AND then after a little while, being assigned to do routine work in
connection with the East Twenty-seventh Street police station, Bellevue
Hospital, and the New York Charities Department, which included branches
that looked after the poor-farm, the morgue, an insane asylum or two, a
workhouse and what not else, I was called upon daily to face as
disagreeable and depressing a series of scenes as it is possible for a
human being to witness and which quite finished me. I was compelled to
inquire of fat, red-faced sergeants, and door-keepers who reigned in
police stations and hospital registry rooms what was new, and, by being
as genial and agreeable as possible and so earning their favor, to get
an occasional tip as to the most unimportant of brawls. Had I been in a
different mental state the thickness and incommunicability of some of
these individuals would not have been proof against my arts. I could
have devised or manufactured something.
But as it was the nature of this world depressed me so that I could not
have written anything very much worth while if I had wanted to. There
was the morgue, for instance—that horrible place! Daily from the
ever-flowing waters about New York there were recaptured or washed up in
all stages and degrees of decomposition the flotsam and jetsam of the
great city, its offal, its victims—its what? I came here often (it stood
at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street near Bellevue Hospital) and
invariably I found the same old brown-denimed caretaker in charge, a
creature so thick and so lethargic and so mentally incompetent generally
that it was all I could do to extract a grunt of recognition out of him.
Yet, if handed a cigar occasionally or a bag of tobacco, he would
trouble to get out of his chair and let you look over a book or ledger
containing the roughly jotted down police descriptions, all done in an
amazing scrawl, of the height, weight, color of clothes if any,
complexion of hair and eyes where these were still distinguishable,
probable length of time in water, contents of pockets, jewelry or money
if any, etc., which same were to be noted in connection with any mystery
or disappearance of a person. And there was always some one “turning up
missing.” And I noticed, with considerable cynicism, that rarely if ever
was there any money or jewelry reported as found by the police. That
would be too much to expect.
Being further persuaded via blandishments or tips of one kind and
another, this caretaker would lead the way to a shelf of drawers
reaching from the floor to the chest-height of a man or higher and
running about two sides of the room, and opening those containing the
latest arrivals, supposing you were interested to look, would allow you
to gaze upon the last of that strange chemical formula which once
functioned as a human being here on earth. The faces! The decay! The
clothing! I stared in sad horror and promised myself that I would never
again look, but duty to the paper compelled me so to do again and again.
And then there was Bellevue itself, that gray-black collection of brick
and stone with connecting bridges of iron, which faced, in winter time
at least, the gray, icy waters of the East River. I have never been able
to forget it, so drear and bleak was it all. The hobbling ghouls of
caretakers in their baggy brown cotton suits to be seen wandering here
and there or hovering over stoves; the large number of half-well charity
patients idling about in gray-green denim, their faces sunken and
pinched, their hair poorly combed! And the chipper and yet often coarse
and vulgar and always overbearing young doctors and nurses and paid
attendants generally! One need but remember that it was the heyday of
the most corrupt period of Tammany Hall’s shameless political control of
New York, Mr. Croker being still in charge. Quite all of those old
buildings have since been replaced and surrounded by a tall iron fence
and bordered with an attractive lawn. In those days it was a little
different: there was the hospital proper, with its various wards, its
detention hospital for the criminal or insane, or both, the morgue and a
world of smaller pavilions stretching along the riverfront and connected
by walks or covered hallways or iron bridges, but lacking the dignity
and care of the later structures. There was, too, the dark psychology
which attends any badly or foully managed institution, that something
which hovers as a cloud over all. And Bellevue at that time had that air
and that psychology. It smacked more of a jail and a poor-house combined
than of a hospital, and so it was, I think. At that time it was a
seething world of medical and political and social graft, a kind of
human hell or sty. Those poor fish who live in comfortable and protected
homes and find their little theories and religious beliefs ready-made
for them in some overawing church or social atmosphere, should be
permitted to take an occasional peep into a world such as this was then.
At this very time there was an investigation and an exposure on in
connection with this institution, which had revealed not only the murder
of helpless patients but the usual graft in connection with food, drugs,
clothing, etc., furnished to the patients called charity. Grafting
officials and medics and brutes of nurses and attendants abounded, of
course. The number of “drunks” and obstreperous or complaining or
troublesome patients doped or beaten or thrown out and even killed, and
the number and quality of operations conducted by incompetent or
indifferent surgeons, was known and shown to be large. One need only
return to the legislative investigations of that date to come upon the
truth of this.
But the place was so huge and crowded that it was like a city in itself.
For one thing, it was a dumping-ground for all the offal gathered by the
police and the charity departments, to say nothing of being a realm of
“soft snaps” for political pensioners of all kinds. On such days as
relatives and friends of charity patients or those detained by the
police were permitted to call, the permit room fairly swarmed with
people who were pushed and shunted here and there like cattle, and
always browbeaten like slaves. I myself, visiting as a stranger
subsequently, was often so treated. “Who? What’s his name? What? Whendee
come? When? Talk a little louder, can’t you? Whatsy matter with your
tongue? Over there! Over there! Out that door there!” So we came,
procured our little cards, and passed in or out.
And the wretched creatures who were “cured” or written down well enough
to walk, and so, before a serious illness had been properly treated and
because they were not able to pay, were shunted out into the world of
the well and the strong with whom they were supposed to compete once
more and make their way. I used to see them coming and going and have
talked to scores, men and women who had never had a dollar above their
meager needs and who, once illness overtook them, had been swept into
this limbo, only to be turned out again at the end of a few weeks or
months to make their way as best they might, and really worse off than
when they came, for now they were in a weak condition physically as well
as penniless, and sometimes, as I noticed, on the day of their going the
weather was most inclement. And the old, wrinkled, washed-out clothing
doled out to them in which they were to once more wander back to the
tenements—to do what? There was a local charity organization at the
time, as there is today, but if it acted in behalf of any of these I
never saw it. They wandered away west on Twenty-sixth Street and along
First and Second Avenue, those drear, dismal, underdog streets—to where?
But by far the most irritating of all the phases of this institution, to
me at least, were the various officials and dancing young medics and
nurses in their white uniforms, the latter too often engaged in flirting
with one another or tennis-playing or reading in some warm room, their
feet planted upon a desk the while they smoked and the while the great
institution with all its company of miserables wagged its indifferent
way. When not actually visiting their patients one could always find
them so ensconced somewhere, reading or smoking or talking or flirting.
In spite of the world of misery that was thrashing about them they were
as comfortable as may be, and to me, when bent upon unraveling the
details of some particular case, they always seemed heartless. “Oh, that
old nut? What’s interesting about him? Surely you don’t expect to dig up
anything interesting about him, do you? He’s been here three weeks now.
No; we don’t know anything about him. Don’t the records show?” Or,
supposing he had died: “I knew he couldn’t live. We couldn’t give him
the necessary attention here. He didn’t have any money, and there’s too
many here as it is. Wanta see an interesting case?” And then one might
be led in to some wretch who was out of his mind or had an illusion of
some kind. “Funny old duck, eh? But there’s no hope. He’ll be dead in a
week or so.”
I think the most sickening thing I ever saw was cash gambling among two
young medics and a young nurse in charge of the receiving ward as to
whether the next patient to be brought in by the ambulance, which had
been sent out on a hurry accident call, would arrive alive or dead.
“Fifty that he’s dead!”
“Fifty that he isn’t!”
“I say alive!”
“I say dead!”
“Well, hand me that stethoscope. I’m not going to be fooled by looks
this time!”
Tearing in came the ambulance, its bell clanging, the hubs of the wheels
barely missing the walls of the entryway, and as the stretcher was
pulled out and set down on the stone step under the archway the three
pushed about and hung over, feeling the heart and looking at the eyes
and lips, now pale blue as in death, quite as one might crowd about a
curious specimen of plant or animal.
“He’s alive!”
“He’s dead!”
“I say he’s alive! Look at his eyes!” to illustrate which one eye was
forced open.
“Aw, what’s eatin’ you! Listen to his heart! Haven’t I got the stetho on
it? Listen for yourself!”
The man was dead, but the jangle lasted a laughing minute or more, the
while he lay there; then he was removed to the morgue and the loser
compelled to “come across” or “fork over.”
One of the internes who occasionally went out “on the wagon,” as the
ambulance was called, told me that once, having picked up a badly
injured man who had been knocked down by a car, this same ambulance on
racing with this man to the hospital had knocked down another and all
but killed him.
“And what did you do about him?” I asked.
“Stopped the boat and chucked him into it, of course.”
“On top of the other one?”
“Side by side, sure. It was a little close, though.”
“Well, did he die?”
“Yep. But the other one was all right. We couldn’t help it, though. It
was a life or death case for the first one.”
“A fine deal for the merry bystander,” was all I could say.
The very worst of all in connection with this great hospital, and I do
not care to dwell on it at too great length since it has all been
exposed before and the records are available, was this: about the
hospital, in the capacity of orderlies, doormen, gatemen, errand boys,
gardeners, and what not, were a number of down-and-out ex-patients or
pensioners of politicians so old and feeble and generally decrepit
mentally and physically as to be fit for little more than the
scrap-heap. Their main desire, in so far as I could see, was to sit in
the sun or safely within the warmth of a room and do nothing at all. If
you asked them a question their first impulse and greatest delight was
to say “Don’t know” or refer you to some one else. They were accused by
the half dozen reporters who daily foregathered here to be of the
lowest, so low indeed that they could be persuaded to do anything for a
little money. And in pursuance of this theory there was one day
propounded by a little red-headed Irish police reporter who used to hang
about there that he would bet anybody five dollars that for the sum of
fifteen dollars he could hire old Gansmuder, who was one of the
shabbiest and vilest-looking of the hospital orderlies, to kill a man.
According to him, and he had his information from one of the policemen
stationed in the hospital, Gansmuder was an ex-convict who had done ten
years’ time for a similar crime. Now old and penniless, he was here
finishing up a shameful existence, the pensioner of some politician to
whom he had rendered a service perhaps.
At any rate here he was, and, as one of several who heard the boast in
the news-room near the gate, I joined in the shout of derision that went
up. “Rot!” “What stuff!” “Well, you’re the limit, Mickey!” However, as
events proved, it was not so much talk as fact. I was not present at the
negotiations but from amazed accounts by other newspaper men I learned
that Gansmuder, being approached by Finn and one other (Finn first, then
the two of them together), agreed for the sum of twenty-five dollars, a
part of it to be paid in advance, to lie in wait at a certain street
corner in Brooklyn for an individual of a given description and there to
strike him in such a way as to dispose of him. Of course the
negotiations went no further than this, but somehow, true or no, this
one incident has always typified the spirit of that hospital, and indeed
of all political New York, to me. It was a period of orgy and crime, and
Bellevue and the charities department constituted the back door which
gave onto the river, the asylums, the potter’s field, and all else this
side of complete chemic dissolution.
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