JEWTOWN.
The tenements grow taller, and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly
as we cross the Bowery and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind,
invade the Hebrew quarter. Baxter Street, with its interminable rows
of old clothes shops and its brigades of pullers-in--nicknamed "the
Bay" in honor, perhaps, of the tars who lay to there after a cruise to
stock up their togs, or maybe after the "schooners" of beer plentifully
bespoke in that latitude--Bayard Street, with its synagogues and its
crowds, gave us a foretaste of it. No need of asking here where we
are. The jargon of the street, the signs of the sidewalk, the manner
and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their
race at every step. Men with queer skull-caps, venerable beard, and the
outlandish long-skirted kaftan of the Russian Jew, elbow the ugliest
and the handsomest women in the land. The contrast is startling. The
old women are hags; the young, houris. Wives and mothers at sixteen, at
thirty they are old. So thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out
the Gentiles in the Tenth Ward that, when the great Jewish holidays
come around every year, the public schools in the district have
practically to close up. Of their thousands of pupils scarce a handful
come to school. Nor is there any suspicion that the rest are playing
hookey. They stay honestly home to celebrate. There is no mistaking
it: we are in Jewtown.
It is said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded
together on a square mile as here. The average five-story tenement adds
a story or two to its stature in Ludlow Street and an extra building
on the rear lot, and yet the sign "To Let" is the rarest of all there.
Here is one seven stories high. The sanitary policeman whose beat
this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families, but the
term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this
house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight
babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In
Essex Street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold
a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders.
The boarder plays as important a part in the domestic economy of
Jewtown as the lodger in the Mulberry Street Bend. These are samples
of the packing of the population that has run up the record here to
the rate of three hundred and thirty thousand per square mile. The
densest crowding of Old London, I pointed out before, never got beyond
a hundred and seventy-five thousand. Even the alley is crowded out.
Through dark hallways and filthy cellars, crowded, as is every foot
of the street, with dirty children, the settlements in the rear are
reached. Thieves know how to find them when pursued by the police,
and the tramps that sneak in on chilly nights to fight for the warm
spot in the yard over some baker's oven. They are out of place in this
hive of busy industry, and they know it. It has nothing in common with
them or with their philosophy of life, that the world owes the idler
a living. Life here means the hardest kind of work almost from the
cradle. The world as a debtor has no credit in Jewtown. Its promise
to pay wouldn't buy one of the old hats that are hawked about Hester
Street, unless backed by security representing labor done at lowest
market rates. But this army of workers must have bread. It is cheap and
filling, and bakeries abound. Wherever they are in the tenements the
tramp will skulk in, if he can. There is such a tramps' roost in the
rear of a tenement near the lower end of Ludlow Street, that is never
without its tenants in winter. By a judicious practice of flopping over
on the stone pavement at intervals, and thus warming one side at a
time, and with an empty box to put the feet in, it is possible to keep
reasonably comfortable there even on a rainy night. In summer the yard
is the only one in the neighborhood that does not do duty as a public
dormitory.
[Illustration: A TRAMP'S NEST IN LUDLOW STREET.]
Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It
is at once its strength and its fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and
its foul disgrace. Become an over-mastering passion with these people
who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution,
from which freedom could be bought only with gold, it has enslaved
them in bondage worse than that from which they fled. Money is their
God. Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest
bank account. In no other spot does life wear so intensely bald and
materialistic an aspect as in Ludlow Street. Over and over again I
have met with instances of these Polish or Russian Jews deliberately
starving themselves to the point of physical exhaustion, while working
night and day at a tremendous pressure to save a little money. An
avenging Nemesis pursues this headlong hunt for wealth; there is no
worse paid class anywhere. I once put the question to one of their
own people, who, being a pawnbroker, and an unusually intelligent and
charitable one, certainly enjoyed the advantage of a practical view of
the situation: "Whence the many wretchedly poor people in such a colony
of workers, where poverty, from a misfortune, has become a reproach,
dreaded as the plague?"
"Immigration," he said, "brings us a lot. In five years it has averaged
twenty-five thousand a year, of which more than seventy per cent. have
stayed in New York. Half of them require and receive aid from the
Hebrew Charities from the very start, lest they starve. That is one
explanation. There is another class than the one that cannot get work:
those who have had too much of it; who have worked and hoarded and
lived, crowded together like pigs, on the scantiest fare and the worst
to be got, bound to save whatever their earnings, until, worn out, they
could work no longer. Then their hoards were soon exhausted. That is
their story." And I knew that what he said was true.
Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease, and
Jewtown is no exception. It could not well be otherwise in such crowds,
considering especially their low intellectual status. The managers of
the Eastern Dispensary, which is in the very heart of their district,
told the whole story when they said: "The diseases these people suffer
from are not due to intemperance or immorality, but to ignorance, want
of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work."[12]
The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also. Reference
will be made to the economic conditions under which they work in a
succeeding chapter. Here we are concerned simply with the fact. You
are made fully aware of it before you have travelled the length of
a single block in any of these East Side streets, by the whir of a
thousand sewing-machines, worked at high pressure from earliest dawn
till mind and muscle give out together. Every member of the family,
from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand, shut in the qualmy
rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried besides,
the live-long day. It is not unusual to find a dozen persons--men,
women, and children--at work in a single small room. The fact accounts
for the contrast that strikes with wonder the observer who comes across
from the Bend. Over there the entire population seems possessed of
an uncontrollable impulse to get out into the street; here all its
energies appear to be bent upon keeping in and away from it. Not that
the streets are deserted. The overflow from these tenements is enough
to make a crowd anywhere. The children alone would do it. Not old
enough to work and no room for play, that is their story. In the home
the child's place is usurped by the lodger, who performs the service
of the Irishman's pig--pays the rent. In the street the army of
hucksters crowd him out. Typhus fever and small-pox are bred here, and
help solve the question what to do with him. Filth diseases both, they
sprout naturally among the hordes that bring the germs with them from
across the sea, and whose first instinct is to hide their sick lest the
authorities carry them off to the hospital to be slaughtered, as they
firmly believe. The health officers are on constant and sharp lookout
for hidden fever-nests. Considering that half of the ready-made clothes
that are sold in the big stores, if not a good deal more than half, are
made in these tenement rooms, this is not excessive caution. It has
happened more than once that a child recovering from small-pox, and in
the most contagious stage of the disease, has been found crawling among
heaps of half-finished clothing that the next day would be offered for
sale on the counter of a Broadway store; or that a typhus fever patient
has been discovered in a room whence perhaps a hundred coats had been
sent home that week, each one with the wearer's death-warrant, unseen
and unsuspected, basted in the lining.
[Footnote 12: Report of Eastern Dispensary for 1889.]
The health officers call the Tenth the typhus ward; in the office where
deaths are registered it passes as the "suicide ward," for reasons
not hard to understand; and among the police as the "crooked ward,"
on account of the number of "crooks," petty thieves and their allies,
the "fences," receivers of stolen goods, who find the dense crowds
congenial. The nearness of the Bowery, the great "thieves' highway,"
helps to keep up the supply of these, but Jewtown does not support
its dives. Its troubles with the police are the characteristic crop
of its intense business rivalries. Oppression, persecution, have not
shorn the Jew of his native combativeness one whit. He is as ready
to fight for his rights, or what he considers his rights, in a
business transaction--synonymous generally with his advantage--as if
he had not been robbed of them for eighteen hundred years. One strong
impression survives with him from his days of bondage: the power of
the law. On the slightest provocation he rushes off to invoke it for
his protection. Doubtless the sensation is novel to him, and therefore
pleasing. The police at the Eldridge Street station are in a constant
turmoil over these everlasting fights. Somebody is always denouncing
somebody else, and getting his enemy or himself locked up; frequently
both, for the prisoner, when brought in, has generally as plausible
a story to tell as his accuser, and as hot a charge to make. The day
closes on a wild conflict of rival interests. Another dawns with the
prisoner in court, but no complainant. Over night the case has been
settled on a business basis, and the police dismiss their prisoner in
deep disgust.
These quarrels have sometimes a comic aspect. Thus, with the numerous
dancing-schools that are scattered among the synagogues, often keeping
them company in the same tenement. They are generally kept by some
man who works in the daytime at tailoring, cigarmaking, or something
else. The young people in Jewtown are inordinately fond of dancing,
and after their day's hard work will flock to these "schools" for a
night's recreation. But even to their fun they carry their business
preferences, and it happens that a school adjourns in a body to make
a general raid on the rival establishment across the street, without
the ceremony of paying the admission fee. Then the dance breaks up in
a general fight, in which, likely enough, someone is badly hurt. The
police come in, as usual, and ring down the curtain.
[Illustration: A MARKET SCENE IN THE JEWISH QUARTER.]
Bitter as are his private feuds, it is not until his religious life
is invaded that a real inside view is obtained of this Jew, whom the
history of Christian civilization has taught nothing but fear and
hatred. There are two or three missions in the district conducting a
hopeless propagandism for the Messiah whom the Tenth Ward rejects,
and they attract occasional crowds, who come to hear the Christian
preacher as the Jews of old gathered to hear the apostles expound the
new doctrine. The result is often strikingly similar. "For once," said
a certain well-known minister of an uptown church to me, after such an
experience, "I felt justified in comparing myself to Paul preaching
salvation to the Jews. They kept still until I spoke of Jesus Christ as
the Son of God. Then they got up and fell to arguing among themselves
and to threatening me, until it looked as if they meant to take me out
in Hester Street and stone me." As at Jerusalem, the Chief Captain
was happily at hand with his centurions, in the person of a sergeant
and three policemen, and the preacher was rescued. So, in all matters
pertaining to their religious life that tinges all their customs, they
stand, these East Side Jews, where the new day that dawned on Calvary
left them standing, stubbornly refusing to see the light. A visit to
a Jewish house of mourning is like bridging the gap of two thousand
years. The inexpressibly sad and sorrowful wail for the dead, as it
swells and rises in the hush of all sounds of life, comes back from
the ages like a mournful echo of the voice of Rachel "weeping for her
children and refusing to be comforted, because they are not."
Attached to many of the synagogues, which among the poorest Jews
frequently consist of a scantily furnished room in a rear tenement,
with a few wooden stools or benches for the congregation, are Talmudic
schools that absorb a share of the growing youth. The school-master
is not rarely a man of some attainments who has been stranded there,
his native instinct for money-making having been smothered in the
process that has made of him a learned man. It was of such a school
in Eldridge Street that the wicked Isaac Iacob, who killed his enemy,
his wife, and himself in one day, was janitor. But the majority of the
children seek the public schools, where they are received sometimes
with some misgivings on the part of the teachers, who find it necessary
to inculcate lessons of cleanliness in the worst cases by practical
demonstration with wash-bowl and soap. "He took hold of the soap as
if it were some animal," said one of these teachers to me after such
an experiment upon a new pupil, "and wiped three fingers across his
face. He called that washing." In the Allen Street public school the
experienced principal has embodied among the elementary lessons, to
keep constantly before the children the duty that clearly lies next to
their hands, a characteristic exercise. The question is asked daily
from the teacher's desk: "What must I do to be healthy?" and the whole
school responds:
"I must keep my skin clean,
Wear clean clothes,
Breathe pure air,
And live in the sunlight."
It seems little less than biting sarcasm to hear them say it, for to
not a few of them all these things are known only by name. In their
everyday life there is nothing even to suggest any of them. Only the
demand of religious custom has power to make their parents clean up at
stated intervals, and the young naturally are no better. As scholars,
the children of the most ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of
their more favored playmates, until it comes to mental arithmetic, when
they leave them behind with a bound. It is surprising to see how strong
the instinct of dollars and cents is in them. They can count, and
correctly, almost before they can talk.
Within a few years the police captured on the East Side a band of
firebugs who made a business of setting fire to tenements for the
insurance on their furniture. There has, unfortunately, been some
evidence in the past year that another such conspiracy is on foot. The
danger to which these fiends expose their fellow-tenants is appalling.
A fire-panic at night in a tenement, by no means among the rare
experiences in New York, with the surging, half-smothered crowds on
stairs and fire-escapes, the frantic mothers and crying children, the
wild struggle to save the little that is their all, is a horror that
has few parallels in human experience.
I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in a First Avenue
tenement. It was in the middle of the night. The fire had swept up
with sudden fury from a restaurant on the street floor, cutting off
escape. Men and women threw themselves from the windows, or were
carried down senseless by the firemen. Thirteen half-clad, apparently
lifeless bodies were laid on the floor of an adjoining coal-office,
and the ambulance surgeons worked over them with sleeves rolled up to
the elbows. A half-grown girl with a baby in her arms walked about
among the dead and dying with a stunned, vacant look, singing in a low,
scared voice to the child. One of the doctors took her arm to lead her
out, and patted the cheek of the baby soothingly. It was cold. The
baby had been smothered with its father and mother; but the girl, her
sister, did not know it. Her reason had fled.
Thursday night and Friday morning are bargain days in the "Pig-market."
Then is the time to study the ways of this peculiar people to the best
advantage. A common pulse beats in the quarters of the Polish Jews
and in the Mulberry Bend, though they have little else in common.
Life over yonder in fine weather is a perpetual holiday, here a
veritable tread-mill of industry. Friday brings out all the latent
color and picturesqueness of the Italians, as of these Semites. The
crowds and the common poverty are the bonds of sympathy between them.
The Pig-market is in Hester Street, extending either way from Ludlow
Street, and up and down the side streets two or three blocks, as the
state of trade demands. The name was given to it probably in derision,
for pork is the one ware that is not on sale in the Pig-market. There
is scarcely anything else that can be hawked from a wagon that is not
to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. Bandannas and tin cups
at two cents, peaches at a cent a quart, "damaged" eggs for a song,
hats for a quarter, and spectacles, warranted to suit the eye, at the
optician's who has opened shop on a Hester Street door-step, for thirty
five cents; frowsy-looking chickens and half-plucked geese, hung by the
neck and protesting with wildly strutting feet even in death against
the outrage, are the great staple of the market. Half or a quarter of a
chicken can be bought here by those who cannot afford a whole. It took
more than ten years of persistent effort on the part of the sanitary
authorities to drive the trade in live fowl from the streets to the
fowl-market on Gouverneur Slip, where the killing is now done according
to Jewish rite by priests detailed for the purpose by the chief rabbi.
Since then they have had a characteristic rumpus, that involved the
entire Jewish community, over the fees for killing and the mode of
collecting them. Here is a woman churning horse-radish on a machine she
has chained and padlocked to a tree on the sidewalk, lest someone steal
it. Beside her a butcher's stand with cuts at prices the avenues never
dreamed of. Old coats are hawked for fifty cents, "as good as new,"
and "pants"--there are no trousers in Jewtown, only pants--at anything
that can be got. There is a knot of half a dozen "pants" pedlars in the
middle of the street, twice as many men of their own race fingering
their wares and plucking at the seams with the anxious scrutiny of
would-be buyers, though none of them has the least idea of investing
in a pair. Yes, stop! This baker, fresh from his trough, bare-headed
and with bare arms, has made an offer: for this pair thirty cents; a
dollar and forty was the price asked. The pedlar shrugs his shoulders,
and turns up his hands with a half pitying, wholly indignant air. What
does the baker take him for? Such pants--. The baker has turned to go.
With a jump like a panther's, the man with the pants has him by the
sleeve. Will he give eighty cents? Sixty? Fifty? So help him, they are
dirt cheap at that. Lose, will he, on the trade, lose all the profit
of his day's pedling. The baker goes on unmoved. Forty then? What, not
forty? Take them then for thirty, and wreck the life of a poor man. And
the baker takes them and goes, well knowing that at least twenty cents
of the thirty, two hundred per cent., were clear profit, if indeed the
"pants" cost the pedlar anything.
[Illustration: THE OLD CLO'E'S MAN--IN THE JEWISH QUARTERS.]
The suspender pedlar is the mystery of the Pig-market, omnipresent and
unfathomable. He is met at every step with his wares dangling over his
shoulder, down his back, and in front. Millions of suspenders thus
perambulate Jewtown all day on a sort of dress parade. Why suspenders,
is the puzzle, and where do they all go to? The "pants" of Jewtown
hang down with a common accord, as if they had never known the support
of suspenders. It appears to be as characteristic a trait of the race
as the long beard and the Sabbath silk hat of ancient pedigree. I
have asked again and again. No one has ever been able to tell me what
becomes of the suspenders of Jewtown. Perhaps they are hung up as
bric-à-brac in its homes, or laid away and saved up as the equivalent
of cash. I cannot tell. I only know that more suspenders are hawked
about the Pig-market every day than would supply the whole of New York
for a year, were they all bought and turned to use.
The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons and about the sidewalk
shops, where a gutter plank on two ash-barrels does duty for a counter!
Pushing, struggling, babbling, and shouting in foreign tongues, a
veritable Babel of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear
almost with a sense of shock, as something unexpected and strange.
In the midst of it all there is a sudden wild scattering, a hustling
of things from the street into dark cellars, into back-yards and
by-ways, a slamming and locking of doors hidden under the improvised
shelves and counters. The health officers' cart is coming down the
street, preceded and followed by stalwart policemen, who shovel up
with scant ceremony the eatables--musty bread, decayed fish and stale
vegetables--indifferent to the curses that are showered on them from
stoops and windows, and carry them off to the dump. In the wake of the
wagon, as it makes its way to the East River after the raid, follow a
line of despoiled hucksters shouting defiance from a safe distance.
Their clamor dies away with the noise of the market. The endless
panorama of the tenements, rows upon rows, between stony streets,
stretches to the north, to the south, and to the west as far as the eye
reaches.