The front yard was of no particular use except that the iron gate served to stimulate the imagination of the small boys who haunted our premises. It was a continual bone of contention. It was always being carried away by bands of enemies and heroically restored by bands of friends—who were sometimes one and the same—until at last we decided to remove it entirely from the sidewalk, where it was of no earthly use as a gate, and store it in an inner closet.
We occupied two floors of the house, the ground floor and the basement. In the basement was a large, well lighted kitchen and a living room. On the first floor were two large connecting rooms which were furnished with folding chairs and a piano. Though our equipment was meager, we had a cook stove and a piano. These two pieces of furniture we came to regard as the necessary minimum of equipment for a girls’ club under all circumstances.
The occupations of the clubs—cooking, sewing, basket-weaving, brass work—were carried on as pastime rather than as work. It was necessary to vary the program repeatedly, for the shifting attention of the girls refused to consider any occupation as pleasurable for long at a time. The one thing of which they never seemed to tire was dancing, and in spite of the ugly forms which this recreation took, it had always the beauty of spontaneity. Their fondness for popular songs was almost as spontaneous. “The Garden of Love,” “The Hypnotizing Man,” “When Broadway was a Pasture,” “The Girl that Married Dad,” and others of the same lurid and sentimental strain were sung over and over to an unvarying appreciation.
Our relations with our co-tenants at “471” threw much additional light on conditions of life on the West Side. Above us on the second floor lived the McClusky family. Ellen McClusky was fourteen, and since her mother’s death two years before had been housekeeper for her father and three brothers. Lately one of the brothers had sickened of tuberculosis, thus adding to Ellen’s housekeeping duties those of a sick nurse. Her school attendance had suffered. The truant officer was paying visits to the house and the health officer was also knocking at the door. Thus the clouds had already begun to gather on the McClusky horizon even before our entrance on the scene. Ellen’s joy at the news that a club for girls had moved in on the ground floor of the house was unbounded. She was allowed at first to come down to us every evening.
But Mr. McClusky soon turned against us. He was a choleric individual, and was, moreover, constantly agitated over the condition of his son, who was dying by inches. It is not surprising that he turned violently against the social coercion which demanded that Ellen should go to school and his son be put away in a hospital. He mishandled the truant officer and forbade Ellen to have anything to do with the “teachers,” whom he regarded as being in league with the forces that harassed him.
Ellen would hang over the banisters in the evenings watching the hall below. But her father had forbidden her even to speak to us. In March the invalid brother died, and the club rooms were closed for a week during which the house was given over to the solemn splendors of a funeral. After the undertaker had retired, the health officer took possession and the rooms were submitted to a thorough fumigation.
We opened our club once more, but Ellen was still forbidden to come to us. She continued living in the isolation of the second floor, peeping over the banisters in the evening. It was finally a great relief to our overstrained sympathies when an officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, upon evidence furnished by Ellen’s aunt, arrived and removed her from her home. This ended the vicissitudes of the McClusky family so far as we had any share in them.
On the top floor lived Mr. Distel, a German mechanic about fifty years old. He was an odd little bitten-off man, unkempt and kindly, who had lived alone in his three little rooms many years. He liked to hear the boys and girls downstairs, he said, and occasionally he made clumsy efforts to join in, but he had been too long a hermit. He could not. Needless to say, Mr. Distel was our most sympathetic neighbor, and the presence of the little man finishing off an industrious and worthy life in his lonely top floor rooms made us but the more determined in our task of supplying wholesome good times to our friends.
The source from which most of our difficulties proceeded was the spirit of disorder abroad in the neighborhood. This was indeed a lawless spirit and, in its extreme form, a sinister and menacing influence. The “Gopher gang”[64] figured largely in the neighborhood gossip, and whatever may have been the actual extent of Gopher operations in our vicinity, the current stories about them, however inaccurate as to facts, were in themselves a sufficiently evil influence in the lives of the boys and girls of the district.
Our most direct contact with local disorderly influences was through the gangs of small boys who haunted our premises, demanding to be admitted. As we were not prepared to open the house to them, our apparent inhospitality drew upon us a series of attacks. Not that all the attacks were acts of deliberate revenge; they were sometimes merely outbursts of habitual rowdyism. Nevertheless, they were a serious element in our situation. We found that we could not run a club for girls on Tenth Avenue without getting the small boys’ consent. Time had to be spent in conciliating them. At first our method was to station an out-post on the sidewalk. To one of the “teachers,” who proved an adept in gang psychology, this difficult task was usually delegated. An entry in her diary under the date of December 20—a date on which the usual Tenth Avenue spirit was enhanced by the approach of the Christmas holidays—reads as follows: “As it was not my night on duty I had no intention of spending the evening at the Tenth Avenue house. I stopped in to speak to Miss Barclay and see how things were going, but the disorder on the outside was so bad that I was forced to spend most of the evening on the sidewalk outside with the boys.”