Children Of The City Part 2

"Now the watch was mine forever. I wound it faithfully each morning and carried it with me at all times. When I wanted to know what time it was I looked at the Ehret Brewery clock and held my watch to my ear. It ran like a charm, and its ticking was a constant reminder that I had, for once, outsmarted Chico."31

The Little Mothers.

We have, to this point, spoken less of girls than of boys-and for good reason. Though girls hawked papers and peddled fruit on the street and went junking in the dumps and alleyways, they were never as numerous as the boys at these work locations. Unfortunately and unfairly, the conditions that made street trading so attractive for the boys made it off-limits for the girls. Young girls were not supposed to be brash, aggressive, and loud. They were not supposed to chase customers they did not know up and down the city's most congested avenues.

Street trading was not only unladylike, it was considered positively dangerous for the young girls of the city. On this, there was as near a consensus as one could get on most subjects in early twentieth-century urban America. From Melvin, a Covington, Kentucky, newsie ("It ain't right for girls to sell papers.... They get tough and heaps o' things"1), to the middle-cla.s.s reformers and the parents themselves, it was agreed that girls did not belong on the streets.

The child labor reformers were the most adamant on the subject. Even Elbridge Gerry, President of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who supported the boys' right to peddle their papers without state interference, argued vociferously against "the employment of girls selling newspapers." Hawking papers, a wholesome and salutary occupation for boys, was, he proclaimed, "one of the most iniquitous practices" city girls could engage in.2 Wilmington, Delaware, May 1910. Two girl newsies and their customer. Girl newsies, though not nearly as numerous as the boys, were not as rare as the reformers would have wished. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Newspaper publishers and editors, usually uncompromising champions of the children's right to work, surrendered when it came to girls. In what appears to be the draft of a reb.u.t.tal to a 1905 Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation pamphlet, an employee of the Chicago Daily News, though disagreeing with everything else the a.s.sociation had to say, agreed that neither the public nor the newspapers were well served by newsgirls. "We [the Chicago Daily News] do everything we can to discourage them. I see no good reason why the girl should not be prohibited by law from selling on the streets."3 With opposition to their street trading almost unanimous, the child labor reformers had an easy time convincing state legislators to draft special measures to "protect" the girls. In twenty of the thirty states with minimum age requirements for street traders, the ages set for girls were significantly higher than for boys. In six states, boys ten and over could work on the streets, while girls under sixteen were barred. In fourteen other states, the girls had to be from two to nine years older than the boys to trade on the streets.4 The laws did not, of course, clear all the girls off the streets. A 1905 Chicago study of one thousand newsies reported that investigators had "seen" twenty newsgirls-though, it added, "a moderate estimate puts them at three times that number." Mary McDowell told a gathering at the 1909 National Child Labor Committee convention that she had, on a recent visit to St. Louis, seen several young girls hawking papers in the vicinity of her hotel and near the railroad station. At the same meeting, a Mrs. E. g.a.y.l.o.r.d Hunt of Grand Rapids, Michigan, admitted that in her home town there were "a few little newsgirls, perhaps a dozen," loose on the streets.5 Though girls could be found trading on the streets of most cities, in only a few could they do so with the protection of the law. The Connecticut legislature, to the consternation of reformers everywhere, expressly forbade the city of Hartford to deny licenses to children "solely on the ground of s.e.x." The lawmakers, reported Survey magazine, had found no evidence at all that the newsgirls were "demoralized by the work.... The evidence gathered [on the contrary] has shown that 'the Hartford newsgirls are a pretty good sort of girl after all.' "6 In Bennington, Vermont, the editor of the Banner was also pleased with the work of his newsgirls. As he told Lewis Hine-at the time a field investigator for the National Child Labor Committee-he would have liked to have had more girls on the street, as he thought "they [were] more honest than the boys generally."7 These reports from Bennington and Hartford show us that girl street traders were every bit as competent as boys. But competence was not the issue. Propriety and decency were. The only females who had any business being on the streets were "street walkers." Girls under the age of ten might, if properly supervised, hustle flowers or baskets in front of their parents' stands. But those a bit older could not do so without projecting an image of indecency.

Hartford, Connecticut, March 1909. A Lewis Hine photograph of newsgirls in one of the cities that permitted girls to trade on the streets. From the way these children are dressed it is clear that they were from homes that were able to provide for their necessities. These children's earnings were probably put towards the family's savings or luxuries like a piano in the parlor or a new icebox for the kitchen. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC) The streets bred tough, self-reliant, self-confident young adults. Their lessons were appropriately learned by boys who would grow up to join the world of work and wages. Working-cla.s.s girls were destined for different futures. Though many would, before marriage or between marriage and motherhood, work for wages in factories, offices, or retail stores, these were considered but temporary detours on the road to motherhood and housekeeping. There was little the girls could learn on the streets that would prepare them to be mothers and wives. On the contrary, it was feared that the streets-with their excitement and adventure-could cause irreparable harm to young girls who, as adults, would have to content themselves with spending the greater portion of every day inside their own homes.

Children who grow up in a society with strictly defined gender roles learn early what will be expected of them. The girls of the early twentieth-century city were no exception. They watched as their brothers were sent out to play while they did their ch.o.r.es. Because the boys were basically useless at home (aside, that is, from fetching the wood and filling the coal bin) and, until they approached ten or eleven, unable to earn much elsewhere, they were free to play in the afternoons. The girls were too useful to be given the same kind of freedom. Six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds were big enough to watch the babies and help their mothers with the lighter household tasks. Ten- and eleven-year-olds could be entrusted with enough responsibilities to fill their afternoons.

Had their mothers had other resources, they might have allowed the girls to stay out at play until they were a bit older. But lacking the money for servants or labor-saving devices, they had to look to their daughters for a.s.sistance. It took considerable labor to care for a household and earn money on the side. Household ch.o.r.es required hours of preparation and involved dozens of separate steps. The laundry had to be done by hand from beginning to end: sorted, soaked, rubbed against the washboard, rinsed, boiled, rinsed again, wrung out, starched, hung to dry, ironed with irons heated on the stove, folded, and put away. Cooking involved not only preparing the food and cooking it but hauling coal for the fire, dumping the ashes afterwards, and keeping the cast-iron stove cleaned, blacked, and rust-free. Housecleaning was complicated by the soot, grime, and ashes released by coal-burning stoves and kerosene and gas lamps. Shopping had to be done daily and in several different shops: there were no refrigerators to store food purchased earlier in the week and no supermarkets for one-stop marketing.8 Little girls, lacking their mothers' experience, strength, and skills, could not do the cooking, the laundry, or the heavy cleaning by themselves. But they could "help out." Adelia Marsik, who grew up in an Italian immigrant household in Chicago, recalled in her oral history that she began helping with the dishes at five or six years of age. "I started out very early.... They would put a chair by the sink and I would kneel there on the chair to do the dishes." Other little girls helped out by sorting and folding the laundry or, like eight-year-old Elizabeth Stern, chopping the "farfel." (According to Stern, farfel was made by "chopping stiff dough into little bits [which were then] cooked with meat as a vegetable.") In families that celebrated the Sabbath, the girls were put to work immediately after school on Friday sweeping the front rooms, dusting the furniture, and preparing the kitchen for the Sabbath meal and celebration. Many young girls did the daily marketing for mothers who had so much to do at home they could not spare the time to shop. They learned how to pick over produce, buy day-old bread (if it were still soft), and bargain with the butcher for a fatter piece of meat and an extra soup bone or two. Investigators in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago found that the children there did "practically all the buying of groceries and staples." From butcher to baker to grocer for canned goods and crackers to the vegetable wagons parked in the street, they traveled each afternoon, their baskets slung over their arms.9 The girls' help with the shopping, cooking, and cleaning was important to the proper running of the household, but secondary in comparison with their major responsibility as "little mothers." Elizabeth Stern recalled in her autobiography that she had been put to work rocking the babies and "taking them out for the 'fresh air' " when she was still too young to go to school. Girls old enough to attend school took over caring for the babies when they returned home in the afternoon. Catharine Brody, who grew up in what she called a lower middle-cla.s.s family in Manhattan, recalled in an article for The American Mercury that all the girls on her block minded babies after school. "The babies came in baby carriages. We parked the carriages, generally at the edge of the sidewalk and placed kitchen chairs or footstools together." For Catharine and her friends, baby-tending was not a ch.o.r.e, but something that little girls did in the afternoon, like embroidering or jumping rope.10 New York City. "Syrian children playing in street." The "little mother," baby in tow, watches a group of smaller boys playing marbles or shooting c.r.a.ps. (Bain Collection, LC) In many working-cla.s.s families, the babies and small children were effectively raised by their older sisters. It was not that the mothers were uninterested or irresponsible. They were, rather, overworked and forced to delegate responsibility to their helpers. Because it was easier to watch the little ones than do the laundry or the cooking or the housecleaning, the girls were given this task. They accepted as a matter of course.

The little mothers were more than baby sitters. They were fully responsible for their charges, often from the time they got home from school until the moment the babies fell asleep. They fed them when they weren't nursing, clothed them, bathed them, diapered them, and put them to bed. The little ones became, in point of fact, their babies.

In Chicago, an unpublished report on preadolescent girls in a Polish neighborhood noted that the girls there had "the 'little mother' spirit well developed." They not only watched over the smaller children but "took considerable pride in the appearance of the one who [was], at the moment, the baby."11 New York City. "A little mother." A Jacob Riis photograph and caption. The children were sitting on the stoop because there was no place inside for them to play, sit, or rest. (Jacob Riis Collection, LC) The eleven-year-old girl who told her story in the Thirteenth Annual Report of Greenwich House claimed that, during the summer, she minded "Danny, my baby brother, all the time.... Sometimes I go to play a little while at night with the other children but I must mind Danny there because he does not like to go to bed until we do. Then he gets so tired he goes right to sleep on my lap and I carry him up. I think my brother is very nice but I get tired minding him sometimes."12 The little mothers and "their" babies were as much a part of the life of the city as their "little merchant" brothers. Settlement-house workers referred to the "little mother" problem by name; newspaper reporters described their activities in mocking detail. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Board of Health even organized its own "Little Mothers League" to instruct the girls in the proper care of "their" babies. As Dr. Walter Benzel of the Board explained to the New York Times, "much of the time in the summer the babies of the tenements [are] entrusted to the keeping of their older sisters, and it would be almost useless to teach the real mothers unless the 'little Mothers' were also taught."13 The girls worked at home and for their mothers. Every increase in their mothers' workload meant an increase in their own. When their mothers took in homework, the girls joined them at the kitchen table hemming skirts, embroidering pincus.h.i.+ons, stemming artificial flowers, or sorting nuts. When the mothers took in boarders, the girls helped with the extra laundry, shopping, cleaning, and cooking.

Boarding single men (and an occasional woman or family) was the most common income-producing activity engaged in by married women and their daughters. The American city, so blessed with abundance in other areas, did not have sufficient private housing units for all who needed them. Apartment houses were, as yet, available only for the more prosperous. There were no affordable hotels and few respectable rooming houses.14 Boarding out provided immigrants from the old world and migrants from the countryside with the cheapest and most comfortable way to survive in a strange, new urban world. It simultaneously brought the boarding families additional income to close their household budget gaps and save money for land of their own. According to the Immigration Commission Report (190810), up to one third of urban immigrant families received some part of their income from boarding fees. In areas with a high percentage of recently arrived immigrants, like the Stockyards district of Chicago, the proportion was even higher. A 1910 study of "back of the Yards" Lithuanian and Polish families found that more than half took in an average of three boarders each. In New York City, 48 percent of the Russian-Jewish households took in an average of two boarders each.15 Caring for boarders was a working-cla.s.s and not an exclusively immigrant means of supplementing the family income.16 Families with children too young to earn regular wages had to choose between mother going out to work or bringing work home. Most decided on the latter course, though not without some thought. Boarders meant less s.p.a.ce and less privacy for the entire family. They were also a sign that the man of the house was not able to support his family on his own wages.17 Caring for boarders was women's work. It was the mothers' and daughters' task to clear out the front room for the newcomers and find mattresses, beds, or other places for them to sleep. Once the boarder or boarders were settled, it was the women's responsibility to buy, cook to order, and serve their food, make their beds, clean their rooms, and launder their bedclothes, workclothes, and Sunday suits. Though some men did not consider this "work," probably because it was done by women at home, the evidence suggests otherwise.18 Taking in boarders was not the only way that mothers and daughters supplemented the family income. Some women brought in money by cooking for single men. Others took in laundry or did sewing. Still more took in industrial homework.

Next to boarders, doing "homework" for small jobbers, middlemen, and contractors was the most common source of income for women who worked at home. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to estimate the number of households where homework was done-or the number of children working in these households.19 According to the Immigration Commission, six in one hundred households did some sort of homework, though the percentages varied greatly by city and by ethnic group: from 11.2 percent of all households in Chicago to 1.6 percent for Buffalo, from 25 percent of New York City Italians to 5.3 percent of Chicago Italians.20 Like caring for boarders, homework was women's work. Unemployed husbands might, in a pinch, join in, but more often they were employed outside the home or, if unemployed, too embarra.s.sed to join their wives at the kitchen table. Their sons, following their lead, stayed as far away as possible. The kitchen and whatever went on in it was not for them.

A photograph taken by Lewis Hine in East Harlem at five in the afternoon on December 19, 1911, shows what was probably a typical scene in a household with plenty of seasonal homework to do. Mary Mauro, the mother, Angelina, a ten-year-old neighbor, Fiorandi, Maggie, and Victoria, ranging in age from eight to eleven, are sitting at the kitchen table sorting feathers by size. Against the back wall of the tiny, cramped kitchen sit two boys, a little one on his big brother's lap. The boys watch from a distance as mother and girls work intently. A second Hine photo tells the same story. Mother and three children sit at the table sorting nuts. Behind them, taking up the rest of the s.p.a.ce in the tiny tenement kitchen, is the father, pipe in hand, sitting in his rocking chair. In a third photo, we see only mother and daughters. Hine tells us that the father had been sorting nuts with the women, but retreated into the bedroom as soon as the visitors arrived, ashamed at being seen or photographed doing "women's work."21 The women and girls worked well together. With all they had to do to keep the household in order, mothers had to make expert and efficient use of their helpers. Girls too young to decorate pillboxes or embroider pillowcases could, at least, keep the babies out of the way. Girls a bit older could pull bastings or sort materials. Ten- and eleven-year-olds were old enough to sit down at the kitchen table and do the work of adults.

New York City, December 1911. "Mrs. Mary Mauro, 309 East 110th Street, 2nd floor. Family work on feathers, make $2.25 a week. In vacation, two or three times as much. Victoria, 8, Angelina 10 (a neighbor), Fiorandi 10, Maggie 11. All work except two boys against the wall. Father is street cleaner and has steady job." (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Because most working-cla.s.s mothers were "too busy" to leave the house, the job of picking up raw materials and delivering finished goods often fell to the girls. Marie Ganz began her day with a trip to the factory loft to pick up a bundle of unfinished skirts for her mother. "The bundle was always twice as big as I was. Just the bundle and a pair of legs were all the neighbors could see as I pa.s.sed their windows. 'The bundle with legs' was the way they described it, for the legs seemed to belong to the pack rather than to a human being."22 Probably New York City. A young girl probably bringing home "work" for her mother to sew. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Girls who helped out at home-especially those who a.s.sisted their mothers with the homework at the kitchen table-grew up fast, perhaps too fast.

Catharine Brody remembered that the Italian barber's daughters who lived on her block and went to her school never played with the other girls in the afternoon. There was an aura of mystery about these girls, with their long black hair flecked with bits of feathers. What did they do every afternoon? And where did they get the feathers to put in their hair? Only by accident did Catharine discover that the girls spent their afternoons sorting and arranging feathers at the kitchen table.23 The eleven-year-old girl who told her story in the Greenwich House Annual Report minded her brother Danny all day during the summer. Her activities during the school year were more varied.

"Every morning before school, I sweep out three rooms and help get breakfast. Then I wash the dishes.

"In the mornings, on the way to school, I leave finished flowers at the shop and stop for more work on my way home.

"After school I do my homework for an hour, then I make flowers. All of us, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts, my mother work on flowers. We put the yellow centers into forget-me-nots. It takes me over an hour to finish one gross and I make three cents for that. If we all work all our spare time after school, we can make as much as two dollars between us."24 New York City, 1912. "Making artificial leaves in tenement attic.... The five year old helps. Her sister, aged 10, works until 9 P.M. some nights, although she is nearsighted." (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Not all city girls worked as hard as this child. Girls fortunate enough to have been born into smaller families or families able to survive without having to take in boarders or industrial homework had less to do. Because Kate Simon's father made good money as an "expert shoe worker, a maker of samples," and her mother kept the family small (by having thirteen abortions, as Kate would later discover), Kate's ch.o.r.es were minimal. She was required to wheel the baby a turn or two around the block and help with the cleaning and dishes.25 Marietta Interlandi grew up in a working-cla.s.s Italian family in Chicago with fewer resources at its disposal. Her good fortune came in the shape of an older sister who was enlisted as mother's chief a.s.sistant. While Marietta was "always out," skating or playing jacks and ball, her sister "stayed at home with my mother. She helped her out a lot. I was younger, you know. Three years makes a difference."26 The little mothers who helped out at home were part-time workers and, like their brothers, were suspended between childhood and adult life. At home and in the cla.s.sroom, they were expected to follow orders. But out at work-hawking their papers, if they were boys, or shopping for the family's food and minding the baby, if they were girls-they were expected to act like adults. Girls and boys accepted their ambiguous status without much complaint. It was all part of growing up.

Though most working-cla.s.s city kids were, by their tenth birthday, doing some sort of work in the afternoons, there were enormous differences between the work a.s.signed to boys and to girls. Like their fathers, the boys earned money outside the homes and were responsible for bringing it home to support their families. Like their fathers as well, they took liberties with their pay checks, holding back a little as a reward for their labor. The girls, on the other hand, like their mothers, earned nothing at their labor. Household ch.o.r.es and baby-tending were entirely unpaid. Caring for boarders brought in income, but it was not considered "work." Industrial homework was, but in this case the income producer was the family of women, not the individuals who comprised it. The girls who joined their mothers at the kitchen table were not earning anything by themselves. They were "helping out."

This situation put the girls at a disadvantage. Aside from the pennies they might earn at junking and the nickel or two they might collect on their birthdays, they were for the most part marooned at home without funds of their own. Every time they wanted to go to the movies or buy a piece of lace to decorate their hand-me-down s.h.i.+rtwaists, they had to go begging to their mothers.

The boys experienced a sort of harmony between their work and the pleasures it bought. The more they worked, the more they could eat, see, and do. The girls' unpaid labor carried with it no such tangible rewards. While the boys' capacity for paid fun and entertainment was bounded only by their earning power, the girls had to pet.i.tion for every penny. Unlike their brothers, they had to learn to postpone their gratifications and be circ.u.mspect in their pursuit of pleasure. They had to find satisfaction instead in the "grown-up" feelings they enjoyed in accomplis.h.i.+ng adult tasks, in their neighbors' compliments on their well-behaved babies, and their mothers' congratulations on their outwitting and outbargaining the butcher. When such rewards were not forthcoming, as was often the case, they had to be satisfied, as their mothers "appeared" to be, with the comfort they received from doing their duty without complaint.

The young girls learned early what would be expected of them as adults. They also learned that no matter how difficult or tedious the task, it could be lightened if accomplished in the company of others. Housework in the early twentieth century was fortunately not yet the isolated, anonymous task it would become. The young girls chopped their "farfel" alongside their mothers, watched the baby from the front stoop with their friends, and joined the other girls and women at the kitchen table to hem the new batch of s.h.i.+rtwaists. While, in comparison to their brothers, they remained isolated from the life of the city, they were able to construct their own community of family, friends, and neighbors and draw from it the companions.h.i.+p and comfort they required and deserved.

All That Money Could Buy.

The children who worked downtown crossed the invisible bridge that separated and linked the two parts of the city. Like their customers, the eleven- and twelve-year-old refugees from the slums, the ghettoes, the "Jewtowns" and "Poletowns" and "Little Sicilies" were commuters working in the heart of the city, where money was most plentiful. With eyes and ears wide open, the newsies, peddlers, and s.h.i.+neboys observed first-hand how life was lived by the other half. They watched and listened as the new middle cla.s.s and the older elites shopped, were entertained, and spent their money. They studied the habits, dress, and style of secretaries and bookkeepers, real estate promoters and railroad magnates, gentlemen and fas.h.i.+onable ladies. They peered through plate-gla.s.s windows into lobster palaces and hotel lobbies, window-shopped with department store customers; perused the billboards, marquees, and gaudy, colored posters outside the movie palaces; and read in the newspapers about the life of the city: the fads, fas.h.i.+ons, amus.e.m.e.nts, and personalities. The more they saw, the more difficult it was to return to their home blocks and take up again their childish games. Ring-around-the-rosy, prisoner's base, and building forts in vacant lots quickly lost their attraction.

The children were swept up in the whirlwind of urban life. They, too, wanted to join in the fun and the games and, as they rapidly learned, this was not impossible. The children could not and did not expect to eat oysters in the lobster palaces, shop in the department stores, or see the latest show at the first-cla.s.s theaters, but they could-for pennies-buy themselves a very good time. There were amus.e.m.e.nts, entertainments, and fas.h.i.+ons to fit every pocketbook, different variations of the same basic model for different cla.s.ses of urban customers. While fas.h.i.+onable ladies got their shoes and hats custom-made or at the department stores, the girls could-for a fraction of the price-purchase imitations from pushcart peddlers and bargain stores. While society people ate their dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria and Delmonico's and the newly enriched middle cla.s.ses patronized the lobster palaces, the children could-for a nickel-sit at the counter of a "dairy lunch" and enjoy a big slice of apple pie with ice cream on top. While the upper crust attended the opera and the middle cla.s.ses the vaudeville palaces and music halls, the children could-for a nickel-see the flickers at the nickelodeon, and-for a dime-watch a cheap vaudeville show from the gallery.

Denver, 191020. Denver newsies smiling for the camera. Every day, these boys left their neighborhoods to travel downtown to sell their papers to the city's businessmen and shoppers. (Mrs. Ben Lindsey Collection, LC) The children had been sent downtown to earn money for their families-and this they intended to do. But the more time they spent away from the block, the more uses they found for the money they earned.

Money bought pleasure and a place in the city. The children required both. As the settlement-house workers were the first to understand, reforms in child labor and compulsory schooling laws had, ironically, created a new problem for the children (and for the reformers who looked after their welfare). Boys and girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen were now able to attend school for a few more years. But school, unlike work, let out at three o'clock, leaving the new working-cla.s.s students with free time in the afternoon-time, the reformers were convinced, that they did not know how to fill constructively.1 The reformers, as we saw in Chapter 2, had tried to provide the children with after-school clubs and playgrounds, but had not succeeded. It was difficult to interest the children in regularly scheduled, supervised activities, and even more difficult to raise the funds needed to build the playgrounds, staff the clubs, and supervise the daily activities.

While the reformers watched from the sidelines, frustrated by their inability to solve the leisure-time problem they had helped to create, an army of small businessmen alert to the jingle of coins in the children's pockets proceeded to give them something to do with their free time. Shopkeepers, penny arcade operators, luncheonette and coffee shop proprietors, nickelodeon, vaudeville, and amus.e.m.e.nt park owners, and the thousands of "Cheap Charlies" who owned corner candy stores opened their doors to let the children in. They provided them-for a price-with amus.e.m.e.nt, recreation, and a place to gather with the gang. The older children would never again enjoy the kind of compact "playground" they had once had on the block. But, as they soon discovered, they no longer needed it. With money in their pockets, they could buy their way into dozens and dozens of different play areas.

The candy shops were the first and foremost of the small businesses to strike a bargain with the children. Though penny candy shops were not new to city or town, they multiplied in the first years of the century until they were more numerous than even the saloons in the working-cla.s.s neighborhoods. The children were drawn to the shops like bees to blossoms, lured by the sweets for a penny and, as a Russell Sage Foundation study put it, by "something still more attractive-a place to meet friends, to chat, sometimes to play games-always to talk and skylark a little amid light and warmth, protected alike from the distractions of the tenement home and the inconveniences of the street corner." If the saloon was the workingman's club, the candy shop was the youngster's.2 The shop owners, as sensitive and alert to the needs of their customers as the department stores were to theirs, did their best to make the children comfortable. There was a tacit understanding between proprietor and customers: children without money to spend had to stay outside, but those with only a penny were welcome to take all day if they wanted, picking out their treat, savoring every morsel, and hanging around afterward. Some kids stayed inside to play the kiddie slot machines. They deposited their pennies and got, in return, a tiny piece of gum and a chance at the jackpot: five, ten, or twenty more tiny pieces of gum. Others played the weekly lottery, with the prize a huge box of candy. In Chicago, the Juvenile Protective Agency claimed that the gambling games in the candy shops had become so popular that children in one school "were p.a.w.ning their school books in order to get money with which to play."3 Whether or not this was true (on its face, the claim appears a bit exaggerated), kids were spending their time and their money in the candy stores. And for good reason.

The children experienced in the candy shops a degree of autonomy and independence they could not easily find elsewhere. The freedom of the consumer is, of course, a truncated, degraded freedom. Some would argue-and with justice-that it is no freedom at all. And yet, for the children of the city, it was the best subst.i.tute they could find. The marketplace knew no distinctions between children and adults. A nickel was a nickel-no matter who held it. Poring over the selections, choosing what to buy and where and how much, children transcended their minute size and inferior status to a.s.sume quasi-adult dimensions. Pennies, nickels, and dimes transformed them from kids to respected customers to be courted and cared for by adult businessmen.

Francie Nolan, the eleven-year-old heroine of Betty Smith's autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was for six days a week just another poor city kid. On the seventh, she became Queen for a Day. Thanks to the nickel in her pocket earned from selling a week's junk to the junkman, the world opened up before her. "Francie had a nickel. Francie had power." She spent most of her Sat.u.r.day morning shopping with that nickel. She began at the candy shop, then headed for Broadway and "the finest nickel and dime store in all the world. It was big and glittering and had everything in the world in it.... Or so it seemed to an eleven-year-old girl....

"Arriving at the store, she walked up and down the aisles handling any object her fancy favored. What a wonderful feeling to pick something up, hold it for a moment, feel its contour, run her hand over its surface and then replace it carefully. Her nickel gave her this privilege. If a floorwalker asked whether she intended buying anything, she could say, yes, buy it and show him a thing or two. Money was a wonderful thing, she decided."4 The magic of money rubbed off on the children who carried it. Money was pure potentiality, pure choice. It was as valuable unspent as it was concretized in commodities. The children who had money to spend carried their new freedom-as consumers-into and out of the candy shops and dime stores. It stayed with them wherever they went, enhancing their status and self-esteem on the streets.

Spending money was psychologically important, but it was also-when spent-a powerful means for meeting one's needs. Children with money in their pockets were no longer supplicants dependent on adult largesse. They were free to purchase what they wanted-when they wanted it. Children who earned money on the streets didn't have to wait until dinnertime to fill their bellies. They could, if they chose, satisfy their after-school appet.i.tes at Cheap Charlie's or they could eat their way down the block, sampling the wares of the vendors before settling on some combination of peanuts, gumdrops, and chocolate-covered cherries, or, depending on the season, ice cream, watermelon slices, lemonade, hot chestnuts or corn on the cob.

The restaurants and lunch counters, especially those near the newspaper offices where the boys picked up their papers, went after the boys' business with afternoon specials on hamburgers and pie a la mode. In Portland, Oregon, the proprietors competed with one another by advertising in the newsboys' newspaper, The Hustler. Woods Quick Lunch ("Say Boys, A hot Hamburger Sandwich 5") and Lambs Club Dairy Lunch ("We Buy the Best in the Market, Tasty Goods, Cakes, Pastry and Pies are Home Made") were among the paper's regular advertisers.5 Wilmington, Delaware, 1910. "Frank F. Gibson, Western Union, fourteen years old, one year in service, guides soldiers to segregated district, smokes, still in school and works from 8:30 P.M. to 12:30 P.M." (Lewis Hine Collection, LC) The young were valued customers in the candy shops and restaurants and in a score of other entertainment establishments. They appeared at precisely the moment when an afternoon lull had set in. The lunch hour was long gone; dinnertime and the homebound commuter rush were still in the future. For those few hours in between and then again after the rush had subsided, the children and their nickels were very welcome.

Because their time was valuable and they had, after all, come downtown to work, the children had to squeeze their paid entertainment into their work schedule. A trip to the ballpark, beach, or amus.e.m.e.nt park was usually out of the question-unless they wanted to abandon work for the afternoon. Fortunately there were abundant sources of entertainment located on or near the streets where they worked.

The penny arcades and amus.e.m.e.nt parlors, in part because of their location and in part because they provided their fun in packages of time which fit into the children's schedule, were among their favorite after-school haunts. Most amus.e.m.e.nt parlors were seedy-looking joints, usually little more than large rooms, open in front, with two or three rows of slot machines "plus a few punching bags, automatic scales, and fortune tellers." The children dropped their pennies into the slot, cranked the handle, and, lo and behold, moving pictures appeared in the peephole. The "movies" lasted only a minute, but that was enough time to experience the excitement of being on a speeding train or observing, unseen, the hootchy-kootchy girls or the mysterious woman "Getting Ready for the Bath."6 Though the arcades were dark, narrow, and crowded with machines, there was room for three, four, or five boys to gather around the Kinetoscopes waiting for their turns. No adults stood in their way, censored their choices, or told them how to behave.

The only drawback was the expense: a minute's entertainment cost a penny and the pennies mounted up. When, in the early years of the new century, enterprising arcade owners blocked off the rear of their rooms to show movies for a nickel, they were delighted to find customers willing to pay the higher price for a longer show. The new moving pictures were so popular that some owners replaced their Kinetoscopes with projectors, filled their arcades with chairs, and opened the first "Electric Theaters. For Up-To-Date High Cla.s.s Motion Picture Entertainment. Especially for Ladies and Children."7 Though moving pictures had been shown in converted arcades and storefront theaters for several years, credit for the first modern movie theater is usually bestowed upon two Pittsburgh businessmen who in 1905 "converted an empty store into a movie theater" and then with a flair for show business "gave their store-theater a luxurious appearance which distinguished it from other store theatres and arcades and impressed the spectators. They added the innovation of piano accompaniment, which increased the grand air of the show. Then, to advertise their theater's cheapness and at the same time maintain its dignity, they named it the 'Nickelodeon.' "

The first "nickelodeon" made so much money-so rapidly-that within a year there were a hundred more-in Pittsburgh alone. By 1908, there were between eight and ten thousand in the nation. In New York City investigators counted more than six hundred entertaining between seventy-five and a hundred thousand children daily. Nickelodeons had, as Jane Addams wrote from Chicago, "sprung up suddenly, somehow, no one knows why," in every working-cla.s.s and immigrant district in the city.8 The early theaters and nickelodeons catered to an almost exclusively working-cla.s.s audience. As Milton Berle remembered in his autobiography. "The movies were something for the lower cla.s.ses and immigrants. Nice people didn't go to the 'flickers.' "9 Barton Currie, writing for Harper's Weekly in 1907, ridiculed the better cla.s.ses who, never having been to one, a.s.sumed the theaters were no more than dark dens for pickpockets and their victims. Whom, he asked, were the thieves going to rob? The audiences in the neighborhood theaters were composed entirely of people with empty pockets: "workingmen, ... tired drudging mothers of bawling infants [and] the little children of the streets, newsboys, bootblacks, and smudgy urchins."10 It was this latter category that made up a sizable portion of the early audience. The children fueled the expansion of the nickelodeons, converting what could have been fallow afternoon, early evening, and Sat.u.r.day matinee periods into virtual bonanzas. According to Roy Rosenzweig, "Virtually all observers of early movie theater audiences noted the presence of large numbers of children and young people. 'The nickelodeon,' wrote one in 1908, 'is almost the creation of the child....' 'Children are the best patrons of the nickelodeon,' added a trade press correspondent that same year.... Children, a range of different studies agreed, composed about one-quarter to one-half of the new movie audience."11 Author and critic Edward Wagenknecht, who saw his first pictures in Chicago in 1905 or 1906, attended the Family Electric Theater "on the southeast corner of Ogden and California Avenues, just across the street from Douglas Park. There was no box office. The proprietor, a man named Brown, stationed himself at the end of a long dingy corridor, and you pa.s.sed in, handed him your nickel, and took your seat.... The rule at the Family Electric Theater was three reels of film [each no more than ten minutes long] and an 'ill.u.s.trated song' for a nickel. The ill.u.s.trated song would be one of the popular ballads of the period-'Clover Blossoms' or 'In the Good Old Summertime' or maybe 'Come Away with Me, Lucille'-sung by the girl Sophie who played the piano (her cousin Helen was in my room at school) to the accompaniment of colored slides on the screen."

Wilmington, Delaware, May 1910. "Where some of the newsboys' earnings go." One of a series of photographs with this caption. Here Hine shows a boy on his way into the nickelodeon. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC) Wagenknecht remembers being utterly "fascinated" by the movement on the screen. He didn't really care what was up there, as long as it moved.12 The children never knew what they were going to see-but enjoyed whatever it was. To attract repeat customers-especially children-the nickelodeons changed their programs daily, twice on weekends. To supply the thousands of nickelodeons, each changing its program daily, movie producers/directors turned out thousands of one-reel films, borrowing ideas where they could. Because the "Great Train Robbery" was the first blockbuster story film, hundreds of imitations were produced, with shoot-outs, stick-ups, criminals, lawmen, and lots of chasing. Some producers, aware that their audience was almost entirely made up of working people and children, borrowed their themes from subjects closer to the daily life of their viewers. In "The Eviction," "The Ex-Convict," "A Desperate Encounter," "She Won't Pay Her Rent," "The Eleventh House," and hundreds of others, they projected onto the big screen their own melodramatic representation of life in the big city.13 In this era before screen writers and screen plays, the easiest way to get a script was to steal a story. The movies stole shamelessly from current events, Shakespeare, opera, novels, short stories, history, even the Bible. There was no telling what you might find on the screen in front of you: King Lear, Parsifal, The Scarlet Letter, A Tale of Two Cities, The Boston Tea Party, The Life of Moses. There were also slapstick comedies, risque light dramas, fantasy films, cowboy films, and more cowboy films.14 In the first two decades of the century, there were more movie "theaters" than there would ever be again, so many that it was the rare city kid who had to walk more than a block or two to get to one. The nickelodeons, housed in converted storefronts, were soon supplemented by neighborhood theaters built specially to show films and, after 1914, by lavish movie palaces decorated and furnished to attract new middle-cla.s.s audiences.

Children who worked downtown had their choice of theaters. They could attend the "nickel dumps" in their neighborhoods or, for an extra nickel, watch the flickers at the new "palaces." Most preferred the dumps. Why spend a dime when you could see the same show for a nickel? The nickelodeons were also more hospitable to their young customers. While the palaces did whatever they could to keep the street kids from tarnis.h.i.+ng their image and dirtying their new carpets, the nickel dumps welcomed them with open arms. Edward Wagenknecht remembers that the proprietor of the Family Electric Theater in Chicago handed his customers "five cent packages of chewing gum" as they entered the theater. In many neighborhoods, children were admitted two for a nickel on Sat.u.r.days. In his autobiography, Sam Levenson, the comedian, recalls the scene outside the theaters as "dozens of two-cent kids would congregate ... chanting the movie matinee call: 'I've got two. Who's got three?' "15 The Bijous, Pictoriums, Theatoriums, Jewels, Electrics, and Dreamlands became the children's "general social center and club house." "Young people," Jane Addams reported from Chicago, "attend the five cent theaters in groups, with something of the 'gang' instinct, boasting of the films and stunts in 'our theater.' " When the lights went down, they were free-as they were free nowhere else indoors-to behave like children: to shout, scream, howl, laugh aloud, and jump up and down in their seats. "They were called silent pictures," Sam Levenson remembers. "Maybe the pictures were silent, but the audience certainly wasn't. When 'talkies' came in, it was two years before we noticed the change."16 The children's behavior, though disturbing to middle-cla.s.s critics, was consistent with a long tradition of working-cla.s.s conduct at cultural events. As Roy Rosenzweig reminds us in his study of working-cla.s.s leisure activities in Worcester, Ma.s.sachussetts, "Modes of conviviality, active sociability, and liveliness remained the norms for the working cla.s.s." Adults and children socialized, ate, drank, cheered, growled, and stamped their feet through all sorts of theatrical performances. The audience was part of the show, part of the fun. The nickelodeon and theater owners, many of them from the neighborhood, did not seem to mind. When the fun got a bit too frantic, they tried to channel the energy in other directions. If the projector broke down-as it often did-slides would be quickly projected onto the screen and the piano player enlisted to play the song the slides ill.u.s.trated. With luck, the children would stop throwing food and insults long enough to join in the singing, until the lights were dimmed again and the screen lit up with cowboys or criminals, pirates or policemen. Phil Silvers, future film actor, Broadway star, and "Sergeant Bilko," began his entertainment career quieting the crowd at his local theater by singing aloud whenever the reels were changed.17 The younger kids on the block had to rely on their parents' largesse for tickets to the Sat.u.r.day matinees. If they were very lucky, they might also get to accompany their mothers to a Sunday show. The children who earned their own money had no such restrictions placed on them. They could go to the flickers whenever they pleased. The nickel price and the short length of the show-twenty or thirty minutes in the era before features-made the movies as accessible as they were entertaining. The street traders could easily take a half hour off from their work on slow days or stop in for a show on their way home for dinner. In Birmingham, Alabama, Esther Rider discovered that most of the boys who hawked papers finished their work day at the cheap theaters. In Chicago, William Hard, a journalist, claimed to have found a group of children who sold papers every afternoon for the sole purpose of raising money for movie tickets. They worked until they had their nickels for admission, quit to see the the show, and then returned to "work again until they [had] another nickel to be spent for the same purpose at another 'theatorium.' "18 Jersey City, New Jersey, November 1912. "Going to the movies: 2:30." (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) While the children saw nothing wrong with spending their hard-earned nickels at the movies, the adult reformers and settlement-house workers were worried about the physical, mental, and moral toll of so much time spent in darkened rooms watching moving images, some of them of subjects best kept secret from growing children. There were dozens and dozens of investigations of the effects of the movies on the children who watched them. Common to every one of them was the investigators' amazement at the number of children who went to the movies and the number of times they went each week. In Madison, Wisconsin, a 1915 Board of Commerce study of recreation found that the average child spent five to six hundred percent more time at the movies than on religious activities. A 1911 Russell Sage Foundation study in New York City revealed that 62 percent of the school children interviewed "declared that they were accustomed to go to moving-picture shows once a week or oftener.... A truly astonis.h.i.+ng proportion, 16% of the total, avow that they go daily." Of the 507 newsies Ina Tyler interviewed in St. Louis, 87 percent "frequented moving picture shows and cheap theaters." One boy claimed that he had attended "a show of some kind every night for four months."19 The movies had become such an attraction that one social worker reported that the Irish mothers on Manhattan's West Side had started giving their young boys money for the "nickel dumps," afraid that if they didn't, the boys would steal it. Jane Addams claimed that a major source of juvenile crime was the children's quest for the price of admission to what she called the "house of dreams." "Out of my twenty years' experience at Hull House I can recall all sorts of pilferings, petty larcenies, and even burglaries, due to that never ceasing effort on the part of boys to procure theater tickets."20 The settlement-house workers, reformers, and educators were worried by what they saw around them. Eleven- to fifteen-year-olds were too influenced, too affected, too attracted, even addicted, to the pleasures of paid entertainment. The theaters were, as Jane Addams called them, "houses of dreams." Adolescents were p.r.o.ne to dreaming, even without the stimulus of the big screen. What the movies did, the reformers feared, was exaggerate this tendency to dangerous levels. At an age where the boys and girls should have been anch.o.r.ed more firmly to the real world, they were indulging in daily flights of fantasy in darkened movie theaters and nickelodeons. The images before them not only distracted them from the crucial task of preparing themselves for adult life, they impeded their socialization by inflaming their desires. Children who spent too much of their childhood dreaming were going to find it difficult to adjust to the discipline and responsibilities of adult life.

The children were impervious to such criticisms. They paid their nickel and enjoyed the show, whatever it was, wherever it took them. Contrary to the adults' fears, the young did not confuse what they saw on the big screen with life on the outside. The movies were not real life. That was why they were so enjoyable. In the real world, bounded for the children by home, school, and the street, dreams did not come true, villains were not always punished, virtue seldom rewarded. The children entered the movie theater as they opened their storybooks: expecting to find there an alternate world, with different values, settings, people, and a guaranteed happy ending. When they left the theater-or put down their stories-they reentered the world they had temporarily vacated. What harm could there be in taking these brief vacations from work and the city? The same street, the same city, the same life would be there when they came out into the light.21 The children who enjoyed the world presented on the big screen would also have thrilled to the melodramas, the music hall shows, and the legitimate English- and foreign-language theaters. Unfortunately live drama cost more than they could afford. The cheaper theaters had almost all been put out of business by the compet.i.tion from the movies.22 The only forms of inexpensive live entertainment that remained by the second decade of the century were the cheap vaudeville halls with galleries where, for a dime, the children could sit for hours watching the acts march past: dancers, singers, instrumentalists, magicians, tumblers, comedians, and animals. Like the nickelodeons, the vaudeville galleries offered the children s.p.a.ce of their own to do as they pleased. Far above the stage and the better-paying audience, so far above they were almost in a different world, the children sat surrounded by their friends, singing with the singers, giggling at the suggestive jokes, hooting the boring acts off the stage, and staring in amazement as the magicians defied gravity and common sense.23 Vaudeville and the flickers, the lunch counters and the penny candy shops, the arcades and downtown amus.e.m.e.nt parlors: these were not treats or luxuries reserved for special occasions. They were, in combination, an integral part of the children's daily life. Poor, underage, and often immigrant, the children were triply handicapped in their quest to join the life of the city. They were outsiders looking in, guest workers allowed downtown to hawk their wares. Only with money in their pockets were they welcomed to stay and become a part of the city they worked in.

The children of the city were not ascetics or martyrs or heads of household who had to save all their money to support their families. They were children who worked hard and wanted to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They did not look to their parents for handouts or allowances. They did not believe that those who did not work were ent.i.tled to play. They had as little use and as much contempt for idle aristocrats as their parents. They asked only that they be allowed to spend some of what they earned.

Their parents refused the request.

St. Louis, May 1910. "Where the boys spend their money." Lewis Hine took a number of photographs under this caption. This particular one shows a boy in front of a vaudeville theater. The gallery seats cost only ten cents, and there were matinees every day for the boys to attend. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

The Battle for Spending Money.

Adults-engaged in a daily struggle to put food on the table, pay the gas bill, and save a bit for a s.h.i.+p's ticket for relatives in the old country, a down payment on a house, or a new icebox-did not look favorably on their twelve-year-olds' demands to be allowed to spend their money as they pleased.

In most working-cla.s.s families, the children were expected, even required, to hand in their earnings to their mother, who would return to them what she believed they required for carfare, lunch, and entertainment. Mothers were not to be questioned when it came to spending money. They alone knew what the family took in every week and what it had to pay out. They alone had the discipline and foresight to carefully husband the family's resources. They alone could estimate-to the penny-what could be put aside for savings and special treats.1 Parents were not averse to spending money on their children. In good times and bad, they had no choice but to buy them shoes, stockings, and decent clothing for school. There was usually a nickel on Sat.u.r.days for the matinee and perhaps a penny or two for a treat at Cheap Charlie's. When everyone was working steadily and the dreaded "slack" periods were a distant memory, there might even be something left over for a new pencil box, a family outing to Coney Island or Luna Park, perhaps violin or piano lessons.

What the parents would not do was allow the children to spend money on their own. Money did not belong in their hands. On this there was near universal agreement among adults. Settlement-house workers and working-cla.s.s parents closed ranks against the children, convinced that they were, by definition, too young, too irresponsible, too susceptible to the temptations of the city to be left alone with their nickels and dimes. As Fannie Fogelson, a "janitress" on East Sixty-second Street, told an investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee, "the possession of money would spoil the best child.... No money that a child may bring into the home can repay the home for the spoiling of the child-child earnings is the dearest money in the world."2 Adults feared the "filthy lucre" for the same reasons that the children cherished it. Children with their own money to spend could do as they pleased away from home, could consume or hide the evidence, and no one, least of all their parents, would be any the wiser. According to Joseph Bosco's mother, a widow struggling to carry on her deceased husband's junk business, money made children into "little grown-ups and took the childhood out of them-if they had money they were acting grown-up and only doing the bad things of grown-ups."3 The boys could smoke cigarettes, spend every afternoon in the nickelodeons, and stuff themselves with hamburger specials; the girls could purchase fancy ribbons, laces, and the silk stockings their mothers refused to let them wear. Money erased the distinctions between childhood and adulthood and, in so doing, tore apart the hierarchical basis upon which the family rested.

Children with money got "spoiled." And spoiled children could not be saved. Those that developed a taste for spending money-and the pleasures it purchased-would, their parents feared, never again be able to do without it. The only way to protect their innocence and keep their eyes, ears, and taste buds closed to the temptations of the street was to keep money out of their hands.

It was easy to protect the younger girls, most of whom did their work at home for no pay. Because they earned no money, they had no money to spend. Their brothers presented a different case. They were, from the age of twelve or so, out on the streets selling papers, blacking boots, and peddling candy and gum. They made their own sales and collected their own tips. When they arrived home in the evening, they were supposed to empty their pockets, which they did. But how were their mothers going to be sure that the change dumped into their laps was the sum total of what had been earned? It was so simple for the boys to deduct a nickel or two and spend it on the way home: for a hamburger in a cheap restaurant, a handful of gum drops at the candy store, a ticket to the nickelodeon, or the latest installment of Oliver Optic's adventures.

Children who were obedient in every other regard did what they had to to preserve some part of their earnings for themselves. They lied, they cheated, they hid away their nickels and dimes, they doctored their pay envelopes. The possession of spending money was too important an item in their daily lives to be voluntarily surrendered.

Their parents were seldom fooled. When the New York Child Labor Committee in 1918 sent investigators into the homes of newsboys to ask about the boys' spending habits, up to 30 percent of the parents confessed, reluctantly, to fears that their boys were cheating them. (Many more probably suspected as much but were not going to admit it to an investigator they did not know and could not trust.)4 Dominick Abbruzzese's parents had no trouble at all figuring out that he had been devouring his earnings in the form of cake and candy when he became suddenly "unable to eat his supper."5 Other parents came to the same conclusion when their children lost their appet.i.tes, came home later than usual, or stared uncomfortably at the floor as they emptied their pockets.

The parents knew what was happening. But they didn't know how to prevent it. Those who suspected their children of cheating had few options. If their charges were denied, parents could either forget the matter or accuse the boys of being liars and cheats. And then what? If they locked the boys in their rooms, they, the parents, forfeited any possibility of getting any money from them. If they punished them further, the boys just might run away.

The fact that the children contributed something to the household's income gave them leverage within the family. Parents who used their children's earnings to help out at home knew that they put this money at risk every time they questioned them. In the Brusco household, where the father, "a shovel worker," brought home money only when the weather was good, Frank's contribution of fifty cents a night made up an important part of the family's income. Every afternoon, Frank traveled to his corner at Madison and Fifty-ninth Street, where he sold papers until 8 P.M. When he returned home at 9 or 10 P.M., or later, he handed his money to his mother and refused to answer any questions about where he had been or what he had been doing. Frank's family knew that the boy was holding out on them, that he spent money on the movies and trash to eat, but they had no influence on him. He "gives the 50 cts and thinks that is enough and no questions should be asked."6 In the La Polla household, the same conditions held. Anna La Polla told the investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee that she knew her son Dominick made more than the dollar a week he brought home, but, with three younger children at home, the baby Delia only six months old, and her husband, a porter, bringing home twelve dollars a week, she was not about to risk a confrontation.7 Though in theory all children were supposed to turn in their earnings, and in practice most objected, only the boys were able to win significant concessions. Some mothers, like Anna La Polla, looked the other way as their sons cheated them; others negotiated settlements that allowed the boys to keep a certain percentage of their earnings for themselves. The boys, explained one mother, had to be pacified because they could "run away if you don't do the right thing by them." The girls, who could not run away, had no bargaining power and no choice but to follow the dictates of the household. Even those who had taken full-time jobs outside the home at age fourteen and now earned more than their fathers had to "coax, cry, or quarrel with their mothers whenever they wished independent spending money."8 And yet they, too, needed an independent source of spending money.

The older girls (fourteen and over) who lived at home and worked downtown or in the neighborhood had no choice, or believed they had no choice, but to spend money on proper clothes and accessories. They walked to work on public streets and rode in streetcars or subways. In the evening, they went to the movies or for a stroll with their girlfriends. Wherever they went, whatever they did, they could not escape the gaze of the anonymous other. Urban s.p.a.ce was public s.p.a.ce, demanding of those who used it set standards of behavior, deportment, and dress. Eight-year-olds who played all day on the block could dress like peasants for all anyone noticed or cared. Their older sisters had to pay attention to what they wore.9 This is not to imply that only girls were fas.h.i.+on-conscious. Lucky Luciano (as he would later be known to the public) and his friends regarded fancy, expensive clothes as a visible sign of success, one of the few available to adolescents. Charles Angoff recalls in his autobiography that in his Boston neighborhood the boys fought with their fathers over shoes: the boys wanted low ones, their fathers insisted on buying them high ones. On the Lower East Side, where Harry Roskolenko lived, the boys were as particular about their caps. Only ones with large visors were acceptable because, as everyone knew, the larger the visor, the tougher the kid underneath.10 Still, though the boys made distinctions between the stylish and the unstylish, to be in fas.h.i.+on was for them an option, not a necessity. Only for their older sisters were the right clothes mandatory.

Working girls could not help comparing their dress and deportment with that of the city's fas.h.i.+onable women. All they had to do was look around them, read the daily department store advertis.e.m.e.nts in the papers, and view the pictures of society people in the Sunday supplements and magazines. It was not possible to close one's eyes to the fas.h.i.+onable or to make believe that such standards need not intrude in one's own personal s.p.a.ce. A Polish-language newspaper in Chicago did its best to explain to parents that their fas.h.i.+on-conscious daughters were not acting aberrantl