experience with its "Holy Terror Park,"[5] a dreary sand lot upon the
site of the old tenements in which the Alley Gang once murdered the one
good boy of the block for the offense of supporting his aged parents by
his work as a baker's apprentice,--Poverty Gap is to have its permanent
playground, and Mulberry Bend and Corlears Hook are down on the League's
books; which is equivalent to saying that they, too, will shortly know
the climbing pole and the vaulting buck. For years the city's only
playground that had any claim upon the name--and that was only a little
asphalted strip behind a public school in First Street--was an old
graveyard. We struggled vainly to get possession of another, long
abandoned. The dead were of more account than the living. But now at
last it is their turn. The other day I watched the children at their
play in the new Hester Street gymnasium. The dusty square was jammed
with a mighty multitude. It was not an ideal spot, for it had not rained
in weeks, and powdered sand and cinders had taken wing and floated like
a pall over the perspiring crowd. But it was heaven to them. A hundred
men and boys stood in line, waiting their turn upon the bridge ladder
and the traveling rings that hung full of struggling and squirming
humanity, groping madly for the next grip. No failure, no rebuff
discouraged them. Seven boys and girls rode with looks of deep
concern--it is their way--upon each end of the see-saw, and two squeezed
into each of the forty swings that had room for one, while a hundred
counted time and saw that none had too much. It is an article of faith
with these children that nothing that is "going" for their benefit is to
be missed. Sometimes the result provokes a smile, as when a band of
young Jews, starting up a club, called themselves the Christian Heroes.
It was meant partly as a compliment, I suppose, to the ladies that gave
them club-room; but at the same time, if there was anything in a name,
they were bound to have it. It is rather to cry over than to laugh at,
if one but understands it. The sight of these little ones swarming over
a sand heap until scarcely an inch of it was in sight, and gazing in
rapt admiration at the poor show of a dozen geraniums and English ivy
plants in pots on the window-sill of the overseer's cottage, was
pathetic in the extreme. They stood for ten minutes at a time resting
their eyes upon them. In the crowd were aged women and bearded men with
the inevitable Sabbath silk hat, who it seemed could never get enough of
it. They moved slowly, when crowded out, looking back many times at the
enchanted spot, as long as it was in sight.
[Footnote 5: The name was bestowed before the fact, not after.]
Perhaps there was in it, on the part of the children at least, just a
little bit of the comforting sense of proprietorship. They had
contributed of their scant pennies more than a hundred dollars toward
the opening of the playground, and they felt that it was their very own.
All the better. Two policemen watched the passing show, grinning. But
their clubs hung idly from their belts. The words of a little woman whom
I met last year in Chicago kept echoing in my ear. She was the "happiest
woman alive," for she had striven long for a playground for her poor
children, and had got it.
"The police like it," she said. "They say that it will do more good than
all the Sunday schools in Chicago. The mothers say, 'This is good
business.' The carpenters that put up the swings and things worked with
a will; everybody was glad. The police lieutenant has had a tree called
after him. The boys that did that used to be terrors. Now they take care
of the trees. They plead for a low limb that is in the way, that no one
may cut it off."
The twilight deepens and the gates of the playground are closed. The
crowds disperse slowly. In the roof garden on the Hebrew Institute
across East Broadway lights are twinkling and the band is tuning up.
Little groups are settling down to a quiet game of checkers or
love-making. Paterfamilias leans back against the parapet where palms
wave luxuriously in the summer breeze. The newspaper drops from his
hand; he closes his eyes and is in dreamland, where strikes come not.
Mother knits contentedly in her seat, with a smile on her face that was
not born of the Ludlow Street tenement. Over yonder a knot of
black-browed men talk with serious mien. They might be met any night in
the anarchist cafe, half a dozen doors away, holding forth against
empires. Here wealth does not excite their wrath, nor power their
plotting. In the roof garden anarchy is harmless, even though a
policeman typifies its government. They laugh pleasantly to one another
as he passes, and he gives them a match to light their cigars. It is
Thursday, and smoking is permitted. On Friday it is discouraged because
it offends the orthodox, to whom the lighting of a fire, even the
holding of a candle, is anathema on the Sabbath eve.
The band plays on. One after another, tired heads droop upon babes
slumbering peacefully at the breast. Ludlow Street, the tenement, are
forgotten; eleven o'clock is not yet. Down along the silver gleam of the
river a mighty city slumbers. The great bridge has hung out its string
of shining pearls from shore to shore. "Sweet land of liberty!" Overhead
the dark sky, the stars that twinkled their message to the shepherds on
Judaean hills, that lighted their sons through ages of slavery, and the
flag of freedom borne upon the breeze,--down there the tenement,
the--Ah, well! let us forget, as do these.
Now if you ask me: "And what of it all? What does it avail?" let me take
you once more back to the Mulberry Bend, and to the policeman's verdict
add the police reporter's story of what has taken place there. In
fifteen years I never knew a week to pass without a murder there, rarely
a Sunday. It was the wickedest, as it was the foulest, spot in all the
city. In the slum the two are interchangeable terms for reasons that
are clear enough to me. But I shall not speculate about it, only state
the facts. The old houses fairly reeked with outrage and violence. When
they were torn down, I counted seventeen deeds of blood in that place
which I myself remembered, and those I had forgotten probably numbered
seven times seventeen. The district attorney connected more than a score
of murders of his own recollection with Bottle Alley, the Whyo gang's
headquarters. Two years have passed since it was made into a park, and
scarce a knife has been drawn, or a shot fired, in all that
neighborhood. Only twice have I been called as a police reporter to the
spot. It is not that the murder has moved to another neighborhood, for
there has been no increase of violence in Little Italy or wherever else
the crowd went that moved out. It is that the light has come in and made
crime hideous. It is being let in wherever the slum has bred murder and
robbery, bred the gang, in the past. Wait, now, another ten years, and
let us see what a story there will be to tell.
Avail? Why, here is Tammany actually applauding Comptroller Coler's
words in Plymouth Church last night: "Whenever the city builds a
schoolhouse upon the site of a dive and creates a park, a distinct and
permanent mental, moral, and physical improvement has been made, and
public opinion will sustain such a policy, even if a dive-keeper is
driven out of business and somebody's ground rent is reduced." And
Tammany's press agent sends forth this paean: "In the light of such
events how absurd it is for the enemies of the organization to contend
that Tammany is not the greatest moral force in the community." Tammany
a moral force! The park and the playground have availed, then, to bring
back the day of miracles.
VII
JUSTICE FOR THE BOY
Sometimes, when I see my little boy hugging himself with delight at the
near prospect of the kindergarten, I go back in memory forty years and
more to the day when I was dragged, a howling captive, to school, as a
punishment for being bad at home. I remember, as though it were
yesterday, my progress up the street in the vengeful grasp of an
exasperated servant, and my reception by the aged monster--most fitly
named Madame Bruin--who kept the school. She asked no questions, but led
me straightway to the cellar, where she plunged me into an empty barrel
and put the lid on over me. Applying her horn goggles to the bunghole,
to my abject terror, she informed me, in a sepulchral voice, that that
was the way bad boys were dealt with in school. When I ceased howling
from sheer fright, she took me out and conducted me to the yard, where
a big hog had a corner to itself. She bade me observe that one of its
ears had been slit half its length. It was because the hog was lazy, and
little boys who were that way minded were in danger of similar
treatment; in token whereof she clipped a pair of tailor's shears
suggestively close to my ear. It was my first lesson in school. I hated
it from that hour.
The barrel and the hog were never part of the curriculum in any American
boy's school, I suppose; they seem too freakish to be credited to any
but the demoniac ingenuity of my home ogre. But they stood for a
comprehension of the office of school and teacher which was not patented
by any day or land. It is not so long since the notion yet prevailed
that the schools were principally to lock children up in for the
convenience of their parents, that we should have entirely forgotten it.
Only the other day a clergyman from up the State came into my office to
tell of a fine reform school they had in his town. They were very proud
of it.
"And how about the schools for the good boys in your town?" I asked,
when I had heard him out. "Are they anything to be proud of?"
He stared. He guessed they were all right, he said, after some
hesitation. But it was clear that he did not know.
It is not necessary to go back forty years to find us in the metropolis
upon the clergyman's platform, if not upon Madame Bruin's. Ten will do.
They will bring us to the day when roof playgrounds were contemptuously
left out of the estimates for an East Side school, as "frills" that had
nothing to do with education; when the Board of Health found but a
single public school in more than sixscore that was so ventilated as to
keep the children from being poisoned by foul air; when the authority of
the Talmud had to be invoked by the Superintendent of School Buildings
to convince the president of the Board of Education, who happened to be
a Jew, that seventy-five or eighty pupils were far too many for one
class-room; when a man who had been dead a year was appointed a school
trustee of the Third Ward, under the mouldy old law surviving from the
day when New York was a big village, and filled the office as well as if
he had been alive, because there were no schools in his ward; when
manual training and the kindergarten were yet the fads of yesterday,
looked at askance; when fifty thousand children roamed the streets for
whom there was no room in the schools, and the only defense of the
School Commissioners was that they "didn't know" there were so many; and
when we mixed truants and thieves in a jail with entire unconcern.
Indeed, the jail filled the title role in the educational cast of that
day. Its inmates were well lodged and cared for, while the sanitary
authorities twice condemned the Essex Market school across the way as
wholly unfit for children to be in, but failed to catch the ear of the
politician who ran things unhindered. When (in 1894) I denounced the
"system" of enforcing--or not enforcing--the compulsory education law as
a device to make thieves out of our children by turning over their
training to the street, he protested angrily; but the experts of the
Tenement House Committee found the charge fully borne out by the facts.
They were certainly plain enough in the sight of us all, had we chosen
to see.
When at last we saw, we gave the politician a vacation for a season. To
say that he was to blame for all the mischief would not be fair. We
were to blame for leaving him in possession. He was only a link in the
chain which our indifference had forged; but he was always and
everywhere an obstruction to betterment,--sometimes, illogically, in
spite of himself. Successive Tammany mayors had taken a stand for the
public schools, when it was clear that reform could not be delayed much
longer; but they were helpless against a system of selfishness and
stupidity of which they were the creatures, though they posed as its
masters. They had to go with it as unfit, and upon the wave that swept
out the last of the rubbish came reform. The Committee of Seventy took
hold, the Good Government Clubs, the Tenement House Committee, and the
women of New York. Five years we strove with the powers of darkness, and
look now at the change. The New York school system is not yet the ideal
one,--it may never be; but the jail, at least, has been cast out of the
firm. We have a compulsory education law under which it will be
possible, when a seat has been provided for every child, to punish the
parent for the boy's truancy, unless he surrenders him as unmanageable;
and we can count the months now till every child shall find the
latchstring out on the school door. We have had to put our hands deep
into our pockets to get to that point, but we are nearly there now.
Since 1895 the expenditure of twenty-two and a half millions of dollars
for new schools in the old city has been authorized by law, and two
thirds of the money has been spent. Fifty-odd new buildings have been
put up, or are going up while I am writing, every one of them with its
playground, which will by and by be free to all the neighborhood. The
idea is at last working through that the schools belong to the people,
and are primarily for the children and their parents; not mere vehicles
of ward patronage, or for keeping an army of teachers in office and pay.
The silly old regime is dead. The ward trustee is gone with his friend
the alderman, loudly proclaiming the collapse of our liberties in the
day that saw the schools taken from "the people's" control. They were
"the people." Experts manage our children's education, which was
supposed in the old plan to be the only thing that did not require any
training. To superintend a brickyard demanded some knowledge, but
anybody could run the public schools. It cost us an election to take
that step. One of the Tammany district leaders, who knew what he was
talking about, said to me after it was all over: "I knew we would win.
Your bringing those foreigners here did the business. Our people believe
in home rule. We kept account of the teachers you brought from out of
town, and who spent the money they made here out of town, and it got to
be the talk among the tenement people in my ward that their daughters
would have no more show to get to be teachers. That did the business. We
figured the school vote in the city at forty-two thousand, and I knew we
could not lose." The "foreigners" were teachers from Massachusetts and
other States, who had achieved a national reputation at their work.
There lies upon my table a copy of the minutes of the Board of Education
of January 9, 1895, in which is underscored a report on a primary school
in the Bronx. "It is a wooden shanty," is the inspector's account,
"heated by stoves, and is a regular tinder box; cellar wet, and under
one class-room only. This building was erected in order, I believe, to
determine whether or not there was a school population in the
neighborhood to warrant the purchase of property to erect a school on."
That was the way then of taking a school census, and the result was the
utter failure of the compulsory education law to compel anything. To-day
we have a biennial census, ordained by law, which, when at last it gets
into the hands of some one who can count, will tell us how many Jacob
Beresheims are drifting upon the shoals of the street. And we have a
truant school to keep them safe in. To it, says the law, no thief shall
be committed. It is not yet five years since the burglar and the
truant--who, having been refused admission to the school because there
was not room for him, inconsequently was locked up for contracting idle
ways--were herded in the Juvenile Asylum, and classified there in squads
of those who were four feet, four feet seven, and over four feet seven!
I am afraid I scandalized some good people, during the fight for decency
in this matter, by insisting that it ought to be considered a good mark
for Jacob that he despised such schools as were provided for him. But it
was true. Except for the risk of the burglar, the jail was preferable by
far. A woman has now had charge of the truant school for fourteen
months, and she tells me that of quite twenty-five hundred boys scarce
sixty were rightly called incorrigible, and even these a little longer
and tighter grip would probably win over. For such, a farm school is yet
to be provided. The rest responded promptly to an appeal to their pride.
She "made it a personal matter" with each of them, and the truant
vanished; the boy was restored. The burglar, too, made it a personal
matter in the old contact, and the result was two burglars for one. In
common with nearly all those who have paid attention to this matter,
Mrs. Alger believes that the truant school strikes at the root of the
problem of juvenile crime. After thirty years of close acquaintance with
the child population of London, Mr. Andrew Drew, chairman of the
Industrial Committee of the School Board, declared his conviction that
"truancy is to be credited with nearly the whole of our juvenile
criminality." But for years there seemed to be no way of convincing the
New York School Board that the two had anything to do with each other.
As executive officer of the Good Government Clubs, I fought that fight
to a finish. We got the school, and in Mrs. Alger, at the time a truant
officer, a person singularly well qualified to take charge of it. She
has recently been removed, that her place might be given to a man. It is
the old scheme come back,--a voter behind the broom,--and the old slough
waiting to overwhelm us again.
But it will not get the chance. I have my own idea of how this truancy
question is going to be solved. Yesterday I went with Superintendent
Snyder through some of the new schools he is building, upon what he
calls the letter H plan, in the crowded districts. It is the plan of the
Hotel de Cluny in Paris, and to my mind as nearly perfect as it is
possible to make a schoolhouse. There is not a dark corner in the whole
structure, from the splendid gymnasium under the red-tiled roof to the
indoor playground on the ground floor, which, when thrown in one with
the two open-air playgrounds that lie embraced in the arms of the H,
will give the children nearly an acre of asphalted floor space from
street to street, to romp on. Seven such schools are going up to-day,
each a beautiful palace, and within the year sixteen thousand children
will be housed in them. When I think of the old Allen Street school,
where the gas had to be kept burning even on the brightest days,
recitations suspended every half hour, and the children made to practice
calisthenics so that they should not catch cold while the windows were
opened to let in fresh air; of the dark playground downstairs, with the
rats keeping up such a racket that one could hardly hear himself speak
at times, or of the other East Side playground where the boys "weren't
allowed to speak above a whisper," so as not to disturb those studying
overhead, I fancy that I can make out both the cause and the cure of the
boy's desperation. "We try to make our schools pleasant enough to hold
the children," wrote the Superintendent of Schools in Indianapolis to me
once, and added that they had no truant problem worth bothering about.
With the kindergarten and manual training firmly engrafted upon the
school course, as they are at last, and with it reaching out to
enlist also the boy's play through playground and vacation schools, I
shall be willing to turn the boy, who will not come in, over to the
reformatory. They will not need to build a new wing to the jail for his
safe-keeping.
[Illustration: LETTER H PLAN OF PUBLIC SCHOOL No. 165
_Showing Front on West 109th Street_]
All ways lead to Rome. The reform in school-building dates back, as does
every other reform in New York, to the Mulberry Bend. It began there.
The first school that departed from the soulless old tradition, to set
beautiful pictures before the child's mind as well as dry figures on the
slate, was built there. At the time I wanted it to stand in the park,
hoping so to hasten the laying out of that; but although the Small Parks
law expressly permitted the erection on park property of buildings for
"the instruction of the people," the officials upon whom I pressed my
scheme could not be made to understand that as including schools.
Perhaps they were right. I catechised thirty-one Fourth Ward girls in a
sewing school, about that time, twenty-six of whom had attended the
public schools of the district more than a year. One wore a badge earned
for excellence in her studies. In those days every street corner was
placarded with big posters of Napoleon on a white horse riding through
fire and smoke. There was one right across the street. Yet only one of
the thirty-one knew who Napoleon was. She "thought she had heard of the
gentleman before." It came out that the one impression she retained of
what she had heard was that "the gentleman" had two wives. They knew of
Washington that he was the first President of the United States, and cut
down a cherry-tree. They were sitting and sewing at the time almost on
the identical spot where he lived and held office. To the question who
ruled before Washington the answer came promptly: no one; he was the
first. They agreed reluctantly, upon further consideration, that there
was probably "a King of America" before his day, and the Irish damsels
turned up their noses at the idea. The people of Canada, they thought,
were copper-colored. The same winter I was indignantly bidden to depart
from a school in the Fourth Ward by a trustee who had heard that I had
written a book about the slum and spoken of "his people" in it.
Those early steps in the reform path stumbled sadly at times over
obstacles that showed how dense was the ignorance and how rank were the
prejudices we had to fight. When I wrote that the Allen Street school
was overrun by rats, which was a fact any one might observe for himself
by spending five minutes in the building, I was called sharply to
account by the Mayor in the Board of Estimate and Apportionment. There
were no rats, he said. The Allen Street school was the worst of them
all, and I determined that the time had come to make a demonstration. I
procured a rat trap, and was waiting for an idle hour to go over and
catch one of the rats, so that I might have it stuffed and sent to the
board over which the Mayor presided, as a convincing exhibit; but before
I got so far reform swept the whole conspiracy of ignorance and jobbery
out of the City Hall.
That was well enough as far as it went; but that the broom was needed
elsewhere we learned later, when the Good Government Clubs fought for
the inspection of the schools and of the children by trained oculists.
The evidence was that the pupils were made both near-sighted and stupid
by the want of proper arrangement of their seats and of themselves in
the class-room. The fact was not denied, and the scheme was strongly
indorsed by the Board of Health and by some of the ablest and best known
oculists in the city; but it was wrecked upon an opposition in which we
heard the ignorant and selfish cry that it would "interfere with private
practice," and so curtail the profits of the practitioner. The proposal
to inspect the classes daily for evidence of contagious disease--which,
carried out, has proved a most effective means of preventing the spread
of epidemics, and one of the greatest blessings--had been opposed,
happily unsuccessfully, with the same arguments.[6] It is very well to
prate about the rapacity of politicians, but these things came often
enough to show what they meant by the claim that they were "closer to
the people" than we who were trying to help them; and they were all the
more exasperating because they came rarely from below,--the tenement
people, when they were not deliberately misled, were ready and eager to
fall in with any plan for bettering things, notably where it concerned
the schools,--but usually from those who knew better, and from whom we
had a right to expect support and backing.
[Footnote 6: I set down reluctantly this censure of an honored
profession, to individual members of which I have been wont, in a long
succession of troubled years, to go for advice and help in public
matters, and never in vain. The statement of the chief sanitary officer
of the Health Department, reaffirmed at the time I am writing, is,
however, positive to the effect that to this opposition, and this only,
was due the failure of that much-needed reform which had for years been
with me a pet measure.]
Speaking of that reminds me of a mishap I had in the Hester Street
school,--the one with the "frills" which the Board of Education cut off.
I happened to pass it after school hours, and went in to see what sort
of a playground the roof would have made. I met no one on the way, and,
finding the scuttle open, climbed out and up the slant of the roof to
the peak, where I sat musing over our lost chance, when the janitor came
to close up. He must have thought I was a crazy man, and my explanation
did not make it any better. He haled me down, and but for the fortunate
chance that the policeman on the beat knew me, I should have been taken
to the lockup as a dangerous lunatic,--all for dreaming of a playground
on the roof of a schoolhouse.