XIV
My Saturdays and holidays I spent racing about the streets and in my playground, Central Park. In the course of these years I came to know this park so well that afterward, when I walked in it, every slope and turn of the winding paths had a story for me. I learned to play tennis on its grass courts; I roller-skated on its walks and ice-skated on its lakes—when the flag with the red ball went up on top of the “castle,” thrilling the souls of young folks for miles around. I played hare and hounds, marking up the asphalt walks with chalk; we thought nothing of running all the way around the park, a distance of seven miles.
The Upper West Side was mostly empty lots, with shanties of “squatters” and goats browsing on tin cans—if one could believe the comic papers. Blasting and building were going on, and the Italian laborers who did this hard and dangerous work were the natural prey of us young aborigines. We snowballed them from the roofs of the apartment houses, and when there was no snow, we used clothespins. When they cursed us we yelled with glee. I can still remember the phrases—or at any rate what we imagined the phrases to be. “Aberragotz!” and “Chingasol!”—do those sounds mean anything to an Italian? If they do, it may be something shocking, perhaps not fit to print. When these “dagos” chased us, we fled in terror most delightful.
Sometimes we would raid grocery stores on the avenue and grab a couple of potatoes, and roast them in bonfires on the vacant lots. I was a little shocked at this idea, but the other boys explained to me that it was not stealing, it was only “swiping,” and the grocers took it for granted. So it has been easy for me to understand how young criminals are made in our great cities. We manufacture crime wholesale, just as certainly and as definitely as we manufacture alcohol in a mash of grain. And just as we can stop getting alcohol by not mixing a mash, so we can stop crime by not permitting exploitation and economic inequality.
But that is propaganda, and I have sworn to leave it out of this book. So instead, let me tell a story that illustrates the police attitude toward these budding criminals. In my mature days when I was collecting material about New York, I was strolling on the East Side with an elderly police captain. It was during a reform administration, and the movement for uplift had taken the form of a public playground, with swings and parallel bars. The young men of the tenements were developing their muscles after a day’s work loading trucks, and I said to the captain, what a fine thing they should have this recreation. The elderly cynic snorted wrathfully: “Porch climbers! Second-story work!”
The Nietzscheans advise us to live dangerously, and this advice I took without having heard it. The motorcar had not yet come in, but there were electric cars and big two-horse trucks, and my memory is full of dreadful moments. Riding down Broadway to college, the wheel of my bicycle slipped into the wet trolley slot, and I was thrown directly in front of an oncoming car. Quick as a cat, I rolled out of the way, but the car ran over my hat, and a woman bystander fainted. Again, skating on an asphalt street, I fell in the space between the front and rear wheels of a fast-moving express wagon, and had to whisk my legs out before the rear wheels caught them. When I was seventeen, I came to the conclusion that Providence must have some special purpose in keeping me in the world, for I was able to reckon up fourteen times that I had missed death by a hairbreadth. I had fallen off a pier during a storm; I had been swept out to sea by a rip tide; I had been carried down from the third story of the Weisiger House by a fireman with a scaling ladder.
I do not know so much about the purposes of Providence now as I did at the age of seventeen, and the best I can make of the matter is this: that several hundred thousand little brats are bred in the great metropolis every year and turned out into the streets to develop their bodies and their wits, and in a rough, general way, those who get caught by streetcars and motorcars and trucks are those who are not quite so quick in their reactions. But when it comes to genius, to beauty, dignity, and true power of mind, I cannot see that there is any chance for them to survive in the insane hurly-burly of metropolitan life. If I wanted qualities such as these in human beings, I would surely transfer them to a different environment. And maybe that is what Providence was planning for me to understand and to do in the world. At any rate, it is what I am trying to do, and is my final reaction to the great metropolis of Mammon.