Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement life in New York City

WHY IT HAPPENED

YOM KIPPUR being at hand, all the East Side was undergoing a scrubbing, the people included. It is part of the religious observance of the chief Jewish holiday that every worshiper presenting himself at the synagogue to be cleansed from sin must first have washed his body clean.

Hence the numerous tenement bath-houses on the East Side are run night and day in Yom Kippur week to their full capacity. There are so many more people than tubs that there is no rest for the attendants even in the small hours of the morning.

They are not palatial establishments exactly, these mikwehs (bath-houses). Most of them are in keeping with the tenements that harbor them; but they fill the bill. One, at 20 Orchard street, has even a Turkish and a Russian attachment. It is one of the most pretentious. For thirty-five cents one can be roasted by dry heat or boiled with steam. The unhappy experience of Jacob Epstein shows that it is even possible to be boiled literally and in earnest in hot water at the same price. He chose that way unwittingly, and the choice came near causing a riot.

Epstein came to the bath-house with a party of friends at 2 a. m., in quest of a Russian bath. They had been steamed, and were disporting themselves to their heart’s content when the thing befell the tailor. Epstein is a tailor. He went to get a shower-bath in a pail,—where Russian baths are got for thirty-five cents they are got partly by hand, as it were,—and in the dim, religious light of the room, the small gas-jet struggling ineffectually with the steam and darkness, he mistook the hot-water faucet for the cold. He found out his mistake when he raised the pail and poured a flood of boiling water over himself.

Then his shrieks filled the house. His companions paused in amazement, and beheld the tailor dancing on one foot and on the other by turns, yelling:

“Weh! Weh! Ich bin verbrennt!”

They thought he had gone suddenly mad, and joined in the lamentation, till one of them saw his skin red and parboiled and raising big blisters. Then they ran with a common accord for their own cold-water pails, and pursued him, seeking to dash their contents over him.

But the tailor, frantic with pain, thought, if he thought at all, that he was going to be killed, and yelled louder than ever. His companions’ shouts, joined to his, were heard in the street, and there promptly gathered a wailing throng that echoed the “Weh! Weh!” from within, and exchanged opinions between their laments as to who was being killed, and why.

Policeman Schulem came just in time to prevent a general panic and restore peace.

Schulem is a valuable man on the East Side. His name alone is enough. It signifies peace—peace in the language of Ludlow street. The crowd melted away, and the tailor was taken to the hospital, bewailing his bad luck.

The bath-house keeper was an indignant and injured man. His business was hurt.

“How did it happen?” he said. “It happened because he is a schlemiehl. Teufel! he’s worse than a schlemiehl; he is a chammer.”

Which accounts for it, of course, and explains everything.

THE CHRISTENING IN BOTTLE ALLEY

ALL Bottle Alley was bidden to the christening. It being Sunday, when Mulberry street was wont to adjust its differences over the cards and the wine-cup, it came “heeled,” ready for what might befall. From Tomaso, the rag-picker in the farthest rear cellar, to the Signor Undertaker, mainstay and umpire in the varying affairs of life, which had a habit in the Bend of lapsing suddenly upon his professional domain, they were all there, the men of Malpete’s village. The baby was named for the village saint, so that it was a kind of communal feast as well. Carmen was there with her man, and Francisco Cessari.

If Carmen had any other name, neither Mulberry street nor the alley knew it. She was Carmen to them when, seven years before, she had taken up with Francisco, then a young mountaineer straight as the cedar of his native hills, the breath of which was yet in the songs with which he wooed her. Whether the priest had blessed their bonds no one knew or asked. The Bend only knew that one day, after three years during which the Francisco tenement had been the scene of more than one jealous quarrel, not, it was whispered, without cause, the mountaineer was missing. He did not come back. From over the sea the Bend heard, after a while, that he had reappeared in the old village to claim the sweetheart he had left behind. In the course of time new arrivals brought the news that Francisco was married and that they were living happily, as a young couple should. At the news Mulberry street looked askance at Carmen; but she gave no sign. By tacit consent, she was the Widow Carmen after that.

The summers passed. The fourth brought Francisco Cessari, come back to seek his fortune, with his wife and baby. He greeted old friends effusively and made cautious inquiries about Carmen. When told that she had consoled herself with his old rival, Luigi, with whom she was then living in Bottle Alley, he laughed with a light heart, and took up his abode within half a dozen doors of the alley. That was but a short time before the christening at Malpete’s. There their paths crossed each other for the first time since his flight.

She met him with a smile on her lips, but with hate in her heart. He, manlike, saw only the smile. The men smoking and drinking in the court watched them speak apart, saw him, with the laugh that sat so lightly upon his lips, turn to his wife, sitting by the hydrant with the child, and heard him say: “Look, Carmen! our baby!”

The woman bent over it, and, as she did, the little one woke suddenly out of its sleep and cried out in affright. It was noticed that Carmen smiled again then, and that the young mother shivered, why she herself could not have told. Francisco, joining the group at the farther end of the yard, said carelessly that she had forgotten. They poked fun at him and spoke Carmen’s name loudly, with laughter.

From the tenement, as they did, came Luigi and asked threateningly who insulted his wife. They only laughed the more, said he had drunk too much wine, and, shouldering him out, bade him go look to his woman. He went. Carmen had witnessed it all from the house. She called him a coward and goaded him with bitter taunts, until, mad with anger and drink, he went out in the court once more and shook his fist in the face of Francisco. They hailed his return with bantering words. Luigi was spoiling for a fight, they laughed, and would find one before the day was much older. But suddenly silence fell upon the group. Carmen stood on the step, pale and cold. She hid something under her apron.

“Luigi!” she called, and he came to her. She drew from under the apron a cocked pistol, and, pointing to Francisco, pushed it into his hand. At the sight the alley was cleared as suddenly as if a tornado had swept through it. Malpete’s guests leaped over fences, dived into cellarways, anywhere for shelter. The door of the woodshed slammed behind Francisco just as his old rival reached it. The maddened man tore it open and dragged him out by the throat. He pinned him against the fence, and leveled the pistol with frenzied curses. They died on his lips. The face that was turning livid in his grasp was the face of his boyhood’s friend. They had gone to school together, danced together at the fairs in the old days. They had been friends—till Carmen came. The muzzle of the weapon fell.

“Shoot!” said a hard voice behind him. Carmen stood there with face of stone. She stamped her foot. “Shoot!” she commanded, pointing, relentless, at the struggling man. “Coward, shoot!”

Her lover’s finger crooked itself upon the trigger. A shriek, wild and despairing, rang through the alley. A woman ran madly from the house, flew across the pavement, and fell panting at Carmen’s feet.

“Mother of God! mercy!” she cried, thrusting her babe before the assassin’s weapon. “Jesus Maria! Carmen, the child! He is my husband!”

No gleam of pity came into the cold eyes. Only hatred, fierce and bitter, was there. In one swift, sweeping glance she saw it all: the woman fawning at her feet, the man she hated limp and helpless in the grasp of her lover.

“He was mine once,” she said, “and he had no mercy.” She pushed the baby aside. “Coward, shoot!”

The shot was drowned in the shriek, hopeless, despairing, of the widow who fell upon the body of Francisco as it slipped lifeless from the grasp of the assassin. The christening party saw Carmen standing over the three with the same pale smile on her cruel lips.

For once the Bend did not shield a murderer. The door of the tenement was shut against him. The women spurned him. The very children spat at him as he fled to the street. The police took him there. With him they seized Carmen. She made no attempt to escape. She had bided her time, and it had come. She had her revenge. To the end of its lurid life Bottle Alley remembered it as the murder accursed of God.

IN THE MULBERRY STREET COURT

“CONDUCT unbecoming an officer,” read the charge, “in this, to wit, that the said defendants brought into the station-house, by means to deponent unknown, on the said Fourth of July, a keg of beer, and, when apprehended, were consuming the contents of the same.” Twenty policemen, comprising the whole off platoon of the East One Hundred and Fourth street squad, answered the charge as defendants. They had been caught grouped about a pot of chowder and the fatal keg in the top-floor dormitory, singing, “Beer, beer, glorious beer!” Sergeant McNally and Roundsman Stevenson interrupted the proceedings.

The commissioner’s eyes bulged as, at the call of the complaint clerk, the twenty marched up and ranged themselves in rows, three deep, before him.

They took the oath collectively, with a toss and a smack, as if to say, “I don’t care if I do,” and told separately and identically the same story, while the sergeant stared and the commissioner’s eyes grew bigger and rounder.

Missing his reserves, Sergeant McNally had sent the roundsman in search of them. He was slow in returning, and the sergeant went on a tour of inspection himself. He journeyed to the upper region, and there came upon the party in full swing. Then and there he called the roll. Not one of the platoon was missing.

They formed a hollow square around something that looked uncommonly like a beer-keg. A number of tin growlers stood beside it. The sergeant picked up one and turned the tap. There was enough left in the keg to barely half fill it. Seeing that, the platoon followed him down-stairs without a murmur.

One by one the twenty took the stand after the sergeant had left it, and testified without a tremor that they had seen no beer-keg. In fact, the majority would not know one if they saw it. They were tired and hungry, having been held in reserve all day, when a pleasant smell assailed their nostrils.

Each of the twenty followed his nose independently to the top floor, where he was surprised to see the rest gathered about a pot of steaming chowder. He joined the circle and partook of some. It was good. As to beer, he had seen none and drunk less. There was something there of wood with a brass handle to it. What it was none of them seemed to know. They were all shocked at the idea that it might have been a beer-keg. Such things are forbidden in police stations.

The sergeant himself could not tell how it could have got in there, while stoutly maintaining that it was a keg. He scratched his head and concluded that it might have come over the roof or, somehow, from a building that is in course of erection next door. The chowder had come in by the main door. At least, one policeman had seen it carried up-stairs. He had fallen in behind it immediately.

When the commissioner had heard this story told exactly twenty times the platoon fell in and marched off to the elevated station. When he can decide what punishment to inflict on a policeman who does not know a beer-keg when he sees it, they all will be fined accordingly, and a door-man who has served a term as a barkeeper will be sent to the East One Hundred and Fourth street station to keep the police there out of harm’s way.

SPOONING IN DYNAMITE ALLEY

DYNAMITE ALLEY is bereft. Its spring spooning is over. Once more the growler has the right of way. But what good is it, with Kate Cassidy hiding in her third floor back, her “steady” hiding from the police, and Tom Hart laid up in hospital with two of his “slats stove in,” all along of their “spieling”? There will be nothing now to heave a brick at on a dark night, and no chance for a row for many a day to come. No wonder Dynamite Alley is out of sorts.

It got its name from the many rows that traveled in the wake of the growler out and in at the three-foot gap between brick walls, which was a garden walk when the front house was young and pansies and spiderwort grew in the back lot. These many years a tenement has stood there, and as it grew older and more dilapidated, rows multiplied and grew noisier, until the explosive name was hooked to the alley by the neighbors, and stuck. It was long after that that the Cassidys, father and daughter, came to live in it, and also the Harts. Their coming wrought no appreciable change, except that it added another and powerful one to the dynamic forces of the alley—jealousy. Kate is pretty. She is blonde and she is twenty. She greases plates in a pie bakery in Sullivan street by day, and so earns her own living. Of course she is a favorite. There isn’t a ball going on that she doesn’t attend, or a picnic either. It was at one of them, the last of the Hounds’ balls, that she met George Finnegan.

There weren’t many hours after that when they didn’t meet. He made the alley his headquarters by day and by night. On the morning after the ball he scandalized it by spooning with Kate from daybreak till nine o’clock. By the middle of the afternoon he was back again, and all night, till every one was asleep, he and Kate held the alley by main strength, as it were, the fact being that when they were in it no one could pass. Their spooning blocked it, blocked the way of the growler. The alley called it mean, and trouble began promptly.

After that things fell by accident out of the windows of the rear tenement when Kate and George Finnegan were sitting in the doorway. They tried to reduce the chances of a hit as much as might be by squeezing into the space of one, at which the alley jeered. Sometimes one of the tenants would jostle them in the yard and “give lip,” in the alley’s vernacular, and Kate would retort with dignity: “Excuse yerself. Ye don’t know who yer talkin’ to.”

It had to come to it, and it did. Finnegan had been continuing the siege since the warm weather set in. He was a good spieler, Kate gave in to that. But she hadn’t taken him for her steady yet, though the alley let on it thought so. Her steady is away at sea. George evidently thought the time ripe for cutting him out. His spooning ran into the small hours of the morning, night after night.

It was near 1 a. m. that morning when Thomas Hart came down to the yard, stumbled over the pair in the doorway, and made remarks. As he passed out of sight, George, the swain, said:

“If he gives any more lip when he comes back, I’ll swing on him.” And just then Hart came back.

He did “give lip,” and George “swung on him.” It took him in the eye, and he fell. Then he jumped on him and stove in his slats. Kate ran.

After all, George Finnegan was not game. When Hart’s wife came down to see who groaned in the yard, and, finding her husband, let out those blood-curdling yells which made Kate Cassidy hide in an ice-wagon half-way down the block, he deserted Kate and ran.

Mistress Hart’s yells brought Policeman Devery. He didn’t ask whence they came, but made straight for the alley. Mistress Hart was there, vowing vengeance upon “Kate Cassidy’s feller,” who had done up her man. She vowed vengeance in such a loud voice that the alley trembled with joyful excitement, while Kate, down the street, crept farther into the ice-wagon, trembling also, but with fear. Kate is not a fighter. She is too good-looking for that.

The policeman found her there and escorted her home, past the Hart door, after he had sent Mister Hart to the hospital, where the doctors fixed his slats (ribs, that is to say). Mistress Hart, outnumbered, fell back and organized an ambush, vowing that she would lay Kate out yet. Discovering that the Floods, next door, had connived at her enemy’s descent by way of their fire-escape, she included them in the siege by prompt declaration of war upon the whole floor.

The cause of it all, safe in the bakery, suspended the greasing of pie-plates long enough to give her version of the row:

“We were a-sittin’ there, quiet an’ peaceful like,” she said, “when Mister Hart came along an’ made remarks, an’ George he give it back to him good. ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘you ain’t a thousand; yer only one,’ an’ he went. When he came back, George he stood up, an’ Mister Hart he says to me: ‘Ye’re not an up-stairs girl; you can be called down,’ an’ George he up an’ struck him. I didn’t wait fer no more. I just run out of the alley. Is he hurted bad?

“Who is George? He is me feller. I met him at the Hounds’ ball in Germania Hall, an’ he treated me same as you would any lady. We danced together an’ had a couple of drinks, an’ he took me home. George ain’t me steady, you know. Me regular he is to sea. See?

“I didn’t see nothin’. I hid in the wagon while I heard him callin’ names. I wasn’t goin’ in till Mr. Deevy [Policeman Devery] he came along. I told him I was scart, and he said: ‘Oh, come along.’ But I was dead scart.

“Say, you won’t forget to come to our picnic, the ‘Pie-Girls,’ will you? It’ll be great.”

HEROES WHO FIGHT FIRE

THIRTEEN years have passed since, but it is all to me as if it had happened yesterday—the clanging of the fire-bells, the hoarse shouts of the firemen, the wild rush and terror of the streets; then the great hush that fell upon the crowd; the sea of upturned faces, with the fire-glow upon it; and up there, against the background of black smoke that poured from roof and attic, the boy clinging to the narrow ledge, so far up that it seemed humanly impossible that help could ever come.

But even then it was coming. Up from the street, while the crew of the truck company were laboring with the heavy extension-ladder that at its longest stretch was many feet too short, crept four men upon long, slender poles with cross-bars, iron-hooked at the end. Standing in one window, they reached up and thrust the hook through the next one above, then mounted a story higher. Again the crash of glass, and again the dizzy ascent. Straight up the wall they crept, looking like human flies on the ceiling, and clinging as close, never resting, reaching one recess only to set out for the next; nearer and nearer in the race for life, until but a single span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic window, reaching with impotent fury for its prey. The next moment they were safe upon the great ladder waiting to receive them below.

Then such a shout went up! Men fell on each other’s necks, and cried and laughed at once. Strangers slapped one another on the back, with glistening faces, shook hands, and behaved generally like men gone suddenly mad. Women wept in the street. The driver of a car stalled in the crowd, who had stood through it all speechless, clutching the reins, whipped his horses into a gallop, and drove away yelling like a Comanche, to relieve his feelings. The boy and his rescuer were carried across the street without any one knowing how. Policemen forgot their dignity, and shouted with the rest. Fire, peril, terror, and loss were alike forgotten in the one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.

Fireman John Binns was made captain of his crew, and the Bennett medal was pinned on his coat on the next parade-day. The burning of the St. George Flats was the first opportunity New York had of witnessing a rescue with the scaling-ladders that form such an essential part of the equipment of the fire-fighters to-day. Since then there have been many such. In the company in which John Binns was a private of the second grade, two others to-day bear the medal for brave deeds: the foreman, Daniel J. Meagher, and Private Martin M. Coleman, whose name has been seven times inscribed on the roll of honor for twice that number of rescues, any one of which stamped him as a man among men, a real hero. And Hook-and-Ladder No. 3 is not specially distinguished among the fire-crews of the metropolis for daring and courage. New-Yorkers are justly proud of their firemen. Take it all in all, there is not, I think, to be found anywhere a body of men as fearless, as brave, and as efficient as the Fire Brigade of New York. I have known it well for twenty years, and I speak from a personal acquaintance with very many of its men, and from a professional knowledge of more daring feats, more hairbreadth escapes, and more brilliant work, than could well be recorded between the covers of this book.

Indeed, it is hard, in recording any, to make a choice, and to avoid giving the impression that recklessness is a chief quality in the fireman’s make-up. That would not be true. His life is too full of real peril for him to expose it recklessly—that is to say, needlessly. From the time when he leaves his quarters in answer to an alarm until he returns, he takes a risk that may at any moment set him face to face with death in its most cruel form. He needs nothing so much as a clear head; and nothing is prized so highly, nothing puts him so surely in the line of promotion; for as he advances in rank and responsibility, the lives of others, as well as his own, come to depend on his judgment. The act of conspicuous daring which the world applauds is oftenest to the fireman a matter of simple duty that had to be done in that way because there was no other. Nor is it always, or even usually, the hardest duty, as he sees it. It came easy to him because he is an athlete trained to do just such things, and because once for all it is easier to risk one’s life in the open, in the sight of one’s fellows, than to face death alone, caught like a rat in a trap. That is the real peril which he knows too well; but of that the public hears only when he has fought his last fight, and lost.

How literally our every-day security—of which we think, if we think of it at all, as a mere matter of course—is built upon the supreme sacrifice of these devoted men, we realize at long intervals, when a disaster occurs such as the one in which Chief Bresnan and Foreman Rooney2 lost their lives three years ago. They were crushed to death under the great water-tank in a Twenty-fourth street factory that was on fire. Its supports had been burned away. An examination that was then made of the water-tanks in the city discovered eight thousand that were either wholly unsupported, except by the roof-beams, or propped on timbers, and therefore a direct menace, not only to the firemen when they were called there, but daily to those living under them. It is not pleasant to add that the department’s just demand for a law that should compel landlords either to build tanks on the wall or on iron supports has not been heeded yet; but that is, unhappily, an old story.

Seventeen years ago the collapse of a Broadway building during a fire convinced the community that stone pillars were unsafe as supports. The fire was in the basement, and the firemen had turned the hose on. When the water struck the hot granite columns, they cracked and fell, and the building fell with them. There were upon the roof at the time a dozen men of the crew of Truck Company No. 1, chopping holes for smoke-vents. The majority clung to the parapet, and hung there till rescued. Two went down into the furnace from which the flames shot up twenty feet when the roof broke. One, Fireman Thomas J. Dougherty, was a wearer of the Bennett medal, too. His foreman answers on parade-day, when his name is called, that he “died on the field of duty.” These, at all events, did not die in vain. Stone columns are not now used as supports for buildings in New York.

So one might go on quoting the perils of the firemen as so many steps forward for the better protection of the rest of us. It was the burning of the St. George Flats, and more recently of the Manhattan Bank, in which a dozen men were disabled, that stamped the average fire-proof construction as faulty and largely delusive. One might even go further, and say that the fireman’s risk increases in the ratio of our progress or convenience. The water-tanks came with the very high buildings, which in themselves offer problems to the fire-fighters that have not yet been solved. The very air-shafts that were hailed as the first advance in tenement-house building added enormously to the fireman’s work and risk, as well as to the risk of every one dwelling under their roofs, by acting as so many huge chimneys that carried the fire to the windows opening upon them in every story. More than half of all the fires in New York occur in tenement-houses. When the Tenement-House Commission of 1894 sat in this city, considering means of making them safer and better, it received the most practical help and advice from the firemen, especially from Chief Bresnan, whose death occurred only a few days after he had testified as a witness. The recommendations upon which he insisted are now part of the general tenement-house law.