From the Bottom Up Part 6

My salary to begin with was ten dollars a week. The word "salary" had a fine sound; it is more refined than "wages," though it was less than my pay as a milkman. After working a month, I had the temerity to outline a plan for a dictionary which would necessitate the most profound scholars.h.i.+p in America. This plan was laughed at, at first, but finally adopted, and it took seven years and millions of dollars, and hundreds of the best scholars in the United States and foreign countries to complete the work. They raised my salary from $10 a week to $100 a month; but when an opening came to work as a missionary among the Bowery lodging houses at $60 a month, I considered it the opportunity of a lifetime, and in 1890 entered my new parish--the Bowery.

CHAPTER VII

FIs.h.i.+NG FOR MEN ON THE BOWERY

The Bowery is one of the most unique thoroughfares of the world. The history of the cheap lodging houses, to which I was commissioned to carry the gospel, is one of the most interesting phases of the Bowery's history. Ex-inspector Thomas Byrnes has described the lodging house of the Bowery as "a breeding place of crime." He probably did not know that the cheap lodging house had its origin in a philanthropic effort. It was in 1872, somewhere on the edge of a financial panic, that the first lodging house of this type was organized by two missionaries--Rev. Dr. A.F. Shauffler and the Rev.

John Dooley. The Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation of the Bowery found a lot of young men attending its meetings who were homeless, and their endeavour to solve this problem resulted in the fitting up of a large dormitory on Spring Street. Somebody--Ex-inspector Byrnes says a Mr.

Howe--saw a business opportunity in the philanthropy and copied the dormitory.

There were from sixty to seventy of them on the Bowery when I began my work. These I visited every day of the week. There was a glamour and a fascination about it in the night-time that held me in its grip as tightly as it did others. What a study were the faces--many of them pale, haggard; many of them painted! How sickly they looked under the white glare of the arc lights that fizzled and sputtered overhead!

Many of its shops have been "selling out below cost," for over twenty years.

I did not confine myself to the Bowery, but went to the small side streets around Chatham Square. They were also filled with cheap lodging houses. The lowest of these were called "bunk houses." Only one of the bunk houses remains. That is situated at No. 9 Mulberry Street. It is there to-day, little altered from the day I first entered it over twenty years ago. The price for lodging ranges from seven to fifteen cents, but fifteen cents was the more usual price.

My headquarters at first was the City Mission Church on Broome Street, called "The Broome Street Tabernacle," and to it I led thousands of weary feet. The minister at that time was the Rev. C.H. Tyndall, a splendid man with a modern mind; but I filled his tabernacle so full of the "Weary w.i.l.l.i.e.s of the Bowery" that Mr. Tyndall revolted, and as I look back at the circ.u.mstance now, he was fully justified in his revolt. Mr. Tyndall was doing a more important work than I was, more fundamental and far-reaching. He was touching the family life of the community and he saw what I did not see--that our congregations could not be mixed; that my work was spoiling his. I did not see it then. I see it now. So I betook myself to another church, and this other church got a credit which it did not deserve, for they had no family life to touch. It was a church at Chatham Square, and its usefulness consisted in the fact that it was situated where it could catch the ebb and flow of the "tramp-tide."

I spent my afternoons in the lodging houses, pocket Bible in hand, going from man to man as they sat there, workless, homeless, dejected and in despair. I very soon found that there was one gospel they were looking for and willing to accept--it was the gospel of work; so, in order to meet the emergency, I became an employment agency. I became more than that. They needed clothing and food--and I became a junk store and a soup kitchen.

After six months' experience in the work, I had a story to tell. It was very vivid, and I could always touch the tear glands of a congregation with it, and stir their hearts; so I went from church to church, uptown and out of town and anywhere, and told the story of my congregation on the Bowery. The result was not by any means a solution of my problem, nor of the tramp problem, but carloads of old clothes, and money to pay for lodgings. There was such a terrific tug at my heartstrings all the time that I never had two coats to my own back, or a change of clothing in hardly any department. As for money, I was, as they were, most of the time penniless! Everything I could beg or borrow went into the work.

At the close of the first year, the results were rather discouraging.

I got a number of men work, but very few had made good. Hundreds of men had been clothed, fed and lodged, but they had pa.s.sed out of my reach. I knew not where they had gone. Scarcely one per cent. ever let me know even by a postal card what had become of them, or how they fared, and yet my work was called successful.

Sunday afternoons, with a baby organ on my shoulder and a small group of converts and helpers following closely behind, I went down the Bowery and held meetings in about half a dozen houses. I did most of the speaking, but urged the converts to tell their own stories at each service. I have said that I was never interfered with or molested in the work, and the following incident can hardly be called an exception. A broken-down prize fighter, slightly under the influence of liquor, tried to prevent us from holding a meeting one afternoon. I reasoned with him.

"You don't seem to know who I am," he said. I confessed my ignorance.

"Well," he said, "I'm Connelly, the prize fighter!"

"Then you're what your profession calls a 'bruiser'."

"Sure!" he replied.

"Probably you are not aware, Mr. Connelly, that the Bible has something to say about bruisers."

He explained that, being a Roman Catholic, his Bible was different from mine, and he did not think there were any bruisers in his Bible.

"Oh, you are mistaken, Mr. Connelly. This is your Bible I have with me"--and I produced a small Douey Bible, and turning over the pages in Genesis I read a pa.s.sage which I thought might appeal to him:

"'The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head.' I suppose you know who the woman was, Connelly."

"The Holy Virgin?" he inquired.

"Yes; and the serpent is the Devil, and he has been pouring firewater into you and has been making you say things you would not otherwise say. As for the seed of the woman, that is Jesus Christ; and this Douey Bible of yours tells you that Jesus Christ is able to bruise the head of the old serpent in you, which is the Devil." That sounded rather reasonable to the retired prize fighter, and he quieted down and we proceeded with the service.

The society for which I worked, occasionally sent down visitors to be shown around the lodging houses, and often I took them in there myself; but the thing grew very distasteful to me, for I never got hardened or calloused to the misery and sorrow of the situation, and it seemed to me eminently unfair to parade them.

About the last man I took around was Sir Walter Besant. I dined with him at the Brevoort House one night, and took him around first to one of the bunk-houses and then to various others, and also into the tenement region around Cherry Street.

"Keep close to me," I told Besant as we entered the bunk house, "don't linger;" so we went to the top floor. The strips of canvas arranged in double tiers were full of lodgers. The floor was strewn with bodies--naked, half naked and fully clothed. We had to step over them to get to the other end. There was a stove in the middle of the room, and beside it, a dirty old lamp shed its yellow rays around, but by no means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and from the hot air of the stove--windows and doors being tightly closed--made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating.

After stepping over the prostrate bodies from one end of the dormitory to the other, the novelist was almost overcome and when we got back to the door he begged to be taken to the open air. When we got to Chatham Square, he said--"Take me to a drugstore." Besant knew the underworld of London as few men of his generation knew it, but he had never seen anything quite so b.e.s.t.i.a.l, so debauched and so low as the bunk-house on Mulberry Street.

It seems strange to me now that after having tramped the streets of New York with the unemployed and after having shared their misery, disappointment and despair, that I should, as a missionary, have entirely forgotten it, and that after years of experience among them, I should still be possessed of the idea that men of this grade were lazy and would not work if they had it. One afternoon in a bunk-house I was so possessed of this idea that I challenged the crowd.

"You men surely do not need any further evidence of my interest in you," I remarked. "All that I have and am belongs to you; but I cannot help telling you of my conviction: that most of you are here because you are lazy. Now, if any man in the house is willing to test the case, I will change clothes with him to-morrow morning and show him how to find work."

The words had scarcely escaped my lips when a man by the name of Tim Grogan stood up and accepted the challenge.

I made an appointment to meet Grogan on Chatham Square at half-past five the next morning. Before I met him, I had done more thinking on the question of the unemployed than I had ever done in my life. I balked on the change of clothing article in the agreement--and furnished my own. Two or three men had enough courage to get up early in the morning and see Tim off--they were sceptical about my intention.

The first thing that we did was to try the piano, soap and other factories on the West Side. From place to place we went, from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street without success. Sometimes under pretence of business and by force of the power to express myself in good English, I gained an entrance to the superintendent; but I always failed to find a job. We crossed the city at Fifty-ninth Street and went down the East Side. Wherever men were working, we applied. We went to the stevedores on the East Side, but they were all "full up."

"For G.o.d's sake," I said to some of them, but I was brushed aside with a wave of the hand. I never felt so like a beggar in my life. Tim trotted at my heels, encouraging me with whimsical Irish phrases, one of which I remember--

"Begorra, mister, the hardest work for sure is no work at all, at all!"

In the middle of the afternoon, I began to get disturbed; then I decided to try a scheme I had worked over for hours. "Keep close to me, now, Tim," I said, as I led him to a drugstore at the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery.

"Sir," I said to the clerk, "you are unaccustomed to giving credit, I know; but perhaps you might suspend your rule for once and trust us to the amount of five cents?"

"You don't talk like a b.u.m," he said, "but you look like one."

I thanked him for the compliment to my language, but insisted on my request.

"Well, what is it?" asked the clerk with somewhat of a sneer.

"I am hungry and thirsty. I have looked for work all day and have utterly failed to find it. Now I have a scheme and I know it will work. Oxalic acid eats away rust. If I had five cents' worth, I could earn a dollar--I know I could."

He looked curiously at me for a moment, and said with an oath:

"By--! I've been on the Bowery a good many years and haven't been sold once. If you're a skin-game man, I'll throw up my job!"

I got the acid. I played the same game in a tailor-shop for five cents' worth of rags. Then I went to a hardware store on the Square and got credit for about ten cents' worth of brickdust and paste. I took Tim by the arm and led him across the west side of Chatham Square. There used to be a big drygoods store on the east side of the Square, with large plate-gla.s.s windows, and underneath the windows, big bra.s.s signs.

"Nothing doing," said the floorwalker, as I asked for the job of cleaning them; nevertheless, when he turned his back, I dropped on my knees and cleaned a square foot--did it inside of a minute.

"Say, boss," I said, "look here! I'm desperately hard up. I want to make money, and I want to make it honestly. I will clean that entire sign for a nickle."

It was pity that moved him to give me the job, and when it was completed, I offered to do the other one. "All right," he said; "go ahead."

"But this one," I said, "will cost you a dime."

"Why a nickle for this one and a dime for the other?" he asked.