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  WEST SIDE STUDIES

  CARRIED ON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF

  PAULINE GOLDMARK

  FORMERLY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR NEW YORK
  SCHOOL OF PHILANTHROPY, MEMBER OF
  INDUSTRIAL BOARD NEW YORK STATE
  DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

  BOYHOOD
  AND LAWLESSNESS

  THE NEGLECTED GIRL

  By RUTH S. TRUE

PREFACE TO WEST SIDE STUDIES

In the summer of 1912 the field work was completed for the West Side
studies published in these volumes. They are part of a wider survey
of the neighborhood which it was proposed to make under the Bureau
of Social Research of the New York School of Philanthropy with funds
supplied by the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Samuel McCune Lindsay,
director of the School, and I were in charge of the Bureau and together
planned the scope and nature of the inquiry. To his inspiriting
influence was due in large measure the enthusiasm and harmonious work
of our staff.

The investigators in the Bureau were men and women who had been
awarded fellowships by the School of Philanthropy. There were junior
fellowships, given for one year only, and intended to provide training
in social research for students without much previous experience, who
were required to give part of their time to class work and special
reading. There were also senior fellowships given to more advanced
students who devoted full time to investigation. After two years’ work
it was felt that to carry out the original plan satisfactorily would
require the employment of a permanent staff of investigators who were
well trained and equipped. The School, therefore, decided not to carry
the survey further and reorganized the Bureau on a different basis.

This brief account of the Bureau is needed to explain the special
topics dealt with in these volumes. The personal qualifications of the
investigators as well as the available opportunities for investigation
necessarily determined the choice of subjects.

A word must be said, too, as to the selection of this particular West
Side district of New York City. These 80 blocks which border upon the
Hudson River, between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-fourth Streets, contrast
sharply with almost all other tenement neighborhoods of the city. They
have as nearly homogeneous and stable a population as can be found
in any part of New York. The original stock was Irish and German. In
each generation the bolder spirits moved away to more prosperous parts
of the city. This left behind the less ambitious and in many cases
the wrecks of the population. Hence in this “backset” from the main
current of the city’s life may be seen some of the most acute social
problems of modern urban life--not the readjustment and amalgamation of
sturdy immigrant groups, but the discouragement and deterioration of an
indigenous American community.

The quarter which we studied is strangely detached from the rest of
the city. Only occasionally an outbreak of lawlessness brings it to
public notice. Its old reputation for violence and crime dates back
many generations and persists to the present day. So true is this
that we considered it essential at the beginning of our undertaking
to ascertain the main facts of the district’s development. To Otho G.
Cartwright was assigned the task of collecting this material. He did
not make an exhaustive inquiry, but obtained from reliable sources
sufficient information to give the historical background of life in
the district today. His work serves as a general introduction to the
more intensive studies which follow.

The study of juvenile delinquency, Boyhood and Lawlessness, shows
clearly the need of special intimate knowledge of social phenomena
if their underlying causes are to be understood. It describes the
inadequacies of the present system: the innumerable arrests for petty
offenses or for playing in the streets, and the failure of the police
to bring the ringleaders into court. All this seems so unreasonable
to the neighborhood and has so often aroused its antagonism that the
influence of the Children’s Court is seriously undermined. In fact,
the fathers and mothers of its charges look upon it only as a hostile
authority in league with the police, while its real purpose is entirely
hidden from them. The evidence is clear, too, that both parents and
community have failed to understand and provide for the most elementary
physical needs of the boys.

The same tragic lack of opportunity and care characterizes the lives
of the girls. Ruth S. True’s portrayal of these lives in The Neglected
Girl rests upon close personal acquaintance with a special group of
girls who, though they were not brought up on charges in the Children’s
Court, yet were without question in grave need of probationary care.

In neither of these two studies was it possible to suggest adequate
remedies for the evils described. It is true that steps have already
been taken by the Children’s Court to make its probation staff more
effective. But the more fundamental need for modification of the
conditions of the child’s life and environment has still to be
pondered. Clearly it is not the child alone who needs reformation.

Similarly, Katharine Anthony’s report, Mothers Who Must Earn, reveals
much more than isolated cases of hardship and suffering due to accident
or death. She has studied the social and economic causes which compel
the mother of a family to become a wage-earner, and the consequences
of such employment for her home and family. The occupations where her
services are in demand were carefully examined. The underpayment of
many of the husbands, which drives their already overburdened wives
into wage-earning, is perhaps the most significant fact disclosed. To
relieve such severe economic pressure there is certainly need of more
radical and far-reaching readjustments than can be effected by any one
remedial measure. Relief giving is at best only a temporary stop-gap.
This is rather a labor problem of the utmost gravity, affecting whole
classes of underpaid laborers.

Indeed, if there is any one truth which emerges from these studies,
it is the futility of dealing with social maladjustments as single
isolated problems. They are all closely interrelated, and the first
step in getting order out of our complexities must be knowledge of what
exists. To such knowledge these studies aim to make a contribution.
They are not intended to prove preconceived ideas nor to test the
efficacy of any special remedies. They aim to describe with sympathy
and insight some of the real needs of a neglected quarter of our
city--“to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature.”

The various investigators who took part in the inquiry are given
herewith: Edward M. Barrows, Clinton S. Childs, Eleanor H. Adler,
Beatrice Sheets, and Ruth S. True contributed to the study of the West
Side boy, here published under the title Boyhood and Lawlessness.
Thomas D. Eliot, a junior fellow, also assisted. Associated with Ruth
S. True in the study of the neglected girl, were Ann Campion and
Dorothy Kirchwey. All three shared the responsibility of conducting the
Tenth Avenue club for the observation of the girls described in their
report. The volume Mothers Who Must Earn is the result of work done by
Katharine Anthony, who was assisted in her field work by Ruth S. Waldo,
a junior fellow.[1]

In the fall of 1912 practically the whole staff at that time employed
devoted two months’ time to inspection of the industrial establishments
of the district, under authority of the New York State Factory
Investigating Commission. The results were published as Appendix V, to
Volume I, of the Commission’s Preliminary Report, 1912.

Thanks are due to many persons who gave unstintedly of their time to
the various investigators. Our indebtedness is especially great to
the staff of the Clinton District office of the Charity Organization
Society, who brought us in touch with many families in their care,
and through their varied experience helped us in interpreting many
aspects of neighborhood life. Among other agencies, Hartley House
was particularly generous in making us acquainted with its Italian
neighbors and in giving us the opportunity to visit them in their
homes. The teachers of various local schools should also be mentioned
with appreciation for the help they gave us in many ways.

  PAULINE GOLDMARK.

[Illustration: JUST BOYS!

Why not make them a community asset?]

  RUSSELL SAGE
  FOUNDATION

  BOYHOOD
  AND LAWLESSNESS

  WEST SIDE STUDIES

  NEW YORK
  SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
  MCMXIV

  Copyright, 1914, by
  THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION

  THE TROW PRESS
  NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION

When the Bureau of Social Research began, early in 1909, an
investigation of the Middle West Side, it was soon realized that of
all the problems presented by the district, none was more urgent and
baffling, none more fundamental, than that of the boy and his gang.
His anti-social activities have forced him upon public attention as
an obstruction to law and business and a menace to order and safety.
Because of this lawlessness and because of New York’s backwardness in
formulating wise preventive measures to meet it, a special study of the
West Side boy was begun.

In order to gain an intimate knowledge of neighborhood conditions which
affect the boy, two men workers, Edward M. Barrows and Clinton S.
Childs, went to live in the district, the former remaining for nearly
two years. During their residence they came in close touch with several
gangs and clubs of boys. Their experiences, while they yielded some
of the most vital and significant material of our study, did not lend
themselves to statistical treatment; they were not recorded in the form
of family and individual histories, but as a running day-by-day diary,
which formed the basis of the chapters dealing with the activities and
the environment of the boys.

Since the West Side boy, either through personal contact or through
association with gang leaders, is inseparable from the Children’s
Court, attention was naturally drawn to the extent and the result of
his relation to this institution. For this reason the Bureau made a
special study of 294 boys[2] selected from the district with particular
reference to their delinquency and their court records.[3]

Of these boys 28 were under twelve years, 71 more were fourteen, and
102 more were under sixteen. In view of these significant facts it
became necessary not only to examine the environment of the West Side
boy, but also to estimate the influence of the Children’s Court and
other institutions upon him when toughness, truancy, gambling, or other
temptations had carried him over the brink into real delinquency.
That society should feel itself compelled to resort continually to
the arrest and trial of children is in itself a confession of defeat.
But when even these resources fail, it becomes imperative to analyze
all the factors in the situation; to set the destructive and the
constructive elements over against each other, and to determine the
chances which the boy and the various public and private agencies
organized to regenerate him have of understanding one another.

To many the study may serve to show at their doors a world undreamed
of; a world in which, through causes which are even now, removable,
youth is denied the universal rights of life, liberty, and happiness.
To the court it may be of use in throwing light into dark places and
in showing where old paths should be abandoned, as well as in offering
suggestions at a critical period in its history.

And, indeed, every suggestion which will tend to lessen the troubles of
the Middle West Side is peculiarly needed. The whole community--from
molested property owners to the most disinterested social workers--are
agreed that the worst elements rule the streets and that neither police
nor court authority succeed in enforcing decency and order. And the
center of the problem is the boy, for in him West Side lawlessness
finds its most perennial and permanent expression.

The aim of this study, therefore, is to trace the principal influences
which have formed the West Side boy; to consider some of the means
which have heretofore been employed to counteract these influences; and
to picture him as he is, exemplifying the results of circumstances for
which not he but the entire community is responsible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                             PAGE

  INTRODUCTION                                          ix

  I. His Background                                      1

  II. His Playground                                    10

  III. His Games                                        24

  IV. His Gangs                                         39

  V. His Home                                           55

  VI. The Boy and the Court                             79

  VII. The Center of the Problem                       141

  APPENDIX.

  Tables                                               165

  Excerpts from Report of Children’s Court,
  County of New York, 1913                             177

  INDEX                                                201

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Photographs by Lewis W. Hine

                                                    FACING
                                                     PAGE

  Just Boys!                          _Frontispiece_

  Tenth Avenue                                           4

  Eleventh (“Death”) Avenue                              4

  Bounce Ball with Wall as Base. Property is Safe       10

  Bounce Ball with Steps as Base. Windows in Danger     10

  Wading in Sewage-laden Water                          20

  A “Den” Under the Dock                                20

  Pigeon Flying. A Roof Game                            28

  Marbles. A Street Game                                28

  Prize Fighters in Training                            34

  Craps with Money at Stake                             34

  Boy Scouts and Soldiers                               40

  After the Battle                                      40

  Resting. What Next?                                   48

  Early Lessons in Craps                                48

  Approaching the “Gopher” Age                          64

  One Diversion of the Older Boys                       64

  Replenishing the Wood Box                             74

  A Rich Find                                           74

  A Ball Game Near the Docks                            82

  “Obstructing Traffic” on Twelfth Avenue               82

  “We Ain’t Doin’ Nothin’”                              98

  The Same Gang at Craps                                98

  An Embryo Gangster                                   122

  The “Toughest Kid” on the Street                     122

  Carrying Loot from a Vacant Building                 142

  Closed by the Gangs                                  142

  De Witt Clinton Park                                 146

  A Favorite Playground                                146

LIST OF TABLES

APPENDIX

  TABLE      PAGE

  1. Sources from which the names of the 294 boys
      studied were obtained                                    167

  2. Ages of boys                                              167

  3. Length of residence in the district of 183 families       168

  4. Country of birth of parents                               168

  5. Nationality of American-born parents                      169

  6. Two hundred families classified according to number
      of persons in households and number of rooms
      occupied                                                 169

  7. Living children in 231 families                           170

  8. Status of mothers in 222 families                         170

  9. Conjugal condition of parents in 233 families             171

  10. Relief records of 241 families                           171

  11. Duration of relief records of families known to have
      received aid from relief societies                       172

  12. Court disposition of cases involving 454 arrests
      affecting 259 boys and 221 families                      172

  13. Final disposition of 92 West Side paroled cases and
      of 1,492 paroled cases disposed of by the Manhattan
      Court in 1909                                            173

  14. Truancy records of 215 boys, classified as delinquent
      or not delinquent                                        173

  15. Status of 163 boys not gainfully employed                174

  16. Occupation and wages of 100 boys gainfully employed      175

CHAPTER I

HIS BACKGROUND

The influence of environment on character is now so fully recognized
that no study of juvenile offenders would be complete without a
consideration of their background. In the lives of the boys with whom
this study deals this background plays a very large part. One-third
of the 241 families studied, 82, are known to have lived in the
district from five to nineteen years, and a somewhat larger number,
88, for twenty years or more.[4] This means that the boys belonged
almost completely to the neighborhood. Most of them had lived there
all their lives, and many of them always will live there. If they are
to be understood aright, this neighborhood which has given them home,
schooling, streets to play in, and factories to work in must also be
pictured and understood.

In New York, owing perhaps to the shape of the island, the
juxtaposition of tenement and mansion is unusually frequent. Walk
five blocks along Forty-second Street west from Fifth Avenue and you
are in the heart of the Middle West Side. The very suddenness of the
change which these blocks present makes the contrast between wealth
and poverty more striking and enables you to appreciate the particular
form taken by poverty in this part of the city. Eighth Avenue, at
which our district begins, looks east for inspiration and west for
patronage. It is the West Sider’s Broadway and Fifth Avenue combined.
Here he promenades, buys his clothes, travels up and down town on the
cars, or waits at night in the long queue before the entrance to a
moving picture show. The pavement is flanked by rows of busy stores;
saloons and small hotels occupy the street corners. There is plenty
of life and movement, and as yet no obvious poverty. On Saturdays and
“sale” days, the neighborhood department stores swarm with custom.

Ninth Avenue has its elevated railroad, and suffers in consequence
from noise, darkness, and congestion of traffic. Here the storekeeper
can no longer rely on his window to attract customers. He knows the
necessity of forceful advertising, and his bedsteads and vegetables,
wooden Indians and show cases, everywhere encroach upon the sidewalk.
On Saturday nights “Paddy’s Market”[5] flares in the open street,
supplying for a few hours a picturesqueness which is greatly needed.
Poor and untidy as this avenue is, the small tradesmen who live in it
profess to look down on their less prosperous neighbors nearer the
river.

West of Ninth Avenue tenements begin and rents decrease. At Tenth
Avenue, where red and yellow crosstown cars swing round the corner
from Forty-second Street, you have reached the center of the West
Side wage-earning community, and a street which on a bright day is
almost attractive. Four stories of red brick tenements surmount the
plate glass of saloons and shops. Here and there immense colored
advertisements of tobacco or breakfast foods flame from windowless
side walls, and the ever-present three brass balls gleam merrily in
the sunlight. But the poverty is unmistakable. You see it in the
tradesman’s well-substantiated boast that here is “the cheapest house
for furniture and carpets in the city.” You see it in the small
store, eking out an existence with cigars and toys and candy. You see
it in the ragged coats and broken shoes of the boys playing in the
street; in the bareheaded, poorly dressed women carrying home their
small purchases in oil-cloth bags; in the grocer’s amazing values in
“strictly fresh” eggs; in the ablebodied loafers who lounge in the
vicinity of the corner saloon, subsisting presumably on the toil of
more conscientious brothers and sisters. And in one other feature
besides its indigence Tenth Avenue is typical of this district. At
the corner of Fiftieth Street stands the shell of what was once a
flourishing settlement, and beside it a smaller building which was
once a church. Both, as regards their original uses, are now deserted.
Both are a concrete expression not merely of failure, but of failure
acquiesced in. These West Side streets are more than poor. They have
ceased to struggle in their slough of despond, and have forgotten to be
dissatisfied with their poverty.

Eleventh Avenue is much more dirty and disconsolate. In its dingy
tenements live some of the poorest and most degraded families of this
district. On the west side of the avenue and lining the cross streets
are machine shops, gas tanks, abattoirs, breweries, warehouses, piano
factories, and coal and lumber yards whose barges cluster around the
nearby piers. Sixty years ago this avenue, in contrast to the fair
farm land upon which the rest of the district grew up, was a stretch
of barren and rocky shore, ending at Forty-second Street in the flat
unhealthy desolation of the Great Kill Swamp. Land in such a deserted
neighborhood was cheap and little sought for, and permission to use it
was readily given to the Hudson River Railroad.[6] Today the franchise,
still continued under its old conditions, is an anomaly. All day
and night, to and from the Central’s yard at Thirtieth Street, long
freight trains pass hourly through the heterogeneous mass of trucks,
pedestrians, and playing children; and though they now go slowly and a
flagman stands at every corner, “Death Avenue” undoubtedly deserves its
name.

De Witt Clinton Park, the only public play space in the district, lies
westward between Fifty-second and Fifty-fourth Streets. It is better
known as “The Lane” from days, not so long ago, when a pathway here
ran down to the river, and on either side of it the last surviving
farm land gave the tenement children a playground, and the young
couples of the neighborhood a place to stroll in. The usual well kept
and restrained air of a small city park is very noticeable here.
There is almost no grass, the swings and running tracks are, perhaps
necessarily, caged by tall iron fences, and uninteresting asphalt paths
cover a considerable part of the limited area. A large stone pergola,
though of course it has obvious uses, somehow deepens the impression
that an opportunity was lost in the laying out of this place. At
one side of the pergola, however, lie the plots of the school farm in
which small groups of boys and girls may often be seen at work. Little
attempt has been made to develop a play center in the park. On a fine
Saturday afternoon it is often practically empty.[7]

[Illustration: TENTH AVENUE]

[Illustration: ELEVENTH (“DEATH”) AVENUE]

Twelfth Avenue adjoins the Hudson River, losing itself here and there
in wharves and pier-heads. Two of the piers belong to the city, one
being devoted to the disposal of garbage, the other to recreation.
Factories and an occasional saloon are on the inland side, but there
are almost no shacks or tenements.

At first sight there are no striking features about the Middle West
Side. Hand-to-mouth existence reduces living to a universal sameness
which has little time or place for variety. In street after street are
the same crowded and unsanitary tenements; the same untended groups
of playing children; the same rough men gathered round the stores
and saloons on the avenue; the same sluggish women grouped on the
steps of the tenements in the cross streets. The visitor will find no
rambling shacks, no conventional criminal’s alleys; only square, dull,
monotonous ugliness, much dirt, and a great deal of apathy.

The very lack of salient features is the supreme characteristic of
this neighborhood. The most noticeable fact about it is that there is
nothing to notice. It is earmarked by negativeness. There is usually a
lifelessness about the streets and buildings, even at their best, which
is reflected in the attitude of the people who live in them. The whole
scene is dull, drab, uninteresting, totally devoid of the color and
picturesqueness which give to so many poor districts a character and
fascination of their own. Tenth Avenue and the streets west of it are
lacking in the crowds and bustle and brilliant lights of the East Side.
Eleventh Avenue by night is almost dark, and throughout the district
are long stretches of poorly lit cross streets in which only the dingy
store windows shine feebly. Over the East River great bridges throw
necklaces of light across the water; here the North River is dark and
unspanned.

What is it that has brought about this condition? Why is this part
of New York so utterly featureless and depressing? The answer lies
primarily not with the present or past inhabitants, but in the
isolation and neglect to which for years it has been subjected. Much
of the Middle West Side was once naturally attractive, with prosperous
homesteads and cottages with gardens.[8] But while other parts of
Manhattan were being developed as a city, the Middle West Side was left
severely alone. It was one of the last sections of the city to become
thickly populated. When the first factories arrived, they brought the
tenements in their wake. The worst kinds of tenements were hastily
built--anything was supposed to be good enough for the poor Irish who
settled there; and these tenements have long survived in spite of
their dilapidated condition because until recently there has been no
one who cared for the rough and dull West Sider. East Side problems
were much more picturesque and inviting. So our district has grown up
under a heritage of desolation and neglect, uninteresting to look at,
unpleasant to live in, overlooked, unsympathized with, and neglected
into aloofness, till today its static population is almost isolated
from and little affected by the life of the rest of the city. The
casual little horse car which jingles up Tenth Avenue four times an
hour is typical of the West Sider’s home, just as the Draft Riots of
1863 were typical of his temper.

The nationalities which largely form the basis of the population
on the Middle West Side are the German and the Irish, the latter
predominating.[9] Peculiar to the district is the large number of
families of the second generation with parents who have been born and
brought up in the immediate neighborhood.

The nationality of the American-born parents throws additional light
on the subject of racial make-up of the population.[10] There were 81
American-born fathers and 92 American-born mothers in the 241 families.
The parentage of 67 American-born fathers for whom information was
available was as follows: 28, German; 21, Irish; 15, American; and 3,
English. The parentage of 73 American-born mothers was: 28, German; 25,
Irish; 18, American; and 2, English. The country of birth of parents
of 14 of the American-born fathers and 19 of the American-born mothers
could not be ascertained.[11]

We are accustomed to regard the German as the best of European
emigrants. He brings with him a thrift and solidity which have taught
us to depend on him. He has been a welcome immigrant as he has become
a successful citizen. Yet here are large numbers of Germans living in
a wild no-man’s-land which has a criminal record scarcely surpassed by
any other district in New York. Surely this is more than a case of the
exception proving the rule. It shows that our estimate of the Middle
West Side is correct.

The district is like a spider’s web. Of those who come to it very few,
either by their own efforts, or through outside agency, ever leave
it. Now and then a boy is taken to the country or a family moves to
the Bronx, but this happens comparatively seldom. Usually those who
come to live here find at first (like Yorick’s starling) that they
cannot get out, and presently that they do not want to. It is not that
conditions throughout the district are economically extreme, although
greater misery and worse poverty cannot be found in other parts of New
York. But there is something in the dullness of these West Side streets
and the traditional apathy of their tenants that crushes the wish for
anything better and kills the hope of change. It is as though decades
of lawlessness and neglect have formed an atmospheric monster, beyond
the power and understanding of its creators, overwhelming German and
Irish alike.

Such, in brief, is the background of the West Side boy. It is a gray
picture, so gray that the casual visitor to these streets may think it
over-painted. But this is because a superficial glance at the Middle
West Side is peculiarly misleading. So much lies below the surface. It
is obvious that this district has come to be singularly unattractive,
and that its methods of life are extraordinarily rough. And it is
equally true that hundreds of boys never know any other place or life
than this, and that most of their offenses against the law are the
direct result of their surroundings. The charges brought against them
in court are only in part against the boys themselves. The indictment
is in the main against the city which considers itself the greatest and
most progressive in the New World, for allowing any of its children
to start the battle of life so poorly equipped and so handicapped for
becoming efficient American citizens. Not that these youngsters have
not their share of “devilment” and original sin, but in estimating the
work of the juvenile court with the boys of this neighborhood, it is
absolutely essential to bear in mind not only the crimes they commit,
but their chances for escaping criminality. If heredity and environment
have any meaning, Tenth Avenue has much to answer for.

CHAPTER II

HIS PLAYGROUND

The boy himself is blissfully untroubled by any serious thoughts about
his background; and to him these streets are as a matter of course a
place to play in. This point of view is perfectly natural for several
reasons:

In the first place, he has never known any other playground. At the
earliest possible stage of infancy he is turned out, perhaps under an
older sister’s supervision, to crawl over the steps of the tenement or
tumble about in the gutter in front of it, watching with large eyes the
new sights around him. Here he is put to play, and here he learns to
imitate the street and sidewalk games of other boys and girls. He is
scarcely to be blamed for a point of view so universally held that it
never occurs to him to doubt it.

In the second place, the street is the place that he must play in,
whether he wants to or not. There is no room for him in the house; the
janitor usually chases him off the roof. Excepting De Witt Clinton
Park, which, as has been shown, is small, restricted, and inadequate,
there is no park on the West Side between Seventy-second and
Twenty-eighth Streets. Central Park and New Jersey are too inaccessible
to be his regular playgrounds. And besides, not only will a boy not
go far afield for his games, but he cannot. He is often needed at
home after school hours to run errands and make himself generally
useful. Moreover, to go any distance involves a question of food and
transportation; so that except at times of truancy and wanderlust,
or when he is away on some baseball or other expedition, the street
inevitably claims him.

[Illustration: BOUNCE BALL WITH WALL AS BASE

Property is safe]

[Illustration: BOUNCE BALL WITH STEPS AS BASE

Windows in danger]

And in the third place, just because this playground is so natural and
so inevitable, he becomes attached to it. It is the earliest, latest,
and greatest influence in his life. Long before he knew his alphabet it
began to educate him, and before he could toddle it was his nursery.
Every possible minute from babyhood to early manhood is spent in it.
Every day, winter and summer, he is here off and on from early morning
till 10 o’clock at night. It gives him a training in which school is
merely a repressive interlude. From the quiet of the class room he
hears its voice, and when lessons are over it shouts a welcome at the
door. The attractions that it offers ever vary. Now a funeral, now a
fire; “craps” on the sidewalk; a stolen ride on one of Death Avenue’s
freight trains; a raid on a fruit stall; a fight, an accident, a game
of “cat”--always fresh incident and excitement, always nerve-racking
kaleidoscopic confusion.

No wonder, then, that the streets are regarded by the boy as his
rightful playground. They are the most constant and vivid part of his
life. They provide companionship, invite to recklessness, and offer
concealment. Every year their attraction grows stronger, till their
lure becomes irresistible and his life is swallowed up in theirs.

But unfortunately for the boy everyone does not agree with him as to
his right of possession. The storekeeper, for instance, insists on the
incompatibility of a vigorous street ball game with the safety of his
plate glass windows. Drivers not unreasonably maintain that the road
is for traffic rather than for marbles or stone throwing. Property
owner, pedestrian, the hardworking citizen, each has a point of view
which does not altogether favor the playground theory. At the very
outset of his career, therefore, in attempting to exercise childhood’s
inalienable right to play, the boy finds himself colliding with the
rights of property; the maintenance of public safety, the enforcement
of law and order, and other things equally puzzling and annoying,
all apparently united in being inimical to his ideas of amusement.
He is too young to understand that in his city’s scheme children
were forgotten. No one can explain to him that he has been born in a
congested area where lack of play space must be accepted patiently;
that life is a process of give and take in which the rights of others
demand as much respect as his own. He does not know that his dilemma is
the problem which eternally confronts the city child. But he does know
that he must play. He has a store of nervous energy and animal spirits
which simply must be let loose. Yet when he tries to play under the
only conditions possible to him he is hampered and repressed at every
turn. Inevitably he revolts; and long before he is old enough to learn
why most of his street games are illegal, fun and law-breaking have
become to him inseparable, and the policeman his natural enemy.

So far the boy’s attitude is normal. Childish antagonism to arbitrary
authority is natural. In any large town it extends to the police. All
over New York games are played with one eye on the corner and often
with a small scout or two on the watch for the “cop.” But at this
point two facts differentiate the Middle West Side from the rest of the
city, and make its situation peculiar. On the one hand, the parents and
older people of the district, instead of showing the usual indifference
or at most a passive antipathy toward the police, openly conspire
against and are actively hostile to them. On the other, the police,
largely because of this neighborhood feeling, are utterly unable to
cope with the lawless conditions which they find around them.

This state of things has been brought about in various ways. The lurid
record of criminals in the district has for years necessitated methods
of policing which have not made the Irish temper any less excitable.
Public sentiment here is almost static, and hatred of the police has
become a tradition. No one has a good word for them; everyone’s hand is
against them. The boys look on them as spoil-sports and laugh at their
authority. The toughs and gangsters are at odds with them perforce.
Fathers and mothers, resenting the trivial arrests of their children,
consign the “cop,” the “dinny” (detective), and “the Gerrys” to outer
darkness together. The better class of residents and property owners,
though their own failure to properly support them is partly to blame
for the failure of the police to do their duty, frankly distrust them
for being so completely incompetent and ineffective. And now perhaps
no one would dare to support them. For the toughs of the district
have taken the law into their own hands, and with the relentlessness
and certainty of a Corsican vendetta every injury received by them is
repaid, sooner or later, by some act of pitiless retaliation. Honest
or dishonest, successful or otherwise, the policeman certainly has
a hard time of it. Wherever he goes he is dangerously unpopular. He
cannot be safely active or inactive, and whatever he does seems to add
to his difficulties. Hectored on duty, frequently bullied in court,
misunderstood and abused by press and public alike, he stands out
solitary, the butt and buffer of the neighborhood’s disorder.

It is scarcely remarkable that under these circumstances the guardian
of the law is bewildered, and tends to become unreasonably touchy and
suspicious. “I tried to start a club in a saloon on Fiftieth Street a
while ago,” said a young Irishman of twenty-five. “After we had had
the club running one night, a policeman came in and asked me for my
license. I told him I didn’t have any. He said he would have to break
up the club then. I kicked about this and he pinched me. They brought
me up for trial next morning, and the judge told me I would have to
close up my club. I asked him why, and said the club was perfectly
orderly and was just made up of young fellows in the neighborhood; and
he said, ‘Well, your club has a bad reputation, and you’ve got to break
it up.’ Now, how could a club have a bad reputation when it had only
been running one day? Tell me that? But that’s the way of it. Those
cops will give you a bad reputation in five minutes if you never had
one before in your life.” “The cops are always arresting us and letting
us go again,” said a small West Sider. “I’ve been taken up two or three
times for throwing stones and playing ball, but they never took me to
the station house yet. You can’t play baseball anywhere around here
without the cops getting you.” And so it has come about that relations
between police and people in this section of New York are abnormally
strained. Provocation is followed by reaction, and reaction by reprisal
and a constant aggravation of annoyances, till the tension continually
reaches breaking point.

This situation shows very definite results in the boy. Gradually his
play becomes more and more mischievous as he finds it easier to evade
capture. Boylike, his delight in wanton and malicious destruction is
increased by the knowledge that he will probably escape punishment.
Six-year-old Dennis opens the door of the Children’s Aid Society school
and throws a large stone into the hall full of children. Another
youngster of about the same age recently was seen trying for several
minutes to break one of the street lamps. He threw stone after stone
until finally the huge globe fell with a crash that could have been
heard a block. Then he ran off down the street and disappeared around
the corner. No one attempted to stop him; no one would tell who he
was. Later on, the boy begins to admire and model himself on the
perpetrators of picturesque crimes whom he sees walking unarrested in
the streets around him. And by the time that he reaches the gang age
he is usually a hardened little ruffian whom the safety of numbers
encourages to carry his play to intolerable lengths. He robs, steals,
gets drunk, carries firearms, and his propensity for fighting with
stones and bottles is so marked that for days whole streets have been
terrorized by his feuds. Insurance companies either ask prohibitive
rates for window glass in this neighborhood or flatly refuse to insure
it at all.

Meanwhile the police are not idle. Public opinion and their own
records at the station house demand a certain amount of activity, and
every week the playground sees its arrests. In the following table
we have classified by causes, from our own intimate knowledge of each
individual case, the arrests which took place during 1909 among the
boys of our 241 families. The court’s legal system of classification
has been discarded here in favor of the classification made to show
the real nature of each offense. The result illustrates how entirely
police intervention has failed to meet the issue in the district, and
consequently explains in part why the work of the children’s court with
boys from this neighborhood has not proved more effectual.

OFFENSES IN 463 CASES OF ARREST AS CLASSIFIED IN THE BUREAU OF SOCIAL
RESEARCH[a]

  Offenses of vagrancy and neglect:

  Truancy                                38
  Begging                                 3
  Selling papers at ten                  18
  Selling papers without a badge          5
  Run-away                                7
  Sleeping in halls and on roofs          6
  Improper guardianship                  12
  General incorrigibility                23
                                        ---
  Total                                 112

  Offenses due to play:

  Playing ball                           20
  Playing cat                             3
  Playing shinny                          2
  Pitching craps                         26
  Pitching pennies                        9
  Throwing stones and other missiles     44
  Building fires in the street           15
  Fighting                                6
                                        ---
  Total                                 125

[a] For the classification of these arrests according to the court
charges see Chapter VI, The Boy and the Court, p. 82.

  Offenses against persons:

  Assault                                            5
  Stabbing                                           4
  Use of firearms                                    3
  Immorality                                         0
  Intoxication                                       1
                                                    --
        Total                                       13

  Offenses against property:

  Illegal use of transfers                           1
  Petty thievery                                    58
  Serious thievery                                  18
  Burglary, i. e., breaking into houses and theft   36
  Forgery                                            0
  Breaking windows                                   4
  Picking pockets                                    2
                                                   ---
        Total                                      119

  Offenses of mischief and annoyance:

  Upsetting ash cans                                 2
  Shouting and singing                               6
  Breaking arc lights                                3
  Loitering, jostling, etc                          12
  Stealing rides on cars                             4
  Profanity                                          1
                                                    --
        Total                                       28

  Unknown                                           73
                                                   ---
        Total                                      470

  Deducting duplicates                               7
                                                   ---
        Grand Total                                463

Not only is this table extraordinarily interesting in itself, but its
importance to our investigation is inestimable, because it brings out
certain features of the problem with a vividness which could not be
equaled in pages of discussion or narrative.

On the one hand, it is noticeable how large a proportion of the
arrests are for offenses which are more or less excusable in these
boys. Almost every one of their offenses is due to one of four causes:
neglect on the part of the parent, the pressure of poverty, the
expression of pure boyish spirits, or the attempt to play. Thievery,
for instance, particularly the stealing of coal from the docks or
railroad tracks, is quite often encouraged at home. “Johnnie is a good
boy,” said one mother quite frankly. “He keeps the coal and wood box
full nearly all the time. I don’t have to buy none.” And her attitude
is typical. Shouting and singing too, and even loitering, do not seem
on the face of them overwhelmingly wicked. Of course, boys sometimes
choose the most impossible times and places in which to shout and sing,
but is no allowance to be made for “the spirit of youth”? And as for
the arrests for play, they speak for themselves. Some of these games,
played when and where they are played, are unquestionably dangerous to
passersby and property, while others are simply forms of gambling. But
it must be remembered that the West Side boy has nowhere else to play;
that his games are the games which he sees around him, and he plays
them because no one has taught him anything better. The policeman,
however, has no interest in the responsibility of the boys for their
offenses; he is concerned merely with offenses as such, and his arrests
must be determined chiefly by opportunity and by rule. All that we can
ask of him is to be tolerant, broad-minded, and sympathetic--a request
with which he will find it difficult enough to comply if only because
of the atmosphere of hostility against him.

On the other hand, it is remarkable how seldom the boys are caught
for very serious offenses.[12] Most of the arrests shown here are for
causes which are comparatively trifling. Yet the whole neighborhood
seethes with the worst kinds of criminality, and many of the boys are
almost incredibly vicious. Stabbing, assault, the use of firearms,
acts of immorality, do not appear in this table to an extent remotely
approximating the frequency with which they occur. In other words, the
police absolutely fail to cover the ground. Although a large proportion
of arrests does take place, they are mostly on less important charges,
and often involve any one but the young criminal whose capture is
really desirable. The little sister of one boy who was “taken”
expressed the position exactly when she said, “The only time Jimmy was
caught was when he wasn’t doin’ anything bad.”

In this way it happens that the fact of a boy’s arrest is no clue
to his character. Again and again boys “get away with” their worst
crimes, secretly committed, in which they are protected from discovery
by the neighborhood’s code of ethics; whereas for minor offenses, of
which they are openly guilty, they are far more likely to be arrested.
Some of the worst offenders may never be caught at all. And if one of
them is taken, it is probably for some technical misdemeanor which
the officer has used less for its own importance than as a pretext
for getting the boy into court. What is the result? The policeman is
lectured by the judge for being an oppressor of the poor, and the boy
is discharged, though his previous record would entitle him to a severe
sentence, as both boy and policeman know.

Not unnaturally, respect for the court is soon lost, and an arrest
quickly comes to be treated with indifference, or is looked upon merely
as a piece of bad luck, like a licking or a broken window. One boy
recounted recently with amusement how he moved the judge to let him
off: “I put on a solemn face and says, ‘Judge, I didn’t mean to do it;
I’ll promise not to do it again,’ and a lot of stuff like that, and
the judge gives me a talkin’ to and lets me go.” “Gee, that court was
easy!” was the comment of another. “You can get away with anything down
there except murder.” Experiences in the juvenile court are invariably
related with a boyish contempt for the judges, who are looked upon
either as “easy guys to work” or as “a lot of crooks” who “get theirs”
out of their jobs. And so the boy comes back to the streets, and plays
there more selfishly and more recklessly than ever.

His activities are not confined to the block in which he lives or even
to the streets of his neighborhood. Any kind of space, from a roof or
an area to a cellar or an empty basement, is utilized as an addition to
the playground. But two places attract him particularly. All the year
around at some time of day or night you can find him on the docks. In
summer they provide a ball ground, in winter, coal for his family, and
always a hiding place from the truant officer or the police. Here along
the river front he bathes in the hot weather, encouraged by the city’s
floating bath which anchors close by, and regardless of the fact that
the water is filthy with refuse and sewage. In the stifling evenings,
too, when the band plays on the recreation pier and there are lights
and crowds and “somethin’ goin’ on,” he is again drawn toward the water.

[Illustration: WADING IN SEWAGE LADEN WATER]

[Illustration: A “DEN” UNDER THE DOCK]

And next to the streets and docks he loves the hallways. There is
something about those dark, narrow passages which makes them seem built
for gangs to meet or play or plot in. The youth of the district and
his girl find other uses for them, but the boy and his playmates have
marked them for their games. Neighbors who have no other place to “hang
around in” may protest, but the boys play on. They dirty the floors,
disturb the tenements by their noises, run into people, and if they
are lying here in wait are apt to chip away the wainscoting or tear
the burlap off the walls. But what do they care! It’s all in the day’s
play; and if the janitor objects, so much the better, for he can often
be included in a game of chase.

Streets, roofs, docks, hallways,--these, then, are the West Side boy’s
playground, and will be for many years to come. And what a playground
it is! Day and night, workdays and holidays alike, the streets are
never quiet, from the half-hour before the factory whistles blow in the
early morning, when throngs of men and boys are hurrying off to work,
to still earlier morning hours when they echo with the footsteps of the
reveler returning home. All day long an endless procession of wagons,
drays, and trucks, with an occasional automobile, jolts and clatters
up and down the avenue. Now and then an ambulance or undertaker’s cart
arrives, drawing its group of curious youngsters to watch the casket
or stretcher carried out. Drunken men are omnipresent, and drunken
women are seen. Street fights are frequent, especially in the evening,
and, except for police annoyance or when “guns” come into play,
are generally regarded as diversions. Every crime, every villainy,
every form of sexual indulgence and perversion is practiced in the
district and talked of openly. The sacredness of life itself finds no
protecting influence in these blocks. There is no rest, no order, no
privacy, no spaciousness, no simplicity; almost nothing that youth, the
city’s everlasting hope, should have, almost everything that it should
not.

A family from another state moved recently into one of these tenements.
The only child, a boy of fifteen, after several tentative efforts to
reconcile himself to street life, came in and announced his intention
of staying in the flat in leisure time thereafter, as he was shocked
and his finer feelings were hurt by what he saw of the street life
around him. His mother tried to persuade him to go out, but the boy
told her she had no idea what she was doing, and refused to go. He
attempted to take his airings on the roof, but was ordered down by the
janitor. Finally he yielded to his mother’s persuasion and went back to
the street. Within three months this boy, a type of the bright, clean
boyhood of our smaller towns, had become marked by dissipation and had
once even come home intoxicated.

What chance has the best of boys who must spend two-thirds of his
school days in such a playground? What wonder that he becomes a callous
young criminal, when the very conditions of his play lead him to crime?
The whole influence of such conditions on a child’s life can never
be gauged. But just as apart from his traditions and background he
is incomprehensible as a boy, so, as a wanton little ruffian, he is
unintelligible apart from his playground. This develops his play into
mischief and his mischief into crime. It educates him superficially in
the worst sides of life, and makes him cynical, hard, and precocious.
It takes from him everything that is good; almost everything that
it gives him is bad. Its teachings and tendencies are not civic but
anti-social, and the boy reflects them more and more. Every year he
adds to a history of lawless achievement which the court, police, and
institutions alike have proved powerless to prevent. And every day the
Middle West Side bears witness to the truth of the saying that “a boy
without a playground is the father of the man without a job.”

HIS GAMES

It would be impossible to describe the thousand and one uses to which
the West Side boy puts his playground. After all, the street is not
such a bad place to play in if you have known nothing better; and as
you tumble out of school on a fine afternoon, ready for mischief, it
offers you almost anything, from a fight with your best friend to a
ride on the steps of an ice wagon. But certain games and sports are so
universal in this district as to deserve separate mention.

Spring is the season for marbles. On any clear day in March or February
you may find the same scene on roadway and sidewalks of every block--a
huddle of multicolored marbles in the middle of a ring, and a group
of excited youngsters, shrieking, quarreling, and tumbling all over
each other, just outside the circle. Instead of the time-honored chalk
ring the boys often use the covers of a manhole, whose corrugated iron
surface offers obstacles and therefore gives opportunity for unusual
skill. Another game consists in shooting marbles to a straight line
drawn along the middle of the sidewalk; thus one such game may be
continued through the whole length of the block. In another the marbles
are pitched against a brick wall or against the curbstone, and the boy
whose marbles stop closest to a chalked mark wins the marbles of all
competitors.

As the fall days grow shorter and the afternoons more crisp, bonfires
become the rage. The small boy has an aptitude for finding wood at
need in places where one would suppose that no fuel of any kind would
be obtainable. A careless grocer leaves a barrel of waste upon the
sidewalk. In five minutes’ time that barrel may be burning in the
middle of the street with a group of cheering youngsters warming their
hands at the blaze, or watching it from their seats on the curbstone.
The grocer may berate the boys and threaten disaster to the one who
lit the barrel, but he is seldom able to find the culprit. Before the
barrel is completely burned some youngster produces a stick or two
which he has found in an areaway or pulled from a passing wagon, and
adds it to the fire. Stray newspapers, bits of excelsior, rags, and
even garbage are contributed to keep the fire going, regardless of
the effect on the olfactory nerves of the neighborhood. The police
extinguish these fires whenever they can, but the small boy meets this
contingency by posting scouts, and on the alarm of “Cheese it!” the
fire is stamped out and the embers are hastily concealed. The “cop”
sniffs at the smoke and looks at the boys suspiciously, but suspicions
do not bother the boys--they are used to them--and when he has passed
on down the street the fragments of the fire are reassembled and
lighted again. On a cold evening one may see half a dozen of these
bonfires flaming in different directions, each with a group of small
figures playing around them. Sticks are thrust into the fire and waved
in figures in the air; and among them very often circle larger and
brighter spots of light which glow into a full flame when the motion
ceases. These are fire pots, an ingenious invention consisting of an
empty tomato can with a wire loop attached to the top by which to swing
it, and filled with burning wood. This amusement might seem harmless
enough if it were not for the fact that these fire pots, being of small
boy construction, have an unfortunate habit of slipping from the wire
loop just as they are being most rapidly hurled.

On election night, until recently, the boys’ traditional right of
making bonfires has been observed. These bonfires are sometimes
elaborate. As early as the middle of October the youngsters begin
hoarding wood for the great occasion. They pile the fuel in the rear
of a tenement or in the areaway or basement of some friendly grocer,
or perhaps in a vacant lot or at the rear of a factory. Frequently to
save their plunder they find it necessary to post guards for the few
days preceding election, and even so, bonfire material often becomes
the center of a furious gang fight. A few of the stronger gangs have
a settled policy of letting some other gang collect their fuel for
them, and then raiding them at the last minute. The victors carry the
wood back triumphantly to their own block, and the vanquished are left
either to collect afresh or to make reprisal on a still weaker gang.
This kind of warfare continues even while the fires are burning on
election night. A gang will swoop down unawares on a rival bonfire,
scatter the burning material, and retire with the unburnt pieces to
their own block.[13] A recent election time, however, proved a gloomy
one for the little West Siders. Wagons appeared in the streets, filled
with fire hose and manned by firemen and police. The police scattered
the boys while the firemen drenched the fires, and by 8 o’clock the
streets, formerly so picturesque and so dangerous, presented a sad and
sober appearance. The tenement lights shone out on heaps of blackened
embers and on groups of despairing youngsters who were not even
permitted to stand on the corners and contemplate the destruction of
their evening’s festivities.

In the winter the shortcomings of the street as a playground are
especially evident. Frost and sleet and a bitter wind give few
compensations for the discomfort which they bring. Traffic, the street
cleaning department, and the vagaries of the New York climate, make
most ways of playing in the snow impossible. But snowballing continues,
in spite of the efforts of the police to prevent it. It is open to the
same objections as baseball in the street, for the freedom which is
possible in the small towns or in the country cannot be tolerated in
a crowded district where a snowball which misses one mark is almost
certain to hit another. Moreover, owing to the facility with which
these boys take to dangerous forms of sport, the practice of making
snowballs with a stone or a piece of coal in the middle and soaking
them in ice water is even more prevalent here than in most other
localities. Of course, snowballing is forbidden and abhorred by the
neighborhood, and everyone takes a hand in chastising the juvenile
snowball thrower. Nevertheless, the afternoon of the first fall is
sure to bring a snow fight, and the innocent passerby is likely to be
involuntarily included in the game.

Marbles and bonfires and snowballs are the sports of the smaller boys
exclusively, but other games which are less seasonal are played by
old and young alike. “Shooting craps,” for instance, and pitching
or matching pennies, are occupations which endure all the year round
and are participated in by grown men as well as by boys. On a Sunday
morning dozens of crap games are usually in full swing along the
streets. Only two players handle the dice, but almost any number
of bystanders can take part by betting amongst themselves on the
throw--“fading,” as it is called. Pennies, dimes, or dollar bills,
according to the prosperity of the bettor, will be thrown upon the
sidewalk, for craps is one of the cheapest and most vicious forms of
gambling, since there is absolutely no restriction in the betting.
Perfect strangers may join in at will if the players will let them, and
there are innumerable opportunities for playing with crooked dice. It
is one of the chief forms of sidewalk amusements in this neighborhood.

Up above the sidewalks, on the roofs of the tenements, there is some
flying of small kites, but pigeon flying is the chief sport. It
provides an occupation less immediately remunerative, perhaps, than
games of chance, but developed by the same unmoral tendencies which
seem to turn all play in the district into vice. Some boys, through
methods of accretion peculiar to this neighborhood, have a score or
more of pigeons which are kept in the house, and taken up to the roof
regularly every Sunday, and oftener during the summer, for exercise.
The birds are tamed and carefully taught to return to their home
roofs after flight, but ingenious boys have discovered many ways of
luring them to alien roofs, so that now the sport of pigeon flying is
as dangerously exciting as a commercial venture in the days of the
pirates. Pigeon owners also train their birds to circle about the
neighborhood and bring back strangers. These strangers are taken
inside, fed, and accustomed to the place before they are released
again. On Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings the pigeons are to be
seen flying around the neighborhood, while behind the chimneys of every
fourth or fifth tenement house are crouched one or two small boys armed
with long sticks, occasionally giving a low peculiar whistle to attract
the pigeons coming from distant roofs. The sticks have a triple use.
Pigeon owners use them to force their pigeons to fly for exercise;
the little pigeon thieves on the roofs have a net on the end of their
sticks for catching the bird when it alights; and most pigeons are
trained to remain passive at the touch of the stick so that they may be
picked up easily by their owner. This training, of course, operates to
the advantage of the thief as well as of the owner, and valuable birds
are sometimes lured away and held for ransom.

[Illustration: PIGEON FLYING. A ROOF GAME]

[Illustration: MARBLES. A STREET GAME]

The two chief sports of the Middle West Side--baseball and boxing--are
perennial. The former, played as it always is, with utter carelessness
and disregard of surroundings, is theoretically intolerable, but it
flourishes despite constant complaints and interference. The diamond
is marked out on the roadway, the bases indicated by paving bricks,
sticks, or newspapers. Frequently guards are placed at each end of
the block to warn of the approach of police. One minute a game is in
full swing; the next, a scout cries “Cheese it!” Balls, bats, and
gloves disappear with an alacrity due to a generation of practice, and
when the “cop” appears round the corner the boys will be innocently
strolling down the streets. Notwithstanding these precautions, as the
juvenile court records show, they are constantly being caught. In a
great majority of these match games too much police vigilance cannot be
exercised, for a game between a dozen or more boys, of from fourteen to
eighteen years of age, with a league ball, in a crowded street, with
plate glass windows on either side, becomes a joke to no one but the
participants. A foul ball stands innumerable chances of going through
the third-story window of a tenement, or of making a bee line through
the valuable plate glass window of a store on the street level, or
of hitting one of the passersby. And if the hit is a fair one, it is
as likely as not to land on the forehead of a restive horse, or to
strike some little child on the sidewalk farther down the street. When
one sees the words “Arrested for playing with a hard ball in a public
street” written on a coldly impersonal record card in the children’s
court one is apt to become indignant. But when you see the same hard
ball being batted through a window or into a group of little children
on this same public street, the matter assumes an entirely different
aspect.

Clearly, from the community’s point of view, the playing of baseball
in the street is rightly a penal offense. It annoys citizens, injures
persons and property, and interferes with traffic. But for all that,
it is not abolished, and probably under present municipal conditions
never will be, simply because there is another point of view, that of
the boy, and his protest against its suppression is almost equally
unanswerable. The store windows are filled with a tempting array of
baseball gloves and bats offered at prices as close as possible to
his means, and every effort is made by responsible business men, who
themselves know the law and the need for order on the streets, to
induce him to buy them. Selling the boy those bats and balls is a
form of business and is perfectly legal. And the boy cannot see why,
after having paid his money for them, the merchant should have all the
benefit of the transaction. The game is in itself perfectly harmless;
and childhood has an abiding resentment against apparently inexplicable
injustice. Perhaps the small boy believes that except for the odds
against him his right to make use of the street in his own way is as
assured as that of anyone else. Perhaps he reflects that he too has to
make sacrifices; that a broken window means usually a lost ball, and a
damaged citizen, a ruined game. At any rate he continues to play, and
as things are, has a fairly good case for doing so.

This neighborhood is also full of regularly organized ball teams,
ranging in the age of players from ten to thirty years. Many of the
large factories have teams made up of their own employes. Almost every
street gang has its own team, as has almost every social club. These
teams meet in regularly matched games, on the waterfront, in the
various city parks, or over in New Jersey. Practically all the teams,
old and young alike, play for stakes, ranging from two to five dollars
a side. When they do not, they call it simply a “friendly” game. There
is no organization among them; one team challenges another, and the
two will decide on some place to play the game. A few of the adult
teams lease Sunday grounds in New Jersey, but most of them trust to the
chance of finding one. The baseball leaders of the neighborhood usually
have uniforms, and to belong to a uniformed team is one of the great
ambitions of the West Side boy.

Down on the waterfront the broad, smooth quays offer a tempting
place for baseball, especially on Sundays and summer evenings, when
they are generally bare of freight. But it has one serious drawback,
that a foul ball on one side invariably goes into the river, and the
players must have either several balls or a willing swimmer if the
game is to continue long. One Sunday game, for instance, between two
fourteen-year-old teams, played near the water, cost five balls,
varying in price from 50 cents to $1.00 each. The game was played
before a scrap-iron yard, the high fence of which was used as a
backstop. Fifty feet to the right was the Hudson River. Within a
hundred feet of second base, in the center field, a slip reached from
the line of the river to the street, which was just beyond third base
on the other side. Behind the sixteen-foot fence of the scrap-iron yard
were a savage dog at large and a morose watchman to keep out river
thieves. Thus hemmed in by water on two sides, a street car line and a
row of glass windows on the third side, and a high fence, a savage dog,
and a watchman on the fourth, the boys started the game. In the first
inning a new dollar ball was fouled over the fence into the scrap-iron
yard and the watchman refused to let the boys in to hunt for it. The
game was stopped while a deputation of boys from both sides walked up
to a nearby street to buy a new fifty-cent ball. The first boy up when
the game was resumed batted this ball into the Hudson River, where
a youthful swimmer got it, and climbing ashore down the river, made
away with it. A third ball was secured, and before the game was half
over this ball was batted into the river, where it lodged underneath
a barge full of paving stones which was made fast to the dock, and
could not be recovered. Then a fourth ball was produced. This lasted
till the game was almost finished, though it was once batted deep into
center field, where it bounced into the slip and stopped the game while
it was being fished out. Finally it followed the first ball into the
scrap-iron yard, and neither taunts nor pleas could move the obdurate
watchman to let the boys in to find it. The game was finished with a
fifth ball which was the personal property of one of the boys. On the
occasion of another game in this same place two balls were batted into
the scrap-iron yard and lost while the teams were warming up before
the match began. A third ball was batted into the river twice but both
times it was recovered. Baseball is played on the docks unmodified, but
in the streets the boys make use of various adaptations, some of which
dispense with the bat and in consequence lessen the dangers of the game.

Ball playing continues sporadically all the year round, and never
loses popularity, but it is, of course, mainly a game for the summer.
During the winter among the small boys, youths, and men alike, boxing
is the all-absorbing sport. It is hard for an outsider to understand
the tremendous hold which prize fighting has upon the boys in a
neighborhood of this kind. Fights are of course of common occurrence,
not only among children but among grown men. This in itself gives a
great impetus to the study of the art of self-defense. Good fighters
become known early in this district. Professional prize fighters are
everywhere; and for every boy who has actually succeeded in getting
into the prize ring on one or more occasions, there are a dozen who are
eager and anxious for an opportunity. The various athletic clubs of
the city always offer chances to boys from fourteen to sixteen years
old to appear in the “preliminaries,” as the boxing contests which
precede the main bout of the evening are called. A boy who gains a
reputation as a street fighter and boxer will be recommended to the
manager of an athletic club as a likely aspirant. He is given a chance
to box in one or two rounds with another would-be prize fighter in a
“preliminary.” If he makes a good showing, he is paid from five to
fifteen dollars according to his ability and experience, and is given
another chance. If he can continue to make favorable appearances in
these preliminaries, he will soon be given a chance of taking part
in a six or eight-round bout at one of the smaller athletic clubs,
and from that time on he takes regular status as a prize fighter, and
accordingly becomes a hero in his circle of youthful acquaintances.
There are many such small prize fighters in our district, none of them
over twenty-one years of age, and all earning just enough to make it
possible to lead a life of indolence. If they can make ten or fifteen
dollars by appearing in a ring once a week, they are quite content.

But boxing and street fighting by no means always go together on the
Middle West Side. The real professional boxers of the neighborhood
dissociate them in practice as well as in theory; they take their
profession for what it is--a game to be played in a sportsmanlike
manner--and they are usually good-natured. One of the best known prize
fighters of the city, who lives on the Middle West Side, states that
it is years since he was mixed up in a fight of any kind. “I box
because I like the game,” he said, “but I’ve no use for fighting.”

[Illustration: PRIZE FIGHTERS IN TRAINING]

[Illustration: CRAPS WITH MONEY AT STAKE]

Another man, an exceedingly clever lightweight boxer, who has appeared
several times in the ring in New York City clubs, was boxing one night
with a rather crude amateur. The bout was really for the instruction
of the amateur, and both boxers were going very easily by agreement.
Suddenly the amateur landed an unintentionally hard blow upon the eye
of his opponent, just as the latter was stepping forward. The eye
became fearfully discolored and the whole side of the boxer’s face
swelled. But in spite of his evident feeling that the amateur had taken
an unfair advantage in striking so hard when his opponent was off his
guard, the lightweight fighter laughed and submitted to treatment for
the eye without losing his temper in the least, and freely accepted the
apologies of the other.

This is boxing at its best, but unfortunately its tendencies are more
usually toward unfairness and brutality than otherwise. Boys are taught
to box early in this district. It is not uncommon to see a bout between
youngsters of seven or eight being watched by a crowd of young men, who
encourage the combatants by cheering every successful blow, but pay no
attention to palpable fouls or obvious attempts to take a dishonest
advantage. Even some of the best of the prize fighters frankly say that
once in the ring the extent to which they foul is only a question of
how much they can deceive the referee. And when this questionable code
of ethics is passed on by these heroes and leaders of sentiment to
the boys who have no referee and no thought beyond that of winning by
disabling an opponent as much as possible, the sport degenerates into
an unfair and tricky test of endurance. Striking with the open hand,
kicking, tripping, hitting in a clinch, all these unfair practices
are considered a great advantage if one can “get away with it.” The
West Side youngster sees very little of the real professional boxers
who, from the very nature of their somewhat strenuous employment, must
keep in good condition, as a rule retire early, drink little, and do a
great deal of hard gymnastic work. But of their brutalized hangers-on,
the “bruisers,” who frequent the saloons and street corners and pose
as real fighters, he sees a great deal; consequently, as a whole,
prize fighting must be classed as one of the worst influences of the
neighborhood. It is too closely allied with street fighting, and too
easily turned to criminal purposes. The bully who learns to box will
use his acquired knowledge as a means of enforcing his superiority on
the street, and if he is beaten will have recourse to weapons or any
other means of maintaining his prestige.

Baseball and boxing bring to a close the list of common outdoor games
played by boys on the Middle West Side,--just ordinary games, modified
by a particular environment and played in a shifting and spasmodic
way which is characteristic of it. It remains to emphasize the lesson
taught by their effects on boy life as they are practiced in this
neighborhood.

The philosophy of the West Side youngster is practical and not
speculative. Otherwise he could not fail to notice very early in his
career that the world in general, from the mother who bundles him out
of an overcrowded tenement in the morning, to the grown-ups in the
street playground where most of his time is spent, seem to think him
very much in the way. All day long this fact is borne in upon him.
If a wagon nearly runs over him the driver lashes him with the whip
as he passes to teach him to “watch out.” If he plays around a store
door the proprietor gives him a cuff or a kick to get rid of him. If
he runs into someone he is pushed into the gutter to teach him better.
And if he is complained of as a nuisance the policeman whacks him with
hand or club to notify him that he must play somewhere else. Moreover,
everything that he does seems to be against the law. If he plays ball
he is endangering property by “playing with a hard ball in a public
place.” If he plays marbles or pitches pennies he is “obstructing the
sidewalk,” and craps, quite apart from the fact that it is gambling,
constitutes the same offense. Street fighting individually or
collectively is “assault,” and a boy guilty of none of these things may
perforce be “loitering.” In other words he finds that property or its
representatives are the great obstacles between him and his pleasure in
the streets. And in considering our problem neither the principal cause
of this situation nor its results must be lost sight of.

The great drawback to normal life on the Middle West Side is that it
is a dual neighborhood. Tenements and industrial establishments are
so inextricably mixed that the demands of the family and the needs of
industry and commerce are eternally in conflict. The same streets must
be used for all purposes; and one of the chief sufferers is the boy.
More obvious, however, than this cause of a complex situation are the
results of it, two of which are especially noticeable. The first is the
inevitableness with which the boy accepts--and must accept--illegal
and immoral amusements as a matter of course. The spirit of youth is
forced to become a criminal tendency, and sport and the rights of
property are forced into antagonism. And in the second place, partly
because of this, partly because their association with the toughs of
the street predisposes them to imitate vice and rowdyism, the boys come
to take a positive pleasure in such activities as retaliation by theft
and destruction of property. Stores and basements in this district
are sometimes completely abandoned owing to the stone throwing and
persecution of a youthful gang which has found their occupants too
strenuously hostile or defensive. Undoubtedly the street is the most
inadequate of playgrounds and throws many difficulties of prevention
and interruption in the path of sport. But these obstacles are from
their nature provocative of contest, and sport flourishes with a
Hydra-like vitality. Nothing short of impossibility will keep the boy
and his game apart.

CHAPTER IV

HIS GANGS

It is frequently necessary in these chapters to consider the boy of
the Middle West Side as a type; and in discussing the causes and
possible solution of the conditions which have produced him it is easy
to forget that what the individual boy actually is at the moment is
also of very real importance. But as a matter of fact it is not the
boy individually but the boy collectively that is the policeman’s bane
and the district’s despair. Once on the street the boy is no longer
an individual but a member of a gang; and it is with and through the
gang that he justly earns a reputation which provoked an irate citizen
recently to suggest that for the New York street urchin boiling in
burning oil was too good a fate. The court finds him a little villain,
and newspapers tell the public that he is a little desperado; but those
who know him best know that he is probably worse than either court or
public suppose, and that for this the development of the gang on the
West Side is primarily responsible.

The formation of “sets” or “gangs” is almost a law of human nature, and
boyhood one of its most constant exponents, for a boy is gregarious
naturally as well as by training. And over here, where the sociable
Irish-American element predominates and children rarely mention the
word “home,” it is inevitable that the gang should flourish and its
members try to find in its activities the rough affection, comfort,
and amusement which a dirty and overcrowded tenement room has failed to
give.

The West Side gang is in its origin perfectly normal. In the words of
one of the boys, “De kids livin’ on de street jist naturally played
together, an’ stuck together w’en anything came up about kids from
any other street.” Nothing is more entirely natural and spontaneous,
and it is exasperating to reflect that nothing could be a more
persuasive and uplifting power in the boy’s life than the gang’s
development when given proper scope and direction. Its influence is
strong and immediate. The gang contains the friends to whose praise
and criticism he is most keenly sensitive, its standards are his aims,
and its activities his happiness. Untrammeled by the perversion of
special circumstances it might encourage his latent interests, train
him to obedience and loyalty, show him the method and the saving of
co-operation, and teach him the beauty of self-sacrifice. Gang life
at its best does so. The universal endorsement and success of the Boy
Scout movement, for instance, in almost every country living under
Western civilization, shows this most clearly. Association and rivalry
should bring out what is best in a boy; but on the Middle West Side it
almost invariably brings out what is worst. Practically, under present
conditions, it is inevitable that this should be so; but with the first
movement toward amelioration such a result becomes less necessary.

[Illustration: BOY SCOUTS AND SOLDIERS]

[Illustration: AFTER THE BATTLE]

Take the case of a certain gang typical of this neighborhood. This gang
is now several years old, but its membership is almost exactly what it
was four or five years ago. Its members singled each other out from
the throng of children in their immediate neighborhood and first
made for themselves a cave between two lumber piles in a neighboring
yard. All one summer they met in this “hang-out”; here they brought
the “loot,” as they call the product of their marauding expeditions,
threw craps, pitched pennies, played cards, smoked, told stories, and
fought. But they were disturbed by early disaster in the shape of
the business needs of the lumber company, which one day caused their
shack to be torn down over their heads. They made their headquarters
next in the empty basement of a tenement, but soon moved at the well
reinforced request of the landlord. After an exiled period of meeting
on the street corners, the boys conceived the idea of building their
own habitation in the protection of their own homes. They began a small
wooden structure in the areaway of the tenement in which the leader
lived. But civil war broke out, and in one unhappy culmination the
leader of the gang chased his own little brother up two flights of
stairs with a hatchet. The little brother promptly “squealed,” and the
projected headquarters was destroyed by parental decree.

There followed another interval of meeting on the streets, and then
one of the workers in a neighboring settlement became interested.
She arranged to have the boys hold meetings in the settlement once a
week. They were given certain privileges in the gymnasium and game
rooms also, which kept them happily occupied and away from the street
influences. But the settlement was closed suddenly and the gang went
back to the streets once more. Here is a case in which a gang were from
the outset driven from pillar to post by the deficiencies of their
surroundings as a playground, and made to feel that every man’s hand
was against them. When kindness was shown to them they responded at
once. And scores of other gangs, if they were given the chance, would
respond in the same way.

There are two salient features of gang life in this neighborhood. Both
can be easily explained and abundantly illustrated; the second alone
applies equally to schoolboy gangs and to adult gangs--for bands of
adult rowdies exist, too, and the semi-mythical “Gopher Gang”[14] is
a terror to conjure with. The first of these features is the loyalty
which the gang invariably shows to a single street or block. As a
gang is naturally formed of boys who live in the same tenement or
next door to each other, or at least in the same block, and as their
chief playground is likely to be the street in front of that block, it
naturally becomes a matter of convenience as well as of honor to defend
that playground from the inroads of any other gang. In this way loyalty
to one block becomes a principle and a basis of gang organization. But
individuals are not always loyal to their home block. If a boy becomes
a member of a gang on Fiftieth Street, for example, and then moves to
Thirtieth Street, or even farther, he may return and continue to belong
to his old gang. Similarly, a Thirtieth Street gang will number among
its ranks former residents who now live in other localities. At the
same time, both gangs are continually being recruited by new arrivals
in the community. When a boy moves he simply uses his own discretion
as to whether to join the new gang or to continue to belong to the old.

The gang is constantly increasing or decreasing its numbers. It
does not necessarily include the whole street except in a very
general sense. Its nucleus is to be found in probably a dozen or
fifteen kindred spirits in the street. For purposes of war, or for
demonstrations at election time, or on any such occasion when there
is either safety or pleasure in numbers, the other boys in the street
are added to this group. Thus the real Fiftieth Street gang may not
number more than 20 or 25 members, but its fighting strength when
pitted against the Fifty-thirds will be nearly a hundred. Again,
while there may be one group of 15 or 20 boys known as “The Fiftieth
Street Gang,” yet on Fiftieth Street between any two avenues will
be found a dozen or more similar groups, each with a leader and a
coherent social consciousness. The one among these groups which will
be called the Fiftieth Street gang is likely to be so known either
because it contains the boy who, for one reason or another, has become
the recognized street leader, or because its members are better known
or more daring than any other group, so that it will be around this
particular group that all the others will rally when the occasion
calls. The territorial limit of a gang is usually the length of one
single cross street between two avenues. In a single week fights took
place between the Fiftieth Street gang between Tenth and Eleventh
Avenues, and the Fifty-third Street gang in the same district; between
the Forty-ninth Street gang between Ninth and Tenth Avenues combined
with the Forty-ninth Street gang between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues,
and the Forty-seventh Street gang between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Loyalty to their home block would be a good habit in boyish
_camaraderie_ if it merely took the form of peaceable rivalry; but
as gang life exists at present on the Middle West Side it becomes a
chronic incentive to lawlessness. For the second salient feature of
gang life is the propensity of the gang to street fighting. Personal
and collective jealousies and feuds have become so habitual and endless
among the boys here that the history of their gangs is little less than
a record of continuous violence of every kind. No doubt the strain of
the constant repression before alluded to in some measure accounts
for this; but possibly it is due in general to a contact with the
streets and in particular to the bad influence of the older toughs
on whom they model themselves and who often attain heroic position
in their eyes. The boys of gangs in the country play that they are
armies, emperors, or kings that they have read of in books or heard of
in stories told. But the city boys of the West Side prefer to imitate
local celebrities whom they know or local deeds of fame with which
they are more intimately acquainted. And the danger of this vulgarized
hero worship lies in the fact that, while a country lad must imagine
the surroundings and implements for imitating the deeds of story book
heroes, the city boy can find on every side of him the real materials
used by his models, the Gophers.

The jargon of the thief and the yeggman is common among these boys’
gangs. They talk casually of murder and robbery as though these were
familiar events in their lives. They lay tentative plans for the
robbery of stores or saloons with no more real intention of commission
than the schoolboy football player has of actual achievement when
he imagines what he would do if his team were playing Yale. They
talk easily and knowingly of “turning off” various people in the
neighborhood, by which they mean robbing them. They threaten each other
with murder and other dire forms of assault, and undoubtedly think that
they mean to carry out their threats. The first active manifestation
of this state of mind consists often in carrying concealed weapons.
The boy obtains a broken revolver from some place or finds or steals
a good one. He will reveal this weapon to his awestruck playmates
and soon come to pose as a bold, ruffianly spirit. Usually this
phase passes away harmlessly enough. Few of the younger residents of
this neighborhood are really armed, though most of them would have
their companions believe that they are. Occasionally some youngster
does manage to carry a revolver, bowie knife, or slingshot, and his
subsequent career is likely to bring him very early into serious
contact with the police. But however late or soon the manifestation,
the gangs are permeated by the tendency to disorder and crime which is
the result of criminal example. It is the old story; only the worst and
most vicious form of the gang spirit has a chance of finding expression
in these streets. And so gang warfare has become not the exception
but the rule, and the violence and ferocity with which the small boys
pursue their feuds excites the alarm of the entire neighborhood.

“There has always been more or less fighting among the gangs of boys on
the streets,” a physician of long residence recently remarked, “but
they are getting worse in character every year until now it seems that
they will stop at nothing. They carry knives, clubs, and even, I have
heard, revolvers. Sometimes arrests are made, but they never amount
to anything, for the boys are always released without punishment. If
an outsider tries to interfere, ordinarily both gangs turn on him.
They terrorize the neighborhood with their fights, breaking windows
and injuring passersby with stones. Only recently one of these fights
broke out almost in front of my house, and a score or more, most of
them armed with beer bottles, were engaged in it. I got a boy by the
shoulder and asked him what he was doing with the bottle. ‘Oh,’ he
said, ‘I am just taking it to the store to get it filled.’ Then he
laughed in my face and the rest of the gang burst out laughing. I could
do nothing with them, and had to retire to my office.”

Sometimes fights are more or less unpremeditated, arising from chance
encounters between two rival gangs; but very often they are formally
arranged and generaled in approved military fashion. One evening
recently a furious battle took place between two gangs of small boys
numbering nearly 50 to the gang, and all apparently from eight to
fifteen years old. One gang proceeded down the street from the corner
at which they had assembled and met the other gang coming from the
opposite direction. They stopped about 100 feet apart and formed two
compact masses, screaming and shouting encouragement to their own side
and insults to the enemy. Then one of the gangs moved slowly forward.
Some one among their opponents threw a beer bottle into the advancing
crowd, and a scene of wild riot followed. Clubs, stones, and beer
bottles were hurled through the air, many of them taking effect and
many of the bottles smashing on the pavement. A crowd gathered on both
sides behind the combatants and windows on all sides were filled with
spectators. None of the boys came into personal contact with their
opponents. Most of them contented themselves with hurling missiles
indiscriminately into the opposing group. In the midst of the mêlée two
boys were maneuvering for over a minute, each armed with a beer bottle
which he was trying to land on his opponent from a distance of not more
than eight or ten feet. They ducked, dodged, and side-stepped, then
finally one boy threw his bottle. The other boy dropped flat to the
pavement and the bottle came so close to his body that it looked for
an instant as though it had hit him. If it had, it might easily have
killed him, for it was hurled with terrific force. But the boy sprang
up and threw his bottle at the other youngster, who was now retreating.

Just as it was growing dark someone fired two shots from a
revolver--whether loaded with blank or bullet cartridges it was of
course impossible to tell--and now for the first time protest from the
spectators began to rise even above the din of the fight. At the same
moment from scouts in the rear guard of both armies came the watchword
of the West Side, “Cheese it!” In an incredibly short space of time
both gangs were rushing at top speed back toward their respective
gathering places. When everything was quiet, two policemen turned the
corner, walked solemnly down to the middle of the block, and returned.
There were, of course, no arrests. One gang had rallied at a point
about 100 yards to the west of the avenue, and were starting back to
the battleground again when two small boys concealed in a cellarway
at the corner shrieked out another warning. The gang broke up again
and the next minute a discomfited policeman stepped out from a doorway
where he had been concealed and came along the street.

At the corner of Ninth Avenue two men were indignantly discussing the
fight. “Those boys do more to ruin property and lower real estate
values around here than any other three causes,” said one of the men.
“They’re having these fights continually now and they seem to grow
worse all the time. Suppose that some passerby had been in the way of
that revolver which was shot down the street just now. Nothing could
have been done. You can’t find out who had the revolver. The police
won’t try to make any arrests, and if they do, the boys are always let
right out again. The insurance companies won’t insure plate glass in
this neighborhood any more, and the whole place seems to be just at the
mercy of these little ruffians.”

On one occasion a gang was short of bonfire material at election
time. The members raided a neighboring street, took the gang there by
surprise, extinguished its celebration bonfires, and carried the wood
in triumph back to their own street. War was immediately declared by
the despoiled, and a regular after-school campaign followed. Through
an injury to one of their number the gang in an intervening street
became involved, and sided with the bonfire stealers. War then became
general and for a year was a constant subject for discussion among old
and young in the neighborhood. The boys of the defensive gang more than
held their own. They descended upon the allies from the intervening
street and vanquished them on their own territory. They fought with
even honors in foreign territory the gang which originally started the
trouble, and repelled several invasions decisively. Finally these terms
were offered: The defensive gang formally notified their opponents that
if they could succeed in forcing their way from the upper avenue to a
Roman Catholic church about three-quarters of the way down the street,
they would accept defeat. Night after night the gang thus challenged
made the attempt, but never succeeded.

[Illustration: RESTING. WHAT NEXT?]

[Illustration: EARLY LESSONS IN CRAPS]

It is not uncommon for fights to end by a formal match between two
opposing leaders, though very often, particularly if the leader of the
weaker gang wins, these conflicts are indecisive because the stronger
gang will not accept defeat. In one case two gangs entered into a
formal truce because one gang was obliged to go through the other’s
territory on the way to school, and found it inexpedient to fight a
battle four times a day. The other gang recognized the justice of this
position and according to compact permitted their enemies to go through
the street unmolested throughout the school year.

Tales of this kind could be multiplied almost indefinitely, for the
exploits of boyish gangs dominate the West Side problem. Such headlines
as

    UPPER WEST SIDE DISTURBED

    BOYS DISCHARGE RIFLES--ONE MAN SHOT AND WINDOWS BROKEN[15]

    GIRL SHOT IN GANG FIGHT

    SERIOUSLY WOUNDED WHILE WALKING IN ELEVENTH AVENUE--ASSAILANT
    ESCAPES[16]

are comparatively common in the newspapers; yet most of the occurrences
of this kind in the district never reach the ears of a reporter. The
following is from the press account of a typical gang war:

    BOY STABBED BY YOUNG FEUDISTS

    IS SECOND HURT[17]

    This is the second boy to receive serious injuries because of
    the feud which has been raging for the last three weeks between
    stone-throwing bands of boys who live in the vicinity of Fiftieth
    Street and Tenth Avenue.... Fifty or more boys have received
    injuries.... Not only are the lives of school children endangered
    but the size of the weapons used makes it perilous for adults to
    venture near during the battles. There are a half dozen bands in
    the neighborhood, and when any two of them meet there is a fight.
    The principal pastime, however, seems to be in a whole crowd
    attacking one or two boys who belong to another band.

    Teachers in the public schools and Sunday school teachers have
    joined in the demand that the Police Department give full
    protection against assault to all living in the vicinity. The fever
    for stone throwing seems to be spreading through all the territory
    between Ninth and Tenth Avenues between Fiftieth and Sixtieth
    Streets, and the situation is said to be beyond the control of the
    present force of police on duty in that part of the city.

Gang fighting is most prevalent when the nervous youngsters are just
released from the school room and must inevitably encounter their
schoolmate antagonists on the streets.

Here is an account of a gang fight, the events of which were described
by one of the small marauders:

“Last night a gang of boys came down with their pockets full of
brickbats, looking for Willie Harrigan, but Johnnie and Jimmie heard of
it and got the gang together. I came up with my pockets full of stones
and was throwing them when I got hit in the leg myself and it hurt so I
couldn’t throw. Just then three cops suddenly jumped off a car, right
in the middle of the fight. Everybody beat it, but a cop grabbed me and
I dropped my stones and jerked away and ran. They caught three of the
others though, and took them to the station house. I don’t know whether
they got there. Every afternoon this gang comes down and tries to catch
our fellows alone as they did with Willie. We fight with stones and
bottles. No one has been very much hurt lately. One of our gang has a
gun, too, but he can’t fire it for fear of the cops.”

These last sentences reveal, or at least refer to, the most repulsive
of all the ways in which the demoralizing effect of West Side gang
development is shown. Even a confirmed pessimist, if he has any
sympathy with boys and any knowledge of their ways, can discern in the
gang’s activities a striving after the unattainable which is yet a
birthright, an effort which is essentially more pathetic than vicious.
In the raid and the “loot,” the chase and the “hang-out,” it is not
difficult to mark the trail of the Redskin and the hunt and the lure
of danger which is so dear to the heart of a boy. But even the most
persistent of optimists, willing to make many allowances, must demur
against the coldblooded and treacherous methods to which the feuds and
enmities of West Side gangs have reduced their members. If ever these
boys had a sense of the spirit of fair play, they seem to have lost it
completely. They win by planning overwhelming advantages. An attack
upon three or four or even one defenseless boy by 30 or 40 merciless
youngsters, who even attempt to surround their prey and strike from
behind, is not a disgraceful thing to them but an exploit to be proud
of. No mercy is shown to the vanquished. Stories are rife in the
neighborhood of boys of thirteen or fourteen being attacked when alone
and undefended, by 10 or more assailants from another street.

That casualties are not more frequent is due to the dominant spirit of
cowardice with which the mob always taints its members. In the thick of
the fight when no responsibility can be placed and every member feels
secure in the presence of his friends, there is no atrocity which these
boys will not attempt; but relying as they do on the strength of the
mob instead of on individual strength, the first feeling of timidity
immediately develops into a panic. An unexpected move by the enemy at
bay will rout an attacking party of four times their strength. Half a
dozen boys caught at a disadvantage will charge unscathed through a
gang of nearly two score, who fly in all directions at this unexpected
display of bravery. One boy, for instance, was recently beset by eight
others when he was about to leave the factory. Instead of retreating
as they expected, he suddenly seized a club, charged one wing of his
assailants, and escaped unhurt. On the other hand, here is a case in
which one of the victims was caught:

“Jim and me was goin’ down the street, w’en about six fellers from the
Fiftieth Street gang hot-footed after us. We ran but they got right
close and hollered to us to halt. I made out like I was goin’ to stop
but got a fresh start w’en they slacked up and got away. Jim did stop
and they near killed him, they beat him up so.”

“Oh! They would-a killed me if they’d got me,” said one boy, relating
how he had been chased into a hallway by five or six of a rival gang,
armed with bottles, clubs, and bricks. “I hid in a toilet, and when
they came up to look in I rushed out on ’em and took ’em by surprise;
I pushed one feller down the steps and beat it, but they didn’t catch
me.” And a similar story was told by another. “After I wins in my fight
with bot’ Mike and his pal me little brother hears ’em telling one day
how they was goin’ to lay for me in the hallway wit clubs. I runs up
tru de house next door on the roof tru de house where dey was goin’ to
lay for me and hides in the toilet wit a big club. When I hear Mike and
his pal come in an’ talkin’ right near me I rushes out and bangs right
an’ left wit me club. I hits ’em bot’ on de bean (head) an’ dey runs
out. After that they never bothered me.”

Gang fighting, in fact, as practiced in this neighborhood, is conducive
to neither manliness, honor, courage, nor self-respect. The strength
of the boy is the strength of the gang, and under its protection
unspeakable horrors take place for which it is impossible to place
responsibility. Rumors of boys being stabbed, shot, clubbed, maimed,
and even killed are current everywhere, and there is good reason to
believe that many of them are true. Such things are, of course, never
mentioned to strangers, and residents learn of them only by chance
conversation. The moment that any definite questions are asked, the
boys become reticent and change the subject. But there can be no doubt
that many crimes are committed in these blocks which never reach the
ears of the police, and that a considerable proportion of them are due
to the boy and his gang.

And so the word “gang” here has grown to be synonymous with the
worst side of boy life, and the group itself, which might in other
surroundings and under other traditions be a positive civic asset,
simply adds the irresponsibility of the mob to the recklessness of
youth and becomes a force which turns West Side boyhood into cowards
and savages. As a priest of one of the Roman Catholic churches said the
other day, “The social evil may be an important one, but _the_ question
in this neighborhood is that of the gangs.”

CHAPTER V

HIS HOME

Among the influences which mold the destinies of the West Side boy
one still remains to be mentioned. We have tried to sketch the
characteristics of the community in which he finds himself and to
indicate the causes and the traditions which have produced them.
We have watched him in the daylight glare of his playground, and
followed him through his games and the maneuvers of his gang. School,
and in later years, the shop or factory, rarely work any appreciable
change in his make-up. The former is usually treated by the class of
boys with whom we are dealing as a long game between himself and the
truant officer. The latter comes into his life too late and often too
unsuitably to be regarded by him as anything but so many dreary years
of necessary imprisonment. But back of his chequered little life on the
docks and streets stand his mother and his tenement home, and surely it
is to them, if anywhere, that we must look for the guidance that is to
help him and the influence that is to counteract the wild persuasions
of the playground.

Is this home attractive? Can it be? Does his mother understand her boy
and his difficulties, even if she can cope with her own? If she does,
how far can she help him? If she does not, how far is she blameworthy?
What is her attitude toward the West Side problems? To what extent is
she--can she be--responsible for her children’s conduct? How far right
are the judges of the New York children’s court, and how far wrong, in
holding West Side parents responsible for the misdemeanors of their
sons? Let us look at the home outside and within, visit the mother and
hear her side of the story; for these are questions which must be asked
and answered before our picture of the West Side boy is complete.

It would be impossible with any truth to call the tenement buildings
externally attractive. Surrounding the factories on all sides, wedged
between tall, noisy buildings, standing almost alone in a block
of lumber and wagon yards, or sometimes occupying entire blocks
to the exclusion of everything else, they rise singly, in groups,
or in rows along the streets and avenues, ugly, monotonous, of an
indistinguishable sameness. Most of them face squarely up to the
sidewalk, with no areaway in front, behind them narrow cement-paved
courts, round which the shabby walls rear themselves, cutting off
sunlight and giving to each little well of air-space the gloominess of
a cañon. Every type of obsolete dwelling, condemned by the building
laws of a decade ago, is present in block lengths, teeming and seething
with human life, and accepted with that philosophy of poverty which
holds that such things are a part of the natural scheme which created
Fifth Avenue for the man who doesn’t have to work and Eleventh Avenue
for the man who does. The “dumb-bell” and “railroad” types of tenement
with dark inner rooms, first sanctioned by the laws of the late
70’s but condemned as dangerous and unsanitary nearly a decade ago,
predominate. These buildings were erected for the most part over
twenty-five years ago (some are forty years old or more), and in the
ten years preceding 1911 only two modern tenements had been erected in
the whole district. Most of the tenements so adjoin that the roofs of
one are accessible from those on either side. Frequently this condition
continues through the whole block, so that a marauder, a fleeing small
boy, or a fugitive from justice, may dodge up one stairway, cross
several roofs, and descend by another. Similarly, if one street door is
locked, the tenement can usually be entered from the adjoining building
by way of the roof.

Inside, the tenements offer a depressing study in bad housing
conditions. The hall is dark, the stairway small and ill-lighted;
modern toilet and sanitary facilities in many cases are absent.
The rooms are often infested with mice, roaches, and bed-bugs. The
slender airshaft is frequently so inaccessible that refuse and rubbish
thrown into it from adjacent windows may lie for months in a rotting
accumulation at the bottom. A large proportion of the families are
herded in flats containing from two to four rooms, which are very
small and receive a minimum of light and air from their few and often
overshadowed windows.

The number of rooms occupied by 200 of these families, as shown by the
table given in the Appendix,[18] is to some extent misleading, for the
rooms are often not really separate. Owing to restrictions of space
there are rarely doors between the rooms in the prevailing type of
tenements; only doorways; and whether these are hung with curtains or
not, privacy within the home is naturally almost impossible. Family
quarrels or Saturday night’s drunken brawl too often take place in the
presence of the children. Moreover, walls are so thin that every word
spoken above an ordinary tone of voice is plainly audible through them
to the inmates of the next flat. A social worker who was for a time
resident here said recently: “In the first part of this month there
were three cases of wife-beating in one tenement alone. This tenement
is of so-called ‘model’ construction, has an exceptionally high rent,
attempts to restrict crowding, and prides itself on an extra high
grade of tenants. Yet the quarreling and brawling between husband and
wife in all parts of the building seem to be incessant. It even breaks
the sleep of the children and other tenants in the early hours of the
morning.”

In homes like these it is scarcely possible for even the smallest
families to live in decency. But small families are not the rule on
the West Side. Of the 231 families for which information regarding the
number of living children was secured, 163, or 71 per cent, had four or
more children. Families having five children formed the largest group;
and one family had 11 living children.[19]

Day begins for the housewife at 6 o’clock, or even earlier if she works
outside the home, and ordinarily her children are up and on the streets
by half past seven. For breakfast she usually prepares a quantity of
food and leaves it at the disposal of the family. The members, as
they rise, successively go to the kitchen and help themselves. The
workers go to the stores and factories, and the children to school or
the streets. By half past seven the factories are in full operation,
the stores are open, and the day’s work has begun. From half past
eight to nine, the streets are thronged with children going to school,
or sometimes to steal a riotous holiday on the streets and docks as
truants. At noon they return to snatch a hasty lunch served in the same
impromptu way as breakfast, and then the woman is left alone again to
wash and cook and mend and gossip till supper time, if she is not one
of the many West Side mothers who must go out to earn.[20] In that
case, the household tasks must be done after she returns home at night.

Such is the average tenement home, abiding place of our West Side
boy and his family. In a very large number of cases the family is a
“broken” one.[21]

As regards ambitions and ideals, the word “home” may stand for anything
from the thrifty German household with its level head for the budget
to a down-at-the-heels, loose-hinged group of people who share the
same abiding place, but scarcely claim the name of family. Of course,
it must be remembered that this is a neighborhood from which the
sturdiest, those having the lucky combination of prosperity, vigor,
and ambition, have pulled away. They have shaken clear both from the
ill-repaired and inconvenient houses and from the district’s reputation
for “toughness.” Here and there a fairly well-to-do family has been
held by the ownership of a business or a house, or because to be a
power even in a block like one of these is more satisfying than to be
second elsewhere. Others have stayed from inertia, shaking their heads
over lax West Side customs, but on the whole accepting them with the
acquiescence of habit; and naturally, on the level of the neighborhood,
they have entered into its life and made their friends here. They will
drift back after brief outward excursions, from sheer loneliness. But
most commonly the people here are too strongly fettered to break loose;
they are bound to these dreary surroundings for their lives.

Practically every family has rubbed elbows with poverty too familiar
for comment,[22] or seen it close at hand among the neighbors in
the house and the children who play with their own on the street.
In many families poverty is a basic condition underlying their many
catastrophes and the whole tenure of their unstable fortunes. Often
the budget simply cannot be stretched by any system of economy to
cover the requisites for healthy and sturdy growth. Such requisites
become luxuries, too extravagant for many a child. Teeth and eyes go
uncared for, nourishment is inadequate, and misbehavior may easily
spring in the wake of this negligence; often it does. For none of these
children is good air obtainable except in short intervals. And very
closely associated with the moral indifference of many an adolescent
boy are the noise and overcrowding within his own home to which he is
accustomed from babyhood. Sleep in a stuffy, dark bedroom, with two or
three other occupants, has a telling effect both on mind and body,
and never from morning to night are these tenements quiet. At the very
outset poverty destroys the possibilities of normal development. The
tenement child runs his race, but it is always a handicap.

Facing these harsh circumstances is a set of women who, though
intimacy reveals among them varied dispositions and abilities, have
yet developed out of the common experience many of the same ideas and
lines of action. To their share falls the heaviest responsibility for
the discipline and training of the children. The father is in the
background and may be used as a court of appeal. Or perhaps he is to be
guarded against,--another source of anxiety to the mother, who assumes
the difficult role of “standing between.” Among the more intelligent
families he usually has a decisive voice in important questions as to
school or work, and frequently he is the stricter parent, and carries
more authority. But the day-in and day-out management and care is the
woman’s. These mothers of the tenements are confronted by the same
problems, and they conform to certain types which it is not difficult
to recognize.

Very familiar is the figure of the well-meaning woman who has kept
her own decency, not without a struggle, but has proved hopelessly
ineffective as a mother. She is usually ill-equipped to conceive
or enter into the feelings of an imperious, self-absorbed, and
overstimulated youngster. Her very decency has often forced her into
a dull routine with a gray, colorless outlook, out of sympathy with
youth that refuses to accept the shadows of her own overworked and
saddened lot. Many of these women came from Ireland as mere girls,
alone or “brought by a friend,” to go into the drudgery of living out.
Their working days began in childhood. Mrs. Macy drew her own picture:
Herself a child of twelve, she started out to “mind” children. “I had a
little hat wi’ daisies all roun’ the brim an’ ribbons hangin’ off the
back with daisies fastened on, and with one hand I was hangin’ on to
a hunk of m’lasses candy. I sure was childish lookin’ help but I held
the job for six years.” Then came the marriage “to get a home of my
own,” followed by those terrible first years of bitter disillusionment
and wretchedness. “He’d leave me alone in the house of an evening--I’d
never been used to that. I was frightened, an’ I’d cry.” Soon child
came after child, probably with a quota early given to death, and with
those who lived arose the problem of their rearing.

Almost at once the women are awakened to the menace of the streets
which become their common enemy. “To keep the boy off the streets” is
the phrase everywhere repeated, pitiful in its futility. For every
contrivance or device is useless once the boy has responded to their
lure. The “fixed up” parlor with its lavishness of staring rugs and
curtains, its piano, the symbol of many an hour’s toil and ambition,
or its phonograph, is exhibited by the mother with much satisfaction.
Yet it crops out that in spite of these attractions Willie does not
stay at home, and that only for severe punishment is he “kept up.” Or,
where restriction is tried, a boy makes use of every sort of subterfuge
in order to escape. An errand, a visit to a boy’s house, a club, even
church, are the alleged destinations which really serve as a pathway
to the “hang-out” of the gang.

If such competition with the street is futile when the family is
comparatively well-to-do, what chance has the mother with no such
attractions at hand? Her home consists of three or four dark, stuffy
rooms, destitute of carpet, or perhaps with a frayed strip or two,
and a meager allowance of shabby furniture. There is no space for a
separate parlor. The evening meal, the one family event, is eaten in
the kitchen, perhaps in cramped quarters where each one takes his turn
for a chair. The very conditions which her own standards impose, the
fact that she “does not bother with such like in this house,” has “no
time for comp’ny,” or “never set foot in one o’ them silly shows,” cut
her off completely from comprehending the excitement and charm of the
streets to which her children yield so eagerly.

Some of these women have carried for years the burden of a shiftless
husband. With dumb patience they accept their lot--there is always the
fact that “four or five dollars is better than none, an’ it means a lot
to me on the rent.” And when even this help is lacking, it may be “he
did used t’ be a good man t’ me an’ in his day he’s worked hard in the
slaughter house. He sez I’d be pretty mean t’ turn him out after all
these years. He can’t last much longer, an’ it’s hard t’ know what’s
right. Most every night he comes up here done. We have to laugh at him
a good deal an’ so manage t’ get along.” A pretty grim kind of humor,
this. In such cases it is well if the man is no longer there. Sometimes
the wife has mustered all her power of decision and made the effort
to eject a chronic loafer from the home. “I talked and I talked for
years,” said Mrs. McCarthy, “an’ he thought I wouldn’t do nothin’. I
couldn’t put him away, but I got the judge t’ make him keep out of my
home. ‘Don’t you never bother this woman,’ he sez. I had got to hate
him so I couldn’t stand it to look at him when I heard him come down
the hall to the door an’ me standin’ there over me irons and me tub.”

The bitter lesson of endurance so well learned, familiar as second
nature, is repeated again and again with sons who are too lazy to work
and depend upon the mother’s earnings for what they cannot get by
gambling or stealing. Often her force is spent. She is weak, querulous,
discouraged. To expect her to stem the tide of outside forces which are
molding the boy into the nerveless or vicious man his father was before
him is to ask the utterly impossible. Perhaps she will close her eyes,
like Mrs. Gates, whose only son has joined a gang of sneak thieves but
who maintains that “Jimmy is a good boy and never was no trouble to
me.” In her heart she knows there is something amiss, but she turns
a deaf ear to any hint of wrongdoing. Sometimes the mother admits
everything, enlarging and complaining, but at the end sits weakly
back. “What can I do? What th’ b’ys does outside they don’t bes aifter
tellin’ inside, an’ I can’t be keepin’ tracks on thim all th’ toime.”

[Illustration: APPROACHING THE “GOPHER” AGE]

[Illustration: ONE DIVERSION OF THE OLDER BOYS]

In the judgment of such mothers a boy’s good nature makes up for
serious dereliction. A fellow who is thoroughly “in wid de push,”
according to her is “just wild like, not bad. He’s thot obliging and
does onything I ask about the house.” Many a slip is forgiven a
stalwart fellow by the woman who is feeding and clothing him if he
brings in her coal, puts up a curtain, and does not “answer back.” So
great in their lives is the dearth of common kindliness. When he takes
to his heels, she confesses to “feelin’ kind o’ lonely without Dan
around,” and nine times out of ten she welcomes him back when his spell
of wandering is over.

Too often, however, this good feeling is absent and active antagonism
and bickering marks the spirit of the place called “home.” The mother
who from “feelin’ it her duty to talk to ’em though they don’t pay no
heed” degenerates into the “nagger,” and so has taken the fatal step
which makes impossible anything like affection or harmony between her
and the boy. The result is always the same: the sullen fellow slouching
before the querulous, upbraiding parent, resentful in every line, ready
to jerk away snarling, or to flash out in a pitched battle of tempers,
leaving behind bitterness, misunderstanding and anger. Sometimes this
shipwreck is accepted with a Spartan quiescence; lifelong experience
forces these women for mere self-preservation into an endurance grown
easier than revolt. Yet the suffering is great, and these mothers,
inadequate and weak as they are, form one of the most pitiful chapters
in the story of juvenile delinquency.

But there is the woman, here as everywhere, who refuses to fold her
hands, who is alert and decisive. She is not likely to be found in
homes where the most stringent pressure of want or overwork is felt.
Yet she is not of necessity the best educated or most refined. She
is always shrewd, with a keen perception of the boy’s side of the
story, but also with a very clear and determined perception of her
own. Very likely she was born and brought up within a few blocks of
her present home. But the experiences of her own childhood form no
parallel to those of this generation. In her day everything to the west
of Tenth Avenue was open playgrounds; truant officers were unknown,
and an arrest was a thing to be spoken of in whispers. Still she has
grown up with the district and has listened to the current gossip. Her
first axiom is that no knowledge of a boy’s doings will come amiss;
her second, that such information cannot be expected from the boy
himself. Even among the best of women a system of spying is carried on,
although the wisest do not make this apparent unless occasion demands,
but quietly “keep an eye on that boy.” It may be a strong motive for
staying in an undesirable block that “If we go, James’ll just be back
here an’ then he’ll be out from under me.” They understand the fallacy
of moving to separate a boy from bad company, unless one can go to a
suburb, from which there are difficulties in the way of transportation
to the West Side. When conversation among the boys can be overheard
they “take occasion to listen.” “I don’t go out very much but I’ve me
ways o’ findin’ out,” says Mrs. Moran, “an’ they know they can’t fool
me.”

The amount of credit to give to tale bearing and complaints is a
question to puzzle the shrewdest. It is an important source of
information, yet “you can’t believe everything you hear.” The irate
complainant who fails to get the expected warmth of support from
maternal authority needs to realize that the life of the West Side boy
is one continuous fracas with the landlord, the janitress, the corner
grocery man, the “Ginnie” paper dealer, and the “cop.” Complaints come
to the mother from all sides and are often unfounded. “I had him up
in the house for playin’ hookey, an’ I watched them fellows crookin’
the bolognie off the cart myself, or I might a’ thought it was him.”
Moreover, it is understood that a boy has a right to expect a certain
amount of support from his mother. Her defense is natural, but she
cannot carry it too far or a boy may lose all fear of restraint at
home. One mother told of hearing a youngster boast, “Aw--g’wan--tell
my mother--she don’t care what I do.” “And that hurts,” she said with
emphasis, “fer a boy to give his own mother a name like that.”

Altogether “it’s no easy matter bringin’ up a boy in New York.” Truancy
and cigarettes are issues on which many a judicious woman must confess
defeat. She knows that surface evidence is not to be taken. The
appearance of a boy at the proper hours with his books does not prove
that they have not been “kept” in a candy store while the youngster had
an eye on the time. Smoking is still harder to regulate, and though a
youngster “don’t dare to do it in the house” few women feel sure as to
what happens outside. One confessed to avoiding the issue. “I knew he
was smoking a long time--smelt it--but I never let on. I thought he’d
do it open if I did and do it more.” Amusements which can safely be
sanctioned are hard to find. Pigeon flying almost always is frowned
upon for fear of accidents on the roofs and because “them pigeons are
the ruination of b’ys, keepin’ them out o’ school, an’ into the comp’ny
of them big toughs as has ’em.” Every shade of opinion is expressed in
regard to the “nickel dumps,” as the moving picture shows are called.
Some believe that “them places is the worst thing that ever happened to
New York, settin’ b’ys to gamblin’ and stealin’.” Others set upon them
the seal of approval. “A b’y’s got t’ do somethin’ an’ I don’t see no
harm in a good show that keeps him off the streets.”

It goes without saying that these families have no very large sums of
money to give their children, but the wisdom of allowing a boy some
spending money is recognized. It is, in fact, far more essential than
in most communities, for here almost everything desirable must be paid
for, from carfare to a ball ground to the highly coveted coin for a
nickel show. Money is usually given to school boys in small quantities
and for definite things. “If he gets a quarter a week, he doesn’t get
it all at once.” And the boy must show that it was spent as intended.
With the boy who is working, the amount he contributes to the household
is an important basis of judgment on his character. If he works
regularly and hands over his envelope, he may still have peccadilloes,
but his main duties are accomplished. If, on the other hand, he is
“wise” and “deep,” he will lie as to what he is earning and keep more
than is thought to be his due. Or, all too often, he will scorn work
altogether and his mother will be known to “have had bad luck with
that boy.” The outsider often expresses pity for the child who must
hand over the bulk of his meager earnings. But the moral sentiment of
the neighborhood insists upon this duty, and with good reason, for the
rearing of children is indeed no easy matter here, even when it has not
gone much further than supplying necessities. Often the price paid
in weariness, pain, and ill-health has been sore, and the slight help
that the child can contribute after the long years of waiting is the
father’s or mother’s due.

Nevertheless, when a boy reaches working age, some allowance from his
earnings is his by right, and it is this fact which adds to his desire
to leave school early. During the first year, when the wage ranges from
$3.50 to $5.00 a week, an allowance of 50 cents seems to be general.
Occasionally, 25 cents is considered enough, but this is generally felt
to be “stingy.” At the same time, “it is not for a boy’s good havin’
too much in his hands.” Sometimes he has $1.00 a week and buys his
own clothes. Lunch money and carfares to work are, of course, allowed
extra. Tips are generally accorded to be his own; it is a mark of high
virtue to surrender them. A woman will tell with pride, “He knew I
was hard up and he gave me his tips.” Occasionally a mother dislikes
to have her son working in a place where he is tipped, because it
is then impossible to know how much money is rightfully his. He can
account very easily for the possession of a surplus. The amount a boy
is spending is always a matter on which a canny mother “has her eye.”
Any doubt brings the sharp question, “Now, where did you get the money
for that?” If he is unduly “flush” he is on the borderline of danger,
and her suspicions are keen. She knows that the temptation to petty
theft is constant. As his wages rise his spending money increases,
and if he still lives at home at the age of eighteen or nineteen he
usually ceases to hand over his earnings but pays for his board. With