I
That part of the city of New York which the older charts describe as Kips Bay, now encompasses the East Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. It is a section of Manhattan famous in song and story. Here in 1635 came Jacobus Kip, the learned Dutch patroon and, with bricks brought from Holland, built a farmhouse on land where St. Gabriel's Park and an astonishingly well-stocked library now flourish. Here Washington had another site for his movable headquarters while, on the heights of Murray Hill hard by, he rallied his troops against the redcoats. Here in Artillery Park (at First Avenue and Forty-fifth Street), Nathan Hale was executed. And here at Turtle Bay (where the East Forties now end) the "Quality" had a fashionable bathing beach in the early eighteen-hundreds.
Of these historic memories the average Kipsian is ignorant, quite contemptuously ignorant. Far livelier realities occupy his thoughts. In the heart of modern Kips Bay there are slums, stables, hospitals, asylums, and model tenement houses, five features ranged in an ascending order of precedence from the neighborhood's point of view. Kips Bay is keen on this order of precedence. No lady of the White House giving her first State Ball could well be keener.
Slums rank lowest in the neighborhood's appraisal because they are the natural or routine habitat of the human species there. Stables go a peg higher, not because they are dirtier, or because artists frequently turn them into studios but because they serve as club houses for professional gangsters, and because a crack gunman is at once the pride and the terror of his district. Hospitals outclass the stables by the same law of human nature that makes an extra holiday outclass a Sunday. For the hospital is a sort of haven in which the true-born Kipsian expects, now and then, to spend a furlough from the ravages of alcohol, from undernourishment, or merely from the wear and tear of the industrial machine.
In their turn, the hospitals yield the palm to the several asylums which, adjoining the hovels of the destitute, provide the infirm, the defective, or the insane with all the comforts and luxuries of the rich. Easily the handsomest buildings in the neighborhood, the asylums stand unrivalled in aristocratic prestige. And this is not due to a Kipsian gratitude for charity, nor to the growing artistic cultivation of the masses. It is due to an inborn respect for plutocracy, a respect that persists in the heart of every Kipsian, no matter how loudly he may applaud the labor agitator who assures him that an asylum is at once a monument to the uneasy consciences of donors and a sepulchre for those soldiers of industry who do not perish in active service.
It would be as difficult for the Kipsian to explain to the outside world why his model tenements outrank asylums as for the outside world to explain to the Kipsian why a civilian Secretary of the Navy can give orders to the uniformed Admiral of the Fleet. In either case, the simplest course the perplexed brain can pursue is to accept the facts on faith.
This is precisely what the Kipsian has done—he has accepted both the civilian Secretary and the model tenements on faith. Nevertheless, the facts quite pass his understanding. The model tenement, he has heard, was built in his midst for the likes of himself, for toilers at the border line of pauperism. It was built, moreover, to accustom him to habits of cleanliness and thrift. Unfortunately, the rooms are too small to hold his furniture, or the furniture is too bulky to leave room for cleanliness. In any case, the rents are so high that only the "aristocrats of labor" can afford to pay them, and the "aristocrats of labor" are not so low as to merge their fortunes with the denizens of Kips Bay.
Because their habits, their pocketbooks, and their pride are thus offended, native-born Kipsians have unanimously fought shy of the model tenements. And these evidences of concern for the welfare of the masses might have proven a poor investment for public benefactors, had not the situation been saved by sundry artists, writers, actors, singers, promoters, efficiency engineers, socialists, anarchists and dynamitards who promptly rented every available apartment besides filling up a long waiting list of impatient applicants.
To the simple-minded natives of Kips Bay, the model tenementers stand clean beyond the bounds of everyday belief. Here are people who plainly hail from comfortable homes, and yet voluntarily set up housekeeping in the slums; who neither work by day nor sleep by night; who flirt with riches and coquet with poverty; and who go to and from their abodes, one day in rags, the next in motor cars. By such contradictions respectable Kipsians are completely mystified. But having grown accustomed to their mystery, they have ceased to hate it. They have even begun to pay it the compliment which idolatrous man usually pays the unfathomable: they worship it above all the things that they can fathom.
And thus it has come to pass that, within the confines of Kips Bay, the model tenement lords it over the asylum for the insane.