How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 in Jewtown, when one would do as well by knocking a hole in the wall.But this shoemaker knows a trick the Italian’s ingenuity did not suggest.He has his “flat” as well as his shop there.A curtain hung back of his stool in the narrow passage half conceals his bed that fills it entirely from wall to wall.To get into it he has to crawl over the foot-board, and he must come out the same way.Expedients more odd than this are born of the East Side crowding.In one of the houses we left, the coal-bin of a family on the fourth floor was on the roof of the adjoining tenement.A quarter of a ton of coal was being dumped there while we talked with the people.
We have reached Broome Street.The hum of industry in this six-story tenement on the corner leaves no doubt of the aspect Sunday wears within it.One flight up, we knock at the nearest door.The grocer, who keeps the store, lives on the “stoop,” the first floor in East Side parlance. In this room a suspender-maker sleeps and works with his family of wife and four children. For a wonder there are no boarders. His wife and eighteen years old daughter share in the work, but the girl’s eyes are giving out from the strain. Three months in the year, when work is very brisk, the family makes by united efforts as high as fourteen and fifteen dollars a week. The other nine months it averages from three to four dollars. The oldest boy, a young man, earns from four to six dollars in an Orchard Street factory, when he has work. The rent is ten dollars a month for the room and a miserable little coop of a bedroom where the old folks sleep. The girl makes her bed on the lounge in the front room; the big boys and the children sleep on the floor. Coal at ten cents a small pail, meat at twelve cents a pound, one and a half pound of butter a week at thirty-six cents, and a quarter of a pound of tea in the same space of time, are items of their house-keeping account as given by the daughter. Milk at four and five cents a quart, “according to quality.” The sanitary authorities know what that means, know how miserably inadequate is the fine of fifty or a hundred dollars for the murder done in cold blood by the wretches who poison the babes of these tenements with the stuff that is half water, or swill. Their defence is that the demand is for “cheap milk.” Scarcely a wonder that this suspender-maker will hardly be able to save up the dot for his daughter, without which she stands no chance of marrying in Jewtown, even with her face that would be pretty had it a healthier tinge.
Up under the roof three men are making boys’ jackets at twenty cents a piece, of which the sewer takes eight, the ironer three, the finisher five cents, and the button-hole-maker two and a quarter, leaving a cent and three-quarters to pay for the drumming up, the fetching and bringing back of the goods.They bunk together in a room for which they pay eight dollars a month.All three are single here, that is: their wives are on the other side yet, waiting for them to earn enough to send for them.Their breakfast, eaten at the work-bench, consists of a couple of rolls at a cent a piece, and a draught of water, milk when business has been very good, a square meal at noon in a restaurant, and the morning meal over again at night.This square meal, that is the evidence of a very liberal disposition on the part of the consumer, is an affair of more than ordinary note; it may be justly called an institution.I know of a couple of restaurants at the lower end of Orchard Street that are favorite resorts for the Polish Jews, who remember the injunction that the ox that treadeth out the corn shall not be muzzled.Being neighbors, they are rivals of course, and cutting under.When I was last there one gave a dinner of soup, meat-stew, bread, pie, pickles, and a “schooner” of beer for thirteen cents; the other charged fifteen cents for a similar dinner, but with two schooners of beer and a cigar, or a cigarette, as the extra inducement.The two cents had won the day, however, and the thirteen-cent restaurant did such a thriving business that it was about to spread out into the adjoining store to accommodate the crowds of customers.At this rate the lodger of Jewtown can “live like a lord,” as he says himself, for twenty-five cents a day, including the price of his bed, that ranges all the way from thirty to forty and fifty cents a week, and save money, no matter what his earnings.He does it, too, so long as work is to be had at any price, and by the standard he sets up Jewtown must abide.
It has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who help to pay its extortionate rents. At night there is scarce a room in all the district that has not one or more of them, some above half a score, sleeping on cots, or on the floor. It is idle to speak of privacy in these “homes.” The term carries no more meaning with it than would a lecture on social ethics to an audience of Hottentots. The picture is not overdrawn. In fact, in presenting the home life of these people I have been at some pains to avoid the extreme of privation, taking the cases just as they came to hand on the safer middle-ground of average earnings. Yet even the direst apparent poverty in Jewtown, unless dependent on absolute lack of work, would, were the truth known, in nine cases out of ten have a silver lining in the shape of a margin in bank.
These are the economical conditions that enable my manufacturing friend to boast that New York can “beat the world” on cheap clothing.In support of his claim he told me that a single Bowery firm last year sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12½.With the material at fifteen cents a yard, he said, children’s suits of assorted sizes can be sold at wholesale for seventy-five cents, and boys’ cape overcoats at the same price.They are the same conditions that have perplexed the committee of benevolent Hebrews in charge of Baron de Hirsch’s munificent gift of ten thousand dollars a month for the relief of the Jewish poor in New York.To find proper channels through which to pour this money so that it shall effect its purpose without pauperizing, and without perpetuating the problem it is sought to solve, by attracting still greater swarms, is indeed no easy task.Colonization has not in the past been a success with these people.The great mass of them are too gregarious to take kindly to farming, and their strong commercial instinct hampers the experiment. To herd them in model tenements, though it relieve the physical suffering in a measure, would be to treat a symptom of the disease rather than strike at its root, even if land could be got cheap enough where they gather to build on a sufficiently large scale to make the plan a success. Trade schools for manual training could hardly be made to reach the adults, who in addition would have to be supported for months while learning. For the young this device has proved most excellent under the wise management of the United Hebrew Charities, an organization that gathers to its work the best thought and effort of many of our most public-spirited citizens. One, or all, of these plans may be tried, probably will. I state but the misgivings as to the result of some of the practical minds that have busied themselves with the problem. Its keynote evidently is the ignorance of the immigrants. They must be taught the language of the country they have chosen as their home, as the first and most necessary step. Whatever may follow, that is essential, absolutely vital. That done, it may well be that the case in its new aspect will not be nearly so hard to deal with.
Evening has worn into night as we take up our homeward journey through the streets, now no longer silent.The thousands of lighted windows in the tenements glow like dull red eyes in a huge stone wall.From every door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for a half-hour’s rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant working.Crowds of half-naked children tumble in the street and on the sidewalk, or doze fretfully on the stone steps.As we stop in front of a tenement to watch one of these groups, a dirty baby in a single brief garment—yet a sweet, human little baby despite its dirt and tatters—tumbles off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly head pillowed on my boot.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BOHEMIANS—TENEMENT-HOUSE CIGARMAKING.
Evil as the part is which the tenement plays in Jewtown as the pretext for circumventing the law that was made to benefit and relieve the tenant, we have not far to go to find it in even a worse rôle. If the tenement is here continually dragged into the eye of public condemnation and scorn, it is because in one way or another it is found directly responsible for, or intimately associated with, three-fourths of the miseries of the poor. In the Bohemian quarter it is made the vehicle for enforcing upon a proud race a slavery as real as any that ever disgraced the South. Not content with simply robbing the tenant, the owner, in the dual capacity of landlord and employer, reduces him to virtual serfdom by making his becoming his tenant, on such terms as he sees fit to make, the condition of employment at wages likewise of his own making. It does not help the case that this landlord employer, almost always a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty Polish race just described.
Perhaps the Bohemian quarter is hardly the proper name to give to the colony, for though it has distinct boundaries it is scattered over a wide area on the East Side, in wedge-like streaks that relieve the monotony of the solid German population by their strong contrasts.The two races mingle no more on this side of the Atlantic than on the rugged slopes of the Bohemian mountains; the echoes of the thirty years’ war ring in New York, after two centuries and a half, with as fierce a hatred as the gigantic combat bred among the vanquished Czechs. A chief reason for this is doubtless the complete isolation of the Bohemian immigrant. Several causes operate to bring this about: his singularly harsh and unattractive language, which he can neither easily himself unlearn nor impart to others, his stubborn pride of race, and a popular prejudice which has forced upon him the unjust stigma of a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor. I greatly mistrust that the Bohemian on our shores is a much-abused man. To his traducer, who casts up anarchism against him, he replies that the last census (1880) shows his people to have the fewest criminals of all in proportion to numbers. In New York a Bohemian criminal is such a rarity that the case of two firebugs of several years ago is remembered with damaging distinctness. The accusation that he lives like the “rat” he is, cutting down wages by his underpaid labor, he throws back in the teeth of the trades unions with the counter-charge that they are the first cause of his attitude to the labor question.
A little way above Houston Street the first of his colonies is encountered, in Fifth Street and thereabouts.Then for a mile and a half scarce a Bohemian is to be found, until Thirty-eighth Street is reached.Fifty-fourth and Seventy-third Streets in their turn are the centres of populous Bohemian settlements.The location of the cigar factories, upon which he depends for a living, determines his choice of home, though there is less choice about it than with any other class in the community, save perhaps the colored people.Probably more than half of all the Bohemians in this city are cigarmakers, and it is the herding of these in great numbers in the so-called tenement factories, where the cheapest grade of work is done at the lowest wages, that constitutes at once their greatest hardship and the chief grudge of other workmen against them. The manufacturer who owns, say, from three or four, to a dozen or more tenements contiguous to his shop, fills them up with these people, charging them outrageous rents, and demanding often even a preliminary deposit of five dollars “key money;” deals them out tobacco by the week, and devotes the rest of his energies to the paring down of wages to within a peg or two of the point where the tenant rebels in desperation. When he does rebel, he is given the alternative of submission, or eviction with entire loss of employment. His needs determine the issue. Usually he is not in a position to hesitate long. Unlike the Polish Jew, whose example of untiring industry he emulates, he has seldom much laid up against a rainy day. He is fond of a glass of beer, and likes to live as well as his means will permit. The shop triumphs, and fetters more galling than ever are forged for the tenant. In the opposite case, the newspapers have to record the throwing upon the street of a small army of people, with pitiful cases of destitution and family misery.
Men, women and children work together seven days in the week in these cheerless tenements to make a living for the family, from the break of day till far into the night.Often the wife is the original cigarmaker from the old home, the husband having adopted her trade here as a matter of necessity, because, knowing no word of English, he could get no other work.As they state the cause of the bitter hostility of the trades unions, she was the primary bone of contention in the day of the early Bohemian immigration.The unions refused to admit the women, and, as the support of the family depended upon her to a large extent, such terms as were offered had to be accepted. The manufacturer has ever since industriously fanned the antagonism between the unions and his hands, for his own advantage. The victory rests with him, since the Court of Appeals decided that the law, passed a few years ago, to prohibit cigarmaking in tenements was unconstitutional, and thus put an end to the struggle. While it lasted, all sorts of frightful stories were told of the shocking conditions under which people lived and worked in these tenements, from a sanitary point of view especially, and a general impression survives to this day that they are particularly desperate. The Board of Health, after a careful canvass, did not find them so then. I am satisfied from personal inspection, at a much later day, guided in a number of instances by the union cigarmakers themselves to the tenements which they considered the worst, that the accounts were greatly exaggerated. Doubtless the people are poor, in many cases very poor; but they are not uncleanly, rather the reverse; they live much better than the clothing-makers in the Tenth Ward, and in spite of their sallow look, that may be due to the all-pervading smell of tobacco, they do not appear to be less healthy than other in-door workers. I found on my tours of investigation several cases of consumption, of which one at least was said by the doctor to be due to the constant inhalation of tobacco fumes. But an examination of the death records in the Health Department does not support the claim that the Bohemian cigarmakers are peculiarly prone to that disease. On the contrary, the Bohemian percentage of deaths from consumption appears quite low. This, however, is a line of scientific inquiry which I leave others to pursue, along with the more involved problem whether the falling off in the number of children, sometimes quite noticeable in the Bohemian settlements, is, as has been suggested, dependent upon the character of the parents’ work. The sore grievances I found were the miserable wages and the enormous rents exacted for the minimum of accommodation. And surely these stand for enough of suffering.
Take a row of houses in East Tenth Street as an instance.They contained thirty-five families of cigarmakers, with probably not half a dozen persons in the whole lot of them, outside of the children, who could speak a word of English, though many had been in the country half a lifetime.This room with two windows giving on the street, and a rear attachment without windows, called a bedroom by courtesy, is rented at $12.25 a month.In the front room man and wife work at the bench from six in the morning till nine at night.They make a team, stripping the tobacco leaves together; then he makes the filler, and she rolls the wrapper on and finishes the cigar.For a thousand they receive $3.75, and can turn out together three thousand cigars a week.The point has been reached where the rebellion comes in, and the workers in these tenements are just now on a strike, demanding $5.00 and $5.50 for their work.The manufacturer having refused, they are expecting hourly to be served with notice to quit their homes, and the going of a stranger among them excites their resentment, until his errand is explained.While we are in the house, the ultimatum of the “boss” is received.He will give $3.75 a thousand, not another cent.Our host is a man of seeming intelligence, yet he has been nine years in New York and knows neither English nor German.Three bright little children play about the floor.
His neighbor on the same floor has been here fifteen years, but shakes his head when asked if he can speak English. He answers in a few broken syllables when addressed in German. With $11.75 rent to pay for like accommodation, he has the advantage of his oldest boy’s work besides his wife’s at the bench. Three properly make a team, and these three can turn out four thousand cigars a week, at $3.75. This Bohemian has a large family; there are four children, too small to work, to be cared for. A comparison of the domestic bill of fare between Tenth and Ludlow Streets result, in the discovery that this Bohemian’s butcher’s bill for the week, with meat at twelve cents a pound as in Ludlow Street, is from two dollars and a half to three dollars. The Polish Jew fed as big a family on one pound of meat a day. The difference proves to be typical. Here is a suit of three rooms, two dark, three flights up. The ceiling is partly down in one of the rooms. “It is three months since we asked the landlord to fix it,” says the oldest son, a very intelligent lad who has learned English in the evening school. His father has not had that advantage, and has sat at his bench, deaf and dumb to the world about him except his own, for six years. He has improved his time and become an expert at his trade. Father, mother, and son together, a full team, make from fifteen to sixteen dollars a week.
A man with venerable beard and keen eyes answers our questions through an interpreter, in the next house.Very few brighter faces would be met in a day’s walk among American mechanics, yet he has in nine years learned no syllable of English.German he probably does not want to learn.His story supplies the explanation, as did the stories of the others.In all that time he has been at work grubbing to earn bread.Wife and he by constant labor make three thousand cigars a week, earning $11.25 when there is no lack of material; when in winter they receive from the manufacturer tobacco for only two thousand, the rent of $10 for two rooms, practically one with a dark alcove, has nevertheless to be paid in full, and six mouths to be fed. He was a blacksmith in the old country, but cannot work at his trade here because he does not understand “Engliska.” If he could, he says, with a bright look, he could do better work than he sees done here. It would seem happiness to him to knock off at 6 o’clock instead of working, as he now often has to do, till midnight. But how? He knows of no Bohemian blacksmith who can understand him; he should starve. Here, with his wife, he can make a living at least. “Aye,” says she, turning, from listening, to her household duties, “it would be nice for sure to have father work at his trade.” Then what a home she could make for them, and how happy they would be. Here is an unattainable ideal, indeed, of a workman in the most prosperous city in the world! There is genuine, if unspoken, pathos in the soft tap she gives her husband’s hand as she goes about her work with a half-suppressed little sigh.
The very ash-barrels that stand in front of the big rows of tenements in Seventy-first and Seventy-third Streets advertise the business that is carried on within.They are filled to the brim with the stems of stripped tobacco leaves.The rank smell that waited for us on the corner of the block follows us into the hallways, penetrates every nook and cranny of the houses.As in the settlement farther down town, every room here has its work-bench with its stumpy knife and queer pouch of bed-tick, worn brown and greasy, fastened in front the whole length of the bench to receive the scraps of waste.This landlord-employer at all events gives three rooms for $12.50, if two be dark, one wholly and the other getting some light from the front room.The mother of the three bare-footed little children we met on the stairs was taken to the hospital the other day when she could no longer work.She will never come out alive.There is no waste in these tenements.Lives, like clothes, are worn through and out before put aside.Her place at the bench is taken already by another who divides with the head of the household his earnings of $15.50 a week.He has just come out successful of a strike that brought the pay of these tenements up to $4.50 per thousand cigars.Notice to quit had already been served on them, when the employer decided to give in, frightened by the prospective loss of rent.Asked how long he works, the man says: “from they can see till bed-time.”Bed-time proves to be eleven o’clock.Seventeen hours a day, seven days in the week, at thirteen cents an hour for the two, six cents and a half for each!Good average earnings for a tenement-house cigarmaker in summer.In winter it is at least one-fourth less.In spite of it all, the rooms are cleanly kept.From the bedroom farthest back the woman brings out a pile of moist tobacco-leaves to be stripped.They are kept there, under cover lest they dry and crack, from Friday to Friday, when an accounting is made and fresh supplies given out.The people sleep there too, but the smell, offensive to the unfamiliar nose, does not bother them.They are used to it.
In a house around the corner that is not a factory-tenement, lives now the cigarmaker I spoke of as suffering from consumption which the doctor said was due to the tobacco-fumes.Perhaps the lack of healthy exercise had as much to do with it.His case is interesting from its own stand-point. He too is one with a—for a Bohemian—large family. Six children sit at his table. By trade a shoemaker, for thirteen years he helped his wife make cigars in the manufacturer’s tenement. She was a very good hand, and until his health gave out two years ago they were able to make from $17 to $25 a week, by lengthening the day at both ends. Now that he can work no more, and the family under the doctor’s orders has moved away from the smell of tobacco, the burden of its support has fallen upon her alone, for none of the children are old enough to help. She has work in the shop at eight dollars a week, and this must go round; it is all there is. Happily, this being a tenement for revenue only, unmixed with cigars, the rent is cheaper: seven dollars for two bright rooms on the top floor. No housekeeping is attempted. A woman in Seventy-second Street supplies their cooking, which the wife and mother fetches in a basket, her husband being too weak. Breakfast of coffee and hard-tack, or black bread, at twenty cents for the whole eight; a good many, the little woman says with a brave, patient smile, and there is seldom anything to spare, but——. The invalid is listening, and the sentence remains unfinished. What of dinner? One of the children brings it from the cook. Oh! it is a good dinner, meat, soup, greens and bread, all for thirty cents. It is the principal family meal. Does she come home for dinner? No; she cannot leave the shop, but gets a bite at her bench. The question: A bite of what? seems as merciless as the surgeon’s knife, and she winces under it as one shrinks from physical pain. Bread, then. But at night they all have supper together—sausage and bread. For ten cents they can eat all they want. Can they not? she says, stroking the hair of the little boy at her knee; his eyes glisten hungrily at the thought, as he nods stoutly in support of his mother. Only, she adds, the week the rent is due, they have to shorten rations to pay the landlord.
But what of his being an Anarchist, this Bohemian—an infidel—I hear somebody say.Almost one might be persuaded by such facts as these—and they are everyday facts, not fancy—to retort: what more natural?With every hand raised against him in the old land and the new, in the land of his hoped-for freedom, what more logical than that his should be turned against society that seems to exist only for his oppression?But the charge is not half true.Naturally the Bohemian loves peace, as he loves music and song.As someone has said: He does not seek war, but when attacked knows better how to die than how to surrender.The Czech is the Irishman of Central Europe, with all his genius and his strong passions, with the same bitter traditions of landlord-robbery, perpetuated here where he thought to forget them; like him ever and on principle in the opposition, “agin the government” wherever he goes.Among such a people, ground by poverty until their songs have died in curses upon their oppressors, hopelessly isolated and ignorant of our language and our laws, it would not be hard for bad men at any time to lead a few astray.And this is what has been done.Yet, even with the occasional noise made by the few, the criminal statistics already alluded to quite dispose of the charge that they incline to turbulence and riot.So it is with the infidel propaganda, the legacy perhaps of the fierce contention through hundreds of years between Catholics and Protestants on Bohemia’s soil, of bad faith and savage persecutions in the name of the Christians’ God that disgrace its history.The Bohemian clergyman, who spoke for his people at the Christian Conference held in Chickering Hall two years ago, took even stronger ground. “They are Roman Catholics by birth, infidels by necessity, and Protestants by history and inclination,” he said. Yet he added his testimony in the same breath to the fact that, though the Freethinkers had started two schools in the immediate neighborhood of his church to counteract its influence, his flock had grown in a few years from a mere handful at the start to proportions far beyond his hopes, gathering in both Anarchists and Freethinkers, and making good church members of them.
Thus the whole matter resolves itself once more into a question of education, all the more urgent because these people are poor, miserably poor almost to a man.“There is not,” said one of them, who knew thoroughly what he was speaking of, “there is not one of them all, who, if he were to sell all he was worth to-morrow, would have money enough to buy a house and lot in the country.”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COLOR LINE IN NEW YORK.
The color line must be drawn through the tenements to give the picture its proper shading.The landlord does the drawing, does it with an absence of pretence, a frankness of despotism, that is nothing if not brutal.The Czar of all the Russias is not more absolute upon his own soil than the New York landlord in his dealings with colored tenants.Where he permits them to live, they go; where he shuts the door, stay out.By his grace they exist at all in certain localities; his ukase banishes them from others.He accepts the responsibility, when laid at his door, with unruffled complacency.It is business, he will tell you.And it is.He makes the prejudice in which he traffics pay him well, and that, as he thinks it quite superfluous to tell you, is what he is there for.
That his pencil does not make quite as black a mark as it did, that the hand that wields it does not bear down as hard as only a short half dozen years ago, is the hopeful sign of an awakening public conscience under the stress of which the line shows signs of wavering.But for this the landlord deserves no credit.It has come, is coming about despite him.The line may not be wholly effaced while the name of the negro, alone among the world’s races, is spelled with a small n.Natural selection will have more or less to do beyond a doubt in every age with dividing the races; only so, it may be, can they work out together their highest destiny. But with the despotism that deliberately assigns to the defenceless Black the lowest level for the purpose of robbing him there that has nothing to do. Of such slavery, different only in degree from the other kind that held him as a chattel, to be sold or bartered at the will of his master, this century, if signs fail not, will see the end in New York.
Ever since the war New York has been receiving the overflow of colored population from the Southern cities.In the last decade this migration has grown to such proportions that it is estimated that our Blacks have quite doubled in number since the Tenth Census.Whether the exchange has been of advantage to the negro may well be questioned.Trades of which he had practical control in his Southern home are not open to him here.I know that it may be answered that there is no industrial proscription of color; that it is a matter of choice.Perhaps so.At all events he does not choose then.How many colored carpenters or masons has anyone seen at work in New York?In the South there are enough of them and, if the testimony of the most intelligent of their people is worth anything, plenty of them have come here.As a matter of fact the colored man takes in New York, without a struggle, the lower level of menial service for which his past traditions and natural love of ease perhaps as yet fit him best.Even the colored barber is rapidly getting to be a thing of the past.Along shore, at any unskilled labor, he works unmolested; but he does not appear to prefer the job.His sphere thus defined, he naturally takes his stand among the poor, and in the homes of the poor.Until very recent times—the years since a change was wrought can be counted on the fingers of one hand—he was practically restricted in the choice of a home to a narrow section on the West Side, that nevertheless had a social top and bottom to it—the top in the tenements on the line of Seventh Avenue as far north as Thirty-second Street, where he was allowed to occupy the houses of unsavory reputation which the police had cleared and for which decent white tenants could not be found; the bottom in the vile rookeries of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue, the old “Africa” that is now fast becoming a modern Italy. To-day there are black colonies in Yorkville and Morrisania. The encroachment of business and the Italian below, and the swelling of the population above, have been the chief agents in working out his second emancipation, a very real one, for with his cutting loose from the old tenements there has come a distinct and gratifying improvement in the tenant, that argues louder than theories or speeches the influence of vile surroundings in debasing the man. The colored citizen whom this year’s census man found in his Ninety-ninth Street “flat” is a very different individual from the “nigger” his predecessor counted in the black-and-tan slums of Thompson and Sullivan Streets. There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.
Cleanliness is the characteristic of the negro in his new surroundings, as it was his virtue in the old.In this respect he is immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale.Nevertheless, he has always had to pay higher rents than even these for the poorest and most stinted rooms. The exceptions I have come across, in which the rents, though high, have seemed more nearly on a level with what was asked for the same number and size of rooms in the average tenement, were in the case of tumble-down rookeries in which no one else would live, and were always coupled with the condition that the landlord should “make no repairs.” It can readily be seen, that his profits were scarcely curtailed by his “humanity.” The reason advanced for this systematic robbery is that white people will not live in the same house with colored tenants, or even in a house recently occupied by negroes, and that consequently its selling value is injured. The prejudice undoubtedly exists, but it is not lessened by the house agents, who have set up the maxim “once a colored house, always a colored house.”
There is method in the maxim, as shown by an inquiry made last year by the Real Estate RecordIt proved agents to be practically unanimous in the endorsement of the negro as a clean, orderly, and “profitable” tenant.Here is the testimony of one of the largest real estate firms in the city: “We would rather have negro tenants in our poorest class of tenements than the lower grades of foreign white people.We find the former cleaner than the latter, and they do not destroy the property so much.We also get higher prices.We have a tenement on Nineteenth Street, where we get $10 for two rooms which we could not get more than $7.50 for from white tenants previously.We have a four-story tenement on our books on Thirty-third Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, with four rooms per floor—a parlor, two bedrooms, and a kitchen.We get $20 for the first floor, $24 for the second, $23 for the third and $20 for the fourth, in all $87 or $1,044 per annum.The size of the building is only 21+55.”Another firm declared that in a specified instance they had saved fifteen to twenty per cent.on the gross rentals since they changed their white tenants for colored ones. Still another gave the following case of a front and rear tenement that had formerly been occupied by tenants of a “low European type,” who had been turned out on account of filthy habits and poor pay. The negroes proved cleaner, better, and steadier tenants. Instead, however, of having their rents reduced in consequence, the comparison stood as follows:
| Rents under White Tenants. | Rents under Colored Tenants. | ||||||||
| Per month. | Per month. | ||||||||
| Front— | 1st | floor | (store, etc.) | $21 | Front— | 1st | floor | (store, etc.) | $21 |
| 2d | ” | 13 | 2d | ” | 14 | ||||
| 3d | ” | 13 | 3d | ” | 14 | ||||
| 4th | ” | (and rear) | 21 | 4th | ” | 14 | |||
| Rear— | 2d | ” | 12 | Rear— | 2d | ” | 12 | ||
| 3d | ” | 12 | 3d | ” | 13 | ||||
| 4th | ” | (see front) | — | 4th | ” | 13 | |||
| Rear house— | 1st | ” | 8 | Rear house— | 1st | ” | 10 | ||
| 2d | ” | 10 | 2d | ” | 12 | ||||
| 3d | ” | 9 | 3d | ” | 11 | ||||
| 4th | ” | 8 | 4th | ” | 10 | ||||
| Total | $127 | Total | $144 | ||||||
An increased rental of $17 per month, or $204 a year, and an advance of nearly thirteen and one-half per cent.on the gross rental “in favor” of the colored tenant.Profitable, surely!
I have quoted these cases at length in order to let in light on the quality of this landlord despotism that has purposely confused the public mind, and for its own selfish ends is propping up a waning prejudice.It will be cause for congratulation if indeed its time has come at last.Within a year, I am told by one of the most intelligent and best informed of our colored citizens, there has been evidence, simultaneous with the colored hegira from the low down-town tenements, of a movement toward less exorbitant rents.I cannot pass from this subject without adding a leaf from my own experience that deserves a place in this record, though, for the credit of humanity, I hope as an extreme case. It was last Christmas that I had occasion to visit the home of an old colored woman in Sixteenth Street, as the almoner of generous friends out of town who wished me to buy her a Christmas dinner. The old woman lived in a wretched shanty, occupying two mean, dilapidated rooms at the top of a sort of hen-ladder that went by the name of stairs. For these she paid ten dollars a month out of her hard-earned wages as a scrub-woman. I did not find her in and, being informed that she was “at the agent’s,” went around to hunt her up. The agent’s wife appeared, to report that Ann was out. Being in a hurry it occurred to me that I might save time by making her employer the purveyor of my friend’s bounty, and proposed to entrust the money, two dollars, to her to be expended for Old Ann’s benefit. She fell in with the suggestion at once, and confided to me in the fullness of her heart that she liked the plan, inasmuch as “I generally find her a Christmas dinner myself, and this money—she owes Mr. —— (her husband, the agent) a lot of rent.” Needless to state that there was a change of programme then and there, and that Ann was saved from the sort of Christmas cheer that woman’s charity would have spread before her. When I had the old soul comfortably installed in her own den, with a chicken and “fixin’s” and a bright fire in her stove, I asked her how much she owed of her rent. Her answer was that she did not really owe anything, her month not being quite up, but that the amount yet unpaid was—two dollars!
Poverty, abuse, and injustice alike the negro accepts with imperturbable cheerfulness.His philosophy is of the kind that has no room for repining.Whether lie lives in an Eighth Ward barrack or in a tenement with a brown-stone front and pretensions to the title of “flat,” he looks at the sunny side of life and enjoys it. He loves fine clothes and good living a good deal more than he does a bank account. The proverbial rainy day it would be rank ingratitude, from his point of view, to look for when the sun shines unclouded in a clear sky. His home surroundings, except when he is utterly depraved, reflect his blithesome temper. The poorest negro housekeeper’s room in New York is bright with gaily-colored prints of his beloved “Abe Linkum,” General Grant, President Garfield, Mrs. Cleveland, and other national celebrities, and cheery with flowers and singing birds. In the art of putting the best foot foremost, of disguising his poverty by making a little go a long way, our negro has no equal. When a fair share of prosperity is his, he knows how to make life and home very pleasant to those about him. Pianos and parlor furniture abound in the uptown homes of colored tenants and give them a very prosperous air. But even where the wolf howls at the door, he makes a bold and gorgeous front. The amount of “style” displayed on fine Sundays on Sixth and Seventh Avenues by colored holiday-makers would turn a pessimist black with wrath. The negro’s great ambition is to rise in the social scale to which his color has made him a stranger and an outsider, and he is quite willing to accept the shadow for the substance where that is the best he can get. The claw-hammer coat and white tie of a waiter in a first-class summer hotel, with the chance of taking his ease in six months of winter, are to him the next best thing to mingling with the white quality he serves, on equal terms. His festive gatherings, pre-eminently his cake-walks, at which a sugared and frosted cake is the proud prize of the couple with the most aristocratic step and carriage, are comic mixtures of elaborate ceremonial and the joyous abandon of the natural man.With all his ludicrous incongruities, his sensuality and his lack of moral accountability, his superstition and other faults that are the effect of temperament and of centuries of slavery, he has his eminently good points.He is loyal to the backbone, proud of being an American and of his new-found citizenship.He is at least as easily moulded for good as for evil.His churches are crowded to the doors on Sunday nights when the colored colony turns out to worship.His people own church property in this city upon which they have paid half a million dollars out of the depth of their poverty, with comparatively little assistance from their white brethren.He is both willing and anxious to learn, and his intellectual status is distinctly improving.If his emotions are not very deeply rooted, they are at least sincere while they last, and until the tempter gets the upper hand again.
Of all the temptations that beset him, the one that troubles him and the police most is his passion for gambling.The game of policy is a kind of unlawful penny lottery specially adapted to his means, but patronized extensively by poor white players as well.It is the meanest of swindles, but reaps for its backers rich fortunes wherever colored people congregate.Between the fortune-teller and the policy shop, closely allied frauds always, the wages of many a hard day’s work are wasted by the negro; but the loss causes him few regrets.Penniless, but with undaunted faith in his ultimate “luck,” he looks forward to the time when he shall once more be able to take a hand at “beating policy.”When periodically the negro’s lucky numbers, 4-11-44, come out on the slips of the alleged daily drawings, that are supposed to be held in some far-off Western town, intense excitement reigns in Thompson Street and along the Avenue, where someone is always the winner.An immense impetus is given then to the bogus business that has no existence outside of the cigar stores and candy shops where it hides from the law, save in some cunning Bowery “broker’s” back office, where the slips are printed and the “winnings” apportioned daily with due regard to the backer’s interests.
It is a question whether “Africa” has been improved by the advent of the Italian, with the tramp from the Mulberry Street Bend in his train.The moral turpitude of Thompson Street has been notorious for years, and the mingling of the three elements does not seem to have wrought any change for the better.The borderland where the white and black races meet in common debauch, the aptly-named black-and-tan saloon, has never been debatable ground from a moral stand-point.It has always been the worst of the desperately bad.Than this commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black, on such ground, there can be no greater abomination.Usually it is some foul cellar dive, perhaps run by the political “leader” of the district, who is “in with” the police.In any event it gathers to itself all the law-breakers and all the human wrecks within reach.When a fight breaks out during the dance a dozen razors are handy in as many boot-legs, and there is always a job for the surgeon and the ambulance.The black “tough” is as handy with the razor in a fight as his peaceably inclined brother is with it in pursuit of his honest trade.As the Chinaman hides his knife in his sleeve and the Italian his stiletto in the bosom, so the negro goes to the ball with a razor in his boot-leg, and on occasion does as much execution with it as both of the others together.More than three-fourths of the business the police have with the colored people in New York arises in the black-and-tan district, now no longer fairly representative of their color.
I have touched briefly upon such facts in the negro’s life as may serve to throw light on the social condition of his people in New York.If, when the account is made up between the races, it shall be claimed that he falls short of the result to be expected from twenty-five years of freedom, it may be well to turn to the other side of the ledger and see how much of the blame is borne by the prejudice and greed that have kept him from rising under a burden of responsibility to which he could hardly be equal.And in this view he may be seen to have advanced much farther and faster than before suspected, and to promise, after all, with fair treatment, quite as well as the rest of us, his white-skinned fellow-citizens, had any right to expect.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMMON HERD.
There is another line not always so readily drawn in the tenements, yet the real boundary line of the Other Half: the one that defines the “flat.”The law does not draw it at all, accounting all flats tenements without distinction.The health officer draws it from observation, lumping all those which in his judgment have nothing, or not enough, to give them claim upon the name, with the common herd, and his way is, perhaps, on the whole, the surest and best.The outside of the building gives no valuable clew.Brass and brown-stone go well sometimes with dense crowds and dark and dingy rooms; but the first attempt to enter helps draw the line with tolerable distinctness.A locked door is a strong point in favor of the flat.It argues that the first step has been taken to secure privacy, the absence of which is the chief curse of the tenement.Behind a locked door the hoodlum is not at home, unless there be a jailor in place of a janitor to guard it.Not that the janitor and the door-bell are infallible.There may be a tenement behind a closed door; but never a “flat” without it.The hall that is a highway for all the world by night and by day is the tenement’s proper badge.The Other Half ever receives with open doors.
With this introduction we shall not seek it long anywhere in the city.Below Houston Street the door-bell in our age is as extinct as the dodo. East of Second Avenue, and west of Ninth Avenue as far up as the Park, it is practically an unknown institution. The nearer the river and the great workshops the more numerous the tenements. The kind of work carried on in any locality to a large extent determines their character. Skilled and well-paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement even in spite of the open door, and usually soon supplies the missing bell. Gas-houses, slaughter-houses and the docks, that attract the roughest crowds and support the vilest saloons, invariably form slum-centres. The city is full of such above the line of Fourteenth Street, that is erroneously supposed by some to fence off the good from the bad, separate the chaff from the wheat. There is nothing below that line that can outdo in wickedness Hell’s Kitchen, in the region of three-cent whiskey, or its counterpoise at the other end of Thirty-ninth Street, on the East River, the home of the infamous Rag Gang. Cherry Street is not “tougher” than Battle Row in East Sixty-third Street, or “the village” at Twenty-ninth Street and First Avenue, where stores of broken bricks, ammunition for the nightly conflicts with the police, are part of the regulation outfit of every tenement. The Mulberry Street Bend is scarce dirtier than Little Italy in Harlem. Even across the Harlem River, Frog Hollow challenges the admiration of the earlier slums for the boldness and pernicious activity of its home gang. There are enough of these sore spots. We shall yet have occasion to look into the social conditions of some of them; were I to draw a picture of them here as they are, the subject, I fear, would outgrow alike the limits of this book and the reader’s patience.
It is true that they tell only one side of the story; that there is another to tell.A story of thousands of devoted lives, laboring earnestly to make the most of their scant opportunities for good; of heroic men and women striving patiently against fearful odds and by their very courage coming off victors in the battle with the tenement; of womanhood pure and undefiled.That it should blossom in such an atmosphere is one of the unfathomable mysteries of life.And yet it is not an uncommon thing to find sweet and innocent girls, singularly untouched by the evil around them, true wives and faithful mothers, literally “like jewels in a swine’s snout,” in the worst of the infamous barracks.It is the experience of all who have intelligently observed this side of life in a great city, not to be explained—unless on the theory of my friend, the priest in the Mulberry Street Bend, that inherent purity revolts instinctively from the naked brutality of vice as seen in the slums—but to be thankfully accepted as the one gleam of hope in an otherwise hopeless desert.
But the relief is not great.In the dull content of life bred on the tenement-house dead level there is little to redeem it, or to calm apprehension for a society that has nothing better to offer its toilers; while the patient efforts of the lives finally attuned to it to render the situation tolerable, and the very success of these efforts, serve only to bring out in stronger contrast the general gloom of the picture by showing how much farther they might have gone with half a chance.Go into any of the “respectable” tenement neighborhoods—the fact that there are not more than two saloons on the corner, nor over three or four in the block will serve as a fair guide—where live the great body of hard-working Irish and German immigrants and their descendants, who accept naturally the conditions of tenement life, because for them there is nothing else in New York; be with and among its people until you understand their ways, their aims, and the quality of their ambitions, and unless you can content yourself with the scriptural promise that the poor we shall have always with us, or with the menagerie view that, if fed, they have no cause of complaint, you shall come away agreeing with me that, humanly speaking, life there does not seem worth the living.Take at random one of these uptown tenement blocks, not of the worst nor yet of the most prosperous kind, within hail of what the newspapers would call a “fine residential section.”These houses were built since the last cholera scare made people willing to listen to reason.The block is not like the one over on the East Side in which I actually lost my way once.There were thirty or forty rear houses in the heart of it, three or four on every lot, set at all sorts of angles, with odd, winding passages, or no passage at all, only “runways” for the thieves and toughs of the neighborhood. These yards are clear. There is air there, and it is about all there is. The view between brick walls outside is that of a stony street; inside, of rows of unpainted board fences, a bewildering maze of clothes-posts and lines; underfoot, a desert of brown, hard-baked soil from which every blade of grass, every stray weed, every speck of green, has been trodden out, as must inevitably be every gentle thought and aspiration above the mere wants of the body in those whose moral natures such home surroundings are to nourish. In self-defence, you know, all life eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and human life is no exception. Within the house there is nothing to supply the want thus left unsatisfied. Tenement-houses have no æsthetic resources. If any are to be brought to bear on them, they must come from the outside. There is the common hall with doors opening softly on every landing as the strange step is heard on the stairs, the air-shaft that seems always so busy letting out foul stenches from below that it has no time to earn its name by bringing down fresh air, the squeaking pumps that hold no water, and the rent that is never less than one week’s wages out of the four, quite as often half of the family earnings.
Why complete the sketch?It is drearily familiar already.Such as it is, it is the frame in which are set days, weeks, months, and years of unceasing toil, just able to fill the mouth and clothe the back.Such as it is, it is the world, and all of it, to which these weary workers return nightly to feed heart and brain after wearing out the body at the bench, or in the shop.To it come the young with their restless yearnings, perhaps to pass on the threshold one of the daughters of sin, driven to the tenement by the police when they raided her den, sallying forth in silks and fine attire after her day of idleness.These in their coarse garments—girls with the love of youth for beautiful things, with this hard life before them—who shall save them from the tempter?Down in the street the saloon, always bright and gay, gathering to itself all the cheer of the block, beckons the boys.In many such blocks the census-taker found two thousand men, women, and children, and over, who called them home.
The picture is faithful enough to stand for its class wherever along both rivers the Irish brogue is heard.As already said, the Celt falls most readily victim to tenement influences since shanty-town and its original free-soilers have become things of the past.If he be thrifty and shrewd his progress thenceforward is along the plane of the tenement, on which he soon assumes to manage without improving things.The German has an advantage over his Celtic neighbor in his strong love for flowers, which not all the tenements on the East Side have power to smother.His garden goes with him wherever he goes.Not that it represents any high moral principle in the man; rather perhaps the capacity for it.He turns his saloon into a shrubbery as soon as his back-yard.But wherever he puts it in a tenement block it does the work of a dozen police clubs.In proportion as it spreads the neighborhood takes on a more orderly character.As the green dies out of the landscape and increases in political importance, the police find more to do.Where it disappears altogether from sight, lapsing into a mere sentiment, police-beats are shortened and the force patrols double at night.Neither the man nor the sentiment is wholly responsible for this.It is the tenement unadorned that is.The changing of Tompkins Square from a sand lot into a beautiful park put an end for good and all to the Bread and Blood riots of which it used to be the scene, and transformed a nest of dangerous agitators into a harmless, beer-craving band of Anarchists.They have scarcely been heard of since.Opponents of the small parks system as a means of relieving the congested population of tenement districts, please take note.
With the first hot nights in June police despatches, that record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and window-sills while asleep, announce that the time of greatest suffering among the poor is at hand.It is in hot weather, when life indoors is well-nigh unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the small rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all restraint.Then a strange and picturesque life moves upon the flat roofs.In the day and early evening mothers air their babies there, the boys fly their kites from the house-tops, undismayed by police regulations, and the young men and girls court and pass the growler. In the stifling July nights, when the big barracks are like fiery furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men and women lie in restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep. Then every truck in the street, every crowded fire-escape, becomes a bedroom, infinitely preferable to any the house affords. A cooling shower on such a night is hailed as a heaven-sent blessing in a hundred thousand homes.
Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones whom the doctor’s skill is powerless to save.When the white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby.There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odds.Fifty “summer doctors,” especially trained to this work, are then sent into the tenements by the Board of Health, with free advice and medicine for the poor.Devoted women follow in their track with care and nursing for the sick.Fresh-air excursions run daily out of New York on land and water; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers in Calvary work over-time, and little coffins are stacked mountains high on the deck of the Charity Commissioners’ boat when it makes its semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery.
Under the most favorable circumstances, an epidemic, which the well-to-do can afford to make light of as a thing to be got over or avoided by reasonable care, is excessively fatal among the children of the poor, by reason of the practical impossibility of isolating the patient in a tenement.The measles, ordinarily a harmless disease, furnishes a familiar example.Tread it ever so lightly on the avenues, in the tenements it kills right and left.Such an epidemic ravaged three crowded blocks in Elizabeth Street on the heels of the grippe last winter, and, when it had spent its fury, the death-maps in the Bureau of Vital Statistics looked as if a black hand had been laid across those blocks, over-shadowing in part the contiguous tenements in Mott Street, and with the thumb covering a particularly packed settlement of half a dozen houses in Mulberry Street.The track of the epidemic through these teeming barracks was as clearly defined as the track of a tornado through a forest district.There were houses in which as many as eight little children had died in five months.The records showed that respiratory diseases, the common heritage of the grippe and the measles, had caused death in most cases, discovering the trouble to be, next to the inability to check the contagion in those crowds, in the poverty of the parents and the wretched home conditions that made proper care of the sick impossible.The fact was emphasized by the occurrence here and there of a few isolated deaths from diphtheria and scarlet fever.In the case of these diseases, considered more dangerous to the public health, the health officers exercised summary powers of removal to the hospital where proper treatment could be had, and the result was a low death-rate.
These were tenements of the tall, modern type.A little more than a year ago, when a census was made of the tenements and compared with the mortality tables, no little surprise and congratulation was caused by the discovery that as the buildings grew taller the death-rate fell.The reason is plain, though the reverse had been expected by most people.The biggest tenements have been built in the last ten years of sanitary reform rule, and have been brought, in all but the crowding, under its laws.The old houses that from private dwellings were made into tenements, or were run up to house the biggest crowds in defiance of every moral and physical law, can be improved by no device short of demolition.They will ever remain the worst.
That ignorance plays its part, as well as poverty and bad hygienic surroundings, in the sacrifice of life is of course inevitable.They go usually hand in hand.A message came one day last spring summoning me to a Mott Street tenement in which lay a child dying from some unknown disease.With the “charity doctor” I found the patient on the top floor, stretched upon two chairs in a dreadfully stifling room.She was gasping in the agony of peritonitis that had already written its death-sentence on her wan and pinched face.The whole family, father, mother, and four ragged children, sat around looking on with the stony resignation of helpless despair that had long since given up the fight against fate as useless.A glance around the wretched room left no doubt as to the cause of the child’s condition.“Improper nourishment,” said the doctor, which, translated to suit the place, meant starvation.The father’s hands were crippled from lead poisoning.He had not been able to work for a year.A contagious disease of the eyes, too long neglected, had made the mother and one of the boys nearly blind.The children cried with hunger.They had not broken their fast that day, and it was then near noon. For months the family had subsisted on two dollars a week from the priest, and a few loaves and a piece of corned beef which the sisters sent them on Saturday. The doctor gave direction for the treatment of the child, knowing that it was possible only to alleviate its sufferings until death should end them, and left some money for food for the rest. An hour later, when I returned, I found them feeding the dying child with ginger ale, bought for two cents a bottle at the pedlar’s cart down the street. A pitying neighbor had proposed it as the one thing she could think of as likely to make the child forget its misery. There was enough in the bottle to go round to the rest of the family. In fact, the wake had already begun; before night it was under way in dead earnest.
Every once in a while a case of downright starvation gets into the newspapers and makes a sensation.But this is the exception.Were the whole truth known, it would come home to the community with a shock that would rouse it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic undoing of its purse-strings.I am satisfied from my own observation that hundreds of men, women, and children are every day slowly starving to death in the tenements with my medical friend’s complaint of “improper nourishment.” Within a single week I have had this year three cases of insanity, provoked directly by poverty and want. One was that of a mother who in the middle of the night got up to murder her child, who was crying for food; another was the case of an Elizabeth Street truck-driver whom the newspapers never heard of. With a family to provide for, he had been unable to work for many months. There was neither food, nor a scrap of anything upon which money could be raised, left in the house; his mind gave way under the combined physical and mental suffering. In the third case I was just in time with the police to prevent the madman from murdering his whole family. He had the sharpened hatchet in his pocket when we seized him. He was an Irish laborer, and had been working in the sewers until the poisonous gases destroyed his health. Then he was laid off, and scarcely anything had been coming in all winter but the oldest child’s earnings as cash-girl in a store, $2.50 a week. There were seven children to provide for, and the rent of the Mulberry Street attic in which the family lived was $10 a month. They had borrowed as long as anybody had a cent to lend. When at last the man got an odd job that would just buy the children bread, the week’s wages only served to measure the depth of their misery. “It came in so on the tail-end of everything,” said his wife in telling the story, with unconscious eloquence. The outlook worried him through sleepless nights until it destroyed his reason. In his madness he had only one conscious thought: that the town should not take the children. “Better that I take care of them myself,” he repeated to himself as he ground the axe to an edge. Help came in abundance from many almost as poor as they when the desperate straits of the family became known through his arrest. The readiness of the poor to share what little they have with those who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of the tenements. Their enormous crowds touch elbow in a closeness of sympathy that is scarcely to be understood out of them, and has no parallel except among the unfortunate women whom the world scorns as outcasts. There is very little professed sentiment about it to draw a sentimental tear from the eye of romantic philanthropy. The hard fact is that the instinct of self-preservation impels them to make common cause against the common misery.
No doubt intemperance bears a large share of the blame for it; judging from the stand-point of the policeman perhaps the greater share.Two such entries as I read in the police returns on successive days last March, of mothers in West Side tenements, who, in their drunken sleep, lay upon and killed their infants, go far to support such a position.And they are far from uncommon.But my experience has shown me another view of it, a view which the last report of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor seems more than half inclined to adopt in allotting to “intemperance the cause of distress, or distress the cause of intemperance,” forty per cent.of the cases it is called upon to deal with.Even if it were all true, I should still load over upon the tenement the heaviest responsibility.A single factor, the scandalous scarcity of water in the hot summer when the thirst of the million tenants must be quenched, if not in that in something else, has in the past years more than all other causes encouraged drunkenness among the poor.But to my mind there is a closer connection between the wages of the tenements and the vices and improvidence of those who dwell in them than, with the guilt of the tenement upon our heads, we are willing to admit even to ourselves. Weak tea with a dry crust is not a diet to nurse moral strength. Yet how much better might the fare be expected to be in the family of this “widow with seven children, very energetic and prudent”—I quote again from the report of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor—whose “eldest girl was employed as a learner in a tailor’s shop at small wages, and one boy had a place as ‘cash’ in a store. There were two other little boys who sold papers and sometimes earned one dollar. The mother finishes pantaloons and can do three pairs in a day, thus earning thirty-nine cents. Here is a family of eight persons with rent to pay and an income of less than six dollars a week.”
And yet she was better off in point of pay than this Sixth Street mother, who “had just brought home four pairs of pants to finish, at seven cents a pair.She was required to put the canvas in the bottom, basting and sewing three times around; to put the linings in the waist-bands; to tack three pockets, three corners to each; to put on two stays and eight buttons, and make six button-holes; to put the buckle on the back strap and sew on the ticket, all for seven cents.”Better off than the “church-going mother of six children,” and with a husband sick to death, who to support the family made shirts, averaging an income of one dollar and twenty cents a week, while her oldest girl, aged thirteen, was “employed down-town cutting out Hamburg edgings at one dollar and a half a week—two and a half cents per hour for ten hours of steady labor—making the total income of the family two dollars and seventy cents per week.”Than the Harlem woman, who was “making a brave effort to support a sick husband and two children by taking in washing at thirty-five cents for the lot of fourteen large pieces, finding coal, soap, starch, and bluing herself, rather than depend on charity in any form.” Specimen wages of the tenements these, seemingly inconsistent with the charge of improvidence.
But the connection on second thought is not obscure.There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessaries of life, to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort.Improvidence and wastefulness are natural results.The instalment plan secures to the tenant who lives from hand to mouth his few comforts; the evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come.When it does come, with failure to pay and the loss of hard-earned dollars, it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.The children soon catch the spirit of this sort of thing.I remember once calling at the home of a poor washer-woman, living in an East Side tenement, and finding the door locked.Some children in the hallway stopped their play and eyed me attentively while I knocked.The biggest girl volunteered the information that Mrs. Smith was out; but while I was thinking of how I was to get a message to her, the child put a question of her own: “Are you the spring man or the clock man?”When I assured her that I was neither one nor the other, but had brought work for her mother, Mrs. Smith, who had been hiding from the instalment collector, speedily appeared.
Perhaps of all the disheartening experiences of those who have devoted lives of unselfish thought and effort, and their number is not so small as often supposed, to the lifting of this great load, the indifference of those they would help is the most puzzling. They will not be helped. Dragged by main force out of their misery, they slip back again on the first opportunity, seemingly content only in the old rut. The explanation was supplied by two women of my acquaintance in an Elizabeth Street tenement, whom the city missionaries had taken from their wretched hovel and provided with work and a decent home somewhere in New Jersey. In three weeks they were back, saying that they preferred their dark rear room to the stumps out in the country. But to me the oldest, the mother, who had struggled along with her daughter making cloaks at half a dollar apiece, twelve long years since the daughter’s husband was killed in a street accident and the city took the children, made the bitter confession: “We do get so kind o’ downhearted living this way, that we have to be where something is going on, or we just can’t stand it.” And there was sadder pathos to me in her words than in the whole long story of their struggle with poverty; for unconsciously she voiced the sufferings of thousands, misjudged by a happier world, deemed vicious because they are human and unfortunate.
It is a popular delusion, encouraged by all sorts of exaggerated stories when nothing more exciting demands public attention, that there are more evictions in the tenements of New York every year “than in all Ireland.”I am not sure that it is doing much for the tenant to upset this fallacy.To my mind, to be put out of a tenement would be the height of good luck.The fact is, however, that evictions are not nearly as common in New York as supposed.The reason is that in the civil courts, the judges of which are elected in their districts, the tenant-voter has solid ground to stand upon at last.The law that takes his side to start with is usually twisted to the utmost to give him time and save him expense. In the busiest East Side court, that has been very appropriately dubbed the “Poor Man’s Court,” fully five thousand dispossess warrants are issued in a year, but probably not fifty evictions take place in the district. The landlord has only one vote, while there may be forty voters hiring his rooms in the house, all of which the judge takes into careful account as elements that have a direct bearing on the case. And so they have—on his case. There are sad cases, just as there are “rounders” who prefer to be moved at the landlord’s expense and save the rent, but the former at least are unusual enough to attract more than their share of attention.
If his very poverty compels the tenant to live at a rate if not in a style that would beggar a Vanderbilt, paying four prices for everything he needs, from his rent and coal down to the smallest item in his housekeeping account, fashion, no less inexorable in the tenements than on the avenue, exacts of him that he must die in a style that is finally and utterly ruinous. The habit of expensive funerals—I know of no better classification for it than along with the opium habit and similar grievous plagues of mankind—is a distinctively Irish inheritance, but it has taken root among all classes of tenement dwellers, curiously enough most firmly among the Italians, who have taken amazingly to the funeral coach, perhaps because it furnishes the one opportunity of their lives for a really grand turn-out with a free ride thrown in. It is not at all uncommon to find the hoards of a whole lifetime of hard work and self denial squandered on the empty show of a ludicrous funeral parade and a display of flowers that ill comports with the humble life it is supposed to exalt. It is easier to understand the wake as a sort of consolation cup for the survivors for whom there is—as one of them, doubtless a heathenish pessimist, put it to me once—“no such luck.” The press and the pulpit have denounced the wasteful practice that often entails bitter want upon the relatives of the one buried with such pomp, but with little or no apparent result. Rather, the undertaker’s business prospers more than ever in the tenements since the genius of politics has seen its way clear to make capital out of the dead voter as well as of the living, by making him the means of a useful “show of strength” and count of noses.
One free excursion awaits young and old whom bitter poverty has denied the poor privilege of the choice of the home in death they were denied in life, the ride up the Sound to the Potter’s Field, charitably styled the City Cemetery.But even there they do not escape their fate. In the common trench of the Poor Burying Ground they lie packed three stories deep, shoulder to shoulder, crowded in death as they were in life, to “save space;” for even on that desert island the ground is not for the exclusive possession of those who cannot afford to pay for it. There is an odd coincidence in this, that year by year the lives that are begun in the gutter, the little nameless waifs whom the police pick up and the city adopts as its wards, are balanced by the even more forlorn lives that are ended in the river. I do not know how or why it happens, or that it is more than a mere coincidence. But there it is. Year by year the balance is struck—a few more, a few less—substantially the same when the record is closed.