"Broke," The Man Without the Dime

by Edwin A. Brown

Studying in Boston—as is said of Paris—is being born in Boston.

When a boy in my teens I spent four years there, and those four years awakened in me the brightest dreams and brightest hopes for a successful future.

After thirty years, I am again in this renowned center of intellectual culture as a student, but this time as a social student in pursuit of knowledge of how our “Modern Athens” cares for the honest, out-of-work, penniless, homeless worker.

At half-past ten at night, in search of a free bed, I made my way down to a building, at least seventy or more years old, looking for Boston’s Municipal Lodging House, “The Wayfarers Lodge,” better known as “The Hawkins Street Woodyard.” (Boston is rather given to pretty names. They have a Deer Island also.)

My reception was not at all encouraging for a destitute man. I was not even asked if I was hungry, but was shown at once into a bath-room, located down in the cellar, which was dark and uninviting.

After my bath I put on a nightshirt taken from a basket, and carrying my hat, shoes, and stockings in my hand, I climbed two flights of stairs to the dormitories, leaving the rest of my clothes to be fumigated, as I supposed, but I doubt very much if that was done, as they had none of the purified odor of thoroughly disinfected clothing I had noticed in New York.

There was no sign of medical inspection, nor any attempt at separation of the sick from the well. I should judge one hundred men to have been in the two dormitories that night. There were boys not more than fifteen years old sleeping by the side of men of seventy. The beds were shoved absolutely tight together, which gave the appearance of all sleeping in one bed. When it became necessary for any one of them to get up during the night he was forced to crawl over the next men or over the head or foot of the bed.

As there were no cuspidors, the men expectorated into space without thought or care of where it fell.

Two men came in and took beds next to mine. The one on my right was an intelligent workingman, the one on my left was a drunkard with a horribly offensive breath from disease and rum.

The beds had no mattresses,—a blanket was simply thrown over the woven wires,—and as I sank down on one, it became a string beneath me. A blanket was our only covering, and the pillows, filled with excelsior, were as hard as boards.