Here also are the flashing, gaudy, poster-lined entrances of Hickman’s and of the Galaxy. These supply the girls with a “craze,” the same that sends those with a more liberal allowance to the matinees. Their pictures spread out adventure and melodrama which are soul-satisfying. The vaudeville is even more popular and not so clean.
Sooner or later almost every girl drifts into some club or settlement. She is a wandering spirit, difficult to hold, still more difficult to tie down to any definite program. She wants activity but soon tires of any one form of it. She cannot concentrate, especially on any finely co-ordinated work requiring time and patience. Dancing and music make the strongest appeal to her. A boisterous club room will quiet suddenly to the sound of “Oh! Mr. Dream Man, let me dream some more.” The dark-eyed girl at the piano drawls in shrill nasal mimicry of the vaudeville “artist,” copying her air and mannerisms.
Cheap and shoddy—but the scene typifies that groping for the ideal which is universal. Look along the line of faces, stilled and attentive. Something is there neither cheap nor small. Here the face of a youngster is caught an instant from its impish drollery. The hardening lines are soft as with a child’s wonder at something beautiful and new. Next to her an older girl is leaning forward. Her features are haggard and drawn, a ghastly white. But she sits with opened lips and a look in her eyes as if she heard beyond the singing something half articulate and far-away. The song has brought a quickening of the imagination, a stirring of childish, unformed aspirations, half gropings for a world finer than the one she knows.
In these girls the longing for the unreal is overlaid by much that is commonplace and sordid. To come upon this sudden, vivid glimpse of it takes away one’s breath. At the same instant some of the faces are prophetic of its final dying out. The girls’ instinctive idealism, a wild thing here, unnurtured, is as elusive and fleeting as it is beautiful. It is foredoomed to fade swiftly in the midst of unfriendly reality.
Only a fleeting glimpse of the ideal, and soon the club room is again a clamorous, gay, turbulent place. There is much energy that must be let off; nothing but dancing will satisfy the demand. This means that the doors must be opened to “the fellows” too. They, meantime, have been besieging the club from the outside. If the older girl is to be held, some concession must be made to her chief desire. Once it is made, many difficulties arise. The interest between the girls and boys here is almost wholly one of sex. They are farther apart than in other circles. As children, there has been very little playing in common. The boys’ interests are more energetic; group athletics have seldom been opened to the girls of the elementary schools. Both boys and girls have a narrow range of knowledge and impersonal interests. Conversation is a mere exchange of personalities, gossip, and bickering, and there is little even of that. The girls line up on one side of the room; the boys group together on the other side. Games are sidetracked as foolish. There is only dancing to bring them together, and so the club dances. This is doubtless the reason why the dance hall holds the first place in the girl’s estimation of a good time. In these places she learns the “tough” dances in their worst forms and with all their suggestive details. If she attends these dubious resorts freely, she is marked socially by it.
Most of the girls under sixteen and the most strictly guarded of the older girls go to dances only occasionally. Then they attend some “racket” given by their special friends, their fathers’ association, or their church. They may go with their families or be taken by a boy friend with their parents’ knowledge and consent. Perhaps a younger sister is allowed to go along, much below the age when the first daughter started, because “she’s company for May.” This occasional ball, with its more or less formal invitation, its sanction by the parents, and its semi-chaperonage, is considered a very different thing from the promiscuous attendance of dance halls.
Many of the older girls, as we have seen, go much as they choose, in a free and easy fashion. They are not restricted, or if they are they “sneak” away. Two girls go together as a rule. They must have a little money—carfare and a quarter for entrance. But that is all that is needed; no chaperon and no escort. Bonds are off; freedom is absolute; the range of possibilities is almost limitless. From Fourteenth Street to 162nd Street, East Side and West, from Coney to Jersey, these eager feet in the path of pleasure find their way. They are not even dependent on the initiative of an escort for their good time. The girls decide on their dance hall, and once on the floor, a “pick-up” is easy to acquire. If they dance together, two men are sure to “break” provided the girls are good looking and dance well. Etiquette demands that they remain through the dance with this random partner. To desert him on the floor is an insult which he may avenge with violence. To sneak between the halves is somewhat risky and is considered mean. It is better, as one of our girls pointed out, to tell him frankly that “you can’t seem to keep step and you’d rather not dance it out.”
The dance hall, with its air of license, its dark corners and balconies, its tough dancing, and its heavy drinking, is becoming familiar to every reader of the newspapers. To the girls who attend them they are not all of one kind by any means. The best places are perhaps too “classy” for the West Side girl, and she has not the proper clothes. The character of the dances at any hall depends, our informants said, entirely upon the club that manages the affair. “If they don’t want nothing but society dancing, why the cop’ll keep the floor clear for them. But if some of these tough fellows are running the racket off they go to the cop and say, ‘We don’t want any dancing stopped here. See?’ and he leaves them alone.”[82] Home-going is not thought of until 1 or 2, often 3 or 4 a. m. The ball is often followed by a trip to a restaurant and home is finally reached at 6 a. m.
A party of this kind is not the single carnival of the year. Once a week, if not twice or thrice, the girl who goes to the dance hall goes through its round of excesses. The most startling fact in this connection is that it is the little girls who are doing the dancing in the public places of amusement in New York. The young girl usually settles down to keeping steady company some time before her early marriage, and goes less to the dance halls. Sixteen-year-old Josie, spending three out of every seven nights of the week at public dances, said, “When I’m eighteen or nineteen I won’t care about it any more. I’ll have a ‘friend’ then and won’t want to go anywheres.”
There is another group of girls who do not go to the dance halls. They have not even the small amount of money that would take them there, nor the one suit of good clothes that would make them presentable among the others. Lacking the tawdry finery and the superficial good manners of the other set, they are shabby and dirty and are known throughout the block as tough. Between them and the upper set, those who hover on the edge of toughness and fight for the poor distinction of just escaping it, there is a chasm of dislike, suspicion, and jealousy. The tough girls have the two universal amusement places—the street and the nickel “dump” (moving picture show). Besides these, they can make meeting places of the alleys, the docks, and vacant rooms in the tenements. These neglected, unlit cracks and crannies serve as traps for childhood of both sexes. Here children are snared in the darkness long before they are old enough to know the meaning of temptation. This is the most sinister phase of the recreation problem.