The Battle with the Slum - Chapters X-XII



CHAPTER X.
JIM 
   
I USED to think that it would have been better for Jim if he had never 
been born. What the good bishop said of some children--that they were not 
so much born into the world as they were damned into it--seemed true of 
Jim, if ever it was true of any one. He had had a father, once, who was 
kind to him, but it was long since. The one he called by that name last 
had been sent to Sing Sing, to the lad's great relief, for a midnight 
burglary, shortly after he married Jim's mother. His back hurt yet when he 
thought of the evil days when he was around. If any one had thought it 
worth while to teach Jim to pray, he would have prayed with all his might 
that his father might never come out. But no one did, so that he was 
spared that sin. I suppose that was what it would have been called. I am 
free to confess that I would have joined Jim in sinning with a right good 
will, even to the extent of speeding the benevolent intentions of 
Providence in that direction--anyhow, until Jim should be able to take 
care of himself. I mean with his fists. He was in a way of learning that 
without long delay, for ever since he was a little shaver he had had to 
fight his own way, and sometimes his mother's. He was thirteen when I met 
him, and most of his time had been put in around the Rag Gang's quarters, 
along First Avenue and the river front, where that kind of learning was 
abundant and came cheap.

   His mother drank. I do not know what made her do it--whether it was the 
loss of the first husband, or getting the second, or both. It did not seem 
important when she stood there, weak and wretched and humble, with Jim. 
And as for my preaching to her, sitting in my easy-chair, well fed and 
respectable, that would come near to being impertinence. So it always 
struck me. Perhaps I was wrong. Anyway, it would have done her no good. 
Too much harm had been done her already. She would disappear for days, 
sometimes for weeks at a time, on her frequent sprees. Jim never made any 
inquiries. On those occasions he kept aloof from us, and paddled his own 
canoe, lest we should ask questions. It was when she had come home sobered 
that we saw them always together. Now it was the rent, and then again a 
few groceries. With such lifts as she got, sandwiched in with much good 
advice, and by the aid of an odd job now and then, Mrs. Kelly managed to 
keep a bit of a roof over her boy and herself, down in the "village" on 
the river front. At least, Jim had a place to sleep. Until, one day, our 
visitor reported that she was gone for good--she and the boy. They were 
both gone,--nobody in the neighborhood knew or cared where,--and the room 
was vacant. Except that they had not been dispossessed, we could learn 
nothing. Jim was not found, and in the press of many things the Kellys 
were forgotten. Once or twice his patient, watchful eyes, that seemed to 
be always trying to understand something to which he had not found the 
key, haunted me at my office; but at last I forgot about them too.

   Some months passed. It was winter. A girl, who had been one of our 
cares, had been taken to the city hospital to die, and our visitor went 
there to see and comfort her. She was hastening down the long aisle 
between the two rows of beds, when she felt something tugging feebly at 
the sleeve of her coat. Looking round, she saw on the pillow of the bed 
she had just passed the face of Jim's mother.

   "Why, Mrs. Kelly!" she exclaimed, and went to her. "Where --?" But the 
question that rose to her lips was never spoken. One glance was enough to 
show that her time was very short, and she was not deceived. The nurse 
supplied the facts briefly in a whisper. She had been picked up in the 
street, drunk or sick--the diagnosis was not clearly made out at the time, 
but her record was against her. She lay a day or two in a police cell, and 
by the time it was clear that it was not rum this time, the mischief was 
done. Probably it would have been done anyhow. The woman was worn out. 
What now lay on the hospital cot was a mere wreck of her, powerless to 
move or speak. She could only plead with her large, sad eyes. As she tried 
to make them say that which was in her soul, two big tears rolled slowly 
down the wan cheeks and fell on the coarse sheet. The visitor understood. 
What woman would not?

   "Jim?" she said, and the light of joy and understanding came into the 
yearning eyes. She nodded ever so feebly, and the hand that rested in her 
friend's twitched and trembled in the effort to grasp hers.

   "I will find him. It is all right. Now, you be quite happy. I will 
bring him here."

   The white face settled back on the pillow, and the weary eyes closed 
with a little sigh of contentment very strange in that place. When the 
visitor passed her cot ten minutes later, she was asleep, with a smile on 
her lips.

   It proved not so easy a matter to find Jim. We came upon his track in 
his old haunts after a while, only to lose it again and again. It was 
clear that he was around, but it seemed almost as if he were purposely 
dodging us; and in fact that proved to have been the case when at last, 
after a hunt of weary days and nights through the neighborhood, he was 
brought in. Ragged, pale, and pinched by hunger, we saw him with a shock 
of remorse for having let him drift so long. His story was simple enough. 
When his mother failed to come back, and, the rent coming due, the door of 
what had been home to him, even such as it was, was closed upon him, he 
took to the street. He slept in hallways and with the gang among the 
docks, never going far from the "village" lest he should miss news of his 
mother coming back. The cold nights came, and he shivered often in his 
burrows; but he never relaxed his watch. All the time his mother lay dying 
less than half a dozen blocks away, but there was no one to tell him. Had 
any one done so, it is not likely that the guard would have let him 
through the gate, as he looked. Seven weeks he had spent in the streets 
when he heard that he was wanted. The other boys told him that it was the 
"cruelty" man sure; and then began the game of hide-and-seek that tried 
our patience and wore on his mother, sinking rapidly now, but that 
eventually turned up Jim.

   We took him up to the hospital, and into the ward where his mother lay. 
Away off at the farther end of the room, he knew her, the last in the row, 
and ran straight to her before we could stop him, and fell on her neck.

   "Mother!" we heard him say, while he hugged her, with his head on her 
pillow. "Mother, why don't you speak to me? I am all right--I am."

   He raised his head and looked at her. Happy tears ran down the thin 
face turned to his. He took her in his arms again.

   "I am all right, mother; honest, I am. Don't you cry. I couldn't keep 
the rooms, mother! They took everything, only the deed to father's grave. 
I kept that."

   He dug in the pocket of his old jacket, and brought out a piece of 
paper, carefully wrapped in many layers of rags and newspaper that hung in 
dirty tatters.

   "Here it is. Everything else is gone. But it is all right. I've got 
you, and I am here. Oh, mother! You were gone so long!"

   Longer--poor Jim--the parting that was even then adding another to the 
mysteries that had vexed my soul concerning you. Happiness at last had 
broken the weary heart. But if it added one, it dispelled another: I knew 
then that I erred, Jim, when I thought it were better if you had never 
been born!



CHAPTER XI.
LETTING IN THE LIGHT 
   
I HAD been out of town and my way had not fallen through the Mulberry Bend 
in weeks until that morning when I came suddenly upon the park that had 
been made there in my absence. Sod had been laid, and men were going over 
the lawn cutting the grass after the rain. The sun shone upon flowers and 
the tender leaves of young shrubs, and the smell of new-mown hay was in 
the air. Crowds of little Italian children shouted with delight over the 
"garden," while their elders sat around upon the benches with a look of 
contentment such as I had not seen before in that place. I stood and 
looked at it all, and a lump came in my throat as I thought of what it had 
been, and of all the weary years of battling for this. It had been such a 
hard fight, and now at last it was won. To me the whole battle with the 
slum had summed itself up in the struggle with this dark spot. The whir of 
the lawn-mower was as sweet a song in my ear as that which the skylark 
sang when I was a boy, in Danish fields, and which gray hairs do not make 
the man forget.

   In my delight I walked upon the grass. It seemed as if I should never 
be satisfied till I had felt the sod under my feet,--sod in the Mulberry 
Bend! I did not see the gray-coated policeman hastening my way, nor the 
wide-eyed youngsters awaiting with shuddering delight the catastrophe that 
was coming, until I felt his cane laid smartly across my back and heard 
his angry command:

   "Hey! Come off the grass! D'ye think it is made to walk on?"

   So that was what I got for it. It is the way of the world. But it was 
all right. The park was there, that was the thing. And I had my revenge. I 
had just had a hand in marking five blocks of tenements for destruction to 
let in more light, and in driving the slum from two other strongholds. 
Where they were, parks are being made to-day in which the sign "Keep off 
the grass!" will never be seen. The children may walk in them from morning 
till night, and I too, if I want to, with no policeman to drive us off. I 
tried to tell the policeman something about it. But he was of the old 
dispensation. All the answer I got was a gruff:

   "G'wan now! I don't want none o' yer guff!"

   It was all "guff" to the politicians, I suppose, from the day the 
trouble began about the Mulberry Bend, but toward the end they woke up 
nobly. When the park was finally dedicated to the people's use, they took 
charge of the celebration with immense unction, and invited themselves to 
sit in the high seats and glory in the achievement which they had done 
little but hamper and delay from the first. They had not reckoned with 
Colonel Waring, however. When they had had their say, the colonel arose, 
and, curtly reminding them that they had really had no hand in the 
business, proposed three cheers for the citizen effort that had struck the 
slum this staggering blow. There was rather a feeble response on the 
platform, but rousing cheers from the crowd, with whom the colonel was a 
prime favorite, and no wonder. Two years later he laid down his life in 
the fight which he so valiantly and successfully waged. It is the simple 
truth that he was killed by politics. The services which he had rendered 
the city would have entitled him in any reputable business to be retained 
in the employment that was his life and his pride. Had he been so 
retained, he would not have gone to Cuba, and would in all human 
probability be now alive. But Tammany is not "in politics for its health" 
and had no use for him, though no more grievous charge could be laid at 
his door, even in the heat of the campaign, than that he was a
"foreigner," being from Rhode Island. Spoils politics never craved a 
heavier sacrifice of any community.

   It was Colonel Waring's broom that first let light into the slum. That 
which had come to be considered an impossible task he did by the simple 
formula of "putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom." The 
words are his own. The man, from a political dummy who loathed his job and 
himself in it with cause, became a self-respecting citizen, and the 
streets that had deen dirty were swept. The ash barrels which had befouled 
the sidewalks disappeared, almost without any one knowing it till they 
were gone. The trucks that obstructed the children's only playground, the 
street, went with the dirt, despite the opposition of the truckman who had 
traded off his vote to Tammany in the past for stall room at the 
curbstone. They did not go without a struggle. When appeal to the alderman 
proved useless, the truckman resorted to strategy. He took a wheel off, or 
kept a perishing nag, that could not walk, hitched to the truck over night 
to make it appear that it was there for business. But subterfuge availed 
as little as resistance. In the Mulberry Bend he made his last stand. The 
old houses had been torn down, leaving a three-acre lot full of dirt 
mounds and cellar holes. Into this the truckmen of the Sixth Ward hauled 
their carts, and defied the street cleaners. They were no longer in their 
way, and they were on the Park Department's domain, where no Colonel 
Waring was in control. But while their owners were triumphing, the 
children playing among the trucks set one of them rolling down into a 
cellar, and three or four of the little ones were crushed. That was the 
end. The trucks disappeared. Even Tammany has not ventured to put them 
back, so great was the relief of their going. They were not only a 
hindrance to the sweeper and the skulking places of all manner of mischief 
at night, but I have repeatedly seen the firemen baffled in their efforts 
to reach a burning house, where they stood four and six deep in the wide 
"slips" at the river.

   Colonel Waring did more for the cause of labor than all the walking 
delegates of the town together, by investing a despised but highly 
important task with a dignity which won the hearty plaudits of a grateful 
city. When he uniformed his men and announced that he was going to parade 
with them so that we might all see what they were like, the town laughed 
and poked fun at the "white wings"; but no one went to see them who did 
not come away converted to an enthusiastic belief in the man and his work. 
Public sentiment, that had been half reluctantly suspending judgment, 
expecting every day to see the colonel "knuckle down to politics" like his 
predecessors, turned in an hour, and after that there was little trouble. 
The tenement house children organized street cleaning bands to help along 
the work, and Colonel Waring enlisted them as regular auxiliaries and made 
them useful.

   They had no better friend. When the unhappy plight of the persecuted 
pushcart men--all immigrant Jews, who were blackmailed, robbed, and driven 
from pillar to post as a nuisance after they had bought a license to trade 
in the street--appealed vainly for a remedy, Colonel Waring found a way 
out in a great morning market in Hester Street that should be turned over 
to the children for a playground in the afternoon. But though he proved 
that it would pay interest on the investment in market fees, and many 
times in the children's happiness, it was never built. It would have been 
a most fitting monument to the man's memory. His broom saved more lives in 
the crowded tenements than a squad of doctors. It did more: it swept the 
cobwebs out of our civic brain and conscience, and set up a standard of a 
citizen's duty which, however we may for the moment forget, will be ours 
until we have dragged other things than our pavements out of the mud.

   Even the colonel's broom would have been powerless to do that for "the 
Bend." That was hopeless and had to go. There was no question of children 
or playground involved. The worst of all the gangs, the Whyós, had its 
headquarters in the darkest of its dark alleys; but it was left to the 
police. We had not begun to understand that the gangs meant something to 
us beyond murder and vengeance, in those days. No one suspected that they 
had any such roots in the soil that they could be killed by merely 
destroying the slum. The cholera was rapping on our door, and, with the 
Bend there, we felt about it as a man with stolen goods in his house must 
feel when the policeman comes up the street. Back in the seventies we 
began discussing what ought to be done. By 1884 the first Tenement House 
Commission had summoned up courage to propose that a street be cut through 
the bad block. In the following year a bill was brought in to destroy it 
bodily, and then began the long fight that resulted in the defeat of the 
slum a dozen years later.

   It was a bitter fight, in which every position of the enemy had to be 
carried by assault. The enemy was the deadly official inertia that was the 
outcome of political corruption born of the slum plus the indifference of 
the mass of our citizens, who probably had never seen the Bend. If I made 
it my own concern to the exclusion of all else, it was only because I knew 
it. I had been part of it. Homeless and alone, I had sought its shelter, 
not for long,--that was not to be endured,--but long enough to taste of 
its poison, and I hated it. I knew that the blow must be struck there, to 
kill. Looking back now over those years, I can see that it was all as it 
should be. We were learning the alphabet of our lesson then. We could have 
learned it in no other way so thoroughly. Before we had been at it more 
than two or three years, it was no longer a question of the Bend merely. 
The Small Parks law, that gave us a million dollars a year to force light 
and air into the slum, to its destruction, grew out of it. The whole 
sentiment which in its day, groping blindly and angrily, had wiped out the 
disgrace of the Five Points, just around the corner, crystallized and took 
shape in its fight. It waited merely for the issue of that, to attack the 
slum in its other strongholds; and no sooner was the Bend gone than the 
rest surrendered. Time was up.

   But it was not so easy campaigning at the start. In 1888 plans were 
filed for the demolition of the block. It took four years to get a report 
of what it would cost to tear it down. About once in two months during all 
that time the authorities had to be prodded into a spasm of activity, or 
we would probably have been yet where we were then. Once, when I appealed 
to the corporation counsel to give a good reason for the delay, I got the 
truth out of him without evasion.

   "Well, I tell you," he said blandly, "no one here is taking any 
interest in that business. That is good enough reason for you, isn't it?"

   It was. That Tammany reason became the slogan of an assault upon 
official incompetence and treachery that hurried things up considerably. 
The property was condemned at a total cost to the city of a million and a 
half, in round numbers, including the assessment of half a million for 
park benefit which the property owners were quick enough, with the aid of 
the politicians, to get saddled on the city at large. In 1894 the city 
took possession and became the landlord of the old barracks. For a whole 
year it complacently collected the rents and did nothing. When it was 
shamed out of that rut, too, and the tenements were at last torn down, the 
square lay as the wreckers had left it for another year, until it became 
such a plague spot that, as a last resort, with a citizen's privilege, I 
arraigned the municipality before the Board of Health for maintaining a 
nuisance upon its premises. I can see the shocked look of the official 
now, as he studied the complaint.

   "But, my dear sir," he coughed diplomatically, "isn't it rather 
unusual? I never heard of such a thing."

   "Neither did I," I replied, "but then there never was such a thing 
before."

   That night, while they were debating the "unusual thing," happened the 
accident to the children of which I spoke, emphasizing the charge that the 
nuisance was "dangerous to life," and there was an end. In the morning the 
Bend was taken in hand, and the following spring the Mulberry Bend Park 
was opened.

   I told the story of that in "The Making of an American," and how the 
red tape of the comptroller's office pointed the way out, after all, with 
its check for three cents that had gone astray in the purchase of a school 
site. Of that sort of thing we had enough. But the Gilder Tenement House 
Commission had been sitting, the Committee of Seventy had been at work, 
and a law was on the statute books authorizing the expenditure of three 
million dollars for two open spaces in the parkless district on the East 
Side, where Jacob Beresheim was born. It had been shown that while the 
proportion of park area inside the limits of the old city was equal to one-
thirteenth of all, below Fourteenth Street, where one-third of the people 
lived, it was barely one-fortieth. It took a citizen's committee appointed 
by the mayor just three weeks to seize the two park sites for the 
children's use, and it took the Good Government Clubs with their allies at 
Albany less than two months to get warrant of law for the tearing down of 
the houses ahead of final condemnation, lest any mischance befall through 
delay or otherwise,--a precaution which subsequent events proved to be 
eminently wise. I believe the legal proceedings are going on yet.

   The playground part of it was a provision of the Gilder law that showed 
what apt scholars we had been. I was a member of that committee, and I fed 
fat my grudge against the slum tenement, knowing that I might not again 
have such a chance. Bone Alley went. I shall not soon get the picture of 
it, as I saw it last, out of my mind. I had wandered to the top floor of 
one of the ramshackle tenements in the heart of the block, to a door that 
stood ajar, and pushed it open. On the floor lay three women rag-pickers 
with their burdens, asleep, overcome by the heat and beer, the stale 
stench of which filled the place. Swarms of flies covered them. The room--
no! let it go. Thank God, we shall not again hear of Bone Alley. Where it 
cursed the earth with its gloom and its poverty, the sun shines to-day on 
children at play. If we are slow to understand the meaning of it all, they 
will not be. We shall have light from that quarter when they grow up, on 
what is truly "educational" in the bringing up of young citizens. The 
children will teach us something for a change that will do us lasting good.

   Half a dozen blocks away, in Rivington Street, the city's first public 
bath-house has at last been built, after many delays, and godliness will 
have a chance to move in with cleanliness. The two are neighbors 
everywhere, but in the slum the last must come first. Glasgow has half a 
dozen public baths. Rome, two thousand years ago, washed its people most 
sedulously, and in heathen Japan to-day, I am told, there are baths, as we 
have saloons, on every corner. Christian New York never had an all-year 
bath-house until now. In a tenement population of 255,033 the Gilder 
Commission found only 306 who had access to bathrooms in the houses where 
they lived, and they would have found the same thing wherever they went. 
The Church Federation canvass of the Fifteenth Assembly District over on 
the West Side, where they did not go, counted three bath-tubs to 1321 
families. Nor was that because they so elected. The People's Baths took in 
121,386 half dimes last year (1901) for as many baths, and more than forty 
per cent of their customers were Italians. In the first five months of the 
present year the Rivington Street baths accommodate 224,876 bathers, of 
whom 66,256 were women and girls. And this in winter. The free river baths 
have registered five and six millions of bathers in one brief season. The 
"great unwashed" were not so from choice, it would appear.

   The river baths were only for summer, and their time is past. As the 
sewers that empty into the river multiply, it is getting less and less a 
place fit to bathe in, though the boys find no fault. Sixteen public bath-
houses on shore are to take the place of the swimming baths. They are all 
to be in the crowded tenement districts. The sites for the first three are 
being chosen now. And a wise woman(1) offers to build and equip one all 
complete at her own expense, as her gift to the city.

   Pull up now a minute, if you think, with some good folks, that the 
world is not advancing, but just marking time, and look back half a 
century. I said that New York never had a public bath till now. I meant a 
free bath. As long ago as 1852, just fifty years ago, the Association for 
improving the Condition of the Poor built one in Mott Street near Grand 
Street, and spent 42,000 in doing it. It ran eight years, and was then 
closed for want of patronage. Forty years passed, and it was again the 
Association for improving the Condition of the Poor that built the 
People's Baths in the same neighborhood. That time they succeeded at once. 
And now here we are, planning a great system of municipal baths as the 
people's right, not as a favor to any one, and the old lie that the poor 
prefer to steep in their squalor is no longer believed by any person with 
sense. This month contracts will be given out for the fitting of nine 
public schools with shower-baths where we had one before, and notice is 
given that that one will be open to the people on Sunday mornings. No, we 
are not marking time; we are forging ahead. Every park, every playground, 
every bath-house, is a nail in the coffin of the slum, and every big, 
beautiful schoolhouse, built for the people's use, not merely to lock the 
children up in during certain hours for which the teachers collect pay, is 
a pole rammed right through the heart of it so that even its ghost shall 
never walk again. For ever so much of it we thank that association of men 
of splendid courage and public spirit. They fight to win because they 
believe in the people. They fight with the people and so they are bound to 
win.

   Every once in a while these days a false note in it all jars upon me--a 
note of dread lest those we are trying to help get tired of the word 
"reform" and balk. Reform such as we have occasionally had is to blame for 
some of that. Certainly you do not want to reform men by main strength, 
drag them into righteousness by the hair of the head, as it were. And let 
it be freely admitted that the man on Fifth Avenue needs to be reformed 
quite as much as his neighbor in Mulberry Street whom he forgot,--more, 
since it is his will to mend things that has to be righted, while it is 
the other's power to do it that is lacking. But right there stop. Let us 
have no pretending that there is nothing to mend. There is a good deal, 
and it is not going to be mended by stuffing the one you would help with 
conceit and ingratitude. Ingratitude does not naturally inhabit the slums, 
but it is a crop that is easily grown there, and where it does grow there 
is an end of efforts to mend things in that generation. You do not want to 
come down to your work for your fellows, when you go from the brown-stone 
front to the tenement; but neither do you want to make him believe that 
you feel you are coming up to him, for you know you do not feel that way. 
And moreover, it is not true, if you are coming at all. You want to come 
right over, to help him reform conditions of his life with which he cannot 
grapple alone, and it is as good for him, as it is for you to know that 
you are doing it. For that is the brotherhood. And now you can see how 
that is the only thing that really helps. Charity may corrupt, correction 
may harden and estrange,--in the family they do neither. There you can 
give and take without offence. Children of one Father! Spin all the fine 
theories you like, build up systems of profound philosophy, of social 
ethics, of philanthropic endeavor; back to that you get--if you get 
anywhere at all.

   I did not mean to preach. I was just thinking that the Association for 
Improving the Condition of the Poor, in its fifty years of battling with 
all that makes the slum, has come nearer that ideal than any and all the 
rest of us. And the president of it these ten years, the same who with his 
brother tried to reform Gotham Court, is the head, too, of the citizens' 
union which is the whole reform programme in a nutshell. All of which is 
as it ought to be.

   To return to the East Side where the light was let in. Bone Alley 
brought thirty-seven dollars under the auctioneer's hammer. Thieves' 
Alley, in the other park down at Rutgers Square, where the police clubbed 
the Jewish cloakmakers a few years ago for the offence of gathering to 
assert their right to "being men, live the life of men," as some one who 
knew summed up the labor movement, brought only seven dollars, and the old 
Helvetia House, where Boss Tweed and his gang met at night to plan their 
plundering raids on the city's treasury, was knocked down for five. 
Kerosene Row, in the same block, did not bring enough to have bought 
kindling wood with which to start one of the numerous fires that gave it 
its bad name. It was in Thieves' Alley that the owner in the days long 
gone by hung out the sign, "No Jews need apply." I stood and watched the 
opening of the first municipal playground upon the site of the old alley, 
and in the thousands that thronged street and tenements from curb to roof 
with thunder of applause, there were not twoscore who could have found 
lodging with the old Jew-baiter. He had to go with his alley, before the 
better day could bring light and hope to the Tenth Ward.

   What became of the people who were dispossessed? The answer to that is 
the reply, too, to the wail that goes up from the speculative builder 
every time we put the screws on the tenement house law. It does not pay 
him to build any more, he says. But when the multitudes of Mulberry Bend, 
of Hester Street, and of the Bone Alley Park were put out, there was more 
than room enough for them in new houses ready for their use. In the 
Seventh, Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth wards, where they 
would naturally go if they wanted to be near home, there were 4268 vacant 
apartments with room for over 18,000 tenants at our New York average of 
four and a half to the family. Including the Bend, the whole number of the 
dispossessed was not 12,000. On Manhattan Island there were at that time 
more than 37,000 vacant flats, so that it seems those builders were either 
"talking through their hats," or else they were philanthropists pure and 
simple. And I know they were not that. The whole question of rehousing the 
population that had been so carefully considered abroad made us no 
trouble, though it gave a few well-meaning people unnecessary concern. The 
unhoused were scattered some, which was one of the things we hoped for, 
but hardly dared believe would come to pass. Many of them, as it appeared, 
had remained in their old slum more from force of habit and association 
than because of necessity.

   "Everything takes ten years," said Abram S. Hewitt, when, exactly ten 
years after he had as mayor championed the Small Parks Act, he took his 
seat as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Small Parks. The ten years 
had wrought a great change. It was no longer the slum of to-day, but that 
of to-morrow, that challenged attention. The committee took the point of 
view of the children from the first. It had a large map prepared, showing 
where in the city there was room to play and where there was none. Then it 
called in the police and asked them to point out where there was trouble 
with the boys; and in every instance the policeman put his finger upon a 
treeless slum.

   "They have no other playground than the street," was the explanation 
given in each case. "They smash lamps and break windows. The storekeepers 
kick and there is trouble. That is how it begins." "Many complaints are 
received daily of boys annoying pedestrians, storekeepers, and tenants by 
their continually playing baseball in some parts of almost every street. 
The damage is not slight. Arrests are frequent, much more frequent than 
when they had open lots to play in." This last was the report of an up-
town captain. He remembered the days when there were open lots there. "But 
those lots are now built upon," he said, "and for every new house there 
are more boys and less chance for them to play."

   The committee put a red daub on the map to indicate trouble. Then it 
asked those police captains who had not spoken to show them where their 
precincts were, and why they had no trouble. Every one of them put his 
finger on a green spot that marked a park.

   "My people are quiet and orderly," said the captain of the Tompkins 
Square precinct.

   The police took the square from a mob by storm twice in my 
recollection, and the commander of the precinct was hit on the head with a 
hammer by "his people" and laid out for dead.

   "The Hook Gang is gone," said he of Corlears Hook. The professional 
pursuit of that gang was to rob and murder inoffensive citizens by night 
and throw them into the river, and it achieved a bad eminence at its 
calling.

   "The whole neighborhood has taken a change, and decidedly for the 
better," said the captain of Mulberry Street; and the committee rose and 
said that it had heard enough.

   The map was hung on the wall, and in it were stuck pins to mark the 
site of present and projected schools as showing where the census had 
found the children crowding. The moment that was done the committee sent 
the map and a copy of chapter 338 of the laws of 1895 to the mayor, and 
reported that its task was finished. This is the law and all there is of 
it:--

   "The people of the State of New York, represented in Senate and 
Assembly, do enact as follows:--

   "Section 1. Hereafter no schoolhouse shall be constructed in the city 
of New York without an open-air playground attached to or used in 
connection with the same.

   "Section 2. This act shall take effect immediately."

   Where the map was daubed with red the school pins crowded one another. 
On the lower East Side, where child crime was growing fast, and no less 
than three storm centres were marked down by the police, nine new schools 
were going up or planned, and in the up-town precinct whence came the wail 
about the ball players there were seven. It was common sense, then, to 
hitch the school playground and the children together. It seemed a happy 
combination, for the new law had been a stumbling-block to the school 
commissioners, who were in a quandary over the needful size of an "open-
air playground." The roof garden idea, which was at the start a measure of 
simple economy to save large expenditure for land, had suggested a way 
out. But there was the long vacation, when schools are closed and children 
most in need of a chance to play. To get the playground on the roof of the 
schoolhouse recognized as the public playground seemed a long step toward 
turning it into a general neighborhood evening resort, that should be 
always open, and so towards bringing school and people, and especially the 
school and the boy, together in a bond of mutual sympathy good for them 
both.

   That was the burden of the committee's report. It made thirteen 
recommendations besides, as to the location of parks and detached 
playgrounds, only two of which have been adopted to date. But that is of 
less account--as also was the information imparted to me as secretary of 
the committee by our late Tammany mayor--and may he be the last--that we 
had "as much authority as a committee of bootblacks in his office"--it is 
all of less account than the fact that the field has at last been studied 
and its needs been made known. The rest will follow, with or without the 
politician's authority. One of the two suggestions carried out was for a 
riverside park in the region up-town, on the West Side, where the 
Federation of Churches and Christian Workers found "saloon social ideals 
minting themselves upon the minds of the people at the rate of seven 
saloon thoughts to one educational thought." "Hudson-bank" (it is at the 
foot of West Fifty-third Street) has been a playground these three years, 
in the charge of the Outdoor Recreation League, and it is recorded with 
pride by the directors, that not a board was stolen from the long fence 
that encloses it in all that time, while fences all about were ripped to 
pieces. Boards have a market value in that neighborhood and private 
property was not always highly regarded. But this is "the children's"; 
that is why, within a year now, the bluff upon which the playground is 
will have been laid out as a beautiful park, and a bar set to the slum in 
that quarter, where it already had got a firm grip. Hard by there is a 
recreation pier, and on summer evenings the young men of the neighborhood 
may be seen trooping riverward with their girls to hear the music. The 
gang that "laid out" two policemen, to my knowledge, has gone out of 
business.

   The best-laid plans are sometimes upset by surprising snags. We had 
planned for two municipal playgrounds on the East Side, where the need is 
greatest, and our plans were eagerly accepted by the city authorities. But 
they were never put into practice. A negligent attorney killed one, a lazy 
clerk the other. And both served under the reform government. The first of 
the two playgrounds was to have been in Rivington Street, adjoining the 
new public bath, where the boys, for want of something better to do, were 
fighting daily battles with stones, to the great damage of windows and the 
worse aggravation of the householders. Four hundred children in that 
neighborhood petitioned the committee for a place of their own, where 
there were no windows to break; and we found one. It was only after the 
proceedings had been started that we discovered that they had been taken 
under the wrong law and the money spent in advertising had been wasted. It 
was then too late. The daily assaults upon the windows were resumed.

   The other case was an attempt to establish a model school park in a 
block where more than four thousand children attended day and night 
school. The public school and the Pro-Cathedral, which divided the 
children between them, were to be allowed to stand, at opposite ends of 
the block. The surrounding tenements were to be torn down to make room for 
a park and playground which should embody the ideal of what such a place 
ought to be, in the opinion of the committee. For the roof garden was not 
in the original plan except as an alternative of the streetlevel 
playground, where land came too high. The plentiful supply of light and 
air, the safety from fire, to be obtained by putting the school in a park, 
beside the fact that it could thus be "built beautiful," were 
considerations of weight. Plans were made, and there was great rejoicing 
in Essex Street, until it came out that this scheme had gone the way of 
the other. The clerk who should have filed the plans in the register's 
office left that duty to some one else, and it took just twenty one days 
to make the journey, a distance of five hundred feet or less. The Greater 
New York had come then with Tammany, and the thing was not heard of again. 
When I traced the failure down to the clerk in question, and told him that 
he had killed the park, he yawned and said: --

   "Yes, and I think it is just as well it is dead. We haven't any money 
for those things. It is very nice to have small parks, and very nice to 
have a horse and wagon, if you can afford it. But we can't. Why, there 
isn't enough to run the city government."

   So the labor of weary weeks and months in the children's behalf was all 
undone by a third-rate clerk in an executive office; but he saved the one 
thing he had in mind: the city government is "run" to date, and his pay is 
secure.

   It is a pity to have to confess it, but it was not the only time reform 
in office gave its cause a black eye in the sight of the people. The 
Hamilton Fish Park that took the place of Bone Alley was laid out with 
such lack of sense that it will have to be worked all over again. The 
gymnasium and bath in it that cost, I am told, 90,000, was never of any 
use for either purpose and was never opened. A policeman sat in the door 
and turned people away, while around the corner clamoring crowds besieged 
the new public bath I spoke of. There were more people waiting, sitting on 
the steps and strung out halfway through the block, when I went over to 
see, one July day, than could have found room in three buildings like it. 
So, also, after seven years, the promised park down by the Schiff Fountain 
called Seward Park lies still, an unlovely waste, waiting to be made 
beautiful. Tammany let its heelers build shanties in it to sell fish and 
dry-goods and such in. Reform just let things be, no matter how bad they 
were, and broke its promises to the people.

   No, that is not fair. There was enough to do besides, to straighten up 
things. Tammany had seen to that. This very day(2) the contractor's men 
are beginning work in Seward Park, which shall give that most crowded spot 
on earth its pleasure-ground, and I have warrant for promising that within 
a year not only will the "HamFish" Park be restored, but Hudsonbank and 
the Thomas Jefferson Park in Little Italy, which are still dreary wastes, 
be opened to the people; while from the Civic Club in Richard Croker's old 
home ward comes the broad hint that unless condemnation proceedings in the 
case of the park and playground, to take the place of the old tenements at 
East Thirty-fifth Street and Second Avenue, are hurried by the Tammany 
Commission, the club will take a hand and move to have the commission 
cashiered. There is to be no repetition of the Mulberry Bend scandal.

   It is all right. Neither stupidity, spite, nor cold-blooded neglect 
will be able much longer to cheat the child out of his rights. The 
playground is here to wrestle with the gang for the boy, and it will win. 
It came so quietly that we hardly knew of it till we heard the shouts. It 
took us seven years to make up our minds to build a play pier,--recreation 
pier is its municipal title,--and it took just about seven weeks to build 
it when we got so far; but then we learned more in one day than we had 
dreamed of in the seven years. Half the East Side swarmed over it with 
shrieks of delight, and carried the mayor and the city government, who had 
come to see the show, fairly off their feet. And now that pier has more 
than seven comrades--great, handsome structures, seven hundred feet long, 
some of them, with music every night for mother and the babies, and for 
papa, who can smoke his pipe there in peace. The moon shines upon the 
quiet river, and the steamers go by with their lights. The street is far 
away with its noise. The young people go sparking in all honor, as it is 
their right to do. The councilman who spoke of "pernicious influences" 
lying in wait for them there made the mistake of his life, unless he has 
made up his mind to go out of politics. That is just a question of 
effective superintendence, as is true of model tenements, and everything 
else in this world. You have got to keep the devil out of everything, 
yourself included. He will get in if he can, as he got into the Garden of 
Eden. The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no crabbed old 
bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges. Their civilizing influence 
upon the children is already felt in a reported demand for more soap in 
the neighborhood where they are, and even the grocer smiles approval.

   The play pier is the kindergarten in the educational campaign against 
the gang. It gives the little ones a chance. Often enough it is a chance 
for life. The street as a playground is a heavy contributor to the 
undertaker's bank account in more than one way. Distinguished doctors said 
at the tuberculosis congress this spring that it is to blame with its dust 
for sowing the seeds of that fatal disease in the half-developed bodies. I 
kept the police slips of a single day in May two years ago, when four 
little ones were killed and three crushed under the wheels of trucks in 
tenement streets. That was unusual, but no day has passed in my 
recollection that has not had its record of accidents, which bring grief 
as deep and lasting to the humblest home as if it were the pet of some 
mansion on Fifth Avenue that was slain. In the Hudson Guild on the West 
Side they have the reports of ten children that were killed in the street 
immediately around there. The kindergarten teaching has borne fruit. 
Private initiative set the pace, but the playground idea has at last been 
engrafted upon the municipal plan. The Outdoor Recreation League was 
organized by public-spirited citizens, including many amateur athletes and 
enthusiastic women, with the object of "obtaining recognition of the 
necessity for recreation and physical welfare of the people." Together 
with the School Reform Club and the Federation of Churches and Christian 
Workers, it maintained a playground on the uptown West Side where the ball 
came into play for the first time as a recognized factor in civic 
progress. The day might well be kept for all time among those that mark 
human emancipation, for it was social reform and Christian work in one, of 
the kind that tells.

   Only the year before, the athletic clubs had vainly craved the 
privilege of establishing a gymnasium in the East River Park, where the 
children wistfully eyed the sacred grass, and cowered under the withering 
gaze of the policeman. A friend whose house stands opposite the park found 
them one day swarming over her stoop in such shoals that she could not 
enter, and asked them why they did not play tag under the trees instead. 
The instant shout came back, "'Cause the cop won't let us." And now even 
Poverty Gap is to have its playground--Poverty Gap, that was partly 
transformed by its one brief season's experience with its Holy Terror Park,
(3) a dreary sand lot upon the site of the old tenements in which the 
Alley Gang murdered the one good boy in the block, for the offence of 
supporting his aged parents by his work as a baker's apprentice. And who 
knows but the Mulberry Bend and "Paradise Park" at the Five Points may yet 
know the climbing pole and the vaulting buck. So the world moves. For 
years the city's only playground that had any claim upon the name--and 
that was only a little asphalted strip behind a public school in First 
Street--was an old graveyard. We struggled vainly to get possession of 
another, long abandoned. But the dead were of more account than the living.

   But now at last it is their turn. I watched the crowds at their play 
where Seward Park is to be. The Outdoor Recreation League had put up 
gymnastic apparatus, and the dusty square was jammed with a mighty 
multitude. It was not an ideal spot, for it had not rained in weeks, and 
powdered sand and cinders had taken wing and floated like a pall over the 
perspiring crowd. But it was heaven to them. A hundred men and boys stood 
in line, waiting their turn upon the bridge ladder and the travelling 
rings, that hung full of struggling and squirming humanity, groping madly 
for the next grip. No failure, no rebuff, discouraged them. Seven boys and 
girls rode with looks of deep concern--it is their way--upon each end of 
the seesaw, and two squeezed into each of the forty swings that had room 
for one, while a hundred counted time and saw that none had too much. It 
is an article of faith with these children that nothing that is "going" 
for their benefit is to be missed. Sometimes the result provokes a smile, 
as when a band of young Jews, starting up a club, called themselves the 
Christian Heroes. It was meant partly as a compliment, I suppose, to the 
ladies that gave them club room; but at the same time, if there was 
anything in a name, they were bound to have it. It is rather to cry over 
than to laugh at, if one but understands it. The sight of these little 
ones swarming over a sand heap until scarcely an inch of it was in sight, 
and gazing in rapt admiration at the poor show of a dozen geraniums and 
English ivy plants on the windowsill of the overseer's cottage, was 
pathetic in the extreme. They stood for ten minutes at a time, resting 
their eyes upon them. In the crowd were aged women and bearded men with 
the inevitable Sabbath silk hat, who it seemed could never get enough of 
it. They moved slowly, when crowded out, looking back many times at the 
enchanted spot, as long as it was in sight.

   Perhaps there was in it, on the part of the children at least, just a 
little bit of the comforting sense of proprietorship. They had contributed 
of their scant pennies more than a hundred dollars toward the opening of 
the playground, and they felt that it was their very own. All the better. 
Two policemen watched the passing show, grinning; their clubs hung idly 
from their belts. The words of a little woman whom I met once in Chicago 
kept echoing in my ear. She was the "happiest woman alive," for she had 
striven long for a playground for her poor children, and had got it.

   "The police like it," she said. "They say that it will do more good 
than all the Sunday-schools in Chicago. The mothers say, 'This is good 
business.' The carpenters that put up the swings and things worked with a 
will; everybody was glad. The police lieutenant has had a tree called 
after him. The boys that did that used to be terrors. Now they take care 
of the trees. They plead for a low limb that is in the way, that no one 
may cut it off."

   The twilight deepens and the gates of the playground are closed. The 
crowds disperse slowly. In the roof garden on the Hebrew Institute across 
East Broadway lights are twinkling and the band is tuning up. Little 
groups are settling down to a quiet game of checkers or lovemaking. 
Paterfamilias leans back against the parapet where palms wave luxuriously 
in the summer breeze. The newspaper drops from his hand; he closes his 
eyes and is in dreamland, where strikes come not. Mother knits contentedly 
in her seat, with a smile on her face that was not born of the Ludlow 
Street tenement. Over yonder a knot of black-browed men talk with serious 
mien. They might be met any night in the anarchist café, half a dozen 
doors away, holding forth against empires. Here wealth does not excite 
their wrath, nor power their plotting. In the roof garden anarchy is 
harmless, even though a policeman typifies its government. They laugh 
pleasantly to one another as he passes, and he gives them a match to light 
their cigars. It is Thursday, and smoking is permitted. On Friday it is 
discouraged because it offends the orthodox, to whom the lighting of a 
fire, even the holding of a candle, is anathema on the Sabbath eve.

   The band plays on. One after another, tired heads droop upon babes 
slumbering peacefully at the breast. Ludlow Street--the tenement--are 
forgotten; eleven o'clock is not yet. Down along the silver gleam of the 
river a mighty city slumbers. The great bridge has hung out its string of 
shining pearls from shore to shore. "Sweet land of liberty!" Overhead the 
dark sky, the stars that twinkled their message to the shepherds on Judæan 
hills, that lighted their sons through ages of slavery, and the flag of 
freedom borne upon the breeze,--down there the tenement, the--Ah, well! 
let us forget as do these.

   Now if you ask me: "And what of it all? What does it avail?" let me 
take you once more back to the Mulberry Bend, and to the policeman's 
verdict add the police reporter's story of what has taken place there. In 
fifteen years I never knew a week to pass without a murder there, rarely a 
Sunday. It was the wickedest, as it was the foulest, spot in all the city. 
In the slum the two are interchangeable terms for reasons that are clear 
enough for me. But I shall not speculate about it, only state the facts. 
The old houses fairly reeked with outrage and violence. When they were 
torn down, I counted seventeen deeds of blood in that place which I myself 
remembered, and those I had forgotten probably numbered seven times 
seventeen. The district attorney connected more than a score of murders of 
his own recollection with Bottle Alley, the Whyó Gang's headquarters. Five 
years have passed since it was made into a park, and scarce a knife had 
been drawn or a shot fired in all that neighborhood. Only twice have I 
been called as a police reporter to the spot. It is not that the murder 
has moved to another neighborhood, for there has been no increase of 
violence in Little Italy or wherever else the crowd went that moved out. 
It is that the light has come in and made crime hideous. It is being let 
in wherever the slum has bred murder and robbery, bred the gang, in the 
past. Wait, now, another ten years, and let us see what a story there will 
be to tell.

   Avail? Why, it was only the other day that Tammany was actually caught 
applauding(4) Comptroller Coler's words in Plymouth Church, "Whenever the 
city builds a schoolhouse upon the site of a dive and creates a park, a 
distinct and permanent mental, moral, and physical improvement has been 
made, and public opinion will sustain such a policy, even if a dive-keeper 
is driven out of business and somebody's ground rent is reduced." And 
Tammany's press agent, in his enthusiasm, sent forth this pæan: "In the 
light of such events how absurd it is for the enemies of the organization 
to contend that Tammany is not the greatest moral force in the community." 
Tammany a moral force! The park and the playground have availed, then, to 
bring back the day of miracles.

(1. Mrs. A. A. Anderson)

(2. June 26, 1901)

(3. The name bestowed upon it by the older toughs before the fact, not 
after)

(4. To be sure, it did nothing else. When the people asked for 5000 to fit 
up one playground, Mayor Van Wyck replied with a sneer that "Vaudeville 
destroyed Rome")



CHAPTER XII.
THE PASSING OF CAT ALLEY
   
WHEN Santa Claus comes around to New York this Christmas he will look in 
vain for some of the slum alleys he used to know. They are gone. Where 
some of them were, there are shrubs and trees and greensward; the sites of 
others are holes and hillocks yet, that by and by, when all the official 
red tape is unwound,--and what a lot of it there is to plague mankind!--
will be levelled out and made into playgrounds for little feet that have 
been aching for them too long. Perhaps it will surprise some good people 
to hear that Santa Claus knew the old alleys; but he did. I have been 
there with him, and I knew that, much as some things which he saw there 
grieved him,--the starved childhood, the pinching poverty, and the 
slovenly indifference that cut deeper than the rest because it spoke of 
hope that was dead,--yet by nothing was his gentle spirit so grieved and 
shocked as by the show that proposed to turn his holiday into a battalion 
drill of the children from the alleys and the courts for patricians, young 
and old, to review. It was well meant, but it was not Christmas. That 
belongs to the home, and in the darkest slums Santa Claus found homes 
where his blessed tree took root and shed its mild radiance about, 
dispelling the darkness, and bringing back hope and courage and trust.

   They are gone, the old alleys. Reform wiped them out. It is well. Santa 
Claus will not have harder work finding the doors that opened to him 
gladly, because the light has been let in. And others will stand ajar that 
before were closed. The chimneys in tenement-house alleys were never built 
on a plan generous enough to let him in in the orthodox way. The cost of 
coal had to be considered in putting them up. Bottle Alley and Bandits' 
Roost are gone with their bad memories. Bone Alley is gone, and Gotham 
Court. I well remember the Christmas tree in the court, under which a 
hundred dolls stood in line, craving partners among the girls in its 
tenements. That was the kind of battalion drill that they understood. The 
ceiling of the room was so low that the tree had to be cut almost in half; 
but it was beautiful, and it lives yet, I know, in the hearts of the 
little ones, as it lives in mine. The "Barracks" are gone, Nibsey's Alley 
is gone, where the first Christmas tree was lighted the night poor Nibsey 
lay dead in his coffin. And Cat Alley is gone.

   Cat Alley was my alley. It was mine by right of long acquaintance. We 
were neighbors for twenty years. Yet I never knew why it was called Cat 
Alley. There was the usual number of cats, gaunt and voracious, which 
foraged in its ash-barrels; but beyond the family of three-legged cats, 
that presented its own problem of heredity,--the kittens took it from the 
mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray,--there was 
nothing specially remarkable about them. It was not an alley, either, when 
it comes to that, but rather a row of four or five old tenements in a back 
yard that was reached by a passageway somewhat less than three feet wide 
between the sheer walls of the front houses. These had once had 
pretensions to some style. One of them had been the parsonage of the 
church next door that had by turns been an old-style Methodist tabernacle, 
a fashionable negroes' temple, and an Italian mission church, thus marking 
time, as it were, to the upward movement of the immigration that came in 
at the bottom, down in the Fourth Ward, fought its way through the Bloody 
Sixth, and by the time it had travelled the length of Mulberry Street had 
acquired a local standing and the right to be counted and rounded up by 
the political bosses. Now the old houses were filled with newspaper 
offices and given over to perpetual insomnia. Week-days and Sundays, night 
or day, they never slept. Police headquarters was right across the way, 
and kept the reporters awake. From his window the chief looked down the 
narrow passageway to the bottom of the alley, and the alley looked back at 
him, nothing daunted. No man is a hero to his valet, and the chief was not 
an autocrat to Cat Alley. It knew all his human weaknesses, could tell 
when his time was up generally before he could, and winked the other eye 
with the captains when the newspapers spoke of his having read them a 
severe lecture on gambling or Sunday beer-selling. Byrnes it worshipped, 
but for the others who were before him and followed after, it cherished a 
neighborly sort of contempt.

   In the character of its population Cat Alley was properly cosmopolitan. 
The only element that was missing was the native American, and in this 
also it was representative of the tenement districts in America's chief 
city. The substratum was Irish, of volcanic properties. Upon this were 
imposed layers of German, French, Jewish, and Italian, or, as the alley 
would have put it, Dutch, Sabé, Sheeny, and Dago; but to this last it did 
not take kindly. With the experience of the rest of Mulberry Street before 
it, it foresaw its doom if the Dago got a footing there, and within a 
month of the moving in of the Gio family there was an eruption of the 
basement volcano, reënforced by the sanitary policeman, to whom complaint 
had been made that there were too many "Ginnies" in the Gio flat. There 
were four--about half as many as there were in some of the other flats 
when the item of house rent was lessened for economic reasons; but it 
covered the ground: the flat was too small for the Gios. The appeal of the 
signora was unavailing. "You got-a three bambino," she said to the 
housekeeper, "all four, lika me," counting the number on her fingers. "I 
no putta me broder-in-law and me sister in the street-a. Italian lika to 
be together."

   The housekeeper was unmoved. "Humph!" she said, "to liken my kids to 
them Dagos! Out they go." And they went.

   Up on the third floor there was the French couple. It was another of 
the contradictions of the alley that of this pair the man should have been 
a typical, stolid German, she a mercurial Parisian, who at seventy sang 
the "Marseillaise" with all the spirit of the Commune in her cracked 
voice, and hated from the bottom of her patriotic soul the enemy with whom 
the irony of fate had yoked her. However, she improved the opportunity in 
truly French fashion. He was rheumatic, and most of the time was tied to 
his chair. He had not worked for seven years. "He no goode," she said, 
with a grimace, as her nimble fingers fashioned the wares by the sale of 
which, from a basket, she supported them both. The wares were dancing 
girls with tremendous limbs and very brief skirts of tricolor gauze,--
"ballerinas," in her vocabulary,--and monkeys with tin hats, cunningly 
made to look like German soldiers. For these she taught him to supply the 
decorations. It was his department, she reasoned; the ballerinas were of 
her country and hers. Parbleu! must one not work? What then? Starve? 
Before her look and gesture the cripple quailed, and twisted and rolled 
and pasted all day long, to his country's shame, fuming with impotent rage.

   "I wish the devil had you," he growled.

   She regarded him maliciously, with head tilted on one side, as a bird 
eyes a caterpillar it has speared.

   "Hein!" she scoffed. "Du den, vat?"

   He scowled. She was right; without her he was helpless. The judgment of 
the alley was unimpeachable. They were and remained "the French couple."

   Cat Alley's reception of Madame Klotz at first was not cordial. It was 
disposed to regard as a hostile act the circumstance that she kept a 
special holiday, of which nothing was known except from her statement that 
it referred to the fall of somebody or other whom she called the Bastille, 
in suspicious proximity to the detested battle of the Boyne; but when it 
was observed that she did nothing worse than dance upon the flags "avec ze 
leetle bébé" of the tenant in the basement, and torture her "Dootch" 
husband with extra monkeys and gibes in honor of the day, unfavorable 
judgment was suspended, and it was agreed that without a doubt the 
"bastard" fell for cause; wherein the alley showed its sound historical 
judgment. By such moral pressure when it could, by force when it must, the 
original Irish stock preserved the alley for its own quarrels, free from 
"foreign" embroilments. These quarrels were many and involved. When Mrs. 
M'Carthy was to be dispossessed, and insisted, in her cups, on killing the 
housekeeper as a necessary preliminary, a study of the causes that led to 
the feud developed the following normal condition: Mrs. M'Carthy had the 
housekeeper's place when Mrs. Gehegan was poor, and fed her "kids." As a 
reward, Mrs. Gehegan worked around and got the job away from her. Now that 
it was Mrs. M'Carthy's turn to be poor, Mrs. Gehegan insisted upon putting 
her out. Whereat, with righteous wrath, Mrs. M'Carthy proclaimed from the 
stoop: "Many is the time Mrs. Gehegan had a load on, an' she went upstairs 
an' slept it off. I didn't. I used to show meself, I did, as a lady. I 
know ye're in there, Mrs. Gehegan. Come out an' show yerself, an' I'ave 
the alley to judge betwixt us." To which Mrs. Gehegan prudently vouchsafed 
no answer.

   Mrs. M'Carthy had succeeded to the office of housekeeper upon the death 
of Miss Mahoney, an ancient spinster who had collected the rents since the 
days of "the riot," meaning the Orange riot--an event from which the alley 
reckoned its time, as the ancients did from the Olympian games. Miss 
Mahoney was a most exemplary and worthy old lady, thrifty to a fault. 
Indeed, it was said when she was gone that she had literally starved 
herself to death to lay by money for the rainy day she was keeping a 
lookout for to the last. In this she was obeying her instincts; but they 
went counter to those of the alley, and the result was very bad. As an 
example, Miss Mahoney's life was a failure. When at her death it was 
discovered that she had bank-books representing a total of two thousand 
dollars, her nephew and only heir promptly knocked off work and proceeded 
to celebrate, which he did with such fervor that in two months he had run 
through it all and killed himself by his excesses. Miss Mahoney's was the 
first bank account in the alley, and, so far as I know, the last.

   From what I have said, it must not be supposed that fighting was the 
normal occupation of Cat Alley. It was rather its relaxation from 
unceasing toil and care, from which no to-morrow held promise of relief. 
There was a deal of good humor in it at most times. "Scrapping" came 
naturally to the alley. When, as was sometimes the case, it was the 
complement of a wake, it was as the mirth of children who laugh in the 
dark because they are afraid. But once an occurrence of that sort 
scandalized the tenants. It was because of the violation of the Monroe 
Doctrine, to which, as I have said, the alley held most firmly, with 
severely local application. To Mulberry Street Mott Street was a foreign 
foe from which no interference was desired or long endured. A tenant in 
"the back" had died in the hospital of rheumatism, a term which in the 
slums sums up all of poverty's hardships, scant and poor food, damp rooms, 
and hard work, and the family had come home for the funeral. It was not a 
pleasant home-coming. The father in his day had been strict, and his 
severity had driven his girls to the street. They had landed in Chinatown, 
with all that implies, one at a time; first the older and then the 
younger, whom the sister took under her wing and coached. She was very 
handsome, was the younger sister, with an innocent look in her blue eyes 
that her language belied, and smart, as her marriage-ring bore witness to. 
The alley, where the proprieties were held to tenaciously, observed it and 
forgave all the rest, even her "Chink" husband. While her father was lying 
ill, she had spent a brief vacation in the alley. Now that he was dead, 
her less successful sister came home, and with her a delegation of girls 
from Chinatown. In their tawdry finery they walked in, sallow and bold, 
with Mott Street and the accursed pipe written all over them, defiant of 
public opinion, yet afraid to enter except in a body. The alley considered 
them from behind closed blinds, while the children stood by silently to 
see them pass. When one of them offered one of the "kids" a penny, he let 
it fall on the pavement, as if it were unclean. It was a sore thrust, and 
it hurt cruelly; but no one saw it in her face as she went in where the 
dead lay, with scorn and hatred as her offering.

   The alley had withheld audible comment with a tact that did it credit; 
but when at night Mott Street added its contingent of "fellows" to the 
mourners properly concerned in the wake, and they started a fight among 
themselves that was unauthorized by local sanction, its wrath was aroused, 
and it arose and bundled the whole concern out into the street with scant 
ceremony. There was never an invasion of the alley after that night. It 
enjoyed home rule undisturbed.

   Withal, there was as much kindness of heart and neighborly charity in 
Cat Alley as in any little community up-town or down-town, or out of town, 
for that matter. It had its standards and its customs, which were to be 
observed; but underneath it all, and not very far down either, was a human 
fellowship that was capable of any sacrifice to help a friend in need. 
Many was the widow with whom and with whose children the alley shared its 
daily bread, which was scanty enough, God knows, when death or other 
disaster had brought her to the jumping-off place. In twenty years I do 
not recall a suicide in the alley, or a case of suffering demanding the 
interference of the authorities, unless with such help as the' hospital 
could give. The alley took care of its own, and tided them over the worst 
when it came to that. And death was not always the worst. I remember yet 
with a shudder a tragedy which I was just in time with the police to 
prevent. A laborer, who lived in the attic, had gone mad, poisoned by the 
stenches of the sewers in which he worked. For two nights he had been 
pacing the hallway, muttering incoherent things, and then fell to 
sharpening an axe, with his six children playing about--beautiful, brown-
eyed girls they were, sweet and innocent little tots. In five minutes we 
should have been too late, for it appeared that the man's madness had 
taken on the homicidal tinge. They were better out of the world, he told 
us, as we carried him off to the hospital. When he was gone, the children 
came upon the alley, and loyally did it stand by them until a job was 
found for the mother by the local political boss. He got her appointed 
scrub-woman at the City Hall, and the alley, always faithful, was solid 
for him ever after. Organized charity might, and indeed did, provide 
groceries on the instalment plan. The Tammany captain provided the means 
of pulling the family through and of bringing up the children, although 
there was not a vote in the family. It was not the first time I had met 
him and observed his plan of "keeping close" to the people. Against it not 
the most carping reform critic could have found just ground of complaint.

   The charity of the alley was contagious. With the reporters' messenger 
boys, a harum-scarum lot, in "the front," the alley was not on good terms 
for any long stretch at a time. They made a racket at night, and had sport 
with "old man Quinn," who was a victim of dropsy. He was "walking on
dough," they asseverated, and paid no attention to the explanation of the 
alley that he had "kidney feet." But when the old man died and his wife 
was left penniless, I found some of them secretly contributing to her 
keep. It was not so long after that that another old pensioner of the 
alley, suddenly drawn into their cyclonic sport in the narrow passageway, 
fell and broke her arm. Apparently no one in the lot was individually to 
blame. It was an unfortunate accident, and it deprived her of her poor 
means of earning the few pennies with which she eked out the charity of 
the alley. Worse than that, it took from her hope after death, as it were. 
For years she had pinched and saved and denied herself to keep up a 
payment of twenty-five cents a week which insured her decent burial in 
consecrated ground. Now that she could no longer work, the dreaded trench 
in the Potter's Field yawned to receive her. That was the blow that broke 
her down. She was put out by the landlord soon after the accident, as a 
hopeless tenant, and I thought that she had gone to the almshouse, when by 
chance I came upon her living quite happily in a tenement on the next 
block. "Living" is hardly the word; she was really waiting to die, but 
waiting with a cheerful content that amazed me until she herself betrayed 
the secret of it. Every week one of the messenger boys brought her out of 
his scanty wages the quarter that alike insured her peace of mind and the 
undisturbed rest of her body in its long sleep, which a life of toil had 
pictured to her as the greatest of earth's boons.

   Death came to Cat Alley in varying forms, often enough as a welcome 
relief to those for whom it called, rarely without its dark riddle for 
those whom it left behind, to be answered without delay or long guessing. 
There were at one time three widows with little children in the alley, 
none of them over twenty-five. They had been married at fifteen or 
sixteen, and when they were called upon to face the world and fight its 
battles alone were yet young and inexperienced girls themselves. 
Improvidence! Yes. Early marriages are at the bottom of much mischief 
among the poor. And yet perhaps these, and others like them, might have 
offered the homes from which they went out, as a valid defence. To their 
credit be it said that they accepted their lot bravely, and, with the help 
of the alley, pulled through. Two of them married again, and made a bad 
job of it. Second marriages seldom turned out well in the alley. They were 
a refuge of the women from work that was wearing their lives out, and gave 
them in exchange usually a tyrant who hastened the process. There never 
was any sentiment about it. "I don't know what I shall do," said one of 
the widows to me, when at last it was decreed that the tenements were to 
be pulled down, "unless I can find a man to take care of me. Might get one 
that drinks? I would hammer him half to death." She did find her "man," 
only to have him on her hands too. It was the last straw. Before the 
wreckers came around she was dead. The amazed indignation of the alley at 
the discovery of her second marriage, which till then had been kept 
secret, was beyond bounds. The supposed widow's neighbor across the hall, 
whom we knew in the front generally as "the Fat One," was so stunned by 
the revelation that she did not recover in season to go to the funeral. 
She was never afterward the same.

   In the good old days when the world was right, the Fat One had enjoyed 
the distinction of being the one tenant in Cat Alley whose growler never 
ran dry. It made no difference how strictly the Sunday law was observed 
toward the rest of the world, the Fat One would set out from the alley 
with her growler in a basket,--this as a concession to the unnatural 
prejudices of a misguided community, not as an evasion, for she made a 
point of showing it to the policeman on the corner,--and return with it 
filled. Her look of scornful triumph as she marched through the alley, and 
the backward toss of her head toward police headquarters, which said 
plainly: "Ha! you thought you could! But you didn't, did you?" were the 
admiration of the alley. It allowed that she had met and downed Roosevelt 
in a fair fight. But after the last funeral the Fat One never again 
carried the growler. Her spirit was broken. All things were coming to an 
end, the alley itself with them.

   One funeral I recall with a pleasure which the years have in no way 
dimmed. It was at a time before the King's Daughters' Tenement House 
Committee was organized, when out-of-town friends used to send flowers to 
my office for the poor. The first notice I had of a death in the alley was 
when a delegation of children from the rear knocked and asked for daisies. 
There was something unnaturally solemn about them that prompted me to make 
inquiries, and then it came out that old Mrs. Walsh was dead and going on 
her long ride up to Hart's Island; for she was quite friendless, and the 
purse-strings of the alley were not long enough to save her from the 
Potter's Field. The city hearse was even then at the door, and they were 
carrying in the rough pine coffin. With the children the crippled old 
woman had been a favorite; she had always a kind word for them, and they 
paid her back in the way they knew she would have loved best. Not even the 
coffin of the police sergeant who was a brother of the district leader was 
so gloriously decked out as old Mrs. Walsh's when she started on her last 
journey. The children stood in the passageway with their arms full of 
daisies, and gave the old soul a departing cheer; and though it was quite 
irregular, it was all right, for it was well meant, and Cat Alley knew it.

   They were much like other children, those of the alley. It was only in 
their later years that the alley and the growler set their stamp upon 
them. While they were small, they loved, like others of their kind, to 
play in the gutter, to splash in the sink about the hydrant, and to dance 
to the hand-organ that came regularly into the block, even though they 
sadly missed the monkey that was its chief attraction till the aldermen 
banished it in a cranky fit. Dancing came naturally to them, too; 
certainly no one took the trouble to teach them. It was a pretty sight to 
see them stepping to the time on the broad flags at the mouth of the 
alley. Not rarely they had for an appreciative audience the big chief 
himself, who looked down from his window, and the uniformed policeman at 
the door. Even the commissioners deigned to smile upon the impromptu show 
in breathing spells between their heavy labors in the cause of politics 
and pull. But the children took little notice of them; they were too happy 
in their play. They loved my flowers, too, with a genuine love that did 
not spring from the desire to get something for nothing, and the parades 
on Italian feast-days that always came through the street. They took a 
fearsome delight in watching for the big dime museum giant, who lived 
around in Elizabeth Street, and who in his last days looked quite lean and 
hungry enough to send a thrill to any little boy's heart, though he had 
never cooked one and eaten him in his whole life, being quite a harmless 
and peaceable giant. And they loved Trilby.

   Trilby was the dog. As far back as my memory reaches there was never 
another in Cat Alley. She arrived in the block one winter morning on a 
dead run, with a tin can tied to her stump of a tail, and with the Mott 
Street gang in hot pursuit. In her extremity she saw the mouth of the 
alley, dodged in, and was safe. The Mott Streeters would as soon have 
thought of following her into police headquarters as there. Ever after she 
stayed. She took possession of the alley and of headquarters, where the 
reporters had their daily walk, as if they were hers by right of conquest, 
which in fact they were. With her whimsically grave countenance, in which 
all the cares of the vast domain she made it her daily duty to oversee 
were visibly reflected, she made herself a favorite with every one except 
the "beaneryman" on the corner, who denounced her angrily, when none of 
her friends were near, for coming in with his customers at lunchtime on 
purpose to have them feed her with his sugar, which was true. At regular 
hours, beginning with the opening of the department offices, she would 
make the round of the police building and call on all the officials, 
forgetting none. She rode up in the elevator and left it at the proper 
floors, waited in the anterooms with the rest when there was a crowd, and 
paid stated visits to the chief and the commissioners, who never omitted 
to receive her with a nod and a "Hello, Trilby!" no matter how pressing 
the business in hand. The gravity with which she listened to what went on, 
and wrinkled up her brow in an evident effort to understand, was comical 
to the last degree. She knew the fire alarm signals and when anything 
momentous was afoot. On the quiet days, when nothing was stirring, she 
would flock with the reporters on the stoop and sing.

   There never was such singing as Trilby's. That was how she got her 
name. I tried a score of times to find out, but to this day I do not know 
whether it was pain or pleasure that was in her note. She had only one, 
but it made up in volume for what it lacked in range. Standing in the 
circle of her friends, she would raise her head until her nose pointed 
straight toward the sky, and pour forth her melody with a look of such 
unutterable woe on her face that peals of laughter always wound up the 
performance; whereupon Trilby would march off with an injured air, and 
hide herself in one of the offices, refusing to come out. Poor Trilby! 
with the passing away of the alley she seemed to lose her grip. She did 
not understand it. After wandering about aimlessly for a while, vainly 
seeking a home in the world, she finally moved over on the East Side with 
one of the dispossessed tenants. But on all Sundays and holidays, and once 
in a while in the middle of the week, she comes yet to inspect the old 
block in Mulberry Street and to join in a quartette with old friends.

   Trilby and Old Barney were the two who stuck to the alley longest. 
Barney was the star boarder. As everything about the place was misnamed, 
the alley itself included, so was he. His real name was Michael, but the 
children called him Barney, and the name stuck. When they were at odds, as 
they usually were, they shouted "Barney Bluebeard!" after him, and ran 
away and hid in trembling delight as he shook his key-ring at them, and 
showed his teeth with the evil leer which he reserved specially for them. 
It was reported in the alley that he was a woman-hater; hence the name. 
Certain it is that he never would let one of the detested sex cross the 
threshold of his attic room on any pretext. If he caught one pointing for 
his aerie, he would block the way and bid her sternly begone. She seldom 
tarried long, for Barney was not a pleasing object when he was in an ugly 
mood. As the years passed, and cobweb and dirt accumulated in his room, 
stories were told of fabulous wealth which he had concealed in the chinks 
of the wall and in broken crocks; and as he grew constantly shabbier and 
more crabbed, they were readily believed. Barney carried his ring and 
filed keys all day, coining money, so the reasoning ran, and spent none; 
so he must be hiding it away. The alley hugged itself in the joyful 
sensation that it had a miser and his hoard in the cockloft. Next to a 
ghost, for which the environment was too matter-of-fact, that was the 
thing for an alley to have.

   Curiously enough, the fact that, summer and winter, the old man never 
missed early mass and always put a silver quarter--even a silver dollar, 
it was breathlessly whispered in the alley--in the contribution box, 
merely served to strengthen this belief. The fact was, I suspect, that the 
key-ring was the biggest end of the business Old Barney cultivated so 
assiduously. There were keys enough on it, and they rattled most 
persistently as he sent forth the strange whoop which no one ever was able 
to make out, but which was assumed to mean "Keys! keys!" But he was far 
too feeble and tremulous to wield a file with effect. In his younger days 
he had wielded a bayonet in his country's defence. On the rare occasions 
when he could be made to talk, he would tell, with a smouldering gleam in 
his sunken eyes, how the Twenty-third Illinois Volunteers had battled with 
the Rebs weary nights and days without giving way a foot. The old man's 
bent back would straighten, and he would step firmly and proudly, at the 
recollection of how he and his comrades earned the name of the "heroes of 
Lexington" in that memorable fight. But only for the moment. The dark 
looks that frightened the children returned soon to his face. It was all 
for nothing, he said. While he was fighting at the front he was robbed. 
His lieutenant, to whom he gave his money to send home, stole it and ran 
away. When he returned after three years there was nothing, nothing! At 
this point the old man always became incoherent. He spoke of money the 
government owed him and withheld. It was impossible to make out whether 
his grievance was real or imagined.

   When Colonel Grant came to Mulberry Street as a police commissioner, 
Barney brightened up under a sudden idea. He might get justice now. Once a 
week, through those two years, he washed himself, to the mute astonishment 
of the alley, and brushed up carefully, to go across and call on "the 
general's son" in order to lay his case before him. But he never got 
farther than the Mulberry Street door. On the steps he was regularly 
awestruck, and the old hero, who had never turned his back to the enemy, 
faltered and retreated. In the middle of the street he halted, faced 
front, and saluted the building with all the solemnity of a grenadier on 
parade, then went slowly back to his attic and to his unrighted grievance.

   It had been the talk of the neighborhood for years that the alley would 
have to go in the Elm Street widening which was to cut a swath through the 
block, right over the site upon which it stood; and at last notice was 
given about Christmas time that the wreckers were coming. The alley was 
sold,--thirty dollars was all it brought,--and the old tenants moved away, 
and were scattered to the four winds. Barney alone stayed. He flatly 
refused to budge. They tore down the church next door and the buildings on 
Houston Street, and filled what had been the yard, or court, of the 
tenements with débris that reached halfway to the roof, so that the old 
locksmith, if he wished to go out or in, must do so by way of the third-
story window, over a perilous path of shaky timbers and sliding brick. He 
evidently considered it a kind of siege, and shut himself in his attic, 
bolting and barring the door, and making secret sorties by night for 
provisions. When the chimney fell down or was blown over, he punched a 
hole in the rear wall and stuck the stove-pipe through that, where it blew 
defiance to the new houses springing up almost within arm's-reach of it. 
It suggested guns pointing from a fort, and perhaps it pleased the old 
man's soldier fancy. It certainly made smoke enough in his room, where he 
was fighting his battles over with himself, and occasionally with the 
janitor from the front, who climbed over the pile of bricks and in through 
the window to bring him water. When I visited him there one day, and, 
after giving the password, got behind the bolted door, I found him, the 
room, and everything else absolutely covered with soot, coal-black from 
roof to rafters. The password was "Lettér!" yelled out loud at the foot of 
the stairs. That would always bring him out, in the belief that the 
government had finally sent him the long-due money. Barney was stubbornly 
defiant, he would stand by his guns to the end; but he was weakening 
physically under the combined effect of short rations and nightly alarms. 
It was clear that he could not stand it much longer.

   The wreckers cut it short one morning by ripping off the roof over his 
head before he was up. Then, and only then, did he retreat. His exit was 
characterized by rather more haste than dignity. There had been a heavy 
fall of snow overnight, and Barney slid down the jagged slope from his 
window, dragging his trunk with him, in imminent peril of breaking his 
aged bones. That day he disappeared from Mulberry Street. I thought he was 
gone for good, and through the Grand Army of the Republic had set 
inquiries on foot to find what had become of him, when one day I saw him 
from my window, standing on the opposite side of the street, key-ring in 
hand, and looking fixedly at what had once been the passageway to the 
alley, but was now a barred gap between the houses, leading nowhere. He 
stood there long, gazing sadly at the gateway, at the children dancing to 
the Italian's hand-organ, at Trilby trying to look unconcerned on the 
stoop, and then went his way silently, a poor castaway, and I saw him no 
more.

   So Cat Alley, with all that belonged to it, passed out of my life. It 
had its faults, but it can at least be said of it, in extenuation, that it 
was very human. With them all it had a rude sense of justice that did not 
distinguish its early builders. When the work of tearing down had begun, I 
watched, one day, a troop of children having fun with a see-saw they had 
made of a plank laid across a lime barrel. The whole Irish contingent rode 
the plank, all at once, with screams of delight. A ragged little girl from 
the despised "Dago" colony watched them from the corner with hungry eyes. 
Big Jane, who was the leader by virtue of her thirteen years and her long 
reach, saw her and stopped the show.

   "Here, Mame," she said, pushing one of the smaller girls from the 
plank, "you get off an' let her ride. Her mother was stabbed yesterday."

   And the little Dago rode, and was made happy.