by David Nasaw
Hester Street in New York City, early 1890s. Jacob Riis, who took this photograph, captioned it “the school children’s only playground.” (Jacob Riis Collection, LC)
Except on the busier thoroughfares where streetcars or cablecars ran regularly, the children were able to exclude or incorporate into their games the wagons, bicyclists, automobiles, and individuals who might otherwise have interfered. When delivery wagons parked for too long on the block, they could be incorporated into the game. Beer trucks outside the saloon became the home run fence for the ballplayers. Ice trucks provided a test of strength, speed, and daring for the boys who competed in stealing a block without getting caught. Open-bed wagons offered free rides for those courageous enough to hitch onto the back and hold on tight.
Horse-drawn carts, trucks, and wagons could be a lot of fun. But they also killed children who failed to get out of the way in time. Harry Roskolenko’s sister “was killed by a truck at the age of fifteen.” Mike Gold’s friend Joey Cohen was run over by a horsecar. “He had stolen a ride, and in jumping, fell under the wheels. The people around saw the flash of his body, and then heard a last scream of pain. The car rolled on. The people rushed to the tracks and picked up the broken body of my playmate.”11
It was dangers such as these that prompted settlement-house workers and reformers to campaign in the newspapers, magazines, city halls, and legislative lobbies for parks, playgrounds, and after-school programs. The reformers were, no doubt, hoping to use such supervised play programs as vehicles for socialization and Americanization, but they were also genuinely concerned for the future of children who had no place but the street to play.
The street was not the perfect playground, but it was the best the children had. “Where children are is where they play,” the Opies have written. “The street in front of their home is seemingly theirs, more theirs sometimes than the family living-rooms.”12 The children made good use of the available space, the streets and sidewalks as well as the doorways, gutters, stoops, and inside stairways. The boundaries that marked off public and private space were ignored. The “block” belonged to those who took possession of it.
The children, as we have seen, dealt in their own way with the adults and vehicles that trespassed on their space. Only the police were beyond reason, humoring, teasing, or incorporating into the game. There were, of course, policemen who could be expected to look the other way as the children took over the street, but there were more who took seriously their “responsibility” to clear the thoroughfare of its child impediments. Why, Mike Gold wondered in his autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money, were the police always in the way? “Why … did they adopt such an attitude of stern virtue toward the small boys? They broke up our baseball games, confiscated our bats. They beat us for splashing under the fire hydrant. They cursed us, growled and chased us for any reason. They hated to see us having fun.”13
Harpo Marx had the same experience but could not profess the same degree of hurt innocence. “There was no such character as ‘the kindly cop on the beat’ in New York in those days. The cops were sworn enemies. By the same token we, the street kids, were the biggest source of trouble for the police. Individually and in gangs we accounted for most of the petty thievery and destruction of property on the upper East Side. And since we couldn’t afford to pay off the cops in the proper, respectable Tammany manner, they hounded us, harassed us, chased us, and every chance they got, happily beat the hell out of us.”14
Mike Gold and Harpo Marx were Jewish in a city where the majority of police were not, but this was not the reason they found themselves at odds with the law. The People’s Institute, in its 1913 study of juvenile arrests on the Middle West Side, an Irish and German neighborhood, discovered that there too the police harassed children at play and work on the streets. More than 50 percent of the arrests made in the district were for noncrimes like “begging, bonfires, fighting, gambling, jumping on [street]cars, kicking the garbage can, loitering, playing football on the streets, pitching pennies, playing [base]ball, playing shinney, playing with water pistol, putting out lights, selling papers, shooting craps, snowballing, subway disturbances, and throwing stones.”15
New York City was not the only place where children were arrested and punished for activities that, in the case of adults, would not have been considered criminal. Jane Addams, after studying the records of the Chicago Juvenile Court, concluded that dozens of children had been arrested for “deeds of adventure”: stealing, junking, harassing railroad employees, “calling a neighbor a ‘scab,’ breaking down a fence, flipping cars [jumping on and off while they were moving], picking up coal from railroad tracks, loafing on the docks, ‘sleeping out’ nights, getting ‘wandering spells,’ and refusing to get off the fender of a streetcar.”16
There appeared to be little rhyme or reason in the causes for arrest. Some of the children’s crimes involved junking, petty thievery, and playing with or on private property, but there were many more that were victimless. Gambling, for example, the most common cause for arrest, was, from the children’s perspective, just another street game. What difference could it possibly make to the police if a group of boys wanted to shoot craps with their own money? They weren’t harming anybody, stealing anything, or causing any trouble. And yet the police seemed to take a special delight in breaking up their games. According to Jan Peerce, the opera singer, “the police who patrolled the Lower East Side on the lookout for crime seemed to take most seriously kids congregated in a backyard—or even a little circle on the street—to shoot craps. Not that the stakes were high. In the whole circle there possibly wasn’t more than a couple of dollars.”17
Mike Gold and his gang thought they knew the reason for the police obsession with kiddie gambling. They figured that the police were on their tail because they enjoyed “pocketing” the “small change” the players left behind when they scrambled for cover. “It was one of our grievances. We often suspected them of being moralists for the sake of this petty graft.”18
The children were a subject population liable to be scolded, chased, or arrested without warning. Still, the threat was more potential than real. Though the kids all knew of instances where innocent youngsters had been unfairly dealt with, most survived childhood without arrest records. As long as you kept a lookout and remembered that the police were not ordinary citizens but far more unpredictable and dangerous, you could expect to stay out of trouble.
The children at play inhabited a world that was encased in but separate from the ordinary adult world that surrounded them. For children who had spent a long day in school and would, at dusk, be called inside their parents’ homes, there was something liberating in this temporary separation from supervising adults. On the streets they could play as they pleased and say what they wanted. They did not have to seek approval or permission to play their games. Teachers disappeared from their lives at three o’clock. Parents exercised more constant authority, but that authority reached into the streets only in the most attenuated form. As long as the children did not disgrace themselves or their families, get into trouble with the police, abandon younger brothers or sisters, or get hurt, their parents left them alone. Though Eddie Cantor’s grandmother on the Lower East Side and Charles Angoff’s father in Boston were both convinced that playing ball was an activity fit only for bums, they did not forbid their children to hit their balls with wooden sticks. Parents had far more important things to do than watch their children play in the streets.19
All children learn from one another. But the scope, style, form, and content of this learning are affected by their relationship—as a group—with adults. Children who are under the thumb of adults from morning to night obviously have less opportunity to learn from one another than those who are free of adult supervision for long stretches of time. The children of the early twentieth-century city were blessed or cursed—depending on your perspective—with more unstructured and unsupervised free time than the generations that preceded or followed them
. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, they did not have to work all day alongside adults in factory, shop, mine, or mill. Unlike their mid-twentieth-century counterparts, they did not spend their afternoons, weekends, and summers in umpired and regulated Little League, scouting, after-school, and summer camp programs. The children of the street were, it is true, watched like hawks in school and at home, but out of school and out of the home, they were on their own or, to be more precise, immersed in a community defined by the absence of adults.
Boston. Playing baseball in a tenement alley. (Lewis Hine Collection, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.)
The children learned a lot from one another about life in the city: too much, according to reformers who were concerned that the lessons of the street were more easily assimilated than those of school and classroom. Philip Davis, who worked directly with children as Boston’s Commissioner of Street Trades, compared the two sources of learning in Street-land, his classic study of Boston’s children. “We fail to recognize that school education very frequently finds but surface roots in the minds of children and, therefore, gets wrenched out of place under the least storm or strain; whereas the roots of street education run deep.” Robert Woods, the Boston settlement-house worker and author, agreed entirely. “The streets,” he noted, “educate with fatal precision.” The classrooms did not.20
Urban public and parochial schoolteachers were not as a rule interested in teaching skills or providing information that would be of immediate assistance in the children’s daily lives. Their task was to prepare them for the future: to educate, socialize, and Americanize them, catechize them in the duties of citizenship, instruct them in manners and morals, and, most important, teach them to read, write, recite, and do sums. The school’s goal was to take the children from the streets and the streets from the children. The children, unfortunately, were not yet ready to abandon the streets. As we have seen, they had no place else to call their own.
Harpo Marx, who was abruptly tossed out of school in second grade by two Irish kids who hoisted him out the classroom window when Miss Flatto turned her back, never regretted the abrupt end of his formal schooling. Unlike his brother Groucho, who was a dedicated and able student, Harpo never found anything worth learning in the classroom. “School was all wrong,” he recalled in his autobiography. “It didn’t teach anybody how to exist from day to day, which was how the poor had to live.” Teachers had a lot to say “about holidays you could never afford to celebrate, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, [but nothing] about the real holidays like St. Patrick’s Day, when you could watch a parade for free, or Election Day, when you could make a giant bonfire in the middle of the street and the cops wouldn’t stop you. School didn’t teach you what to do when you were stopped by an enemy gang—when to run and when to stand your ground. School didn’t teach you how to collect tennis balls, build a scooter, ride the El trains and trolleys, hitch onto delivery wagons, own a dog, go for a swim, get a chunk of ice or a piece of fruit—all without paying a cent. School didn’t teach you which hockshops would give you dough without asking where you got your merchandise … or where to sell junk or how to find sleeping room in a bed with four other brothers. School simply didn’t teach you how to be poor and live from day to day.”21
Harpo was, of course, an exceptional child. How many others “dropped out” of school in second grade never again to return? Still, the discontinuity that he experienced between the world presented in the classroom and the one outside was common to other city kids. For Samuel Ornitz and his gang, the daily trip from “the strict rarefied public school world” to the boys’ “street existence, our sweet lawless, personal, high colored life” was like “traveling from planet to planet.”22
The street was a separate world with its own standards of right and wrong, its own code of ethics. The children learned in school—and probably at home as well—that gambling was wasteful and sinful, stealing was a crime, money was for saving, and citizens owed allegiance to the law and the officials sworn to enforce it. On the streets, however, they observed that lots of kids shot craps or pitched pennies, that stealing from the railroads was as common an afternoon’s occupation as stickball, that money was for spending, and that your primary duty was to friends, family and fellow gang members—not the police or the laws they claimed to enforce. The adults the children came in contact with, especially their teachers, tried to wean the children from the street and its laws. But they could not succeed. Not even the threat of corporal punishment would make children inform on one another. In case after case, reported Frederick Thrasher, children preferred to “take a beating than ‘stool’ on their associates.”23
New York City, 1907. Minnie Fiske, an actress, had this photograph taken for use “as an aid in designing sets, etc.” for “Salvation Nell,” a play she was to star in. (Minnie Fiske Collection, LC)
The children took care of one another. They managed their own space and their own games—according to their own rules. They laid out their ball fields and decided what was fair, foul, and a home run. They chalked their potsie squares and watched the lines. They decided the proper punishment for the kid who refused to follow the leader down into the basement to make faces at the Chinese laundryman.
The children’s play community of the street, like all other play communities, was founded on a bedrock of rules. Every game had its own particular rules: the children as a group might alter or adapt them to their own circumstances, but they could not ignore or dispense with them.24
New York City. “East Side Children” playing on the sidewalk. (Bain Collection, LC)
It was the task of the older, more experienced street kids to teach the greenies, newcomers, and little ones how to run the bases, shoot dice, swing a broom handle bat, and jump rope in rhyme. There were always new kids on the block. Some were recent immigrants, some were just shifting neighborhoods—perhaps so their parents could take advantage of a landlord’s offer of a few months’ free rent; others were for the first time being permitted to leave the protective grasp of their sisters on the stoops. What was constant was the community, not the individuals who comprised it.
Each child was initiated into the larger play community and a smaller subgroup defined by age and gender. Each subgroup had its space on the block, its separate games, and its responsibilities to others. The girls looked after the babies and toddlers; the bigger boys—in their gangs—guarded the block from “other streeters”; all kept a special eye out for younger siblings and relatives.
The block—that totality of street, gutter, sidewalk, stoop, and doorways—was informally divided to provide each group with the space it needed and a bit of distance from the others. Children of every ethnic, religious, racial, and language group played together. But girls did not always play with boys. Nor were the little ones allowed in the bigger ones’ games.
The girls occupied the stoops, where they met each afternoon to spend what author Kate Simon of the Bronx remembered in her autobiography as “long, chattering, comfortable” hours watching their little brothers and sisters, embroidering their French knots and pink roses on bits of cloth clamped onto small hoops, and hearing from their more experienced friends about the forbidden subjects: the monthlies, where babies came from, and what “shooting scum” really meant. They also played potsies on the sidewalks, jumped rope to complicated nonsense rhymes, and bounced their balls. Periodically they joined the boys for a game of prisoner’s base, ring-a-levio, or a race around the block.25
The center of the street belonged to the boys. It was there that they played their thousand and one variations on a theme with ball and bat, kicked the can, lit and tended fires, played marbles—always for keeps—and leapfrogged milk cans, fire pumps, and one another.
Though the older boys (ten and up) often joined in the ball games, much of their time was spent on the corners. With their backs to the street, huddled in a semicircle, they shielded their crap games, pitched pennies, a
nd did the grown-up things big boys do while waiting for something more exciting to happen.26
Cincinnati, 1908. Shooting craps on the sidewalk. (Lewis Hine, NCLC)
City kids made do with what they had. “You know,” George Burns remembers in his sometimes serious autobiography, The Third Time Around, “when I look back on those days on Rivington Street it makes me realize how lucky kids are today. They’ve got organized playgrounds, Little League, field trips, and in the summer they all get on buses and go to summer camps where they have swimming pools, basketball courts, baseball diamonds, and even a counselor to hand them a Kleenex in case they sneeze. When I was a kid we had none of those things. Our playground was the middle of Rivington Street. We only played games that needed very little equipment, games like kick-the-can, hopscotch, hide-and-go-seek, follow-the-leader. When we played baseball we used a broom handle and a rubber ball. A manhole cover was home plate, a fire hydrant was first base, second base was a lamp post, and Mr. Gitletz, who used to bring a kitchen chair down to sit and watch us play, was third base. One time I slid into Mr. Gitletz; he caught the ball and tagged me out.”27
Children had to scrounge for their equipment and then some. Garbage pail lids were made into sleds, bicycle wheels into hoops, discarded cans and used bags into footballs; baby carriages were transformed into pushcarts and wagons, and scraps of wood too insignificant to be used for kindling at home were burned in bonfires in discarded lunch pails.