CHAPTER V
HIS HOME
Among the influences which mold the destinies of the West Side boy one still remains to be mentioned. We have tried to sketch the characteristics of the community in which he finds himself and to indicate the causes and the traditions which have produced them. We have watched him in the daylight glare of his playground, and followed him through his games and the maneuvers of his gang. School, and in later years, the shop or factory, rarely work any appreciable change in his make-up. The former is usually treated by the class of boys with whom we are dealing as a long game between himself and the truant officer. The latter comes into his life too late and often too unsuitably to be regarded by him as anything but so many dreary years of necessary imprisonment. But back of his chequered little life on the docks and streets stand his mother and his tenement home, and surely it is to them, if anywhere, that we must look for the guidance that is to help him and the influence that is to counteract the wild persuasions of the playground.
Is this home attractive? Can it be? Does his mother understand her boy and his difficulties, even if she can cope with her own? If she does, how far can she help him? If she does not, how far is she blameworthy? What is her attitude toward the West Side problems? To what extent is she—can she be—responsible for her children’s conduct? How far right are the judges of the New York children’s court, and how far wrong, in holding West Side parents responsible for the misdemeanors of their sons? Let us look at the home outside and within, visit the mother and hear her side of the story; for these are questions which must be asked and answered before our picture of the West Side boy is complete.
It would be impossible with any truth to call the tenement buildings externally attractive. Surrounding the factories on all sides, wedged between tall, noisy buildings, standing almost alone in a block of lumber and wagon yards, or sometimes occupying entire blocks to the exclusion of everything else, they rise singly, in groups, or in rows along the streets and avenues, ugly, monotonous, of an indistinguishable sameness. Most of them face squarely up to the sidewalk, with no areaway in front, behind them narrow cement-paved courts, round which the shabby walls rear themselves, cutting off sunlight and giving to each little well of air-space the gloominess of a cañon. Every type of obsolete dwelling, condemned by the building laws of a decade ago, is present in block lengths, teeming and seething with human life, and accepted with that philosophy of poverty which holds that such things are a part of the natural scheme which created Fifth Avenue for the man who doesn’t have to work and Eleventh Avenue for the man who does. The “dumb-bell” and “railroad” types of tenement with dark inner rooms, first sanctioned by the laws of the late 70’s but condemned as dangerous and unsanitary nearly a decade ago, predominate. These buildings were erected for the most part over twenty-five years ago (some are forty years old or more), and in the ten years preceding 1911 only two modern tenements had been erected in the whole district. Most of the tenements so adjoin that the roofs of one are accessible from those on either side. Frequently this condition continues through the whole block, so that a marauder, a fleeing small boy, or a fugitive from justice, may dodge up one stairway, cross several roofs, and descend by another. Similarly, if one street door is locked, the tenement can usually be entered from the adjoining building by way of the roof.
Inside, the tenements offer a depressing study in bad housing conditions. The hall is dark, the stairway small and ill-lighted; modern toilet and sanitary facilities in many cases are absent. The rooms are often infested with mice, roaches, and bed-bugs. The slender airshaft is frequently so inaccessible that refuse and rubbish thrown into it from adjacent windows may lie for months in a rotting accumulation at the bottom. A large proportion of the families are herded in flats containing from two to four rooms, which are very small and receive a minimum of light and air from their few and often overshadowed windows.
The number of rooms occupied by 200 of these families, as shown by the table given in the Appendix,[18] is to some extent misleading, for the rooms are often not really separate. Owing to restrictions of space there are rarely doors between the rooms in the prevailing type of tenements; only doorways; and whether these are hung with curtains or not, privacy within the home is naturally almost impossible. Family quarrels or Saturday night’s drunken brawl too often take place in the presence of the children. Moreover, walls are so thin that every word spoken above an ordinary tone of voice is plainly audible through them to the inmates of the next flat. A social worker who was for a time resident here said recently: “In the first part of this month there were three cases of wife-beating in one tenement alone. This tenement is of so-called ‘model’ construction, has an exceptionally high rent, attempts to restrict crowding, and prides itself on an extra high grade of tenants. Yet the quarreling and brawling between husband and wife in all parts of the building seem to be incessant. It even breaks the sleep of the children and other tenants in the early hours of the morning.”
In homes like these it is scarcely possible for even the smallest families to live in decency. But small families are not the rule on the West Side. Of the 231 families for which information regarding the number of living children was secured, 163, or 71 per cent, had four or more children. Families having five children formed the largest group; and one family had 11 living children.[19]
Day begins for the housewife at 6 o’clock, or even earlier if she works outside the home, and ordinarily her children are up and on the streets by half past seven. For breakfast she usually prepares a quantity of food and leaves it at the disposal of the family. The members, as they rise, successively go to the kitchen and help themselves. The workers go to the stores and factories, and the children to school or the streets. By half past seven the factories are in full operation, the stores are open, and the day’s work has begun. From half past eight to nine, the streets are thronged with children going to school, or sometimes to steal a riotous holiday on the streets and docks as truants. At noon they return to snatch a hasty lunch served in the same impromptu way as breakfast, and then the woman is left alone again to wash and cook and mend and gossip till supper time, if she is not one of the many West Side mothers who must go out to earn.[20] In that case, the household tasks must be done after she returns home at night.
Such is the average tenement home, abiding place of our West Side boy and his family. In a very large number of cases the family is a “broken” one.[21]
As regards ambitions and ideals, the word “home” may stand for anything from the thrifty German household with its level head for the budget to a down-at-the-heels, loose-hinged group of people who share the same abiding place, but scarcely claim the name of family. Of course, it must be remembered that this is a neighborhood from which the sturdiest, those having the lucky combination of prosperity, vigor, and ambition, have pulled away. They have shaken clear both from the ill-repaired and inconvenient houses and from the district’s reputation for “toughness.” Here and there a fairly well-to-do family has been held by the ownership of a business or a house, or because to be a power even in a block like one of these is more satisfying than to be second elsewhere. Others have stayed from inertia, shaking their heads over lax West Side customs, but on the whole accepting them with the acquiescence of habit; and naturally, on the level of the neighborhood, they have entered into its life and made their friends here. They will drift back after brief outward excursions, from sheer loneliness. But most commonly the people here are too strongly fettered to break loose; they are bound to these dreary surroundings for their lives.