THE STREET ARAB.
Not all the barriers erected by society against its nether life, not
the labor of unnumbered societies for the rescue and relief of its
outcast waifs, can dam the stream of homelessness that issues from a
source where the very name of home is a mockery. The Street Arab is
as much of an institution in New York as Newspaper Row, to which he
gravitates naturally, following his Bohemian instinct. Crowded out
of the tenements to shift for himself, and quite ready to do it, he
meets there the host of adventurous runaways from every State in the
Union and from across the sea, whom New York attracts with a queer
fascination, as it attracts the older emigrants from all parts of the
world. A census of the population in the Newsboys' Lodging-house on any
night will show such an odd mixture of small humanity as could hardly
be got together in any other spot. It is a mistake to think that they
are helpless little creatures, to be pitied and cried over because they
are alone in the world. The unmerciful "guying" the good man would
receive, who went to them with such a programme, would soon convince
him that that sort of pity was wasted, and would very likely give him
the idea that they were a set of hardened little scoundrels, quite
beyond the reach of missionary effort.
But that would only be his second mistake. The Street Arab has all the
faults and all the virtues of the lawless life he leads. Vagabond that
he is, acknowledging no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or
anything, with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries
to coerce him, he is as bright and sharp as the weasel, which, among
all the predatory beasts, he most resembles. His sturdy independence,
love of freedom and absolute self-reliance, together with his rude
sense of justice that enables him to govern his little community, not
always in accordance with municipal law or city ordinances, but often
a good deal closer to the saving line of "doing to others as one would
be done by"--these are strong handles by which those who know how can
catch the boy and make him useful. Successful bankers, clergymen, and
lawyers all over the country, statesmen in some instances of national
repute, bear evidence in their lives to the potency of such missionary
efforts. There is scarcely a learned profession, or branch of honorable
business, that has not in the last twenty years borrowed some of its
brightest light from the poverty and gloom of New York's streets.
Anyone, whom business or curiosity has taken through Park Row or across
Printing House Square in the midnight hour, when the air is filled with
the roar of great presses spinning with printers' ink on endless rolls
of white paper the history of the world in the twenty-four hours that
have just passed away, has seen little groups of these boys hanging
about the newspaper offices; in winter, when snow is on the streets,
fighting for warm spots around the grated vent-holes that let out
the heat and steam from the underground press-rooms with their noise
and clatter, and in summer playing craps and 7-11 on the curb for
their hard-earned pennies, with all the absorbing concern of hardened
gamblers. This is their beat. Here the agent of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children finds those he thinks too young for
"business," but does not always capture them. Like rabbits in their
burrows, the little ragamuffins sleep with at least one eye open,
and every sense alert to the approach of danger: of their enemy, the
policeman, whose chief business in life is to move them on, and of the
agent bent on robbing them of their cherished freedom. At the first
warning shout they scatter and are off. To pursue them would be like
chasing the fleet-footed mountain goat in his rocky fastnesses. There
is not an open door, a hidden turn or runway which they do not know,
with lots of secret passages and short cuts no one else ever found.
To steal a march on them is the only way. There is a coal chute from
the sidewalk to the boiler-room in the sub-cellar of the Post Office
which the Society's officer found the boys had made into a sort of
toboggan slide to a snug berth in wintry weather. They used to slyly
raise the cover in the street, slide down in single file, and snuggle
up to the warm boiler out of harm's way, as they thought. It proved a
trap, however. The agent slid down himself one cold night--there was
no other way of getting there--and, landing right in the midst of the
sleeping colony, had it at his mercy. After repeated raids upon their
headquarters, the boys forsook it last summer, and were next found
herding under the shore-end of one of the East River banana docks,
where they had fitted up a regular club-room that was shared by thirty
or forty homeless boys and about a million rats.
Newspaper Row is merely their headquarters. They are to be found all
over the city, these Street Arabs, where the neighborhood offers a
chance of picking up a living in the daytime and of "turning in"
at night with a promise of security from surprise. In warm weather
a truck in the street, a convenient out-house, or a dug-out in a
hay-barge at the wharf make good bunks. Two were found making their
nest once in the end of a big iron pipe up by the Harlem Bridge,
and an old boiler at the East River served as an elegant flat for
another couple, who kept house there with a thief the police had long
sought, little suspecting that he was hiding under their very noses
for months together. When the Children's Aid Society first opened
its lodging-houses, and with some difficulty persuaded the boys that
their charity was no "pious dodge" to trap them into a treasonable
"Sunday-school racket," its managers overheard a laughable discussion
among the boys in their unwontedly comfortable beds--perhaps the first
some of them had ever slept in--as to the relative merits of the
different styles of their everyday berths. Preferences were divided
between the steam-grating and a sand-box; but the weight of the
evidence was decided to be in favor of the sand-box, because, as its
advocate put it, "you could curl all up in it." The new "find" was
voted a good way ahead of any previous experience, however. "My eyes,
ain't it nice!" said one of the lads, tucked in under his blanket up
to the chin, and the roomful of boys echoed the sentiment. The compact
silently made that night between the Street Arabs and their hosts has
never been broken. They have been fast friends ever since.
Whence this army of homeless boys? is a question often asked. The
answer is supplied by the procession of mothers that go out and in at
Police Headquarters the year round, inquiring for missing boys, often
not until they have been gone for weeks and months, and then sometimes
rather as a matter of decent form than from any real interest in the
lad's fate. The stereotyped promise of the clerks who fail to find
his name on the books among the arrests, that he "will come back when
he gets hungry," does not always come true. More likely he went away
because he was hungry. Some are orphans, actually or in effect, thrown
upon the world when their parents were "sent up" to the island or to
Sing Sing, and somehow overlooked by the "Society," which thenceforth
became the enemy to be shunned until growth and dirt and the hardships
of the street, that make old early, offer some hope of successfully
floating the lie that they are "sixteen." A drunken father explains
the matter in other cases, as in that of John and Willie, aged ten
and eight, picked up by the police. They "didn't live nowhere," never
went to school, could neither read nor write. Their twelve-year-old
sister kept house for the father, who turned the boys out to beg, or
steal, or starve. Grinding poverty and hard work beyond the years of
the lad; blows and curses for breakfast, dinner, and supper; all these
are recruiting agents for the homeless army. Sickness in the house, too
many mouths to feed:
[Illustration: "DIDN'T LIVE NOWHERE."]
"We wuz six," said an urchin of twelve or thirteen I came across in the
Newsboys' Lodging House, "and we ain't got no father. Some on us had
to go." And so he went, to make a living by blacking boots. The going
is easy enough. There is very little to hold the boy who has never
known anything but a home in a tenement. Very soon the wild life in
the streets holds him fast, and thenceforward by his own effort there
is no escape. Left alone to himself, he soon enough finds a place in
the police books, and there would be no other answer to the second
question: "what becomes of the boy?" than that given by the criminal
courts every day in the week.
But he is not left alone. Society in our day has no such suicidal
intention. Right here, at the parting of the ways, it has thrown up
the strongest of all its defences for itself and for the boy. What
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is to the
baby-waif, the Children's Aid Society is to the homeless boy at this
real turning-point in his career. The good it has done cannot easily
be over-estimated. Its lodging-houses, its schools and its homes block
every avenue of escape with their offer of shelter upon terms which
the boy soon accepts, as on the whole cheap and fair. In the great
Duane Street lodging-house for newsboys, they are succinctly stated
in a "notice" over the door that reads thus: "Boys who swear and chew
tobacco cannot sleep here." There is another unwritten condition, viz.:
that the boy shall be really without a home; but upon this the managers
wisely do not insist too obstinately, accepting without too close
inquiry his account of himself where that seems advisable, well knowing
that many a home that sends forth such lads far less deserves the name
than the one they are able to give them.
[Illustration: STREET ARABS IN SLEEPING QUARTERS.]
With these simple preliminaries the outcast boy may enter. Rags do
not count; to ignorance the door is only opened wider. Dirt does not
survive long, once within the walls of the lodging-house. It is the
settled belief of the men who conduct them that soap and water are as
powerful moral agents in their particular field as preaching, and they
have experience to back them. The boy may come and go as he pleases,
so long as he behaves himself. No restraint of any sort is put on his
independence. He is as free as any other guest at a hotel, and, like
him, he is expected to pay for what he gets. How wisely the men planned
who laid the foundation of this great rescue work and yet carry it on,
is shown by no single feature of it better than by this. No pauper
was ever bred within these houses. Nothing would have been easier with
such material, or more fatal. But charity of the kind that pauperizes
is furthest from their scheme. Self-help is its very key-note, and it
strikes a response in the boy's sturdiest trait that raises him at
once to a level with the effort made in his behalf. Recognized as an
independent trader, capable of and bound to take care of himself, he is
in a position to ask trust if trade has gone against him and he cannot
pay cash for his "grub" and his bed, and to get it without question.
He can even have the loan of the small capital required to start him
in business with a boot-black's kit, or an armful of papers, if he is
known or vouched for; but every cent is charged to him as carefully
as though the transaction involved as many hundreds of dollars, and
he is expected to pay back the money as soon as he has made enough to
keep him going without it. He very rarely betrays the trust reposed in
him. Quite on the contrary, around this sound core of self-help, thus
encouraged, habits of thrift and ambitious industry are seen to grow up
in a majority of instances. The boy is "growing" a character, and he
goes out to the man's work in life with that which for him is better
than if he had found a fortune.
Six cents for his bed, six for his breakfast of bread and coffee, and
six for his supper of pork and beans, as much as he can eat, are the
rates of the boys' "hotel" for those who bunk together in the great
dormitories that sometimes hold more than a hundred berths, two tiers
high, made of iron, clean and neat. For the "upper ten," the young
financiers who early take the lead among their fellows, hire them to
work for wages and add a share of their profits to their own, and for
the lads who are learning a trade and getting paid by the week, there
are ten-cent beds with a locker and with curtains hung about. Night
schools and Sunday night meetings are held in the building and are
always well attended, in winter especially, when the lodging-houses
are crowded. In summer the tow-path and the country attract their
share of the bigger boys. The "Sunday-school racket" has ceased to
have terror for them. They follow the proceedings with the liveliest
interest, quick to detect cant of any sort, should any stray in. No
one has any just conception of what congregational singing is until
he has witnessed a roomful of these boys roll up their sleeves and
start in on "I am a lily of the valley." The swinging trapeze in the
gymnasium on the top floor is scarcely more popular with the boys than
this tremendously vocal worship. The Street Arab puts his whole little
soul into what interests him for the moment, whether it be pulverizing
a rival who has done a mean trick to a smaller boy, or attending at the
"gospel shop" on Sundays. This characteristic made necessary some extra
supervision when recently the lads in the Duane Street Lodging House
"chipped in" and bought a set of boxing gloves. The trapeze suffered a
temporary eclipse until this new toy had been tested to the extent of
several miniature black eyes upon which soap had no effect, and sundry
little scores had been settled that evened things up, as it were, for a
fresh start.
[Illustration: GETTING READY FOR SUPPER IN THE NEWSBOYS' LODGING
HOUSE.]
I tried one night, not with the best of success I confess, to
photograph the boys in their wash-room, while they were cleaning up
for supper. They were quite turbulent, to the disgust of one of their
number who assumed, unasked, the office of general manager of the show,
and expressed his mortification to me in very polite language. "If
they would only behave, sir!" he complained, "you could make a good
picture."
"Yes," I said, "but it isn't in them, I suppose."
"No, b'gosh!" said he, lapsing suddenly from grace under the
provocation, "them kids ain't got no sense, nohow!"
The Society maintains five of these boys' lodging houses, and one
for girls, in the city. The Duane Street Lodging House alone has
sheltered since its foundation in 1855 nearly a quarter of a million
different boys, at a total expense of a good deal less than half a
million dollars. Of this amount, up to the beginning of the present
year, the boys and the earnings of the house had contributed no less
than $172,776.38. In all of the lodging-houses together, 12,153 boys
and girls were sheltered and taught last year. The boys saved up no
inconsiderable amount of money in the savings banks provided for them
in the houses, a simple system of lock-boxes that are emptied for
their benefit once a month. Besides these, the Society has established
and operates in the tenement districts twenty-one industrial schools,
co-ordinate with the public schools in authority, for the children
of the poor who cannot find room in the city's school-houses, or are
too ragged to go there; two free reading-rooms, a dressmaking and
typewriting school and a laundry for the instruction of girls; a
sick-children's mission in the city and two on the sea-shore, where
poor mothers may take their babies; a cottage by the sea for crippled
girls, and a brush factory for crippled boys in Forty-fourth Street.
The Italian school in Leonard Street, alone, had an average attendance
of over six hundred pupils last year. The daily average attendance
at all of them was 4,105, while 11,331 children were registered and
taught. When the fact that there were among these 1,132 children of
drunken parents, and 416 that had been found begging in the street,
is contrasted with the showing of $1,337.21 deposited in the school
savings banks by 1,745 pupils, something like an adequate idea is
gained of the scope of the Society's work in the city.
A large share of it, in a sense the largest, certainly that productive
of the happiest results, lies outside of the city, however. From the
lodging-houses and the schools are drawn the battalions of young
emigrants that go every year to homes in the Far West, to grow up
self-supporting men and women safe from the temptations and the vice of
the city. Their number runs far up in the thousands. The Society never
loses sight of them. The records show that the great mass, with this
start given them, become useful citizens, an honor to the communities
in which their lot is cast. Not a few achieve place and prominence in
their new surroundings. Rarely bad reports come of them. Occasionally
one comes back, lured by homesickness even for the slums; but the
briefest stay generally cures the disease for good. I helped once to
see a party off for Michigan, the last sent out by that great friend of
the homeless children, Mrs. Astor, before she died. In the party was
a boy who had been an "Insider" at the Five Points House of Industry,
and brought along as his only baggage a padlocked and iron-bound box
that contained all his wealth, two little white mice of the friendliest
disposition. They were going with him out to live on the fat of the
land in the fertile West, where they would never be wanting for a
crust. Alas! for the best-laid plans of mice and men. The Western diet
did not agree with either. I saw their owner some months later in the
old home at the Five Points. He had come back, walking part of the
way, and was now pleading to be sent out once more. He had at last
had enough of the city. His face fell when I asked him about the mice.
It was a sad story, indeed. "They had so much corn to eat," he said,
"and they couldn't stand it. They burned all up inside, and then they
busted."
Mrs. Astor set an example during her noble and useful life in gathering
every year a company of homeless boys from the streets and sending them
to good homes, with decent clothes on their backs--she had sent out no
less than thirteen hundred when she died, and left funds to carry on
her work--that has been followed by many who, like her, had the means
and the heart for such a labor of love. Most of the lodging-houses
and school-buildings of the society were built by some one rich man
or woman who paid all the bills, and often objected to have even the
name of the giver made known to the world. It is one of the pleasant
experiences of life that give one hope and courage in the midst of
all this misery to find names, that stand to the unthinking mass
only for money-getting and grasping, associated with such unheralded
benefactions that carry their blessings down to generations yet unborn.
It is not so long since I found the carriage of a woman, whose name is
synonymous with millions, standing in front of the boys' lodging-house
in Thirty-fifth Street. Its owner was at that moment busy with a
surgeon making a census of the crippled lads in the brush-shop, the
most miserable of all the Society's charges, as a preliminary to
fitting them out with artificial limbs.
Farther uptown than any reared by the Children's Aid Society, in
Sixty-seventh Street, stands a lodging-house intended for boys of a
somewhat larger growth than most of those whom the Society shelters.
Unlike the others, too, it was built by the actual labor of the young
men it was designed to benefit. In the day when more of the boys
from our streets shall find their way to it and to the New York Trade
Schools, of which it is a kind of home annex, we shall be in a fair
way of solving in the most natural of all ways the question what to
do with this boy, in spite of the ignorant opposition of the men
whose tyrannical policy is now to blame for the showing that, out of
twenty-three millions of dollars paid annually to mechanics in the
building trades in this city, less than six millions go to the workman
born in New York, while his boy roams the streets with every chance of
growing up a vagabond and next to none of becoming an honest artisan.
Colonel Auchmuty is a practical philanthropist to whom the growing
youth of New York will one day owe a debt of gratitude not easily paid.
The progress of the system of trade schools established by him, at
which a young man may acquire the theory as well as the practice of a
trade in a few months at a merely nominal outlay, has not been nearly
as rapid as was to be desired, though the fact that other cities are
copying the model, with their master mechanics as the prime movers in
the enterprise, testifies to its excellence. But it has at last taken
a real start, and with union men and even the officers of unions now
sending their sons to the trade schools to be taught,[19] one may
perhaps be permitted to hope that an era of better sense is dawning
that shall witness a rescue work upon lines which, when the leaven has
fairly had time to work, will put an end to the existence of the New
York Street Arab, of the native breed at least.
[Footnote 19: Colonel Auchmuty's own statement.]