Children of the City

by David Nasaw

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

  The residents of the central cities struggled as best they could to find a breath of air, cool, fresh, clean air. Men, women, and children herded themselves into streetcars and subways for interminable Sunday excursions to the parks and beaches, looking for grass to walk on and air to breathe. In the summertime, when the air was so heavy and hot “it was painful to draw one’s breath,” entire families—abandoning their last grasp at privacy—relocated on the docks, in the parks, at the stoops, the fire escapes or up on the roofs. As Mike Gold put it in Jews Without Money, “People went exploring for sleep as for a treasure.”31 “Like rats scrambling on deck from the hold of a burning ship, that’s how we poured on the roof at night to sleep. What a mélange in the starlight! Mothers, graybeards, lively young girls, exhausted sweatshop fathers, young consumptive coughers and spitters, all of us snored and groaned there side by side, on newspapers or mattresses. We slept in pants and undershirt, heaped like corpses. The city reared about us.”32

  Light, air, and privacy were scarce commodities in the working-class districts of the cities. But to paint too grim a picture of life in the early twentieth century, to speak only of scarcity, to emphasize only poverty is to caricature the conditions of daily life for many. The city was no golden land, but it was also no desert. There was plenty mixed with the poverty, abundance interspersed with scarcity. The city was many things at the same time to the same people.

  Marcus Ravage, who arrived in New York City from his native Vaslui, Rumania, at the turn of the century, tried hard to organize his perceptions of this new land. He could not resolve the contradictions. He was disappointed on his arrival, “bitterly disappointed” at the “littered streets, with the rows of pushcarts lining the sidewalks and the centers of the thoroughfares, the ill-smelling merchandise, and the deafening noise,” at the congestion inside the homes, and the boarders crowded into too little space, stuffed into too few beds. (In Vaslui, he remembered, only the “very lowest of people kept roomers.”) And yet, at the very same time, he was astonished at the material abundance displayed amidst the poverty. His landlady scrubbed the floor, not with sand, but with a “pretty white powder out of a metal can.” “Moreover, she kept the light burning all the time we were in the kitchen, which was criminal wastefulness even if the room was a bit dark.” There was “eggplant in midwinter, and tomatoes, and yellow fruit which had the shape of a cucumber and the taste of a muskmelon.” There was meat in the middle of the day and “twists instead of plain rye bread, to say nothing of rice-and-raisins … and liver paste and black radish.” And then, as if he had not seen enough such wonders in his first day in the country, the young men calling on his Cousin Rose arrived that evening “with beer in a pitcher from the corner saloon.” Common people—with beer in a pitcher—at home.33

  The city—not just New York City, but every early twentieth-century city—overwhelmed with its abundance. There were enough goods to go around town and back again. The department stores and specialty shops got the best of the lot, but the working-class districts, according to Harry Roskolenko, a poet and journalist who grew up on the Lower East Side, were stocked with their own “massive supplies of shoddy goods … leftovers from other years and seasons; things that could not be sold” elsewhere; and goods produced especially for sale to “the peddlers and the peasants and the proletarians jamming the sidewalks and gutters.”34

  New York City, 1908–15. An East Side “pushcart market.” Migrants from rural areas on both sides of the Atlantic marveled at the abundance and the variety of produce sold on the streets of the city. (Bain Collection, LC)

  The pushcarts overflowed, the shops were littered with items for sale: umbrellas, stockings, boys’ sailor suits with whistles attached, suspenders, gabardine overcoats, handkerchiefs, laces and ribbons and shoes and long underwear. There were carts filled with oranges and others loaded with bananas, herring came in barrels, milk was ladled out of forty-quart cans, potatoes dug out of fifty-pound sacks. Food, drink, and sweets could be purchased from peddlers and pushcarts, from stands, butchers, bakers, and grocers who sold it in cans, in boxes, in jars, in bottles, in packages, in bags.35

  Newcomers might have assumed that city markets had always displayed such variety and abundance, but many of the items now prominently displayed were as new to the city as the electric streetcars and lobster palaces. The banana, for example, among the most proletarian of fruits, had until the 1880s been almost entirely absent from the working-class shops and shopping streets. On arrival in New Orleans, “each fruit was wrapped individually in tinfoil and like a rare and precious object rushed to New York or New England, where, if it survived the journey, a single banana was worth a dollar.”36

  Oranges were also a luxury item until the 1890s when, with the completion of the Florida East Coast Railway, they could be shipped north by rail instead of being imported from the Mediterranean.37

  Grapefruits were entirely new to the city. The old pear-shaped fruit, distinguished by its lack of juice, coarse rind, and expensive price tag had been redesigned by Florida growers who shipped them north in refrigerated boxcars. Between 1909 and 1920, annual consumption of the new pink fruit jumped from under a pound to over five pounds per capita.38

  The immigrants who arrived in American cities in the early twentieth century were astounded by the number of foods for sale and the variety of ways in which they could be purchased. Fruits, vegetables, soups, meats, even baby food, were sold fresh and in cans and tins. Propelled into the marketplace by new food companies alert to the advantages of national distribution, advertising, and brand name promotions, Campbell’s soups, Heinz’s fifty-seven varieties, and Libby’s canned goods became part of the city’s daily diet. Between 1909 and 1920, annual per capita consumption of canned fruits increased from under three pounds to over nine, canned soups from less than a third of a pound to two, and baby food from less than a tenth of a pound to over two.39

  The addition of fresh and canned fruits and vegetables to a diet that had once consisted of little more than bread, potatoes, crackers, and various forms of salted and preserved meats was no doubt beneficial. From a social standpoint, the availability of food in cans meant even more. Here was yet another item once exclusively the preserve of the wealthy (and of military expeditions which could survive on no other form of food) that had become part of the common folks’ daily diet.40 The family that could now for the first time eat peas for dinner was certainly more pleased by the new addition to its diet than it was distressed by the nutritional loss suffered in the canning process.

  Of all the foods entering the diet of the working people, none were as enticing, as aristocratic, as luxurious, and as plentiful as the sweets. One by one, luxuries like refined white sugar and chocolate and homemade delights like fresh ice cream were mass-produced, distributed, and marketed in the cities. Candy consumption increased from 2.2 pounds per capita in 1880 to 5.6 in 1914 and 13.1 in 1919; ice cream from 1.5 pounds in 1909 to 7.5 in 1920. To wash it all down, there was Coca-Cola, invented as a “remedy for headaches and hangovers” by an Atlanta dentist in 1886.41

  The new sweets further broadened and “democratized” the urban diet. Luxuries became commonplaces available for pennies from neighborhood shops and pushcart peddlers. And yet, there remained significant differences between the diet of the downtown gentleman and the factory worker’s family. Both ate sweets and vegetables and meat. But the sirloin and spring lam
b served in the lobster palaces was a far cry from the meat soup “made up of leftovers and ends and bones which the butcher sold for six cents a pound instead of throwing it away.”42 Bananas and oranges and grapefruits were, for the first time, available downtown and in the slums, but only for the few who had the money to pay for them. For the rest, they remained as inaccessible as they had been in the days before refrigerated boats and boxcars carried them north.

  In the midst of plenty, poverty and hunger remained. Within sight of the carts and shops filled with enough food to feed armies, parents struggled to provide for their families. Children grew up with what actress Ruth Gordon has called “the dark brown taste of being poor.”43 Hy Kraft, later a successful Broadway playwright, never forgot what it was like to grow up poor. “A boy stands in front of a candy store—in front, mind you. He sees a hundred varieties of sweets, but he doesn’t have a penny, one cent. Or he’s in the street; a vendor pushes his cart, calling ‘Icacrim sendwich, pennyapiss.’ Other kids holler up to their mamas, ‘Mama, t’row me down a penny’ and the mama wraps the penny in paper and ‘t’rows’ it down. This kid doesn’t have a penny—one cent. And there’s no mama upstairs; she’s in the back of the basement.”44

  Poverty was not unique to the metropolis, but nowhere else did it coexist with such splendor and spectacle. As Charles Zueblin, an authority on American cities, noted in the preface to his widely read volume on American Municipal Progress, “There is poverty in the country, sordid and ugly. But city poverty is under the shadow of wealth. Luxury flaunts itself in the city.”45

  The city was suffused with contrasts: between the electrically illuminated magnificence of the downtown shopping and entertainment districts and the grayish squalor of the slums, between the abundance of goods offered for sale on the streets and the paucity of resources available to pay for them. Poverty and plenty lived side by side, in the same city, on the same block, in the same tenement flat. The contradictions that assailed Marcus Ravage on his first day in the city were inescapable. Wise men peddled suspenders on the streets while fools lived like millionaires. People slept crowded one on top of another, but they ate meat several times a week. Families shared toilets with complete strangers, but they were able to purchase shoes, stockings, and underwear for everyone—even for the children. It made no sense and yet it was real. It was the-city.

  At Play in the City

  The central city districts were deprived of space, privacy, light, and air. But they were, as Theodore Dreiser found on his visit to the Lower East Side, “rich … in those quickly withering flowers of flesh and blood, the boys and girls of the city.”1

  In the mornings, after 3 P.M. when school let out, and after dinner, the tenements poured forth their armies of children: through the darkened halls, out the front door, down the stoop, into the street they walked, ran, skipped, and jumped.

  The children were everywhere: in the streets and alleyways, on the stoops and sidewalks, hanging from fire escapes and out of windows. Henry James on his visit to the Lower East Side was overwhelmed by “the sense … of a great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely.” It was “the children [who] swarmed above all.” “Here was multiplication with a vengeance.” Theodore Dreiser counted “thousands” running the thoroughfare. Robert Woods, a Boston settlement-house worker, describing the South End, noted that “sometimes in a little side street you will see a hundred … at play.”2

  The children played on the streets because there was nowhere else for them. Urban space was a commodity, an item bought and sold like any other. As the population of the cities expanded, land became more and more valuable.3 The logic of urban progress was inexorable. Undeveloped land was wasted land. With space at a premium, even the backyards were too valuable to be given over to the children. They were quickly filled up by the adults: with goats or chickens, herb and vegetable gardens, or some combination of “outhouses, sheds, fences, clothes lines, trash heaps, and even garbage piles.”4

  New York City. While their older brothers left the block to sell papers and black boots, the little ones stayed behind. The children used all the space on the block. There was, as you can see from this photograph, no strict boundary between sidewalk and street, nor did there have to be. On streets such as this, where the traffic was light, the children could play their games without undue interference. To the right of the photograph are two “little mothers” watching over their younger siblings. (LC)

  Inflated land prices led to congestion inside as well as out. There was no room for children to play in tiny tenement flats and subdivided one-family houses stuffed full with aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents, babies, and boarders. The best rooms in the flat, the front and rear ones, were reserved for parents or boarders willing to pay extra for the privilege. The little ones slept in the living room or kitchen or with their parents or, if in rooms of their own, interior ones without windows, light, or air. The children not only lacked rooms of their own; they didn’t even have their own beds. In his oral history, Frank Broska, a Chicago factory worker who grew up in a house heated only by a stove in the kitchen, remembered warmly being bundled up in bed with big feather ticks piled on top, heated house bricks wrapped in towels at his feet, and brothers and sisters on either side of him.5

  It was much easier for a family to make space for the children to sleep than it was to find room for them to play. The little ones could be tied to chairs or put in makeshift playpens in a corner of the kitchen. The bigger ones, if they sat quietly at the kitchen table doing their homework, were allowed to stay indoors. Otherwise, they were free to gaze out the window, sit on the fire escape, or leave altogether. Indoors was for adults; children only got in the way: of mother and her chores, of father trying to relax after a long day at work, of boarders who worked the night shift and had to sleep during the day.6 Catharine Brody, a journalist who grew up on a city block in Manhattan, remembered in a 1928 article for The American Mercury that when she was a girl “there was no such thing as gathering or playing in the house.” The children required no special encouragement to go outside to play. That was where they belonged. “The streets,” as Catharine Brody put it, “were the true homes of the [city’s] small Italians, Irish, and Jews.”7

  The children shared these “homes” with others. The street was their playground, but it was also a marketplace, meeting ground, social club, place of assignation, political forum, sports arena, parade grounds, open-air tavern, coffeehouse, and thoroughfare. The life on the street was the life of the city. While the children played, the policemen walked their beat, prostitutes solicited “johns,” peddlers shouted their wares, delivery wagons squeezed down the block to neighborhood shops, and men and women clustered in small groups on the corners, in front of the shops, at the threshold of the saloons, and on their front stoops.

  New York City, 1908–15. Three city kids intent on some sort of game, involving a hoop, a stick, and an empty can. While these children appear to be “alone” in the street, their mothers in the tenements overhead, older sisters along the sidewalks and on the stoops, and local shopkeepers kept watch over them. (Bain Collection, LC)

  The presence of adults in the street—and in the tenements overhead—protected the children at play. There was always someone within shouting distance should trouble appear. When Joey Cohen was lured into a tenement hallway by the “scarecrow” who offered him a nickel and then tried to pull down his pants, the boy’s shout for help brought assistance at once. The apple peddler down the street, a man “in flannel shirt and cap,” “two Italian laborers who [had] been digging a sewer nearby,” and a crowd of peddlers, children, and housewives appeared from nowhere. According to Mike Gold, who witnessed the scene and wrote about it years later, “If a cop had not arrived,” the crowd would have “torn … the pervert … into little bleeding hunks.”8

  The presence of adults on their play streets was not an unmixed blessing for the children. They shared their space, but only grudgingly. As Peter and Ion
a Opie reported in their magnificent study of Children’s Games in Street and Playground, adults and children have fought over the public space they share since the Middle Ages. While the older generation has tried to get the children off the street and out from under foot, the children have exacerbated tensions by appearing “deliberately to attract attention to themselves, screaming, scribbling on the pavements, smashing milk bottles, banging on doors, and getting in people’s way.” In the words of Colin Ward, author of The Child in the City, “one of the things that play is about, intermingled with all the others, is conflict with the adult world.”9 This was certainly true for the children who grew up in the turn-of-the-century American cities. Their play communities were defined not only by their commitment to their own rules but by their disregard for those laid down by adults. City kids, “good” city kids, appeared to take special delight in disobeying the “No Swimming” signs in front of the city’s concrete fountains, climbing the poles that held up the clothes lines, playing tag on the roofs and “hide and seek” on the stairways, bouncing their balls off front doors and occupied stoops, teasing the ice man’s horse, and stealing whatever they could from the trucks and pushcarts that invaded their territory.

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