MULBERRY BEND PARK
A million dollars a year had been lost while we were learning our lesson. The Small Parks Fund was not cumulative, and when it came to paying for the Bend a special bill had to be passed to authorize it, the award being "more than one million in one year." The wise financiers who framed and hung in the comptroller's office a check for three cents that had been under-paid on a school site, for the taxpayer to bow before in awe and admiration at such business methods, could find no way to make the appropriation for two years apply, though the new year was coming in a week or two. 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 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 sites which are now being laid out in playgrounds chiefly, 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. The slow legal proceedings are going on yet.
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 the 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 stood workmen are to-day building a gymnasium with baths for the people, and a playground and park which may even be turned into a skating-pond in winter if the architect keeps his promise. A skating-pond for the children of the Eleventh Ward! No wonder the politician is in a hurry to take the credit for what is going forward over there. It is that or nothing with him now. It will be all up with Tammany, once the boys find out that these were the things she withheld from them all the years, for her own gain.
Half a dozen blocks away the city's first public bath house is at last going up, 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 a bath house. In a tenement population of 255,033 the Gilder Committee found only 306 who had access to bath-rooms in the houses where they lived. The Church Federation canvass of the Fifteenth Assembly District counted three bath-tubs to 1321 families. Nor was that because they so elected. The People's Baths took in 115,000 half dimes last year for as many baths, and forty per cent. of their customers were Italians. The free river baths admitted 5,096,876 customers during the summer. The "great unwashed" were not so from choice, it would appear.
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 offense 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 would not have brought enough to buy 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." Last week I 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.
In all this the question of rehousing the population, that had to be so carefully considered abroad in the destruction of slums, gave no trouble. The speculative builder had seen to that. In the five wards, the Seventh, Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth, in which the unhoused ones would look for room, if they wanted to stay near their old home, there were, according to the tenement census at the time when the old houses were torn down, 4268 vacant apartments, with room for more than 18,000 persons at our average of four and a half to the family. Even including the Mulberry Bend, the whole number of the dispossessed was not 10,000. On Manhattan Island there were at this time more than 37,000 vacant apartments, so that the question could not arise in any serious shape, much as it plagued the dreams of some well-meaning people. As a matter of fact the unhoused were scattered much more widely than had been anticipated, which was one of the very purposes sought to be attained. Many of them had remained in their old slum more from force of habit and association than because of necessity.