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NOT all the barriers erected by society against its nether life, not the labor of unnumbered societies for the rescue and relief of its outcast waifs, can dam the stream of homelessness that issues from a source where the very name of home is a mockery. The Street Arab is as much of an institution in New York as Newspaper Row, to which he gravitates naturally, following his Bohemian instinct. Crowded out of the tenements to shift for himself, and quite ready to do it, he meets there the host of adventurous runaways from every State in the Union and from across the sea, whom New York attracts with a queer fascination, as it attracts the older emigrants from all parts of the world. A census of the
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population in the Newsboys' Lodging-house on any night will show such an odd mixture of small humanity as could hardly be got together in any other spot. It is a mistake to think that they are helpless little creatures, to be pitied and cried over because they are alone in the world. The unmerciful "guying" the good man would receive, who went to them with such a programme, would soon convince him that that sort of pity was wasted, and would very likely give him the idea that they were a set of hardened little scoundrels, quite beyond the reach of missionary effort.
But that would only be his second mistake. The Street
Arab has all the faults and all the virtues of the
lawless life he leads. Vagabond that he is, acknowledging
no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or
anything, with his grimy fist raised against society
whenever it tries to coerce him, he is as bright 'and
sharp as the weasel, which, among all the predatory
beasts, he most resembles His sturdy independence,
love of freedom and absolute self-reliance, together
with his rude sense of justice that enables him to
govern his little community, not always in accordance
with municipal law or city ordinances, but often a
good deal closer to the saving line of "doing
to others as one would be done by"--these are
strong handles by which those who know how can catch
the boy and make him useful. Successful bankers, clergymen,
and lawyers all over the country, statesmen in some
instances of national repute, bear evidence in their
lives to the potency of such missionary efforts. There
is scarcely a learned profession, or branch of honorable
business, that has not in the last twenty years borrowed
some of its brightest light from the poverty and gloom
of New York's streets.
Anyone, whom business or curiosity has taken through
Park Row or across Printing House Square in the midnight
hour, when the air is filled with the roar of great
presses spinning with printers' ink on endless rolls
of white paper the history of the world in the twentyfour
hours that have just passed away, has seen little
groups of these boys hanging about the newspaper offices;
in winter, when snow is on the streets, fighting for
warm spots around the grated vent-holes that let out
the heat and steam from the underground press-rooms
with their noise and clatter, and in summer playing
craps and 7-11 on the curb for their hard-earned pennies,
with all the absorbing concern of hardened gamblers.
This is their beat. Here the agent of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children finds those
he thinks too young for "business," but
does not always capture them. Like rabbits in their
burrows, the little ragamuffins sleep with at least
one eye open, and every sense alert to the approach
of danger: of their enemy, the policeman, whose chief
business in life is to move them on, and of the agent
bent on robbing them of their cherished freedom. At
the first warning shout they scatter and are off.
To pursue them would be like chasing the fleet-footed
mountain goat in his rocky fastnesses. |
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There is not an open
door, a hidden turn or runway which they do not
know, with lots of secret passages and short cuts
no one else ever found. To steal a march on them
is the only way. There is a coal chute from the
sidewalk to the boiler-room in the sub-cellar
of the Post Office which the Society's officer
found the boys had made into a sort of toboggan
slide to a snug berth in wintry weather. They
used to slyly raise the cover in the street, slide
down in single file, and snuggle up to the warm
boiler out of harm's way, as they thought. It
proved a trap, however. The agent slid down himself
one cold night--there was no other way of getting
there--and, landing light in the midst of the
sleeping colony, had it at his mercy. After repeated
raids upon their headquarters, the boys forsook
it last summer, and were next found herding under
the shore-end of one of the East River banana
docks, where they had |
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fitted up a regular club-room
that was shared by thirty or forty homeless boys
and about a million rats.
Newspaper Row is merely their headquarters. They
are to be found all over the city, these Street
Arabs, where the neighborhood offers a chance
of picking up a living in the daytime and of "turning
in" at night with a promise of security from
surprise. In warm weather a truck in the street,
a convenient out-house, or a dug-out in a hay-barge
at the wharf make good bunks. Two were found making their nest once in
the end of a big iron pipe up by the Harlem Bridge,
and an old boiler at the East River served as an elegant
flat for another couple, who kept house there with a
thief the police had long sought, little suspecting
that he was hiding under their very noses for months
together. When the Children's Aid Society first opened
its lodging-houses, and with some difficulty persuaded
the boys that their charity was no "pious dodge"
to trap them into a treasonable "Sunday-school
racket," its managers overheard a laughable discussion
among the boys in their unwontedly comfortable beds--
perhaps the first some of them had ever slept in--as
to the relative merits of the different styles of their
everyday berths. Preferences were divided between the
steam-grating and a sand-box; but the weight of the
evidence was decided to be in favor of the sand-box,
because, as its advocate put it, "you could curl
all up in it." The new "find" was voted
a good way ahead of any previous experience, however.
"My eyes, ain't it nice!" said one of the
lads, tucked in under his blanket up to the chin, and
the roomful of boys echoed the sentiment The compact
silently made that night between the Street Arabs and
their hosts has never been broken. They have been fast
friends ever since.
Whence this army of homeless boys? is a question
often asked. The answer is supplied by the procession
of mothers that go out and in at Police Headquarters
the fear round, inquiring for missing boys, often
not until they have been gone for weeks and months,
and then sometimes rather as a matter of decent form
than from any real interest in the lad's fate. The
stereotyped promise of the clerks who fail to find
his name on the books among the arrests, that he "will
come back when he gets hungry," does not always
come true. More likely he went away because he was
hungry. Some are orphans, actually or in effect, thrown
upon the world when their parents were "sent
up" to the island or to Sing Sing, and somehow
overlooked by the "Society," which thenceforth
became the enemy to be shunned until growth and dirt
and the hardships of the street, that make old early,
offer some hope of successfully floating the lie that
they are "sixteen." A drunken father explains
the matter in other cases, as in that of John and
Willie, aged ten and eight, picked up by the police
They "didn't live nowhere," never went to
school, could neither read nor write. Their twelve-year-old
sister kept house for the father, who turned the boys
out to beg, or steal? or starve. Grinding poverty
and hard work beyond the years of the lad; blows and
curses for breakfast, dinner, and supper; all these
are recruiting agents for the homeless army. Sickness
in the house, too many mouths to feed:
"We wuz six," said an urchin of twelve
or thirteen I came across in the Newsboys' Lodging
House, "and we ain't got no father. Some on us
had to go." And so he went, to make a living
by blacking boots. The going is easy enough. There
is very little to hold the boy who has never known
anything but a home in a tenement. Very soon the wild
life in the streets holds him fast, and thenceforward
by his own effort there is no escape. Left alone to
himself, he soon enough finds a place in the police
books, and there would be no other answer to the second
question: "what becomes of the boy?" than
that given by the criminal courts every day in the
week. |
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But he is not left
alone. Society in our day has no such suicidal
intention. Right here, at the parting of the ways,
it has thrown up the strongest of all its defences
for itself and for the boy. What the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is to the
baby-waif, the Children's Aid Society is to the
homeless boy at this real turning-point in his
career. The good it has done cannot easily be
over-estimated. Its lodging-houses, its schools
and its homes block every avenue of escape with
their offer of shelter upon terms which the boy
soon accepts, as on the whole cheap and fair.
In the great Duane Street lodging-house for newsboys,
they are succinctly stated in a "notice"
over the door that reads thus: "Boys who
swear and chew tobacco cannot sleep here."
There is another unwritten condition, viz.: that
the boy shall be really without a home; but upon
this the managers wisely do not insist too obstinately,
accepting without too close inquiry his account
of himself where that seems advisable, well knowing
that many a home that sends forth such |
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lads far
less deserves the name than the one they are able
to give them.
With these simple preliminaries the outcast boy
may enter. Rags do not count; to ignorance the
door is only opened wider. Dirt does not survive
long, once within the walls of the lodging-house.
It is the settled belief of the men who conduct
them that soap and water are as powerful moral
agents in their particular field as preaching,
and they have experience to back them. The boy
may come and go as he pleases, so long as he behaves
himself. No restraint of any sort is put on his
independence. He is as free as any other guest
at a hotel, and, like him, he is expected to pay
for what he gets. How wisely the men planned who
laid the foundation of this great rescue work
and yet carry it on, is shown by no single feature
of it better than by this. No pauper was ever
bred within these houses. Nothing would have been
easier with such material, or more fatal. But charity of the kind that pauperizes
is furthest from their scheme. Self-help is its very
key-note, and it strikes a response in the boy's sturdiest
trait that raises him at once to a level with the effort
made in his behalf. Recognized as an independent trader,
capable of and bound to take care of himself, he is
in a position to ask trust if trade has gone against
him and he cannot pay cash for his "grub"
and his bed, and to get it without question. He can
even have the loan of the small capital required to
start him in business with a boot-black's kit, or an
armful of papers, if he is known or vouched for; but
every cent is changed to him as carefully as though
the transaction involved as many hundreds of dollars,
and he is expected to pay back the money as soon as
he has made enough to keep him going without it. He
very rarely betrays the trust reposed in him. Quite
on the contrary, around this sound core of self-help,
thus encouraged, habits of thrift and ambitious industry
are seen to grow up in a majority of instances. The
boy is "growing" a character, and he goes
out to the man's work in life with that which for him
is better than if he had found a fortune.
Six cents for his bed, six for his breakfast of bread
and coffee, and six for his supper of pork and beans,
as much as he can eat, are the rates of the boys' "hotel"
for those who bunk together in the great dormitories
that sometimes hold more than a hundred berths, two
tiers high, made of iron, clean and neat. For the "upper
ten," the young financiers who early take the lead
among their fellows, hire them to work for wages and
add a share of their profits to their own, and for the
lads who are learning a trade and getting paid by the
week, there are ten-cent beds with a locker and with
curtains hung about. Night schools and Sunday night
meetings are held in the building and are always well
attended, in winter especially, when the lodging-houses
are crowded. In summer the tow-path and the country
attract their share of the bigger boys. The "Sunday-school
racket" has ceased to have terror for them. |
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They follow the proceedings
with the liveliest interest, quick to detect cant
of any sort, should any stray in. No one has any
just conception of what congregational singing
is until he has witnessed a roomful of these boys
roll up their sleeves and start in on "I
am a lily of the valley." The swinging trapeze
in the gymnasium on the top floor is scarcely
more popular with the boys than this tremendously
vocal worship. The Street Arab puts his whole
little soul into what interests him for the moment,
whether it be pulverizing a rival who has done
a mean trick to a smaller boy, or attending at
the "gospel shop" on Sundays. This characteristic
made necessary some extra supervision when recently
the lads in the Duane Street Lodging House "chipped
in" and bought a set of boxing gloves. The
trapeze suffered a temporary eclipse until this
new toy had been tested to the extent of several
miniature black eyes upon which soap had no effect,
and sundry little scores had been settled that
evened things up, as it were, for a fresh start.
I tried one night, not with the best of success
I confess, to photograph the boys in their |
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wash-room,
while they were cleaning up for supper. They were
quite turbulent, to the disgust of one of their
number who assumed, unasked, the office of general
manager of the show, and expressed his mortification
to me in very polite language. "If they would
only behave, sir!" he complained, "you
could make a good picture."
"Yes," I said, "but it isn't in them,
I suppose."
"No, b'gosh!" said he, lapsing suddenly
from grace under the provocation, "them kids
ain't got no sense, nohow!"
The Society maintains five of these boys' lodging
houses, and one for girls, in the city. The Duane
Street Lodging House alone has sheltered since its
foundation in 1855 nearly a quarter of a million different
boys, at a total expense of a good deal less than
half a million dollars. Of this amount, up to the
beginning of the present year, the boys and the earnings
of the house had contributed no less than $172,776.38.
In all of the lodging-houses together, 12,153 boys
and girls were sheltered and taught last year. The
boys saved up no inconsiderable amount of money in
the savings banks provided for them in the houses,
a simple system of lock-boxes that are emptied for
their benefit once a month. Besides these, the Society
has established and operates in the tenement districts
twenty-one industrial schools, co-ordinate with the
public schools in authority, for the children of the
poor who cannot find room in the city's school-houses,
or are too ragged to go there; two free reading-rooms,
a dressmaking and typewriting school and a laundry
for the instruction of girls; a sick-children's mission
in the city and two on the sea-shore, where poor mothers
may take their babies; a cottage by the sea for crippled
girls, and a brush factory for crippled boys in Forty-fourth
Street. The Italian school in Leonard Street, alone,
had an average attendance of over six hundred pupils
last year. The daily average attendance at all: of
them was 4,105, while 11,331 children were registered
and taught. When the fact that there were among these
1,132 children of drunken parents, and 416 that had
been found begging in the street, is contrasted with
the showing of $1,337.21 deposited in the school savings
banks by 1,745 pupils, something like an adequate
idea is gained of the scope of the Society's work
in the city. |
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A large share of it,
in a sense the largest, certainly that productive
of the happiest results, lies outside of the city,
however. From the lodging-houses and the schools
are drawn the battalions of young emigrants that
go every year to homes in the Far West, to grow
up self-supporting men and women safe from the
temptations and the vice of the city. Their number
runs far up in the thousands. The Society never
loses sight of them. The records show that the
great mass, with this start given them, become
useful citizens, an honor to the communities in
which their lot is cast. Not a few achieve place
and prominence in their new surroundings. Rarely
bad reports come of them. Occasionally one comes
back, lured by homesickness even for the slums;
but the briefest stay generally cures the disease
for good. I helped once to see a party off for
Michigan, the last sent out by that great friend
of the homeless children, Mrs. Astor, before she
died. In the party was a boy who had been an "Insider"
at the Five Points House of Industry, and brought
along as his only baggage a padlocked and iron-bound |
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box that contained all his wealth, two little
white mice of the friendliest disposition. They
were going with him out to live on the fat of
the laud in the fertile West, where they would
never be wanting for a crust. Alas ! for the best-laid
plans of mice and men. The Western diet did not
agree with either. I saw their owner some months
later in the old home at the Five Paints. He had
come back, walking part of the way, and was now pleading to be sent out once more. He
had at last had enough of the city. His face fell when
I asked him about the mice. It was a sad story, indeed.
"They had so much corn to eat," he said, "and
they couldn't stand it. They burned all up inside, and
then they busted."
Mrs. Astor set an example during her noble and useful
life in gathering every year a company of homeless
boys from-the streets and sending them to good homes,
with decent clothes on their backs--she had sent out
no less than thirteen hundred when she died, and left
funds to carry on her work--that has been followed
by many who, like her, had the means and the heart
for such a labor of love. Most of the lodging-houses
and school-buildings of the society were built by
some one rich man or woman who paid all the bills,
and often objected to have even the name of the giver
made known to the world. It is one of the pleasant
experiences of life that give one hope and courage
in the midst of all this misery to find names, that
stand to the unthinking mass only for money-getting
and grasping, associated with such unheralded benefactions
that carry their blessings down to generations yet
unborn. It is not so long since I found the carriage
of a woman, whose name is synonymous with millions,
standing in front of the boys' lodging-house in Thirty-fifth
Street. Its owner was at that moment busy with a surgeon
making a census of the crippled lads in the brush-shop, the most miserable of all the Society's charges, as
a preliminary to fitting them out with artificial
limbs.
Farther uptown than any reared by the Children's
Aid Society, in Sixty-seventh Street, stands a lodging-house
intended for boys of a somewhat larger growth than
most of those whom the Society shelters. Unlike the
others, too, it was built by the actual labor of the
young men it was designed to benefit. In the day when
more of the boys from our streets shall find their
way to it and to the New York Trade Schools, of which
it is a kind of home annex, we shall be in a fair
way of solving in the most natural of all ways the
question what to do with this boy, in spite of the
ignorant opposition of the men whose tyrannical policy is
now to blame for the |
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showing that, out of twenty-three
millions of dollars paid annually to mechanics
in the building trades in this city, less than
six millions go to the workman born in New York,
while his boy roams the streets with every chance
of growing up a vagabond and next to none of becoming
an honest artisan. Colonel Auchmuty is a practical
philanthropist to whom the growing youth of New
York will one day owe a debt of gratitude not
easily paid. The progress of the system of trade
schools established by him, at which a young man
may acquire the theory as well as the practice
of a trade in a few months at a merely nominal
outlay, has not been nearly as rapid as was to
be desired, though the fact that other cities
are copying the model, with their master mechanics
as the prime movers in the enterprise, testifies
to its excellence. But it has at last taken a
real start, and with union men and even the officers
of unions now |
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sending their sons to the trade
schools to be taught, [1] one may perhaps be permitted to hope that an era
of better sense is dawning that shall witness
a rescue work upon lines which, when the leaven
has fairly had time to work, will put an end to
the existence of the New York Street Arab, of
the native breed at least. |
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Go to Chapter
18 |
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[1] Colonel Auchmuty's own statement. |
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