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WHEN it comes to the question of numbers with this tramps' army, another factor of serious portent has to be taken into account: the cheap lodging-houses. In the caravanseries that line Chatham Street and the Bowery, harboring nightly a population as large as that of many a thriving town, a home-made article of tramp and thief is turned out that is attracting the increasing attention of the police, and offers a field for the missionary's labors beside which most others seem of slight account. Within a year they have been stamped as nurseries of crime by the chief of the Secret Police, [1] the sort of crime that feeds especially on idleness and lies ready to the hand of fatal opportunity. In the same strain one o f |
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the justices on the police court bench sums up his long experience as a committing magistrate: "The ten-cent lodging-houses more than counterbalance the good done by the free reading-room, lectures, and all other agencies of reform. Such lodging-houses have caused more destitution, more beggary and crime than any other agency I know of." A very
slight acquaintance with the subject is sufficient to
convince the observer that neither authority overstates
the fact. The two officials had reference, however,
to two different grades of lodging-houses. The cost
of a night's lodging makes the difference. There is
a wider gap between the "hotel "--they are
all hotels--that charges a quarter and the one that
furnishes a bed for a dime than between the bridal suit
e and the every-day hall bedroom of the ordinary hostelry.
The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle
to the moth. It attracts them in swarms that come year
after year with the vague idea that they can get along
here if anywhere; that something is bound to turn up
among so ma ny. Nearly all are young men, unsettled
in life, many--most of them, perhaps--fresh from good
homes, beyond a doubt with honest hopes of getting a
start in the city and making a way for themselves. Few
of them have much money to waste while looking around
, and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object.
Fewer still know anything about the city and its pitfalls.
They have come in search of crowds, of "life,"
and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery, the great
democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent
lodging-houses take them in. In the alleged reading-rooms
of these great barracks, that often have accommodations,
such as they are, for two, three, and even four hundred
guests, they encounter three distinct classes of associates:
th e great mass adventurers like themselves, waiting
there for something to turn up; a much smaller class
of respectable clerks or mechanics, who, too poor or
too lonely to have a home of their own, live this way
from year to year; and lastly the thief in se arch of
recruits for his trade. The sights the young stranger
sees, and the company he keeps, in the Bowery are not
of a kind to strengthen any moral principle he may have
brought away from home, and by. the time his money is
gone, with no work yet in sig ht, and he goes down a
step, a long step, to the fifteen-cent lodging-house,
he is ready for the tempter whom he finds waiting for
him there, reinforced by the contingent of ex-convicts
returning from the prisons after having served out their
sentences fo r robbery or theft. Then it is that the
something he has been waiting for turns up. The police
returns have the record of it. "In nine cases out
of ten," says Inspector Byrnes, "he turns
out a thief, or a burglar, if, indeed, he does not sooner
or later b ecome a murderer." As a matter of fact,
some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been
the result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses,
and so frequent and bold have become the depredations
of the lodging-house thieves, that the authoriti es
have been compelled to make a public demand for more
effective laws that shall make them subject at all times
to police regulation. |
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Inspector Byrnes observes that in the last
two or three years at least four hundred young
men have been arrested for petty crimes that
originated in the lodging-houses, and that in
many cases it was their first step in crime.
He add s his testimony to the notorious fact
that three-fourths of the young men called on
to plead to generally petty offences in the
courts are under twenty years of age, poorly
clad, and without means. The bearing of the
remark is obvious. One of the, to the police,
well-known thieves who lived, when out of jail,
at the Windsor, a well-known lodging-house in
the Bowery, went to Johnstown after the flood
and was shot and killed there while robbing
the dead.
An idea of just how this particular scheme
of corruption works, with an extra touch of
infamy thrown in, may be gathered from the story
of David Smith, the "New York Fagin,"
who was convicted and sent to prison last year
through the instrumentality of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here
is the account from the Society's last report: |
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"The boy, Edward Mulhearn fourteen years
old, had run away from his home in Jersey City,
thinking he might find work and friends in New
York. He may have been a trifle wild. He met Smith
on the Bowery and recognized him as an acquai
ntance. When Smith offered him a supper and bed
he was only too glad to accept. Smith led the
boy to a vile lodging-house on the Bowery, where
he introduced him to his 'pals' and swore he would
make a man of him before he was a week older.
Next day he took the unsuspecting Edward all over
the Bowery and Grand Street, showed him the sights
and drew his attention to the careless way the
ladies carried their bags and purses and the easy
thing it was to get them. He induced Edward to
try his hand. Edward tried and won. He was richer
by three dollars! It did seem easy. 'Of course
it is,' said his companion. From that time Smith took
the boy on a number of thieving raids, but he never
seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out of range
of the 'Fagin's' watchful eye. When he went out alone
he generally returned empty-handed. This did not suit
Smith. It was then he conceived the idea of turning
this little inferior thief into a superior beggar. He
took the boy into his room and burned his arms with
a hot iron. The boy screamed and entreated in vain.
The merciless wretch pressed the iron deep into the
tender flesh, and afterward applied acid to the raw
wound.
"Thus prepared, with his arm inflamed, swollen,
and painful, Edward was sent out every day by this
fiend, who never let him out of his sight, and threatened
to burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough.
He was instructed to tell people the wound had been
caused by acid falling upon his arm at the works.
Edward was now too much under the man's influence
to resist or disobey him. He begged hard and handed
Smith the pennies faithfully. He received in return
bad food and worse treatment."
The reckoning came when the wretch encountered the
boy's father, in search of his child, in the Bowery,
and fell under suspicion of knowing more than he pretended
of the lad's whereabouts. He was found in his den
with a half dozen o f his chums revelling on the proceeds
of the boy's begging for the day.
The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence
of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing
a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair
and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is
the shallowest of all pretenses. The fifteen-cent
bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full
of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul.
At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's
clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it.
The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to
lock up save, on general principles, the lodger. Usually
the ten- and seven cent lodgings are different grades
of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for
a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aris
tocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky stroke
of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box
or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of
one of these "hotels." A strip of canvas,
strung between rough timbers, without covering of
any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger
who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot
stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer
dive. It is not the most secure perch in the world.
Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have
not far to fall to the next tier of bunks, and the
commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the boss
and his club. On cold winter nights, when every bunk
had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room
more than once, and listening to the snoring of the
sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and
the slow creaking of the beams under their restless
weight, imagined myself on shipboard and experienced
the very real nausea of sea-sickness. The one thing
that did not favor the deception was the air; its
character could not be mistaken. |
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The proprietor of one of these seven-cent houses
was known to me as a man of reputed wealth and
respectability. He "ran" three such
establishments and made, it was said, $8,000
a year clear profit on his investment. He lived
in a ha ndsome house quite near to the stylish
precincts of Murray Hill, where the nature of
his occupation was not suspected. A notice that
was posted on the wall of the lodgers' room
suggested at least an effort to maintain his
up-town standing in the slums. It read: "No
swearing or loud talking after nine o'clock."
Before nine no exceptions were taken to the
natural vulgarity of the place; but that was
the limit.
There are no licensed lodging-houses known
to me which charge less than seven cents for
even such a bed as this canvas strip, though
there are unlicensed ones enough where one may
sleep on the floor |
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for five cents a spot, or
squat in a sheltered hallway for three.
The police station lodging-house, where the soft
side of a plank is the regulation couch, is next
in order. The manner in which this police bed
is "made up" is interesting in its simplicity.
The loose planks that make th e platform are simply
turned over, and the job is done, with an occasional
coat of whitewash thrown in to sweeten things.
I know of only one easier way, but, so far as
I am informed, it has never been introduced in
this country. It used to be practised, if report
spoke truly, in certain old-country towns. The "bed"
was represented by clothes-lines stretched across the
room upon which the sleepers hung by the arm-pits for
a penny a night. In the morning the boss woke them up
by simply untying the line at o ne end and letting it
go with its load; a labor-saving device certainly, and
highly successful in attaining the desired end.
According to the police figures, 4,974,025 separate
lodgings were furnished last year by these dormitories
between two and three hundred in number, and, adding
the 147,634 lodgings furnished by the station-houses,
the total of the homeless army was 5,121,659, an average
of over fourteen thousand homeless men [2] for every night in the year! The health officers,
professional optimists always in matters that trench
upon their official jurisdiction, insist that t he
number is not quite so large as here given But, apart
from any slight discrepancy in the figures, the more
important fact remains that last year's record of
lodgers is an all round increase over the previous
year's of over three hundred thousand, and that this
has been the ratio of growth of the business during
the last three years, the period of which Inspector
Byrnes complains as turning out so many young criminals
with the lodging-house stamp upon them. More than
half of the lodging-houses are in the Bowery district,
that is to say, the Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Wards,
and they harbor nearly three-fourths of their crowds.
The calculation that more than nine thousand homeless
young men lodge nightly along Chatham Street and the
Bowery, between the City Hall and the Cooper Union,
is probably not far out of the way. The City Missionary
finds them there far less frequently than the thief
in need of helpers. Appropriately enough, nearly one-fifth
of all the pawn-shops in the city and one-sixth of all the saloons are located here, while twenty-seven
per cent. of all the arrests on the police books have
been credited to the district for the last two years.
About election time, especially in Presidential elections,
the lodging-houses come out strong on the side of
the political boss who has the biggest "barrel."
The victory in political contests, in the three wards
I have mentioned o f all others, is distinctly to
the general with the strongest battalions, and the
lodging-houses are his favorite recruiting ground.
The colonization of voters is an evil of the first
magnitude, none the less because both parties smirch
their hands with i t, and for that reason next to
hopeless. Honors are easy, where the two "machines,"
intrenched in their strongholds, outbid each other
across the Bowery in open rivalry as to who shall
commit the most flagrant frauds at the polls. Semi-occasionally
a cham pion offender is caught and punished, as was,
not long ago, the proprietor of one of the biggest
Bowery lodging-houses. But such scenes are largely
spectacular, if not prompted by some hidden motive
of revenge that survives from the contest. Beyond
a doub t Inspector Byrnes speaks by the card when
he observes that "usually this work is done in
the interest of some local political boss, who stands
by the owner of the house, in case the latter gets
into trouble." For standing by, read twisting
the machinery of outraged justice so that its hand
shall fall not too heavily upon the culprit, or miss
him altogether. One of the houses that achieved profitable
notoriety in this way in many successive elections,
a notorious tramps' resort in Houston Street, was
late ly given up, and has most appropriately been
turned into a bar-factory, thus still contributing,
though in a changed form, to the success of "the
cause." It must be admitted that the black tramp
who herds in the West Side "hotels" is more
discriminating i n this matter of electioneering than
his white brother. He at least exhibits some real
loyalty in invariably selling his vote to the Republican
bidder for a dollar, while he charges the Democratic
boss a dollar and a half. |
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In view of the well-known facts, there is a
good deal of force in the remark made by a friend
of ballot reform during the recent struggle
over that hotly contested issue, that real ballot
reform will do more to knock out cheap lodging-houses
than all the regulations of police and health
officers together.
The experiment made by a well-known stove manufacturer
a winter or two ago in the way of charity, might
have thrown much desired light on the question
of the number of tramps in the city, could it
have been carried to a successful end. He opened
a sort of breakfast shop for the idle and unemployed
in the region of Washington Square, offering
to all who had no money a cup of coffee and
a roll for nothing. The first morning he had
a dozen customers, the next about two hundred.
The n umber kept growing until one morning,
at the end of two weeks, found by actual count
2,014 shivering creatures in |
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line waiting their
turn for a seat at his tables. The shop was
closed that day. It was one of the rare instances
of too great a rush of custo m wrecking a promising
business, and the great problem remained unsolved. |
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Go to Chapter
9 |
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[1] Inspector Byrnes on Lodging-houses,
in the North American Review, September, 1889.
[2] Deduct 69,111 women lodgers
in the police stations. |
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