How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
have been harmless young fellows enjoying themselves in peace, let me
say that within half an hour after our meeting, when I called at the
police station three blocks away, I found there two of my friends of
the "Montgomery Guards" under arrest for robbing a Jewish pedlar who
had passed that way after I left them, and trying to saw his head off,
as they put it, "just for fun. The sheeny cum along an' the saw was
there, an' we socked it to him." The prisoners were described to me by
the police as Dennis, "the Bum," and "Mud" Foley.
It is not always that their little diversions end as harmlessly as did
this, even from the standpoint of the Jew, who was pretty badly hurt.
Not far from the preserves of the Montgomery Guards, in Poverty Gap,
directly opposite the scene of the murder to which I have referred in
a note explaining the picture of the Cunningham family (p. 169), a
young lad, who was the only support of his aged parents, was beaten to
death within a few months by the "Alley Gang," for the same offence
that drew down the displeasure of its neighbors upon the pedlar: that
of being at work trying to earn an honest living. I found a part of the
gang asleep the next morning, before young Healey's death was known,
in a heap of straw on the floor of an unoccupied room in the same row
of rear tenements in which the murdered boy's home was. One of the
tenants, who secretly directed me to their lair, assuring me that no
worse scoundrels went unhung, ten minutes later gave the gang, to its
face, an official character for sobriety and inoffensiveness that very
nearly startled me into an unguarded rebuke of his duplicity. I caught
his eye in time and held my peace. The man was simply trying to protect
his own home, while giving such aid as he safely could toward bringing
the murderous ruffians to justice. The incident shows to what extent a
neighborhood may be terrorized by a determined gang of these reckless
toughs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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