“The gift of a Peabody Museum or a Hemenway Gymnasium does not offend the pride or help to pauperize the Harvard student, nor do the Lowell lectures make the most cultivated people of Boston count themselves recipients of charity when they crowd the hall to hear Professor Morse talk about Japanese pottery, or the Englishman Haweis discourse on music. Money given like that, in a large way, in the enjoyment of which all unite, never does the harm that the gift to the individual would surely do.
“Now, I propose to set up a counter-attraction to the delights of the saloon and the dance-hall and the street; and I shall put it right where it is most needed. There shall be one substantial, clean, beautiful building, a beacon light of beauty and delight in a square mile of dinginess and discomfort.
“It shall be of brick, and I shall enjoin upon my architect to show what beautiful lines and arches can be wrought in simple material. In a street of ugly straight lines and right angles, this shall stand as an object-lesson in the power of creating perpetual pleasure to the eye by such simple devices as the substitution of the curve for the straight line over door and window.
“Then within there shall be a dozen immense rooms connected by folding-doors, with sand heaps and swings and blocks for the delight of the gutter child, too old to be in the cradle and too young to be in school. From morning until night, if he behaves himself, he shall be sheltered and warm and happy under the charge of some good woman. At night these rooms shall be filled with older boys and girls learning the use of tools, sawing, planing, hammering, and finding it better fun to vent their energies in manufacturing something which they can take home for their own use than in playing tag around the ash-barrels on the corner.”
“What, would you have boys and girls together?” I asked.
“Certainly,” said Mildred; “they would be together on the street, and why not here?”
“But what is the use of a girl learning carpentering?” I asked. “I should think she might much better learn sewing. Besides, girls can’t do it, and I don’t believe they would like to, if they could.”
“In regard to that, you don’t know those girls so well as I do. They will sit by a smoky lamp in a close room and grow round-shouldered and near-sighted in crocheting edging and working blue cats on cardboard; but as to plain sewing, they think it a bore. After a day at school or in the shop they don’t want to sit demurely on a bench and ‘backstitch’ and sew ‘over and over.’ Then, too, a course in carpentry would do more for them physically than a course at the gymnasium. There is no danger that city girls will not walk enough at all times; what they lack is development of arms and chest. Moreover, this is not an experiment. I once visited a summer class in carpentering for girls at the Tennyson Street school in Boston, and I can assure you I haven’t forgotten the neat book-racks and little tables those girls of fourteen were making for themselves, nor the good time they were having in doing it, either. Such muscle as they were developing! However, there can be cooking classes and sewing classes too, if they want them, though my House Beautiful is not to be primarily a manual training school. The city may provide that for the child; but I want to do what it cannot do, and that is to give innocent amusement and a bit of beauty to lives that know nothing of it.
“So above these rooms is to be a great auditorium arranged like an amphitheatre, and capable of seating comfortably three thousand people. There shall be no cushions, and no need of them, for every seat shall be planned with reference to the human figure, and will require no padding to insure absolute comfort.
“There shall be a golden-piped organ and ‘storied windows richly dight,’ not casting a ‘dim religious light,’ but shedding warm, rich color upon the thousand shabby coats and shawls gathered from the alleys and street corners of a Sunday afternoon. Every night in the week, and all day on Sunday, this is to be opened free to every man or woman who wants to sit in a comfortable seat, see interesting pictures, hear sweet music, and give tired nerves and body a respite from the noise and confusion of the tenement and street.”