Children of the City Read online

  In Chicago, State Street was as grand a tourist attraction as New York’s Fifth Avenue. One could wander up and down the avenue for days without running out of stores to visit and windows to peer into. There was Marshall Field’s with its forty acres of shopping and its forty-five plate glass windows; Carson, Pirie, Scott’s in its new building designed by Louis Sullivan; Fair, Rothschild’s, Siegel, Cooper and Company; the Boston Store; Mandel Brothers; and the Stevens Store— all within walking distance of one another.5

  Every city had its own special stores, stores which had grown up with the downtown areas and, in the beginning, helped lure customers from the outskirts: Jordan Marsh’s and Filene’s in Boston, the original Wanamaker’s and Gimbel’s in Philadelphia, Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh, Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, Rich’s in Atlanta, Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, Goldwater’s in Prescott and then in Phoenix, Arizona, I. Magnin’s in San Francisco, Hudson’s in Detroit, and Lazarus in Columbus.

  The department stores were more than containers of goods or huge indoor markets. They were living encyclopedias of abundance designed to overwhelm the consumer with the variety of items available for purchase. The department stores brought together under one roof an unimaginable collection of commodities, catalogued by department, arranged by floor. Furniture, rugs, and bedding were on the upper floors; ready-to-wear clothing and shoes for women and children on the middle floors; bargain goods and groceries in the basement. The street-level floors displayed clothing and accessories for men, who it was feared would not take the time to ride to the higher floors; and for the women, dozens and dozens of alluring, lower-priced items: cosmetics, notions, gloves, stationery, hosiery.6

  What overwhelmed was not simply the variety of goods, but the variety and abundance of luxury goods, “from silk dresses and chocolate-covered candies to bicycles, cigarettes, and pink popcorn, which consumers had not produced themselves and which they did not need.”7

  The department stores, by so artfully juxtaposing the necessary and the frivolous, redefined and intertwined needs with desires. There was so much there, at such a range of prices, it was difficult to know what to buy. Sister Carrie, recently arrived in the city from the countryside and looking for work, was directed by a policeman to “The Fair,” one of Chicago’s more massive and imposing stores. “Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a showplace of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used—nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire.”8

  One did not have to go inside to be touched by the magic of the stores. Plate-glass windows with superbly crafted displays highlighted by “the planned adoption of electrical lighting and of a new color technology, of drapery and mechanical props, of reflectors and wax mannequins, and even, occasionally of living models … consciously converted what had once been dull places stuffed with goods into focused show windows, ‘gorgeous’ little theatrical stage-sets, sculpted scenes, where single commodities might be presented in the best possible light.” The banks of show windows opened up the street, extending the interior opulence of the palaces onto the sidewalks and inviting the passers-by to pause and dream of the splendors inside. Window-shopping, in essence no more than a dignified form of loafing, became a new and acceptable pastime.9

  If shopping brought people downtown, entertainment establishments kept them there after dark or, to be more accurate, after the sun went down. There was, in reality, no more “dark” in the theater districts. Street lighting, first by kerosene and gas, then by electric arc and incandescent lights, extended day into night. Theater marquees, billboards, and restaurants with plate glass windows revealing and highlighting the gaiety within converted dark, deserted streets into well-lit thoroughfares of fun and fantasy. Broadway, the Great White Way, illuminated for two miles between Madison and Longacre Squares, was the prototype for the all-night entertainment district, but every city had its theaters, its restaurants, its hotels, its vaudeville palaces, and motion picture shows.10

  New York City, 1908–15. A group of children studying the contents of a carefully arranged department store show window during the Christmas season. The window is probably Macy’s. (Bain Collection, LC)

  Night life, once the province of lower-class characters and men who acted as if they were, had moved out from the tenderloin and vice districts into the lights of the new and expanded “Broadways.” Every city had its cheap public dance halls, saloons, and whorehouses, but for those who wanted to be entertained without shame and guilt and in the company of respectable women, there were new and proper places to do it.11

  The vaudeville theaters were the first establishments to, quite literally, clean up their acts. Once a men-only affair, with prostitutes cruising the aisles, profanity rampant, “girly shows” on stage, and the aroma of stale beer inescapable, vaudeville had, in the 1870s and 1880s, been transformed into acceptable, wholesome entertainment for the entire family. “Jeering, drinking, smoking, and soliciting were all but abolished by policing. Managers also clamped down on vulgar stage language and actions, creating a strict system of censorship that outlawed the uttered ‘hell’ and ‘damn.’ ”12 Animal acts, magicians, pantomimists, and ladies who played the “concertina, banjo, and xylophone” were brought in to replace the “blue” acts that had once been standard.13

  Though vaudeville shows could be seen in every town, at country fairs, and at amusement parks, it was in the cities that the theaters attracted the largest number of customers. In New York City there were, by 1910, thirty-one different vaudeville houses. Chicago had twenty-two, Philadelphia thirty.14

  Vaudeville brought the middle classes—in the thousands—downtown for the show. It was not, however, the only attraction of the entertainment districts. There were also the variety theaters and the music halls, where on any given night one could see operettas, new musical comedies like Little Johnny Jones and George Washington Junior, melodramas, or Shakespeare. Arnold Bennett, on his trip to the United States in 1912, was astounded to find “nearly twice as many first-class theaters in New York as in London.”15

  Within walking distance of the theaters were restaurants to wine, dine, and be seen in. Dining out, once the preserve of society people who could afford fancy hotel dining rooms and restaurants like Delmonico’s and of working men who frequented taverns, chophouses, and rathskellers, had become an acceptable—and accessible—form of entertainment for middle-class men and women. In New York City, the dozens of new “Broadway” restaurants which opened their doors between 1899 and 1912 “helped make the life of conspicuous consumption available to a wider portion of the city and the nation.”16

  Patrons were not only wined and dined but also treated like kings and queens on holiday. Restauranteurs created sumptuous new interior decors to bedazzle their customers with a taste of luxury. “In Murray’s [on Broadway in New York City], patrons entered the main dining room through a black and gold mosaic-lined foyer. The main dining room was built to resemble the atrium of a Roman home, complete with an open court with colonnades on each side. Surrounded by trees and statues and gazing out on an ancient barge fronting a terraced fountain crowned by a classical temple rising clear to the ceiling, diners enjoyed the illusion of being in ancient Rome or at a villa in Pompeii.… The classical porticos and temples provided a sense of restful magnificence, while the enormous height of the room and open space suggested the lofty opulence and power of the diner.”17

  Entering the room was only the beginning of the treat. Eating in a lobster palace, like shopping in a department store, was an adventure, an excitement, an event to be savored. The beginning to a proper meal in hotel dining room or lobster palace was o
ysters (when not in season, clams could be substituted), followed by soup, hors d’oeuvres, fish, the entrée, the main course (usually a roast), the game dish, and dessert and coffee.18

  For those who preferred to keep the good time rolling late into the night, there were cabarets and nightclubs, another early twentieth century addition to city night life. Fast dancing, once practiced only in the cheap dance halls and bawdy houses, was a major attraction in the new clubs. And when people danced, they danced—not waltzes or two-steps—but the turkey trot and the grizzly bear to the syncopated ragtime beat of black musicians who, had they not been playing in the band, would never have been allowed in such respectable downtown establishments.19

  As Lloyd Morris has noted, it was just three miles from Rector’s on Broadway, where twenty dollars would buy a dinner for five with two bottles of champagne, to the lower end of Orchard Street, where another restaurant “served a dinner of soup, meat stew, bread, pickles, pie, and a ‘schooner’ of beer for thirteen cents.”20

  In New York City, as in Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, Columbus, and almost every other city in the nation, the “other half” lived close by and a world away from the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment districts. H. G. Wells noticed during his visit in 1905 that there were “moments when I could have imagined there were no immigrants at all” in American cities. “One goes about the wide streets of Boston, one meets all sorts of Boston people, one visits the State-House; it’s all the authentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, too, is America without a touch of foreign-born.” And yet, Wells recognized, the America of the immigrant and the working class, though out of sight, was just around the corner, just down the street, just over the hill, “a hundred yards south of the pretty Boston Common,” “a block or so east of Fifth Avenue,” an elevated stop from the Loop in Chicago.21

  The two urban worlds did not mingle or mix. Each recognized the presence of the other, but neither went out of its way to cross over into the other’s workplace or neighborhood. As Robert Shackleton noted in Chicago, the sellers and customers in the department stores were almost all “Americans.” “The great foreign population of the city lives and does its shopping mainly in its own districts.”22

  Most residents of the working-class city had no reason to travel downtown. Why leave the neighborhood where goods were cheaper and shopkeepers spoke your own language? Why go elsewhere to be entertained when you had little free time and the local streets provided all you needed in friends, family, neighbors, social clubs, saloons, and coffee houses?

  Working men and women stayed behind in their own neighborhood because they were comfortable there. While the neighborhoods were not ethnically homogeneous, there were always enough “landsmen” clustered to establish and sustain churches, lodges, patriotic groups, food shops, bakers, butchers, restaurants, theaters, banks, and newspapers.

  Settlement-house workers at the turn of the century and historians, more recently, who portray the working-class immigrants as helpless, hopeless, uprooted victims misread the historical record.23 On the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment streets the Italian, Polish, and Russian Jewish immigrants wearing dirty overalls and speaking foreign tongues might have been out of place. But in their own communities, they were at home.

  The two cities, though geographically distinct, shared the same congested, polluted urban space. There were many constants in city life. No matter where you lived or worked, you were assaulted daily by the smoke, soot, and dust in the air; the noise of clattering cobblestones, cable cars, trolleys, and the elevated; the smell of horse dung on the streets. In the working-class and immigrant residential districts, these annoyances were intensified a hundredfold. It was in the city of the “other half” that the sewers were always clogged and the streets and alleyways filled with garbage. It was here that dead horses lay for days, bloated and decaying, children poking at their eyes and pulling out their hair to weave into rings. It was here that cats roamed at will through the streets, alleyways, backyards, roofs, and interior hallways, alley cats with gaping wounds, flesh hung loosely on starving bodies, wide frightened eyes, and the look, smell, and howl of starvation. It was here that tuberculosis raged and babies died of exposure or cold or heat or spoiled milk, that pushcarts, streetcars, and horse-drawn wagons fought for space, and children were crushed to death in the duel.

  The residents of the working-class districts lived in a variety of dwellings: multistory tenements, converted single-family row houses, double-deckers, triple-deckers, wooden shacks and shanties. Wherever they lived, they were likely to live piled together, several families in space designed for one, several persons to a room.

  New York City, 1908–15. There is no way of knowing how long this horse has been lying here. During the warm spells of summer, dozens of horses dropped dead on city streets and lay rotting for days on end. Motorcar enthusiasts claimed that the “horseless” buggy was the only solution to this particular pollution problem. (Bain Collection, LC)

  Families made the best possible use of their limited space, rearranging their flats every evening to provide maximum sleeping room for children, relatives, and boarders. On his first evening in the New World, Marcus Ravage, future historian and author of An American in the Making, looked on in amazement as his relatives transformed their apartment into a “camp.” “The sofas opened up and revealed their true character. The bureau lengthened out shamelessly, careless of its daylight pretensions. Even the wash-tubs, it turned out, were a miserable sham. The carved dining-room chairs arranged themselves into two rows that faced each other like dancers in a cotillion.… The two young ladies’ room was not, I learned, a young ladies’ room at all; it was a female dormitory. The sofa in the parlor alone held four sleepers, of whom I was one. We were ranged broadside, with the rocking-chairs at the foot to insure the proper length. And the floor was by no means exempt. I counted no fewer than nine male inmates in that parlor alone one night. Mrs. Segal with one baby slept on the washtubs, while the rest of the youngsters held the kitchen floor. The pretended children’s room was occupied by a man and his family of four.”24

  As the population and land values in the central cities increased, working people and the poor were forced to live in spaces that should have remained uninhabited. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, cities within the city were built in the alleyways. In Pittsburgh and Chicago, investigators discovered hundreds of families living below street level in cellars, basements, and dark, dreary, “cave-like” dwellings. In Chicago, where landlords had increased their profits—and the congestion—by building on every inch of land they owned, “rear tenements” and wooden shacks facing on alleyways were built in the back of long, slender lots.25

  Cities with massive, multistory tenements had the worst congestion. In New York City, where a higher percentage of residents lived in tenements than anywhere else in the country, the congestion inside and out was beyond belief. Theodore Dreiser, among those visitors to the Lower East Side overwhelmed by the sight, reported having seen “block after block of four-story and five-story buildings, “all painted a dull red, and nearly all … divided in the most unsanitary manner. Originally they were built five rooms deep, with two flats on a floor, but now the single flats have been subdivided and two or three, occasionally four or five, families live and toil in the space which was originally intended for one.”26

  Light, air, and privacy were at a premium for the working-class and immigrant residents of the early twentieth-century cities. In the typical New York City tenement, with fourteen rooms on each floor, only four—two in front and two in back—“received direct light and air from the street or from the small yard at the back of the building.”27 A housing inspector testified that the inner kitchens and bedrooms on the lower floors of the tenements he visited “were so dark that the lights are kept burning in the kitchen during the daytime. The bedrooms may be used for sleeping at any time within the twenty-four hours, as they exceed the Arctic Zone in havin
g night 365 days in the year.”28

  Lack of windows meant lack of ventilation. The front and rear windows let in a bit of air—along with the noise and stench of street and alleyway. The interior rooms had windows, but because they opened onto airshafts and courtyards stuffed with rotting garbage, most residents kept them permanently closed.

  The flats were dark, the hallways darker. In most tenements, the only light in the halls came from the front door when that was opened. A tenement house inspector testified that, in his experience, “the most barbarous parts of [tenement] buildings are the halls. A person coming in from the sunlight outside, plunges into these halls just like a car filled with men plunges and disappears in the black mouth of a mine shaft. If he is fortunate in not running against anybody, he stumbles along, finding his way with his feet.… [H]e hurries forward as rapidly as possible and rushes out upon the roof or into some open room, because the air is so dense and stifling [in the hallway] that he wishes to escape quickly.”29

  Privacy was as treasured and rare in the working-class districts as fresh air and light. High rents forced families to economize on space and sublet rooms and parts of rooms to boarders. City dwellers shared their flats, their rooms, even their beds and their toilets with virtual strangers. In many tenements, the water closet was located in the hall or the backyard, where it was used by several families and their boarders and relatives. In Chicago, for example, a turn-of-the-century study found that only 43 percent of families had toilets in their flats, 30 percent had to use the water closet in the yard, 10 percent had a toilet in the basement or cellar, and another 17 percent shared a hall toilet with their neighbors on the floor.30

  Unventilated, overused water closets and backyard privies were bound to and did overflow continually, seeping waste through the floorboards and into the yards. The odor of human excrement joined that of horse dung from the streets and stables and of garbage rotting in the airshafts, inner courtyards, streets, and alleyways.