CHAPTER III
THE real estate boom collapsed. The cause of the catastrophe lay in the nature, or rather in the unnaturalness, of the "get-rich-quick" epidemic.
Its immediate cause, however, was a series of rent strikes inspired and engineered by the Jewish socialists through their Yiddish daily. One of the many artificialities of the situation had been a progressive inflation of rent values. Houses had been continually changing hands, being bought, not as a permanent investment, but for speculation, whereupon each successive purchaser would raise rents as a means of increasing the market price of his temporary property. And so the socialists had organized a crusade that filled the municipal courts with dispossess cases and turned the boom into a panic
Hundreds of people who had become rich overnight now became worse than penniless overnight. The Ghetto was full of dethroned "kings for a day only." It seemed as if it all really had been a dream
One of the men whose quickly made little fortune burst like a bubble was poor Tevkin. I wondered how his children took the socialist rent strikes
Nor did I escape uninjured when the crisis broke loose. I still had a considerable sum in real estate, all my efforts to extricate it having proved futile. My holdings were rapidly depreciating. In hundreds of cases similar to mine equities were wiped out through the speculators' inability to pay interest on mortgages or even taxes. To be sure, things did not come to such a pass in my case, but then some of the city lots or improved property in which I was interested had been hit so hard as to be no longer worth the mortgages on them
Volodsky lost almost everything except his courage and speculative spirit
"Oh, it will come back," he once said to me, speaking of the boom
When I urged that it had been an unnatural growth he retorted that it was the collapse of the boom which was unnatural. He was scheming some sort of syndicate again
"It requires no money to make a lot of money," he said. "All it does require is brains and some good luck."
Nevertheless, he coveted some of my money for his new scheme. He did not succeed with me, but he found other "angels." He was now quite in his element in the American atmosphere of breathless enterprise and breakneck speed. When the violence of the crisis had quieted down building operations were resumed on a more natural basis. Men like Volodsky, with hosts of carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers—all Russian or Galician Jews—continued to build up the Bronx, Washington Heights, and several sections of Brooklyn.
Vast areas of meadowland and rock were turned by them, as by a magic wand, into densely populated avenues and streets of brick and mortar. Under the spell of their activity cities larger than Odessa sprang up within the confines of Greater New York in the course of three or four years
Mrs. Chaikin came out of her speculations more than safe. She and her husband, who is still in my employ, own half a dozen tenement-houses. One day, on the first of the month, I met her in the street with a large hand-bag and a dignified mien. She was out collecting rent.