FISHING FOR MEN ON THE BOWERY
The Bowery is one of the most unique thoroughfares of the world. The
history of the cheap lodging houses, to which I was commissioned to
carry the gospel, is one of the most interesting phases of the
Bowery's history. Ex-inspector Thomas Byrnes has described the lodging
house of the Bowery as "a breeding place of crime." He probably did
not know that the cheap lodging house had its origin in a
philanthropic effort. It was in 1872, somewhere on the edge of a
financial panic, that the first lodging house of this type was
organized by two missionaries--Rev. Dr. A.F. Shauffler and the Rev.
John Dooley. The Young Men's Christian Association of the Bowery found
a lot of young men attending its meetings who were homeless, and their
endeavour to solve this problem resulted in the fitting up of a large
dormitory on Spring Street. Somebody--Ex-inspector Byrnes says a Mr.
Howe--saw a business opportunity in the philanthropy and copied the
dormitory.
There were from sixty to seventy of them on the Bowery when I began my
work. These I visited every day of the week. There was a glamour and
a fascination about it in the night-time that held me in its grip as
tightly as it did others. What a study were the faces--many of them
pale, haggard; many of them painted! How sickly they looked under the
white glare of the arc lights that fizzled and sputtered overhead!
Many of its shops have been "selling out below cost," for over twenty
years.
I did not confine myself to the Bowery, but went to the small side
streets around Chatham Square. They were also filled with cheap
lodging houses. The lowest of these were called "bunk houses." Only
one of the bunk houses remains. That is situated at No. 9 Mulberry
Street. It is there to-day, little altered from the day I first
entered it over twenty years ago. The price for lodging ranges from
seven to fifteen cents, but fifteen cents was the more usual price.
My headquarters at first was the City Mission Church on Broome Street,
called "The Broome Street Tabernacle," and to it I led thousands of
weary feet. The minister at that time was the Rev. C.H. Tyndall, a
splendid man with a modern mind; but I filled his tabernacle so full
of the "Weary Willies of the Bowery" that Mr. Tyndall revolted, and as
I look back at the circumstance now, he was fully justified in his
revolt. Mr. Tyndall was doing a more important work than I was, more
fundamental and far-reaching. He was touching the family life of the
community and he saw what I did not see--that our congregations could
not be mixed; that my work was spoiling his. I did not see it then. I
see it now. So I betook myself to another church, and this other
church got a credit which it did not deserve, for they had no family
life to touch. It was a church at Chatham Square, and its usefulness
consisted in the fact that it was situated where it could catch the
ebb and flow of the "tramp-tide."
I spent my afternoons in the lodging houses, pocket Bible in hand,
going from man to man as they sat there, workless, homeless, dejected
and in despair. I very soon found that there was one gospel they were
looking for and willing to accept--it was the gospel of work; so, in
order to meet the emergency, I became an employment agency. I became
more than that. They needed clothing and food--and I became a junk
store and a soup kitchen.
After six months' experience in the work, I had a story to tell. It
was very vivid, and I could always touch the tear glands of a
congregation with it, and stir their hearts; so I went from church to
church, uptown and out of town and anywhere, and told the story of my
congregation on the Bowery. The result was not by any means a solution
of my problem, nor of the tramp problem, but carloads of old clothes,
and money to pay for lodgings. There was such a terrific tug at my
heartstrings all the time that I never had two coats to my own back,
or a change of clothing in hardly any department. As for money, I was,
as they were, most of the time penniless! Everything I could beg or
borrow went into the work.
At the close of the first year, the results were rather discouraging.
I got a number of men work, but very few had made good. Hundreds of
men had been clothed, fed and lodged, but they had passed out of my
reach. I knew not where they had gone. Scarcely one per cent. ever let
me know even by a postal card what had become of them, or how they
fared, and yet my work was called successful.
Sunday afternoons, with a baby organ on my shoulder and a small group
of converts and helpers following closely behind, I went down the
Bowery and held meetings in about half a dozen houses. I did most of
the speaking, but urged the converts to tell their own stories at each
service. I have said that I was never interfered with or molested in
the work, and the following incident can hardly be called an
exception. A broken-down prize fighter, slightly under the influence
of liquor, tried to prevent us from holding a meeting one afternoon. I
reasoned with him.
"You don't seem to know who I am," he said. I confessed my ignorance.
"Well," he said, "I'm Connelly, the prize fighter!"
"Then you're what your profession calls a 'bruiser'."
"Sure!" he replied.
"Probably you are not aware, Mr. Connelly, that the Bible has
something to say about bruisers."
He explained that, being a Roman Catholic, his Bible was different
from mine, and he did not think there were any bruisers in his Bible.
"Oh, you are mistaken, Mr. Connelly. This is your Bible I have with
me"--and I produced a small Douey Bible, and turning over the pages in
Genesis I read a passage which I thought might appeal to him:
"'The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head.' I suppose
you know who the woman was, Connelly."
"The Holy Virgin?" he inquired.
"Yes; and the serpent is the Devil, and he has been pouring firewater
into you and has been making you say things you would not otherwise
say. As for the seed of the woman, that is Jesus Christ; and this
Douey Bible of yours tells you that Jesus Christ is able to bruise the
head of the old serpent in you, which is the Devil." That sounded
rather reasonable to the retired prize fighter, and he quieted down
and we proceeded with the service.
The society for which I worked, occasionally sent down visitors to be
shown around the lodging houses, and often I took them in there
myself; but the thing grew very distasteful to me, for I never got
hardened or calloused to the misery and sorrow of the situation, and
it seemed to me eminently unfair to parade them.
About the last man I took around was Sir Walter Besant. I dined with
him at the Brevoort House one night, and took him around first to one
of the bunk-houses and then to various others, and also into the
tenement region around Cherry Street.
"Keep close to me," I told Besant as we entered the bunk house, "don't
linger;" so we went to the top floor. The strips of canvas arranged in
double tiers were full of lodgers. The floor was strewn with
bodies--naked, half naked and fully clothed. We had to step over them
to get to the other end. There was a stove in the middle of the room,
and beside it, a dirty old lamp shed its yellow rays around, but by no
means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours
coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and
from the hot air of the stove--windows and doors being tightly
closed--made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating.
After stepping over the prostrate bodies from one end of the dormitory
to the other, the novelist was almost overcome and when we got back to
the door he begged to be taken to the open air. When we got to Chatham
Square, he said--"Take me to a drugstore." Besant knew the underworld
of London as few men of his generation knew it, but he had never seen
anything quite so bestial, so debauched and so low as the bunk-house
on Mulberry Street.
It seems strange to me now that after having tramped the streets of
New York with the unemployed and after having shared their misery,
disappointment and despair, that I should, as a missionary, have
entirely forgotten it, and that after years of experience among them,
I should still be possessed of the idea that men of this grade were
lazy and would not work if they had it. One afternoon in a bunk-house
I was so possessed of this idea that I challenged the crowd.
"You men surely do not need any further evidence of my interest in
you," I remarked. "All that I have and am belongs to you; but I cannot
help telling you of my conviction: that most of you are here because
you are lazy. Now, if any man in the house is willing to test the
case, I will change clothes with him to-morrow morning and show him
how to find work."
The words had scarcely escaped my lips when a man by the name of Tim
Grogan stood up and accepted the challenge.
I made an appointment to meet Grogan on Chatham Square at half-past
five the next morning. Before I met him, I had done more thinking on
the question of the unemployed than I had ever done in my life. I
balked on the change of clothing article in the agreement--and
furnished my own. Two or three men had enough courage to get up early
in the morning and see Tim off--they were sceptical about my
intention.
The first thing that we did was to try the piano, soap and other
factories on the West Side. From place to place we went, from
Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street without success. Sometimes under
pretence of business and by force of the power to express myself in
good English, I gained an entrance to the superintendent; but I always
failed to find a job. We crossed the city at Fifty-ninth Street and
went down the East Side. Wherever men were working, we applied. We
went to the stevedores on the East Side, but they were all "full up."
"For God's sake," I said to some of them, but I was brushed aside with
a wave of the hand. I never felt so like a beggar in my life. Tim
trotted at my heels, encouraging me with whimsical Irish phrases, one
of which I remember--
"Begorra, mister, the hardest work for sure is no work at all, at
all!"
In the middle of the afternoon, I began to get disturbed; then I
decided to try a scheme I had worked over for hours. "Keep close to
me, now, Tim," I said, as I led him to a drugstore at the corner of
Grand Street and the Bowery.
"Sir," I said to the clerk, "you are unaccustomed to giving credit, I
know; but perhaps you might suspend your rule for once and trust us
to the amount of five cents?"
"You don't talk like a bum," he said, "but you look like one."
I thanked him for the compliment to my language, but insisted on my
request.
"Well, what is it?" asked the clerk with somewhat of a sneer.
"I am hungry and thirsty. I have looked for work all day and have
utterly failed to find it. Now I have a scheme and I know it will
work. Oxalic acid eats away rust. If I had five cents' worth, I could
earn a dollar--I know I could."
He looked curiously at me for a moment, and said with an oath:
"By--! I've been on the Bowery a good many years and haven't been sold
once. If you're a skin-game man, I'll throw up my job!"
I got the acid. I played the same game in a tailor-shop for five
cents' worth of rags. Then I went to a hardware store on the Square
and got credit for about ten cents' worth of brickdust and paste. I
took Tim by the arm and led him across the west side of Chatham
Square. There used to be a big drygoods store on the east side of the
Square, with large plate-glass windows, and underneath the windows,
big brass signs.
"Nothing doing," said the floorwalker, as I asked for the job of
cleaning them; nevertheless, when he turned his back, I dropped on my
knees and cleaned a square foot--did it inside of a minute.
"Say, boss," I said, "look here! I'm desperately hard up. I want to
make money, and I want to make it honestly. I will clean that entire
sign for a nickle."
It was pity that moved him to give me the job, and when it was
completed, I offered to do the other one. "All right," he said; "go
ahead."
"But this one," I said, "will cost you a dime."
"Why a nickle for this one and a dime for the other?" he asked.
"Well," I said, "we are just entering business. In the first case I
charged you merely for the work done; in the second, I charge you for
the idea."
"What idea?" he inquired.
"The idea that cleanliness is part of any business man's capital."
"Well, go ahead."
When both signs were polished I offered to do the big plate-glass
windows for ten cents each. This was thirty cents below the regular
price, and I was permitted to do the job. Tim, of course, took his cap
off, rolled his shirtsleeves up and worked with a will beside me.
After that, we swept the sidewalk, earning the total sum of
thirty-five cents. We tried to do other stores, but the nationality of
most of them was against us; nevertheless, in the course of the
afternoon, we made a dollar and a half. I took Tim to "Beefsteak
John's," and we had dinner. Then I began to boast of the performance
and to warn Tim that on the following Sunday afternoon I should
explain my success to the men in the bunk-house.
"Yes, yes, indeed, yer honour," said Tim, "y're a janyus! There's no
doubt about that at all, at all! But----"
"Go on," I said.
"I was jist switherin'," said Tim, "what a wontherful thing ut is that
a man kin always hev worruk whin he invints ut."
"Well, that's worth knowing, Tim," I said, disappointedly. "Did you
learn anything else?"
"There's jist one thing that you forgot, yer honour."
"What is it?" I asked.
"Begorra, you forgot that if all the brains in the bunk-house wor put
together they cudn't think of a thrick like that--the thrick of
cleaning a window wid stuff from a dhrugstore! They aint got brains."
"Why haven't they?"
"Ach, begorra, I dunno except for the same raisin that a fish hasn't
no horns!"
We retraced our steps to the drugstore and the tailor-shop and the
hardware store, and paid our bills and I handed over what was left to
Tim.
This experiment taught me more than it taught Tim. It made a better
student of me. I had investigated the cases of a hundred men in that
same bunk-house--their nationality, age and occupation--and I had
tried to find out the cause of their failure. And my superficial
inquiry led me to the conclusion that the use of intoxicating liquor
was the chief cause.
The following table shows the trade, nationality and age of one of our
Sunday audiences in the B---- bunk-house. The audience numbered 108,
and were all well-known individually to the Lodging House Missionary.
_Trade_
Engineer 1
Waiter 1
Watchman 1
Labourers 17
'Longshoremen 7
Junkmen 3
Mechanics 3
Coal Heavers 18
Street Peddlers 4
Beer Helpers 2
Knife Grinders 4
Tailors 4
Cooks 2
Cigar Makers 2
Upholsterer 1
Painter 1
Butcher 1
Shoemakers 6
Gardeners 3
Gilder 1
Jeweler 1
Oysterman 1
Bronzer 1
Truckman 1
Firemen 2
Last Maker 1
Farmer 1
Thieves and Bums of various grades 18
____
Total 108
_Nationality_
Germans 52
Americans 19
Irish 22
English 4
Swedish 2
Austrians 2
Scotch 2
Welsh 1
French 2
Greek 1
Cuban 1
____
Total 108
_Age_
Between 20 and 30 21
" 30 and 40 30
" 40 and 50 29
" 50 and 60 20
" 60 and 70 8
____
Total 108
Average age, 41 years
Despite my experience with Tim Grogan, I diagnosed the condition of
these men as being entirely due to strong drink. I went back over the
ground and investigated with a little more care the causes that led
them to drink, and this was the more fruitful of the two
investigations. I wondered why men would not even stick at a job when
I got them work. A careful investigation led me to the belief that,
when a man gets out of a job once, he loses just a little of the
routine, the continuity, the habit of work, and it is just a little
harder to apply himself when he begins again. If a man loses a job two
or three times in a year, it is just as many times harder to go on
with a regular job when it comes. Lack of regular employment is the
cause not only of the physical disintegration, but of the moral
disintegration also; so, these men who had been out of employment so
often, actually could not stick at a job when they got it. They were
disorganized. A few of them had the stamina to overcome this
disorganization. I found the same to be true in morals. When a man
made his first break, it was easier to make the second, and it was as
easy for him to lose a good habit as to acquire a bad one.
The same thing holds good in what we call charity. A terrific
soul-struggle goes on in every man and woman before the hand is put
out for the first time. Self-respect is a tremendous asset, and
people hold on to it as to their very souls; but when a hand is held
out once and the community puts alms therein, the fabric of
self-respect begins to totter, and the whole process of disintegration
begins.