Bend." That was hopeless and had to go. There was no question of
children or playground involved. The worst of all the gangs, the Whyos,
had its headquarters in the darkest of its dark alleys; but it was left
to the police. We had not begun to understand that the gangs meant
something to us beyond murder and vengeance, in those days. No one
suspected that they had any such roots in the soil that they could be
killed by merely destroying the slum. The cholera was rapping on our
door and, with the Bend there, we felt about it as a man with stolen
goods in his house must feel when the policeman comes up the street.
Back in the seventies we began discussing what ought to be done. By 1884
the first Tenement House Commission had summoned up courage to propose
that a street be cut through the bad block. In the following year a bill
was brought in to destroy it bodily, and then began the long fight that
resulted in the defeat of the slum a dozen years later.
It was a bitter fight, in which every position of the enemy had to be
carried by assault. The enemy was the deadly official inertia that was
the outcome of political corruption born of the slum plus the
indifference of the mass of our citizens, who probably had never seen
the Bend. If I made it my own concern to the exclusion of all else, it
was only because I knew it. I had been part of it. Homeless and alone, I
had sought its shelter, not for long,--that was not to be endured,--but
long enough to taste of its poison, and I hated it. I knew that the blow
must be struck there, to kill. Looking back now over those years, I can
see that it was all as it should be. We were learning the alphabet of
our lesson then. We could have learned it in no other way so thoroughly.
Before we had been at it more than two or three years, it was no longer
a question of the Bend merely. The Small Parks law that gave us a
million dollars a year to force light and air into the slum, to its
destruction, grew out of it. The whole sentiment which in its day,
groping blindly and angrily, had wiped out the disgrace of the Five
Points, just around the corner, crystallized and took shape in its
fight. It waited merely for the issue of that, to attack the slum in
its other strongholds; and no sooner was the Bend gone than the rest
surrendered, unconditionally.
But it was not so easy campaigning at the start. In 1888 plans were
filed for the demolition of the block. It took four years to get a
report of what it would cost to tear it down. About once in two months
during all that time the authorities had to be prodded into a spasm of
activity, or we would probably have been yet where we were then. Once
when I appealed to the Corporation Counsel to give a good reason for the
delay, I got the truth out of him without evasion.
"Well, I tell you," he said blandly, "no one here is taking any interest
in that business. That is good enough reason for you, isn't it?"
It was. That Tammany reason became the slogan of an assault upon
official incompetence and treachery that hurried things up considerably.
The property was condemned at a total cost to the city of a million and
a half, in round numbers, including the assessment of half a million for
park benefit which the property owners were quick enough, with the aid
of the politicians, to get saddled on the city at large. In 1894 the
city took possession and became the landlord of the old barracks. For a
whole year it complacently collected the rents and did nothing. When it
was shamed out of that rut, too, and the tenements were at last torn
down, the square lay as the wreckers had left it for another year, until
it became such a plague spot that, as a last resort, with a citizen's
privilege, I arraigned the municipality before the Board of Health for
maintaining a nuisance upon its premises. I can see the shocked look of
the official now, as he studied the complaint.
"But, my dear sir," he coughed diplomatically, "isn't it rather unusual?
I never heard of such a thing."
"Neither did I," I replied, "but then there never was such a thing
before."
That night, while they were debating the "unusual thing," happened the
accident to the children of which I spoke, emphasizing the charge that
the nuisance was "dangerous to life," and there was an end. In the
morning the Bend was taken in hand, and the following spring the
Mulberry Bend Park was opened.
A million dollars a year had been lost while we were learning our
lesson. The Small Parks Fund was not cumulative, and when it came to
paying for the Bend a special bill had to be passed to authorize it, the
award being "more than one million in one year." The wise financiers who
framed and hung in the comptroller's office a check for three cents that
had been under-paid on a school site, for the taxpayer to bow before in
awe and admiration at such business methods, could find no way to make
the appropriation for two years apply, though the new year was coming in
a week or two. But the Gilder Tenement House Commission had been
sitting, the Committee of Seventy had been at work, and a law was on the
statute books authorizing the expenditure of three million dollars for
two open spaces in the parkless district on the East Side, where Jacob
Beresheim was born. It had shown that while the proportion of park area
inside the limits of the old city was equal to one thirteenth of all,
below Fourteenth Street, where one third of the people lived, it was
barely one fortieth. It took a citizen's committee appointed by the
mayor just three weeks to seize the two sites which are now being
laid out in playgrounds chiefly, and it took the Good Government Clubs
with their allies at Albany less than two months to get warrant of law
for the tearing down of the houses ahead of final condemnation lest any
mischance befall through delay or otherwise,--a precaution which
subsequent events proved to be eminently wise. The slow legal
proceedings are going on yet.
[Illustration: MULBERRY BEND PARK]
The playground part of it was a provision of the Gilder law that showed
what apt scholars we had been. I was a member of that committee, and I
fed fat my grudge against the slum tenement, knowing that I might not
again have such a chance. Bone Alley went. I shall not soon get the
picture of it, as I saw it last, out of my mind. I had wandered to the
top floor of one of the ramshackle tenements in the heart of the block,
to a door that stood ajar, and pushed it open. On the floor lay three
women rag-pickers with their burdens, asleep, overcome by the heat and
the beer, the stale stench of which filled the place. Swarms of flies
covered them. The room--no! let it go. Thank God, we shall not again
hear of Bone Alley. Where it stood workmen are to-day building a
gymnasium with baths for the people, and a playground and park which may
even be turned into a skating-pond in winter if the architect keeps his
promise. A skating-pond for the children of the Eleventh Ward! No wonder
the politician is in a hurry to take the credit for what is going
forward over there. It is that or nothing with him now. It will be all
up with Tammany, once the boys find out that these were the things she
withheld from them all the years, for her own gain.
Half a dozen blocks away the city's first public bath house is at last
going up, after many delays, and godliness will have a chance to move in
with cleanliness. The two are neighbors everywhere, but in the slum the
last must come first. Glasgow has half a dozen public baths. Rome, two
thousand years ago, washed its people most sedulously, and in heathen
Japan to-day, I am told, there are baths, as we have saloons, on every
corner. Christian New York never had a bath house. In a tenement
population of 255,033 the Gilder Committee found only 306 who had access
to bath-rooms in the houses where they lived. The Church Federation
canvass of the Fifteenth Assembly District counted three bath-tubs to
1321 families. Nor was that because they so elected. The People's Baths
took in 115,000 half dimes last year for as many baths, and forty per
cent. of their customers were Italians. The free river baths admitted
5,096,876 customers during the summer. The "great unwashed" were not so
from choice, it would appear.
Bone Alley brought thirty-seven dollars under the auctioneer's hammer.
Thieves' Alley, in the other park down at Rutgers Square, where the
police clubbed the Jewish cloakmakers a few years ago for the offense of
gathering to assert their right to "being men, live the life of men," as
some one who knew summed up the labor movement, brought only seven
dollars, and the old Helvetia House, where Boss Tweed and his gang met
at night to plan their plundering raids on the city's treasury, was
knocked down for five. Kerosene Row would not have brought enough to buy
kindling wood with which to start one of the numerous fires that gave it
its bad name. It was in Thieves' Alley that the owner in the days long
gone by hung out the sign: "No Jews need apply." Last week I watched the
opening of the first municipal playground upon the site of the old
alley, and in the thousands that thronged street and tenements from curb
to roof with thunder of applause, there were not twoscore who could have
found lodging with the old Jew-baiter. He had to go with his alley
before the better day could bring light and hope to the Tenth Ward.
In all this the question of rehousing the population, that had to be so
carefully considered abroad in the destruction of slums, gave no
trouble. The speculative builder had seen to that. In the five wards,
the Seventh, Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth, in which the
unhoused ones would look for room, if they wanted to stay near their old
home, there were, according to the tenement census at the time when the
old houses were torn down, 4268 vacant apartments, with room for more
than 18,000 persons at our average of four and a half to the family.
Even including the Mulberry Bend, the whole number of the dispossessed
was not 10,000. On Manhattan Island there were at this time more than
37,000 vacant apartments, so that the question could not arise in any
serious shape, much as it plagued the dreams of some well-meaning
people. As a matter of fact the unhoused were scattered much more widely
than had been anticipated, which was one of the very purposes sought to
be attained. Many of them had remained in their old slum more from force
of habit and association than because of necessity.
"Everything takes ten years," said Abram S. Hewitt when, exactly ten
years after he had as mayor championed the Small Parks Act, he took his
seat as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Small Parks. The ten years
had wrought a great change. It was no longer the slum of to-day, but
that of to-morrow that challenged attention. The committee took the
point of view of the children from the first. It had a large map
prepared showing where in the city there was room to play and where
there was none. Then it called in the police and asked them to point out
where there was trouble with the boys; and in every instance the
policeman put his finger upon a treeless slum.
"They have no other playground than the street," was the explanation
given in each case. "They smash lamps and break windows. The
storekeepers kick and there is trouble. That is how it begins." "Many
complaints are received daily of boys annoying pedestrians,
storekeepers, and tenants by their continually playing baseball in some
parts of almost every street. The damage is not slight. Arrests are
frequent, much more frequent than when they had open lots to play in."
This last was the report of an uptown captain. He remembered the days
when there were open lots there. "But these lots are now built upon," he
said, "and for every new house there are more boys and less chance for
them to play."
The committee put a red daub on the map to indicate trouble. Then it
asked those police captains who had not spoken to show them where their
precincts were, and why they had no trouble. Every one of them put his
finger on a green spot that marked a park. "My people are quiet and
orderly," said the captain of the Tompkins Square precinct. The police
took the square from a mob by storm twice in my recollection, and the
commander of the precinct then was hit on the head with a hammer by "his
people" and laid out for dead. "The Hook Gang is gone," said he of
Corlears Hook. The professional pursuit of that gang was to rob and
murder inoffensive citizens by night and throw them into the river, and
it achieved a bad eminence at its calling. "The whole neighborhood has
taken a change, and decidedly for the better," said the captain of
Mulberry Street, and the committee rose and said that it had heard
enough.
The map was hung on the wall, and in it were stuck pins to mark the site
of present and projected schools as showing where the census had found
the children crowding. The moment that was done the committee sent the
map and a copy of chapter 338 of the laws of 1895 to the mayor, and
reported that its task was finished. This is the law and all there is of
it:--
"The people of the State of New York, represented in Senate and
Assembly, do enact as follows:--
"Section 1. Hereafter no schoolhouse shall be constructed in the
city of New York without an open-air playground attached to or
used in connection with the same.
"Section 2. This act shall take effect immediately."
Where the map was daubed with red the school pins crowded one another.
On the lower East Side, where child crime was growing fast, and no less
than three storm centres were marked down by the police, nine new
schools were going up or planned, and in the uptown precinct whence came
the wail about the ball players there were seven. The playground had
proved its case. Where it was expedient it was to be a school
playground. It seemed a happy combination, for the new law had been a
stumbling-block to the school commissioners, who were in a quandary over
the needful size of an "open-air playground." The success of the
roof-garden idea suggested a way out. But schools are closed at the time
of the year when playgrounds are most needed for city children. To get
the garden on the roof of the schoolhouse recognized as the public
playground seemed a long step toward turning it into a general
neighborhood evening resort that should be always open, and so toward
bringing school and people, and especially the school and the boy,
together in a bond of mutual sympathy highly desirable for both.
That was the burden of the committee's report. It made thirteen
recommendations besides, as to the location of parks and detached
playgrounds, only one of which has been adopted. But that is of less
account--as also was the information imparted to me as secretary of the
committee by our peppery Tammany mayor, that we had "as much authority
as a committee of bootblacks in his office"--than the fact that the
field has at last been studied and its needs have been made known. The
rest will follow, with or without the politician's authority. The one
recommendation that has been carried out was that of a riverside park in
the region uptown on the West Side where the Federation of Churches and
Christian Workers found "saloon social ideals minting themselves upon
the minds of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one
educational thought." There is an outdoor gymnasium to-day on the chosen
site,--while the legal proceedings to take possession are unraveling
their red tape,--and a recreation pier hard by. In the evening the young
men of the neighborhood may be seen trooping riverward with their girls
to hear the music. The gang that "laid out" two policemen, to my
knowledge, has gone out of business.
The best laid plans are sometimes upset by surprising snags. We had
planned for two municipal playgrounds on the East Side where the need is
greatest, and our plans were eagerly accepted by the city authorities.
But they were never put into practice. A negligent attorney killed one,
a lazy clerk the other. And both served under the reform government. The
first of the two playgrounds was to have been in Rivington Street,
adjoining the new public bath, where the boys, for want of something
better to do, were fighting daily battles with stones, to the great
damage of windows and the worse aggravation of the householders. Four
hundred children in that neighborhood petitioned the committee for a
place of their own where there were no windows to break, and we found
one. It was only after the proceedings had been started that we
discovered that they had been taken under the wrong law and the money
spent in advertising had been wasted. It was then too late. The daily
assaults upon the windows were resumed. The other case was an attempt to
establish a model school park in a block where more than four thousand
children attended day and night school. The public school and the
pro-cathedral, which divided the children between them, were to be
allowed to stand, at opposite ends of the block. The surrounding
tenements were to be torn down to make room for a park and playground
which should embody the ideal of what such a place ought to be, in the
opinion of the committee. The roof garden was not in the original plan
except as an alternative of the street-level playground, where land came
too high. The plentiful supply of light and air, the safety from fire to
be obtained by putting the school in a park, beside the fact that it
could thus be "built beautiful," were considerations of weight. Plans
were made, and there was great rejoicing in Essex Street, until it came
out that this scheme had gone the way of the other. The clerk who should
have filed the plans in the register's office left that duty to some
one else, and it took just twenty-one days to make the journey, a
distance of five hundred feet or less. The Greater New York had come
then with Tammany, and the thing was not heard of again. When I traced
the failure down to the clerk in question, and told him that he had
killed the park, he yawned and said:--
"Yes, and I think it is just as well it is dead. We haven't any money
for those things. It is very nice to have small parks, and very nice to
have a horse and wagon, if you can afford it. But we can't. Why, there
isn't money enough to run the city government."
So the labor of weary weeks and months in the children's behalf was all
undone by a third-rate clerk in an executive office; but he saved the
one thing he had in mind: the city government is "run" to date, and his
pay is secure.
Neither stupidity, spite, nor the false cry that "reform extravagance"
has wrecked the city's treasury will be able much longer, however, to
cheat the child out of his rights. The playground is here to wrestle
with the gang for the boy, and it will win. It came so quietly that we
hardly knew of it till we heard the shouts. It took us seven years to
make up our minds to build a play pier,--recreation pier is its
municipal title,--and it took just about seven weeks to build it when we
got so far; but then we learned more in one day than we had dreamed of
in the seven years. Half the East Side swarmed over it with shrieks of
delight, and carried the mayor and the city government, who had come to
see the show, fairly off their feet. And now "we are seven," or will be
when the one in Brooklyn has been built,--great, handsome structures,
seven hundred feet long, some of them, with music every night for mother
and the babies, and for papa, who can smoke his pipe there in peace. The
moon shines upon the quiet river, and the steamers go by with their
lights. The street is far away with its noise. The young people go
sparking in all honor, as it is their right to do. The councilman who
spoke the other day of "pernicious influences" lying in wait for them
there made the mistake of his life, unless he has made up his mind to go
out of politics. The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no
crabbed old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges. Their
civilizing influence upon the children is already felt in a reported
demand for more soap in the neighborhood where they are, and even the
grocer smiles approval.
The play pier is the kindergarten in the educational campaign against
the gang. It gives the little ones a chance. Often enough it is a chance
for life. The street as a playground is a heavy contributor to the
undertaker's bank account. I kept the police slips of a single day in
May two years ago, when four little ones were killed and three crushed
under the wheels of trucks in tenement streets. That was unusual, but no
day has passed in my recollection that has not had its record of
accidents which bring grief as deep and lasting to the humblest home as
if it were the pet of some mansion on Fifth Avenue that was slain. The
kindergarten teaching bore fruit. To-day there are half a dozen
full-blown playgrounds downtown and uptown where the children swarm.
Private initiative set the pace, but the idea has been engrafted upon
the municipal plan. The city helped get at least one of them under way.
The Outdoor Recreation League was organized last year by public-spirited
citizens, including many amateur athletes and enthusiastic women, with
the object of "obtaining recognition of the necessity for recreation and
physical exercise as fundamental to the moral and physical welfare of
the people." Together with the Social Reform Club and the Federation of
Churches and Christian Workers it maintained a playground on the uptown
West Side last summer. The ball came into play there for the first time
as a recognized factor in civic progress. The day might well be kept for
all time among those that mark human emancipation, for it was social
reform and Christian work in one, of the kind that tells.
Only the year before, the athletic clubs had vainly craved the privilege
of establishing a gymnasium in the East River Park, where the children
wistfully eyed the sacred grass, and cowered under the withering gaze of
the policeman. A friend whose house stands opposite the park found them
one day swarming over her stoop in such shoals that she could not enter,
and asked them why they did not play tag under the trees instead. The
instant shout came back: "'Cause the cop won't let us." Now a splendid
gymnasium has been opened on the site of the people's park that is to
come at Fifty-Third Street and Eleventh Avenue. It is called Hudsonbank.
A board fence more than a thousand feet long surrounds it. The director
pointed out to me with pride, last week, that not a board had been
stolen from it in a year, while other fences within twenty feet of it
were ripped to pieces. And he was right. The neighborhood is one that
has been anything but distinguished for its respect for private property
in the past, and where boards have a market value among the Irish
settlers. Better testimony could not have been borne to the spirit in
which the gift was accepted by the children.