Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  For the younger kids, the streets provided constant fun, games, and companions. There was always something to do or watch. Just when it was getting a bit dull, a horse might drop dead in the gutter, fire engines and ambulances appear from nowhere, teamsters and pushcarts do battle for the right-of-way, a stray cat creep out of the basement to be tortured.28 What made the spectacles even more fun was that you never had to watch them alone. As George Burns remembers, “There was never any problem finding someone to play with because the streets were loaded with kids.… In our building alone there were sixteen families, and each family had between eight and ten kids. When we were all playing together in the street there were so many of us we’d get mixed up and forget which family we belonged to. At nine o’clock in the evening my mother would holler out the window, ‘Come on up, children, it’s time to go to bed!’ We’d all rush up, and my mother would stand there with the door open. When the house was full she’d close it. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I slept in the hall.”29

  The children found their playmates in the same way that they found their equipment: they made use of what was there. They played with the kids who lived in their building and the other buildings on the block. When the block was ethnically homogeneous, their playmates were likely to be “landsmen.” When, as was more often the case, the block was a mixed one, they played with kids who at home spoke different languages, ate different foods, and worshipped different gods. Kids whose parents would not have dreamed of socializing became the best of friends. In her article on “A New York Childhood,” journalist Catharine Brody recalled that there were “innumerable obstacles of caste and race” which prevented friends from visiting each other’s homes. On the streets, however, all “met on fairly equal terms.” Celia Blazek, a Chicago woman whose oral history is found in the Oral History Archives of Chicago-Polonia, played with the three “colored” girls, Ethel, Mabel, and Corrine, who lived across the street from her. Jerre Mangione, the writer, who grew up in Rochester, New York, played with Tony Long, whose mother spoke only Polish, Abe Rappaport, a Jew, and Robert di Nella, who claimed to be a real Italian, not some “lousy Siciliano” like Mangione. In the Bronx, Milton Berle, the future comedian, and his brother Jack tagged along with a “Catholic kid” named McDermott who lived in their building. Jimmy Cagney, the future actor, spent so much time with his Jewish pals from the block that he learned to speak Yiddish.30

  New York City, 1912. Taking a ride in a homemade pushcart. The child pushing may well have been an older brother taking care of a younger sibling after school. (Bain Collection, LC)

  The block was the basic unit of social organization for city kids. Play groups and gangs were organized exclusively by geography. Frederick Thrasher, in his exhaustive and exhausting study of Chicago’s eight hundred and eighty gangs, found that geography, not ethnicity or religion, determined membership. “In the more crowded sections of the city, the geographical basis of a gang is both sides of the same street for a distance of two blocks.” The boys who lived on these blocks became gang members, no matter what language their parents spoke at home. Thrasher quoted approvingly one of his gang contacts: “Aw, we never ask what nationality dey are.… If dey are good guys, dey get in our gang. Dat’s all we want.”31

  When children moved away from the block, they were forced to leave their friends—and gang—behind. Without access to transportation, they had no way of returning to play with their old buddies on the block. The only solution was to make new friends and join a new gang.32 William Gropper, whose family moved constantly to get the month’s free rent landlords offered to new tenants, was never settled long enough to feel comfortable. “No sooner did I get acquainted in this [new] street” than it was time to move again. Every time he moved he’d “be initiated into different gangs, but they’d remember, ‘Oh, you were in the other street,’ and give [him] a hard time.”33

  “Cleveland Boy Gang.” April 8, 1911. A boy gang at the foot of a hill it had claimed for itself. Like most “gangs,” this one had members of different ages. The third boy from the right in the second row was probably five or six years older than the child sitting cross-legged in front of him. (Bain Collection, LC)

  The cities were divided by block and gang. Gang fighting to protect turf or extend it into the vacant lot next door was commonplace and often ferocious. Kids fought with paving stones, bottles, bricks, and garbage can lids as shields until one side, bloodied and bowed, was forced to retreat.34 The wars appeared to outsiders to be ethnically inspired, especially when the combatants called each other Sheeny, Christ-killer, Dago, and Mickie. But it was space, not ethnicity or religion they fought over. Territory was everything to the children. It was, indeed, the only thing they could call their own.35

  Kids who ventured off the block were likely to get in trouble. If the foreign block was occupied by a rival gang, the trouble was compounded. The children of the city, all of them, grew up with street maps etched into their brains. Harpo Marx, who spent a good part of his childhood on the streets, survived by learning precisely who lived where for blocks in every direction. When he had to leave the block, he made sure to carry “some kind of boodle in my pocket—a dead tennis ball, an empty spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.”36

  Springfield, Massachusetts, June 27, 1916. “Street gang—corner Margaret and Water Streets—4:30.” (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  All city kids faced the same consequences should they be caught on foreign blocks. If they had suitable ransom—like Harpo—they would be released. If not, they would be chased out of the neighborhood with sticks, stones, and fists. For black boys in “transitional” white neighborhoods and Jewish boys caught on Gentile blocks, there were added dangers. Though the Jews did not risk serious bodily injury as some of the blacks did, each knew what was in store should he be trapped off the block. Harry Golden recalls his first “brush with anti-Semitism [at age ten]. I ventured a block or two beyond our slum into the Irish slum. Some Irish kids chased me. A year later, three of these Irish buckoes caught me when I dared a similar venture. They ‘cockalized’ me. There are hundreds of men in their sixties who know what it is to be cockalized. Indeed, cockalization was universal.… The enemy kids threw the Jew to the ground, opened his pants, and spat and urinated on his circumcised penis while they shouted, ‘Christ killer.’ ”37

  In his autobiography Golden recalls this incident without bitterness or resentment. Harpo Marx and George Burns remembered their battles with the same matter-of-fact tone. Getting threatened or ambushed in enemy territory was as American as apple pie. It hurt at the time and might leave scars for years to come, but it was unavoidable, part of the price one paid in growing up.38

  It was, of course, possible to avoid such dangers by staying on your home block, as the smaller kids did. The bigger ones, however, as they approached their teens found the block too confining and the lure of foreign adventure too strong. In small groups or with their gangs, they searched the city for open space. When the weather grew warm, they traveled to the lakes, the rivers, and the ponds for a swim. It mattered little whether the water was on private or public land or how polluted it might appear. If there was enough room to swim and no adults to get in the way, it would do. On a hot July day in Cleveland, investigators found groups of boys bathing all along the lakefront, from East Sixteenth to Gordon Park, “most of them without suits.” In New York City, the boys’ swimming hole was the East River, where they used a modified dog paddle to push the garbage out of their way. “It was,” Samuel Chotzinoff, pianist and music critic, remembered, “perfectly legal to dive off the docks provided one wore one’s underwear.”39

  The geography of the city was kinder to some children than others. Those who lived near “swimming holes” or within walking distance of the undeveloped parts of town and the urban wastelands had little trouble locating areas to explore and play in. In Cleveland, the children who lived near the lakefront played in the gu
llies. They constructed “dens, dug-outs, and shanties,” listened to the hoboes’ stories, built bonfires in the sand, and with food “copped” from the freight trains, cooked themselves feasts.40

  The children were not without their allies in the search for usable play areas. Though, as David Macleod has shown in his insightful and comprehensive book, Building Character in the American Boy, many middle-class “boys’ workers” devoted their energies to saving boys of their own class, there were others who took up the rescue of lower-class children.41 The reformers’ first priority was to remove these children from the contaminating effect of life on the city streets. Boys and girls who escaped being run over by wagons, trucks, and horsecars remained subject to the debilitating influence of the bad elements with whom they shared public space. As Simon Patten observed in his 1905 lectures on “The New Basis of Civilization,” the respectable poor in the early twentieth-century city had no choice but to share their living quarters “with the vicious, the depraved, and the chronic paupers.”42

  From the 1880s on, a loosely connected coalition of settlement-house workers, educators, Protestant clergy, crusading journalists, and full-time “child-savers” and “boys’ workers” campaigned for playgrounds and supervised play spaces large enough to accommodate the thousands of children who had no place but the street to call their own. While they were successful in building dozens of new playgrounds, in opening up some schoolyards for after-school activities, and in establishing scores of boys’ clubs in cities across the country, they had neither the energy nor the resources nor the volunteers to serve all the children of the city.

  New York City. The old swimming hole, New York City style. (Bain Collection, LC)

  The child-savers’ problems were compounded by the children’s reluctance to follow their lead. The boys’ clubs set up expressly for “street” and working boys fought a never-ending battle to keep their young charges in attendance and in line. Though their ultimate goal was to teach the boys to play properly, submit their “individual wills to the welfare of the team,” follow orders, obey preestablished rules, practice self-control, and experience the exhilaration of “fighting shoulder to shoulder for the honor of the team,” they found that most of their efforts were devoted to building a stable membership.43 No matter how many different and exciting activities, sports, and games they offered as inducements, the boys continued to drop in only sporadically rather than committing themselves full-time to the club.44 The reformers found the same difficulty in attracting children to their after-school centers and playgrounds. While neighborhood kids enjoyed using the equipment provided, they did not relish the adult “supervision” that came along with it. Roy Rosenzweig, in his marvelous study of “workers and leisure in an industrial city,” quotes from what are purported to be interviews with Worcester (Massachusetts) children who had used the city’s playgrounds. In all cases, the children expressed disdain for the adult efforts to teach them how to play, and many said that they either no longer paid attention to the play leaders or had stopped attending the playgrounds altogether. ‘I can’t go to the playgrounds now,’ complained one eleven-year-old … ‘They get on me nerves with so many men and women around telling you what to do.’ ”44

  The reformers were stymied as well by the children’s highly developed sense of turf. Most children would only consider playing at playgrounds near enough to their homes to “belong” to them. They would not, no matter what the apparent benefits, venture onto someone else’s playground. Roy Rosenzweig found that in Worcester “82% of the children who attended a particular playground lived within a quarter mile of it.” In Chicago, Henry S. Curtis reported in 1910 that “little children below six will not come regularly to a playground that is more than two blocks [from their home], the children under nine or ten will not come over one-quarter of a mile, and even the older children will not come regularly over a half mile.” Even had the children been willing to travel greater distances, it is doubtful that their mothers would have let them leave their home blocks for such distant locations.45

  There was no simple way to solve this problem. Though legislators, mayors, school officials, and progressive-minded philanthropists agreed in principle that more playgrounds had to be built to accommodate more city kids, they did not have or did not want to provide the funds necessary to buy and clear the land, construct the playgrounds, and staff them with qualified supervisors. A number of cities, Chicago and Pittsburgh most prominently, embarked on ambitious building campaigns, but none came close to providing sufficient play space for all the children who needed it.46

  New York City, August 1911. A photograph taken at the Carnegie Playground on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The attraction here was the real basketball court and ball. Unfortunately, children who wanted to use the court had to submit to the supervision of the adult standing to the left. (Bain Collection, LC)

  Studies of child’s play in New York City (1913), Milwaukee (1914), and Cleveland (1920) confirmed what was obvious from the window of any tenement. The children—and their mothers—preferred the streets as playgrounds to the supervised parks and after-school settlement house programs. In Milwaukee, where such facilities were within walking distance of 20 percent of the city’s children, less than 4 percent used them. The figures from Cleveland were almost identical: only 4 percent of the school-age children played in city and school playgrounds. In New York City, 95 percent of the children played on the streets.47 The children, though aware of the dangers posed by traffic and the bad elements, felt safer on their home blocks than anywhere else. This was their space—with its mud, horse dung, bums, and prostitutes. There was something reassuring about the clutter, the noise, the turmoil, the congestion. The dangers were known and visible by mothers from the front room window. Should the worst happen, help was only a shout away.

  The play communities of the streets existed only for those children still young enough to be allowed to spend their free time on the block. As working-class city kids reached the ages of eleven or twelve, their days of leisure came to an end. One after the other, they were called away from the block to help out at home or earn money downtown.

  Those who traveled downtown to earn some money did not, on that account, join the adult community. They remained members of a children’s community of the streets which, like the earlier play communities, defined itself by its difference from and, at times, opposition to the ordinary adult world. At work—as at play—the children would remain, in Huizinga’s words, “apart-together”48 in the midst of but separate from the adult world.

  Child Labor and Laborers

  This is a book about children, but not about all children or even all city children. I have chosen to write about a particular group of city kids. These were children born to working-class parents who owned little or no property, had received little or no formal education, and worked for wages or piece rates at skilled or unskilled jobs.

  The children of the city were immigrant and native-born, of Jewish, Italian, Polish, German, Irish, or native-born American parents. They grew up in cities across the country. What united them as a group—and what distinguished them from their more prosperous middle-class contemporaries—was the size, shape, and reach of their families’ incomes.

  As the numerous “family budget” studies demonstrated at the time, most working-class families made do by stretching every possible resource as far as it would go. Seldom if ever could the heads of households earn enough to support their families by themselves. In the stockyards district of Chicago, in New York City and Buffalo, New York, in Springfield, Illinois, and almost everywhere else investigators studied working-class budgets, they found families spending more each month than the primary wage earners brought home.1 In Springfield, Illinois, in 1916, only nineteen of the one hundred families studied (80 percent of which were headed by native-born white fathers) lived on the father’s salary. In the Chicago stockyards community, a 1914 study found that while the average father’s salary was $503, the a
verage yearly family income was $854.2 Wages were low and work was irregular. Men who worked outdoors, skilled craftsmen like bricklayers, stonecutters, and ironworkers, and unskilled laborers, drivers, longshoremen, and street and sewer workers, lost their jobs when the weather turned bad.3

  Cincinnati. A Lewis Hine photograph of “Marie Costa, Basket Seller, 605 Elm Street. Sister and friend help her.” (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  In other industries employment was seasonal because management found it profitable to lay off workers during slack times and speed them up during booms. In dressmaking, employees could count on only about eight months of guaranteed work a year. From May through July, there was plenty of work—and overtime—preparing next winter’s garments. August and September were slack times, with less work and shorter work weeks. In October, it was back to full time to produce spring and summer wear. By February, the work had given out and the slack times returned.4 In meat-packing, there was less work in summer as demand fell off and short weeks in winter as management rushed animals from the pens to the packinghouses and sped them down the disassembly line early in the week so that by Thursday they could begin sending workers home with less than a full week’s wages.5

  There was no escaping the recurrent layoffs and short weeks. Families responded as best they could by fortifying their income to diminish reliance on the father’s wages. Though most wives with children at home did not go out to work, they contributed to the family income by cooking or doing laundry for single men or taking in industrial homework or boarders. There were variations in the strategies employed by different ethnic and racial groups. Black women were more likely than white to take in homework, Poles to take in boarders.6 What was common to all, however, was the need to make use of every potential source of income. Boarders were squeezed into front rooms, kitchens converted into work areas for industrial homework, and everyone put to work—including the children.