Transcript for:
Understanding Jacob Riis and Urban Poverty

preface of how the other half lives studies among the tenements of new york this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org how the other half lives preface the belief that every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it no matter what that experience may be so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent honest work made me begin this book with the result before him the reader can judge for himself now whether or not i was right right or wrong the many and exacting duties of a newspaper man's life would hardly have allowed me to bring it to an end but for the frequent friendly lifts given me by willing hands to the president of the board of health mr charles g wilson and to chief inspector burns of the police force i am indebted for much kindness the patient friendship of dr roger s tracy the registrar of vital statistics has done for me what i never could have done for myself for i know nothing of tables statistics and percentages while there is nothing about them that he does not know most of all i owe in this as in all things else to the womanly sympathy and the loving companionship of my dear wife ever my chief helper my wisest counselor and my gentlest critic end of preface section one of how the other half lives this is the librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by maggie russell how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 1 genesis of the tenement the first tenement new york knew bore the mark of cain from its birth though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered it was the quote rear house end quote infamous ever after in our city's history there had been tenant houses before but they were not built for the purpose nothing would probably have shocked their original owners more than the idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd for they were the decorous homes of the old knickerbockers the proud aristocracy of manhattan in the early days it was the stir and bustle of trade together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of 1812 that dislodged them in 35 years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls for whom homes had to be found within the memory of men not yet in their prime washington had moved from his house on cherry hill as too far out of town to be easily reached now the old residents followed his example but they moved in a different direction and for a different reason their comfortable dwellings and the once fashionable streets along the east river front fell into the hands of real estate agents and boarding housekeepers and here says the report to the legislature of 1857 when the evils engendered had excited just alarm quote in its beginning the tenant house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings limited their expenses and whose employment in workshops stores or about the warehouses and thoroughfares render a near residence of much importance end quote not for long however as business increased and the city grew with rapid strides the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors and the stamp was set upon the old houses suddenly become valuable which the best thought and effort of a later age have vainly struggled to efface their quote large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones without regard to light or ventilation the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street and they soon became filled from cellar to garrett with the class of tennentry living from hand to mouth loosened morals improvident inhabits degraded and squalored as beggary itself end quote it was thus the dark bedroom prolific of untold depravities came into the world was destined to survive the old houses in their new role says the old report eloquent in its indignant denunciation of quote evils more destructive than wars end quote quote they were not intended to last rents were fixed high enough to cover damage and abuse from this class from whom nothing was expected and the most was made of them while they lasted neatness order cleanliness were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant house system as it spread its localities from year to year while reckless loveliness discontent privation and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results until the entire premises reached the level of tenant house dilapidation containing but sheltering not the miserable hordes that crowded beneath mouldering water rotted roofs or borrowed among the rats of clammy sellers end quote yet so illogical is human greed that at a later day when called to account quote the proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property utterly losing sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil and that for this they themselves were alone responsible end quote still the pressure of the crowds did not abate and in the old garden where the solid dutch burger grew his tulips or early cabbages a rear house was built generally of wood two stories high at first presently it was carried up another story and another where two families had lived ten moved in the front house followed suit if the brick walls were strong enough the question was not always asked judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness that the old buildings were quote often carried up to a great height without regard to the strength of the foundation walls end quote it was rent the owner was after nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort of the tenants the garden gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges the shell-paved walk had become an alley what the rear house had left of the garden a quote court end quote plenty such are yet to be found in the fourth ward with here and there one of the original rear tenements worse was to follow it was quote soon perceived by estate owners and agents of property that a greater percentage of profits could be realized by the conversion of houses and blocks into barracks and dividing their space into smaller proportions capable of containing human life within four walls blocks were rented of real estate owners or purchased on time or taken in charge at a percentage and held for under letting end quote with the appearance of the middleman wholly irresponsible and utterly reckless and unrestrained began the era of tenement building which turned out such blocks as gotham court where in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards the tenants died at the rate of 195 to the thousand of population which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in 41.83 in 1815 to 1 in 27.33 in 1855 a year of unusual freedom from epidemic disease and which rung from the early organizers of the health department this whale there are numerous examples of tenement houses in which are lodged several hundred people that have a pro-rata allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards upon the city lot courtyards and all included end quote the tenement house population had swelled to half a million souls by that time and on the east side in what is still the most densely populated district in all the world china not excluded it was packed at the rate of 290 000 to the square mile a state of affairs wholly unexampled the utmost cupidity of other lands and other days had never contrived to herd much more than half that number within the same space the greatest crowding of old london was at the rate of 175 816. swine rose and gutters as their principal scavengers footnote it was not until the winter of 1867 that owners of swine were prohibited by ordinance from letting them run at large in the built-up portions of the city end of footnote the death of a child in a tenement was registered at the bureau of vital statistics as quote plainly due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment end quote and the senators who had come down from albany to find out what was the matter with new york reported that quote there are annually cut off from the population by disease and death enough human beings to people a city and enough human labor to sustain it end quote and yet experts had testified that as compared with uptown rents were from 25 to 30 percent higher in the worst slums of the lower wards with such accommodations as were enjoyed for instance by a quote family with borders and quote in cedar street who fed hogs in the cellar that contained eight or ten loads of manure or quote one room twelve by twelve with five families living in it comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages with only two beds without partition screen chair or table end quote the rate of rent has been successfully maintained to the present day though the hog at least has been eliminated lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that is happily passed and may safely be forgotten let me mention here three very recent instances of tenement house life that came under my notice one was the burning of a rear house in mott street from appearances one of the original tenant houses that made their owners rich the fire made homeless 10 families who had paid an average of five dollars a month for their mean little cubby holes the owner himself told me that it was fully insured for 800 though it brought him in 600 a year rent he evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property another was the case of a hard-working family of man and wife young people from the old country who took poison together in a crosby street tenement because they were quote tired end quote there was no other explanation and none was needed when i stood in the room in which they had lived it was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all with scarcely room enough to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance there were four such rooms in that attic and together they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of brooklyn the third instance was that of a colored family of husband wife and baby in a wretched rear rookery in west third street their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top story so small that i was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open door three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent there was just one excuse for the early tenement house builders and their successors may plead it with nearly as good right for what it is worth quote such says an official report is the lack of house room in the city that any kind of tenement can be immediately crowded with lodgers if there is space offered end quote thousands were living in cellars there were 300 underground lodging houses in the city when the health department was organized some 15 years before that the old baptist church in mulberry street just off chatham street had been sold and the rear half of the frame structure had been converted into tenements that with their swarming population became the scandal even of that reckless age the wretched pile harbored no less than 40 families and the annual rate of deaths to the population was officially stated to be 75 in 1000 these tenements were an extreme type of very many for the big barracks had by this time spread east and west and far up the island into the sparsely settled wards whether or not the title was clear to the land upon which they were built was of less account than that the rents were collected if there were damages to pay the tenant had to foot them cases were quote very frequent when property was in litigation and two or three different parties were collecting rents end quote of course under such circumstances quote no repairs were ever made end quote the climax had been reached the situation was summed up by the society for the improvement of the condition of the poor and these words quote crazy old buildings crowded rear tenements in filthy yards dark damp basements leaking garretts shops outhouses and stables footnote converted into dwellings though scarcely fit to shelter brutes are habitations of thousands of our fellow beings in this wealthy christian city end quote footnote this quote unventilated and fever-breeding structure end quote the year after it was built was picked out by the council of hygiene then just organized and presented to the citizens association of new york as a specimen quote multiple domicile quote in a desirable street with the following comment quote here are 12 living rooms and 21 bedrooms and only six of the ladder have any provision or possibility for the admission of light and air accepting the family sitting and living room being utterly dark close and unventilated the living rooms are about 10 by 12 feet the bedroom is six and a half by seven feet and quote quote a lot 50 by 60 contained 20 stables rented for dwellings at 15 a year each costed the whole 600 end quote and a footnote quote the city says its historian mrs martha lamb commenting on the era of aqueduct building between 1835 and 1845 quote was a general asylum for vagrants and quote young vagabonds the natural offspring of such quote home and quote conditions overran the streets juvenile crime increased fearfully year by year the children's aid society and kindred philanthropic organizations were yet unborn but in the city directory was to be found the address of the quote american society for the promotion of education in africa end quote end of section one recording by maggie russell lower east side new york city section two of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by leanne howlett how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 2 the awakening the dread of advancing cholera with the guilty knowledge of the harvest field that awaited the plague in new york slums pricked the conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the war a citizen's movement resulted in the organization of a board of health and the adoption of the tenement house act of 1867 the first step toward remedial legislation a thorough canvas of the tenements had been begun already in the previous year but the cholera first and next a scourge of smallpox delayed the work while emphasizing the need of it so that it was 1869 before it got fairly underway and began to tell the dark bedroom fell under the band first in that year the board ordered the cutting of more than 46 000 windows in interior rooms chiefly for ventilation for little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways air shafts were unknown the saw had a job all that summer by early fall nearly all the orders had been carried out not without opposition obstacles were thrown in the way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added expense to diminish their income from the rent on the other side by the tenants themselves who had sunk after a generation of unavailing protests to the level of their surroundings and were at last content to remain there the tenements had bred their nemesis a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds already it taxed the city heavily for the support of its jails and charities the basis of opposition curiously enough was the same at both extremes owner and tenant alike considered official interference an infringement of personal rights and a hardship it took long years of weary labor to make good the claim of the sunlight to such corners of the dens as it could reach at all not until five years after did the department succeed at last in ousting the cave dwellers and closing some 550 cellars south of houston street many of them below tidewater that had been used as living apartments in many instances the police had to drag the tenants out by force the work went on but the need of it only grew with the effort the sanitarians were following up an evil that grew faster than they went like a fire it could only be headed off not chased with success official reports read in the churches in 1879 characterized the younger criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and unhealthy overcrowded lodgings brought up in an atmosphere of actual darkness moral and physical this after the saw had been busy in the dark corners ten years if we could see the air breathed by these poor creatures and their tenements said a well-known physician it would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters little improvement was apparent despite all that had been done the new tenements that have been recently built have been usually as badly planned as the old with dark and unhealthy rooms often over wet cellars where extreme overcrowding is permitted was the verdict of one authority these are the houses that today perpetuate the worst traditions of the past and they are counted by thousands the five points had been cleansed as far as the immediate neighborhood was concerned but the mulberry street bend was fast out doing it in foulness not a stone's throw away and new centers of corruption were continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever vigilance was relaxed forever so short of time it is one of the curses of the tenement house system that the worst houses exercise a leveling influence upon all the rest just as one bad boy in a school room will spoil the whole class it is one of the ways the evil that was the result of forgetfulness of the poor as the council of hygiene mildly put it has of avenging itself the determined effort to head it off by laying a strong hand upon the tenement builders that has been the chief business of the health board of recent years dates from this period the era of the air shaft has not solved the problem of housing the poor but it has made good use of limited opportunities over the new houses sanitary law exercises full control but the old remain they cannot be summarily torn down though in extreme cases the authorities can't order them cleared the outrageous overcrowding too remains it is characteristic of the tenements poverty their badge and typical condition invites compels it all efforts to abate it result only in temporary relief as long as they exist it will exist with them and the tenements will exist in new york forever today what is a tenement the law defines it as a house occupied by three or more families living independently and doing their cooking on the premises or by more than two families on a floor so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls stairways yards etc that is the legal meaning and includes flats and apartment houses with which we have nothing to do in its narrower sense the typical tenement was thus described when last arraigned before the bar of public justice it is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street frequently with a store on the first floor which when used for the sale of liquor has a side opening for the benefit of the inmates and to evade the sunday law four families occupy each floor and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets used as bedrooms with a living room 12 feet by ten the staircase is too often a dark well in the center of the house and no direct through ventilation is possible each family being separated from the other by partitions frequently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories high with two families on a floor the picture is nearly as true today as ten years ago and will be for a long time to come the dim light admitted by the air shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever tenements are still good property and the poverty of the poor man his destruction a barrack downtown where he has to live because he is poor brings in a third more rent than a decent flat house in harlem the statement once made a sensation that between 70 and 80 children had been found in one tenement it no longer excites even passing attention when the sanitary police report counting 101 adults and 91 children in a crosby street house one of twins built together the children in the other if i am not mistaken numbered 89 a total of 180 for two tenements or when a midnight inspection in mulberry street unearths 150 lodgers sleeping on filthy floors in two buildings spite of brownstone trimmings plate glass and mosaic vegetable floors the water does not rise in summer to the second story while the beer flows unchecked to the all-night picnics on the roof the saloon with the side door and the landlord divide the prosperity of the place between them and the tenant and sullen submission foots the bills where are the tenements of today say rather where are they not in 50 years they have crept up from the fourth ward slums and the five points the whole length of the island and have polluted the annex district to the westchester line crowding all the lower wards wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed strung along both rivers like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street and filling up harlem with their restless pent-up multitudes they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of new york hold them at their mercy in the day of mob rule and wrath the bulletproof shutters the stacks of hand grenades and the gatling guns of the sub-treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected the tenements today are new york harboring three-fourths of its population when another generation shall have doubled the census of our city and to that vast army of workers held captive by poverty the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery what will the harvest be end of section 2 recording by leanne howlett section 3 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by leanne howlett how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 3 the mixed crowd when once i asked the agent of a notorious fourth ward alley how many people might be living in it i was told 140 families 100 irish 38 italian and two that spoke the german tongue barring the agent herself there was not a native-born individual in the court the answer was characteristic of the cosmopolitan character of lower new york very nearly so of the whole of it wherever it runs to alleys and courts one may find for the asking an italian a german a french african spanish bohemian russian scandinavian jewish and chinese colony even the arab who peddles holy earth from the battery as a direct importation from jerusalem has his exclusive preserves at the lower end of washington street the one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of america is a distinctively american community there is none certainly not among the tenements where have they gone to the old inhabitants i put the question to one who might fairly be presumed to be of the number since i had found him sighing for the good old days when the legend no irish need apply was familiar in the advertising columns of the newspapers he looked at me with a puzzled air i don't know he said i wish i did some went to california in 49 some to the war and never came back the rest i expect have gone to heaven or somewhere i don't see them round here whatever the merit of the good man's conjectures his eyes did not deceive him they are not here in their place has come this queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements ever striving and working like whiskey and water in one glass and with the like result final union and a prevailing taint of whiskey the once unwelcome irishman has been followed in his turn by the italian the russian jew and the and has himself taken a hand at opposition quite as bitter and quite as ineffectual against these later hordes wherever these have gone they have crowded him out possessing the block the street the ward with their denser swarms but the irishman's revenge is complete victorious in defeat over his recent as over his more ancient foe the one who opposed his coming no less than the one who drove him out he dictates to both their politics and secure in possession of the offices returns the native his greeting with interest while collecting the rents of the italian whose house he has bought with the prophets of his saloon as a landlord he is picturesquely autocratic amusing instance of his methods came under my notice while writing these lines an inspector of the health department found an italian family paying a man with a celtic name 25 a month for three small rooms and a ramshackle rear tenement more than twice what they were worth and expressed his astonishment to the tenant an ignorant sicilian laborer he replied that he had once asked the landlord to reduce the rent but he would not do it well what did he say asked the inspector damn a man he said if you speaker that away to me i fire you and your things in the streeter and the frightened italian paid the rent in justice to the irish landlord it must be said that like an apt pupil he was merely showing forth the result of the schooling he had received reenacting in his own way the scheme of the tenements it is only his frankness that shocks the irishman does not naturally take kindly to tenement life though with characteristic versatility he adapts himself to his conditions at once it does violence nevertheless to the best that is in him and for that very reason of all who come within its sphere soonest corrupts him the result is a sediment the product of more than a generation in the city's slums that as distinguished from the large body of his class justly ranks at the foot of tenement dwellers the so-called low irish it is not to be assumed of course that the whole body of the population living in the tenements of which new yorkers are in the habit of speaking vaguely as the poor or even the larger part of it is to be classed as vicious or as poor in the sense of verging on beggary new york's wage earners have no other place to live more is the pity they are truly poor for having no better homes waxing poorer and purse as the exorbitant rents to which they are tied as ever was served to soil keep rising the wonder is that they are not all corrupted and speedily by their surroundings if on the contrary there be a steady working up if not out of the slough the fact is a powerful argument for the optimist's belief that the world is after all growing better not worse and would go far toward disarming apprehension read not for the steadier growth of the sediment of the slums and its constant menace such an impulse towards better things there certainly is the german rag picker of 30 years ago quite as low in this scale as his italian successor is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of today footnote the sheriff's street colony of rag pickers long since gone is an instance in point the thrifty germans saved up money during years of hard work and squalor and apparently wretched poverty to buy a township in a western state and the whole colony moved out there in a body there need be no doubt about their thriving there end footnote the italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit stands while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder the irish hodge carrier and the second generation has become a bricklayer if not the alderman of his ward while the chinese coulee is an almost exclusive possession of the laundry business the reason is obvious the poorest immigrant comes here with the purpose and ambition to better himself and given half a chance might be reasonably expected to make the most of it to the false plea that he prefers the squalid homes in which his kind are housed there could be no better answer the truth is his half-chance has too long been wanting and for the bad result he has been unjustly blamed as immigration from east to west follows the latitude so does the foreign influx in new york distribute itself along certain well-defined lines that waver and break only under the stronger pressure of a more gregarious race or the encroachment of inexorable business a feeling of dependence upon mutual effort natural to strangers in a strange land unacquainted with its language and customs sufficiently accounts for this the irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant all pervading he shares his lodging with perfect impartiality with the italian the greek and the dutchman yielding only to sheer force of numbers and objects equally to them all a map of the city colored to designate nationalities would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra and more colors than any rainbow the city on such a map would fall into two great halves green for the irish prevailing in the west side tenement districts and blue for the germans on the east side but intermingled with these ground colors would be an odd variety of tents that would give the whole the appearance of an extraordinary crazy quilt from down in the sixth ward upon the site of the old collect pond that in the days of the fathers drained the hills which are no more the red of the italian would be seen forcing its way northward along the line of mulberry street to the quarter of the french purple on bleecker street and south fifth avenue to lose itself and reappear after a lapse of miles in the little italy of harlem east of 2nd avenue dashes of red sharply defined would be seen strung through the annexed district northward to the city line on the west side the red would be seen overrunning the old africa of thompson street pushing the black of the negro rapidly up down against quarry-less but unavailing protests occupying his home his church his trade and all with merciless impartiality there is a church in mulberry street that has stood for two generations as a sort of milestone of these migrations built originally for the worship of stayed new yorkers of the old stock it was engulfed by the colored tide when the draft riots drove the negroes out of reach of cherry street and the five points within the past decade the advance wave of the italian onset reached it and today the arms of united italy adorn its front the negros have made a stand at several points along 7th and 8th avenues but their main body still pursued by the italian foe is on the march yet and the black mark will be found overshadowing today many blocks on the east side with 100th street as the center where colonies of them have settled recently hardly less aggressive than the italian the russian and polish jew having overrun the district between rivington and division streets east of the bowery to the point of suffocation is filling the tenements of the old seventh ward to the riverfront and disputing with the italian every foot of available space in the back alleys of mulberry street the two races differing hopelessly and much have this in common they carry their slums with them wherever they go if allowed to do it little italy already rivals its parent the bend and foulness other nationalities that begin at the bottom make a fresh start when crowded up the ladder happily both are manageable the one by rabbinical the other by the civil law between the dull gray of the jew his favorite color and the italian red would be seen squeezed in on the map a sharp streak of yellow marking the narrow boundaries of chinatown tailed in with the german population the poor but thrifty bohemian might be picked out by the somber hue of his life as of his philosophy struggling against heavy odds in the big human beehives of the east side colonies of his people extend northward with long lapses of space from below the cooper institute more than three miles the bohemian is the only foreigner with any considerable representation in the city who counts no wealthy man of his race none who has not to work hard for a living or has got beyond the reach of the tenement down near the battery the west side emerald would be soiled by a dirty stain spreading rapidly like a splash of ink on a sheet of blotting paper headquarters of the arab tribe that in a single year has swelled from the original dozen to twelve hundred intent every mother's son on trade and barter dots and dashes of color here and there which show where the finished sailors worship their demala god the greek peddlers the ancient name of their race and the swiss the goddess of thrift and so on to the end of the long register all toiling together in the galling fetters of the tenement where the question raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged who resists most stubbornly its leveling tendency knows how to drag even the barracks upward a part of the way at least toward the ideal plane of the home the palm must be unhesitatingly awarded the teuton the italian and the poor jew rise only by compulsion the does not rise at all here as at home he simply remains stationary the irishman's genius runs to public affairs rather than domestic life wherever he is mustered in force the saloon is the gorgeous center of political activity the german struggles vainly to learn his trick his teutonic wit is too heavy and the political ladder he raises from his saloon usually too short or too clumsy to reach the desired goal the best part of his life is lived at home and he makes himself a home independent of the surroundings giving the lie to the saying unhappily become a maxim of social truth that popperism and drunkenness naturally grow in the tenements he makes the most of his tenement and it should be added that whenever and as soon as he can save up money enough he gets out and never crosses the threshold of one again end of section three recording by leanne howlett section 4 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by marianne how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 4 the downtown back alleys part one down below chatham square in the old fourth ward where the cradle of the tenement stood we shall find new york's other half at home receiving such as care to call and are not afraid not all of it to be sure there is not room for that but a fairly representative gathering representative of its earliest and worst traditions there is nothing to be afraid of in this metropolis let it be understood there is no public street where the stranger may not go safely by day and by night provided he knows how to mind his own business and is sober his coming and going will excite little interest unless he is suspected of being a truant officer in which case he will be impressed with the truth of the observation that the american stock is dying out for wand of children if he escapes this suspicion and the risk of trampling upon or being himself run down by the bewildering swarms of youngsters that are everywhere or nowhere as the exigency and their quick scent of danger direct he will see no reason for dissenting from that observation glimpses caught of the parents watching the youngsters play from windows or open doorways will soon convince him that the native stock is in no way involved leaving the elevated railroad where it dives under the brooklyn bridge at franklin square scarce a dozen steps will take us where we wish to go with its rush and roar echoing yet in our ears we have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty we stand upon the domain of the tenement in the shadow of the great stone abutments the old knickerbocker houses linger like ghosts of a departed day down the winding slope of cherry street proud and fashionable cherry hill that was their broad steps sloping roofs and dormer windows are easily made out all the more easily for the contrast with the ugly barracks that elbow them right and left these never had other design than to shelter add as little outlay as possible the great crowds out of which rent could be rung they were the bad afterthought of a heedless day the years have brought to the old house's unhonored age a queerless second childhood that is out of tune with the time their tenants the neighbors and cries out against them and against you in fretful protest in every step on their rotten floors or squeaky stairs good cause have they for their fretting this one with its shabby front and poorly patched roof what glowing firesides what happy children may at once have owned heavy feet too often with unsteady step for the pot houses next door where is it not next door in these slums have worn away the brown stone steps since the broken columns at the door have rotted away at the base of the handsome cornice barely a trace is left dirt and desolation rain in the wide hallway and danger lurks on the stairs rough pine boards fence off the roomy fireplaces where coal is bought by the pail at a rate of 12 dollars a ton these have no place the arched gateway leads no longer to a shady bower on the banks of the rushing stream inviting to daydreams with its gentle repose but to a dark and nameless alley shut in by high brick walls cheerless as the lives of those they shelter the wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that come to this alley echoes of the day's cares a horde of dirty children play around the dripping hydrant the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it it is the best it can do these are the children of the tenements the growing generation of the slums this their home from the great highway overhead along which throbs the lifetide of two great cities one might drop a pebble into half a dozen of such alleys one yawns just across the street not very broadly but it is not to blame the builder of the old gateway had no thought of its ever becoming a public thoroughfare once inside it widens but only to make room for a big box-like building with the worn and greasy look of the slum tenement that is stamped alike on the houses and their tenants down here even on the homeless curve that romps with the children in yonder building lot with an air of expectant interest plainly betraying the forlorn hope that at some stage of the game a meat bone may show up in the role of it vain hope truly nothing more appetizing than a bare-legged ragamuffin appears meat bones not long scents picked clean are as scarce in blind man's alley as elbow room in any fourth ward backyard the shouts of the children come hushed over the housetops as if apologizing for the intrusion few glad noises make this old alley ring morning and evening it echoes with the gentle groping tap of the blind man's staff as he feels his way to the street blind man's alley bears its name for a reason until little more than a year ago its dark burrows harbored a colony of blind beggars tenants of a blind landlord old daniel murphy whom every child in the ward knows if he never heard of the president of the united states old dan made a big fortune he told me once four hundred thousand dollars out of his alley and the surrounding tenements only to grow blind himself in extreme old age sharing in the end the chief hardship of the wretched beings whose thought he had stubbornly refused to better that he might increase his wealth even when the board of health at last compelled him to repair and clean up the worst of the old buildings under threat of driving out the tenants and locking the doors behind them the work was accomplished against the old man's angry protests he appeared in person before the board to argue his case and his argument was characteristic i have made my will he said my monument stands waiting for me in calvary i stand on the very brink of the grave blind and helpless and now here the pathos of the appeal was swept under in a burst of angry indignation do you want me to build and get skinned skinned these people are not fit to live in a nice house let them go where they can and let my house stand in spite of the genuine anguish of the appeal it was downright amusing to find that his anger was provoked less by the anticipated waste of luxury on his tenants than by distrust of his own kind the builder he knew intuitively what to expect the results showed that mr murphy had gauged his tenants correctly the cleaning up process apparently destroyed the home feeling of the alley many of the blind people moved away and did not return some remained however and the name has clung to the place some idea of what is meant by a sanitary cleaning up in these slums may be gained from the account of a mishap i met with once in taking a flashlight picture of a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements down here with unpracticed hands i managed to set fire to the house when the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and i could see once more i discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze there were six of us five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger and myself in an attic room with a dozen crooked rickety stairs between us and the street and as many households as helpless as the one whose guest i was all about us the thought how were they ever to be got out may my blood run cold as i saw the flames creeping up the wall and my first impulse was to bolt for the street and shout for help the next was this mother the fire myself and i did with a vast deal of trouble afterward when i came down to the street i told a friendly policeman of my trouble for some reason he thought had a rather good joke and laughed immoderately at my concern lest even then sparks should be burning in the rotten wall that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that were in it he told me why when he found time to draw a breath why don't you know he said that house is the dirty spoon it caught fire six times last winter but it wouldn't burn the dirt was so thick on the walls it smothered the fire which if true shows that water and dirt not usually held to be harmonious elements work together for the good of those who insure houses sunless and joyless though it be blind man's alley has that which is compiers of the slums vainly yearned for it has a payday once a year sunlight shines into the lives of its forlorn crew past and present in june when the superintendent of outdoor poor distributes the twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the city in half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them blind man's alley takes a day off and goes to see mr blake that night it is noisy with unwanted merriment there are scraping of squeaky fiddles in the dark rooms and cracked old voices seeing long forgotten songs even the blind landlord rejoices for much of the money goes into his coffers from their perch up along the rafters mrs gallagher's blind borders might hear did they listen the of the policemen always on duty in gotham court half a stone's throw away his beat though it takes in but a small portion of a single block is quite as lively as most larger patrol rounds a double row of five story tenements back to back under a common roof extending back from the street 234 feet with barred openings in the dividing wall so that the tenants may see but cannot get at each other from the stairs makes the court allies one wider by a couple of feet than the other wins the distinction single and double alley skirt the barracks on either side such briefly is the tenement that has challenged public attention more than any other in the whole city and tested the power of sanitary law and rule for 40 years the name of the pile is not down in the city directory but in the public records it holds an unenviable place it was here the mortality rose during the last great cholera epidemic to the unprecedented rate of 195 in 1 000 inhabitants in its worst days a full thousand could not be packed into the court though the number did probably not fall short of it even now under the management of men of conscience and an agent a king's daughter whose practical energy kindness and good sense have done much to redeem its foul reputation the swarms at shelters would make more than one fair-sized country village the mixed character of the population by this time about equally divided between the celtic and the italian stock accounts for the iron bars and the policemen it was an eminently irish suggestion that the latter was to be credited to the presence of two german families in the court who made trouble all the time a whom i questioned as he hurried past the iron gate of the alley put the matter in a different light lem he said gotham court has been the entering wedge for the italian hordes which until recently had not attained a foothold in the fourth ward but are now trailing across chatham street from their stronghold in the bend in ever ever-increasing numbers seeking according to their want the lowest level it is curious to find that this notorious block whose name was so long synonymous with all that was desperately bad was originally built in 1851 by a benevolent quaker for the express purpose of rescuing the poor people from the dreadful rookeries they were then living in how long it continued to model tenement is not on record it could not have been very long for already in 1862 10 years after it was finished a sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness in the court including all kinds of infectious disease from smallpox down and reported that of 138 children born in less than three years 61 had died mostly before they were one year old seven years later the inspector of the district reported to the board of health that nearly 10 percent of the population is sent to the public hospitals each year when the alley was finally taken in hand by the authorities and as a first step towards reclamation the entire population was driven out by the police experience dictated as one of the first improvements to be made the putting in of a kind of sewer grating so constructed as the official report patiently puts it as to prevent the ingress of people disposed to make a hiding place of the sewer and the sellers into which they opened the fact was that the big vaulted sewers had long been a runaway for thieves the swamp's angels who threw them easily escaped when chased by the police as well as a storehouse for their plunder the sewers are there today in fact the two alleys are nothing but the roofs of these enormous tunnels in which a man may walk upright the full distance of the block and into the cherry street sewer if he likes the fun and is not afraid of rats could their grimy walls speak the big canals might tell many a startling tale but they are silent enough and so are most of those whose secrets they might betray the floodgates connecting with the cherry street maine are closed now except when the waters drained off then there were no gates and it is on record that the sewers were chosen as a shortcut habitually by residents of the court whose business lay on the line of them near manhole perhaps in cherry street or at the river mouth of the big pipe when it was clear at low tide me jimmy said one wrinkled old dame who looked in while we were nosing about under double alley he used to go to work along down cherry street that way every morning and come back at night the associations must have been congenial probably jimmy fitted himself into the landscape end of section four section five of how the other half lives this is a lippervox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by marianne how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter four the downtown back alleys part two halfway back from the street in this latter alley is a tenement facing the main building on the west side of the way that was not originally part of the court proper it stands there a curious monument to a quaker's revenge a living illustration of the power of hate to perpetuate its bitter fruit beyond the grave the lot upon which it is built was the property of john wood brother of silas the builder of gotham court he sold the cherry street front to a man who built upon a tenement with entrance only from the street mr wood afterward quarreled about the partition line with his neighbor alderman mullins who had put up a long tenement barrack on his block after the style of the court and the alderman knocked him down tradition records that the quaker picked himself up with a quiet remark i will pay thee for that friend alderman and went his way his manner of paying was to put up the big building in the rear of 34 cherry street with an immense blank wall right in front of the windows of alderman mullen's tenements shutting out effectually light and air from them but as he had no access to the street from his building for many years it could not be let or used for anything and remained vacant until it passed under the management of the gotham court property mullins court is there yet and so is the quaker's vengeful wall that has cursed the lives of thousands of innocent people since at its farther end the alley between the two that begins inside the cherry street tenement six or seven feet wide narrows down to less than two feet it is barely possible to squeeze through but few care to do it for the rift leads to the jail of the oak street police station and therefore is not popular with the growing youth of the district there is a crepe on the door of the aldermen's court as we pass out and upstairs in one of the tenements preparations are being made for awake a man lies dead in the hospital who was cut to pieces in a can racket in the alley on sunday the sway of the excise law is not extended to these back alleys it would matter little if it were there are secret byways and some it is not held worthwhile to keep secret along rich the growler wanders at all hours and seasons unmolested it climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder resulted it is nothing unusual on cherry street nothing to make a fuss about not a week before two or three blocks up the street the police felt called upon to interfere in one of these can rackets at two o'clock in the morning to secure peace for the neighborhood the interference took the form of a general fuselage during which one of the disturbers fell off the roof and was killed there was the usual wake and nothing more was heard of it what indeed was there to say the rock of ages is the name over the door of a low saloon that blocks the entrance to another alley if possible more forlorn and dreary than the rest as we pass out of the aldermen's court it sounds like a jeer from the days happily passed when the wickedest man in new york lived around the corner a little way and boasted of his title one cannot take many steps in cherry street without encountering some relic of past or present prominence in the ways of crime scarce one that does not turn up specimen bricks of the coming thief the cherry street though is all pervading ask superintendent murray who as captain of the oak street squad in seven months secured convictions for theft robbery and murder aggravating no less than 530 years of penal servitude and he will tell you his opinion that the fourth ward even in the last 20 years has turned out more criminals than all the rest of the city together but though the swamp angels have gone to their reward their successors carry on business at the old stand successfully if not as boldly there goes one who was once a shining light and thiefdom he has reformed since they say the policeman on the corner who is addicted to professional unbelief in reform of any kind will tell you that while on the island once he sailed away on a shutter paddling along until he was picked up in hellgate by a schooner's crew whom he persuaded that he was a fanatic performing some sort of religious penance by his singular expedition over yonder tweed the arch thief worked in a brush shop and earned an honest living before he took to politics as we stroll from one narrow street to another the odd contrast between the low old looking houses in front and the towering tenements in the backyards grows even more striking perhaps because we expect and are looking for it nobody who was not would suspect the presence of the rear houses though they have been there long enough here is one seven stories high behind one with only three floors take a look into roosevelt street alley just about one step wide with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air god help us for pitiful mockery from this slit between brick walls there are no windows in the wall on the other side it is perfectly blank the fire escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it but the rays of the sun rising setting or at high noon never do it never shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it there was once an english doctor who experimented with the sunlight in the soldier's barracks and found that on the side that was shut off altogether from the sun the mortality was 100 percent greater than on the light side where its rays had free access but then the soldiers are of some account have a fixed value if not a very high one the people who live here have not the horse that pulls the dirt cart one of these labors loads and unloads is of ever so much more account to the employer of his labor than he and all that belongs to him ask the owner he will not attempt to deny it if the horse is worth anything the man too knows it it is the one thought that occasionally troubles the owner of the horse in the enjoyment of his prosperity built of and upon the successful assertion of the truth that all men are created equal with what a shock did the story of yonder madison street alley come home to new yorkers one morning eight or ten years ago when a fire that broke out after the men had gone to their work swept up those narrow stairs and burned up women and children to the number of a full half score there were fire escapes yes but so placed that they could not be reached the firemen had to look twice before they could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare a stout man would never venture in some wonderfully heroic rescues were made at that fire by people living in the adjoining tenements danger and trouble of the imminent kind not the everyday sword that excites neither interest nor commiseration run even this common clay into heroic molds on occasion occasions that help us to remember that the gap that separates the man with the patched coat from his wealthy neighbor is after all perhaps but a tenement yet what a gap and of who's making here as we stroll along madison street workmen are busy putting the finishing touches to the brownstone front of a tall new tenement this one will probably be called an apartment house they are carving satter's heads in the stone with a crowd of gaping youngsters looking on in admiring wonder next door are two other tenements likewise with brown stone fronts fair to look at the youngest of the children in the group is not too young to remember how their army of tenants was turned out by the health officials because the houses have been condemned as unfit for human beings to live in the owner was a wealthy builder who stood high in the community is it only in our fancy that the sardonic lear on the stone faces seems to list that way or is it an introspective grin we will not ask if the new house belongs to the same builder he too may have reformed we have crossed the boundary of the seventh ward penitentiary row suggestive name for a block of cherry street tenements is behind us within recent days it has become peopled holy with hebrews the overflow from jewtown adjoining peddlers and tailors all of them it is odd to read this legend from the other days over the door no peddlers allowed in this house these thrifty people are not only crowding into the tenements of this once exclusive district they are buying them the jew runs to real estate as soon as he can save up enough for a deposit to clinch the bargain as fast as the old houses are torn down towering structures go up in their place and hebrews are found to be the builders here is a whole alley nicknamed after the intruder jews alley but abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the israelite with he pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time he knows from experience both sweet and bitter that all things come to those who wait including the houses and lands of their persecutors here comes a pleasure party as gay as any on the avenue though the carryall is an ash cart the father is the driver and he has taken his brown-legged boy for a ride how proud and happy they both look up there on their perch the queer old building they have halted in front of is the ship famous for 50 years as a ramshackle tenement filled with the oddest crowd no one knows why it is called the ship though there is a tradition that once the river came clear up here to hamilton street and boats were moored alongside it more likely it is because it is as bewildering inside as a crazy old ship with its ups and downs of ladders parading as stairs and its unexpected pitfalls but hamilton street like water street is not what it was the missions drove from the latter the worst of its dives a sailor's mission has lately made its appearance in hamilton street but there are no dives there nothing worse than the ubiquitous saloon and tough tenements enough of them everywhere suppose we look into one no cherry street be a little careful please the hall this dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there not that it would hurt them kicks and cuffs are their daily diet they have little else here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step and again another a flight of stairs you can feed your way if you cannot see it close yes what would you have all the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall door that is forever slamming and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements god meant to be free but man deals out with such niggerly hand that was a woman filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against the sinks are in the hallway that all the tenants may have access and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches hear the pump squeak it is the lullaby of tenement house babes in summer when a thousand thirsty throats panned for a cooling drink in this block it is worked in vain but the saloon whose open door you passed in the hall is always there the smell of it has followed you up here is a door listen that short hacking cough that tiny helpless whale what do they mean they mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell oh a sadly familiar story before the day is at an end the child is dying with measles with half a chance it might have lived but it had none that dark bedroom killed it it was took all of a sudden said the mother soothing the throbbing little body with trembling hands there's no unkindness in the rough voice of the man in the jumper who sits by the window grimly smoking a clay pipe with a little life ebbing out of his sight bitter as his words sound hush mary if we cannot keep the baby need we complain such as we such as we what if the words ring in your ears as we grope our way up the stairs and down from floor to floor listening to the sounds behind the closed doors some of quarreling some of course songs more of profanity they are true when the summer heats come with their suffering they have meaning more terrible than words can tell come over here step carefully over this baby it is a baby spite of its rags and dirt under these iron bridges called fire escapes but loaded down despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen with broken household goods with wash tubs and barrels over which no man could climb from a fire this gap between dingy brick walls is the yard that strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people do you wonder the name does not attract them to the churches that baby's parents live in the rear tenement here she is at least as clean as the steps we are now climbing there are plenty of houses with half a hundred such in the tenement is much like the one in front we just left only fowler closer darker we will not say more cheerless the word is a mockery a hundred thousand people lived in rear tenements in new york last year here is a room neater than the rest the woman a stout matron with hard lines of care in her face is at the wash tub i tried to keep the children clean she says apologetically but with a hopeless glance around the spice of hot soap suds is added to the air already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage of rags and uncleanliness all about it makes an overpowering compound it is thursday but patched linen is hung upon the pulley line from the window there is no monday cleaning in the tenements it is wash day all the week round for change of clothing is scarce among the poor they are poverty's honest badge these perennial lines of rags hung out to dry those that are not the washer woman's professional shingle the true line to be drawn between popperism and honest poverty is the clothesline with it begins the effort to be clean that is the first and the best evidence of a desire to be honest what sort of answer thank you would come from these tenements to the question is life worth living were they hurt at all in the discussion it may be that this cut from the last report but one of the association for the improvement of the condition of the poor a long name for a very weary task has a suggestion of it in the depth of winter the attention of the association was called to a protestant family living in a garret in a miserable tenement in cherry street the family's condition was most deplorable the man his wife and three small children shivering in one room through the roof of which the pitiless winds of winter whistled the room was almost barren of furniture the parents slept on the floor the elder children in boxes and the baby was swung in an old shaw attached to the rafters by cords by way of a hammock the father a seaman had been obliged to give up that calling because he was in consumption and was unable to provide either bread or fire for his little ones perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case but one that came to my notice some months ago in a seventh ward tenement was typical enough to escape that reproach there were nine in the family husband wife an aged grandmother and six children honest hard-working germans scrupulously neat but poor all nine lived in two rooms one about ten feet square that served as parlor bedroom and eating room the other a small hall room made into a kitchen the rent was seven dollars and a half a month more than a week's wages for the husband and father who was the only breadwinner in the family that day the mother had thrown herself out of the window and was carried up from the street dead she was discouraged said some of the other women from the tenement who had come in to look after the children while the messenger carried the news to the father of the shop they went solidly about their task although they were evidently not without feeling for the dead woman no doubt she was wrong in not taking life philosophically as did the four families a city missionary found housekeeping in the four corners of one room they got along well enough together until one of the families took a border and made trouble philosophy according to my optimistic friend naturally inhabits the tenements the people who live there come to look upon death in a different way from the rest of us do not take it as hard he has never found time to explain how the fact fits into the general theory that life is not unbearable in the tenements unhappily for the philosophy of the slums it is too apt to be of the kind that readily recognizes the saloon always handy as the refuge from every trouble and shapes its practice according to the discovery end of section five section 6 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil chenever how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 5 the italian in new york certainly a picturesque if not very tidy element has been added to the population in the quote assisted close quote italian immigrant who claims so large a share of public attention partly because he keeps coming at such a tremendous rate but chiefly because he elects to stay in new york or near enough for it to serve as his base of operations and here promptly reproduces conditions of destitution and disorder which set in the framework of mediterranean exuberance are the delight of the artist but in a matter of fact american community become its danger and reproach the reproduction is made easier in new york because he finds the material ready to hand in the worst of the slum tenements but even where it is not he soon reduces what he does find to his own level if allowed to follow his natural bent footnote the process can be observed in the italian tenements in harlem little italy which since their occupation by these people have been gradually sinking to the slum level in footnote the italian comes in at the bottom and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there in the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who quote makes less trouble close quote than the contentious irishman or the ardor loving german that is to say is content to live in a pigsty and submits to robbery at the hands of the rent collector without murmur yet this very tractability makes of him in good hands when firmly and intelligently managed a really desirable tenant but it is not his good fortune often to fall in with other hospitality upon his coming than that which brought him here for its own profit and he has no idea of letting go its grip upon him as long as there is a sent to be made out of him recent congressional inquiries have shown the nature of the quote assistance close quote he receives from greedy steamship agents and bankers who persuade him by false promises to mortgage his home his few belongings and his wages for months to come for a ticket to the land where plenty of work is to be had at princely wages the patron the banker is nothing else having made his ten percent out of an all-route receives him at the landing and turns him to double account as a wage earner and a rent payer in each of these roles he is made to yield a profit to his unscrupulous countrymen whom he trusts implicitly with the instinct of utter helplessness the man is so ignorant that as one of the sharpers who pray upon him put it once it would be downright sinful not to take him in his ignorance and unconquerable suspicion of strangers dig the pit into which he falls he not only knows no word of english but he does not know enough to learn rarely only can he write his own language unlike the german who begins learning english the day he lands as a matter of duty or the polish jew who takes it up as soon as he is able as an investment the italian learns slowly if at all even his boy born here often speaks his native tongue indifferently he is forced therefore to have constant recourse to the middleman who makes him pay handsomely at every turn he hires him out to the railroad contractor receiving a commission from the employer as well as from the laborer and repeats the performance monthly as often as he can have him dismissed in the city he contracts for his lodging subletting to him space in the vilest tenements at extortionate rents and sets an example that does not lack imitators the quote princely wages close quote have vanished with his coming and in their place hardships and a dollar a day be helped with the padrones merciless mortgage confront him bred to even worse fare he takes both as a matter of course and applying the maxim that it is not what one makes but what he saves that makes him rich manages to turn the very dirt of the streets into a horde of gold with which he either returns to his southern home or brings over his family to join in his work and in his fortunes the next season the discovery was made by earlier explorers that there is money in new york's ash barrel but it was left to the genius of the padron to develop the full resources of the mind that has become the exclusive preserve of the italian immigrant only a few years ago when rag picking was carried on in a desert tree and irresponsible sort of way the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash skulls before they were sent out to sea the trimming consisted in leveling out the dirt as it was dumped from the carts so that the scowl might be evenly loaded the men were paid a dollar and a half a day kept what they found that was worth having and allowed the swarms of italians that hung about the dumps to do the heavy work for them letting them have their pick of the loads for their trouble today italians contract for the work paying large sums to be permitted to do it the city received not less than eighty thousand dollars last year for the sale of this privilege to the contractors who in addition have to pay gangs of their countrymen for sorting out the bones rags tin cans and other waste that are found in the ashes and form the staples of their trade and their sources of revenue the effect has been vastly to increase the power of the padron or his ally the contractor by giving him exclusive control of the one industry in which the italian was formerly an independent dealer and reducing him literally to the plane of the dump whenever the back of the sanitary police is turned he will make his home in the filthy boroughs where he works by day sleeping and eating his meals under the dump on the edge of slimy depths and amid surroundings full of unutterable horror the city did not bargain to house though it is content to board him as long as he can make the ash barrels yield the food to keep him alive and a vigorous campaign is carried on at intervals against these unlicensed dump settlements but the temptation of having to pay no rent is too strong and they are driven from one dump only to find lodgement under another a few blocks further up or down the river the fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage of the dumps by rival factions represented by opposing contractors and it has happened that the defeated party has endeavored to capture by strategy but he failed to carry by assault it augurs unsuspected adaptability in the italian to our system of self-government that these rivalries have more than once been suspected of being behind the sharpening of city ordinances that were apparently made in good faith to prevent meddling with the refuse in the ash barrels are in transit did the italian always adapt himself as readily to the operation of the civil law as to the manipulation of political pull on occasion he would save himself a good deal of unnecessary trouble ordinarily he is easily enough governed by authority always accepting sunday when he settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions like the chinese the italian is a born gambler his soul is in the game from the moment the cards are on the table and very frequently his knife is in it too before the game has ended no sunday has passed in new york since the bend became a suburb of naples without one or more of these murderous afraids coming to the notice of the police as a rule that happens only when the man the game went against is either dead or so badly wounded as to require instant surgical help as to the other unless he is caught red-handed the chances that the police will ever get him are slim indeed the wounded man can seldom be persuaded to portray him he wards off all inquiries with a wicked quote i fix him myself close quote and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers if the latter the community hears after a while of another italian f-ray a man stabbed in a quarrel dead or dying and the police know that he has been fixed and the account squared with all his conspicuous faults the swarthy italian immigrant has his redeeming traits he is as honest as he is hot-headed there are no italian burglars in the rogues gallery the extra brigand toils peacefully with pickaxe and shovel on american ground his boy occasionally shows as a pickpocket the results of his training with the tufts of the sixth ward slums the only criminal business to which the father occasionally lends his hand outside of murder is a bunko game of which his confiding countrymen returning with their horde to their native land are the victims the women are faithful wives and devoted mothers their vivid and picturesque costumes lend a tinge of color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit the italian is gay light-hearted and if his fur is not stroked the wrong way inoffensive as a child his worst offense is that he keeps the stale beardives where his headquarters is in the mulberry street bend these vile dents flourish and gather about them all the wrecks the utterly wretched the hopelessly lost on the lowest slope of depraved humanity and out of their misery he makes a profit end of section 6 section 7 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil shenover how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 6 the bend where mulberry street crooks like an elbow with inhale of the old depravity of the five points is the bend foul core of new york slums long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trot a path over this hill echoes of tinkling bells linger there still but they do not call up memories of green meadows and summer fields they proclaim the homecoming of the rag pickers cart in the memory of man the old cow path has never been other than a vast human pigsty there is but one bend in the world and it is enough the city authorities moved by the angry protests of ten years of sanitary reform effort have decided that it is too much and must come down another paradise park will take its place and let in sunlight and air to work such transformations as at the five points around the corner of the next block never was change more urgently needed around the bend cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad even by the optimists of the health department incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home in the scores of back alleys of stable lanes and hidden by ways of which the rent collectors alone can keep track they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash barrels of the city here too shunning the light skulks the unclean beast of dishonest idleness the bend is the home of the as well as the rag picker it is not much more than 20 years since a census of the bend district returned only 24 of the 609 tenements as in decent condition three-fourths of the population of the bloody sixth ward were then irish the army of tramps that grew up after the disbandment of the armies in the field and has kept up its muster role together with the inrush of the italian tide have ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to all efforts at permanent improvement the more that has been done the less it has seemed to accomplish in the way of real relief until it has at last become clear that nothing short of entire demolition will ever prove of radical benefit corruption could not have chosen ground for its stand with better promise of success the whole district is a maze of narrow often unsuspected passageways necessarily for there is scarce a lot that has not two three or four tenements upon it swarming with unwholesome crowds what a bird's-eye view of the bend would be like is a matter of bewildering conjecture its everyday appearance as seen from the corner of bayard street on a sunny day is one of the sites of new york bayard street is the high road to jewtown across the bowery picketed from end to end with outposts of israel hebrew faces hebrew signs and incessant chatter in the queer lingo that passes for hebrew on the east side attend the curious wanderer to every corner of mulberry street but the moment he turns the corner the scene changes abruptly before him lies spread out what might better be the marketplace in some town in southern italy than a street in new york all but the houses they are still the same old tenements of the unromantic type but for once they do not make the foreground in a slum picture from the american metropolis the interest centers not in them but in the crowd they shelter only when the street is not preferable and that with the italian is only when it rains or he is sick when the sun shines the entire population seeks the street carrying on its household work its bargaining its love making on street or sidewalk or idling there when it has nothing better to do with the reverse of the impulse that makes the polish jew coop himself up in his den with the thermometer at stewing heat along the curb women sit in rows young and old alike with the odd head covering pad or turban that is their badge of servitude hers to bear the burden as long as she lives haggling over baskets of frozen weeds some sort of salad probably stale tomatoes and oranges not above suspicion ash barrels serve them as counters and not infrequently does the arrival of the official cart on route for the dump cause a temporary suspension of trade until the barrels have been emptied and restored hucksters and peddler's carts make two rows of booths in the street itself and along the houses is still another a perpetual market doing a very lively trade in its own queer staples found nowhere on american ground save in the bend two old hags camping on the pavement are dispensing stale bread baked not in loaves but in the shape of big wreaths like exaggerated crawlers out of bags of dirty bed tick there is no use disguising the fact they look like and they probably are old mattresses mustered into service under the pressure of a rush of trade stale bread was the one article the health officers after a raid on the market once reported as quote not unwholesome close quote it was only disgusting here is a brawny butcher sleeves rolled up above the elbows and clay pipe and mouth skinning a kid that hangs from his hook they will tell you with a laugh at the elizabeth street police station that only a few days ago when a dead goat had been reported lying in pell street it was mysteriously missing by the time the offal cart came to take it away it turned out that an italian had carried it off in his sack to awake or feast of some sort in one of the back alleys on either side of the narrow entrance to bandit's roost one of the most notorious of these is a shop that is a fair sample of the sort of invention necessity is the mother of in the bend it is not enough that trucks and ash barrels have provided four distinct lines of shops that are not down on the insurance maps to accommodate the crowds here have the very hallways been made into shops three feet wide by four deep they have just room for one the shopkeeper who himself within does his business outside his wares displayed on a board hung across what was once the hall door back of the rear door of this unique shop a hole has been punched from the hall into the alley and the tenants go that way one of the shops is a tobacco bureau presided over by an unknown sink done in yellow and red there is not a shop a stand or an ash barrel doing duty as a counter that has not its patron saint the other is a fish stand full of slimy odd-looking creatures fish that never swam in american waters or if they did were never seen on an american fish stand and snails big awkward sausages anything but appetizing hang in the grocer's doorway knocking against the customer's head as if to remind him that they are there waiting to be bought what they are i never had the courage to ask down the street comes a file of women carrying enormous bundles of firewood on their heads loads of decaying vegetables from the market wagons and their aprons and each a baby at the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling down the women do all the carrying all the work one sees going on in the bin the men sit or stand in the streets on trucks or in the open doors of the saloons smoking black clay pipes talking and gesticulating as if forever on the point of coming to blows near a particularly boisterous group a really pretty girl with a string of amber beads twisted artlessly in the knot of her raven hair has been bargaining long and earnestly with an old granny who presides over a wheelbarrow load of second-hand stockings and faded cotton yarn industriously darning the biggest holes while she extols the virtues of her stock one of the rude swains with patched overalls tucked into his boots to whom the girl's eyes have strayed more than once steps up and gallantly offers to pick her out the handsomest pair whereas she laughs and pushes him away with the gesture which he interprets as an invitation to stay and he does evidently to the satisfaction of the bell dumb who forthwith raises her prices fifty percent without being detected by the girl red bandanas and yellow kerchiefs are everywhere so is the italian tongue infinitely sweeter than the harsh gutturals of the russian jew around the corner so are the restaurantes of innumerable pasquales half of the people in the bend are christened prosquali or get the name in some other way when the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer they guess at pasquale and send the name out on alarm in nine cases out of ten it fits so are the banks that hang out their shingle as tempting bait on every hand there are half a dozen in the single block steamship agencies employment offices and saving banks all in one so are the toddling youngsters bowlegged half of them and so are no end of mothers present in perspective some of them scarce yet in their teens those who are not in the street are hanging halfway out of the windows shouting at someone below all the bend must be if not all together at least half out of doors when the sun shines in the street where the city wheels the broom there is at least an effort at cleaning up there has to be or it would be swamped in filth over running from the courts and alleys where the rag pickers live it requires more than ordinary courage to explore these on a hot day the undertaker has to do it then the police always right here in this tenement on the east side of the street they found little antonia candia victim of fiendish cruelty quote covered close quote said the account found in the records of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children quote with sores and her hair matted with dried blood close quote abuse is the normal condition of the bend murder its everyday crop with the tenants not always the criminals in this block between bayard park mulberry and baxter streets the bend proper the late tenement house commission counted 155 deaths of children footnote the term child means in the mortality tables a person under five years of age children five years old and over figure in the tables as adult in the footnote in a specimen year 1882 their percentage of total mortality in the block was 68 68.28 while for the whole city the proportion was only 46.20 the infant mortality in any city or place as compared with the whole number of deaths is justly considered a good barometer of its general sanitary condition here in this tenement number 58 and a half next to banned its roost 14 persons died that year and 11 of them were children in number 61 11 and 8 of them not yet five years old according to records in the bureau of vital statistics only 39 people lived in number 59 and a half in the year 1888 nine of them little children there were five baby funerals in that house the same year out of the alley itself number 59 nine dead were carried in 1888 five in baby coffins here is the record of the year for the whole block as furnished by the registrar of vital statistics dr roger s tracy population population five years old and over baxter street 1918 mulberry street 2788 total 4706 under five years baxter street 315 mulberry street 629 total 944 total baxter street 2233 mulberry street 3417 total 5650 deaths five years old and over baxter street 26 mulberry street 44 total 70. under five years baxter street 46 mulberry street 86 total 132 total baxter street 72 mulberry street 130 total 202 death rate five years old and over baxter street 13.56 mulberry street 15.78 total 14.87 under five years baxter street 146 mulberry street 136.70 total 139.83 general baxter street 32.24 mulberry street 38.05 total 35.75 the general death rate for the whole city that year was 26.27 these figures speak for themselves when it is shown that in the model tenement across the way at numbers 48 and 50 where the same class of people live in greater swarms 161 according to the record but under good management and in decent quarters the hearse called that year only twice once for a baby the agent of the christian people who built that tenement will tell you that italians are good tenants while the owner of the alley will oppose every order to put his property in repair with the claim that they are the worst of a bad lot both are right from their different standpoints it is the standpoint that makes the difference and the tenant what if i were to tell you that this alley and more tenement properly in the bend all of it notorious for years as the vilest and worst to be found anywhere stood associated on the textbooks all through the long struggle to make its owners responsible which has at last resulted in a qualified victory for the law with the name of an honored family one of the oldest and best rich in possessions and in influence and high in the councils of the city's government it would be but the plain truth nor would it be the only instance by very many that stand recorded on the health department's books of a kind that has come near to making the name of landlord as odious in new york as it has become in ireland bottle alley is around the corner in baxter street but it is a fair specimen of its kind were ever found look into any of these houses everywhere the same piles of rags of melodorous bones and musty paper all of which the sanitary police flatter themselves they have banished to the dumps and the warehouses here is a quote flat close quote of quote parlor close quote and two pitch dark coops called bedrooms truly the bed is all there is room for the family tea kettle is on the stove doing duty for the time being as a wash boiler by night it will have returned to its proper use again a practical illustration of how poverty in the bend makes both ends meet one two three beds are there if the old boxes and heaps of foul straw can be called by that name a broken stove with crazy pipe from which the smoke leaks at every joint a table of rough boards propped up on boxes piles of rubbish in the corner the closeness and smell are appalling how many people sleep here the woman with the red bandana shakes her head sullenly but the bare-legged girl with a bright face counts on her fingers five six six are six grown people and five children only five she says with a smile swabbing the little one on her lap in its cruel bandage there is another in the cradle actually a cradle and how much the rent nine and a half and please sir he won't put the paper on he is the landlord the paper hangs in musty shreds on the wall well do i recollect the visit of a health inspector to one of these tenements on a july day when the thermometer outside was climbing high in the 90s but inside in that awful room with half a dozen persons washing cooking and sorting rags lay the dying baby alongside the stove where the doctor's thermometer ran up to 115 degrees perishing for the want of a breath of fresh air in this city of untold charities did not the manager of the fresh air fund write to the pastor of an italian church only last year too that quote no one asked for italian children close quote and hence he could not send any to the country half a dozen blocks up mulberry street there is a rag pickers settlement a sort of overflow from the bend that exists today in all its pristine nastiness something like 40 families are packed into five old two-story and attic houses that were built to hold five and out in the yards additional crowds are or were until very recently accommodated in sheds built of all sorts of old boards and used as drying racks for the italian tenants stock i found them empty when i visited the settlement while writing this the last two tenants had just left their fate was characteristics the quote old man close quote who lived in the corner coop with barely room to crouch beside the stove there would not have been room for him to sleep had not aged cooked his frame to fit his house had been taken to the crazy house and the woman who was his neighbor and had lived in her shed for years had simply disappeared the agent and the other tenants guessed doubtless correctly that she might be found on the quote island close quote but she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism and quote not much good close quote and no one took the trouble to inquire for her they had all they could do attending to their own business and raising the rent no wonder i found that for one front room and two quote bedrooms close quote in the shameful old wrecks of buildings the tenant was paying ten dollars a month for the back room and one bedroom nine dollars and for the attic rooms according to size from three dollars to 75 cents to five dollars and fifty cents there is a standing quarrel between the professional i mean now the official sanitarian and the unsalaried agitator for sanitary reform over the question of overcrowded tenements the one puts the number a little vaguely at four or five hundred while the other asserts that there are thirty-two thousand the whole number of houses classed as tenements at the census of two years ago taking no account of the better kind of flats it depends on the angle from which one sees it which is right at best the term overcrowding is a relative one and the scale of official measurement conveniently sliding under the pressure of the italian influx the standard of breathing space required for an adult by the health officers has been cut down from six to four hundred cubic feet the quote needs of the situation close quote is their plea and no more perfect argument could be advanced for the reformers position it is in the bend the sanitary policeman locates the bulk of his 400 and the sanitary reformer gives up the task in despair of its vast homeless crowds the census takes no account it is their instinct to shun the light and they cannot be corralled in one place long enough to be counted but the house is canned and the last count showed that in the bend district between broadway and the bowery and canal and chatham streets in a total of 4 367 quote apartments close quote only nine were for the moment vacant while in the old africa west of broadway that receives the overflow from mulberry street and is rapidly changing its character the notice quote standing room only close quote is up not a single vacant room was found there nearly a hundred and fifty quote lodgers close quote were driven out of two adjoining mulberry street tenements one of them aptly named the house of blazes during that census what squalor and degradation inhabit these dens the health officers know through the long summer days their carts patrol the mend scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes and sinks and cellars and hidden hovels where the burrows from midnight till far into the small hours of the morning the policeman's thundering wrap on closed doors is heard with his stern command upreport on his rounds gathering evidence of illegal overcrowding the doors are opened unwillingly enough but the order means business and the tenant knows it even if he understands no word of english upon such scenes as the one presented in the picture it was photographed by flashlight on just such a visit in a room not 13 feet either way slept 12 men and women two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove the rest of the floor a kerosene lamp burned dimly in the fearful atmosphere probably to guide other and later arrivals to their quote beds close quote for it was only just past midnight a baby's fretful whale came from an adjoining hall room where in the semi-darkness three recumbent figures could be made out the apartment was one of three in two adjoining buildings we had found within half an hour similarly crowded most of the men were lodgers who slept there for five since a spot another room on the top floor that had been examined a few nights before was comparatively empty there were only four persons in it two men an old woman and a young girl the landlord opened the door with alacrity and exhibited with a proud sweep of his hand the sacrifice he had made of his personal interests to satisfy the law our visit had been anticipated the policeman's back was probably no sooner turned then the room was reopened for business end of section 7 recording by phil chadovir baton rouge louisiana section 8 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by matthew reese how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 7 a raid on the stale beer dives midnight roll call was over in the elizabeth street police station but the reserves were held under orders a raid was on foot but whether on the chinese fan tan games or the opium joints of mott and pell streets or on dens of even worse character was a matter of guesswork in the men's room when the last patrolman had come in from his beat all doubt was dispelled by the brief order to the bend the stale beer dives were the object of the raid the policemen buckled their belts tighter and with expressive grunts of disgust took up their march toward mulberry street past the heathen temples of mott street there was some fun to be gotten out of a raid there they trooped into the bend sending here and there a belated scurrying in fright toward healthier quarters and halted at the mouth of one of the hidden alleys squads were told off and sent to make a simultaneous descent on all the known tramps burrows in the block led by the sergeant ours i went along as a kind of war correspondent groped its way in single file through the narrow rift between slimy walls to the tenements in the rear twice during our trip we stumbled over tramps both women asleep in the passage they were quietly passed to the rear receiving sundry prods and punches on the trip and headed for the station in the grip of a policeman as a sort of advanced guard of the coming army after what seemed half a mile of groping in the dark we emerged finally into the alley proper where light escaping through the cracks of closed shutters on both sides enabled us to make out the contour of three rickety frame tenements snatches of rybalt's songs and peels of coarse laughter reached us from now this now that of the unseen burrows school is in said the sergeant dryly as we stumbled down the worn steps of the next seller way a kick of his boot heel sent the door flying into the room a room perhaps a dozen feet square with walls and ceiling that might once have been clean assuredly the floor had not in the memory of man if indeed there was other floor than hard trodden mud but were now covered with a brown crust that touched with the end of a club came off in shuttering showers of crawling bugs revealing the blacker filth beneath grouped about a beer keg that was propped on the wreck of a broken chair a foul and ragged host of men and women on boxes benches and stools tomato cans filled at the keg were passed from hand to hand in the center of the group a sallow wrinkled hag evidently the ruler of the feast dealt out the hideous stuff a pile of copper coins rattled in her apron the very pennies received with such showers of blessings upon the giver that afternoon the faces of some of the women were familiar enough from the streets as those of beggars forever whining for a penny to keep a family from starving their wine and boisterous hilarity were alike hushed now insulin cowed submission they sat evidently knowing what to expect at the first glimpse of the uniform in the open door some in the group customers with a record probably had turned their heads away to avoid the searching glance of the officer while a few less used to such scenes stared defiantly a single stride took the sergeant into the middle of the room and with a swinging blow of his club he knocked the faucet out of the keg and the half-filled can from the boss hag's hand as the contents of both splashed upon the floor half a dozen of the group made a sudden dash and with shoulders humped above their heads to shield their skulls against the dreaded locust broke for the door they had not counted upon the policemen outside there was a brief struggle two or three heavy thumps and the runaways were brought back to where their comrades crouched in dogged silence 13 called the sergeant completing a survey take them out revolvers all but one good for six months on the island the whole lot the exception was a young man not much if any over twenty with a hard look of dissipation on his face he seemed less unconcerned than the rest but tried hard to make up for it by putting on the boldest air he could come down early commented the officer shoving him along with his stick there is need of it they don't last long at this that stuff is brewed to kill at long range at the head of the cellar steps we encountered a similar procession from farther back in the alley where still another was forming to take up its march to the station out in the street was heard the of the hosts already pursuing that well-trodden path as with a fresh compliment of men we entered the next stale beer alley there were four dives in one cellar here the filth and the stench were utterly unbearable even the sergeant turned his back and fled after scattering the crowd with his club and starting them toward the door the very dog in the alley preferred the cold flags for a berth to the stifling cellar we found it lying outside 75 tramps male and female were arrested in the four small rooms in one of them where the air seemed thick enough to cut with a knife we found a woman a mother with a newborn babe on a heap of dirty straw she was asleep and was left until an ambulance could be called to take her to the hospital returning to the station with this batch we found every window in the building thrown open to the cold october wind and the men from the sergeant down smoking the strongest cigars that could be obtained by way of disinfecting the place 275 tramps had been jammed into the cells to be arraigned next morning in the police court on the charge of vagrancy with a certain prospect of six months on the island of the sentence at least they were sure as to the length of the men's stay the experienced official at the desk was skeptical it being then within a month of an important election if tramps have nothing else to call their own they have votes and votes that are for sale cheap for cash about election time this gives them a pull at least by proxy the sergeant observed as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he had more than once seen the same sent to blackwell's island twice in 24 hours for six months at a time as a thief never owns to his calling however devoid of moral scruples preferring to style himself a speculator so this real home product of the slums the stale beer dive is known about the bend by the more dignified name of the two cent restaurant usually as in this instance it is in some cellar giving on a back alley doctored unlicensed beer is its chief wear sometimes a cup of coffee in a stale roll may be had for two cents the men pay the score to the women unutterable horror of the suggestion the place is free the beer is collected from the kegs put on the sidewalk by the saloon keeper to await the brewer's cart and is touched up with drugs to put a froth on it the privilege to sit all night on a chair or sleep on a table or in a barrel goes with each round of drinks generally an italian sometimes a negro occasionally a woman runs the dive their customers alike homeless and hopeless in their utter wretchedness are the professional tramps and these only the meanest thief is infinitely above the stale beer level once upon that plane there is no escape to sink below it is impossible no one ever rose from it one night spent in a stale beer dive is like the traditional putting on of the uniform of the cast the discarded rags of an old that style once crossed the lane has no longer return and contrary to the proverb it is usually not long either with the gravitation of the italian landlord toward the old stronghold of the african on the west side a share of the stale beer traffic has left the bend but its headquarters will always remain there the real home of trampdom just as 14th street is its limit no real crosses that frontier after nightfall and in the daytime only to beg repulsive as the business is its profits to the italian dive keeper are considerable in fact barring a slight outlay in the ingredients that serve to give life to the beer dregs it is all profit the banker who curses the italian colony does not despise taking a hand in it and such a thing as a stale beer trust on a mulberry street scale may yet be among the possibilities one of these bankers who was once known to the police as the keeper of one notorious stale beer dive and the active backer of others is today an extensive manufacturer of macaroni the owner of several big tenements and other real estate and the capital it is said has all come out of his old business very likely it is true on hot summer nights it is no rare experience when exploring the worst of the tenements in the bend to find the hallways occupied by rows of sitters tramps whom laziness or hard luck has prevented from earning enough by their day's labor to pay the admission fee to a stale beer dive and who have their reasons for declining the hospitality of the police station lodging rooms huddled together in loathsome files they squat there overnight or until an inquisitive policeman breaks up the congregation with this club which in mulberry street has always free swing at that season the woman predominates the men some of them at least take to the railroad track and to camping out when the nights grow warm returning in the fall to prey on the city and to recruit their ranks from the lazy the shiftless and the unfortunate like a foul lodestone the bend attracts and brings them back no matter how far they have wandered for next to idleness the loves rum next to rum stale beer its equivalent of the gutter and the first and last go best together as sitters they occasionally find a job in the saloons about chatham and pearl streets on cold winter nights when the hallway is not practicable that enables them to pick up a charity drink now and then and a bite of an infrequent sandwich the barkeeper permits them to sit about the stove and by shivering invite the sympathy of transient customers the dodge works well especially about christmas and election time and the sitters are able to keep comfortably filled up to the advantage of their host but to look thoroughly miserable they must keep awake a placidly dozing at the fire would not be an object of sympathy to make sure that they do keep awake the wily bartender makes them sit constantly swinging one foot like the pendulum of a clock when it stops the slothful sitter is roused with a kick and fired out it is said by those who profess to know that habit has come to the rescue of oversleepy tramps and that the old rounders can swing hand or foot in their sleep without betraying themselves in some saloon sitters are let in at these seasons in fresh batches every hour on one of my visits to the bend i came across a particularly ragged and disreputable who sat smoking his pipe on the rung of a ladder with such evident philosophic contentment in the busy labor of a score of rag pickers all about him that i made him sit for a picture offering him 10 cents for the job he accepted the offer with hardly a nod and sat patiently watching me from his perch until i got ready for work then he took the pipe out of his mouth and put it in his pocket calmly declaring that it was not included in the contract and that it was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture the pipe by the way was of clay and of the two for ascent kind but i had to give in the man scarce 10 seconds employed at honest labor even at sitting down at which he was an undoubted expert had gone on strike he knew his rights and the value of work and was not to be cheated out of either whence these tramps and why the tramping our questions often are asked than answered ill-applied charity and idleness answer the first query they are the wence and to a large extent the y also once started on the career of a the man keeps to it because it is the laziest tramps and tufts profess the same doctrine that the world owes them a living but from standpoints that tend in different directions the tough does not become a save in rare instances when old and broken down even then usually he is otherwise disposed of the devil has various ways of taking care of his own nor is the tramps army recruited from any certain class all occupations and most grades of society yield to it their contingent of idleness occasionally from one cause or another a recruit of a better stamp is forced into the ranks but the first acceptance of alms puts a brand on the able-bodied man which his moral nature rarely holds out to a face he seldom recovers his lost cast the evolution is gradual keeping step with the increasing shabbiness of his clothes and corresponding loss of self-respect until he reaches the bottom in the bend of the tough the doctrine that the world owes him a living makes a thief of the a coward numbers only make him bold unless he has to do with defenseless women in the city the policemen keep him straight enough the women rob an occasional clothesline when no one else is looking or steal the pail and scrubbing brush with which they are set to clean up in the station house lodging rooms after their night's sleep at the police station the roads of the and the tuff again converge in midwinter on the coldest nights the sanitary police corral the tramps here and in their lodging houses and vaccinate them despite their struggles and many oaths that they have recently been scraped the station house is the sieve that sifts out the chaff from the wheat if there be any wheat there a man goes from his first night's sleep on the hard slab of a police station lodging room to a deckhand's berth on an outgoing steamer to the recruiting office to any work that is honest or he goes to the devil or the dives same thing says my friend the sergeant who knows end of section 8 recording by matthew reese davenport iowa section 9 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by kevin kennelly how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 8 the cheap lodging houses when it comes to the question of numbers with this tramps army another factor of serious portent has to be taken into account the cheap lodging houses and the caravansaries that lined chatham street in the bowery harboring nightly a population as large as that of many a thriving town a homemade article of and thief is turned out that is attracting the increasing attention of the police and offers a field for the missionaries labors besides which most others seem of slight account within a year they have been stamped as nurseries of crime by the chief of the secret police footnote inspector burns on lodging houses in the north american review september 1889 end footnote the sort of crime that feeds especially on idleness and lies ready to the hand of fatal opportunity in the same strain one of the justices on the police court bench sums up his long experience as a committed magistrate quote the 10 cent lodging houses more than counter balance the good done by the free reading rooms lectures and all other agencies of reform such lodging houses have caused more destitution more beggary in crime than any other agency i know of end quote a very slight acquaintance with the subject is sufficient to convince the observer that neither authority overstates the fact the two officials had reference however to two different grades of lodging houses the cost of a night's lodging makes the difference there is a wider gap between the quote hotel end quote they are all hotels that charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a dime then between the bridal suite and the everyday hall bedroom of the ordinary hostelry the metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth it attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere that something is bound to turn up among so many nearly all our young men unsettled in life many most of them perhaps fresh from good homes beyond a doubt with honest hopes of getting a start in the city and making a way for themselves few of them have much money to waste while looking around and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object fewer still know anything about the city and its pitfalls they have come in search of crowds of quote life end quote and they gravitate naturally to the bowery the great democratic highway of the city where the 25 cent lodging houses take them in in the alleged reading rooms of these great barracks that often have accommodations such as they are for two three or even 400 guests they encounter three distinct classes of associates the great mass adventurers like themselves waiting there for something to turn up a much smaller class of respectable clerks or mechanics who too poor or too lonely to have a home of their own lived this way from year to year and lastly the thief in search of recruits for his trade the sights of the young stranger seize and the company he keeps in the bowery are not of a kind to strengthen any moral principle he may have brought away from home and by the time his money is gone with no work yet in sight and he goes down a step a long step to the 15 cent lodging house he is ready for the tempter whom he finds waiting for him there reinforced by the contingent of ex-convicts returning from the prisons after having served out their sentences for robbery or theft then it is that the something he has been waiting for turns up the police returns have the record of it quote in nine cases out of ten says inspector burns he turns out a thief or a burglar if indeed he does not sooner or later become a murderer end quote as a matter of fact some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been the result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses and so frequent and bold have become the depredations of the lodging house thieves that the authorities have been compelled to make a public demand for more effective laws that shall make them subject at all times to police regulation inspector burns observes that in the last two or three years at least 400 young men have been arrested for petty crimes that originated in the lodging houses and that in many cases it was their first step in crime he adds his testimony to the notorious fact that three-fourths of the young men called on to plead to generally petty offenses in the courts are under 20 years of age poorly clad and without means the bearing of the remark is obvious one of the to the police well-known thieves who lived went out of jail at the windsor house a well-known lodging house in the bowery went to johnstown after the flood and was shot and killed there while robbing the dead an idea of just how this particular scheme of corruption works with an extra touch of infamy thrown in may be gathered from the story of david smith the quote new york fagin end quote who was convicted and sent to prison last year through the instrumentality of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children here is the account from the society's last report quote the boy edward mulhern 14 years old had run away from his home in jersey city thinking he might find work and friends in new york he may have been a trifle wild he met smith on the bowery and recognized him as an acquaintance when smith offered him a supper in bed he was only too glad to accept smith led the boy to a vile lodging house on the bowery where he introduced him to his pals and swore he would make a man of him before he was a week older next day he took the unsuspecting edward all over the bowery and grand street showed him the sights and drew his attention to the careless way the ladies carried their bags and purses and the easy thing it was to get them he induced edward to try his hand edward tried and won he was richer by three dollars it did seem easy of course it is said his companion from that time smith took the boy on a number of thieving raids but he never seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out of range of the fagin's watchful eye when he went out alone he generally returned empty-handed this did not suit smith it was then he conceived the idea of turning this little inferior thief into a superior beggar he took the boy into his room and burned his arms with a hot iron the boy screamed and entreated in vain the merciless wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh and afterwards applied acid to the raw wound thus prepared with his arm inflamed swollen and painful edward was sent out every day by this fiend who never let him out of his sight and threatened to burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough he was instructed to tell people the wound had been caused by acid falling upon his arm at the works edward was now too much under the man's influence to resist or disobey him he begged hard and handed smith the pennies faithfully he received in return banned food and worse treatment end quote the reckoning came when the wretch encountered the boy's father in search of his child in the bowery and fell under suspicion of knowing more than he pretended of the lad's whereabouts he was found in his den with a half dozen of his chums reveling on the proceeds of the boys begging for the day the 25 cent lodging house keeps up the pretense of a bedroom though the head high partition in closing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of pretenses the 15 cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul at the 10 cent level the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears there's no longer need of it the limit is reached and there is nothing to lock up save on general principles the lodger usually the 10 and 7 cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination some sort of an apology for a bed with mattress and blanket represents the aristocratic purchase of the who by a lucky stroke of beggary has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these quote hotels a strip of canvas strung between rough timbers without covering of any kind does for the couch of the seven cent lodger who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale beer dive it is not the most secure perch in the world uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the boss and his club on cold winter nights when every bunk had its tenant i have stood in such lodging room more than once and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine and the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight imagine myself on shipboard and experienced the very real nausea of seasickness the one thing that did not favor the deception was the air its character could not be mistaken the proprietor of one of these seven cent houses was known to me as a man of reputed wealth and respectability he quote ran three such establishments and made it is 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 uptown standing in the slums it read quote no swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock end quote 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 or 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 the police bed is quote made up end quote 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 whitewash thrown in to sweeten things i know of only one easier way but so far as i'm informed it has never been introduced in this country it used to be practiced if reports spoke truly in certain old country towns the bed was represented by clotheslines stretch across the room upon which the sleepers hung by the armpits 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 million nine hundred and seventy four thousand and twenty five separate lodgings were furnished last year by these dormitories between two and three hundred in number and adding the hundred and forty seven thousand six hundred and thirty four lodgings furnished by the station houses the total number of homeless army was five million one hundred and twenty one thousand six hundred and fifty nine an average of over fourteen thousand homeless men footnote deduct 69 111 women lodgers in the police stations and footnote for every night in the year the health officers professional optimists always in matters that trench upon their official jurisdiction insists 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 years of over 300 000 and that this has been the ratio of growth of the business during the last three years the period of which inspector burns 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 4th 6th and 10th wards and they harbor nearly three-fourths of their crowds the calculation that more than 9 000 homeless young men lodged nightly along chatham street in 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 27 percent 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 quote barrel end quote the victory in political contests in the three words 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 nonetheless because both parties smirch their hands with it and for that reason next to hopeless honors are easy where the two quote machines end quote entrenched 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 burns speaks by the card when he observes that quote 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 end quote 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 and 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 changed form to the success of quote the cause end quote it must be admitted that the black 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 200 the number kept growing until one morning at the end of two weeks found by actual count 2014 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 two greater rush of custom wrecking a promising business and the great problem remained unsolved end of section 9 recording by kevin kenley in el disembo sonora mexico section 10 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by kevin kennelly how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 9 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 worshippers own gain and lusts whatever may be said about the being a thousand years behind the age on his own shores here he is distinctly abreast of it in his successful scheming to quote 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 stated in advance as my opinion based on the steady observation of years that all attempts to make an effective christian of john 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 gaily 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 with the streamers of red flannel tact on that announces in chinese characters that dr chae young chong sells chinese herb medicines or that one long and company queer contradiction take in washing or deal out tea and groceries there are some gym cracks 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 background with its kabbalistic trademark 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 but lets in his dead god on payment of the statutory duty on bric-a-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 general dullness 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 unmeeting 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 a part of the 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 towards a stranger whom he 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 fachuvant that breathes annoyance and distrust trust not him who trusts no one is a safer rule in chinatown as out of it we're not matt street over odd 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 footfall of leather shoes on the steps the hum of talks ceases and the group of celestials crouching over their game of fantan stop playing and watch the comer with ugly looks fantan is their ruling passion the average 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 layout where they can be enjoyed safe from police interference the smokes opium as caucasians smoke tobacco and apparently with little worse effect upon himself but woe unto the white victim upon which his palest drug gets its grip the blouse peddlers who with arms buried half to the elbow in their trousers pockets lounge behind their stock of watermelon seed and sugarcane 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 its holiday style to carry his hands in his pockets and his denizens follow the fashion whether in blue blouse in gray or in brown with shining and braided pigtail dangling below the knees or with hair crop short above a coat collar of melican cut all kinds of men are met but no women not 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 whys of chinatown are a different stock that comes closer to 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 new 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 insatiable 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 results i have in mind a house in pell street that has been rated no end of times by the police and its population emptied upon blackwell's island or into the reformatories it is today honeycombed with scores of conventional households of the chinese quarter the men worshipers of joss the women all white girls hardly yet grown to womanhood worshiping 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 font 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 quote hitting the pipe end quote together on a tour through their dens one night with the police captain the precinct the girls knew him called him by name offered him a pipe and chatted with them about the incidents of their acquaintance how many times he had quote sent them up end quote and their chances of lasting much longer there was no shade of regret in their voices nothing but the utter indifference and surrender one thing about them was conspicuous their scrupulous neatness it is distinguishing mark of chinatown outwardly and physically is not all together by chance that 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 matter fighting 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 mont 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 a 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 insists that she is 16 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 passed through my hands report the arrest of a for a quote in vaguely little girls into his laundry end quote 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 number 39499 in this year's report of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children will discover one of the much traveled roads to chinatown the girl whose story it tells was 13 and one of six children abandoned by a dissipated father she had been discharged from an eighth avenue store where she had been employed as a cash girl 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 a 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 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 suppose your wifey bad you know licky 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 shown in his eye and pity and contempt struggled in his voice then i guess she licky 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 rose 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 has once happened some sacrilegious sneaks in and gets ahead of them the practical way in which these people combine worship with business is certainly admirable i was told that the scroll 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 the reward in this world no matter what happened to them in the next there was another inscription overhead that needed no interpreter and familiar english letters copied bodily from the trade dollar was a 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 melikan jaws the almighty dollar chinatown has enlisted the telegraph for the dissemination of public intelligence but has got hold of the contrivance by the wrong end as the wires serve us in newspaper making so the makes use of the poll 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 centers the real life of the colony it's gambling news every day yellow and red notices are posted upon it by unseen hands announcing that in such and such a seller a fantan 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 counterplotting 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 idol 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 authority except under compulsion if now and then some horrible crime in the chinese colony a murder of such hideous ferocity is one i have very vivid recollection of where the murderer stabbed his victim both of course in the back with a meat knife plunging it into the hilt no less than 17 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 berserk wholly to be ascribed to the familiar fact that to caucasianize quote all chinamen look alike and quote but rather to their acting alike in a body to defeat discovery at any cost with all the police give the chinese the name of being the quietest people down there end quote meaning in the notoriously turbulent sixth ward and they are the one thing they desire above all else is to be let alone a very natural wish perhaps considering all the circumstances if it were 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 and 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 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 i would have the door opened wider for his wife make it a condition of his coming or stain 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 questions 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 end of section 10 recording by kevin kenley disembo sonora mexico section 11 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil shenover how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 10 jewtown the tenements grow taller and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly as we cross the bowery end 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 taurus who lay two there after a cruise to stock up their togs or maybe after these schooners of beer plentifully bespoke in that latitude bayard street with its synagogues and its crowds gave us a foretaste of it no need in asking here where we are the jargon of the street the signs of the sidewalk the manner of dress of the people their unmistakable physiognomy betray the race at every step men with queer skull caps venerable beard and the outlandish long skirted captain of the russian jew elbow the ugliest and the handsomest women in the land the contrast is startling the old women are haggs the young oris wives and mothers at 16 at 30 they are old so thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out the gentiles in the tenth war that when the great jewish holidays come round 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 hooky they stay honestly home to celebrate there is no mistaking it we are in jew town it is said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together on a square mile as here the average five-story tournament adds a story or two to its stature in ludlow street and an extra building on the rear lot and yet the sign toulette 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 36 families but the term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues in this house where a case of smallpox was reported there were 58 babies and 38 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 a father and mother 12 children and six borders the border 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 330 000 per square mile the densest crowding of old london i pointed out before never got beyond 175 000 even the alley is crowded out through dark hallways and filthy cellars crowded as is every foot of the street with dirty children these 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 eye of a 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 bred it is cheap and filling and bakeries abound wherever they are in the tenements the will skulk in if he can there are such 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 pavements 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 were so intensely bald and materialistic in 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 worst paid class anywhere i once put the question to one of their own people who being a pawn broker 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 he said quote immigration brings us a lot in five years it has averaged 25 000 a year of which more than 70 percent 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 fair and the worst to be got bound to save whatever their earnings until worn out they could work no longer then their hordes were soon exhausted that is their story close quote and i knew that what intellectual status the managers of eastern dispensary which is in the very heart of their district told the whole story when they said quote the diseases these people suffer from are not due to intemperance or immorality but to ignorance want a suitable food and the foul air in which they live and work close quote 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 traveled 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 kwame 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 to 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 smallpox 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 smallpox 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 paddy 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 chewtown does not support its dives its troubles with the police are the characteristic crop of its intense business rivalries oppression persecution have not shown the jew of his native combativeness one wit he is 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 been robbed of them for 1800 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 much of a charge to make the day closes on a wild conflict of rival interests another dawns with the prisoner in court but no complainant overnight the case has been settled on a business basis and the police dismissed 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 cigar making or something else the young people in jewtown are inaudibly 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 gather 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 amongst themselves into threatening me until it looked as if they meant to take me out to ilster 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 consists of a scantily furnished room in a rear tenant with a few wooden stools or benches for the congregation or intel mutic schools that absorb a share of the growing youth the schoolmaster is not rarely a man of some attainments who has been stranded there his native instincts from 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 jacob 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 quote he took hold of the soap as if it were some animal close quote said one of these teachers to me after such an experiment upon a new pupil quote and wiped three fingers across his face he called that washing close quote in the allen street public school the experienced principal has embodied among the elementary lessons to keep constantly before the children the duty that clearly lies next to their hands a characteristic exercise the question is asked daily from the teacher's desk what must i do to be healthy and the whole school responds i must keep my skin clean wear clean clothes breathe pure air and live in the sunlight it seems little less than biting sarcasm to hear them say it for two 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 shutter 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 their 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 barking 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 treadmill 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 it probably in derision for pork is the one where 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 bandanas and ten 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 opticians who has opened shop on a hester street doorstep for 35 cents frozen-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 could not afford a whole it took more than ten years of persistent effort on the part of the sanitary authorities to drive the trade and live foul from the streets to the follow market on governor slip where the killing is now done according to jewish right 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 harsh radish on a machine she has chained and padlocked to a tree on the sidewalk lest someone steal it beside her a butcher stand with cuts at prices the avenue never dreamed of old coats are hawked for 50 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 peddlers 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 30 cents a dollar and 40 was the price asked the peddler shrugs his shoulders then turns up his hands with a half pitying holy indignant air what does the baker take him for such pants the baker has turned to go with a jump like a panthers the man with the pants has him by the sleeve will he give 80 cents 60 50. so help him they are dirt cheap at that lose will he on the trade lose all the profit of his days peddling the baker goes on unmoved 40 then what not 40 take them then for 30 and wreck the life of a poor man and the baker takes them and goes well knowing that at least 20 cents of the 30 200 percent were clear profit if indeed the pants cost the peddler anything the suspender peddler is the mystery of the pig market omnipresent and unfathomable he has 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 ju town 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 brick or 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 where 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 babble 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 backyards and byways a slamming and locking of doors hidden under the improvised shelves and counters the health officer's 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 rose upon rows between stony streets stretches to the north to the south and to the west as far as the eye reaches into section 11 recording by phil chinovere baton rouge louisiana section 12 of how the other half lives this is a libravox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil schineber how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 12 the sweaters of jewtown anything like an exhaustive discussion of the economical problem presented by the tenth ward is beset by difficulties that increase in precise proportion to the efforts put forth to remove them footnote i refer to the 10th ward always as typical the district embraced in the discussion really includes the 13th ward and in a growing sense large portions of the seventh and contiguous wards as well end footnote i have two 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 pilots 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 hordes and the unhesitating mendacity of these people where they conceived 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 footnote an invention that cuts many garments at once where the scissors would cut only a few in footnote 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 it to 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 barrett 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 subcontractor 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 a workman he can always get enough every ship load from german ports bring 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 5 or 6 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 workmen 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 keeps the men on starvation wages of their constitutional greed that will not permit the sacrifice of temporary advantage however slight for a 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 trade unions and by experiments in cooperation 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 hoards 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 and 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 45 minutes at least must be allowed for dinner and children under 16 must not be employed unless they can read and write english none at all under 14. 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 stands 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 and 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 for a spent the huckster's wagons are absent or stand idle at the curb the saloons admit the thirsty crowds through the side door labeled family entrance a 10 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 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 15 and a boy who says unasked that he is 15 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 side long glances but had 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 footnote i was always accompanied on these tours of inquiry by one of their own people who knew of and sympathized with my mission without that precaution my errand would have been fruitless even with him it was often nearly so in footnote set her fears whatever they are at rest and she grows almost talkative the learners work for weeks 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 120 dozen knee pants a week for which the manufacturer pays 70 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 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 be grimed rooms one somewhat larger than ordinary they pay twenty dollars a month she does not complain though quote times are not what they were and it costs a good deal to live close quote eight dollars a week for the family of six and two borders 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 quote eight cents a quarter of a pound close quote 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 big red hot stoves to keep the pressing irons ready for use is a family of a man wife three children and a border 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 65 cents a week he is really only a larger getting his meals outside the rent is two dollars and 25 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 worked 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 a finisher at a dollar and a half she is 12 she says and can neither read nor write will probably never learn how should she the family clears from 10 to 11 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 12 hours a day turning out three dozen knee pants for which he receives 42 cents a dozen the finisher who works with him gets 10 and the ironer 8 cents a dozen buttonholes are extra at 8 to 10 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 75 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 border 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 aware that they can make as much as twelve dollars a week when they are employed by taking their work home and sowing 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 fifteen dollars fifteen cents to nineteen dollars twenty cents a week by striving from six a.m to eleven pm that is to say from 7.58 cents to 9.60 each footnote the strike of the cloak makers last summer that ended in victory raised their wages considerably at least for the time being in footnote the sweater on this work probably made as much as 50 percent at least on their labor not far away as a factory in a rear yard where the factory inspector reports teams of tailors making men's coats at an average of 27 cents a coat all complete except buttons and buttonholes 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 thirteen dollars a month here is a reminder of the bend a hallway turned into a shoemaker 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 floorboard 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 cold 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 to the people we have reached broome street the hum of industry in this six store 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 borders his wife and 18 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 unified efforts as high as 14 and 15 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 10 cents a small pail meet at 12 cents a pound one and a half pounds of butter a week at 36 cents and a quarter of a pound of tea in the same space of time are items of their housekeeping 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 poisoned the babes of these tenements with the stuff that is half water or swill their defense 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 headed a healthier tinge up on the roof three men are making boys jackets at 20 cents apiece of which the sower takes eight the hour and a three the finisher five cents and the buttonhole maker two and a quarter leaving a cent and three quarters to pay for the drumming up the fetching and breaking 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 workbench consists of a couple of rolls and a cent apiece and a draft 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 a soup meat stew bread pie pickles and a schooner of beer for 13 cents the other charged 15 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 13 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 25 cents a day including the price of his bed that ranges all the way from 30 to 40 and 50 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 allied it has thousands upon thousands of lodgers who helped to pay its extortionate rents at night there is scarce a room in all the district that has done one or more of them some above half a score sleeping on cuts 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 hot dots 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 probation taking the cases just as they came to hand on the safer middle ground of average earnings yet even the direst apparent poverty in chew town unless dependent on absolute lack of work would where the truth be 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 15 000 suits at 1.95 cents that averaged in cost one dollar 12 and a half cents with the material at 15 cents a yard he said children's suits of assorted sizes can be sold at wholesale for 75 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 affect its purpose without properizing 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 deforming and their strong commercial instinct hampers the experiment to herd them in model tenements though it relieved 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 busyed 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 in tonight as we take up our homework 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 tumbled in the street and on the sidewalk are dozed 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 foot end of section 12 section 13 of how the other half lives this is a libra box recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil chenever how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 12 the bohemians tenement house cigar making evil as is the part 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 role 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 30 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 import 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 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 5th street and thereabouts then for a mile and a half scarce a bohemian is to be found until 38th street is reached 54th and 73rd streets in their turn are the centers 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 the city are cigar makers 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 the amount tobacco by the week and devotes the rest of his energies to the powering 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 cigar maker 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 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 cigar making 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 canvas 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 cigar makers themselves to the tenements which they consider 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 10th 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 indoor 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 cigar makers are particularly prone to that disease on the contrary the bohemian percentage of deaths from consumption appears to be quite low this however is a line of scientific inquiry which i leave to others to pursue along with the more involved problem whether the falling off and the number of children sometimes quite noticeable in the bohemian settlements is as has been suggested dependent upon the character of the parrot's work the sore grievances i found were the miserable wages and the enormous rents extracted for the minimum of accommodation and surely these stand for enough of suffering take a row of houses in east 10th street as an instance they contained 35 families of cigar makers 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 cents a month in the front room a 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 cents 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 five dollars and five dollars fifty cents 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 were in the house the ultimatum of the boss is received he will give 3.75 cents 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 15 years but shakes his head when asked if he can speak english he answers in a few broken syllables when he dressed in german with 11.75 rent to pay for like accommodation he has the advantage of his oldest bar's work beside 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 cents this bohemian has a large family there are four children too small to work to be cared for a comparison of the domestic bills affair in 10th and in ludlow streets results in the discovery that this bohemian's butcher bill for the week with meat at 12 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 suite of three rooms two dark three flights up the ceiling is partly down in one of the rooms quote it is three months since we asked the landlord to fix it close quote 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 son 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 15 to 16 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 america's 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 working grubbing to earn bread wife and he by constant labor make 3 000 cigars a week earning 11.25 cents when there is no lack of material when in winter they receive from the manufacturer tobacco for only two thousand the rent of ten dollars for two rooms practically one with a dark alcove has nevertheless to be paid in full and six months to be fed he was a blacksmith in the old country but cannot work at his trade here because he does not understand english 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 six 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 i 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 71st and 73rd streets advertise the business that is carried on within they are filled to the brim with stems of stripped tobacco leaves the ranked 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 further downtown every room here has its workbench 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 twelve dollars fifty cents if to be dark one holy and the other getting some light from the front room the mother of the three barefooted 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 fifteen dollars fifty cents a week he has just come out successfully of a strike that brought the pay of these tenements up to four dollars fifty cents 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 quote from they can see till bedtime close quote bedtime proves to be 11 o'clock 17 hours a day seven days in the week at 13 cents an hour for the two six cents and half for each good average earnings for a tenant house cigar maker in summer in winter it is at least one-fourth less in spite of it all the rooms are cleanly kept after the bedroom for this 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're used to it in a house around the corner that is not a factory tenement lives now the cigar maker 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 standpoint he too is one with a for a bohemian large family six children sit at his table by trade a shoemaker for 13 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 dollars a week by lengthening the day at both ends now that he can work no more 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 is 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 72nd street supplies their meals which the wife and mother fetches in a basket her husband being too weak breakfast of coffee and heart attack are black bread at 20 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 30 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 in her knee his eyes glisten hungrily at the thought as he nods stoutly in support of his mother only she adds the weak 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 hope 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 again the government wherever he goes among such people ground by poverty until their songs have died and 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 inclined 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 bohemian soil of bad faith and savage persecutions in the name of the christian's god that disgrace its history the bohemian clergyman who spoke for his people at the christian conference held in checkering hall two years ago took even stronger ground quote they are roman catholics by birth infidels by necessity and protestants by history and inclination close quote 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 said one of them who knew thoroughly what he was speaking of quote there is not one of them all who if he were to sell all he was worth tomorrow would have the money enough to buy a house and lot in the country end section 13 recording by phil shinover section 14 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil shinover how the other half lives by jacob reese 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 pretense a frankness of despotism that is nothing if not brutal the czar of all the rushes 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 u-case 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 trafficks 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 wheels 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 holy effaced while the name of the negro alone among the world's races is spelled with a small in natural selection will have more or less to do beyond the 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 defenseless 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 chattel to be sold or bartered at the will of his master this century if signs fail not we'll 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 10th 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 prescription of color that 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 a 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 a long sure that 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 has 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 7th avenue as far north as 32nd 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 today 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 tenet 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 99th street flat is a very different individual from the 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 classified in the past in the 10th scale nevertheless he has always had to pay higher rents than even those for the poorest and most stinted rooms the exceptions i have come across in which the rents though high have seemed more nearly on the level with what was asked for the same number and size of rooms in the average tenement were in the case of tumbledown rookeries in which no one else would live and were always coupled with a 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 the 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 a method in the maxim as shown by an inquiry made last year by the real estate record it 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 quote we would rather have negro tenants in our poorest class of tenements than the lower grades of foreign white people we people find the farmer cleaner than the latter and they do not destroy the property so much we also get higher prices we have a tenement on 19th street where we get 10 for two rooms which we could not get more than seven dollars and fifty cents for from white tenants previously we have a four-story tenant on our books on 33rd street between sixth and seventh avenues with four rooms per floor a parlor two bedrooms and a kitchen we get twenty dollars for the first floor twenty four for the second twenty three dollars for the third and twenty dollars for the fourth in all eighty seven dollars or one thousand forty four dollars per annum the size of the building is only twenty one plus fifty five close quote another firm declared that in a specified instance they had saved fifteen to twenty percent on the gross rentals since they changed from white to colored tenants since another gave the following case of a front and rear tenant 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 per month front first floor store etcetera twenty one dollars second floor thirteen dollars third floor thirteen dollars fourth floor and rear twenty one dollars rear second floor twelve dollars third floor 12 dollars fourth floor c front rear house first floor eight dollars second floor ten dollars third floor nine dollars fourth floor eight dollars total 127 dollars rents under colored tenants per month front first floor store etc twenty one dollars second floor fourteen dollars third floor fourteen dollars fourth floor fourteen dollars rear second floor twelve dollars third floor thirteen dollars fourth floor thirteen dollars rear house first floor ten dollars second floor twelve dollars third floor eleven dollars fourth floor ten dollars total 144 dollars an increased rental of 17 per month or 204 dollars a year and an advance of nearly 13 and one half percent on the gross rental in favor of the color tenet 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 in 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 hajira from the low downtown tenements of a movement towards 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 16th street as the elementor 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 agents went round 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 all anne'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 and so much 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 say that there was a change of program then and there and that anne 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 infections 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 he lives in an eighth ward barrack or in a tenement with a brownstone 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 ranking gratitude from his point of view to look for when the sun shines unclouded in a clear sky his home's surroundings except when he is utterly depraved reflect his bliss and temper the poorest negro housekeeper's room in new york is bright with gaily colored prints of his beloved abe lincoln general grant president garfield mrs cleveland and other national celebrities and cherry with flowers and singing birds in the art of putting the best foot foremost 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 when the wolf howls at the door he makes a bold and gorgeous front the amount of style displayed on fine sundays on 6th and 7th avenues bi-colored holidaymakers would turn a pessimist block 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 a white tie of a waiter in a first class summer hotel with a chance of taking his ease in six months of winter or to him the next best thing to mingling with the white quality he serves on equal terms his festive gatherings preeminently his cake walks at which a sugared and frosted cake is the proud prize of the couple with the most aristocratic step in 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 imminently good points he is loyal to the backbone proud of being an american and of his newfound citizenship he is at least as easily molded 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 the 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 whatever 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 and 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 brokers back office where the slips are printed and the winnings are portioned daily with due regard to the backers interests it is a question whether africa has been improved by the advent of the italian with the 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 standpoint it has always been the worst of the desperately bad then 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 seller 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 bootlegs 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 honest trade as the hides his knife in his sleeve at the italian his stiletto in his bosom so the negro goes to the ball with a razor in his bootleg 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 25 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 end of section 14 section 15 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by leanne howlett how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 14 the common herd part one there is another line not always so readily drawn in the tenements yet the real boundary line of the other half is the one that defines the flat the law does not draw it at all accounting all flats tenement 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 clue brass and brownstone 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 jailer in place of a janitor to guard it not that the janitor and the doorbell 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 doorbell in our age is as extinct as the dodo east of 2nd avenue and west of 9th 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 slaughterhouses and the docks that attract the roughest crowds and support the vilest saloons and variably form slum centers the city is full of such above the line of 14th 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 counter poise at the other end of 39th street on the east river the home of the infamous rag gang cherry street is not tougher than battle row in east 63rd street or the village at 29th 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 as 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 and a swine snout in the worst of the infamous barracks it is the experience of all who have intelligently observed this site 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 and 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 and 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 lived 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 always have 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 30 or 40 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 tufts 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 stoney street inside of rows of unpainted board fences bewildering maze of closed posts and lines under foot 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 to be every gentle thought and aspiration above the mere wants of the body and those whose moral natures such home surroundings are to nourish in self-defense 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 aesthetic 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 course 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 celts fall most readily victim to tenement influences since shantytown and its original free soilers have become things of the past if he be thrifty and shrewd his progress thence forward is along the plain of the tenement on which he soon assumes to manage without improving things the german has an advantage over his celtic neighbor and 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 backyard 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 or blood of 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 park system as a means of relieving the congested population of tenement districts please take note with the first hot nights in june police dispatches that record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and windowsills while asleep announced 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 housetops undismayed by police regulations and the young men and girls court and past 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 morning 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 50 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 gravediggers in calvary work overtime and little coffins are stacked mountain high on the deck of the charity commissioner's 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 and possibility 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 and the tenements it kills right and left such an epidemic ravaged three crowded blocks in elizabeth street on the heels of the grip 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 overshadowing 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 grip 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 and 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 10 years of sanitary reform rule and have been brought and all but the crowding under its laws the old houses that from private dwellings were made into tenements over 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 and 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 one 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 peddler'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 underway in dead earnest end of section 15 recording by leanne howlett section 16 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by phil chinovere how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 16 the common herd part two 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 friends complaint of quote improper nourishment close quote 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 the store 2.50 cents a week there were seven children to provide for and the rent of the mulberry street attic in which the family lived was ten dollars a month they had borrowed as long as anybody had a sent to lend when at last the man got an odd job that would just buy the children bred the week's wages only served to measure the depth of their misery quote it came in so on the tail end of everything close quote 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 standpoint 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 for 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 40 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 tenement and the vices and improvements of those who dwell in them then 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 fair 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 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 39 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 waistbands to attack 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 the husband sick to death who to support the family made shirts averaging an income of one dollar and 20 cents a week while her oldest girl age 13 was employed downtown cutting out hamburg edgings at one dollar and a half a week two and a half cents per hour for 10 hours of steady labor making the total income of the family two dollars and seventy cents per week then the harlem woman who was making a brave effort to support a sick husband and two children by taking in washing at 35 cents for the lot of 14 large pieces finding coal soap starch and blueing herself rather than depend on charity in any form specimen wages of the tenements these seemingly inconsistent with the charge of improvements but the connection on second thought is not obscure there is nothing in the prospect of a sharp unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead everything to discourage the effort improvements and wastefulness are natural results the installment plan secures to the tenant who lives from hand to mouth his few comforts the evil day of reckoning is put off till a tomorrow 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 mr smith who had been hiding from the installment 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 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 hubble 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 womb to these 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 12 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 down-hearted 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 tenet 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 5 000 dispossessed warrants are issued in a year but probably not 50 evictions take place in the district the landlord has only one vote while there may be 40 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 farmer 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 for 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 tenants than on the avenue extracts 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 turnout with a free ride thrown in it is not at all uncommon to find the hordes of a whole lifetime of hard work and self-denial squandered on the empty show of a ludicrous funeral parade and the 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 heathenus 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 prompt 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 and 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 depth 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 wastes 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 end of section 16 recording by phil chenever baton rouge louisiana section 17 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by matthew reese how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 15 the problem of the children the problem of the children becomes in these swarms to the last degree perplexing their varied number makes one stand aghast i have already given instances of the packing of the child population in east side tenements they might be continued indefinitely until the array would be enough to startle any community four be it remembered these children with the training they receive or do not receive with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up are to be our future rulers if our theory of government is worth anything more than a working majority of our voters now register from the tenements i counted the other day the little ones up to 10 years or so in a bayard street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the center with sides 14 or 15 feet long just room enough for a row of ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hydrant at the apex there was about as much light in this yard as in the average seller i gave up my self-imposed task in despair when i had counted 128 in 40 families 13 i had missed or not found in applying the average for the 40 to the whole 53 the house contained 170 children it is not the only time i have had to give up such census work i have in mind an alley an inlet rather to a row of rear tenants that is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in i tried to count the children that swarmed there but could not sometimes i have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about when last spring some workmen while moving a pile of lumber on a north river pier found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death no one had missed a boy though his parents afterward turned up the truant officer assuredly does not know though he spends his life trying to find out somewhat illogically perhaps since the department that employs him admits that thousands of poor children are crowded out of the schools year by year for want of room there was a big tenement in the sixth ward now happily appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business that blots out so many foul spots in new york it figured not long ago in the official reports as an out and out hog pin that had a record of 102 arrests in four years among its 478 tenants 57 of them for drunken and disorderly conduct i do not know how many children there were in it but the inspector reported that he found only seven in the whole house who owned that they went to school the rest gathered all the instruction they received running beer for their elders some of them claimed the flat as their home as a mere matter of form they slept in the streets at night the official came upon a little party of four drinking beer out of the cover of a milk can in the hallway they were of the seven good boys and proved their claim to the title by offering him some the old question what to do with the boy assumes a new and serious phase in the tenements under the best conditions found there it is not easily answered in nine cases out of ten he would make an excellent mechanic if trained early to work at a trade for he is neither dull nor slow but the short-sighted depotism of the trades unions has practically closed that avenue to him trade schools however excellent cannot supply the opportunity thus denied him and at the outset the boy stands condemned by his own to low and ill-paid drudgery held down by the hand that of all should labor to raise him home the greatest factor in all the training of the young means nothing to him but a pigeonhole in a coupe along with so many other human animals its influence is scarcely of the elevating kind if it have any the very games at which he takes a band in the street become polluting in its atmosphere with no steady hand to guide him the boy takes naturally to idle ways caught in the street by the truant officer or by the agents of the children's societies peddling perhaps or begging to help out the family resources he runs the risk of being sent to a reformatory where contact with vicious boys older than himself soon developed the latent possibilities for evil that lie hidden in him the city has no truant home in which to keep him and all efforts of the children's friends to enforce school attendance are paralyzed by this want the risk of the reformatory is too great what is done in the end is to let him take chances with the chances all against him the result is the rough young savage familiar from the street rough as he is if anyone doubt that this child of common clay having him the instinct of beauty of love for the ideal of which his life has no embodiment let him put the matter to the test let him take into a tenement block a handful of flowers from the fields and watch the brightened faces the sudden abandonment of play and fight that go ever hand in hand where there is no elbow room the wild entreaty for posies the eager love with which the little messengers of peace are shielded once possessed then let him change his mind i have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club seen instincts awaken under their gentle appeal whose very existence in the soil in which they grew made seem a mockery i have not forgotten the deputation of ragamuffins from a mulberry street alley that knocked at my office door one morning on a mysterious expedition for flowers not for themselves but for a lady and having obtained what they wanted trooped off to bestow them a ragged and dirty little band with a solemnity that was quite unusual it was not until an old man called the next day to thank me for the flowers that i found out they had decked the beer of a popper in the dark rear room where she lay waiting in her pine board coffin for the city's hearse yet as i knew that dismal alley with its bare brick walls between which no sun ever rose or set was the world of those children it filled their young lives probably not one of them had ever been out of the sight of it they were too dirty too ragged and too generally disreputable too well hidden in their slum besides to come into line with the fresh air summer borders with such human instincts and cravings forever unsatisfied turned into a haunting curse with appetite ground to keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed the children of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives a wearysome toil that claims them at an age when the play of their happier fellows has but just begun has a yard of turf been laid and a vine been coaxed to grow within their reach they are banished and barred out from it as from a heaven that is not for such as they i came upon a couple of youngsters in a mulberry street yard a while ago that were talking on a fence their first lesson in writin and this is what they wrote keeb of t grass they had it by heart for there was not i verily believe a green sod within a quarter of a mile home to them is an empty name pleasure a gentleman once catechized a ragged class in a downtown public school on this point and recorded the result out of 48 boys 20 had never seen the brooklyn bridge that was scarcely five minutes walk away three only had been in central park fifteen had known the joy of a ride in a horse car the street with its ash barrels and its dirt the river that runs foul with mud are their domain what training they receive is picked up there and they are apt pupils if the mud and the dirt are easily reflected in their lives what wonder scarce half such lads as these confront the world with the challenge to give them their due too long withheld or our jails supply the answer to the alternative a little fellow who seemed clad in but a single rag was among the flotsam and jetsam stranded at police headquarters one day last summer no one knew where he came from or where he belonged the boy himself knew as little about it as anybody and was the least anxious to have light shed on the subject after he had spent a night in the matrons nursery the discovery that beds were provided for boys to sleep in there and that he could have a whole egg and three slices of bread for breakfast put him on the best of terms with the world in general and he decided that headquarters was a bully place he sang mcginty all through with 10th avenue variations for the police and then settled down to the serious business of giving an account of himself the examination went on after this fashion where do you go to church my boy we don't have no clothes to go to church and indeed his appearance as he was in the door of any new york church would have caused a sensation well where do you go to school then i don't go to school with a snort of contempt where do you buy your bread we don't buy no bread we buy beer said the boy and it was eventually the saloon that led the police as a landmark to his home it was worthy of the boy as he had said his only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the floor his daily diet a crust in the morning nothing else into the rooms of the children's aid society were led two little girls whose father had busted up the house and put them on the street after their mother died another who was turned out by her stepmother because she had five of her own could not afford to keep her could not remember ever having been in church or sunday school and only knew the name of jesus through hearing people swear by it she had no idea what they meant these were specimens of the overflow from the tenements of our home heathen that are growing up in new york streets today while tenderhearted men and women are busying themselves with the socks and the hereafter of well-fed little hot and tots thousands of miles away according to ken and taylor of york 109 missionaries in the four fields of persia palestine arabia and egypt spent one year and sixty thousand dollars in converting one little heathen girl if there is nothing the matter with those missionaries they might come to new york with a good deal better prospect of success by those who lay flattering unction to their souls and the knowledge that today new york has at all events no brood of the gutters of tender years that can be homeless long unheeded let it be remembered well through what effort this judgment has been averted in 37 years the children's aid society that came into existence as an emphatic protest against the tenement corruption of the young has sheltered quite three hundred thousand outcast homeless and orphaned children in its lodging houses and has found homes in the west for seventy thousand that had none doubtless as a mere stroke of finance the five millions and a half thus spent were a wiser investment than to have let them grow up thieves and thugs in the last 15 years of this tireless battle for the safety of the state the intervention of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children has been invoked for 138 891 little ones it has thrown its protection around more than 25 000 helpless children and has convicted nearly 16 000 wretches of child beating and abuse add to this the standing army of fifteen thousand dependent children in new york's asylums and institutions and some idea is gained of the crop that is garnered day by day in the tenements of the enormous force employed to check their inroads on our social life and of the cause for apprehension that would exist did their efforts flag forever so brief a time nothing is now better understood than that the rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty as presented for our solution today that character may be formed where to reform it would be a hopeless task the concurrent testimony of all who have to undertake it at a later stage that the young are naturally neither vicious nor hardened simply weak and undeveloped except by the bad influences of the street makes this duty all the more urgent as well as hopeful helping hands are held out on every side to private charity the municipality leaves the entire care of its proletariat of tender years lulling its conscience to sleep with liberal appropriations of money to foot the bills indeed it is held by those whose opinions are entitled to wait that it is far too liberal a paymaster for its own best interests and those of its wards it deals with the evil in the seed to a limited extent in gathering in the outcast babies from the streets to the ripe fruit the gates of its prisons its reformatories and its workhouses are opened wide the year round what the showing would be at this end of the line were it not for the barriers wise charity has thrown across the broad highway to ruin is building day by day may be measured by such results as those quoted above in the span of a single life end of section 17 recording by matthew reese davenport iowa section 18 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by leanne howlett how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 16 waifs of the city's slums first among these barriers is the foundling asylum it stands at the very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly two millions of people powerless to prevent it though it gather in the outcasts by night and by day in a score of years an army of 25 000 of these forlorn little waves have cried out from the streets of new york in arraignment of a christian civilization under the blessings of which the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want only the poor abandon their children the stories of richly dressed foundlings that are dished up in the newspapers at intervals or pure fiction not one instance of even a well-dressed infant having been picked up on the streets is on record they come in rags a newspaper often the only wrap semi-occasionally won in a clean slip with some evidence of loving care a little slip of paper pinned on perhaps with some such message as this i once read and a woman's trembling hand take care of johnny for god's sake i cannot but even that is the rarest of all happenings the city divides with the sisters of charity the task of gathering them in the real foundlings the children of the gutter that are picked up by the police are the city's wards in mid-winter when the poor shiver in their homes and in the dog days when the fierce heat and foul air of the tenements smother their babies by thousands they are found sometimes three and four in a night in hallways in areas and on the doorsteps of the rich with whose comfort in luxurious homes the wretched mother somehow connects her own misery perhaps as the drowning man clutches at a straw she hopes that these happier hearts may have love despair even for her little one in this she is mistaken unauthorized babies especially are not popular in the abodes of the wealthy it never happens outside of the storybooks that a baby so deserted finds home and friends at once its career though rather more official is less romantic and generally brief after a night spent at police headquarters it travels up to the infant's hospital on randall's island in the morning fitted out with a number and a bottle that seldom see much wear before they are laid aside for a fresh recruit few outcast babies survive their desertion long murder is the true name of the mother's crime in eight cases out of ten of 508 babies received at the randalls island hospital last year 333 died 65.55 percent but of the 508 only 170 were picked up in the streets and among these the mortality was much greater probably nearer 90 percent if the truth were told the rest were born in the hospitals the high mortality among the foundlings is not to be marveled at the wonder is rather that any survive the stormier the night the more certain is the police nursery to echo with the feeble cries of abandoned babies often they come half dead from exposure one live baby came in a little pine coffin which a policeman found an inhuman wretch trying to bury in an uptown lot but many do not live to be officially registered as a charge upon the county 72 dead babies were picked up in the streets last year some of them were doubtless put out by very poor parents to save funeral expenses in hard times the number of dead and live foundlings always increases very noticeably but whether traveling by way of the morgue or the infant's hospital the little army of waif's meet reunited soon in the trench in the potter's field where if no medical student is in need of a subject they are laid in squads of a dozen most of the foundlings come from the east side where they are left by young mothers without wedding ring or other name than their own to bestow upon the baby returning from the island hospital to face an unpitying world with the evidence of their shame not infrequently they wear the bed tick regimentals of the public charities and thus their origin is easily enough traced often or no ray of light penetrates the gloom and no effort is made to probe the mystery of sin and sorrow this also was the policy pursued in the great foundling asylum of the sisters of charity in 68th street known all over the world as sister irene's asylum years ago the crib that now stands just inside the street door under the great main portal was placed outside at night but it filled up too rapidly the babies took to coming in little squads instead of in single file and in self-defense the sisters were forced to take the cradle in now their mother must bring her child inside and put it in the crib where she is seen by the sister on guard no effort is made to question her or discover the child's antecedents but she is asked to stay and nurse her own and another baby if she refuses she is allowed to depart unhindered if willing she enters it once into the great family of the good sister who in 21 years has gathered as many thousand homeless babies into her fold one was brought in when i was last in the asylum in the middle of july that received in its crib the number 20715 the death rate is of course lowered a good deal where exposure of the child is prevented among the 1100 infants in the asylum it was something over 19 percent last year but among those actually received in the 12-month nearer twice that figure even the 19 percent remarkably low for a foundling asylum was equal to the starling death rate of gotham court in the cholera scourge 460 mothers who could not or would not keep their own babies did voluntary penance for their sin in the asylum last year by nursing a strange waif besides their own until both should be strong enough to take their chances in life's battle an even larger number than the 1100 were pay babies put out to be nursed by mothers outside the asylum the money thus earned pays the rent of hundreds of poor families it is no trifle quite half of the quarter of a million dollars contributed annually by the city for the support of the asylum the procession of these nurse mothers when they come to the asylum on the first wednesday of each month to receive their pay and have the babies inspected by the sisters is one of the sites of the city the nurses who are under strict supervision go to love their little charges and part from them with tears when at the age of four or five they are sent to western homes to be adopted the sisters carefully encouraged the home feeling and the child as their strongest ally in seeking its mental and moral elevation and the toddlers depart happy to join their papas and mamas and the far away unknown home an infinitely more fiendish if to surface appearance is less deliberate plan of child murder than desertion has flourished in new york for years under the title of baby farming the name put into plain english means starving babies to death the law has fought this most heinous of crimes by compelling the registry of all baby farms as well might it require all persons intending murder to register their purpose with time in place of the deed under the penalty of exemplary fines murderers do not hang out a shingle baby farms said once mr elbridge t yeri the president of the society charged with the execution of the law that was passed through his efforts are concerns by means of which persons usually of disreputable character eke out a living by taking two or three or four babies to board they are the charges of outcasts or illegitimate children they feed them on sour milk and give them perigoric to keep them quiet until they die when they get some young medical man without experience to sign a certificate to the board of health that the child died of ina nation and so the matter ends the baby is dead and there is no one to complain a handful of baby farms have been registered and licensed by the prevention of cruelty to children in the last five years but none of this kind the devil keeps the only complete register to be found anywhere their traces found often as by the coroner or the police sometimes they may be discovered hiding in the advertising columns of certain newspapers under the guise of the scarcely less heartless traffic and helpless children that is dignified with the pretense of adoption for cash an idea of how this scheme works was obtained through the disclosures in a celebrated divorce case a year or two ago the society has among its records a very recent case of a baby a week old baby blue eyes that was offered for sale adoption the dealer called it in a newspaper the agent bought it after some haggling for a dollar and arrested the woman slave trader but the law was powerless to punish her for her crime 12 unfortunate women awaiting dishonored motherhood were found in her house one gets a glimpse of the frightful depths to which human nature perverted by avarice bread of ignorance and rasping poverty can descend and the mere suggestion of systematic insurance for profit of children's lives a woman was put on trial in this city last year for incredible cruelty in her treatment of a stepchild the evidence aroused a strong suspicion that a pitifully small amount of insurance on the child's life was one of the motives for the woman's savagery a little investigation brought out the fact that three companies that were in the business of insuring the children's lives for sums varying from a dollar seventeen up had issued not less than a million such policies the premiums range from five to twenty five cents a week what untold horrors this business may conceal was suggested by a formal agreement entered into by some of the companies for the purpose of preventing speculation in the insurance of children's lives by the terms of this compact no higher premium than 10 cents could be accepted on children under 6 years old barbarism forsooth did ever heathen cruelty invent a more fiendish plot than the one written down between the lines of this legal paper it is with a sense of glad relief that one turns from this misery to the brighter page of the helping hands stretched forth on every side to save the young and the helpless new york is i firmly believe the most charitable city in the world nowhere is there so eager a readiness to help when it is known that help is worthily wanted nowhere are such armies of devoted workers nowhere such abundance of means ready to the hand of those who know the need and how rightly to supply it its poverty its slums and its suffering are the result of unprecedented growth with the consequent disorder and crowding and the common penalty of metropolitan greatness if the structure shows signs of being top heavy evidences are not wanting they are multiplying day by day that patient toilers are at work among the underpinnings the day nurseries the numberless kindergartens and charitable schools in the poor quarters the fresh air funds the thousand and one charities that in one way or another reach the homes and the lives of the poor with sweetening touch are proof that if much is yet to be done if the need only grows with the effort hearts and hands will be found to do it in ever increasing measure black as the cloud is it has a silver lining bright with promise new york is today a hundred fold cleaner better purer city than it was even ten years ago two powerful agents that were among the pioneers in this work of moral and physical regeneration stand in paradise park today as milestones on the rocky uphill road the handful of noble women who braved the foul depravity of the old brewery to rescue its child victims rolled away the first and heaviest boulder which legislatures and city councils had tackled in vain the five points mission and the five points house of industry have accomplished what no machinery of government availed to do sixty thousand children have been rescued by them from the streets and had their little feet set in the better way their work still goes on increasing and gathering in the ways instructing and feeding them and helping their parents with advice and more substantial aid their charity knows not creed or nationality the house of industry is an enormous nursery school with an average of more than 400 day scholars and constant borders outsiders and insiders its influence is felt for many blocks around in that crowded part of the city it is one of the most touching sites in the world to see a score of babies rescued from homes of brutality and desolation where no other blessing than a drunken curse was ever heard saying their prayers in the nursery at bedtime too often their white nightgowns hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly bruised by inhuman hands in the shelter of this fold they are safe and a happier little group one may seek long and far in vain end of section 18 recording by leanne howlett section 19 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by michael evans urbana illinois how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 17 the street arab not all the barriers erected by society against its netherlife not the labor of unnumbered societies for the rescue and relief of its outcast waves can dam the stream of homelessness that issues from a source where the very name of home is a mockery the street arab is as much of an institution in new york as newspaper row to which he gravitates naturally following his bohemian instinct crowded out of the tenements to shift for himself and quite ready to do it he meets there the host of adventurous runaways from every state in the union and from across the sea whom new york attracts with a queer fascination as it attracts the older immigrants from all parts of the world a census of the population in the news boys lodging house on any night will show such an odd mixture of small humanity as could hardly be got together in any other spot it is a mistake to think that they are helpless little creatures to be pitied and cried over because they are alone in the world the unmerciful gain the good man would receive who went to them with such a program would soon convince him that that sort of pity was wasted and would very likely give him the idea that they were a set of hardened little scoundrels quite beyond the reach of missionary effort but that would only be his second mistake the street arab has all the faults and all the virtues of the lawless life he leads vagabond that he is acknowledging no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or anything with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries to coerce him he is as bright and as sharp as the weasel which among all the predatory beasts he most resembles his sturdy independence love of freedom and absolute self-reliance together with his rude sense of justice that enables him to govern his little community not always in accordance with municipal law or city ordinances but often a good deal closer to the saving line of doing to others as one would be done by these are strong handles by which those who know how can catch the boy and make him useful successful bankers clergymen and lawyers all over the country statesmen in some instances of national repute bear evidence in their lives to the potency of such missionary efforts there is scarcely a learned profession or branch of honorable business that has not in the last 20 years borrowed some of its brightest light from the poverty and gloom of new york streets anyone who business or curiosity is taken through park row or across printing house square in the midnight hour when the air is filled with the roar of great presses spinning with printers ink on endless rolls of white paper the history of the world in the 24 hours that have just passed away has seen little groups of these boys hanging about the newspaper offices in winter when snow is on the streets fighting for warm spots around the grated vent holes that let out the heat and steam from the underground press rooms with their noise and clutter and in summer playing craps and 7-eleven on the curb for their hard-earned pennies with all the absorbing concern of hardened gamblers this is their beat here the agent of society for the prevention of cruelty to children finds those he thinks too young for business but does not always capture them like rabbits in their burrows the little ragamuffins sleep with at least one eye open and every sense alert to the approach of danger of their enemy the policeman whose chief business in life is to move them on and of the agent bent on robbing them of their cherished freedom at the first warning shout they scatter and are off to pursue them would be like chasing the fleet-footed mountain goat in his rocky fastness there is not an open door a hidden turn or runaway which they do not know with lots of secret passages and shortcuts no one else ever found to steal a march on them is the only way there is a coal shoot from the sidewalk to the boiler room in the sub-cellar of the post office which the society's officer found the boys had made into a sort of toboggan slide to a snug birth in wintry weather they used to slyly raise the cover in the street slide down in single file and snuggle up to the warm boiler out of harm's way as they thought it proved a trap however the agent slid down himself one cold night there was no other way of getting there and landing right in the midst of the sleeping colony had it at his mercy after repeated raids upon their headquarters the boys forsook it last summer and were next found hurting under the shore end of one of the east river banana docks where they had fitted up a regular club room that was shared by 30 or 40 homeless boys and about a million rats newspaper row is merely their headquarters they are to be found all over the city these street arabs where the neighborhood offers a chance of picking up a living in the daytime and of turning in at night with the promise of security from surprise in warm weather truck and street a convenient outhouse or dugout and a hay barge at the wharf make good bucks two were found making their nest once in the end of a big iron pipe up by the harlem bridge and an old boiler at the east river served as an elegant flat for another couple who kept house there with a thief the police had long sought little suspecting that he was hiding under their very noses for months together when the children's aid society first opened its lodging houses and with some difficulty persuaded the boys that their charity was no pious dodge to trap them into a treasonable sunday school racket its managers overheard a laughable discussion among the boys in their unwantedly comfortable beds perhaps the first some of them had ever slept in as to the relative merits of the different styles of their everyday births preferences were divided between steam grating in a sandbox but the weight of the evidence was decided to be in favor of the sandbox because as its advocate put it you could curl all up in it the new find was voted as a good way ahead of any previous experience however my eyes ain't it nice said one of the lads tucked in under his blanket up to the chin and the roomful of boys echoed the sentiment the compact silently made that night between the street arabs and their hosts has never been broken they have been fast friends ever since whence this army of homeless boys is a question often asked the answer is supplied by the procession of mothers that go out and in at police headquarters the year round inquiring from missing boys often not until they have been gone for weeks and months and then sometimes rather as a matter of decent form than from any real interest in the lad's fate the stereotyped promise of the clerks who fail to find his name in the books among the arrests that he will come back when he gets hungry does not always come true more likely he went away because he was hungry summer orphans actually are in effect thrown upon the world when their parents were sent up to the island or to sing-sing and somehow overlooked by the society which thenceforth became the enemy to be shunned until growth and dirt and the hardships of the street that make old early offer some hope of successfully floating the lie that they are 16 a drunken father explains the matter in other cases as in that of john and willie aged 10 and 8 picked up by the police they didn't live nowhere never went to school could neither read nor write their 12 year old sister kept house for the father who turned the boys out to beg or steal or starve grinding poverty and hard work beyond the years of the lad blows and curses for breakfast dinner and supper all these are recruiting asians for the homeless army sickness in the house too many mouths to feed we was six said an urchin of 12 or 13 i came across in the news newsboys lodging house and we ain't got no father some of us had to go and so he went to make a living by blacking boots the going is easy enough there is very little to hold a boy who has never known anything but a home in a tenement very soon the wildlife in the streets holds him fast and thence forward by his own effort there is no escape left alone to himself he soon enough finds a place in the police books and there would be no other answer to the second question what becomes of the boy than that given by the criminal courts every day in the week but he is not left alone society in our day has no such suicidal intention right here at the parting of the ways it has thrown up the strongest of all its defenses for itself and for the boy what the society for the prevention of cruelty to children is to the baby wave the children's aid society is to the homeless boy at this real turning point in his career the good it has done cannot easily be overestimated its lodging houses its schools and its homes block every avenue of escape with their offer of shelter upon terms which the boy soon accepts as on the whole cheap and fair in the great duane street lodging house for newsboys they are succinctly stated in a notice over the door that reads thus boys who swear and chew tobacco cannot sleep here there is another unwritten condition this that the boys shall be really without a home but upon this the managers wisely do not insist too obstinately accepting without too close inquiry his account of himself where that seems advisable well knowing that many a home that sends forth such lads far less deserves the name than one they are able to give them with these simple preliminaries the outcast boy may enter rags do not count to ignorance the door is only opened wider dirt does not survive long once within the walls of the lodging house it is the settled belief of the men who conduct them that soap and water are as powerful moral agents in their particular field as preaching and they have experience to back them the boy may come and go as he pleases so long as he behaves himself no restraint of any sort is put on his independence he is as free as any other guest at a hotel and like him he is expected to pay for what he gets how wisely the men planned who laid the foundation of this great rescue work and yet carry it on is shown by no single feature of it better than by this no pauper was ever bred within these houses nothing would have been easier with such material or more fatal but charity of the kind that popperizes is furthest from their scheme self-help is its very keynote and it strikes a response in the boy's sturdiest trait that raises him at once to a levy with the effort made in his behalf recognized as an independent traitor capable of and bound to take care of himself he is in a position to ask trust if trade has gone against him and he cannot pay cash for his grub and his bed and to get it without question he can even have the loan of the small capital required to start him in business with a boot blax kit or an arm full of papers if he is known or vouched for but every cent is charged to him as carefully as though the transaction involved as many hundreds of dollars and he is expected to pay back the money as soon as he has made enough to keep him going without it he very rarely betrays the trust reposed in him quite on the contrary around this sound core of self-help thus encouraged habits of thrift and ambitions industry are seen to grow up in a majority of instances the boy is growing a character and he goes out to the man's work in life with that which for him is better than if he had found a fortune cents for his bed six for his breakfast of bread and coffee and six for his supper of pork and beans as much as he can eat are the rates of the boys hotel for those who bunked together in the great dormitories that sometimes hold more than a hundred births two tiers high made of iron clean and neat for the upper ten the young financiers who early take the lead among their fellows hire them to work for wages and add a share their profits to their own and for the lads who are learning a trade and getting paid by the week there are tenant beds with the locker and with curtains hung about night schools and sunday night meetings are held in the building and are always well attended in winter especially when the lodging houses are crowded in summer the towpath and the country attract their share of the bigger boys the sunday school racket has ceased to have any terror for them they follow the proceedings with the liveliest interest quick to detect can't of any sort should any stray in no one has any just conception of what congregational singing is until he has witnessed a roomful of these boys roll up their sleeves and start in on he is the lily of the valley the swinging trapeze in the gymnasium on the top floor is scarcely more popular with the boys than this tremendously vocal worship the street arrow puts his whole little soul into what interests him for the moment whether it be pulverizing a rival who has done a mean trick to a smaller boy or attending at the gospel shop on sundays this characteristic made necessary some extra supervision when recently the lads in the dwayne street lodging house chipped in and bought a set of boxing gloves the terpese suffered a temporary eclipse until this new toy had been tested to the extent of several miniature black eyes upon which soap had no effect and sundry little scores had been settled that even things up as it were for a fresh start i tried one night not with the best of success i confessed to photograph the boys in their washroom while they were cleaning up for supper they were quite turbulent to the disgust of one of their number who assumed unasked the office of general manager of the show and expressed his mortification to me in very polite language if they would only behave sir he complained you could make a good picture yes i said but it isn't in them i suppose no begosh said he lapsing something from grace unto the provocation then kids ain't got no sense no how the society maintains five of these boys lodging houses and one for girls in the city the dwayne street lodging house alone has sheltered since its foundation in 1855 nearly a quarter of a million different boys at a total expense of a good deal less than half a million dollars of this amount up to the beginning of the present year the boys and the earnings of the house had contributed no less than 172 776 dollars and 38 cents in all of the lodging houses together 12 153 boys and girls were sheltered and taught last year the boys saved up no inconsiderable amount of money in the savings banks provided for them in the houses a simple system of lock boxes that are emptied for their benefit once a month besides these the society has established and operates in the tenement district's 21 industrial schools coordinate with the public schools in authority for the children of the poor who cannot find room in the city schoolhouses or are too ragged to go there two free reading rooms a dressmaking and typewriting school and a laundry for the instruction of girls a sick children's mission in the city and two on the seashore where poor mothers may take their babies a cottage by the sea for crippled girls and a brush factory for crippled boys in 44th street the italian school in lynyrd street alone had an average attendance of over 600 pupils last year the daily average attendance at all of them was 4105 while 11 331 children were registered and taught when the fact that there were among these 1132 children of drunken parents and 416 that had been found begging in the street is contrasted with the showing of dollars and 1337.20 cents deposited in the school's savings banks by 1745 pupils something like an adequate idea is gained of the scope of the society's work in the city a large share of it in a sense the largest certainly that productive of the happiest results lies outside of the city however from the lodging houses and the schools are drawn the battalions of young immigrants that go every year to homes in the far west to grow up self-supporting men and women safe from the temptations and the vice of the city their number runs far up in the thousands the society never loses sight of them the records show that the great mass with this start given them become useful citizens and honor to the communities in which their lot is cast not a few achieve place and prominence in their new surroundings rarely bad reports come of them occasionally one comes back lured by homesickness even for the slums but the briefest stay generally cures the disease for good i helped once to see a party off from michigan the last sent out by that great friend of the homeless children mrs astor before she died in the party was a boy who had been an insider at the five points house of industry and brought along as his only baggage a padlocked and iron bound box that contained all his wealth two little white mice the friendliest disposition they were going with him out to live on the fat of the land in the fertile west where they would never be wanting for a crust alas for the best laid plans of mice and men the western diet did not agree with either i saw their owner some months later in the old home at the five points he had come back walking part of the way and was now pleading to be sent out once more he had at last had enough of the city his face fell when i asked him about the mice it was a sad story indeed they had so much corn to eat he said and they couldn't stand it they burned all up inside and then they busted mrs astor set an example during her noble and useful life in gathering every year a company of homeless boys from the streets and sending them to good homes with decent clothes on their backs she had sent out no less than 1300 when she died and left funds to carry on her work that has been followed by many who like her had the means and the heart for such a labor of love most of the lodging houses and school buildings of the society were built by some one rich man or woman who paid all the bills and often objected to have even the name of the giver made known to the world it is one of the pleasant experiences of life that gives one hope and courage in the midst of all this misery to find names that stand to the unthinking mass only for money getting and grasping associated with such unheralded benefactions that carry their blessings down to generations yet unborn it's not so long since i found the carriage of a woman whose name is synonymous with millions standing in front of the boy's lodging house in 35th street its owner was at that moment busy with a surgeon making a census of the crippled lads in the brush shop the most miserable of all the society's charges as a preliminary to fitting them out with artificial limbs farther uptown than any reared by the children's aid society in 67th street stands a lodging house intended for boys of a somewhat larger growth than most of those from the society shelters unlike the others too it was built by the actual labor of the young men it was designed to benefit in the day when more of the boys from our streets shall find their way to it and to the new york trade schools of which is a kind of home annex we shall be in a fair way of solving in the most natural of all ways the question what to do with this boy in spite of the ignorant opposition of the men whose tyrannical policy is now to blame for the showing that out of the 23 millions of dollars paid annually to the mechanics in the building trades in this city less than six millions go to the workman born in new york while his boy roams the streets with every chance of growing up a vagabond and next to none of becoming an honest artisan colonel auchmuty is a practical philanthropist to whom the growing youth of new york will one day owe a debt of gratitude not easily paid the progress of the system of trade schools established by him at which a young man may acquire the theory as well as the practice of a trade in a few months at a merely nominal outlay has not been nearly as rapid as was to be desired though the fact that other cities are copying the model with their master mechanics as the prime movers in the enterprise testifies to its excellence but it has at last taken a real start and with union men and even the officers of unions now sending their sons to the trade schools to be taught one may perhaps be permitted to hope that an era of better sense is dawning that shall witness a rescue work upon lines which when the leaven has fairly had time to work will put an end to the existence of the new york street arab of the native breed at least end of section 19 recording by michael evans urbana illinois section 20 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by ashley jane how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 20 the reign of rome where god builds a church the devil builds next door a saloon is an old saying that has lost its point in new york either the devil was on the ground first or has been doing a good deal more in the way of building i tried once to find out how the account stored and counted to 111 protestant churches chapels and places of worship of every kind below 14th street 4065 saloons the worst half of the tenement population lives down there and it has to this day the worst half of the saloons uptown the account stands a little bigger but there are easily 10 saloons to every church today i'm afraid too that the congregations are larger by a good deal certainly the attendance is steadier and the contributions more liberal the week round sunday included turn and twist it as we may over every bulwark for decency and morality where society erects the saloon project is colossal shadow omen of evil wherever it falls into the lives of the poor nowhere is its mark so broad or so black to their misery it sticketh closer than a brother persuading them that within its doors only is refuge relief it has the best of the argument too for it is true worst pity that in many a tenement house block the saloon is the one bright and cheery humanely decent spot to be found it is a sorry admission to make that to bring the rest of the neighborhood up to the level of the saloon would be one way of squelching it but it is so wherever the tenements thicken it multiplies upon the direst poverty of their crowds it grows fat and prosperous levying upon attacks heavier than all the rest of its grievous burdens combined it is not yet two years since the excise board made the rule that no three corners of any street crotting not already so occupied should thenceforth be licensed for room selling and the tardy prohibition was intended for the tenement districts nowhere else is there need of it one may walk miles through the homes of the poor searching vainly for an open reading room a cheerful coffee house a decent club that is not a cloak for the trafficking rum the dram shop yawns at every step the poorman's club his forum and his haven of rest when wary and disgusted with the crowding and quarreling and the wretchedness at home with the poison dealt out there he takes his politics in quality not far apart as the source so the stream the rum shop turns a political crank in new york the natural yield is run politics of what that means successive boards of older men composed in a measure if not of the majority of dive keepers have given new york a taste the disgrace of the infamous brutal board will be remembered until some corruption even fowler crops out and throws it into the shade what relation the saloon bears to the crowds let me illustrate by a comparison below 14th street were when the health department took its first accurate census of the tenements a year and a half ago 13 220 of the 32 390 buildings classed as such in the whole city of the eleven hundred thousand tenants not quite half a million embracing a host of more than sixty three thousand children under five years of age lived below the line below it also were 234 of the cheap lodging houses accounted for by the police last year with a total of 4 million and a half of lodges for the 12 month 59 of the city's 110 pawn shops and 4065 of its 7884 saloons the former densely people precincts the 4th 6th 10th and 11th supported together in round numbers 1200 saloons and their return show 27 of the whole number of arrests for the year the 11th precinct that has the greatest and the poorest crowds of all it is a tenth ward and harbored one-third of the army of homeless lodges and 14 of all the prisoners of the year kept 485 saloons going in 1889. it is not on record that one of them all failed for want of support a number of them on the contrary had brought their owners wealth and prominence from their bars these eminent citizens stepped proudly into the councils of the city and the state the very floor of one of the bar rooms in a neighborhood that lately resounded with the cry for bread of starving workmen is paved with silver dollars east side poverty is not alone in thus rewarding the tyrants that sweeten its cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison the fourth ward points with pride to the honorable record of the conductors of its tub of blood and a dozen bar rooms with less startling titles the west side to the wealth and social standing of the owners of such resorts as the witch's broth and the plug hat in the region of hell's kitchen three cent whiskey names ominous of the concoctions brewed there and their fatality generous measure another word that boasts some of the best residences and the bluest blood in manhattan island honours with political leadership in the ruling party the proprietor of one of the most disreputable black and tan dives and dancing halls to be found anywhere criminal and policemen alike do him homage the list might be strung out to make texts for sermons with a stronger home flavor than many that are preached in our pulpits on sunday but i've not set out to write the political history of new york besides the list would not be complete secret dives are skulking in the slums and out of them that are not labeled respectable by a board of excise and support no family entrance their business like that of the stale beer dives is done through a side door the week through no one knows the number of unlicensed saloons in the city those who have made the matter a study estimated at a thousand more or less the police make occasional schedules of a few and report them to headquarters perhaps there is a farce in the police court and there the matter ends rom and influence are synonymous terms the interest of the one rarely suffers for the want of attention from the other with the exception of these freelancers that treat the law openly with contempt the saloons will hang out a sign announcing in fact type that no beer or liquor is sold to children in the downtown morgues that make the lowest degradation of humanity pan out of paying interest as in the reputable resorts uptown where inspector burns men spot their worthy aquary elbowing citizens whom the idea of associating with a burglar would give a shock they would not get over for a week this sign is seen conspicuously displayed though apparently it means submission to a beneficent law in reality the sign is a heartless cruel joke i doubt if one child in a thousand who brings his growler to be filled at the average new york bar is sent away empty-handed if able to pay for what he wants i once followed a little boy who shivered in bare feet on a cold november night so that he seemed in danger of smashing his picture on the icy pavement into a mulberry street saloon where just a sign hung on the wall and forbade the bar keeper to serve the boy the man was astonished at my interference as if i told him to shut up his shop and go home which in fact i might have done with his good of right for it was after 1am the legal closing hour he was mighty indignant too and told me roughly to go away and mind my own business while he filled the picture the law prohibiting the selling of beer to miners is about as much respected in the tenement house districts as the ordinance against swearing newspaper records will recall a story told little more than a year ago of a boy who after carrying beer a whole day from a shop full of men over on the east side where his father work crept into the cellar to sleep off the effects of his own chair in the riverton it was saturday evening sunday his parents sought him high and low but it was not until monday morning when the shop was opened that he was found killed and half eaten by the rats that overran the place all the evil the saloon does in breeding poverty and incorrupting politics all the suffering it brings into the lives of its thousands of innocent victims the wives and children of drunkards it sends forth to curse community it's fostering of crime and its shielding of criminals it is all as nothing to this its worst offence in its affinity for the thief there is at least this compensation that as it makes it also unmakes him it starts him on his career only to trip him up and betray him into the hands of the law when the rum he exchanged for his honesty has swole in his brains as well for the corruption of the child there is no restitution none is possible it saps the very vitals of society undermines its strongest offenses and delivers them over to the enemy fostered and filled by the saloon the growler looms up in the new york street boy's life baffling the most persistent efforts to reclaim him there's no escape from it no hope for the boy once his blighting grip is upon him thenceforth the logic of the slums that the world which gave him poverty and ignorance for his portion owes him a living is his creed and the career of the tough lies open before him a beaten track to be blindly followed to a bad end in the wake of the growler end of section 20 recording by ashley jane section 21 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 19 the harvest of tares the growler stood at the cradle of the tuff it bosses him through his boyhood apprenticeship in the gang and leaves him for a time only at the door of the jail that receives him to finish his training and turn him loose upon the world a thief to collect by stealth or by force the living his philosophy tells him that it owes him and will not voluntarily surrender without an equivalent in the work which he hates from the moment he almost a baby for the first time carries the growler for beer he is never out of its reach and the two soon form a partnership that lasts through life it has at least the merit such as it is of being loyal the saloon is the only thing that takes kindly to the lad honest play is interdicted in the streets the policeman arrests the ball tossers and there is no room in the backyard in one of these between two enormous tenements that swarmed with children i read this ominous notice quote all boys caught in this yard will be dealt with according to law end quote along the waterfronts in the holes of the dock rats and on the avenues the young tuff finds plenty of kindred spirits every corner has its gang not always on the best of terms with the rivals in the next block but all with a common program defiance of law and order and with a common ambition to get pinched i.e arrested so as to pose as heroes before their fellows a successful raid on the grocer's till is a good mark doing up a policeman cause for promotion the gang is an institution in new york the police deny its existence while nursing the bruises received in nightly battles with it that tax their utmost resources the newspapers chronicle its doings daily with a sensational minuteness of detail that does its share toward keeping up its evil traditions and inflaming the ambition of its members to be as bad as the worst the gang is the ripe fruit of tenement house growth it was born there endowed with a heritage of instinctive hostility to restraint by a generation that sacrificed home to freedom or left its country for its country's good the tenement received and nursed the seed the intensity of the american temper stood sponsored to the murder in what would have been the common bruiser of a more phlegmatic climb new york's tough represents the essence of reaction against the old and the new oppression nursed in the rank soil of its slums its gangs are made up of the american-born sons of english irish and german parents they reflect exactly the conditions of the tenements from which they sprang murder is as congenial to cherry street or to battle roe as quiet and order to murray hill the assimilation of europe's oppressed hordes upon which our 4th of july orators are fond of dwelling is perfect the product is our own such is the genesis of new york's gangs their history is not so easily written it would embrace the largest share of our city's criminal history for two generations back every page of it died red with blood the guillotine paris set up a century ago to avenge its wrongs was not more relentless or less discriminating than this nemesis of new york the difference is of intent murder with that was the serious purpose with ours it is the careless incident the wanton brutality of the moment bravado and robbery are the real purposes of the gangs the former prompts the attack upon the policeman the latter that upon the citizen within a single week last spring the newspapers recorded six murderous assaults on unoffending people committed by young highway men in the public streets how many more were suppressed by the police who always do their utmost to hush up such outrages in the interest of justice i shall not say there has been no lack of such occurrences since as the records of the criminal courts show in fact the past summer has seen after a period of comparative quiescence of the gangs a reawakening to renewed turbulence of the east side tribes and over and over again the reserve forces of a precinct have been called out to club them into submission it is a peculiarity of the gangs that they usually break out in spots as it were when the west side is in a state of eruption the east side gangs lie low and when the tufts along the north river are nursing broken heads at home or their revenge in sing-sing fresh trouble breaks out in the tenements east of third avenue this result is brought about by the very efforts made by the police to put down the gangs in spite of local feuds there is between them a species of ruffianly freemasonry that readily admits to full fellowship a hunted rival in the face of the common enemy the gangs built the city like a huge chain from the battery to harlem the collective name of the chain gang has been given to their scattered groups in the belief that a much closer connection exists between them than commonly supposed and the ruffian for whom the east side has become too hot has only to step across town and change his name a matter usually much easier for him than to change a shirt to find a sanctuary in which to plot fresh outrages the more notorious he is the warmer the welcome and if he has done his man he is by common consent accorded the leadership in his new field from all this it might be inferred that the new york tough is a very fierce individual of indomitable courage and naturally as bloodthirsty as a tiger on the contrary he is an errant coward his instincts of ferocity are those of the wolf rather than the tiger it is only when he hunts with a pack that he is dangerous then his inordinate vanity makes him forget all fear or caution in the desire to distinguish himself before his fellows a result of his swallowing all the flash literature and penny dreadfuls he can beg borrow or steal and there is never any lack of them and of the strongly dramatic element in his nature that is nursed by such a diet into rank and morbid growth he is a queer bundle of contradictions at all times drunk and foul-mouthed ready to cut the throat of a defenseless stranger at the toss of ascent fresh from beating his decent mother black and blue to get money for rum footnote this very mother will implore the court with tears the next morning to let her renegade son off a poor woman who claimed to be the widow of a soldier applied to the tenement house relief committee of the king's daughters last summer to be sent to some home as she had neither kith nor kin to care for her upon investigation it was found that she had four big sons all tufts who beat her regularly and took from her all the money she could earn or beg she was a respectable woman of good habits the inquiry developed and lied only to shield her rascally sons and footnote he will resent as an intolerable insult the imputation that he is no gentleman fighting his battles with the coward's weapons the brass knuckles and the deadly sandbag or with brick bats from the housetops he is still in all seriousness a lover of fair play and as likely as not when his gang has downed a policeman in a battle that has cost a dozen broken heads to be found next saving a drowning child or woman at the peril of his own life it depends on the angle at which he is seen whether he is a cowardly ruffian or a possible hero with different training and under different social conditions ready wit he has at all times and there is less meanness in his makeup than in that of the bully of the london slums but an intense love of show and applause that carries him to any length of bravado which is twin brother across the sea entirely lacks i have a very vivid recollection of seeing one of his tribe a robber and murderer before he was 19 go to the gallows unmoved all fear of the rope overcome as it seemed by the secret exultant pride of being the center of a first class show shortly to be followed by the acme of tenement life bliss a big funeral he had his reward his name is to this day a talisman among west side ruffians and is proudly born by the gang of which up till the night when he knocked out his man he was an obscure though aspiring member the crime that made mcloyne famous was the cowardly murder of an unarmed saloon keeper who came upon the gang while it was sacking his bar room at the dead of night mcgloin might easily have fled but disdained to run for a dutchman his act was a fair measure of the standard of heroism set up by his class in its conflicts with society the finish is worthy of the start the first long step in crime taken by the half-grown boy fired with ambition to earn a standing in his gang is usually to rob a lash i.e a drunken man who has strayed his way likely enough is lying asleep in a hallway he has served an apprenticeship on copper bottom wash boilers and like articles found lying around loose and capable of being converted into cash enough to give the growler a trip or two but his venture at robbery moves him up into full fellowship at once he is no longer a kid though his years may be few but a tough with the rest he may even in time he is reasonably certain of it get his name in the papers as a murderous scoundrel and have his cup of glory filled to the brim i came once upon a gang of such young rascals passing the growler after a successful raid of some sort down at the west 37th street dock and having my camera along offered to take them they were not old and wary enough to be shy of the photographer whose acquaintance they usually first make in handcuffs and the grip of a policeman or their vanity overcame their caution it is entirely in keeping with the tufts character that he should love all things to pose before a photographer and the ambition is usually the stronger the more repulsive the tough these were of that sort and accepted the offer with great readiness dragging into their group a disreputable looking sheep that roamed about with them the slaughterhouses were close at hand as one of the band the homeless ruffian of the lot who insisted on being taken with the growler to his mug took the opportunity to pour what was left in it down his throat and this caused a brief unpleasantness but otherwise the performance was a success while i was getting the camera ready i threw out a vague suggestion of cigarette pictures and it took root at once nothing would do then but that i must take the boldest spirits of the company in character one of them tumbled over against a shed as if asleep while two of the others bent over him searching his pockets with a deafness that was highly suggestive this they explained for my benefit was to show how they did the trick the rest of the band were so impressed with the importance of this exhibition that they insisted on crowding into the picture by climbing upon the shed sitting on the roof with their feet dangling over the edge and disposing themselves in every imaginable manner within view as they thought lest any reader be led into the error of supposing them to have been harmless young fellows enjoying themselves in peace let me say that within half an hour after our meeting when i called at the police station three blocks away i found there two of my friends of the montgomery guards under arrest for robbing a jewish peddler who had passed that way after i left them and trying to saw his head off as they put it quote just for fun the come along and the saw was there and we socked it to him end quote the prisoners were described to me by the police as dennis the bum and mud fully it is not always that their little diversions end as harmlessly as did this even from the standpoint of the jew who was pretty badly hurt not far from the preserves of the montgomery guards and poverty gap directly opposite the scene of the murder to which i have referred in a note explaining the picture of the cunningham family page 169 a young lad who was the only support of his aged parents was beaten to death within a few months by the alley gang for the same offense that drew down the displeasure of its neighbors upon the peddler that of being at work trying to earn an honest living i found a part of the gang asleep the next morning before young healy's death was known in a heap of straw on the floor of an unoccupied room in the same row of rear tenements in which the murdered boy's home was one of the tenants who secretly directed me to their lair assuring me that no worse scoundrels went unhung ten minutes later gave the gang to its face an official character for sobriety and inoffensiveness that very nearly startled me into an unguarded rebuke of his duplicity i caught his eye in time and held my peace the man was simply trying to protect his own home while giving such aid as he safely could toward bringing the murderous ruffians to justice the incident shows to what extent a neighborhood may be terrorized by a determined gang of these reckless tufts in poverty gap there were still a few decent people left when it comes to hell's kitchen or to its computers at the other end of 39th street over by the east river and further down first avenue in the village the rag gang and its allies have no need of fearing treachery in their periodical battles with the police the entire neighborhood takes a hand on these occasions the women in the front rank partly from sheer love of the fun but chiefly because husbands brothers and sweethearts are in the fight to a man and need their help chimney tops form the staple of ammunition then and stacks of loose brick and paving stones carefully hoarded in upper rooms as a prudent provision against emergencies regular patrol posts are established by the police on the housetops in times of trouble in these localities but even then they do not escape whole skinned if indeed with their lives neither does the gang the policeman knows of but one cure for the tough the club and he lays it on without stint whenever and wherever he has the chance knowing right well that if caught at a disadvantage he will get his outlay back with interest words are worse than wasted in the gang districts it is a blow at sight and the tough thus accosted never stops to ask questions unless he is wanted for some signal outrage the policeman rarely bothers with arresting him he can point out half a dozen at sight against whom indictments are pending by the basketful but whom no jail ever held many hours they only serve to make him more reckless for he knows that the political backing that has saved him in the past can do it again it is a commodity that is only exchangeable for value received and it is not hard to imagine what sort of value is in demand the saloon in 99 cases out of a hundred stands behind the bargain for these reasons as well as because he knows from frequent experience his own way to be the best the policeman lets the gangs alone except when they come within reach of his long night stick they have their club rooms where they meet generally in a tenement sometimes under a pier or a dump to carouse play cards and plan their raids their fences who dispose of the stolen property when the necessity presents itself for a descent upon the gang after some particularly fragrant outrage the police have a task on hand that is not of the easiest the gangs like foxes have more than one hole to their dens in some localities where the interior of a block is filled with rear tenements often set at all sorts of odd angles surprise alone is practicable pursuit through the winding ways and passages is impossible the young thieves know them all by heart they have their runaways over roofs and fences which no one else could find their lair is generally selected with special reference to its possibilities of escape once pitched upon its occupation by the gang with its ear mark of nightly symposiums can rackets in the slang of the street is the signal for a rapid deterioration of the tenement if that is possible relief is only to be had by ousting the intruders an instance came under my notice in which valuable property had been well nigh ruined by being made the thoroughfare of thieves by night and by day they had chosen it because of a passage that led through the block by way of several connecting halls and yards the place came soon to be known as murderer's alley complaint was made to the board of health as a last resort of the condition of the property the practical inspector who was sent to report upon it suggested to the owner that he built a brick wall in a place where it would shut off communication between the streets and he took the advice within the brief space of a few months the house changed character entirely and became as decent as it had been before the convenient runaway was discovered this was in the sixth ward where the infamous wyo gang until a few years ago absorbed the worst depravity of the bend and what is left of the five points the gang was finally broken up when its leader was hanged for murder after a life of uninterrupted and unavenged crimes the recital of which made his father confessor turn pale listening in the shadow of the scaffold the many years of labor as chaplain of the tombs had hardened him to such rehearsals the great yo had been a power in the ward handy at carrying elections for the party or faction that happened to stand in need of his services and was willing to pay for them in money or in kind other gangs have sprung up since with as high ambition and a fair prospect about doing their predecessor the conditions that bred it still exist practically unchanged inspector burns is authority for the statement that throughout the city the young tough has more ability and nerve than the thief whose example he successfully emulates he begins earlier too speaking of the increase of the native element among criminal prisoners exhibited in the census returns of the last 30 years footnote the percentage of foreign-born prisoners in 1850 as compared with that of natives was more than five times that of native prisoners now 1880 it is less than double american prisons in the 10th census end footnote the reverend fred h wine says their youth is a very striking fact had he confined his observations to the police courts of new york he might have emphasized that remark and found an explanation of the discovery that the ratio of prisoners in cities is two and one-quarter times as great as in the country at large a computation that takes no account of the reformatories for juvenile delinquents or the exhibit would have been still more striking of the 82 200 persons arrested by the police in 1889 10 505 were under 20 years old the last report of the society of the prevention of cruelty to children enumerates as a few typical cases 18 professional cracks men between 9 and 15 years old who had been caught with burglars tools were in the act of robbery four of them hardly yet in long trousers had held up a wayfarer in the public street and robbed him of 73 dollars one aged 16 was the leader of a noted gang of young robbers in 49th street he committed murder for which he is now serving a term of 19 years in state prison four of the 18 were girls and quite as bad as the worst in a few years they would have been living with the tufts of their choice without the ceremony of marriage egging them on by their pride in their lawless achievements and fighting side by side with them in their encounters with the cops the exploits of the paradise park gang in the way of highway robbery showed last summer that the embers of the scattered wyo gang upon the wreck of which it grew were smoldering still the hanging of driscoll broke up the wyos because they were a comparatively small band and with incomparable master spirit gone were unable to resist the angry rush of public indignation that followed the crowning outrage this is the history of the passing away of famous gangs from time to time the passing is more apparent than real however some other daring leader gathers the scattered elements about him soon and the war on society is resumed a bare enumeration of the names of the best known gangs would occupy pages of this book the rock gang the rag gang the stable gang and the short tail gang down about the hook have all achieved bad eminence along with scores of others that have not appeared so frequently in the newspapers by day they loaf in the corner grogeries on their beat at night they plunder the stores along the avenues or lie in wait at the river for unsteady feet straying their way the man who is sober and minds his own business they seldom molest unless he be a stranger inquiring his way or a policeman and the gang 20 against the one the tipsy wayfarer is their chosen victim and they seldom have to look for him long one is not far to go to the river from any point in new york the man who does not know where he is going is sure to reach it sooner or later should he foolishly resist or make an outcry dead men tell no tales floaters come ashore every now and then with pockets turned inside out not always evidence of the post-mortem inspection by doc rats police patrol the rivers as well as the shore on constant lookout for these but seldom catch up with them if overtaken after a race during which shots are often exchanged from the boats the thieves have an easy way of escaping and at the same time destroying the evidence against them they simply upset the boat they swim one and all like real rats the lost plunder can be recovered at leisure the next day by diving or grappling the loss of the boat counts for little another is stolen and the gang is ready for business again the fiction of a social club which most of the gangs keep up helps them to a pretext for blackmailing the politicians and the storekeepers in their bailiwick at the annual seasons of their picnic or ball the thieves ball is as well known and recognized an institution on the east side as the charity ball in a different social stratum although it does not go by that name in print at least indeed the last thing a new york tough will admit is that he is a thief he dignifies his calling with the pretense of gambling he does not steal he wins your money on your watch and on the police returns he is a speculator if when he passes around the hat for voluntary contributions any storekeeper should have the temerity to refuse to chip in he may look for a visit from the gang on the first dark night and account himself lucky if his place escapes being altogether wrecked the hell's kitchen gang and the rag gang have both distinguished themselves within recent times by blowing up objectionable stores with stolen gunpowder but if no such episode mar the celebration the excursion comes off and is the occasion for a series of drunken fights that is likely as not end in murder no season has passed within my memory that has not seen the police reserves called out to receive some howling pandemonium returning from a picnic grove on the hudson or on the sound at least one peaceful community up the river that had borne with this nuisance until patience had ceased to be a virtue received a boatload of such picnickers in a style befitting the occasion and the cargo the outraged citizens planted a howitzer on the deck and bade the party land at their peril with a loaded gun pointed dead at them the furious tufts gave up and the piece was not broken on the hudson that day at least not ashore it is good cause for congratulation that the worst of all forms of recreation popular among the city tufts the moonlight picnic has been effectually discouraged its opportunities for disgraceful revelry and immorality were unrivaled anywhere in spite of influence and protection the tough reaches eventually the end of his rope occasionally not too often there is a noose on it if not the world that owes him a living according to his creed will insist on his earning it on the safe side of a prison wall a few a very few have been clubbed into an approach to righteousness from the police standpoint the condemned tough goes up to serve his bit or couple of stretches followed by the applause of his gang in the prison he meets older thieves than himself and sits at their feet listening with respectful admiration to their accounts of the great things that sent them before he returns with the brand of the jail upon him to encounter the hero worship of his old associates as an offset to the cold shoulder given him by all the rest of the world even if he is willing to work disgusted with the restraint and hard labor of prison life and in the majority of cases that thought is probably uppermost in his mind no one will have him around if with the assistance of inspector burns who was a philanthropist in his own practical way he secures a job he is discharged on the slightest provocation and for the most trifling fault very soon he sinks back into his old surroundings to rise no more until he is lost to view in the queer mysterious way in which thieves and fallen women disappear no one can tell how in the ranks of criminals he never rises above that of the laborer the small thief or burglar or general crook who blindly does the work planned for him by others and runs the biggest risk for the poorest pay it cannot be said that the growler brought him luck or its friendship fortune and yet if his misdeeds have helped to make manifest that all effort to reclaim his kind must begin with the conditions of life against which his very existence is a protest even the tough has not lived in vain this measure of credit at least should be accorded him that with or without his good will he has been a factor in urging on the battle against the slums that bred him it is a fight in which eternal vigilance is truly the price of liberty and the preservation of society end of section 21 recording by guerrero section 22 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org how the other half lives by jacob reese the working girls of new york of the harvest of tares sown in iniquity and reaped in wrath the police returns tell the story the pen that wrote the song of the shirt is needed to tell of the sad and toil worn lives of new york's working women the cry echoes by night and by day through its tenements o god that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap six months have not passed since a great public meeting in this city the working women's society reported quote it is a known fact that men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist but women's wages have no limit since the paths of shame are always open to her it is simply impossible for any woman to live without assistance on the low salary a sales woman earns without depriving herself of necessities it is inevitable that they must in many instances resort to evil end quote it was only a few brief weeks before that verdict was uttered that the community was shocked by the story of a gentle and refined woman who left in direst poverty to earn her own living alone among strangers threw herself from her attic window preferring death to dishonor quote i would have done any honest work even to scrubbing end quote she wrote drenched and starving after a vain search for work in a driving storm she had tramped the streets for weeks on her weary errand and the only living wages that were offered her were the wages of sin the ink was not dry upon her letter before a woman in an east side tenement wrote down her reason for self-murder quote weakness sleeplessness and yet obliged to work my strength fails me seeing at my coffin where does the soul find a home and rest end quote her story may be found as one of two typical cases of despair in one little church community in the city mission society's monthly for last february it is a story that has many parallels in the experience of every missionary every police reporter and every family doctor whose practice is among the poor it is estimated that at least 150 000 women and girls earn their own living in new york but there is reason to believe that this estimate falls far short of the truth when sufficient account is taken of the large number who are not wholly dependent upon their own labor while contributing by it to the family's earnings these alone constitute a large class of the women wage earners and it is characteristic of the situation that the very fact that some need to starve on their wages condemns the rest to that fate the pay they are willing to accept all have to take what the everlasting law of supply and demand that serves as such a convenient gag for public indignation has to do with it one learns from observation all along the road of inquiry into these real women's wrongs to take the case of the saleswoman for illustration the investigation of the working women's society disclosed the fact that wages averaging from two dollars to four dollars fifty cents a week were reduced by excessive fines quote the employer is placing a value upon time lost that is not given to services rendered end quote a little girl who received two dollars a week made cash sales amounting to dollars in a single day while the receipts of a fifteen dollar male clerk in the same department footed up only 125 dollars yet for some trivial mistake the girl was fined 60 cents out of her two dollars the practice prevailed in some stores of dividing the fines between the superintendent and the timekeeper at the end of the year in one instance they amounted to three thousand dollars and quote the superintendent was heard to charge the timekeeper with not being strict enough in his duties end quote one of the causes for fine in a certain large store was sitting down the law requiring seats for saleswomen generally ignored was obeyed faithfully in this establishment the seats were there but the girls were fined when found using them cash girls receiving 1.75 cents a week for work that at certain seasons lengthened their day to 16 hours were sometimes required to pay for their aprons a common cause for discharge from stores in which on account of the oppressive heat and lack of ventilation quote girls fainted day after day and came out looking like corpses end quote was too long service no other fault was found with the discharged sales women than that they had been long enough in the employee of the firm to justly expect an increase of salary the reason was even given with brutal frankness in some instances these facts give a slight idea of the hardship and the poor pay of a business that notoriously absorbs child labor the girls are sent to the store before they have fairly entered their teens because the money they can earn there is needed for the support of the family if the boys will not work if the street tempts them from home among the girls at least there must be no drones to keep their places they are told to lie about their age and to say that they are over 14. the precaution is usually superfluous the women's investigating committee found the majority of the children employed in the stores to be underage but heard only in a single instance of the truant officer's calling in that case they came once a year and sent the youngest children home but in a month's time they were all back in their places and were not again disturbed when it comes to the factories where hard bodily labor is added to long hours stifling rooms and starvation wages matters are even worse the legislature has passed laws to prevent the employment of children as it has forbidden saloon keepers to sell them beer and it has provided means of enforcing its mandate so efficient that the very number of factories in new york is guessed at as in the neighborhood of twelve thousand up till this summer a single inspector was charged with the duty of keeping the run of them all and of seeing to it that the law was respected by the owners 60 cents is put as the average day's earning of the 150 000 but into this computation enters the stylish cashiers two dollars a day as well as the 30 cents of the poor little girl who pulls threads in an east side factory and if anything the average is probably too high such as it is however it represents board rent clothing and pleasure to this army of workers here is the case of a woman employed in the manufacturing department of a broadway house it stands for a hundred like her own she averages three dollars a week pays one dollar fifty cents for her room for breakfast she has a cup of coffee lunch she cannot afford one meal a day is her allowance this woman is young she is pretty she has the world before her is it anything less than a miracle if she is guilty of nothing worse than the quote early and improvident marriage end quote against which moralists exclaim as one of the prolific causes of the distress of the poor almost any door might seem to offer welcome escape from such slavery as this quote i feel so much healthier since i got three square meals a day end quote set a lodger in one of the girls homes two young sewing girls came in seeking domestic service so that they might get enough to eat they had been only half fed for some time and starvation had driven them to the one door at which the pride of the american-born girl will not permit her to knock though poverty be the price of her independence the tenement and the competition of public institutions and farmers wives and daughters have done the tyrant shirt to death but they have not bettered the lot of the needle women the sweater of the east side has appropriated the flannel shirt he turns him out today at 45 cents a dozen paying his jewish workers from 20 to 35 cents one of these testified before the state board of arbitration during the shirtmakers strike that she worked 11 hours in the shop and four at home and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week another stated that she worked from four o'clock in the morning to 11 at night these girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages the white shirt has gone to the public and private institutions that shelter large number of young girls and to the country there are not half as many shirt makers in new york today as only a few years ago and some of the largest firms have closed their city shops the same is true of the manufacturers of underwear one large broadway firm has nearly all its work done by farmers girls in maine who think themselves well off if they can earn two or three dollars a week to pay for a sunday silk or the wedding outfit little dreaming of the part they are playing and starving their city sisters literally they sew quote with double thread a shroud as well as a shirt end quote their pin money sets the rate of wages for thousands of poor sewing girls in new york the average earnings of the worker on underwear today do not exceed the three dollars which her competitor among the eastern hills is willing to accept as the price of her play the shirtmaker's pay is better only because the very finest custom work is all there is left for her to do calico wrappers at a dollar and a half a dozen the very expert sewers able to make from eight to ten to common run five or six neckties at from 25 to 75 cents a dozen with a dozen as a good day's work are specimens of women's wages and yet people persist in wondering at the poor quality of work done in the tenements italian cheap labor has come of late also to possess this poor field with a sweater in its train there is scarce a branch of woman's work outside the home in which wages long since at low water mark have not fallen to the point of actual starvation a case was brought to my notice recently by a woman doctor whose heart as well as her life work is with the poor of a widow with two little children she found at work in an east side attic making paper bags her father she told the doctor had made good wages at it but she received only 5 cents for 600 of the little three cornered bags and her fingers had to be very swift and handle the paste brush very deftly to bring her earnings up to 25 and 30 cents a day she paid four dollars a month for her room the rest went to buy food for herself and the children the physician's purse rather than her skill had healing for their complaint i have aimed to set down a few drive facts merely they carry their own comment back of the shop with its weary grinding toil the home in the tenement of which it was said in a report of the state labor bureau quote decency and womanly reserve cannot be maintained there what wonder so many fall away from virtue end quote of the outlook what last christmas eve my business took me to an obscure street among the west side tenements an old woman had just fallen on the doorstep stricken with paralysis the doctor said she would never again move her right hand or foot the whole side was dead by her bedside in their cheerless room sat the patient's aged sister a hopeless in dumb despair forty years ago the sisters had come five in number then with their mother from the north of ireland to make their home and earn a living among strangers they were lace embroiderers and found work easily at good wages all the rest had died as the years went by the two remained and firmly resolved to lead an honest life worked on the wages fell and fell as age and toil stiffened their once nimble fingers and dimmed their sight then one of them dropped out her hands palsied and her courage gone still the other toiled on resting neither by night nor by day that the sister might not want now that she too had been stricken as she was going to the store for the work that was to keep them through the holidays the battle was over at last there was before them starvation or the poor house and the proud spirits of the sisters helpless now quailed at the outlook these were old with life behind them for them nothing was left but to sit in the shadow and wait but of the thousands who are traveling the road they trod to the end with a hot blood of youth in their veins with a love of life and of the beautiful world to which not even 60 cents a day can shut their eyes who is to blame if their feet find the paths of shame that are always open to them the very paths that they have effaced the saving limit and to which it is declared to be quote inevitable that they must in many instances resort and quote let the moralist answer let the wise economist apply his rule of supply and demand and let the answer be heard in this city of a thousand charities where justice goes begging to the everlasting credit of new york's working girl let it be said rough though her road may be all but hopeless her battle with life only in the rarest instances does she go astray as a class she is brave virtuous and true new york's army of profligate women is not as in some foreign countries recruited from her ranks she is as plucky as she is proud the american girls never whimper became a proverb long ago and she accepts her lot uncomplainingly doing the best she can and holding her cherished independence cheap at the cost of a meal or of half her daily ration if need be the home in the tenement and the traditions of her childhood have neither trained her to luxury nor predisposed her in favor of domestic labor in preference to the shop so to the world she presents a cheerful uncomplaining front that sometimes deceives it her courage will not be without its reward slowly as the conviction is thrust upon society that woman's work must enter more and more into its planning a better day is dawning the organization of working girls clubs unions and societies with a community of interest despite the obstacles to such a movement bears testimony to it as to the devotion of the unselfish women who have made their poorer sisters cause their own and will yet ring from an unfair where the justice too long denied her end of section 22 recording by guerrero section 23 of how the other half lives this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by denny sayers how the other half lives by jacob reese chapter 21 popperism in the tenements the reader who has followed with me the fate of the other half thus far may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight years 135 595 families in new york were registered as asking or receiving charity perhaps however the intelligence will rouse him that for five years passed one person in every ten who died in the city was buried in the potter's field these facts tell a terrible story the first means that in a population of a million and a half very nearly if not quite half a million persons were driven or chose to beg for food or to accept it in charity at some period of the eight years if not during the whole of it there is no mistake about these figures they are drawn from the records of the charity organization society and represent the time during which it has been in existence it is not even pretended that the record is complete to be well within the limits the society's statisticians allow only three and a half to the family instead of the four and a half that are accepted as the standard of calculations which deal with new york's population as a whole they estimate upon the basis of their everyday experience that allowing for those who have died moved away or become for the time being at least self-supporting 85 of the registry are still within or lingering upon the borders of dependence precisely how the case stands with this great horde of the indigent is shown by a classification of 5169 cases that were investigated by the society in one year this was the way it turned out 327 worthy of continuous relief or 6.4 percent 1200 worthy of temporary relief or 24.4 2698 in need of work rather than relief or 52.2 875 unworthy of relief or 17 that is nearly six and a half percent of all were utterly helpless orphans cripples or the very aged nearly one-fourth needed just a lift to start them on the road to independence or to permanent pauperism according to the wisdom with which the lever was applied more than half were destitute because they had no work and were unable to find any and one-sixth were frauds professional beggars training their children to follow in their footsteps a veritable tribe of ishmael tightening its grip on society as the years pass until society shall summon up pluck to say with paul if any man will not work neither shall he eat and stick to it it is worthy of note that almost precisely the same results followed a similar investigation in boston there were a few more helpless cases of the sort true charity accounts it again to care for but the proportion of a given lot that was crippled for want of work or unworthy was exactly the same as in this city the bankrupt in hope in courage in purse and in purpose are not peculiar to new york they are found the world over but we have our full share if further proof were wanted it is found in the prevalence of proper burials the potter's field stands ever for utter hopeless surrender the last the poor will let go however miserable their lot in life is the hope of a decent burial but for the five years ending with 1888 the average of burials in the potter's field has been 10.03 of all in 1889 it was 9.64 in that year the proportion of the total mortality of those who died in hospitals institutions and in the alms house was as one in five the one hundred thirty five thousand five hundred ninety five families inhabited no fewer than thirty one thousand different tenements i say tenements advisedly though the society calls them buildings because at least 99 percent were found in the big barracks the rest in shanties scattered here and there and now and then a fraud or an exceptional case of distress in a dwelling house of better class here undoubtedly allowance must be made for the constant moving about of those who live on charity which enables one active beggar to blacklist a dozen houses in the year still the great mass of the tenements are shown to be harboring alms seekers they might almost safely harbor the smallpox that scourge is not more contagious than the alm seekers complaint these are houses that have been corrupted through and through by this pestilence until their very atmosphere breathes beggary more than 120 proper families have been reported from time to time as living in one such tenement the truth is that popperism grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in a garden plot a moral distemper like crime it finds there its most fertile soil all the surroundings of tenement house life favor its growth and where once it has taken root it is harder to dislodge than the most virulent of physical diseases the thief is infinitely easier to deal with than the pauper because the very fact of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man granted that it is bad there is still something a possible handle by which to catch him to the pauper there is none he is as hopeless as his own poverty i speak of the pauper not of the honestly poor there is a sharp line between the two but a thwart it stands the tenement all the time blurring and blotting it out quote it all comes down to the character in the end close quote was the verdict of a philanthropist whose life has been spent wrestling with this weary problem and so it comes down to the tenement the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere quote in nine years said a wise and charitable physician sadly to me i have known of but a single case of permanent improvement in a poor tenement family close quote i have known of some whose experience extending over an even longer stretch was little better the beggar follows the tufts rule of life that the world owes him a living but his scheme of collecting it stops short of violence he has not the pluck to rob even a drunken man his highest flights take in at most an unguarded clothesline or a little child sent to buy bread or beer with the pennies he clutches tightly as he skips along even then he prefers to attain his end by stratagem rather than by force though occasionally when the coast is clear he rises to the height of the bully the way he finds of collecting under the cloak of undeserved poverty are numberless and often reflect on the man's ingenuity if not on the man himself i remember the shock with which my first experience with his kind her kind rather in this case the beggar was a woman came home to me on the way to and from the office i had been giving charity regularly as i finally believed to an old woman who sat in the chatham square with the baby done up in a bundle of rags moaning piteously in sunshine and rain please help the poor it was the baby i pitied and thought i was doing my little to help until one night i was just in time to rescue it from rolling out of her lap and found the bundle i had been wasting my pennies upon just rags and nothing more and the old hag dead drunk since then i have encountered bogus babies borrowed babies and drugged babies in the streets and fought shy of them all most of them i'm glad to say have been banished from the streets since but they are still occasionally to be found it was only last winter that the officers of the society for the prevention of cruelty to children arrested an italian woman who was begging along madison avenue with the poor little wreck of a girl whose rags and pinched face were calculated to tug hard at the first strings of a miser over five dollars in nickels and pennies were taken from the woman's pockets and when her story of poverty and hunger was investigated at the family's home in a baxter street tenement bank books turned up that showed the missonis to be regular proper capitalists able to draw their check for three thousand dollars had they been so disposed the woman was fined two hundred and fifty dollars a worse punishment undoubtedly than to have sent her to prison for the rest of her natural life her class has unhappily representatives in new york that have not yet been brought to grief nothing short of making street begging a crime has availed to clear our city of this pest to an appreciable extent by how much of an effort this result has been accomplished may be gleaned from the fact that the charity organization society alone in five years caused the taking up of 2594 street beggars and the arrest and conviction of 1474 persistent offenders last year it dealt with 612 per ambulating mendicans the police report only 19 arrests for begging during the entire year of 1889 but the real facts of the case are found under the heading vagrancy in all 2000 633 persons were charged with this offense 947 of them women a goodly portion of these latter came from the low grogeries of the tenth ward where a peculiar variety of the female trapped beggar is at home the scrub the scrub is one degree perhaps above the average popper in this that she is willing to work at least one day in the week generally the jewish sabbath the orthodox jew can do no work of any sort from friday evening till sunset on saturday and this interim the scrub fills out in ludlow street the pittance she receives for this vicarious sacrifice of herself upon the altar of the ancient faith buys her run for at least two days of the week at one of the neighborhood morgues she lives through the other four by begging there are distilleries in juton or just across its borders that depend almost wholly on her custom recently when one in hester street was raided because the neighbors had complained of the boisterous hilarity of the hags over their beer 32 aged scrubs were marched off to the station house it is curious to find preconceived notions quite upset in a review of the nationalities that go to make up this squad of street beggars the irish had the list with 15 and the native american is only a little way behind with 12 while the italian who in his own country turns beggary into a fine art has less than two percent eight percent were germans the relative prevalence of the races in our population does not account for the showing various causes operate no doubt to produce it chief among them is i think the tenement itself it has no power to corrupt the italian who comes here in almost every instance to work no beggar would ever immigrate from anywhere else unless forced to do so he is distinctly on its lowest level from the start with the irishman the case is different the tenement especially its lowest type appears to possess a peculiar affinity for the worse nature of the celt to whose best and strongest instincts it does violence and soonest and most thoroughly corrupts him the native 12 percent represent the result of this process the hereditary beggar of the second or third generation in the slums the blind beggar alone is winked at in new york streets because the authorities do not know what else to do with him there is no provision for him anywhere after he is old enough to strike out for himself the annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide until the city affords him some systematic way of earning his living by work as philadelphia has done for instance to banish him from the street would be tantamount to sentencing him to death by starvation so he possesses it in peace that is if he is blind in good earnest and begs without encumbrance professional mendicancy does not hesitate to make use of the greatest of human afflictions as a pretense for enlisting the sympathy upon which it thrives many new yorkers will remember the french schoolmaster who was blinded by a shell at the siege of paris but miraculously recovered his sight when arrested and deprived of his children by the officers of mr jerry's society when last heard of he kept a museum in hartford and acted the overseer with financial success his sign with its pitiful tale that was a familiar sight in our streets for years and earned for him the capital upon which he started his business might have found a place among the curiosities exhibited there had it not been kept in a different sort of museum here as a memento of his rascality there was another of his tribe a woman who begged for years with a deformed child in her arms which she was found to have hired at an alms house in genoa for 15 francs a month it was a good investment for she proved to be possessed of a comfortable fortune sometime before that the society for the prevention of cruelty to children that found her out had broken up the dreadful padrony system a real slave trade in italian children who were bought of poor parents across the sea and made to beg their way on foot through france to the port once they were shipped to this city to be beaten and starved here by their cruel masters and sent out to beg often after merciless mutilation to make them take better with a pitying public but after all the tenement offers a better chance of fraud on impulsive but thoughtless charity than all the wretchedness of the street and with fewer wrists to the tender-hearted and unwary it is in itself the strongest plea for help when such a cry goes up as it was heard recently from a mont street den where the family of a sick husband a despairing mother and half a dozen children in rags and dirt were destitute of the first necessities of life it is not to be wondered at that a stream of gold comes pouring in to relieve it happens too often as in that case that a little critical inquiry or reference to the black list of the charity organization society justly dreaded only by the frauds discovers the sickness to stand for laziness and the destitution to be the family's stock in trade and the community receives a shock that for once is downright wholesome if it imposes a check on an undiscriminated charity that is worse than none at all the case referred to furnished and apt illustration of how thoroughly corrupting popperism is in such a setting the tenement woke up early to the gold mine that was being worked under its roof and before the day was three hours old the stream of callers who responded to the newspaper appeal found the alley blocked by a couple of tufts who exacted toll of a silver quarter from each tearful sympathizer with the misery in the attic a volume might be written about the tricks of the professional beggar and the uses to which he turns the tenement in his trade the boston widow whose husband turned up alive and well after she had buried him 17 times with tears and lamentation and made the public pay for the weekly funerals is not without representatives in new york the gentleman is a familiar type from our streets and the once respectable methodist who patronized all the revivals in town with his profitable story of repentance only to fall from grace into the saloon door nearest the church after the service was over merely transferred the scene of his operations from the tenement to the church as the proper setting for his specialty there is enough of real suffering in the homes of the poor to make one wish that there were some effective way of enforcing paul's plan of starving the drones into the paths of self-support no work nothing to eat the message came from one of the health department's summer doctors last july to the king's daughter's tenement house committee that a family with a sick child was absolutely famishing in an uptown tenement the address was not given the doctor had forgotten to write it down and before he could be found and a visitor sent to the house the baby was dead and the mother had gone mad the nurse found the father who was an honest laborer long out of work packing the little corpse in an orange box partly filled with straw that he might take it to the morgue for proper burial there was absolutely not a crust to eat in the house and the other children were crying for food the great immediate need in that case as in more than half of all according to the record was work and living wages alms do not meet the emergency at all they frequently aggravate it degrading and pauperizing where true help should aim at raising the sufferer to self-respect and self-dependence the experience of the charity organization society in raising in eight years four thousand five hundred families out of the rut of properism into proud if modest independence without alms but by a system of friendly visitation and the work of the society for improving the condition of the poor and kindred organizations along the same line shows what can be done by well-directed effort it is estimated that new york spends in public and private charity every year around 8 million dollars a small part of this sum intelligently invested in a great labor bureau that would bring the seeker of work and the one with work to give together under auspices offering some degree of mutual security would certainly repay the amount of the investment in the saving a much capital now worse than wasted and would be prolific of the best results the ultimate and greatest need however the real remedy is to remove the cause the tenement that was built for a class of whom nothing was expected and which has come fully up to the expectation tenement house reform holds the key to the problem of popperism in the city we can never get rid of either the tenement or the pauper the two will always exist together in new york but by reforming the one we can do more toward exterminating the other than can be done by all other means together that have yet been invented or ever will be end of section 23.