I should like to tell you of that godless municipal “charity” which herded old thieves and old tramps and young homeless lads, who were adrift in the great city, in those vile dens called police station lodging rooms, and of the war upon it that was won at last; but I have written so much and so often about it, and about my own experience in one of those dens, where I was beaten and robbed, and where my little dog was killed, when I was a homeless boy myself, and I have not the time to repeat it. You have fought that same fight in Philadelphia and won it, too. Our battle went dead against us, until that man with honest purpose came among us and set things right. I shall never forget the night he and I spent in touring the police stations together until we brought up in the Church Street station, where the thing happened of which I have just spoken. Standing there, I told him my story and he cried angrily, “Did they do that to you? I’ll smash them to-morrow.” And he did. And so that foul disgrace came to an end. Thank God for Theodore Roosevelt!
There remained the awful nuisance of the cheap lodging houses in the Bowery, where thieves recruit their broken-up gangs among the young men who are stranded there, coming from everywhere out in the country. They have a standing army of lodgers, from thirteen to sixteen thousand homeless men and lads; and we knew not what to do with them, until there arose among us a philanthropist who gave of his fortune to solve this problem also. He gave a million or more, and gave so wisely that his work, the great Mills houses, have become one of the real benefactions of to-day. There are two of them and they shelter a constant population of twenty-six hundred lodgers. They are so well managed that they return a profit, even a very good profit, upon the investment. So they are free from the taint of alms-giving and the man who lives in them can and does keep his self-respect. Mr. D. O. Mills deserves a place among the real benefactors of our day.
The “To-morrow”
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
I am to speak to you next of the to-morrow. Here it sits in a wagon, two of the children of the poor whose only playground is their father’s truck. (See illustration facing page 144.) “Was” I should have said. I took their picture before the day of Colonel Waring, and when they stepped out of the truck they landed in a street where the mud was over half a foot in depth. You never saw anything like it, and pray that you never may. We solaced ourselves with the belief in those days that no one could clean our streets, that it was an impossible job. That was the day of the man who “can’t,” or rather who won’t. When one of the other kind came with his broom, he gave the children their first playground, though it was not a good one, and his broom swept some of the cobwebs out of our heads at the same time. “A man instead of a voter behind every broom,” that was his watch-word, and it cleaned our streets and cleaned our politics for a season. Just remember it; it applies to other kinds of dirt than that which lies in the street.
The children got a playground, but not the kind they needed. We had to put our hands deep into our pockets to give them that. Over on that East-side, where three hundred and twenty-four thousand persons were penned up upon seven hundred and eleven acres of land, out of reach and out of sight of a green spot, we tore down block after block of old buildings, paying a million dollars for each block, and making the best bargain of our lives in doing it. It was marvelous how long it took us to see that this was good sense, and we were not alone in that, either. A year ago, when I spoke in this city about children and their rights, I was shown a square that had been laid out as a playground for the little ones, but that was wholly neglected and gone to wreck. That was not good sense. I looked for better among the people of Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin lived; and I expect to find it, too.
The Mulberry Bend we laid by the heels; that was the worst pigsty of all, and here again let me hark back to the murder I have spoken of so often. I do not believe that there was a week in all the twenty years I had to do with the den, as a police reporter, in which I was not called to record there a stabbing or shooting affair, some act of violence. It is now five years since the Bend became a park (see illustration facing page [146]), and the police reporter has not had business there once during that time; not once has a shot been fired or a knife been drawn. That is what it means to let the sunlight in and give the boys their rights in a slum like that!
It is Five Years Since the Bend Became a Park
From “The Making of an American.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
Of this boy of the slum we shall speak together further. He is just what you let him be: good, if you give him the chance; bad, if you will have none of him. Take the home out of his life, and you handicap him forever and mortgage your own future with the heaviest of mortgages. It is since that understanding began to dawn upon us that we have seized playgrounds right and left, wherever we had the chance. I have in mind one which we got away from a corporation on the West-side—it goes a little hard with me to own that it was a church corporation, because by that time the church ought to have had better sense. It was an old burial ground where some of the old-time New Yorkers lay who, in their day, neglected their boys and gave us the heritage of the slum. I hope that they have seen their mistake: I am sure they have, and that their ears are rejoiced by the patter of little children’s feet where once there was the silence; for they are echoing the better to-morrow, those little feet.