
  all who have intelligently observed this side of life in a great city not to
• 4:22:12
  be explained unless on the theory of my friend the priest in the Mulberry Street
• 4:22:18
  Bend, that inherent purity revolts instinctively from the naked brutality of vice as seen
• 4:22:22
  in the slums, but to be thankfully accepted as the one gleam of hope
• 4:22:27
  in an otherwise hopeless desert. But the relief is not great. In the
• 4:22:33
  dull content of life bred on the tenement house dead level. There is little
• 4:22:37
  to redeem it or to calm apprehension for a society that has nothing better to
• 4:22:42
  offer its toilers, while the patient efforts of the lives finally attune to it
• 4:22:48
  to render the situation tolerable. And the very success of these efforts serve only
• 4:22:53
  to bring out in stronger contrast the general gloom of the picture, by showing
• 4:22:57
  how much farther they might have gone, with half a chance go into any
• 4:23:03
  of their respectable tenement neighborhoods. The fact that there are not more than two
• 4:23:07
  saloons on the corner, nor over three or four in the block will serve
• 4:23:11
  as a fair guide. Where live the great body of hard working Irish and
• 4:23:15
  German immigrants and their descendants, who accept naturally the conditions of tenement life,
• 4:23:22
  because for them there is nothing else in New York be with and among its
• 4:23:26
  people until you understand their ways, their aims, and the quality of their
• 4:23:30
  ambitions. And unless you can content yourself with a scriptural promise that the poor
• 4:23:36
  we shall always have with us, or with the menagerie view that if fed,
• 4:23:41
  they have no cause of complaint, you shall come away agreeing with me
• 4:23:45
  that humanly speaking, life there does not seem worth the living. Take at
• 4:23:51
  random one of these uptown tenement blocks, not of the worst, nor yet
• 4:23:55
  of the most prosperous kind, within hail of what the newspapers would call a
• 4:23:59
  fine residential section. These houses were built since the last cholera scare made people
• 4:24:06
  willing to listen to reason. The block is not like the one over on
• 4:24:10
  the east side, in which I actually lost my way once. There were
• 4:24:14
  thirty or forty rear houses in the heart of it, three or four on
• 4:24:18
  every lot, set at all sorts of angles, with odd winding passages,
• 4:24:22
  or no passage at all, only runways for the thieves and tufts of the
• 4:24:26
  neighborhood. These yards are clear, there is air there, and it is
• 4:24:32
  about all there is. The view between brick walls outside is that of a
• 4:24:37
  stony street, inside of rows of unpainted board fences, bewildering maze of closed
• 4:24:42
  posts and lines underfoot, a desert of brown, hard baked soil, from
• 4:24:48
  which every blade of grass, every stray weed, every speck of green has
• 4:24:53
  been trodden out, as must inevitably to be every gentle thought and aspiration above
• 4:24:59
  them mere wants of the body, and those whose moral natures such home surroundings
• 4:25:03
  are to nourish in self defense. You know, all life eventually accommodates itself
• 4:25:10
  to its environment, and human life is no exception. Within the house,
• 4:25:15
  there is nothing to supply the want, thus left unsatisfied. Tenement houses have
• 4:25:19
  no esthetic resources. If any are to be brought to bear on them,
• 4:25:25
  they must come from the outside. There is the common hall with doors opening
• 4:25:29
  softly on every landing as the strange step is heard on the stairs. The
• 4:25:33
  air shaft that seems always so busy letting out foul stenches from below that it
• 4:25:38
  has no time to earn its name by bringing down fresh air. The squeaking
• 4:25:44
  pumps that hold no water. And the rent that is never less than one
• 4:25:48
  week's wages out of the four quite as often half of the family earnings.
• 4:25:53
  Why complete the sketch? It is drearily familiar already, such as it is,
• 4:26:00
  it is the frame in which are set days, weeks, months,
• 4:26:03
  and years of unceasing toil, just able to fill the mouth and clothe the
• 4:26:07
  back. Such as it is. It is the world and all of it
• 4:26:12
  to which these weary workers return nightly to feed heart and brain, after wearing
• 4:26:18
  out the body at the bench or in the shop. To it come the
• 4:26:22
  young, with their restless yearnings, perhaps to pass on the threshold. One
• 4:26:26
  of the daughters of sin, driven to the tenement by the police when they
• 4:26:30
  raided her den, sallying forth in silks and fine attire after her day of
• 4:26:34
  idleness, These in their coarse garments, girls with the love of youth for
• 4:26:40
  beautiful things, With this hard life before them, who shall save them from
• 4:26:45
  the tempter? Down in the street, the saloon always bright and gay,
• 4:26:49
  gathering to itself. All the cheer of the block beckons the boys. And
• 4:26:55
  many such blocks the censes taker found two thousand men, women and children,
• 4:27:00
  and over who called them home. The picture is faithful enough to stand for
• 4:27:04
  its class. Wherever along both rivers the Irish brogue is heard. As already
• 4:27:11
  said, the Celts fall most readily victim to tenement influences. Since shantytown and
• 4:27:15
  its original free soilers have become things of the past. If he be thrifty
• 4:27:22
  and shrewd his progress, thenceforward is along the plain of the tenement on which
• 4:27:26
  he soon assumes to manage without improving things. The German has an advantage over
• 4:27:32
  his Celtic neighbor, and his strong love for flowers, which not all the
• 4:27:36
  tenements on the east side have power to smother. His garden goes with him
• 4:27:41
  wherever he goes, not that it represents any high moral principle in the man,
• 4:27:45
  rather perhaps the capacity for it. He turns his saloon into a shrubbery
• 4:27:51
  as soon as his back yard, but wherever he puts it in a tenement
• 4:27:56
  block, and does the work of a dozen police clubs in proportion. As
• 4:28:00
  it spreads, the neighborhood takes on a more orderly character. As the green
• 4:28:04
  dies out of the landscape and increases in political importance, the police find more
• 4:28:10
  to do where it disappears altogether from sight, lapsing into a mere sentiment.
• 4:28:17
  Police beats are shortened and the force patrols double at night. Neither the man
• 4:28:22
  nor the sentiment is wholly responsible for this. It is the tenement, unadorned
• 4:28:27
  that is the changing of Tompkin's Square from a sandlot into a beautiful park,
• 4:28:33
  put an end for good and all to the bread or blood of riots of
• 4:28:37
  which it used to be the scene, and transformed a nest of dangerous agitators
• 4:28:41
  into a harmless, beer craving band of anarchists. They have scarcely been heard
• 4:28:47
  of since. Opponents of the small parks system as a means of relieving the
• 4:28:51
  congested population of tenement districts please take note. With the first hot nights in
• 4:28:57
  June, police dispatches that record the killing of men and women by rolling off
• 4:29:03
  roofs and window sills while asleep, announced that the time of greatest suffering among
• 4:29:07
  the poor is at hand. It is in hot weather, when life indoors
• 4:29:11
  is well nigh unbearable, with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded
• 4:29:17
  into the small rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all restraint.
• 4:29:22
  Then a strange and picturesque life moves upon the flat roofs in the day
• 4:29:27
  and early evening. Mothers air their babies there, the boys fly their kites
• 4:29:33
  from the housetops, undismayed by police regulations, and the young men and girls
• 4:29:37
  court and past the grower in the stifling July nights, when the big barracks
• 4:29:42
  are like fiery furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men and
• 4:29:48
  women lie in restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep. Then
• 4:29:55
  every truck in the street, every crowded fire escape, becomes a bedroom infinitely
• 4:30:00
  preferable to any of the house affords. A cooling shower on such a night
• 4:30:06
  is hailed as a heaven sent blessing in one hundred thousand homes. Life in
• 4:30:11
  the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom
• 4:30:15
  the doctor's skill is powerless to save. When the white badge of mourning flutters
• 4:30:21
  from every second door, Sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the
• 4:30:26
  early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of a
• 4:30:30
  sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion, striving against
• 4:30:36
  fearfully hopeless odds. Fifty summer doctors, especially trained to this work are then
• 4:30:42
  sent into the tenements by the Board of Health with free advice and medicine for
• 4:30:47
  the poor. Devoted women following their track with care and nursing for the sick.
• 4:30:52
  Fresh air excursions run daily out of New York on land and water,
• 4:30:57
  but despite all efforts, the grave diggers and cavalry work overtime, and little
• 4:31:03
  coffins are stacked mountain high on the deck of the charity Commissioner's boat when it
• 4:31:07
  makes its semi weekly trips to the city cemetery. Under the most favorable circumstances,
• 4:31:15
  an epidemic, which the well to do can afford to make light of
• 4:31:18
  as a thing to be got over or avoided by reasonable care, is excessively
• 4:31:22
  fatal among the children of the poor by reason of the practical impossibility of isolating
• 4:31:29
  the patient and a tenement the measles. Ordinarily a harmless disease furnishes a familiar
• 4:31:34
  example, tread it ever so lightly on the avenues in the tenements it kills,
• 4:31:41
  right and left. Such an epidemic ravaged three crowded blocks in Elizabeth Street
• 4:31:47
  on the heels of the grip last winter, and when it had spent its
• 4:31:51
  fury, the death maps in the Bureau of Vital Statistics looked as if a
• 4:31:55
  black hand had been laid across those blocks, overshadowing in heart the contiguous tenements
• 4:32:00
  in Mott Street, and with the thumb covering a particularly packed settlement of half
• 4:32:06
  a dozen houses in Mulberry Street. The track of the epidemic through these teeming
• 4:32:11
  barracks was as clearly defined as the track of a tornado through a forest district.
• 4:32:15
  There were houses in which as many as eight little children had died in
• 4:32:19
  five months. The records showed that respiratory diseases, the common heritage of the
• 4:32:26
  grip and the measles, had caused death in most cases, discovering the trouble
• 4:32:30
  to be next to the inability to check the contagion in those crowds, in
• 4:32:36
  the poverty of the parents, and the wretched home conditions that made proper care
• 4:32:40
  of the sick impossible. The fact was emphasized by the occurrence here and there
• 4:32:45
  of a few isolated deaths from diphtheria and scarlet fever. In the case of
• 4:32:51
  these diseases considered more dangerous to the public health, the health officers exercised summary
• 4:32:56
  powers of removal to the hospital where proper treatment could be had, and the
• 4:33:02
  result was a low death rate. These were tenements of the tall modern type.
• 4:33:07
  A little more than a year ago, when a census was made of
• 4:33:11
  the tenements and compared with the mortality tables. No little surprise and congratulation was
• 4:33:17
  caused by the discovery that as the buildings grew taller, the death rate fell.
• 4:33:22
  The reason is plain, though the reverse had been expected by most people.
• 4:33:27
  The biggest tenements have been built in the last ten years of Sanitary Reform
• 4:33:32
  rule and have been brought and all but the crowding under its laws. The
• 4:33:37
  old houses that from private dwellings were made into tenements over run up to house
• 4:33:41
  the biggest crowds, in defiance of every moral and physical law, can be
• 4:33:45
  improved by no device short of demolition. They will ever remain the worst.
• 4:33:52
  That ignorance plays its part as well as poverty and bad hygienic surroundings, and
• 4:33:56
  the sacrifice of life is of course an evera they go usually hand in hand.
• 4:34:03
  A message came one day last spring summoning me to a Mott Street tenement
• 4:34:07
  in which lay a child dying from some unknown disease. With the charity doctor.
• 4:34:12
  I found the patient on the top floor, stretched upon two chairs in
• 4:34:17
  a dreadfully stifling room. She was gasping in the agony of peritonitis. That
• 4:34:22
  had already written its death sentence on her wand and pinched face. The whole
• 4:34:27
  family, father, mother, and four ragged children sat around, looking on
• 4:34:33
  with a stony resignation of helpless despair that had long since given up the fight
• 4:34:38
  against fate as useless. A glance around the wretched room left no doubt as
• 4:34:44
  to the cause of the child's condition. Improper nourishment, said the doctor,
• 4:34:49
  which translated to suit the place meant starvation. The father's hands were crippled from
• 4:34:56
  lead poisoning. He had not been able to work for a year. A
• 4:35:00
  contagious disease of the eyes, too long neglected, had made the mother in
• 4:35:04
  one of the boys, nearly blind. The children cried with hunger. They
• 4:35:08
  had not broken their fast that day, and it was then near noon.
• 4:35:14
  For months, the family had subsisted on two dollars a week from the priest,
• 4:35:18
  and a few loaves and a piece of corned beef which the sisters sent
• 4:35:21
  them. On Saturday, the doctor gave direction for the treatment of the child,
• 4:35:26
  knowing that it was possible only to alleviate its sufferings until death should end
• 4:35:30
  them, and left some money for food for the rest. An hour later,
• 4:35:34
  when I returned, I found them feeding the dying child with ginger ale,
• 4:35:40
  bought for two cents a bottle at the peddler's cart down the street.
• 4:35:44
  A pitying neighbor had proposed it as the one thing she could think of as
• 4:35:48
  likely to make the child forget its misery. There was enough in the bottle
• 4:35:52
  to go round to the rest of the family. In fact, the wake
• 4:35:56
  had already begun before night. It was under way and dead earnest end of
• 4:36:03
  Section fifteen, Chapter sixteen, The Common Herd, Part two. Every once
• 4:36:10
  in a while a case of downright starvation gets into the newspapers and makes a
• 4:36:14
  sensation. But this is the exception. Were the whole truth known, it
• 4:36:19
  would come home to the community with a shock that would rouse it to a
• 4:36:22
  more serious effort than the spasmodic undoing of its purse strings. I am satisfied
• 4:36:29
  from my own observation that hundreds of men, women and children are every day
• 4:36:33
  slowly starving to death in the tenements, with my medical friend's complaint of quote
• 4:36:40
  improper nourishment close quote. Within a single week, I have had this year
• 4:36:45
  three cases of insanity provoked directly by poverty and want. One was that of
• 4:36:51
  a mother who in the middle of the night got up to murder her child
• 4:36:53
  who was crying for food. Another was the case of an Elizabeth Street truck
• 4:36:57
  driver, whom the new newspapers never heard of. With a family to provide
• 4:37:03
  for, he had been unable to work for many months. There was neither
• 4:37:07
  food nor a scrap of anything upon which money could be raised left in the
• 4:37:11
  house. His mind gave way under the combined physical and mental suffering. In
• 4:37:18
  the third case, I was just in time with the police to prevent the
• 4:37:21
  madman from murdering his whole family. He had the sharpened hatchet in his pocket
• 4:37:26
  when we seized him. He was an Irish laborer and had been working in
• 4:37:30
  the sewers until the poisonous gases destroyed his health. Then he was laid off,
• 4:37:34
  and scarcely anything had been coming in all winter but the oldest child's earnings
• 4:37:40
  as cash girl in a store two dollars fifty cents a week. There were
• 4:37:45
  seven children to provide for, and the rent of the Mulberry Street attic in
• 4:37:48
  which the family lived was ten dollars a month. They had borrowed as long
• 4:37:53
  as anybody had a cent to lend when at last the man got an odd
• 4:37:59
  job that would just to buy the children bread, The week's wages only served
• 4:38:03
  to measure the depth of their misery. Quote. It came in so on
• 4:38:07
  the tail end of everything close, quote, said his wife, in telling
• 4:38:11
  the story with unconscious eloquence. The outlook worried him through sleepless nights, until
• 4:38:15
  it destroyed his reason. In his madness, he had only one conscious thought
• 4:38:21
  that the town should not take the children better that I take care of them
• 4:38:26
  myself, he repeated to himself, as he ground the axe to an edge.
• 4:38:30
  Help came in abundance for many almost as poor as they, when the
• 4:38:33
  desperate straits of the family became known through his arrest. The readiness of the
• 4:38:38
  poor to share what little they have with those who have even less is one
• 4:38:44
  of the few moral virtues of the tenements. Their enormous crowds touch elbow in
• 4:38:49
  a closeness of sympathy that is scarcely to be understood out of them, and
• 4:38:55
  has no parallel except among the unfortunate women, whom the world scorned as outcasts.
• 4:39:00
  There is very little professed sentiment about it. To draw a sentimental tear
• 4:39:06
  from the eye of romantic philanthropy. The hard fact is that the instinct of
• 4:39:11
  self preservation impels them to make common cause against the common misery. No doubt
• 4:39:17
  intemperance bears a large share of the blame for it, judging from the standpoint
• 4:39:21
  of the policeman, perhaps the greater share. Two such entries as I read
• 4:39:26
  in the Police returns on successive days last March, of mothers in west side
• 4:39:30
  tenements who in their drunken sleep lay upon and killed their infants, go for
• 4:39:36
  to support such a position, And they are far from uncommon. But my
• 4:39:41
  experience has shown me another view of it, a view which the last report
• 4:39:45
  of the Society for improving the Condition of the Poor seems more than half inclined
• 4:39:51
  to adopt. In allotting to intemperance the cause of distress or distress the cause
• 4:39:56
  of intemperance forty percent of the cases it is called upon to de deal with.
• 4:40:00
  Even if it were all true, I should still load over and upon
• 4:40:04
  the tenement. The heaviest responsibility a single factor, the scandalous scarcity of water
• 4:40:11
  in the hot summer, when the thirst of the million tenants must be quenched,
• 4:40:15
  if not in that, in something else has, in the past years,
• 4:40:19
  more than all other causes, encouraged drunkenness among the poor. But to
• 4:40:26
  my mind, there is a closer connection between the wages of the tenement and
• 4:40:30
  the vices and improvidence of those who dwell in them. Then, with the
• 4:40:33
  guilt of the tenement upon our heads, we are willing to admit even to
• 4:40:37
  ourselves weak. Tea with a dry crust is not a diet to nurse moral
• 4:40:44
  strength. Yet how much better might the fair be expected to be in the
• 4:40:48
  family of this widow with seven children, very energetic and prudent. I quote
• 4:40:53
  again from the Report of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the
• 4:40:57
  Poor, whose oldest girl was employed as a learner in a tailor's shop at
• 4:41:03
  small wages, and one boy had a place as cash in a store.
• 4:41:08
  There were two other little boys who sold papers and sometimes earned one dollar.
• 4:41:14
  The mother finishes pantaloons and can do three pairs in a day, thus earning
• 4:41:18
  thirty nine cents. Here is a family of eight persons with rent to pay
• 4:41:23
  and an income of less than six dollars a week, And yet she was
• 4:41:27
  better off in point of pay than this sixth Street mother, who had just
• 4:41:33
  brought home four pairs of pants to finish at seven cents a pair. She
• 4:41:37
  was required to put the canvas in the bottom, basting and sewing three times
• 4:41:41
  around, to put the linings in the waistbands, to tack three pockets three
• 4:41:45
  corners to each, to put on two stays and eight buttons, and make
• 4:41:51
  six button holes, to put the buckle on the back strap, and sew
• 4:41:55
  on the ticket, all for seven cents better off than the church going mother
• 4:42:00
  of six children and with the husband sick to death, who to support the
• 4:42:04
  family made shirts averaging an income of one dollar and twenty cents a week,
• 4:42:10
  while her oldest girl, aged thirteen, was employed downtown cutting out hamburg edgings
• 4:42:15
  at one dollar and a half a week two and a half cents per hour
• 4:42:19
  for ten hours of steady labor, making the total income of the family two
• 4:42:25
  dollars and seventy cents per week. Then the Harlem woman who was making a
• 4:42:30
  brave effort to support a sick husband and two children by taking in washing at
• 4:42:34
  thirty five cents for the law of fourteen large pieces, finding coal, soap,
• 4:42:40
  starch, and bluing herself rather than depend on charity in any form specimen
• 4:42:47
  wages of the tenements. These seemingly inconsistent with the charge of improvidence, but
• 4:42:52
  the connection on second thought is not obscure. There is nothing in the prospect
• 4:42:57
  of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking
• 4:43:03
  ahead. Everything to discourage the effort. Improvidence and wastefulness are natural results.
• 4:43:10
  The installment plan seccures to the tenant who lives from hand to mouth his few
• 4:43:15
  comforts. The evil day of reckoning is put off till aight tomorrow that may
• 4:43:19
  never come. When it does come, with failure to pay in the loss
• 4:43:23
  of hard earned dollars, it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from
• 4:43:29
  the cradle by such incidents. The children soon catch the spirit of this sort
• 4:43:34
  of thing. I remember once calling at the home of a poor washer woman
• 4:43:38
  living in an east side tenement, and finding the door locked. Some children
• 4:43:44
  in the hallway stop their play and eyed me attentively while I knocked. The
• 4:43:48
  biggest girl volunteered the information that missus Smith was out, But while I was
• 4:43:52
  thinking of how I was to get a message to her, the child put
• 4:43:56
  a question of her own, are you the spring man or the clockband.
• 4:44:00
  When I assured her that I was neither one nor the other, but had
• 4:44:04
  brought work for her mother. Missus Smith, who had been hiding from the
• 4:44:08
  installment collector, speedily appeared. Perhaps of all the disheartening experiences of those who
• 4:44:15
  have devoted lives of unselfish thought and effort, and their number is not so
• 4:44:19
  small as often supposed to the lifting of this great load, the indifference of
• 4:44:23
  those they would help is most puzzling. They will not be helped dragged by
• 4:44:30
  main force out of their misery. They slip back again on the first opportunity,
• 4:44:34
  seemingly content only in the old rut. The explanation was supplied by two
• 4:44:41
  women of my acquaintance in an Elizabeth Street tenement, whom the city missionaries had
• 4:44:45
  taken from their wretched hobble and provided with work and a decent home somewhere in
• 4:44:49
  New Jersey. In three weeks they were back, saying that they preferred their
• 4:44:56
  dark rear womb to these stumps out in the country. To me. The
• 4:45:00
  oldest, the mother who had struggled along with her daughter making cloaks at half
• 4:45:03
  a dollar apiece. Twelve long years since the daughter's husband was killed in a
• 4:45:07
  street accident, and the city took the children. Made the bitter confession,
• 4:45:12
  we do get so kind a downhearted live in this way that we have to
• 4:45:18
  be where something has going on, or we just can't stand it. And
• 4:45:22
  there was sadder pathos to me in her words than in the whole long story
• 4:45:26
  of their struggle with poverty. For unconsciously she voiced the sufferings of thousands misjudged
• 4:45:33
  by a happier world, deemed vicious because they are human and unfortunate. It
• 4:45:38
  is a popular delusion, encouraged by all sorts of exaggerated stories, when nothing
• 4:45:44
  more exciting demand's public attention. That there are more evictions in the tenements of
• 4:45:48
  New York every year than in all Ireland. I am not sure that it
• 4:45:53
  is doing much for the tenant to upset this fallacy. To my mind,
• 4:45:57
  to be put out of a tenement would be the height of good luck.
• 4:46:02
  The fact is, however, that evictions are not nearly as common in New
• 4:46:04
  York as supposed. The reason is that in the civil courts, the judges
• 4:46:10
  of which are elected in their districts, the tenant voter has solid ground to
• 4:46:15
  stand upon. At last, the law that takes his side to start with
• 4:46:18
  is usually twisted to the utmost to give him time and save him expense.
• 4:46:25
  In the busiest East Side court that has been very appropriately dubbed the poor man's
• 4:46:30
  court, fully five thousand dispossessed warrants are issued in a year, but probably
• 4:46:37
  not fifty evictions take place in the district. The landlord has only one vote,
• 4:46:42
  while there may be forty voters hiring his rooms in the house, all
• 4:46:47
  of which the judge takes into careful account as elements that have a direct bearing
• 4:46:51
  on the case, and so they have on his case. There are sad
• 4:46:56
  cases, just as there are rounders who prefer to be moved moved at the
• 4:47:00
  landlord's expense and save the rent. But the farmer at least are unusual enough
• 4:47:04
  to attract more than their share of attention if his very poverty compels the tenant
• 4:47:10
  to live at a rate, if not in a style that would beggar a
• 4:47:12
  Vanderbilt, paying four prices for everything he needs from his rent and coal down
• 4:47:18
  to the smallest island in his housekeeping account. Fashion no less inexorable in the
• 4:47:22
  tenements than on the avenue, extracts of him that he must die in a
• 4:47:26
  style that is finally and utterly ruinous. The habit of expensive funerals I know
• 4:47:33
  of no better classification for it than along with the opium habit and similar grievous
• 4:47:38
  plagues of mankind, is a distinctively Irish inheritance. But it has taken root
• 4:47:45
  among all classes of tenement dwellers, curiously enough, most firmly among the Italians,
• 4:47:52
  who have taken amazingly to the funeral coach, perhaps because it furnishes the
• 4:47:56
  one opportunity of their lives for a re le grand turnout, with a free
• 4:48:02
  ride thrown in. It is not at all uncommon to find the hordes of
• 4:48:06
  a whole lifetime of hard work and self denial squandered on the empty show of
• 4:48:11
  a ludicrous funeral parade and the display of flowers that ill comports with the humble
• 4:48:17
  life it is supposed to exalt. It is easier to understand the wake as
• 4:48:22
  a sort of consolation cup for the survivors, for whom there is as one
• 4:48:26
  of them. Doubtless a heathenist pessimist put it to me once, no such
• 4:48:30
  luck. The press and the pulpit have denounced the wasteful practice that often entails
• 4:48:37
  bitter want upon the relatives of the one buried with such pomped, but with
• 4:48:41
  little or no apparent result. Rather, the undertaker's business prosperous more than ever
• 4:48:47
  in the tenements, since the genius of politics has seen its way clear to
• 4:48:52
  make capital out of the dead voter as well as of the living, by
• 4:48:56
  making him the means of a useful show of strength and count of the noses.
• 4:49:00
  One free excursion awaits young and old, whom bitter poverty has denied the
• 4:49:06
  poor privilege of the choice of the home and death they were denied in life.
• 4:49:10
  The ride up the sound to the Potter's field charitably style the city cemetery,
• 4:49:17
  but even there they do not escape their fate. In the common trench
• 4:49:21
  of the poor burying ground, they lie packed three stories deep, shoulder to
• 4:49:26
  shoulder, crowded in death as they were in life, to safe space,
• 4:49:30
  For even on that desert island, the ground is not for the exclusive possession
• 4:49:36
  of those whom cannot afford to pay for it. There is an odd coincidence
• 4:49:38
  in this that year by year, the lives that are begun in the gutter,
• 4:49:44
  the little nameless wastes whom the police pick up and the city adopts as
• 4:49:48
  its wards are balanced by the even more forlorn lives that are ended in the
• 4:49:52
  river. I do not know how or why it happens, or that it
• 4:49:56
  is more than a mere coincidence, but the there it is. Year by
• 4:50:00
  year, the balance is struck, a few more, a few less,
• 4:50:06
  substantially the same when the record is closed. Endo Section sixteen, Chapter fifteen.
• 4:50:14
  The problem of the children. The problem of the children becomes in these
• 4:50:19
  swarms to the last degree, perplexing their varied number makes one stand aghast.
• 4:50:26
  I have already given instances of the packing of the child population in east Side
• 4:50:30
  tenements. They might be continued indefinitely until the array would be enough to startle
• 4:50:36
  any community. For be it remembered. These children, with the training they
• 4:50:40
  receive or do not receive, with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their
• 4:50:45
  growing up, are to be our future rulers, if our theory of government
• 4:50:49
  is worth anything more than a working majority of our voters now register from the
• 4:50:56
  tenements. I counted the other day the ones up to ten years or so
• 4:51:02
  in a Bayard Street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the
• 4:51:06
  center, with sides fourteen or fifteen feet long, just room enough for a
• 4:51:10
  row of ill smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hydrant at
• 4:51:14
  the apex. There was about as much light in this yard as in the
• 4:51:18
  average cellar. I gave up my self imposed task in despair. When I
• 4:51:22
  had counted one hundred and twenty eight in forty families. Thirteen I had missed
• 4:51:27
  or not found. In applying the average for the forty to the whole fifty
• 4:51:33
  three, the house contained one hundred and seventy children. It is not the
• 4:51:37
  only time I have had to give up such census work. I have in
• 4:51:41
  mind an alley an inlet rather to a row of rear tenements that is either
• 4:51:45
  two or four feet wide, according as the wall of the crazy old building
• 4:51:49
  that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count the children
• 4:51:53
  that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows
• 4:51:59
  just how many there are about bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers
• 4:52:03
  right along in summer, whom no one seems to know anything about. When
• 4:52:07
  last spring, some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on the North
• 4:52:11
  River pier found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to
• 4:52:15
  death. No one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up.
• 4:52:22
  The truant officer assuredly does not know, though he spends his life trying
• 4:52:26
  to find out, somewhat illogically, perhaps, since the department that employs him
• 4:52:30
  admits that thousands of poor children are crowded out of the schools year by year
• 4:52:36
  for want of room. There was a big tenement in the sixth Ward,
• 4:52:41
  now happily appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business that blots out so many foul
• 4:52:45
  spots in New York. It figured not long ago in the official reports as
• 4:52:49
  an out and out hog pen that had a record of one hundred and two
• 4:52:53
  arrests in four years among its four hundred and seventy eight tenants, fifty seven
• 4:52:59
  of them for drunken and disorderly conduct. I do not know how many children
• 4:53:03
  there were in it, but the inspector reported that he found only seven in
• 4:53:07
  the whole house who owned that they went to school. The rest gathered all
• 4:53:11
  the instruction they received running beer for their elders. Some of them claimed the
• 4:53:17
  flat as their home. As a mere matter of form, they slept in
• 4:53:19
  the streets. At night, the official came upon a little party of four
• 4:53:25
  drinking beer out of the cover of a milk can in the hallway. They
• 4:53:29
  were of the seven Good Boys, and proved their claim to the title by
• 4:53:33
  offering him some The old question what to do with the boy, assumes a
• 4:53:37
  new and serious phase in the tenements. Under the best conditions found there,
• 4:53:41
  it is not easily answered. In nine cases out of ten, he would
• 4:53:45
  make an excellent mechanic if trained early to work at a trade, for he
• 4:53:49
  is neither dull nor slow. But the short sighted depotism of the trades unions
• 4:53:55
  has practically closed that avenue to him. Trade schools, however, excellent,
• 4:54:00
  cannot supply the opportunity thus denied him, And at the outset the boy stands
• 4:54:04
  condemned by his own to low and ill paid drudgery, held down by the
• 4:54:08
  hand that of all should labor to raise him home. The greatest factor in
• 4:54:15
  all the training of the young means nothing to him but a pigeon hole in
• 4:54:18
  a coupe. Along with so many other human animals, its influence is scarcely
• 4:54:23
  of the elevating kind if it have any. The very games at which he
• 4:54:29
  takes a band in the street become polluting in its atmosphere. With no steady
• 4:54:33
  hand to guide him, the boy takes naturally to idle ways, caught in
• 4:54:37
  the street by the truant officer or by the agents of the children's societies,
• 4:54:42
  peddling perhaps or begging to help out the family resources, he runs the risk
• 4:54:48
  of being sent to a reformatory, where contact with vicious boys older than himself
• 4:54:52
  soon develop the latent possibilities for evil that lie hidden in him. The city
• 4:54:57
  has no truant home in which to keep him, and all efforts of the
• 4:55:00
  children's friends to enforce school attendants are paralyzed by this want. The risk of
• 4:55:07
  the reformatory is too great. What is done, in the end is to
• 4:55:11
  let him take chances, with the chances all against him. The result is
• 4:55:18
  the rough, young savage, familiar from the street, rough as he is.
• 4:55:22
  If any one doubt that this child of common Clay have in him the
• 4:55:25
  instinct of beauty, of love, for the ideal of which his life has
• 4:55:29
  no embodiment, let him put the matter to the test. Let him take
• 4:55:33
  into a tenement block a handful of flowers from the fields, and watch the
• 4:55:37
  brightened faces, the sudden abandonment of play and fight that go ever hand in
• 4:55:41
  hand where there is no elbow room, the wild entreaty for posies, the
• 4:55:47
  eager love with which the little messengers of peace are shielded. Once possessed,
• 4:55:51
  then let him change his mind. I have seen an armful of daisies keep
• 4:55:56
  the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club. See instincts
• 4:56:00
  awakened under their gentle appeal, whose very existence in the soil in which they
• 4:56:03
  grew made seem a mockery. I have not forgotten the deputation of ragamuffins from
• 4:56:10
  a Mulberry Street alley that knocked at my office door one morning on a mysterious
• 4:56:14
  expedition for flowers, not for themselves but for a lady, and having obtained
• 4:56:19
  what they wanted, trooped off to bestow them a ragged and dirty little band
• 4:56:23
  with a solemnity that was quite unusual. It was not until an old man
• 4:56:29
  called the next day to thank me for the flowers that I found out they
• 4:56:33
  had decked the bier of a pauper in the dark rear room where she lay
• 4:56:37
  waiting in her pine board coffin for the city's hearse. Yet as I knew,
• 4:56:41
  that dismal alley, with its bare brick walls, between which no sun
• 4:56:45
  ever rose or set, was the world of those children. It filled their
• 4:56:48
  young lives. Probably not one of them had ever been out of the sight
• 4:56:52
  of it. They were too dirty, too ragged, and too generally disreputable,
• 4:56:56
  too well hidden in their slum. Besides, to come into line with
• 4:57:00
  the fresh air summer boarders, with such human instincts and cravings, forever unsatisfied,
• 4:57:07
  turned into a haunting curse, with appetite ground to keenest edge by a
• 4:57:11
  hunger that is never fed. The children of the poor grow up in joyless
• 4:57:15
  homes to lives of wearisome toil that claims them. At an age when the
• 4:57:18
  play of their happier fellows has but just begun. Has a yard of turf
• 4:57:23
  been laid and a vine been coaxed to grow within their reach, they are
• 4:57:27
  banished and barred out from it, as from a heaven that is not for
• 4:57:30
  such as they. I came upon a couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street
• 4:57:34
  yard a while ago that were chalking on a fence their first lesson in writin,
• 4:57:40
  and this is what they wrote, keeb of te grass. They had
• 4:57:45
  it by heart, for there was not I verily believe a green sod within
• 4:57:49
  a quarter of a mile home to them is an empty name pleasure. A
• 4:57:56
  gentleman once catechised a ragged class in a downtown public school on this point,
• 4:58:00
  and recorded the result. Out of forty eight boys, twenty had never seen
• 4:58:04
  the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes walk away. Three only had been
• 4:58:11
  in Central Park. Fifteen had known the joy of a ride in a horse
• 4:58:15
  car. The street, with its ash barrels and its dirt, the river
• 4:58:18
  that runs foul with mud are their domain. What training they receive is picked
• 4:58:23
  up there, and they are apt pupils. If the mud and the dirt
• 4:58:27
  are easily reflected in their lives, what wonder scarce half grown such lads as
• 4:58:33
  these confront the world with the challenge to give them their due? Too long
• 4:58:37
  withheld? Or our jails supplied the answer to the alternative. A little fellow
• 4:58:45
  who seemed clad in but a single rag, was among the flotsam and jetsam
• 4:58:48
  stranded at police headquarters one day last summer. No one knew where he came
• 4:58:52
  from or where he belonged. The boy himself knew as little about it as
• 4:58:56
  anybody, and was the least anxious to have light shed on the subject.
• 4:59:00
  After he had spent a night in the matron's nursery, the discovery that beds
• 4:59:04
  were provided for boys to sleep in there, and that he could have a
• 4:59:08
  whole egg and three slices of bread for breakfast put him on the best of
• 4:59:11
  terms with the world in general, and he decided that headquarters was a bully
• 4:59:15
  place. He sang mc ginty all through with tenth Avenue variations for the police,
• 4:59:22
  and then settled down to the serious business of giving an account of himself.
• 4:59:27
  The examination went on after this fashion, Where do you go to church,
• 4:59:32
  my boy? We don't have no clothes to go to church. And
• 4:59:37
  indeed his appearance, as he was in the door of any New York church
• 4:59:40
  would have caused a sensation. Well where do you go to school? Then
• 4:59:48
  I don't go to school? With a snort of contempt, where do you
• 4:59:52
  buy your bread? We don't buy no bread, We buy beer, said
• 4:59:57
  the boy. And it was eventually the saloon that led the police as a
• 5:00:00
  landmark to his home. It was worthy of the boy, as he had
• 5:00:04
  said, His only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the floor,
• 5:00:07
  his daily diet a crust in the morning, nothing else. Into the rooms
• 5:00:12
  of the Children's Aid Society were led two little girls whose father had busted up
• 5:00:17
  the house and put them on the street after their mother died. Another who
• 5:00:21
  was turned out by her stepmother because she had five of her own, could
• 5:00:25
  not afford to keep her could not remember ever having been in church or Sunday
• 5:00:29
  school, and only knew the name of Jesus through hearing people swear by it.
• 5:00:33
  She had no idea what they meant. These were specimens of the overflow
• 5:00:37
  from the tenements of our home heathen that are growing up in New York streets
• 5:00:41
  today, while tender hearted men and women are busying themselves with the socks and
• 5:00:45
  the hereafter of well fed little hottentots thousands of miles away. According to Canon
• 5:00:52
  Taylor of York, one hundred and nine missionaries in the four fields of Persia,
• 5:00:56
  Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt spent one year and sixty thousand dollars in
• 5:01:02
  converting one little heathen girl. If there is nothing the matter with those missionaries
• 5:01:07
  they might come to New York with a good deal better prospect of success by
• 5:01:12
  those who lay flattering unction to their souls, and the knowledge that to day
• 5:01:15
  New York has, at all events no brood of the gutters of tender years
• 5:01:19
  that can be homeless long unheeded. Let it be remembered well through what effort
• 5:01:25
  this judgment has been averted. In thirty seven years, the Children's Aid Society,
• 5:01:30
  that came into existence as an emphatic protest against the tenement corruption of the
• 5:01:34
  young, has sheltered quite three hundred thousand outcasts homeless and orphaned children in its
• 5:01:40
  lodging houses, and has found homes in the West for seventy thousand that had
• 5:01:44
  none, doubtless as a mere stroke of finance. The five millions and a
• 5:01:48
  half thus spent were a wiser investment than to have let them grow up thieves
• 5:01:53
  and thugs. In the last fifteen years of this tireless battle for the safety
• 5:01:57
  of the state, the intervention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
• 5:02:03
  Children has been invoked for one hundred thirty eight thousand, eight hundred ninety one
• 5:02:07
  little ones. It has thrown its protection around more than twenty five thousand helpless
• 5:02:11
  children, and has convicted nearly sixteen thousand wretches of child beating and abuse.
• 5:02:17
  Add to this the standing army of fifteen thousand dependent children in New York's asylums
• 5:02:22
  and institutions, and some idea is gained of the crop that is garnered day
• 5:02:26
  by day in the tenements, of the enormous force employed to check their inroads
• 5:02:30
  on our social life, and of the cause for apprehension that would exist did
• 5:02:33
  their efforts flag for ever so brief a time. Nothing is now better understood
• 5:02:38
  than that the rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city
• 5:02:42
  poverty, as presented for our solution to day that character may be formed,
• 5:02:48
  where to reform it would be a hopeless task. The concurrent testimony of all
• 5:02:52
  who have to undertake it at a later stage that the young are naturally neither
• 5:02:56
  vicious nor hardened, simply weak, undeveloped except by the bad influences of the
• 5:03:03
  street, makes this duty all the more urgent. As well as hopeful,
• 5:03:07
  helping hands are held out on every side to private charity, the municipality leaves
• 5:03:12
  the entire care of its proletariat of tender years lulling its conscience to sleep,
• 5:03:18
  with liberal appropriations of money to foot the bills. Indeed, it is held
• 5:03:22
  by those whose opinions are entitled to wait that it is far too liberal,
• 5:03:26
  a paymaster for its own best interests and those of its wards. It deals
• 5:03:32
  with evil in the seed to a limited extent, in gathering in the outcast
• 5:03:36
  babies from the streets to the ripe fruit. The gates of its prisons,
• 5:03:40
  its reformatories, and its workhouses are opened wide the year round. What the
• 5:03:44
  showing would be at this end of the line were it not for the barriers,
• 5:03:48
  wise charity has thrown across the broad highway to ruin is building day by
• 5:03:52
  day may be measured by such results as those quoted above in the span of
• 5:03:56
  a single life end of Section seventeen, Chapter sixteen, waifs of the city's
• 5:04:04
  slums. First among these barriers is the Foundling Asylum. It stands at the
• 5:04:12
  very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly
• 5:04:15
  two millions of people, powerless to prevent it. Though it gather in the
• 5:04:21
  outcasts by night and by day. In a score of years, an army
• 5:04:26
  of twenty five thousand of these forlorn little waifs have cried out from the streets
• 5:04:30
  of New York in arraignment of a Christian civilization under the blessings of which the
• 5:04:36
  instinctive motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want only the poor abandon their children.
• 5:04:42
  The stories of richly dressed foundlings that are dished up in the newspapers at
• 5:04:47
  intervals or pure fiction. Not one instance of even a well dressed infant having
• 5:04:52
  been picked up on the streets is on record. They come in rags,
• 5:04:56
  a newspaper, often the only wrap, semi occasionally one in a clean slip
• 5:05:02
  with some evidence of loving care, a little slip of paper pinned on,
• 5:05:06
  perhaps with some such message as this I once read in a woman's trembling hand.
• 5:05:11
  Take care of Johnny for God's sake. I cannot. But even that
• 5:05:18
  is the rarest of all happenings. The city divides with the sisters of Charity
• 5:05:23
  the task of gathering them in. The real foundlings, the children of the
• 5:05:27
  gutter that are picked up by the police are the city's wards. In midwinter,
• 5:05:33
  when the poor shiver in their homes, and in the dog days when
• 5:05:37
  the fierce heat and foul air of the tenements smother their babies. By thousands.
• 5:05:41
  They are found, sometimes three and four in a night, in hallways,
• 5:05:47
  in areas, and on the doorsteps of the rich, with whose comfort
• 5:05:51
  and luxurious homes. The wretched mother somehow connects her own misery, Perhaps as
• 5:05:56
  the drowning man clutches at a straw, she hopes that these happier hearts may
• 5:06:02
  have love despair, even for her little one. In this she is mistaken.
• 5:06:07
  Unauthorized babies especially, are not popular in the abodes of the wealthy.
• 5:06:12
  It never happens outside of the story books that a baby so deserted finds home
• 5:06:17
  and friends at once. Its career, though rather more official, is less
• 5:06:22
  romantic and generally brief. After a night spent at police headquarters, it travels
• 5:06:27
  up to the Infant's hospital on Randall's Island in the morning, fitted out with
• 5:06:33
  a number and a bottle that seldom see much wear, before they are laid
• 5:06:36
  aside for a fresh recruit. Few outcast babies survive their desertion. Long murder
• 5:06:42
  is the true name of the mother's crime. In eight cases out of ten
• 5:06:48
  of five hundred eight babies received at the Randall's Island Hospital. Last year,
• 5:06:52
  three hundred thirty three died sixty five point fifty five percent. But of the
• 5:06:59
  five hundred eight, only one hundred seventy were picked up in the streets,
• 5:07:03
  and among these the mortality was much greater, probably nearer ninety percent. If
• 5:07:07
  the truth were told. The rest were born in the hospitals. The high
• 5:07:12
  mortality among the foundlings is not to be marveled at. The wonder is rather
• 5:07:18
  that any survive. The stormier the night. The more certain is the police
• 5:07:22
  nursery to echo with the feeble cries of abandoned babies. Often they come half
• 5:07:27
  dead from exposure. One live baby came in a little pine coffin which a
• 5:07:33
  policeman found an inhuman wretch trying to bury in an uptown lot. But many
• 5:07:38
  do not live to be officially registered as a charge upon the county. Seventy
• 5:07:44
  two dead babies were picked up in the streets last year. Some of them
• 5:07:48
  were doubtless put out by very poor parents to save funeral expenses. In hard
• 5:07:52
  times, a number of dead and live foundlings always increases very noticeably. But
• 5:07:59
  whether traveling way of the morgue or the infant's hospital, the little Army of
• 5:08:03
  waifs meet reunited soon in the trench in the Potter's Field, where if no
• 5:08:08
  medical student is in need of a subject, they are laid in squads of
• 5:08:12
  a dozen. Most of the foundlings come from the East Side, where they
• 5:08:18
  are left by young mothers without wedding ring or other name than their own to
• 5:08:22
  bestow upon the baby returning from the island hospital to face an unpitying world with
• 5:08:27
  the evidence of their shame. Not infrequently they wear the bedtick regimentals of the
• 5:08:33
  public charities, and thus their origin is easily enough traced oftener. No ray
• 5:08:40
  of light penetrates the gloom, and no effort is made to probe the mystery
• 5:08:44
  of sin and sorrow. This also is the policy pursued in the Great Foundling
• 5:08:48
  Asylum of the Sisters of Charity in sixty eighth Street, known all over the
• 5:08:53
  world as Sister Irene's Asylum. Years ago, the crib that now stands just
• 5:08:57
  inside the street door under the Great Main portal was placed outside at night,
• 5:09:03
  but it filled up too rapidly. The babies took to coming in little squads
• 5:09:07
  instead of a single file, and in self defense the sisters were forced to
• 5:09:12
  take the cradle in Now their mother must bring her child inside and put it
• 5:09:17
  in the crib, where she is seen by the sister on guard. No
• 5:09:22
  effort is made to question her or discover the child's antecedents, but she is
• 5:09:26
  asked to stay and nurse her own and another baby. If she refuses,
• 5:09:32
  she is allowed to depart unhindered. If willing, she enters at once into
• 5:09:36
  the great family of the Good Sister, who in twenty one years has gathered
• 5:09:41
  as many thousand homeless babies into her fold. One was brought in when I
• 5:09:45
  was last in the asylum in the middle of July, that received in its
• 5:09:49
  crib the number two zero seven one five. The death rate is of course
• 5:09:55
  lowered a good deal where exposure of the child is prevented. Among the the
• 5:10:00
  eleven hundred infants in the asylum it was something over nineteen percent last year,
• 5:10:04
  but among those actually received in the twelvemonth nearer twice that figure. Even the
• 5:10:11
  nineteen percent, remarkably low for a foundling asylum, was equal to the starling
• 5:10:15
  death rate of Gotham Court and the cholera scourge. Four hundred and sixty mothers
• 5:10:22
  who could not or would not keep their own babies did voluntary penance for their
• 5:10:27
  sin in the asylum last year by nursing a strange waif besides their own until
• 5:10:33
  both should be strong enough to take their chances in life's battle. An even
• 5:10:37
  larger number than the eleven hundred were pay babies put out to be nursed by
• 5:10:41
  mothers outside the asylum. The money thus earned pays the rent of hundreds of
• 5:10:48
  poor families. It is no trifle, quite half of the quarter of a
• 5:10:52
  million dollars contributed annually by the city for the support of the asylum. The
• 5:10:57
  procession of these nurse mothers when they come to the asylum on the first Wednesday
• 5:11:02
  of each month to receive their pay and have the babies inspected by the sisters,
• 5:11:07
  is one of the sights of the city. The nurses, who are
• 5:11:10
  under strict supervision, growe to love their little charges and part from them with
• 5:11:15
  tears. When at the age of four or five they are sent to western
• 5:11:18
  homes to be adopted. The sisters carefully encouraged the home feeling and the child
• 5:11:25
  is their strongest ally in seeking its mental and moral elevation, and the toddlers
• 5:11:30
  to part happy to join their papas and mamas and the far away unknown home.
• 5:11:36
  An infantly more fiendish, if to surface appearance, is less deliberate plan
• 5:11:41
  of child murder than desertion. Has flourished in New York for years under the
• 5:11:45
  title of baby farming. The name, put into plain English, means starving
• 5:11:51
  babies to death. The law has fought this most heinous of crimes by compelling
• 5:11:56
  the registry of all baby farms as well. Might it require all persons intending
• 5:12:02
  murder to register their purpose with time and place of the deed, under the
• 5:12:06
  penalty of exemplary fines. Murderers do not hang out a shingle baby farms,
• 5:12:12
  said once mister Elbridge t Yary, the president of the society charged with the
• 5:12:18
  execution of the law that was passed through his efforts, are concerns by means
• 5:12:22
  of which persons, usually of disreputable character, eke out a living by taking
• 5:12:29
  two or three or four babies to board. They are the charges of outcasts
• 5:12:33
  or illegitimate children. They feed them on sour milk and give them paragoric to
• 5:12:38
  keep them quiet until they die. When they get some young medical man without
• 5:12:44
  experience to sign a certificate to the Board of Health that the child died of
• 5:12:48
  inanation, and so the matter ends. The baby is dead and there is
• 5:12:52
  no one to complain. A handful of baby farms have been registered and licensed
• 5:12:57
  by the Prevention of Cruel to Children in the last five years, but none
• 5:13:02
  of this kind. The devil keeps the only complete register to be found.
• 5:13:07
  Anywhere their trace is found, often as by the coroner or the police.
• 5:13:11
  Sometimes they may be discovered hiding in the advertising columns of certain newspapers under the
• 5:13:17
  guise of the scarcely less, heartless traffic and helpless children that is dignified with
• 5:13:22
  the pretense of adoption for cash. An idea of how this scheme works was
• 5:13:27
  obtained through the disclosures in a celebrated divorce case a year or two ago.
• 5:13:33
  The Society has among its records a very recent case of a baby, a
• 5:13:37
  week old baby blue eyes, that was offered for sale adoption. The dealer
• 5:13:42
  called it in a newspaper. The agent bought it after some haggling for a
• 5:13:48
  dollar and arrested the woman slave trader, but the law was powerless to punish
• 5:13:52
  her for her crime. Twelve unfortunate women awaiting dishonored motherhood were found in her
• 5:13:59
  house, One gets a glimpse of the frightful depths to which human nature,
• 5:14:03
  perverted by avarice, bread of ignorance and rasping poverty, can descend in the
• 5:14:10
  mere suggestion of systematic insurance for profit of children's lives. A woman was put
• 5:14:15
  on trial in this city last year for incredible cruelty in her treatment of a
• 5:14:18
  step child. The evidence aroused a strong suspicion that a pitifully small amount of
• 5:14:25
  insurance on the child's life was one of the motives for the woman's savagery.
• 5:14:30
  A little investigation brought out the fact that three companies that were in the business
• 5:14:33
  of insuring the children's lives for sums varying from a dollar seventeen up had issued
• 5:14:41
  not less than a million such policies. The premiums range from five to twenty
• 5:14:45
  five cents a week. What untold horrors this business may conceal was suggested by
• 5:14:52
  a formal agreement entered into by some of the companies for the purpose of preventing
• 5:14:56
  speculation in the insurance of children's lives wives. By the terms of this compact,
• 5:15:03
  no higher premium than ten cents could be accepted on children under six years
• 5:15:07
  old. Barbarism forsooth, did ever heathen cruelty invent a more fiendish plot than
• 5:15:14
  the one written down between the lines of this legal paper. It is with
• 5:15:18
  a sense of glad relief that one turns from this misery to the brighter page
• 5:15:22
  of the helping hands stretched forth on every side to save the young and the
• 5:15:26
  helpless. New York is, I firmly believe, the most charitable city in
• 5:15:33
  the world. Nowhere is there so eager a readiness to help when it is
• 5:15:37
  known that help is worthily wanted. Nowhere are such armies of devoted workers,
• 5:15:42
  Nowhere such abundance of means ready to the hand of those who know the need
• 5:15:47
  and how rightly to supply it. Its poverty, its slums, and its
• 5:15:52
  suffering are the result of unprecedented growth, with the consequent disorder and crowding,
• 5:15:57
  and the common penalty of metropolis and greatness. If the structure shows signs of
• 5:16:03
  being top heavy, evidences are not wanting. They are multiplying day by day
• 5:16:08
  that patient toilers are at work among the underpinnings, the day nurseries, the
• 5:16:14
  numberless kindergartens and charitable schools in the poor quarters, the fresh air funds,
• 5:16:19
  the thousand and one charities that, in one way or another, reach the
• 5:16:22
  homes and the lives of the poor with sweetening touch, are proof that if
• 5:16:27
  much is yet to be done, if the need only grows with the effort,
• 5:16:30
  hearts and hands will be found to do it in ever increasing measure.
• 5:16:36
  Black as the cloud is, it has a silver lining bright with promise.
• 5:16:41
  New York is today a hundredfold cleaner, better, purer city than it was
• 5:16:45
  even ten years ago. Two powerful agents that were among the pioneers in this
• 5:16:52
  work of moral and physical regeneration stand in Paradise Park today as milestones on the
• 5:16:57
  rocky uphill road. The handful of noble women who braved the foul depravity of
• 5:17:03
  the old brewery to rescue its child victims rolled away the first and heaviest boulder
• 5:17:08
  which legislatures and city councils had tackled in vain. The Five Points Mission in
• 5:17:15
  the Five Points House of Industry have accomplished what no machinery of government availed to
• 5:17:19
  do. Sixty thousand children had been rescued by them from the streets and had
• 5:17:26
  their little feet set in the better way. Their work still goes on increasing
• 5:17:30
  and gathering in the waifs, instructing and feeding them, and helping their parents
• 5:17:36
  with advice and more substantial aid. Their charity knows, not creed or nationality.
• 5:17:42
  The House of Industry is an enormous nursery school, with an average of
• 5:17:47
  more than four hundred day scholars in constant boarders, outsiders and insiders. Its
• 5:17:53
  influence is felt for many blocks around in that crowded part of the city.
• 5:17:57
  It is one of the most touching sun in the world to see a score
• 5:18:00
  of babies rescued from homes of brutality and desolation, where no other blessing than
• 5:18:07
  a drunken curse was ever heard, saying their prayers in the nursery at bedtime.
• 5:18:12
  Too often their white nightgowns hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly bruised by
• 5:18:17
  inhuman hands. In the shelter of this fold, they are safe and a
• 5:18:22
  happier little group. One may seek long and far in vain. End of
• 5:18:30
  Section eighteen, Chapter seventeen. The street Arab not all the barriers erected by
• 5:18:37
  society against its nether life, not the labor of unnumbered societies for the rescue
• 5:18:41
  and relief of its outcast wastes can damn the stream of homelessness that issues from
• 5:18:47
  a source where the very name of home is a mockery. The street Arab
• 5:18:52
  is as much of an institution in New York as newspaper row, to which
• 5:18:56
  he gravitates naturally, following his bohemian instinct. Crowded out of the tenements to
• 5:19:00
  shift for himself, and quite ready to do it, he meets there the
• 5:19:04
  host of adventurous runaways from every state in the Union and from across the sea,
• 5:19:10
  whom New York attracts with a queer fascination as it attracts the older immigrants
• 5:19:15
  from all parts of the world. A census of the population in the Newsboy's
• 5:19:18
  lodging house on any night will show such an odd mixture of small humanity as
• 5:19:23
  could hardly be got together in any other spot. It is a mistake to
• 5:19:27
  think that they are helpless little creatures to be pitied and cried over because they
• 5:19:32
  are alone in the world. The unmerciful guying the good man would receive who
• 5:19:37
  went to them with such a program, would soon convince him that that sort
• 5:19:41
  of pity was wasted, and would very likely give him the idea that they
• 5:19:45
  were a set of hardened little scoundrels quite beyond the reach of missionary effort.
• 5:19:51
  But that would only be his second mistake. The street Arab has all the
• 5:19:55
  faults and all the virtues of the lawless life. He leads vagabonded. He
• 5:20:00
  is acknowledging no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or anything. With his
• 5:20:04
  grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries to coerce him. He is as
• 5:20:10
  bright and as sharp as the weasel, which, among all the predatory beats
• 5:20:14
  he most resembles. His sturdy independence, love of freedom, and absolute self
• 5:20:19
  reliance, together with his rude sense of justice, that enables him to govern
• 5:20:23
  his little community, not always in accordance with municipal law or city ordinances,
• 5:20:29
  but often a good deal closer to the saving line of doing to others as
• 5:20:33
  one would be done by These are strong handles by which those who know how
• 5:20:37
  can catch the boy and make him useful. Successful bankers, clergymen, and
• 5:20:42
  lawyers all over the country statesmen in some instances of national repute, bear evidence
• 5:20:48
  in their lives to the potency of such missionary efforts. There is scarcely a
• 5:20:53
  learned profession or branch of honorable business that has not, in the last twenty
• 5:20:57
  years borrowed some of its brightest light from the poverty and gloom of New York
• 5:21:02
  streets. Anyone whom business or curiosity is taken through Park Row or across Printing
• 5:21:07
  House Square in the midnight hour, when the air is filled with the roar
• 5:21:11
  of great presses spinning with printers ink on endless rolls of white paper. The
• 5:21:15
  history of the world, in the twenty four hours that have just passed away,
• 5:21:21
  has seen little groups of these boys hanging about the newspaper offices in winter
• 5:21:25
  when snow is on the streets, fighting for warm spots around the grated vent
• 5:21:29
  holes that let out the heat and steam from the underground press rooms with their
• 5:21:33
  noise and clatter, And in summer playing craps and seven to eleven on the
• 5:21:37
  curb for their hard earned pennies, with all the absorbing concern of hardened gamblers.
• 5:21:42
  This is their beat. Here, the agent of society for the prevention
• 5:21:47
  of cruelty to children finds those he thinks too young for business, but does
• 5:21:52
  not always capture them. Like rabbits in their burrows, the little ragamuffins sleep
• 5:21:56
  with at least one eye open and every sense alert to the approach of danger
• 5:22:02
  of their enemy, the policeman, whose chief business in life is to move
• 5:22:06
  them on, and of the agent bent on robbing them of their cherished freedom.
• 5:22:11
  At the first warning shout, they scatter and are off. To pursue
• 5:22:15
  them would be like chasing the fleet footed mountain goat in his rocky fastness.
• 5:22:21
  There is not an open door, a hidden turn or runaway which they do
• 5:22:23
  not know. With lots of secret passages and shortcuts, no one else ever
• 5:22:27
  found to steal a march on them is the only way. There is a
• 5:22:32
  coal shoot from the sidewalk to the boiler room in the sub cellar of the
• 5:22:34
  post office, which the society's officer found the boys had made into a sort
• 5:22:40
  of toboggan slide to a snug birth in wintry weather, they used to slyly
• 5:22:45
  raise the cover in the street, slide down in single file, and snuggle
• 5:22:48
  up to the warm boiler out of harm's way. As they thought it proved
• 5:22:52
  a trap. However, the agent slid down himself one cold night there was
• 5:22:56
  no other way of getting there, and landing right in the midst of the
• 5:23:00
  sleeping colony had it at his mercy. After repeated raids upon their headquarters.
• 5:23:07
  The boys forsook it last summer and were next found herding under the shore end
• 5:23:11
  of one of the East River banana ducks, where they had fitted up a
• 5:23:15
  regular club room that was shared by thirty or forty homeless boys and about a
• 5:23:18
  million rats. Newspaper row is merely their headquarters. They are to be found
• 5:23:25
  all over the city, these street arabs, where the neighborhood offers a chance
• 5:23:29
  of picking up a living in the daytime and of turning in at night with
• 5:23:33
  a promise of security from surprise in warm weather, truck in the street,
• 5:23:37
  a convenient outhouse or a dugout, and a hay barge at the wharf make
• 5:23:41
  good bucks. Two were found making their nest once in the end of a
• 5:23:45
  big iron pipe up by the Harlem Bridge, and an old boiler at the
• 5:23:49
  East River served as an elegant flat for another couple who kept house there with
• 5:23:55
  a thief. The police had long sought little, suspecting that he was hiding
• 5:23:59
  on their very noses for months together. When the Children's Aid Society first opened
• 5:24:04
  its lodging houses, and with some difficulty persuaded the boys that their charity was
• 5:24:10
  no pious dodge to trap them into a treasonable Sunday school racket. Its managers
• 5:24:15
  overheard a laughable discussion among the boys in their unwontedly comfortable beds, perhaps the
• 5:24:19
  first some of them had ever slept in, as to the relative merits of
• 5:24:23
  the different styles of their everyday berths. Preferences were divided between steam grating and
• 5:24:30
  a sandbox, but the weight of the evidence was decided to be in favor
• 5:24:33
  of the sandbox, because, as its advocate put it, you could curl
• 5:24:37
  all up in it. The new find was voted as a good way ahead
• 5:24:41
  of any previous experience. However, my eyes ain't at nice, said one
• 5:24:47
  of the lads, tucked in under his blanket up to the chin, and
• 5:24:49
  the room full of boys echoed the sentiment. The compact silently made that night
• 5:24:56
  between the street Arabs and their hosts has never been broken, been fast friends
• 5:25:00
  ever since. Whence this army of homeless boys is a question often asked.
• 5:25:07
  The answer is supplied by the procession of mothers that go out and in at
• 5:25:11
  police headquarters the year round inquiring for missing boys, often not until they have
• 5:25:17
  been gone for weeks and months, and then sometimes rather as a matter of
• 5:25:21
  decent form than from any real interest in the lad's fate. The stereotyped promise
• 5:25:26
  of the clerks who fail to find his name in the books among the arrests
• 5:25:30
  that he will come back when he gets hungry does not always come true.
• 5:25:34
  More likely he went away because he was hungry. Some are orphans, actually
• 5:25:41
  or in effect, thrown upon the world when their parents were sent up to
• 5:25:44
  the island or to sing sing, and somehow overlooked by the society, which
• 5:25:48
  thenceforth became the enemy to be shunned until growth and dirt and the hardships of
• 5:25:52
  the street that make old early offer some hope of successfully floating the lie that
• 5:25:59
  they are sick sixteen, a drunken father explains the matter. In other cases,
• 5:26:03
  as in that of John and Willie, aged ten and eight, picked
• 5:26:07
  up by the police, they didn't live nowhere, never went to school,
• 5:26:11
  could neither read nor write. Their twelve year old sister kept house for the
• 5:26:15
  father who turned the boys out to beg or steal or starve grinding poverty and
• 5:26:22
  hard work beyond the years of the lad, blows and curses for breakfasts,
• 5:26:26
  dinner and supper. All these are recruiting agents for the homeless, army,
• 5:26:32
  sickness in the house, too many mouths to feed. We was six,
• 5:26:37
  said an urchin of twelve or thirteen. I came across in the newsboy's lodging
• 5:26:41
  house, and we ain't got no father. Some of us had to go,
• 5:26:45
  and so he went to make a living by blacking boots. The going
• 5:26:48
  is easy enough. There is very little to hold the boy, who has
• 5:26:52
  never known anything but a home and a tenement. Very soon the wildlife in
• 5:26:56
  the streets holds him fast, and henceforward by his own effort, there is
• 5:27:02
  no escape. Left alone to himself, he soon enough finds a place in
• 5:27:06
  the police books. And there would be no other answer to the second question
• 5:27:11
  what becomes of the boy than that given by the criminal courts every day in
• 5:27:15
  the week. But he is not left alone. Society in our day has
• 5:27:19
  no such suicidal intention. Right here at the parting of the ways, it
• 5:27:25
  has thrown up the strongest of all its defenses for itself and for the boy.
• 5:27:30
  What the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is to the baby
• 5:27:33
  wave, the Children's Aid Society is to the homeless boy at this real turning
• 5:27:38
  point in his career. The good it has done cannot easily be overestimated.
• 5:27:44
  Its lodging houses, its schools, and its homes block every avenue of escape
• 5:27:48
  with their offer of shelter, upon terms which the boy soon accepts as on
• 5:27:53
  the whole cheap and fair. In the Great Duayne Street lodging House for newsboys,
• 5:28:00
  they are succinctly stated in a notice over the door that reads, thus
• 5:28:03
  boys who swear and chew tobacco cannot sleep here. There is another unwritten condition,
• 5:28:11
  viz. That the boy shall be really without a home. But upon
• 5:28:15
  this the managers wisely do not insist too obstinately, excepting, without too close
• 5:28:21
  inquiry, his account of himself, where that seems advisable, well knowing that
• 5:28:25
  many a home that sends forth such lads far less deserves the name than one
• 5:28:29
  they are able to give them. With these simple preliminaries, the outcast boy
• 5:28:33
  may enter. Rags do not count to ignorance. The door is only opened
• 5:28:37
  wider dirt does not survive long once within the walls of the lodging house.
• 5:28:41
  It is the settled belief of the men who conduct them that soap and water
• 5:28:45
  are as powerful moral agents in their particular field as preaching, and they have
• 5:28:51
  experience to back them. The boy may come and go as he pleases,
• 5:28:56
  so long as he behaves himself. No restraint of any sort is put on
• 5:29:00
  his independence. He is as free as any other guest at a hotel,
• 5:29:04
  and like him, he is expected to pay for what he gets. How
• 5:29:08
  wisely the men planned who laid the foundation of this great rescue work and yet
• 5:29:14
  carry it on, is shown by no single feature of it better than by
• 5:29:18
  this. No pauper was ever bred within these houses. Nothing would have been
• 5:29:22
  easier with such material, or more fatal. But charity of the kind that
• 5:29:27
  pauperizes is furthest from their scheme. Self help is its very keynote, and
• 5:29:33
  it strikes a response in the boy's sturdiest trait that raises him at once to
• 5:29:37
  a levee with the effort made in his behalf. Recognized as an independent trader,
• 5:29:41
  capable of and bound to take care of himself, he is in a
• 5:29:45
  position to ask trust if trade has gone against him and he cannot pay cash
• 5:29:49
  for his grub and his bed, and to get it without question, he
• 5:29:53
  can even have the loan of the small capital required to start him in business
• 5:29:57
  with a boot blaxed kit or an armful of papers if he is known or
• 5:30:02
  vouched for. But every cent it's charged to him as carefully as though the
• 5:30:06
  transaction involved as many hundreds of dollars, and he is expected to pay back
• 5:30:11
  the money as soon as he has made enough to keep him going without it.
• 5:30:15
  He very rarely betrays the trust reposed in him. Quite on the contrary,
• 5:30:19
  around this sound core of self help, thus encouraged, habits of thrift
• 5:30:23
  and ambitions industry are seen to grow up. In a majority of instances,
• 5:30:29
  the boy is growing a character, and he goes out to the man's work
• 5:30:33
  in life with that which for him is better than if he had found a
• 5:30:36
  fortune. Six cents for his bed, six for his breakfast of bread and
• 5:30:41
  coffee, and six for his supper of pork and beans, as much as
• 5:30:45
  he can eat are the rates of the boy's hotel. For those who bump
• 5:30:48
  together in the great dormitories that sometimes hold more than one hundred berths, two
• 5:30:52
  tiers high, made of iron, clean and neat for the upper ten.
• 5:30:57
  The young financiers who early take the lead among their fellows, hire them to
• 5:31:02
  work for wages, and add to share their profits to their own and for
• 5:31:06
  the lads who are learning a trade and getting paid by the week. Their
• 5:31:08
  attendant beds with the locker and with curtains hung about. Night schools and Sunday
• 5:31:14
  night meetings are held in the building and are always well attended in winter,
• 5:31:18
  especially when the lodging houses are crowded. In summer, the tow path and
• 5:31:22
  the country attract their share of the bigger boys. The Sunday school racket has
• 5:31:27
  ceased to have any terror for them. They follow the proceedings with the liveliest
• 5:31:32
  interest, quick to detect cant of any sort should any stray in. No
• 5:31:37
  one has any just conception of what congregational singing is until he has witnessed a
• 5:31:41
  roomful of these boys roll up their sleeves and start in on he as the
• 5:31:45
  lily of the valley. The swinging trapeze in the gymnasium on the top floor
• 5:31:51
  is scarcely more popular with the boys than this tremendously vocal worship. The street
• 5:31:56
  Arab puts his whole little soul into what interests him for them moment, whether
• 5:32:00
  it be pulverizing a rival who has done a mean trick to a smaller boy,
• 5:32:04
  or attending at the gospel shop on Sundays. This characteristic made necessary some
• 5:32:10
  extra supervision. When recently the lads in the Duayne Street lodging house chipped in
• 5:32:15
  and bought a set of boxing gloves, the Rapees suffered a temporary eclipse until
• 5:32:19
  this new toy had been tested to the extent of several miniature black eyes,
• 5:32:25
  upon which soap had no effect, and sundry little scores had been settled that
• 5:32:29
  even things up, as it were, for a fresh start. I tried
• 5:32:33
  one night, not with the best of success, I confess, to photograph
• 5:32:37
  the boys in their washroom while they were cleaning up for supper. They were
• 5:32:41
  quite turbulent, to the disgust of one of their number, who assumed unasked
• 5:32:45
  the office of general manager of the show and expressed his mortification to me in
• 5:32:51
  very polite language. If they would only behave sir, he complained, you
• 5:32:56
  could make a good picture, yes, I said, but it is an
• 5:32:59
  inn them. I suppose no, my gosh, said he lapsing something from
• 5:33:03
  grace under provocation. Then kids ain't got no sense. No, how the
• 5:33:10
  Society maintains five of these boys lodging houses and one for girls in the city.
• 5:33:15
  The Dwayne Street Lodging House alone has sheltered since its foundation in eighteen fifty
• 5:33:18
  five nearly a quarter of a million different boys, at a total expense of
• 5:33:23
  a good deal less than half a million dollars. Of this amount. Up
• 5:33:27
  to the beginning of the present year, the boys and the earnings of the
• 5:33:30
  house had contributed no less than one hundred seventy two thousand, seven hundred seventy
• 5:33:36
  six dollars and thirty eight cents. In all of the lodging houses together,
• 5:33:41
  twelve thousand, one hundred and fifty three boys and girls were sheltered and taught
• 5:33:45
  last year. The boys saved up no inconsiderable amount of money, and the
• 5:33:51
  savings banks provided for them in the houses a simple system of lock boxes that
• 5:33:55
  are emptied for their benefit once a month. Besides these, the Society has
• 5:34:00
  established and operates in the tenement District's twenty one industrial schools, coordinate with the
• 5:34:06
  public schools in authority for the children of the poor who cannot find room in
• 5:34:11
  the city's schoolhouses or are two ragged to go there. Two free reading rooms,
• 5:34:17
  a dressmaking and typewriting school, and a laundry for the instruction of girls,
• 5:34:22
  A six children's mission in the city and two on the sea shore where
• 5:34:26
  poor mothers may take their babies, a cottage by the sea for crippled girls,
• 5:34:30
  and a brush factory for crippled boys in forty four Street. The Italian
• 5:34:34
  school in Lyonard Street alone had an average attendance of over six hundred pupils last
• 5:34:41
  year. The daily average attendance at all of them was four thousand, one
• 5:34:45
  hundred five, while eleven thousand, three hundred thirty one children were registered and
• 5:34:49
  taught. When the fact that there were among these one thousand, one hundred
• 5:34:53
  thirty two children of drunken parents and four hundred sixteen that had been found begging
• 5:34:59
  in the street is contrasted with the showing of one thousand, three hundred thirty
• 5:35:03
  seven dollars and twenty one cents deposited in the schools savings banks by one seven
• 5:35:08
  hundred and forty five pupils, something like an adequate idea is gained of the
• 5:35:12
  scope of the Society's work in the city, a large share of it in
• 5:35:18
  a sense, the largest certainly that productive of the happiest results lies outside of
• 5:35:22
  the city. However, from the lodging houses and the schools are drawn the
• 5:35:26
  battalions of young immigrants that go every year to homes in the far West to
• 5:35:30
  grow up self supporting men and women, safe from the temptations and the vice
• 5:35:36
  of the city. Their number runs far up in the thousands. The society
• 5:35:40
  never loses sight of them. The records show that the great mass, with
• 5:35:44
  this start given them, become useful citizens and honor to the communities in which
• 5:35:48
  their lot is cast. Not a few achieve place and prominence in their new
• 5:35:53
  surroundings. Rarely bad reports come of them. Occasionally one comes back by home
• 5:36:00
  sickness, even for the slums, but the briefest stay generally cures the disease
• 5:36:04
  for good. I helped once to see a party off from Michigan, the
• 5:36:08
  last sent out by that great friend of the homeless children, missus Astor,
• 5:36:12
  before she died. In the party was a boy who had been an insider
• 5:36:18
  at the Five Points House of Industry, and brought along as his only baggage
• 5:36:22
  a padlocked and iron bound box that contained all his wealth. Two little white
• 5:36:26
  mice of the friendliest disposition They were going with him out to live on the
• 5:36:32
  fat of the land in the fertile west, where they would never be wanting
• 5:36:34
  for a crust alas for the best laid plans of mice and men, the
• 5:36:40
  western diet did not agree with either. I saw their owner some months later
• 5:36:45
  in the old home at the Five Points. He had come back, walking
• 5:36:48
  part of the way, and was now pleading to be sent out once more.
• 5:36:52
  He had at last had enough of the city. His face fell when
• 5:36:56
  I asked him about the mice. It was a sad story. Indeed,
• 5:37:00
  they had so much corn to eat, he said, and they couldn't stand
• 5:37:03
  it. They burned all up inside, and then they busted. Missus Astor
• 5:37:08
  set an example during her noble and useful life in gathering every year a company
• 5:37:14
  of homeless boys from the streets and sending them to good homes with decent clothes
• 5:37:18
  on their backs. She had sent out no less than thirteen hundred when she
• 5:37:22
  died, and left funds to carry on her work that has been followed by
• 5:37:26
  many, who, like her, had the means and the heart for such
• 5:37:30
  a labor of love. Most of the lodging houses and school buildings of the
• 5:37:34
  Society were built by some one rich man or woman, who paid all the
• 5:37:38
  bills and often objected to have even the name of the giver made known to
• 5:37:42
  the world. It is one of the pleasant experiences of life that gives one
• 5:37:48
  hope and courage in the midst of all this misery, to find names that
• 5:37:52
  stand to the unthinking mass only for money getting and grasping, associated with such
• 5:37:56
  unheralded benefactions that carry their blessings down to generations yet unborn. It's not so
• 5:38:03
  long since I found the carriage of a woman whose name is synonymous with millions,
• 5:38:08
  standing in front of the boy's lodging House in thirty fifth Street. Its
• 5:38:12
  owner was at that moment busy with a surgeon making a sensus of the crippled
• 5:38:18
  lads in the brush shop, the most miserable of all the Society's charges,
• 5:38:22
  as a preliminary to fitting them out with artificial limbs. Farther uptown than any
• 5:38:27
  reared by the Children's Aid Society in sixty seventh Street stands a lodging house intended
• 5:38:33
  for boys of a somewhat larger growth than most of those whom the Society shelters.
• 5:38:38
  Unlike the others, too, it was built by the actual labor of
• 5:38:41
  the young men. It was designed to benefit. In the day when more
• 5:38:45
  of the boys from our streets shall find their way to it, and to
• 5:38:48
  the New York Trade Schools, of which is a kind of home annex,
• 5:38:52
  we shall be in a fair way of solving, in the most natural of
• 5:38:56
  all ways, the question what to do with this boy, in spite of
• 5:39:00
  the ignorant opposition of the men whose tyrannical policy is now to blame for the
• 5:39:04
  showing that out of the twenty three millions of dollars paid annually to the mechanics
• 5:39:10
  in the building trades in this city, less than six millions go to the
• 5:39:12
  workmen born in New York, while his boy roams the streets with every chance
• 5:39:18
  of growing up a vagabond, and next to none of becoming an honest artisan.
• 5:39:22
  Colonel alcmuty is a practical philanthropist to whom the growing youth of New York
• 5:39:27
  will one day owe a debt of gratitude not easily paid the progress of the
• 5:39:33
  system of trade schools established by him, at which a young man may acquire
• 5:39:37
  the theory as well as the practice of a trade, in a few months,
• 5:39:41
  at a merely nominal outlay has not been nearly as rapid as was to
• 5:39:45
  be desired, though the fact that other cities are copying the model with their
• 5:39:48
  master mechanics as the prime movers in the enterprise testifies to its excellence. But
• 5:39:53
  it has at last taken a real start, and with union men and even
• 5:39:57
  the officers of unions now sending their sons to the trade schools to be taught,
• 5:40:03
  one may perhaps be permitted to hope that an era of better since his
• 5:40:07
  darning, that shall witness a rescue work upon lines, which, when the
• 5:40:11
  eleven has fairly had time to work, will put an end to the existence
• 5:40:15
  of the New York street Arab of the native breed at least end of Section
• 5:40:21
  nineteen, chapter twenty, The Reign of Rum, where God builds a church,
• 5:40:27
  the devil builds next door a saloon, is an old saying that has
• 5:40:30
  lost its point in New York. Either the devil was on the ground first
• 5:40:36
  or has been doing a good deal more in the way of building. I
• 5:40:38
  tried once to find out how the accounts taught, and counted to one hundred
• 5:40:42
  and eleven Protestant churches, chapels and places of worship of every kind below Fourteenth
• 5:40:49
  Street, four thousand and sixty five saloons. The worst half of the tenement
• 5:40:55
  population lives down there, and it has to this day the worst half of
• 5:40:59
  the saloons uptown. The account stands a little bigger. But there are easily
• 5:41:03
  ten saloons to every church to day. I am afraid too, that the
• 5:41:07
  congregations are larger by a good deal. Certainly the attendance is steadier, and
• 5:41:12
  the contributions more liberal. The weak round Sunday included, Turn and twist it
• 5:41:18
  as we may over every bulwark for decency and morality where society erects. The
• 5:41:22
  saloon project is colossal shadow, omen of evil. Wherever it falls into the
• 5:41:29
  lives of the poor, nowhere is its mark so broad or so black to
• 5:41:33
  their misery. It sticketh closer than a brother, persuading them that within its
• 5:41:37
  doors only is refuge relief. It has the best of the argument, too,
• 5:41:42
  For it is true, whilst pity that in many a tenement house block,
• 5:41:47
  the saloon is the one bright and cheery, humanely decent spot to be
• 5:41:51
  found, it is a sorry admission to make that to bring the rest of
• 5:41:55
  the neighborhood up to the level of the saloon would be one way of squelching
• 5:41:59
  it. But it is so Wherever the tenements thicken, it multiplies upon the
• 5:42:03
  direst poverty of their crowds. It grows fat and prosperous, levying upon attacks
• 5:42:10
  heavier than all the rest of its grievous burdens combined. It is not yet
• 5:42:15
  two years since the Excise Board made the rule that no three corners of any
• 5:42:18
  street crossing not already so occupied, should thenceforth be licensed for rum selling.
• 5:42:23
  And the tardy prohibition was intended for the tenement districts. Nowhere else is their
• 5:42:30
  need of it. One may walk miles through the homes of the poor,
• 5:42:33
  searching vainly for an open reading room, a cheerful coffee house, a decent
• 5:42:37
  club that is not a cloak for the traffic in rum. The dram shop
• 5:42:41
  yawns at every step, the poorman's club, his forum, and his haven
• 5:42:45
  of rest. When weary and disgusted with the crowding and quarreling, and the
• 5:42:49
  wretchedness at home, with the poison dealt out there, he takes his politics
• 5:42:55
  in quality, not far apart as the source. So the stream the rum
• 5:43:00
  shop turns a political crank in New York, the natural yield is rum politics
• 5:43:04
  of what that means. Successive boards of alder men composed in a measure,
• 5:43:08
  if not of a majority of dive keepers, have given New York a taste.
• 5:43:14
  The disgrace of the infamous boodle board will be remembered until some corruption even
• 5:43:18
  fowler, crops out and throws it into the shade. What relation the saloon
• 5:43:23
  bears to the crowds. Let me illustrate by a comparison below Fourteenth Street were
• 5:43:30
  when the Health Department took its first accurate census as the tenements a year and
• 5:43:33
  a half ago, thirteen thousand, two hundred and twenty of the thirty two
• 5:43:38
  thousand, three hundred and ninety buildings classed as such in the whole city.
• 5:43:44
  Of the eleven hundred thousand tenants, not quite half a million, embracing a
• 5:43:48
  host of more than sixty three thousand children under five years of age, lived
• 5:43:52
  below the line below. It also we two hundred and thirty four of the
• 5:43:56
  cheap lodging houses accounted for by the police last year, with a total of
• 5:44:02
  four million and a half of lodgers for the twelvemonth fifty nine of the city's
• 5:44:07
  one hundred and ten pawn shops and four thousand and sixty five of its seven
• 5:44:11
  thousand, eight hundred and eighty four saloons. The foremost densely peopled precincts,
• 5:44:18
  the fourth, six tenth, and eleventh, supported together in round numbers,
• 5:44:22
  twelve hundred saloons, and their return showed twenty seven percent of the whole number
• 5:44:26
  of arrests for the year. The eleventh precinct that as the greatest and the
• 5:44:32
  poorest crowds of all, it is a tenth ward and harbored one third of
• 5:44:36
  the army of homeless lodgers, and fourteen percent of all the prisoners of the
• 5:44:40
  year, kept four hundred and eighty five saloons going in eighteen eighty nine.
• 5:44:45
  It is not on record that one of them all failed for want of support.
• 5:44:49
  A number of them, on the contrary, had brought their owner's wealth
• 5:44:52
  and prominence from their bars. These eminent citizens stepped proudly into the councils of
• 5:44:57
  the city and the state. The very floor of one of the bar rooms
• 5:45:02
  in a neighborhood that lately resounded with the cry for bread of starving workmen,
• 5:45:07
  is paved with silver dollars. East side, poverty is not alone in thus
• 5:45:11
  rewarding the tyrants that sweeten its cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison. The
• 5:45:17
  fourth ward points with pride to the honorable record of the conductors of its Tub
• 5:45:21
  of Blood and a dozen barrooms with less startling titles. The West side to
• 5:45:26
  the wealth and social standing of the owners of such resorts as the Witch's Broth
• 5:45:32
  and the plug Hat. In the region of Hell's Kitchen, three cent whisky
• 5:45:36
  names ominous of the concoctions brewed there and their fatality generous measure. Another word
• 5:45:42
  that boasts some of the best residences and the bluest blood in Manhattan Island,
• 5:45:47
  honors with political leadership in the ruling party, the proprietor of one of the
• 5:45:52
  most disreputable black and tanned dives and dancing halls to be found anywhere. Criminal
• 5:45:59
  and policemen alike do him homage. The list might be strung out to make
• 5:46:03
  texts for sermons with a stronger home flavor than many that are preached in our
• 5:46:07
  pulpits on Sunday, But I have not set out to write the political history
• 5:46:11
  of New York. Besides, the list would not be complete. Secret dives
• 5:46:15
  are skulking in the sums and out of them that are not labeled respectable by
• 5:46:19
  a board of excise and support no family entrance. Their business, like that
• 5:46:25
  of the stale beer dives, is done through a side door the week through.
• 5:46:29
  No one knows the number of unlicensed saloons in the city, those who
• 5:46:33
  have made the matter a study estimated at a thousand, more or less.
• 5:46:37
  The police make occasional schedules of a few and report them to headquarters. Perhaps
• 5:46:42
  they are ad a face in the police court and near the matter ends.
• 5:46:45
  Rum and influence are synonymous terms. The interests of the one rarely suffers for
• 5:46:52
  the want of attention from the other. With the exception of these freelances that
• 5:46:56
  treat the law openly with contempt, the saloons allang out a sign announcing,
• 5:47:00
  in fact type that no beer or liquor is sold to children in the downtown.
• 5:47:06
  More that make the lowest degradation of tramp humanity pan out to paying interest,
• 5:47:11
  as in the reputable resorts uptown where Inspector Burns's men spot their worthyerquarry elbowing
• 5:47:18
  citizens whom the idea of associating with a burglar would give a shock. They
• 5:47:22
  would not get over for a week. This sign is seen conspicuously displayed,
• 5:47:26
  though apparently it means submission to a beneficent law. In reality the sign is
• 5:47:32
  a heartless, cruel joke. I doubt if one child in a thousand who
• 5:47:37
  brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar is sent away
• 5:47:41
  empty handed if able to pay for what he wants. I once followed a
• 5:47:45
  little boy who shivered in bare feet on a cold November night, so that
• 5:47:48
  he seemed in danger of smashing his picture on the icy pavement into a Maulberry
• 5:47:53
  Street saloon where just a sign hung on the wall, and forbade the barkeeper
• 5:47:59
  to serve the boy. The man was astonished at my interference, as if
• 5:48:03
  I had told him to shut up his shop and go home, which in
• 5:48:06
  fact I might have done with as good a right, for it was after
• 5:48:08
  one a m. The legal closing hour. He was mighty indignant too,
• 5:48:12
  and told me roughly to go away and mind my own business while he filled
• 5:48:17
  the picture. The law prohibiting the selling of beer to miners is about as
• 5:48:21
  much respected in the tenement house districts as the ordinance against swearing newspaper records will
• 5:48:26
  recall a story told little more than a year ago of a boy who,
• 5:48:30
  after carrying beer a whole day from a shopful of men over on the East
• 5:48:36
  Side where his father worked, crept into the cellar to sleep off the effects
• 5:48:40
  of his own share in the riveting. It was Saturday evening Sunday, his
• 5:48:45
  parents sought him high and low, but it was not until Monday morning,
• 5:48:48
  when the shop was opened, that he was found killed and half eaten by
• 5:48:52
  the rats at over ran the place. All the evil the saloon does in
• 5:48:56
  breeding poverty and incorrupting politics, or the suffering it brings into the lives of
• 5:49:02
  its thousands of innocent victims, the wives and children of drunkards it sends forth
• 5:49:07
  to curse community. Its fostering of crime and its shielding of criminals, tis
• 5:49:11
  all as nothing to this its worst offense, in its affinity for the thief.
• 5:49:17
  There is at least this compensation that, as it makes, it also
• 5:49:21
  unmakes him. It starts him on his career, only to trip him up
• 5:49:23
  and betray him into the hands of the law when the rum he exchanged for
• 5:49:27
  his honesty has swollen his brains. As well. For the corruption of the
• 5:49:32
  child, there is no restitution, none is possible. Its SAPs the very
• 5:49:36
  vitals of society, undermines its strongest defenses and delivers them over to the enemy.
• 5:49:41
  Fostered and filled by the saloon, the Growler looms up in the New
• 5:49:45
  York Street Boy's life, baffling the most persistent efforts to reclaim him. There's
• 5:49:51
  no escape from it, no hope for the boy wants its blighting grippers upon
• 5:49:55
  him. Thenceforth, the logic of the slums that the world which gave him
• 5:49:59
  pover retain ignorance for his portion, owes him a living is his creed,
• 5:50:03
  and the career of the Tough lies open before him, a beaten track to
• 5:50:07
  be blindly followed to a bad end in the wake of the Growler. End
• 5:50:14
  of Section twenty, chapter nineteen, The Harvest of Tears, The Growler stood
• 5:50:21
  at the cradle of the Tough. It bosses him through his boyhood apprenticeship in
• 5:50:26
  the gang, and leaves him for a time only at the door of the
• 5:50:30
  jail that receives him to finish his training and turn him loose upon the world,
• 5:50:36
  a thief to collect by stealth or by force. The living. His
• 5:50:40
  philosophy tells him that it owes him, and will not voluntarily surrender without an
• 5:50:45
  equivalent in the work which he hates. From the moment he almost a baby
• 5:50:52
  for the first time, carries the growler for beer. He is never out
• 5:50:56
  of its reach, and the two soon form a partner that lasts through life.
• 5:51:03
  It has at least the merit, such as it is, of being
• 5:51:06
  loyal. The saloon is the only thing that takes kindly to the lad Honest
• 5:51:11
  play is interdited in the streets. The policeman arrests the ball tossers, and
• 5:51:18
  there is no room in the backyard. In one of these between two enormous
• 5:51:22
  tenements that swarmed with children, I read this ominous notice. Quote. All
• 5:51:29
  boys caught in this yard will be dealt with according to law. End quote.
• 5:51:34
  Along the water fronts, in the holes of the dock rats, and
• 5:51:37
  on the avenues, the young tough finds plenty of kindred spirits. Every corner
• 5:51:44
  has its gain, not always on the best of terms with the rivals in
• 5:51:48
  the next block, but all with a common program defiance of law and order,
• 5:51:53
  and with a common ambition to get pinched. I e arrested so as
• 5:51:59
  to pose heroes before their fellows. A successful raid on the grocer's till is
• 5:52:04
  a good mark, doing up a policeman cause for promotion. The gang is
• 5:52:10
  an institution in New York. The police deny its existence while nursing the bruises
• 5:52:15
  received in nightly battles with it that tax their utmost resources. The newspapers chronicle
• 5:52:22
  its doings daily with a sensational minuteness of detail that does its share toward keeping
• 5:52:27
  up its evil traditions and inflaming the ambition of its members to be as bad
• 5:52:33
  as the worst. The gang is the ripe fruit of tenement house growth.
• 5:52:38
  It was born there, endowed with a heritage of instinctive hostility to restraint by
• 5:52:45
  a generation that sacrificed home to freedom or left its country for its country's good.
• 5:52:51
  The tenement received and nursed the seed. The intensity of the American temper
• 5:52:56
  stood sponsor to the murder in what would have been the common bruiser of a
• 5:53:00
  more phlegmatic climb. New York's tough represents the essence of reaction against the old
• 5:53:07
  and the new oppression nursed in the rank soil of its slums. Its gangs
• 5:53:14
  are made up of the American born sons of English, Irish and German parents.
• 5:53:19
  They reflect exactly the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang. Murder
• 5:53:25
  is as congenial to Cherry Street, or to Battle Row, as quiet in
• 5:53:30
  order to Murray Hill. The assimilation of Europe's oppressed hordes, upon which our
• 5:53:34
  Fourth of July orators are fond of dwelling, is perfect. The product is
• 5:53:40
  our own. Such as the genesis of New York's gangs, their history is
• 5:53:45
  not so easily written. It would embrace the largest share of our city's criminal
• 5:53:51
  history for two generations back, every page of it dyed red with blood.
• 5:53:56
  The guillotine Paris, set up a century ago to avenge its wrongs, was
• 5:54:00
  not more relentless or less discriminating than this nemesis of New York. The difference
• 5:54:07
  is of intent. Murder with that was the serious purpose. With ours,
• 5:54:14
  it is the careless incident, the wanton brutality of the moment. Bravado and
• 5:54:18
  robbery are the real purposes of the gangs. The former prompts the attack upon
• 5:54:23
  the policeman, the latter that upon the citizen. Within a single week last
• 5:54:29
  spring, the newspapers recorded six murderous assaults on unoffending people committed by young highwaymen
• 5:54:36
  in the public streets. How many more were suppressed by the police, who
• 5:54:41
  always do their utmost to hush up such outrages in the interest of justice.
• 5:54:45
  I shall not say there has been no lack of such occurrences since, as
• 5:54:51
  the records of the criminal courts show. In fact, the past summer has
• 5:54:56
  seen, after a period of comparative quiescence the gangs, a reawakening to renewed
• 5:55:03
  turbulence of the East Side tribes, and over and over again the reserved forces
• 5:55:08
  of a precinct have been called out to club them into submission. It is
• 5:55:14
  a peculiarity of the gangs that they usually break out in spots, as it
• 5:55:18
  were, when the West Side is in a state of eruption, the east
• 5:55:22
  Side gangs lie low, and when the tufts along the North River are nursing
• 5:55:27
  broken heads at home or their revenge in sing sing, fresh trouble breaks out
• 5:55:33
  in the tenements east of Third Avenue. This result is brought about by the
• 5:55:37
  very efforts made by the police to put down the gangs in spite of local
• 5:55:42
  feuds. There is between them a species of ruffianly freemasonry that readily admits to
• 5:55:48
  full fellowship a hunted rival in the face of the common enemy. The gangs
• 5:55:55
  built the city like a huge chain, from the battery to Harlem. The
• 5:56:00
  collective name of the Chain Gang has been given to their scattered groups, in
• 5:56:03
  the belief that a much closer connection exists between them than commonly supposed. And
• 5:56:10
  the ruffian, for whom the east Side has become too hot, has only
• 5:56:14
  to step across town and change his name, a matter usually much easier for
• 5:56:18
  him than to change a shirt, to find a sanctuary in which to plot
• 5:56:22
  fresh outrages. The more notorious he is, the warmer, the welcome,
• 5:56:29
  and if he has done his man, he is, by common consent,
• 5:56:33
  accorded the leadership in his new field. From all this, it might be
• 5:56:37
  inferred that the New York tough is a very fierce individual, of indomitable courage,
• 5:56:42
  and naturally as bloodthirsty as a tiger. On the contrary, he is
• 5:56:48
  an errant coward. His instincts of ferocity are those of the woof rather than
• 5:56:52
  the tiger. It is only when he hunts with a pack that he is
• 5:56:56
  dangerous. Than his inordinate vesanity makes him forget all fear or caution. In
• 5:57:03
  the desire to distinguish himself before his fellows, a result of his swallowing all
• 5:57:08
  the flash literature and penny dreadfuls he can beg, borrow, or steal,
• 5:57:14
  and there is never any lack of them, and of the strongly dramatic element
• 5:57:18
  in his nature that is nursed by such a diet into rank and morbid growth.
• 5:57:23
  He is a queer bundle of contradictions, at all times, drunk and
• 5:57:29
  foul mouthed, ready to cut the throat of a defenseless stranger at the toss
• 5:57:33
  of Ascent, fresh from beating his decent mother black and blue to get money
• 5:57:38
  for rum Footnote This very mother will implore the court with tears the next morning
• 5:57:45
  to let her renegade son off. A poor woman who claimed to be the
• 5:57:49
  widow of a soldier applied to the Tenement House Relief Committee of the King's Daughters
• 5:57:55
  last summer to be sent to some home, as she had neither kith nor
• 5:57:59
  kin to care for her. Upon investigation, it was found that she had
• 5:58:03
  four big sons, all tufts, who beat her regularly and took from her
• 5:58:08
  all the money she could earn or beg. She was a respectable woman,
• 5:58:12
  of good habits, the inquiry developed and lied only to shield her rascally sons
• 5:58:18
  and footnote. He will resent as an intolerable insult the imputation that he is
• 5:58:25
  no gentleman fighting his battles with the coward's weapons, the brass knuckles and the
• 5:58:30
  deadly sand bag, or with brick bats from the house tops. He is
• 5:58:34
  still, in all seriousness, a lover of fair play, and as likely
• 5:58:40
  as not when his gang has downed a policeman in a battle that has cost
• 5:58:44
  a dozen broken heads, to be found next saving a drowning child or woman
• 5:58:48
  at the peril of his own life. It depends on the angle at which
• 5:58:52
  he is seen whether he is a cowardly ruffian or a possible hero with different
• 5:58:57
  training and under different social conditions. Ready wit he has at all times,
• 5:59:03
  and there is less meanness in his make up than in that of the bully
• 5:59:07
  of the London slums, but an intense love of show and applause that carries
• 5:59:14
  him to any length of bravado which his twin brother across the sea entirely lacks.
• 5:59:21
  I have a very vivid recollection of seeing one of his tribe a robber
• 5:59:25
  and murderer, before he was nineteen go to the gallows unmoved. All fear
• 5:59:30
  of the rope overcome, as it seemed, by the secret exultant pride of
• 5:59:34
  being the center of a first class show, shortly to be followed by the
• 5:59:40
  acme of tenement life. Bliss a big funeral he had his reward. His
• 5:59:45
  name is to this day a talisman among West Side Ruffians, and is proudly
• 5:59:51
  borne by the gang of Witch Up till the night when he knocked out his
• 5:59:55
  man. He was an obscure though aspiring member. That made mcloin famous was
• 6:00:02
  the cowardly murder of an unarmed saloon keeper who came upon the gang while it
• 6:00:07
  was sacking his bar room at the dead of night. Mcloin might easily have
• 6:00:11
  fled, but disdained to run. For a Dutchman, his act was a
• 6:00:17
  fair measure of the standard of heroism set up by his class in its conflicts
• 6:00:22
  with society. The finish is worthy of the start. The first long step
• 6:00:27
  in crime taken by the half grown boy fired with ambition to earn at standing
• 6:00:33
  in his gang is usually to rob a lash i e. A drunken man
• 6:00:37
  who has strayed his way. Likely enough is lying asleep in a hallway.
• 6:00:42
  He has served an apprenticeship on copper bottom wash boilers and like articles found lying
• 6:00:48
  around, loose and capable of being converted into cash enough to give the Growler
• 6:00:53
  a trip or two. But his venture at robbery moves him up into full
• 6:00:59
  fellow at once. He is no longer a kid, though his years may
• 6:01:03
  be few, but a tough with the rest he may even in time,
• 6:01:08
  he is reasonably certain of it, get his name in the papers as a
• 6:01:14
  murderous scoundrel, and have his cup of glory filled to the brim. I
• 6:01:18
  came once upon a gang of such young rascals, passing the Growler after a
• 6:01:23
  successful rate of some sort down at the West thirty seventh Street dock, and
• 6:01:29
  having my camera along, offered to take them. They were not old and
• 6:01:33
  wary enough to be shy of the photographer, whose acquaintance they usually first make
• 6:01:38
  in handcuffs, and the grip of a policeman, or their vanity overcame their
• 6:01:42
  caution. It is entirely in keeping with the tough's character that he should love
• 6:01:48
  all things to pose before a photographer, and the ambition is usually the stronger,
• 6:01:55
  the more repulsive, the tough. These were of that sort, and
• 6:01:59
  accepted the offer with great readiness, dragging into their group a disreputable looking sheep
• 6:02:04
  that roamed about with them. The slaughterhouses were close at hand, as one
• 6:02:10
  of the band, the homeliest ruffian of the lot, who insisted on being
• 6:02:15
  taken with a growler to his mug, took the opportunity to pour what was
• 6:02:18
  left in it down his throat, and this caused a brief unpleasantness, but
• 6:02:25
  otherwise the performance was a success. While I was getting the camera ready,
• 6:02:30
  I threw out a vague suggestion of cigarette pictures, and it took root at
• 6:02:34
  once. Nothing would do then, but that I must take the boldest spirits
• 6:02:38
  of the company in character. One of them tumbled over against a shed as
• 6:02:44
  if asleep, while two of the others bent over him, searching his pockets
• 6:02:48
  with a deafness that was highly suggestive. This, they explained, for my
• 6:02:52
  benefit, was to show how they did the trick. The rest of the
• 6:02:57
  band were so impressed with the importance of this exhibition that they insisted on crowding
• 6:03:02
  into the picture by climbing upon the shed, sitting on the roof with their
• 6:03:07
  feet dangling over the edge and disposing themselves in every imaginable manner within view,
• 6:03:12
  as they thought, lest any reader be led into the error of supposing them
• 6:03:18
  to have been harmless young fellows enjoying themselves in peace. Let me say that
• 6:03:22
  within half an hour after our meeting, when I called at the police station
• 6:03:26
  three blocks away, I found there two of my friends of the Montgomery Guards
• 6:03:33
  under arrest for robbing a Jewish pedler who had passed that way after I left
• 6:03:37
  them, and trying to saw his head off, as they put it,
• 6:03:41
  quote, just for fun. The sheeney come along and the saw was there,
• 6:03:45
  and we socked it to him end quote. The prisoners were described to
• 6:03:49
  me by the police as denis the bum and mud. Fully, it is
• 6:03:56
  not always that their little diversions and as harmlessly as did this, even from
• 6:04:02
  the standpoint of the jew who was pretty badly hurt. Not far from the
• 6:04:07
  preserves of the Montgomery Guards in Poverty Gap, directly opposite the scene of the
• 6:04:11
  murder to which I have referred in a note explaining the picture of the Cunningham
• 6:04:15
  family page one sixty nine, a young lad who was the only support of
• 6:04:21
  his aged parents was beaten to death within a few months by the Alley gang
• 6:04:26
  for the same offense that drew down the displeasure of its neighbors upon the peddler,
• 6:04:30
  that of being at work trying to earn an honest living. I found
• 6:04:36
  a part of the gang asleep the next morning, before young Healey's death was
• 6:04:40
  known in a heap of straw on the floor of an unoccupied room in the
• 6:04:45
  same row of rear tenements in which the murdered boy's home was one of the
• 6:04:49
  tenants, who secretly directed me to their lair, assuring me that no worse
• 6:04:55
  scoundrels went unhung. Ten minutes later gave the gang to its face an official
• 6:05:00
  character for sobriety and in offensiveness that very nearly startled me into an unguarded rebuke
• 6:05:07
  of his duplicity. I caught his eye in time and held my peace.
• 6:05:12
  The man was simply trying to protect his own home while giving such aid as
• 6:05:18
  he safely could toward bringing the murderous Ruffians to justice. The incident shows to
• 6:05:22
  what extent a neighborhood may be terrorized by a determined gang of these reckless tufts.
• 6:05:30
  In poverty Gap, there were still a few decent people left when it
• 6:05:33
  comes to Hell's Kitchen, or to its compeers at the other end of thirty
• 6:05:37
  ninth Street, over by the East River, and further down First Avenue in
• 6:05:41
  the village. The rag gang and its allies have no need of fearing treachery
• 6:05:48
  in their periodical battles with the police. The entire neighborhood takes a hand on
• 6:05:52
  these occasions. The women in the front rank partly from sheer love of the
• 6:05:57
  fun, but chiefly because husbands, brothers and sweethearts are in the fight to
• 6:06:03
  a man and need their help. Chimney tops form the staple of ammunition then,
• 6:06:10
  and stacks of loose brick and paving stones carefully hoarded in upper rooms.
• 6:06:15
  As a prudent provision against emergencies, regular patrol posts are established by the police
• 6:06:21
  on the housetops in times of trouble in these localities, but even then they
• 6:06:26
  do not escape whole skinned, if indeed, with their lives, neither does
• 6:06:30
  the gang. The policeman knows of but one cure for the tough the club,
• 6:06:36
  and he lays it on without stint whenever and wherever he has the chance,
• 6:06:41
  knowing right well that if caught at a disadvantage. He will get his
• 6:06:45
  outlay back with interest. Words are worse than wasted. In the gang districts.
• 6:06:52
  It is a blow at sight, and the tough thus accosted never stops
• 6:06:56
  to ask questions unless he is wanted for some signal outrage. The policeman rarely
• 6:07:02
  bothers with arresting him. He can point out half a dozen at sight,
• 6:07:07
  against whom indictments are pending by the basketful, but whom no jail ever held
• 6:07:11
  many hours. They only serve to make him more reckless, for he knows
• 6:07:17
  that the political backing that has saved him in the past can do it again.
• 6:07:21
  It is a commodity that is only exchangeable for value received, and it
• 6:07:26
  is not hard to imagine what sort of value is in demand. The saloon
• 6:07:30
  in ninety nine cases out of one hundred, stands behind the bargain. For
• 6:07:36
  these reasons, as well as because he knows from frequent experience his own way
• 6:07:41
  to be the best. The policeman lets the gangs alone, except when they
• 6:07:45
  come within reach of his long nightstick. They have their club rooms, where
• 6:07:48
  they meet generally in a tenement, sometimes under a peer or a dump,
• 6:07:55
  to carouse, play cards, and plan their raids their fences, who dispose
• 6:08:00
  of the stolen property when the necessity presents itself for a descent upon the gang
• 6:08:06
  after some particularly fragrant outrage. The police have a task on hand that is
• 6:08:11
  not of the easiest. The gangs, like foxes, have more than one
• 6:08:15
  hole to their dens. In some localities where the interior of a block is
• 6:08:21
  filled with rear tenements, often set at all sorts of odd angles, surprise
• 6:08:26
  alone is practicable. Pursuit through the winding ways and passages is impossible. The
• 6:08:33
  young thieves know them all by heart. They have their runaways over roofs and
• 6:08:37
  fences which no one else could find. Their lair is generally selected with special
• 6:08:44
  reference to its possibilities of escape, once pitched upon its occupation by the gang,
• 6:08:49
  with its ear mark of nightly symposiums can rackets in the slaying of the
• 6:08:53
  street is the signal for a rapid deterioration of the tenement that is possible.
• 6:09:00
  Relief is only to be had by ousting the intruders. An instance came under
• 6:09:06
  my notice in which valuable property had been well nigh ruined by being made the
• 6:09:11
  thoroughfare of thieves by night and by day they had chosen it. Because of
• 6:09:15
  a passage that led through the block by way of several connecting halls and yards,
• 6:09:21
  the place came soon to be known as Murderer's Alley. Complaint was made
• 6:09:26
  to the Board of Health as a last resort of the condition of the property.
• 6:09:30
  The practical inspector, who was sent to report upon it, suggested to
• 6:09:34
  the owner that he built a brick wall in a place where it would shut
• 6:09:38
  off communication between the streets, and he took the advice. Within the brief
• 6:09:44
  space of a few months, the house changed character entirely and became as decent
• 6:09:49
  as it had been before the convenient runaway was discovered. This was in the
• 6:09:55
  sixth Ward, where the infamous Wyo Gang, until a few years ago,
• 6:10:00
  absorbed the worst depravity of the Bend and what is left of the Five Points.
• 6:10:06
  The gang was finally broken up when its leader was hanged for murder after
• 6:10:10
  a life of uninterrupted and unavenged crimes, the recital of which made his father
• 6:10:15
  Confessor turn pale listening in the shadow of the scaffold, though many years of
• 6:10:21
  labor as chaplain of the tombs had hardened him to such rehearsals. The Great
• 6:10:27
  Wyo had been a power in the ward, handy at carrying elections for the
• 6:10:33
  party or faction that happened to stand in need of his services, and was
• 6:10:37
  willing to pay for them in money or in kind. Other gangs have sprung
• 6:10:41
  up since with as high ambition and a fair prospect about doing their predecessor.
• 6:10:48
  The conditions that bred it still exist practically unchanged. Inspector Burns is authority for
• 6:10:56
  the statement that throughout the city the young tough has more ability and nerve than
• 6:11:00
  the thief whose example he successfully emulates. He begins earlier, too, speaking
• 6:11:07
  of the increase of the native element among criminal prisoners exhibited in the census returns
• 6:11:12
  of the last thirty years. Footnote. The percentage of foreign born prisoners in
• 6:11:18
  eighteen fifty, as compared with that of natives, was more than five times
• 6:11:22
  that of native prisoners. Now eighteen eighty it is less than double American prisons
• 6:11:30
  in the tenth census end footnote. The Reverend Fred H. Wine says their
• 6:11:36
  youth is a very striking fact. Had he confined his observations to the police
• 6:11:41
  courts of New York, he might have emphasized that remark and found an explanation
• 6:11:45
  of the discovery that the ratio of prisoners in cities is two and one quarter
• 6:11:51
  times as great as in the country at large, a computation that takes no
• 6:11:56
  account of the reformatories for juvenile delinqus quince, or the exhibit would have been
• 6:12:02
  still more striking. Of the eighty two thousand, two hundred persons arrested by
• 6:12:07
  the police in eighteen eighty nine, ten thousand, five hundred five were under
• 6:12:11
  twenty years old. The last report of the Society of the Prevention of Cruelty
• 6:12:17
  to Children enumerates as a few typical cases eighteen professional cracksmen between nine and fifteen
• 6:12:25
  years old, who had been caught with burglars, tools, or in the
• 6:12:29
  act of robbery. Four of them, hardly yet in long trousers, had
• 6:12:33
  held up a wayfarer in the public street and robbed him of seventy three dollars.
• 6:12:40
  One, aged sixteen, was the leader of a noted gang of young
• 6:12:45
  robbers in forty ninth Street. He committed murder, for which he is now
• 6:12:49
  serving a term of nineteen years in state prison. Four of the eighteen were
• 6:12:55
  girls, and quite as bad as the worst. In a few years,
• 6:12:59
  they would have been living with the tufts of their choice without the ceremony of
• 6:13:03
  marriage, egging them on by their pride in their lawless achievements, and fighting
• 6:13:07
  side by side with them in their encounters with the cops. The exploits of
• 6:13:12
  the Paradise Park Gang in the way of highway robbery showed last summer that the
• 6:13:18
  embers of the Scattered Wyo Gang, upon the wreck of which it grew,
• 6:13:22
  were smoldering still. The hanging of Driscoll broke up the Wyos because they were
• 6:13:27
  a comparatively small band, and with the incomparable master spirit gone, were unable
• 6:13:34
  to resist the angry rush of public indignation that followed the Crowning outrage. This
• 6:13:41
  is the history of the passing away of famous gangs. From time to time,
• 6:13:45
  the passing is more apparent than real. However, some other daring leader
• 6:13:51
  gathers the scattered elements about him soon and the war on society is resumed.
• 6:13:56
  A bare enumeration of the names of the best known gangs would occupy pages of
• 6:14:02
  this book. The Rock Gang, the Raggang, the Stable Gang, and
• 6:14:06
  the short Tail Gang down about the Hook have all achieved bad eminence along with
• 6:14:12
  scores of others that have not appeared so frequently in the newspapers. By day,
• 6:14:18
  they loaf in the corner groggerys on their beat. At night they plunder
• 6:14:22
  the stores along the avenues, or lie in wait at the river for unsteady
• 6:14:26
  feet straying their way. The man who is sober and minds his own business
• 6:14:32
  they seldom molest, unless he be a stranger inquiring his way, or a
• 6:14:37
  policeman. And the gang twenty against the one. The tipsy wayfarer is their
• 6:14:41
  chosen victim, and they seldom have to look for him long. One is
• 6:14:47
  not far to go to the river from any point in New York. The
• 6:14:51
  man who does not know where he is going is sure to reach it sooner
• 6:14:55
  or later. Should he foolishly resist or make an outcry, Men tell no
• 6:15:00
  tales. Floaters come ashore every now and then, with pockets turned inside out,
• 6:15:07
  not always evidence of the post mortem inspection by dock rats. Police patrol
• 6:15:11
  the rivers as well as the shore on constant lookout for these, but seldom
• 6:15:17
  catch up with them if overtaken. After a race, during which shots are
• 6:15:21
  often exchanged from the boats, the thieves have an easy way of escaping and
• 6:15:26
  at the same time destroying the evidence against them. They simply upset the boat.
• 6:15:32
  They swim one and all, like real rats. The lost plunder can
• 6:15:37
  be recovered at leisure the next day by diving or grappling. The loss of
• 6:15:41
  the boat counts for little. Another is stolen, and the gang is ready
• 6:15:45
  for business again. The fiction of a social club, which most of the
• 6:15:51
  gangs keep up, helps them to a pretext for blackmailing the politicians and the
• 6:15:56
  store keepers in their bailiwick at the annual season of their picnic or ball.
• 6:16:02
  The Thieves Ball is as well known and recognized an institution on the East Side
• 6:16:07
  as the Charity Ball in a different social stratum, although it does not go
• 6:16:11
  by that name in print at least. Indeed, the last thing in New
• 6:16:17
  York Tough will admit is that he is a thief. He dignifies his calling
• 6:16:21
  with a pretense of gambling. He does not steal. He wins your money
• 6:16:26
  on your watch and on the police returns. He is a speculator. If,
• 6:16:30
  when he passes around the hat for voluntary contributions, any storekeeper should have
• 6:16:36
  the temerity to refuse to chip in, he may look for a visit from
• 6:16:40
  the gang on the first dark night and account himself lucky if his place escapes
• 6:16:45
  being altogether wrecked. The Hell's Kitchen Gang and the Rag Gang have both distinguished
• 6:16:52
  themselves within recent times by blowing up objectionable stores with stolen gunpowder. But if
• 6:16:59
  no such episode mar the celebration, the excursion comes off and is the occasion
• 6:17:04
  for a series of drunken fights that as likely as not and in murder.
• 6:17:10
  No season has passed within my memory that has not seen the police reserves called
• 6:17:15
  out to receive some howling pandemonium returning from a picnic grove on the Hudson or
• 6:17:21
  on the Sound. At least one peaceful community up the river that had borne
• 6:17:26
  with this nuisance until patients had ceased to be a virtue received a boatload of
• 6:17:30
  such picnickers. In a style befitting the occasion and the cargo. The outraged
• 6:17:37
  citizens planted a howitzer on the deck and bade the party land at their peril
• 6:17:42
  with a loaded gun pointed dead at them. The furious Tufts gave up,
• 6:17:48
  and the peace was not broken on the Hudson that day, at least not
• 6:17:52
  ashore. It is good cause for congratulation that the worst of all forms of
• 6:17:56
  recreation popular among the city tufts, the moonlight picnic, has been effectually discouraged.
• 6:18:03
  Its opportunities for disgraceful revelry and immorality were unrivaled anywhere. In spite of
• 6:18:11
  influence and protection, the tuff reaches eventually the end of his rope. Occasionally,
• 6:18:18
  not too often, there is a noose on it. If not the
• 6:18:22
  world that owes him a living according to his creed will insist on his earning
• 6:18:26
  it. On the safe side of a prison wall, a few, a
• 6:18:30
  very few, have been clubbed into an approach to righteousness. From the police
• 6:18:36
  standpoint, the condemned tuf goes up to serve his bit or couple of stretches,
• 6:18:42
  followed by the applause of his gang. In the prison, he meets
• 6:18:47
  older thieves than himself and sits at their feet, listening with respectful admiration to
• 6:18:52
  their accounts of the great things that sent them, before he returns with the
• 6:18:56
  brand of the jail upon him to enc counter the hero worship of his old
• 6:19:00
  associates as an offset to the cold shoulder given him by all the rest of
• 6:19:06
  the world. Even if he is willing to work, disgusted with the restraint
• 6:19:11
  and hard labor of prison life, and in a majority of cases that thought
• 6:19:15
  is probably uppermost in his mind. No one will have him around. If,
• 6:19:21
  with the assistance of Inspector Burns, who is a philanthropist in his own
• 6:19:25
  practical way, he secures a job, he is discharged on the slightest provocation
• 6:19:30
  and for the most trifling fault. Very soon he sinks back into his old
• 6:19:36
  surroundings, to rise no more until he is lost to view in the queer,
• 6:19:41
  mysterious way in which thieves and fallen women disappear. No one can tell
• 6:19:47
  how in the ranks of criminals he never rises above that of the laborer,
• 6:19:52
  the small thief or burglar or general crook, who blindly does the work planned
• 6:19:56
  for him by others, and runs the big risk for the poorest pay.
• 6:20:02
  It cannot be said that the growler brought him luck or its friendship fortune.
• 6:20:07
  And yet if his misdeeds have helped to make manifest that all effort to reclaim
• 6:20:12
  his kind must begin with the conditions of life against which his very existence is
• 6:20:18
  a protest. Even the tough has not lived in vain. This measure of
• 6:20:22
  credit at least should be accorded him that, with or without his good will,
• 6:20:27
  he has been a factor in urging on the battle against the slums that
• 6:20:32
  bred him. It is a fight in which eternal vigilance is truly the price
• 6:20:37
  of liberty and the preservation of society. End of Section twenty one. The
• 6:20:44
  Working Girls of New York, of the harvest of tares, sown in iniquity
• 6:20:49
  and reaped in wrath. The police returns tell the story. The pen that
• 6:20:55
  wrote the song of the shirt is needed to tell of the sad and toil
• 6:20:59
  war born lives of New York's working women. The cry echoes by night and
• 6:21:04
  by day through its tenements, O God, that bread should be so dear,
• 6:21:10
  and flesh and blood so cheap. Six months have not passed since a
• 6:21:15
  great public meeting in this city, the Working Women's Society reported, quote.
• 6:21:22
  It is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which
• 6:21:26
  they can exist. But woman's wages have no limit. Since the paths of
• 6:21:30
  shame are always open to her, it is simply impossible for any woman to
• 6:21:36
  live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns without depriving herself of necessities,
• 6:21:42
  it is inevitable that they must, in many instances, resort to evil.
• 6:21:48
  End. It was only a few brief weeks before that verdict was uttered
• 6:21:52
  that the community was shocked by the story of a gentle and refined woman who
• 6:21:57
  left in direst poverty to earn her own living alone among strangers, threw herself
• 6:22:03
  from her attic window, preferring death to dishonor. Quote. I would have
• 6:22:08
  done any honest work, even to scrubbing end quote, she wrote, Drenched
• 6:22:15
  and starving after a vain search for work in a driving storm. She had
• 6:22:19
  tramped the streets for weeks on her weary errand, and the only living wages
• 6:22:23
  that were offered her were the wages of sin. The ink was not dry.
• 6:22:27
  Upon her letter before, a woman in an east side tenement wrote down
• 6:22:33
  her reason for self murder quote weakness, sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work.
• 6:22:38
  My strength fails me seeing at my coffin, where does the soul find
• 6:22:44
  a home and rest? End quote. Her story may be found as one
• 6:22:48
  of two typical cases of despair in one little church community in the city.
• 6:22:52
  Mission Societies Monthly for last February. It is a story that has many parallels
• 6:22:59
  in the experience of every missionary, every police reporter, and every family doctor
• 6:23:03
  whose practice is among the poor. It is estimated that at least one hundred
• 6:23:08
  and fifty thousand women and girls earn their own living in New York, but
• 6:23:14
  there is reason to believe that this estimate falls far short of the truth when
• 6:23:18
  sufficient account is taken of the large number who are not wholly dependent upon their
• 6:23:22
  own labor while contributing by it to the family's earnings. These alone constitute a
• 6:23:30
  large class of the women wage earners, and it is characteristic of the situation
• 6:23:34
  that the very fact that some need to starve on their wages condemns the rest
• 6:23:40
  to that fate. The pay they are willing to accept. All have to
• 6:23:44
  take. What the everlasting law of supply and demand that serves as such a
• 6:23:48
  convenient gag for public indignation has to do with it. One learns from observation
• 6:23:55
  all along the road of inquiry into these real woman's wrongs. To take the
• 6:24:00
  case of the saleswoman for illustration. The investigation of the Working Women's Society disclosed
• 6:24:07
  the fact that wages averaging from two dollars to four dollars fifty cents a week
• 6:24:11
  were reduced by excessive fines. Quote the employers placing a value upon time lost
• 6:24:18
  that is not given to services rendered end quote. A little girl who received
• 6:24:23
  two dollars a week made cash sales amounting to one hundred sixty seven dollars in
• 6:24:29
  a single day, while the receipts of a fifteen dollar mail clerk in the
• 6:24:33
  same department footed up only one hundred twenty five dollars. Yet for some trivial
• 6:24:40
  mistake, the girl was fined sixty cents out of her two dollars. The
• 6:24:45
  practice prevailed in some stores of dividing the fines between the superintendent and the time
• 6:24:49
  keeper at the end of the year. In one instance, they amounted to
• 6:24:53
  three thousand dollars and quote, the superintendent was heard to charge the time keeper
• 6:25:00
  with not being strict enough in his duties end quote. One of the causes
• 6:25:04
  for fine in a certain large store was sitting down. The law requiring seats
• 6:25:11
  for saleswomen generally ignored, was obeyed faithfully in this establishment. The seats were
• 6:25:17
  there, but the girls were fined when found using them. Cash girls receiving
• 6:25:22
  one dollar seventy five cents a week for work that at certain seasons lengthened their
• 6:25:27
  day to sixteen hours, were sometimes required to pay for their aprons. A
• 6:25:33
  common cause for discharge from stores in which, on account of the oppressive heat
• 6:25:37
  and lack of ventilation, quote girls fainted day after day and came out looking
• 6:25:42
  like corpses. End quote was too long service. No other fault was found
• 6:25:48
  with the discharged saleswomen than that they had been long enough in the employ of
• 6:25:53
  the firm to justly expect an increase of salary. The reason was even given
• 6:25:59
  with brutal frankness in some instances. These facts give a slight idea of the
• 6:26:04
  hardship and the poor pay of a business that notoriously absorbs child labor. The
• 6:26:11
  girls are sent to the store before they have fairly entered their teens, because
• 6:26:15
  the money they can earn there is needed for the support of the family.
• 6:26:19
  If the boys will not work, if the street tempts them from home.
• 6:26:23
  Among the girls, at least there must be no drones to keep their places.
• 6:26:29
  They are told to lie about their age and to say that they are
• 6:26:32
  over fourteen. The precaution is usually superfluous. The Women's Investigating Committee found the
• 6:26:38
  majority of the children employed in the stores to be under age, but heard
• 6:26:44
  only in a single instance of the truant officers calling. In that case,
• 6:26:49
  they came once a year and sent the youngest children home, But in a
• 6:26:52
  month's time they were all back in their places and were not again disturbed.
• 6:26:59
  When it comes to the fact factories, where hard bodily labor is added to
• 6:27:03
  long hours, stifling rooms, and starvation wages, matters are even worse.
• 6:27:08
  The legislature has passed laws to prevent the employment of children, as it has
• 6:27:14
  forbidden saloon keepers to sell them beer, and it has provided means of enforcing
• 6:27:18
  its mandate so efficient that the very number of factories in New York is guessed
• 6:27:22
  at as in a neighborhood of twelve thousand up till this summer, a single
• 6:27:27
  inspector was charged with the duty of keeping the run of them all and of
• 6:27:32
  seeing to it that the law was respected by the owners. Sixty cents is
• 6:27:37
  put as the average day's earning of the one hundred fifty thousand, But into
• 6:27:41
  this computation enters the stylish cashiers two dollars a day, as well as the
• 6:27:48
  thirty cents of the poor little girl who pulls threads in an east Side factory,
• 6:27:53
  and if anything, the average is probably too high. Such as it
• 6:27:59
  is, however, it represents board, rent, clothing, and pleasure to
• 6:28:03
  this army of workers. Here is the case of a woman employed in the
• 6:28:07
  manufacturing department of a Broadway house. It stands for a hundred like her own.
• 6:28:12
  She averages three dollars a week, pays one dollar fifty cents for her
• 6:28:18
  room. For breakfast, she has a cup of coffee lunch. She cannot
• 6:28:22
  afford. One meal a day is her allowance. This woman is young,
• 6:28:26
  she is pretty, She has the world before her. Is it anything less
• 6:28:32
  than a miracle if she is guilty of nothing worse than the quote early and
• 6:28:37
  improvident marriage end quote, against which moralists exclaim as one of the prolific causes
• 6:28:44
  of the distress of the poor. Almost any door might seem to offer welcome
• 6:28:48
  escape from such slavery as this quote. I feel so much healthier since I
• 6:28:53
  got three square meals a day, end quote, said a lodger in one
• 6:28:57
  of the girl's homes. Two young sewing girls came in seeking domestic service so
• 6:29:03
  that they might get enough to eat. They had been only half fed for
• 6:29:07
  some time. And starvation had driven them to the one door at which the
• 6:29:12
  pride of the American born girl will not permit her to knock, though poverty
• 6:29:18
  be the price of her independence. The tenement and the competition of public institutions
• 6:29:25
  and farmers wives and daughters have done the tyrant's shirt to death, but they
• 6:29:30
  have not bettered the lot of the needlewomen. The sweater of the East Side
• 6:29:33
  has appropriated the flannel shirt. He turns them out to day at forty five
• 6:29:37
  cents a dozen, paying his Jewish workers from twenty to thirty five cents.
• 6:29:44
  One of these testified before the State Board of Arbitration during the shirt maker's strike
• 6:29:48
  that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had
• 6:29:52
  never, in the best of times, made over six dollars a week.
• 6:29:56
  Another stated that she worked from four o'clock in the morning to eleven at night.
• 6:30:02
  These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines
• 6:30:06
  out of their wages. The white shirt has gone to the public and private
• 6:30:10
  institutions that shelter large number of young girls into the country. There are not
• 6:30:15
  half as many shirt makers in New York to day as only a few years
• 6:30:18
  ago. And some of the largest firms have closed their city shops. The
• 6:30:23
  same is true of the manufacturers of underwear. One large Broadway firm has nearly
• 6:30:30
  all its work done by farmers. Girls in Maine who think themselves well off
• 6:30:36
  if they can earn two or three dollars a week to pay for a Sunday's
• 6:30:38
  silk or the wedding outfit, little dreaming of the part they are playing in
• 6:30:44
  starving their city sisters. Literally, they sew quote with double thread a shroud
• 6:30:49
  as well as a shirt end quote. Their pin money sets the rate of
• 6:30:55
  wages for thousands of poor sewing girls in New York. The average earnings of
• 6:31:00
  the worker on underwear today do not exceed the three dollars which are competitor among
• 6:31:04
  the Eastern Hills is willing to accept as the price of her play. The
• 6:31:10
  shirt maker's pay is better only because the very finest custom work is all there
• 6:31:15
  is left for her to do. Calico wrappers at a dollar and a half
• 6:31:18
  a dozen, the very expert sewers able to make from eight to ten.
• 6:31:23
  The common run five or six neckties at from twenty five to seventy five cents
• 6:31:29
  a dozen, with a dozen as a good day's work are specimens of women's
• 6:31:33
  wages, and yet people persist in wondering at the poor quality of work done
• 6:31:38
  in the tenements. Italian cheap labor has come of late also to possess this
• 6:31:44
  poor field with a sweater in its train. There is scarce a branch of
• 6:31:48
  woman's work outside the home, in which wages, long since at low water
• 6:31:52
  mark, have not fallen to the point of actual starvation. A case was
• 6:31:56
  brought to my notice recently by a woman doctor, whose heart, as well
• 6:32:00
  as her life work is with the poor of a widow with two little children.
• 6:32:06
  She found at work in an east side attic making paper bags. Her
• 6:32:11
  father, she told the doctor had made good wages at it, but she
• 6:32:15
  received only five cents for six hundred of the little three cornered bags, and
• 6:32:19
  her fingers had to be very swift and handle the paste brush very deftly.
• 6:32:25
  To bring her earnings up to twenty five and thirty cents a day. She
• 6:32:30
  paid four dollars a month for her room. The rest went to buy food
• 6:32:33
  for herself and the children. The physician's purse, rather than her skill,
• 6:32:38
  had healing for their complaint. I have aimed to set down a few dry
• 6:32:44
  facts. Merely they carry their own comment back of the shop with its weary
• 6:32:49
  grinding toil. The home in the tenement of which, it was said in
• 6:32:53
  a report of the State Labor Bureau decency and womanly reserve case not be maintained
• 6:33:00
  there. What wonder so many fall away from virtue? End quote of the
• 6:33:04
  outlook. What last Christmas Eve, my business took me to an obscure street
• 6:33:10
  among the west side tenements. An old woman had just fallen on the doorstep,
• 6:33:15
  stricken with paralysis. The doctor said she would never again move her right
• 6:33:19
  hand or foot. The whole side was dead. By her bedside. In
• 6:33:23
  their cheerless room sat the patient's aged sister, a hopeless cripple in dumb despair.
• 6:33:30
  Forty years ago, the sisters had come five in number then with their
• 6:33:36
  mother, from the North of Ireland, to make their home and earn a
• 6:33:38
  living among strangers. They were lace embroiderers and found work easily at good wages.
• 6:33:45
  All the rest had died as the years went by, the two remained
• 6:33:49
  and firmly resolved to lead an honest life, worked on though wages fell and
• 6:33:55
  fell, as age and toil stiffened their once nimble feets and dimmed their sight.
• 6:34:02
  Then one of them dropped out her hands, palsied, and her courage
• 6:34:06
  gone. Still. The other toiled on, resting neither by night nor by
• 6:34:11
  day, that the sister might not want, now that she too had been
• 6:34:15
  stricken, as she was going to the store for the work that was to
• 6:34:18
  keep them through the holidays. The battle was over. At last. There
• 6:34:22
  was before them starvation or the poor house, and the proud spirits of the
• 6:34:27
  sisters helpless now quailed at the outlook. These were old, with life behind
• 6:34:33
  them. For them nothing was left but to sit in the shadow and wait.
• 6:34:38
  But of the thousands who are traveling the road, they trod to the
• 6:34:42
  end, with the hot blood of youth in their veins, with the love
• 6:34:45
  of life and of the beautiful world, to which not even sixty cents a
• 6:34:49
  day can shut their eyes. Who was to blame? If their feet find
• 6:34:53
  the paths of shame, they are always open to them, the very paths
• 6:34:59
  at the have effaced the saving limit, and to which it is declared to
• 6:35:03
  be quote inevitable, that they must in many instances resort end quote. Let
• 6:35:08
  the moralist answer, Let the wise economist apply his rule of supply and demand,
• 6:35:15
  And let the answer be heard in this city of a thousand charities,
• 6:35:18
  where justice goes begging to the everlasting credit of New York's working girl, Let
• 6:35:23
  it be said rough though her road may be all but hopeless, her battle
• 6:35:29
  with life. Only in the rarest instances does she go astray. As a
• 6:35:33
  class, she is brave, virtuous, and true. New York's army of
• 6:35:38
  profligate women is not as in some foreign countries, recruited from her ranks.
• 6:35:45
  She is as plucky as she is proud. The American girls never whimper became
• 6:35:49
  a proverb long ago, and she accepts her lot uncomplainingly, doing the best
• 6:35:56
  she can, and holding her cherished independence cheap the cost of a meal,
• 6:36:00
  or of half her daily ration, if need be. The home in the
• 6:36:04
  tenement, and the traditions of her childhood have neither trained her to luxury,
• 6:36:08
  nor predisposed her in favor of domestic labor in preference to the shop. So
• 6:36:15
  to the world she presents a cheerful, uncomplaining front that sometimes deceives it.
• 6:36:21
  Her courage will not be without its reward. Slowly, as the conviction is
• 6:36:25
  thrust upon society that woman's work must enter more and more into its planning.
• 6:36:30
  A better day is dawning. The organization of working girls clubs, unions,
• 6:36:36
  and societies with a community of interest, despite the obstacles to such a movement,
• 6:36:41
  bears testimony to it as to the devotion of the unselfish women who have
• 6:36:48
  made their poorer sister's cause their own, and will yet wring from an unfair
• 6:36:52
  where the justice too long denied her end of Section twenty two twenty one pauperism
• 6:37:02
  in the tenements. The reader who has followed with me the fate of the
• 6:37:07
  other half thus far, may not experience much of a shock at being told
• 6:37:11
  that in eight years, one hundred and thirty five thousand, five hundred and
• 6:37:17
  ninety five families in New York were registered as asking or receiving charity. Perhaps,
• 6:37:25
  however, the intelligence will rouse him that for five years past, one
• 6:37:30
  person in every ten who died in this city was buried in the potter's field.
• 6:37:37
  These facts tell a terrible story. The first means that in a population
• 6:37:42
  of a million and a half, very nearly if not quite half a million,
• 6:37:48
  persons were driven or chose to beg for food or to accept it in
• 6:37:53
  charity. At some period of the eight years, if not during the whole
• 6:37:59
  of it. There is no mistake about these figures. They are drawn from
• 6:38:03
  the records of the charity organization Society and represent the time during which it has
• 6:38:11
  been in existence. It is not even pretended that the record is complete.
• 6:38:17
  To be well within the limits, the Society's statisticians allow only three and a
• 6:38:22
  half to the family, instead of the four and a half that are accepted
• 6:38:27
  as the standard of calculations which deal with New York's population as a whole.
• 6:38:33
  They estimate, upon the basis of their everyday experience that, allowing for those
• 6:38:40
  who have died, moved away, or become for the time being at least
• 6:38:45
  self supporting, eighty five percent of the registry are still within or lingering upon
• 6:38:52
  the borders of dependence. Precisely how the case stands with this great horde of
• 6:39:00
  the indigent is shown by a classification of five thousand, one hundred and sixty
• 6:39:06
  nine cases that were investigated by the Society in one year. This was the
• 6:39:11
  way it turned out, three hundred twenty seven worthy of continuous relief, or
• 6:39:18
  six point four percent one thousand, two hundred sixty nine worthy of temporary relief,
• 6:39:26
  or twenty four point four percent two thousand, six hundred and ninety eight
• 6:39:32
  in need of work rather than relief, or fifty two point two percent eight
• 6:39:37
  hundred and seventy five unworthy of relief, or seventeen percent, that is,
• 6:39:45
  nearly six and a half percent of all were utterly helpless, orphans, cripples,
• 6:39:52
  or the very aged. Nearly one fourth needed just a lift to start
• 6:39:56
  them on the road to independence or to permanent pauperism. According to the wisdom
• 6:40:03
  with which the lever was applied, more than halfward destitute because they had no
• 6:40:08
  work and were unable to find any, and one sixth were frauds, professional
• 6:40:15
  beggars, training their children to follow in their footsteps, a veritable tribe of
• 6:40:22
  ishmael, tightening its grip on society as the years pass, until society shall
• 6:40:29
  summon up plucked to say with Paul, if any man will not work,
• 6:40:34
  neither shall he eat, and stick to it. It is worthy of note
• 6:40:40
  that almost precisely the same results followed a similar investigation in Boston. There were
• 6:40:47
  a few more helpless cases of the sort. True charity accounts it again to
• 6:40:52
  care for, but the proportion of a given lot that was crippled for want
• 6:40:59
  of work or unworthy was exactly the same as in this city. The bankrupt
• 6:41:06
  in hope, in courage, in purse, and in purpose are not peculiar
• 6:41:11
  to New York. They are found the world over. But we have our
• 6:41:18
  full share. If further proof were wanted, it is found in the prevalence
• 6:41:22
  of popper burials. The Potter's Field stands ever for utter hopeless surrender. The
• 6:41:30
  last the poor will let go, however miserable their lot in life, is
• 6:41:37
  the hope of a decent burial. But for the five years ending with eighteen
• 6:41:42
  eighty eight, the average of burials in the Potter's Field has been ten point
• 6:41:49
  zero three percent of all. In eighteen eighty nine, it was nine point
• 6:41:56
  sixty four. In that year, the proportion of the total mortality of those
• 6:42:02
  who died in hospitals, institutions, and in the almshouse was as one in
• 6:42:08
  five. The one hundred thirty five thousand, five hundred ninety five families inhabited
• 6:42:17
  no fewer than thirty one thousand different tenements. I say tenements advisedly, though
• 6:42:23
  the society calls them buildings, because at least ninety nine percent were found in
• 6:42:30
  the big barracks, the rest in shanties scattered here and there, and now
• 6:42:37
  and then a fraud or an exceptional case of distress in a dwelling house of
• 6:42:42
  better class. Here, undoubtedly allowance must be made for the constant moving about
• 6:42:49
  of those who live on charity, which enables one active beggar to blacklist a
• 6:42:56
  dozen houses in the year. Still, the great mass of the tenements are
• 6:43:02
  shown to be harboring alms seekers, they might almost as safely harbor the smallpox
• 6:43:10
  that scourge is not more contagious than the alm seeker's complaint. These are houses
• 6:43:17
  that have been corrupted through and through by this pestilence, until their very atmosphere
• 6:43:23
  breathes beggary. More than one hundred and twenty pauper families have been reported from
• 6:43:30
  time to time as living in one such tenement. The truth is that pauperism
• 6:43:37
  grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in a garden plot. A moral
• 6:43:45
  distemper like crime, it finds there its most fertile soil. All the surroundings
• 6:43:52
  of tenement house life favor its growth, and where once it has taken root,
• 6:43:59
  it is harder to dislodge than the most virulent of physical diseases. The
• 6:44:04
  thief is infinitely easier to deal with than the pauper, because the very fact
• 6:44:11
  of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man. Granted that it
• 6:44:18
  is bad, there is still something, a possible handle by which to catch
• 6:44:22
  him. To the pauper, there is none. He is as hopeless as
• 6:44:29
  his own poverty. I speak of the pauper, not of the honestly poor.
• 6:44:34
  There is a sharp line between the two, but a thwart it stands
• 6:44:40
  the tenement all the time, blurring and blotting it out. Quote. It
• 6:44:45
  all comes down to the character in the end close quote was the verdict of
• 6:44:52
  a philanthropist whose life has been spent wrestling with this weary problem. And so
• 6:45:00
  it comes down to the tenement, the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere.
• 6:45:07
  Quote in nine years, said a wise and charitable physician, sadly to me,
• 6:45:15
  I have known of but a single case of permanent improvement in a poor
• 6:45:21
  tenement family. Close quote. I have known of some whose experience, extending
• 6:45:27
  over an even longer stretch, was little better. The beggar follows the tough's
• 6:45:34
  rule of life that the world owes him a living, but his scheme of
• 6:45:40
  collecting it stops short of violence. He has not the pluck to rob even
• 6:45:45
  a drunken man. His highest flights take in at most an unguarded clothes line
• 6:45:52
  or a little child sent to buy bread or beer. With the pennies he
• 6:45:59
  clutches tightly as he skips along. Even then, he prefers to attain his
• 6:46:04
  end by stratagem rather than by force, though occasionally, when the coast is
• 6:46:11
  clear he rises to the height of the bully. The way he finds of
• 6:46:17
  collecting under the cloak of undeserved poverty are numberless, and often reflect on the
• 6:46:26
  man's ingenuity, if not on the man himself. I remember the shot with
• 6:46:32
  which my first experience with his kind, her kind rather in this case,
• 6:46:38
  the beggar was a woman came home to me on the way too and from
• 6:46:44
  the office. I had been giving charity regularly, as I finally believed to
• 6:46:49
  an old woman who sat in the Chatham Square with the baby done up in
• 6:46:55
  a bundle of rags, moaning piteously in sunshine and rain, Please help the
• 6:47:03
  poor. It was the baby I pitied, and thought I was doing my
• 6:47:07
  little to help until one night I was just in time to rescue it from
• 6:47:15
  rolling out of her lap and found the bundle I had been wasting my pennies
• 6:47:19
  upon just rags and nothing more, and the old hag dead drunk. Since
• 6:47:27
  then I have encountered bogus babies, borrowed babies, and drugged babies in the
• 6:47:34
  streets, and fought shy of them all. Most of them, I'm glad
• 6:47:41
  to say, have been banished from the streets since, but they are still
• 6:47:45
  occasionally to be found. It was only last winter that the officers of the
• 6:47:49
  Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children arrested an Italian woman who was begging
• 6:47:56
  along Madison Avenue with the poor little wreck of a girl, whose rags and
• 6:48:03
  pinched face were calculated to tug hard at the perch strings of a miser.
• 6:48:08
  Over five dollars in nickels and pennies were taken from the woman's pockets, and
• 6:48:14
  when her story of poverty and hunger was investigated at the family's home in a
• 6:48:19
  Baxter Street tenement, bank books turned up that showed the Masonis to be regular
• 6:48:27
  pauper capitalists, able to draw their check for three thousand dollars had they been
• 6:48:34
  so disposed. The woman was fined two hundred and fifty dollars, a worse
• 6:48:41
  punishment, undoubtedly than to have sent her to prison for the rest of her
• 6:48:45
  natural life. Her class has unhappily representatives in New York that have not yet
• 6:48:55
  been brought to grief. Nothing short of making streak begging a crime, has
• 6:49:00
  availed to clear our city of this pest to an appreciable extent. By how
• 6:49:07
  much of an effort this result has been accomplished may be gleaned from the fact
• 6:49:11
  that the charity organization Society alone in five years caused the taking up of two
• 6:49:19
  thousand, five hundred ninety four street beggars and the arrest and conviction of one
• 6:49:26
  thousand, four hundred and seventy four persistent offenders. Last year, it dealt
• 6:49:32
  with six hundred and twelve per ambulating mendicants. The police report only nineteen arrests
• 6:49:40
  for begging during the entire year of eighteen eighty nine, but the real facts
• 6:49:45
  of the case are found under the heading vagrancy. In all, two thousand,
• 6:49:52
  six hundred thirty three persons were charged with this offense. Nine hundred and
• 6:49:59
  forty seven of them them women. A goodly portion of these latter came from
• 6:50:04
  the low groggeries of the tenth Ward, where a peculiar variety of the female
• 6:50:11
  tramp beggar is at home the scrub. The scrub is one degree perhaps above
• 6:50:18
  the average pauper in this that she is willing to work at least one day
• 6:50:22
  in the week, generally the Jewish Sabbath. The Orthodox jew can do no
• 6:50:30
  work of any sort from Friday evening till sunset on Saturday, and this interim
• 6:50:36
  the scrub fills out in Ludlow Street. The pittance she receives for this vicarious
• 6:50:42
  sacrifice of herself upon the altar of the ancient faith buys her rum for at
• 6:50:48
  least two days of the week at one of the neighborhood morgues. She lives
• 6:50:53
  through the other four by begging. There are distilleries in Jutan, or just
• 6:51:00
  across its borders that depend almost wholly on her custom. Recently, when one
• 6:51:07
  in Hester Street was rated because the neighbors had complained of the boisterous hilarity of
• 6:51:15
  the hags over their beer, thirty two aged scrubs were marched off to the
• 6:51:21
  station house. It is curious to find preconceived notions quite upset. In a
• 6:51:29
  review of the nationalities that go to make up this squad of street beggars,
• 6:51:34
  the Irish had the list with fifteen percent, and the Native American is only
• 6:51:40
  a little way behind with twelve percent, while the Italian, who in his
• 6:51:45
  own country turns beggary into a fine art, has less than two percent.
• 6:51:52
  Eight percent were Germans. The relative prevalence of the races in our population does
• 6:52:00
  not account for this showing. Various causes operate, no doubt, to produce
• 6:52:06
  it. Chief among them is, I think the tenement itself it has no
• 6:52:11
  power to corrupt the Italian, who comes here in almost every instance to work.
• 6:52:18
  No beggar would ever immigrate from anywhere else unless forced to do so.
• 6:52:25
  He is distinctly on its lowest level. From the start. With the Irishman,
• 6:52:30
  the case is different. The Tenement, especially its lowest type, appears
• 6:52:36
  to possess a peculiar affinity for the worse nature of the celt to whose best
• 6:52:42
  and strongest instincts it does violence and soonest and most thoroughly corrupts him. The
• 6:52:51
  native twelve percent represent the result of this process. The hereditary beggar of the
• 6:52:57
  second or third General in the slums. The blind beggar alone is winked at
• 6:53:04
  in New York streets because the authorities do not know what else to do with
• 6:53:11
  him. There is no provision for him anywhere. After he is old enough
• 6:53:15
  to strike out for himself. The annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which
• 6:53:22
  he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor for the
• 6:53:27
  rest his misfortune, and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners
• 6:53:33
  must provide until the city affords him some systematic way of earning his living by
• 6:53:41
  work, as Philadelphia has done. For instance, to banish him from the
• 6:53:45
  street would be tantamount to sentencing him to death by starvation. So he possesses
• 6:53:53
  it in peace, that is, if he is blind, in good earnest
• 6:54:00
  and begs without encumbrance. Professional mendicancy does not hesitate to make use of the
• 6:54:07
  greatest of human afflictions as a pretense for enlisting the sympathy upon which it thrives.
• 6:54:15
  Many New Yorkers will remember the French schoolmaster who was blinded by a shell
• 6:54:21
  at the Siege of Paris, but miraculously recovered his sight when arrested and deprived
• 6:54:29
  of his children by the officers of mister Jerry's society. When last heard of,
• 6:54:36
  he kept a museum in Hartford and acted the overseer with financial success.
• 6:54:44
  His sign, with its pitiful tale, that was a familiar sight in our
• 6:54:49
  streets for years and earned for him the capital upon which he started his business,
• 6:54:55
  might have found a place among the curiosities exhibited them, had it not
• 6:55:00
  been kept in a different sort of museum here as a memento of his rascality.
• 6:55:08
  There was another of his tribe, a woman who begged for years with
• 6:55:12
  a deformed child in her arms, which she was found to have hired at
• 6:55:18
  an almshouse in Genoa for fifteen francs a month. It was a good investment,
• 6:55:25
  for she proved to be possessed of a comfortable fortune. Some time before
• 6:55:30
  that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that found her out,
• 6:55:37
  had broken up the dreadful padrone system, a real slave trade in Italian children
• 6:55:44
  who were bought of poor parents across the sea and made to beg their way
• 6:55:48
  on foot through France to the port, whence they were shipped to this city
• 6:55:55
  to be beaten and starved here by their cruel masters, and sent out to
• 6:56:00
  beg often after merciless mutilation, to make them take better with a pitying public.
• 6:56:08
  But after all, the tenement offers a better chance of fraud on impulsive
• 6:56:15
  but thoughtless charity than all the wretchedness of the street, and with fewer wrists
• 6:56:23
  to the tender hearted and unwary. It is in itself the strongest plea for
• 6:56:30
  help. When such a cry goes up, as it was heard recently from
• 6:56:34
  a Mott Street den, where the family of a sick husband, a despairing
• 6:56:41
  mother, and half a dozen children in rags and dirt were destitute of the
• 6:56:47
  first necessities of life, it is not to be wondered at that a stream
• 6:56:52
  of gold comes pouring into relieve. It happens too often, as in that
• 6:56:59
  case, that a little critical inquiry or reference to the blacklist of the charity
• 6:57:06
  organization society justly dreaded only by the frauds, discovers the sickness to stand for
• 6:57:14
  laziness and the destitution to be the family's stock in trade, and the community
• 6:57:22
  receives a shock that for once his downright wholesome if it imposes a check on
• 6:57:29
  an undiscriminating charity that is worse than none at all. The case referred to
• 6:57:36
  furnished an apt illustration of how thoroughly corrupting pauperism is in such a setting.
• 6:57:42
  The tenement woke up early to the gold mine that was being worked under its
• 6:57:48
  roof, and before the day was three hours old, the stream of callers
• 6:57:52
  who responded to the newspaper appeal found the alley blocked by a couple of tufts,
• 6:58:00
  who exacted toll of a silver quarter from each tearful sympathizer. With the
• 6:58:07
  misery in the attic, a volume might be written about the tricks of the
• 6:58:12
  professional beggar and the uses to which he turns the tenement in his trade.
• 6:58:18
  The Boston widow whose husband turned up alive and well after she had buried him
• 6:58:23
  seventeen times with tears and lamentation, and made the public pay for the weekly
• 6:58:30
  funerals, is not without representatives in New York. The gentleman tramp is a
• 6:58:37
  familiar type from our streets, and the once respectable Methodist who patronized all the
• 6:58:45
  revivals in town with his profitable story of repentance, only to fall from grace
• 6:58:51
  into the saloon door nearest the church after the service was over, merely transferred
• 6:58:57
  the scene of his operation from the tenement to the church as the proper setting
• 6:59:03
  for his specialty. There is enough of real suffering in the homes of the
• 6:59:10
  poor to make one wish that there were some effective way of enforcing Paul's plan
• 6:59:18
  of starving the drones into the paths of self support. No work, nothing
• 6:59:25
  to eat. The message came from one of the Health Department's summer doctors last
• 6:59:32
  July to the King's Daughter's Tenement House Committee that a family with a sick child
• 6:59:37
  was absolutely famishing in an uptown tenement. The address was not given, the
• 6:59:45
  doctor had forgotten to write it down, and before he could be found and
• 6:59:49
  a visitor sent to the house, the baby was dead and the mother had
• 6:59:55
  gone mad. The nurse found the father, who was an honest laborer long
• 7:00:00
  out of work, packing the little corpse in an orange box partly filled with
• 7:00:06
  straw, that he might take it to the morgue for pauper burial. There
• 7:00:11
  was absolutely not a crust to eat in the house, and the other children
• 7:00:17
  were crying for food. The Great immediate need. In that case, as
• 7:00:22
  in more than half of all, according to the record, was work and
• 7:00:26
  living wages. Alms do not meet the emergency at all. They frequently aggravate
• 7:00:34
  it, degrading and pouperizing, where true help should aim at raising the sufferer
• 7:00:41
  to self respect and self dependence. The experience of the charity organization Society in
• 7:00:49
  raising in eight years, four thousand, five hundred families out of the rut
• 7:00:55
  of pauperism into proud, if modest independence without alms, but by a system
• 7:01:03
  of friendly visitation, and the work of the Society for improving the condition of
• 7:01:08
  the poor and kindred organizations along the same line, shows what can be done
• 7:01:15
  by well directed effort. It is estimated that New York spends in public and
• 7:01:21
  private charity every year around eight million dollars. A small part of this sum
• 7:01:29
  intelligently invested in a great labor bureau that would bring the seeker of work and
• 7:01:34
  the one with work to give together under auspices, offering some degree of mutual
• 7:01:41
  security, would certainly repay the amount of the investment in the saving a much
• 7:01:48
  capital now worse than wasted, and would be prolific of the best results the
• 7:01:55
  ultimate and greatest need. However, the real remedy is to remove the cause,
• 7:02:02
  the tenement that was built for a class of whom nothing was expected,
• 7:02:07
  and which has come fully up to the expectation. Tenement house reform holds the
• 7:02:15
  key to the problem of poperism in the city. We can never get rid
• 7:02:19
  of either the tenement or the pauper. The two will always exist together in
• 7:02:26
  New York. But by reforming the one, we can do more toward exterminating
• 7:02:32
  the other than can be done by all other means together that have yet been
• 7:02:37
  invented or ever will be. End of Section twenty three, Chapter twenty two.
• 7:02:48
  The res and the waste Popperdom is to blame for the unjust joking of
• 7:02:55
  poverty with punishment, charities with correction, and our municipal ministering to the needs
• 7:03:00
  of the nether half. The shadow of the workhouse points like a scornful finger
• 7:03:06
  toward its neighbour, the Almshouse, when the sun sets behind the teeming city
• 7:03:11
  across the East River. As if could its stone speak, it would say,
• 7:03:15
  before night drops its black curtain between them, you and I are brothers.
• 7:03:22
  I am not more bankrupt and moral purpose than you a common parent begat
• 7:03:26
  us twin breasts, the tenement and the saloon, nourished us, vice and
• 7:03:33
  unthrift go hand in hand. Pauper, behold thy brother, and the almshouse
• 7:03:40
  owns the bitter relationship in silence. Over on the islands that lie strung along
• 7:03:47
  the river and far up the sound. The nether half hides its deformity except
• 7:03:51
  on show days, when distinguished visitors have to be entertained, and the sore
• 7:03:56
  is uncovered by the authorities with due municipal pride. In the exhibit, I
• 7:04:02
  shall spare the reader the sight. The aim of these pages has been to
• 7:04:06
  lay bare its source, but a brief glance at our prescribed population is needed
• 7:04:11
  to give background in tone to the picture. The review begins with the charity
• 7:04:17
  hospital with its thousand helpless human wrecks, takes in the penitentiary, where the
• 7:04:22
  tough from battle row and poverty gap is made to earn behind stone walls the
• 7:04:27
  living the world owes him. A thoughtless, jolly convict band with opportunity at
• 7:04:33
  last to think behind the iron bars, but little desire to improve it.
• 7:04:40
  Governed like unruly boys, which in fact most of them are. Three of
• 7:04:45
  them were taken from the dinner table while I was there one day, for
• 7:04:48
  sticking pins into each other, and were set with their faces to the wall
• 7:04:52
  in sight of six hundred of their comrades for punishment, pleading incessantly for tobacco.
• 7:04:59
  When the keepers back is turned as the next best thing to the whiskey,
• 7:05:03
  they cannot get, though they can plainly make out the saloon signs across
• 7:05:07
  the stream where they robbed or slugged their way to prison. Every once in
• 7:05:11
  a while, the longing gets the best of some prisoner from the penitentiary or
• 7:05:15
  the workhouse, and he risks his life in the swift currents to reach the
• 7:05:19
  goal that tantalizes him with the promise of just one more drunk. The chances
• 7:05:26
  are at least even of his being run down by some passing steamer and drowned,
• 7:05:30
  even if he is not overtaken by the armed guards who patrol the shore
• 7:05:33
  in boats, or his strength does not give out. This workhouse comes next,
• 7:05:41
  with the broken down hoards from the dives, the lodging houses, and
• 7:05:45
  the tramps nests. The hell box footnote in printing offices, the broken,
• 7:05:52
  worn out and useless type is thrown into the hell box to be recast at
• 7:05:56
  the foundry end footnote, rather than the repair shop of the city. In
• 7:06:03
  eighteen eighty nine, the registry at the workhouse footed up twenty two thousand,
• 7:06:07
  four hundred seventy seven, of whom some had been there as many as twenty
• 7:06:12
  times before. It is the popular summer resort of the slums, but businesses
• 7:06:18
  brisket this stand of the year round. Not a few of its patrons drift
• 7:06:22
  back periodically without the formality of a commitment to take their chances on the island
• 7:06:29
  when there is no escape from the alternative of work in the city. Work
• 7:06:33
  but not too much work, is the motto of the establishment. The workhouse
• 7:06:38
  step is an institution that must be observed on the island in order to draw
• 7:06:44
  any comparison between it and the snail's pace that shall do justice to the snail.
• 7:06:49
  Nature and man's art have made these islands beautiful. But weeds grow luxuriantly
• 7:06:55
  in their gardens, and spiders spend their cobwebs unmolested in the borders of sweet
• 7:07:00
  smelling mocks. The work which two score of hired men could do well is
• 7:07:04
  too much for these thousands rows of old women. Some smoking, stumpy black
• 7:07:11
  clay pipes, others knitting or idling, All grumbling, sit or stand under
• 7:07:17
  the trees that hedge in the almshouse, or limp about on the sunshine,
• 7:07:22
  leaning on crutches or bean pole staffs. They are a growler gang of another
• 7:07:27
  sort than may be seen in session on the rocks of the opposite shore at
• 7:07:32
  that very moment. They grumble and growl from sunrise to sunset, at the
• 7:07:37
  weather, the breakfast, the dinner, the supper, at pork and beans,
• 7:07:41
  as at corn, beef and cabbage, at their Thanksgiving dinner, as
• 7:07:45
  at the half rations of the sick ward at the past that had no joy,
• 7:07:52
  at the present, whose comfort they deny, and at the future without
• 7:07:55
  promise. The crusty old men in the next building are not circumstance to them.
• 7:08:02
  The warden, who was in charge of the almshouse for many years,
• 7:08:06
  had become so snappish and profaned by constant association with a thousand cross old women,
• 7:08:11
  that I approached him, with some misgivings, to request his permission to
• 7:08:15
  take a group of a hundred or so who were within shot of my camera.
• 7:08:21
  He misunderstood me take them, He yelled, take the thousand of them,
• 7:08:27
  and be welcome. They will never be still by till they are sent
• 7:08:32
  up on Heart's Island in a box, and I'll be blamed if I don't
• 7:08:36
  think they will growl. Then at the style of the funeral, and he
• 7:08:40
  threw his arms around me in an outburst of enthusiasm over the wondrous good luck
• 7:08:45
  that had sent a friend indeed to his door. I felt it to be
• 7:08:48
  a painful duty to undeceive him. When I told him that I simply wanted
• 7:08:53
  the old woman's picture, he turned away in speechless disgust, and to his
• 7:08:59
  dying day, I have no doubt remembered my call as the day of the
• 7:09:03
  Champion Fool's visit to the island. When it is known that many of these
• 7:09:08
  old people have been sent to the almshouse to die by their heartless children,
• 7:09:12
  for whom they had worked faithfully as long as they were able, their growling
• 7:09:17
  and discontent is not hard to understand bitter poverty through them all on the county,
• 7:09:23
  often on the wrong county. At that very many of them are old
• 7:09:27
  country poor sent There is reason to believe to America by the authorities to get
• 7:09:33
  rid of the obligation to support them. The almshouse wrote A good missionary affords
• 7:09:41
  a sad illustration of Saint Paul's description of the last days. The class from
• 7:09:47
  which comes our poor house population is to a large extent without natural affection.
• 7:09:53
  I was reminded by his words of what my friend the doctor had said to
• 7:09:57
  me a little while before. Many a mother has told me at her child's
• 7:10:03
  death bed, I cannot afford to lose it. It costs too much to
• 7:10:07
  bury it. And when the little one did die, there was no time
• 7:10:11
  for the mother's grief. The question crowded on at once, where shall the
• 7:10:18
  money come from? Natural feelings and affections are smothered in the tenements. The
• 7:10:23
  doctor's experience furnished a sadly appropriate text for the priest's sermon. Bitiful as these
• 7:10:30
  are, sights and sounds, infinitely more saddening await us beyond the gate that
• 7:10:36
  shuts this world of woe off from one, whence the light of hope and
• 7:10:38
  reason have gone out together. The shuffling of many feet on the Macamadized roads
• 7:10:45
  heralds the approach of a host of women, hundreds upon hundreds, beyond the
• 7:10:51
  churn in the road. They still keep coming, marching with the faltering step,
• 7:10:56
  the unseeing look, and the incessant senseless chatter that trays the darkened mine.
• 7:11:02
  The lunatic women of the Blackwells Island Asylum are taking their afternoon walk.
• 7:11:07
  Beyond on the wide lawn moves another still stranger procession, a file of women
• 7:11:14
  in the asylum dress of dull gray, hitched to a queer little wagon that,
• 7:11:18
  with its gaudy adornments, suggests a cross between a baby carriage and a
• 7:11:22
  circus chariot. One crazy woman is trapped in the seat, forty tug at
• 7:11:27
  the rope to which they are securely bound. This is the chain gang,
• 7:11:33
  so called once in scoffing ignorance of the humane purpose the contrivance serves. These
• 7:11:38
  are the patients afflicted with suicidal mania, who cannot be trusted at large for
• 7:11:44
  a moment with the river in sight, yet must have their daily walk as
• 7:11:48
  a necessary part of their treatment. So this wagon was invented by a clever
• 7:11:52
  doctor to afford them at once exercise and amusement. A merry go round in
• 7:11:59
  the grounds suggest variation of this scheme ghastly suggestion of mirth with that stricken host,
• 7:12:06
  advancing on its aimless journey. As we stop to see it pass.
• 7:12:11
  The plaintive strains of a familiar song flote through a barred window in the gray
• 7:12:15
  stone building. The voice is sweet, but inexpressibly sad. Oh how my
• 7:12:22
  heart grows weary far from the song breaks off suddenly in a low, troubled
• 7:12:29
  laugh. She has forgotten, forgotten. A woman in the ranks, whose
• 7:12:36
  head has been turned toward the window, throws up her hands with a scream.
• 7:12:41
  The rest stir uneasily, the nurses by her side in an instant with
• 7:12:45
  words half soothing, half stern. A messenger comes in haste from the asylum
• 7:12:51
  to ask us not to stop. Strangers may not linger where the patients pass.
• 7:12:56
  It is apt to excite them as we go in with him. The
• 7:13:00
  human file is passing, yet quiet restored. The troubled voice of the unseen
• 7:13:06
  singer still gropes vainly among the lost memories of the past for the missing key.
• 7:13:11
  Oh how my heart grows weary far from who is she? Doctor hopeless
• 7:13:19
  case she will never see home again. An average of seventeen hundred women.
• 7:13:26
  This asylum harbors the asylum for men up on Ward's Island. Even more,
• 7:13:32
  Altogether, one thousand, four hundred nineteen patients were admitted to the city asylums
• 7:13:37
  for the insane in eighteen eighty nine, and at the end of the year
• 7:13:41
  four thousand, nine hundred thirteen remained in them. There is a constant ominous
• 7:13:47
  increase in this class of helpless unfortunates that are thrown on the city's charity.
• 7:13:52
  Quite two hundred are added year by year, and the asylums were long since
• 7:13:56
  so overcrowded that a great farm had to be established on Long Island to receive
• 7:14:02
  the surplus. The strain of our hurried, overworked life has something to do
• 7:14:07
  with this. Poverty has more. For these are all of the poor.
• 7:14:12
  It is the harvest of sixty eight hundredfold, the fearful rolling up and rolling
• 7:14:18
  down from generation to generation, through all the ages of the weakness, vice
• 7:14:23
  and moral darkness of the past. Footnote Doctor Louis L. Seaman, late
• 7:14:30
  Chief of Staff of the Blackwells Island Hospitals. Social Waste of a great City,
• 7:14:37
  read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, eighteen eighty six.
• 7:14:44
  End footnote. The Curse of the Island haunts all that come once within
• 7:14:49
  its reach. No man or woman, says doctor Louis l Seaman, who
• 7:14:55
  speaks from many years experience in a position that gave him full opportunity to observe
• 7:15:00
  the facts, who is sent up to these colonies ever returns to the city
• 7:15:04
  scot free. There is a lean visible or hidden upon his or her present
• 7:15:11
  or future, which too often prove stronger than the best purposes and fairest opportunities
• 7:15:17
  of social rehabilitation. The underworld holds in rigorous bondage every unfortunate or miscreant who
• 7:15:23
  has once served time. There is often tragic interest in the struggles of the
• 7:15:30
  ensnared wretches to break away from the meshes spun about them. But the maelstrom
• 7:15:36
  has no bowels of mercy, and there would be Fugitives are flung back again
• 7:15:40
  and again into the devouring whirlpool of crime and poverty, until the end is
• 7:15:45
  reached. On the dissecting table or in the potter's field. What can the
• 7:15:51
  moralists or scientists do by way of resuscitation, Very little at best. The
• 7:15:56
  flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds and fragments of wasted lives. Such a ministry
• 7:16:02
  must begin at the sources, is necessarily prophylactic, nutritive, educational. On
• 7:16:10
  these islands there are no flexible twigs, only gnarled, blasted, blighted trunks
• 7:16:15
  and sensible to moral on social influences. Sad words, but true. The
• 7:16:23
  commonest keeper soon learns to pick out, almost at sight the cases that will
• 7:16:27
  leave the penitentiary, the workhouse, the almshouse, only to return again and
• 7:16:33
  again, each time more hopeless, to spend their wasted lives in the bondage
• 7:16:38
  of the island. The alcoholic cells in Bellevue Hospital are away station for a
• 7:16:45
  goodly share of them on their journeys back and forth across the East River.
• 7:16:51
  Last year they held altogether three thousand, six hundred ninety four prisoners, considerably
• 7:16:56
  more than one fourth of the whole number of thirteen thousand, eight hundred thirteen
• 7:17:00
  patients that went in through the hospital gates. The daily average of cases in
• 7:17:07
  this the Hospital of the Poor, is over six hundred. The average daily
• 7:17:11
  census of all the prisons, hospitals, workhouses and asylums in charge of the
• 7:17:18
  Department of Charities and Correction last year was about fourteen thousand and about one employee
• 7:17:23
  was required for every ten of this army to keep its machinery running smoothly.
• 7:17:30
  The total number admitted in eighteen eighty nine to all the jails and institutions in
• 7:17:34
  the city and on the islands was one hundred thirty eight thousand, three hundred
• 7:17:40
  thirty two. To the Almshouse alone, thirty eight thousand, six hundred were
• 7:17:45
  admitted, nine thousand, seven hundred sixty five were there to start the new
• 7:17:51
  year with, and five hundred fifty three were born with the dark shadow of
• 7:17:55
  the poorhouse overhanging their lives, making a total of forty eight thousand, nine
• 7:18:00
  hundred eighteen. In the care of all their wards, the Commissioners expended two
• 7:18:06
  million, three hundred forty three thousand, three hundred seventy two dollars. The
• 7:18:11
  appropriation for the police force in eighteen eighty nine was four million, four hundred
• 7:18:18
  nine thousand, five hundred fifty dollars ninety four cents, and for the criminal
• 7:18:23
  courts and their machinery four hundred three thousand, one hundred ninety dollars. Thus,
• 7:18:30
  the first cost of maintaining our standing army of paupers, criminals and sick
• 7:18:36
  poor by direct taxation was last year seven million, one hundred fifty six thousand,
• 7:18:44
  one hundred twelve dollars ninety four cents. End of Section twenty four,
• 7:18:52
  Chapter twenty five. The man with the Knife. A man stood at the
• 7:18:56
  corner of Fifth Avenue of fourteenth Street the other day, looking gloomily at the
• 7:19:02
  carriages that roll by, carrying the wealth and fashion of the avenues to and
• 7:19:06
  from the big stores downtown. He was poor and hungry and ragged. This
• 7:19:11
  thought was in his mind day behind their well fed teams have no thought for
• 7:19:15
  the morrow. They're no hunger only by name, and ride down to spend
• 7:19:19
  in an hour's shopping that would keep me and my little ones from one to
• 7:19:22
  whole year. Thever is up before him, the pictures of those little ones
• 7:19:27
  crying for bread around the cold and cheerless hearth. Then he sprang into the
• 7:19:32
  throng and splashed about him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill to revenge.
• 7:19:38
  The man was arrested, of course, and locked up. Today he
• 7:19:41
  is probably in a madhouse, forgotten, and the carriages roll by to and
• 7:19:45
  from the big stores with their gay throng of shoppers. The world forgets easily
• 7:19:51
  too what it does not like to remember. Nevertheless, the man and his
• 7:19:55
  knife had a mission. They spoke in their ignorant, impatient way. The
• 7:19:59
  warning one of the most conservative, dispassionate of public bodies, had sounded only
• 7:20:03
  a little while before. Our only fear is that reform may come in a
• 7:20:08
  burst of public indignation, destructive to property and to God morales. They represented
• 7:20:15
  one solution of the problem of ignorant poverty versus ignorant wealth that has come down
• 7:20:19
  to us unsolved, the danger cry of which we have lately heard in the
• 7:20:23
  shout that never should have been raised on American soil, the shout of the
• 7:20:29
  masses against the classes, the solution of violence. There is another solution,
• 7:20:33
  that of justice. The choices between the two, which shall it be?
• 7:20:38
  Well, say some well meaning people. We don't see the need of putting
• 7:20:44
  it in that way. We have been down among the tenements, looking them
• 7:20:47
  over. There are a good many people there. They are not comfortable,
• 7:20:52
  perhaps what would you have? They are poor, and the houses are not
• 7:20:56
  such hovels as we have seen and read of in the slums of the old
• 7:20:59
  world. They are decent in comparison. Why some of them have brownstone fronts.
• 7:21:04
  You will own at least that they make a decent show. Yes,
• 7:21:08
  that is true. The worst tenements in New York do not, as a
• 7:21:11
  rule look bad. Neither Hell's Kitchen nor Murderer's Rod bears its true character stamped
• 7:21:18
  on the front. They are not quite old enough. Perhaps the same is
• 7:21:22
  true of their tenants. The New York tough may be ready to kill,
• 7:21:25
  where his London brother would do little more than scowl. Yet as a general,
• 7:21:29
  though he is less repulsively brutal in looks. Here again, the reason
• 7:21:33
  may be the same. The breed is not so old. A few generations
• 7:21:37
  more in the slums, and all that will be changed. To get at
• 7:21:41
  the pregnant facts of tenement house life, one must look beneath the surface.
• 7:21:45
  Many an apple has a fair skin and a rotten call. There is a
• 7:21:49
  much better argument for the tenements in the assurance of the Registrar of Vital Statistics
• 7:21:55
  that the death rate of these houses as of late been brought below the general
• 7:21:59
  death rate of the sea, and that it is the lowest in the biggest
• 7:22:02
  houses. This means two things. One that the almost exclusive attention given to
• 7:22:07
  the tenements by the sanitary authorities in twenty years has borne some fruit, and
• 7:22:12
  that the newer tenements are better than the old. There is some hope in
• 7:22:15
  that the other, that the whole strain of tenement house dwellers has been bred
• 7:22:21
  down to the conditions under which it exists, that the struggle with corruption has
• 7:22:25
  begotten the power to resist it. This is a familiar law of nature,
• 7:22:29
  necessary to its first and strongest import of self preservation. To a certain extent,
• 7:22:33
  we are all creatures of the condition that surround us physically and morally.
• 7:22:37
  But is a knowledge reassuring in the light of what we have seen? Does
• 7:22:41
  not the question arise? What sort of creature? Then? This of the
• 7:22:45
  tenement? I try to draw his likeness from observation in telling the story of
• 7:22:51
  the tough has it nothing to suggest the man with the knife? I will
• 7:22:55
  go further. I'm not willing even to admit it to be an unqualified advantage.
• 7:22:59
  At our New York tenements have less of the slum look than those of
• 7:23:03
  older cities. It helps to delay the recognition of their true character on the
• 7:23:07
  part of the well meaning but uninstructed, who are always in the majority.
• 7:23:12
  The dangerous classes of New York long ago compelled recognition. They are dangerous less
• 7:23:18
  because of their own crimes than because of the criminal ignorance of those who were
• 7:23:22
  not of their kind. The danger to society comes not from the poverty of
• 7:23:26
  the tenements, but from the ill spent wealth that reared them, that it
• 7:23:30
  might earn an assurious interest from a class from which nothing else was expected.
• 7:23:34
  That was a broad foundation laid down, and the edifice built upon its corresponds
• 7:23:40
  to the groundwork. That this is well understood. On the unsafe side of
• 7:23:44
  the line that separates the rich from the poor much better than those who have
• 7:23:48
  all the advantages of discriminating education, It is good cause for disquietude in it.
• 7:23:55
  A keen foresight may again dimly discern the shadow of the man with the
• 7:23:59
  knife. Two years ago a great meeting was held at Chickering Hall. I
• 7:24:03
  spoken of it before, a meeting that discussed for days and nights to question
• 7:24:07
  how to banish this specter, how to lay hold with good influences of this
• 7:24:11
  enormous mass of more than a million people who were drifting away faster and faster
• 7:24:17
  from the safe moorings of the old faith. Clergymen and laymen from all the
• 7:24:21
  Protestant denominations took part in the discussion, nor was a good word forgotten for
• 7:24:26
  the brethren of the other great Christian fold, who labor among the poor.
• 7:24:30
  Much was said that was good and true, and the ways were found of
• 7:24:33
  reaching the spiritual needs of the tenement population that promised success. But at no
• 7:24:38
  time throughout the conference was the real keynote of the situation so boldly struck as
• 7:24:45
  has been done by a few far seeing business men who had listen to the
• 7:24:48
  cry of that Christian builder. How shall the love of God be understood by
• 7:24:52
  those who have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man? Their
• 7:24:56
  practical program of philanthropy and five percent has set examples in tenement building that show,
• 7:25:03
  though they are yet few and scattered, what may be in time accomplished,
• 7:25:07
  even with such poor opportunities as New York offers to day of undoing the
• 7:25:11
  old wrong. This is a gospel of justice, the solution that must be
• 7:25:15
  sought as the one alternative to the man with the knife? Are you not
• 7:25:19
  looking too much to the material condition of these people? Said a good minister
• 7:25:23
  to me after a lecture in Harlem Church last winter, And forgetting the inner
• 7:25:29
  man? I told him, no, for you cannot expect to find an
• 7:25:33
  inner man to appeal to in the worst tenement house surroundings. You must first
• 7:25:37
  put the man where he can respect himself. Traverse the argument of the apple.
• 7:25:41
  You cannot expect to find a sound core in a rotten fruit. End
• 7:25:47
  of Chapter twenty five. What has been done in twenty years? What has
• 7:25:52
  been done in New York to solve the tenement house problem? The law has
• 7:25:57
  done what it could. That was not always a great deal, seldom more
• 7:26:03
  than barely sufficient for the moment. An aroused municipal conscience endowed the Health Department
• 7:26:08
  with all most autocratic powers in dealing with this subject. But the desire to
• 7:26:14
  educate rather than forced the community into a better way, dictated their exercise with
• 7:26:19
  a slow conservatism that did not always seem wise to the impatient reformer. New
• 7:26:26
  York has its Saint Antoine, and it has often sadly missed the Napoleon the
• 7:26:30
  Third to clean up and make light in the dark corners. The obstacles,
• 7:26:37
  too have been many and great. Nevertheless, the authorities have not been idled,
• 7:26:42
  though it is a grave question whether all the improvements made under the sanitary
• 7:26:47
  regulation of recent years deserved the name. Tenements quite as bad as the worst
• 7:26:52
  are too numerous yet, but one tremendous factor for evil in the lives of
• 7:26:56
  the poor has been taken by the throat, and something has unquestionably been done
• 7:27:03
  where that was possible to lift those lives out of the rut where they were
• 7:27:07
  equally beyond the reach of hope and ambition. It is no longer lawful to
• 7:27:12
  construct barracks to cover the whole of a lot. Air and sunlight have a
• 7:27:18
  legal claim, and the day of rear tenements is past. Two years ago
• 7:27:23
  a hundred thousand people burrowed in these inhuman dens, but some have been torn
• 7:27:30
  down since their number will decrease steadily until they shall have become a bad tradition
• 7:27:36
  of a heedless past. The dark unventilated bedroom is going with them, and
• 7:27:41
  the open sewer. The day is at hand when the greatest of all evils
• 7:27:47
  that now curse life in the tenements, the dearth of water in the hot
• 7:27:51
  summer days, will also have been remedied, and the long step taken toward
• 7:27:56
  the moral and physical redemption of their tenets. Public sentiment has done something also,
• 7:28:03
  but very far from enough. As a rule, it has slumbered peacefully
• 7:28:07
  until some flagrant outrage of decency and the health of the community aroused it to
• 7:28:14
  noisy but ephemeral indignation, or until a dreaded epidemic knocked at our door.
• 7:28:21
  It is this unsteadiness of purpose that has been to a large extent responsible for
• 7:28:26
  the apparent lagging of the authorities in cases not involving immediate danger to general health.
• 7:28:33
  The law needs a much stronger and readier backing of a thoroughly enlightened public
• 7:28:38
  sentiment to make it as effective as it might be made. It is to
• 7:28:44
  be remembered that the health officers, in dealing with this subject of dangerous houses,
• 7:28:48
  or constantly trenching upon what each landlord considers his private rights for which he
• 7:28:56
  is ready and bound to fight to the last, nothing short of the strongest
• 7:29:00
  pressure will avail to convince him that these individual rights are to be surrendered for
• 7:29:07
  the clear benefit of the whole. It is easy enough to convince a man
• 7:29:11
  that he ought not to harbor the thief who steals people's property, but to
• 7:29:18
  make him see that he has no right to slowly kill his neighbors or his
• 7:29:22
  tenants by making a death trap of his house seems to be the hardest of
• 7:29:26
  all tasks. It is apparently the slowness of the process that obscures his mental
• 7:29:33
  sight. The man who will fight in ardor to repair the plumbing in his
• 7:29:37
  house through every court he can reach, would suffer tortures rather than shed the
• 7:29:42
  blood of a fellow man by actual violence. Clearly, it is a matter
• 7:29:48
  of education on the part of the landlord, no less than the tenant.
• 7:29:52
  In spite of this, the landlord has done his share, chiefly, perhaps
• 7:29:57
  by yielding, not all always gracefully, when it was no longer of any
• 7:30:03
  use to fight. There have been exceptions, however, men and women who
• 7:30:07
  have mended and built with an eye to the real welfare of their tenants as
• 7:30:12
  well as to their own pockets. Let it be understood that the two are
• 7:30:17
  inseparable. If any good is to come of it. The business of housing
• 7:30:22
  the poor, if it is to amount to anything, must be business,
• 7:30:26
  as it was business with our fathers, to put them where they are.
• 7:30:30
  As charity pastime are fad it will miserably fail always and everywhere. This is
• 7:30:38
  an inexorable rule, now thoroughly well understood in England and continental Europe, and
• 7:30:45
  by all who have given the matter serious thought here call it poetic justice,
• 7:30:49
  or divine justice, or anything else. It is a hard fact not to
• 7:30:55
  be gotten over upon any other plan than the assumption that the workman has a
• 7:31:00
  just claim to a decent home and the right to demand it. Any scheme
• 7:31:06
  for his relief fails. It must be a fair exchange of the man's money
• 7:31:11
  for what he can afford to buy at a reasonable price. Any charity scheme
• 7:31:15
  merely turns him into a pauper. However it may be disguised and drowns him
• 7:31:19
  hopelessly in the mire out of which it proposed to pull him. And this
• 7:31:25
  principle must pervade the whole plan. Expert management of model tenements succeeds where amateur
• 7:31:33
  management, with the best intentions gives up the task discouraged as a flat failure.
• 7:31:38
  Some of the best conceived enterprises, backed by an abundant capital and good
• 7:31:44
  will, have been wrecked on this rock. Sentiment, having prompted the effort
• 7:31:51
  forgot to stand aside and let business make it. Business in a wider sense,
• 7:31:56
  has done more than all other agencies together to wipeout the worst tenements.
• 7:32:02
  It has been the new York's real Napoleon, the third from whose decree there
• 7:32:06
  was no appeal. In ten years I have seen plague spots disappear before its
• 7:32:11
  onward March, with which health officers, police and sanitary science had struggled vainly
• 7:32:18
  since such struggling began as a serious business, and the process goes on still.
• 7:32:23
  Unfortunately, the crowding in some of the most densely packed quarters downtown has
• 7:32:29
  made the property there so valuable that relief from this source is less confidently to
• 7:32:33
  be expected at all events in the near future. Still their time may come.
• 7:32:40
  Also, it comes so quickly, sometimes as to fairly take one's breath
• 7:32:45
  away. More than once I have returned after a few brief weeks to some
• 7:32:51
  specimen rookery in which I was interested, to find it gone, and an
• 7:32:56
  army of workmen delving twenty feet underground to the foundation of a mighty warehouse.
• 7:33:03
  This was the case with the Big flat in Mott Street. I had not
• 7:33:07
  had occasion to visit it for several months last winter, and when I went
• 7:33:11
  there entirely and prepared for a change, I could not find it. It
• 7:33:15
  had always been conspicuous enough in the landscape before, and I marveled much at
• 7:33:22
  my own stupidity, until by examining the number of the house, I found
• 7:33:26
  out that I had gone right by it. It was the flat that had
• 7:33:30
  disappeared. In its place towered a six story carriage factory, with business going
• 7:33:37
  on on every floor as if it had been there for years and years.
• 7:33:41
  This same big flat furnished a good illustration of why some well meant efforts in
• 7:33:47
  tenement building have failed. Like Gothamcourt, it was originally built as a model
• 7:33:53
  tenement, but speedily came to rival the Court in foulness. It became a
• 7:33:59
  regular hotbed of thieves and peace breakers, and made no wind of trouble for
• 7:34:03
  the police. The immediate reason, outside of the lack of proper supervision,
• 7:34:10
  was that it had open access to two streets in a neighborhood where thieves and
• 7:34:14
  tufts abounded. These took advantage of an arrangement that had been supposed by the
• 7:34:19
  builders to be a real advantage as a means of ventilation, and their occupancy
• 7:34:25
  drove honest folk away. Murderer's Alley of which I have spoken elsewhere, and
• 7:34:30
  the sanitary Inspector's experiment with building a brick wall athwart it to shut off travel
• 7:34:36
  through the block is a parallel case. The causes that operate to obstruct efforts
• 7:34:41
  to better the lot of the tenement population are in our day largely found among
• 7:34:48
  the tenants themselves. This is true particularly of the poorest. There are shiftless,
• 7:34:53
  destructive, and stupid. In a word, they are what the tenements
• 7:34:59
  have made them. It is a dreary old truth that those who would fight
• 7:35:03
  for the poor must fight the poor. To do it. It must be
• 7:35:07
  confessed that there is little enough in their past experience to inspire confidence in the
• 7:35:12
  sincerity of the effort to help them. I recall the discomfiture of a certain
• 7:35:18
  well known philanthropist, since deceased, whose heart beat responsive to other suffering than
• 7:35:25
  that of human kind. He was a large owner of tenement property, and
• 7:35:29
  once undertook to fit out his houses with stationary tubs, sanitary plumbing, wood
• 7:35:34
  closets, and all the latest improvements. He introduced his rough tenants to all
• 7:35:41
  this magnificence, without taking the precaution of providing a competent housekeeper to see that
• 7:35:48
  the new acquaintances got on together. He felt that his tenants ought to be
• 7:35:52
  grateful for the interest he took in them. They were They found the boards
• 7:35:57
  in the wood closet's fine kindling wood, while the pipes and faucets were as
• 7:36:02
  good as cash at the jug shop. In three months the owner had to
• 7:36:07
  remove what was left of his improvements. The pipes were cut and the houses
• 7:36:11
  running full of water. The stationary tubs were put to all sorts of uses
• 7:36:15
  except washing, and of the wood closets not a trace was left. The
• 7:36:21
  philanthropist was, ever after, a firm believer in the total depravity of tenement
• 7:36:26
  house people. Others had been led to like reasoning by as plausible arguments,
• 7:36:32
  without discovering that the shiftlessness and ignorance that offended them were the consistent crop of
• 7:36:38
  the tenement they were trying to reform, and had to be included in the
• 7:36:42
  effort. The owners of a block of model tenements uptown had got their tenants
• 7:36:48
  comfortably settled and were indulging in high hopes of their redemption under proper management.
• 7:36:55
  When a contractor ran up a row of skin tenements, shaky but fair to
• 7:37:00
  look at, with brown stone trimmings and gegaws, the result was to tempt
• 7:37:06
  a lot of the well housed tenant's way. It was a very astonishing instance
• 7:37:10
  of perversity to the planners of the benevolent scheme. But after all, there
• 7:37:14
  was nothing strange in it. It is all a matter of education. As
• 7:37:18
  I said about the landlord, that the education comes slowly, need excite no
• 7:37:22
  surprise. The forces on the other side are ever active, the faculty of
• 7:37:27
  the tenement for appropriating to itself every foul thing that comes within its reach,
• 7:37:33
  and piling up and intensifying its corruption, until out of all proportion to the
• 7:37:38
  beginning is something marvelous. Drop a case of scarlet fever, of measles,
• 7:37:45
  or of diphtheria into one of these barracks, and unless it is caught at
• 7:37:48
  the very start and stamped out, the contagion of the one case will sweep
• 7:37:53
  block after block and half people at graveyard. Let the police break up a
• 7:38:00
  viled in goaded by the angry protests of the neighborhood. Forthwith the outcasts,
• 7:38:06
  set in circulation by the raid, betake themselves to the tenements, where in
• 7:38:11
  their hired rooms, safe from interference, they set up as many independent centers
• 7:38:15
  of contagion, infinitely more destructive each and every one than was the known dive
• 7:38:21
  before. I am not willing to affirm that this is the police reason for
• 7:38:25
  letting so many of the dives alone, but it might well be they are
• 7:38:30
  perfectly familiar with the process and quite powerless to prevent it. This faculty as
• 7:38:37
  inherent in the problem itself. The prodigious increase of the tenement house population that
• 7:38:41
  goes on without cessation, and its consequent greater crowding, is the chief obstacle
• 7:38:48
  to its solution. In eighteen sixty nine, there were fourteen thousand, eight
• 7:38:53
  hundred seventy two tenements in New York with a population of four hundred sixty eight
• 7:38:59
  thousand, hundred ninety two persons. In eighteen seventy nine, the number of
• 7:39:03
  the tenements was estimated at twenty one thousand, and their tenants had passed the
• 7:39:08
  half million mark. At the end of the year eighteen eighty eight, when
• 7:39:12
  a regular census was made for the first time since eighteen sixty nine, the
• 7:39:17
  showing was thirty two thousand, three hundred ninety tenements with a population of one
• 7:39:22
  million, ninety three thousand, seven hundred and one souls. Today we have
• 7:39:27
  thirty seven thousand, three hundred sixteen tenements, including two thousand, six hundred
• 7:39:33
  thirty rear houses, and their population is over one million, two hundred fifty
• 7:39:37
  thousand. A large share of this added population, especially of that which comes
• 7:39:44
  to us from abroad, crowds in below fourteenth Street, where the population is
• 7:39:48
  already packed beyond reason and confounds all attempts to make matters better there. At
• 7:39:55
  the same time, new slums are constantly growing up uptown and have be kept
• 7:40:00
  down with a firm hand. This drift of population to the great cities has
• 7:40:04
  to be taken into account as a steady factor. It will probably increase rather
• 7:40:10
  than decrease, for many years to come. At the beginning of the century,
• 7:40:14
  the percentage of our population that lived in cities was as one in twenty
• 7:40:18
  five. In eighteen eighty it was one in four and one half, and
• 7:40:23
  in eighteen ninety the census will in all probability show it to be one in
• 7:40:29
  four. Against such tendencies, in the absence of suburban outlets for the crowding
• 7:40:34
  masses, all remedial measures must prove more or less ineffective. The confident belief
• 7:40:41
  expressed by the Board of Health in eighteen seventy four that rapid transit would solve
• 7:40:47
  the problem is now known to have been of vain hope. Working men in
• 7:40:52
  New York at all events will live near their work, no matter at what
• 7:40:56
  sacrifice of comfort, one might almost say it one ad ever cost, and
• 7:41:00
  the city will never be less crowded than it is. To distribute the crowds
• 7:41:04
  as evenly as possible is the effort of the authorities, where nothing better can
• 7:41:08
  be done. In the first six months of the present year, one thousand
• 7:41:12
  and sixty eight persons were turned out of not quite two hundred tenements below Houston
• 7:41:18
  Street by the sanitary police on their midnight inspections, and this covered only a
• 7:41:25
  very small part of that field. The uptown tenements were practically left to take
• 7:41:30
  care of themselves in this respect. The quick change of economic conditions in the
• 7:41:33
  city that often outpaces all plans of relief, rendering useless today what method demands
• 7:41:40
  of the situation well enough yesterday, is another cause of perplexity. A common
• 7:41:45
  obstacle also, I am inclined to think, quite as common as in Ireland,
• 7:41:51
  though we hear less of it in the newspapers. Is the absentee landlord
• 7:41:56
  the home article, who fights for his rights as he chooses to consider of
• 7:42:00
  them is bad enough, but the absentee landlord is responsible for no end of
• 7:42:04
  trouble. He was one of the first obstructions the sanitary reformers stumbled over when
• 7:42:11
  the Health Department took hold. It reported in eighteen sixty nine that many of
• 7:42:15
  the tenants were entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to their requests
• 7:42:21
  to have the houses put in order was an invitation to pay their rent or
• 7:42:26
  get out. Inquiry often disclosed the fact that the owner of the property was
• 7:42:30
  a wealthy gentleman or lady, either living in an aristocratic part of the city
• 7:42:37
  or in a neighboring city, or, as was occasionally found to be the
• 7:42:41
  case in Europe, the property is usually managed entirely by an agent whose instructions
• 7:42:47
  are simple but emphatic, collect the rent in advance or, failing eject the
• 7:42:52
  occupants. The Committee, having a manner in charge, proposed to compel owners
• 7:42:57
  of sentiments with ten family are more to put a housekeeper in the house,
• 7:43:02
  who should be how responsible to the Health Department. Unluckily, the powers of
• 7:43:07
  the board gave out at that point and the proposition was not acted upon.
• 7:43:11
  Then could it have been much trouble would have been spared the health board and
• 7:43:17
  untold suffering the tenants in many houses. The tribe of absentee landlords is by
• 7:43:23
  no means extinct in New York. Not a few who fled from across the
• 7:43:27
  sea to avoid being crushed by his heel there have groaned under it here,
• 7:43:33
  scarcely profiting by the exchange. Sometimes it can hardly be set. In extenuation.
• 7:43:40
  The heel that crunches is applied in saddening ignorance. I recall the angry
• 7:43:45
  indignation of one of these absentee landlords, a worthy man, who, living
• 7:43:51
  far away in the country, had inherited city property. When he saw the
• 7:43:55
  condition of his slum tenements, the man was shocked beyond expression, all the
• 7:44:00
  more because he did not know whom to blame except himself for the state of
• 7:44:04
  things that had aroused his wrath, and yet, conscious of the integrity of
• 7:44:10
  his intentions, felt that he should not justly be held responsible. The experience
• 7:44:15
  of this landlord points directly to the remedy which the law failed to supply to
• 7:44:21
  the early reformers, yet has since been fully demonstrated that a competent agent on
• 7:44:26
  the premises a man of the best and highest stamp, who knows how to
• 7:44:32
  instruct and guide with a firm hand, is a prerequisite to the success of
• 7:44:37
  any reform tenement scheme. This is a plain business proposition that has been proved
• 7:44:42
  entirely sound in some notable instances of tenement building, of which more hereafter.
• 7:44:48
  Even among the poorer tenements, there are always the best in which the owner
• 7:44:53
  himself lives. It is a helpful sign in any case. The difficulty of
• 7:44:59
  proc curing such assistance without having to pay a ruinous price is one of the
• 7:45:04
  obstructions that have vexed in this city efforts to solve the problem of housing the
• 7:45:08
  poor properly, because it presupposes that the effort must be made on a larger
• 7:45:14
  scale than has often been attempted. The readiness with which the tenants respond to
• 7:45:19
  intelligent efforts in their behalf, when made under fair conditions, is as surprising
• 7:45:25
  as it is gratifying, and fully proves the claim that tenants are only satisfied
• 7:45:30
  in filthy and unwholesome surroundings because nothing better is offered. The moral effect is
• 7:45:37
  as great as the improvements of their physical health. It is clearly discernible in
• 7:45:41
  the better class of tenement dwellers to day. The change in the character of
• 7:45:45
  the colored population in the last few years since it began to move out of
• 7:45:48
  the wicked rookeries of the Old Africa to the decent tenements in Yorkville furnishes a
• 7:45:55
  notable illustration, and a still better one is found in the contrast between the
• 7:46:00
  model tenement in the Mulberry Street Bend and the barracks across the way of which
• 7:46:04
  I spoke in the chapter devoted to the Italian. The Italian himself is the
• 7:46:11
  strongest argument of all. With his fatal contentment in the filthiest surroundings, he
• 7:46:15
  gives undoubted evidence of having in him the instinctive cleanliness that, properly cultivated,
• 7:46:22
  would work his rescue in a very little while. It is a queer contradiction,
• 7:46:26
  but the fact is patent to any one who has observed the man in
• 7:46:30
  his home life, and he is not alone in this. I came across
• 7:46:33
  an instance this past summer of how a refined, benevolent personality works like a
• 7:46:41
  eleven to even the roughest tenement house crowd. This was no model tenement,
• 7:46:45
  far from it. It was a towering barrack in the tenth ward, sheltering
• 7:46:51
  more than twenty families. All the light and air that entered its interior came
• 7:46:56
  through an air shaft two feet square up, on which two bedrooms and the
• 7:47:00
  hall gave in every story. In three years I had known of two domestic
• 7:47:07
  tragedies prompted by poverty and justifiable disgust with life, occurring in the house,
• 7:47:12
  and had come to look upon it as a typically bad tenement, quite beyond
• 7:47:18
  the pale of possible improvement. What was my surprise when chance led me to
• 7:47:22
  it once more after a while, to find the character of the occupants entirely
• 7:47:26
  changed. Some of the old ones were there still, but they did not
• 7:47:32
  seem to be the same people. I discovered the secret to be the new
• 7:47:36
  housekeeper, a tidy, mild mannered, but exceedingly strict little body who had
• 7:47:41
  a natural faculty of drawing her to prave surroundings within the beneficent sphere of her
• 7:47:47
  strong sympathy and withal of exacting respect for her orders. The worst elements had
• 7:47:52
  been banished from the house in short order under her management, and for the
• 7:47:56
  rest a new era of self respect had dawned. They were as a body
• 7:48:02
  as vastly superior to the general run of their class, as they had before
• 7:48:07
  seen below it, and this had been effected in the short space of a
• 7:48:11
  single year. My observations on this point are more than confirmed by those of
• 7:48:17
  nearly all the practical tenement reformers I have known, who have patiently held in
• 7:48:22
  the course they had laid down. One of these, whose experience succeeds that
• 7:48:26
  of all the rest together, and whose influence for good has been very great,
• 7:48:32
  said to me recently, I hold that not ten percent of the people
• 7:48:37
  now living in tenements were refused to avail themselves of the best improved conditions offered,
• 7:48:42
  and come fully up to the use of them, properly instructed. But
• 7:48:47
  they cannot get them. They are up to them now fully. If the
• 7:48:52
  chances were only offered, they don't have to come up. It is all
• 7:48:56
  a gigantic mistake on the part of the public, of which these these poor
• 7:49:00
  people are the victims. I have built homes for more than five hundred families
• 7:49:04
  in fourteen years, and I have been getting daily more faith in human nature
• 7:49:08
  from my work among the poor tenants, through approaching that nature on a plain
• 7:49:14
  and under conditions that could scarcely promise better for disappointment. It is true that
• 7:49:19
  my friend has built his houses in Brooklyn, but human nature does not differ
• 7:49:25
  greatly on the two shores of the East River. For those who think it
• 7:49:29
  does quite the severest arraignment of the tenement that had yet been uttered, it
• 7:49:33
  may be well to remember that only five years ago the Tenement House Commission summed
• 7:49:38
  up the situation in this city in the declaration that the condition of the tenants
• 7:49:44
  is in advance of the houses which they occupy. Quite the severest arraignment of
• 7:49:48
  the tenement that had yet been uttered. The many philanthropic efforts that have been
• 7:49:52
  made in the last few years to render less intolerable the lot of the tenants
• 7:49:57
  in the homes where many of them must continue to live have undoubtedly had their
• 7:50:02
  effect in creating a disposition to accept better things that will make later sailing for
• 7:50:07
  future builders of model tenements. In many ways, as in the colored settlement
• 7:50:14
  of courageous girls, the neighborhood guilds, through the efforts of the King's Daughters,
• 7:50:19
  and numerous other schemes of practical mission work, the poor and the will
• 7:50:25
  to do have been brought closer together in an everyday companionship that cannot but be
• 7:50:30
  productive of the best results to the one who gives no less than to one
• 7:50:34
  who receives. And thus, as a good lady wrote to me once,
• 7:50:40
  though the problems fans yet unresolved, more perplexing than ever. Though the bright
• 7:50:45
  spots in the dreary picture be too often bright only by comparison, and many
• 7:50:49
  of the expedients hit upon for relief sad makeshifts, we can dimly discern behind
• 7:50:56
  it all that good is somehow working out of even this slew of despond the
• 7:51:03
  while it is deepening and widening in our sight and in his own good season.
• 7:51:07
  If we labor on with courage and patience, will bear fruit sixty and
• 7:51:12
  one hundredfold. Inter Section twenty six, Chapter twenty five. How the case
• 7:51:18
  stands, What then, are the bald facts with which we have to deal
• 7:51:22
  in New York. One That we have a tremendous, ever swelling crowd of
• 7:51:27
  wage journers, which it is our business to house decently. Two that it
• 7:51:33
  is not housed decently. Three that it must be so housed here for the
• 7:51:37
  present and for a long time to come. All schemes of suburban relief,
• 7:51:42
  being as yet utopian impracticable. Four that it pays high enough rents to entitle
• 7:51:48
  it to be housed as a right. Five, That nothing but our own
• 7:51:52
  slothfulness is in the way of so housing it, since the condition of the
• 7:51:56
  tenants is in advance of the condition of the houses which they occupy. Parentheses
• 7:52:02
  Report of Tenement House Commission closed, parentheses. Six. That the security of
• 7:52:07
  the one know less than of the other half demands, on sanitary, moral
• 7:52:11
  and economic grounds, that it be decently housed. Seven that it will pay
• 7:52:17
  to do so as an investment, I mean, and in hard cash.
• 7:52:22
  This I shall immediately proceed to prove. Eight That the tenement has come to
• 7:52:26
  stay, and must itself be the solution of the problem with which it confronts
• 7:52:32
  us. This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however we
• 7:52:36
  may deplore it. Doubtless the best would be to get rid of it altogether.
• 7:52:40
  But as we cannot, all argument on that score may at this time
• 7:52:45
  be dismissed as idle. The practical question is what to do with the tenement.
• 7:52:52
  I watched a Mott Street landlord, the owner of a row of barracks
• 7:52:56
  that have made no end of trouble for the health authorities for twenty years.
• 7:53:00
  Solved that question for himself the other day. His way was to give the
• 7:53:04
  wretched pile a coat of paint and put a gargeous tin carnie on with the
• 7:53:10
  year eighteen ninety in letters. A yard long from where I stood watching the
• 7:53:15
  operation, I looked down upon the same dirty crowds camping on the roof,
• 7:53:21
  foremost among them an Italian mother with two stark naked children, who had apparently
• 7:53:26
  never made the acquaintance of a washtub. That was a landlord's way, and
• 7:53:32
  will not get us out of the mire. The flat is another way that
• 7:53:36
  does not solve the problem. Rather, it extends it. The flat is
• 7:53:40
  not a model, though it is a modern tenement. It gets rid of
• 7:53:44
  some of the nuisances of the low tenement, and of the worse of them,
• 7:53:48
  the overcrowding, If it gets rid of them at all, at a
• 7:53:52
  cost that takes it at once out of the catalog of homes for the poor,
• 7:53:56
  while imposing some of the evils from which they suffer upon those who ought
• 7:54:00
  to escape from them. There are three effective ways of dealing with the tenements
• 7:54:06
  in New York one by law, two by remodeling and making the most out
• 7:54:11
  of the old houses. Three by building new model tenements. Private enterprise conscience
• 7:54:18
  to put it in the category of duties where it belongs, must do the
• 7:54:22
  lion's share under these last two heads of what the law has affected I have
• 7:54:26
  spoken already. The drastic measures adopted in Paris, in Glasgow and in London
• 7:54:33
  are not practicable here on anything like as large a scale. Still it can,
• 7:54:38
  under strong pressure of public opinion, rid us of the worst plague spots.
• 7:54:44
  The Mulberry Street bend will go the way of the Five Points, when
• 7:54:48
  all the red tape that binds the hands of municipal effort has been unwound.
• 7:54:53
  Prizes were offered in public competition some years ago for the best plans of modern
• 7:54:59
  tenement houses. It may be that we shall see the day when the building
• 7:55:03
  of model tenements will be encouraged by subsidies in the way of a rebate of
• 7:55:07
  taxes. Meanwhile, the arrests and summary punishment of landlords or their agents who
• 7:55:14
  persistently violate law and decency will have a salutary effect. If a few of
• 7:55:19
  the wealthy absentee landlords who are the worst offenders, could be got within the
• 7:55:26
  jurisdiction of the city, and by arrest be compelled to employ proper overseers.
• 7:55:32
  It would be a proud day for New York to remedy the overcrowding with which
• 7:55:37
  the night inspections of the Sanitary Police cannot keep step. Tenements may eventually have
• 7:55:41
  to be licensed, as now the lodging houses to hold so many tenants and
• 7:55:47
  no more. Or the state may have to bring down the rents that cause
• 7:55:51
  the crowding by assuming the right to regulate them as it regulates the fares on
• 7:55:56
  the elevated roads. I throw out the suggestion, knowing quite well that it
• 7:56:00
  is open to attack. It emanated originally from one of the brightest minds that
• 7:56:06
  have had to struggle officially with this tenement house question in the last ten years.
• 7:56:11
  In any event, to succeed, reform by law must aim at making
• 7:56:15
  it unprofitable to own a bad tenement. At best, it is apt to
• 7:56:22
  travel at a snail's pace, while the enemy it pursues is putting the best
• 7:56:26
  foot foremost. In this manner of profit, the law ought to have its
• 7:56:30
  strongest ally in the landlord himself, though the reverse is the case. This
• 7:56:36
  condition of things I believe to rest on a monstrous error. It cannot be
• 7:56:41
  that tenement property that is worth preserving at all can continue to yield larger returns
• 7:56:48
  if allowed to run down than if properly cared for and kept in good repair.
• 7:56:52
  The point must be reached and soon, where the costs of repairs necessary
• 7:56:57
  with a house full of the lowest, most ignorant tenants must overbalance the saving
• 7:57:03
  of the first few years of neglect. For this class is everywhere the most
• 7:57:07
  destructive, as well as the poorest paying. I have the experience of owners
• 7:57:12
  who have found this out to their cost to back me up in the assertion.
• 7:57:17
  Even if it were not the statement of a plain business fact that proves
• 7:57:21
  itself. I do not include tenement property that is deliberately allowed to fall into
• 7:57:26
  decay because at some future time the ground will be valuable for business or other
• 7:57:30
  purposes. There is, unfortunately enough of that kind in New York. Often
• 7:57:37
  lease whole property owned by wealthy estates or soulless corporations that oppose all their great
• 7:57:44
  influence to the efforts of the law in behalf of their tenants there is abundant
• 7:57:48
  evidence, on the other hand, that it can be made to pay,
• 7:57:52
  to improve and make the most of the worst tenement property, even in the
• 7:57:56
  most wretched locality. Example set by Miss Allen Collins in her Water Street houses
• 7:58:03
  will always stand as a decisive answer to all doubts on this point. It
• 7:58:08
  is quite ten years since she bought three old tenements at the corner of Water
• 7:58:14
  and Roosevelt Streets, then as now one of the lowest localities in the city.
• 7:58:19
  Since then she has least three more adjoining her purchase, and so much
• 7:58:23
  of Water Street has at all events been purified. Her first effort was to
• 7:58:29
  let in the light in the hallways, and with the darkness disappeared, as
• 7:58:33
  if by magic, the heaps of refuge that used to be piled up beside
• 7:58:37
  the saints. A few of the most refractory tenants disappeared with them, but
• 7:58:44
  a very considerable proportion stayed conforming readily to the new rules, and are there
• 7:58:49
  yet. It should here be stated that Miss Collins's tenants are distinctly of the
• 7:58:55
  poorest. Her purpose was to experiment with this class, and her ferment has
• 7:59:00
  been more than satisfactory. Her plan was as she puts it herself fair play
• 7:59:06
  between tenant and landlord. To this end, the rents were put as low
• 7:59:11
  as consistent with the idea of a business investment that must return a reasonable interest
• 7:59:17
  to be successful. The houses were thoroughly refitted with proper plumbing. A competent
• 7:59:22
  janitor was put in charge to see that the rules were observed by the tenants
• 7:59:27
  when Miss Collins herself was not there. Of late years, she has had
• 7:59:33
  to give very little time to personal superintendents, and the caretaker told me only
• 7:59:37
  the other day that very little was needed. The houses seemed to run themselves
• 7:59:42
  in the groove once laid down. Once the reputed haunt of thieves, they
• 7:59:48
  have become the most orderly in the neighborhood. Clothes are left hanging on the
• 7:59:52
  lines all night with impunity, and the pretty flower beds in the yard,
• 7:59:56
  where the children not only from the six houses, but of the whole block
• 8:00:02
  play, skip and swing, are undisturbed. The tenants, by the way,
• 8:00:07
  provide the flowers themselves in the spring, and take all the more pride
• 8:00:11
  in them because they are their own. The six houses contain forty five families,
• 8:00:17
  and there has never been any need of putting up a bill as to
• 8:00:22
  the income from the property, Miss Collins said to me last August quote,
• 8:00:26
  I have had six and even six and three quarters percent on the capital investment
• 8:00:32
  on the whole. You may safely say five and a half percent. This
• 8:00:36
  I regard as entirely satisfactory. Close quote. It should be added that she
• 8:00:41
  has persistently refused to let the corner store, now occupied by a butcher as
• 8:00:47
  a saloon, or her income from it might have been considerably increased. Miss
• 8:00:52
  Collins's experience is of value, chiefly is showing what can be accomplished with the
• 8:00:57
  worst possible material by the sort of personal interest in the poor that alone will
• 8:01:03
  meet their real needs. All the charity in the world scattered with the most
• 8:01:07
  lavish hand will not take its place. Fair Play between landlord and tenant is
• 8:01:14
  the key, too long, mislaid, that unlocks the door to success.
• 8:01:18
  Everywhere, as it did for Miss Collins, she has not lacked imitators whose
• 8:01:23
  experience has been akin to her own. The case of Gotham Court has already
• 8:01:29
  been cited. On the other hand, instances are not wanting of landlords who
• 8:01:33
  have undertaken the task but have tired of it, or sold their property before
• 8:01:38
  it had been fully redeemed, with the result that it relapsed into its former
• 8:01:44
  bad condition faster than it had improved, and the tenants with it. I
• 8:01:48
  am inclined to think that such houses are liable to fall even below the average
• 8:01:53
  level. Backsliding in brick and mortar does not greatly differ from similar performances in
• 8:02:00
  flesh and blood. Back by a strong and steady sentiment, such as these
• 8:02:04
  pioneers have evinced, that would make it the personal business of wealthy owners with
• 8:02:10
  time to spare to look after their tenants, the law would be able in
• 8:02:14
  a very short time to work a salutary transformation in the worst quarters to the
• 8:02:18
  lasting advantage. I am well persuaded of the landlord no less than the tenant.
• 8:02:25
  Unfortunately, it is in this quality of personal effort that the sentiment of
• 8:02:30
  interest in the poor upon which we have to depend is too often lacking.
• 8:02:36
  People who are willing to give money feel that that ought to be enough.
• 8:02:41
  It is not. The money thus given is too apt to be wasted,
• 8:02:45
  along with the sentiment that prompted the gift. Even when it comes to the
• 8:02:49
  third of the ways I spoke of as effective in dealing with the tenement house
• 8:02:53
  problem the building of model structures, the personal interest in the matter must form
• 8:02:59
  a large share of the capital invested if it is to yield full returns.
• 8:03:04
  Where that is the case, there is even less doubt about its paying with
• 8:03:08
  ordinary business management than in the case of reclaiming the old building, which is
• 8:03:14
  like putting life into a defunct newspaper. Pretty apt to be uphill work.
• 8:03:19
  Model tenement building has not been attempted in New York on anything like as large
• 8:03:25
  a scale as in many other great cities. And it is perhaps owing to
• 8:03:30
  this in a measure, that a belief prevails that it cannot succeed here.
• 8:03:34
  This is the wrong notion entirely. The various undertakings of that sort that have
• 8:03:40
  been made here under intelligent management have, as far as I know, all
• 8:03:45
  been successful. From the managers of the two best known experience in model tenement
• 8:03:49
  building in the city, the Improved Dwellings Association and the Tenement House Building Company,
• 8:03:56
  I have letters dated last August clearing their enterprise is eminently successful. There
• 8:04:03
  is no reason why their experience should not be conclusive that the Philadelphia plan is
• 8:04:08
  not practicable in New York. Is not a good reason why our own plan,
• 8:04:14
  which is precisely the reverse of our neighbours, should not be. In
• 8:04:18
  fact, it is an argument for its success. The very reason why we
• 8:04:22
  cannot house our working masses in cottages, as has been done in Philadelphia viz.
• 8:04:27
  That they must live on Manhattan Island, where the land is too costly
• 8:04:30
  for small houses, is the best guarantee of the success of the model tenement
• 8:04:37
  house properly located and managed. The drift in tenement building, as in everything
• 8:04:42
  else, is toward concentration and helps smooth the way. Four families on the
• 8:04:48
  floor twenty in the house is the rule of today. As the crowds increase,
• 8:04:52
  the need of guiding this drift into safe channels becomes more urgent. The
• 8:04:57
  larger the scale upon which the model tenements planned, the more certain the promise
• 8:05:03
  of success. The utmost ingenuity cannot build a house for sixteen or twenty families
• 8:05:08
  on a lot twenty five by one hundred feet in the middle of a block
• 8:05:12
  like that that shall give them the amount of air and sunlight to be had
• 8:05:17
  by the erection of a dozen or twenty houses on a common plan around a
• 8:05:22
  central yard. This was the view of the committee that awarded the prizes for
• 8:05:26
  the best plan for the conventional tenement ten years ago. It coupled this verdict
• 8:05:32
  with the emphatic declaration that, in its view, it was impossible to secure
• 8:05:37
  the requirements of physical and moral health within these narrow and arbitrary limits. Houses
• 8:05:44
  have been built since on better plans than any the committee saw, but its
• 8:05:48
  judgment stands unimpaired. A point two that is not to be overlooked is the
• 8:05:53
  reduced cost of expert superintendence, the first condition of successful management in the larger
• 8:06:00
  buildings. The Improved Dwellings Association put up its block of thirteen houses in East
• 8:06:07
  seventy second Street nine years ago. Their cost, estimated at about two hundred
• 8:06:12
  and forty thousand dollars with the land, was increased to two hundred and eighty
• 8:06:17
  five thousand by troubles with the contractor engaged to build them. Thus the Association's
• 8:06:22
  task did not begin under the happiest auspices. Unexpected expenses came to deplete its
• 8:06:30
  treasury. The neighborhood was new and not crowded at the start, no expense
• 8:06:36
  was spared, and the benefit of all the best and most recent experienced in
• 8:06:41
  tenement building was given to the tenants. The families were provided with from two
• 8:06:45
  to four rooms, all outer rooms, of course, at rents ranging from
• 8:06:49
  fourteen dollars per month for the four on the ground floor, two six dollars
• 8:06:53
  and twenty five cents for two rooms on the top floor. Coal lifts,
• 8:06:59
  ash shoots, common laundrys in the basement, and free baths are features of
• 8:07:03
  these buildings that were then new enough to be looked upon with suspicion by the
• 8:07:07
  stoubting Thomases who predicted disaster. There are rooms in the block for two hundred
• 8:07:14
  eighteen families, and when I looked in recently, all but nine of the
• 8:07:18
  apartments were let. One of the nine was rented. While I was in
• 8:07:22
  the building, the superintendent told me that he had little troubles with disorderly tenants,
• 8:07:27
  though the buildings shelter all sorts of people. Mister W. Vineyard Cutting,
• 8:07:33
  the president of the Association, writes to me, quote by the terms
• 8:07:37
  of subscription to the stock. Before incorporation, dividends were limited to five percent
• 8:07:42
  on the stock of the Improved Dwellings Association. These dividends had been paid two
• 8:07:48
  percent each six months ever since the expiration of the first six months of the
• 8:07:53
  building's operation, all surplus has been expended upon the buildings. New and expensive
• 8:08:00
  roofs have been put on for the comfort of such tenets as might choose to
• 8:08:04
  use them. The buildings have been completely painted inside and out in a manner
• 8:08:08
  not contemplated at the outset. An expensive set of fire escapes has been put
• 8:08:15
  on at the command of the fire Department, and a considerable number of other
• 8:08:19
  improvements made. I regard the experience as eminently successful and satisfactory, particularly when
• 8:08:26
  it is considered that the buildings were the first erected in this city upon anything
• 8:08:32
  like a large scale, where it was proposed to meet the architectural difficulties that
• 8:08:37
  present themselves in the tenement house problem. I have no doubt that the experiment
• 8:08:42
  could be tried today with the improved knowledge which has come with time, and
• 8:08:48
  a much larger return be shown upon the investment. The results referred to have
• 8:08:52
  been attained in spite of the provision which prevents the selling of liquor upon the
• 8:08:56
  association's premises. You are aware, of course, how much larger rent can
• 8:09:02
  be obtained for a liquor saloon than for an ordinary store, an investment of
• 8:09:07
  five percent net upon real estate security worth more than the principal sum, ought
• 8:09:12
  to be considered desirable. Close quote. The Tenement House building Company made its
• 8:09:18
  experiment in a much more difficult neighborhood, Cherry Street, some six years later.
• 8:09:25
  Its houses shelter many Russian Jews, and the difficulty of keeping them in
• 8:09:30
  order is correspondingly increased, particularly as there are no ass shoots in the houses.
• 8:09:37
  It has been necessary even to shut the children out of the yards upon
• 8:09:41
  which the kitchen windows give, lest they be struck by something thrown out by
• 8:09:45
  the tenants and killed. It is the Cherry Street style not easily got rid
• 8:09:49
  of. Nevertheless, the houses are well kept. Of the one hundred and
• 8:09:56
  six apartments, only four were vacant. In August, Professor Edwin R.
• 8:10:00
  A. Sliegmann, the secretary of the company, writes to me the tenements
• 8:10:04
  are now a decided success close quote. In the three years since they were
• 8:10:10
  built, they have returned in interest from five to five one half percent on
• 8:10:15
  the capitol invested. The original intention of making the tenants profit sharers on a
• 8:10:21
  plan of rent insurance, under which all earnings above four percent would be put
• 8:10:25
  to the credit of the tenants has not yet been carried out. A scheme
• 8:10:30
  of dividends to tenants on a somewhat similar plan has been carried out by a
• 8:10:36
  Brooklyn builder, mister A. T. White, who has devoted a life
• 8:10:40
  of beneficent activity to tenement building, and whose experience, though it has been
• 8:10:45
  altogether across the East River, I regard as justly applying to New York as
• 8:10:52
  well. He so regards it himself. Discussing the cost of building, he
• 8:10:56
  says, there is not the slightest reason to doubt that the financial result of
• 8:11:00
  a similar undertaking in any tenement house district of the New York City would be
• 8:11:06
  equally good. High cost of land is no detriment, provided the value is
• 8:11:11
  made by the pressure of people seeking residence there. Rents in New York City
• 8:11:15
  bear a higher ratio to Brooklyn rents than would the cost of land and building
• 8:11:21
  in the one city to that in the other close quote. The assertion that
• 8:11:26
  Brooklyn furnishes a better class of tenants than the tenement districts in New York would
• 8:11:30
  not be worth discussing seriously, even if mister White did not meet it himself
• 8:11:37
  with the statement that the proportion of day laborers and sewing women in his houses
• 8:11:41
  is greater than in any of the London model tenements, showing that they reach
• 8:11:47
  the humblest classes. Mister White has built homes for five hundred poor families since
• 8:11:52
  he began his work, and has made it pay well enough to allow good
• 8:11:56
  tenants a share in the profits every nearly one month's rent out of the twelve
• 8:12:02
  as a premium upon promptness and order. The plan of his last tenements,
• 8:12:07
  reproduced on page two ninety two, may be justly regarded as the bow eye
• 8:12:12
  deeal of a model tenement for a great city like New York. It embodies
• 8:12:18
  all the good features of Sir Sidney Waterlow's London Plan, with improvements suggested by
• 8:12:22
  the builder's own experience. Its chief merit is that it gathers three hundred real
• 8:12:30
  homes, not simply three hundred families, under one roof three tenants. It
• 8:12:36
  will be seen use each entrance hall. Of the rest of the three hundred
• 8:12:40
  they may never know, rarely see one. Each has his private front door.
• 8:12:45
  The common hall, with all that it stands for, has disappeared.
• 8:12:49
  The fireproof stairs are outside the house, a perfect fire escape. Each tenant
• 8:12:55
  has his own scullery and ash flu. There are no air shafts for the
• 8:13:00
  they are not needed. Every room under the admirable arrangement of the plan looks
• 8:13:04
  out either upon the street or the yard that is nothing less than a great
• 8:13:08
  park with a playground set apart for the children, where they may dig in
• 8:13:12
  the sand to their hearts content. Weekly concerts are given in the park by
• 8:13:18
  a brass band. The drying of clothes is done on the roof, where
• 8:13:22
  racks are fitted for the purpose. The outside stairways end in terrens that give
• 8:13:27
  the buildings a very smart appearance. Mister White never has any trouble with his
• 8:13:33
  sentence, though he gathers in the poorest, Nor do his tenements have anything
• 8:13:37
  of the institution character that occasionally attaches to the ventures of this sort. To
• 8:13:44
  their damage, they are like a big village of contented people who live in
• 8:13:48
  peace with one another because they have elbow room even under one big roof.
• 8:13:55
  Enough has been said to show that model tenements can be built successfully and made
• 8:14:00
  to pay in New York if the owner will be content with the five or
• 8:14:04
  six percent he does not even dream of when investing his funds in governments at
• 8:14:10
  three or four. It is true that in the latter case he has only
• 8:14:14
  to cut off his coupons and cash them. But the extra trouble of looking
• 8:14:18
  after his tenement properly, that is the condition of highest and lasting success,
• 8:14:22
  is the penalty extracted for the sins of our fathers that shall be visited upon
• 8:14:27
  the children unto the third and fourth generation. We shall indeed be well off.
• 8:14:33
  If it stops there. I fear there is too much reason to believe
• 8:14:37
  that our own iniquities must be added to transmit the curse still further. And
• 8:14:42
  yet such is the leavening influence of a good deed in that dreary desert of
• 8:14:48
  sin and suffering, that the erection of a single good tenement has the power
• 8:14:52
  to change gradually, but surely the character of a whole bad block. It
• 8:14:57
  sets up a standard to which the neighborhood bus rise if it cannot succeed in
• 8:15:03
  dragging it down to its own low level. And so this task too has
• 8:15:08
  come to an end. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he ohso reap.
• 8:15:14
  I have aimed to tell the truth as I saw it. If this book
• 8:15:18
  shall have borne ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest of justice,
• 8:15:22
  it has served its purpose. While I was writing these lines, I went
• 8:15:27
  down to the sea, where thousands from the city were enjoying their summer rest.
• 8:15:33
  The ocean slumbered under a cloudless sky. Gentle waves washed lazily over the
• 8:15:38
  white sand, where children fled before them with screams of laughter. Standing there
• 8:15:45
  and watching their play, I was told that during the fierce storms of winter,
• 8:15:49
  it happened that this sea, now so calm, rose and rage and
• 8:15:55
  beat down, broke over the bluff, sweeping all before it. No barrier
• 8:16:00
  built by human hands had power to stay it. Then, the sea of
• 8:16:03
  a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements once
• 8:16:11
  already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness.
• 8:16:17
  Before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell
• 8:16:21
  of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may
• 8:16:26
  avail to check it. The gap between the classes in which its surges,
• 8:16:30
  unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is widening every day. No tardy enactment
• 8:16:37
  of law, no political expedient, can close it. Against all other dangers,
• 8:16:42
  our system of government may offer defense and shelter against this knot. I
• 8:16:48
  know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded
• 8:16:52
  upon justice and built of human hearts. I believe that the danger of such
• 8:16:57
  conditions as are fasts growing up around us, is greater for the very freedom
• 8:17:03
  which they mock. The words of the poet with whose lines I prefaced this
• 8:17:07
  book are truer today have far greater meaning to us than when they were pinned
• 8:17:15
  forty years ago. Think ye that buildings shall endure which shelters the noble and
• 8:17:22
  crushes the poor. Into Section twenty seven Appendix statistics bearing on the tenement problem.
• 8:17:32
  Statistics of population were left out of the text in the hope that the
• 8:17:36
  results of this year's census would be available as a basis for calculation before the
• 8:17:41
  book went to press. They are now at hand, but their correctness is
• 8:17:45
  disputed. The statisticians of the Health Department claim that New York's population has been
• 8:17:51
  underestimated one hundred thousand at least, and they appear to have the best of
• 8:17:56
  the argument. A recount is called for, and the printer will not wait.
• 8:18:00
  Such statistics as follow have been based on the Health Department estimates, except
• 8:18:06
  where the census source is given. The extent of the quarrel of official figures
• 8:18:11
  may be judged from this one fact that the ordinarily conservative and careful calculations of
• 8:18:17
  the Sanitary Bureau make the death rate of New York in eighteen eighty nine twenty
• 8:18:22
  five point one nine for the thousand of a population of one million, five
• 8:18:26
  hundred seventy five thousand, seventy three, while the census would make it twenty
• 8:18:32
  six point seven six in a population of one million, four hundred eighty two
• 8:18:36
  thousand, two hundred seventy three. Population of New York eighteen eighty census,
• 8:18:42
  one million, two hundred six thousand, two hundred ninety nine, population of
• 8:18:48
  London eighteen eighty one, Census, three million, eight hundred sixteen thousand,
• 8:18:55
  four hundred eighty three. Population of Philadelphia eighteen eighty six, Census, eight
• 8:19:00
  hundred forty six thousand, nine hundred eighty population of Brooklyn eighteen eighty census,
• 8:19:08
  five hundred sixty six thousand, six hundred eighty nine. Population of Boston eighteen
• 8:19:15
  eighty census three hundred sixty two thousand, five hundred thirty five population of New
• 8:19:22
  York eighteen eighty nine estimated one million, five hundred seventy five thousand, seventy
• 8:19:27
  three. Population of London eighteen eighty nine estimated four million, three hundred fifty
• 8:19:34
  one thousand, seven hundred thirty eight. Population of Philadelphia eighteen eighty nine estimated
• 8:19:42
  one million, forty thousand, two hundred forty five. Population of Brooklyn eighteen
• 8:19:48
  eighty nine estimated eight hundred fourteen thousand, five hundred five population of Boston eighteen
• 8:19:56
  eighty nine. Estimated four hundred twenty thousand. Population of New York under five
• 8:20:03
  years of age in eighteen eighty one hundred forty thousand, three hundred twenty seven.
• 8:20:08
  Population of New York under five years of age in eighteen eighty nine estimated
• 8:20:15
  one hundred eighty two thousand, seven hundred seventy. Population of tenements in New
• 8:20:19
  York in eighteen sixty nine Census four hundred sixty eight thousand, four hundred ninety
• 8:20:26
  two footnote in eighteen sixty nine, a tenement was a house occupied by four
• 8:20:32
  families or more and footnote. Population of tenements in New York in eighteen eighty
• 8:20:37
  eight Census one million, ninety three thousand, seven hundred one footnote in eighteen
• 8:20:45
  eighty eight. A tenement was a house occupied by three families or more and
• 8:20:48
  footnote. Population of tenements in New York in eighteen eighty eight under five years
• 8:20:55
  of age one hundred forty three thousand, two hundred forty three population of New
• 8:21:00
  York in eighteen eighty census. One million, two hundred six thousand, two
• 8:21:06
  hundred ninety nine population of Manhattan Island in eighteen eighty census. One million,
• 8:21:12
  one hundred sixty four thousand, six hundred seventy three population of tenth Ward in
• 8:21:18
  eighteen eighty census. Forty seven thousand, five hundred fifty four population of eleventh
• 8:21:26
  Ward in eighteen eighty census, sixty eight thousand, seven hundred seventy eight population
• 8:21:33
  of thirteenth Ward in eighteen eighty census, thirty seven thousand, seven hundred ninety
• 8:21:38
  seven population of New York in eighteen ninety census. One million, five hundred
• 8:21:45
  thirteen thousand, five hundred one population of Manhattan Island in eighteen ninety census.
• 8:21:52
  One million, four hundred forty thousand, one hundred one population of tenth Ward
• 8:21:57
  in eighteen ninety censis fifty seven thousand, five hundred fourteen. Population of eleventh
• 8:22:04
  Ward in eighteen ninety census seventy five thousand, seven hundred eight. Population of
• 8:22:11
  thirteenth Ward in eighteen ninety census forty five thousand, eight hundred eighty two.
• 8:22:18
  Number of acres in New York City twenty four thousand, eight hundred ninety.
• 8:22:22
  Number of acres in Manhattan Island twelve thousand, six hundred seventy three. Number
• 8:22:29
  of acres in tenth Ward one hundred ten. Number of acres in eleventh Ward
• 8:22:33
  one hundred ninety six. Number of acres in thirteenth Ward one hundred seven.
• 8:22:41
  Density of population per acre in eighteen eighty New York City forty eight point four.
• 8:22:47
  Density of population per acre in eighteen eighty Manhattan Island ninety two point six.
• 8:22:53
  Density of population per acre in eighteen eighty tenth Ward four hundred thirty two
• 8:22:59
  point three. Density of population per acre in eighteen eighty Eleventh Ward three hundred
• 8:23:04
  fifty point nine. Density of population per acre in eighteen eighty thirteen Ward three
• 8:23:11
  hundred fifty three point two. Density of population per acre in eighteen ninety New
• 8:23:18
  York City Census sixty point oh eight. Density of population per acre in eighteen
• 8:23:23
  ninety Manhattan Island Census one hundred fourteen point fifty three. Density of population per
• 8:23:32
  acre in eighteen ninety tenth Ward Census five hundred twenty two point zero zero.
• 8:23:37
  Density of population per acre in eighteen ninety eleventh Ward Census three hundred eighty six
• 8:23:45
  point zero zero. Density of population per acre in eighteen ninety thirteenth Ward Census
• 8:23:52
  four hundred twenty eight point eight. Density of population to the square mile in
• 8:23:57
  eighteen eighty New York City Census thirty thousand, nine hundred seventy six. Density
• 8:24:04
  of population to the square mile in eighteen eighty Manhattan Island Census forty one thousand,
• 8:24:11
  two hundred sixty four. Density of population to the square mile in eighteen
• 8:24:15
  eighty tenth Ward Census two hundred seventy six thousand, six hundred seventy two.
• 8:24:22
  Density of population to the square mile in eighteen eighty eleventh Ward Census two hundred
• 8:24:27
  twenty four thousand, five hundred seventy six. Density of population to the square
• 8:24:33
  mile in eighteen eighty thirteenth Ward Census two hundred twenty six thousand, forty eight
• 8:24:41
  Density of population to the square mile in eighteen ninety New York City Census thirty
• 8:24:45
  eight thousand, four hundred fifty one. Density of population to the square mile
• 8:24:52
  in eighteen ninety Manhattan Island Census seventy three thousand, two hundred ninety nine.
• 8:24:57
  Density of population the square mile in eighteen ninety tenth Ward Census three hundred thirty
• 8:25:03
  four thousand eighty. Density of population to the square mile in eighteen ninety eleventh
• 8:25:11
  Ward Census two hundred forty six thousand, forty. Density of population to the
• 8:25:17
  square mile in eighteen ninety thirteenth Ward Census two hundred seventy four thousand, four
• 8:25:22
  hundred thirty two. Number of persons to a dwelling in New York eighteen eighty
• 8:25:27
  census sixteen point thirty seven. Number of persons to a dwelling in London eighteen
• 8:25:34
  eighty one census, seventeen point nine. Number of persons to a dwelling in
• 8:25:40
  Philadelphia eighteen eighty census, five point seventy nine. Number of persons to a
• 8:25:45
  dwelling in Brooklyn eighteen eighty census nine point one one. Number of persons to
• 8:25:52
  a dwelling in Boston eighteen eighty census eight point two six number of deaths in
• 8:25:59
  New York eighteen thirty one thousand, nine hundred thirty seven. Number of deaths
• 8:26:03
  in London eighteen eighty one eighty one thousand, four hundred thirty one. Number
• 8:26:10
  of deaths in Philadelphia eighteen eighty seventeen thousand, seven hundred eleven. Number of
• 8:26:15
  deaths in Brooklyn eighteen eighty thirteen thousand, two hundred twenty two. Number of
• 8:26:22
  deaths in Boston eighteen eighty eight thousand, six hundred twelve. Death rate of
• 8:26:26
  New York eighteen eighty twenty six point forty seven, death rate of London eighteen
• 8:26:33
  eighty one twenty one point three, death rate of Philadelphia eighteen eighty twenty point
• 8:26:38
  ninety one, death rate of Brooklyn eighteen eighty twenty three point thirty three.
• 8:26:45
  Death rate of Boston eighteen eighty twenty three point seventy five. Number of deaths
• 8:26:51
  in New York eighteen eighty nine thirty nine thousand, six hundred seventy nine.
• 8:26:56
  Number of deaths in London eighteen eighty nine seventy five thousand, six hundred eighty
• 8:27:00
  three. Number of deaths in Philadelphia eighteen eighty nine twenty thousand, five hundred
• 8:27:07
  thirty six. Number of deaths in Brooklyn eighteen eighty nine, eighteen thousand,
• 8:27:11
  two hundred eighty eight. Number of deaths in Boston eighteen eighty nine, ten
• 8:27:17
  thousand, two hundred fifty nine. Death rate of New York eighteen eighty nine,
• 8:27:22
  twenty five point nineteen, death rate of London eighteen eighty nine, seventeen
• 8:27:26
  point four, death rate of Philadelphia eighteen eighty nine, nineteen point seven,
• 8:27:33
  death rate of Brooklyn eighteen eighty nine, twenty two point five, death rate
• 8:27:37
  of Boston eighteen eighty nine, twenty four point forty two. For every person
• 8:27:45
  who dies, there are always two disabled by illness, so that there was
• 8:27:48
  a regular average of seventy nine thousand, three hundred fifty eight New Yorkers on
• 8:27:52
  the sick list at any moment last year. It is usual to count twenty
• 8:27:57
  eight cases of sickness the year round for every death, and this would give
• 8:28:02
  a total for the year eighteen eighty nine of one million, one hundred eleven
• 8:28:06
  thousand, eighty two of illness of all sorts. Number of deaths and tenements
• 8:28:11
  in New York eighteen sixty nine thirteen thousand, two hundred eighty five number of
• 8:28:18
  deaths and tenements in New York eighteen eighty eight twenty four thousand, eight hundred
• 8:28:22
  forty two. Death rate in tenements in New York eighteen sixty nine twenty eight
• 8:28:27
  point thirty five. Death rate in tenements in New York eighteen eighty eight,
• 8:28:33
  twenty two point seventy one. This is exclusive of deaths in institutions properly referable
• 8:28:41
  to the tenements. In most cases, the adult death rate is found to
• 8:28:45
  decrease. In the larger tenements of newer construction, the child mortality increases,
• 8:28:51
  reaching one hundred fourteen point zero four percent of one thousand living in houses containing
• 8:28:56
  between sixty and eighty tenants from das in this point, it decreases with the
• 8:29:00
  adult death rate. Number of deaths and prisons New York eighteen eighty nine eighty
• 8:29:07
  five. Number of deaths and hospitals New York, eighteen eighty nine, six
• 8:29:12
  thousand, one hundred two. Number of deaths and lunatic asylums New York,
• 8:29:18
  eighteen eighty nine, four hundred forty eight. Number of deaths in institutions for
• 8:29:23
  children, New York, eighteen eighty nine, five hundred twenty two. Number
• 8:29:29
  of deaths and homes for aged New York, eighteen eighty nine, two hundred
• 8:29:33
  thirty eight. Number of deaths in Elmshouse, New York, eighteen eighty nine,
• 8:29:38
  four hundred twenty four. Number of deaths and other institutions, New York,
• 8:29:45
  eighteen eighty nine, one sixty two. Number of burials in city cemetery
• 8:29:51
  paupers New York eighteen eighty nine three thousand, eight hundred fifteen percentage of such
• 8:29:57
  burials on total nine nine point sixty four. Number of tenants weeded out of
• 8:30:03
  overcrowded tenements, New York, eighteen eighty nine, one thousand, two hundred
• 8:30:07
  forty six. Number of tenants weeded out of overcrowded tenements in first half of
• 8:30:14
  eighteen ninety one thousand, sixty eight. Footnote. These figures represent less than
• 8:30:19
  two hundred of the worst tenements below Houston Street and footnote. Number of six
• 8:30:26
  poor visited by Summer Corps of Doctors, New York, eighteen ninety sixteen thousand,
• 8:30:32
  five hundred one. Police statistics. Arrests made by the police in eighteen
• 8:30:38
  eighty nine males sixty two thousand, two hundred seventy four females nineteen thousand,
• 8:30:45
  nine hundred twenty six. Number of arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct males twenty
• 8:30:52
  thousand, two hundred fifty three females, eight thousand, nine hundred eighty one.
• 8:30:57
  Number of arrests for disorderly conduct males ten thousand, nine hundred fifty three
• 8:31:04
  females seven thousand, four hundred seventy seven. Number of arrests for assault and
• 8:31:11
  battery males four thousand, five hundred thirty four females, four hundred ninety seven.
• 8:31:19
  Number of arrests for theft males four thousand, three hundred ninety nine females,
• 8:31:26
  seven hundred twenty one. Number of arrests for robbery males two hundred forty
• 8:31:33
  seven females ten number of arrests for vagrancy males one thousand, six hundred eighty
• 8:31:41
  six females, nine hundred forty seven. Prisoners unable to read or write males
• 8:31:48
  two thousand, three hundred ninety nine females one thousand, two hundred eighty one.
• 8:31:55
  Number of lost children found in the streets eighteen eighty nine two thousand,
• 8:32:00
  nine hundred sixty eight. Number of sick and destitute cared for eighteen eighty nine
• 8:32:07
  two thousand, seven hundred fifty three found sick in the streets one thousand,
• 8:32:13
  two hundred eleven. Number of pawnshops in city eighteen eighty nine, one hundred
• 8:32:17
  ten number of cheap lodging houses eighteen eighty nine two hundred seventy number of saloons
• 8:32:27
  eighteen eighty nine, seven thousand, eight hundred eighty four Immigration immigrants landed at
• 8:32:35
  Castle Garden in twenty years, ending with eighteen eighty nine five million, three
• 8:32:39
  hundred thirty five thousand, three hundred ninety six immigrants landed at Castle Garden in
• 8:32:45
  eighteen eighty nine. Three hundred forty nine thousand, two hundred thirty three immigrants
• 8:32:52
  from England landed at Castle Garden in eighteen eighty nine. Forty six thousand,
• 8:32:57
  two hundred fourteen immigrants from Scotland landed at Castle Garden in eighteen eighty nine.
• 8:33:04
  Eleven thousand, four hundred fifteen immigrants from Ireland landed at Castle Garden in eighteen
• 8:33:09
  eighty nine. Forty three thousand, ninety immigrants from Germany landed at Castle Garden
• 8:33:15
  in eighteen eighty nine. Seventy five thousand, four hundred fifty eight Italy eighteen
• 8:33:22
  eighty three, twenty five thousand, four hundred eighty five, eighteen eighty four,
• 8:33:28
  fourteen thousand, seventy six, eighteen eighty five, sixteen thousand, thirty
• 8:33:32
  three, eighteen eighty six, twenty nine thousand, three hundred twelve, eighteen
• 8:33:37
  eighty seven, forty four thousand, two hundred seventy four, eighteen eighty eight,
• 8:33:43
  forty three thousand, nine hundred twenty seven, eighteen eighty nine, twenty
• 8:33:46
  eight thousand, eight hundred ten Russia Poland eighteen eighty three, seven thousand,
• 8:33:53
  five hundred seventy seven, eighteen eighty four, twelve thousand, four hundred thirty
• 8:33:58
  two, eighteen eighty five, sixteen thousand, five hundred seventy eight, eighteen
• 8:34:04
  eighty six, twenty three thousand, nine hundred eighty seven, eighteen eighty seven,
• 8:34:08
  thirty three thousand, two hundred three, eighteen eighty eight, thirty three
• 8:34:14
  thousand, fifty two, eighteen eighty nine, thirty one thousand, three hundred
• 8:34:19
  twenty nine. Hungary eighteen eighty three, thirteen thousand, one hundred sixty eighteen
• 8:34:25
  eighty four, fifteen thousand, seven hundred ninety seven, eighteen eighty five,
• 8:34:31
  eleven thousand, one hundred twenty nine, eighteen eighty six, eighteen thousand,
• 8:34:37
  one hundred thirty five, eighteen eighty seven, seventeen thousand, seven hundred nineteen,
• 8:34:44
  eighteen eighty eight, twelve thousand, nine hundred five, eighteen eighty nine,
• 8:34:49
  fifteen thousand, six hundred seventy eight, Bohemia eighteen eighty three, four
• 8:34:55
  thousand, eight hundred seventy seven, eighteen eighty four, seven ninety three,
• 8:35:00
  eighteen eighty five, six thousand, six hundred ninety seven, eighteen eighty six,
• 8:35:07
  four thousand, two hundred twenty two, eighteen eighty seven, six thousand,
• 8:35:12
  four hundred forty nine, eighteen eighty eight, three thousand, nine hundred
• 8:35:15
  eighty two, eighteen eighty nine, five thousand, four hundred twelve tenements.
• 8:35:23
  Number of tenements in New York December first, eighteen eighty eight thirty two thousand,
• 8:35:29
  three hundred ninety number built from June first, eighteen eighty eight to August
• 8:35:35
  first, eighteen ninety three thousand, seven hundred thirty three rear tenements in existence
• 8:35:40
  August first, eighteen ninety two thousand, six hundred thirty Total number of tenements
• 8:35:47
  August first, eighteen ninety thirty seven thousand, three hundred sixteen. Estimated population
• 8:35:53
  of tenements August first, eighteen ninety one million, two hundred fifty thousand.
• 8:36:00
  Estimated number of children under five years in tenements eighteen ninety one hundred sixty three
• 8:36:06
  thousand, seven hundred twelve. Corner tenements may cover all of the lot except
• 8:36:12
  four feet at the rear. Tenements in the block may only cover seventy eight
• 8:36:16
  percent of the lot. They must have a rear yard ten feet wide and
• 8:36:22
  air shafts or open courts equal to twelve percent of the lot. Tenements or
• 8:36:27
  apartment houses must not be built over seventy feet high in streets sixty feet wide.
• 8:36:32
  Tenements or apartment houses must not be built over eighty feet high in streets
• 8:36:37
  wider than sixty feet End of Section twenty eight. End of How the Other
• 8:36:44
  Half Lives by Jacob Riese