Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  The children offered their customers an image of themselves that was but partially false. Their customers grabbed at it. They saw before them not simply a small army of children working hard for their pennies, but a flesh-and-blood enactment of the quintessential American morality play, a real-life Horatio Alger story on every street corner—Ragged Dick, Mark the Match Boy, Nelson the Newsboy, and Paul the Peddler, rough and ready, frank and fearless, struggling upward, bound to rise in a new world.59

  The image was a reassuring one to those concerned with the picture of urban crime and destitution presented by spectacle-seeking newspapers and muckraking magazines. The turn-of-the-century city was a city divided by class and geography. Only the chroniclers of life “for the other half” and the street trading children bridged the two metropolitan worlds. The reformers and journalists painted lurid pictures of the working-class, immigrant city while the children reached out across the boundaries of class and ethnicity with their papers, shoeshine boxes, and candy bars.

  While the reformers watched—with anger and alarm—the children and their customers cemented a symbiotic relationship. Each gave the other what was needed: the children got their tips, and their customers the reassurance that this remained the land of opportunity, if not for the poor and downtrodden, then at least for their hardworking children.

  Junkers, Scavengers, and Petty Thieves

  For eleven-year-old Francie Nolan, the heroine of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith’s autobiographical novel of working-class life before the first World War, “Saturday started with a trip to the junkie. She and her brother Neeley, like other Brooklyn kids, collected rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other junk and hoarded it in locked cellar bins or in boxes hidden under the bed.” On Saturday mornings, they hauled it out and sold it to the junkman, after considerable haggling over quality, weight, and price.1

  The working-class children of the early twentieth-century city were expert and experienced junkers, salvagers, ragpickers, and scavengers. Children too young to leave the block collected their junk in the streets, the backyards, the alleyways; older boys and girls ranged farther away, some on a regular basis, others when they were in special need of ready cash.

  Boys and girls, five years old and fifteen years old, recognized at a glance the value of the junk adults had left behind. They scoured the back lots, dumps, railroad tracks, construction sites, and urban wastelands for discarded items to sell to the junkman or rehabilitate for use at home. Everything had its price: in Brooklyn, in 1912, according to Betty Smith, papers were worth “a penny for ten pounds. Rags brought two cents a pound and iron, four. Copper was good—ten cents a pound.”2

  For the children of the street, junking was as common a pastime as playing baseball or jumping rope. According to his biographer, Louis B. Mayer, the film producer, spent his young years “out on the street ragpicking and collecting scraps at all hours when not in school.” Mayer gave his junk to his father, who was in the business.3 Other children utilized the services of the junkmen, ragpickers, and pawnbrokers who could be found on every city block. No kid with junk to sell had any trouble selling it. Junking was a neighborhood business—and a big one. In 1916 alone, according to a U. S. Department of Commerce report, over five thousand tons of wastepaper (one quarter of the total consumed in a year) and $265 million worth of scrap metals were retrieved from junk, a good deal of it by children.4 Massachusetts Child Labor Committee investigators found that more than 40 percent of the children in one Boston school district regularly scavenged wood to burn at home or sell to the junkman.5 Had the investigators asked how many kids went junking—for iron or coal on the railroad tracks; for old clothing, furniture, and machine parts at the dump; for bones, rags, and bottles in the alleys; for faucets and lead pipe at vacant houses; for food at the produce markets; or just about anything in boxcars at the railroad yards—they would have found an even greater proportion of junkers among the children of the city.

  Boston, probably from 1909. A group of boys hauling home their loot from an afternoon of scavenging. Though the wood in the cart probably came from the railroad tracks, construction sites, or other places the boys did not belong, none of the adults on the street appear to pay the scavengers any attention. This must have been a common scene on this particular Boston street. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  There was plenty of valuable “stuff” lying around waiting for children to rescue and recycle it. (According to the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, “stuff” was the “technical name of the material” the children gathered.) American cities were the waste capitals of the world, generating over 860 pounds per capita (an average taken from surveys of fourteen cities between 1888 and 1913), almost twice as much as was produced in English cities and almost three times more than in Germany. The waste came in several varieties: garbage—the name given the wet, organic materials; dry refuse, trash, litter, and rubbish; ashes from coal and wood stoves; street sweepings; and night soil, the contents of privies and chamber pots.

  Year by year the mountains of garbage, ashes, and dry refuse grew. Between 1903 and 1907 alone, “Pittsburgh’s garbage increased from 47,000 to 82,498 tons,” Milwaukee’s from thirty to forty thousand, Cincinnati’s from twenty-two to thirty-one thousand tons. “As Luther E. Lovejoy, secretary of the Detroit Housing Commission, fatalistically concluded, ‘The accumulation of garbage and rubbish is one of the penalties human society inevitably pays for the luxury of civilization.’ ”6

  City governments, reform groups, and business/civic associations did their best to find solutions to the growing waste problem. They organized and reorganized health and sanitation departments; hired new street-cleaning squads, and, to boost their morale, dressed them in white from head to foot; lectured school children on sanitation and enlisted them in Juvenile Street Cleaning Leagues; held widely publicized cleanup-week campaigns; and purchased expensive machinery that did not always work: incinerators and reduction plants from Europe and automatic street sweepers like “The Sanitary Street Flushing Machine,” which “flushes—not merely wets—but scrubs, washes, scours, cleans, rids the street of all health menacing unsanitary conditions.”7

  Many cities required residents to separate their wet garbage from ashes and dry refuse, though from that point on there was little agreement on what to do with it. The sanitary experts and engineers wanted to turn the “waste into wealth” or, at the very least, get rid of it as cheaply as possible. Indoor plumbing connected to sewers was beginning to carry away the “night soil,” but something had to be done about the wet organic garbage, which decayed rapidly, attracted rats and flies, smelled bad, and looked worse. In some cities, the sanitation departments only collected the wet stuff, leaving householders and private scavengers to dispose of the ashes and refuse. A surprisingly large number of cities collected the organic garbage and fed it to hogs; others reduced it to grease; a few simply dumped it as far from downtown as possible.8

  The dry refuse was less of a problem. It could be burned—or dumped. European cities, with less land for dumps, had to rely on incinerators. Americans, with more trash and more land, had an alternative. As the new century wore on and the cities piled up more and more trash, authorities found it simpler and cheaper to dump it than burn it. By 1909, 102 of the 180 “crematories” built in the 1880s and 1890s had been “abandoned or dismantled.”9

  The sanitarians’ loss was the scavengers’ gain. Had the incinerators proved more economical, there would have been less to scavenge. The junk would have been carted away and burned before the children had the opportunity to pick through it.

  The children were also aided by the cities’ efforts at waste separation. Because collecting and disposing of the wet organic garbage was the first concern, dry refuse was often left standing on the streets or in backyards for days. When collected, it was removed to nearby dumps where the scavengers could examine it and haul away what they wanted.

  Every city had its dumps, and working-class kids knew precise
ly where they were—and what they held. Though the more affluent neighborhoods generated the most waste, it was the least affluent that got the dumps.10 In Chicago, the bulk of the refuse was carried south and dumped “back of the Yards” on five acres of open fields that had once held rich clay deposits. As the clay was excavated for the nearby brickyards, the enterprising city alderman who owned the pits sold the city the right to fill in the holes with trash. It made little difference to politicians and city officials that thousands of Polish and Slavic families lived adjacent to the fields that were, from the middle 1890s, the chief recipient of the city’s wastes. The trash had to be dumped somewhere; why not in this immigrant neighborhood already polluted by the odors of packinghouse and stockyard?11 According to Upton Sinclair, the odor of the district was so powerful, railway passengers could smell it within an hour of their arrival in Chicago.12

  Boston, October 1909. Two young scavengers at the dump, filling their sack with valuables. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  The neighborhood children who went scavenging in the dumps “back of the Yards” arrived after school just in time to watch the carts from uptown unload their riches. The children waited outside the gates until the “picker,” who had paid fifteen dollars for the privilege, sifted through the piles with his helpers. When the professionals were finished, the children and the neighborhood women who gathered with them were let into the dumps to dig with sticks or bare hands through the mounds looking for something to sell to the junkman: tin cans, milk bottles, wooden boxes, automobile or wagon tires, iron, rags, or something that, cleaned and repaired, might be used at home: old mattresses, worn garments, battered furniture, pots, pans, dishes. The scavengers did their work quickly and quietly, with hope eternal that just under the next mound they’d find the discarded silverware the “picker” had overlooked.13

  Junking went on wherever there were kids in need of money and dumps with items worth cash to the junkman. Not all dumps were as noxious as the Chicago ones. A 1909 Lewis Hine photograph taken at a Boston dump shows a group of kids having a fine time near the shores of some polluted bay. In the background stands a boy with a pile of wood in his arms, in front of him are ten or twelve others sorting through the rubbish with their bare hands, to the right are two little girls neatly dressed in long, check and plaid dresses, with ribbons in their hair and baskets over their arms. At first glance, it is hard to tell if the children are playing or working. They were, in fact, doing both.14

  The dumps (especially in cities like Boston, where the garbage was disposed of elsewhere or fed to hogs) were, in Hine’s words, “a natural meeting ground” for neighborhood children. What better places to gather and play than wide open fields overlooking bodies of water? Since no adults frequented the dumps except the hoboes, who were seldom any trouble, the children could do as they pleased: run and chase, dig for buried treasure, build forts, “start a warming fire or throw rocks at old bottles without raising the ire of property owners or cops.”15

  Boston, October 1909. A group of children playing and working at a Boston dump. Only the adult picker to the far left and the two little girls on the right are excluded from the game. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  While the reformers castigated public authorities—and rightly—for creating and then refusing to clean up their overflowing dumps, the children went right on playing and junking, oblivious to the real and potential health hazards. They were too intent on their work to bother about the danger or the smell or the warnings from the settlement-house workers. They also shunted aside whatever misgivings they might have had about the legality of their expeditions. Junking was, in most of its forms, a combination of trespass and petty theft. The children who forced their way into closed city dumps or railroad yards or vacant lots and construction sites were well aware that they didn’t belong there. But they didn’t seem to care. Laws that weren’t enforced and made no sense could be disobeyed with impunity.

  The children had evolved thier own working definitions of junk and private property. And as long as the authorities looked the other way, they could act as if these were the only legitimate ones. Material found unused on public or quasi-public space belonged to whoever had the foresight to collect and make use of it. “Use,” not “title,” conferred rights of ownership.

  As Perry Duis observed in his brilliant dissertation on “The Saloons and the Public City,” “Public space in the city … tended to depersonalize private property.”16 Items that were found outside in the street or on the railroad tracks or yards did not “belong” to anyone. They were free for the picking.

  Though the dumps were usually on city property and the railroad yards and tracks privately owned, the children made no distinction between the two sources of junk. From their perspective, material left behind in the dump or lying unused on tracks was ownerless until claimed. Open-bed railroad cars on poorly laid track threw off a steady supply of coal, wood, and iron. The children, with their wagons, their baskets, and their canvas sacks, collected it daily.

  For children with adventure in their hearts and larceny on their minds, the tracks led into the railway yards, where boxcars filled with everything from whisky to wire spools sat unguarded. Theft from the boxcars was as easily rationalized as junking from the tracks. The stuff didn’t yet belong to anybody. If it had, it would have been taken away and made use of. Besides, there was so much jammed into the cars, no one could possibly miss a wagonful.

  Stan, the future “delinquent” whose story was told and dissected by Chicago sociologist Clifford Shaw, began his life of crime crawling into boxcars and handing out the merchandise to his stepbrother. “Stealing in the neighborhood,” he informed Shaw, “was a common practice among the children and approved by the parents.… I hardly knew any boys who did not go robbing.” Shaw, the expert on crime and juvenile delinquency, agreed with Stanley that acts of petty thievery, like breaking into boxcars, were not morally significant for the boys. “It may be assumed that Stanley’s initial experience in delinquency was an aspect of the play activity of his gang and neighborhood.… From his point of view, it is probable that his early experiences in stealing had no more moral significance than the non-delinquent practices in which he engaged.… There are many areas in the city in which stealing from freight cars is a very prevalent practice.”17

  Fall River, Massachusetts, June 27, 1916. “Pine Street Dump Scavengers” (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  Though Chicago, with its multiple rail connections, presented junkers with more opportunities than were available elsewhere, children in every city with tracks and yards took advantage of them. Stealing from the railroads was a group activity. The whole neighborhood participated: boys and girls, big brothers and little sisters, all the kids from the block. The little ones squeezed through the pried-open boxcar doors, while the big ones kept watch and carried away the loot to the junkman. Parents did not often help the kids do the junking, but they knew what was going on and made use of whatever their children dragged home. When the police finally caught up with a group of Detroit kids who had, in a month’s time, stolen “nine tons of coal, twenty-four baskets of oats, ten barrels of flour, six barrels of sugar, thirty cases of bottled beer, clothing, and more than a hundred dollars worth of perfumery and toilet articles,” they found that the stolen goods had been stored in the children’s homes, with the exception of the “perfumery and toilet requisites [which had been] used freely by the entire neighborhood.”18 The parents had to have known—and condoned—their children’s action. How else could the kids have hidden so much loot?

  Denver, 1910–20: “Where Tommy Costello” got the coal. One of the pictures donated to the Library of Congress by Mrs. Ben Lindsey, wife of the famous Juvenile Court judge, progressive reformer, and writer. This photograph, probably posed, shows three boys scavenging for coal along the tracks. The open-bed cars behind them, bumping along on poorly laid track, threw off enough coal to keep the boys busy all day long. (Mrs. Ben Lindsey, LC)

  In Clev
eland, Henry Thurston found that the children who lived near the railroad tracks supplied their homes with coal and wood—with the active connivance of the railroad watchmen. A small group of boys arrested for stealing tobacco from a boxcar defended themselves by claiming “The door was open, no one seemed to be taking care of the tobacco, and we thought they left it for us, as they do the cratings.”19

  The children did not spend their time looking for reasons not to carry away loot that appeared to have been abandoned. They were too busy making use of the junk to worry over whether it was rightfully theirs to appropriate. Leonard Covello, who became a New York City high school principal and author, grew up in East Harlem “in a neighborhood of rubble and debris and abandoned buildings.” The city planned to tear down some tenements and replace them with a park, but the delay between clearing the buildings of tenants and razing them was a long one. The neighborhood children didn’t mind in the least. They systematically looted the area of every item they could sell or use. “We stole lead from the primitive plumbing to sell to the junkman. We stole bricks and chipped off the old mortar and sold them again.”20

  For poor kids in rich cities, junk was not an occasional temptation, but an elementary and necessary ingredient in their daily lives. In a better world, the children would not have had to settle for discarded materials. But in the one they inhabited, such items were a never-ending source of enrichment.