Speaker 1: Merry Christmas in the tenements from out of Mulberry Street
by Jacob A. Reese. It was just a sprig of
holly with scarlet berries showing against the green, stuck in
by one of the office boys, probably behind the sign
that pointed the way up to the editorial rooms. There
was no reason why it should have made me start
when I came suddenly upon it at the turn of
the stairs. But it did. Perhaps it was because that
dingy hall, given over to dust and drafts all the
days of the year, was the last place in which
I expected to meet any sign of Christmas. Perhaps it
was because I myself had nearly forgotten the holiday. Whatever
the cause, it gave me quite a turn. I stood
and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered. Probably
it had come a long way. Not much holly grows
about printing House Square, except in the colored supplements, and
that is scarcely of a kind to stir tender memories.
Withered and dry. This did, I thought, with a twinge
of conscience, of secret little conclaves of my children, of
private views of things hidden from Mama at the bottom
of drawers of wild flights. When Papa appeared unbidden in
the door which I had allowed for once to pass unheeded.
Absorbed in the business of the office, I had hardly
thought of Christmas coming on until now it was here,
and this sprig of holly on the wall that had
come to remind me come. Nobody knew how far did
it grow yet in the beech wood clearings, as it
did when I gathered it as a boy tracking through
the snow. Christ's thorn. We called it in our Danish tongue.
The red berries, to our simple faith, were the drops
of blood that fell from the Saviour's brow as it
drooped under its cruel crown upon the cross. Back to
the long ago, wandered my thoughts to the moss green
beach in which I cut my name and that of
a little girl with yellow curls of blessed memory with
the first jackknife I ever owned, to the story book
with a little fir tree that pined because it was small,
and because the hare jumped over it and would not
be content, though the wind and the sun kissed it,
and the dews wept over it and told it to
rejoice in its young life. And that was so proud
when in the second year the hare had to go
round it, because then it knew it was getting big.
Hans Christian Andersen's story that we loved above all the rest,
for we knew the tree right well, and the hare,
even the tracks that left in the snow, we had seen. Ah.
Those were the Yule tide seasons, when the old dom
Kirk shone with a thousand wax candles on Christmas Eve,
when all business was laid aside to let the world
make merry one whole week, when big red apples were
roast on the stove and bigger doughnuts were baked within
it for the long feast. Never such had been known
since Christmas to day is but a name, a memory.
A door slammed below and let in the noises of
the street, the holly rustled in the draft. Some one
going out said a Merry Christmas to you all in
a big, hearty voice. I awoke from my reverie to
find myself back in New York with a glad glow
at the heart. It was not true. I had only forgotten.
It was myself that had changed, not Christmas that was
here with the old cheer, the old message of good will,
the old royal road to the heart of mankind. How
often had I seen its blessed charity, that never corrupts,
makes light in the hovels of darkness and despair. How
often watched its spirit of self sacrifice and devotion, and
those who had, besides themselves nothing to give, And as
often the sight made whole my faith in human nature.
No Christmas was not of the past, its spirit not dead.
The lad who fixed the sprig of holly on the
stairs knew it. My reporter's note book bore witness to it,
witness of my contrition for the wrong I did. The
gentle spirit of the holiday. Here let the book tell
the story of one Christmas in the tenements of the poor.
It is evening in Grand Street. The shops east and
west are pouring forth their swarms of workers. Street and
sidewalk are filled with an eager throng of young men
and women, chatting gaily and elbowing the jam of holiday
shoppers that linger about the big stores. The street cars
labor along, loaded down to the steps with passengers carrying
bundles of every size and odd shape. Along the curb,
a string of peddlers hawk penny toys and push carts
with noisy clamor fearless for once of being moved on
by the police. Christmas brings a two weeks respite from persecution,
even to the friendless street faker. From the window of
one brilliantly lighted store, a bevy of mature dolls in
dishabille stretch forth, their arms appealingly to a troop of
factory hands passing by. The young men chaff the girls,
who shriek with laughter and run. The policeman on the
corner stops beating his hands together to keep warm, and
makes a mock attempt to catch them, whereat their shrieks
rise shriller than ever them stockings a yearn'll be the
death of Santa Claus. He shouts after them as they dodge,
and they, looking back, snap saucily. Mind your business, freshy,
But their laughter belies their words. They gin it to
ye straight that time grins. The grocer's clerk come out
to snatch a look at the crowds, and the two
swap holiday greetings. At the corner where two opposing tides
of travel form an eddy, the line of push carts
bouches down the darker side street in its gloom, their
torches turn with a fitful glare that wakes black shadows
among the trusses of the railroad structure. Overhead, a woman
with worn shawl drawn tightly about head and shoulders, bargains
with a peddler for a monkey on a stick and
two cents worth of flitter gold. Five ill clad youngsters
flatten their noses against the frozen pane of the toy
shop in ecstasy at something there, which proves to be
a milk wagon with driver horses and cans that can
be unloaded. It is something their minds can grasp. One
comes forth with a penny gold fish of pasteboard, clutched
tightly in his hand, and casting cautious glances right and left,
speeds across the way to the door of a tenement,
where a little girl stands waiting. It's yer Christmas Kate,
he says, and thrusts it into her eager fist. The
black doorway swallows them up across the narrow yard. In
the basement of the rear house, the lights of a
Christmas tree show against the grimy window pane. The hare
would never have gone around it, it is so very small.
The two children are busily engaged fixing the gold fish
upon one of its branches. Three little candles that burn
there shed light upon a scene of utmost desolation. The
room is black with smoke and dirt. In the middle
of the floor oozes an oil stove that serves at
once to take the raw edge off the cold and
to cook the meals by half. The window panes are
broken and the holes stuffed with rags. The sleeve of
an old coat hangs out of one and beats drearily
upon the sash when the wind sweeps across the fence
and rattles the rotten shutters. The family wash clammy and
gray hangs on a clothes line stretched across the room.
Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty plates,
a discouraged woman sits eyeing the children's show gloomily. It
is evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces
of the little ones wear a famished look. There are three.
The third an infant put to bed in what was
once a baby carriage. The two from the street are
pulling it around to get the tree in range. The
baby sees it and crows with delight. The boy shakes
a branch, and the goldfish leaps and sparkles in the candlelight.
See Sister he pipes, See Santa Claus, and they clap
their hands in glee. The woman at the table wakes
out of her stupor, gazes around her, and bursts into
a fit of maudlin weeping. The door falls too. Five
flights up. Another opens upon a bare attic room which
a patient little woman is setting to rights. There are
only three chairs, a box, and a bedstead in the room,
but they take a deal of careful arranging. The bed
hides the broken plaster and the wall through which the
wind came in. Each chair leg stands over a rat
hole at once to hide it and to keep the
rats out. One is left. The box is for that.
The plaster of the ceiling is held up with pasteboard patches.
I know the story of that attic. It is one
of cruel desertion. The woman's husband is even now living
in plenty with a creature for whom he forsook her,
not a dozen blocks away, while she keeps the home
together for the childer. She sought justice, but the lawyer
demanded a retainer, so she gave it up and went
back to her little ones. For this room, that barely
keeps the winter out. She pays four dollars a month
and is behind with the rent. There is scarce bread
in the house, but the spirit of Christmas has found her.
Attic against a broken wall is tacked a hemlock branch
the leavings of the corner grocer's fitting block. Pink string
from the packing counter hangs on it, infestoons. A tallow
dip on the box furnishes the illumination. The children sit
up in bed and watch it with shining eyes. We're
having Christmas, they say. The lights of the bowery glow
like a myriad twinkling stars, upon the ceaseless flood of
humanity that surges ever through the great highway of the homeless.
They shine upon long rows of lodging houses, in which
hundreds of young men, cast helpless upon the reef of
the strange city, are learning their first lessons of utter loneliness.
For what desolation is there like that of the careless
crowd when all the world rejoices. They shine upon the
tempter setting his snares there, and upon the missionary and
the salvation army lasts disputing his catch with him, Upon
the police detective going his rounds with coldly observant eye,
intent upon the outcome of the contest, upon the wreck
that has past hope, and upon the youth pausing on
the verge of the pit in which the other has
long ceased to struggle. Sights and sounds of Christmas there
are in plenty in the bowery. Juniper and tamarack and
fir stand in groves along the busy thoroughfare, and garlands
of green and bower mission and dive Impartially. Once a year,
the old Street recalls its youth with an effort. It
is true that it is largely a commercial effort, that
the evergreen, with an instinct that is not of its
native hills, haunts saloon corners by preference. But the smell
of the pine woods is in the air, and Christmas
is not too critical. One is grateful for the effort.
It varies with the opportunity at beef Steak John's. It
is content with artistically embalming crullers and mince pies in
green cabbage under the window lamp. Over yonder, where the
mild post of the old Lane still stands in its
unhonored old age, become the vehicle of publishing the latest
sure cure to the world. A florist whose undenominational zeal
for the holiday and trade out strips alike distinction of
creed and property has transformed the sidewalk and the ugly
railroad structure into a veritable bower, spanning it with a
canopy of green under which dwell with him in neighborly
good will, the young Men's Christian Association and the gentile
tailor next door. In the next block, a Turkey shoot
is in progress. Crowds are trying their luck at breaking
the glass balls that dance upon tiny jets of water
in front of a marine view with the moon rising
yellow and big out of a silver sea. A man
of war with lights burning aloft labors under a rocky coast.
Groggy sailormen on shore leave make unsteady attempts upon the
dancing balls. One mistakes the moon for the target, but
is discovered in season. Don't shoot that, says the man
who loads the guns. There's a lamp behind it. Three
scared birds in the window recess try vainly to snatch
a moment's sleep between shots and the trains that go
roaring overhead on the elevated road. Roused by the sharp
crack of the rifles, they blink at the lights in
the street and peck moodily at a crust in their
bed of shavings. The Dime Museum gong clatters out its
noisy warning that the lecture is about to begin. From
the concert hall, where men sit drinking beer in clouds
of smoke, comes the thin voice of a short skirted singer, warbling,
do they think of me at home? The young fellow,
who sits near the door abstractedly making figures in the
wet track of the schooners, buries something there with a sudden,
restless turn, and calls for another beer. Out in the streets,
a band strikes up. A host with banners advances, chanting
in unfamiliar hymn. In the ranks marches a cripple on crutches.
Newsboys follow, gaping under the illuminated clock of the Cooper Institute.
The procession halts, and the leader, turning his face to
the sky, offers a prayer. The passing crowds stop to listen.
A few bare their heads. The devoted group, the flapping
banners and the changing torchlight on upturned faces make a strange,
weird picture. Then the drum beat, and the band flies
into its barracks across the street. A few of the
listeners follow, among them the lad from the concert hall,
who SLINKs shamefacedly in when he thinks no one is looking. Down.
At the foot of the bowery is the panhandler's beat,
where the saloons elbow one another at every step, crowding
out all other business than that of keeping lodgers to
support them within call of it. Across the square stands
a church which, in the memory of men yet living,
was built to shelter the fashionable Baptist audiences of a
day when Madison Square was out in the fields and
Harlem had a foreign sound. The fashionable audiences are gone
long since to day. The church, fallen into premature decay,
but still handsome in its strong and noble lines, stands
as a missionary outpost in the land of the enemy.
Its builders would have said, doing a greater work than
they planned to. Night is the Christmas festival of its
English speaking Sunday School, and the pews are filled. The
banners of United Italy, of modern Hellas of France and
Germany and England hang side by side with the Chinese
dragon and the starry flag, signs of the cosmopolitan character
of the congregation. Greek and Roman Catholics, Jews and Josh
worshippers go. There few Protestants and no Baptists. It is
easy to pick out the children in their seats by nationality,
and as easy to read the story of poverty and
suffering that stands written in more than one mother's haggard face,
now beaming with pleasure at the little one's glee. A
gaily decorated Christmas tree has taken the place of the pulpit.
At its foot is stacked a mountain of bundles Santa
Clauses gifts to the school. A self conscious young man
with soap locks has been allowed to retire amid tumultuous applause,
after blowing Nearer my God to THEE on his horn
until his cheeks swelled almost to bursting. A trumpet, ever
takes the fourth ward by storm. A class of little
girls is climbing upon the platform. Each wears a capital
letter on her breast and has a piece to speak
that begins with the letter. Together they speak its lesson.
There is momentary consternation. One is missing. As the discovery
is made, a child pushes past the door keeper, hot
and breathless. Aye am in boundless love, she says, and
makes for the platform, where her arrival restores confidence and
the language in the audience. The befrocked visitor from uptown
sits cheek by jowl with the pig tailed Chinaman and
the dark Italian. Up in the gallery farthest from the
preacher's desk and the tree sits a Jewish mother with
three boys, almost in rags. A dingy and threadbare shawl
partly hides her poor calico rap and patched apron. The
woman shrinks in the pew, fearful of being seen. Her
boys stand upon the benches and applaud with the rest.
She endeavors vainly to restrain them. Tick tick goes the
old clock over the door through which wealth and fashion
went out long years ago, and poverty came in. Tick tick.
The world moves with us, without without and with She
is the yesterday, They the tomorrow, What shall the harvest be?
Loudly ticked the old clock, in time with the doxology.
The other day, when they cleared the tenants out of
Gotham Court down here in Cherry Street, and shut the
iron doors of single and double Alley against them. Never
did the world move faster or surer toward a better
day than when the wretched slum was seized by the
health officers as a nuisance, unfit longer to disgrace a
Christian city. The snow lies deep in the deserted passageways,
and the vacant floors are given over to evil smells,
and to the rats that forage, and squads burrowing in
the neglected sewers. The Wall of Wrath still towers above
the buildings in the adjoining Alderman's Court, but its wrath,
at last is wasted. It was built by a vengeful Quaker,
whom the Aldermen had knocked down in a quarrel over
the boundary line, and transmitted its legacy of hate to
generations yet unborn. For where it stood it shut out
sunlight and air from the tenements of Alderman's Court. And
at last it is to go Gotham Court and all
and to the going the Wall of Wrath has contributed
its share, thus in the end, atoning for some of
the harm it wrought. Tick old clock, the world moves.
Never yet did Christmas seem less dark on Cherry Street
than since the lights were put out in Gothamcourt Forever.
In the Bend, the philanthropist undertaker, who buries for what
he can catch on the plate, hails the Yule tide
season with a pyramid of green made of two coffins
set on end. It has been a good day, he says, cheerfully,
putting up the shutters, and his mind is easy. But
the good days of the Bend are over too. The
Bend itself is all but gone. Where the old pigstye stood,
Children dance and sing to the strumming of a cracked
piano organ propelled on wheels by an Italian and his wife.
The park that has come to take the place of
the slum will curtail the Undertaker's profits, as it has
lessened the work of the police. Murder was the fashion
of the day that has passed. Scarce a knife has
been drawn since the sunlight shone in to that evil spot,
and grass and green shrubs took the place of the
old rookeries. The Christmas Gospel of peace and good will
moves in where the slum moves out. It never had
a chance before the children follow the organ, stepping in
the slush to the music, bare headed and with torn shoes,
but happy. Across the five points and through the bay
known to the directory as Baxter Street to the divide,
still Chatham Street to its denizens, though the Aldermen have
rechristened it park Row. There other delegations of Greek and
Italian children meet and escort the music on its homeward trip.
In one of the crooked streets near the river, its
journey comes to an end. A battered door opens to
let it in. A tallow dip burns sleepily on the
creaking stairs. The water runs with a loud clatter in
the sink. It is to keep it from freezing. There
is not a whole window pane in the hall. Time
was when this was a fine house, harboring wealth and refinement.
It has neither now. In the old parlor downstairs, a
knot of hard faced men and women sit on benches
about a deal table, playing cards. They have a jug
between them from which they drink. By turns on the
stump of a mantel shelf. A lamp burns before a
rude print of the Mother of God. No one pays
any heed to the hand organ man and his wife.
As they climb to their attic. There is a colony
of them up there. Three families in four rooms. Come in, Antonio,
says the tenant of the double flat, the one with
two rooms, Come and keep Christmas. Antonio enters cap in hand.
In the corner by the dormer window, a crib has
been fitted up in commemoration of the Nativity. A soap
box and two hemlock branches are the elements. Six tallow
candles and a night light illuminate a singular collection of rarities,
set out with much ceremonial show. A doll wrapped tightly
in swaddling clothes represents the child. Over it stands a
ferocious looking beast, easily recognized as a survival of the
last political campaign, the Tammany tiger, threatening to swallow it
at a gulp if one as much as takes one's
eyes off of it. A miniature Santa claus, a pasteboard monkey,
and several other articles of bric a brac of the
kind the tenement affords complete the outfit. The background is
a picture of Saint Donardo, their village saint, with the
madonna whom they worship. Most, but the incongruity harbors no
suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with
genuine reverence, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are five,
The oldest a girl of seventeen, who works for a sweater,
making three dollars a week. It is all the money
that comes in for the father has been safe and
unable to work eight months, and the mother has her
hands full. The youngest is a baby in arms. Three
of the children go to a charity school where they
are fed a great help. Now the holidays have come
to make work slack for sister. The rent is six
dollars two weeks pay out of the four. The mention
of a possible chance of light work for the man
brings the daughter with her sewing from the adjoining room.
Eager to hear that would be Christmas. Indeed Pietro, She
runs to the neighbors to communicate the joyful tidings. Pietro
comes with his new born baby, which he is tending
while his wife lies ill to look at the maestro,
so powerful and good. He also has been out of
work for months, with a family of mouths to fill
and nothing coming in. His children are all small yet,
but they speak English. What I say, holding a silver
dime up before the oldest, a smart little champ of seven,
What would you do if I gave you this? Get change?
He replies promptly when he is told that it is
his own to buy toys, with his eyes open wide,
with wondering incredulity. By degrees, he understands the father does not.
He looks questioningly from one to the other. When told.
His respect increases visibly for the rich gentleman. They were
villagers of the same community in southern Italy, these people
and others in the tenements thereabouts, and they moved their
patron saint with them. They cluster about his worship here,
But the worship is more than an empty form. He
typifies to them the old neighborliness of home, the spirit
of mutual help, of charity, and of the common cause
against the common enemy. The community life survives through their
saint in the far city to an unsuspected extent. The
sick are cared for, the dreaded hospital is fenced out.
There are no etis evictions. The saint has paid the
rent of this attic through two hard months, and here
at his shrine the Calabrian village gathers in the persons
of these three to do him honor on Christmas Eve,
where the old Africa has been made into a modern Italy.
Since King Humbert's cohorts struck the uptown trail, three hundred
of the little foreigners are having an uproarious time over
their Christmas tree in the Children's Aid Society's school, and
well they may, for the like has not been seen
in Sullivan Street in this generation. Christmas trees are rather
rarer over here than on the east side, where the
German leavens the lump with his loyalty to home traditions.
This is loaded with silver and gold and toys without end,
until there is little left of the original green. Santa
Claus's sleigh must have been upset in a snow drift
over here and righted by throwing the cargo overboard, for
there is at least a way dagon load of things.
They can find no room on the tree. The appearance
of teacher with a double armful of curly headed dolls
in red, yellow and green, mother hoverds, doubtful how to
dispose of them, provokes a shout of approval, which is
presently quieted by the principal's bell, school is in for
the preliminary exercises. Afterward there are to be the tree
and ice cream for the good children. In their anxiety
to prove their title clear, they sit so straight with
arms folded, that the whole row bends over backwards. The
lesson is brief. The answers to the point, what do
we receive at Christmas? The teacher wants to know. The
whole school responds with a shout dolls and toys to
the question, why do we receive them at Christmas? The
answer is not so prompt, But one youngster from Thompson
Street holds up his hand. He knows, because we always
get him, he says. The class is convinced it is
a fact. The baby wails because it cannot get the
whole tree at once. The little mother, herself, a child
of less than a dozen winters, who has it in charge,
coos over it and soothes its grief with the aid
of a surreptitious sponge cake evolved from the depths of
teacher's pocket. Babies are encouraged in these schools, though not
originally included in their plan, as often the one condition
upon which the older children can be reached. Some one
has to mind the baby. With all the hands out
at work, the school sings Sante Luccia and children of
the Heavenly King, and baby is lulled to sleep. Who
is this king? Asked the teacher. Suddenly, at the end
of a verse momentary stupefaction, the little minds are on
ice cream. Just then the lad nearest the door has
telegraphed that it is being carried up in pails. A
little fellow on the back seat saves the day. Up
goes his brown fist. Well veto who is he? Mc kinley,
shouts the lad, who remembers the election just passed, And
the school adjourns for ice cream. It is a sight
to see them eat it. In a score of such
schools from the Hook to Harlem, the sight is enjoyed
in Christmas week by the men and women who, out
of their own pockets, reimburse Santa Claus for his outlay,
and counted a joy as well they may, for their
beneficence sometimes makes the one bright spot in lives that
have suffered, of all wrongs, the most cruel, that of
being despoiled of their childhood. Sometimes they are little Bohemians,
sometimes the children of refugee Jews, and again Italians are
the descendants of the Irish stock of Hell's kitchen and
poverty row. Always the poorest, the shabbiest, the hungriest, the
children Santa Claus loves best to find if any one
will show him the way. Having so much on hand,
he has no time, you see, to look them up himself.
That must be done for him, and it is done
to the teacher in this Sullivan Street school. Came one
little girl this last Christmas with anxious inquiry if it
was true that he came around with toys. I hanged
my stocking last time, she said, And he didn't come
at all in the front house, indeed he left a
drum and a doll, but no message from him reached
the rear house in the alley. Maybe he couldn't find it,
she said, soberly. Did the teacher think he would come
if she wrote to him? She had learned to write.
Together they composed a note to Santa Claus speaking for
a doll and a bell, the bell to play go
to school with when she was kept home minding the baby,
lest he should by any chance miss the alley in
spite of direct actions, Little Rosa was invited to hang
her stocking and her sisters with the janitor's children's in
the school, and lo on Christmas morning there was a
gorgeous doll and a bell that was the whole curriculum
in itself, as good as a year's schooling any day.
Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson Street
alley for this generation at least, and Santa Claus got
by hook or by crook into an eighth Ward alley,
is as good as the whole Supreme Court bench with
the Court of Appeals thrown in for backing the Board
of Health against the slum. But the ice cream, they
eat it off the seats, half of them kneeling or
squatting on the floor. They blow on it and put
it in their pockets to carry home to baby. Two
little shavers discovered to be feeding each other, each watching
the smack develop on the other's lips as the acme
of his own bliss are cousins. That is why of
cake there is a double supply. It is a dozen
years since fighting Mary, the wildest child in the seventh
Avenue School, taught them a lesson there which they have
never forgotten she was perfectly untamable, fighting everybody in school,
the despair of her teacher till on Thanksgiving were reluctantly
included in the general amnesty and mince pie. She was
caught cramming the pie into her pocket after eyeing it
with a look of pure ecstasy, but refusing to touch
it for mother was her explanation, delivered with a defiant look,
before which the class quailed. It is recorded, but not
in the Minutes, that the board of managers wept over
fighting Mary, who all unconscious of having caused such an
astonishing break, was at that moment engaged in maintaining her
prestige and reputation by fighting the gang in the next block.
The minutes contain merely a formal resolution to the effect
that occasions mince pie shall carry double rations thenceforth, and
the rule has been kept not only in Seventh Avenue
but in every industrial school since. Fighting Mary won the
biggest fight of her troubled life that day, without striking
a blow. It was in the Seventh Avenue School last
Christmas that I offered the truant class a four bladed
penknife as a prize for whittling out the truest Maltese cross.
It was a class of black sheep, and it was
the blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize.
That awful savaree, said the principal in despair. I thought
of fighting Mary and bade her take heart. I regret
to say that within a week the hapless savaree was
blacklisted for banking up the school door with snow so
that not even the janitor could get out and at
him within hail of the Sullivan Street school camp's a
scattered little band the Christmas customs of which I had
been trying for years to surprise. They are Indians, a
handful of Mohawk and Iroquois, whom some ill wind has
blown down from their Canadian reservation and left in these
West Side tenements to eke out such a living as
they can, weaving mats and baskets and threading glass pearls
on slippers and pincushions, until one after another they have
died off and gone to happier hunting grounds than Thompson Street.
There were as many families as one could count on
the fingers of both hands when I first came upon
them at the death of Old Taminund the basket maker.
Last Christmas there were seven I had about made up
my mind that the only real Americans in New York
did not keep the holiday at all, when when Christmas Eve,
they showed me how. Just as dark was setting in
old Missus Benoit came from her Hudson Street attic, where
she was known among the neighbors as old and poor
as she as Missus ben Wit, and believed to be
the relic of a warrior of the name of Benjamin Waugh,
to the office of the charity organization Society with a
bundle for a friend who had helped her over a
rough spot the rent. I suppose. The bundle was done
up elaborately with blue cheese cloth, and contained a lot
of little garments which she had made out of the
remnants of blankets and cloth of her own from a
younger and better day for those, she said in her French,
buttois who are poorer than myself, and hobbled away. I
found out a few days later, when I took her
picture weaving mats in her attic room, that she had
scarcely food in the house that Christmas Day, and not
the car fare to take her to church. Walking was bad,
and her old limbs were stiff. She sat by the
window through the winter evening and watched the sun go
down behind the western hills, comforted by her pipe. Missus Benoit,
to give her her local name, is not really an Indian,
but her husband was one, and she lived all her
life with the tribe till she came here. She is
a philosopher in her own quaint way. It is no
disgrace to be poor, she said to me, regarding her
empty tobacco pouch. But it is sometimes a great inconvenience.
Not even the recollection of the vote of censure that
was passed upon me once by the ladies of the
Charitable Ten for surreptitiously supplying an aged couple the special
object of their charity with army plug could have deterred
me from taking the hint. Very likely, my old friend,
miss Sherman in her Broome Street cellar. It is always
the attic or the cellar would object to Missus Benoi's
claim to being the only real American in my note book.
She is from down East and says, stunned for stone.
In her youth, she was lady's maid to a general's wife,
the recollection of which military career equally condones the cellar
and prevents her holding any sort of communication with her
common neighbors, who add to the offense of being foreigners
the unpardonable one of being mostly men. Eight cats bear
her steady company and keep alive her starved affections. I
found them on last Christmas Eve, behind barricaded doors. For
the cold that had locked the water pipes had brought
the neighbors down to the cellar, where Missus Sherman's cunning
had kept them from freezing. Their tin pans and buckets
were even then banging against her door. They're a miserable lot,
said the old maid, fondling her cats defiantly. But let
em it's Christmas, Ah, she added, as one of the
eight stood up in her lap and rubbed its cheek
against hers. They're innocent. It isn't poor animals that does
the harm. It's men and women that does it to
each other. I don't know whether it was just philosophy
like Missus ben Wahs, or a glimpse of her story.
If she had one, she kept it for her cats
in a hundred places all over the city. When Christmas comes,
as many open air fares spring suddenly into life. A
kind of gentile feast of tabernacles possesses the tenement districts,
especially green embowered booths stand in rows at the curb,
and the voice of the tin trumpet is heard in
the land. The common source of all the show is
down by the North River, in the district known as
the Farm. Down there, Santa Claus establishes headquarters early in
December and until past New Year. The broad Quay looks
more then like a clearing in a pine forest than
a busy section of the metropolis. The steamers discharge their
loads of fir trees at the piers until they stand
stacked mountain high, with foothills of holly and ground ivy
trailing off toward the land side. An army train of
wagons is engaged in carting them away from early morning
till late at night, But the green forest grows in
spite of it all, until in places it shuts the
shipping out of sight altogether. The air is redolent with
the smell of balsam and pine after nightfall, when the
lights are burning in the busy market and the homeward
bound crowds with baskets and heavy burdens of Christmas greens
jostle one another with good natured banter. Nobody is ever
crossed down here in the holiday season. It is good
to take a stroll through the farm if one has
a spot in his heart. Faithful yet to the hills
in the woods in spite of the latter day city.
But it is when the moonlight is upon the water
and upon the dark, phantom forest, when the heavy breathing
of some passing steamer is the only sound that breaks
the stillness of the night, and the watchman smokes his
only pipe on the bulwark, that the farm has a
mood and an atmosphere all its own, full of poetry,
which some day a painter's brush will catch and hold
into the ugliest tenement street. Christmas brings something of picturesqueness
as of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor
and the heavy laden, and by them it is understood
with an instinctive yearning to do it honor. In the
stiff dignity of the brownstone streets uptown, there may be
scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor.
It blossoms on stoop and fire escape looks out of
the front window, and makes the unsightly barber pole to
sprout over night like an Arran's rod. Poor, indeed, is
the home that has not its sign of peace over
the hearth. Be it but a single sprig of green.
A little color creeps with it even into rabbinical Hester Street,
and shows in the shop windows and in the children's faces.
The very feather dusters in the peddler's stock take on
brighter hues for the occasion, and the big knives in
the cutler's shop gleam with a lively anticipation of the
impending goose with fixens. A concession perhaps to the commercial
rather than the religious holiday business comes then, if ever,
a crowd of ragamuffins camp out at a window where
Santa Claus and his wife stand in state embodiment of
the domestic ideal that has not yet gone out of
fashion in these tenements, gazing hungrily at the announcement that
a silver present will be given to every purchaser by
a real Santa Claus m Levitsky. Across the way and
a hole in the wall, two cobblers are pegging away
under an oozy lamp that makes a yellow splurge on
the inky blackness about them, revealing to the passer by
their bearded faces. But nothing of the environment save a
single sprig of holly suspended from the lamp. From what
forgotten break It came with a message of cheer, a
thought of wife and children across the sea waiting their summons.
God knows. The shop is their house and home. It
was once the hall of the tenement, but to save
space enough has been walled in to make room for
their bench and bed. The tenants go through the next house,
no matter if they are cramped. By and by they
will have room. By and by comes the spring, and
with it the steamer does not the green branch speak
of spring and of hope. The policemen on the beat
hears their hammers beat a joyous tattoo past midnight, far
into Christmas morning. Who shall say its message has not
reached even them in their slum, where the noisy trains
speed over the iron highway, past the second story windows
of Allen Street. A cellar door yawns darkly in the
shadow of one of the pillars that half block the
narrow sidewalk. A dull gleam behind the cobweb shrouded window
pane supplants the sign over the door in Yiddish and
English old brasses. Four crooked and moldy steps lead to
utter darkness. With no friendly voice to guide the hapless customer.
Fumbling along the dank wall, he is left to find
the door of the shop as best he can, not
a likely place to encounter the fastidious from the avenue. Yet,
ladies in furs and silk find this door in the
grim old smith within it now and then an artist
stumbles upon them and exults exceedingly in his find. Two
holiday shoppers are even now haggling with the coppersmith over
the price of a pair of curiously wrought brass candlesticks.
The old man has turned from the forge at which
he was working, unmindful of his collars, roving among the
dusky shelves. Standing there, erect and sturdy in his shiny
leather apron, hammer in hand, with a fire light upon
his venerable head, strong arms bared to the elbow, and
the square paper cap pushed back from a thoughtful, knotty brow,
he stirs strange fancies. One half expects to see him
fashioning a gorget or a sword on his anvil. But
his is a more peaceful craft. Nothing more warlike is
in sight than a row of brass shields designed for ornament,
not for battle. Dark shadows chase one another by the
flickering light, among copper kettles of ruddy glow, old fashioned samovars,
and massive and irons of tarnished brass. The bargaining goes
on overhead. The nineteenth century speeds by with rattle and roar.
In here linger the shadows of the centuries long dead.
The boy at the anvil listens open mouthed, clutching the
bellows rope. In Liberty Hall, a Jewish wedding is in progress. Liberty,
how strange the word echoes through these sweaters tenements, where
starvation is at home. Half the time it is as
in all consuming passion with these people, whose spirit a
thousand years of bondage have not availed to daunt. It
breaks out in strikes, when to strike is to hunger
and die. Not until I stood by a striking cloak
maker whose last scent was gone, with not a crust
in the house to feed seven hungry mouths. Yet who
had voted vehemently in the meeting that day to keep
up the strike to the bitter end, bitter indeed, nor
far distant, and heard him at sunset recite the prayers
of his fathers. Blessed art thou, o Lord, our God,
King of the world, that thou hast redeemed us, as
thou didst redeem our fathers, hast delivered us from bondage
to liberty, and from servile dependence to redemption. Not until
then did I know what of sacrifice the word might mean,
and how utterly we of another day had forgotten. But
for once shop and tenement are left behind, whatever other
days may have in store. This is their day of play,
when all may rejoice. The bridegroom, a cloak presser in
a higher dress suit, sits alone and ill at ease
at one end of the hall, sipping whiskey with a
fine air of indifference, but glancing apprehensively toward the crowd
of women. In the opposite corner that surrounds the bride,
a pale little shop girl with a pleading, winsome face.
From somewhere unexpectedly appears a big man in an ill
fitting coat and skull cap flanked on either side by
a fiddler who scrapes away and away, accompanying the improvisitor
with a plaintive minor key. As he halts before the
bride and intones his ley with many a shrug of
stooping shoulders and queer excited gesture. He drones in the harsh,
guttural Yiddish of Hester Street, his story of life's joys
and sorrows, it struggles and victories in the land of promise.
The women listen, nodding and swaying their bodies sympathetically. He
works himself into a frenzy in which the fiddlers vainly
try to keep up with him. He turns and digs
the laggard angrily in the side, without losing the meter.
The climax comes, the bursts into hysterical sobs, while the
women wipe their eyes. A plate heretofore concealed under his
coat is whisked out. He has conquered the inevitable collection
is taken up. The tuneful procession moves upon the bridegroom.
An Essex street girl in the crowd watching them go says, disdainfully,
none of this humbug. When I get married, it is
the straining of young America at the fetters of tradition.
Ten minutes later, when between double files of women holding candles,
the couple passed to the canopy where the rabbi waits,
she has already forgotten, and when the crunching of a
glass under the bridegroom's heel announces that they are one,
and that until the broken pieces be reunited, he is
hers and hers alone, she joins with all the company
in the exulting shout of mazeltov good luck. Then the
dupa men and women joining in forgetting all but the moment,
hands on hips, stepping in time for forward, backward and
a cross, and then the feast. They sit at the
long tables by squads and tribes. Those who belong together
sit together. There is no attempt at paring off for
conversation or mutual entertainment. At the speech making or toasting.
The business in hand is to eat, and it is
attended to. The bridegroom at the head of the table
with his shiny silk hat on sets the example, and
the guests emulate it with zeal. The men smoking big
strong cigars between mouthfuls, gosh, ain't it fine? Is the
grateful comment of one curly haired youngster, bravely attacking his
third plate of chicken stew finest silk, nods his neighbor
in Knickerbocker's Christmas, for once means something to them that
they can understand. The crowd of hurrying waiters make room
for one bearing aloft, a small turkey, adorned with much
tinsel and many paper flowers. It is for the bride,
though one thing, not to be touched until the next day,
one day off from the drudgery of housekeeping, she too,
can keep Christmas. A group of bearded, dark browed men
sit apart the Rabbi. Among them they are the Orthodox,
who cannot break bread with the rest, for fear, though
the food be kosher, the plates have been defiled. They
brought their own to the feast and sit at their
own table, stern and justified. Did they but know what
depravity is harbored in the impish mind of the girl
Yonder who plans to hang her stocking over night by
the window. There is no fireplace in the tenement. Queer
things happen over there in the strife between the old
and the new. The girls of the college settlement last
Summer felt compelled to explain that the holiday in the
country which they offered some of these children was to
be spent in an episcopal clergyman's house, where they had
prayers every morning. Oh, was the indulgent answer. They know
it isn't true, so it won't hurt them. The bell
of a neighboring church tower strikes the vesper hour. A
man in working clothes uncovers his head reverently and passes
on through the vista of green bowers formed of the
grocer's stock of Christmas trees. A passing glimpse of flaring
torches in the distant square is caught. They touch with
flame the gilt cross towering high above the white garden
as the German residence call Tompkins Square. On the sidewalk,
the Holy Eve Fair is in its busiest hour. In
the pine bored booths stand rows of staring dogs alternately
with plaster saints. Red apples and candy are hawked from carts.
Peddlers offer colored candles with shrill outcry. A huckster feeding
his horse by the curb scatters unseen a share for
the sparrows. The cross flashes white against the dark sky
in one of the side streets near the East River
has stood for thirty years a little mission church called
Hope Chapel by its founders in the brave spirit in
which they built it. It has had plenty use for
the spirit since of the kind of problems that beset
its pastor. I caught a glimpse the other day when
as I entered his room, a rough looking man went
out one of my cares, said mister Devons, looking after
him with contracted brow. He has spent two Christmas days
of twenty three out of jail. He is a burglar,
or was. His daughter has brought him round. She is
a seamstress. For three months now she has been keeping
him in the home working nights. If I could only
get him a job, he won't stay honest long without it.
But who wants a burglar for a watchman? And how
can I recommend him? A few doors from the chapel
and alley sets into the block we halted at the
mouth of it. Come in, said mister Devans, and wish
blind Jenny a merry Christmas. We went in single file.
There was not room for two. As we climbed the
creaking stairs of the rear tenement, A chorus of children's
shrill voices burst into song somewhere above. It is her class,
said the pastor of Hope Chapel, as he stopped on
the landing. They are all kinds. We could never hope
to reach them. Jenny. Can they fetch her the papers
given out in the Sunday school and read to her
what is printed under the pictures? She tells them the
story of it. There is nothing Jenny doesn't know about
the Bible. The door opened upon a low ceilinged room,
where the evening shades lay deep the red glow from
the kitchen stove. Discovered a jamb of children, young girls,
mostly perched on the table the chairs in one another's laps,
or squatting on the floor. In the midst of them
a little old one with heavily veiled face and wan
wrinkled hands folded in her lap. The singing ceased as
we stepped across the threshold. Be welcome, piped a harsh
voice with a singular note of cheerfulness in it. Whose
step is that with you? Past her? I don't know it.
He is welcome in Jenny's house, whoever he be, Girls
make him to home. The girls moved up to make room.
Jenny has not seen since she was a child, said
the clergyman gently. But she knows a friend without it.
Some day she shall see the great Friend in his glory,
and then she shall be blind Jenny no more. The
little woman raised the veil from a face, shockingly disfigured,
and touched the eyeless sockets. Some day, she repeated, Jenny
shall see not long now, not long. Her pastor patted
her hand. The silence of the dark room was broken
by blind Jenny's voice, rising, cracked and quavering. Alas, and
did my Savior bleed? The shrill chorus burst in. It
was there by faith I received my sight, and now
I am happy all the day. The light that falls
from the windows of the Neighborhood Guild into Lancey Street
makes a white path across the asphalt pavement. Within there
is mirth and laughter. The tenth Ward's Social Reform Club
is having its Christmas festival. Its members poor mothers, scrub women.
The president is a janitress. In the tenement near by
have brought their little ones a few their husbands to
share in the fun. One little girl has to be
dragged up to the grab bag. She cries. At the
sight of Santa Claus, the baby has drawn a wooly horse.
He kisses the toy with a look of ecstatic bliss,
and toddles away. At the far end of the hall,
a game of blind Man's Bluff is starting up. The
aged grandmother, who has watched it with growing excitement, bids
one of the settlement workers hold her grandchild that she
may join in, and she does join in, with all
the pent up hunger of fifty joyless years. The worker,
looking on, smiles. One has been reached. Thus is the
battle against the slum waged, and one with the child's play.
Tramp Tramp comes the tomorrow. Upon the stage. Two hundred
and fifty pairs of little feet keeping step are marching
to dinner in the newsboys lodging house. Five hundred pairs
more are restlessly awaiting their turn upstairs in prison, hospital
and almshouse. To night, the city is host and gives
of her plenty. Here an unknown friend has spread a
generous repast for the waifs, who all the rest of
their days shift for themselves as best they can turkey,
coffee and pie, with vegetables to fill in as the
fire isle of eagle eyed youngsters passes down the long tables.
There are swift movements of grimy hands and waist shirts.
Bulge ragged coats sag at the pockets hardly as the
file seated. When the plaint arises, I ain't got no pie.
It got swiped on me. Seven despoiled ones hold up
their hands. The superintendent laughs, it is Christmas Eve. He
taps one tentatively on the bulging shirt. What have you here,
my lad me pie, responds he with an innocent look.
I was scared it would get stole. A little fellow
who has been eyeing one of the visitors attentively takes
his knife out of his mouth and points it at
him with conviction. I know you, he pipes. You're a
police commissioner. I senior picked her in the papers. You're
Teddy Roosevelt. The clatter of knives and forks ceases. Suddenly,
seven pies creep stealthily over the edge of the table
and are placed on as many plates. The visitors laugh
it was a case of mistaken identity. Farthest down town,
where the island narrows toward the battery and warehouses crowd
the few remaining tenements. The somber hued colony of Syrians
is astir with preparations for the holiday. How comes it that,
in the only settlement of the real Christmas people in
New York, the corner Saloon appropriates to itself all the
outward signs of it. Even the floral cross that is
nailed over the door of the Orthodox Church is long
withered and dead. It has been there since Easter, and
it is yet twelve days to Christmas, by the belated
reckoning of the Greek Church. But if the houses show
no sign of the holiday within, there is nothing lacking.
The whole colony is gone a visiting. There are enough
of the unorthodox to set the fashion, and the rest
follow the custom of the country. The men go from
house to house, la shake hands and kiss one another
on both cheeks with a salutation col aen vaugh An
toomb Salamon every year and you are safe. The Syrian
guide renders it into English, and a non professional interpreter
amends it may you grow happier year by year. Arak
made from grapes and flavored with aniseed and candy, baked
and little white balls like marbles, are served with the
indispensable cigarette for long collars. The pipe in the top
floor room of one of the darkest of the dilapidated tenements,
the dusty window panes of which the last glow in
the winter sky is tinging faintly with red, A dance
is in progress. The guests, most of them fresh from
the hillsides of Mount Lebanon, squat about the room. A
reed pipe and a tambourine furnish the music. One has
the center of the floor with a beer jug filled
to the brim on his head. He skips and sways, bending, twisting, kneeling,
gesturing and keeping time while the men clap their hands.
He lies down and turns over, but not a drop
is spilled. Another succeeds him, stepping proudly gracefully, furling and
unfurling a handkerchief like a banner. As he sits down,
and the beer goes around. One in the corner, who
looks like a shepherd fresh from his pasture, strikes up
a song, A far off, lonesome, plaintive lay far as
the hills, says the guide, A song of the old
days and the old people, now seldom heard. All together
croon the refrain. The host delivers himself of an epoch
about his love across the seas, with the most agonizing
expression and in a shockingly bad voice. He is the
worst singer I have ever heard. But his companions greet
his effort with approving shouts of ye yee. They look
so fierce and yet are so childishly happy that at
the thought of their exile and of the dark tenement,
the question arises, why all this joy? The Guide answers
it with a look of surprise. They sing, he says,
because they are glad they are free. Did you not know?
The bells in Old Trinity chime the midnight hour from
dark hallways. Men and women pour forth and hasten to
the Marianite church in the loft of the dingy old warehouse,
wax candles burned before an altar of brass. The priest,
in a white robe with a huge gold cross worked
on the back, chants the ritual. The people respond. The
women kneel in the aisles, shrouding their heads and their shawls.
The surpliced Alkalite swings his censer. The heavy perfume of
burning incense fills the hall. The band at the Anarchist's
ball is tuning up for the last dance. Young and
old float to the happy strains forgetting injustice, oppression, hatred.
Children slide upon the waxed floor, weaving feardlessly in and
out between the couples, between fierce bearded men and short
haired women with crimson bordered kerchiefs. A punch and judy
show in the corner evokes shouts of laughter outside, the
snow is falling. It sifts silently into each nook and corner,
softens all the hard and ugly lines, and throws the
spotless mantle of charity over the blemishes the shortcomings. Christmas
morning will dawn pure and white and of merry Christmas.
In the Tenements by Jacob Riese