How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
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Title: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Author: Jacob A. Riis
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES: STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS OF NEW YORK ***
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES
[Illustration: GOTHAM COURT.]
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES
_STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS
OF NEW YORK_
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS CHIEFLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1890
COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW'S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.
PREFACE.
The belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to
the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may
be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest
work, made me begin this book. With the result before him, the reader
can judge for himself now whether or not I was right. Right or wrong,
the many and exacting duties of a newspaper man's life would hardly
have allowed me to bring it to an end but for frequent friendly lifts
given me by willing hands. To the President of the Board of Health, Mr.
Charles G. Wilson, and to Chief Inspector Byrnes of the Police Force I
am indebted for much kindness. The patient friendship of Dr. Roger S.
Tracy, the Registrar of Vital Statistics, has done for me what I never
could have done for myself; for I know nothing of tables, statistics
and percentages, while there is nothing about them that he does not
know. Most of all, I owe in this, as in all things else, to the womanly
sympathy and the loving companionship of my dear wife, ever my chief
helper, my wisest counsellor, and my gentlest critic.
J. A. R.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION, 1
CHAPTER I.
GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT, 7
CHAPTER II.
THE AWAKENING, 15
CHAPTER III.
THE MIXED CROWD, 21
CHAPTER IV.
THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS, 28
CHAPTER V.
THE ITALIAN IN NEW YORK, 48
CHAPTER VI.
THE BEND, 55
CHAPTER VII.
A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES, 71
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES, 82
CHAPTER IX.
CHINATOWN, 92
CHAPTER X.
JEWTOWN, 104
CHAPTER XI.
THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN, 120
CHAPTER XII.
THE BOHEMIANS--TENEMENT-HOUSE CIGARMAKING, 136
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK, 148
CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMMON HERD, 159
CHAPTER XV.
THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN, 179
CHAPTER XVI.
WAIFS OF THE CITY'S SLUMS, 187
CHAPTER XVII.
THE STREET ARAB, 196
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE REIGN OF RUM, 210
CHAPTER XIX.
THE HARVEST OF TARES, 217
CHAPTER XX.
THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK, 234
CHAPTER XXI.
PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS, 243
CHAPTER XXII.
THE WRECKS AND THE WASTE, 255
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE, 263
CHAPTER XXIV.
WHAT HAS BEEN DONE, 268
CHAPTER XXV.
HOW THE CASE STANDS, 282
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
GOTHAM COURT, _Frontispiece_
PAGE
HELL'S KITCHEN AND SEBASTOPOL, 6
TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH
FLAT, 12
TENEMENT OF THE OLD STYLE. BIRTH OF THE
AIR-SHAFT, 18
AT THE CRADLE OF THE TENEMENT.--DOORWAY OF AN
OLD-FASHIONED DWELLING ON CHERRY HILL, 30
UPSTAIRS IN BLINDMAN'S ALLEY, 34
AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET, 45
IN THE HOME OF AN ITALIAN RAG-PICKER, JERSEY
STREET, 51
THE BEND, 59
BANDITS' ROOST, 63
BOTTLE ALLEY, 66
LODGERS IN A CROWDED BAYARD STREET TENEMENT--"FIVE
CENTS A SPOT," 69
AN ALL-NIGHT TWO-CENT RESTAURANT, IN "THE BEND," 75
THE TRAMP, 79
BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET, 87
IN A CHINESE JOINT, 98
"THE OFFICIAL ORGAN OF CHINATOWN," 100
A TRAMP'S NEST IN LUDLOW STREET, 106
A MARKET SCENE IN THE JEWISH QUARTER, 111
THE OLD CLO'E'S MAN--IN THE JEWISH QUARTERS, 117
"KNEE-PANTS" AT FORTY-FIVE CENTS A DOZEN--A
LUDLOW STREET SWEATER'S SHOP, 127
BOHEMIAN CIGARMAKERS AT WORK IN THEIR TENEMENT, 143
A BLACK-AND-TAN DIVE IN "AFRICA," 157
THE OPEN DOOR, 160
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF AN EAST SIDE TENEMENT BLOCK, 163
THE WHITE BADGE OF MOURNING, 166
IN POVERTY GAP, WEST TWENTY-EIGHTH STREET.
AN ENGLISH COAL-HEAVER'S HOME, 169
DISPOSSESSED, 176
THE TRENCH IN THE POTTER'S FIELD, 178
PRAYER-TIME IN THE NURSERY--FIVE POINTS HOUSE
OF INDUSTRY, 195
"DIDN'T LIVE NOWHERE," 200
STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING QUARTERS, 202
GETTING READY FOR SUPPER IN THE NEWSBOYS'
LODGING-HOUSE, 205
A DOWNTOWN "MORGUE," 214
A GROWLER GANG IN SESSION, 223
TYPICAL TOUGHS (FROM THE ROGUES' GALLERY), 228
HUNTING RIVER THIEVES, 231
SEWING AND STARVING IN AN ELIZABETH STREET ATTIC, 238
A FLAT IN THE PAUPER BARRACKS, WEST THIRTY-EIGHTH
STREET, WITH ALL ITS FURNITURE, 245
COFFEE AT ONE CENT, 252
EVOLUTION OF THE TENEMENT IN TWENTY YEARS, 269
GENERAL PLAN OF THE RIVERSIDE BUILDINGS
(A. T. WHITE'S) IN BROOKLYN, 292
FLOOR PLAN OF ONE DIVISION IN THE RIVERSIDE
BUILDINGS, SHOWING SIX "APARTMENTS," 293
"With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold;
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven these eighteen hundred years."
"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, through all our land."
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.
These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
"The _images_ ye have made of me!"
--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES.
_INTRODUCTION._
Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the
other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did
not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles,
and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was
able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when
the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent
upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and
then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information
on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world
has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.
In New York, the youngest of the world's great cities, that time came
later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great. There
were those who believed that it would never come; but their hopes were
vain. Greed and reckless selfishness wrought like results here as in
the cities of older lands. "When the great riot occurred in 1863," so
reads the testimony of the Secretary of the Prison Association of New
York before a legislative committee appointed to investigate causes
of the increase of crime in the State twenty-five years ago, "every
hiding-place and nursery of crime discovered itself by immediate and
active participation in the operations of the mob. Those very places
and domiciles, and all that are like them, are to-day nurseries of
crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.
By far the largest part--eighty per cent. at least--of crimes against
property and against the person are perpetrated by individuals who
have either lost connection with home life, or never had any, or whose
_homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to
afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and
family_.... The younger criminals seem to come almost exclusively from
the worst tenement house districts, that is, when traced back to the
very places where they had their homes in the city here." Of one thing
New York made sure at that early stage of the inquiry: the boundary
line of the Other Half lies through the tenements.
It is ten years and over, now, since that line divided New York's
population evenly. To-day three-fourths of its people live in the
tenements, and the nineteenth century drift of the population to the
cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. The fifteen
thousand tenant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the
past generation have swelled into thirty-seven thousand, and more than
twelve hundred thousand persons call them home. The one way out he
saw--rapid transit to the suburbs--has brought no relief. We know now
that there is no way out; that the "system" that was the evil offspring
of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre
forever of our civilization. Nothing is left but to make the best of a
bad bargain.
What the tenements are and how they grow to what they are, we shall
see hereafter. The story is dark enough, drawn from the plain public
records, to send a chill to any heart. If it shall appear that the
sufferings and the sins of the "other half," and the evil they
breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it
no other choice, it will be because that is the truth. The boundary
line lies there because, while the forces for good on one side vastly
outweigh the bad--it were not well otherwise--in the tenements all
the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the
epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of
pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw
off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and
workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a
round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain
a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies;
because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral
contagion. This is their worst crime, inseparable from the system. That
we have to own it the child of our own wrong does not excuse it, even
though it gives it claim upon our utmost patience and tenderest charity.
What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day. It was
asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political
cutthroats, the legitimate outgrowth of life on the tenement-house
level.[1] Law and order found the answer then and prevailed. With our
enormously swelling population held in this galling bondage, will that
answer always be given? It will depend on how fully the situation that
prompted the challenge is grasped. Forty per cent. of the distress
among the poor, said a recent official report, is due to drunkenness.
But the first legislative committee ever appointed to probe this sore
went deeper down and uncovered its roots. The "conclusion forced
itself upon it that certain conditions and associations of human life
and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and
morals," and it recommended "the prevention of drunkenness by providing
for every man a clean and comfortable home." Years after, a sanitary
inquiry brought to light the fact that "more than one-half of the
tenements with two-thirds of their population were held by owners
who made the keeping of them a business, _generally a speculation_.
The owner was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that
percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent., and frequently
exceeded thirty.[2]... The complaint was universal among the tenants
that they were entirely uncared for, and that the only answer to their
requests to have the place put in order by repairs and necessary
improvements was that they must pay their rent or leave. The agent's
instructions were simple but emphatic: 'Collect the rent in advance,
or, failing, eject the occupants.'" Upon such a stock grew this
upas-tree. Small wonder the fruit is bitter. The remedy that shall be
an effective answer to the coming appeal for justice must proceed from
the public conscience. Neither legislation nor charity can cover the
ground. The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it,
as far as it can now be undone. Homes must be built for the working
masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be
"good property" in the old, heartless sense. "Philanthropy and five per
cent." is the penance exacted.
[Footnote 1: Tweed was born and bred in a Fourth Ward tenement.]
[Footnote 2: Forty per cent. was declared by witnesses before a Senate
Committee to be a fair average interest on tenement property. Instances
were given of its being one hundred per cent. and over.]
If this is true from a purely economic point of view, what then of the
outlook from the Christian standpoint? Not long ago a great meeting was
held in this city, of all denominations of religious faith, to discuss
the question how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements
with Christian influences, to which they are now too often strangers.
Might not the conference have found in the warning of one Brooklyn
builder, who has invested his capital on this plan and made it pay more
than a money interest, a hint worth heeding: "How shall the love of
God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the
greed of man?"
[Illustration: HELL'S KITCHEN AND SEBASTOPOL.]
CHAPTER I.
GENESIS OF THE TENEMENT.
The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth,
though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered. It was
the "rear house," infamous ever after in our city's history. There had
been tenant-houses before, but they were not built for the purpose.
Nothing would probably have shocked their original owners more than the
idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd; for they were the decorous
homes of the old Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy of Manhattan in
the early days.
It was the stir and bustle of trade, together with the tremendous
immigration that followed upon the war of 1812 that dislodged them.
In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to
harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to be found. Within the
memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his
house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached. Now
the old residents followed his example; but they moved in a different
direction and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings in
the once fashionable streets along the East River front fell into the
hands of real-estate agents and boarding-house keepers; and here,
says the report to the Legislature of 1857, when the evils engendered
had excited just alarm, "in its beginning, the tenant-house became a
real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings
limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops, stores,
or about the warehouses and thoroughfares, render a near residence
of much importance." Not for long, however. As business increased,
and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor
became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors, and the stamp
was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best
thought and effort of a later age has vainly struggled to efface.
Their "_large_ rooms were partitioned into _several smaller ones_,
without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower
in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became
filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from
hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and
squalid as beggary itself." It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of
untold depravities, came into the world. It was destined to survive
the old houses. In their new rôle, says the old report, eloquent in
its indignant denunciation of "evils more destructive than wars,"
"they were not intended to last. Rents were fixed high enough to cover
damage and abuse from this class, from whom nothing was expected,
and the most was made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order,
cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house
system, as it spread its localities from year to year; while reckless
slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work
out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the
level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not,
the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted
roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars." Yet so illogical
is human greed that, at a later day, when called to account, "the
proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an
excuse for the condition of their property, utterly losing sight of the
fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil,
and that for this they themselves were alone responsible."
Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in the old garden
where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages a
rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first.
Presently it was carried up another story, and another. Where two
families had lived ten moved in. The front house followed suit, if the
brick walls were strong enough. The question was not always asked,
judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness, that the old
buildings were "often carried up to a great height without regard to
the strength of the foundation walls." It was rent the owner was after;
nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort
of the tenants. The garden gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges.
The shell-paved walk had become an alley; what the rear house had left
of the garden, a "court." Plenty such are yet to be found in the Fourth
Ward, with here and there one of the original rear tenements.
Worse was to follow. It was "soon perceived by estate owners and agents
of property that a greater percentage of profits could be realized
by the conversion of houses and blocks into barracks, and dividing
their space into smaller proportions capable of containing human life
within four walls.... Blocks were rented of real estate owners, or
'purchased on time,' or taken in charge at a percentage, and held
for under-letting." With the appearance of the middleman, wholly
irresponsible, and utterly reckless and unrestrained, began the era of
tenement building which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court, where,
in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the
tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand
of population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from
1 in 41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom
from epidemic disease, and which wrung from the early organizers of
the Health Department this wail: "There are numerous examples of
tenement-houses in which are lodged several hundred people that have a
_pro rata_ allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards
upon the city lot, court-yards and all included." The tenement-house
population had swelled to half a million souls by that time, and on the
East Side, in what is still the most densely populated district in all
the world, China not excluded, it was packed at the rate of 290,000
to the square mile, a state of affairs wholly unexampled. The utmost
cupidity of other lands and other days had never contrived to herd much
more than half that number within the same space. The greatest crowding
of Old London was at the rate of 175,816. Swine roamed the streets and
gutters as their principal scavengers.[3] The death of a child in a
tenement was registered at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as "plainly
due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment," and
the Senators, who had come down from Albany to find out what was the
matter with New York, reported that "there are annually cut off from
the population by disease and death enough human beings to people a
city, and enough human labor to sustain it." And yet experts had
testified that, as compared with uptown, rents were from twenty-five
to thirty per cent. higher in the worst slums of the lower wards, with
such accommodations as were enjoyed, for instance, by a "family with
boarders" in Cedar Street, who fed hogs in the cellar that contained
eight or ten loads of manure; or "one room 12 × 12 with five families
living in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages,
with only two beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table." The
rate of rent has been successfully maintained to the present day,
though the hog at least has been eliminated.
[Footnote 3: It was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine
were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the
built-up portions of the city.]
Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these were evils of
a day that is happily past and may safely be forgotten, let me mention
here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under
my notice. One was the burning of a rear house in Mott Street, from
appearances one of the original tenant-houses that made their owners
rich. The fire made homeless ten families, who had paid an average of
$5 a month for their mean little cubby-holes. The owner himself told
me that it was _fully_ insured for $800, though it brought him in
$600 a year rent. He evidently considered himself especially entitled
to be pitied for losing such valuable property. Another was the case
of a hard-working family of man and wife, young people from the old
country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because
they were "tired." There was no other explanation, and none was needed
when I stood in the room in which they had lived. It was in the attic
with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof that
it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough
to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a
half a month in advance. There were four such rooms in that attic, and
together they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage, in
a pleasant part of Brooklyn. The third instance was that of a colored
family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West
Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room
on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it
even by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps
across either way would have measured its full extent.
[Illustration: TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT.[4]
D, dark. L, light. H, halls.]
[Footnote 4: This "unventilated and fever-breeding structure" the year
after it was built was picked out by the Council of Hygiene, then just
organized, and presented to the Citizens' Association of New York as a
specimen "multiple domicile" in a desirable street, with the following
comment: "Here are twelve living-rooms and twenty-one bedrooms, and
only six of the latter have any provision or possibility for the
admission of light and air, excepting through the family sitting-
and living-room; being utterly dark, close, and unventilated. The
living-rooms are but 10 × 12 feet; the bedrooms 6½ × 7 feet."]
There was just one excuse for the early tenement-house builders, and
their successors may plead it with nearly as good right for what it
is worth. "Such," says an official report, "is the lack of house-room
in the city that any kind of tenement can be immediately crowded with
lodgers, if there is space offered." Thousands were living in cellars.
There were three hundred underground lodging-houses in the city when
the Health Department was organized. Some fifteen years before that the
old Baptist Church in Mulberry Street, just off Chatham Street, had
been sold, and the rear half of the frame structure had been converted
into tenements that with their swarming population became the scandal
even of that reckless age. The wretched pile harbored no less than
forty families, and the annual rate of deaths to the population was
officially stated to be 75 in 1,000. These tenements were an extreme
type of very many, for the big barracks had by this time spread east
and west and far up the island into the sparsely settled wards. Whether
or not the title was clear to the land upon which they were built was
of less account than that the rents were collected. If there were
damages to pay, the tenant had to foot them. Cases were "very frequent
when property was in litigation, and two or three different parties
were collecting rents." Of course under such circumstances "no repairs
were ever made."
The climax had been reached. The situation was summed up by the Society
for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor in these words: "Crazy
old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp
basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables[5] converted
into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations
of thousands of our fellow-beings in this wealthy, Christian city."
"The city," says its historian, Mrs. Martha Lamb, commenting on the
era of aqueduct building between 1835 and 1845, "was a general asylum
for vagrants." Young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such "home"
conditions, overran the streets. Juvenile crime increased fearfully
year by year. The Children's Aid Society and kindred philanthropic
organizations were yet unborn, but in the city directory was to be
found the address of the "American Society for the Promotion of
Education in Africa."
[Footnote 5: "A lot 50 × 60, contained twenty stables, rented for
dwellings at $15 a year each; cost of the whole $600."]
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II.
THE AWAKENING.
The dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowledge of the
harvest field that awaited the plague in New York's slums, pricked the
conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the
war. A citizens' movement resulted in the organization of a Board of
Health and the adoption of the "Tenement-House Act" of 1867, the first
step toward remedial legislation. A thorough canvass of the tenements
had been begun already in the previous year; but the cholera first,
and next a scourge of small-pox, delayed the work, while emphasizing
the need of it, so that it was 1869 before it got fairly under way and
began to tell. The dark bedroom fell under the ban first. In that year
the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows
in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation--for little or no light was
to be had from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The saw
had a job all that summer; by early fall nearly all the orders had
been carried out. Not without opposition; obstacles were thrown in the
way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements,
who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added
expense to diminish their income from the rent; on the other side by
the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing
protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content
to remain there. The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat
ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds. Already it taxed
the city heavily for the support of its jails and charities. The basis
of opposition, curiously enough, was the same at both extremes; owner
and tenant alike considered official interference an infringement of
personal rights, and a hardship. It took long years of weary labor to
make good the claim of the sunlight to such corners of the dens as
it could reach at all. Not until five years after did the department
succeed at last in ousting the "cave-dwellers" and closing some five
hundred and fifty cellars south of Houston Street, many of them below
tide-water, that had been used as living apartments. In many instances
the police had to drag the tenants out by force.
The work went on; but the need of it only grew with the effort. The
Sanitarians were following up an evil that grew faster than they went;
like a fire, it could only be headed off, not chased, with success.
Official reports, read in the churches in 1879, characterized the
younger criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and
unhealthy, overcrowded lodgings, brought up in "an atmosphere of actual
darkness, moral and physical." This after the saw had been busy in the
dark corners ten years! "If we could see the air breathed by these
poor creatures in their tenements," said a well-known physician, "it
would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters." Little
improvement was apparent despite all that had been done. "The new
tenements, that have been recently built, have been usually as badly
planned as the old, with dark and unhealthy rooms, often over wet
cellars, where extreme overcrowding is permitted," was the verdict
of one authority. These are the houses that to-day perpetuate the
worst traditions of the past, and they are counted by thousands. The
Five Points had been cleansed, as far as the immediate neighborhood
was concerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing it in
foulness not a stone's throw away, and new centres of corruption were
continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever vigilance
was relaxed for ever so short a time. It is one of the curses of the
tenement-house system that the worst houses exercise a levelling
influence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a schoolroom will
spoil the whole class. It is one of the ways the evil that was "the
result of forgetfulness of the poor," as the Council of Hygiene mildly
put it, has of avenging itself.
The determined effort to head it off by laying a strong hand upon the
tenement builders that has been the chief business of the Health Board
of recent years, dates from this period. The era of the air-shaft has
not solved the problem of housing the poor, but it has made good use of
limited opportunities. Over the new houses sanitary law exercises full
control. But the old remain. They cannot be summarily torn down, though
in extreme cases the authorities can order them cleared. The outrageous
overcrowding, too, remains. It is characteristic of the tenements.
Poverty, their badge and typical condition, invites--compels it. All
efforts to abate it result only in temporary relief. As long as they
exist it will exist with them. And the tenements will exist in New York
forever.
[Illustration: TENEMENT OF THE OLD STYLE.]
[Illustration: BIRTH OF THE AIR-SHAFT.]
To-day, what is a tenement? The law defines it as a house "occupied by
three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking
on the premises; or by more than two families on a floor, so living
and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways,
yards, etc." That is the legal meaning, and includes flats and
apartment-houses, with which we have nothing to do. In its narrower
sense the typical tenement was thus described when last arraigned
before the bar of public justice: "It is generally a brick building
from four to six stories high on the street, frequently with a store
on the first floor which, when used for the sale of liquor, has a
side opening for the benefit of the inmates and to evade the Sunday
law; four families occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of
one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve
feet by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of
the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family
being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently the rear of
the lot is occupied by another building of three stories, high with
two families on a floor." The picture is nearly as true to-day as ten
years ago, and will be for a long time to come. The dim light admitted
by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tenements are
still "good property," and the poverty of the poor man his destruction.
A barrack down town where he _has to live_ because he is poor brings
in a third more rent than a decent flat house in Harlem. The statement
once made a sensation that between seventy and eighty children had been
found in one tenement. It no longer excites even passing attention,
when the sanitary police report counting 101 adults and 91 children in
a Crosby Street house, one of twins, built together. The children in
the other, if I am not mistaken, numbered 89, a total of 180 for two
tenements! Or when a midnight inspection in Mulberry Street unearths a
hundred and fifty "lodgers" sleeping on filthy floors in two buildings.
Spite of brown-stone trimmings, plate-glass and mosaic vestibule
floors, the water does not rise in summer to the second story, while
the beer flows unchecked to the all-night picnics on the roof. The
saloon with the side-door and the landlord divide the prosperity of the
place between them, and the tenant, in sullen submission, foots the
bills.
Where are the tenements of to-day? Say rather: where are they not?
In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward slums and the
Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the
Annexed District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards,
wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both
rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and
filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold
within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them
at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. The bullet-proof
shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the
Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of
the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring
three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have
doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held
captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery,
what will the harvest be?
CHAPTER III.
THE MIXED CROWD.
When once I asked the agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how
many people might be living in it I was told: One hundred and forty
families, one hundred Irish, thirty-eight Italian, and two that
spoke the German tongue. Barring the agent herself, there was not a
native-born individual in the court. The answer was characteristic of
the cosmopolitan character of lower New York, very nearly so of the
whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and courts. One may find for
the asking an Italian, a German, a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian,
Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony. Even the Arab, who
peddles "holy earth" from the Battery as a direct importation from
Jerusalem, has his exclusive preserves at the lower end of Washington
Street. The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of
America is a distinctively American community. There is none; certainly
not among the tenements. Where have they gone to, the old inhabitants?
I put the question to one who might fairly be presumed to be of the
number, since I had found him sighing for the "good old days" when the
legend "no Irish need apply" was familiar in the advertising columns
of the newspapers. He looked at me with a puzzled air. "I don't know,"
he said. "I wish I did. Some went to California in '49, some to the
war and never came back. The rest, I expect, have gone to heaven, or
somewhere. I don't see them 'round here."
Whatever the merit of the good man's conjectures, his eyes did not
deceive him. They are not here. In their place has come this queer
conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements, ever striving and working
like whiskey and water in one glass, and with the like result: final
union and a prevailing taint of whiskey. The once unwelcome Irishman
has been followed in his turn by the Italian, the Russian Jew, and the
Chinaman, and has himself taken a hand at opposition, quite as bitter
and quite as ineffectual, against these later hordes. Wherever these
have gone they have crowded him out, possessing the block, the street,
the ward with their denser swarms. But the Irishman's revenge is
complete. Victorious in defeat over his recent as over his more ancient
foe, the one who opposed his coming no less than the one who drove him
out, he dictates to both their politics, and, secure in possession
of the offices, returns the native his greeting with interest, while
collecting the rents of the Italian whose house he has bought with the
profits of his saloon. As a landlord he is picturesquely autocratic.
An amusing instance of his methods came under my notice while writing
these lines. An inspector of the Health Department found an Italian
family paying a man with a Celtic name twenty-five dollars a month
for three small rooms in a ramshackle rear tenement--more than twice
what they were worth--and expressed his astonishment to the tenant,
an ignorant Sicilian laborer. He replied that he had once asked the
landlord to reduce the rent, but he would not do it.
"Well! What did he say?" asked the inspector.
"'Damma, man!' he said; 'if you speaka thata way to me, I fira you and
your things in the streeta.'" And the frightened Italian paid the rent.
In justice to the Irish landlord it must be said that like an apt
pupil he was merely showing forth the result of the schooling he had
received, re-enacting, in his own way, the scheme of the tenements.
It is only his frankness that shocks. The Irishman does not naturally
take kindly to tenement life, though with characteristic versatility
he adapts himself to its conditions at once. It does violence,
nevertheless, to the best that is in him, and for that very reason of
all who come within its sphere soonest corrupts him. The result is a
sediment, the product of more than a generation in the city's slums,
that, as distinguished from the larger body of his class, justly ranks
at the foot of tenement dwellers, the so-called "low Irish."
It is not to be assumed, of course, that the whole body of the
population living in the tenements, of which New Yorkers are in the
habit of speaking vaguely as "the poor," or even the larger part of
it, is to be classed as vicious or as poor in the sense of verging on
beggary.
New York's wage-earners have no other place to live, more is the pity.
They are truly poor for having no better homes; waxing poorer in purse
as the exorbitant rents to which they are tied, as ever was serf to
soil, keep rising. The wonder is that they are not all corrupted, and
speedily, by their surroundings. If, on the contrary, there be a steady
working up, if not out of the slough, the fact is a powerful argument
for the optimist's belief that the world is, after all, growing better,
not worse, and would go far toward disarming apprehension, were it not
for the steadier growth of the sediment of the slums and its constant
menace. Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The
German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as
his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of
to-day.[6]
[Footnote 6: The Sheriff Street Colony of rag-pickers, long since gone,
is an instance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during
years of hard work in squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a
township in a Western State, and the whole colony moved out there in a
body. There need be no doubt about their thriving there.]
The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive
control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy
monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was
an intruder. The Irish hod-carrier in the second generation has become
a brick-layer, if not the Alderman of his ward, while the Chinese
coolie is in almost exclusive possession of the laundry business. The
reason is obvious. The poorest immigrant comes here with the purpose
and ambition to better himself and, given half a chance, might be
reasonably expected to make the most of it. To the false plea that he
prefers the squalid homes in which his kind are housed there could
be no better answer. The truth is, his half chance has too long been
wanting, and for the bad result he has been unjustly blamed.
As emigration from east to west follows the latitude, so does the
foreign influx in New York distribute itself along certain well-defined
lines that waver and break only under the stronger pressure of a more
gregarious race or the encroachments of inexorable business. A feeling
of dependence upon mutual effort, natural to strangers in a strange
land, unacquainted with its language and customs, sufficiently accounts
for this.
The Irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant. All-pervading, he
shares his lodging with perfect impartiality with the Italian, the
Greek, and the "Dutchman," yielding only to sheer force of numbers,
and objects equally to them all. A map of the city, colored to
designate nationalities, would show more stripes than on the skin of
a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow. The city on such a map
would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in
the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the
East Side. But intermingled with these ground colors would be an
odd variety of tints that would give the whole the appearance of an
extraordinary crazy-quilt. From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site
of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers drained the
hills which are no more, the red of the Italian would be seen forcing
its way northward along the line of Mulberry Street to the quarter of
the French purple on Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue, to lose
itself and reappear, after a lapse of miles, in the "Little Italy" of
Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply defined, would
be seen strung through the Annexed District, northward to the city
line. On the West Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa
of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly uptown,
against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying his home, his
church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality. There is a
church in Mulberry Street that has stood for two generations as a sort
of milestone of these migrations. Built originally for the worship of
staid New Yorkers of the "old stock," it was engulfed by the colored
tide, when the draft-riots drove the negroes out of reach of Cherry
Street and the Five Points. Within the past decade the advance wave
of the Italian onset reached it, and to-day the arms of United Italy
adorn its front. The negroes have made a stand at several points along
Seventh and Eighth Avenues; but their main body, still pursued by the
Italian foe, is on the march yet, and the black mark will be found
overshadowing to-day many blocks on the East Side, with One Hundredth
Street as the centre, where colonies of them have settled recently.
Hardly less aggressive than the Italian, the Russian and Polish Jew,
having overrun the district between Rivington and Division Streets,
east of the Bowery, to the point of suffocation, is filling the
tenements of the old Seventh Ward to the river front, and disputing
with the Italian every foot of available space in the back alleys of
Mulberry Street. The two races, differing hopelessly in much, have
this in common: they carry their slums with them wherever they go, if
allowed to do it. Little Italy already rivals its parent, the "Bend,"
in foulness. Other nationalities that begin at the bottom make a fresh
start when crowded up the ladder. Happily both are manageable, the one
by rabbinical, the other by the civil law. Between the dull gray of the
Jew, his favorite color, and the Italian red, would be seen squeezed
in on the map a sharp streak of yellow, marking the narrow boundaries
of Chinatown. Dovetailed in with the German population, the poor but
thrifty Bohemian might be picked out by the sombre hue of his life
as of his philosophy, struggling against heavy odds in the big human
bee-hives of the East Side. Colonies of his people extend northward,
with long lapses of space, from below the Cooper Institute more than
three miles. The Bohemian is the only foreigner with any considerable
representation in the city who counts no wealthy man of his race, none
who has not to work hard for a living, or has got beyond the reach of
the tenement.
Down near the Battery the West Side emerald would be soiled by a
dirty stain, spreading rapidly like a splash of ink on a sheet of
blotting paper, headquarters of the Arab tribe, that in a single
year has swelled from the original dozen to twelve hundred, intent,
every mother's son, on trade and barter. Dots and dashes of color
here and there would show where the Finnish sailors worship their
djumala (God), the Greek pedlars the ancient name of their race, and
the Swiss the goddess of thrift. And so on to the end of the long
register, all toiling together in the galling fetters of the tenement.
Were the question raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged,
who resists most stubbornly its levelling tendency--knows how to drag
even the barracks upward a part of the way at least toward the ideal
plane of the home--the palm must be unhesitatingly awarded the Teuton.
The Italian and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman
does not rise at all; here, as at home, he simply remains stationary.
The Irishman's genius runs to public affairs rather than domestic
life; wherever he is mustered in force the saloon is the gorgeous
centre of political activity. The German struggles vainly to learn
his trick; his Teutonic wit is too heavy, and the political ladder he
raises from his saloon usually too short or too clumsy to reach the
desired goal. The best part of his life is lived at home, and he makes
himself a home independent of the surroundings, giving the lie to the
saying, unhappily become a maxim of social truth, that pauperism and
drunkenness naturally grow in the tenements. He makes the most of his
tenement, and it should be added that whenever and as soon as he can
save up money enough, he gets out and never crosses the threshold of
one again.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DOWN TOWN BACK-ALLEYS.
Down below Chatham Square, in the old Fourth Ward, where the cradle
of the tenement stood, we shall find New York's Other Half at home,
receiving such as care to call and are not afraid. Not all of it,
to be sure, there is not room for that; but a fairly representative
gathering, representative of its earliest and worst traditions. There
is nothing to be afraid of. In this metropolis, let it be understood,
there is no public street where the stranger may not go safely by day
and by night, provided he knows how to mind his own business and is
sober. His coming and going will excite little interest, unless he is
suspected of being a truant officer, in which case he will be impressed
with the truth of the observation that the American stock is dying out
for want of children. If he escapes this suspicion and the risk of
trampling upon, or being himself run down by the bewildering swarms of
youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exigency and their
quick scent of danger direct, he will see no reason for dissenting
from that observation. Glimpses caught of the parents watching the
youngsters play from windows or open doorways will soon convince him
that the native stock is in no way involved.
Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge
at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps will take us where we wish to
go. With its rush and roar echoing yet in our ears, we have turned
the corner from prosperity to poverty. We stand upon the domain of
the tenement. In the shadow of the great stone abutments the old
Knickerbocker houses linger like ghosts of a departed day. Down the
winding slope of Cherry Street--proud and fashionable Cherry Hill that
was--their broad steps, sloping roofs, and dormer windows are easily
made out; all the more easily for the contrast with the ugly barracks
that elbow them right and left. These never had other design than to
shelter, at as little outlay as possible, the greatest crowds out
of which rent could be wrung. They were the bad after-thought of a
heedless day. The years have brought to the old houses unhonored age,
a querulous second childhood that is out of tune with the time, their
tenants, the neighbors, and cries out against them and against you in
fretful protest in every step on their rotten floors or squeaky stairs.
Good cause have they for their fretting. This one, with its shabby
front and poorly patched roof, what glowing firesides, what happy
children may it once have owned? Heavy feet, too often with unsteady
step, for the pot-house is next door--where is it not next door in
these slums?--have worn away the brown-stone steps since; the broken
columns at the door have rotted away at the base. Of the handsome
cornice barely a trace is left. Dirt and desolation reign in the wide
hallway, and danger lurks on the stairs. Rough pine boards fence off
the roomy fire-places--where coal is bought by the pail at the rate of
twelve dollars a ton these have no place. The arched gateway leads no
longer to a shady bower on the banks of the rushing stream, inviting to
day-dreams with its gentle repose, but to a dark and nameless alley,
shut in by high brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they
shelter. The wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams
that come to this alley, echoes of the day's cares. A horde of dirty
children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley
that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it: it is the
best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing
generation of the slums; this their home. From the great highway
overhead, along which throbs the life-tide of two great cities, one
might drop a pebble into half a dozen such alleys.
[Illustration: AT THE CRADLE OF THE TENEMENT.--DOORWAY OF AN
OLD-FASHIONED DWELLING ON CHERRY HILL.]
One yawns just across the street; not very broadly, but it is not
to blame. The builder of the old gateway had no thought of its ever
becoming a public thoroughfare. Once inside it widens, but only to
make room for a big box-like building with the worn and greasy look
of the slum tenement that is stamped alike on the houses and their
tenants down here, even on the homeless cur that romps with the
children in yonder building lot, with an air of expectant interest
plainly betraying the forlorn hope that at some stage of the game a
meat-bone may show up in the role of "It." Vain hope, truly! Nothing
more appetizing than a bare-legged ragamuffin appears. Meat-bones,
not long since picked clean, are as scarce in Blind Man's Alley as
elbow-room in any Fourth Ward back-yard. The shouts of the children
come hushed over the house-tops, as if apologizing for the intrusion.
Few glad noises make this old alley ring. Morning and evening it echoes
with the gentle, groping tap of the blind man's staff as he feels his
way to the street. Blind Man's Alley bears its name for a reason.
Until little more than a year ago its dark burrows harbored a colony
of blind beggars, tenants of a blind landlord, old Daniel Murphy, whom
every child in the ward knows, if he never heard of the President
of the United States. "Old Dan" made a big fortune--he told me once
four hundred thousand dollars--out of his alley and the surrounding
tenements, only to grow blind himself in extreme old age, sharing in
the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose lot he had
stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth. Even
when the Board of Health at last compelled him to repair and clean
up the worst of the old buildings, under threat of driving out the
tenants and locking the doors behind them, the work was accomplished
against the old man's angry protests. He appeared in person before the
Board to argue his case, and his argument was characteristic.
"I have made my will," he said. "My monument stands waiting for me in
Calvary. I stand on the very brink of the grave, blind and helpless,
and now (here the pathos of the appeal was swept under in a burst of
angry indignation) do you want me to build and get skinned, skinned?
These people are not fit to live in a nice house. Let them go where
they can, and let my house stand."
In spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal, it was downright amusing
to find that his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of
luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his own kind, the builder.
He knew intuitively what to expect. The result showed that Mr. Murphy
had gauged his tenants correctly. The cleaning up process apparently
destroyed the home-feeling of the alley; many of the blind people moved
away and did not return. Some remained, however, and the name has clung
to the place.
Some idea of what is meant by a sanitary "cleaning up" in these slums
may be gained from the account of a mishap I met with once, in taking a
flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements
down here. With unpractised hands I managed to set fire to the house.
When the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and I could see
once more, I discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the
wall were ablaze. There were six of us, five blind men and women who
knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a
dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many
households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. The
thought: how were they ever to be got out? made my blood run cold as I
saw the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt
for the street and shout for help. The next was to smother the fire
myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came
down to the street I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some
reason he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoderately at my
concern lest even then sparks should be burrowing in the rotten wall
that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that
were in it. He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. "Why,
don't you know," he said, "that house is the Dirty Spoon? It caught
fire six times last winter, but it wouldn't burn. The dirt was so thick
on the walls, it smothered the fire!" Which, if true, shows that water
and dirt, not usually held to be harmonious elements, work together for
the good of those who insure houses.
Sunless and joyless though it be, Blind Man's Alley has that which its
compeers of the slums vainly yearn for. It has a pay-day. Once a year
sunlight shines into the lives of its forlorn crew, past and present.
In June, when the Superintendent of Out-door Poor distributes the
twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the city, in
half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them,
Blindman's Alley takes a day off and goes to "see" Mr. Blake. That
night it is noisy with unwonted merriment. There is scraping of squeaky
fiddles in the dark rooms, and cracked old voices sing long-forgotten
songs. Even the blind landlord rejoices, for much of the money goes
into his coffers.
[Illustration: UPSTAIRS IN BLINDMAN'S ALLEY.]
From their perch up among the rafters Mrs. Gallagher's blind boarders
might hear, did they listen, the tramp of the policeman always on
duty in Gotham Court, half a stone's throw away. His beat, though it
takes in but a small portion of a single block, is quite as lively
as most larger patrol rounds. A double row of five-story tenements,
back to back under a common roof, extending back from the street two
hundred and thirty-four feet, with barred openings in the dividing
wall, so that the tenants may see but cannot get at each other from
the stairs, makes the "court." Alleys--one wider by a couple of feet
than the other, whence the distinction Single and Double Alley--skirt
the barracks on either side. Such, briefly, is the tenement that has
challenged public attention more than any other in the whole city and
tested the power of sanitary law and rule for forty years. The name of
the pile is not down in the City Directory, but in the public records
it holds an unenviable place. It was here the mortality rose during the
last great cholera epidemic to the unprecedented rate of 195 in 1,000
inhabitants. In its worst days a full thousand could not be packed into
the court, though the number did probably not fall far short of it.
Even now, under the management of men of conscience, and an agent, a
King's Daughter, whose practical energy, kindliness and good sense have
done much to redeem its foul reputation, the swarms it shelters would
make more than one fair-sized country village. The mixed character of
the population, by this time about equally divided between the Celtic
and the Italian stock, accounts for the iron bars and the policeman. It
was an eminently Irish suggestion that the latter was to be credited
to the presence of two German families in the court, who "made trouble
all the time." A Chinaman whom I questioned as he hurried past the iron
gate of the alley, put the matter in a different light. "Lem Ilish
velly bad," he said. Gotham Court has been the entering wedge for the
Italian element, who until recently had not attained a foothold in the
Fourth Ward, but are now trailing across Chatham Street from their
stronghold in "the Bend" in ever increasing numbers, seeking, according
to their wont, the lowest level.
It is curious to find that this notorious block, whose name was so long
synonymous with all that was desperately bad, was originally built (in
1851) by a benevolent Quaker for the express purpose of rescuing the
poor people from the dreadful rookeries they were then living in. How
long it continued a model tenement is not on record. It could not have
been very long, for already in 1862, ten years after it was finished, a
sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness in the court, including
"all kinds of infectious disease," from small-pox down, and reported
that of 138 children born in it in less than three years 61 had died,
mostly before they were one year old. Seven years later the inspector
of the district reported to the Board of Health that "nearly ten per
cent. of the population is sent to the public hospitals each year."
When the alley was finally taken in hand by the authorities, and, as a
first step toward its reclamation, the entire population was driven out
by the police, experience dictated, as one of the first improvements to
be made, the putting in of a kind of sewer-grating, so constructed, as
the official report patiently puts it, "as to prevent the ingress of
persons disposed to make a hiding-place" of the sewer and the cellars
into which they opened. The fact was that the big vaulted sewers had
long been a runway for thieves--the Swamp Angels--who through them
easily escaped when chased by the police, as well as a storehouse for
their plunder. The sewers are there to-day; in fact the two alleys are
nothing but the roofs of these enormous tunnels in which a man may
walk upright the full distance of the block and into the Cherry Street
sewer--if he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats. Could their grimy
walls speak, the big canals might tell many a startling tale. But they
are silent enough, and so are most of those whose secrets they might
betray. The flood-gates connecting with the Cherry Street main are
closed now, except when the water is drained off. Then there were no
gates, and it is on record that the sewers were chosen as a short cut
habitually by residents of the court whose business lay on the line
of them, near a manhole, perhaps, in Cherry Street, or at the river
mouth of the big pipe when it was clear at low tide. "Me Jimmy," said
one wrinkled old dame, who looked in while we were nosing about under
Double Alley, "he used to go to his work along down Cherry Street that
way every morning and come back at night." The associations must have
been congenial. Probably "Jimmy" himself fitted into the landscape.
Half-way back from the street in this latter alley is a tenement,
facing the main building, on the west side of the way, that was
not originally part of the court proper. It stands there a curious
monument to a Quaker's revenge, a living illustration of the power of
hate to perpetuate its bitter fruit beyond the grave. The lot upon
which it is built was the property of John Wood, brother of Silas,
the builder of Gotham Court. He sold the Cherry Street front to a man
who built upon it a tenement with entrance only from the street. Mr.
Wood afterward quarrelled about the partition line with his neighbor,
Alderman Mullins, who had put up a long tenement barrack on his lot
after the style of the Court, and the Alderman knocked him down.
Tradition records that the Quaker picked himself up with the quiet
remark, "I will pay thee for that, friend Alderman," and went his
way. His manner of paying was to put up the big building in the rear
of 34 Cherry Street with an immense blank wall right in front of the
windows of Alderman Mullins's tenements, shutting out effectually
light and air from them. But as he had no access to the street from
his building for many years it could not be let or used for anything,
and remained vacant until it passed under the management of the Gotham
Court property. Mullins's Court is there yet, and so is the Quaker's
vengeful wall that has cursed the lives of thousands of innocent people
since. At its farther end the alley between the two that begins inside
the Cherry Street tenement, six or seven feet wide, narrows down to
less than two feet. It is barely possible to squeeze through; but few
care to do it, for the rift leads to the jail of the Oak Street police
station, and therefore is not popular with the growing youth of the
district.
There is crape on the door of the Alderman's court as we pass out, and
upstairs in one of the tenements preparations are making for a wake. A
man lies dead in the hospital who was cut to pieces in a "can racket"
in the alley on Sunday. The sway of the excise law is not extended to
these back alleys. It would matter little if it were. There are secret
by-ways, and some it is not held worth while to keep secret, along
which the "growler" wanders at all hours and all seasons unmolested.
It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder
resulted. It is nothing unusual on Cherry Street, nothing to "make a
fuss" about. Not a week before, two or three blocks up the street, the
police felt called upon to interfere in one of these can rackets at
two o'clock in the morning, to secure peace for the neighborhood. The
interference took the form of a general fusillade, during which one of
the disturbers fell off the roof and was killed. There was the usual
wake and nothing more was heard of it. What, indeed, was there to say?
The "Rock of Ages" is the name over the door of a low saloon that
blocks the entrance to another alley, if possible more forlorn and
dreary than the rest, as we pass out of the Alderman's court. It sounds
like a jeer from the days, happily past, when the "wickedest man in New
York" lived around the corner a little way and boasted of his title.
One cannot take many steps in Cherry Street without encountering some
relic of past or present prominence in the ways of crime, scarce one
that does not turn up specimen bricks of the coming thief. The Cherry
Street tough is all-pervading. Ask Superintendent Murray, who, as
captain of the Oak Street squad, in seven months secured convictions
for theft, robbery, and murder aggregating no less than five hundred
and thirty years of penal servitude, and he will tell you his opinion
that the Fourth Ward, even in the last twenty years, has turned out
more criminals than all the rest of the city together.
But though the "Swamp Angels" have gone to their reward, their
successors carry on business at the old stand as successfully, if not
as boldly. There goes one who was once a shining light in thiefdom.
He has reformed since, they say. The policeman on the corner, who is
addicted to a professional unbelief in reform of any kind, will tell
you that while on the Island once he sailed away on a shutter, paddling
along until he was picked up in Hell Gate by a schooner's crew, whom
he persuaded that he was a fanatic performing some sort of religious
penance by his singular expedition. Over yonder, Tweed, the arch-thief,
worked in a brush-shop and earned an honest living before he took
to politics. As we stroll from one narrow street to another the odd
contrast between the low, old-looking houses in front and the towering
tenements in the back yards grows even more striking, perhaps because
we expect and are looking for it. Nobody who was not would suspect the
presence of the rear houses, though they have been there long enough.
Here is one seven stories high behind one with only three floors. Take
a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide,
with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air--God
help us for pitiful mockery!--from this slit between brick walls.
There are no windows in the wall on the other side; it is perfectly
blank. The fire-escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it; but the
rays of the sun, rising, setting, or at high noon, never do. It never
shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it.
There was once an English doctor who experimented with the sunlight
in the soldiers' barracks, and found that on the side that was shut
off altogether from the sun the mortality was one hundred per cent.
greater than on the light side, where its rays had free access. But
then soldiers are of some account, have a fixed value, if not a very
high one. The people who live here have not. The horse that pulls the
dirt-cart one of these laborers loads and unloads is of ever so much
more account to the employer of his labor than he and all that belongs
to him. Ask the owner; he will not attempt to deny it, if the horse
is worth anything. The man too knows it. It is the one thought that
occasionally troubles the owner of the horse in the enjoyment of his
prosperity, built of and upon the successful assertion of the truth
that all men are created equal.
With what a shock did the story of yonder Madison Street alley come
home to New Yorkers one morning, eight or ten years ago, when a fire
that broke out after the men had gone to their work swept up those
narrow stairs and burned up women and children to the number of a
full half score. There were fire-escapes, yes! but so placed that
they could not be reached. The firemen had to look twice before they
could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man
would never venture in. Some wonderfully heroic rescues were made at
that fire by people living in the adjoining tenements. Danger and
trouble--of the imminent kind, not the everyday sort that excites
neither interest nor commiseration--run even this common clay into
heroic moulds on occasion; occasions that help us to remember that
the gap that separates the man with the patched coat from his wealthy
neighbor is, after all, perhaps but a tenement. Yet, what a gap! and of
whose making? Here, as we stroll along Madison Street, workmen are busy
putting the finishing touches to the brown-stone front of a tall new
tenement. This one will probably be called an apartment house. They are
carving satyrs' heads in the stone, with a crowd of gaping youngsters
looking on in admiring wonder. Next door are two other tenements,
likewise with brown-stone fronts, fair to look at. The youngest of the
children in the group is not too young to remember how their army of
tenants was turned out by the health officers because the houses had
been condemned as unfit for human beings to live in. The owner was a
wealthy builder who "stood high in the community." Is it only in our
fancy that the sardonic leer on the stone faces seems to list that
way? Or is it an introspective grin? We will not ask if the new house
belongs to the same builder. He too may have reformed.
We have crossed the boundary of the Seventh Ward. Penitentiary Row,
suggestive name for a block of Cherry Street tenements, is behind us.
Within recent days it has become peopled wholly with Hebrews, the
overflow from Jewtown adjoining, pedlars and tailors, all of them. It
is odd to read this legend from other days over the door: "No pedlars
allowed in this house." These thrifty people are not only crowding into
the tenements of this once exclusive district--they are buying them.
The Jew runs to real estate as soon as he can save up enough for a
deposit to clinch the bargain. As fast as the old houses are torn down,
towering structures go up in their place, and Hebrews are found to be
the builders. Here is a whole alley nicknamed after the intruder, Jews'
Alley. But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite
with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time. He
knows from experience, both sweet and bitter, that all things come to
those who wait, including the houses and lands of their persecutors.
Here comes a pleasure party, as gay as any on the avenue, though the
carry-all is an ash-cart. The father is the driver and he has taken
his brown-legged boy for a ride. How proud and happy they both look
up there on their perch! The queer old building they have halted in
front of is "The Ship," famous for fifty years as a ramshackle tenement
filled with the oddest crowd. No one knows why it is called "The Ship,"
though there is a tradition that once the river came clear up here
to Hamilton Street, and boats were moored along-side it. More likely
it is because it is as bewildering inside as a crazy old ship, with
its ups and downs of ladders parading as stairs, and its unexpected
pitfalls. But Hamilton Street, like Water Street, is not what it was.
The missions drove from the latter the worst of its dives. A sailors'
mission has lately made its appearance in Hamilton Street, but there
are no dives there, nothing worse than the ubiquitous saloon and tough
tenements.
Enough of them everywhere. Suppose we look into one? No. -- Cherry
Street. Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might
stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it
would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little
else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a
step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way,
if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh
air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is
forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn
receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to
be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand. That was a woman
filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. The sinks
are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access--and all be
poisoned alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pump squeak! It is
the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty
throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain.
But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always
there. The smell of it has followed you up. Here is a door. Listen!
That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail--what do they mean?
They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs
will have another story to tell--Oh! a sadly familiar story--before
the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a
chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed
it.
"It was took all of a suddint," says the mother, smoothing the
throbbing little body with trembling hands. There is no unkindness in
the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly
smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight,
bitter as his words sound: "Hush, Mary! If we cannot keep the baby,
need we complain--such as we?"
[Illustration: AN OLD REAR-TENEMENT IN ROOSEVELT STREET.]
Such as we! What if the words ring in your ears as we grope our way
up the stairs and down from floor to floor, listening to the sounds
behind the closed doors--some of quarrelling, some of coarse songs,
more of profanity. They are true. When the summer heats come with their
suffering they have meaning more terrible than words can tell. Come
over here. Step carefully over this baby--it is a baby, spite of its
rags and dirt--under these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded
down, despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken
household goods, with wash-tubs and barrels, over which no man could
climb from a fire. This gap between dingy brick-walls is the yard. That
strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people. Do
you wonder the name does not attract them to the churches? That baby's
parents live in the rear tenement here. She is at least as clean as
the steps we are now climbing. There are plenty of houses with half a
hundred such in. The tenement is much like the one in front we just
left, only fouler, closer, darker--we will not say more cheerless. The
word is a mockery. A hundred thousand people lived in rear tenements in
New York last year. Here is a room neater than the rest. The woman, a
stout matron with hard lines of care in her face, is at the wash-tub.
"I try to keep the childer clean," she says, apologetically, but with
a hopeless glance around. The spice of hot soap-suds is added to the
air already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage, of rags and
uncleanliness all about. It makes an overpowering compound. It is
Thursday, but patched linen is hung upon the pulley-line from the
window. There is no Monday cleaning in the tenements. It is washday
all the week round, for a change of clothing is scarce among the poor.
They are poverty's honest badge, these perennial lines of rags hung
out to dry, those that are not the washerwoman's professional shingle.
The true line to be drawn between pauperism and honest poverty is the
clothes-line. With it begins the effort to be clean that is the first
and the best evidence of a desire to be honest.
What sort of an answer, think you, would come from these tenements to
the question "Is life worth living?" were they heard at all in the
discussion? It may be that this, cut from the last report but one of
the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, a
long name for a weary task, has a suggestion of it: "In the depth of
winter the attention of the Association was called to a Protestant
family living in a garret in a miserable tenement in Cherry Street.
The family's condition was most deplorable. The man, his wife, and
three small children shivering in one room through the roof of which
the pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was almost barren of
furniture; the parents slept on the floor, the elder children in boxes,
and the baby was swung in an old shawl attached to the rafters by cords
by way of a hammock. The father, a seaman, had been obliged to give up
that calling because he was in consumption, and was unable to provide
either bread or fire for his little ones."
Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case, but one that came
to my notice some months ago in a Seventh Ward tenement was typical
enough to escape that reproach. There were nine in the family: husband,
wife, an aged grandmother, and six children; honest, hard-working
Germans, scrupulously neat, but poor. All nine lived in two rooms, one
about ten feet square that served as parlor, bedroom, and eating-room,
the other a small hall-room made into a kitchen. The rent was seven
dollars and a half a month, more than a week's wages for the husband
and father, who was the only bread-winner in the family. That day the
mother had thrown herself out of the window, and was carried up from
the street dead. She was "discouraged," said some of the other women
from the tenement, who had come in to look after the children while
a messenger carried the news to the father at the shop. They went
stolidly about their task, although they were evidently not without
feeling for the dead woman. No doubt she was wrong in not taking life
philosophically, as did the four families a city missionary found
housekeeping in the four corners of one room. They got along well
enough together until one of the families took a boarder and made
trouble. Philosophy, according to my optimistic friend, naturally
inhabits the tenements. The people who live there come to look upon
death in a different way from the rest of us--do not take it as hard.
He has never found time to explain how the fact fits into his general
theory that life is not unbearable in the tenements. Unhappily for the
philosophy of the slums, it is too apt to be of the kind that readily
recognizes the saloon, always handy, as the refuge from every trouble,
and shapes its practice according to the discovery.
CHAPTER V.
THE ITALIAN IN NEW YORK.
Certainly a picturesque, if not very tidy, element has been added to
the population in the "assisted" Italian immigrant who claims so large
a share of public attention, partly because he keeps coming at such a
tremendous rate, but chiefly because he elects to stay in New York,
or near enough for it to serve as his base of operations, and here
promptly reproduces conditions of destitution and disorder which, set
in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of the
artist, but in a matter-of-fact American community become its danger
and reproach. The reproduction is made easier in New York because he
finds the material ready to hand in the worst of the slum tenements;
but even where it is not he soon reduces what he does find to his own
level, if allowed to follow his natural bent.[7] The Italian comes in
at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays
there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who "makes less trouble"
than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to
say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submits to robbery at the
hands of the rent-collector without murmur. Yet this very tractability
makes of him in good hands, when firmly and intelligently managed, a
really desirable tenant. But it is not his good fortune often to fall
in with other hospitality upon his coming than that which brought him
here for its own profit, and has no idea of letting go its grip upon
him as long as there is a cent to be made out of him.
[Footnote 7: The process can be observed in the Italian tenements in
Harlem (Little Italy), which, since their occupation by these people,
have been gradually sinking to the slum level.]
Recent Congressional inquiries have shown the nature of the
"assistance" he receives from greedy steamship agents and "bankers,"
who persuade him by false promises to mortgage his home, his few
belongings, and his wages for months to come for a ticket to the land
where plenty of work is to be had at princely wages. The padrone--the
"banker," is nothing else--having made his ten per cent. out of him
en route, receives him at the landing and turns him to double account
as a wage-earner and a rent-payer. In each of these rôles he is made
to yield a profit to his unscrupulous countryman, whom he trusts
implicitly with the instinct of utter helplessness. The man is so
ignorant that, as one of the sharpers who prey upon him put it once,
it "would be downright sinful not to take him in." His ignorance and
unconquerable suspicion of strangers dig the pit into which he falls.
He not only knows no word of English, but he does not know enough to
learn. Rarely only can he write his own language. Unlike the German,
who begins learning English the day he lands as a matter of duty, or
the Polish Jew, who takes it up as soon as he is able as an investment,
the Italian learns slowly, if at all. Even his boy, born here, often
speaks his native tongue indifferently. He is forced, therefore, to
have constant recourse to the middle-man, who makes him pay handsomely
at every turn. He hires him out to the railroad contractor, receiving a
commission from the employer as well as from the laborer, and repeats
the performance monthly, or as often as he can have him dismissed. In
the city he contracts for his lodging, subletting to him space in the
vilest tenements at extortionate rents, and sets an example that does
not lack imitators. The "princely wages" have vanished with his coming,
and in their place hardships and a dollar a day, beheft with the
padrone's merciless mortgage, confront him. Bred to even worse fare, he
takes both as a matter of course, and, applying the maxim that it is
not what one makes but what he saves that makes him rich, manages to
turn the very dirt of the streets into a hoard of gold, with which he
either returns to his Southern home, or brings over his family to join
in his work and in his fortunes the next season.
[Illustration: IN THE HOME OF AN ITALIAN RAG-PICKER, JERSEY STREET.]
The discovery was made by earlier explorers that there is money in New
York's ash-barrel, but it was left to the genius of the padrone to
develop the full resources of the mine that has become the exclusive
preserve of the Italian immigrant. Only a few years ago, when
rag-picking was carried on in a desultory and irresponsible sort of
way, the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash-scows before they were
sent out to sea. The trimming consisted in levelling out the dirt as
it was dumped from the carts, so that the scow might be evenly loaded.
The men were paid a dollar and a half a day, kept what they found
that was worth having, and allowed the swarms of Italians who hung
about the dumps to do the heavy work for them, letting them have their
pick of the loads for their trouble. To-day Italians contract for the
work, paying large sums to be permitted to do it. The city received
not less than $80,000 last year for the sale of this privilege to the
contractors, who in addition have to pay gangs of their countrymen for
sorting out the bones, rags, tin cans and other waste that are found
in the ashes and form the staples of their trade and their sources of
revenue. The effect has been vastly to increase the power of the
padrone, or his ally, the contractor, by giving him exclusive control
of the one industry in which the Italian was formerly an independent
"dealer," and reducing him literally to the plane of the dump. Whenever
the back of the sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the
filthy burrows where he works by day, sleeping and eating his meals
under the dump, on the edge of slimy depths and amid surroundings full
of unutterable horror. The city did not bargain to house, though it
is content to board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield
the food to keep him alive, and a vigorous campaign is carried on at
intervals against these unlicensed dump settlements; but the temptation
of having to pay no rent is too strong, and they are driven from one
dump only to find lodgement under another a few blocks farther up or
down the river. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage of the
dumps by rival factions represented by opposing contractors, and it has
happened that the defeated party has endeavored to capture by strategy
what he failed to carry by assault. It augurs unsuspected adaptability
in the Italian to our system of self-government that these rivalries
have more than once been suspected of being behind the sharpening of
city ordinances, that were apparently made in good faith to prevent
meddling with the refuse in the ash-barrels or in transit.
Did the Italian always adapt himself as readily to the operation of the
civil law as to the manipulation of political "pull" on occasion, he
would save himself a good deal of unnecessary trouble. Ordinarily he is
easily enough governed by authority--always excepting Sunday, when he
settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions.
Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His soul is in the
game from the moment the cards are on the table, and very frequently
his knife is in it too before the game is ended. No Sunday has passed
in New York since "the Bend" became a suburb of Naples without one or
more of these murderous affrays coming to the notice of the police. As
a rule that happens only when the man the game went against is either
dead or so badly wounded as to require instant surgical help. As to the
other, unless he be caught red-handed, the chances that the police will
ever get him are slim indeed. The wounded man can seldom be persuaded
to betray him. He wards off all inquiries with a wicked "I fix him
myself," and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers.
If the latter, the community hears after a while of another Italian
affray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying, and the police know
that "he" has been fixed, and the account squared.
With all his conspicuous faults, the swarthy Italian immigrant has
his redeeming traits. He is as honest as he is hot-headed. There are
no Italian burglars in the Rogues' Gallery; the ex-brigand toils
peacefully with pickaxe and shovel on American ground. His boy
occasionally shows, as a pick-pocket, the results of his training with
the toughs of the Sixth Ward slums. The only criminal business to which
the father occasionally lends his hand, outside of murder, is a bunco
game, of which his confiding countrymen, returning with their hoard to
their native land, are the victims. The women are faithful wives and
devoted mothers. Their vivid and picturesque costumes lend a tinge of
color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit. The
Italian is gay, light-hearted and, if his fur is not stroked the wrong
way, inoffensive as a child. His worst offence is that he keeps the
stale-beer dives. Where his headquarters is, in the Mulberry Street
Bend, these vile dens flourish and gather about them all the wrecks,
the utterly wretched, the hopelessly lost, on the lowest slope of
depraved humanity. And out of their misery he makes a profit.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VI.
THE BEND.
Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old
depravity of the Five Points, is "the Bend," foul core of New York's
slums. Long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trod a
path over this hill. Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but
they do not call up memories of green meadows and summer fields; they
proclaim the home-coming of the rag-picker's cart. In the memory of man
the old cow-path has never been other than a vast human pig-sty. There
is but one "Bend" in the world, and it is enough. The city authorities,
moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort,
have decided that it is too much and must come down. Another Paradise
Park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such
transformation as at the Five Points, around the corner of the next
block. Never was change more urgently needed. Around "the Bend" cluster
the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even
by the optimists of the Health Department. Incessant raids cannot
keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back
alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector
alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle
structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps
and ash barrels of the city. Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the
unclean beast of dishonest idleness. "The Bend" is the home of the
tramp as well as the rag-picker.
It is not much more than twenty years since a census of "the Bend"
district returned only twenty-four of the six hundred and nine
tenements as in decent condition. Three-fourths of the population of
the "Bloody Sixth" Ward were then Irish. The army of tramps that grew
up after the disbandment of the armies in the field, and has kept up
its muster roll, together with the in-rush of the Italian tide, have
ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to all efforts at permanent
improvement. The more that has been done, the less it has seemed to
accomplish in the way of real relief, until it has at last become clear
that nothing short of entire demolition will ever prove of radical
benefit. Corruption could not have chosen ground for its stand with
better promise of success. The whole district is a maze of narrow,
often unsuspected passage-ways--necessarily, for there is scarce a
lot that has not two, three, or four tenements upon it, swarming with
unwholesome crowds. What a birds-eye view of "the Bend" would be like
is a matter of bewildering conjecture. Its everyday appearance, as seen
from the corner of Bayard Street on a sunny day, is one of the sights
of New York.
Bayard Street is the high road to Jewtown across the Bowery, picketed
from end to end with the outposts of Israel. Hebrew faces, Hebrew
signs, and incessant chatter in the queer lingo that passes for
Hebrew on the East Side attend the curious wanderer to the very
corner of Mulberry Street. But the moment he turns the corner the
scene changes abruptly. Before him lies spread out what might better
be the market-place in some town in Southern Italy than a street in
New York--all but the houses; they are still the same old tenements
of the unromantic type. But for once they do not make the foreground
in a slum picture from the American metropolis. The interest centres
not in them, but in the crowd they shelter only when the street is
not preferable, and that with the Italian is only when it rains or he
is sick. When the sun shines the entire population seeks the street,
carrying on its household work, its bargaining, its love-making on
street or sidewalk, or idling there when it has nothing better to do,
with the reverse of the impulse that makes the Polish Jew coop himself
up in his den with the thermometer at stewing heat. Along the curb
women sit in rows, young and old alike with the odd head-covering, pad
or turban, that is their badge of servitude--her's to bear the burden
as long as she lives--haggling over baskets of frowsy weeds, some sort
of salad probably, stale tomatoes, and oranges not above suspicion.
Ash-barrels serve them as counters, and not infrequently does the
arrival of the official cart en route for the dump cause a temporary
suspension of trade until the barrels have been emptied and restored.
Hucksters and pedlars' carts make two rows of booths in the street
itself, and along the houses is still another--a perpetual market doing
a very lively trade in its own queer staples, found nowhere on American
ground save in "the Bend." Two old hags, camping on the pavement, are
dispensing stale bread, baked not in loaves, but in the shape of big
wreaths like exaggerated crullers, out of bags of dirty bed-tick. There
is no use disguising the fact: they look like and they probably are
old mattresses mustered into service under the pressure of a rush of
trade. Stale bread was the one article the health officers, after a
raid on the market, once reported as "not unwholesome." It was only
disgusting. Here is a brawny butcher, sleeves rolled up above the
elbows and clay pipe in mouth, skinning a kid that hangs from his hook.
They will tell you with a laugh at the Elizabeth Street police station
that only a few days ago when a dead goat had been reported lying in
Pell Street it was mysteriously missing by the time the offal-cart came
to take it away. It turned out that an Italian had carried it off in
his sack to a wake or feast of some sort in one of the back alleys.
[Illustration: THE BEND.]
On either side of the narrow entrance to Bandit's Roost, one of the
most notorious of these, is a shop that is a fair sample of the sort
of invention necessity is the mother of in "the Bend." It is not
enough that trucks and ash-barrels have provided four distinct lines
of shops that are not down on the insurance maps, to accommodate the
crowds. Here have the very hallways been made into shops. Three feet
wide by four deep, they have just room for one, the shop-keeper, who,
himself within, does his business outside, his wares displayed on a
board hung across what was once the hall door. Back of the rear wall of
this unique shop a hole has been punched from the hall into the alley
and the tenants go that way. One of the shops is a "tobacco bureau,"
presided over by an unknown saint, done in yellow and red--there is
not a shop, a stand, or an ash-barrel doing duty for a counter, that
has not its patron saint--the other is a fish-stand full of slimy,
odd-looking creatures, fish that never swam in American waters, or
if they did, were never seen on an American fish-stand, and snails.
Big, awkward sausages, anything but appetizing, hang in the grocer's
doorway, knocking against the customer's head as if to remind him
that they are there waiting to be bought. What they are I never had
the courage to ask. Down the street comes a file of women carrying
enormous bundles of fire-wood on their heads, loads of decaying
vegetables from the market wagons in their aprons, and each a baby at
the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling
down. The women do all the carrying, all the work one sees going on
in "the Bend." The men sit or stand in the streets, on trucks, or in
the open doors of the saloons smoking black clay pipes, talking and
gesticulating as if forever on the point of coming to blows. Near a
particularly boisterous group, a really pretty girl with a string of
amber beads twisted artlessly in the knot of her raven hair has been
bargaining long and earnestly with an old granny, who presides over
a wheel-barrow load of second-hand stockings and faded cotton yarn,
industriously darning the biggest holes while she extols the virtues of
her stock. One of the rude swains, with patched overalls tucked into
his boots, to whom the girl's eyes have strayed more than once, steps
up and gallantly offers to pick her out the handsomest pair, whereat
she laughs and pushes him away with a gesture which he interprets as an
invitation to stay; and he does, evidently to the satisfaction of the
beldame, who forthwith raises her prices fifty per cent. without being
detected by the girl.
Red bandannas and yellow kerchiefs are everywhere; so is the Italian
tongue, infinitely sweeter than the harsh gutturals of the Russian Jew
around the corner. So are the "ristorantes" of innumerable Pasquales;
half of the people in "the Bend" are christened Pasquale, or get the
name in some other way. When the police do not know the name of an
escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on
alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits. So are the "banks" that hang
out their shingle as tempting bait on every hand. There are half a
dozen in the single block, steamship agencies, employment offices, and
savings-banks, all in one. So are the toddling youngsters, bow-legged
half of them, and so are no end of mothers, present and prospective,
some of them scarce yet in their teens. Those who are not in the street
are hanging half way out of the windows, shouting at some one below.
All "the Bend" must be, if not altogether, at least half out of doors
when the sun shines.
In the street, where the city wields the broom, there is at least an
effort at cleaning up. There has to be, or it would be swamped in
filth overrunning from the courts and alleys where the rag-pickers
live. It requires more than ordinary courage to explore these on a hot
day. The undertaker has to do it then, the police always. Right here,
in this tenement on the east side of the street, they found little
Antonia Candia, victim of fiendish cruelty, "covered," says the account
found in the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children, "with sores, and her hair matted with dried blood." Abuse is
the normal condition of "the Bend," murder its everyday crop, with the
tenants not always the criminals. In this block between Bayard, Park,
Mulberry, and Baxter Streets, "the Bend" proper, the late Tenement
House Commission counted 155 deaths of children[8] in a specimen year
(1882). Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was
68.28, while for the whole city the proportion was only 46.20. The
infant mortality in any city or place as compared with the whole number
of deaths is justly considered a good barometer of its general sanitary
condition. Here, in this tenement, No. 59½, next to Bandits' Roost,
fourteen persons died that year, and eleven of them were children; in
No. 61 eleven, and eight of them not yet five years old. According to
the records in the Bureau of Vital Statistics only thirty-nine people
lived in No. 59½ in the year 1888, nine of them little children.
There were five baby funerals in that house the same year. Out of
the alley itself, No. 59, nine dead were carried in 1888, five in
baby coffins. Here is the record of the year for the whole block, as
furnished by the Registrar of Vital Statistics, Dr. Roger S. Tracy:
_Deaths and Death-rates in 1888 in Baxter and Mulberry Streets,
between Park and Bayard Streets._
Key
A = Five years old and over.
B = Under five years.
C = Total.
D = General.
----------------+------------------+------------+---------------------
| POPULATION. | DEATHS. | DEATH-RATE.
+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
| A | B | C | A | B | C | A | B | D
----------------+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
Baxter Street | 1,918| 315| 2,233| 26| 46| 72| 13.56| 146.02| 32.24
Mulberry Street | 2,788| 629| 3,417| 44| 86| 130| 15.78| 136.70| 38.05
+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
Total | 4,706| 944| 5,650| 70|132| 202| 14.87| 139.83| 35.75
----------------+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
The general death-rate for the whole city that year was 26.27.
These figures speak for themselves, when it is shown that in the model
tenement across the way at Nos. 48 and 50, where the same class of
people live in greater swarms (161, according to the record), but under
good management, and in decent quarters, the hearse called that year
only twice, once for a baby. The agent of the Christian people who
built that tenement will tell you that Italians are good tenants, while
the owner of the alley will oppose every order to put his property in
repair with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot. Both are
right, from their different stand-points. It is the stand-point that
makes the difference--and the tenant.
[Illustration: BANDITS' ROOST.]
What if I were to tell you that this alley, and more tenement property
in "the Bend," all of it notorious for years as the vilest and worst
to be found anywhere, stood associated on the tax-books all through
the long struggle to make its owners responsible, which has at last
resulted in a qualified victory for the law, with the name of an
honored family, one of the "oldest and best," rich in possessions and
in influence, and high in the councils of the city's government? It
would be but the plain truth. Nor would it be the only instance by very
many that stand recorded on the Health Department's books of a kind
that has come near to making the name of landlord as odious in New York
as it has become in Ireland.
Bottle Alley is around the corner in Baxter Street; but it is a fair
specimen of its kind, wherever found. Look into any of these houses,
everywhere the same piles of rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper,
all of which the sanitary police flatter themselves they have banished
to the dumps and the warehouses. Here is a "flat" of "parlor" and two
pitch-dark coops called bedrooms. Truly, the bed is all there is room
for. The family tea-kettle is on the stove, doing duty for the time
being as a wash-boiler. By night it will have returned to its proper
use again, a practical illustration of how poverty in "the Bend" makes
both ends meet. One, two, three beds are there, if the old boxes and
heaps of foul straw can be called by that name; a broken stove with
crazy pipe from which the smoke leaks at every joint, a table of
rough boards propped up on boxes, piles of rubbish in the corner.
The closeness and smell are appalling. How many people sleep here?
The woman with the red bandanna shakes her head sullenly, but the
bare-legged girl with the bright face counts on her fingers--five, six!
"Six, sir!" Six grown people and five children.
"Only five," she says with a smile, swathing the little one on her
lap in its cruel bandage. There is another in the cradle--actually a
cradle. And how much the rent?
Nine and a half, and "please, sir! he won't put the paper on."
"He" is the landlord. The "paper" hangs in musty shreds on the wall.
Well do I recollect the visit of a health inspector to one of these
tenements on a July day when the thermometer outside was climbing
high in the nineties; but inside, in that awful room, with half a
dozen persons washing, cooking, and sorting rags, lay the dying baby
alongside the stove, where the doctors thermometer ran up to 115°!
Perishing for the want of a breath of fresh air in this city of untold
charities! Did not the manager of the Fresh Air Fund write to the
pastor of an Italian Church only last year[9] that "no one asked for
Italian children," and hence he could not send any to the country?
[Footnote 9: See City Mission Report, February, 1890, page 77.]
[Illustration: BOTTLE ALLEY.]
Half a dozen blocks up Mulberry Street there is a rag-picker's
settlement, a sort of overflow from "the Bend," that exists to-day
in all its pristine nastiness. Something like forty families are
packed into five old two-story and attic houses that were built to
hold five, and out in the yards additional crowds are, or were until
very recently, accommodated in sheds built of all sorts of old boards
and used as drying racks for the Italian tenants' "stock." I found
them empty when I visited the settlement while writing this. The
last two tenants had just left. Their fate was characteristic. The
"old man," who lived in the corner coop, with barely room to crouch
beside the stove--there would not have been room for him to sleep had
not age crooked his frame to fit his house--had been taken to the
"crazy-house," and the woman who was his neighbor and had lived in
her shed for years had simply disappeared. The agent and the other
tenants "guessed," doubtless correctly, that she might be found on the
"island," but she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism, and "not much
good," and no one took the trouble to inquire for her. They had all
they could do attending to their own business and raising the rent.
No wonder; I found that for one front room and two "bedrooms" in the
shameful old wrecks of buildings the tenant was paying $10 a month, for
the back-room and one bedroom $9, and for the attic rooms, according to
size, from $3.75 to $5.50.
There is a standing quarrel between the professional--I mean now the
official--sanitarian and the unsalaried agitator for sanitary reform
over the question of overcrowded tenements. The one puts the number a
little vaguely at four or five hundred, while the other asserts that
there are thirty-two thousand, the whole number of houses classed as
tenements at the census of two years ago, taking no account of the
better kind of flats. It depends on the angle from which one sees it
which is right. At best the term overcrowding is a relative one, and
the scale of official measurement conveniently sliding. Under the
pressure of the Italian influx the standard of breathing space required
for an adult by the health officers has been cut down from six to four
hundred cubic feet. The "needs of the situation" is their plea, and no
more perfect argument could be advanced for the reformer's position.
It is in "the Bend" the sanitary policeman locates the bulk of his
four hundred, and the sanitary reformer gives up the task in despair.
Of its vast homeless crowds the census takes no account. It is their
instinct to shun the light, and they cannot be corralled in one place
long enough to be counted. But the houses can, and the last count
showed that in "the Bend" district, between Broadway and the Bowery and
Canal and Chatham Streets, in a total of four thousand three hundred
and sixty-seven "apartments" only nine were for the moment vacant,
while in the old "Africa," west of Broadway, that receives the overflow
from Mulberry Street and is rapidly changing its character, the notice
"standing room only" is up. Not a single vacant room was found there.
Nearly a hundred and fifty "lodgers" were driven out of two adjoining
Mulberry Street tenements, one of them aptly named "the House of
Blazes," during that census. What squalor and degradation inhabit these
dens the health officers know. Through the long summer days their carts
patrol "the Bend," scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes, in
sinks and cellars, and hidden hovels where the tramp burrows. From
midnight till far into the small hours of the morning the policeman's
thundering rap on closed doors is heard, with his stern command, "_Apri
port'!_" on his rounds gathering evidence of illegal overcrowding. The
doors are opened unwillingly enough--but the order means business, and
the tenant knows it even if he understands no word of English--upon
such scenes as the one presented in the picture. It was photographed
by flash-light on just such a visit. In a room not thirteen feet
either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a
sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly
in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals
to their "beds," for it was only just past midnight. A baby's fretful
wail came from an adjoining hall-room, where, in the semi-darkness,
three recumbent figures could be made out. The "apartment" was one of
three in two adjoining buildings we had found, within half an hour,
similarly crowded. Most of the men were lodgers, who slept there for
five cents a spot.
[Illustration: LODGERS IN A CROWDED BAYARD STREET TENEMENT--"FIVE CENTS
A SPOT."]
Another room on the top floor, that had been examined a few nights
before, was comparatively empty. There were only four persons in it,
two men, an old woman, and a young girl. The landlord opened the
door with alacrity, and exhibited with a proud sweep of his hand the
sacrifice he had made of his personal interests to satisfy the law. Our
visit had been anticipated. The policeman's back was probably no sooner
turned than the room was re-opened for business.
CHAPTER VII.
A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES.
Midnight roll-call was over in the Elizabeth Street police-station,
but the reserves were held under orders. A raid was on foot, but
whether on the Chinese fan-tan games, on the opium joints of Mott and
Pell Streets, or on dens of even worse character, was a matter of
guess-work in the men's room. When the last patrolman had come in from
his beat, all doubt was dispelled by the brief order "To the Bend!" The
stale-beer dives were the object of the raid. The policemen buckled
their belts tighter, and with expressive grunts of disgust took up
their march toward Mulberry Street. Past the heathen temples of Mott
Street--there was some fun to be gotten out of a raid _there_--they
trooped, into "the Bend," sending here and there a belated tramp
scurrying in fright toward healthier quarters, and halted at the
mouth of one of the hidden alleys. Squads were told off and sent
to make a simultaneous descent on all the known tramps' burrows in
the block. Led by the sergeant, ours--I went along as a kind of war
correspondent--groped its way in single file through the narrow rift
between slimy walls to the tenements in the rear. Twice during our trip
we stumbled over tramps, both women, asleep in the passage. They were
quietly passed to the rear, receiving sundry prods and punches on the
trip, and headed for the station in the grip of a policeman as a sort
of advance guard of the coming army. After what seemed half a mile of
groping in the dark we emerged finally into the alley proper, where
light escaping through the cracks of closed shutters on both sides
enabled us to make out the contour of three rickety frame tenements.
Snatches of ribald songs and peals of coarse laughter reached us from
now this, now that of the unseen burrows.
"School is in," said the Sergeant drily as we stumbled down the worn
steps of the next cellar-way. A kick of his boot-heel sent the door
flying into the room.
A room perhaps a dozen feet square, with walls and ceiling that might
once have been clean--assuredly the floor had not in the memory of
man, if indeed there was other floor than hard-trodden mud--but were
now covered with a brown crust that, touched with the end of a club,
came off in shuddering showers of crawling bugs, revealing the blacker
filth beneath. Grouped about a beer-keg that was propped on the wreck
of a broken chair, a foul and ragged host of men and women, on boxes,
benches, and stools. Tomato-cans filled at the keg were passed from
hand to hand. In the centre of the group a sallow, wrinkled hag,
evidently the ruler of the feast, dealt out the hideous stuff. A pile
of copper coins rattled in her apron, the very pennies received with
such showers of blessings upon the giver that afternoon; the faces of
some of the women were familiar enough from the streets as those of
beggars forever whining for a penny, "to keep a family from starving."
Their whine and boisterous hilarity were alike hushed now. In sullen,
cowed submission they sat, evidently knowing what to expect. At the
first glimpse of the uniform in the open door some in the group,
customers with a record probably, had turned their heads away to avoid
the searching glance of the officer; while a few, less used to such
scenes, stared defiantly.
A single stride took the sergeant into the middle of the room, and
with a swinging blow of his club he knocked the faucet out of the keg
and the half-filled can from the boss hag's hand. As the contents of
both splashed upon the floor, half a dozen of the group made a sudden
dash, and with shoulders humped above their heads to shield their
skulls against the dreaded locust broke for the door. They had not
counted upon the policemen outside. There was a brief struggle, two or
three heavy thumps, and the runaways were brought back to where their
comrades crouched in dogged silence.
"Thirteen!" called the sergeant, completing his survey. "Take them out.
'Revolvers' all but one. Good for six months on the island, the whole
lot." The exception was a young man not much if any over twenty, with a
hard look of dissipation on his face. He seemed less unconcerned than
the rest, but tried hard to make up for it by putting on the boldest
air he could. "Come down early," commented the officer, shoving him
along with his stick. "There is need of it. They don't last long at
this. That stuff is brewed to kill at long range."
At the head of the cellar-steps we encountered a similar procession
from farther back in the alley, where still another was forming to take
up its march to the station. Out in the street was heard the tramp of
the hosts already pursuing that well-trodden path, as with a fresh
complement of men we entered the next stale-beer alley. There were
four dives in one cellar here. The filth and the stench were utterly
unbearable; even the sergeant turned his back and fled after scattering
the crowd with his club and starting them toward the door. The very
dog in the alley preferred the cold flags for a berth to the stifling
cellar. We found it lying outside. Seventy-five tramps, male and
female, were arrested in the four small rooms. In one of them, where
the air seemed thick enough to cut with a knife, we found a woman, a
mother with a new-born babe on a heap of dirty straw. She was asleep
and was left until an ambulance could be called to take her to the
hospital.
Returning to the station with this batch, we found every window in the
building thrown open to the cold October wind, and the men from the
sergeant down smoking the strongest cigars that could be obtained by
way of disenfecting the place. Two hundred and seventy-five tramps had
been jammed into the cells to be arraigned next morning in the police
court on the charge of vagrancy, with the certain prospect of six
months "on the Island." Of the sentence at least they were sure. As to
the length of the men's stay the experienced official at the desk was
sceptical, it being then within a month of an important election. If
tramps have nothing else to call their own they have votes, and votes
that are for sale cheap for cash. About election time this gives them
a "pull," at least by proxy. The sergeant observed, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world, that he had more than once seen the
same tramp sent to Blackwell's Island twice in twenty-four hours for
six months at a time.
[Illustration: AN ALL-NIGHT TWO-CENT RESTAURANT, IN "THE BEND."]
As a thief never owns to his calling, however devoid of moral scruples,
preferring to style himself a speculator, so this real home-product
of the slums, the stale-beer dive, is known about "the Bend" by the
more dignified name of the two-cent restaurant. Usually, as in this
instance, it is in some cellar giving on a back alley. Doctored,
unlicensed beer is its chief ware. Sometimes a cup of "coffee"
and a stale roll may be had for two cents. The men pay the score.
To the women--unutterable horror of the suggestion--the place is
free. The beer is collected from the kegs put on the sidewalk by the
saloon-keeper to await the brewer's cart, and is touched up with drugs
to put a froth on it. The privilege to sit all night on a chair, or
sleep on a table, or in a barrel, goes with each round of drinks.
Generally an Italian, sometimes a negro, occasionally a woman, "runs"
the dive. Their customers, alike homeless and hopeless in their utter
wretchedness, are the professional tramps, and these only. The meanest
thief is infinitely above the stale-beer level. Once upon that plane
there is no escape. To sink below it is impossible; no one ever rose
from it. One night spent in a stale-beer dive is like the traditional
putting on of the uniform of the caste, the discarded rags of an old
tramp. That stile once crossed, the lane has no longer a turn; and
contrary to the proverb, it is usually not long either.
With the gravitation of the Italian tramp landlord toward the old
stronghold of the African on the West Side, a share of the stale-beer
traffic has left "the Bend;" but its headquarters will always remain
there, the real home of trampdom, just as Fourteenth Street is its
limit. No real tramp crosses that frontier after nightfall and in the
daytime only to beg. Repulsive as the business is, its profits to the
Italian dive-keeper are considerable; in fact, barring a slight outlay
in the ingredients that serve to give "life" to the beer-dregs, it
is all profit. The "banker" who curses the Italian colony does not
despise taking a hand in it, and such a thing as a stale-beer trust
on a Mulberry Street scale may yet be among the possibilities. One of
these bankers, who was once known to the police as the keeper of one
notorious stale-beer dive and the active backer of others, is to-day an
extensive manufacturer of macaroni, the owner of several big tenements
and other real estate; and the capital, it is said, has all come out of
his old business. Very likely it is true.
On hot summer nights it is no rare experience when exploring the worst
of the tenements in "the Bend" to find the hallways occupied by rows of
"sitters," tramps whom laziness or hard luck has prevented from earning
enough by their day's "labor" to pay the admission fee to a stale-beer
dive, and who have their reasons for declining the hospitality of the
police station lodging-rooms. Huddled together in loathsome files,
they squat there over night, or until an inquisitive policeman breaks
up the congregation with his club, which in Mulberry Street has always
free swing. At that season the woman tramp predominates. The men, some
of them at least, take to the railroad track and to camping out when
the nights grow warm, returning in the fall to prey on the city and to
recruit their ranks from the lazy, the shiftless, and the unfortunate.
Like a foul loadstone, "the Bend" attracts and brings them back, no
matter how far they have wandered. For next to idleness the tramp loves
rum; next to rum stale beer, its equivalent of the gutter. And the
first and last go best together.
As "sitters" they occasionally find a job in the saloons about Chatham
and Pearl Streets on cold winter nights, when the hallway is not
practicable, that enables them to pick up a charity drink now and then
and a bite of an infrequent sandwich. The barkeeper permits them to
sit about the stove and by shivering invite the sympathy of transient
customers. The dodge works well, especially about Christmas and
election time, and the sitters are able to keep comfortably filled
up to the advantage of their host. But to look thoroughly miserable
they must keep awake. A tramp placidly dozing at the fire would not be
an object of sympathy. To make sure that they do keep awake, the wily
bartender makes them sit constantly swinging one foot like the pendulum
of a clock. When it stops the slothful "sitter" is roused with a kick
and "fired out." It is said by those who profess to know that habit has
come to the rescue of oversleepy tramps and that the old rounders can
swing hand or foot in their sleep without betraying themselves. In some
saloons "sitters" are let in at these seasons in fresh batches every
hour.
On one of my visits to "the Bend" I came across a particularly ragged
and disreputable tramp, who sat smoking his pipe on the rung of a
ladder with such evident philosophic contentment in the busy labor of a
score of rag-pickers all about him, that I bade him sit for a picture,
offering him ten cents for the job. He accepted the offer with hardly a
nod, and sat patiently watching me from his perch until I got ready for
work. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth and put it in his pocket,
calmly declaring that it was not included in the contract, and that it
was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture. The pipe, by the way,
was of clay, and of the two-for-a-cent kind. But I had to give in. The
man, scarce ten seconds employed at honest labor, even at sitting down,
at which he was an undoubted expert, had gone on strike. He knew his
rights and the value of "work," and was not to be cheated out of either.
[Illustration: THE TRAMP.]
Whence these tramps, and why the tramping? are questions oftener asked
than answered. Ill-applied charity and idleness answer the first
query. They are the whence, and to a large extent the why also. Once
started on the career of a tramp, the man keeps to it because it is
the laziest. Tramps and toughs profess the same doctrine, that the
world owes them a living, but from stand-points that tend in different
directions. The tough does not become a tramp, save in rare instances,
when old and broken down. Even then usually he is otherwise disposed
of. The devil has various ways of taking care of his own. Nor is the
tramps' army recruited from any certain class. All occupations and
most grades of society yield to it their contingent of idleness.
Occasionally, from one cause or another, a recruit of a better stamp is
forced into the ranks; but the first acceptance of alms puts a brand on
the able-bodied man which his moral nature rarely hold out to efface.
He seldom recovers his lost caste. The evolution is gradual, keeping
step with the increasing shabbiness of his clothes and corresponding
loss of self-respect, until he reaches the bottom in "the Bend."
Of the tough the tramp doctrine that the world owes him a living makes
a thief; of the tramp a coward. Numbers only make him bold unless he
has to do with defenceless women. In the city the policemen keep him
straight enough. The women rob an occasional clothes-line when no one
is looking, or steal the pail and scrubbing-brush with which they are
set to clean up in the station-house lodging-rooms after their night's
sleep. At the police station the roads of the tramp and the tough again
converge. In mid-winter, on the coldest nights, the sanitary police
corral the tramps here and in their lodging-houses and vaccinate them,
despite their struggles and many oaths that they have recently been
"scraped." The station-house is the sieve that sifts out the chaff from
the wheat, if there be any wheat there. A man goes from his first
night's sleep on the hard slab of a police station lodging-room to a
deck-hand's berth on an out-going steamer, to the recruiting office, to
any work that is honest, or he goes "to the devil or the dives, same
thing," says my friend, the Sergeant, who knows.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.
When it comes to the question of numbers with this tramps' army,
another factor of serious portent has to be taken into account: the
cheap lodging-houses. In the caravanseries that line Chatham Street and
the Bowery, harboring nightly a population as large as that of many a
thriving town, a home-made article of tramp and thief is turned out
that is attracting the increasing attention of the police, and offers
a field for the missionary's labors beside which most others seem of
slight account. Within a year they have been stamped as nurseries of
crime by the chief of the Secret Police,[10] the sort of crime that
feeds especially on idleness and lies ready to the hand of fatal
opportunity. In the same strain one of the justices on the police court
bench sums up his long experience as a committing magistrate: "The
ten-cent lodging-houses more than counterbalance the good done by the
free reading-room, lectures, and all other agencies of reform. Such
lodging-houses have caused more destitution, more beggary and crime
than any other agency I know of." A very slight acquaintance with the
subject is sufficient to convince the observer that neither authority
overstates the fact. The two officials had reference, however, to two
different grades of lodging-houses. The cost of a night's lodging makes
the difference. There is a wider gap between the "hotel"--they are all
hotels--that charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a
dime than between the bridal suite and the every-day hall bedroom of
the ordinary hostelry.
[Footnote 10: Inspector Byrnes on Lodging-houses, in the North American
Review, September, 1889.]
The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth.
It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague
idea that they can get along here if anywhere; that something is bound
to turn up among so many. Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life,
many--most of them, perhaps--fresh from good homes, beyond a doubt
with honest hopes of getting a start in the city and making a way for
themselves. Few of them have much money to waste while looking around,
and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object. Fewer still know
anything about the city and its pitfalls. They have come in search
of crowds, of "life," and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery,
the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent
lodging-houses take them in. In the alleged reading-rooms of these
great barracks, that often have accommodations, such as they are,
for two, three, and even four hundred guests, they encounter three
distinct classes of associates: the great mass adventurers like
themselves, waiting there for something to turn up; a much smaller
class of respectable clerks or mechanics, who, too poor or too lonely
to have a home of their own, live this way from year to year; and
lastly the thief in search of recruits for his trade. The sights the
young stranger sees, and the company he keeps, in the Bowery are not
of a kind to strengthen any moral principle he may have brought away
from home, and by the time his money is gone, with no work yet in
sight, and he goes down a step, a long step, to the fifteen-cent
lodging-house, he is ready for the tempter whom he finds waiting for
him there, reinforced by the contingent of ex-convicts returning from
the prisons after having served out their sentences for robbery or
theft. Then it is that the something he has been waiting for turns
up. The police returns have the record of it. "In nine cases out of
ten," says Inspector Byrnes, "he turns out a thief, or a burglar, if,
indeed, he does not sooner or later become a murderer." As a matter
of fact, some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been the
result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses, and so frequent
and bold have become the depredations of the lodging-house thieves,
that the authorities have been compelled to make a public demand for
more effective laws that shall make them subject at all times to police
regulation.
Inspector Byrnes observes that in the last two or three years at
least four hundred young men have been arrested for petty crimes that
originated in the lodging-houses, and that in many cases it was their
first step in crime. He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that
three-fourths of the young men called on to plead to generally petty
offences in the courts are under twenty years of age, poorly clad, and
without means. The bearing of the remark is obvious. One of the, to the
police, well-known thieves who lived, when out of jail, at the Windsor,
a well-known lodging-house in the Bowery, went to Johnstown after the
flood and was shot and killed there while robbing the dead.
An idea of just how this particular scheme of corruption works, with
an extra touch of infamy thrown in, may be gathered from the story
of David Smith, the "New York Fagin," who was convicted and sent to
prison last year through the instrumentality of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here is the account from the
Society's last report:
"The boy, Edward Mulhearn, fourteen years old, had run away from his
home in Jersey City, thinking he might find work and friends in New
York. He may have been a trifle wild. He met Smith on the Bowery and
recognized him as an acquaintance. When Smith offered him a supper
and bed he was only too glad to accept. Smith led the boy to a vile
lodging-house on the Bowery, where he introduced him to his 'pals' and
swore he would make a man of him before he was a week older. Next day
he took the unsuspecting Edward all over the Bowery and Grand Street,
showed him the sights and drew his attention to the careless way the
ladies carried their bags and purses and the easy thing it was to get
them. He induced Edward to try his hand. Edward tried and won. He was
richer by three dollars! It did seem easy. 'Of course it is,' said his
companion. From that time Smith took the boy on a number of thieving
raids, but he never seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out
of range of the 'Fagin's' watchful eye. When he went out alone he
generally returned empty-handed. This did not suit Smith. It was then
he conceived the idea of turning this little inferior thief into a
superior beggar. He took the boy into his room and burned his arms
with a hot iron. The boy screamed and entreated in vain. The merciless
wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh, and afterward
applied acid to the raw wound.
"Thus prepared, with his arm inflamed, swollen, and painful, Edward was
sent out every day by this fiend, who never let him out of his sight,
and threatened to burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough. He
was instructed to tell people the wound had been caused by acid falling
upon his arm at the works. Edward was now too much under the man's
influence to resist or disobey him. He begged hard and handed Smith the
pennies faithfully. He received in return bad food and worse treatment."
The reckoning came when the wretch encountered the boy's father, in
search of his child, in the Bowery, and fell under suspicion of knowing
more than he pretended of the lad's whereabouts. He was found in his
den with a half dozen of his chums revelling on the proceeds of the
boy's begging for the day.
The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom,
though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to
hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes
is the shallowest of all pretences. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly
forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and
blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's
clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is
reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles,
the lodger. Usually the ten- and seven-cent lodgings are different
grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for a bed, with
mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp
who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty
box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these
"hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without
covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who
prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow
to the revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most secure perch
in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have not
far to fall to the next tier of bunks, and the commotion that ensues
is speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights,
when every bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room
more than once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the
regular strokes of an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under
their restless weight, imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the
very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not favor the
deception was the air; its character could not be mistaken.
[Illustration: BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET.]
The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me
as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. He "ran" three such
establishments and made, it was said, $8,000 a year clear profit on
his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish
precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not
suspected. A notice that was posted on the wall of the lodgers' room
suggested at least an effort to maintain his up-town standing in the
slums. It read: "No swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock."
Before nine no exceptions were taken to the natural vulgarity of the
place; but that was the limit.
There are no licensed lodging-houses known to me which charge less than
seven cents for even such a bed as this canvas strip, though there are
unlicensed ones enough where one may sleep on the floor for five cents
a spot, or squat in a sheltered hallway for three. The police station
lodging-house, where the soft side of a plank is the regulation couch,
is next in order. The manner in which this police bed is "made up" is
interesting in its simplicity. The loose planks that make the platform
are simply turned over, and the job is done, with an occasional coat
of white-wash thrown in to sweeten things. I know of only one easier
way, but, so far as I am informed, it has never been introduced in this
country. It used to be practised, if report spoke truly, in certain
old-country towns. The "bed" was represented by clothes-lines stretched
across the room upon which the sleepers hung by the arm-pits for a
penny a night. In the morning the boss woke them up by simply untying
the line at one end and letting it go with its load; a labor-saving
device certainly, and highly successful in attaining the desired end.
According to the police figures, 4,974,025 separate lodgings were
furnished last year by these dormitories, between two and three
hundred in number, and, adding the 147,634 lodgings furnished by the
station-houses, the total of the homeless army was 5,121,659, an
average of over fourteen thousand homeless men[11] for every night
in the year! The health officers, professional optimists always in
matters that trench upon their official jurisdiction, insist that
the number is not quite so large as here given. But, apart from any
slight discrepancy in the figures, the more important fact remains
that last year's record of lodgers is an all round increase over the
previous year's of over three hundred thousand, and that this has
been the ratio of growth of the business during the last three years,
the period of which Inspector Byrnes complains as turning out so many
young criminals with the lodging-house stamp upon them. More than half
of the lodging-houses are in the Bowery district, that is to say, the
Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Wards, and they harbor nearly three-fourths
of their crowds. The calculation that more than nine thousand homeless
young men lodge nightly along Chatham Street and the Bowery, between
the City Hall and the Cooper Union, is probably not far out of the way.
The City Missionary finds them there far less frequently than the thief
in need of helpers. Appropriately enough, nearly one-fifth of all the
pawn-shops in the city and one-sixth of all the saloons are located
here, while twenty-seven per cent. of all the arrests on the police
books have been credited to the district for the last two years.
[Footnote 11: Deduct 69,111 women lodgers in the police stations.]
About election time, especially in Presidential elections, the
lodging-houses come out strong on the side of the political boss who
has the biggest "barrel." The victory in political contests, in the
three wards I have mentioned of all others, is distinctly to the
general with the strongest battalions, and the lodging-houses are his
favorite recruiting ground. The colonization of voters is an evil of
the first magnitude, none the less because both parties smirch their
hands with it, and for that reason next to hopeless. Honors are easy,
where the two "machines," intrenched in their strongholds, outbid each
other across the Bowery in open rivalry as to who shall commit the most
flagrant frauds at the polls. Semi-occasionally a champion offender is
caught and punished, as was, not long ago, the proprietor of one of the
biggest Bowery lodging-houses. But such scenes are largely spectacular,
if not prompted by some hidden motive of revenge that survives from
the contest. Beyond a doubt Inspector Byrnes speaks by the card when
he observes that "usually this work is done in the interest of some
local political boss, who stands by the owner of the house, in case the
latter gets into trouble." For standing by, read twisting the machinery
of outraged justice so that its hand shall fall not too heavily upon
the culprit, or miss him altogether. One of the houses that achieved
profitable notoriety in this way in many successive elections, a
notorious tramps' resort in Houston Street, was lately given up, and
has most appropriately been turned into a bar-factory, thus still
contributing, though in a changed form, to the success of "the cause."
It must be admitted that the black tramp who herds in the West Side
"hotels" is more discriminating in this matter of electioneering
than his white brother. He at least exhibits some real loyalty in
invariably selling his vote to the Republican bidder for a dollar,
while he charges the Democratic boss a dollar and a half. In view of
the well-known facts, there is a good deal of force in the remark made
by a friend of ballot reform during the recent struggle over that
hotly contested issue, that real ballot reform will do more to knock
out cheap lodging-houses than all the regulations of police and health
officers together.
The experiment made by a well-known stove manufacturer a winter or two
ago in the way of charity, might have thrown much desired light on
the question of the number of tramps in the city, could it have been
carried to a successful end. He opened a sort of breakfast shop for
the idle and unemployed in the region of Washington Square, offering
to all who had no money a cup of coffee and a roll for nothing. The
first morning he had a dozen customers, the next about two hundred. The
number kept growing until one morning, at the end of two weeks, found
by actual count 2,014 shivering creatures in line waiting their turn
for a seat at his tables. The shop was closed that day. It was one of
the rare instances of too great a rush of custom wrecking a promising
business, and the great problem remained unsolved.
CHAPTER IX.
CHINATOWN.
Between the tabernacles of Jewry and the shrines of the Bend, Joss
has cheekily planted his pagan worship of idols, chief among which
are the celestial worshipper's own gain and lusts. Whatever may be
said about the Chinaman being a thousand years behind the age on his
own shores, here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful
scheming to "make it pay." It is doubtful if there is anything he does
not turn to a paying account, from his religion down, or up, as one
prefers. At the risk of distressing some well-meaning, but, I fear,
too trustful people, I state it in advance as my opinion, based on the
steady observation of years, that all attempts to make an effective
Christian of John Chinaman will remain abortive in this generation; of
the next I have, if anything, less hope. Ages of senseless idolatry,
a mere grub-worship, have left him without the essential qualities
for appreciating the gentle teachings of a faith whose motive and
unselfish spirit are alike beyond his grasp. He lacks the handle of a
strong faith in something, anything however wrong, to catch him by.
There is nothing strong about him, except his passions when aroused.
I am convinced that he adopts Christianity, when he adopts it at all,
as he puts on American clothes, with what the politicians would call
an ulterior motive, some sort of gain in the near prospect--washing, a
Christian wife, perhaps, anything he happens to rate for the moment
above his cherished pigtail. It may be that I judge him too harshly.
Exceptions may be found. Indeed, for the credit of the race, I hope
there are such. But I am bound to say my hope is not backed by lively
faith.
Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing. Next-door neighbor to
the Bend, it has little of its outdoor stir and life, none of its
gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty. Mott Street is
clean to distraction: the laundry stamp is on it, though the houses
are chiefly of the conventional tenement-house type, with nothing to
rescue them from the everyday dismal dreariness of their kind save
here and there a splash of dull red or yellow, a sign, hung endways
and with streamers of red flannel tacked on, that announces in Chinese
characters that Dr. Chay Yen Chong sells Chinese herb medicines, or
that Won Lung & Co.--queer contradiction--take in washing, or deal
out tea and groceries. There are some gimcracks in the second story
fire-escape of one of the houses, signifying that Joss or a club has a
habitation there. An American patent medicine concern has seized the
opportunity to decorate the back-ground with its cabalistic trade-mark,
that in this company looks as foreign as the rest. Doubtless the
privilege was bought for cash. It will buy anything in Chinatown, Joss
himself included, as indeed, why should it not? He was bought for cash
across the sea and came here under the law that shuts out the live
Chinaman, but lets in his dead god on payment of the statutory duty
on bric-à-brac. Red and yellow are the holiday colors of Chinatown as
of the Bend, but they do not lend brightness in Mott Street as around
the corner in Mulberry. Rather, they seem to descend to the level of
the general dulness, and glower at you from doors and windows, from
the telegraph pole that is the official organ of Chinatown and from
the store signs, with blank, un-meaning stare, suggesting nothing,
asking no questions, and answering none. Fifth Avenue is not duller on
a rainy day than Mott Street to one in search of excitement. Whatever
is on foot goes on behind closed doors. Stealth and secretiveness are
as much part of the Chinaman in New York as the cat-like tread of his
felt shoes. His business, as his domestic life, shuns the light, less
because there is anything to conceal than because that is the way of
the man. Perhaps the attitude of American civilization toward the
stranger, whom it invited in, has taught him that way. At any rate,
the very doorways of his offices and shops are fenced off by queer,
forbidding partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege. The
stranger who enters through the crooked approach is received with
sudden silence, a sullen stare, and an angry "Vat you vant?" that
breathes annoyance and distrust.
Trust not him who trusts no one, is as safe a rule in Chinatown as out
of it. Were not Mott Street overawed in its isolation, it would not be
safe to descend this open cellar-way, through which come the pungent
odor of burning opium and the clink of copper coins on the table. As
it is, though safe, it is not profitable to intrude. At the first
foot-fall of leather soles on the steps the hum of talk ceases, and the
group of celestials, crouching over their game of fan tan, stop playing
and watch the comer with ugly looks. Fan tan is their ruling passion.
The average Chinaman, the police will tell you, would rather gamble
than eat any day, and they have ample experience to back them. Only
the fellow in the bunk smokes away, indifferent to all else but his
pipe and his own enjoyment. It is a mistake to assume that Chinatown is
honeycombed with opium "joints." There are a good many more outside
of it than in it. The celestials do not monopolize the pipe. In Mott
Street there is no need of them. Not a Chinese home or burrow there,
but has its bunk and its lay-out, where they can be enjoyed safe from
police interference. The Chinaman smokes opium as Caucasians smoke
tobacco, and apparently with little worse effect upon himself. But woe
unto the white victim upon which his pitiless drug gets its grip!
The bloused pedlars who, with arms buried half to the elbow in their
trousers' pockets, lounge behind their stock of watermelon seed and
sugar-cane, cut in lengths to suit the purse of the buyer, disdain to
offer the barbarian their wares. Chinatown, that does most things by
contraries, rules it holiday style to carry its hands in its pockets,
and its denizens follow the fashion, whether in blue blouse, in gray,
or in brown, with shining and braided pig-tail dangling below the
knees, or with hair cropped short above a coat collar of "Melican"
cut. All kinds of men are met, but no women--none at least with almond
eyes. The reason is simple: there are none. A few, a very few, Chinese
merchants have wives of their own color, but they are seldom or never
seen in the street. The "wives" of Chinatown are of a different stock
that comes closer home.
From the teeming tenements to the right and left of it come the white
slaves of its dens of vice and their infernal drug, that have infused
into the "Bloody Sixth" Ward a subtler poison than ever the stale-beer
dives knew, or the "sudden death" of the Old Brewery. There are houses,
dozens of them, in Mott and Pell Streets, that are literally jammed,
from the "joint" in the cellar to the attic, with these hapless victims
of a passion which, once acquired, demands the sacrifice of every
instinct of decency to its insatiate desire. There is a church in Mott
Street, at the entrance to Chinatown, that stands as a barrier between
it and the tenements beyond. Its young men have waged unceasing war
upon the monstrous wickedness for years, but with very little real
result. I have in mind a house in Pell Street that has been raided no
end of times by the police, and its population emptied upon Blackwell's
Island, or into the reformatories, yet is to-day honeycombed with
scores of the conventional households of the Chinese quarter: the men
worshippers of Joss; the women, all white, girls hardly yet grown to
womanhood, worshipping nothing save the pipe that has enslaved them
body and soul. Easily tempted from homes that have no claim upon the
name, they rarely or never return. Mott Street gives up its victims
only to the Charity Hospital or the Potter's Field. Of the depth of
their fall no one is more thoroughly aware than these girls themselves;
no one less concerned about it. The calmness with which they discuss
it, while insisting illogically upon the fiction of a marriage that
deceives no one, is disheartening. Their misery is peculiarly fond of
company, and an amount of visiting goes on in these households that
makes it extremely difficult for the stranger to untangle them. I came
across a company of them "hitting the pipe" together, on a tour through
their dens one night with the police captain of the precinct. The girls
knew him, called him by name, offered him a pipe, and chatted with
him about the incidents of their acquaintance, how many times he had
"sent them up," and their chances of "lasting" much longer. There was
no shade of regret in their voices, nothing but utter indifference and
surrender.
One thing about them was conspicuous: their scrupulous neatness. It
is the distinguishing mark of Chinatown, outwardly and physically. It
is not altogether by chance the Chinaman has chosen the laundry as
his distinctive field. He is by nature as clean as the cat, which he
resembles in his traits of cruel cunning, and savage fury when aroused.
On this point of cleanliness he insists in his domestic circle,
yielding in others with crafty submissiveness to the caprice of the
girls, who "boss" him in a very independent manner, fretting vengefully
under the yoke they loathe, but which they know right well they can
never shake off, once they have put the pipe to their lips and given
Mott Street a mortgage upon their souls for all time. To the priest,
whom they call in when the poison racks the body, they pretend that
they are yet their own masters; but he knows that it is an idle boast,
least of all believed by themselves. As he walks with them the few
short steps to the Potter's Field, he hears the sad story he has heard
told over and over again, of father, mother, home, and friends given
up for the accursed pipe, and stands hopeless and helpless before the
colossal evil for which he knows no remedy.
The frequent assertions of the authorities that at least no girls under
age are wrecked on this Chinese shoal, are disproved by the observation
of those who go frequently among these dens, though the smallest girl
will invariably, and usually without being asked, insist that she is
sixteen, and so of age to choose the company she keeps. Such assertions
are not to be taken seriously. Even while I am writing, the morning
returns from one of the precincts that pass through my hands report the
arrest of a Chinaman for "inveigling little girls into his laundry,"
one of the hundred outposts of Chinatown that are scattered all over
the city, as the outer threads of the spider's web that holds its prey
fast. Reference to case No. 39,499 in this year's report of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, will discover one of the
much travelled roads to Chinatown. The girl whose story it tells was
thirteen, and one of six children abandoned by a dissipated father. She
had been discharged from an Eighth Avenue store, where she was employed
as cash girl, and, being afraid to tell her mother, floated about until
she landed in a Chinese laundry. The judge heeded her tearful prayer,
and sent her home with her mother, but she was back again in a little
while despite all promises of reform.
[Illustration: IN A CHINESE JOINT.]
Her tyrant knows well that she will come, and patiently bides his time.
When her struggles in the web have ceased at last, he rules no longer
with gloved hand. A specimen of celestial logic from the home circle at
this period came home to me with a personal application, one evening
when I attempted, with a policeman, to stop a Chinaman whom we found
beating his white "wife" with a broom-handle in a Mott Street cellar.
He was angry at our interference, and declared vehemently that she was
"bad."
"S'ppose your wifee bad, you no lickee her?" he asked, as if there
could be no appeal from such a common-sense proposition as that. My
assurance that I did not, that such a thing could not occur to me,
struck him dumb with amazement. He eyed me a while in stupid silence,
poked the linen in his tub, stole another look, and made up his mind. A
gleam of intelligence shone in his eye, and pity and contempt struggled
in his voice. "Then, I guess, she lickee you," he said.
No small commotion was caused in Chinatown once upon the occasion of an
expedition I undertook, accompanied by a couple of police detectives,
to photograph Joss. Some conscienceless wag spread the report, after
we were gone, that his picture was wanted for the Rogues' Gallery
at Headquarters. The insult was too gross to be passed over without
atonement of some sort. Two roast pigs made matters all right with
his offended majesty of Mott Street, and with his attendant priests,
who bear a very practical hand in the worship by serving as the
divine stomach, as it were. They eat the good things set before their
rice-paper master, unless, as once happened, some sacrilegious tramp
sneaks in and gets ahead of them. The practical way in which this
people combine worship with business is certainly admirable. I was
told that the scrawl covering the wall on both sides of the shrine
stood for the names of the pillars of the church or club--the Joss
House is both--that they might have their reward in this world, no
matter what happened to them in the next. There was another inscription
overhead that needed no interpreter. In familiar English letters,
copied bodily from the trade dollar, was the sentiment: "In God we
trust." The priest pointed to it with undisguised pride and attempted
an explanation, from which I gathered that the inscription was intended
as a diplomatic courtesy, a delicate international compliment to the
"Melican Joss," the almighty dollar.
[Illustration: "THE OFFICIAL ORGAN OF CHINATOWN."]
Chinatown has enlisted the telegraph for the dissemination of public
intelligence, but it has got hold of the contrivance by the wrong
end. As the wires serve us in newspaper-making, so the Chinaman makes
use of the pole for the same purpose. The telegraph pole, of which I
spoke as the real official organ of Chinatown, stands not far from
the Joss House in Mott Street, in full view from Chatham Square. In
it centres the real life of the colony, its gambling news. Every day
yellow and red notices are posted upon it by unseen hands, announcing
that in such and such a cellar a fan tan game will be running that
night, or warning the faithful that a raid is intended on this or that
game through the machination of a rival interest. A constant stream
of plotting and counter-plotting makes up the round of Chinese social
and political existence. I do not pretend to understand the exact
political structure of the colony, or its internal government. Even
discarding as idle the stories of a secret cabal with power over life
and death, and authority to enforce its decrees, there is evidence
enough that the Chinese consider themselves subject to the laws of the
land only when submission is unavoidable, and that they are governed
by a code of their own, the very essence of which is rejection of all
other authority except under compulsion. If now and then some horrible
crime in the Chinese colony, a murder of such hideous ferocity as
one I have a very vivid recollection of, where the murderer stabbed
his victim (both Chinamen, of course) in the back with a meat-knife,
plunging it in to the hilt no less than seventeen times, arouses the
popular prejudice to a suspicion that it was "ordered," only the
suspected themselves are to blame, for they appear to rise up as one
man to shield the criminal. The difficulty of tracing the motive of the
crime and the murderer is extreme, and it is the rarest of all results
that the police get on the track of either. The obstacles in the way
of hunting down an Italian murderer are as nothing to the opposition
encountered in Chinatown. Nor is the failure of the pursuit wholly to
be ascribed to the familiar fact that to Caucasian eyes "all Chinamen
look alike," but rather to their acting "alike," in a body, to defeat
discovery at any cost.
Withal the police give the Chinese the name of being the "quietest
people down there," meaning in the notoriously turbulent Sixth Ward;
and they are. The one thing they desire above all is to be let alone,
a very natural wish perhaps, considering all the circumstances. If it
were a laudable, or even an allowable ambition that prompts it, they
might be humored with advantage, probably, to both sides. But the facts
show too plainly that it is not, and that in their very exclusiveness
and reserve they are a constant and terrible menace to society, wholly
regardless of their influence upon the industrial problems which
their presence confuses. The severest official scrutiny, the harshest
repressive measures are justifiable in Chinatown, orderly as it appears
on the surface, even more than in the Bend, and the case is infinitely
more urgent. To the peril that threatens there all the senses are
alert, whereas the poison that proceeds from Mott Street puts mind and
body to sleep, to work out its deadly purpose in the corruption of the
soul.
This again may be set down as a harsh judgment. I may be accused of
inciting persecution of an unoffending people. Far from it. Granted,
that the Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population,
that they serve no useful purpose here, whatever they may have done
elsewhere in other days, yet to this it is a sufficient answer that
they are here, and that, having let them in, we must make the best of
it. This is a time for very plain speaking on this subject. Rather than
banish the Chinaman, I would have the door opened wider--for his wife;
make it a condition of his coming or staying that he bring his wife
with him. Then, at least, he might not be what he now is and remains, a
homeless stranger among us. Upon this hinges the real Chinese question,
in our city at all events, as I see it. To assert that the victims of
his drug and his base passions would go to the bad anyhow, is begging
the question. They might and they might not. The chance is the span
between life and death. From any other form of dissipation than that
for which Chinatown stands there is recovery: for the victims of any
other vice, hope. For these there is neither hope nor recovery; nothing
but death--moral, mental, and physical death.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER X.
JEWTOWN.
The tenements grow taller, and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly
as we cross the Bowery and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind,
invade the Hebrew quarter. Baxter Street, with its interminable rows
of old clothes shops and its brigades of pullers-in--nicknamed "the
Bay" in honor, perhaps, of the tars who lay to there after a cruise to
stock up their togs, or maybe after the "schooners" of beer plentifully
bespoke in that latitude--Bayard Street, with its synagogues and its
crowds, gave us a foretaste of it. No need of asking here where we
are. The jargon of the street, the signs of the sidewalk, the manner
and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their
race at every step. Men with queer skull-caps, venerable beard, and the
outlandish long-skirted kaftan of the Russian Jew, elbow the ugliest
and the handsomest women in the land. The contrast is startling. The
old women are hags; the young, houris. Wives and mothers at sixteen, at
thirty they are old. So thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out
the Gentiles in the Tenth Ward that, when the great Jewish holidays
come around every year, the public schools in the district have
practically to close up. Of their thousands of pupils scarce a handful
come to school. Nor is there any suspicion that the rest are playing
hookey. They stay honestly home to celebrate. There is no mistaking
it: we are in Jewtown.
It is said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded
together on a square mile as here. The average five-story tenement adds
a story or two to its stature in Ludlow Street and an extra building
on the rear lot, and yet the sign "To Let" is the rarest of all there.
Here is one seven stories high. The sanitary policeman whose beat
this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families, but the
term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this
house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight
babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In
Essex Street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold
a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders.
The boarder plays as important a part in the domestic economy of
Jewtown as the lodger in the Mulberry Street Bend. These are samples
of the packing of the population that has run up the record here to
the rate of three hundred and thirty thousand per square mile. The
densest crowding of Old London, I pointed out before, never got beyond
a hundred and seventy-five thousand. Even the alley is crowded out.
Through dark hallways and filthy cellars, crowded, as is every foot
of the street, with dirty children, the settlements in the rear are
reached. Thieves know how to find them when pursued by the police,
and the tramps that sneak in on chilly nights to fight for the warm
spot in the yard over some baker's oven. They are out of place in this
hive of busy industry, and they know it. It has nothing in common with
them or with their philosophy of life, that the world owes the idler
a living. Life here means the hardest kind of work almost from the
cradle. The world as a debtor has no credit in Jewtown. Its promise
to pay wouldn't buy one of the old hats that are hawked about Hester
Street, unless backed by security representing labor done at lowest
market rates. But this army of workers must have bread. It is cheap and
filling, and bakeries abound. Wherever they are in the tenements the
tramp will skulk in, if he can. There is such a tramps' roost in the
rear of a tenement near the lower end of Ludlow Street, that is never
without its tenants in winter. By a judicious practice of flopping over
on the stone pavement at intervals, and thus warming one side at a
time, and with an empty box to put the feet in, it is possible to keep
reasonably comfortable there even on a rainy night. In summer the yard
is the only one in the neighborhood that does not do duty as a public
dormitory.
[Illustration: A TRAMP'S NEST IN LUDLOW STREET.]
Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It
is at once its strength and its fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and
its foul disgrace. Become an over-mastering passion with these people
who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution,
from which freedom could be bought only with gold, it has enslaved
them in bondage worse than that from which they fled. Money is their
God. Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest
bank account. In no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and
materialistic an aspect as in Ludlow Street. Over and over again I
have met with instances of these Polish or Russian Jews deliberately
starving themselves to the point of physical exhaustion, while working
night and day at a tremendous pressure to save a little money. An
avenging Nemesis pursues this headlong hunt for wealth; there is no
worse paid class anywhere. I once put the question to one of their
own people, who, being a pawnbroker, and an unusually intelligent and
charitable one, certainly enjoyed the advantage of a practical view of
the situation: "Whence the many wretchedly poor people in such a colony
of workers, where poverty, from a misfortune, has become a reproach,
dreaded as the plague?"
"Immigration," he said, "brings us a lot. In five years it has averaged
twenty-five thousand a year, of which more than seventy per cent. have
stayed in New York. Half of them require and receive aid from the
Hebrew Charities from the very start, lest they starve. That is one
explanation. There is another class than the one that cannot get work:
those who have had too much of it; who have worked and hoarded and
lived, crowded together like pigs, on the scantiest fare and the worst
to be got, bound to save whatever their earnings, until, worn out, they
could work no longer. Then their hoards were soon exhausted. That is
their story." And I knew that what he said was true.
Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease, and
Jewtown is no exception. It could not well be otherwise in such crowds,
considering especially their low intellectual status. The managers of
the Eastern Dispensary, which is in the very heart of their district,
told the whole story when they said: "The diseases these people suffer
from are not due to intemperance or immorality, but to ignorance, want
of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work."[12]
The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also. Reference
will be made to the economic conditions under which they work in a
succeeding chapter. Here we are concerned simply with the fact. You
are made fully aware of it before you have travelled the length of
a single block in any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a
thousand sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn
till mind and muscle give out together. Every member of the family,
from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand, shut in the qualmy
rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried besides,
the live-long day. It is not unusual to find a dozen persons--men,
women, and children--at work in a single small room. The fact accounts
for the contrast that strikes with wonder the observer who comes across
from the Bend. Over there the entire population seems possessed of
an uncontrollable impulse to get out into the street; here all its
energies appear to be bent upon keeping in and away from it. Not that
the streets are deserted. The overflow from these tenements is enough
to make a crowd anywhere. The children alone would do it. Not old
enough to work and no room for play, that is their story. In the home
the child's place is usurped by the lodger, who performs the service
of the Irishman's pig--pays the rent. In the street the army of
hucksters crowd him out. Typhus fever and small-pox are bred here, and
help solve the question what to do with him. Filth diseases both, they
sprout naturally among the hordes that bring the germs with them from
across the sea, and whose first instinct is to hide their sick lest the
authorities carry them off to the hospital to be slaughtered, as they
firmly believe. The health officers are on constant and sharp lookout
for hidden fever-nests. Considering that half of the ready-made clothes
that are sold in the big stores, if not a good deal more than half, are
made in these tenement rooms, this is not excessive caution. It has
happened more than once that a child recovering from small-pox, and in
the most contagious stage of the disease, has been found crawling among
heaps of half-finished clothing that the next day would be offered for
sale on the counter of a Broadway store; or that a typhus fever patient
has been discovered in a room whence perhaps a hundred coats had been
sent home that week, each one with the wearer's death-warrant, unseen
and unsuspected, basted in the lining.
[Footnote 12: Report of Eastern Dispensary for 1889.]
The health officers call the Tenth the typhus ward; in the office where
deaths are registered it passes as the "suicide ward," for reasons
not hard to understand; and among the police as the "crooked ward,"
on account of the number of "crooks," petty thieves and their allies,
the "fences," receivers of stolen goods, who find the dense crowds
congenial. The nearness of the Bowery, the great "thieves' highway,"
helps to keep up the supply of these, but Jewtown does not support
its dives. Its troubles with the police are the characteristic crop
of its intense business rivalries. Oppression, persecution, have not
shorn the Jew of his native combativeness one whit. He is as ready
to fight for his rights, or what he considers his rights, in a
business transaction--synonymous generally with his advantage--as if
he had not been robbed of them for eighteen hundred years. One strong
impression survives with him from his days of bondage: the power of
the law. On the slightest provocation he rushes off to invoke it for
his protection. Doubtless the sensation is novel to him, and therefore
pleasing. The police at the Eldridge Street station are in a constant
turmoil over these everlasting fights. Somebody is always denouncing
somebody else, and getting his enemy or himself locked up; frequently
both, for the prisoner, when brought in, has generally as plausible
a story to tell as his accuser, and as hot a charge to make. The day
closes on a wild conflict of rival interests. Another dawns with the
prisoner in court, but no complainant. Over night the case has been
settled on a business basis, and the police dismiss their prisoner in
deep disgust.
These quarrels have sometimes a comic aspect. Thus, with the numerous
dancing-schools that are scattered among the synagogues, often keeping
them company in the same tenement. They are generally kept by some
man who works in the daytime at tailoring, cigarmaking, or something
else. The young people in Jewtown are inordinately fond of dancing,
and after their day's hard work will flock to these "schools" for a
night's recreation. But even to their fun they carry their business
preferences, and it happens that a school adjourns in a body to make
a general raid on the rival establishment across the street, without
the ceremony of paying the admission fee. Then the dance breaks up in
a general fight, in which, likely enough, someone is badly hurt. The
police come in, as usual, and ring down the curtain.
[Illustration: A MARKET SCENE IN THE JEWISH QUARTER.]
Bitter as are his private feuds, it is not until his religious life
is invaded that a real inside view is obtained of this Jew, whom the
history of Christian civilization has taught nothing but fear and
hatred. There are two or three missions in the district conducting a
hopeless propagandism for the Messiah whom the Tenth Ward rejects,
and they attract occasional crowds, who come to hear the Christian
preacher as the Jews of old gathered to hear the apostles expound the
new doctrine. The result is often strikingly similar. "For once," said
a certain well-known minister of an uptown church to me, after such an
experience, "I felt justified in comparing myself to Paul preaching
salvation to the Jews. They kept still until I spoke of Jesus Christ as
the Son of God. Then they got up and fell to arguing among themselves
and to threatening me, until it looked as if they meant to take me out
in Hester Street and stone me." As at Jerusalem, the Chief Captain
was happily at hand with his centurions, in the person of a sergeant
and three policemen, and the preacher was rescued. So, in all matters
pertaining to their religious life that tinges all their customs, they
stand, these East Side Jews, where the new day that dawned on Calvary
left them standing, stubbornly refusing to see the light. A visit to
a Jewish house of mourning is like bridging the gap of two thousand
years. The inexpressibly sad and sorrowful wail for the dead, as it
swells and rises in the hush of all sounds of life, comes back from
the ages like a mournful echo of the voice of Rachel "weeping for her
children and refusing to be comforted, because they are not."
Attached to many of the synagogues, which among the poorest Jews
frequently consist of a scantily furnished room in a rear tenement,
with a few wooden stools or benches for the congregation, are Talmudic
schools that absorb a share of the growing youth. The school-master
is not rarely a man of some attainments who has been stranded there,
his native instinct for money-making having been smothered in the
process that has made of him a learned man. It was of such a school
in Eldridge Street that the wicked Isaac Iacob, who killed his enemy,
his wife, and himself in one day, was janitor. But the majority of the
children seek the public schools, where they are received sometimes
with some misgivings on the part of the teachers, who find it necessary
to inculcate lessons of cleanliness in the worst cases by practical
demonstration with wash-bowl and soap. "He took hold of the soap as
if it were some animal," said one of these teachers to me after such
an experiment upon a new pupil, "and wiped three fingers across his
face. He called that washing." In the Allen Street public school the
experienced principal has embodied among the elementary lessons, to
keep constantly before the children the duty that clearly lies next to
their hands, a characteristic exercise. The question is asked daily
from the teacher's desk: "What must I do to be healthy?" and the whole
school responds:
"I must keep my skin clean,
Wear clean clothes,
Breathe pure air,
And live in the sunlight."
It seems little less than biting sarcasm to hear them say it, for to
not a few of them all these things are known only by name. In their
everyday life there is nothing even to suggest any of them. Only the
demand of religious custom has power to make their parents clean up at
stated intervals, and the young naturally are no better. As scholars,
the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of
their more favored playmates, until it comes to mental arithmetic, when
they leave them behind with a bound. It is surprising to see how strong
the instinct of dollars and cents is in them. They can count, and
correctly, almost before they can talk.
Within a few years the police captured on the East Side a band of
firebugs who made a business of setting fire to tenements for the
insurance on their furniture. There has, unfortunately, been some
evidence in the past year that another such conspiracy is on foot. The
danger to which these fiends expose their fellow-tenants is appalling.
A fire-panic at night in a tenement, by no means among the rare
experiences in New York, with the surging, half-smothered crowds on
stairs and fire-escapes, the frantic mothers and crying children, the
wild struggle to save the little that is their all, is a horror that
has few parallels in human experience.
I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in a First Avenue
tenement. It was in the middle of the night. The fire had swept up
with sudden fury from a restaurant on the street floor, cutting off
escape. Men and women threw themselves from the windows, or were
carried down senseless by the firemen. Thirteen half-clad, apparently
lifeless bodies were laid on the floor of an adjoining coal-office,
and the ambulance surgeons worked over them with sleeves rolled up to
the elbows. A half-grown girl with a baby in her arms walked about
among the dead and dying with a stunned, vacant look, singing in a low,
scared voice to the child. One of the doctors took her arm to lead her
out, and patted the cheek of the baby soothingly. It was cold. The
baby had been smothered with its father and mother; but the girl, her
sister, did not know it. Her reason had fled.
Thursday night and Friday morning are bargain days in the "Pig-market."
Then is the time to study the ways of this peculiar people to the best
advantage. A common pulse beats in the quarters of the Polish Jews
and in the Mulberry Bend, though they have little else in common.
Life over yonder in fine weather is a perpetual holiday, here a
veritable tread-mill of industry. Friday brings out all the latent
color and picturesqueness of the Italians, as of these Semites. The
crowds and the common poverty are the bonds of sympathy between them.
The Pig-market is in Hester Street, extending either way from Ludlow
Street, and up and down the side streets two or three blocks, as the
state of trade demands. The name was given to it probably in derision,
for pork is the one ware that is not on sale in the Pig-market. There
is scarcely anything else that can be hawked from a wagon that is not
to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. Bandannas and tin cups
at two cents, peaches at a cent a quart, "damaged" eggs for a song,
hats for a quarter, and spectacles, warranted to suit the eye, at the
optician's who has opened shop on a Hester Street door-step, for thirty
five cents; frowsy-looking chickens and half-plucked geese, hung by the
neck and protesting with wildly strutting feet even in death against
the outrage, are the great staple of the market. Half or a quarter of a
chicken can be bought here by those who cannot afford a whole. It took
more than ten years of persistent effort on the part of the sanitary
authorities to drive the trade in live fowl from the streets to the
fowl-market on Gouverneur Slip, where the killing is now done according
to Jewish rite by priests detailed for the purpose by the chief rabbi.
Since then they have had a characteristic rumpus, that involved the
entire Jewish community, over the fees for killing and the mode of
collecting them. Here is a woman churning horse-radish on a machine she
has chained and padlocked to a tree on the sidewalk, lest someone steal
it. Beside her a butcher's stand with cuts at prices the avenues never
dreamed of. Old coats are hawked for fifty cents, "as good as new,"
and "pants"--there are no trousers in Jewtown, only pants--at anything
that can be got. There is a knot of half a dozen "pants" pedlars in the
middle of the street, twice as many men of their own race fingering
their wares and plucking at the seams with the anxious scrutiny of
would-be buyers, though none of them has the least idea of investing
in a pair. Yes, stop! This baker, fresh from his trough, bare-headed
and with bare arms, has made an offer: for this pair thirty cents; a
dollar and forty was the price asked. The pedlar shrugs his shoulders,
and turns up his hands with a half pitying, wholly indignant air. What
does the baker take him for? Such pants--. The baker has turned to go.
With a jump like a panther's, the man with the pants has him by the
sleeve. Will he give eighty cents? Sixty? Fifty? So help him, they are
dirt cheap at that. Lose, will he, on the trade, lose all the profit
of his day's pedling. The baker goes on unmoved. Forty then? What, not
forty? Take them then for thirty, and wreck the life of a poor man. And
the baker takes them and goes, well knowing that at least twenty cents
of the thirty, two hundred per cent., were clear profit, if indeed the
"pants" cost the pedlar anything.
[Illustration: THE OLD CLO'E'S MAN--IN THE JEWISH QUARTERS.]
The suspender pedlar is the mystery of the Pig-market, omnipresent and
unfathomable. He is met at every step with his wares dangling over his
shoulder, down his back, and in front. Millions of suspenders thus
perambulate Jewtown all day on a sort of dress parade. Why suspenders,
is the puzzle, and where do they all go to? The "pants" of Jewtown
hang down with a common accord, as if they had never known the support
of suspenders. It appears to be as characteristic a trait of the race
as the long beard and the Sabbath silk hat of ancient pedigree. I
have asked again and again. No one has ever been able to tell me what
becomes of the suspenders of Jewtown. Perhaps they are hung up as
bric-à-brac in its homes, or laid away and saved up as the equivalent
of cash. I cannot tell. I only know that more suspenders are hawked
about the Pig-market every day than would supply the whole of New York
for a year, were they all bought and turned to use.
The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons and about the sidewalk
shops, where a gutter plank on two ash-barrels does duty for a counter!
Pushing, struggling, babbling, and shouting in foreign tongues, a
veritable Babel of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear
almost with a sense of shock, as something unexpected and strange.
In the midst of it all there is a sudden wild scattering, a hustling
of things from the street into dark cellars, into back-yards and
by-ways, a slamming and locking of doors hidden under the improvised
shelves and counters. The health officers' cart is coming down the
street, preceded and followed by stalwart policemen, who shovel up
with scant ceremony the eatables--musty bread, decayed fish and stale
vegetables--indifferent to the curses that are showered on them from
stoops and windows, and carry them off to the dump. In the wake of the
wagon, as it makes its way to the East River after the raid, follow a
line of despoiled hucksters shouting defiance from a safe distance.
Their clamor dies away with the noise of the market. The endless
panorama of the tenements, rows upon rows, between stony streets,
stretches to the north, to the south, and to the west as far as the eye
reaches.
CHAPTER XI.
THE SWEATERS OF JEWTOWN.
Anything like an exhaustive discussion of the economical problem
presented by the Tenth Ward[13] is beset by difficulties that increase
in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them. I have
too vivid a recollection of weary days and nights spent in those
stewing tenements, trying to get to the bottom of the vexatious
question only to find myself in the end as far from the truth as at
the beginning, asking with rising wrath Pilate's question, "What is
truth?" to attempt to weary the reader by dragging him with me over
that sterile and unprofitable ground. Nor are these pages the place for
such a discussion. In it, let me confess it at once and have done with
it, I should be like the blind leading the blind; between the real and
apparent poverty, the hidden hoards and the unhesitating mendacity of
these people, where they conceive their interests to be concerned in
one way or another, the reader and I would fall together into the ditch
of doubt and conjecture in which I have found company before.
[Footnote 13: I refer to the Tenth Ward always as typical. The district
embraced in the discussion really includes the Thirteenth Ward, and in
a growing sense large portions of the Seventh and contiguous wards as
well.]
The facts that lie on the surface indicate the causes as clearly as
the nature of the trouble. In effect both have been already stated. A
friend of mine who manufactures cloth once boasted to me that nowadays,
on cheap clothing, New York "beats the world." "To what," I asked, "do
you attribute it?" "To the cutter's long knife[14] and the Polish Jew,"
he said. Which of the two has cut deepest into the workman's wages
is not a doubtful question. Practically the Jew has monopolized the
business since the battle between East Broadway and Broadway ended in a
complete victory for the East Side and cheap labor, and transferred to
it the control of the trade in cheap clothing. Yet, not satisfied with
having won the field, he strives as hotly with his own for the profit
of half a cent as he fought with his Christian competitor for the
dollar. If the victory is a barren one, the blame is his own. His price
is not what he can get, but the lowest he can live for and underbid his
neighbor. Just what that means we shall see. The manufacturer knows it,
and is not slow to take advantage of his knowledge. He makes him hungry
for work by keeping it from him as long as possible; then drives the
closest bargain he can with the sweater.
[Footnote 14: An invention that cuts many garments at once, where the
scissors could cut only a few.]
Many harsh things have been said of the "sweater," that really apply to
the system in which he is a necessary, logical link. It can at least be
said of him that he is no worse than the conditions that created him.
The sweater is simply the middleman, the sub-contractor, a workman like
his fellows, perhaps with the single distinction from the rest that he
knows a little English; perhaps not even that, but with the accidental
possession of two or three sewing-machines, or of credit enough to hire
them, as his capital, who drums up work among the clothing-houses.
Of workmen he can always get enough. Every ship-load from German
ports brings them to his door in droves, clamoring for work. The sun
sets upon the day of the arrival of many a Polish Jew, finding him
at work in an East Side tenement, treading the machine and "learning
the trade." Often there are two, sometimes three, sets of sweaters on
one job. They work with the rest when they are not drumming up trade,
driving their "hands" as they drive their machine, for all they are
worth, and making a profit on their work, of course, though in most
cases not nearly as extravagant a percentage, probably, as is often
supposed. If it resolves itself into a margin of five or six cents,
or even less, on a dozen pairs of boys' trousers, for instance, it is
nevertheless enough to make the contractor with his thrifty instincts
independent. The workman growls, not at the hard labor, or poor pay,
but over the pennies another is coining out of his sweat, and on the
first opportunity turns sweater himself, and takes his revenge by
driving an even closer bargain than his rival tyrant, thus reducing his
profits.
The sweater knows well that the isolation of the workman in his
helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done what he
could--with merciless severity where he could--to smother every symptom
of awakening intelligence in his slaves. In this effort to perpetuate
his despotism he has had the effectual assistance of his own system and
the sharp competition that keep the men on starvation wages; of their
constitutional greed, that will not permit the sacrifice of temporary
advantage, however slight, for permanent good, and above all, of the
hungry hordes of immigrants to whom no argument appeals save the cry
for bread. Within very recent times he has, however, been forced to
partial surrender by the organization of the men to a considerable
extent into trades unions, and by experiments in co-operation, under
intelligent leadership, that presage the sweater's doom. But as long as
the ignorant crowds continue to come and to herd in these tenements,
his grip can never be shaken off. And the supply across the seas is
apparently inexhaustible. Every fresh persecution of the Russian or
Polish Jew on his native soil starts greater hordes hitherward to
confound economical problems, and recruit the sweater's phalanx. The
curse of bigotry and ignorance reaches halfway across the world, to sow
its bitter seed in fertile soil in the East Side tenements. If the Jew
himself was to blame for the resentment he aroused over there, he is
amply punished. He gathers the first-fruits of the harvest here.
The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the tenements, which the
law that regulates factory labor does not reach. To the factories
themselves that are taking the place of the rear tenements in rapidly
growing numbers, letting in bigger day-crowds than those the health
officers banished, the tenement shops serve as a supplement through
which the law is successfully evaded. Ten hours is the legal work-day
in the factories, and nine o'clock the closing hour at the latest.
Forty-five minutes at least must be allowed for dinner, and children
under sixteen must not be employed unless they can read and write
English; none at all under fourteen. The very fact that such a law
should stand on the statute book, shows how desperate the plight of
these people. But the tenement has defeated its benevolent purpose. In
it the child works unchallenged from the day he is old enough to pull
a thread. There is no such thing as a dinner hour; men and women eat
while they work, and the "day" is lengthened at both ends far into
the night. Factory hands take their work with them at the close of the
lawful day to eke out their scanty earnings by working overtime at
home. Little chance on this ground for the campaign of education that
alone can bring the needed relief; small wonder that there are whole
settlements on this East Side where English is practically an unknown
tongue, though the people be both willing and anxious to learn. "When
shall we find time to learn?" asked one of them of me once. I owe him
the answer yet.
Take the Second Avenue Elevated Railroad at Chatham Square and ride up
half a mile through the sweaters' district. Every open window of the
big tenements, that stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides of
the way, gives you a glimpse of one of these shops as the train speeds
by. Men and women bending over their machines, or ironing clothes at
the window, half-naked. Proprieties do not count on the East Side;
nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard cash. The road is
like a big gangway through an endless work-room where vast multitudes
are forever laboring. Morning, noon, or night, it makes no difference;
the scene is always the same. At Rivington Street let us get off and
continue our trip on foot. It is Sunday evening west of the Bowery.
Here, under the rule of Mosaic law, the week of work is under full
headway, its first day far spent. The hucksters' wagons are absent or
stand idle at the curb; the saloons admit the thirsty crowds through
the side-door labelled "Family Entrance;" a tin sign in a store-window
announces that a "Sunday School" gathers in stray children of the new
dispensation; but beyond these things there is little to suggest the
Christian Sabbath. Men stagger along the sidewalk groaning under heavy
burdens of unsewn garments, or enormous black bags stuffed full of
finished coats and trousers. Let us follow one to his home and see how
Sunday passes in a Ludlow Street tenement.
Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage,
of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines
behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that
opens to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way.
Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says
unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines
sewing knickerbockers, "knee-pants" in the Ludlow Street dialect. The
floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on
a couch of many dozens of "pants" ready for the finisher, a bare-legged
baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps
him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the
elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth
on which they are working. The boy and the woman alone look up at our
entrance. The girls shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning look from
the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically
than ever. The men do not appear to be aware even of the presence of a
stranger.
They are "learners," all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the
wife of the boss, and have "come over" only a few weeks ago. She is
disinclined to talk at first, but a few words in her own tongue from
our guide[15] set her fears, whatever they are, at rest, and she grows
almost talkative. The learners work for week's wages, she says. How
much do they earn? She shrugs her shoulders with an expressive gesture.
The workers themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently,
as though the question were of no interest: from two to five dollars.
The children--there are four of them--are not old enough to work.
The oldest is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty dozen
"knee-pants" a week, for which the manufacturer pays seventy cents a
dozen. Five cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own and her
husband's work brings the family earnings up to twenty-five dollars a
week, when they have work all the time. But often half the time is put
in looking for it. They work no longer than to nine o'clock at night,
from daybreak. There are ten machines in the room; six are hired at
two dollars a month. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one
somewhat larger than ordinary, they pay twenty dollars a month. She
does not complain, though "times are not what they were, and it costs a
good deal to live." Eight dollars a week for the family of six and two
boarders. How do they do it? She laughs, as she goes over the bill of
fare, at the silly question: Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk two
quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at
twelve cents, butter one pound a week at "eight cents a quarter of a
pound." Coffee, potatoes, and pickles complete the list. At the least
calculation, probably, this sweater's family hoards up thirty dollars
a month, and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and profit
by the example set by their landlord in rent-collecting. It is the way
the savings of Jewtown are universally invested, and with the natural
talent of its people for commercial speculation the investment is
enormously profitable.
[Footnote 15: I was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by
one of their own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission.
Without that precaution my errand would have been fruitless; even with
him it was often nearly so.]
[Illustration: "KNEE-PANTS" AT FORTY-FIVE CENTS A DOZEN--A LUDLOW
STREET SWEATER'S SHOP.]
On the next floor, in a dimly lighted room with a big red-hot stove
to keep the pressing irons ready for use, is a family of man, wife,
three children, and a boarder. "Knee-pants" are made there too, of a
still lower grade. Three cents and a half is all he clears, says the
man, and lies probably out of at least two cents. The wife makes a
dollar and a half finishing, the man about nine dollars at the machine.
The boarder pays sixty-five cents a week. He is really only a lodger,
getting his meals outside. The rent is two dollars and twenty-five
cents a week, cost of living five dollars. Every floor has at least
two, sometimes four, such shops. Here is one with a young family for
which life is bright with promise. Husband and wife work together;
just now the latter, a comely young woman, is eating her dinner of dry
bread and green pickles. Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown. They are
filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have
stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong--plain
proof that they are good to eat. The rest? "Well, they die," says our
guide, dryly. No thought of untimely death comes to disturb this family
with life all before it. In a few years the man will be a prosperous
sweater. Already he employs an old man as ironer at three dollars a
week, and a sweet-faced little Italian girl as finisher at a dollar and
a half. She is twelve, she says, and can neither read nor write; will
probably never learn. How should she? The family clears from ten to
eleven dollars a week in brisk times, more than half of which goes into
the bank.
A companion picture from across the hall. The man works on the
machine for his sweater twelve hours a day, turning out three dozen
"knee-pants," for which he receives forty-two cents a dozen. The
finisher who works with him gets ten, and the ironer eight cents a
dozen; buttonholes are extra, at eight to ten cents a hundred. This
operator has four children at his home in Stanton Street, none old
enough to work, and a sick wife. His rent is twelve dollars a month;
his wages for a hard week's work less than eight dollars. Such as he,
with their consuming desire for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks
of the anarchists, won over by the promise of a general "divide;"
and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose at the vicious
foreigner for whose perverted notions there is no room in this land of
plenty.
Turning the corner into Hester Street, we stumble upon a nest of
cloak-makers in their busy season. Six months of the year the
cloak-maker is idle, or nearly so. Now is his harvest. Seventy-five
cents a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. The cloak is
of cheap plush, and might sell for eight or nine dollars over the
store-counter. Seven dollars is the weekly wage of this man with wife
and two children, and nine dollars and a half rent to pay per month.
A boarder pays about a third of it. There was a time when he made ten
dollars a week and thought himself rich. But wages have come down
fearfully in the last two years. Think of it: "come down" to this. The
other cloak-makers aver that they can make as much as twelve dollars a
week, when they are employed, by taking their work home and sewing till
midnight. One exhibits his account-book with a Ludlow Street sweater.
It shows that he and his partner, working on first-class garments
for a Broadway house in the four busiest weeks of the season, made
together from $15.15 to $19.20 a week by striving from 6 A.M.
to 11 P.M., that is to say, from $7.58 to $9.60 each.[16]
The sweater on this work probably made as much as fifty per cent. at
least on their labor. Not far away is a factory in a rear yard where
the factory inspector reports teams of tailors making men's coats at an
average of twenty-seven cents a coat, all complete except buttons and
button-holes.
[Footnote 16: The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in
victory, raised their wages considerably, at least for the time being.]
Turning back, we pass a towering double tenement in Ludlow Street,
owned by a well-known Jewish liquor dealer and politician, a triple
combination that bodes ill for his tenants. As a matter of fact, the
cheapest "apartment," three rear rooms on the sixth floor, only one of
which deserves the name, is rented for $13 a month. Here is a reminder
of the Bend, a hallway turned into a shoemaker's shop. Two hallways
side by side in adjoining tenements, would be sinful waste
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