Children Of The City Part 1

Children of the City.

David Nasaw.

Acknowledgments.

I have received much a.s.sistance in the writing of this book. Rhoda Weyr's advice and encouragement were instrumental in the design of the project. Richard Drinnon carefully read and thoughtfully commented on the first draft. James Gilbert's critique of an early version helped me clarify my thoughts and focus my interpretation. Fred Binder and Daniel Coleman offered suggestions for improving the text. Herbert Leibowitz read and meticulously critiqued the final version.

Papers delivered at the Columbia University Faculty Seminar in American Civilization, the American Educational Research a.s.sociation annual convention, the New York Inst.i.tute for the Humanities, and Bucknell University offered an opportunity to share, clarify, and amend my thinking.

I am very grateful to Bill Leach for his help in the final stages of the project. Numerous discussions with him have helped me to sharpen and, I believe, b.u.t.tress my arguments. Phil Pachoda has read several drafts of the ma.n.u.script and responded to each with valuable suggestions. Warren Susman has, almost from the first day, been generous with his time, energy, bibliographic resources, and a.n.a.lytic brilliance. He saw, at times before I did, the larger meaning of the story I was trying to tell.

I am thankful to Owen Laster for his ongoing support. Loretta Barrett's enthusiasm and editorial skills have been invaluable a.s.sets to the project. She has helped me to shape what was a ma.s.s of material into what I now hope is a coherent, structured whole. Felecia Abbadessa has, with grace and humor, shepherded the book through production. Viera Morse did a remarkable job of copy editing.

I am indebted to Dinitia Smith for her faith in me and my book. She has been my best reader, certainly my most critical one. I have profited immeasurably from her encouragement, her critical ac.u.men, her editorial a.s.sistance, and her good humor.

I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Preface.

This book is about children and the cities they grew up in, about children at play and children at work. The time is the first decades of this century, the period in which so many of our grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated to the cities and the era in which children were expected to work in their spare time after school, on weekends, and during holidays.

These were the years of our own social childhood: the years in which we first began to use the telephone, go to the movies, drive automobiles, ride on subways, eat fresh bananas and oranges, and survive-as best we could-by learning to play as hard as we worked. In all of this, the children were a step in front. Just as today children lead us into the computer age, seventy-five years ago they led the way into the twentieth century. In cities where the majority of adults had been raised in the countryside, it was the children who were the most comfortable, the most adaptable, the most competent. The city was, after all, the only world they knew; it was the place they called home.

This book does not take as its starting point the a.s.sumption that the city is, has been, and must be the worst possible environment for the young. City kids grew up without adequate air, light, and s.p.a.ce to play and grow, but, compared to their rural counterparts locked inside mines, mills, and canneries or put out to work on sugar beet, cotton, and berry fields, they were privileged. The children of the city did not wither and die in the urban air but were able to carve out social s.p.a.ce of their own. They converted streets, stoops, sidewalks, alleyways, and the city's wastelands into their playgrounds. As they reached the age of ten or eleven, they went to work in the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment districts where, every afternoon after school, they scavenged for junk, blacked boots, peddled gum, candy, and handkerchiefs, and hawked the latest editions of the afternoon dailies.

At play and at work, the children inhabited a social world in the midst of but distinct from the adult worlds around them. They organized their own s.p.a.ce, regulated their own street trades, made and enforced their unwritten laws, protected their properties and their profits, and, when mistreated by the adults they worked with, established unions and went out on strike. In one such strike, in New York City in 1899, they astounded the public and the press by shutting down circulation of the New York Evening Journal and Evening World, forcing the two most powerful publishers in the nation, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, to arrive at a compromise agreeable to employees too young to shave.

The children of the street worked hard-and then they played hard. Though they were expected to turn over all their earnings to their mothers, they held back enough to buy themselves a good time in the city. They were connoisseurs of the streets, devotees of the corner candy shops, the nickelodeons, penny arcades, amus.e.m.e.nt parks, vaudeville halls, cheap eateries, red-hot stands, and pushcart vendors. The money they earned magically transported them from the realm of dependent childhood to the world of consumption where money, not age, brought with it fun and freedom.

I have tried to write about the children of the street from their perspective, not that of parents, teachers, child labor reformers, settlement house workers, or juvenile justice authorities. I have approached them as sentient, intentional beings desirous and capable (within limits) of acting on and within their social environments. The children were subjects of history but like all historical beings they grew up in a social world they had not created. They were autonomous and free but within limits not of their own choosing. They claimed the street as their social center, playground, and workplace. It became "theirs" in a way that home, school, and settlement house could never be. Nonetheless, the street belonged to the city, not the children. And the city was ruled by adults. To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, paraphrasing Friedrich Engels, the street made the children while the children made the street.

This study owes its life to the thousands of pages of primary source material generated, collected, a.s.sembled, and preserved by early twentieth-century settlement-house workers, educators, juvenile court officials, social workers, sociologists, law enforcement officials, and the thousands of men and women, amateurs and professionals, generically referred to as "reformers." These adults, like their muckraker journalist contemporaries, believed in the power of direct observation to crystallize truth which, communicated properly, would then lead to action. In the course of my research, I have examined hundreds of their reports: on newsboys in New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Boston, Philadelphia, Bennington and Burlington (Vermont), Newark and Jersey City, Cincinnati and Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Dallas, Kansas City, Birmingham, and other cities across the country; on "delinquents" in reformatories and "wayward" children in the children's courts; on the children's lives at work, at play, at school, and at home; on the foods they ate; the movies they watched; the games they played; the candy stores they frequented; the clothes they wore; the languages their parents spoke; and the homes they lived in.

These reports, some published, some unpublished, some never even completed, provided the base upon which I was able to construct my picture of urban childhood. Oral histories, autobiographies, and a few autobiographical novels offered a complementary but divergent perspective. While the reformers-to elicit action from public and politicians-painted their picture of urban youth in the most dismal tones, the narrative accounts and oral histories, with few exceptions, presented the subject in a very different light. They described the dirt and the dangers of urban life, but also the fun, the excitement, the hope for the future that the children experienced at the turn of the century.

Though, regrettably, by the time I began my research, the majority of my subjects were either deceased or at an age where they were not often able to remember their childhoods with clarity, I was able to utilize a number of oral history collections, published and unpublished, which included detailed first-person accounts of working-cla.s.s childhood at the turn of the century.

An additional source of evidence used in the study were the photographs of children at work and at play taken by early twentieth-century photographers, reformers, and journalists. Though I had at first intended to use these pictures as "ill.u.s.trations" for my text, I quickly discovered that they were primary source material as interesting and informative in their own right as the narrative accounts of life on the streets. A sample of the photographs consulted has been included in the book.

In the course of my research, I have read many biographies and autobiographies of novelists, educators, philosophers, gangsters, businessmen, housewives, textile workers, politicians, union organizers, musicians, diplomats, and even a heavyweight champion of the world. The most numerous and most valuable were the books by and about entertainers and celebrities. While many of these were written to settle scores, a.s.sail enemies, praise friends, and rescue or preserve reputations, the first twenty-five to seventy-five pages-where the authors speak of their childhood-were relatively free of cant, with few names dropped, grudges recalled, or actions defended. The authors seemed to enjoy recalling their childhood, finding in their past more than they realized was there and taking care to recreate it as vividly and accurately as possible.

The street children who grew up to become stars or make their mark in the entertainment world were not like all the others. Their ambition, drive, talent, and eventual success would put them into different social worlds when they grew up. As children, however, they lived the same daily lives as their friends, cla.s.smates, neighbors, or brothers and sisters (with a few exceptions like Milton Berle, who was whisked off the streets and onto the stage before he was six years old). n.o.body knew they were going to be famous and n.o.body treated them any differently. They were kids, perhaps a bit louder, brasher, or funnier than the others, but still just kids who grew up on the same streets, doing the same things as their playmates. Their stories, critically evaluated, provide an invaluable source of information on the daily life and work of city kids in the first decades of this century.

Unlike my other sources of evidence, the celebrity autobiographies are biased toward Russian Jewish children who grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In comparing their accounts of childhood with those presented in the reformers' investigative reports and the oral histories, I discovered-to no great surprise-that no matter what city or town the boys and girls grew up in, and no matter what their ethnic origin, the conditions they encountered on the streets and their response to those conditions were much the same. Working-cla.s.s Irish kids in Toledo and Philadelphia, Jews in Youngstown and Syracuse, Poles in Chicago and Pittsburgh, Italians in Los Angeles and Cleveland, and "natives" in cities across the country earned their money after school by scavenging for the same kind of junk, selling afternoon papers, blacking boots, and peddling spearmint gum and chocolate bars to commuters, tourists, and people out for a good time on a Sat.u.r.day night. Wherever they came from, they were expected to turn in their money to their parents. Wherever they came from, they were likely to hold some back to see the same kinds of movies in the nickelodeons and gorge themselves on the same kinds of treats from pushcart peddlers and corner candy stores. Though there were differences in the languages they spoke at home, the G.o.ds they wors.h.i.+pped, and the land their parents called "home," the developing twentieth-century urban culture transcended the particularities of ethnicity, geography, and population size to bind them together into one generation.

The City They Called Home.

The early twentieth-century city was among the wonders of the New World. Concentrated within it were the marvels of the age. Electric lights made night into day. Subways, streetcars, and the elevated sped commuters through the streets. Steel-girded skysc.r.a.pers and granite railroad stations expressed its solidity and its power. Lobster palaces, vaudeville palaces, movie palaces, and department store palaces of consumption recreated in the present the mythic splendors of the past.

American cities had expanded in all directions in the decades surrounding the turn of the century: up with the skysc.r.a.pers, down into the subway tunnels, outward across the bridges and tunnels to the new streetcar suburbs. The central business districts, once crowded with warehouses but not much else, had been enlarged and subdivided into financial, government, manufacturing, warehousing, shopping, and entertainment districts, each with its army of workers.1 Every morning swarms of commuters boarded their trolleys, trains, cable cars, elevateds, and subways for the ride to town. Three quarters of a million people flowed daily off the elevated into the Chicago Loop. They arrived in downtown Boston from Roxbury, West Roxbury, Dorchester, and the surrounding "streetcar suburbs." In Cincinnati, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, they took electric streetcars from the heights into the "flats" of the central city. In Manhattan, they trooped to work across the bridges, on the ferries, and by streetcar, elevated train, and subway. Theodore Dreiser described the procession from his vantage point at the Williamsburg Bridge. "Already at six and six-thirty in the morning they have begun to trickle small streams of human beings Manhattan or cityward, and by seven and seven-fifteen these streams have become sizable affairs. By seven-thirty and eight they have changed into heavy, turbulent rivers and by eight-fifteen and eight-thirty and nine they are raging torrents, no less. They overflow all the streets and avenues and every available means of conveyance. They are pouring into all available doorways, shops, factories, office-buildings-those huge affairs towering so significantly above them. Here they stay all day long, causing those great hives and their adjacent streets to flush with a softness of color not indigenous to them, and then at night, between five and six, they are going again, pouring forth over the bridges and through the subways and across the ferries and out on the trains, until the last drop of them appears to have been exuded."2 Those who arrived in the central business districts came to work, but they stayed to be entertained and to shop. The city's palaces of consumption were as new, as exciting, and as spectacular as its skysc.r.a.pers and bridges. The downtown department stores, huge as factories, luxurious as the most opulent millionaire's mansions, and jammed full of goods were a relatively new phenomenon in the life of the city. Until the 1870s there had been no real downtown shopping streets. City folk did their shopping in neighborhood stores or from itinerant peddlers. Local shops were specialized: butcher, baker, and candlestick maker had their own establishments where they produced and sold their own goods.

The extension of the streetcar lines into the suburbs and the new concentration of white-collar workers downtown provided retailers with hundreds of thousands of customers. Old-fas.h.i.+oned dry goods stores were expanded into department stores and then relocated and rebuilt along the busiest streetcar and subway lines to make shopping as convenient as possible for suburban women, tourists, and downtown workers.

Visitors to the city joined the commuters and workers on the shopping streets where the department stores were located. In Manhattan, the first "Ladies' Mile" was situated along Broadway and Fifth and Sixth Avenues between Eighth and Twenty-third Streets. There was nothing like it anywhere in the world. Wanamaker's, a sixteen-story cast-iron giant, was at Eighth Street and Broadway, Hearn's was on Fourteenth Street, and Siegel-Cooper's on Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street with its main attraction, "The Fountain," a circular marble terrace surrounding a mammoth marble and bra.s.s statue of "The Republic" shooting jets of water, "illuminated by myriad colored lights." Across the street from the Big Store was B. Altman's, a short walk away were Stern Brothers, Lord and Taylor, Arnold Constable, Best and Company, Bonwit Teller's, W. and J. Sloane, and Macy's.3 Wilmington, Delaware, May 1910. "James Loquilla, newsboy, twelve years old. Selling newspapers three years. Average earnings 50 per week. Selling newspapers own choice. Earnings not needed at home. Don't smoke. Visits saloons. Works seven hours a day." Unlike the mythic street-urchin newsboy portrayed by Horatio Alger, the real-life model was apt to be well dressed, as this boy was, with a st.u.r.dy pair of shoes, high socks, knickers and a stylish cap. (Lewis Hine, LC) As the city moved northward so did the department stores. Macy's in 1901 broke ground on its new Herald Square store-with one million square feet of floor s.p.a.ce. Within a decade all the other downtown stores had relocated on Fifth Avenue or close by.4 In Chicago, State Street was as grand a tourist attraction as New York's Fifth Avenue. One could wander up and down the avenue for days without running out of stores to visit and windows to peer into. There was Marshall Field's with its forty acres of shopping and its forty-five plate gla.s.s windows; Carson, Pirie, Scott's in its new building designed by Louis Sullivan; Fair, Rothschild's, Siegel, Cooper and Company; the Boston Store; Mandel Brothers; and the Stevens Store- all within walking distance of one another.5 Every city had its own special stores, stores which had grown up with the downtown areas and, in the beginning, helped lure customers from the outskirts: Jordan Marsh's and Filene's in Boston, the original Wanamaker's and Gimbel's in Philadelphia, Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh, Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, Rich's in Atlanta, Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, Goldwater's in Prescott and then in Phoenix, Arizona, I. Magnin's in San Francisco, Hudson's in Detroit, and Lazarus in Columbus.

The department stores were more than containers of goods or huge indoor markets. They were living encyclopedias of abundance designed to overwhelm the consumer with the variety of items available for purchase. The department stores brought together under one roof an unimaginable collection of commodities, catalogued by department, arranged by floor. Furniture, rugs, and bedding were on the upper floors; ready-to-wear clothing and shoes for women and children on the middle floors; bargain goods and groceries in the bas.e.m.e.nt. The street-level floors displayed clothing and accessories for men, who it was feared would not take the time to ride to the higher floors; and for the women, dozens and dozens of alluring, lower-priced items: cosmetics, notions, gloves, stationery, hosiery.6 What overwhelmed was not simply the variety of goods, but the variety and abundance of luxury goods, "from silk dresses and chocolate-covered candies to bicycles, cigarettes, and pink popcorn, which consumers had not produced themselves and which they did not need."7 The department stores, by so artfully juxtaposing the necessary and the frivolous, redefined and intertwined needs with desires. There was so much there, at such a range of prices, it was difficult to know what to buy. Sister Carrie, recently arrived in the city from the countryside and looking for work, was directed by a policeman to "The Fair," one of Chicago's more ma.s.sive and imposing stores. "Carrie pa.s.sed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a showplace of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used-nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire."8 One did not have to go inside to be touched by the magic of the stores. Plate-gla.s.s windows with superbly crafted displays highlighted by "the planned adoption of electrical lighting and of a new color technology, of drapery and mechanical props, of reflectors and wax mannequins, and even, occasionally of living models ... consciously converted what had once been dull places stuffed with goods into focused show windows, 'gorgeous' little theatrical stage-sets, sculpted scenes, where single commodities might be presented in the best possible light." The banks of show windows opened up the street, extending the interior opulence of the palaces onto the sidewalks and inviting the pa.s.sers-by to pause and dream of the splendors inside. Window-shopping, in essence no more than a dignified form of loafing, became a new and acceptable pastime.9 If shopping brought people downtown, entertainment establishments kept them there after dark or, to be more accurate, after the sun went down. There was, in reality, no more "dark" in the theater districts. Street lighting, first by kerosene and gas, then by electric arc and incandescent lights, extended day into night. Theater marquees, billboards, and restaurants with plate gla.s.s windows revealing and highlighting the gaiety within converted dark, deserted streets into well-lit thoroughfares of fun and fantasy. Broadway, the Great White Way, illuminated for two miles between Madison and Longacre Squares, was the prototype for the all-night entertainment district, but every city had its theaters, its restaurants, its hotels, its vaudeville palaces, and motion picture shows.10 New York City, 190815. A group of children studying the contents of a carefully arranged department store show window during the Christmas season. The window is probably Macy's. (Bain Collection, LC) Night life, once the province of lower-cla.s.s characters and men who acted as if they were, had moved out from the tenderloin and vice districts into the lights of the new and expanded "Broadways." Every city had its cheap public dance halls, saloons, and wh.o.r.ehouses, but for those who wanted to be entertained without shame and guilt and in the company of respectable women, there were new and proper places to do it.11 The vaudeville theaters were the first establishments to, quite literally, clean up their acts. Once a men-only affair, with prost.i.tutes cruising the aisles, profanity rampant, "girly shows" on stage, and the aroma of stale beer inescapable, vaudeville had, in the 1870s and 1880s, been transformed into acceptable, wholesome entertainment for the entire family. "Jeering, drinking, smoking, and soliciting were all but abolished by policing. Managers also clamped down on vulgar stage language and actions, creating a strict system of censors.h.i.+p that outlawed the uttered 'h.e.l.l' and 'd.a.m.n.' "12 Animal acts, magicians, pantomimists, and ladies who played the "concertina, banjo, and xylophone" were brought in to replace the "blue" acts that had once been standard.13 Though vaudeville shows could be seen in every town, at country fairs, and at amus.e.m.e.nt parks, it was in the cities that the theaters attracted the largest number of customers. In New York City there were, by 1910, thirty-one different vaudeville houses. Chicago had twenty-two, Philadelphia thirty.14 Vaudeville brought the middle cla.s.ses-in the thousands-downtown for the show. It was not, however, the only attraction of the entertainment districts. There were also the variety theaters and the music halls, where on any given night one could see operettas, new musical comedies like Little Johnny Jones and George Was.h.i.+ngton Junior, melodramas, or Shakespeare. Arnold Bennett, on his trip to the United States in 1912, was astounded to find "nearly twice as many first-cla.s.s theaters in New York as in London."15 Within walking distance of the theaters were restaurants to wine, dine, and be seen in. Dining out, once the preserve of society people who could afford fancy hotel dining rooms and restaurants like Delmonico's and of working men who frequented taverns, chophouses, and rathskellers, had become an acceptable-and accessible-form of entertainment for middle-cla.s.s men and women. In New York City, the dozens of new "Broadway" restaurants which opened their doors between 1899 and 1912 "helped make the life of conspicuous consumption available to a wider portion of the city and the nation."16 Patrons were not only wined and dined but also treated like kings and queens on holiday. Restauranteurs created sumptuous new interior decors to bedazzle their customers with a taste of luxury. "In Murray's [on Broadway in New York City], patrons entered the main dining room through a black and gold mosaic-lined foyer. The main dining room was built to resemble the atrium of a Roman home, complete with an open court with colonnades on each side. Surrounded by trees and statues and gazing out on an ancient barge fronting a terraced fountain crowned by a cla.s.sical temple rising clear to the ceiling, diners enjoyed the illusion of being in ancient Rome or at a villa in Pompeii.... The cla.s.sical porticos and temples provided a sense of restful magnificence, while the enormous height of the room and open s.p.a.ce suggested the lofty opulence and power of the diner."17 Entering the room was only the beginning of the treat. Eating in a lobster palace, like shopping in a department store, was an adventure, an excitement, an event to be savored. The beginning to a proper meal in hotel dining room or lobster palace was oysters (when not in season, clams could be subst.i.tuted), followed by soup, hors d'oeuvres, fish, the entree, the main course (usually a roast), the game dish, and dessert and coffee.18 For those who preferred to keep the good time rolling late into the night, there were cabarets and nightclubs, another early twentieth century addition to city night life. Fast dancing, once practiced only in the cheap dance halls and bawdy houses, was a major attraction in the new clubs. And when people danced, they danced-not waltzes or two-steps-but the turkey trot and the grizzly bear to the syncopated ragtime beat of black musicians who, had they not been playing in the band, would never have been allowed in such respectable downtown establishments.19 As Lloyd Morris has noted, it was just three miles from Rector's on Broadway, where twenty dollars would buy a dinner for five with two bottles of champagne, to the lower end of Orchard Street, where another restaurant "served a dinner of soup, meat stew, bread, pickles, pie, and a 'schooner' of beer for thirteen cents."20 In New York City, as in Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, Columbus, and almost every other city in the nation, the "other half" lived close by and a world away from the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment districts. H. G. Wells noticed during his visit in 1905 that there were "moments when I could have imagined there were no immigrants at all" in American cities. "One goes about the wide streets of Boston, one meets all sorts of Boston people, one visits the State-House; it's all the authentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, too, is America without a touch of foreign-born." And yet, Wells recognized, the America of the immigrant and the working cla.s.s, though out of sight, was just around the corner, just down the street, just over the hill, "a hundred yards south of the pretty Boston Common," "a block or so east of Fifth Avenue," an elevated stop from the Loop in Chicago.21 The two urban worlds did not mingle or mix. Each recognized the presence of the other, but neither went out of its way to cross over into the other's workplace or neighborhood. As Robert Shackleton noted in Chicago, the sellers and customers in the department stores were almost all "Americans." "The great foreign population of the city lives and does its shopping mainly in its own districts."22 Most residents of the working-cla.s.s city had no reason to travel downtown. Why leave the neighborhood where goods were cheaper and shopkeepers spoke your own language? Why go elsewhere to be entertained when you had little free time and the local streets provided all you needed in friends, family, neighbors, social clubs, saloons, and coffee houses?

Working men and women stayed behind in their own neighborhood because they were comfortable there. While the neighborhoods were not ethnically h.o.m.ogeneous, there were always enough "landsmen" cl.u.s.tered to establish and sustain churches, lodges, patriotic groups, food shops, bakers, butchers, restaurants, theaters, banks, and newspapers.

Settlement-house workers at the turn of the century and historians, more recently, who portray the working-cla.s.s immigrants as helpless, hopeless, uprooted victims misread the historical record.23 On the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment streets the Italian, Polish, and Russian Jewish immigrants wearing dirty overalls and speaking foreign tongues might have been out of place. But in their own communities, they were at home.

The two cities, though geographically distinct, shared the same congested, polluted urban s.p.a.ce. There were many constants in city life. No matter where you lived or worked, you were a.s.saulted daily by the smoke, soot, and dust in the air; the noise of clattering cobblestones, cable cars, trolleys, and the elevated; the smell of horse dung on the streets. In the working-cla.s.s and immigrant residential districts, these annoyances were intensified a hundredfold. It was in the city of the "other half" that the sewers were always clogged and the streets and alleyways filled with garbage. It was here that dead horses lay for days, bloated and decaying, children poking at their eyes and pulling out their hair to weave into rings. It was here that cats roamed at will through the streets, alleyways, backyards, roofs, and interior hallways, alley cats with gaping wounds, flesh hung loosely on starving bodies, wide frightened eyes, and the look, smell, and howl of starvation. It was here that tuberculosis raged and babies died of exposure or cold or heat or spoiled milk, that pushcarts, streetcars, and horse-drawn wagons fought for s.p.a.ce, and children were crushed to death in the duel.

The residents of the working-cla.s.s districts lived in a variety of dwellings: multistory tenements, converted single-family row houses, double-deckers, triple-deckers, wooden shacks and shanties. Wherever they lived, they were likely to live piled together, several families in s.p.a.ce designed for one, several persons to a room.

New York City, 190815. There is no way of knowing how long this horse has been lying here. During the warm spells of summer, dozens of horses dropped dead on city streets and lay rotting for days on end. Motorcar enthusiasts claimed that the "horseless" buggy was the only solution to this particular pollution problem. (Bain Collection, LC) Families made the best possible use of their limited s.p.a.ce, rearranging their flats every evening to provide maximum sleeping room for children, relatives, and boarders. On his first evening in the New World, Marcus Ravage, future historian and author of An American in the Making, looked on in amazement as his relatives transformed their apartment into a "camp." "The sofas opened up and revealed their true character. The bureau lengthened out shamelessly, careless of its daylight pretensions. Even the wash-tubs, it turned out, were a miserable sham. The carved dining-room chairs arranged themselves into two rows that faced each other like dancers in a cotillion.... The two young ladies' room was not, I learned, a young ladies' room at all; it was a female dormitory. The sofa in the parlor alone held four sleepers, of whom I was one. We were ranged broadside, with the rocking-chairs at the foot to insure the proper length. And the floor was by no means exempt. I counted no fewer than nine male inmates in that parlor alone one night. Mrs. Segal with one baby slept on the washtubs, while the rest of the youngsters held the kitchen floor. The pretended children's room was occupied by a man and his family of four."24 As the population and land values in the central cities increased, working people and the poor were forced to live in s.p.a.ces that should have remained uninhabited. In Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, cities within the city were built in the alleyways. In Pittsburgh and Chicago, investigators discovered hundreds of families living below street level in cellars, bas.e.m.e.nts, and dark, dreary, "cave-like" dwellings. In Chicago, where landlords had increased their profits-and the congestion-by building on every inch of land they owned, "rear tenements" and wooden shacks facing on alleyways were built in the back of long, slender lots.25 Cities with ma.s.sive, multistory tenements had the worst congestion. In New York City, where a higher percentage of residents lived in tenements than anywhere else in the country, the congestion inside and out was beyond belief. Theodore Dreiser, among those visitors to the Lower East Side overwhelmed by the sight, reported having seen "block after block of four-story and five-story buildings, "all painted a dull red, and nearly all ... divided in the most unsanitary manner. Originally they were built five rooms deep, with two flats on a floor, but now the single flats have been subdivided and two or three, occasionally four or five, families live and toil in the s.p.a.ce which was originally intended for one."26 Light, air, and privacy were at a premium for the working-cla.s.s and immigrant residents of the early twentieth-century cities. In the typical New York City tenement, with fourteen rooms on each floor, only four-two in front and two in back-"received direct light and air from the street or from the small yard at the back of the building."27 A housing inspector testified that the inner kitchens and bedrooms on the lower floors of the tenements he visited "were so dark that the lights are kept burning in the kitchen during the daytime. The bedrooms may be used for sleeping at any time within the twenty-four hours, as they exceed the Arctic Zone in having night 365 days in the year."28 Lack of windows meant lack of ventilation. The front and rear windows let in a bit of air-along with the noise and stench of street and alleyway. The interior rooms had windows, but because they opened onto airshafts and courtyards stuffed with rotting garbage, most residents kept them permanently closed.

The flats were dark, the hallways darker. In most tenements, the only light in the halls came from the front door when that was opened. A tenement house inspector testified that, in his experience, "the most barbarous parts of [tenement] buildings are the halls. A person coming in from the sunlight outside, plunges into these halls just like a car filled with men plunges and disappears in the black mouth of a mine shaft. If he is fortunate in not running against anybody, he stumbles along, finding his way with his feet.... [H]e hurries forward as rapidly as possible and rushes out upon the roof or into some open room, because the air is so dense and stifling [in the hallway] that he wishes to escape quickly."29 Privacy was as treasured and rare in the working-cla.s.s districts as fresh air and light. High rents forced families to economize on s.p.a.ce and sublet rooms and parts of rooms to boarders. City dwellers shared their flats, their rooms, even their beds and their toilets with virtual strangers. In many tenements, the water closet was located in the hall or the backyard, where it was used by several families and their boarders and relatives. In Chicago, for example, a turn-of-the-century study found that only 43 percent of families had toilets in their flats, 30 percent had to use the water closet in the yard, 10 percent had a toilet in the bas.e.m.e.nt or cellar, and another 17 percent shared a hall toilet with their neighbors on the floor.30 Unventilated, overused water closets and backyard privies were bound to and did overflow continually, seeping waste through the floorboards and into the yards. The odor of human excrement joined that of horse dung from the streets and stables and of garbage rotting in the airshafts, inner courtyards, streets, and alleyways.

If we were to be moved backward in time to the early twentieth-century city, we would probably be most repelled not by the lack of privacy, or toilets, or s.p.a.ce, air, and light, but by this stench. Without proper ventilation, the interior halls and rooms of the tenements retained their odors indefinitely. Inside and out, the air was not just heavy and fetid but, at times, unbearable. Cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, with their slaughterhouses, packing plants, and streets clogged with hogs, sheep, and cattle smelled the worst, but no city was free of what we today would consider an overpowering stench.

The residents of the central cities struggled as best they could to find a breath of air, cool, fresh, clean air. Men, women, and children herded themselves into streetcars and subways for interminable Sunday excursions to the parks and beaches, looking for gra.s.s to walk on and air to breathe. In the summertime, when the air was so heavy and hot "it was painful to draw one's breath," entire families-abandoning their last grasp at privacy-relocated on the docks, in the parks, at the stoops, the fire escapes or up on the roofs. As Mike Gold put it in Jews Without Money, "People went exploring for sleep as for a treasure."31 "Like rats scrambling on deck from the hold of a burning s.h.i.+p, that's how we poured on the roof at night to sleep. What a melange in the starlight! Mothers, graybeards, lively young girls, exhausted sweatshop fathers, young consumptive coughers and spitters, all of us snored and groaned there side by side, on newspapers or mattresses. We slept in pants and unders.h.i.+rt, heaped like corpses. The city reared about us."32 Light, air, and privacy were scarce commodities in the working-cla.s.s districts of the cities. But to paint too grim a picture of life in the early twentieth century, to speak only of scarcity, to emphasize only poverty is to caricature the conditions of daily life for many. The city was no golden land, but it was also no desert. There was plenty mixed with the poverty, abundance interspersed with scarcity. The city was many things at the same time to the same people.

Marcus Ravage, who arrived in New York City from his native Vaslui, Rumania, at the turn of the century, tried hard to organize his perceptions of this new land. He could not resolve the contradictions. He was disappointed on his arrival, "bitterly disappointed" at the "littered streets, with the rows of pushcarts lining the sidewalks and the centers of the thoroughfares, the ill-smelling merchandise, and the deafening noise," at the congestion inside the homes, and the boarders crowded into too little s.p.a.ce, stuffed into too few beds. (In Vaslui, he remembered, only the "very lowest of people kept roomers.") And yet, at the very same time, he was astonished at the material abundance displayed amidst the poverty. His landlady scrubbed the floor, not with sand, but with a "pretty white powder out of a metal can." "Moreover, she kept the light burning all the time we were in the kitchen, which was criminal wastefulness even if the room was a bit dark." There was "eggplant in midwinter, and tomatoes, and yellow fruit which had the shape of a cuc.u.mber and the taste of a muskmelon." There was meat in the middle of the day and "twists instead of plain rye bread, to say nothing of rice-and-raisins ... and liver paste and black radish." And then, as if he had not seen enough such wonders in his first day in the country, the young men calling on his Cousin Rose arrived that evening "with beer in a pitcher from the corner saloon." Common people-with beer in a pitcher-at home.33 The city-not just New York City, but every early twentieth-century city-overwhelmed with its abundance. There were enough goods to go around town and back again. The department stores and specialty shops got the best of the lot, but the working-cla.s.s districts, according to Harry Roskolenko, a poet and journalist who grew up on the Lower East Side, were stocked with their own "ma.s.sive supplies of shoddy goods ... leftovers from other years and seasons; things that could not be sold" elsewhere; and goods produced especially for sale to "the peddlers and the peasants and the proletarians jamming the sidewalks and gutters."34 New York City, 190815. An East Side "pushcart market." Migrants from rural areas on both sides of the Atlantic marveled at the abundance and the variety of produce sold on the streets of the city. (Bain Collection, LC) The pushcarts overflowed, the shops were littered with items for sale: umbrellas, stockings, boys' sailor suits with whistles attached, suspenders, gabardine overcoats, handkerchiefs, laces and ribbons and shoes and long underwear. There were carts filled with oranges and others loaded with bananas, herring came in barrels, milk was ladled out of forty-quart cans, potatoes dug out of fifty-pound sacks. Food, drink, and sweets could be purchased from peddlers and pushcarts, from stands, butchers, bakers, and grocers who sold it in cans, in boxes, in jars, in bottles, in packages, in bags.35 Newcomers might have a.s.sumed that city markets had always displayed such variety and abundance, but many of the items now prominently displayed were as new to the city as the electric streetcars and lobster palaces. The banana, for example, among the most proletarian of fruits, had until the 1880s been almost entirely absent from the working-cla.s.s shops and shopping streets. On arrival in New Orleans, "each fruit was wrapped individually in tinfoil and like a rare and precious object rushed to New York or New England, where, if it survived the journey, a single banana was worth a dollar."36 Oranges were also a luxury item until the 1890s when, with the completion of the Florida East Coast Railway, they could be s.h.i.+pped north by rail instead of being imported from the Mediterranean.37 Grapefruits were entirely new to the city. The old pear-shaped fruit, distinguished by its lack of juice, coa.r.s.e rind, and expensive price tag had been redesigned by Florida growers who s.h.i.+pped them north in refrigerated boxcars. Between 1909 and 1920, annual consumption of the new pink fruit jumped from under a pound to over five pounds per capita.38 The immigrants who arrived in American cities in the early twentieth century were astounded by the number of foods for sale and the variety of ways in which they could be purchased. Fruits, vegetables, soups, meats, even baby food, were sold fresh and in cans and tins. Propelled into the marketplace by new food companies alert to the advantages of national distribution, advertising, and brand name promotions, Campbell's soups, Heinz's fifty-seven varieties, and Libby's canned goods became part of the city's daily diet. Between 1909 and 1920, annual per capita consumption of canned fruits increased from under three pounds to over nine, canned soups from less than a third of a pound to two, and baby food from less than a tenth of a pound to over two.39 The addition of fresh and canned fruits and vegetables to a diet that had once consisted of little more than bread, potatoes, crackers, and various forms of salted and preserved meats was no doubt beneficial. From a social standpoint, the availability of food in cans meant even more. Here was yet another item once exclusively the preserve of the wealthy (and of military expeditions which could survive on no other form of food) that had become part of the common folks' daily diet.40 The family that could now for the first time eat peas for dinner was certainly more pleased by the new addition to its diet than it was distressed by the nutritional loss suffered in the canning process.

Of all the foods entering the diet of the working people, none were as enticing, as aristocratic, as luxurious, and as plentiful as the sweets. One by one, luxuries like refined white sugar and chocolate and homemade delights like fresh ice cream were ma.s.s-produced, distributed, and marketed in the cities. Candy consumption increased from 2.2 pounds per capita in 1880 to 5.6 in 1914 and 13.1 in 1919; ice cream from 1.5 pounds in 1909 to 7.5 in 1920. To wash it all down, there was Coca-Cola, invented as a "remedy for headaches and hangovers" by an Atlanta dentist in 1886.41 The new sweets further broadened and "democratized" the urban diet. Luxuries became commonplaces available for pennies from neighborhood shops and pushcart peddlers. And yet, there remained significant differences between the diet of the downtown gentleman and the factory worker's family. Both ate sweets and vegetables and meat. But the sirloin and spring lamb served in the lobster palaces was a far cry from the meat soup "made up of leftovers and ends and bones which the butcher sold for six cents a pound instead of throwing it away."42 Bananas and oranges and grapefruits were, for the first time, available downtown and in the slums, but only for the few who had the money to pay for them. For the rest, they remained as inaccessible as they had been in the days before refrigerated boats and boxcars carried them north.

In the midst of plenty, poverty and hunger remained. Within sight of the carts and shops filled with enough food to feed armies, parents struggled to provide for their families. Children grew up with what actress Ruth Gordon has called "the dark brown taste of being poor."43 Hy Kraft, later a successful Broadway playwright, never forgot what it was like to grow up poor. "A boy stands in front of a candy store-in front, mind you. He sees a hundred varieties of sweets, but he doesn't have a penny, one cent. Or he's in the street; a vendor pushes his cart, calling 'Icacrim sendwich, pennyap.i.s.s.' Other kids holler up to their mamas, 'Mama, t'row me down a penny' and the mama wraps the penny in paper and 't'rows' it down. This kid doesn't have a penny-one cent. And there's no mama upstairs; she's in the back of the bas.e.m.e.nt."44 Poverty was not unique to the metropolis, but nowhere else did it coexist with such splendor and spectacle. As Charles Zueblin, an authority on American cities, noted in the preface to his widely read volume on American Munic.i.p.al Progress, "There is poverty in the country, sordid and ugly. But city poverty is under the shadow of wealth. Luxury flaunts itself in the city."45 The city was suffused with contrasts: between the electrically illuminated magnificence of the downtown shopping and entertainment districts and the grayish squalor of the slums, between the abundance of goods offered for sale on the streets and the paucity of resources available to pay for them. Poverty and plenty lived side by side, in the same city, on the same block, in the same tenement flat. The contradictions that a.s.sailed Marcus Ravage on his first day in the city were inescapable. Wise men peddled suspenders on the streets while fools lived like millionaires. People slept crowded one on top of another, but they ate meat several times a week. Families shared toilets with complete strangers, but they were able to purchase shoes, stockings, and underwear for everyone-even for the children. It made no sense and yet it was real. It was the-city.

At Play in the City.

The central city districts were deprived of s.p.a.ce, privacy, light, and air. But they were, as Theodore Dreiser found on his visit to the Lower East Side, "rich ... in those quickly withering flowers of flesh and blood, the boys and girls of the city."1 In the mornings, after 3 P.M. when school let out, and after dinner, the tenements poured forth their armies of children: through the darkened halls, out the front door, down the stoop, into the street they walked, ran, skipped, and jumped.

The children were everywhere: in the streets and alleyways, on the stoops and sidewalks, hanging from fire escapes and out of windows. Henry James on his visit to the Lower East Side was overwhelmed by "the sense ... of a great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely." It was "the children [who] swarmed above all." "Here was multiplication with a vengeance." Theodore Dreiser counted "thousands" running the thoroughfare. Robert Woods, a Boston settlement-house worker, describing the South End, noted that "sometimes in a little side street you will see a hundred ... at play."2 The children played on the streets because there was nowhere else for them. Urban s.p.a.ce was a commodity, an item bought and sold like any other. As the population of the cities expanded, land became more and more valuable.3 The logic of urban progress was inexorable. Undeveloped land was wasted land. With s.p.a.ce at a premium, even the backyards were too valuable to be given over to the children. They were quickly filled up by the adults: with goats or chickens, herb and vegetable gardens, or some combination of "outhouses, sheds, fences, clothes lines, trash heaps, and even garbage piles."4 New York City. While their older brothers left the block to sell papers and black boots, the little ones stayed behind. The children used all the s.p.a.ce on the block. There was, as you can see from this photograph, no strict boundary between sidewalk and street, nor did there have to be. On streets such as this, where the traffic was light, the children could play their games without undue interference. To the right of the photograph are two "little mothers" watching over their younger siblings. (LC) Inflated land prices led to congestion inside as well as out. There was no room for children to play in tiny tenement flats and subdivided one-family houses stuffed full with aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents, babies, and boarders. The best rooms in the flat, the front and rear ones, were reserved for parents or boarders willing to pay extra for the privilege. The little ones slept in the living room or kitchen or with their parents or, if in rooms of their own, interior ones without windows, light, or air. The children not only lacked rooms of their own; they didn't even have their own beds. In his oral history, Frank Broska, a Chicago factory worker who grew up in a house heated only by a stove in the kitchen, remembered warmly being bundled up in bed with big feather ticks piled on top, heated house bricks wrapped in towels at his feet, and brothers and sisters on either side of him.5 It was much easier for a family to make s.p.a.ce for the children to sleep than it was to find room for them to play. The little ones could be tied to chairs or put in makes.h.i.+ft playpens in a corner of the kitchen. The bigger ones, if they sat quietly at the kitchen table doing their homework, were allowed to stay indoors. Otherwise, they were free to gaze out the window, sit on the fire escape, or leave altogether. Indoors was for adults; children only got in the way: of mother and her ch.o.r.es, of father trying to relax after a long day at work, of boarders who worked the night s.h.i.+ft and had to sleep during the day.6 Catharine Brody, a journalist who grew up on a city block in Manhattan, remembered in a 1928 article for The American Mercury that when she was a girl "there was no such thing as gathering or playing in the house." The children required no special encouragement to go outside to play. That was where they belonged. "The streets," as Catharine Brody put it, "were the true homes of the [city's] small Italians, Irish, and Jews."7 The children shared these "homes" with others. The street was their playground, but it was also a marketplace, meeting ground, social club, place of a.s.signation, political forum, sports arena, parade grounds, open-air tavern, coffeehouse, and thoroughfare. The life on the street was the life of the city. While the children played, the policemen walked their beat, prost.i.tutes solicited "johns," peddlers shouted their wares, delivery wagons squeezed down the block to neighborhood shops, and men and women cl.u.s.tered in small groups on the corners, in front of the shops, at the threshold of the saloons, and on their front stoops.

New York City, 190815. Three city kids intent on some sort of game, involving a hoop, a stick, and an empty can. While these children appear to be "alone" in the street, their mothers in the tenements overhead, older sisters along the sidewalks and on the stoops, and local shopkeepers kept watch over them. (Bain Collection, LC) The presence of adults in the street-and in the tenements overhead-protected the children at play. There was always someone within shouting distance should trouble appear. When Joey Cohen was lured into a tenement hallway by the "scarecrow" who offered him a nickel and then tried to pull down his pants, the boy's shout for help brought a.s.sistance at once. The apple peddler down the street, a man "in flannel s.h.i.+rt and cap," "two Italian laborers who [had] been digging a sewer nearby," and a crowd of peddlers, children, and housewives appeared from nowhere. According to Mike Gold, who witnessed the scene and wrote about it years later, "If a cop had not arrived," the crowd would have "torn ... the pervert ... into little bleeding hunks."8 The presence of adults on their play streets was not an unmixed blessing for the children. They shared their s.p.a.ce, but only grudgingly. As Peter and Iona Opie reported in their magnificent study of Children's Games in Street and Playground, adults and children have fought over the public s.p.a.ce they share since the Middle Ages. While the older generation has tried to get the children off the street and out from under foot, the children have exacerbated tensions by appearing "deliberately to attract attention to themselves, screaming, scribbling on the pavements, smas.h.i.+ng milk bottles, banging on doors, and getting in people's way." In the words of Colin Ward, author of The Child in the City, "one of the things that play is about, intermingled with all the others, is conflict with the adult world."9 This was certainly true for the children who grew up in the turn-of-the-century American cities. Their play communities were defined not only by their commitment to their own rules but by their disregard for those laid down by adults. City kids, "good" city kids, appeared to take special delight in disobeying the "No Swimming" signs in front of the city's concrete fountains, climbing the poles that held up the clothes lines, playing tag on the roofs and "hide and seek" on the stairways, bouncing their b.a.l.l.s off front doors and occupied stoops, teasing the ice man's horse, and stealing whatever they could from the trucks and pushcarts that invaded their territory.

The children fought with the adults, not simply because they were perverse, obstinate, and unruly, but because they resented the intrusion of others into their play world. As Johan Huizinga has written, "All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.... All [playgrounds] are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart."10 The children, in establis.h.i.+ng their playground on the street, had to exclude from it adults and their activities. Through sheer force of numbers, raw energy (released in a torrent after a day in the cla.s.sroom), and a bit of ingenuity, they converted public s.p.a.ce into their community playground, pus.h.i.+ng aside the ordinary adult world of peddlers and pushcarts, policemen and delivery wagons. The intensity with which the children threw themselves into their games startled middle-cla.s.s observers. But this intensity was just the outward manifestation of their capacity for putting the adult world at a distance.

Hester Street in New York City, early 1890s. Jacob Riis, who took this photograph, captioned it "the school children's only playground." (Jacob Riis Collection, LC) Except on the busier thoroughfares where streetcars or cablecars ran regularly, the children were able to exclude or incorporate into their games the wagons, bicyclists, automobiles, and individuals who might otherwise have interfered. When delivery wagons parked for too long on the block, they could be incorporated into the game. Beer trucks outside the saloon became the home run fence for the ballplayers. Ice trucks provided a test of strength, speed, and daring for the boys who competed in stealing a block without getting caught. Open-bed wagons offered free rides for those courageous enough to hitch onto the back and hold on tight.

Horse-drawn carts, trucks, and wagons could be a lot of fun. But they also killed children who failed to get out of the way in time. Harry Roskolenko's sister "was killed by a truck at the age of fifteen." Mike Gold's friend Joey Cohen was run over by a horsecar. "He had stolen a ride, and in jumping, fell under the wheels. The people around saw the flash of his body, and then heard a last scream of pain. The car rolled on. The people rushed to the tracks and picked up the broken body of my playmate."11 It was dangers such as these that prompted settlement-house workers and reformers to campaign in the newspapers, magazines, city halls, and legislative lobbies for parks, playgrounds, and after-school programs. The reformers were, no doubt, hoping to use such supervised play programs as vehicles for socialization and Americanization, but they were also genuinely concerned for the future of children who had no place but the street to play.

The street was not the perfect playground, but it was the best the children had. "Where children are is where they play," the Opies have written. "The street in front of their home is seemingly theirs, more theirs sometimes than the family living-rooms."12 The children made good use of the available s.p.a.ce, the streets and sidewalks as well as the doorways, gutters, stoops, and inside stairways. The boundaries that marked off public and private s.p.a.ce were ignored. The "block" belonged to those who took possession of it.

The children, as we have seen, dealt in their own way with the adults and vehicles that trespa.s.sed on their s.p.a.ce. Only the police were beyond reason, humoring, teasing, or incorporating into the game. There were, of course, policemen who could be expected to look the other way as the children took over the street, but there were more who took seriously their "responsibility" to clear the thoroughfare of its child impediments. Why, Mike Gold wondered in his autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money, were the police always in the way? "Why ... did they adopt such an att.i.tude of stern virtue toward the small boys? They broke up our baseball games, confiscated our bats. They beat us for splas.h.i.+ng under the fire hydrant. They cursed us, growled and chased us for any reason. They hated to see us having fun."13 Harpo Marx had the same experience but could not profess the same degree of hurt innocence. "There was no such character as 'the kindly cop on the beat' in New York in those days. The cops were sworn enemies. By the same token we, the street kids, were the biggest source of trouble for the police. Individually and in gangs we accounted for most of the petty thievery and destruction of property on the upper East Side. And since we couldn't afford to pay off the cops in the proper, respectable Tammany manner, they hounded us, hara.s.sed us, chased us, and every chance they got, happily beat the h.e.l.l out of us."14 Mike Gold and Harpo Marx were Jewish in a city where the majority of police were not, but this was not the reason they found themselves at odds with the law. The People's Inst.i.tute, in its 1913 study of juvenile arrests on the Middle West Side, an Irish and German neighborhood, discovered that there too the police hara.s.sed children at play and work on the streets. More than 50 percent of the arrests made in the district were for noncrimes like "begging, bonfires, fighting, gambling, jumping on [street]cars, kicking the garbage can, loitering, playing football on the streets, pitching pennies, playing [base]ball, playing s.h.i.+nney, playing with water pistol, putting out lights, selling papers, shooting c.r.a.ps, s...o...b..lling, subway disturbances, and throwing stones."15 New York City was not the only place where children were arrested and punished for activities that, in the case of adults, would not have been considered criminal. Jane Addams, after studying the records of the Chicago Juvenile Court, concluded that dozens of children had been arrested for "deeds of adventure": stealing, junking, hara.s.sing railroad employees, "calling a neighbor a 'scab,' breaking down a fence, flipping cars [jumping on and off while they were moving], picking up coal from railroad tracks, loafing on the docks, 'sleeping out' nights, getting 'wandering spells,' and refusing to get off the fender of a streetcar."16 There appeared to be little rhyme or reason in the causes for arrest. Some of the children's crimes involved junking, petty thievery, and playing with or on private property, but there were many more that were victimless. Gambling, for example, the most common cause for arrest, was, from the children's perspective, just another street game. What difference could it possibly make to the police if a group of boys wanted to shoot c.r.a.ps with their own money? They weren't harming anybody, stealing anything, or causing any trouble. And yet the police seemed to take a special delight in breaking up their games. According to Jan Peerce, the opera singer, "the police who patrolled the Lower East Side on the lookout for crime seemed to take most seriously kids congregated in a backyard-or even a little circle on the street-to shoot c.r.a.ps. Not that the stakes were high. In the whole circle there possibly wasn't more than a couple of dollars."17 Mike Gold and his gang thought they knew the reason for the police obsession with kiddie gambling. They figured that the police were on their tail because they enjoyed "pocketing" the "small change" the players left behind when they scrambled for cover. "It was one of our grievances. We often suspected them of being moralists for the sake of this petty graft."18 The children were a subject population liable to be scolded, chased, or arrested without warning. Still, the threat was more potential than real. Though the kids all knew of instances where innocent youngsters had been unfairly dealt with, most survived childhood without arrest records. As long as you kept a lookout and remembered that the police were not ordinary citizens but far more unpredictable and dangerous, you could expect to stay out of trouble.

The children at play inhabited a world that was encased in but separate from the ordinary adult world that surrounded them. For children who had spent a long day in school and would, at dusk, be called inside their parents' homes, there was something liberating in this temporary separation from supervising adults. On the streets they could play as they pleased and say what they wanted. They did not have to seek approval or permission to play their games. Teachers disappeared from their lives at three o'clock. Parents exercised more constant authority, but that authority reached into the streets only in the most attenuated form. As long as the children did not disgrace themselves or their families, get into trouble with the police, abandon younger brothers or sisters, or get hurt, their parents left them alone. Though Eddie Cantor's grandmother on the Lower East Side and Charles Angoff's father in Boston were both convinced that playing ball was an activity fit only for b.u.ms, they did not forbid their children to hit their b.a.l.l.s with wooden sticks. Parents had far more important things to do than watch their children play in the streets.19 All children learn from one another. But the scope, style, form, and content of this learning are affected by their relations.h.i.+p-as a group-with adults. Children who are under the thumb of adults from morning to night obviously have less opportunity to learn from one another than those who are free of adult supervision for long stretches of time. The children of the early twentieth-century city were blessed or cursed-depending on your perspective-with more unstructured and unsupervised free time than the generations that preceded or followed them.