WEST SIDE STUDIES
CARRIED ON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF
PAULINE GOLDMARK
FORMERLY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR NEW YORK
SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY, MEMBER OF
INDUSTRIAL BOARD NEW YORK STATE
DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
BOYHOOD
AND LAWLESSNESS
——
THE NEGLECTED GIRL
By RUTH S. TRUE

PREFACE TO WEST SIDE STUDIES

In the summer of 1912 the field work was completed for the West Side studies published in these volumes. They are part of a wider survey of the neighborhood which it was proposed to make under the Bureau of Social Research of the New York School of Philanthropy with funds supplied by the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Samuel McCune Lindsay, director of the School, and I were in charge of the Bureau and together planned the scope and nature of the inquiry. To his inspiriting influence was due in large measure the enthusiasm and harmonious work of our staff.

The investigators in the Bureau were men and women who had been awarded fellowships by the School of Philanthropy. There were junior fellowships, given for one year only, and intended to provide training in social research for students without much previous experience, who were required to give part of their time to class work and special reading. There were also senior fellowships given to more advanced students who devoted full time to investigation. After two years’ work it was felt that to carry out the original plan satisfactorily would require the employment of a permanent staff of investigators who were well trained and equipped. The School, therefore, decided not to carry the survey further and reorganized the Bureau on a different basis.

This brief account of the Bureau is needed to explain the special topics dealt with in these volumes. The personal qualifications of the investigators as well as the available opportunities for investigation necessarily determined the choice of subjects.

A word must be said, too, as to the selection of this particular West Side district of New York City. These 80 blocks which border upon the Hudson River, between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-fourth Streets, contrast sharply with almost all other tenement neighborhoods of the city. They have as nearly homogeneous and stable a population as can be found in any part of New York. The original stock was Irish and German. In each generation the bolder spirits moved away to more prosperous parts of the city. This left behind the less ambitious and in many cases the wrecks of the population. Hence in this “backset” from the main current of the city’s life may be seen some of the most acute social problems of modern urban life—not the readjustment and amalgamation of sturdy immigrant groups, but the discouragement and deterioration of an indigenous American community.

The quarter which we studied is strangely detached from the rest of the city. Only occasionally an outbreak of lawlessness brings it to public notice. Its old reputation for violence and crime dates back many generations and persists to the present day. So true is this that we considered it essential at the beginning of our undertaking to ascertain the main facts of the district’s development. To Otho G. Cartwright was assigned the task of collecting this material. He did not make an exhaustive inquiry, but obtained from reliable sources sufficient information to give the historical background of life in the district today. His work serves as a general introduction to the more intensive studies which follow.

The study of juvenile delinquency, Boyhood and Lawlessness, shows clearly the need of special intimate knowledge of social phenomena if their underlying causes are to be understood. It describes the inadequacies of the present system: the innumerable arrests for petty offenses or for playing in the streets, and the failure of the police to bring the ringleaders into court. All this seems so unreasonable to the neighborhood and has so often aroused its antagonism that the influence of the Children’s Court is seriously undermined. In fact, the fathers and mothers of its charges look upon it only as a hostile authority in league with the police, while its real purpose is entirely hidden from them. The evidence is clear, too, that both parents and community have failed to understand and provide for the most elementary physical needs of the boys.

The same tragic lack of opportunity and care characterizes the lives of the girls. Ruth S. True’s portrayal of these lives in The Neglected Girl rests upon close personal acquaintance with a special group of girls who, though they were not brought up on charges in the Children’s Court, yet were without question in grave need of probationary care.

In neither of these two studies was it possible to suggest adequate remedies for the evils described. It is true that steps have already been taken by the Children’s Court to make its probation staff more effective. But the more fundamental need for modification of the conditions of the child’s life and environment has still to be pondered. Clearly it is not the child alone who needs reformation.

Similarly, Katharine Anthony’s report, Mothers Who Must Earn, reveals much more than isolated cases of hardship and suffering due to accident or death. She has studied the social and economic causes which compel the mother of a family to become a wage-earner, and the consequences of such employment for her home and family. The occupations where her services are in demand were carefully examined. The underpayment of many of the husbands, which drives their already overburdened wives into wage-earning, is perhaps the most significant fact disclosed. To relieve such severe economic pressure there is certainly need of more radical and far-reaching readjustments than can be effected by any one remedial measure. Relief giving is at best only a temporary stop-gap. This is rather a labor problem of the utmost gravity, affecting whole classes of underpaid laborers.

Indeed, if there is any one truth which emerges from these studies, it is the futility of dealing with social maladjustments as single isolated problems. They are all closely interrelated, and the first step in getting order out of our complexities must be knowledge of what exists. To such knowledge these studies aim to make a contribution. They are not intended to prove preconceived ideas nor to test the efficacy of any special remedies. They aim to describe with sympathy and insight some of the real needs of a neglected quarter of our city—“to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature.”

The various investigators who took part in the inquiry are given herewith: Edward M. Barrows, Clinton S. Childs, Eleanor H. Adler, Beatrice Sheets, and Ruth S. True contributed to the study of the West Side boy, here published under the title Boyhood and Lawlessness. Thomas D. Eliot, a junior fellow, also assisted. Associated with Ruth S. True in the study of the neglected girl, were Ann Campion and Dorothy Kirchwey. All three shared the responsibility of conducting the Tenth Avenue club for the observation of the girls described in their report. The volume Mothers Who Must Earn is the result of work done by Katharine Anthony, who was assisted in her field work by Ruth S. Waldo, a junior fellow.[1]

In the fall of 1912 practically the whole staff at that time employed devoted two months’ time to inspection of the industrial establishments of the district, under authority of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission. The results were published as Appendix V, to Volume I, of the Commission’s Preliminary Report, 1912.

Thanks are due to many persons who gave unstintedly of their time to the various investigators. Our indebtedness is especially great to the staff of the Clinton District office of the Charity Organization Society, who brought us in touch with many families in their care, and through their varied experience helped us in interpreting many aspects of neighborhood life. Among other agencies, Hartley House was particularly generous in making us acquainted with its Italian neighbors and in giving us the opportunity to visit them in their homes. The teachers of various local schools should also be mentioned with appreciation for the help they gave us in many ways.

Pauline Goldmark.

Just Boys!

Why not make them a community asset?

RUSSELL SAGE
FOUNDATION
—
BOYHOOD
AND LAWLESSNESS
WEST SIDE STUDIES
NEW YORK
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
MCMXIV

Copyright, 1914, by
The Russell Sage Foundation

THE TROW PRESS
NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION

When the Bureau of Social Research began, early in 1909, an investigation of the Middle West Side, it was soon realized that of all the problems presented by the district, none was more urgent and baffling, none more fundamental, than that of the boy and his gang. His anti-social activities have forced him upon public attention as an obstruction to law and business and a menace to order and safety. Because of this lawlessness and because of New York’s backwardness in formulating wise preventive measures to meet it, a special study of the West Side boy was begun.

In order to gain an intimate knowledge of neighborhood conditions which affect the boy, two men workers, Edward M. Barrows and Clinton S. Childs, went to live in the district, the former remaining for nearly two years. During their residence they came in close touch with several gangs and clubs of boys. Their experiences, while they yielded some of the most vital and significant material of our study, did not lend themselves to statistical treatment; they were not recorded in the form of family and individual histories, but as a running day-by-day diary, which formed the basis of the chapters dealing with the activities and the environment of the boys.

Since the West Side boy, either through personal contact or through association with gang leaders, is inseparable from the Children’s Court, attention was naturally drawn to the extent and the result of his relation to this institution. For this reason the Bureau made a special study of 294 boys[2] selected from the district with particular reference to their delinquency and their court records.[3]

Of these boys 28 were under twelve years, 71 more were fourteen, and 102 more were under sixteen. In view of these significant facts it became necessary not only to examine the environment of the West Side boy, but also to estimate the influence of the Children’s Court and other institutions upon him when toughness, truancy, gambling, or other temptations had carried him over the brink into real delinquency. That society should feel itself compelled to resort continually to the arrest and trial of children is in itself a confession of defeat. But when even these resources fail, it becomes imperative to analyze all the factors in the situation; to set the destructive and the constructive elements over against each other, and to determine the chances which the boy and the various public and private agencies organized to regenerate him have of understanding one another.

To many the study may serve to show at their doors a world undreamed of; a world in which, through causes which are even now, removable, youth is denied the universal rights of life, liberty, and happiness. To the court it may be of use in throwing light into dark places and in showing where old paths should be abandoned, as well as in offering suggestions at a critical period in its history.

And, indeed, every suggestion which will tend to lessen the troubles of the Middle West Side is peculiarly needed. The whole community—from molested property owners to the most disinterested social workers—are agreed that the worst elements rule the streets and that neither police nor court authority succeed in enforcing decency and order. And the center of the problem is the boy, for in him West Side lawlessness finds its most perennial and permanent expression.

The aim of this study, therefore, is to trace the principal influences which have formed the West Side boy; to consider some of the means which have heretofore been employed to counteract these influences; and to picture him as he is, exemplifying the results of circumstances for which not he but the entire community is responsible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Photographs by Lewis W. Hine

LIST OF TABLES
APPENDIX

CHAPTER I
HIS BACKGROUND

The influence of environment on character is now so fully recognized that no study of juvenile offenders would be complete without a consideration of their background. In the lives of the boys with whom this study deals this background plays a very large part. One-third of the 241 families studied, 82, are known to have lived in the district from five to nineteen years, and a somewhat larger number, 88, for twenty years or more.[4] This means that the boys belonged almost completely to the neighborhood. Most of them had lived there all their lives, and many of them always will live there. If they are to be understood aright, this neighborhood which has given them home, schooling, streets to play in, and factories to work in must also be pictured and understood.

In New York, owing perhaps to the shape of the island, the juxtaposition of tenement and mansion is unusually frequent. Walk five blocks along Forty-second Street west from Fifth Avenue and you are in the heart of the Middle West Side. The very suddenness of the change which these blocks present makes the contrast between wealth and poverty more striking and enables you to appreciate the particular form taken by poverty in this part of the city. Eighth Avenue, at which our district begins, looks east for inspiration and west for patronage. It is the West Sider’s Broadway and Fifth Avenue combined. Here he promenades, buys his clothes, travels up and down town on the cars, or waits at night in the long queue before the entrance to a moving picture show. The pavement is flanked by rows of busy stores; saloons and small hotels occupy the street corners. There is plenty of life and movement, and as yet no obvious poverty. On Saturdays and “sale” days, the neighborhood department stores swarm with custom.

Ninth Avenue has its elevated railroad, and suffers in consequence from noise, darkness, and congestion of traffic. Here the storekeeper can no longer rely on his window to attract customers. He knows the necessity of forceful advertising, and his bedsteads and vegetables, wooden Indians and show cases, everywhere encroach upon the sidewalk. On Saturday nights “Paddy’s Market”[5] flares in the open street, supplying for a few hours a picturesqueness which is greatly needed. Poor and untidy as this avenue is, the small tradesmen who live in it profess to look down on their less prosperous neighbors nearer the river.

West of Ninth Avenue tenements begin and rents decrease. At Tenth Avenue, where red and yellow crosstown cars swing round the corner from Forty-second Street, you have reached the center of the West Side wage-earning community, and a street which on a bright day is almost attractive. Four stories of red brick tenements surmount the plate glass of saloons and shops. Here and there immense colored advertisements of tobacco or breakfast foods flame from windowless side walls, and the ever-present three brass balls gleam merrily in the sunlight. But the poverty is unmistakable. You see it in the tradesman’s well-substantiated boast that here is “the cheapest house for furniture and carpets in the city.” You see it in the small store, eking out an existence with cigars and toys and candy. You see it in the ragged coats and broken shoes of the boys playing in the street; in the bareheaded, poorly dressed women carrying home their small purchases in oil-cloth bags; in the grocer’s amazing values in “strictly fresh” eggs; in the ablebodied loafers who lounge in the vicinity of the corner saloon, subsisting presumably on the toil of more conscientious brothers and sisters. And in one other feature besides its indigence Tenth Avenue is typical of this district. At the corner of Fiftieth Street stands the shell of what was once a flourishing settlement, and beside it a smaller building which was once a church. Both, as regards their original uses, are now deserted. Both are a concrete expression not merely of failure, but of failure acquiesced in. These West Side streets are more than poor. They have ceased to struggle in their slough of despond, and have forgotten to be dissatisfied with their poverty.

Eleventh Avenue is much more dirty and disconsolate. In its dingy tenements live some of the poorest and most degraded families of this district. On the west side of the avenue and lining the cross streets are machine shops, gas tanks, abattoirs, breweries, warehouses, piano factories, and coal and lumber yards whose barges cluster around the nearby piers. Sixty years ago this avenue, in contrast to the fair farm land upon which the rest of the district grew up, was a stretch of barren and rocky shore, ending at Forty-second Street in the flat unhealthy desolation of the Great Kill Swamp. Land in such a deserted neighborhood was cheap and little sought for, and permission to use it was readily given to the Hudson River Railroad.[6] Today the franchise, still continued under its old conditions, is an anomaly. All day and night, to and from the Central’s yard at Thirtieth Street, long freight trains pass hourly through the heterogeneous mass of trucks, pedestrians, and playing children; and though they now go slowly and a flagman stands at every corner, “Death Avenue” undoubtedly deserves its name.

De Witt Clinton Park, the only public play space in the district, lies westward between Fifty-second and Fifty-fourth Streets. It is better known as “The Lane” from days, not so long ago, when a pathway here ran down to the river, and on either side of it the last surviving farm land gave the tenement children a playground, and the young couples of the neighborhood a place to stroll in. The usual well kept and restrained air of a small city park is very noticeable here. There is almost no grass, the swings and running tracks are, perhaps necessarily, caged by tall iron fences, and uninteresting asphalt paths cover a considerable part of the limited area. A large stone pergola, though of course it has obvious uses, somehow deepens the impression that an opportunity was lost in the laying out of this place. At one side of the pergola, however, lie the plots of the school farm in which small groups of boys and girls may often be seen at work. Little attempt has been made to develop a play center in the park. On a fine Saturday afternoon it is often practically empty.[7]

Tenth Avenue

Eleventh (“Death”) Avenue]

Twelfth Avenue adjoins the Hudson River, losing itself here and there in wharves and pier-heads. Two of the piers belong to the city, one being devoted to the disposal of garbage, the other to recreation. Factories and an occasional saloon are on the inland side, but there are almost no shacks or tenements.

At first sight there are no striking features about the Middle West Side. Hand-to-mouth existence reduces living to a universal sameness which has little time or place for variety. In street after street are the same crowded and unsanitary tenements; the same untended groups of playing children; the same rough men gathered round the stores and saloons on the avenue; the same sluggish women grouped on the steps of the tenements in the cross streets. The visitor will find no rambling shacks, no conventional criminal’s alleys; only square, dull, monotonous ugliness, much dirt, and a great deal of apathy.

The very lack of salient features is the supreme characteristic of this neighborhood. The most noticeable fact about it is that there is nothing to notice. It is earmarked by negativeness. There is usually a lifelessness about the streets and buildings, even at their best, which is reflected in the attitude of the people who live in them. The whole scene is dull, drab, uninteresting, totally devoid of the color and picturesqueness which give to so many poor districts a character and fascination of their own. Tenth Avenue and the streets west of it are lacking in the crowds and bustle and brilliant lights of the East Side. Eleventh Avenue by night is almost dark, and throughout the district are long stretches of poorly lit cross streets in which only the dingy store windows shine feebly. Over the East River great bridges throw necklaces of light across the water; here the North River is dark and unspanned.

What is it that has brought about this condition? Why is this part of New York so utterly featureless and depressing? The answer lies primarily not with the present or past inhabitants, but in the isolation and neglect to which for years it has been subjected. Much of the Middle West Side was once naturally attractive, with prosperous homesteads and cottages with gardens.[8] But while other parts of Manhattan were being developed as a city, the Middle West Side was left severely alone. It was one of the last sections of the city to become thickly populated. When the first factories arrived, they brought the tenements in their wake. The worst kinds of tenements were hastily built—anything was supposed to be good enough for the poor Irish who settled there; and these tenements have long survived in spite of their dilapidated condition because until recently there has been no one who cared for the rough and dull West Sider. East Side problems were much more picturesque and inviting. So our district has grown up under a heritage of desolation and neglect, uninteresting to look at, unpleasant to live in, overlooked, unsympathized with, and neglected into aloofness, till today its static population is almost isolated from and little affected by the life of the rest of the city. The casual little horse car which jingles up Tenth Avenue four times an hour is typical of the West Sider’s home, just as the Draft Riots of 1863 were typical of his temper.

The nationalities which largely form the basis of the population on the Middle West Side are the German and the Irish, the latter predominating.[9] Peculiar to the district is the large number of families of the second generation with parents who have been born and brought up in the immediate neighborhood.

The nationality of the American-born parents throws additional light on the subject of racial make-up of the population.[10] There were 81 American-born fathers and 92 American-born mothers in the 241 families. The parentage of 67 American-born fathers for whom information was available was as follows: 28, German; 21, Irish; 15, American; and 3, English. The parentage of 73 American-born mothers was: 28, German; 25, Irish; 18, American; and 2, English. The country of birth of parents of 14 of the American-born fathers and 19 of the American-born mothers could not be ascertained.[11]

We are accustomed to regard the German as the best of European emigrants. He brings with him a thrift and solidity which have taught us to depend on him. He has been a welcome immigrant as he has become a successful citizen. Yet here are large numbers of Germans living in a wild no-man’s-land which has a criminal record scarcely surpassed by any other district in New York. Surely this is more than a case of the exception proving the rule. It shows that our estimate of the Middle West Side is correct.

The district is like a spider’s web. Of those who come to it very few, either by their own efforts, or through outside agency, ever leave it. Now and then a boy is taken to the country or a family moves to the Bronx, but this happens comparatively seldom. Usually those who come to live here find at first (like Yorick’s starling) that they cannot get out, and presently that they do not want to. It is not that conditions throughout the district are economically extreme, although greater misery and worse poverty cannot be found in other parts of New York. But there is something in the dullness of these West Side streets and the traditional apathy of their tenants that crushes the wish for anything better and kills the hope of change. It is as though decades of lawlessness and neglect have formed an atmospheric monster, beyond the power and understanding of its creators, overwhelming German and Irish alike.

Such, in brief, is the background of the West Side boy. It is a gray picture, so gray that the casual visitor to these streets may think it over-painted. But this is because a superficial glance at the Middle West Side is peculiarly misleading. So much lies below the surface. It is obvious that this district has come to be singularly unattractive, and that its methods of life are extraordinarily rough. And it is equally true that hundreds of boys never know any other place or life than this, and that most of their offenses against the law are the direct result of their surroundings. The charges brought against them in court are only in part against the boys themselves. The indictment is in the main against the city which considers itself the greatest and most progressive in the New World, for allowing any of its children to start the battle of life so poorly equipped and so handicapped for becoming efficient American citizens. Not that these youngsters have not their share of “devilment” and original sin, but in estimating the work of the juvenile court with the boys of this neighborhood, it is absolutely essential to bear in mind not only the crimes they commit, but their chances for escaping criminality. If heredity and environment have any meaning, Tenth Avenue has much to answer for.

CHAPTER II
HIS PLAYGROUND

The boy himself is blissfully untroubled by any serious thoughts about his background; and to him these streets are as a matter of course a place to play in. This point of view is perfectly natural for several reasons:

In the first place, he has never known any other playground. At the earliest possible stage of infancy he is turned out, perhaps under an older sister’s supervision, to crawl over the steps of the tenement or tumble about in the gutter in front of it, watching with large eyes the new sights around him. Here he is put to play, and here he learns to imitate the street and sidewalk games of other boys and girls. He is scarcely to be blamed for a point of view so universally held that it never occurs to him to doubt it.

In the second place, the street is the place that he must play in, whether he wants to or not. There is no room for him in the house; the janitor usually chases him off the roof. Excepting De Witt Clinton Park, which, as has been shown, is small, restricted, and inadequate, there is no park on the West Side between Seventy-second and Twenty-eighth Streets. Central Park and New Jersey are too inaccessible to be his regular playgrounds. And besides, not only will a boy not go far afield for his games, but he cannot. He is often needed at home after school hours to run errands and make himself generally useful. Moreover, to go any distance involves a question of food and transportation; so that except at times of truancy and wanderlust, or when he is away on some baseball or other expedition, the street inevitably claims him.

Bounce Ball with Wall as Base

Property is safe

Bounce Ball with Steps as Base

Windows in danger

And in the third place, just because this playground is so natural and so inevitable, he becomes attached to it. It is the earliest, latest, and greatest influence in his life. Long before he knew his alphabet it began to educate him, and before he could toddle it was his nursery. Every possible minute from babyhood to early manhood is spent in it. Every day, winter and summer, he is here off and on from early morning till 10 o’clock at night. It gives him a training in which school is merely a repressive interlude. From the quiet of the class room he hears its voice, and when lessons are over it shouts a welcome at the door. The attractions that it offers ever vary. Now a funeral, now a fire; “craps” on the sidewalk; a stolen ride on one of Death Avenue’s freight trains; a raid on a fruit stall; a fight, an accident, a game of “cat”—always fresh incident and excitement, always nerve-racking kaleidoscopic confusion.

No wonder, then, that the streets are regarded by the boy as his rightful playground. They are the most constant and vivid part of his life. They provide companionship, invite to recklessness, and offer concealment. Every year their attraction grows stronger, till their lure becomes irresistible and his life is swallowed up in theirs.

But unfortunately for the boy everyone does not agree with him as to his right of possession. The storekeeper, for instance, insists on the incompatibility of a vigorous street ball game with the safety of his plate glass windows. Drivers not unreasonably maintain that the road is for traffic rather than for marbles or stone throwing. Property owner, pedestrian, the hardworking citizen, each has a point of view which does not altogether favor the playground theory. At the very outset of his career, therefore, in attempting to exercise childhood’s inalienable right to play, the boy finds himself colliding with the rights of property; the maintenance of public safety, the enforcement of law and order, and other things equally puzzling and annoying, all apparently united in being inimical to his ideas of amusement. He is too young to understand that in his city’s scheme children were forgotten. No one can explain to him that he has been born in a congested area where lack of play space must be accepted patiently; that life is a process of give and take in which the rights of others demand as much respect as his own. He does not know that his dilemma is the problem which eternally confronts the city child. But he does know that he must play. He has a store of nervous energy and animal spirits which simply must be let loose. Yet when he tries to play under the only conditions possible to him he is hampered and repressed at every turn. Inevitably he revolts; and long before he is old enough to learn why most of his street games are illegal, fun and law-breaking have become to him inseparable, and the policeman his natural enemy.

So far the boy’s attitude is normal. Childish antagonism to arbitrary authority is natural. In any large town it extends to the police. All over New York games are played with one eye on the corner and often with a small scout or two on the watch for the “cop.” But at this point two facts differentiate the Middle West Side from the rest of the city, and make its situation peculiar. On the one hand, the parents and older people of the district, instead of showing the usual indifference or at most a passive antipathy toward the police, openly conspire against and are actively hostile to them. On the other, the police, largely because of this neighborhood feeling, are utterly unable to cope with the lawless conditions which they find around them.

This state of things has been brought about in various ways. The lurid record of criminals in the district has for years necessitated methods of policing which have not made the Irish temper any less excitable. Public sentiment here is almost static, and hatred of the police has become a tradition. No one has a good word for them; everyone’s hand is against them. The boys look on them as spoil-sports and laugh at their authority. The toughs and gangsters are at odds with them perforce. Fathers and mothers, resenting the trivial arrests of their children, consign the “cop,” the “dinny” (detective), and “the Gerrys” to outer darkness together. The better class of residents and property owners, though their own failure to properly support them is partly to blame for the failure of the police to do their duty, frankly distrust them for being so completely incompetent and ineffective. And now perhaps no one would dare to support them. For the toughs of the district have taken the law into their own hands, and with the relentlessness and certainty of a Corsican vendetta every injury received by them is repaid, sooner or later, by some act of pitiless retaliation. Honest or dishonest, successful or otherwise, the policeman certainly has a hard time of it. Wherever he goes he is dangerously unpopular. He cannot be safely active or inactive, and whatever he does seems to add to his difficulties. Hectored on duty, frequently bullied in court, misunderstood and abused by press and public alike, he stands out solitary, the butt and buffer of the neighborhood’s disorder.

It is scarcely remarkable that under these circumstances the guardian of the law is bewildered, and tends to become unreasonably touchy and suspicious. “I tried to start a club in a saloon on Fiftieth Street a while ago,” said a young Irishman of twenty-five. “After we had had the club running one night, a policeman came in and asked me for my license. I told him I didn’t have any. He said he would have to break up the club then. I kicked about this and he pinched me. They brought me up for trial next morning, and the judge told me I would have to close up my club. I asked him why, and said the club was perfectly orderly and was just made up of young fellows in the neighborhood; and he said, ‘Well, your club has a bad reputation, and you’ve got to break it up.’ Now, how could a club have a bad reputation when it had only been running one day? Tell me that? But that’s the way of it. Those cops will give you a bad reputation in five minutes if you never had one before in your life.” “The cops are always arresting us and letting us go again,” said a small West Sider. “I’ve been taken up two or three times for throwing stones and playing ball, but they never took me to the station house yet. You can’t play baseball anywhere around here without the cops getting you.” And so it has come about that relations between police and people in this section of New York are abnormally strained. Provocation is followed by reaction, and reaction by reprisal and a constant aggravation of annoyances, till the tension continually reaches breaking point.

This situation shows very definite results in the boy. Gradually his play becomes more and more mischievous as he finds it easier to evade capture. Boylike, his delight in wanton and malicious destruction is increased by the knowledge that he will probably escape punishment. Six-year-old Dennis opens the door of the Children’s Aid Society school and throws a large stone into the hall full of children. Another youngster of about the same age recently was seen trying for several minutes to break one of the street lamps. He threw stone after stone until finally the huge globe fell with a crash that could have been heard a block. Then he ran off down the street and disappeared around the corner. No one attempted to stop him; no one would tell who he was. Later on, the boy begins to admire and model himself on the perpetrators of picturesque crimes whom he sees walking unarrested in the streets around him. And by the time that he reaches the gang age he is usually a hardened little ruffian whom the safety of numbers encourages to carry his play to intolerable lengths. He robs, steals, gets drunk, carries firearms, and his propensity for fighting with stones and bottles is so marked that for days whole streets have been terrorized by his feuds. Insurance companies either ask prohibitive rates for window glass in this neighborhood or flatly refuse to insure it at all.

Meanwhile the police are not idle. Public opinion and their own records at the station house demand a certain amount of activity, and every week the playground sees its arrests. In the following table we have classified by causes, from our own intimate knowledge of each individual case, the arrests which took place during 1909 among the boys of our 241 families. The court’s legal system of classification has been discarded here in favor of the classification made to show the real nature of each offense. The result illustrates how entirely police intervention has failed to meet the issue in the district, and consequently explains in part why the work of the children’s court with boys from this neighborhood has not proved more effectual.

[a] For the classification of these arrests according to the court charges see Chapter VI, The Boy and the Court, p. 82.

Not only is this table extraordinarily interesting in itself, but its importance to our investigation is inestimable, because it brings out certain features of the problem with a vividness which could not be equaled in pages of discussion or narrative.

On the one hand, it is noticeable how large a proportion of the arrests are for offenses which are more or less excusable in these boys. Almost every one of their offenses is due to one of four causes: neglect on the part of the parent, the pressure of poverty, the expression of pure boyish spirits, or the attempt to play. Thievery, for instance, particularly the stealing of coal from the docks or railroad tracks, is quite often encouraged at home. “Johnnie is a good boy,” said one mother quite frankly. “He keeps the coal and wood box full nearly all the time. I don’t have to buy none.” And her attitude is typical. Shouting and singing too, and even loitering, do not seem on the face of them overwhelmingly wicked. Of course, boys sometimes choose the most impossible times and places in which to shout and sing, but is no allowance to be made for “the spirit of youth”? And as for the arrests for play, they speak for themselves. Some of these games, played when and where they are played, are unquestionably dangerous to passersby and property, while others are simply forms of gambling. But it must be remembered that the West Side boy has nowhere else to play; that his games are the games which he sees around him, and he plays them because no one has taught him anything better. The policeman, however, has no interest in the responsibility of the boys for their offenses; he is concerned merely with offenses as such, and his arrests must be determined chiefly by opportunity and by rule. All that we can ask of him is to be tolerant, broad-minded, and sympathetic—a request with which he will find it difficult enough to comply if only because of the atmosphere of hostility against him.

On the other hand, it is remarkable how seldom the boys are caught for very serious offenses.[12] Most of the arrests shown here are for causes which are comparatively trifling. Yet the whole neighborhood seethes with the worst kinds of criminality, and many of the boys are almost incredibly vicious. Stabbing, assault, the use of firearms, acts of immorality, do not appear in this table to an extent remotely approximating the frequency with which they occur. In other words, the police absolutely fail to cover the ground. Although a large proportion of arrests does take place, they are mostly on less important charges, and often involve any one but the young criminal whose capture is really desirable. The little sister of one boy who was “taken” expressed the position exactly when she said, “The only time Jimmy was caught was when he wasn’t doin’ anything bad.”

In this way it happens that the fact of a boy’s arrest is no clue to his character. Again and again boys “get away with” their worst crimes, secretly committed, in which they are protected from discovery by the neighborhood’s code of ethics; whereas for minor offenses, of which they are openly guilty, they are far more likely to be arrested. Some of the worst offenders may never be caught at all. And if one of them is taken, it is probably for some technical misdemeanor which the officer has used less for its own importance than as a pretext for getting the boy into court. What is the result? The policeman is lectured by the judge for being an oppressor of the poor, and the boy is discharged, though his previous record would entitle him to a severe sentence, as both boy and policeman know.

Not unnaturally, respect for the court is soon lost, and an arrest quickly comes to be treated with indifference, or is looked upon merely as a piece of bad luck, like a licking or a broken window. One boy recounted recently with amusement how he moved the judge to let him off: “I put on a solemn face and says, ‘Judge, I didn’t mean to do it; I’ll promise not to do it again,’ and a lot of stuff like that, and the judge gives me a talkin’ to and lets me go.” “Gee, that court was easy!” was the comment of another. “You can get away with anything down there except murder.” Experiences in the juvenile court are invariably related with a boyish contempt for the judges, who are looked upon either as “easy guys to work” or as “a lot of crooks” who “get theirs” out of their jobs. And so the boy comes back to the streets, and plays there more selfishly and more recklessly than ever.

His activities are not confined to the block in which he lives or even to the streets of his neighborhood. Any kind of space, from a roof or an area to a cellar or an empty basement, is utilized as an addition to the playground. But two places attract him particularly. All the year around at some time of day or night you can find him on the docks. In summer they provide a ball ground, in winter, coal for his family, and always a hiding place from the truant officer or the police. Here along the river front he bathes in the hot weather, encouraged by the city’s floating bath which anchors close by, and regardless of the fact that the water is filthy with refuse and sewage. In the stifling evenings, too, when the band plays on the recreation pier and there are lights and crowds and “somethin’ goin’ on,” he is again drawn toward the water.

Wading in Sewage Laden Water

A “Den” Under the Dock

And next to the streets and docks he loves the hallways. There is something about those dark, narrow passages which makes them seem built for gangs to meet or play or plot in. The youth of the district and his girl find other uses for them, but the boy and his playmates have marked them for their games. Neighbors who have no other place to “hang around in” may protest, but the boys play on. They dirty the floors, disturb the tenements by their noises, run into people, and if they are lying here in wait are apt to chip away the wainscoting or tear the burlap off the walls. But what do they care! It’s all in the day’s play; and if the janitor objects, so much the better, for he can often be included in a game of chase.

Streets, roofs, docks, hallways,—these, then, are the West Side boy’s playground, and will be for many years to come. And what a playground it is! Day and night, workdays and holidays alike, the streets are never quiet, from the half-hour before the factory whistles blow in the early morning, when throngs of men and boys are hurrying off to work, to still earlier morning hours when they echo with the footsteps of the reveler returning home. All day long an endless procession of wagons, drays, and trucks, with an occasional automobile, jolts and clatters up and down the avenue. Now and then an ambulance or undertaker’s cart arrives, drawing its group of curious youngsters to watch the casket or stretcher carried out. Drunken men are omnipresent, and drunken women are seen. Street fights are frequent, especially in the evening, and, except for police annoyance or when “guns” come into play, are generally regarded as diversions. Every crime, every villainy, every form of sexual indulgence and perversion is practiced in the district and talked of openly. The sacredness of life itself finds no protecting influence in these blocks. There is no rest, no order, no privacy, no spaciousness, no simplicity; almost nothing that youth, the city’s everlasting hope, should have, almost everything that it should not.

A family from another state moved recently into one of these tenements. The only child, a boy of fifteen, after several tentative efforts to reconcile himself to street life, came in and announced his intention of staying in the flat in leisure time thereafter, as he was shocked and his finer feelings were hurt by what he saw of the street life around him. His mother tried to persuade him to go out, but the boy told her she had no idea what she was doing, and refused to go. He attempted to take his airings on the roof, but was ordered down by the janitor. Finally he yielded to his mother’s persuasion and went back to the street. Within three months this boy, a type of the bright, clean boyhood of our smaller towns, had become marked by dissipation and had once even come home intoxicated.

What chance has the best of boys who must spend two-thirds of his school days in such a playground? What wonder that he becomes a callous young criminal, when the very conditions of his play lead him to crime? The whole influence of such conditions on a child’s life can never be gauged. But just as apart from his traditions and background he is incomprehensible as a boy, so, as a wanton little ruffian, he is unintelligible apart from his playground. This develops his play into mischief and his mischief into crime. It educates him superficially in the worst sides of life, and makes him cynical, hard, and precocious. It takes from him everything that is good; almost everything that it gives him is bad. Its teachings and tendencies are not civic but anti-social, and the boy reflects them more and more. Every year he adds to a history of lawless achievement which the court, police, and institutions alike have proved powerless to prevent. And every day the Middle West Side bears witness to the truth of the saying that “a boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job.”

CHAPTER III
HIS GAMES

It would be impossible to describe the thousand and one uses to which the West Side boy puts his playground. After all, the street is not such a bad place to play in if you have known nothing better; and as you tumble out of school on a fine afternoon, ready for mischief, it offers you almost anything, from a fight with your best friend to a ride on the steps of an ice wagon. But certain games and sports are so universal in this district as to deserve separate mention.

Spring is the season for marbles. On any clear day in March or February you may find the same scene on roadway and sidewalks of every block—a huddle of multicolored marbles in the middle of a ring, and a group of excited youngsters, shrieking, quarreling, and tumbling all over each other, just outside the circle. Instead of the time-honored chalk ring the boys often use the covers of a manhole, whose corrugated iron surface offers obstacles and therefore gives opportunity for unusual skill. Another game consists in shooting marbles to a straight line drawn along the middle of the sidewalk; thus one such game may be continued through the whole length of the block. In another the marbles are pitched against a brick wall or against the curbstone, and the boy whose marbles stop closest to a chalked mark wins the marbles of all competitors.

As the fall days grow shorter and the afternoons more crisp, bonfires become the rage. The small boy has an aptitude for finding wood at need in places where one would suppose that no fuel of any kind would be obtainable. A careless grocer leaves a barrel of waste upon the sidewalk. In five minutes’ time that barrel may be burning in the middle of the street with a group of cheering youngsters warming their hands at the blaze, or watching it from their seats on the curbstone. The grocer may berate the boys and threaten disaster to the one who lit the barrel, but he is seldom able to find the culprit. Before the barrel is completely burned some youngster produces a stick or two which he has found in an areaway or pulled from a passing wagon, and adds it to the fire. Stray newspapers, bits of excelsior, rags, and even garbage are contributed to keep the fire going, regardless of the effect on the olfactory nerves of the neighborhood. The police extinguish these fires whenever they can, but the small boy meets this contingency by posting scouts, and on the alarm of “Cheese it!” the fire is stamped out and the embers are hastily concealed. The “cop” sniffs at the smoke and looks at the boys suspiciously, but suspicions do not bother the boys—they are used to them—and when he has passed on down the street the fragments of the fire are reassembled and lighted again. On a cold evening one may see half a dozen of these bonfires flaming in different directions, each with a group of small figures playing around them. Sticks are thrust into the fire and waved in figures in the air; and among them very often circle larger and brighter spots of light which glow into a full flame when the motion ceases. These are fire pots, an ingenious invention consisting of an empty tomato can with a wire loop attached to the top by which to swing it, and filled with burning wood. This amusement might seem harmless enough if it were not for the fact that these fire pots, being of small boy construction, have an unfortunate habit of slipping from the wire loop just as they are being most rapidly hurled.

On election night, until recently, the boys’ traditional right of making bonfires has been observed. These bonfires are sometimes elaborate. As early as the middle of October the youngsters begin hoarding wood for the great occasion. They pile the fuel in the rear of a tenement or in the areaway or basement of some friendly grocer, or perhaps in a vacant lot or at the rear of a factory. Frequently to save their plunder they find it necessary to post guards for the few days preceding election, and even so, bonfire material often becomes the center of a furious gang fight. A few of the stronger gangs have a settled policy of letting some other gang collect their fuel for them, and then raiding them at the last minute. The victors carry the wood back triumphantly to their own block, and the vanquished are left either to collect afresh or to make reprisal on a still weaker gang. This kind of warfare continues even while the fires are burning on election night. A gang will swoop down unawares on a rival bonfire, scatter the burning material, and retire with the unburnt pieces to their own block.[13] A recent election time, however, proved a gloomy one for the little West Siders. Wagons appeared in the streets, filled with fire hose and manned by firemen and police. The police scattered the boys while the firemen drenched the fires, and by 8 o’clock the streets, formerly so picturesque and so dangerous, presented a sad and sober appearance. The tenement lights shone out on heaps of blackened embers and on groups of despairing youngsters who were not even permitted to stand on the corners and contemplate the destruction of their evening’s festivities.

In the winter the shortcomings of the street as a playground are especially evident. Frost and sleet and a bitter wind give few compensations for the discomfort which they bring. Traffic, the street cleaning department, and the vagaries of the New York climate, make most ways of playing in the snow impossible. But snowballing continues, in spite of the efforts of the police to prevent it. It is open to the same objections as baseball in the street, for the freedom which is possible in the small towns or in the country cannot be tolerated in a crowded district where a snowball which misses one mark is almost certain to hit another. Moreover, owing to the facility with which these boys take to dangerous forms of sport, the practice of making snowballs with a stone or a piece of coal in the middle and soaking them in ice water is even more prevalent here than in most other localities. Of course, snowballing is forbidden and abhorred by the neighborhood, and everyone takes a hand in chastising the juvenile snowball thrower. Nevertheless, the afternoon of the first fall is sure to bring a snow fight, and the innocent passerby is likely to be involuntarily included in the game.

Marbles and bonfires and snowballs are the sports of the smaller boys exclusively, but other games which are less seasonal are played by old and young alike. “Shooting craps,” for instance, and pitching or matching pennies, are occupations which endure all the year round and are participated in by grown men as well as by boys. On a Sunday morning dozens of crap games are usually in full swing along the streets. Only two players handle the dice, but almost any number of bystanders can take part by betting amongst themselves on the throw—“fading,” as it is called. Pennies, dimes, or dollar bills, according to the prosperity of the bettor, will be thrown upon the sidewalk, for craps is one of the cheapest and most vicious forms of gambling, since there is absolutely no restriction in the betting. Perfect strangers may join in at will if the players will let them, and there are innumerable opportunities for playing with crooked dice. It is one of the chief forms of sidewalk amusements in this neighborhood.

Up above the sidewalks, on the roofs of the tenements, there is some flying of small kites, but pigeon flying is the chief sport. It provides an occupation less immediately remunerative, perhaps, than games of chance, but developed by the same unmoral tendencies which seem to turn all play in the district into vice. Some boys, through methods of accretion peculiar to this neighborhood, have a score or more of pigeons which are kept in the house, and taken up to the roof regularly every Sunday, and oftener during the summer, for exercise. The birds are tamed and carefully taught to return to their home roofs after flight, but ingenious boys have discovered many ways of luring them to alien roofs, so that now the sport of pigeon flying is as dangerously exciting as a commercial venture in the days of the pirates. Pigeon owners also train their birds to circle about the neighborhood and bring back strangers. These strangers are taken inside, fed, and accustomed to the place before they are released again. On Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings the pigeons are to be seen flying around the neighborhood, while behind the chimneys of every fourth or fifth tenement house are crouched one or two small boys armed with long sticks, occasionally giving a low peculiar whistle to attract the pigeons coming from distant roofs. The sticks have a triple use. Pigeon owners use them to force their pigeons to fly for exercise; the little pigeon thieves on the roofs have a net on the end of their sticks for catching the bird when it alights; and most pigeons are trained to remain passive at the touch of the stick so that they may be picked up easily by their owner. This training, of course, operates to the advantage of the thief as well as of the owner, and valuable birds are sometimes lured away and held for ransom.

Pigeon Flying. A Roof Game

Marbles. A Street Game

The two chief sports of the Middle West Side—baseball and boxing—are perennial. The former, played as it always is, with utter carelessness and disregard of surroundings, is theoretically intolerable, but it flourishes despite constant complaints and interference. The diamond is marked out on the roadway, the bases indicated by paving bricks, sticks, or newspapers. Frequently guards are placed at each end of the block to warn of the approach of police. One minute a game is in full swing; the next, a scout cries “Cheese it!” Balls, bats, and gloves disappear with an alacrity due to a generation of practice, and when the “cop” appears round the corner the boys will be innocently strolling down the streets. Notwithstanding these precautions, as the juvenile court records show, they are constantly being caught. In a great majority of these match games too much police vigilance cannot be exercised, for a game between a dozen or more boys, of from fourteen to eighteen years of age, with a league ball, in a crowded street, with plate glass windows on either side, becomes a joke to no one but the participants. A foul ball stands innumerable chances of going through the third-story window of a tenement, or of making a bee line through the valuable plate glass window of a store on the street level, or of hitting one of the passersby. And if the hit is a fair one, it is as likely as not to land on the forehead of a restive horse, or to strike some little child on the sidewalk farther down the street. When one sees the words “Arrested for playing with a hard ball in a public street” written on a coldly impersonal record card in the children’s court one is apt to become indignant. But when you see the same hard ball being batted through a window or into a group of little children on this same public street, the matter assumes an entirely different aspect.

Clearly, from the community’s point of view, the playing of baseball in the street is rightly a penal offense. It annoys citizens, injures persons and property, and interferes with traffic. But for all that, it is not abolished, and probably under present municipal conditions never will be, simply because there is another point of view, that of the boy, and his protest against its suppression is almost equally unanswerable. The store windows are filled with a tempting array of baseball gloves and bats offered at prices as close as possible to his means, and every effort is made by responsible business men, who themselves know the law and the need for order on the streets, to induce him to buy them. Selling the boy those bats and balls is a form of business and is perfectly legal. And the boy cannot see why, after having paid his money for them, the merchant should have all the benefit of the transaction. The game is in itself perfectly harmless; and childhood has an abiding resentment against apparently inexplicable injustice. Perhaps the small boy believes that except for the odds against him his right to make use of the street in his own way is as assured as that of anyone else. Perhaps he reflects that he too has to make sacrifices; that a broken window means usually a lost ball, and a damaged citizen, a ruined game. At any rate he continues to play, and as things are, has a fairly good case for doing so.

This neighborhood is also full of regularly organized ball teams, ranging in the age of players from ten to thirty years. Many of the large factories have teams made up of their own employes. Almost every street gang has its own team, as has almost every social club. These teams meet in regularly matched games, on the waterfront, in the various city parks, or over in New Jersey. Practically all the teams, old and young alike, play for stakes, ranging from two to five dollars a side. When they do not, they call it simply a “friendly” game. There is no organization among them; one team challenges another, and the two will decide on some place to play the game. A few of the adult teams lease Sunday grounds in New Jersey, but most of them trust to the chance of finding one. The baseball leaders of the neighborhood usually have uniforms, and to belong to a uniformed team is one of the great ambitions of the West Side boy.

Down on the waterfront the broad, smooth quays offer a tempting place for baseball, especially on Sundays and summer evenings, when they are generally bare of freight. But it has one serious drawback, that a foul ball on one side invariably goes into the river, and the players must have either several balls or a willing swimmer if the game is to continue long. One Sunday game, for instance, between two fourteen-year-old teams, played near the water, cost five balls, varying in price from 50 cents to $1.00 each. The game was played before a scrap-iron yard, the high fence of which was used as a backstop. Fifty feet to the right was the Hudson River. Within a hundred feet of second base, in the center field, a slip reached from the line of the river to the street, which was just beyond third base on the other side. Behind the sixteen-foot fence of the scrap-iron yard were a savage dog at large and a morose watchman to keep out river thieves. Thus hemmed in by water on two sides, a street car line and a row of glass windows on the third side, and a high fence, a savage dog, and a watchman on the fourth, the boys started the game. In the first inning a new dollar ball was fouled over the fence into the scrap-iron yard and the watchman refused to let the boys in to hunt for it. The game was stopped while a deputation of boys from both sides walked up to a nearby street to buy a new fifty-cent ball. The first boy up when the game was resumed batted this ball into the Hudson River, where a youthful swimmer got it, and climbing ashore down the river, made away with it. A third ball was secured, and before the game was half over this ball was batted into the river, where it lodged underneath a barge full of paving stones which was made fast to the dock, and could not be recovered. Then a fourth ball was produced. This lasted till the game was almost finished, though it was once batted deep into center field, where it bounced into the slip and stopped the game while it was being fished out. Finally it followed the first ball into the scrap-iron yard, and neither taunts nor pleas could move the obdurate watchman to let the boys in to find it. The game was finished with a fifth ball which was the personal property of one of the boys. On the occasion of another game in this same place two balls were batted into the scrap-iron yard and lost while the teams were warming up before the match began. A third ball was batted into the river twice but both times it was recovered. Baseball is played on the docks unmodified, but in the streets the boys make use of various adaptations, some of which dispense with the bat and in consequence lessen the dangers of the game.

Ball playing continues sporadically all the year round, and never loses popularity, but it is, of course, mainly a game for the summer. During the winter among the small boys, youths, and men alike, boxing is the all-absorbing sport. It is hard for an outsider to understand the tremendous hold which prize fighting has upon the boys in a neighborhood of this kind. Fights are of course of common occurrence, not only among children but among grown men. This in itself gives a great impetus to the study of the art of self-defense. Good fighters become known early in this district. Professional prize fighters are everywhere; and for every boy who has actually succeeded in getting into the prize ring on one or more occasions, there are a dozen who are eager and anxious for an opportunity. The various athletic clubs of the city always offer chances to boys from fourteen to sixteen years old to appear in the “preliminaries,” as the boxing contests which precede the main bout of the evening are called. A boy who gains a reputation as a street fighter and boxer will be recommended to the manager of an athletic club as a likely aspirant. He is given a chance to box in one or two rounds with another would-be prize fighter in a “preliminary.” If he makes a good showing, he is paid from five to fifteen dollars according to his ability and experience, and is given another chance. If he can continue to make favorable appearances in these preliminaries, he will soon be given a chance of taking part in a six or eight-round bout at one of the smaller athletic clubs, and from that time on he takes regular status as a prize fighter, and accordingly becomes a hero in his circle of youthful acquaintances. There are many such small prize fighters in our district, none of them over twenty-one years of age, and all earning just enough to make it possible to lead a life of indolence. If they can make ten or fifteen dollars by appearing in a ring once a week, they are quite content.

But boxing and street fighting by no means always go together on the Middle West Side. The real professional boxers of the neighborhood dissociate them in practice as well as in theory; they take their profession for what it is—a game to be played in a sportsmanlike manner—and they are usually good-natured. One of the best known prize fighters of the city, who lives on the Middle West Side, states that it is years since he was mixed up in a fight of any kind. “I box because I like the game,” he said, “but I’ve no use for fighting.”

Prize Fighters in Training

Craps with Money at Stake

Another man, an exceedingly clever lightweight boxer, who has appeared several times in the ring in New York City clubs, was boxing one night with a rather crude amateur. The bout was really for the instruction of the amateur, and both boxers were going very easily by agreement. Suddenly the amateur landed an unintentionally hard blow upon the eye of his opponent, just as the latter was stepping forward. The eye became fearfully discolored and the whole side of the boxer’s face swelled. But in spite of his evident feeling that the amateur had taken an unfair advantage in striking so hard when his opponent was off his guard, the lightweight fighter laughed and submitted to treatment for the eye without losing his temper in the least, and freely accepted the apologies of the other.

This is boxing at its best, but unfortunately its tendencies are more usually toward unfairness and brutality than otherwise. Boys are taught to box early in this district. It is not uncommon to see a bout between youngsters of seven or eight being watched by a crowd of young men, who encourage the combatants by cheering every successful blow, but pay no attention to palpable fouls or obvious attempts to take a dishonest advantage. Even some of the best of the prize fighters frankly say that once in the ring the extent to which they foul is only a question of how much they can deceive the referee. And when this questionable code of ethics is passed on by these heroes and leaders of sentiment to the boys who have no referee and no thought beyond that of winning by disabling an opponent as much as possible, the sport degenerates into an unfair and tricky test of endurance. Striking with the open hand, kicking, tripping, hitting in a clinch, all these unfair practices are considered a great advantage if one can “get away with it.” The West Side youngster sees very little of the real professional boxers who, from the very nature of their somewhat strenuous employment, must keep in good condition, as a rule retire early, drink little, and do a great deal of hard gymnastic work. But of their brutalized hangers-on, the “bruisers,” who frequent the saloons and street corners and pose as real fighters, he sees a great deal; consequently, as a whole, prize fighting must be classed as one of the worst influences of the neighborhood. It is too closely allied with street fighting, and too easily turned to criminal purposes. The bully who learns to box will use his acquired knowledge as a means of enforcing his superiority on the street, and if he is beaten will have recourse to weapons or any other means of maintaining his prestige.

Baseball and boxing bring to a close the list of common outdoor games played by boys on the Middle West Side,—just ordinary games, modified by a particular environment and played in a shifting and spasmodic way which is characteristic of it. It remains to emphasize the lesson taught by their effects on boy life as they are practiced in this neighborhood.

The philosophy of the West Side youngster is practical and not speculative. Otherwise he could not fail to notice very early in his career that the world in general, from the mother who bundles him out of an overcrowded tenement in the morning, to the grown-ups in the street playground where most of his time is spent, seem to think him very much in the way. All day long this fact is borne in upon him. If a wagon nearly runs over him the driver lashes him with the whip as he passes to teach him to “watch out.” If he plays around a store door the proprietor gives him a cuff or a kick to get rid of him. If he runs into someone he is pushed into the gutter to teach him better. And if he is complained of as a nuisance the policeman whacks him with hand or club to notify him that he must play somewhere else. Moreover, everything that he does seems to be against the law. If he plays ball he is endangering property by “playing with a hard ball in a public place.” If he plays marbles or pitches pennies he is “obstructing the sidewalk,” and craps, quite apart from the fact that it is gambling, constitutes the same offense. Street fighting individually or collectively is “assault,” and a boy guilty of none of these things may perforce be “loitering.” In other words he finds that property or its representatives are the great obstacles between him and his pleasure in the streets. And in considering our problem neither the principal cause of this situation nor its results must be lost sight of.

The great drawback to normal life on the Middle West Side is that it is a dual neighborhood. Tenements and industrial establishments are so inextricably mixed that the demands of the family and the needs of industry and commerce are eternally in conflict. The same streets must be used for all purposes; and one of the chief sufferers is the boy. More obvious, however, than this cause of a complex situation are the results of it, two of which are especially noticeable. The first is the inevitableness with which the boy accepts—and must accept—illegal and immoral amusements as a matter of course. The spirit of youth is forced to become a criminal tendency, and sport and the rights of property are forced into antagonism. And in the second place, partly because of this, partly because their association with the toughs of the street predisposes them to imitate vice and rowdyism, the boys come to take a positive pleasure in such activities as retaliation by theft and destruction of property. Stores and basements in this district are sometimes completely abandoned owing to the stone throwing and persecution of a youthful gang which has found their occupants too strenuously hostile or defensive. Undoubtedly the street is the most inadequate of playgrounds and throws many difficulties of prevention and interruption in the path of sport. But these obstacles are from their nature provocative of contest, and sport flourishes with a Hydra-like vitality. Nothing short of impossibility will keep the boy and his game apart.

CHAPTER IV
HIS GANGS

It is frequently necessary in these chapters to consider the boy of the Middle West Side as a type; and in discussing the causes and possible solution of the conditions which have produced him it is easy to forget that what the individual boy actually is at the moment is also of very real importance. But as a matter of fact it is not the boy individually but the boy collectively that is the policeman’s bane and the district’s despair. Once on the street the boy is no longer an individual but a member of a gang; and it is with and through the gang that he justly earns a reputation which provoked an irate citizen recently to suggest that for the New York street urchin boiling in burning oil was too good a fate. The court finds him a little villain, and newspapers tell the public that he is a little desperado; but those who know him best know that he is probably worse than either court or public suppose, and that for this the development of the gang on the West Side is primarily responsible.

The formation of “sets” or “gangs” is almost a law of human nature, and boyhood one of its most constant exponents, for a boy is gregarious naturally as well as by training. And over here, where the sociable Irish-American element predominates and children rarely mention the word “home,” it is inevitable that the gang should flourish and its members try to find in its activities the rough affection, comfort, and amusement which a dirty and overcrowded tenement room has failed to give.

The West Side gang is in its origin perfectly normal. In the words of one of the boys, “De kids livin’ on de street jist naturally played together, an’ stuck together w’en anything came up about kids from any other street.” Nothing is more entirely natural and spontaneous, and it is exasperating to reflect that nothing could be a more persuasive and uplifting power in the boy’s life than the gang’s development when given proper scope and direction. Its influence is strong and immediate. The gang contains the friends to whose praise and criticism he is most keenly sensitive, its standards are his aims, and its activities his happiness. Untrammeled by the perversion of special circumstances it might encourage his latent interests, train him to obedience and loyalty, show him the method and the saving of co-operation, and teach him the beauty of self-sacrifice. Gang life at its best does so. The universal endorsement and success of the Boy Scout movement, for instance, in almost every country living under Western civilization, shows this most clearly. Association and rivalry should bring out what is best in a boy; but on the Middle West Side it almost invariably brings out what is worst. Practically, under present conditions, it is inevitable that this should be so; but with the first movement toward amelioration such a result becomes less necessary.

Boy Scouts and Soldiers

After the Battle

Take the case of a certain gang typical of this neighborhood. This gang is now several years old, but its membership is almost exactly what it was four or five years ago. Its members singled each other out from the throng of children in their immediate neighborhood and first made for themselves a cave between two lumber piles in a neighboring yard. All one summer they met in this “hang-out”; here they brought the “loot,” as they call the product of their marauding expeditions, threw craps, pitched pennies, played cards, smoked, told stories, and fought. But they were disturbed by early disaster in the shape of the business needs of the lumber company, which one day caused their shack to be torn down over their heads. They made their headquarters next in the empty basement of a tenement, but soon moved at the well reinforced request of the landlord. After an exiled period of meeting on the street corners, the boys conceived the idea of building their own habitation in the protection of their own homes. They began a small wooden structure in the areaway of the tenement in which the leader lived. But civil war broke out, and in one unhappy culmination the leader of the gang chased his own little brother up two flights of stairs with a hatchet. The little brother promptly “squealed,” and the projected headquarters was destroyed by parental decree.

There followed another interval of meeting on the streets, and then one of the workers in a neighboring settlement became interested. She arranged to have the boys hold meetings in the settlement once a week. They were given certain privileges in the gymnasium and game rooms also, which kept them happily occupied and away from the street influences. But the settlement was closed suddenly and the gang went back to the streets once more. Here is a case in which a gang were from the outset driven from pillar to post by the deficiencies of their surroundings as a playground, and made to feel that every man’s hand was against them. When kindness was shown to them they responded at once. And scores of other gangs, if they were given the chance, would respond in the same way.

There are two salient features of gang life in this neighborhood. Both can be easily explained and abundantly illustrated; the second alone applies equally to schoolboy gangs and to adult gangs—for bands of adult rowdies exist, too, and the semi-mythical “Gopher Gang”[14] is a terror to conjure with. The first of these features is the loyalty which the gang invariably shows to a single street or block. As a gang is naturally formed of boys who live in the same tenement or next door to each other, or at least in the same block, and as their chief playground is likely to be the street in front of that block, it naturally becomes a matter of convenience as well as of honor to defend that playground from the inroads of any other gang. In this way loyalty to one block becomes a principle and a basis of gang organization. But individuals are not always loyal to their home block. If a boy becomes a member of a gang on Fiftieth Street, for example, and then moves to Thirtieth Street, or even farther, he may return and continue to belong to his old gang. Similarly, a Thirtieth Street gang will number among its ranks former residents who now live in other localities. At the same time, both gangs are continually being recruited by new arrivals in the community. When a boy moves he simply uses his own discretion as to whether to join the new gang or to continue to belong to the old.

The gang is constantly increasing or decreasing its numbers. It does not necessarily include the whole street except in a very general sense. Its nucleus is to be found in probably a dozen or fifteen kindred spirits in the street. For purposes of war, or for demonstrations at election time, or on any such occasion when there is either safety or pleasure in numbers, the other boys in the street are added to this group. Thus the real Fiftieth Street gang may not number more than 20 or 25 members, but its fighting strength when pitted against the Fifty-thirds will be nearly a hundred. Again, while there may be one group of 15 or 20 boys known as “The Fiftieth Street Gang,” yet on Fiftieth Street between any two avenues will be found a dozen or more similar groups, each with a leader and a coherent social consciousness. The one among these groups which will be called the Fiftieth Street gang is likely to be so known either because it contains the boy who, for one reason or another, has become the recognized street leader, or because its members are better known or more daring than any other group, so that it will be around this particular group that all the others will rally when the occasion calls. The territorial limit of a gang is usually the length of one single cross street between two avenues. In a single week fights took place between the Fiftieth Street gang between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and the Fifty-third Street gang in the same district; between the Forty-ninth Street gang between Ninth and Tenth Avenues combined with the Forty-ninth Street gang between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and the Forty-seventh Street gang between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Loyalty to their home block would be a good habit in boyish camaraderie if it merely took the form of peaceable rivalry; but as gang life exists at present on the Middle West Side it becomes a chronic incentive to lawlessness. For the second salient feature of gang life is the propensity of the gang to street fighting. Personal and collective jealousies and feuds have become so habitual and endless among the boys here that the history of their gangs is little less than a record of continuous violence of every kind. No doubt the strain of the constant repression before alluded to in some measure accounts for this; but possibly it is due in general to a contact with the streets and in particular to the bad influence of the older toughs on whom they model themselves and who often attain heroic position in their eyes. The boys of gangs in the country play that they are armies, emperors, or kings that they have read of in books or heard of in stories told. But the city boys of the West Side prefer to imitate local celebrities whom they know or local deeds of fame with which they are more intimately acquainted. And the danger of this vulgarized hero worship lies in the fact that, while a country lad must imagine the surroundings and implements for imitating the deeds of story book heroes, the city boy can find on every side of him the real materials used by his models, the Gophers.

The jargon of the thief and the yeggman is common among these boys’ gangs. They talk casually of murder and robbery as though these were familiar events in their lives. They lay tentative plans for the robbery of stores or saloons with no more real intention of commission than the schoolboy football player has of actual achievement when he imagines what he would do if his team were playing Yale. They talk easily and knowingly of “turning off” various people in the neighborhood, by which they mean robbing them. They threaten each other with murder and other dire forms of assault, and undoubtedly think that they mean to carry out their threats. The first active manifestation of this state of mind consists often in carrying concealed weapons. The boy obtains a broken revolver from some place or finds or steals a good one. He will reveal this weapon to his awestruck playmates and soon come to pose as a bold, ruffianly spirit. Usually this phase passes away harmlessly enough. Few of the younger residents of this neighborhood are really armed, though most of them would have their companions believe that they are. Occasionally some youngster does manage to carry a revolver, bowie knife, or slingshot, and his subsequent career is likely to bring him very early into serious contact with the police. But however late or soon the manifestation, the gangs are permeated by the tendency to disorder and crime which is the result of criminal example. It is the old story; only the worst and most vicious form of the gang spirit has a chance of finding expression in these streets. And so gang warfare has become not the exception but the rule, and the violence and ferocity with which the small boys pursue their feuds excites the alarm of the entire neighborhood.

“There has always been more or less fighting among the gangs of boys on the streets,” a physician of long residence recently remarked, “but they are getting worse in character every year until now it seems that they will stop at nothing. They carry knives, clubs, and even, I have heard, revolvers. Sometimes arrests are made, but they never amount to anything, for the boys are always released without punishment. If an outsider tries to interfere, ordinarily both gangs turn on him. They terrorize the neighborhood with their fights, breaking windows and injuring passersby with stones. Only recently one of these fights broke out almost in front of my house, and a score or more, most of them armed with beer bottles, were engaged in it. I got a boy by the shoulder and asked him what he was doing with the bottle. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I am just taking it to the store to get it filled.’ Then he laughed in my face and the rest of the gang burst out laughing. I could do nothing with them, and had to retire to my office.”

Sometimes fights are more or less unpremeditated, arising from chance encounters between two rival gangs; but very often they are formally arranged and generaled in approved military fashion. One evening recently a furious battle took place between two gangs of small boys numbering nearly 50 to the gang, and all apparently from eight to fifteen years old. One gang proceeded down the street from the corner at which they had assembled and met the other gang coming from the opposite direction. They stopped about 100 feet apart and formed two compact masses, screaming and shouting encouragement to their own side and insults to the enemy. Then one of the gangs moved slowly forward. Some one among their opponents threw a beer bottle into the advancing crowd, and a scene of wild riot followed. Clubs, stones, and beer bottles were hurled through the air, many of them taking effect and many of the bottles smashing on the pavement. A crowd gathered on both sides behind the combatants and windows on all sides were filled with spectators. None of the boys came into personal contact with their opponents. Most of them contented themselves with hurling missiles indiscriminately into the opposing group. In the midst of the mêlée two boys were maneuvering for over a minute, each armed with a beer bottle which he was trying to land on his opponent from a distance of not more than eight or ten feet. They ducked, dodged, and side-stepped, then finally one boy threw his bottle. The other boy dropped flat to the pavement and the bottle came so close to his body that it looked for an instant as though it had hit him. If it had, it might easily have killed him, for it was hurled with terrific force. But the boy sprang up and threw his bottle at the other youngster, who was now retreating.

Just as it was growing dark someone fired two shots from a revolver—whether loaded with blank or bullet cartridges it was of course impossible to tell—and now for the first time protest from the spectators began to rise even above the din of the fight. At the same moment from scouts in the rear guard of both armies came the watchword of the West Side, “Cheese it!” In an incredibly short space of time both gangs were rushing at top speed back toward their respective gathering places. When everything was quiet, two policemen turned the corner, walked solemnly down to the middle of the block, and returned. There were, of course, no arrests. One gang had rallied at a point about 100 yards to the west of the avenue, and were starting back to the battleground again when two small boys concealed in a cellarway at the corner shrieked out another warning. The gang broke up again and the next minute a discomfited policeman stepped out from a doorway where he had been concealed and came along the street.

At the corner of Ninth Avenue two men were indignantly discussing the fight. “Those boys do more to ruin property and lower real estate values around here than any other three causes,” said one of the men. “They’re having these fights continually now and they seem to grow worse all the time. Suppose that some passerby had been in the way of that revolver which was shot down the street just now. Nothing could have been done. You can’t find out who had the revolver. The police won’t try to make any arrests, and if they do, the boys are always let right out again. The insurance companies won’t insure plate glass in this neighborhood any more, and the whole place seems to be just at the mercy of these little ruffians.”

On one occasion a gang was short of bonfire material at election time. The members raided a neighboring street, took the gang there by surprise, extinguished its celebration bonfires, and carried the wood in triumph back to their own street. War was immediately declared by the despoiled, and a regular after-school campaign followed. Through an injury to one of their number the gang in an intervening street became involved, and sided with the bonfire stealers. War then became general and for a year was a constant subject for discussion among old and young in the neighborhood. The boys of the defensive gang more than held their own. They descended upon the allies from the intervening street and vanquished them on their own territory. They fought with even honors in foreign territory the gang which originally started the trouble, and repelled several invasions decisively. Finally these terms were offered: The defensive gang formally notified their opponents that if they could succeed in forcing their way from the upper avenue to a Roman Catholic church about three-quarters of the way down the street, they would accept defeat. Night after night the gang thus challenged made the attempt, but never succeeded.

Resting. What Next?

Early Lessons in Craps

It is not uncommon for fights to end by a formal match between two opposing leaders, though very often, particularly if the leader of the weaker gang wins, these conflicts are indecisive because the stronger gang will not accept defeat. In one case two gangs entered into a formal truce because one gang was obliged to go through the other’s territory on the way to school, and found it inexpedient to fight a battle four times a day. The other gang recognized the justice of this position and according to compact permitted their enemies to go through the street unmolested throughout the school year.

Tales of this kind could be multiplied almost indefinitely, for the exploits of boyish gangs dominate the West Side problem. Such headlines as

UPPER WEST SIDE DISTURBED

Boys Discharge Rifles—One Man Shot and Windows Broken[15]

GIRL SHOT IN GANG FIGHT

Seriously Wounded While Walking in Eleventh Avenue—Assailant Escapes[16]

are comparatively common in the newspapers; yet most of the occurrences of this kind in the district never reach the ears of a reporter. The following is from the press account of a typical gang war:

BOY STABBED BY YOUNG FEUDISTS

Is Second Hurt[17]

This is the second boy to receive serious injuries because of the feud which has been raging for the last three weeks between stone-throwing bands of boys who live in the vicinity of Fiftieth Street and Tenth Avenue.... Fifty or more boys have received injuries.... Not only are the lives of school children endangered but the size of the weapons used makes it perilous for adults to venture near during the battles. There are a half dozen bands in the neighborhood, and when any two of them meet there is a fight. The principal pastime, however, seems to be in a whole crowd attacking one or two boys who belong to another band.

Teachers in the public schools and Sunday school teachers have joined in the demand that the Police Department give full protection against assault to all living in the vicinity. The fever for stone throwing seems to be spreading through all the territory between Ninth and Tenth Avenues between Fiftieth and Sixtieth Streets, and the situation is said to be beyond the control of the present force of police on duty in that part of the city.

Gang fighting is most prevalent when the nervous youngsters are just released from the school room and must inevitably encounter their schoolmate antagonists on the streets.

Here is an account of a gang fight, the events of which were described by one of the small marauders:

“Last night a gang of boys came down with their pockets full of brickbats, looking for Willie Harrigan, but Johnnie and Jimmie heard of it and got the gang together. I came up with my pockets full of stones and was throwing them when I got hit in the leg myself and it hurt so I couldn’t throw. Just then three cops suddenly jumped off a car, right in the middle of the fight. Everybody beat it, but a cop grabbed me and I dropped my stones and jerked away and ran. They caught three of the others though, and took them to the station house. I don’t know whether they got there. Every afternoon this gang comes down and tries to catch our fellows alone as they did with Willie. We fight with stones and bottles. No one has been very much hurt lately. One of our gang has a gun, too, but he can’t fire it for fear of the cops.”

These last sentences reveal, or at least refer to, the most repulsive of all the ways in which the demoralizing effect of West Side gang development is shown. Even a confirmed pessimist, if he has any sympathy with boys and any knowledge of their ways, can discern in the gang’s activities a striving after the unattainable which is yet a birthright, an effort which is essentially more pathetic than vicious. In the raid and the “loot,” the chase and the “hang-out,” it is not difficult to mark the trail of the Redskin and the hunt and the lure of danger which is so dear to the heart of a boy. But even the most persistent of optimists, willing to make many allowances, must demur against the coldblooded and treacherous methods to which the feuds and enmities of West Side gangs have reduced their members. If ever these boys had a sense of the spirit of fair play, they seem to have lost it completely. They win by planning overwhelming advantages. An attack upon three or four or even one defenseless boy by 30 or 40 merciless youngsters, who even attempt to surround their prey and strike from behind, is not a disgraceful thing to them but an exploit to be proud of. No mercy is shown to the vanquished. Stories are rife in the neighborhood of boys of thirteen or fourteen being attacked when alone and undefended, by 10 or more assailants from another street.

That casualties are not more frequent is due to the dominant spirit of cowardice with which the mob always taints its members. In the thick of the fight when no responsibility can be placed and every member feels secure in the presence of his friends, there is no atrocity which these boys will not attempt; but relying as they do on the strength of the mob instead of on individual strength, the first feeling of timidity immediately develops into a panic. An unexpected move by the enemy at bay will rout an attacking party of four times their strength. Half a dozen boys caught at a disadvantage will charge unscathed through a gang of nearly two score, who fly in all directions at this unexpected display of bravery. One boy, for instance, was recently beset by eight others when he was about to leave the factory. Instead of retreating as they expected, he suddenly seized a club, charged one wing of his assailants, and escaped unhurt. On the other hand, here is a case in which one of the victims was caught:

“Jim and me was goin’ down the street, w’en about six fellers from the Fiftieth Street gang hot-footed after us. We ran but they got right close and hollered to us to halt. I made out like I was goin’ to stop but got a fresh start w’en they slacked up and got away. Jim did stop and they near killed him, they beat him up so.”

“Oh! They would-a killed me if they’d got me,” said one boy, relating how he had been chased into a hallway by five or six of a rival gang, armed with bottles, clubs, and bricks. “I hid in a toilet, and when they came up to look in I rushed out on ’em and took ’em by surprise; I pushed one feller down the steps and beat it, but they didn’t catch me.” And a similar story was told by another. “After I wins in my fight with bot’ Mike and his pal me little brother hears ’em telling one day how they was goin’ to lay for me in the hallway wit clubs. I runs up tru de house next door on the roof tru de house where dey was goin’ to lay for me and hides in the toilet wit a big club. When I hear Mike and his pal come in an’ talkin’ right near me I rushes out and bangs right an’ left wit me club. I hits ’em bot’ on de bean (head) an’ dey runs out. After that they never bothered me.”

Gang fighting, in fact, as practiced in this neighborhood, is conducive to neither manliness, honor, courage, nor self-respect. The strength of the boy is the strength of the gang, and under its protection unspeakable horrors take place for which it is impossible to place responsibility. Rumors of boys being stabbed, shot, clubbed, maimed, and even killed are current everywhere, and there is good reason to believe that many of them are true. Such things are, of course, never mentioned to strangers, and residents learn of them only by chance conversation. The moment that any definite questions are asked, the boys become reticent and change the subject. But there can be no doubt that many crimes are committed in these blocks which never reach the ears of the police, and that a considerable proportion of them are due to the boy and his gang.

And so the word “gang” here has grown to be synonymous with the worst side of boy life, and the group itself, which might in other surroundings and under other traditions be a positive civic asset, simply adds the irresponsibility of the mob to the recklessness of youth and becomes a force which turns West Side boyhood into cowards and savages. As a priest of one of the Roman Catholic churches said the other day, “The social evil may be an important one, but the question in this neighborhood is that of the gangs.”

CHAPTER V
HIS HOME

Among the influences which mold the destinies of the West Side boy one still remains to be mentioned. We have tried to sketch the characteristics of the community in which he finds himself and to indicate the causes and the traditions which have produced them. We have watched him in the daylight glare of his playground, and followed him through his games and the maneuvers of his gang. School, and in later years, the shop or factory, rarely work any appreciable change in his make-up. The former is usually treated by the class of boys with whom we are dealing as a long game between himself and the truant officer. The latter comes into his life too late and often too unsuitably to be regarded by him as anything but so many dreary years of necessary imprisonment. But back of his chequered little life on the docks and streets stand his mother and his tenement home, and surely it is to them, if anywhere, that we must look for the guidance that is to help him and the influence that is to counteract the wild persuasions of the playground.

Is this home attractive? Can it be? Does his mother understand her boy and his difficulties, even if she can cope with her own? If she does, how far can she help him? If she does not, how far is she blameworthy? What is her attitude toward the West Side problems? To what extent is she—can she be—responsible for her children’s conduct? How far right are the judges of the New York children’s court, and how far wrong, in holding West Side parents responsible for the misdemeanors of their sons? Let us look at the home outside and within, visit the mother and hear her side of the story; for these are questions which must be asked and answered before our picture of the West Side boy is complete.

It would be impossible with any truth to call the tenement buildings externally attractive. Surrounding the factories on all sides, wedged between tall, noisy buildings, standing almost alone in a block of lumber and wagon yards, or sometimes occupying entire blocks to the exclusion of everything else, they rise singly, in groups, or in rows along the streets and avenues, ugly, monotonous, of an indistinguishable sameness. Most of them face squarely up to the sidewalk, with no areaway in front, behind them narrow cement-paved courts, round which the shabby walls rear themselves, cutting off sunlight and giving to each little well of air-space the gloominess of a cañon. Every type of obsolete dwelling, condemned by the building laws of a decade ago, is present in block lengths, teeming and seething with human life, and accepted with that philosophy of poverty which holds that such things are a part of the natural scheme which created Fifth Avenue for the man who doesn’t have to work and Eleventh Avenue for the man who does. The “dumb-bell” and “railroad” types of tenement with dark inner rooms, first sanctioned by the laws of the late 70’s but condemned as dangerous and unsanitary nearly a decade ago, predominate. These buildings were erected for the most part over twenty-five years ago (some are forty years old or more), and in the ten years preceding 1911 only two modern tenements had been erected in the whole district. Most of the tenements so adjoin that the roofs of one are accessible from those on either side. Frequently this condition continues through the whole block, so that a marauder, a fleeing small boy, or a fugitive from justice, may dodge up one stairway, cross several roofs, and descend by another. Similarly, if one street door is locked, the tenement can usually be entered from the adjoining building by way of the roof.

Inside, the tenements offer a depressing study in bad housing conditions. The hall is dark, the stairway small and ill-lighted; modern toilet and sanitary facilities in many cases are absent. The rooms are often infested with mice, roaches, and bed-bugs. The slender airshaft is frequently so inaccessible that refuse and rubbish thrown into it from adjacent windows may lie for months in a rotting accumulation at the bottom. A large proportion of the families are herded in flats containing from two to four rooms, which are very small and receive a minimum of light and air from their few and often overshadowed windows.

The number of rooms occupied by 200 of these families, as shown by the table given in the Appendix,[18] is to some extent misleading, for the rooms are often not really separate. Owing to restrictions of space there are rarely doors between the rooms in the prevailing type of tenements; only doorways; and whether these are hung with curtains or not, privacy within the home is naturally almost impossible. Family quarrels or Saturday night’s drunken brawl too often take place in the presence of the children. Moreover, walls are so thin that every word spoken above an ordinary tone of voice is plainly audible through them to the inmates of the next flat. A social worker who was for a time resident here said recently: “In the first part of this month there were three cases of wife-beating in one tenement alone. This tenement is of so-called ‘model’ construction, has an exceptionally high rent, attempts to restrict crowding, and prides itself on an extra high grade of tenants. Yet the quarreling and brawling between husband and wife in all parts of the building seem to be incessant. It even breaks the sleep of the children and other tenants in the early hours of the morning.”

In homes like these it is scarcely possible for even the smallest families to live in decency. But small families are not the rule on the West Side. Of the 231 families for which information regarding the number of living children was secured, 163, or 71 per cent, had four or more children. Families having five children formed the largest group; and one family had 11 living children.[19]

Day begins for the housewife at 6 o’clock, or even earlier if she works outside the home, and ordinarily her children are up and on the streets by half past seven. For breakfast she usually prepares a quantity of food and leaves it at the disposal of the family. The members, as they rise, successively go to the kitchen and help themselves. The workers go to the stores and factories, and the children to school or the streets. By half past seven the factories are in full operation, the stores are open, and the day’s work has begun. From half past eight to nine, the streets are thronged with children going to school, or sometimes to steal a riotous holiday on the streets and docks as truants. At noon they return to snatch a hasty lunch served in the same impromptu way as breakfast, and then the woman is left alone again to wash and cook and mend and gossip till supper time, if she is not one of the many West Side mothers who must go out to earn.[20] In that case, the household tasks must be done after she returns home at night.

Such is the average tenement home, abiding place of our West Side boy and his family. In a very large number of cases the family is a “broken” one.[21]

As regards ambitions and ideals, the word “home” may stand for anything from the thrifty German household with its level head for the budget to a down-at-the-heels, loose-hinged group of people who share the same abiding place, but scarcely claim the name of family. Of course, it must be remembered that this is a neighborhood from which the sturdiest, those having the lucky combination of prosperity, vigor, and ambition, have pulled away. They have shaken clear both from the ill-repaired and inconvenient houses and from the district’s reputation for “toughness.” Here and there a fairly well-to-do family has been held by the ownership of a business or a house, or because to be a power even in a block like one of these is more satisfying than to be second elsewhere. Others have stayed from inertia, shaking their heads over lax West Side customs, but on the whole accepting them with the acquiescence of habit; and naturally, on the level of the neighborhood, they have entered into its life and made their friends here. They will drift back after brief outward excursions, from sheer loneliness. But most commonly the people here are too strongly fettered to break loose; they are bound to these dreary surroundings for their lives.

Practically every family has rubbed elbows with poverty too familiar for comment,[22] or seen it close at hand among the neighbors in the house and the children who play with their own on the street. In many families poverty is a basic condition underlying their many catastrophes and the whole tenure of their unstable fortunes. Often the budget simply cannot be stretched by any system of economy to cover the requisites for healthy and sturdy growth. Such requisites become luxuries, too extravagant for many a child. Teeth and eyes go uncared for, nourishment is inadequate, and misbehavior may easily spring in the wake of this negligence; often it does. For none of these children is good air obtainable except in short intervals. And very closely associated with the moral indifference of many an adolescent boy are the noise and overcrowding within his own home to which he is accustomed from babyhood. Sleep in a stuffy, dark bedroom, with two or three other occupants, has a telling effect both on mind and body, and never from morning to night are these tenements quiet. At the very outset poverty destroys the possibilities of normal development. The tenement child runs his race, but it is always a handicap.

Facing these harsh circumstances is a set of women who, though intimacy reveals among them varied dispositions and abilities, have yet developed out of the common experience many of the same ideas and lines of action. To their share falls the heaviest responsibility for the discipline and training of the children. The father is in the background and may be used as a court of appeal. Or perhaps he is to be guarded against,—another source of anxiety to the mother, who assumes the difficult role of “standing between.” Among the more intelligent families he usually has a decisive voice in important questions as to school or work, and frequently he is the stricter parent, and carries more authority. But the day-in and day-out management and care is the woman’s. These mothers of the tenements are confronted by the same problems, and they conform to certain types which it is not difficult to recognize.

Very familiar is the figure of the well-meaning woman who has kept her own decency, not without a struggle, but has proved hopelessly ineffective as a mother. She is usually ill-equipped to conceive or enter into the feelings of an imperious, self-absorbed, and overstimulated youngster. Her very decency has often forced her into a dull routine with a gray, colorless outlook, out of sympathy with youth that refuses to accept the shadows of her own overworked and saddened lot. Many of these women came from Ireland as mere girls, alone or “brought by a friend,” to go into the drudgery of living out. Their working days began in childhood. Mrs. Macy drew her own picture: Herself a child of twelve, she started out to “mind” children. “I had a little hat wi’ daisies all roun’ the brim an’ ribbons hangin’ off the back with daisies fastened on, and with one hand I was hangin’ on to a hunk of m’lasses candy. I sure was childish lookin’ help but I held the job for six years.” Then came the marriage “to get a home of my own,” followed by those terrible first years of bitter disillusionment and wretchedness. “He’d leave me alone in the house of an evening—I’d never been used to that. I was frightened, an’ I’d cry.” Soon child came after child, probably with a quota early given to death, and with those who lived arose the problem of their rearing.

Almost at once the women are awakened to the menace of the streets which become their common enemy. “To keep the boy off the streets” is the phrase everywhere repeated, pitiful in its futility. For every contrivance or device is useless once the boy has responded to their lure. The “fixed up” parlor with its lavishness of staring rugs and curtains, its piano, the symbol of many an hour’s toil and ambition, or its phonograph, is exhibited by the mother with much satisfaction. Yet it crops out that in spite of these attractions Willie does not stay at home, and that only for severe punishment is he “kept up.” Or, where restriction is tried, a boy makes use of every sort of subterfuge in order to escape. An errand, a visit to a boy’s house, a club, even church, are the alleged destinations which really serve as a pathway to the “hang-out” of the gang.

If such competition with the street is futile when the family is comparatively well-to-do, what chance has the mother with no such attractions at hand? Her home consists of three or four dark, stuffy rooms, destitute of carpet, or perhaps with a frayed strip or two, and a meager allowance of shabby furniture. There is no space for a separate parlor. The evening meal, the one family event, is eaten in the kitchen, perhaps in cramped quarters where each one takes his turn for a chair. The very conditions which her own standards impose, the fact that she “does not bother with such like in this house,” has “no time for comp’ny,” or “never set foot in one o’ them silly shows,” cut her off completely from comprehending the excitement and charm of the streets to which her children yield so eagerly.

Some of these women have carried for years the burden of a shiftless husband. With dumb patience they accept their lot—there is always the fact that “four or five dollars is better than none, an’ it means a lot to me on the rent.” And when even this help is lacking, it may be “he did used t’ be a good man t’ me an’ in his day he’s worked hard in the slaughter house. He sez I’d be pretty mean t’ turn him out after all these years. He can’t last much longer, an’ it’s hard t’ know what’s right. Most every night he comes up here done. We have to laugh at him a good deal an’ so manage t’ get along.” A pretty grim kind of humor, this. In such cases it is well if the man is no longer there. Sometimes the wife has mustered all her power of decision and made the effort to eject a chronic loafer from the home. “I talked and I talked for years,” said Mrs. McCarthy, “an’ he thought I wouldn’t do nothin’. I couldn’t put him away, but I got the judge t’ make him keep out of my home. ‘Don’t you never bother this woman,’ he sez. I had got to hate him so I couldn’t stand it to look at him when I heard him come down the hall to the door an’ me standin’ there over me irons and me tub.”

The bitter lesson of endurance so well learned, familiar as second nature, is repeated again and again with sons who are too lazy to work and depend upon the mother’s earnings for what they cannot get by gambling or stealing. Often her force is spent. She is weak, querulous, discouraged. To expect her to stem the tide of outside forces which are molding the boy into the nerveless or vicious man his father was before him is to ask the utterly impossible. Perhaps she will close her eyes, like Mrs. Gates, whose only son has joined a gang of sneak thieves but who maintains that “Jimmy is a good boy and never was no trouble to me.” In her heart she knows there is something amiss, but she turns a deaf ear to any hint of wrongdoing. Sometimes the mother admits everything, enlarging and complaining, but at the end sits weakly back. “What can I do? What th’ b’ys does outside they don’t bes aifter tellin’ inside, an’ I can’t be keepin’ tracks on thim all th’ toime.”

Approaching the “Gopher” Age

One Diversion of the Older Boys

In the judgment of such mothers a boy’s good nature makes up for serious dereliction. A fellow who is thoroughly “in wid de push,” according to her is “just wild like, not bad. He’s thot obliging and does onything I ask about the house.” Many a slip is forgiven a stalwart fellow by the woman who is feeding and clothing him if he brings in her coal, puts up a curtain, and does not “answer back.” So great in their lives is the dearth of common kindliness. When he takes to his heels, she confesses to “feelin’ kind o’ lonely without Dan around,” and nine times out of ten she welcomes him back when his spell of wandering is over.

Too often, however, this good feeling is absent and active antagonism and bickering marks the spirit of the place called “home.” The mother who from “feelin’ it her duty to talk to ’em though they don’t pay no heed” degenerates into the “nagger,” and so has taken the fatal step which makes impossible anything like affection or harmony between her and the boy. The result is always the same: the sullen fellow slouching before the querulous, upbraiding parent, resentful in every line, ready to jerk away snarling, or to flash out in a pitched battle of tempers, leaving behind bitterness, misunderstanding and anger. Sometimes this shipwreck is accepted with a Spartan quiescence; lifelong experience forces these women for mere self-preservation into an endurance grown easier than revolt. Yet the suffering is great, and these mothers, inadequate and weak as they are, form one of the most pitiful chapters in the story of juvenile delinquency.

But there is the woman, here as everywhere, who refuses to fold her hands, who is alert and decisive. She is not likely to be found in homes where the most stringent pressure of want or overwork is felt. Yet she is not of necessity the best educated or most refined. She is always shrewd, with a keen perception of the boy’s side of the story, but also with a very clear and determined perception of her own. Very likely she was born and brought up within a few blocks of her present home. But the experiences of her own childhood form no parallel to those of this generation. In her day everything to the west of Tenth Avenue was open playgrounds; truant officers were unknown, and an arrest was a thing to be spoken of in whispers. Still she has grown up with the district and has listened to the current gossip. Her first axiom is that no knowledge of a boy’s doings will come amiss; her second, that such information cannot be expected from the boy himself. Even among the best of women a system of spying is carried on, although the wisest do not make this apparent unless occasion demands, but quietly “keep an eye on that boy.” It may be a strong motive for staying in an undesirable block that “If we go, James’ll just be back here an’ then he’ll be out from under me.” They understand the fallacy of moving to separate a boy from bad company, unless one can go to a suburb, from which there are difficulties in the way of transportation to the West Side. When conversation among the boys can be overheard they “take occasion to listen.” “I don’t go out very much but I’ve me ways o’ findin’ out,” says Mrs. Moran, “an’ they know they can’t fool me.”

The amount of credit to give to tale bearing and complaints is a question to puzzle the shrewdest. It is an important source of information, yet “you can’t believe everything you hear.” The irate complainant who fails to get the expected warmth of support from maternal authority needs to realize that the life of the West Side boy is one continuous fracas with the landlord, the janitress, the corner grocery man, the “Ginnie” paper dealer, and the “cop.” Complaints come to the mother from all sides and are often unfounded. “I had him up in the house for playin’ hookey, an’ I watched them fellows crookin’ the bolognie off the cart myself, or I might a’ thought it was him.” Moreover, it is understood that a boy has a right to expect a certain amount of support from his mother. Her defense is natural, but she cannot carry it too far or a boy may lose all fear of restraint at home. One mother told of hearing a youngster boast, “Aw—g’wan—tell my mother—she don’t care what I do.” “And that hurts,” she said with emphasis, “fer a boy to give his own mother a name like that.”

Altogether “it’s no easy matter bringin’ up a boy in New York.” Truancy and cigarettes are issues on which many a judicious woman must confess defeat. She knows that surface evidence is not to be taken. The appearance of a boy at the proper hours with his books does not prove that they have not been “kept” in a candy store while the youngster had an eye on the time. Smoking is still harder to regulate, and though a youngster “don’t dare to do it in the house” few women feel sure as to what happens outside. One confessed to avoiding the issue. “I knew he was smoking a long time—smelt it—but I never let on. I thought he’d do it open if I did and do it more.” Amusements which can safely be sanctioned are hard to find. Pigeon flying almost always is frowned upon for fear of accidents on the roofs and because “them pigeons are the ruination of b’ys, keepin’ them out o’ school, an’ into the comp’ny of them big toughs as has ’em.” Every shade of opinion is expressed in regard to the “nickel dumps,” as the moving picture shows are called. Some believe that “them places is the worst thing that ever happened to New York, settin’ b’ys to gamblin’ and stealin’.” Others set upon them the seal of approval. “A b’y’s got t’ do somethin’ an’ I don’t see no harm in a good show that keeps him off the streets.”

It goes without saying that these families have no very large sums of money to give their children, but the wisdom of allowing a boy some spending money is recognized. It is, in fact, far more essential than in most communities, for here almost everything desirable must be paid for, from carfare to a ball ground to the highly coveted coin for a nickel show. Money is usually given to school boys in small quantities and for definite things. “If he gets a quarter a week, he doesn’t get it all at once.” And the boy must show that it was spent as intended. With the boy who is working, the amount he contributes to the household is an important basis of judgment on his character. If he works regularly and hands over his envelope, he may still have peccadilloes, but his main duties are accomplished. If, on the other hand, he is “wise” and “deep,” he will lie as to what he is earning and keep more than is thought to be his due. Or, all too often, he will scorn work altogether and his mother will be known to “have had bad luck with that boy.” The outsider often expresses pity for the child who must hand over the bulk of his meager earnings. But the moral sentiment of the neighborhood insists upon this duty, and with good reason, for the rearing of children is indeed no easy matter here, even when it has not gone much further than supplying necessities. Often the price paid in weariness, pain, and ill-health has been sore, and the slight help that the child can contribute after the long years of waiting is the father’s or mother’s due.

Nevertheless, when a boy reaches working age, some allowance from his earnings is his by right, and it is this fact which adds to his desire to leave school early. During the first year, when the wage ranges from $3.50 to $5.00 a week, an allowance of 50 cents seems to be general. Occasionally, 25 cents is considered enough, but this is generally felt to be “stingy.” At the same time, “it is not for a boy’s good havin’ too much in his hands.” Sometimes he has $1.00 a week and buys his own clothes. Lunch money and carfares to work are, of course, allowed extra. Tips are generally accorded to be his own; it is a mark of high virtue to surrender them. A woman will tell with pride, “He knew I was hard up and he gave me his tips.” Occasionally a mother dislikes to have her son working in a place where he is tipped, because it is then impossible to know how much money is rightfully his. He can account very easily for the possession of a surplus. The amount a boy is spending is always a matter on which a canny mother “has her eye.” Any doubt brings the sharp question, “Now, where did you get the money for that?” If he is unduly “flush” he is on the borderline of danger, and her suspicions are keen. She knows that the temptation to petty theft is constant. As his wages rise his spending money increases, and if he still lives at home at the age of eighteen or nineteen he usually ceases to hand over his earnings but pays for his board. With this increased independence comes a general feeling that the time of subservience is passing and that “you can’t say much to a boy of that age.”

On the whole, this type of mother is lenient and broadminded, realizing that “you can’t keep a boy tied to your apron strings,” and too sensible to set up any impossible standards. But the wisest of them know—and rare and valuable, indeed, is such wisdom—that once a boy has passed the boundary line, punishment must be meted out in no faltering or indecisive way. “He don’t dare do that, he knows he won’t be let,” spoken with a certain emphasis, carries weight, and lucky is the boy who with consistency and firmness “is not let.” But on the West Side such discipline is not common.

Many of the mothers reflect the average opinions of the neighborhood. They are rough-and-ready Irish women who give themselves no airs and “don’t pretend to be better than the people they was raised with”; women with a coarse and hearty good nature, easy-going standards, and, if occasion demands, a good assertive tongue. As a rule, the burden of discipline sits easily on their shoulders. “Oi juist drrive thim out—th’ whole raft o’ thim,” says Mrs. Haggerty, blessed with eight children and four rooms. “Oi can’t be bothered with th’ noise o’ thim, Oi’m that nearvous.” These women are not necessarily “a bad lot” as the district goes, but neither are they over-particular. If a boy has no complaints from school, or has held his job and managed to keep out of the hands of the “cop” for the last few months, “he’s a good b’ye,” and any “wildness” in his past can be excused and forgotten. On the other hand, if he has happened to give “trrouble,” the chance visitor is likely to hear the tale from A to Z and, if the youngster has had the bad luck to be present, with a good, round scolding for him thrown in.

There is little delicacy or finesse about this discipline; it is of the hammer and tongs variety. In the vast majority of these homes, even those of higher type, the emotions rule at one moment with cuff and shout, at the next with a caress or a laugh. No consistency is maintained, and the clever youngster soon learns by the signs when to duck and when to “clear out,” just as a little later he learns the earmarks of the “dinny” and knows when to “cheese it.” There is a constant piling up of threats which mean nothing. When Joseph boasts of his gang and their glories, “What, are youse fightin’ with that crew?” Mrs. Dooley raps out. “You just better not let me catch you or you’ll get all that’s comin’ to youse.” But she can back him up as hotly and unreasonably as she berates him, and the ill-starred policeman who comes beneath the onslaught of her tongue and within the range of her invective will find discretion the better part of valor and do well to hold his peace.

But most tragic and helpless of all is the mother who has gone down before the vicissitudes of her life. She belongs to the scum of our cities, accorded no respect and scant pity, only the scorn of her more “decent” neighbor of the tenements. She may still be holding her family together, but is almost always weak and enervated. Their unkempt and wretched quarters, their nomadic wanderings from house to house and block to block, reflect her own failure. The father may be the “better of the two,” but without her aid he is almost always incapable of keeping their heads far above water. Often he is another of her kind, and both have become the victims of their own habits. Suspicion and surliness may well be expected from such a family, for they have often much to fear.

Yet it may be that even such a woman as Mrs. Catesby, in her three barren rooms at the top of a rear tenement shack on one of the far river blocks, will receive you without questioning your right to enter and to share her confidence. Perhaps it is a latent desire for human intercourse, perhaps merely the spirit of simple courtesy, so universal among the women of the tenements. She is a slatternly little figure, dressed in a shabby black waist that scarcely covers her, with a tangle of frizzled red hair slipping over her face and held in tether by an odd hairpin or two. Her cheeks are pink, though the skin is loose and flabby, and her eyes are watery but clear and blue. An empty whiskey bottle on the table is a needless index to the chief interest of her sordid life. But although she may not share your opinions, which in her life have proved mere extra weight and have gone overboard as valueless, she is nevertheless very well aware of them. It is harsh to term her effort to play up to your standards deception; perhaps it is a genuine remnant of more decent aspirations. “If company comes it’s then I’m bound not to be clean. Now, don’t you look at the dirt in this house.” The dirt is of long standing, but conventions are appeased.

The picture of her life, her husband, and her children, which the woman paints for you, is colored for your benefit, and is not to be taken at its face value. There are plenty of evasions and falsehoods. Yet the poor shams which she raises to shield herself from your criticism are pitifully weak defenses through which may easily be caught many an illuminating glimpse of the dingy realities behind. Nor is her confidence difficult to gain, once your claim to friendliness is established. “Yes, once I was down to that children’s court. I was that frightened they’d take the children off. They was only ten an’ eight when they come in one day, Jenny an’ Paul, with a man I’d never seed before. ‘Good day,’ says he, ‘you’re Mrs. Catesby?’ ‘I am,’ says I, ‘but I’ve never had the pleasure.’ ‘No,’ says he, ‘I’m from the Gerries, and I’ve come for the children. They’ll have to come along with me.’ I was that upset I a’most fainted an’ I was all shaky like. Well, I went out to call papa,—he had work that day,—an’ when we come back, he’d took them clear off just like they was. He’d even left their little caps, an’ there they was, layin’ on the table. There’d been a complaint, I found out, yes, a complaint about how papa was drinkin’ too much, but we got ’em back all right. Wouldn’t it been awful if they’d been took!”

Sometimes the family is broken up, the children are carried away, and the parents left to drink out the rest of their lives as they will. To remove the children may seem high-handed and brutal, but the reverse picture—the family left to vent its weakness and its vice on the plastic children in its care—is surely a worse alternative. Some of these women are known as “harborers.” They send the youngsters out to beg, and wink at their pilfering if they do no worse. School in their eyes, as in the boys’, is an unnecessary regulation and enforced by an arbitrary society. Evasion of law is part of their code, quite as much as is the “working” of any organization or church, which is legitimate prey if there is something to be gained. Beyond the calls upon their children to gather coal and wood and to mind babies there are few restrictions. “Lord, I can’t be aifter botherin’ me heads over thim, lady, they do be off somewheres an’ ye can thrust thim younguns to take care o’ thimselves.” And take care of themselves they do, and quite effectually, until they have the bad luck to run foul of the police. Even then it is probably no very serious matter till Tommy gets to be an old offender. His mother at least is not worried about the condition of his morals, and can be counted on to give the most glowing character to “the Gerry man.” What need to fear the streets for him? Surely they can furnish him few sights more sordid and more impressive to his childish imagination and prematurely sharpened mind than those with which he has grown intimate within the walls of his “home.”

Truly they have a hard life, these West Side tenement mothers, and though many fail and many despair, from first to last the majority make a brave fight of it. When one is born to the lowest rung of the ladder and lives among people who seldom aspire beyond, existence becomes a difficult matter. How can the boy’s home be attractive when there is scarcely room to turn round in it, the family is large, and when year in and year out his mother is merely a drudge? How can his mother, under such conditions, hope to make the home rival the ever-changing lure of the streets? What time and mental energy can she give to her children separately, when she is struggling from morning till night to clothe and feed them? Is the child, produced as he is, so much her fault? Is he not much more a product of a situation for which her responsibility is small?

Replenishing the Wood Box

A Rich Find

Home conditions, the tension of constant quarreling, broken sleep, fear, hatred, and excitement, combine to break down the nervous constitution of the child before it gets a fair start. Little is known or cared about infant nutrition; there is no time to bother over such things. In many families not even once a day is there a regular meal or meal time. Father and children eat the same food, and the boy is accustomed to the stimulus of tea and coffee from childhood. Sugar comes from the grocery fairly clogged with flour. The coffee contains barley and other cheap ingredients. Cheap jellies and condiments poison him with their acids and coloring materials. The owners of delicatessen stores say in defense that it is not worth while to keep the higher grade brands for the neighborhood will not pay the few necessary cents extra to secure them. A storekeeper recently advertised a keg of cider for sale at one cent a glass. When asked for his reason, he said that the cider was so spoiled that nobody but the children would buy it. While he was making this explanation two small boys came in; one gave his penny to the storekeeper and received a glass of cider which he shared with his mate. Often the home food is not sufficient, and it is not at all uncommon for a boy to pick up at least one meal a day in the streets, leaving the house at noon and not returning till late at night. Crushed fruit and stale cakes and rolls are sold to children at half price, and the stalls provide candy which, like the staple foods of this neighborhood, is usually adulterated. But the boys care for quantity rather than quality. The mixture of glue, glucose, aniline dyes, and coarse flour which they eat would upset the digestion of children far better nourished than they, and most adults find it impossible to drink the soda water flavored with cheap compounds which is sold on the streets. It is scarcely to be wondered at that boyhood on the Middle West Side is physically and morally subnormal; and it can scarcely be contended that West Side motherhood is greatly to blame for it.

If there is cause for wonder at the results of the home life of these tenements, it is wonder that parents do not give up more often. For here indeed it does seem that “the struggle naught availeth.” Perhaps they do not know how to give up. Their ethical sense, even their sense of life itself, is dulled or deadened by the hopelessness and squalor around them. The father’s struggle to meet the rent, provide food and occasional clothes for the family, and still leave enough for the hour or two at the saloon, which is often his only recreation; the mother’s pitiful, incessant effort to keep her dingy tenement habitable and her family together; to make one penny buy the groceries of two; and withal to keep up to some slight extent a decent appearance,—these things have left scant time or energy for attention to the moral needs of the children. So long accustomed to the dangers of the streets, to the open flaunting of vice, drunkenness, and gambling on all sides, they do not take into account the impressions which these conditions are making upon young minds, now and with ever-growing inquisitiveness seeking information and experimenting on all manner of things which come within their ken. Their very poverty itself aids in dimming the moral sense. Mothers frankly say they have no room for their children in the house, and it is nearly always true. They are between the devil and the deep sea. Physical and moral conditions in the home are bad for the boy; the street gives him more light and air but is more dangerously immoral. In the face of so many apparently insoluble difficulties is it surprising that the parents’ attitude is bewildered and discouraged?

From the midst of this squalid and disjointed home life one fact emerges—that the recreation of the West Side boy lies beyond the power of the family. To look to such homes as those of this district to counteract the tremendous forces that play upon him outside is as unreasonable as it is useless. Wretched as it is, the tenement home has an influence, usually vaguely restrictive, and in a few cases wise enough and strong enough to help a boy who is “steadying down” and “getting sensible”; but this influence can rarely bear the strain of competition with the pull of the street and the gang. And so it happens that one type of mother—most pitiful because so near to efficient motherhood and yet so far from it—is perhaps the saddest of them all; the type that is fully alive to her son’s dangers, but realizes that it is impossible for her to cope with them.

Let us repeat, it is the inadequacy of the tenement home that is the greatest curse of these blocks. Its lack of space for storage helps to force uneconomical marketing; its lack of size and equipment drives the boy to the street. The mother is compelled to become her own boy’s worst enemy. She would gladly keep him off the streets, but the very conditions of her drudgery force him to them, and cut her off from the sympathy which she knows she cannot show him. Of course, the picture is not totally unrelieved. East of the tenements are the brownstone houses, and both here and in other parts of the district there are families which form exceptions of kindliness and comparative success in dealing with the problem of living. But by far the most of our boys would recognize their own homes and mothers in these pages. Dirt, frowsiness, dissoluteness, darkness, and rags—these are too often known to him from infancy. In the far West Side, home seems to be the one place which the children desire to keep away from.

CHAPTER VI
THE BOY AND THE COURT

[This investigation was made in 1909-10. Since that time great progress has been made in the children’s court of Manhattan. The failure of the kind of treatment described in Sections II and III of this chapter has been recognized by the court and a great step forward has been taken in the reorganization of its probation work. A number of improvements give evidence of a genuine and growing desire to make the work of the court more thorough and humane. These and other modifications will be noted in detail by footnotes in the following pages.

The description of court procedure here given is therefore to be read with the fact always in mind that the conditions described are those of several years ago. The account has been included because the material relating to the court, while partly out of date, is inextricably interwoven with the material describing neighborhood conditions which are practically unchanged. The improvements in the children’s court have not yet had time to seriously affect the district.

A further reason for including some statements regarding partly outgrown court conditions here is that they are not wholly outgrown in other cities. There are still children’s courts in other places which have no special children’s judge, where parole is used instead of probation, and where the records are entirely inadequate.]

The foregoing chapters have reviewed the situation back of the boy’s delinquency and have shown that his difficulties are deeply rooted in the whole neighborhood life of the Middle West Side. It cannot be denied that the courts are a necessary instrument in the handling of such lawlessness as we have found to be characteristic of our tenement neighborhood. But it must also be admitted that the unsupplemented efforts of a court of law, however humane its methods, cannot be the ultimate answer to our question of what to do with the West Side boy.

From the point of view of the neighborhood the children’s court takes its place among the various forces which influence him as wholly foreign. In the first place, the point of view of the tribunal is strange to his little savage mind. The judge is a sort of Setebos whom the little Caliban, sprawling in his West Side mire, both fears and scorns. In the second place, the court building itself is far from the district and beyond the range of his familiar haunts. After the boy is arrested, he is taken to the children’s court by way of the detention rooms of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In his own estimation he has made a notable journey by the time he reaches the court. His parents, too, view the trip to court as a considerable journey, which involves putting on their best clothes and the spending of carfare. It may also mean the loss of a day’s work and the possible loss of a job.

In order to make clear the experience of the boy in the court, at this point we must give a brief description of the growth, equipment, and processes of the Manhattan Children’s Court and its allied agencies. Later we shall examine some of the tangible results of this treatment in individual cases from the West Side neighborhood.

As a first essential to an understanding of the causes of arrest and the methods of the court, we must know the legal definition of juvenile delinquency. Chapter 478 of the Laws of 1909 provided that “a child of more than seven and less than sixteen years of age, who shall commit any act or omission which, if committed by an adult, would be a crime not punishable by death or life imprisonment, shall not be deemed guilty of any crime, but of juvenile delinquency only.”[23] The offenses, however, are still registered in the court according to the law violated. The clauses under which charges are most frequently made are given below. The number of the paragraph in the Penal Law containing the full text of the law is given in each case.

Sec. 486 Penal Law a. Improper guardianship (peculiar in that the child was arraigned for the offense of his guardians). b. Disorderly or ungovernable child (on complaint of parents or guardian). Sec. 720 Penal Law “Any person who shall by an offensive or disorderly act or language, annoy or interfere with any person in any place or with the passengers of any public stage, railroad car, ferry boat, or other public conveyance, ... shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” Sec. 43 Penal Law A person who commits “any act which seriously injures the person or property of another, or which seriously disturbs or endangers the public peace or health, or which openly outrages public decency, for which no other punishment is expressly prescribed by this chapter, is guilty of a misdemeanor.” Sec. 1310 Penal Law a. Petty Larceny. b. Grand Larceny. Sec. 405 Penal Law Burglary and Unlawful Entry. Sec. 242 Penal Law Assault. Sec. 1610 Penal Law Peddling without License. Sec. 1990 Penal Law “Riding on freight trains; boarding cars in motion; obstructing passage of car.” Sec. 2120 Robbery.

Besides the violations of the penal law, violations of the compulsory education law and of the child labor law are frequently the ground of complaint.

The list of offenses with which our special group of 294 boys was charged agrees in the main with those given above. The list of court charges[24] according to the number of arrests for each is given herewith for the whole group of 463 arrests.

A Ball Game Near the Docks

“Obstructing Traffic” on Twelfth Avenue]

As early as 1892, a law was passed permitting the separate trial of children in New York City, but it was not until September, 1902, that a separate court was established in Manhattan in a building of its own at the corner of Third Avenue and Eleventh Street.[26] The children’s court, including all those sitting in the various boroughs of Greater New York, is called the Children’s Part of the Court of Special Sessions. The court sits daily until the calendar is cleared.[27] The cases before the court had to be rushed through with great speed. In 1909, over 11,000 cases were handled by the Manhattan court. This allowed the judge an average of five minutes for a trial, including the most serious and perplexing.[28]

The court building, which was once the headquarters of the Department of Corrections, has long been congested, inconvenient, dingy, and unsanitary.[29] The room where the hearing is given is always crowded and noisy.

An account of the court’s equipment is incomplete without a word in regard to the detention quarters set aside in its own building by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The detention home, with dormitories and dining rooms, is given rent free. The total expense of caring for the children temporarily in the care of the society in 1909 amounted to something over $20,000.[30] The total amount spent by the city for court service in handling over 11,000 cases in 1909 was $56,012.15. This averages $5.00 less per capita than any other large city in the country.

The development of a probation system for juvenile delinquents was of very slow growth in New York City. The first probation law in New York state was passed in 1901, but children under sixteen were excluded through the efforts of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.[31] In 1903, a compromise was made which permitted the appointment of an official probation staff. Until the series of adjustments and improvements recommended by the reports of the Page Commission[32] in April, 1910, was begun, the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the volunteer probation societies did the only work approaching probation in nature.[33] The court process, however, was not probation, but parole, though until recently the words were used as synonymous in the court. “At the end of the period of parole, sentence is suspended if the child has done well,” wrote Mr. Homer Folks. “The term ‘parole’ as used in this court signifies practically an adjournment of the case. The oversight of the children on parole is not clearly separated from the work of the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”[34]

Very early in the history of the court private efforts were made to help the many children who, it was felt, were not receiving adequate attention. The impulse to reform and save the child, being largely moral, naturally originated in the churches. The result was a division of volunteer probation along church lines which left its impress on the later developments of probation work.

In Manhattan the first to enter the field were the Catholics. The Catholic Probation League, incorporated February 3, 1907, under the auspices of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, was the appropriate sponsor for the movement. The pioneer work had already been done, however, by a small group of women known as the Catholic Ladies’ Committee. After the formation of the Probation League, its parole committee co-operated with the ladies’ committee by taking over the cases of the older boys. The committee took all the girls’ cases and gave them especial attention. The members themselves did the visiting, and at one time maintained a paid worker. Some of them favored the establishment of an official probation staff. They thought that the willingness of volunteer agencies to shoulder the entire burden was delaying this important move.

The Jewish Protectory and Aid Society had for several years engaged in parole and probation work to a certain extent. The society maintained a paid worker who represented its legal authority as guardian of all Jewish juvenile delinquents in the city and who was made a special officer by the police commissioner. Until the recent establishment of the Jewish Big Brother movement he bore the brunt of all the visiting of Jewish cases, and handled as best he could all the cases passing through the court or paroled from the Hawthorne School.

Before the founding of the Big Brother movement, there was no organized effort in behalf of the children of Protestant parents who passed through the court and were not committed to an institution. Ernest K. Coulter, clerk of the court, seeing the need of work similar to that of the other two great religious groups, induced a club of men in the Central Presbyterian Church to promise that each one would act as “Big Brother” to one court boy. The preliminary work was carried on by the club for a couple of years, and the movement aroused considerable interest. Other church clubs also took up the work. In March, 1907, the movement was reorganized, so as to be independent of the churches. For a time the branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association acted as “centers” while neighboring church clubs acted as “locals.” Later the alliance with the Association was severed, the work becoming independent of sponsorship.

The Jewish Big Brother movement, modeled in many respects upon the Big Brother movement of the Protestants, was formally organized in February, 1909. At first, this society took only the boys on parole from the Hawthorne School, but later the work was extended to include parole cases from the House of Refuge.

All these religious agencies,[35] in contrast to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, have not been in any way connected officially with the court.[36]

1. GETTING INTO COURT

Let us follow a boy, accused of violation of the law, through all the possible vicissitudes of a court experience in Manhattan previous to September, 1910. The task may prove tedious but not nearly so meaningless or bewildering for the reader as for the thousands of families who had to go through it every year.

Once arrested, he was led to the nearest police station, followed by a throng of curious onlookers. At the station house children were occasionally discharged, but ordinarily their names were entered on the police docket and the parents were informed. If no one was found at home, a message was left with a near neighbor. Some one must vouch for the boy’s appearance in court the next day before he could be liberated. If the boy was arrested in the evening, he might be taken directly to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children for detention and the parent notified to appear there for the child before midnight or at court the following morning.

The law provides that in cases of delinquency which do not involve a felony the police sergeant may accept the word of the parent or guardian as sufficient surety for presence at trial, without bail. However, the decision is left to the discretion of the officer, and bail was sometimes required for trivial offenses.[37] There is opportunity here for the local political “boss” to foster the belief that he is able to help a friendless family, and later to send his henchman to enlist the vote at the next election. There was no evidence that the local “boss” had any influence in the children’s court; it is significant, however, that the people thought he had.

In one case the great political “boss” of the district personally accompanied the mother to the court. This was when Mrs. Hannon, apparently believing that it was the thing to do, had “got up her ‘noive’” and appealed to him at once, without waiting for her husband to tell her. Furthermore, Mrs. Hannon triumphantly pointed out, the boy who had been brought in simultaneously with her son, was fined $3.00 “because his father was not ‘in’ with the Senator” at that time. In two other cases it was the aged mother of the “boss” who seemed to have the deciding voice as to his actions! There were other parents, one a saloon keeper, who boasted that they could have secured aid if they had happened to need it. One old woman resident said she had “enough friends to get the boy off the gallus if nade be!” These stories illustrate the Celtic feudal relation which existed between the political sponsor of the district and its inhabitants.[38]

Bail was seldom demanded at the headquarters of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. When the boy was once inside this building, the general public could learn little of what went on except through the annual reports of the society, a formal visit, or reports from the families themselves. To many families the functions of the court and “the Gerry,” as the society is called after its founder, were indistinguishable amidst the irritating confusion of their court experience. If any distinction was made, there was a dread of “the Gerry man” (sometimes used as a “bogey”) which was not felt regarding the court.

By 10 o’clock of the first court day following the arrest, the boy was deposited by the society’s agents in the waiting room on the second floor of the court building, or brought by his parents to the court room. After a tedious wait his name was shouted through the corridor back of the court, and relayed to the waiting room. He was then taken into the noisy court room, where he stood one step below the witness stand while the officer or complainants were sworn in and corroborated the data on the judge’s or their own memoranda. The judge had only a brief record of the arrest and charge at this time, with an occasional verbal report from an officer of the society or a volunteer.[39] No investigation of the case, individual or social, was made before the trial. Our records contain cases which, had they been investigated, would have shown feeble-mindedness, adenoids, bad eyes, frail constitution, self-abuse, or terrible home conditions. On the other hand, there were cases where the character and family surroundings of the child should have shown a severe sentence to be unnecessary. Sometimes faulty records failed to show a previous arrest and the boy’s word was taken that he had never been in court before.

Following the accusation the boy was allowed to speak for himself, pleading guilty or not guilty. He stood on the top step, the center of a small group, about three feet from the judge. The distracting noise of the court room had at least one advantage; it prevented the audience from hearing what was said. After the boy had spoken, the mother or guardian might be admitted inside the rail to speak to the judge. In some cases, this privilege was refused. This constituted the distinct grievance of a group of parents who were not all of low type by any means. On the other hand, in two of our worst cases the judge, ignorant of conditions, proved susceptible to a shrewd appeal by the mother. It is hard to see, however, how the court could avoid such mistakes without an adequate investigating staff.

Occasionally the parents had engaged a lawyer, who was semi-officially recognized by the court and who collected what fees he could from the defendants. Sometimes the engagement was due to the initiative of the lawyer. In fully 80 per cent of the cases there was no lawyer formally pleading, and even when one was engaged he was in most cases unnecessary. The delay, and the cost to defendants, would have been much reduced if he had not been present. Since, however, every case registered as pleading “not guilty” was supposed to have had the opportunity of counsel, a lawyer’s name was formally entered in the record after every such case.

Before disposing of a case the judge might remand the boy to the care of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children while an investigation was made, if he were not sure of the proper treatment to be given. Only flagrantly bad conditions show up, however, under superficial investigation. A case was occasionally “remanded for investigation” in order to give the boy and the family a lesson; a remand of this sort being in reality a mild punishment. Since the reformatories have refused short commitments, this has frequently been the substitute.

Unless the boy was an old case, it was only after the court had acted and he had stepped down from the stand that the volunteer probation agencies took a hand. By this time the boy and his parents were pretty well bewildered, and in the excitement it was often impossible to make clear to them what was meant by the questions asked or the suggestions offered by these volunteers. The entire court experience meant for the more sensitive among both parents and children a nervous shock, or, at least, an extremely trying ordeal which was frequently out of all proportion to the triviality of the offense in question. Where the type of family which passed through the ordeal with indifference was concerned, it was correspondingly ineffective.

The kinds of disposition which the judge might make of any given case are as follows:

(1) Dismissal for insufficient evidence. Evidence applies, as in criminal courts, only to the specific act; and if it be lacking, the court is powerless to act as guardian of the child as it could do if it had equity powers. However, in especially flagrant cases a child dismissed under one charge may be returned for improper guardianship.

(2) Acquittal, if the boy pleads not guilty, and there is some evidence that he was not involved in the escapade. This is sometimes technical and takes no account of serious delinquency which may lie back of the affair.

(3) Suspended sentence, after conviction, with a warning of reprimand, but no supervision or visiting.

(4) A fine, usually one or two dollars, though it may be as low as 50 cents or as high as five dollars. This is used ordinarily as a lesson to the parents, since the burden of the fine falls upon them.

(5) “Committed for one day to the parental care of John Ward.” This is for the purpose of having an officer give the boy a “licking” upstairs in the court, when a parent refuses to do so. Occasionally sentence is suspended, or fine remitted, on condition that the parent do this, in case the boy or his parents have not learned to say, when the judge asks the question that he has already been licked. This method is said by some of the judges to be very effective in preventing recidivation. Its reforming effect is not quite so certain.

(6) Parole in the custody of the parents, to be visited by the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. A boy’s parole is often continued month by month. At its expiration the boy may be discharged from parole, committed to an institution, or given a suspended sentence. In the case of school children, especially truants, the principal acts as a parole officer and signs the parole card daily, vouching for the boy’s attendance and conduct. In case of serious offense during this period, parole may be revoked, and disposition made on both offenses, one sentence being held in reserve for its deterrent effect. If a child and his parents fail to appear on the prescribed date, a bench warrant is issued and the child is arrested and brought in. The same thing is sometimes done in improper guardianship cases, if the agent’s investigation has revealed conditions unimproved.

(7) Commitment to an institution, if possible to one of the same religious faith as the child. Neglected children are sent to charitable institutions; delinquents, usually older boys, after several offenses, violation of parole, or serious incorrigibility, to one of the reformatories. The House of Refuge is in many respects a prison for minors. Boys are committed to it who cannot be cared for by the New York Juvenile Asylum, Catholic Protectory, or Hawthorne School. Truants, if committed from this court, are sent to one of the truant schools.

This résumé of dispositions forms a basis for a natural division of our case material. We have studied the effects of the court experience upon different groups of children according to the sentence received. To a large extent the home visiting was apportioned among our investigators along the same lines. The disposition indicates the judgment of the court as to the seriousness of the offense, and it is the effect of this judgment which is to be tested.

As has been stated in the introduction, a statistical study of the delinquency of boys was made in 241 West Side families. Four hundred and sixty-three arrests of boys occurred among these families during the period covered by our investigation. Data are available concerning the offenses committed and the action taken in court for 454 of these 463 cases. As some boys were arrested more than once, and as some families had two or more boys who were arrested, the 454 arrests affected but 259 boys and 221 families.[40]

There were, in the families investigated, a number of boys who were not themselves arrested, but who were, nevertheless, properly included in our study of delinquency. Their gang relations or other connections with the boys who were arrested made their cases significant. As these boys and the boys concerning whose arrests complete statistical information is lacking numbered, together, 35, the total number of boys dealt with is 294.

Not all the boys were really delinquent. Some were brought into court because of improper guardianship, an offense on the part of the parents rather than on that of the children; and others who were not incorrigible came to the notice of the investigators. The word “delinquent” seems properly to apply to 249 of the 294 boys.

We shall divide the 454 arrests studied into three main groups: (1) The group of 260 cases in which the court did nothing after the child left its doors; namely, those acquitted, discharged, released under suspended sentence, whipped, or fined; (2) the group of 95 paroled cases; (3) the group of 99 cases committed to institutions. Each of these groups will be considered separately in the following sections.

II. THE BOY WHO IS LET GO

The majority of the children who daily passed through the court were dismissed either on the day of the trial or, at the latest, after the rehearing a day or two later.[41] We have recorded 260 of these cases, considered trivial by the court and closed officially as soon as the offender passed out of the door on Eleventh Street. As some children were arrested more than once on these petty charges, the 260 arrests affected 197 individuals and 176 families. In the words of the district, these 197 boys were simply “let go.”

The district phrase does not discriminate between the several verdicts under which this might happen. If evidence was wanting to prove the child guilty of the special act of which he was accused, he was “discharged.” If, on the other hand, he was convicted, he might still be allowed to go free with a “suspended sentence,” under which he might be retried at any time during the ensuing year. However, a retrial practically never occurred unless the boy was rearrested under a new charge. This fundamental distinction, then, between innocence and guilt becomes a mere technical difference and must be gleaned by the stickler for verbal accuracy from the court records and the rulings of the law. It is not to be discovered in the minds of either parents or children. Both verdicts came to the same thing in the end. “Aw, he got out a’ right the next day. They couldn’t do nothin’ to him for a little thing like that.”

Sometimes the boy was let go but a fine was imposed. This was a fact never to be forgotten by his parents. Several years after the event, the mother would recall ruefully: “He cost me two dollars for that fine, he did—an’ him only standin’ and lookin’ on.” When the fine was not forthcoming, the youngster might be held for the day in the court building and then dismissed. Sometimes the record reads “Committed for a day,” which means that the culprit had received a trouncing from an official of the court. But there was very little difference after the lapse of a few months in the effect of these verdicts, whether of discharge or suspended sentence, because none projected themselves very far into the later experience of the boy. There was some additional hectoring at home and the full recital of events to the gang. Then, with a few exceptions, the experience became past history.

Owing to the thousands of petty cases which flood the court the individual case was cursorily handled during the hearing as well as afterward. There was seldom any effort to probe deeper into the affair than appeared from the version given by the little group before the bench, consisting of the officer who made the arrest, the complainant, if there was one, perhaps a friend or witness who was interested and chose to be present, and the boy’s parents. Sometimes the mother did not even reach the bench, so great was the speed with which such cases were reeled off. Very seldom was there any time for patient questioning, without which the truth cannot be obtained from a reluctant and fearful child or from a parent already on the defensive. The disposition of the case, according to the routine procedure, must be based on an inadequate knowledge of the circumstances. On a minor charge the judge would seldom utilize his right to adjourn a hearing, and even this so-called “Remand for Investigation” might be used merely as a light punishment, since the child was kept for several days in the detention rooms of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It did not necessarily mean that any further inquiry was made.

In so rough a hopper as our system of arrests, boys of all sorts are run in on petty complaints. Of course, many of the tales of needless and mistaken arrests must be taken with a large grain of salt, as the mother is often quite ready to accept the boy’s version. But the evidence of disinterested residents and social workers in the district indicated the casual nature of many of the arrests. An arrest was simply bad luck, like the measles. “I ain’t been in court yet!” said Joey Burns. “I’ve only been in court twice,” said Patrick Coogan.

Nor is the argument entirely against the “cop.” The chances are that, if the boy wasn’t throwing craps then, he had done it often enough before, and the policeman, as the mother bitingly comments, “has got his job to hold down.” In case of a bonfire or a fight, it is humanly impossible to select from a horde of running boys the exact one who threw the can or lit the match. An onlooker is pretty sure to be hauled in and an angry woman to be down around the officer’s ears with, “It’s a foine sight of a strappin’ strong man ye are t’ be takin’ up a poor innicint b’y an’ lettin’ thieves and sluggers get away on yez.”

Yet there are important differences among these boys arrested on a seemingly trivial class of charges, such as “Loitering in the hallway of a house in West Forty-ninth Street,” “Making a noise,” “Shouting and creating a disturbance to the annoyance of the occupants of said house.” The offender may be a weakling, frail, ill-nourished, and backward. For this type of boy, sensitive and timid as he already is by nature, the court experience simply serves to increase his defect. Or, at the other extreme, he may be the leader on his block, and the prime spirit of all its “deviltry.” Hardened by a long career of semi-vagabondage in the streets, this boy is likely to be utterly scornful of the courts and their discipline. But most of the boys brought in on minor charges belong somewhere between these two extremes. Many of them are merely “wild,” like scores of other fellows on their streets, and would have a fair prospect of turning out well under proper supervision.

“We Ain’t Doin’ Nothin’”

The Same Gang at Craps

It is safe to say that “delinquent” was a misnomer for at least one-fifth of the 197 boys so easily dismissed from court. On a conservative estimate, 39 of these boys could not be charged with real misdemeanor, still less with crime. The sum of their iniquity was the violation of a city ordinance; they had “obstructed a sidewalk of a public street while engaged in playing” some game ranging from football to craps.

One boy, for instance, was arrested for pitching pennies. His parents were sending him to high school and had managed to give each of his older brothers two years in a business college—facts which betoken in our district unusual family energy and ambition. The boy himself was the leading spirit of an especially vigorous settlement club. His mother was firm in her protest that “parents ought to be given a chance to punish for such little things themselves.” Even the graver offense of stone throwing, when traced to its origin, does not always proceed from criminal instincts. The course of public opinion on his block draws any spirited boy, sooner or later, into some of the closely contested fights which occur periodically in lieu of a better form of recreation.

These charges are less a reflection of the boy’s waywardness than of the community’s disregard for his needs and rights. Apart from the misdemeanors which brought them into court, these 39 boys were well up to the best standard of behavior in the neighborhood. In only one case was there any serious truancy and the boys of working age all had steady jobs. The explanation of their better behavior was to be found, for the most part, in the better circumstances of their families; for most of them lived in fair homes in the more prosperous blocks of the district.

A few of this group, however, belonged to the most heavily handicapped families of our acquaintance. One boy, in particular, stands out for a degree of courage and energy remarkable for his years. His name was Sam Sharkey. His family lived on a river block from which it was assumed that no good could ever come. “If the rent’s paid, there ain’t nothing more looked for from that lot,” was the neighborhood opinion of this particular row. On the ground floor of one of these squalid houses Sam and his mother kept up a home for the younger brothers and sisters. Mrs. Sharkey scrubbed the floors of the dental college and the boy drove a delivery wagon. Sam was his mother’s steadfast right hand, sharing every responsibility with her. During one period of four weeks, for instance, while Mrs. Sharkey lay in the hospital with peritonitis, fifteen-year-old Sam kept up the home without her. “All the time I was out of my head,” said Mrs. Sharkey, speaking of her hospital experience later, “I was talking about Sam and calling on him to do things. The nurse, she says to me when I was myself again, ‘Who is this Sam that you’ve been talking about all this time?’ says she. ‘That’s my boy,’ says I. And I was for getting up and coming right home to help him, only they wouldn’t let me.” This was the same boy who had been arrested not long before his mother’s illness, for playing craps. In his case there was great need of outside help and interference of the right sort; but thanks to the marvelous stamina of young life still to be found occasionally even in the depths of squalor, there was certainly no problem of delinquency.

The largest group among the 197 boys discharged from court, which numbered 96, were of the type which the neighborhood characterizes as “wild.” This means boys who are troublesome in school and are probably truants. They are common nuisances, marauding on streets and roofs, damaging property, lying, and pilfering. Boys of this sort may be counted by the hundreds through these blocks. There was nothing to indicate that the 96 representatives who had been in court were very different from their neighbors, except by their ill luck in being “pinched.” It would be a desperate outlook indeed if all the “wild” lads of the West Side were likely to develop into the lawless Gopher element which as boys they emulate. Still, for all of them the chances are precarious. There can be no question, however, that it is still possible to counteract the influences which are hastening many of these boys along a criminal path.

The record of one twelve-year-old boy shows the typical cross currents of influence which affect the boys in this class. Hugh Mallory was the youngest of eight children. During the first ten years of his life his family had lived in the house in which he was born. Here they suffered so much from sickness, death, and poverty that they finally moved to another street, hoping to “change their luck.” After this they were more prosperous for a time until the father and one of the older boys got out of work and things began to look less cheerful. Mallory was a hard drinker, especially when out of work. The younger children feared him when he was in liquor, as it made him ugly-tempered. A special antagonism existed between him and the second son, who would get out of bed even late at night and go out on the streets if his father came home drunk and in a quarrelsome mood.

Still, the family had “never had to ask help but had had enough to eat and could get along.” James, the oldest son, a young man of twenty-three, was the mainstay of the family. The mother had done well under the hard load she had had to carry. She was thrifty, making all the children’s clothes, even to the boys’ jackets, but she showed the effects of her hard life in both her thin, worn appearance and her slack moral standards. She was not above conniving at such pilfering on the part of the boys as would “help along.” For two years Hugh had brought home coal regularly from the neighboring freight yard. Mrs. Mallory said that he was very smart about it and showed with pride two large bags which he had gathered. The method, she explained, was for one boy to climb on a car and throw down the coal to the others, who picked it up. She was, however, constantly in fear lest Hugh should be arrested. The court records showed that Hugh had never been brought in for stealing coal, but he had been arrested for stealing old iron. It was natural that “swiping coal for his mother” should lead to “swiping” things for his own purposes. Hugh and his fifteen-year-old brother were members of a club in a Protestant institutional church. The club had a camp to which both boys went in the summer. They had to pay their railroad expenses, and got the money, in part at least, from their winnings at craps. The outcome for Hugh was hard to foretell. It was a toss-up as to which of the elements playing on the boy’s nature would ultimately assume the dominant place. An effort to swing the balance with boys like these seems thoroughly worth while.

Youngsters like these form a large group, and are perhaps the most vulnerable point of attack for a court. With those who are merely “wild,” the oversight and help of a good probation officer should bring the best results. Leaders in settlement clubs, Big Brothers and social workers generally, agree that the problem of the boy of this type, whatever his surroundings, is largely one of wise direction of his sports and other activities. If the families of the culprits and the social agencies which have the welfare of the city boy at heart could be brought into close co-operation with the court through an efficient probation department, it is believed that results would quickly be shown in the diminution of the delinquent boy problem.

The remaining 62 of the group of boys let go presented a less hopeful aspect. The court charge was not an index to be trusted. Charges of petty theft were frequent, and six burglaries were recorded against this group. On the other hand, some of the boys, whom we knew to be seriously delinquent, had been brought before the judge for playing craps, building a fire, or some equally trifling offense, and discharged. When we pushed the investigation further, we found in the case of all these 62 boys a situation whose elements already foretold a useless if not a vicious manhood, unless vigorous and sustained effort were made to rescue them.

Matty Gilmore, for instance, had been brought in on the charge of “maintaining a bonfire on a public street.” On nearer acquaintance, he proved to be a boy in whom a definite criminal tendency was already noticeable. He had never worked more than a week or two at a time in spite of the many jobs to which he had been “chased.” In this he was carrying out the tradition of his family. His father and three older brothers had always loafed by spells “on” the mother and sisters, who worked steadily.

One of the jobs he had held for two weeks was that of delivering packages and collecting for the Diamond Laundry. At the end of the first week, his employer discovered that he was pilfering. Accused by the manager, Matty confessed his guilt but earnestly declared that he had been induced to pilfer by a friend of his, “a bad boy,” who was also in the service of the laundry and who was discharged forthwith. Matty remained. On Tuesday of the next week, two friends of his brought back a package with the tale that Matty had been run over by a train and was too badly hurt to work. He had entrusted them with the package to see that it was returned. It was not until several days later that the laundry discovered that Matty and his friends had delivered all the packages but one that morning and had pocketed the money collected. His mother and sisters made good the laundryman’s loss and the boy was not brought into court. A year later, he was arrested for disposing of several gold watches which had been stolen in a Connecticut town. As he was sixteen by this time he was sent, after a week or so in the Tombs, to the town where the theft had been committed, and spent several weeks in jail awaiting trial. He was then dismissed and allowed to come home again, where he took up his old habits, lounging in the streets and “hanging out” with the gang in its headquarters at “Fatty” Walker’s candy store.

The transient court experience leaves perhaps a deeper impression on the mother than on the boy. Many, to be sure, take it lightly enough and look upon the whole elaborate system as a sort of adjunct to their family discipline. “It was just as well,” one would say, “Oh, of course, he plays now, but he did keep off the streets there for awhile. I guess it did him some good, scared him some.” As for its effect upon herself, this type of mother is likely to show the indifference of the woman who “don’t seem to mind, she has seen so much of them courts.”

This statement does not necessarily mean that the woman has been to the court repeatedly. A single experience may go a long way toward inducing this state of mind. Mrs. Tracy’s account of Michael’s trial, for instance, shows how the cursory hearing given the case was bound to diminish her respect for the court. Michael’s actual trial, which was over in three minutes, was the anticlimax of a distressful day. It had begun with a hurried appeal to the local political boss, which had been followed by a trip to the court under the direction of one of his henchmen and by a long, anxious wait at the court from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. And then, according to Mrs. Tracy, “The judge says, ‘Officer, did you see the stone in his hand?’ ‘No,’ says he. ‘Well,’ says the judge, ‘don’t bring me any more cases like this.’ We none of us got a chance to speak, me nor Michael, nor the man who made the complaint, and who come down to court.”

But many cannot take it so philosophically, especially those who work hard and are not so much in the drift of neighborhood events and sentiments. They have not heard enough gossip to regard an arrest as a necessary episode and to discount its dangers. Instantly the great fear looms up that their boy is to be taken away. In the momentary panic, good women who have the welfare of their children most sincerely at heart will falsify to the judges without a scruple. A clergyman of the district said that more than once he had heard the same mother who had previously come to him in deep anxiety concerning her son’s misconduct give him an unblemished reputation before the judge. It rarely occurred to one of these women that any real aid was to be had from the court. To them it was simply another of the many hardships which worried and harassed their overburdened lives. Loss of time, and perhaps of money for a fine, are a very real sacrifice for the woman who works; but even these are nothing to compare with their worry and distress. “I couldn’t help crying, do you know, all the time I was there, and it made me sick for a week.”

We have then to consider the result of this whole cumbersome system of minor arrests and discharges. On the whole, we were led to the conclusion that the handling of minor cases in the manner described did hold in check the trifling delinquencies, more properly termed nuisances, especially in the better blocks. In the poorer sections it was not very successful even as a check on nuisances, as the casual passerby quickly learned; and it did not seem to have the slightest effect on serious lawlessness, where the need of restraint and discipline was greatest. The hurried hearing, the slight consideration, and the facile discharge were not only ineffective but often positively harmful. There is no getting around the fact that the court dealt with unjust severity with some boys, while with others its very leniency tended to make order and justice a mockery.

There is no simple panacea for all these troubles, but in the immediate situation and along the lines of court action some changes are worth trying out. The matter of arrests is a difficult one to control; often no valid distinction between the guilty and the innocent can be made on the spot, and even the best of police are in no way equipped to decide with certainty as to the degree of an offender’s guilt. However, it would be better to eliminate altogether a number of the most trifling arrests rather than to treat the offenders in too cursory a manner after they are brought into court.

The greater expenditure of time and money which a more thorough treatment of those arrested presupposes is an absolute necessity if we are to increase to any marked degree the success of the court in grappling with the real problem of delinquency. For this problem, as has been indicated, the best solution undoubtedly is to be found in the maintenance of an adequate and efficient probation staff, whose duty it shall be to furnish data concerning the situation back of the minor charges as well as of the more serious ones, upon which the judge may base his action.

III. PAROLED IN THE CUSTODY OF HIS PARENTS

As there was no official probation[42] in the children’s court of Manhattan, the judges had to rely on volunteer probation and what is known as “parole.”[43] Under the so-called parole system as it existed in connection with the Manhattan Court, no constructive effort was brought to bear on the boy beyond reproof and advice given in court and an attempt to impress him with a fear of the consequences to himself if these were disregarded. This method was used in cases deemed too serious for immediate discharge, yet not suitable for commitment to institutions. There are among our records 95 arrests where this solution was tried. The number of children concerned was 83; the number of families, 76.

The procedure in such cases took more time and consideration than when the child was simply discharged. Sometimes the “parole” was granted on the day of the first hearing without any previous investigation, but usually the child was sent to the detention rooms of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children for two or three days to await a second hearing. During this time an officer of the society made an inquiry and brought a report to the court. If the judge then decided to “parole” the culprit, he was sent home to his parents, to whom the following card was given:

“Your child ..................., paroled in your custody until ............, on which date you will report with h... at the Children’s Court, 66 Third Avenue (Corner of Eleventh Street), at 10 a. m. for further instructions from the Court.

“The disposition of the case will depend entirely upon h... conduct while so released and your supervision over h....

“The case will be re-investigated by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Children, and a full report submitted on the date set for the return to Court.”

The date set for his next appearance was generally about a month later. Just before it arrived another inquiry was made to form the basis of a new report to the court. The officer of the society to whom the case was assigned had no responsibility for the conduct of the child during this interval. His sole task was to discover what it had been and to report it correctly. The judge glanced over the papers concerning the previous hearing, read the new report, and accordingly terminated or extended the “parole.” As a usual thing it was only two or three months before the forces of the law ceased to concern themselves with the boy, and for the time at least he passed beyond the oversight of the court. He might have to report, perhaps once, perhaps four times—very seldom more. In case of failure to do this, a bench warrant might be issued on which he would be brought in, but this happened very seldom.

A comparison of our 95 paroled cases with all the cases, 1,805 in number, under the care of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children during 1909, shows that the average period of parole was about the same for both groups. Speaking in general terms, about one-third of the children in each group were on parole a month or even less, and at the end of three months the parole was ended for all but a small proportion of the cases in both groups. The inadequacy of the one to three months’ parole is best indicated by comparing it with the usual term of commitments. The institutions have, by common consent, declared that a commitment of less than one and a half to two years is not sufficient to effect any real change in the character of the offender. There is, then, little to expect in the way of actual reformation from brief parole terms. Especially is this true so long as they are not re-enforced by any direct effort to modify the conditions of the child’s life or to influence his character and conduct.

A second defect of the parole system was the important part played in the court’s decision by the written word of the parole officer. Meager statements, even when accurate in themselves, may be as misleading as if they were false. Two reports placed in the hands of the judge may, on the face of them, be not dissimilar; but in the light of further investigation, one of the cases may prove to be far more serious than the other.

An investigation too frequently was made as follows: The parole officer secured the mother’s statement as to the boy’s conduct, hours, and associates; the testimony of the neighbors as to the character of the family; a statement from the boy’s school; and, perhaps, if he was working, a statement from his employer as to his regularity, conduct, and quality of work. The following is a typical record of such an investigation:

This record concerns Patrick Staley, a boy of twelve, living at West —— Street, “charged with disorderly conduct in that he did climb on the rear of a truck moving through said street and take and carry away merchandise, to wit: one jar, containing a quantity of mustard.”

The report of the investigation reads: “Defendant lives at the above address with his widowed mother, in a very poorly furnished home of three rooms, where they have resided the past two years. Mother of the defendant is employed as a cleaner in Public School 51 where she earns $6.00 a week. This is the only income of the family. Mrs. Staley was seen and states that her son Patrick has been very well behaved since arrested and paroled. Further states that he attends school every day at Public School 51 and that he has no bad associates that she knows of. Further states that he is never on the street at night and is well behaved in and about the house. Neighbors, all of the poorest class, state that the boy Patrick is a good boy. No school record was obtained as there is no school this week.”

With every rehearing the same ground was covered in the reinvestigation—a second interview with the mother, the neighbors, the school, and possibly the employer. In addition to the parole officer’s report, the boy was supposed to present a card signed daily by his teacher and parent. Of the full family make-up, its history, the attitude of the parents, the temper of the home, the character of the neighborhood, the boy’s individuality and interest,—in a word, of the whole vital human situation represented, nothing is to be gleaned from the curt and general phrases of hastily gathered reports. The importance, therefore, of insuring complete and thorough investigation through the employment of a trained staff of workers cannot be over-emphasized.[44]

The following record, as brief as the one quoted above, was based on a very thorough investigation by a trained worker.

This report concerns James Riley, a boy of fourteen, living in West 53rd Street, charged with creating a disturbance by “throwing missiles and knocking off a man’s hat.”

The report of the investigation reads: “Defendant resides at the above address with his parents in a fairly clean and comfortable home of four rooms. Mrs. Riley was seen and she states that her son has been very well behaved since on parole. That he has been attending school regularly and has no bad associates to her knowledge. Further states that he is never out of the house evenings. Further states that her daughter Mary practically takes care of the home and that she herself is employed in Bellevue Hospital and her husband is a longshoreman. Neighbors and janitress all speak favorably of the Riley family and state that the boy James since on parole is very well behaved in and about the premises and seems to attend school more regularly. At Public School 82 the following report was obtained: “Attendance satisfactory, conduct excellent, work fair to good.”

The two boys, the two homes, the two situations were radically different. Yet, although there may be no misstatement, the cases of the boy James and the boy Patrick appear, on the face of the reports, to be quite similar.

It does not follow from the brevity with which facts may be presented that they are the sifted truth from which the chaff of falsehood has been blown away. And yet in gathering this kind of evidence, judicious sifting is absolutely necessary. The word of the parents must be considered and is of great importance, but it cannot be taken on its face value. In a district such as ours, with its marked hostility toward the forces of the law, it would indeed be strange if a parent on the defensive would choose to give reliable evidence rather than evasive and misleading statements. And the more serious the charge, the less reliable, naturally, is the parent’s word. At best it is merely indicative of the father’s or mother’s judgment, which is often too feeble a staff to be depended upon.

For similar reasons, the testimony of neighbors is open to question. The Bransfields, who had a reputation from one end of the block to the other as being the “toughest of the tough” were nevertheless, according to court records, “favorably spoken of in the house.” Thus, also, the parents of James Burckel were set down as “to all appearances respectable. They are favorably spoken of in the house. They have lived there for the past four years.” Yet the father of James Burckel had served three terms in prison. On the other hand, really respectable parents deeply resent the stigma of having the news spread through the house that a probation officer has been inquiring about them. Evidence of this sort, unreliable as it is likely to be for the court on the one hand and mortifying to the parents on the other, should be gathered only with the greatest care and discrimination.

The school has been in the past, and must continue to be in the future, one of the most important contributors to the information of the court. Here is to be found a group of people—principal, teachers, and possibly truant officer—who are free from the personal bias of the family and who have been in daily contact with the child arraigned. This joining of forces with the school was one of the great advances made by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in its development of the parole system. A good school record was a concrete argument in favor of the boy, while truancy and loafing were nearly certain to go hand in hand with any very serious misconduct. But in order to be useful such records need to be as full as possible. School attendance, for instance, is best reported by giving the exact number of days absent and present. Similarly, inquiry concerning his employment should include the statement of his hours of work and the exact periods of unemployment as far as this is possible.

The work record of the wage-earner corresponds in importance to the school records of the younger boy. This inquiry must be handled very carefully. The fact of a boy’s delinquency, if brought directly to his employer’s attention, may bear disproportionately hard upon him. But often the mere recital of his work history by his parents or by himself would reveal the essential facts, such as the number of shifts in employment, the speedy “throwing up” of his job, and the long waits between work.

Parents, neighbors, school, and place of work—this completes the list of sources from which, at the time of our investigation, the court drew its information. The start made with the schools had not been extended to the social and charitable agencies of the neighborhood. Yet the records of the relief societies often contained in compact form, ready to hand, facts which were vital to a full understanding of the case. In 41 of the 95 parole cases which came under our observation, the families had records in the offices of relief societies. Some of the family histories extended back fifteen or twenty years, but in none of these cases had the records been consulted by the court.