Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  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 amusement 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 amusement, 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-class 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 pawning 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 substitute 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 assume 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 Saturday 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 appetites 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 à 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 amusement 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 amusement 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 amusement 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 a
dults 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 Class 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-class and immigrant district in the city.8

  The early theaters and nickelodeons catered to an almost exclusively working-class audience. As Milton Berle remembered in his autobiography. “The movies were something for the lower classes and immigrants. Nice people didn’t go to the ‘flickers.’ ”9 Barton Currie, writing for Harper’s Weekly in 1907, ridiculed the better classes who, never having been to one, assumed 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 Saturday 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 passed 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 ‘illustrated song’ for a nickel. The illustrated 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, risqué 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-class 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 tarnishing 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 Saturdays. 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-class critics, was consistent with a long tradition of working-class conduct at cultural events. As Roy Rosenzweig reminds us in his study of working-class leisure activities in Worcester, Massachussetts, “Modes of conviviality, active sociability, and liveliness remained the norms for the working class.” Adults and children socialized, ate, drank, cheered, growled, and stamped their feet through all sorts of theatrical performances. The aud
ience 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 illustrated. 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 Saturday 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