The Battle with the SlumRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Battle with the Slum
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
ways of the country; and especially is it not lost on his boy.
[Footnote 30: The following is from the New York _Herald_ of April
8, 1902: One of the strangest sandwich complications so far recorded
occurred in a saloon in Columbia Street, Brooklyn, on Sunday. A boy
rushed into the Amity Street police station at noon, declaring that
two men in the saloon were killing each other. Two policemen ran to
the place, and found the bartender and a customer pummelling each
other on the floor. When the men had been separated the police
learned that the trouble had arisen from the attempt of the customer
to eat the sandwich which had been served with his drink. The
barkeeper objected, and, finding remonstrance in vain, resorted to
physical force to rescue the sandwich from the clutches of the
hungry stranger. The police restored the sandwich to the bartender
and made no arrests.]
We shall see how it affects him. He is the one for whom we are waging
the battle with the slum. He is the to-morrow that sits to-day drinking
in the lesson of the prosperity of the big boss who declared with pride
upon the witness stand that he rules New York, that judges pay him
tribute, and that only when _he_ says so a thing "goes"; and that he is
"working for his own pocket all the time just the same as everybody
else." He sees corporations pay blackmail and rob the people in return,
quite according to the schedule of Hester Street. Only there it is the
police who charge the pedler twenty cents, while here it is the
politicians taking toll of the franchises, twenty per cent. Wall Street
is not ordinarily reckoned in the slum, because of certain physical
advantages; but, upon the evidence of the day, I think we shall have to
conclude that the advantage ends there. The boy who is learning such
lessons,--how is it with him?
The president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
says that children's crime is increasing, and he ought to know. The
managers of the Children's Aid Society, after nearly fifty years of
wrestling with the slum for the boy, in which they have lately seemed to
get the upper hand, said recently, that on the East Side children are
growing up in certain districts "entirely neglected," and that the
number of such children "increases beyond the power of philanthropic and
religious bodies to cope properly with their needs." In the Tompkins
Square Lodging House the evening classes were thinning out, and the
keeper wailed, "Those with whom we have dealt of late have not been
inclined to accept this privilege; how to make night school attractive
to shiftless, indifferent street boys is a difficult problem to solve."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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