the saloons elbow one another at every step, crowding out all other
business than that of keeping lodgers to support them. Within call of
it, across the square, stands a church which, in the memory of men
yet living, was built to shelter the fashionable Baptist audiences
of a day when Madison Square was out in the fields, and Harlem had a
foreign sound. The fashionable audiences are gone long since. To-day
the church, fallen into premature decay, but still handsome in its
strong and noble lines, stands as a missionary outpost in the land of
the enemy, its builders would have said, doing a greater work than they
planned. To-night is the Christmas festival of its English-speaking
Sunday-school, and the pews are filled. The banners of United Italy,
of modern Hellas, of France and Germany and England, hang side by side
with the Chinese dragon and the starry flag--signs of the cosmopolitan
character of the congregation. Greek and Roman Catholics, Jews and
joss-worshippers, go there; few Protestants, and no Baptists. It is
easy to pick out the children in their seats by nationality, and as
easy to read the story of poverty and suffering that stands written in
more than one mother's haggard face, now beaming with pleasure at the
little ones' glee. A gayly decorated Christmas tree has taken the place
of the pulpit. At its foot is stacked a mountain of bundles, Santa
Claus's gifts to the school. A self-conscious young man with soap-locks
has just been allowed to retire, amid tumultuous applause, after
blowing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" on his horn until his cheeks swelled
almost to bursting. A trumpet ever takes the Fourth Ward by storm.
A class of little girls is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a
capital letter on her breast, and has a piece to speak that begins
with the letter; together they spell its lesson. There is momentary
consternation; one is missing. As the discovery is made, a child pushes
past the door-keeper, hot and breathless. "I am in 'Boundless Love,'"
she says, and makes for the platform, where her arrival restores
confidence and the language.
In the audience the befrocked visitor from up-town sits cheek by jowl
with the pigtailed Chinaman and the dark-browed Italian. Up in the
gallery, farthest from the preacher's desk and the tree, sits a Jewish
mother with three boys, almost in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl
partly hides her poor calico wrap and patched apron. The woman shrinks
in the pew, fearful of being seen; her boys stand upon the benches,
and applaud with the rest. She endeavors vainly to restrain them.
"Tick, tick!" goes the old clock over the door through which wealth and
fashion went out long years ago, and poverty came in.
Tick, tick! the world moves, with us--without; without or with. She is
the yesterday, they the to-morrow. What shall the harvest be?
Loudly ticked the old clock in time with the doxology, the other day,
when they cleared the tenants out of Gotham Court down here in Cherry
Street, and shut the iron doors of Single and Double Alley against
them. Never did the world move faster or surer toward a better day
than when the wretched slum was seized by the health officers as a
nuisance unfit longer to disgrace a Christian city. The snow lies deep
in the deserted passsageways, and the vacant floors are given over to
evil smells, and to the rats that forage in squads, burrowing in the
neglected sewers. The "wall of wrath" still towers above the buildings
in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but its wrath at last is wasted.
It was built by a vengeful Quaker, whom the alderman had knocked down
in a quarrel over the boundary line, and transmitted its legacy of hate
to generations yet unborn; for where it stood it shut out sunlight
and air from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And at last it is
to go, Gotham Court and all; and to the going the wall of wrath has
contributed its share, thus in the end atoning for some of the harm it
wrought. Tick! old clock; the world moves. Never yet did Christmas seem
less dark on Cherry Hill than since the lights were put out in Gotham
Court forever.
In "The Bend" the philanthropist undertaker who "buries for what he
can catch on the plate" hails the Yule-tide season with a pyramid of
green made of two coffins set on end. It has been a good day, he says
cheerfully, putting up the shutters; and his mind is easy. But the
"good days" of The Bend are over, too. The Bend itself is all but gone.
Where the old pig-sty stood, children dance and sing to the strumming
of a cracked piano-organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his
wife. The park that has come to take the place of the slum will curtail
the undertaker's profits, as it has lessened the work of the police.
Murder was the fashion of the day that is past. Scarce a knife has been
drawn since the sunlight shone into that evil spot, and grass and green
shrubs took the place of the old rookeries. The Christmas gospel of
peace and good-will moves in where the slum moves out. It never had a
chance before.
The children follow the organ, stepping in the slush to the music,
bareheaded and with torn shoes, but happy; across the Five Points and
through "the Bay,"--known to the directory as Baxter Street,--to "the
Divide," still Chatham Street to its denizens, though the aldermen have
rechristened it Park Row. There other delegations of Greek and Italian
children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip. In one of the
crooked streets near the river its journey comes to an end. A battered
door opens to let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the creaking
stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter in the sink: it is to keep
it from freezing. There is not a whole window pane in the hall. Time
was when this was a fine house harboring wealth and refinement. It has
neither now. In the old parlor downstairs a knot of hard-faced men and
women sit on benches about a deal table, playing cards. They have a
jug between them, from which they drink by turns. On the stump of a
mantel-shelf a lamp burns before a rude print of the Mother of God. No
one pays any heed to the hand-organ man and his wife as they climb to
their attic. There is a colony of them up there--three families in four
rooms.
"Come in, Antonio," says the tenant of the double flat,--the one with
two rooms,--"come and keep Christmas." Antonio enters, cap in hand.
In the corner by the dormer-window a "crib" has been fitted up in
commemoration of the Nativity. A soap-box and two hemlock branches
are the elements. Six tallow candles and a night-light illuminate a
singular collection of rarities, set out with much ceremonial show. A
doll tightly wrapped in swaddling-clothes represents "the Child." Over
it stands a ferocious-looking beast, easily recognized as a survival
of the last political campaign,--the Tammany tiger,--threatening to
swallow it at a gulp if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A
miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles
of bric-à-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit.
The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with
the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity harbors no
suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with
genuine reverence, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are
five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, who works for a sweater, making
three dollars a week. It is all the money that comes in, for the father
has been sick and unable to work eight months and the mother has her
hands full: the youngest is a baby in arms. Three of the children go to
a charity school, where they are fed, a great help, now the holidays
have come to make work slack for sister. The rent is six dollars--two
weeks' pay out of the four. The mention of a possible chance of light
work for the man brings the daughter with her sewing from the adjoining
room, eager to hear. That would be Christmas indeed! "Pietro!" She
runs to the neighbors to communicate the joyful tidings. Pietro comes,
with his new-born baby, which he is tending while his wife lies ill, to
look at the maestro, so powerful and good. He also has been out of work
for months, with a family of mouths to fill, and nothing coming in. His
children are all small yet, but they speak English.
"What," I say, holding a silver dime up before the oldest, a smart
little chap of seven--"what would you do if I gave you this?"
"Get change," he replies promptly. When he is told that it is his own,
to buy toys with, his eyes open wide with wondering incredulity. By
degrees he understands. The father does not. He looks questioningly
from one to the other. When told, his respect increases visibly for
"the rich gentleman."
They were villagers of the same community in southern Italy, these
people and others in the tenements thereabouts, and they moved their
patron saint with them. They cluster about his worship here, but
the worship is more than an empty form. He typifies to them the old
neighborliness of home, the spirit of mutual help, of charity, and of
the common cause against the common enemy. The community life survives
through their saint in the far city to an unsuspected extent. The sick
are cared for; the dreaded hospital is fenced out. There are no Italian
evictions. The saint has paid the rent of this attic through two hard
months; and here at his shrine the Calabrian village gathers, in the
persons of these three, to do him honor on Christmas eve.
Where the old Africa has been made over into a modern Italy, since
King Humbert's cohorts struck the up-town trail, three hundred of the
little foreigners are having an uproarious time over their Christmas
tree in the Children's Aid Society's school. And well they may, for
the like has not been seen in Sullivan Street in this generation.
Christmas trees are rather rarer over here than on the East Side, where
the German leavens the lump with his loyalty to home traditions. This
is loaded with silver and gold and toys without end, until there is
little left of the original green. Santa Claus's sleigh must have been
upset in a snow-drift over here, and righted by throwing the cargo
overboard, for there is at least a wagon-load of things that can find
no room on the tree. The appearance of "teacher" with a double armful
of curly-headed dolls in red, yellow, and green Mother-Hubbards,
doubtful how to dispose of them, provokes a shout of approval, which
is presently quieted by the principal's bell. School is "in" for the
preliminary exercises. Afterward there are to be the tree and ice-cream
for the good children. In their anxiety to prove their title clear,
they sit so straight, with arms folded, that the whole row bends over
backward. The lesson is brief, the answers to the point.
"What do we receive at Christmas?" the teacher wants to know. The
whole school responds with a shout, "Dolls and toys!" To the question,
"Why do we receive them at Christmas?" the answer is not so prompt.
But one youngster from Thompson Street holds up his hand. He knows.
"Because we always get 'em," he says; and the class is convinced: it is
a fact. A baby wails because it cannot get the whole tree at once. The
"little mother"--herself a child of less than a dozen winters--who has
it in charge, cooes over it, and soothes its grief with the aid of a
surreptitious sponge-cake evolved from the depths of teacher's pocket.
Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not originally included
in their plan, as often the one condition upon which the older children
can be reached. Some one has to mind the baby, with all hands out at
work.
The school sings "Santa Lucia" and "Children of the Heavenly King," and
baby is lulled to sleep.
"Who is this King?" asks the teacher, suddenly, at the end of a verse.
Momentary stupefaction. The little minds are on ice-cream just then;
the lad nearest the door has telegraphed that it is being carried up
in pails. A little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up goes his
brown fist.
"Well, Vito, who is he?"
"McKinley!" pipes the lad, who remembers the election just past; and
the school adjourns for ice-cream.
It is a sight to see them eat it. In a score of such schools, from the
Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed in Christmas week by the men and
women who, out of their own pockets, reimburse Santa Claus for his
outlay, and count it a joy, as well they may; for their beneficence
sometimes makes the one bright spot in lives that have suffered of all
wrongs the most cruel,--that of being despoiled of their childhood.
Sometimes they are little Bohemians; sometimes the children of refugee
Jews; and again, Italians, or the descendants of the Irish stock of
Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Row; always the poorest, the shabbiest, the
hungriest--the children Santa Claus loves best to find, if any one will
show him the way. Having so much on hand, he has no time, you see, to
look them up himself. That must be done for him; and it is done. To the
teacher in the Sullivan Street school came one little girl, this last
Christmas, with anxious inquiry if it was true that he came around with
toys.
"I hanged my stocking last time," she said, "and he didn't come at
all." In the front house indeed, he left a drum and a doll, but no
message from him reached the rear house in the alley. "Maybe he
couldn't find it," she said soberly. Did the teacher think he would
come if she wrote to him? She had learned to write.
Together they composed a note to Santa Claus, speaking for a doll and
a bell--the bell to play "go to school" with when she was kept home
minding the baby. Lest he should by any chance miss the alley in spite
of directions, little Rosa was invited to hang her stocking, and her
sister's, with the janitor's children's in the school. And lo! on
Christmas morning there was a gorgeous doll, and a bell that was a
whole curriculum in itself, as good as a year's schooling any day!
Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson Street alley for
this generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook or by crook into
an Eighth Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme Court bench, with
the Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board of Health against
the slum.
But the ice-cream! They eat it off the seats, half of them kneeling or
squatting on the floor; they blow on it, and put it in their pockets to
carry home to baby. Two little shavers discovered to be feeding each
other, each watching the smack develop on the other's lips as the acme
of his own bliss, are "cousins"; that is why. Of cake there is a double
supply. It is a dozen years since "Fighting Mary," the wildest child in
the Seventh Avenue school, taught them a lesson there which they have
never forgotten. She was perfectly untamable, fighting everybody in
school, the despair of her teacher, till on Thanksgiving, reluctantly
included in the general amnesty and mince-pie, she was caught cramming
the pie into her pocket, after eyeing it with a look of pure ecstasy,
but refusing to touch it. "For mother" was her explanation, delivered
with a defiant look before which the class quailed. It is recorded, but
not in the minutes, that the board of managers wept over Fighting Mary,
who, all unconscious of having caused such an astonishing "break,"
was at that moment engaged in maintaining her prestige and reputation
by fighting the gang in the next block. The minutes contain merely a
formal resolution to the effect that occasions of mince-pie shall carry
double rations thenceforth. And the rule has been kept--not only in
Seventh Avenue, but in every industrial school--since. Fighting Mary
won the biggest fight of her troubled life that day, without striking a
blow.
It was in the Seventh Avenue school last Christmas that I offered the
truant class a four-bladed penknife as a prize for whittling out the
truest Maltese cross. It was a class of black sheep, and it was the
blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize. "That awful Savarese,"
said the principal in despair. I thought of Fighting Mary, and bade her
take heart. I regret to say that within a week the hapless Savarese was
black-listed for banking up the school door with snow, so that not
even the janitor could get out and at him.
Within hail of the Sullivan Street school camps a scattered little
band, the Christmas customs of which I had been trying for years to
surprise. They are Indians, a handful of Mohawks and Iroquois, whom
some ill wind has blown down from their Canadian reservation, and left
in these West Side tenements to eke out such a living as they can,
weaving mats and baskets, and threading glass pearls on slippers and
pin-cushions, until, one after another, they have died off and gone
to happier hunting-grounds than Thompson Street. There were as many
families as one could count on the fingers of both hands when I first
came upon them, at the death of old Tamenund, the basket maker. Last
Christmas there were seven. I had about made up my mind that the only
real Americans in New York did not keep the holiday at all, when, one
Christmas eve, they showed me how. Just as dark was setting in, old
Mrs. Benoit came from her Hudson Street attic--where she was known
among the neighbors, as old and poor as she, as Mrs. Ben Wah, and was
believed to be the relict of a warrior of the name of Benjamin Wah--to
the office of the Charity Organization Society, with a bundle for a
friend who had helped her over a rough spot--the rent, I suppose. The
bundle was done up elaborately in blue cheese-cloth, and contained
a lot of little garments which she had made out of the remnants of
blankets and cloth of her own from a younger and better day. "For
those," she said, in her French patois, "who are poorer than myself;"
and hobbled away. I found out, a few days later, when I took her
picture weaving mats in her attic room, that she had scarcely food
in the house that Christmas day and not the car fare to take her to
church! Walking was bad, and her old limbs were stiff. She sat by the
window through the winter evening, and watched the sun go down behind
the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Mrs. Ben Wah, to give her
her local name, is not really an Indian; but her husband was one, and
she lived all her life with the tribe till she came here. She is a
philosopher in her own quaint way. "It is no disgrace to be poor," said
she to me, regarding her empty tobacco-pouch; "but it is sometimes a
great inconvenience." Not even the recollection of the vote of censure
that was passed upon me once by the ladies of the Charitable Ten for
surreptitiously supplying an aged couple, the special object of their
charity, with army plug, could have deterred me from taking the hint.
Very likely, my old friend Miss Sherman, in her Broome Street
cellar,--it is always the attic or the cellar,--would object to Mrs.
Ben Wah's claim to being the only real American in my note-book. She
is from Down East, and says "stun" for stone. In her youth she was
lady's-maid to a general's wife, the recollection of which military
career equally condones the cellar and prevents her holding any sort
of communication with her common neighbors, who add to the offence
of being foreigners the unpardonable one of being mostly men. Eight
cats bear her steady company, and keep alive her starved affections. I
found them on last Christmas eve behind barricaded doors; for the cold
that had locked the water-pipes had brought the neighbors down to the
cellar, where Miss Sherman's cunning had kept them from freezing. Their
tin pans and buckets were even then banging against her door. "They're
a miserable lot," said the old maid, fondling her cats defiantly; "but
let 'em. It's Christmas. Ah!" she added, as one of the eight stood up
in her lap and rubbed its cheek against hers, "they're innocent. It
isn't poor little animals that does the harm. It's men and women that
does it to each other." I don't know whether it was just philosophy,
like Mrs. Ben Wah's, or a glimpse of her story. If she had one, she
kept it for her cats.
In a hundred places all over the city, when Christmas comes, as
many open-air fairs spring suddenly into life. A kind of Gentile
Feast of Tabernacles possesses the tenement districts especially.
Green-embowered booths stand in rows at the curb, and the voice of
the tin trumpet is heard in the land. The common source of all the
show is down by the North River, in the district known as "the Farm."
Down there Santa Claus establishes headquarters early in December and
until past New Year. The broad quay looks then more like a clearing
in a pine forest than a busy section of the metropolis. The steamers
discharge their loads of fir trees at the piers until they stand
stacked mountain-high, with foot-hills of holly and ground-ivy trailing
off toward the land side. An army train of wagons is engaged in carting
them away from early morning till late at night; but the green forest
grows, in spite of it all, until in places it shuts the shipping out
of sight altogether. The air is redolent with the smell of balsam
and pine. After nightfall, when the lights are burning in the busy
market, and the homeward-bound crowds with baskets and heavy burdens of
Christmas greens jostle one another with good-natured banter,--nobody
is ever cross down here in the holiday season,--it is good to take a
stroll through the Farm, if one has a spot in his heart faithful yet
to the hills and the woods in spite of the latter-day city. But it is
when the moonlight is upon the water and upon the dark phantom forest,
when the heavy breathing of some passing steamer is the only sound that
breaks the stillness of the night, and the watchman smokes his only
pipe on the bulwark, that the Farm has a mood and an atmosphere all its
own, full of poetry which some day a painter's brush will catch and
hold.
Into the ugliest tenement street Christmas brings something of
picturesqueness, of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the
heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive yearning
to do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brown-stone streets up-town
there may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms
on stoop and fire-escape, looks out of the front window, and makes the
unsightly barber-pole to sprout overnight like an Aaron's-rod. Poor
indeed is the home that has not its sign of peace over the hearth, be
it but a single sprig of green. A little color creeps with it even into
rabbinical Hester Street, and shows in the shop-windows and in the
children's faces. The very feather dusters in the pedler's stock take
on brighter hues for the occasion, and the big knives in the cutler's
shop gleam with a lively anticipation of the impending goose "with
fixin's"--a concession, perhaps, to the commercial rather than the
religious holiday: business comes then, if ever. A crowd of ragamuffins
camp out at a window where Santa Claus and his wife stand in state,
embodiment of the domestic ideal that has not yet gone out of fashion
in these tenements, gazing hungrily at the announcement that "A silver
present will be given to every purchaser by a real Santa Claus.--M.
Levitsky." Across the way, in a hole in the wall, two cobblers are
pegging away under an oozy lamp that makes a yellow splurge on the inky
blackness about them, revealing to the passer-by their bearded faces,
but nothing of the environment save a single sprig of holly suspended
from the lamp. From what forgotten brake it came with a message of
cheer, a thought of wife and children across the sea waiting their
summons, God knows. The shop is their house and home. It was once the
hall of the tenement; but to save space, enough has been walled in to
make room for their bench and bed; the tenants go through the next
house. No matter if they are cramped; by and by they will have room. By
and by comes the spring, and with it the steamer. Does not the green
branch speak of spring and of hope? The policeman on the beat hears
their hammers beat a joyous tattoo past midnight, far into Christmas
morning. Who shall say its message has not reached even them in their
slum?
Where the noisy trains speed over the iron highway past the
second-story windows of Allen Street, a cellar door yawns darkly in the
shadow of one of the pillars that half block the narrow sidewalk. A
dull gleam behind the cobweb-shrouded window pane supplements the sign
over the door, in Yiddish and English: "Old Brasses." Four crooked and
mouldy steps lead to utter darkness, with no friendly voice to guide
the hapless customer. Fumbling along the dank wall, he is left to find
the door of the shop as best he can. Not a likely place to encounter
the fastidious from the Avenue! Yet ladies in furs and silk find this
door and the grim old smith within it. Now and then an artist stumbles
upon them, and exults exceedingly in his find. Two holiday shoppers
are even now haggling with the coppersmith over the price of a pair
of curiously wrought brass candlesticks. The old man has turned from
the forge, at which he was working, unmindful of his callers roving
among the dusty shelves. Standing there, erect and sturdy, in his shiny
leather apron, hammer in hand, with the firelight upon his venerable
head, strong arms bared to the elbow, and the square paper cap pushed
back from a thoughtful, knotty brow, he stirs strange fancies. One half
expects to see him fashioning a gorget or a sword on his anvil. But his
is a more peaceful craft. Nothing more warlike is in sight than a row
of brass shields, destined for ornament, not for battle. Dark shadows
chase one another by the flickering light among copper kettles of ruddy
glow, old-fashioned samovars, and massive andirons of tarnished brass.
The bargaining goes on. Overhead the nineteenth century speeds by with
rattle and roar; in here linger the shadows of the centuries long dead.
The boy at the anvil listens open-mouthed, clutching the bellows-rope.