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CHAPTER VII.
A RAID ON THE STALE-BEER DIVES.
MIDNIGHT roll-call was over in the Elizabeth Street police-station, but the reserves were held under orders. A raid was on foot, but whether on the Chinese fan-tan games, on the opium joints of Mott and Pell Streets, or on dens of even worse character, was a matter of guess-work in the men's room. When the last patrolman had come in from his beat, all doubt was dispelled by the brief order "To the Bend!" The stale-beer dives were the object of the raid. The policemen buckled their belts tighter, and with expressive grunts of disgust took up their march toward Mulberry Street. Past the heathen temples of Mott Street--there was some fun to be gotten out of a raid there--they trooped, into "the Bend," sending here and there a belated tramp scurrying in fright toward healthier quarters, and halted at the mouth of |
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one of the hidden alleys. Squads were told off and sent to make a simultaneous descent on all the known tramps' burrows in the block. Led by the sergeant, ours--I went along as a kind of war correspondent--groped its way in single file through the
narrow rift between slimy walls to the tenements in
the rear. Twice during our trip we stumbled over tramps,
both women, asleep in the passage. They were quietly
passed to the rear, receiving sundry prods and punches
on the trip, and headed for the station in the grip
of a policeman as a sort of advance guard of the coming
army. After what seemed half a mile of groping in the
dark we emerged finally into the alley proper, where
light escaping through the cracks of closed shutters
on both sides enabled us to make out the contour of
three rickety frame tenements. Snatches of ribald songs
and peals of coarse laughter reached us from now this,
now that of the unseen burrows.
"School is in," said the Sergeant drily
as we stumbled down the worn steps of the next cellar-way.
A kick of his boot-heel sent the door flying into
the room.
A room perhaps a dozen feet square, with walls and
ceiling that might once have been clean--assuredly
the floor had not in the memory of man, if indeed
there was other floor than hard-trodden mud--but were
now covered with a brown crust that, touched with
the end of a club, came off in shuddering showers
of crawling bugs, revealing the blacker filth beneath.
Grouped about a beer-keg that was propped on the wreck
of a broken chair, a foul and ragged host of men and
women, on boxes, benches, and stools. Tomato-cans
filled at the keg were passed from hand to hand. In
the centre of the group a sallow, wrinkled hag, evidently
the ruler of the feast, dealt out the hideous stuff.
A pile of copper coins rattled in her apron, the very
pennies received with such showers of blessings upon
the giver that afternoon; the faces of some of the
women were familiar enough from the streets as those
of beggars forever whining for a penny, "to keep
a family from starving." Their whine and boisterous
hilarity were alike hushed now. In sullen, cowed submission
they sat, evidently knowing what to expect. At the
first glimpse of the uniform in the open door some
in the group, customers with a record probably, had
turned their heads away to avoid the searching glance
of the officer; while a few, less used to such scenes,
stared defiantly.
A single stride took the sergeant into the middle
of the; room, and with a swinging blow of his club
he knocked the, faucet out of the keg and the half-filled
can from the boss hag's hand. As the contents of both
splashed upon the floor, half a dozen of the group
made a sudden dash,: and with shoulders humped above
their heads to shield' their skulls against the dreaded
locust broke for the door. They had not counted upon
the policemen outside. There was a brief struggle,
two or three heavy thumps, and the runaways were brought
back to where their comrades crouched in dogged silence.
"Thirteen!" called the sergeant' completing
his survey "Take them out. 'Revolvers' all but
one. Good for sit months on the island, the whole
lot." The exception was a young man not much
if any over twenty, with a hard look of dissipation
on his face. He seemed less unconcerned than the rest,
but tried hard to make up for it by putting on the
boldest air he could. "Come down early,"
commented the officer, shoving him along with his
stick. "There is need of it. They don't last
long at this. That stuff is brewed to kill at long
range." |
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At the head of the
cellar-steps we encountered a similar procession
from farther back in the alley, where still another
was forming to take up its march to the station.
Out in the street was heard the tramp of the hosts
already pursuing that well-trodden path, as with
a fresh complement of men we entered the next
stale-beer alley. There were four dives in one
cellar here. The filth and the stench were utterly
unbearable; even the sergeant turned his back
and fled after scattering the crowd with his club
and starting them toward the door. The very dog
in the alley preferred the cold flags for a berth
to the stifling cellar. We found it lying outside.
Seventy-five tramps, male and female, were arrested
in the four small rooms. In one of them, where
the air seemed thick enough to cut with a knife,
we found a woman, a mother with a newborn babe
on a heap of dirty straw. She was asleep and was
left until an ambulance could be called to take
her to the hospital. Returning to the station
with this batch, we found |
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every window in the
building thrown open -to the cold October wind,
and the men from the sergeant down smoking the strongest cigars that could be obtained by way
of disenfecting the place. Two hundred and seventy-five
tramps had been jammed into the cells to be arraigned
next morning in the police court on the charge
of vagrancy, with the certain prospect of six
months "on the Island." Of the sentence
at least they were sure. As to the length of the
men's stay the experienced official at the desk was sceptical, it being then within
a month of au important election. If tramps have nothing
else to call their own they have votes, and votes that
are for sale cheap for cash. About election time this
gives them a "pull," at least by proxy. The
sergeant observed, as if it were the most natural thing
in the world, that he had more than once seen the same
tramp sent to Blackwell's Island twice in twenty-four
hours for six months at a time.
As a thief never owns to his calling, however devoid
of moral scruples, preferring to style himself a speculator,
so this real home-product of the slums, the stale-beer
dive, is known about "the Bend" by the more
dignified name of the two-cent restaurant. Usually,
as in this instance, it is in some cellar giving on
a back alley. Doctored, unlicensed beer is its chief
ware. Sometimes a cup of "coffee" and a
stale roll may be had for two cents. The men pay the
score. To the women--unutterable horror of the suggestion--the
place is free. The beer is collected from the kegs
put on the sidewalk by the saloon-keeper to await
the brewer's cart, and is touched up with drugs to
put a froth on it. The privilege to sit all night
on a chair, or sleep on a table, or in a barrel, goes
with each round of drinks. Generally an Italian, sometimes
a negro, occasionally a woman, "runs" the
dive. Their customers, alike homeless and hopeless
in their utter wretchedness, are the professional
tramps, and these only. The meanest thief is infinitely
above the stale-beer level;. Once upon that plane
there is no escape. To sink below it is impossible;
no one ever rose from it. One night spent in a stale-beer
dive is like the traditional putting on of the uniform
the caste, the discarded rags of an old tramp. That
stile once crossed, the lane has no longer a turn;
and contrary to the proverb, it is usually not long
either.
With the gravitation of the Italian tramp landlord
toward the old stronghold of the African on the West
Side, a share of the stale-beer traffic has left "the
Bend;" but its headquarters will always remain
there, the real home of trampdom, just as Fourteenth
Street is its limit. No real tramp crosses that frontier
after nightfall and in the daytime only to beg. Repulsive
as the business is, its profits to the Italian dive-keeper
are considerable; in fact, barring a slight outlay
in the ingredients that serve to give "life"
to the beer-dregs, it is all profit. The "banker"
who curses the Italian colony does not despise taking
a hand in it, and such a thing as a stale-beer trust
on a Mulberry Street scale may yet be among the possibilities.
One of these bankers, who was once known to the police
as the keeper of one notorious stale-beer dive and
the active backer of others, is to-day an extensive
manufacturer of macaroni, the owner of several big
tenements and other real estate; and the capital,
it is said, has all come out of his old business.
Very likely it is true. |
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On hot summer nights it is no rare experience
when exploring the worst of the tenements in
"the Bend" to find the hallways occupied
by rows of "sitters," tramps whom
laziness or hard luck has prevented from earning
enough by their day's "labor" to pay
the admission fee to a stale-beer dive, and
who have their reasons for declining the hospitality
of the police station lodging-rooms. Huddled
together in loathsome files, they squat there
over night, or until an inquisitive policeman
breaks up the congregation with his club, which
in Mulberry Street has always free swing. At
that season the woman tramp predominates. The
men, some of them at least, take to the railroad
track and to camping out when the nights grow
warm, returning in the fall to prey on the city
and to recruit their ranks from the lazy, the
shiftless, and the unfortunate. Like a foul
loadstone "the Bend" attracts and
brings them back, no matter how far they have
wandered. For next to idleness the tramp loves
rum; next to rum stale beer, its equivalent
of the gutter. And the first and last go best
together. |
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As "sitters" they occasionally find
a job in the saloons about Chatham and Pearl
Streets on cold winter nights, when the hallway
is not practicable, that enables them to pick
up a charity drink now and then and a bite of
an infrequent sandwich.
The barkeeper permits them to sit about the stove
and by shivering invite the sympathy of transient
customers. The dodge works well, especially about
Christmas and election time, and the sitters are
able to keep comfortably filled up to the advantage
of their host. But to look thoroughly miserable
they must keep awake. A tramp placidly dozing
at the fire would not be an object of sympathy.
To make sure that they do keep awake, the wily
bartender makes them sit constantly swinging one
foot like the pendulum of a clock. When it stops
the slothful "sitter" is roused with
a kick and "fired out." It is said by
those who profess to know that
habit has come to the rescue of oversleepy tramps and
that the old rounders can swing hand or foot in their
sleep without betraying themselves. In some saloons
"sitters" are let in at these seasons in fresh
batches every hour.
On one of my visits to "the Bend" I came
across a particularly ragged and disreputable tramp,
who sat smoking his pipe on the rung of a ladder with
such evident philosophic contentment in the busy labor
of a score of rag-pickers all about him, that I bade
him sit for a picture, offering him ten cents for
the job. He accepted the offer with hardly a nod,
and sat patiently watching me from his perch until
I got ready for work. Then he took the pipe out of
his mouth and put it in his pocket, calmly declaring
that it was not included in the contract, and that
it was worth a quarter to have it go in the picture.
The pipe, by the way, was of clay, and of the two-for-a-cent
kind. But I had to give in. The man, scarce ten seconds
employed at honest labor, even at sitting down, at
which he was an undoubted expert, had gone on strike.
He knew his rights and the value of "work,"
and was not to be cheated out of either.
Whence these tramps, and why the tramping? are questions
oftener asked than answered. Ill-applied charity and
idleness answer the first query. They are the whence,
and to a large extent the why also. Once started on
the career of a tramp, the man keeps to it because
it is the laziest. Tramps and toughs profess the same
doctrine, that the world owes them a living, but from
stand-points that tend in different directions. The
tough does not become a tramp, save in rare instances,
when old and broken down. Even then usually he is
otherwise disposed of. The devil has various ways
of taking care of his own. Nor is the tramps' army
recruited from any certain class. All occupations
and most grades of society yield to it their contingent
of idleness. Occasionally, from one cause or another,
a recruit of a better stamp is forced into the ranks;
but the first acceptance of aims puts a brand on the
able-bodied man which his moral nature rarely hold
out to efface. He seldom recovers his lost caste.
The evolution is gradual, keeping step with the increasing
shabbiness of his clothes and corresponding loss of
self-respect, until he reaches the bottom in "the
Bend." |
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Of the tough the tramp
doctrine that the world owes him a living makes
a thief; of the tramp a coward! Numbers only make
him bold unless he has to do with defenseless
women. In the city the policemen keep him straight
enough. The women rob an occasional clothesline
when no one is looking, or steal the pail and
scrubbing-brush with which they are set to clean
up in the station-house lodging-rooms after their
night's sleep. At the police station the roads
of the tramp and the tough again converge. In
mid-winter, on the coldest nights, the sanitary
police corral the tramps here and in their lodging-houses
and vaccinate them, despite their struggles and
many oaths that they have recently been "scraped."
The station-house is the sieve that sifts out
the chaff from the wheat, if there be any wheat
there. A man goes from his first night's sleep
on the hard slab of a police station lodging-room
to a deck-hand's |
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berth on an outgoing steamer,
to the recruiting office, to any work that is
honest, or he goes "to the devil or the dives,
same thing," says my friend, the Sergeant,
who knows. |
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Go to Chapter
8 |
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