LETTING IN THE LIGHT
I had been out of town and my way had not fallen through the Mulberry
Bend in weeks until that morning when I came suddenly upon the park that
had been made there in my absence. Sod had been laid, and men were going
over the lawn cutting the grass after the rain. The sun shone upon
flowers and the tender leaves of young shrubs, and the smell of new-mown
hay was in the air. Crowds of little Italian children shouted with
delight over the "garden," while their elders sat around upon the
benches with a look of contentment such as I had not seen before in that
place. I stood and looked at it all, and a lump came in my throat as I
thought of what it had been, and of all the weary years of battling for
this. It had been such a hard fight, and now at last it was won. To me
the whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle with
this dark spot. The whir of the lawn-mower was as sweet a song in my ear
as that which the skylark sang when I was a boy, in Danish fields, and
which gray hairs do not make the man forget.
[Illustration: "Keep off the grass!"]
In my delight I walked upon the grass. It seemed as if I should never be
satisfied till I had felt the sod under my feet,--sod in the Mulberry
Bend! I did not see the gray-coated policeman hastening my way, nor the
wide-eyed youngsters awaiting with shuddering delight the catastrophe
that was coming, until I felt his cane laid smartly across my back and
heard his angry command:
"Hey! Come off the grass! D'ye think it is made to walk on?"
So that was what I got for it. It is the way of the world. But it was
all right. The park was there, that was the thing. And I had my revenge.
I had just had a hand in marking five blocks of tenements for
destruction to let in more light, and in driving the slum from two other
strongholds. Where they were, parks are being made to-day in which the
sign "Keep off the grass!" will never be seen. The children may walk in
them from morning till night, and I too, if I want to, with no policeman
to drive us off. I tried to tell the policeman something about it. But
he was of the old dispensation. All the answer I got was a gruff:
"G'wan now! I don't want none o' yer guff!"
It was all "guff" to the politicians, I suppose, from the day the
trouble began about the Mulberry Bend, but toward the end they woke up
nobly. When the park was finally dedicated to the people's use, they
took charge of the celebration with immense unction, and invited
themselves to sit in the high seats and glory in the achievement which
they had done little but hamper and delay from the first. They had not
reckoned with Colonel Waring, however. When they had had their say, the
colonel arose, and, curtly reminding them that they had really had no
hand in the business, proposed three cheers for the citizen effort that
had struck the slum this staggering blow. There was rather a feeble
response on the platform, but rousing cheers from the crowd, with whom
the colonel was a prime favorite, and no wonder. Two years later he laid
down his life in the fight which he so valiantly and successfully waged.
It is the simple truth that he was killed by politics. The services
which he had rendered the city would have entitled him in any reputable
business to be retained in the employment that was his life and his
pride. Had he been so retained, he would not have gone to Cuba, and
would in all human probability be now alive. But Tammany is not "in
politics for its health" and had no use for him, though no more grievous
charge could be laid at his door, even in the heat of the campaign, than
that he was a "foreigner," being from Rhode Island. Spoils politics
never craved a heavier sacrifice of any community.
[Illustration: Colonel George E. Waring, Jr.]
It was Colonel Waring's broom that first let light into the slum. That
which had come to be considered an impossible task he did by the simple
formula of "putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom." The
words are his own. The man, from a political dummy who loathed his job
and himself in it with cause, became a self-respecting citizen, and the
streets that had been dirty were swept. The ash barrels which had
befouled the sidewalks disappeared, almost without any one knowing it
till they were gone. The trucks that obstructed the children's only
playground, the street, went with the dirt, despite the opposition of
the truckman who had traded off his vote to Tammany in the past for
stall room at the curbstone. They did not go without a struggle. When
appeal to the alderman proved useless, the truckman resorted to
strategy. He took a wheel off, or kept a perishing nag, that could not
walk, hitched to the truck over night to make it appear that it was
there for business. But subterfuge availed as little as resistance. In
the Mulberry Bend he made his last stand. The old houses had been torn
down, leaving a three-acre lot full of dirt mounds and cellar holes.
Into this the truckmen of the Sixth Ward hauled their carts, and defied
the street cleaners. They were no longer in their way, and they were on
the Park Department's domain, where no Colonel Waring was in control.
But while their owners were triumphing, the children playing among the
trucks set one of them rolling down into a cellar, and three or four of
the little ones were crushed. That was the end. The trucks disappeared.
Even Tammany has not ventured to put them back, so great was the relief
of their going. They were not only a hindrance to the sweeper and the
skulking-places of all manner of mischief at night, but I have
repeatedly seen the firemen baffled in their efforts to reach a burning
house, where they stood four and six deep in the wide "slips" at the
river.
Colonel Waring did more for the cause of labor than all the walking
delegates of the town together, by investing a despised but highly
important task with a dignity which won the hearty plaudits of a
grateful city. When he uniformed his men and announced that he was going
to parade with them so that we might all see what they were like, the
town laughed and poked fun at the "white wings"; but no one went to see
them who did not come away converted to an enthusiastic belief in the
man and his work. Public sentiment, that had been half reluctantly
suspending judgment, expecting every day to see the colonel "knuckle
down to politics" like his predecessors, turned in an hour, and after
that there was little trouble. The tenement house children organized
street cleaning bands to help along the work, and Colonel Waring
enlisted them as regular auxiliaries and made them useful.
They had no better friend. When the unhappy plight of the persecuted
push-cart men--all immigrant Jews, who were blackmailed, robbed, and
driven from pillar to post as a nuisance after they had bought a license
to trade in the street--appealed vainly for a remedy. Colonel Waring
found a way out in a great morning market in Hester Street that should
be turned over to the children for a playground in the afternoon. But
though he proved that it would pay interest on the investment in market
fees, and many times in the children's happiness, it was never built. It
would have been a most fitting monument to the man's memory. His broom
saved more lives in the crowded tenements than a squad of doctors. It
did more: it swept the cobwebs out of our civic brain and conscience,
and set up a standard of a citizen's duty which, however we may for the
moment forget, will be ours until we have dragged other things than our
pavements out of the mud.
[Illustration: A Tammany-swept East Side Street before Colonel Waring's
Day.]
Even the colonel's broom would have been powerless to do that for "the
Bend." That was hopeless and had to go. There was no question of
children or playground involved. The worst of all the gangs, the Whyós,
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.
[Illustration: The Same Street when Colonel Waring wielded the Broom.]
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. Time was up.
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.
[Illustration: The Mulberry Bend.]
I told the story of that in "The Making of an American," and how the red
tape of the comptroller's office pointed the way out, after all, with
its check for three cents that had gone astray in the purchase of a
school site. Of that sort of thing we had enough. 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 been 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 park sites for the children's use, 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. I
believe the legal proceedings are going on yet.
[Illustration: Bone Alley.]
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
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 cursed the earth with its gloom and its
poverty, the sun shines to-day on children at play. If we are slow to
understand the meaning of it all, they will not be. We shall have light
from that quarter when they grow up, on what is truly "educational" in
the bringing up of young citizens. The children will teach us something
for a change that will do us lasting good.
Half a dozen blocks away, in Rivington Street, the city's first public
bath-house has at last been built, 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 an
all-year bath-house until now. In a tenement population of 255,033 the
Gilder Commission found only 306 who had access to bathrooms in the
houses where they lived, and they would have found the same thing
wherever they went. The Church Federation canvass of the Fifteenth
Assembly District over on the West Side, where they did not go, counted
three bath-tubs to 1321 families. Nor was that because they so elected.
The People's Baths took in 121,386 half dimes last year (1901) for as
many baths, and more than forty per cent of their customers were
Italians. In the first five months of the present year the Rivington
Street baths accommodate 224,876 bathers, of whom 66,256 were women
and girls. And this in winter. The free river baths have registered five
and six millions of bathers in one brief season. The "great unwashed"
were not so from choice, it would appear.
The river baths were only for summer, and their time is past. As the
sewers that empty into the river multiply, it is getting less and less a
place fit to bathe in, though the boys find no fault. Sixteen public
bath-houses on shore are to take the place of the swimming baths. They
are all to be in the crowded tenement districts. The sites for the first
three are being chosen now. And a wise woman[33] offers to build and
equip one all complete at her own expense, as her gift to the city.
[Footnote 33: Mrs. A. A. Anderson.]
Pull up now a minute, if you think, with some good folks, that the world
is not advancing, but just marking time, and look back half a century. I
said that New York never had a public bath till now. I meant a free
bath. As long ago as 1852, just fifty years ago, the Association for
improving the Condition of the Poor built one in Mott Street near Grand
Street, and spent $42,000 in doing it. It ran eight years, and was then
closed for want of patronage. Forty years passed, and it was again the
Association for improving the Condition of the Poor that built the
People's Baths in the same neighborhood. That time they succeeded at
once. And now here we are, planning a great system of municipal baths as
the people's right, not as a favor to any one, and the old lie that the
poor prefer to steep in their squalor is no longer believed by any
person with sense. This month contracts will be given out for the
fitting of nine public schools with shower-baths where we had one
before, and notice is given that that one will be open to the people on
Sunday mornings. No, we are not marking time; we are forging ahead.
Every park, every playground, every bath-house, is a nail in the coffin
of the slum, and every big, beautiful schoolhouse, built for the
people's use, not merely to lock the children up in during certain hours
for which the teachers collect pay, is a pole rammed right through the
heart of it so that even its ghost shall never walk again. For ever so
much of it we thank that association of men of splendid courage and
public spirit. They fight to win because they believe in the people.
They fight _with_ the people and so they are bound to win.
Every once in a while these days a false note in it all jars upon me--a
note of dread lest those we are trying to help get tired of the word
"reform" and balk. Reform such as we have occasionally had is to blame
for some of that. Certainly you do not want to reform men by main
strength, drag them into righteousness by the hair of the head, as it
were. And let it be freely admitted that the man on Fifth Avenue needs
to be reformed quite as much as his neighbor in Mulberry Street whom he
forgot,--more, since it is his will to mend things that has to be
righted, while it is the other's power to do it that is lacking. But
right there stop. Let us have no pretending that there is nothing to
mend. There is a good deal, and it is not going to be mended by stuffing
the one you would help with conceit and ingratitude. Ingratitude does
not naturally inhabit the slums, but it is a crop that is easily grown
there, and where it does grow there is an end of efforts to mend things
in that generation. You do not want to come _down_ to your work for your
fellows, when you go from the brown-stone front to the tenement; but
neither do you want to make him believe that you feel you are coming up
to him, for you know you do not feel that way. And moreover, it is not
true, if you are coming at all. You want to come right _over_, to help
him reform conditions of his life with which he cannot grapple alone,
and it is as good for him, as it is for you to know that you are doing
it. For that is the brotherhood. And now you can see how that is the
only thing that really helps. Charity may corrupt, correction may harden
and estrange,--in the family they do neither. There you can give and
take without offence. Children of one Father! Spin all the fine theories
you like, build up systems of profound philosophy, of social ethics, of
philanthropic endeavor; back to that you get--if you get anywhere at
all.
I did not mean to preach, I was just thinking that the Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor, in its fifty years of battling with
all that makes the slum, has come nearer that ideal than any and all the
rest of us. And the president of it these ten years, the same who with
his brother tried to reform Gotham Court, is the head, too, of the
citizens' union which is the whole reform programme in a nutshell. All
of which is as it ought to be.
To return to the East Side where the light was let in. 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 offence 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, in the same block, did not bring
enough to have bought 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." I stood and 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.
What became of the people who were dispossessed? The answer to that is
the reply, too, to the wail that goes up from the speculative builder
every time we put the screws on the tenement house law. It does not pay
him to build any more, he says. But when the multitudes of Mulberry
Bend, of Hester Street, and of the Bone Alley Park were put out, there
was more than room enough for them in new houses ready for their use. In
the Seventh, Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth wards, where
they would naturally go if they wanted to be near home, there were 4268
vacant apartments with room for over 18,000 tenants at our New York
average of four and a half to the family. Including the Bend, the whole
number of the dispossessed was not 12,000. On Manhattan Island there
were at that time more than 37,000 vacant flats, so that it seems those
builders were either "talking through their hats," or else they were
philanthropists pure and simple. And I know they were not that. The
whole question of rehousing the population that had been so carefully
considered abroad made us no trouble, though it gave a few well-meaning
people unnecessary concern. The unhoused were scattered some, which was
one of the things we hoped for, but hardly dared believe would come to
pass. Many of them, as it appeared, 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 base-ball 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 up-town captain. He remembered the days
when there were open lots there. "But those 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 was hit on the head with a hammer by
"his people" and laid out for dead.
"The Hook Gang is gone," said he of Corlear's 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.
[Illustration: Mulberry Bend Park.]
"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 up-town precinct whence
came the wail about the ball players there were seven. It was common
sense, then, to hitch the school playground and the children together.
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 roof garden idea,
which was at the start a measure of simple economy to save large
expenditure for land, had suggested a way out. But there was the long
vacation, when schools are closed and children most in need of a chance
to play. To get the playground on the roof of the school house
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 towards bringing school and people, and especially the
school and the boy, together in a bond of mutual sympathy good for them
both.
[Illustration: Roof Playground on a Public School.]
That was the burden of the committee's report. It made thirteen
recommendations besides, as to the location of parks and detached
playgrounds, only two of which have been adopted to date. But that is of
less account--as also was the information imparted to me as secretary
of the committee by our late Tammany mayor--and may he be the last--that
we had "as much authority as a committee of bootblacks in his
office"--it is all of less account than the fact that the field has at
last been studied and its needs been made known. The rest will follow,
with or without the politician's authority. One of the two suggestions
carried out was for a riverside park in the region up-town, 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."
"Hudson-bank" (it is at the foot of West Fifty-third Street) has been a
playground these three years, in the charge of the Outdoor Recreation
League, and it is recorded with pride by the directors, that not a board
was stolen from the long fence that encloses it in all that time, while
fences all about were ripped to pieces. Boards have a market value in
that neighborhood and private property was not always highly regarded.
But this is "the children's"; that is why, within a year now, the bluff
upon which the playground is will have been laid out as a beautiful
park, and a bar set to the slum in that quarter, where it already had
got a firm grip. Hard by there is a recreation pier, and on summer
evenings 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. For 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 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.
It is a pity to have to confess it, but it was not the only time reform
in office gave its cause a black eye in the sight of the people. The
Hamilton Fish Park that took the place of Bone Alley was laid out with
such lack of sense that it will have to be worked all over again. The
gymnasium and bath in it that cost, I am told, $90,000, was never of any
use for either purpose and was never opened. A policeman sat in the door
and turned people away, while around the corner clamoring crowds
besieged the new public bath I spoke of. There were more people waiting,
sitting on the steps and strung out halfway through the block, when I
went over to see, one July day, than could have found room in three
buildings like it. So, also, after seven years, the promised park down
by the Schiff Fountain called Seward Park lies still, an unlovely waste,
waiting to be made beautiful. Tammany let its heelers build shanties in
it to sell fish and dry-goods and such in. Reform just let things be, no
matter how bad they were, and broke its promises to the people.
No, that is not fair. There was enough to do besides, to straighten up
things. Tammany had seen to that. This very day[34] the contractor's men
are beginning work in Seward Park, which shall give that most crowded
spot on earth its pleasure-ground, and I have warrant for promising that
within a year not only will the "Ham-Fish" Park be restored, but
Hudson-bank and the Thomas Jefferson Park in Little Italy, which are
still dreary wastes, be opened to the people; while from the Civic Club
in Richard Croker's old home ward comes the broad hint that unless
condemnation proceedings in the case of the park and playground, to take
the place of the old tenements at East Thirty-fifth Street and Second
Avenue, are hurried by the Tammany Commission, the club will take a hand
and move to have the commission cashiered. There is to be no repetition
of the Mulberry Bend scandal.
[Footnote 34: June 26, 1901.]
[Illustration: Kindergarten on the Recreation Pier, at the Foot of E.
24th Street.]
It is all right. Neither stupidity, spite, nor coldblooded neglect will
be able much longer 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
that pier has more than seven comrades--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 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. That is just a question of effective superintendence, as is
true of model tenements, and everything else in this world. You have got
to keep the devil out of everything, yourself included. He will get in
if he can, as he got into the Garden of Eden. 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 in more than one way. Distinguished doctors
said at the tuberculosis congress this spring that it is to blame with
its dust for sowing the seeds of that fatal disease in the
half-developed bodies. 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. In the Hudson
Guild on the West Side they have the reports of ten children that were
killed in the street immediately around there. The kindergarten teaching
has borne fruit. Private initiative set the pace, but the playground
idea has at last been engrafted upon the municipal plan. The Outdoor
Recreation League was organized 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 School Reform Club and the Federation of
Churches and Christian Workers, it maintained a playground on the
up-town West Side where the ball came into play 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.
[Illustration: The East River Park.]
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." And now even
Poverty Gap is to have its playground--Poverty Gap, that was partly
transformed by its one brief season's experience with its Holy Terror
Park,[35] a dreary sand lot upon the site of the old tenements in which
the Alley Gang murdered the one good boy in the block, for the offence
of supporting his aged parents by his work as a baker's apprentice. And
who knows but the Mulberry Bend and "Paradise Park" at the Five Points
may yet know the climbing pole and the vaulting buck. So the world
moves. 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. But the dead were of more account
than the living.
[Footnote 35: The name bestowed upon it by the older toughs before
the fact, not after.]
[Illustration: The Seward Park.]
But now at last it is their turn. I watched the crowds at their play
where Seward Park is to be. The Outdoor Recreation League had put up
gymnastic apparatus, and 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
travelling 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 seesaw, 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 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.
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; their
clubs hung idly from their belts. The words of a little woman whom I met
once 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."
[Illustration: The Seward Park on Opening Day.]
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 café, 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.
[Illustration: In the Roof Garden of the Hebrew Educational Alliance.]
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
Judæan 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.
[Illustration: Bottle Alley, Whyó Gang's Headquarters.
This picture was evidence at a murder trial. The X marks the place where
the murderer stood when he shot his victim on the stairs.]
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 for 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 Whyó Gang's
headquarters. Five years have passed since it was made into a park, and
scarce a knife had 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, it was only the other day that Tammany was actually caught
applauding[36] Comptroller Coler's words in Plymouth Church, "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, in his enthusiasm, sent forth this
pæan: "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.
[Footnote 36: To be sure, it did nothing else. When the people asked
for $5000 to fit up one playground. Mayor Van Wyck replied with a
sneer that "Vaudeville destroyed Rome."]