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22 chapters
NEIGHBORS
NEIGHBORS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO “LITTLE LOUISA’S FINGERS WERE NIMBLER THAN HER MOTHER’S. SHE WAS ONLY EIGHT, BUT SHE SOON LEARNED TO TIE A PLUME.”...
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JACOB A. RIIS
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF “HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES,” “THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN,” “CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS,” “HERO TALES OF THE FAR NORTH,” ETC. New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1914 All rights reserved Copyright , 1914, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914. Reprinted December, 1914. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A....
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PREFACE
PREFACE
These stories have come to me from many sources—some from my own experience, others from settlement workers, still others from the records of organized charity, that are never dry, as some think, but alive with vital human interest and with the faithful striving to help the brother so that it counts. They have this in common, that they are true. For good reasons, names and places are changed, but they all happened as told here. I could not have invented them had I tried; I should not have tried
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THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET
THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET
“You get the money, or out you go! I ain’t in the business for me health,” and the bang of the door and the angry clatter of the landlord’s boots on the stairs, as he went down, bore witness that he meant what he said. Judah Kapelowitz and his wife sat and looked silently at the little dark room when the last note of his voice had died away in the hall. They knew it well enough—it was their last day of grace. They were two months behind with the rent, and where it was to come from neither of the
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KIN
KIN
Early twilight was setting in on the Holy Eve. In the streets of the city stirred the bustling preparation for the holiday. The great stores were lighting up, and crowds of shoppers thronged the sidewalks and stood stamping their feet in the snow at the crossings where endless streams of carriages passed. At a corner where two such currents met sat an old man, propped against a pillar of the elevated road, and played on a squeaky fiddle. His thin hair was white as the snow that fell in great sof
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THE WARS OF THE RILEYS
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS
It was the night before Washington’s Birthday that Mr. Riley broke loose. They will speak of it long in the Windy City as “the night of the big storm,” and with good right—it was “that suddint and fierce,” just like Mr. Riley himself in his berserker moods. Mr. Riley was one of the enlivening problems of “the Bureau” in the region back of the stock-yards that kept it from being dulled by the routine of looking after the poor. He was more: he rose to the dignity of a “cause” at uncertain interval
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LIFE’S BEST GIFT
LIFE’S BEST GIFT
Margaret Kelly is dead, and I need not scruple to call her by her own name. For it is certain that she left no kin to mourn her. She did all the mourning herself in her lifetime, and better than that when there was need. She nursed her impetuous Irish father and her gentle English mother in their old age—like the loving daughter she was—and, last of all, her only sister. When she had laid them away, side by side, she turned to face the world alone, undaunted, with all the fighting grit of her pe
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DRIVEN FROM HOME
DRIVEN FROM HOME
“Doctor, what shall I do? My father wants me to tend bar on Sunday. I am doing it nights, but Sunday—I don’t want to. What shall I do?” The pastor of Olivet Church looked kindly at the lad who stood before him, cap in hand. The last of the Sunday-school had trailed out; the boy had waited for this opportunity. Dr. Schauffler knew and liked him as one of his bright boys. He knew, too, his home—the sordid, hard-fisted German father and his patient, long-suffering mother. “What do you think yoursel
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THE PROBLEM OF THE WIDOW SALVINI
THE PROBLEM OF THE WIDOW SALVINI
The mere mention of the widow Salvini always brings before me that other widow who came to our settlement when her rascal husband was dead after beating her black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty Gap, during which he did his best to make ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls by driving them out into the street to earn money to buy him rum whenever he was not on the Island, which, happily, he was most of the time. I know I had a hand in sending him there nineteen times, more shame to
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PETER
PETER
Miss Wald of the Nurses’ Settlement told me the story of Peter, and I set it down here as I remember it. She will forgive the slips. Peter has nothing to forgive; rather, he would not have were he alive. He was all to the good for the friendship he gave and took. Looking at it across the years, it seems as if in it were the real Peter. The other, who walked around, was a poor knave of a pretender. This was Miss Wald’s story:— He came to me with the card of one of our nurses, a lanky, slipshod so
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KATE’S CHOICE
KATE’S CHOICE
My winter lecture travels sometimes bring me to a town not a thousand miles from New York, where my mail awaits me. If it happens then, as it often does, that it is too heavy for me to attack alone—for it is the law that if a man live by the pen he shall pay the penalty in kind—I send for a stenographer, and in response there comes a knock at my door that ushers in a smiling young woman, who answers my inquiries after “Grandma” with the assurance that she is very well indeed, though she is getti
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THE MOTHER’S HEAVEN
THE MOTHER’S HEAVEN
The door-bell of the Nurses’ Settlement rang loudly one rainy night, and a Polish Jewess demanded speech with Miss Wald. This was the story she told: She scrubbed halls and stairs in a nice tenement on the East Side. In one of the flats lived the Schaibles, a young couple not long in the country. He was a music teacher. Believing that money was found in the streets of America, they furnished their flat finely on the installment plan, expecting that he would have many pupils, but none came. A bab
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WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR
“Go quickly, please, to No. — East Eleventh Street, near the river,” was the burden of a message received one day in the Charities Building; “a Hungarian family is in trouble.” The little word that covers the widest range in the language gives marching orders daily to many busy feet thereabouts, and, before the October sun had set, a visitor from the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor had climbed to the fourth floor of the tenement and found the Josefy family. This was
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WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD
WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD
The first snowflake was wafted in upon the north wind to-day. I stood in my study door and watched it fall and disappear; but I knew that many would come after and hide my garden from sight ere long. What will the winter bring us? When they wake once more, the flowers that now sleep snugly under their blanket of dead leaves, what shall we have to tell? The postman has just brought me a letter, and with it lying open before me, my thoughts wandered back to “the hard winter” of a half-score season
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THE CITY’S HEART
THE CITY’S HEART
“Bosh!” said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, “all bosh! A city has no heart. It’s incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet’s dream, my good fellow; pretty but moonshine!” We turned the corner of the tenement street as he spoke. The placid river was before us, with the moonlight upon it. Far as the eye reached, up and down the stream, the shores lay outlined by rows of electric lamps, like strings
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CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM
It is a good many years since I ran across the Murphy family while hunting up a murder, in the old Mulberry Street days. That was not their name, but no matter; it was one just as good. Their home was in Poverty Gap, and I have seldom seen a worse. The man was a wife-beater when drunk, which he was whenever he had “the price.” Hard work and hard knocks had made a wreck of his wife. The five children, two of them girls, were growing up as they could, which was not as they should, but according to
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HEARTSEASE
HEARTSEASE
In a mean street, over on the West Side, I came across a doorway that bore upon its plate the word “Heartsease.” The house was as mean as the street. It was flanked on one side by a jail, on the other by a big stable barrack. In front, right under the windows, ran the elevated trains, so close that to open the windows was impossible, for the noise and dirt. Back of it they were putting up a building which, when completed, would hug the rear wall so that you couldn’t open the windows there at all
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HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT
HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT
“The prisoner will stand,” droned out the clerk in the Court of General Sessions. “Filippo Portoghese, you are convicted of assault with intent to kill. Have you anything to say why sentence should not be passed upon you?” A sallow man with a hopeless look in his heavy eyes rose slowly in his seat and stood facing the judge. There was a pause in the hum and bustle of the court as men turned to watch the prisoner. He did not look like a man who would take a neighbor’s life, and yet so nearly had
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OUR ROOF GARDEN AMONG THE TENEMENTS
OUR ROOF GARDEN AMONG THE TENEMENTS
A year has gone since we built a roof garden on top of the gymnasium that took away our children’s playground by filling up the yard. In many ways it has been the hardest of all the years we have lived through with our poor neighbors. Poverty, illness, misrepresentation, and the hottest and hardest of all summers for those who must live in the city’s crowds—they have all borne their share. But to the blackest cloud there is somewhere a silver lining if you look long enough and hard enough for it
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THE SNOW BABIES’ CHRISTMAS
THE SNOW BABIES’ CHRISTMAS
“All aboard for Coney Island!” The gates of the bridge train slammed, the whistle shrieked, and the cars rolled out past rows of houses that grew smaller and lower to Jim’s wondering eyes, until they quite disappeared beneath the track. He felt himself launching forth above the world of men, and presently he saw, deep down below, the broad stream with ships and ferry-boats and craft going different ways, just like the tracks and traffic in a big, wide street; only so far away was it all that the
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AS TOLD BY THE RABBI
AS TOLD BY THE RABBI
Three stories have come to me out of the past for which I would make friends in the present. The first I have from a rabbi of our own day whom I met last winter in the far Southwest. The other two were drawn from the wisdom of the old rabbis that is as replete with human contradiction as the strange people of whose life it was, and is, a part. If they help us to understand how near we live to one another, after all, it is well. Without other comment, I shall leave each reader to make his own app
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NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman By H. G. WELLS. Cloth, 12mo. $1.50 net. The name of H. G. Wells upon a title page is an assurance of merit. It is a guarantee that on the pages which follow will be found an absorbing story told with master skill. In the present book Mr. Wells surpasses even his previous efforts. He is writing of modern society life, particularly of one very charming young woman, Lady Harman, who finds herself so bound in by conventions, so hampered by restrictions, largely those of
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