CHAPTER III

HIS GAMES

It would be impossible to describe the thousand and one uses to which the West Side boy puts his playground. After all, the street is not such a bad place to play in if you have known nothing better; and as you tumble out of school on a fine afternoon, ready for mischief, it offers you almost anything, from a fight with your best friend to a ride on the steps of an ice wagon. But certain games and sports are so universal in this district as to deserve separate mention.

Spring is the season for marbles. On any clear day in March or February you may find the same scene on roadway and sidewalks of every block--a huddle of multicolored marbles in the middle of a ring, and a group of excited youngsters, shrieking, quarreling, and tumbling all over each other, just outside the circle. Instead of the time-honored chalk ring the boys often use the covers of a manhole, whose corrugated iron surface offers obstacles and therefore gives opportunity for unusual skill. Another game consists in shooting marbles to a straight line drawn along the middle of the sidewalk; thus one such game may be continued through the whole length of the block. In another the marbles are pitched against a brick wall or against the curbstone, and the boy whose marbles stop closest to a chalked mark wins the marbles of all competitors.

As the fall days grow shorter and the afternoons more crisp, bonfires become the rage. The small boy has an aptitude for finding wood at need in places where one would suppose that no fuel of any kind would be obtainable. A careless grocer leaves a barrel of waste upon the sidewalk. In five minutes’ time that barrel may be burning in the middle of the street with a group of cheering youngsters warming their hands at the blaze, or watching it from their seats on the curbstone. The grocer may berate the boys and threaten disaster to the one who lit the barrel, but he is seldom able to find the culprit. Before the barrel is completely burned some youngster produces a stick or two which he has found in an areaway or pulled from a passing wagon, and adds it to the fire. Stray newspapers, bits of excelsior, rags, and even garbage are contributed to keep the fire going, regardless of the effect on the olfactory nerves of the neighborhood. The police extinguish these fires whenever they can, but the small boy meets this contingency by posting scouts, and on the alarm of “Cheese it!” the fire is stamped out and the embers are hastily concealed. The “cop” sniffs at the smoke and looks at the boys suspiciously, but suspicions do not bother the boys--they are used to them--and when he has passed on down the street the fragments of the fire are reassembled and lighted again. On a cold evening one may see half a dozen of these bonfires flaming in different directions, each with a group of small figures playing around them. Sticks are thrust into the fire and waved in figures in the air; and among them very often circle larger and brighter spots of light which glow into a full flame when the motion ceases. These are fire pots, an ingenious invention consisting of an empty tomato can with a wire loop attached to the top by which to swing it, and filled with burning wood. This amusement might seem harmless enough if it were not for the fact that these fire pots, being of small boy construction, have an unfortunate habit of slipping from the wire loop just as they are being most rapidly hurled.

On election night, until recently, the boys’ traditional right of making bonfires has been observed. These bonfires are sometimes elaborate. As early as the middle of October the youngsters begin hoarding wood for the great occasion. They pile the fuel in the rear of a tenement or in the areaway or basement of some friendly grocer, or perhaps in a vacant lot or at the rear of a factory. Frequently to save their plunder they find it necessary to post guards for the few days preceding election, and even so, bonfire material often becomes the center of a furious gang fight. A few of the stronger gangs have a settled policy of letting some other gang collect their fuel for them, and then raiding them at the last minute. The victors carry the wood back triumphantly to their own block, and the vanquished are left either to collect afresh or to make reprisal on a still weaker gang. This kind of warfare continues even while the fires are burning on election night. A gang will swoop down unawares on a rival bonfire, scatter the burning material, and retire with the unburnt pieces to their own block.[13] A recent election time, however, proved a gloomy one for the little West Siders. Wagons appeared in the streets, filled with fire hose and manned by firemen and police. The police scattered the boys while the firemen drenched the fires, and by 8 o’clock the streets, formerly so picturesque and so dangerous, presented a sad and sober appearance. The tenement lights shone out on heaps of blackened embers and on groups of despairing youngsters who were not even permitted to stand on the corners and contemplate the destruction of their evening’s festivities.

In the winter the shortcomings of the street as a playground are especially evident. Frost and sleet and a bitter wind give few compensations for the discomfort which they bring. Traffic, the street cleaning department, and the vagaries of the New York climate, make most ways of playing in the snow impossible. But snowballing continues, in spite of the efforts of the police to prevent it. It is open to the same objections as baseball in the street, for the freedom which is possible in the small towns or in the country cannot be tolerated in a crowded district where a snowball which misses one mark is almost certain to hit another. Moreover, owing to the facility with which these boys take to dangerous forms of sport, the practice of making snowballs with a stone or a piece of coal in the middle and soaking them in ice water is even more prevalent here than in most other localities. Of course, snowballing is forbidden and abhorred by the neighborhood, and everyone takes a hand in chastising the juvenile snowball thrower. Nevertheless, the afternoon of the first fall is sure to bring a snow fight, and the innocent passerby is likely to be involuntarily included in the game.

Marbles and bonfires and snowballs are the sports of the smaller boys exclusively, but other games which are less seasonal are played by old and young alike. “Shooting craps,” for instance, and pitching or matching pennies, are occupations which endure all the year round and are participated in by grown men as well as by boys. On a Sunday morning dozens of crap games are usually in full swing along the streets. Only two players handle the dice, but almost any number of bystanders can take part by betting amongst themselves on the throw--“fading,” as it is called. Pennies, dimes, or dollar bills, according to the prosperity of the bettor, will be thrown upon the sidewalk, for craps is one of the cheapest and most vicious forms of gambling, since there is absolutely no restriction in the betting. Perfect strangers may join in at will if the players will let them, and there are innumerable opportunities for playing with crooked dice. It is one of the chief forms of sidewalk amusements in this neighborhood.

Up above the sidewalks, on the roofs of the tenements, there is some flying of small kites, but pigeon flying is the chief sport. It provides an occupation less immediately remunerative, perhaps, than games of chance, but developed by the same unmoral tendencies which seem to turn all play in the district into vice. Some boys, through methods of accretion peculiar to this neighborhood, have a score or more of pigeons which are kept in the house, and taken up to the roof regularly every Sunday, and oftener during the summer, for exercise. The birds are tamed and carefully taught to return to their home roofs after flight, but ingenious boys have discovered many ways of luring them to alien roofs, so that now the sport of pigeon flying is as dangerously exciting as a commercial venture in the days of the pirates. Pigeon owners also train their birds to circle about the neighborhood and bring back strangers. These strangers are taken inside, fed, and accustomed to the place before they are released again. On Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings the pigeons are to be seen flying around the neighborhood, while behind the chimneys of every fourth or fifth tenement house are crouched one or two small boys armed with long sticks, occasionally giving a low peculiar whistle to attract the pigeons coming from distant roofs. The sticks have a triple use. Pigeon owners use them to force their pigeons to fly for exercise; the little pigeon thieves on the roofs have a net on the end of their sticks for catching the bird when it alights; and most pigeons are trained to remain passive at the touch of the stick so that they may be picked up easily by their owner. This training, of course, operates to the advantage of the thief as well as of the owner, and valuable birds are sometimes lured away and held for ransom.

The two chief sports of the Middle West Side--baseball and boxing--are perennial. The former, played as it always is, with utter carelessness and disregard of surroundings, is theoretically intolerable, but it flourishes despite constant complaints and interference. The diamond is marked out on the roadway, the bases indicated by paving bricks, sticks, or newspapers. Frequently guards are placed at each end of the block to warn of the approach of police. One minute a game is in full swing; the next, a scout cries “Cheese it!” Balls, bats, and gloves disappear with an alacrity due to a generation of practice, and when the “cop” appears round the corner the boys will be innocently strolling down the streets. Notwithstanding these precautions, as the juvenile court records show, they are constantly being caught. In a great majority of these match games too much police vigilance cannot be exercised, for a game between a dozen or more boys, of from fourteen to eighteen years of age, with a league ball, in a crowded street, with plate glass windows on either side, becomes a joke to no one but the participants. A foul ball stands innumerable chances of going through the third-story window of a tenement, or of making a bee line through the valuable plate glass window of a store on the street level, or of hitting one of the passersby. And if the hit is a fair one, it is as likely as not to land on the forehead of a restive horse, or to strike some little child on the sidewalk farther down the street. When one sees the words “Arrested for playing with a hard ball in a public street” written on a coldly impersonal record card in the children’s court one is apt to become indignant. But when you see the same hard ball being batted through a window or into a group of little children on this same public street, the matter assumes an entirely different aspect.

Clearly, from the community’s point of view, the playing of baseball in the street is rightly a penal offense. It annoys citizens, injures persons and property, and interferes with traffic. But for all that, it is not abolished, and probably under present municipal conditions never will be, simply because there is another point of view, that of the boy, and his protest against its suppression is almost equally unanswerable. The store windows are filled with a tempting array of baseball gloves and bats offered at prices as close as possible to his means, and every effort is made by responsible business men, who themselves know the law and the need for order on the streets, to induce him to buy them. Selling the boy those bats and balls is a form of business and is perfectly legal. And the boy cannot see why, after having paid his money for them, the merchant should have all the benefit of the transaction. The game is in itself perfectly harmless; and childhood has an abiding resentment against apparently inexplicable injustice. Perhaps the small boy believes that except for the odds against him his right to make use of the street in his own way is as assured as that of anyone else. Perhaps he reflects that he too has to make sacrifices; that a broken window means usually a lost ball, and a damaged citizen, a ruined game. At any rate he continues to play, and as things are, has a fairly good case for doing so.

This neighborhood is also full of regularly organized ball teams, ranging in the age of players from ten to thirty years. Many of the large factories have teams made up of their own employes. Almost every street gang has its own team, as has almost every social club. These teams meet in regularly matched games, on the waterfront, in the various city parks, or over in New Jersey. Practically all the teams, old and young alike, play for stakes, ranging from two to five dollars a side. When they do not, they call it simply a “friendly” game. There is no organization among them; one team challenges another, and the two will decide on some place to play the game. A few of the adult teams lease Sunday grounds in New Jersey, but most of them trust to the chance of finding one. The baseball leaders of the neighborhood usually have uniforms, and to belong to a uniformed team is one of the great ambitions of the West Side boy.

Down on the waterfront the broad, smooth quays offer a tempting place for baseball, especially on Sundays and summer evenings, when they are generally bare of freight. But it has one serious drawback, that a foul ball on one side invariably goes into the river, and the players must have either several balls or a willing swimmer if the game is to continue long. One Sunday game, for instance, between two fourteen-year-old teams, played near the water, cost five balls, varying in price from 50 cents to $1.00 each. The game was played before a scrap-iron yard, the high fence of which was used as a backstop. Fifty feet to the right was the Hudson River. Within a hundred feet of second base, in the center field, a slip reached from the line of the river to the street, which was just beyond third base on the other side. Behind the sixteen-foot fence of the scrap-iron yard were a savage dog at large and a morose watchman to keep out river thieves. Thus hemmed in by water on two sides, a street car line and a row of glass windows on the third side, and a high fence, a savage dog, and a watchman on the fourth, the boys started the game. In the first inning a new dollar ball was fouled over the fence into the scrap-iron yard and the watchman refused to let the boys in to hunt for it. The game was stopped while a deputation of boys from both sides walked up to a nearby street to buy a new fifty-cent ball. The first boy up when the game was resumed batted this ball into the Hudson River, where a youthful swimmer got it, and climbing ashore down the river, made away with it. A third ball was secured, and before the game was half over this ball was batted into the river, where it lodged underneath a barge full of paving stones which was made fast to the dock, and could not be recovered. Then a fourth ball was produced. This lasted till the game was almost finished, though it was once batted deep into center field, where it bounced into the slip and stopped the game while it was being fished out. Finally it followed the first ball into the scrap-iron yard, and neither taunts nor pleas could move the obdurate watchman to let the boys in to find it. The game was finished with a fifth ball which was the personal property of one of the boys. On the occasion of another game in this same place two balls were batted into the scrap-iron yard and lost while the teams were warming up before the match began. A third ball was batted into the river twice but both times it was recovered. Baseball is played on the docks unmodified, but in the streets the boys make use of various adaptations, some of which dispense with the bat and in consequence lessen the dangers of the game.

Ball playing continues sporadically all the year round, and never loses popularity, but it is, of course, mainly a game for the summer. During the winter among the small boys, youths, and men alike, boxing is the all-absorbing sport. It is hard for an outsider to understand the tremendous hold which prize fighting has upon the boys in a neighborhood of this kind. Fights are of course of common occurrence, not only among children but among grown men. This in itself gives a great impetus to the study of the art of self-defense. Good fighters become known early in this district. Professional prize fighters are everywhere; and for every boy who has actually succeeded in getting into the prize ring on one or more occasions, there are a dozen who are eager and anxious for an opportunity. The various athletic clubs of the city always offer chances to boys from fourteen to sixteen years old to appear in the “preliminaries,” as the boxing contests which precede the main bout of the evening are called. A boy who gains a reputation as a street fighter and boxer will be recommended to the manager of an athletic club as a likely aspirant. He is given a chance to box in one or two rounds with another would-be prize fighter in a “preliminary.” If he makes a good showing, he is paid from five to fifteen dollars according to his ability and experience, and is given another chance. If he can continue to make favorable appearances in these preliminaries, he will soon be given a chance of taking part in a six or eight-round bout at one of the smaller athletic clubs, and from that time on he takes regular status as a prize fighter, and accordingly becomes a hero in his circle of youthful acquaintances. There are many such small prize fighters in our district, none of them over twenty-one years of age, and all earning just enough to make it possible to lead a life of indolence. If they can make ten or fifteen dollars by appearing in a ring once a week, they are quite content.

But boxing and street fighting by no means always go together on the Middle West Side. The real professional boxers of the neighborhood dissociate them in practice as well as in theory; they take their profession for what it is--a game to be played in a sportsmanlike manner--and they are usually good-natured. One of the best known prize fighters of the city, who lives on the Middle West Side, states that it is years since he was mixed up in a fight of any kind. “I box because I like the game,” he said, “but I’ve no use for fighting.”

Another man, an exceedingly clever lightweight boxer, who has appeared several times in the ring in New York City clubs, was boxing one night with a rather crude amateur. The bout was really for the instruction of the amateur, and both boxers were going very easily by agreement. Suddenly the amateur landed an unintentionally hard blow upon the eye of his opponent, just as the latter was stepping forward. The eye became fearfully discolored and the whole side of the boxer’s face swelled. But in spite of his evident feeling that the amateur had taken an unfair advantage in striking so hard when his opponent was off his guard, the lightweight fighter laughed and submitted to treatment for the eye without losing his temper in the least, and freely accepted the apologies of the other.

This is boxing at its best, but unfortunately its tendencies are more usually toward unfairness and brutality than otherwise. Boys are taught to box early in this district. It is not uncommon to see a bout between youngsters of seven or eight being watched by a crowd of young men, who encourage the combatants by cheering every successful blow, but pay no attention to palpable fouls or obvious attempts to take a dishonest advantage. Even some of the best of the prize fighters frankly say that once in the ring the extent to which they foul is only a question of how much they can deceive the referee. And when this questionable code of ethics is passed on by these heroes and leaders of sentiment to the boys who have no referee and no thought beyond that of winning by disabling an opponent as much as possible, the sport degenerates into an unfair and tricky test of endurance. Striking with the open hand, kicking, tripping, hitting in a clinch, all these unfair practices are considered a great advantage if one can “get away with it.” The West Side youngster sees very little of the real professional boxers who, from the very nature of their somewhat strenuous employment, must keep in good condition, as a rule retire early, drink little, and do a great deal of hard gymnastic work. But of their brutalized hangers-on, the “bruisers,” who frequent the saloons and street corners and pose as real fighters, he sees a great deal; consequently, as a whole, prize fighting must be classed as one of the worst influences of the neighborhood. It is too closely allied with street fighting, and too easily turned to criminal purposes. The bully who learns to box will use his acquired knowledge as a means of enforcing his superiority on the street, and if he is beaten will have recourse to weapons or any other means of maintaining his prestige.

Baseball and boxing bring to a close the list of common outdoor games played by boys on the Middle West Side,--just ordinary games, modified by a particular environment and played in a shifting and spasmodic way which is characteristic of it. It remains to emphasize the lesson taught by their effects on boy life as they are practiced in this neighborhood.

The philosophy of the West Side youngster is practical and not speculative. Otherwise he could not fail to notice very early in his career that the world in general, from the mother who bundles him out of an overcrowded tenement in the morning, to the grown-ups in the street playground where most of his time is spent, seem to think him very much in the way. All day long this fact is borne in upon him. If a wagon nearly runs over him the driver lashes him with the whip as he passes to teach him to “watch out.” If he plays around a store door the proprietor gives him a cuff or a kick to get rid of him. If he runs into someone he is pushed into the gutter to teach him better. And if he is complained of as a nuisance the policeman whacks him with hand or club to notify him that he must play somewhere else. Moreover, everything that he does seems to be against the law. If he plays ball he is endangering property by “playing with a hard ball in a public place.” If he plays marbles or pitches pennies he is “obstructing the sidewalk,” and craps, quite apart from the fact that it is gambling, constitutes the same offense. Street fighting individually or collectively is “assault,” and a boy guilty of none of these things may perforce be “loitering.” In other words he finds that property or its representatives are the great obstacles between him and his pleasure in the streets. And in considering our problem neither the principal cause of this situation nor its results must be lost sight of.

The great drawback to normal life on the Middle West Side is that it is a dual neighborhood. Tenements and industrial establishments are so inextricably mixed that the demands of the family and the needs of industry and commerce are eternally in conflict. The same streets must be used for all purposes; and one of the chief sufferers is the boy. More obvious, however, than this cause of a complex situation are the results of it, two of which are especially noticeable. The first is the inevitableness with which the boy accepts--and must accept--illegal and immoral amusements as a matter of course. The spirit of youth is forced to become a criminal tendency, and sport and the rights of property are forced into antagonism. And in the second place, partly because of this, partly because their association with the toughs of the street predisposes them to imitate vice and rowdyism, the boys come to take a positive pleasure in such activities as retaliation by theft and destruction of property. Stores and basements in this district are sometimes completely abandoned owing to the stone throwing and persecution of a youthful gang which has found their occupants too strenuously hostile or defensive. Undoubtedly the street is the most inadequate of playgrounds and throws many difficulties of prevention and interruption in the path of sport. But these obstacles are from their nature provocative of contest, and sport flourishes with a Hydra-like vitality. Nothing short of impossibility will keep the boy and his game apart.