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: One hundred and forty
families, one hundred Irish, thirty-eight 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
Chinaman, 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
profits of his saloon. As a landlord he is picturesquely autocratic.
An 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 twenty-five dollars a month
for three small rooms in 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.
"'Damma, man!' he said; 'if you speaka thata way to me, I fira you and
your things in the streeta.'" 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, re-enacting, 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 its 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 larger 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 in purse
as the exorbitant rents to which they are tied, as ever was serf 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, were it not
for the steadier growth of the sediment of the slums and its constant
menace. Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The
German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as
his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of
to-day.[6]
[Footnote 6: The Sheriff Street Colony of rag-pickers, long since gone,
is an instance in point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during
years of hard work in 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.]
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 hod-carrier in the second generation has become
a brick-layer, if not the Alderman of his ward, while the Chinese
coolie is in 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 emigration 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 encroachments 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 tints 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 Second 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 uptown,
against querulous 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
staid 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 to-day the arms of United Italy
adorn its front. The negroes have made a stand at several points along
Seventh and Eighth Avenues; but their main body, still pursued by the
Italian foe, is on the march yet, and the black mark will be found
overshadowing to-day many blocks on the East Side, with One Hundredth
Street as the centre, 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 river front, and disputing
with the Italian every foot of available space in the back alleys of
Mulberry Street. The two races, differing hopelessly in 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,"
in 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. Dovetailed in with the German population, the poor but
thrifty Bohemian might be picked out by the sombre hue of his life
as of his philosophy, struggling against heavy odds in the big human
bee-hives 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 would show where the Finnish sailors worship their
djumala (God), the Greek pedlars 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.
Were the question raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged,
who resists most stubbornly its levelling 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 Chinaman
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
centre 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 pauperism 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.