We are stopping quietly here, taking our meals in our rooms mostly, and
going out very little indeed. When I say we, I use the term editorially.
We notice first of all the great contrast between this and other
hotels, and in several instances this one is superior. In the first
place, there is a sense of absolute security when one goes to sleep
here that can not be felt at a popular hotel, where burglars secrete
themselves in the wardrobe during the day and steal one’s pantaloons
and contents at night. This is one of the compensations of life in
prison.
Here the burglars go to bed at the hour that the rest of us do. We all
retire at the same time, and a murderer can not sit up any later at
night than the smaller or unknown criminal can.
You can get to Ludlow Street Jail by taking the Second Avenue elevated
train to Grand Street and then going east two blocks, or you can fire a
shotgun into a Sabbath school.
You can pay five cents to the Elevated Railroad and get here, or you
can put some other man’s nickel in your own slot and come here with an
attendant.
William Marcy Tweed was the contractor of Ludlow Street Jail and here
also he died. He was the son of a poor chairmaker and was born April 3,
1823. From the chair business in 1853 to congress was the first false
step. Exhilarated by the delirium of official life, and the false joys
of franking his linen home every week, and having cake and preserves
franked back to him at Washington, he resolved to still further
taste the delights of office, and in 1857 we find him as a school
commissioner.
In 1860 he became Grand Sachem of the Tammany Society, an association
at that time more purely political than politically pure. As president
of the board of supervisors, head of the department of public works,
state senator, and Grand Sachem of Tammany, Tweed had a large and
seductive influence over the city and state. The story of how he earned
a scanty livelihood by stealing a million at a pop, and thus, with the
most rigid economy, scraped together $20,000,000 in a few years by
patient industry and smoking plug tobacco, has been frequently told.
Tweed was once placed here in Ludlow Street Jail in default of
$3,000,000 bail. How few there are of us who could slap up that amount
of bail if rudely gobbled on the street by the hand of the law. While
riding out with the sheriff, in 1875, Tweed asked to see his wife, and
said he would be back in a minute.
He came back by way of Spain, in the fall of ’76, looking much
improved. But the malaria and dissipation of Blackwell’s Island
afterwards impaired his health, and having done time there, and having
been arrested afterwards and placed in Ludlow Street Jail, he died here
April 12, 1878, leaving behind him a large, vain world, and an equally
vain judgment for $6,537,117.38, to which he said he would give his
attention as soon as he could get a paving contract in the sweet
ultimately.
From the exterior Ludlow Street Jail looks somewhat like a conservatory
of music, but as soon as one enters he readily discovers his mistake.
The structure has 100 feet frontage, and a court, which is sometimes
called the court of last resort. The guest can climb out of this court
by ascending a polished brick wall about 100 feet high and then letting
himself down in a similar way on the Ludlow street side.
That one thing is doing a great deal towards keeping quiet a number of
people here who would otherwise, I think, go away.
James D. Fish and Ferdinand Ward both remained here prior to their
escape to Sing Sing. Red Leary also made his escape from this point but
did not succeed in reaching the penitentiary. Forty thousand prisoners
have been confined in Ludlow Street Jail, mostly for civil offenses. A
man in New York runs a very short career if he tries to be offensively
civil.
As you enter Ludlow Street Jail the door is carefully closed after
you and locked by means of an iron lock about the size of a pictorial
family Bible. You then remain on the inside for quite a spell. You
do not hear the prattle of soiled children any more. All the glad
sunlight, and stench-condensing pavements, and dark-haired inhabitants
of Rivington street, are seen no longer, and the heavy iron storm door
shuts out the wail of the combat from the alley nearby. Ludlow Street
Jail may be surrounded by a very miserable and dirty quarter of the
city, but when you get inside all is changed.
You register first. There is a good pen there that you can write with,
and the clerk does not chew tolu and read a sporting paper while you
wait for a room. He is there to attend to business, and he attends to
it. He does not seem to care whether you have any baggage or not. You
can stay here for days, even if you don’t have any baggage. All you
need is a kind word and a mittimus from the court.
One enters this sanitarium either as a boarder or a felon. If you
decide to come in as a boarder, you pay the warden $15 a week for
the privileges of sitting at his table and eating the luxuries of
the market. You also get a better room than at many hotels, and you
have a good strong door, with a padlock on it, which enables you to
prevent the sudden and unlooked-for entrance of the chambermaid. It
is a good-sized room, with a wonderful amount of seclusion, a plain
bed, table, chairs, carpet and so forth. After a few weeks at the
seaside, at $19 per day, I think the room in which I am writing is not
unreasonable at $2.
Still, of course, we miss the sea breeze.
You can pay $50 to $100 per week here if you wish, and get your money’s
worth, too. For the latter sum one may live in the bridal chamber, so
to speak, and eat the very best food all the time.
Heavy iron bars keep the mosquitoes out, and at night the house
is lighted by incandescent lights of one-candle power each. Neat
snuffers, consisting of the thumb and forefinger polished on the hair,
are to be found in each occupied room.
Bread is served to the Freshmen and Juniors in rectangular wads. It is
such bread as convicts’ tears have moistened many thousand years. In
that way it gets quite moist.
The most painful feature about life in Ludlow Street Jail is the
confinement. One can not avoid a feeling of being constantly hampered
and hemmed in.
One more disagreeable thing is the great social distinction here.
The poor man who sleeps in a stone niche near the roof, and who is
constantly elbowed and hustled out of his bed by earnest and restless
vermin with a tendency toward insomnia, is harassed by meeting in the
courtyard and corridors the paying boarders who wear good clothes, live
well, have their cigars, brandy and Kentucky Sec all the time.
The McAllister crowd here is just as exclusive as it is on the outside.
But, great Scott! what a comfort it is to a man like me, who has been
nearly killed by a cyclone, to feel the firm, secure walls and solid
time lock when he goes to bed at night! Even if I can not belong to the
400, I am almost happy.
We retire at 7:30 o’clock at night and arise at 6:30 in the morning, so
as to get an early start. A man who has five or ten years to stay in a
place like this naturally likes to get at it as soon as possible each
day, and so he gets up at 6:30.
We dress by the gaudy light of the candle, and while we do so, we
remember far away at home our wife and the little boy asleep in her
arms. They do not get up at 6:30. It is at this hour we remember the
fragrant drawer in the dresser at home where our clean shirts, and
collars and cuffs, and socks and handkerchiefs, are put every week by
our wife. We also recall as we go about our stone den, with its odor of
former corned beef, and the ghost of some bloody-handed predecessor’s
snore still moaning in the walls, the picture of green grass by our own
doorway, and the apples that were just ripening when the bench warrant
came.
The time from 6:30 to breakfast is occupied by the average, or
non-paying inmate, in doing the chamber work and tidying up his
state-room. I do not know how others feel about it, but I dislike
chamber work most heartily, especially when I am in jail. Nothing has
done more to keep me out of jail, I guess, than the fact that while
there I have to make up my bed and dust the piano.
Breakfast is generally table d’hote and consists of bread. A tincup of
coffee takes the taste of the bread out of your mouth, and then if you
have some Limburger cheese in your pocket you can with that remove the
taste of the coffee.
Dinner is served at 12 o’clock and consists of more bread with soup.
This soup has everything in it except nourishment. The bead on this
soup is noticeable for quite a distance. It is disagreeable. Several
days ago I heard that the Mayor was in the soup, but I didn’t realize
it before. I thought it was a newspaper yarn. There is everything in
this soup, from shop-worn rice up to neat’s-foot oil. Once I thought I
detected cuisine in it.
The dinner menu is changed on Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, on which
days you get the soup first and the bread afterwards. In this way the
bread is saved.
Three days in a week each man gets at dinner a potato containing
a thousand-legged worm. At 6 o’clock comes supper with toast and
responses. Bread is served at supper time, together with a cup of tea.
To those who dislike bread and never eat soup, or do not drink tea or
coffee, life at Ludlow Street Jail is indeed irksome.
I asked for kumiss and a pony of Benedictine, as my stone boudoir made
me feel rocky, but it has not yet been sent up.
Somehow, while here, I can not forget poor old man Dorrit, the Master
of the Marshalsea, and how the Debtors’ Prison preyed upon his mind
till he didn’t enjoy anything except to stand off and admire himself.
Ludlow Street Jail is a good deal like it in many ways, and I can see
how in time the canker of unrest and the memories of those who did us
wrong but who are basking in the bright and bracing air, while we, to
meet their obligations, sacrifice our money, our health and at last our
minds, would kill hope and ambition.
Before closing this brief and incomplete account as a guest at Ludlow
Street Jail I ought, in justice to my family, to say, perhaps, that I
came down this morning to see a friend of mine who is here because he
refuses to pay alimony to his recreant and morbidly sociable wife. He
says he is quite content to stay here, so long as his wife is on the
outside. He is writing a small ready-reference book on his side of the
great problem, “Is Marriage a Failure?”
With this I shake him by the hand and in a moment the big iron storm
door clangs behind me, the big lock clicks in its hoarse, black throat
and I welcome even the air of Ludlow street so long as the blue sky is
above it.
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