Children of the City Read online

  Copyright © 1985 by David Nasaw

  All rights reserved. Published by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, in 1985, and subsequently published in paperback in the United States by Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, in 1986.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor eISBN: 978-0-307-81662-7

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  Acknowledgments

  I have received much assistance in the writing of this book. Rhoda Weyr’s advice and encouragement were instrumental in the design of the project. Richard Drinnon carefully read and thoughtfully commented on the first draft. James Gilbert’s critique of an early version helped me clarify my thoughts and focus my interpretation. Fred Binder and Daniel Coleman offered suggestions for improving the text. Herbert Leibowitz read and meticulously critiqued the final version.

  Papers delivered at the Columbia University Faculty Seminar in American Civilization, the American Educational Research Association annual convention, the New York Institute for the Humanities, and Bucknell University offered an opportunity to share, clarify, and amend my thinking.

  I am very grateful to Bill Leach for his help in the final stages of the project. Numerous discussions with him have helped me to sharpen and, I believe, buttress my arguments. Phil Pachoda has read several drafts of the manuscript and responded to each with valuable suggestions. Warren Susman has, almost from the first day, been generous with his time, energy, bibliographic resources, and analytic brilliance. He saw, at times before I did, the larger meaning of the story I was trying to tell.

  I am thankful to Owen Laster for his ongoing support. Loretta Barrett’s enthusiasm and editorial skills have been invaluable assets to the project. She has helped me to shape what was a mass of material into what I now hope is a coherent, structured whole. Felecia Abbadessa has, with grace and humor, shepherded the book through production. Viera Morse did a remarkable job of copy editing.

  I am indebted to Dinitia Smith for her faith in me and my book. She has been my best reader, certainly my most critical one. I have profited immeasurably from her encouragement, her critical acumen, her editorial assistance, and her good humor.

  I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Preface

  This book is about children and the cities they grew up in, about children at play and children at work. The time is the first decades of this century, the period in which so many of our grandparents and great-grandparents emigrated to the cities and the era in which children were expected to work in their spare time after school, on weekends, and during holidays.

  These were the years of our own social childhood: the years in which we first began to use the telephone, go to the movies, drive automobiles, ride on subways, eat fresh bananas and oranges, and survive—as best we could—by learning to play as hard as we worked. In all of this, the children were a step in front. Just as today children lead us into the computer age, seventy-five years ago they led the way into the twentieth century. In cities where the majority of adults had been raised in the countryside, it was the children who were the most comfortable, the most adaptable, the most competent. The city was, after all, the only world they knew; it was the place they called home.

  This book does not take as its starting point the assumption that the city is, has been, and must be the worst possible environment for the young. City kids grew up without adequate air, light, and space to play and grow, but, compared to their rural counterparts locked inside mines, mills, and canneries or put out to work on sugar beet, cotton, and berry fields, they were privileged. The children of the city did not wither and die in the urban air but were able to carve out social space of their own. They converted streets, stoops, sidewalks, alleyways, and the city’s wastelands into their playgrounds. As they reached the age of ten or eleven, they went to work in the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment districts where, every afternoon after school, they scavenged for junk, blacked boots, peddled gum, candy, and handkerchiefs, and hawked the latest editions of the afternoon dailies.

  At play and at work, the children inhabited a social world in the midst of but distinct from the adult worlds around them. They organized their own space, regulated their own street trades, made and enforced their unwritten laws, protected their properties and their profits, and, when mistreated by the adults they worked with, established unions and went out on strike. In one such strike, in New York City in 1899, they astounded the public and the press by shutting down circulation of the New York Evening Journal and Evening World, forcing the two most powerful publishers in the nation, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, to arrive at a compromise agreeable to employees too young to shave.

  The children of the street worked hard—and then they played hard. Though they were expected to turn over all their earnings to their mothers, they held back enough to buy themselves a good time in the city. They were connoisseurs of the streets, devotees of the corner candy shops, the nickelodeons, penny arcades, amusement parks, vaudeville halls, cheap eateries, red-hot stands, and pushcart vendors. The money they earned magically transported them from the realm of dependent childhood to the world of consumption where money, not age, brought with it fun and freedom.

  I have tried to write about the children of the street from their perspective, not that of parents, teachers, child labor reformers, settlement house workers, or juvenile justice authorities. I have approached them as sentient, intentional beings desirous and capable (within limits) of acting on and within their social environments. The children were subjects of history but like all historical beings they grew up in a social world they had not created. They were autonomous and free but within limits not of their own choosing. They claimed the street as their social center, playground, and workplace. It became “theirs” in a way that home, school, and settlement house could never be. Nonetheless, the street belonged to the city, not the children. And the city was ruled by adults. To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, paraphrasing Friedrich Engels, the street made the children while the children made the street.

  This study owes its life to the thousands of pages of primary source material generated, collected, assembled, and preserved by early twentieth-century settlement-house workers, educators, juvenile court officials, social workers, sociologists, law enforcement officials, and the thousands of men and women, amateurs and professionals, generically referred to as “reformers.” These adults, like their muckraker journalist contemporaries, believed in the power of direct observation to crystallize truth which, communicated properly, would then lead to action. In the course of my research, I have examined hundreds of their reports: on newsboys in New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Boston, Philadelphia, Bennington and Burlington (Vermont), Newark and Jersey City, Cincinnati and Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Dallas, Kansas City, Birmingham, and other cities across the country; on “delinquents” in reformatories and “wayward” children in the children’s courts; on the children’s lives at work, at play, at school, and at home; on the foods they ate; the movies they watched; the games they played; the candy stores they frequented; the clothes they wore; the languages their parents spoke; and the homes they lived in.

  These reports, some published, some unpublished, some never even completed, provided the base upon which I was able to construct my picture of urban childhood. Oral histories, autobiographies, and a few autobiographical novels offered a complementary but divergent perspective. While the reformers—to elicit action from
public and politicians—painted their picture of urban youth in the most dismal tones, the narrative accounts and oral histories, with few exceptions, presented the subject in a very different light. They described the dirt and the dangers of urban life, but also the fun, the excitement, the hope for the future that the children experienced at the turn of the century.

  Though, regrettably, by the time I began my research, the majority of my subjects were either deceased or at an age where they were not often able to remember their childhoods with clarity, I was able to utilize a number of oral history collections, published and unpublished, which included detailed first-person accounts of working-class childhood at the turn of the century.

  An additional source of evidence used in the study were the photographs of children at work and at play taken by early twentieth-century photographers, reformers, and journalists. Though I had at first intended to use these pictures as “illustrations” for my text, I quickly discovered that they were primary source material as interesting and informative in their own right as the narrative accounts of life on the streets. A sample of the photographs consulted has been included in the book.

  In the course of my research, I have read many biographies and autobiographies of novelists, educators, philosophers, gangsters, businessmen, housewives, textile workers, politicians, union organizers, musicians, diplomats, and even a heavyweight champion of the world. The most numerous and most valuable were the books by and about entertainers and celebrities. While many of these were written to settle scores, assail enemies, praise friends, and rescue or preserve reputations, the first twenty-five to seventy-five pages—where the authors speak of their childhood—were relatively free of cant, with few names dropped, grudges recalled, or actions defended. The authors seemed to enjoy recalling their childhood, finding in their past more than they realized was there and taking care to recreate it as vividly and accurately as possible.

  The street children who grew up to become stars or make their mark in the entertainment world were not like all the others. Their ambition, drive, talent, and eventual success would put them into different social worlds when they grew up. As children, however, they lived the same daily lives as their friends, classmates, neighbors, or brothers and sisters (with a few exceptions like Milton Berle, who was whisked off the streets and onto the stage before he was six years old). Nobody knew they were going to be famous and nobody treated them any differently. They were kids, perhaps a bit louder, brasher, or funnier than the others, but still just kids who grew up on the same streets, doing the same things as their playmates. Their stories, critically evaluated, provide an invaluable source of information on the daily life and work of city kids in the first decades of this century.

  Unlike my other sources of evidence, the celebrity autobiographies are biased toward Russian Jewish children who grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In comparing their accounts of childhood with those presented in the reformers’ investigative reports and the oral histories, I discovered—to no great surprise—that no matter what city or town the boys and girls grew up in, and no matter what their ethnic origin, the conditions they encountered on the streets and their response to those conditions were much the same. Working-class Irish kids in Toledo and Philadelphia, Jews in Youngstown and Syracuse, Poles in Chicago and Pittsburgh, Italians in Los Angeles and Cleveland, and “natives” in cities across the country earned their money after school by scavenging for the same kind of junk, selling afternoon papers, blacking boots, and peddling spearmint gum and chocolate bars to commuters, tourists, and people out for a good time on a Saturday night. Wherever they came from, they were expected to turn in their money to their parents. Wherever they came from, they were likely to hold some back to see the same kinds of movies in the nickelodeons and gorge themselves on the same kinds of treats from pushcart peddlers and corner candy stores. Though there were differences in the languages they spoke at home, the gods they worshipped, and the land their parents called “home,” the developing twentieth-century urban culture transcended the particularities of ethnicity, geography, and population size to bind them together into one generation.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1. The City They Called Home

  2. At Play in the City

  3. Child Labor and Laborers

  4. The Littlest Hustlers

  5. The Newsies

  6. Junkers, Scavengers, and Petty Thieves

  7. The “Little Mothers”

  8. All That Money Could Buy

  9. The Battle for Spending Money

  10. The Children and the Child-Savers

  11. Working Together

  12. Unions and Strikes

  13. End of an Era

  Epilogue

  Appendix: A Note on Sources: The Newsboy Studies

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  The City They Called Home

  The early twentieth-century city was among the wonders of the New World. Concentrated within it were the marvels of the age. Electric lights made night into day. Subways, streetcars, and the elevated sped commuters through the streets. Steel-girded skyscrapers and granite railroad stations expressed its solidity and its power. Lobster palaces, vaudeville palaces, movie palaces, and department store palaces of consumption recreated in the present the mythic splendors of the past.

  American cities had expanded in all directions in the decades surrounding the turn of the century: up with the skyscrapers, down into the subway tunnels, outward across the bridges and tunnels to the new streetcar suburbs. The central business districts, once crowded with warehouses but not much else, had been enlarged and subdivided into financial, government, manufacturing, warehousing, shopping, and entertainment districts, each with its army of workers.1

  Every morning swarms of commuters boarded their trolleys, trains, cable cars, elevateds, and subways for the ride to town. Three quarters of a million people flowed daily off the elevated into the Chicago Loop. They arrived in downtown Boston from Roxbury, West Roxbury, Dorchester, and the surrounding “streetcar suburbs.” In Cincinnati, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, they took electric streetcars from the heights into the “flats” of the central city. In Manhattan, they trooped to work across the bridges, on the ferries, and by streetcar, elevated train, and subway. Theodore Dreiser described the procession from his vantage point at the Williamsburg Bridge. “Already at six and six-thirty in the morning they have begun to trickle small streams of human beings Manhattan or cityward, and by seven and seven-fifteen these streams have become sizable affairs. By seven-thirty and eight they have changed into heavy, turbulent rivers and by eight-fifteen and eight-thirty and nine they are raging torrents, no less. They overflow all the streets and avenues and every available means of conveyance. They are pouring into all available doorways, shops, factories, office-buildings—those huge affairs towering so significantly above them. Here they stay all day long, causing those great hives and their adjacent streets to flush with a softness of color not indigenous to them, and then at night, between five and six, they are going again, pouring forth over the bridges and through the subways and across the ferries and out on the trains, until the last drop of them appears to have been exuded.”2

  Those who arrived in the central business districts came to work, but they stayed to be entertained and to shop. The city’s palaces of consumption were as new, as exciting, and as spectacular as its skyscrapers and bridges. The downtown department stores, huge as factories, luxurious as the most opulent millionaire’s mansions, and jammed full of goods were a relatively new phenomenon in the life of the city. Until the 1870s there had been no real downtown shopping streets. City folk did their shopping in neighborhood stores or from itinerant peddlers. Local shops were specialized: butcher, baker, and candlestick maker had their own establishments where they produced and sold their own goods.

  The extension of th
e streetcar lines into the suburbs and the new concentration of white-collar workers downtown provided retailers with hundreds of thousands of customers. Old-fashioned dry goods stores were expanded into department stores and then relocated and rebuilt along the busiest streetcar and subway lines to make shopping as convenient as possible for suburban women, tourists, and downtown workers.

  Visitors to the city joined the commuters and workers on the shopping streets where the department stores were located. In Manhattan, the first “Ladies’ Mile” was situated along Broadway and Fifth and Sixth Avenues between Eighth and Twenty-third Streets. There was nothing like it anywhere in the world. Wanamaker’s, a sixteen-story cast-iron giant, was at Eighth Street and Broadway, Hearn’s was on Fourteenth Street, and Siegel-Cooper’s on Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street with its main attraction, “The Fountain,” a circular marble terrace surrounding a mammoth marble and brass statue of “The Republic” shooting jets of water, “illuminated by myriad colored lights.” Across the street from the Big Store was B. Altman’s, a short walk away were Stern Brothers, Lord and Taylor, Arnold Constable, Best and Company, Bonwit Teller’s, W. and J. Sloane, and Macy’s.3

  Wilmington, Delaware, May 1910. “James Loquilla, newsboy, twelve years old. Selling newspapers three years. Average earnings 50¢ per week. Selling newspapers own choice. Earnings not needed at home. Don’t smoke. Visits saloons. Works seven hours a day.” Unlike the mythic street-urchin newsboy portrayed by Horatio Alger, the real-life model was apt to be well dressed, as this boy was, with a sturdy pair of shoes, high socks, knickers and a stylish cap. (Lewis Hine, LC)

  As the city moved northward so did the department stores. Macy’s in 1901 broke ground on its new Herald Square store—with one million square feet of floor space. Within a decade all the other downtown stores had relocated on Fifth Avenue or close by.4