With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

Americans are proud of saying that the Woolworth Building, the Grand Central Station, the Pennsylvania Railway Station, and the New York Central Library show the New York of the future. Almost everything else will be pulled down and built to match these. They are new buildings, they are the soul of the New America finding expression. They are temples of a new religion. Americans pray more and aspire more to God in these than they do in their churches.

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There stands out in my memory the East Side, and the slums which I walked night after night in quest of some idea, some redeeming feature, something that would explain them to me. I walked almost at random, taking ever the first turning to the left, the first to the right, and the first to the left again, coming ever and anon to the river and the harbour, and having to turn and change.

The East Side is more spectacular than the East End of London. The houses are so high, and there is so much more crowding, that you get into ten streets of New York what we get into a hundred streets. The New York slums are slums at the intensest. The buildings, great frames of rags and dirt, hang over the busy street below, and are wildly alive from base to summit. All day long the bedding hangs out at the windows or on the iron fire-escapes attached to the houses. Women are shouting and children are crying on the extraordinary stairs which lead from room to room and story to story in the vast honeycomb of dens. On the side-walk is a rough crowd speaking all tongues. The toy doors of the saloons swing to and fro, simple couples sit on high stools in the soda-bars and suck various kinds of "dope." Lithuanian and Polish boys are rushing after one another with toy pistols, the girls are going round and round the barber's pole, singing and playing, with hands joined. The stores are crowded, and notices tell the outsider that he can buy two quarts of Grade B milk for eleven cents, or ten State eggs for twenty-five cents. You come to streets where all the bakers' shops are "panneterias," and you know you are among the Italians. One Hundred and Thirteenth Street as it goes down from Second Avenue to First Avenue is full of Greeks and Italians, and is extraordinarily dark and wild; men of murderous aspect are prowling about, there is howling across the street from tenement to tenement. Dark, plump women stand at doorways and stare at you, and occasionally a negress in finery trapes past.

You come to little Italian theatres where the price of admission is only five cents, and find them crammed with families, so that you cannot hear Rigoletto for the squalling of the babies. There are mean cinema houses where you see only worn-out and spoiled films giving broken and incoherent stories. And all the while the lights and shadows play, the Greek hawker of confectionery shouts:

"Soh-dah!"

"Can-dee!"

You continue your wanderings and you strike a nigger district. Negresses and their beaux are flirting in corners and on doorsteps. Darky boys and girls are skirling in the roadway. Smartly dressed young men, carrying canes, come giggling and pushing one another on the pavement, crying out music-hall catches—"Who was you with last night?" and the like.

You know the habitat of the Jew by the abundance of junk-shops, old-clothes shops, and offices of counsellors-at-law. It seems the Jews are very litigious, and even the poorest families go to law for their rights. You find windows full of boxing-gloves, for the Jews are great boxers in America. You find stalls and push-carts without end. And every now and then rubbish comes sailing down from a window up above. That is one of the surest signs of the Jews being installed—the pitching of cabbage-leaves and fish-bones and sausage-parings from upper windows.