THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.
When it comes to the question of numbers with this tramps' army,
another factor of serious portent has to be taken into account: the
cheap lodging-houses. In the caravanseries that line Chatham Street and
the Bowery, harboring nightly a population as large as that of many a
thriving town, a home-made article of tramp and thief is turned out
that is attracting the increasing attention of the police, and offers
a field for the missionary's labors beside which most others seem of
slight account. Within a year they have been stamped as nurseries of
crime by the chief of the Secret Police,[10] the sort of crime that
feeds especially on idleness and lies ready to the hand of fatal
opportunity. In the same strain one of the justices on the police court
bench sums up his long experience as a committing magistrate: "The
ten-cent lodging-houses more than counterbalance the good done by the
free reading-room, lectures, and all other agencies of reform. Such
lodging-houses have caused more destitution, more beggary and crime
than any other agency I know of." A very slight acquaintance with the
subject is sufficient to convince the observer that neither authority
overstates the fact. The two officials had reference, however, to two
different grades of lodging-houses. The cost of a night's lodging makes
the difference. There is a wider gap between the "hotel"--they are all
hotels--that charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a
dime than between the bridal suite and the every-day hall bedroom of
the ordinary hostelry.
[Footnote 10: Inspector Byrnes on Lodging-houses, in the North American
Review, September, 1889.]
The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth.
It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague
idea that they can get along here if anywhere; that something is bound
to turn up among so many. Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life,
many--most of them, perhaps--fresh from good homes, beyond a doubt
with honest hopes of getting a start in the city and making a way for
themselves. Few of them have much money to waste while looking around,
and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object. Fewer still know
anything about the city and its pitfalls. They have come in search
of crowds, of "life," and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery,
the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent
lodging-houses take them in. In the alleged reading-rooms of these
great barracks, that often have accommodations, such as they are,
for two, three, and even four hundred guests, they encounter three
distinct classes of associates: the great mass adventurers like
themselves, waiting there for something to turn up; a much smaller
class of respectable clerks or mechanics, who, too poor or too lonely
to have a home of their own, live this way from year to year; and
lastly the thief in search of recruits for his trade. The sights the
young stranger sees, and the company he keeps, in the Bowery are not
of a kind to strengthen any moral principle he may have brought away
from home, and by the time his money is gone, with no work yet in
sight, and he goes down a step, a long step, to the fifteen-cent
lodging-house, he is ready for the tempter whom he finds waiting for
him there, reinforced by the contingent of ex-convicts returning from
the prisons after having served out their sentences for robbery or
theft. Then it is that the something he has been waiting for turns
up. The police returns have the record of it. "In nine cases out of
ten," says Inspector Byrnes, "he turns out a thief, or a burglar, if,
indeed, he does not sooner or later become a murderer." As a matter
of fact, some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been the
result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses, and so frequent
and bold have become the depredations of the lodging-house thieves,
that the authorities have been compelled to make a public demand for
more effective laws that shall make them subject at all times to police
regulation.
Inspector Byrnes observes that in the last two or three years at
least four hundred young men have been arrested for petty crimes that
originated in the lodging-houses, and that in many cases it was their
first step in crime. He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that
three-fourths of the young men called on to plead to generally petty
offences in the courts are under twenty years of age, poorly clad, and
without means. The bearing of the remark is obvious. One of the, to the
police, well-known thieves who lived, when out of jail, at the Windsor,
a well-known lodging-house in the Bowery, went to Johnstown after the
flood and was shot and killed there while robbing the dead.
An idea of just how this particular scheme of corruption works, with
an extra touch of infamy thrown in, may be gathered from the story
of David Smith, the "New York Fagin," who was convicted and sent to
prison last year through the instrumentality of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here is the account from the
Society's last report:
"The boy, Edward Mulhearn, fourteen years old, had run away from his
home in Jersey City, thinking he might find work and friends in New
York. He may have been a trifle wild. He met Smith on the Bowery and
recognized him as an acquaintance. When Smith offered him a supper
and bed he was only too glad to accept. Smith led the boy to a vile
lodging-house on the Bowery, where he introduced him to his 'pals' and
swore he would make a man of him before he was a week older. Next day
he took the unsuspecting Edward all over the Bowery and Grand Street,
showed him the sights and drew his attention to the careless way the
ladies carried their bags and purses and the easy thing it was to get
them. He induced Edward to try his hand. Edward tried and won. He was
richer by three dollars! It did seem easy. 'Of course it is,' said his
companion. From that time Smith took the boy on a number of thieving
raids, but he never seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out
of range of the 'Fagin's' watchful eye. When he went out alone he
generally returned empty-handed. This did not suit Smith. It was then
he conceived the idea of turning this little inferior thief into a
superior beggar. He took the boy into his room and burned his arms
with a hot iron. The boy screamed and entreated in vain. The merciless
wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh, and afterward
applied acid to the raw wound.
"Thus prepared, with his arm inflamed, swollen, and painful, Edward was
sent out every day by this fiend, who never let him out of his sight,
and threatened to burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough. He
was instructed to tell people the wound had been caused by acid falling
upon his arm at the works. Edward was now too much under the man's
influence to resist or disobey him. He begged hard and handed Smith the
pennies faithfully. He received in return bad food and worse treatment."
The reckoning came when the wretch encountered the boy's father, in
search of his child, in the Bowery, and fell under suspicion of knowing
more than he pretended of the lad's whereabouts. He was found in his
den with a half dozen of his chums revelling on the proceeds of the
boy's begging for the day.
The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom,
though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to
hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes
is the shallowest of all pretences. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly
forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and
blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's
clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is
reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles,
the lodger. Usually the ten- and seven-cent lodgings are different
grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for a bed, with
mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp
who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty
box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these
"hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without
covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who
prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow
to the revelry of the stale-beer dive. It is not the most secure perch
in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have not
far to fall to the next tier of bunks, and the commotion that ensues
is speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights,
when every bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room
more than once, and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the
regular strokes of an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under
their restless weight, imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the
very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing that did not favor the
deception was the air; its character could not be mistaken.
[Illustration: BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET.]
The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses was known to me
as a man of reputed wealth and respectability. He "ran" three such
establishments and made, it was said, $8,000 a year clear profit on
his investment. He lived in a handsome house quite near to the stylish
precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of his occupation was not
suspected. A notice that was posted on the wall of the lodgers' room
suggested at least an effort to maintain his up-town standing in the
slums. It read: "No swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock."
Before nine no exceptions were taken to the natural vulgarity of the
place; but that was the limit.
There are no licensed lodging-houses known to me which charge less than
seven cents for even such a bed as this canvas strip, though there are
unlicensed ones enough where one may sleep on the floor for five cents
a spot, or squat in a sheltered hallway for three. The police station
lodging-house, where the soft side of a plank is the regulation couch,
is next in order. The manner in which this police bed is "made up" is
interesting in its simplicity. The loose planks that make the platform
are simply turned over, and the job is done, with an occasional coat
of white-wash thrown in to sweeten things. I know of only one easier
way, but, so far as I am informed, it has never been introduced in this
country. It used to be practised, if report spoke truly, in certain
old-country towns. The "bed" was represented by clothes-lines stretched
across the room upon which the sleepers hung by the arm-pits for a
penny a night. In the morning the boss woke them up by simply untying
the line at one end and letting it go with its load; a labor-saving
device certainly, and highly successful in attaining the desired end.
According to the police figures, 4,974,025 separate lodgings were
furnished last year by these dormitories, between two and three
hundred in number, and, adding the 147,634 lodgings furnished by the
station-houses, the total of the homeless army was 5,121,659, an
average of over fourteen thousand homeless men[11] for every night
in the year! The health officers, professional optimists always in
matters that trench upon their official jurisdiction, insist that
the number is not quite so large as here given. But, apart from any
slight discrepancy in the figures, the more important fact remains
that last year's record of lodgers is an all round increase over the
previous year's of over three hundred thousand, and that this has
been the ratio of growth of the business during the last three years,
the period of which Inspector Byrnes complains as turning out so many
young criminals with the lodging-house stamp upon them. More than half
of the lodging-houses are in the Bowery district, that is to say, the
Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Wards, and they harbor nearly three-fourths
of their crowds. The calculation that more than nine thousand homeless
young men lodge nightly along Chatham Street and the Bowery, between
the City Hall and the Cooper Union, is probably not far out of the way.
The City Missionary finds them there far less frequently than the thief
in need of helpers. Appropriately enough, nearly one-fifth of all the
pawn-shops in the city and one-sixth of all the saloons are located
here, while twenty-seven per cent. of all the arrests on the police
books have been credited to the district for the last two years.
[Footnote 11: Deduct 69,111 women lodgers in the police stations.]
About election time, especially in Presidential elections, the
lodging-houses come out strong on the side of the political boss who
has the biggest "barrel." The victory in political contests, in the
three wards I have mentioned of all others, is distinctly to the
general with the strongest battalions, and the lodging-houses are his
favorite recruiting ground. The colonization of voters is an evil of
the first magnitude, none the less because both parties smirch their
hands with it, and for that reason next to hopeless. Honors are easy,
where the two "machines," intrenched in their strongholds, outbid each
other across the Bowery in open rivalry as to who shall commit the most
flagrant frauds at the polls. Semi-occasionally a champion offender is
caught and punished, as was, not long ago, the proprietor of one of the
biggest Bowery lodging-houses. But such scenes are largely spectacular,
if not prompted by some hidden motive of revenge that survives from
the contest. Beyond a doubt Inspector Byrnes speaks by the card when
he observes that "usually this work is done in the interest of some
local political boss, who stands by the owner of the house, in case the
latter gets into trouble." For standing by, read twisting the machinery
of outraged justice so that its hand shall fall not too heavily upon
the culprit, or miss him altogether. One of the houses that achieved
profitable notoriety in this way in many successive elections, a
notorious tramps' resort in Houston Street, was lately given up, and
has most appropriately been turned into a bar-factory, thus still
contributing, though in a changed form, to the success of "the cause."
It must be admitted that the black tramp who herds in the West Side
"hotels" is more discriminating in this matter of electioneering
than his white brother. He at least exhibits some real loyalty in
invariably selling his vote to the Republican bidder for a dollar,
while he charges the Democratic boss a dollar and a half. In view of
the well-known facts, there is a good deal of force in the remark made
by a friend of ballot reform during the recent struggle over that
hotly contested issue, that real ballot reform will do more to knock
out cheap lodging-houses than all the regulations of police and health
officers together.
The experiment made by a well-known stove manufacturer a winter or two
ago in the way of charity, might have thrown much desired light on
the question of the number of tramps in the city, could it have been
carried to a successful end. He opened a sort of breakfast shop for
the idle and unemployed in the region of Washington Square, offering
to all who had no money a cup of coffee and a roll for nothing. The
first morning he had a dozen customers, the next about two hundred. The
number kept growing until one morning, at the end of two weeks, found
by actual count 2,014 shivering creatures in line waiting their turn
for a seat at his tables. The shop was closed that day. It was one of
the rare instances of too great a rush of custom wrecking a promising
business, and the great problem remained unsolved.