Lodgers at “Five Cents a Spot”
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
As yet you can do it with soap and water and patience. Take them out into the open, set them among the daisies, and see the change. When they return, it is as if windows had been opened for their souls, through which they could look out and see God. They could not before. That is the offense of the slum which kills the home, that it will not let either the one Who is in it or the one who built it see God. Windows for their souls! No need of wondering at that if you saw the window giving upon the dark air-shaft through which those children looked out all the days of their lives when they were at home! When I stood there with that harassed mother, I asked thoughtlessly if the five children I saw about me were all she had. She reddened a little and there was a sob in her voice as she said: “Yes, all but Mary; she doesn’t like to sleep home.” Mary was seventeen. You would not have wondered that she did not like to “sleep home” if you had been there. What does that tell us of one of the horrid problems with which we have to do in our cities? It all comes to the wreck of the home.
Poverty Gap was one of the black spots that stand out as I look back over twenty-five years of wrestling with the slum. I have seldom seen a more hopeless place. It was there that “the gang” murdered the one “good boy” there was in the block, for the offense of earning an honest living. Yet the hope there was in it all, was with these very children. There came a kindergarten that way and opened our eyes. That is one of the functions of the kindergarten, you know. It is the great miracle-worker of our day; it has power to move mountains of indifference, of sloth and wretchedness, of human inefficiency and despair, for it is backed by the eternal forces of faith and hope and love, however much they may look to you or to me like soap and water and toilsome effort. The kindergarten came that way and, when we saw the Gap through its eyes, we were ashamed and set about tearing it down. It was then that an inspiration came to a good woman who had happened upon a pile of sand in the neighborhood. She had it brought in and put upon the site of the old Gap, with wheelbarrows and pails and shovels for the boys and swings for the girls, and the children on the West-side got their first playground. “The gang” went out of business that summer and the Gap that had been violent became orderly.
Its steam had been penned up before and that is bad. What would you think of a yard as wide as an ordinary bedroom, with signs in it forbidding the boys to play ball there and giving warning that “all boys caught in this yard will be delt with accordin’ to law”? I can show you such yards, and wherever they are, gang violence breaks out, for the street is the only alternative. There are no homes in such slums as those.
I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements and there I trod upon a baby. It is the regular means of introduction to a tenement house baby in the old dark houses, but I never have been able to get used to it. I went off and got my camera and photographed that baby standing with its back against the public sink in a pool of filth that overflowed on the floor. I do not marvel much at the showing of the Gilder Tenement House Committee that one in five of the children in the rear tenements into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house. It seemed strange, rather, that any survived. But they do, and as soon as they are able, they take to the street, which is thenceforward their training ground.
Some years ago, the Gerry Society picked up two boys that “lived nowhere,” so they said. (See illustration facing page [136].) They were brothers with a drunken father and no mother. Some one was curious enough to try to find out their moral and religious status. The older of the two had heard of the Lord’s Prayer as something that it was lucky to say over at night before one went to sleep, so as to have good luck the next day pitching pennies; his younger brother knew the name of the Saviour as something to swear by. These were our home heathen, growing up in the Christian city of New York. That is one way of looking at it. There is another for which we have to wait only a few years: then these lads come to the polls with their ballots, and there develops the citizen equality over which their father puzzled in his air-shaft. Ask yourself the question again, is it safe?
They “Lived Nowhere”
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
These boys belong to the street and they learn its lessons: gambling, pilfering, and by and by robbery. A little further along on the road they are traveling are the Rogues’ Gallery and the jail. At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen they are thieves, little and big, house-breakers, and highway robbers. One year when I kept a census of the child criminals I had to deal with in Mulberry Street, I found them beginning their careers at four and six years. The very little ones were useful to their elders to “crawl through a hole” into the place that was to be robbed.