THE BEND.
Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old
depravity of the Five Points, is "the Bend," foul core of New York's
slums. Long years ago the cows coming home from the pasture trod 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 home-coming of the rag-picker's cart. In the memory of man
the old cow-path has never been other than a vast human pig-sty. 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
transformation 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 byways, of which the rent collector
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
tramp as well as the rag-picker.
It is not much more than twenty years since a census of "the Bend"
district returned only twenty-four of the six hundred and nine
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 roll, together with the in-rush 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 passage-ways--necessarily, for there is scarce a
lot that has not two, three, or four tenements upon it, swarming with
unwholesome crowds. What a birds-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 sights
of New York.
Bayard Street is the high road to Jewtown across the Bowery, picketed
from end to end with the 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 the very
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 market-place 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 centres
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--her's to bear the burden
as long as she lives--haggling over baskets of frowsy 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 en route for the dump cause a temporary
suspension of trade until the barrels have been emptied and restored.
Hucksters and pedlars' 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 crullers, 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 "not unwholesome." It was only
disgusting. Here is a brawny butcher, sleeves rolled up above the
elbows and clay pipe in 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 a wake or feast of some sort in one of the back alleys.
[Illustration: THE BEND.]
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 shop-keeper, 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 wall 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 saint, done in yellow and red--there is
not a shop, a stand, or an ash-barrel doing duty for 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 fire-wood on their heads, loads of decaying
vegetables from the market wagons in 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 Bend." 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 wheel-barrow 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, whereat
she laughs and pushes him away with a gesture which he interprets as an
invitation to stay; and he does, evidently to the satisfaction of the
beldame, who forthwith raises her prices fifty per cent. without being
detected by the girl.
Red bandannas 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 "ristorantes" of innumerable Pasquales;
half of the people in "the Bend" are christened Pasquale, 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
savings-banks, all in one. So are the toddling youngsters, bow-legged
half of them, and so are no end of mothers, present and prospective,
some of them scarce yet in their teens. Those who are not in the street
are hanging half way out of the windows, shouting at some one below.
All "the Bend" must be, if not altogether, at least half out of doors
when the sun shines.
In the street, where the city wields the broom, there is at least an
effort at cleaning up. There has to be, or it would be swamped in
filth overrunning 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, "covered," says the account
found in the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children, "with sores, and her hair matted with dried blood." 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[8] in a specimen year
(1882). Their per centage of the total mortality in the block was
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, No. 59½, next to Bandits' Roost,
fourteen persons died that year, and eleven of them were children; in
No. 61 eleven, and eight of them not yet five years old. According to
the records in the Bureau of Vital Statistics only thirty-nine people
lived in No. 59½ 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, No. 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:
_Deaths and Death-rates in 1888 in Baxter and Mulberry Streets,
between Park and Bayard Streets._
Key
A = Five years old and over.
B = Under five years.
C = Total.
D = General.
----------------+------------------+------------+---------------------
| POPULATION. | DEATHS. | DEATH-RATE.
+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
| A | B | C | A | B | C | A | B | D
----------------+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
Baxter Street | 1,918| 315| 2,233| 26| 46| 72| 13.56| 146.02| 32.24
Mulberry Street | 2,788| 629| 3,417| 44| 86| 130| 15.78| 136.70| 38.05
+------+----+------+---+---+----+------+-------+------
Total | 4,706| 944| 5,650| 70|132| 202| 14.87| 139.83| 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 Nos. 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 stand-points. It is the stand-point that
makes the difference--and the tenant.
[Illustration: BANDITS' ROOST.]
What if I were to tell you that this alley, and more tenement property
in "the Bend," all of it notorious for years as the vilest and worst
to be found anywhere, stood associated on the tax-books 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, wherever found. Look into any of these houses,
everywhere the same piles of rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper,
all of which the sanitary police flatter themselves they have banished
to the dumps and the warehouses. Here is a "flat" of "parlor" 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 bandanna shakes her head sullenly, but the
bare-legged girl with the bright face counts on her fingers--five, six!
"Six, sir!" Six grown people and five children.
"Only five," she says with a smile, swathing 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 nineties; 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 doctors thermometer ran up to 115°!
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[9] that "no one asked for
Italian children," and hence he could not send any to the country?
[Footnote 9: See City Mission Report, February, 1890, page 77.]
[Illustration: BOTTLE ALLEY.]
Half a dozen blocks up Mulberry Street there is a rag-picker's
settlement, a sort of overflow from "the Bend," that exists to-day
in all its pristine nastiness. Something like forty 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 characteristic. The
"old man," 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 age crooked 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
"island," but she was decrepit anyhow from rheumatism, and "not much
good," 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 "bedrooms" in the
shameful old wrecks of buildings the tenant was paying $10 a month, for
the back-room and one bedroom $9, and for the attic rooms, according to
size, from $3.75 to $5.50.
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 "needs of the situation" is their plea, and no
more perfect argument could be advanced for the reformer's position.
It is in "the Bend" the sanitary policeman locates the bulk of his
four hundred, 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 houses can, and the last count
showed that in "the Bend" district, between Broadway and the Bowery and
Canal and Chatham Streets, in a total of four thousand three hundred
and sixty-seven "apartments" 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
"standing room only" is up. Not a single vacant room was found there.
Nearly a hundred and fifty "lodgers" 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 Bend," scattering disinfectants in streets and lanes, in
sinks and cellars, and hidden hovels where the tramp burrows. From
midnight till far into the small hours of the morning the policeman's
thundering rap on closed doors is heard, with his stern command, "_Apri
port'!_" 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 flash-light on just such a visit. In a room not thirteen feet
either way slept twelve men and women, two or three in bunks set in a
sort of alcove, the rest on the floor. A kerosene lamp burned dimly
in the fearful atmosphere, probably to guide other and later arrivals
to their "beds," for it was only just past midnight. A baby's fretful
wail 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 cents a spot.
[Illustration: LODGERS IN A CROWDED BAYARD STREET TENEMENT--"FIVE CENTS
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 than the room was re-opened for business.