CHAPTER I

HIS BACKGROUND

The influence of environment on character is now so fully recognized that no study of juvenile offenders would be complete without a consideration of their background. In the lives of the boys with whom this study deals this background plays a very large part. One-third of the 241 families studied, 82, are known to have lived in the district from five to nineteen years, and a somewhat larger number, 88, for twenty years or more.[4] This means that the boys belonged almost completely to the neighborhood. Most of them had lived there all their lives, and many of them always will live there. If they are to be understood aright, this neighborhood which has given them home, schooling, streets to play in, and factories to work in must also be pictured and understood.

In New York, owing perhaps to the shape of the island, the juxtaposition of tenement and mansion is unusually frequent. Walk five blocks along Forty-second Street west from Fifth Avenue and you are in the heart of the Middle West Side. The very suddenness of the change which these blocks present makes the contrast between wealth and poverty more striking and enables you to appreciate the particular form taken by poverty in this part of the city. Eighth Avenue, at which our district begins, looks east for inspiration and west for patronage. It is the West Sider’s Broadway and Fifth Avenue combined. Here he promenades, buys his clothes, travels up and down town on the cars, or waits at night in the long queue before the entrance to a moving picture show. The pavement is flanked by rows of busy stores; saloons and small hotels occupy the street corners. There is plenty of life and movement, and as yet no obvious poverty. On Saturdays and “sale” days, the neighborhood department stores swarm with custom.

Ninth Avenue has its elevated railroad, and suffers in consequence from noise, darkness, and congestion of traffic. Here the storekeeper can no longer rely on his window to attract customers. He knows the necessity of forceful advertising, and his bedsteads and vegetables, wooden Indians and show cases, everywhere encroach upon the sidewalk. On Saturday nights “Paddy’s Market”[5] flares in the open street, supplying for a few hours a picturesqueness which is greatly needed. Poor and untidy as this avenue is, the small tradesmen who live in it profess to look down on their less prosperous neighbors nearer the river.

West of Ninth Avenue tenements begin and rents decrease. At Tenth Avenue, where red and yellow crosstown cars swing round the corner from Forty-second Street, you have reached the center of the West Side wage-earning community, and a street which on a bright day is almost attractive. Four stories of red brick tenements surmount the plate glass of saloons and shops. Here and there immense colored advertisements of tobacco or breakfast foods flame from windowless side walls, and the ever-present three brass balls gleam merrily in the sunlight. But the poverty is unmistakable. You see it in the tradesman’s well-substantiated boast that here is “the cheapest house for furniture and carpets in the city.” You see it in the small store, eking out an existence with cigars and toys and candy. You see it in the ragged coats and broken shoes of the boys playing in the street; in the bareheaded, poorly dressed women carrying home their small purchases in oil-cloth bags; in the grocer’s amazing values in “strictly fresh” eggs; in the ablebodied loafers who lounge in the vicinity of the corner saloon, subsisting presumably on the toil of more conscientious brothers and sisters. And in one other feature besides its indigence Tenth Avenue is typical of this district. At the corner of Fiftieth Street stands the shell of what was once a flourishing settlement, and beside it a smaller building which was once a church. Both, as regards their original uses, are now deserted. Both are a concrete expression not merely of failure, but of failure acquiesced in. These West Side streets are more than poor. They have ceased to struggle in their slough of despond, and have forgotten to be dissatisfied with their poverty.

Eleventh Avenue is much more dirty and disconsolate. In its dingy tenements live some of the poorest and most degraded families of this district. On the west side of the avenue and lining the cross streets are machine shops, gas tanks, abattoirs, breweries, warehouses, piano factories, and coal and lumber yards whose barges cluster around the nearby piers. Sixty years ago this avenue, in contrast to the fair farm land upon which the rest of the district grew up, was a stretch of barren and rocky shore, ending at Forty-second Street in the flat unhealthy desolation of the Great Kill Swamp. Land in such a deserted neighborhood was cheap and little sought for, and permission to use it was readily given to the Hudson River Railroad.[6] Today the franchise, still continued under its old conditions, is an anomaly. All day and night, to and from the Central’s yard at Thirtieth Street, long freight trains pass hourly through the heterogeneous mass of trucks, pedestrians, and playing children; and though they now go slowly and a flagman stands at every corner, “Death Avenue” undoubtedly deserves its name.

De Witt Clinton Park, the only public play space in the district, lies westward between Fifty-second and Fifty-fourth Streets. It is better known as “The Lane” from days, not so long ago, when a pathway here ran down to the river, and on either side of it the last surviving farm land gave the tenement children a playground, and the young couples of the neighborhood a place to stroll in. The usual well kept and restrained air of a small city park is very noticeable here. There is almost no grass, the swings and running tracks are, perhaps necessarily, caged by tall iron fences, and uninteresting asphalt paths cover a considerable part of the limited area. A large stone pergola, though of course it has obvious uses, somehow deepens the impression that an opportunity was lost in the laying out of this place. At one side of the pergola, however, lie the plots of the school farm in which small groups of boys and girls may often be seen at work. Little attempt has been made to develop a play center in the park. On a fine Saturday afternoon it is often practically empty.[7]

Twelfth Avenue adjoins the Hudson River, losing itself here and there in wharves and pier-heads. Two of the piers belong to the city, one being devoted to the disposal of garbage, the other to recreation. Factories and an occasional saloon are on the inland side, but there are almost no shacks or tenements.

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At first sight there are no striking features about the Middle West Side. Hand-to-mouth existence reduces living to a universal sameness which has little time or place for variety. In street after street are the same crowded and unsanitary tenements; the same untended groups of playing children; the same rough men gathered round the stores and saloons on the avenue; the same sluggish women grouped on the steps of the tenements in the cross streets. The visitor will find no rambling shacks, no conventional criminal’s alleys; only square, dull, monotonous ugliness, much dirt, and a great deal of apathy.

The very lack of salient features is the supreme characteristic of this neighborhood. The most noticeable fact about it is that there is nothing to notice. It is earmarked by negativeness. There is usually a lifelessness about the streets and buildings, even at their best, which is reflected in the attitude of the people who live in them. The whole scene is dull, drab, uninteresting, totally devoid of the color and picturesqueness which give to so many poor districts a character and fascination of their own. Tenth Avenue and the streets west of it are lacking in the crowds and bustle and brilliant lights of the East Side. Eleventh Avenue by night is almost dark, and throughout the district are long stretches of poorly lit cross streets in which only the dingy store windows shine feebly. Over the East River great bridges throw necklaces of light across the water; here the North River is dark and unspanned.

What is it that has brought about this condition? Why is this part of New York so utterly featureless and depressing? The answer lies primarily not with the present or past inhabitants, but in the isolation and neglect to which for years it has been subjected. Much of the Middle West Side was once naturally attractive, with prosperous homesteads and cottages with gardens.[8] But while other parts of Manhattan were being developed as a city, the Middle West Side was left severely alone. It was one of the last sections of the city to become thickly populated. When the first factories arrived, they brought the tenements in their wake. The worst kinds of tenements were hastily built--anything was supposed to be good enough for the poor Irish who settled there; and these tenements have long survived in spite of their dilapidated condition because until recently there has been no one who cared for the rough and dull West Sider. East Side problems were much more picturesque and inviting. So our district has grown up under a heritage of desolation and neglect, uninteresting to look at, unpleasant to live in, overlooked, unsympathized with, and neglected into aloofness, till today its static population is almost isolated from and little affected by the life of the rest of the city. The casual little horse car which jingles up Tenth Avenue four times an hour is typical of the West Sider’s home, just as the Draft Riots of 1863 were typical of his temper.

The nationalities which largely form the basis of the population on the Middle West Side are the German and the Irish, the latter predominating.[9] Peculiar to the district is the large number of families of the second generation with parents who have been born and brought up in the immediate neighborhood.

The nationality of the American-born parents throws additional light on the subject of racial make-up of the population.[10] There were 81 American-born fathers and 92 American-born mothers in the 241 families. The parentage of 67 American-born fathers for whom information was available was as follows: 28, German; 21, Irish; 15, American; and 3, English. The parentage of 73 American-born mothers was: 28, German; 25, Irish; 18, American; and 2, English. The country of birth of parents of 14 of the American-born fathers and 19 of the American-born mothers could not be ascertained.[11]

We are accustomed to regard the German as the best of European emigrants. He brings with him a thrift and solidity which have taught us to depend on him. He has been a welcome immigrant as he has become a successful citizen. Yet here are large numbers of Germans living in a wild no-man’s-land which has a criminal record scarcely surpassed by any other district in New York. Surely this is more than a case of the exception proving the rule. It shows that our estimate of the Middle West Side is correct.

The district is like a spider’s web. Of those who come to it very few, either by their own efforts, or through outside agency, ever leave it. Now and then a boy is taken to the country or a family moves to the Bronx, but this happens comparatively seldom. Usually those who come to live here find at first (like Yorick’s starling) that they cannot get out, and presently that they do not want to. It is not that conditions throughout the district are economically extreme, although greater misery and worse poverty cannot be found in other parts of New York. But there is something in the dullness of these West Side streets and the traditional apathy of their tenants that crushes the wish for anything better and kills the hope of change. It is as though decades of lawlessness and neglect have formed an atmospheric monster, beyond the power and understanding of its creators, overwhelming German and Irish alike.

Such, in brief, is the background of the West Side boy. It is a gray picture, so gray that the casual visitor to these streets may think it over-painted. But this is because a superficial glance at the Middle West Side is peculiarly misleading. So much lies below the surface. It is obvious that this district has come to be singularly unattractive, and that its methods of life are extraordinarily rough. And it is equally true that hundreds of boys never know any other place or life than this, and that most of their offenses against the law are the direct result of their surroundings. The charges brought against them in court are only in part against the boys themselves. The indictment is in the main against the city which considers itself the greatest and most progressive in the New World, for allowing any of its children to start the battle of life so poorly equipped and so handicapped for becoming efficient American citizens. Not that these youngsters have not their share of “devilment” and original sin, but in estimating the work of the juvenile court with the boys of this neighborhood, it is absolutely essential to bear in mind not only the crimes they commit, but their chances for escaping criminality. If heredity and environment have any meaning, Tenth Avenue has much to answer for.