I.

But I must not give too exclusive an impression of ceremony in the

New-Yorkers. I made some calls about Christmas-time last year in a

quarter of the city where the informalities are real and where the

hospitalities, such as they were, I thought as sincere as in the

houses where the informalities are more apparent. The sort of calls

I made were rather fashionable some years ago, but are so no longer.

It was a fad to make them, and the fad, like all really nice fads,

came from England, and perhaps it has now died out here because it has

died out there. At any rate, it seems certain that there is now less

interest, less curiosity, concerning the home life of the poor than

there was then among the comfortable people. I do not say there is less

sympathy--there must be still a good deal of sympathy--but I should

say there was less hope with the well-to-do of bettering the condition

of the ill-to-do; some philosophers even warn us against indulging a

feeling of commiseration, lest it should encourage the poor to attempt

themselves to better their condition.

Yet there are no signs of rebellion on the part of the poor, whom I

found as tame and peaceful, apparently, when I went the rounds of their

unceremonious at-homes as the most anxious philosopher could desire.

My calls were by no means of the nature of a perquisition, but they

left very little unknown to me, I fancy, of the way the poor live, so

frank and simple is their life. They included some tenements of the

American quarter, near the point of the island, on the West Side, and

a rather greater number on the East Side, in the heart of the district

abandoned chiefly to the Russian Jews, though there are no doubt

other nationalities to be found there. It is said to be more densely

populated than any other area in the world, or at least in Christendom,

for within a square mile there are more than three hundred and fifty

thousand men, women and children. One can imagine from this fact

alone how they are housed and what their chances of the comforts and

decencies of life may be. But I must not hurry to the region of these

homes before I have first tried to show the interiors of that quarter

called American, where I found the Americans represented, as they are

so often, by Irish people. The friend who went with me on my calls led

me across the usual surface tracks, under the usual elevated tracks,

and suddenly dodged before me into an alleyway about two feet wide.

This crept under houses fronting on the squalid street we had left and

gave into a sort of court some ten or twelve feet wide by thirty or

forty feet long. The buildings surrounding it were low and very old.

One of them was a stable, which contributed its stench to the odors

that rose from the reeking pavement and from the closets filling an

end of the court, with a corner left beside them for the hydrant that

supplied the water of the whole inclosure. It is from this court that

the inmates of the tenements have their sole chance of sun and air.

What the place must be in summer I had not the heart to think, and on

the wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the skies which

my guide said would have been evident to me if I had seen it in August.

I could better fancy this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one

of the houses and found myself in a typical New York tenement. Then I

almost choked at the thought of what a hot day, what a hot night, must

be in such a place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid

breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled by the passage

through the living-room, to the black hole in the rear, where the whole

family lay on the heap of rags that passed for a bed.

We had our choice which door to knock at on the narrow landing, a

yard wide at most, which opened into such tenements to the right and

left, as many stories up as the stairs mounted. We stood at once in

the presence of the hostess; there was no ceremony of sending in our

cards here, or having our names called to her. In one case we found

her over the washtub, with her three weeks’ babe bundled in a chair

beside it. A table, with a half-eaten loaf, that formed her breakfast,

on it, helped, with the cooking-stove, to crowd the place past any

possibility of sitting down, if there had been chairs to sit in; so

we stood, as people do at an afternoon tea. At sight of us the woman

began to cry and complain that her man had been drunk and idle for a

month and did nothing for her; though in these times he might have been

sober and idle and done as little. Some good soul was paying the rent

for her, which was half as great as would have hired a decent flat in a

good part of the town; but how her food came or the coal for her stove

remained a mystery which we did not try to solve. She wiped her tears

at the exhibition of a small coin, which she had perhaps dimly foreseen

through them from the moment they began to flow. It was wrong, perhaps,

to give her money, but it was not very wrong, perhaps, for the money

was not very much, and if it pauperized her it could not have been said

that she was wholly unpauperized before she took it. These are very

difficult cases, but all life is a hopeless tangle, and the right is

something that does not show itself at once, especially in economical

affairs.

In another tenement we found a family as gay and hopeful as this was

dismal and desperate. An Irish lady with a stylish fringe of red hair

decorating her forehead, welcomed us with excuses for the state of the

apartment, which in the next breath she proved herself very proud of,

for she said that if people were not comfortable in their houses it was

because they were slovenly and untidy. I could not see that she was

neater than her neighbor on the landing below. She had a florid taste

in pictures, and half a dozen large colored prints went far to hide the

walls, which, she said, the landlord had lately had whitewashed, though

to eyes less fond than hers they showed a livid blue. The whitewashing

was the sole repairs which had been put upon her tenement since she

came into it, but she seemed to think it quite enough; and her man, who

sat at leisure near the stove, in the three days’ beard which seems

inseparable from idle poverty, was quite boastful of its advantages.

He said that he had lived in that court for thirty years and there

was no such air anywhere else in this world. I could readily believe

him, being there to smell it and coming away with the taste of it in my

mouth. Like other necessaries of life, it must have been rather scanty

in that happy home, especially at night, when the dark fell outside and

a double dark thickened in the small bin which stood open to our gaze

at the end of the room. The whitewash seemed not to have penetrated to

this lair, where a frowzy mattress showed itself on a rickety bedstead.

The beds in these sleeping-holes were never made up; they were rounded

into a heap and seemed commonly of a coarse brown sacking. They had

always a horrible fascination for me. I fancied them astir with a

certain life which, if there had been a consensus of it to that effect,

might have walked off with them.

All the tenements here were of this size and shape--a room with windows

opening upon the court and at the rear the small black bin or pen

for the bed. The room was perhaps twelve feet square and the bin was

six, and for such a dwelling the tenant pays six dollars a month. If

he fails to pay it he is evicted, and some thirty thousand evictions

have taken place in the past year. But an eviction is by no means the

dreadful hardship the reader would perhaps imagine it. To be sure,

it means putting the tenant on the sidewalk with his poor household

gear in any weather and at any hour; but if it is very cold or very

wet weather, the evicted family is seldom suffered to pass the night

there. The wretched neighbors gather about and take them in, and their

life begins again on the old terms; or the charities come to their aid,

and they are dispersed into the different refuges until the father or

mother can find another hole for them to crawl into. Still, natural as

it all is, I should think it must surprise an Irishman, who supposed he

had left eviction behind him in his native land, to find it so rife in

the country of his adoption.