Part 6

Poverty Gap was one of the black spots that stand out as I look back over twenty-five years of wrestling with the slum. I have seldom seen a more hopeless place. It was there that “the gang” murdered the one “good boy” there was in the block, for the offense of earning an honest living. Yet the hope there _was_ in it all, was with these very children. There came a kindergarten that way and opened our eyes. That is one of the functions of the kindergarten, you know. It is the great miracle-worker of our day; it has power to move mountains of indifference, of sloth and wretchedness, of human inefficiency and despair, for it is backed by the eternal forces of faith and hope and love, however much they may look to you or to me like soap and water and toilsome effort. The kindergarten came that way and, when we saw the Gap through its eyes, we were ashamed and set about tearing it down. It was then that an inspiration came to a good woman who had happened upon a pile of sand in the neighborhood. She had it brought in and put upon the site of the old Gap, with wheelbarrows and pails and shovels for the boys and swings for the girls, and the children on the West-side got their first playground. “The gang” went out of business that summer and the Gap that had been violent became orderly.

Its steam had been penned up before and that is bad. What would you think of a yard as wide as an ordinary bedroom, with signs in it forbidding the boys to play ball there and giving warning that “all boys caught in this yard will be delt with accordin’ to law”? I can show you such yards, and wherever they are, gang violence breaks out, for the street is the only alternative. There are no homes in such slums as those.

I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements and there I trod upon a baby. It is the regular means of introduction to a tenement house baby in the old dark houses, but I never have been able to get used to it. I went off and got my camera and photographed that baby standing with its back against the public sink in a pool of filth that overflowed on the floor. I do not marvel much at the showing of the Gilder Tenement House Committee that one in five of the children in the rear tenements into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house. It seemed strange, rather, that any survived. But they do, and as soon as they are able, they take to the street, which is thenceforward their training ground.

Some years ago, the Gerry Society picked up two boys that “lived nowhere,” so they said. (See illustration facing page 136.) They were brothers with a drunken father and no mother. Some one was curious enough to try to find out their moral and religious status. The older of the two had heard of the Lord’s Prayer as something that it was lucky to say over at night before one went to sleep, so as to have good luck the next day pitching pennies; his younger brother knew the name of the Saviour as something to swear by. These were our home heathen, growing up in the Christian city of New York. That is one way of looking at it. There is another for which we have to wait only a few years: then these lads come to the polls with their ballots, and there develops the citizen equality over which their father puzzled in his air-shaft. Ask yourself the question again, is it safe?

These boys belong to the street and they learn its lessons: gambling, pilfering, and by and by robbery. A little further along on the road they are traveling are the Rogues’ Gallery and the jail. At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen they are thieves, little and big, house-breakers, and highway robbers. One year when I kept a census of the child criminals I had to deal with in Mulberry Street, I found them beginning their careers at four and six years. The very little ones were useful to their elders to “crawl through a hole” into the place that was to be robbed.

Was that good sense? No, it was not. That came later when a man came into Mulberry Street, where “the gang” was beginning to make serious trouble, and wanted to know if the boys would join a club he was forming. Would they join, those boys? They fell over one another to get there. The whole block joined with a rush. That was the good sense of the new day that lets the boys in, instead of forever warning them off from everything and everywhere. His club was a marching club (see illustration facing page 138) and with their wooden guns on their shoulders, that man could lead those boys where and how far he chose; they would go with him wherever he went. Just remember that it is one of two things, a gun on the shoulder or stripes on the back, where the home interposes no barrier. It is because of the killing off of that home that our jails are filled with young men from the big cities.

From alleys where “the sunlight never enters” comes that growing procession that fills our prisons; where the sunlight does not enter, deeds of darkness naturally belong. When at last we fully understood this, we began to tear down the worst of the rookeries that had murdered the home. Nearly the worst of them all was the Mott Street barracks. There were some six hundred Italians living in that row when it was at its worst, and it was one of the few places I have known in which the rent actually rose as you went up-stairs. There was a little sunlight up there, but only darkness and dirt down below. The yard between the front and rear tenement—think of calling such a crack a yard—was five feet, ten inches wide. I remember that well. Theodore Roosevelt held one end of the tape line when we measured it, and I the other. By the time we had got up indignation enough to settle with the barracks, he had come into the municipal government of our city and made things go. The showing upon which we arraigned the barracks was, that during a season when we watched it, one-third of the babies there had died, killed by the house. So we tore down the rear tenements, and when we did we found that the mortgage on the property, with its awful baby death rate, was held by a cemetery corporation!

To me the barracks seemed as nearly hell on earth as could be; but let me give you a glimpse of the veritable hell here below. Whatever you may think of the one hereafter, you need not doubt its existence here. One night, when I went through one of the worst dives I ever knew, my camera caught and held this scene that I set before you. (See illustration facing page 140.) When I look upon that unhappy girl’s face, I think that the grace of God can reach that “lost woman” in her sins; but what about the man who made a profit on the slum that gave her up to the street? She _did not sleep home_, that was where the mischief began. What about us who let that slum grow unchallenged, and who took from those in it, with the home on earth the hope of heaven? _We_ need the grace of God, if any one does. That is our fight—for the home in which the girl may sleep securely, in which she will want to stay; thank God! we are winning it at last.

For see: these tenements have homes in them. (See illustration facing page 142.) They were built by the City and Suburban Homes Company with money subscribed by Christian men and women. Foremost among them all that good woman to whom we owe so much in this new day of ours, the wife of Bishop Potter. They are called the Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, and stand in West 68th and 69th Streets, in that neighborhood where the “social ideals minted themselves upon the lives of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The plan of the City and Suburban Homes Company is that of philanthropy and five per cent. They limit their income to five per cent., and have so far received four. Their tenants are happy, as well they may be, and the owners have good cause to be the same. They have done us a very notable service in their work; since those houses were built, others have been added and provision made for some fifteen or sixteen hundred families. Four per cent. on such an investment is enough to settle it in the sight of us all that real homes _can_ be provided for the multitude even on Manhattan Island, and therefore must be; also, that the slum landlord must stop building houses that kill his tenants; that murder is murder, whether it is done with an axe or with a house.

I should like to tell you of that godless municipal “charity” which herded old thieves and old tramps and young homeless lads, who were adrift in the great city, in those vile dens called police station lodging rooms, and of the war upon it that was won at last; but I have written so much and so often about it, and about my own experience in one of those dens, where I was beaten and robbed, and where my little dog was killed, when I was a homeless boy myself, and I have not the time to repeat it. You have fought that same fight in Philadelphia and won it, too. Our battle went dead against us, until that man with honest purpose came among us and set things right. I shall never forget the night he and I spent in touring the police stations together until we brought up in the Church Street station, where the thing happened of which I have just spoken. Standing there, I told him my story and he cried angrily, “Did they do that to you? I’ll smash them to-morrow.” And he did. And so that foul disgrace came to an end. Thank God for Theodore Roosevelt!

There remained the awful nuisance of the cheap lodging houses in the Bowery, where thieves recruit their broken-up gangs among the young men who are stranded there, coming from everywhere out in the country. They have a standing army of lodgers, from thirteen to sixteen thousand homeless men and lads; and we knew not what to do with them, until there arose among us a philanthropist who gave of his fortune to solve this problem also. He gave a million or more, and gave so wisely that his work, the great Mills houses, have become one of the real benefactions of to-day. There are two of them and they shelter a constant population of twenty-six hundred lodgers. They are so well managed that they return a profit, even a very good profit, upon the investment. So they are free from the taint of alms-giving and the man who lives in them can and does keep his self-respect. Mr. D. O. Mills deserves a place among the real benefactors of our day.

I am to speak to you next of the to-morrow. Here it sits in a wagon, two of the children of the poor whose only playground is their father’s truck. (See illustration facing page 144.) “Was” I should have said. I took their picture before the day of Colonel Waring, and when they stepped out of the truck they landed in a street where the mud was over half a foot in depth. You never saw anything like it, and pray that you never may. We solaced ourselves with the belief in those days that no one could clean our streets, that it was an impossible job. That was the day of the man who “can’t,” or rather who won’t. When one of the other kind came with his broom, he gave the children their first playground, though it was not a good one, and his broom swept some of the cobwebs out of our heads at the same time. “A man instead of a voter behind every broom,” that was his watch-word, and it cleaned our streets and cleaned our politics for a season. Just remember it; it applies to other kinds of dirt than that which lies in the street.

The children got a playground, but not the kind they needed. We had to put our hands deep into our pockets to give them that. Over on that East-side, where three hundred and twenty-four thousand persons were penned up upon seven hundred and eleven acres of land, out of reach and out of sight of a green spot, we tore down block after block of old buildings, paying a million dollars for each block, and making the best bargain of our lives in doing it. It was marvelous how long it took us to see that this was good sense, and we were not alone in that, either. A year ago, when I spoke in this city about children and their rights, I was shown a square that had been laid out as a playground for the little ones, but that was wholly neglected and gone to wreck. That was not good sense. I looked for better among the people of Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin lived; and I expect to find it, too.

The Mulberry Bend we laid by the heels; that was the worst pigsty of all, and here again let me hark back to the murder I have spoken of so often. I do not believe that there was a week in all the twenty years I had to do with the den, as a police reporter, in which I was not called to record there a stabbing or shooting affair, some act of violence. It is now five years since the Bend became a park (see illustration facing page 146), and the police reporter has not had business there once during that time; not once has a shot been fired or a knife been drawn. That is what it means to let the sunlight in and give the boys their rights in a slum like that!

Of this boy of the slum we shall speak together further. He is just what you let him be: good, if you give him the chance; bad, if you will have none of him. Take the home out of his life, and you handicap him forever and mortgage your own future with the heaviest of mortgages. It is since that understanding began to dawn upon us that we have seized playgrounds right and left, wherever we had the chance. I have in mind one which we got away from a corporation on the West-side—it goes a little hard with me to own that it was a church corporation, because by that time the church ought to have had better sense. It was an old burial ground where some of the old-time New Yorkers lay who, in their day, neglected their boys and gave us the heritage of the slum. I hope that they have seen their mistake: I am sure they have, and that their ears are rejoiced by the patter of little children’s feet where once there was the silence; for they are echoing the better to-morrow, those little feet.

I wish I had time to tell you the whole story of what we have learned as to that in these last ten years, but it is too long. Let it be enough to say that, wherever we have destroyed the slum that killed the home and given the children a chance, there order has moved in where violence and gang rule were before, and the police are having a vacation. We are extending that program of ours right and left. Seven years ago we had not one school playground in New York; now we have a law which says that never another public school shall be built without an outdoor playground for the children. And we have been building more than three-score new and splendid schools since then. Some of these schools have the playgrounds on the street, and some on the roof, and in the latter, last year, Mayor Low’s Board of Education put brass bands in the summer evenings during the long vacation, and invited in the neighborhood. If you have any doubts about the millennium’s coming nearer, you should have been there then. It seemed to me when I saw three thousand children dancing to the tune of “Sunday Afternoon” on top of the school that had been used so long as a kind of jail in which to lock them up for the convenience of some one who wanted to get rid of them—it seemed to me then, as if we had put on seven league boots in the race to distance the slum and the janitor. Both of them lost their grip on those children then and there, and for all time; though the janitor strove hard against fate. He tried to drive them away with a club when we were not looking; and when he was caught at that, he reported that those roof playgrounds were no good: they were too hot in summer and too cold in winter. So, it would appear, is most of the rest of the earth.

However, his day is past and the children’s is coming. The school of the new day is “built beautiful,” quite like a palace, and our women hang the walls of the class-rooms with handsome pictures that open windows for the souls of the little ones, who sit and look on. There are still some growlers who think that the money put into handsome stone and wrought iron and polished wood is wasted. They are wrong; we never made a better investment, unless it be in the playgrounds which are part of those schools. All these things help to restore ideals. What is the matter with the slum is that it lacks ideals. Where _they_ are made to grow, there comes the irresistible demand for the home that is the essence of good, and then we are on the home stretch.

Our vacation schools gather in the boys, to teach them sloyd and how to handle useful tools (see illustration facing page 150), and the girls to teach them cooking; and, on alternate days, the men and boys and the women and girls are taught swimming at our public baths. Over on the West-side, where one of our neighborhood parks is being laid out, the Park Department even went into teaching the young lads truck-farming last summer. From that sort of school no one “plays hookey.” We shall shortly have no truant question at all, or, if we do, we shall be in a position to deal with it easily, for there need be no quibbling about the proper disposal of the lad who deserts the school of the new dispensation.

I once found a little fellow picking bones and rags under an ash dump, the only home he knew being a vile shed under that pile of rubbish. That dump was in the identical spot where now one of our new recreation piers extends into the North River. If he had been left there, to grow up as he could—and he could neither read nor write—he would have grown naturally into the tough who says that the world owes him a living, which he is bound to collect as easily as he can, especially without any work. It is a lie; the world owes no man a living. It is like a bank upon which you draw according to the amount of work you put into it and no more. But the boy was not left there, and, as I said, the dump that cursed his life has been replaced by a park and a play-pier. The band comes there in the evening and the crowds from the tenements, young and old; and, on the long summer days in the vacation season, the kindergartner comes and gathers her class, and there in the open they study with one another the first lessons of the new political science that shall draw us closer together and restore to us the neighborly feeling, and the lost home with it.

When we build our altar on that ground, we shall hear no more of empty churches. The life has come back. How great was the yearning for it, none of us may ever know. The other day, a little lad, watching the lighted Christmas tree in a settlement in my city, whispered anxiously to the head-worker when the distribution of presents began: “Shall we not worship the tree?” No, but we shall worship together, they and we, God in the hearts that were at last opened to let them in—to let the lost neighbor in—in His name.

Here they come, an army with banners to help us win the fight for the home! They are the children of the very poor, sometimes too ragged to attend the public school, and sometimes kept out because they do not know our language. They are the children of foreigners who brought them here that they might live in a free land, at once the only and the greatest heritage they could leave them. If you doubt that they are on our side in the fight, go and hear them salute the flag in the morning (see illustration facing page 152), promising “our hearts, our heads and our hands to our country—one country, one language, one flag!” And never doubt or distrust them again, for to do so is to distrust God, whose children they are, even if we rejected them, and to reject the republic which is to be His means of bringing us together again.

IV

OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW

IV

OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW

IN concluding these lectures, I wish first of all to extend to Philadelphia my hearty thanks for the ready and patient hearing she has given to this fight for the American home, upon which all depends. The great audiences that have attended, whether in church or hall, are in themselves the best guarantee that the fight will be won, that the to-morrow is safe. There is needed only the strong and informed public opinion that sees clearly the peril, to set a barrier against the inroads of the slum. Without that we fight in vain. If Philadelphia or Boston or Connecticut were to be deaf to the evils of sweating, we should be powerless against them in New York, or vice versa. If, on the other hand, public opinion from the Mississippi to the Hudson condemns tenement-made goods, their market will be gone and our fight won. The protest of Oshkosh against the home conditions that degrade manhood and womanhood in New York is registered at Albany in a hundred echoes from my own state and makes our annual struggle with the selfish interests, that for profit seek to sacrifice the home, so much easier. We shall win, I know it; for, in my own time, I have seen this protest against the abandonment of the brother swell from scattered voices here and there to an angry chorus, that first shamed decent men, who did not know, out of the owning of slum tenements, and afterwards drove Christian men, who did know and who cared, too, into it with the result that we have seen. We shall win the fight—indeed! I have spoken to little purpose if you do not see with me that we _must_ win the fight for the people’s homes, if we would live as a nation.

And now this to-morrow! Let me bring you face to face with it as it confronted me one day, years ago, in East 16th Street directly opposite St. George’s Church. It stood there in the person of a ragamuffin, typical, in his rags and dirt, of his kind and quite in the character; for he was engaged in slinging mud. He dug it out of the gutter by the fistful and distributed it impartially all over the church across the way. Why the church, I wondered as I watched him. He, the boy, had no stouter friend than its stalwart rector. Why then throw mud at his church? I went up to ask and for once he was taken unawares. I was upon him before he saw me and put my hand upon his shoulder! and that moment I knew what I wanted to know, what ailed the lad. The years that have passed have added many details to the record of his case, but nothing of the first importance. It was all clear to me that instant; for he turned like a hunted wild beast, his fistful of mud gripped tight, to confront the enemy—it could be nothing else. In all his dreary little life no hand had ever been laid upon his shoulder in kindness. That was the story. That _is_ the story too often yet. Every man’s hand raised against him, his was raised against the world that would have none of him. It was self-defense. I saw it and was dumb.