|
|
THE tenements grow taller, and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly as we cross the Bowery and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind, invade the Hebrew quarter. Baxter Street, with its interminable rows of old clothes shops and its brigades of pullers--ill-nicknamed the Bay in honor, perhaps, of the tars who lay to there after a cruise to stock up their togs, or maybe after the "schooners" of beer plentifully bespoke in that latitude--Bayard Street, with its synagogues and its
|
|
crowds, gave us a foretaste of it. It is said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together on a square mile as here. The average five-story tenement adds a story or two to its stature in Ludlow Street and an extra building on the rear lot, and yet the sign "To Let" is the rarest of all there. Here is one seven stories high. The sanitary policeman whose beat this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex Street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders. The boarder plays as important
a part in the domestic economy of Jewtown as the lodger
in the Mulberry Street Bend. These are samples of the
packing of the population that has run up the record
here to the rate of three hundred and thirty thousand
per square mile.
The densest crowding of Old London, I pointed out before,
never got beyond a hundred and seventy-five thousand.
Even the alley is crowded out. Through dark hallways
and filthy cellars, crowded, as is every foot of the
street, with dirty children, the settlements in the
rear are reached. Thieves know how to find them when
pursued by the police, and the tramps that sneak in
on chilly nights to fight for the warm spot in the yard
over some baker's oven. They are out of place in this
hive of busy industry and they know it. It has nothing
in common with them or with their philosophy of life,
that the world owes the idler a living. Life here means
the hardest kind of work almost from the cradle. The
world as a debtor has no credit in Jewtown. Its promise
to pay wouldn't buy one of the old hats that are hawked
about Hester Street, unless backed by security representing
labor done at lowest market rates. But this army of
workers must have bread. It is cheap and filling, and
bakeries abound. Wherever they are in the tenements
the tramp will skulk in, if he can. There is such a
tramps' roost in the rear of a tenement near the lower
end of Ludlow Street, that is never w ithout its tenants
in winter. By a judicious practice of flopping over
on the stone pavement at intervals, and thus warming
one side at a time, and with an empty box to put the
feet in, it is possible to keep reasonably comfortable
there even on a rainy night. In summer the yard is the
only one in the neighborhood that does not do duty as
a public dormitory. |
|
Thrift is the watchword
of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It
is at once its strength and its fatal weakness,
its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace. Become
an over-mastering passion with these people who
come here in d roves from Eastern Europe to escape
persecution, from which freedom could be bought
only with gold, it has enslaved them in bondage
worse than that from which they fed. Money is
their God. Life itself is of little value compared
with even the leanest bank account. In no other
spot does life wear so intensely bald and materialistic
an aspect as in Ludlow Street. Over and over again
I have met with instances of these Polish or Russian
Jews deliberately starving themselves to the point
of physical exhaustion , while working night and
day at a tremendous pressure to save a little
money. |
|
An avenging Nemesis pursues this headlong hunt
for wealth; there is no worse paid class anywhere.
I once put the question to one of their own
people, who, being a pawnbroker, a nd an unusually
intelligent and charitable one, certainly enjoyed
the advantage of a practical view of the situation:
"Whence the many wretchedly poor people
in such a colony of workers, where poverty, from a misfortune, has become a reproach,
dreaded as the plague?"
"Immigration," he said, "brings us
a lot. In five years it has averaged twenty-five thousand
a year, of which more that seventy per cent. hare
stayed in New Cork. Half of them require and receive
aid from the Hebrew Charities from t he very start,
lest they starve. That is one explanation. There is
another class than the one that cannot get work: those
who have had too much of it; who have worked and hoarded
and lived, crowded together like pigs, on the scantiest
fare and the worst t o be got, bound to save whatever
their earnings, until, worn out, they could work no
longer. Then their hoards were soon exhausted. That
is their story." And I knew that what he said
was true.
Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt
and disease, and Jewtown is no exception. It could
not well be otherwise in such crowds, considering
especially their low intellectual status. The managers
of the Eastern Dispensary, which is in the very heart
of their district, told the whole story when they
said: "The diseases these people suffer from
are not due to intemperance or immorality, but to
ignorance, want of suitable food, and the foul air
in which they live and work." [1] The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops
also. Reference will be made to the economic conditions
under which they work in a succeeding chapter. Here
we are concerned simply with the fact. You are made
fully aware of it befo re you have travelled the length
of a single block in any of these East Side streets,
by the whir of a thousand sewing-machines, worked
at high pressure from earliest dawn till mind and
muscle give out together. Every member of the family,
from the younge st to the oldest, bears a hand, shut
in the qualmy rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing
washed and dried besides, the livelong day. It is
not unusual to find a dozen persons--men women, and
children--at work in a single small room. The fact
accounts for the contrast that strikes with wonder
the observer who comes across from the Bend. Over
there the entire population seems possessed of an
uncontrollable impulse to get out into the street;
here all its energies appear to be bent upon keeping
in and a way from it. Not that the streets are deserted.
The overflow from these tenements is enough to make
a crowd anywhere. The children alone would do it.
Not old enough to work and no room for play, that
is their story. In the home the child's place is usurpe
d by the lodger, who performs the service of the Irishman's
pig--pays the rent. In the street the army of hucksters
crowd him out. Typhus fever and smallpox are bred
here, and help solve the question what to do with
him. Filth diseases both, they sprout n aturally among
the hordes that bring the germs with them from across
the sea, and whose first instinct is to hide their
sick lest the authorities carry them off to the hospital
to be slaughtered, as they firmly believe. The health
officers are on constant and sharp lookout for hidden
fever-nests. Considering that half of the ready-made
clothes that are sold in the big stores, if not a
good deal more than half, are made in these tenement
rooms, this is not excessive caution. It has happened
more than once that a child recovering from small-pox,
and in the most contagious stage of the disease, has
been found crawling among heaps of half-finished clothing
that the next day would be offered for sale on the
counter of a Broadway store; or that a typhus fever
p atient has been discovered in a room whence perhaps
a hundred coats had been sent home that week, each
one with the wearer's death-warrant, unseen and unsuspected,
basted in the lining. |
|
The health officers
call the Tenth the typhus ward; in the office
where deaths are registered it passes as the "suicide
ward," for reasons not hard to understand;
and among the police as the "crooked ward,"
on account of the number of "crooks,"
petty thieves and their allies, the "fences,"
receivers of stolen goods, who find the dense
crowds congenial. The nearness of the Bowery,
the great "thieves' highway," helps
to keep up the supply of these, but Jewtown does
not support its dives. Its troubles with the police
are the characteristic crop of its intense business
rivalries. Oppression, persecution, have not shorn
the Jew of his native combativeness one whit.
Be is as ready to fight for his rights, or what
he considers his rights, in a business transaction--synonymous
generally with his advantage--as if he had not
been robbed of them for eighteen hundred years;
One strong impression survives with him |
|
from his
days of bondage: the power of the law. On the
slightest provocation he rushes off to invoke
it for his protection. Doubtless the sensation
is novel to him, and therefore pleasing. The police
at the Eldridge Street station are in a constant
turmoil over these everlasting fights. Somebody
is always denouncing somebody else, and getting
his enemy or himself locked up; frequently both,
for the prisoner, when brought in, has generally
as plausible a story to tell as his accuser, and
as hot a charge to make. The day closes on a wild
conflict of rival interests. Another dawns with
the prisoner in court, but no complainant. Over night the case has
been settled on a business basis, and the police dismiss
their prisoner in deep disgust.
These quarrels have sometimes a comic aspect. Thus,
with the numerous dancing-schools that are scattered
among the synagogues, often keeping them company in
the' same tenement. They are generally kept by some
man who works in the da ytime at tailoring, cigarmaking,
or something else. The young people in Jewtown are inordinately
fond of dancing, and after their day's hard work will
flock to these "schools" for a night's recreation.
But even to their fun they carry their business prefe
rences, and it happens that a school adjourns in a body
to make a general raid on the rival establishment across
the street, without the ceremony of paying the admission
fee. Then the dance breaks up in a general fight, in
which, likely enough, someone is badly hurt. The police
come in, as usual, and ring down the curtain. |
|
Bitter as are his private
feuds it is not until his religious life is invaded
that a real inside view is obtained of this Jew,
whom the history of Christian civilization has
tau ght nothing but fear and hatred. There are
two or three missions in the district conducting
a hopeless propagandism for the Messiah whom the
Tenth Ward rejects, and they attract occasional
crowds, who come to hear the Christian preacher
as the Jews of old gathered to hear the apostles
expound the new doctrine. The result is often
strikingly similar. "For once," said
a certain well-known minister of an uptown church
to me, after such an experience, "I felt
justified in comparing myself to Paul preaching
sa lvation to the Jews. They kept still until
I spoke of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Then
they got up and fell to arguing among themselves
and to threatening me, until it looked as if they
meant to take me out in Hester Street and |
|
stone
me." As at Jerusalem the Chief Captain was
happily at hand with his centurions, in the person
of a sergeant and three policemen, and the preacher
was rescued. So, in all matters pertaining to
their religious life that tinges all their customs,
they stand these East Side Jews, where the new
day that dawned on Calvary left them standing,
stubbornly refusing to see the light. A visit
to a Jewish house of mourning is like bridging
the gap of two thousand years. The inexpressibly
sad and sorrowful wail for the dead, as it swells
and rises in the hush of all sounds of life, comes
back from the ages like a mournful echo of the voice of Rachel "weeping for her
children and refusing to be comforted, because they
are not."
Attached to many of the synagogues, which among the
poorest Jews frequently consist of a scantily furnished
room in a rear tenement, with a few wooden stools
or benches for the congregation, are Talmudic schools
that absorb a shar e of the growing youth. The school-master
is not rarely a man of some attainments who has been
stranded there, his native instinct for money-making
having been smothered in the process that has made
of him a learned man. It was of such a school in Eldridg
e Street that the wicked Isaac Iacob, who killed his
enemy, his wife, and himself in one day, was janitor.
But the majority of the children seek the public schools,
where they are received sometimes with some misgivings
on the part of the teachers, who fi nd it necessary
to inculcate lessons of cleanliness in the worst cases
by practical demonstration with wash-bowl and soap.
"He took hold of the soap as if it were some
animal," said one of these teachers to me after
such an experiment upon a new pupil, "a nd wiped
three fingers across his face. He called that washing."
In the Allen Street public school the experienced
principal has embodied among the elementary lessons,
to keep constantly before the children the duty that
clearly lies next to their hands, a characteristic
exercise. The question is asked daily from the teacher's
desk: "What must I do to be healthy?" and
the whole school responds:
"I must keep my skin clean,
Wear clean clothes,
Breathe pure air,
And live in the sunlight."
It seems little less than biting sarcasm to hear
them say it, for to not a few of them all these things
are known only by name. In their everyday life there
is nothing even to suggest any of them. Only the demand
of religious cust om hag power to make their parents
clean up at stated intervals, and the young naturally
are no better.As scholars, the children of the most
ignorant Polish Jew keep fairly abreast of their more
favored playmates, until it comes to mental arithmetic,
when they leave them behind with a bound. It is surprising
to see how strong the instinct of dollars and cents
is in them. They can count, and correctly, almost
before they can talk. |
|
Within a few years the police captured on the
East Side a band of firebugs who made a business
of setting fire to tenements for the insurance
on their furniture. There has, unfortunately,
been some evidence in the past year that a nother
such conspiracy is on foot. The danger to which
these fiends expose their fellow-tenants is
appalling. A fire-panic at night in a tenement,
by no means among the rare experiences in New
York, with the surging, half-smothered crowds
on stairs and fire-escapes, the frantic mothers
and crying children, the wild struggle to save
the little that is their all, is a horror that
has few parallels in human experience.
I cannot think without a shudder of one such
scene in a First Avenue tenement. It was in
the middle of the night. The fire had swept
up with sudden fury from a restaurant on the
street floor, cutting off |
|
escape. Men and women
threw themselves from the windows, or were carried
down senseless by the firemen.
Thirteen half-clad, apparently lifeless bodies
were laid on the floor of an adjoining coal-office,
and the ambulance surgeons worked over them with
sleeves rolled up to the elbo ws. A half-grown
girl with a baby in her arms walked about among
the dead and dying with a stunned, vacant look,
singing in a low, scared voice to the child. One
of the doctors took her arm to lead her out, and
patted the cheek of the baby soothingly. It was
cold. The baby had been smothered with its father and mother;
but the girl, her sister, did not know it. Her reason
had fled.
Thursday night and Friday morning are bargain days in
the "Pig-market." Then is the time to study
the ways of this peculiar people to the best advantage.
A common pulse beats in the quarters of the Polish Jews
and in the Mulberry Bend, though they have little else
in common. Life over yonder in fine weather is a perpetual
holiday, here a veritable tread-mill of industry. Friday
brings out all the latent color and picturesqueness
of the Italians, as of these Semites. The crowds and
the common poverty are the bonds of sympathy between
them. The Pig-market is in Hester Street, extending
either way from Ludlow Street, and up and down the side
streets two or three blocks, as the state-of trade demands.
The name was given to it probably in derision, for pork
is the one ware that is not on sale in the Pig-market. |
|
There is scarcely anything
else that can be hawked from a wagon that is not
to be found, and at ridiculously low prices. Bandannas
and tin cups at two cents, peaches at a cent a
quart, "damaged" eggs for a song, hats
for a quarter, and spectacles, warranted to suit
the eye, at the optician's who has opened shop
on a Hester Street door-step, for thirty-five'
cents; frowsy-looking chickens and half-plucked
geese, hung by the neck and protesting with wildly
strutting feet even in death against the outrage,
are the great staple of the market. Half or a
quarter of a chicken can be bought here by those
who cannot afford a whole. It took more than ten
years of persistent effort on the part of the
sanitary authorities to drive the trade in live
fowl from the streets to the fowl-market on Gouverneur
Slip, where the killing is now done according
to Jewish rite by priests detailed for the purpose
by the chief rabbi. |
|
Since then they have had a
characteristic rumpus, that involved the entire
Jewish community, over the fees for killing and
the mode of collecting them. Here is a woman churning
horse-radish on a machine she has chained and
padlocked to a tree on the sidewalk, lest someone
steal it. Beside her a butcher's stand with cuts
at prices the avenues never dreamed of. Old coats
are hawked for fifty cents, "as good as new,"
and "pants"--there are no trousers in
Jewtown, only pants--at anything that can be got. There is a knot of half
a d ozen "pants" pedlars in the middle of
the street, twice as many men of their own race fingering
their wares and plucking at the seams with the anxious
scrutiny of would-be buyers, though none of I them has
the least idea of investing in a pair. Yes, stop! This
baker, fresh from his trough, bare-headed and with bare
arms, has wade an offer: for this pair thirty cents;
a dollar and forty was the price asked. The pedlar shrugs
his shoulders, and turns up his hands with a. half pitying,
wholly indignant air. What does the baker take him for?
Such pants--. The baker has turned to go. With a jump
like a panther's, the man with the pants: has him by
the sleeve. Will he give eighty cents? Sixty? Fifty?
So help him, they are dirt cheap at that Lose, will
he, on the trade, lose all the profit of his day's pedling.
The baker goes on unmoved. Forty then? What, not forty?
Take them then for thirty, and wreck the life of a poor
man. And the baker takes them and goes, well knowing
that at least twenty cents of the thirt y, two hundred
per cent., were clear profit, if indeed the "pants"
cost the pedlar anything.
The suspender pedlar is the mystery of the Pig-market,
omnipresent and unfathomable. He is met at every step
with his waves dangling over his shoulder, down his
back, and in f ront. Millions of suspenders thus perambulate
Jewtown all day on a sort of dress parade. |
|
Why suspenders, is
the puzzle, and where do they all go to? The "pants"
of Jewtown hang down with a common accord, as
if they had never known the support of suspenders.
It appears to be as characteristic a trait of
the race as the long beard and the Sabbath silk
hat of ancient pedigree. I have asked again and
again. No one has ever been able to tell me what
becomes of the suspenders of Jewtown. Perhaps
they are hung up as bric-a-brac in its homes,
or laid away and saved up as the equivalent of
cash. I cannot tell. I only know that more suspenders
are hawked about the Pig-market every day than
would supply the whole of New York for a year,
were they all bought and turned to use.The crowds
that jostle each other at the wagons and about
the sidewalk shops, where a gutter plank on two
ash-barrels does duty for a counter! Pushing,
struggling, babbling, and shouting in foreign
tongues, a veritable Babel of confusion. An English
word falls upon the ear almost with a sense of
shock, as something unexpected and strange. In
the midst of it all there is a sudden wild scattering,
a hustling of things from the street into dark
cellars, into back-yards and by- |
|
ways, a slamming
and locking of doors hidden under the improvised
shelves and counters. The health officers' cart
is coming down the street, preceded and followed
by stalwart policemen, who shovel up with scant
ceremony the eatables--musty bread, decayed fish
and stale vegetables--indifferent to the curses
that are showered on them from stoops and windows,
and carry them off to the dump. In the wake of
the wagon, as it makes its way to the East River
after the raid, follow a line of despoiled hucksters
shouting defiance from a safe distance. Their
clamor dies away with the noise of the market.
The endless panorama of the tenements, rows upon
rows, between stony streets, stretches to the
north, to the south, and to the west as far as
the eye reaches. |
|
Go to Chapter
11 |
|
[1] Report of
Eastern Dispensary for 1889. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|