From the Bottom Up Part 11

Doc laughed and made some explanations. They had a wheezy old organ in Halloran's dive, and Doc kept it in repair and played occasionally for them. Doc had a Rip Van Winkle look. His hair hung down his back, and his clothes were threadbare and green with age. His shoes were tied to his feet with wire, and stockings he had none. Doc had studied in a Medical College until the eve of his graduation. Then he slipped a cog and went down, down, down, until he landed at Halloran's dive.

For twelve years he had been selling penny song-sheets on the streets and in saloons. He was usually in rags, but a score of the wildest inhabitants of that dive told me that Doc was their "good angel." He could play the songs of their childhood, he was kind and gentle, and men couldn't be vulgar in his presence.

I saw in Doc an unusual man, and was able to persuade him to go home with me. In a week he was a new man, clothed and in his right mind. He became librarian of a big church library, and our volunteer organist at all the Sunday meetings.

After two years of uninterrupted service as librarian, during which time Doc had been of great service in the bunk-house, I lost him. Five years later, crossing Brooklyn Bridge on a car, I pa.s.sed Doc who was walking in the same direction. At the end of the bridge I planted myself in front of him. "Doc," I said, "you will never get away from me again." I took him to New Haven, where he has been ever since.

It is needless to say that several years' work in the midst of such surroundings gives one a hopeless outlook for that kind of work. In 1891 a movement to establish a munic.i.p.al lodging house was organized, and I became part of it. A committee composed largely of business men met in the office of Killaen Van Ransellaer, 56 Wall Street. In discussing the plan of a munic.i.p.al lodging house, the "Wayfarers Lodge" in Boston, an inst.i.tution of the character under discussion, was pointed out as a model, and it was decided to send a representative to Boston to investigate and make a report on it.

I was suspicious of the printed report of the Boston place. It spoke of the men getting clean bedding, clean sheets and good meals; and experience was teaching me that that kind of catering for the tramp would swamp any inst.i.tution. Then, I knew something about the padding of charitable reports. I did not care to offer any objection to the sending of a representative, but I determined to go myself; so, dressed in an old cotton shirt with collar attached, a ragged coat, a battered hat and with exactly the railroad fare in my pocket, I went to Boston. I stopped a policeman on the street, told him I was homeless and hungry. "Go to the Police Station," he said, and knowing that at each Police Station tickets of admission were served, I presented myself to the Sergeant at the desk.

Furnished with a ticket, I went to No. 30 Hawkins Street, and there fell in line with a crowd of the same kind of people I was working with and for on the Bowery. We had about an hour to wait. When it came my turn for examination, I was rather disturbed to find the representative of the committee sitting beside the superintendent, investigating the tramps as they pa.s.sed. I knew he could not recognize me by my clothes, but I was not so certain about my voice, so I spoke in a low tone.

"Open your mouth," the superintendent said. "Where are you from?"

I kept my eyes on the ground and answered a little louder, "Ireland."

"You are lying," the superintendent said. "Where are you from?"

"Ireland," I answered again in the same tone.

Two kinds of checks lay on the table in front of him--one pile green, the other red. After answering the rest of the questions, I was given a red check and taken to a cell where a black man stripped me to the skin.

"Why did I get a red card while most of the others got a green card?"

I asked.

"You're lousy, boss, dat's why."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"Steam 'em." So he tied my clothes in a bundle and put them under a pressure of two hundred and fifty pounds of steam, the coloured man remarking as he stowed them away: "What's left of 'em when they come out, boss, aint gwine to do no harm." Then I was marched, sockless, with my shoes on and a metal check strung around my neck, to the bath where I was taken charge of by another coloured man.

"Here!" he said, as he pointed to an empty tub. I bathed myself to his satisfaction and then looked for the clean towels of the "Annual Report," but found them not. Instead, there was a pile of towels already used--towels made of crash--and I was told to select the driest of them and dry myself.

"I was clean when I went into that tub," I said to the black man--"I am cleaner now; but if I dry myself with this sodden piece of crash, I will be dirtier than when I began." The black man proceeded to force me to do this and his attempt nearly ended the experiment, for I refused pointblank to do it. "No, thank you," I said, "I will walk up and down until I dry."

When the superintendent of that department was called into counsel, my use of English rather surprised him, and he let it go at that. Then we were marched upstairs to bed; there were one hundred and fifty beds in a big dormitory. I looked around for the linen of the "Annual Report,"

and was again disappointed. The cots were furnished with horse blankets.

The method of arousing the men in the early morning was rather unique.

A man with a stick--a heavy stick that reminded me of an Irish flail--thumped the bare floor, and, to my astonishment, there was a rush of this savage-looking, naked crowd to the door. As I knew no reason for the excitement, I took my time.

I followed the men to the boiler-room, where, after calling out my number, I got the bundle corresponding to it, and it looked like a crow's nest. Everybody around me was hustling to get his clothes on, boiled or unboiled; and again I was mystified as to the hurry. When I arrived in the yard, I discovered the reason for this unusual activity of my parishioners. The first men out in the yard had a cord of wood each to saw, and it took twice as long to chop as it did to saw it.

Those who were last had to chop. I took my axe and began my task. Soon the splinters were flying in all directions. The man next to me was rather put out by this activity and said that if he wanted to work like that he could do it outside.

"This ain't no place to work like that," he said; then he began to expectorate over my block and annoy me in that way. I tried a few words of gentle persuasion on him, but it made him worse. He bespattered my hands and the axe handle, and I took him by the neck and ran him to the other end of the yard and dumped him in a corner.

Any kind of a fuss in that yard had usually a very serious ending; but this had not, for the yard superintendent took my part.

I think it was about eleven o'clock in the forenoon when I finished my wood, and went in to get breakfast, which consisted of a bowl of gruel and two hard biscuits. One of these biscuits I kept hanging in my study for two years. After breakfast I marched into the office, and said to the superintendent:

"Brother, I want to ask you a few questions which belong to a domain--that mysterious domain that lies between the facts and your 'Annual Report.'"

"Are you a reporter?" was his first question.

a.s.suring him that I was not, I asked him the necessary questions, and, furnished with some real information, I returned to the Wall Street Conference.

I think John H. Finley of the City College was the representative, and he rendered his report. Then I stood up and told of my experience which differed vitally from the re-hash of the "Annual Report." The facts, as I found them, were all in favour of such an inst.i.tution. A man would have to be mighty hard up to go to the Boston munic.i.p.al lodging house; and that is exactly what was needed. The necessity for padding the "Annual Report" I could never find out.

The munic.i.p.al lodging house agitated at that time is now a fact. It has been duplicated. On February 19th, 1893, in the Church of the Covenant on Park Avenue, I made the suggestion, and it was published in the papers the following day, that there was a splendid opportunity for a philanthropist to invest a few million dollars at five per cent. in a few lodging houses on a gigantic scale. What connection the Mills Hotels bear to that suggestion, I do not know, but they are the exact fulfilment of it.

A few years in that work gave me a terrific feeling of hopelessness, and I longed for some other form of church work where I could obviate some of the work of the Bowery. The best a man could do on the Bowery was to save a few old stranded wrecks; but the work among children appealed to me now with far greater force. I also saw the necessity of the preacher touching not only the spiritual side of a man, but the material side also. A preacher's function, as I understood it after these experiences, was to touch the whole round sphere of life.

CHAPTER XI

A CHURCH IN THE GHETTO

About this time the old church of Sea and Land at the corner of Market and Henry streets was to be put up for auction. The New York Presbytery wanted to sell it and devote most of the money to the building up of uptown churches. I was sent there by the missionary society to hold the place until they got a good price for it. I gathered the trustees around me--a splendid band of devout men, mostly young men--and I did not need to tell them that it was a forlorn hope.

They already knew it.

We outlined a plan of campaign to save the church for that community, and the result is that the church is there to-day. Of course, the district is largely Jewish, but there were enough Gentiles to fill a dozen churches.

It was inevitable that we should get in touch with the Jewish children. We had a kindergarten, but made it known to the Jewish community that we were not in the business of proselyting, and that they need have no hesitation in sending their children to our kindergarten, which was a great blessing to the whole community.

Sunday evenings in the spring and fall, I spoke to large congregations of Jewish people from the steps of the church, on the spirit of Jewish history--as to what it had done for the world and what it could still do.

I think it was in the early part of 1893 that I began my work there.

It was the year of the panic, and the East Side was in a general state of stringency and starvation. A group of ministers of various denominations got together and devised a plan for a cheap restaurant in which we were to sell meals at cost.

Probably for the first time in the history of New York, a Roman Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist pastors sat down around a table to talk over the welfare of the people. A committee was formed, and I nominated the Catholic priest for chairman. He was elected. The restaurant did not last very long, and probably the chief good of the thing was the getting together of these men. Difficulties, of course, came thick and fast. Kosher meat for the Jews, fish for the Catholics on Friday, and any old thing for the Gentiles, were the smallest of the difficulties to be overcome.

I was supported in my church work by a band of young men and women, mostly from a distance, who gave their services freely, and in the course of a year or two, we managed to increase the church membership by a hundred or so, and occasionally we filled the structure by serving out refreshments to the lodging-house men of the Bowery. I had an opportunity to touch the social needs of the community by cooperating with the University Settlement which was then in its infancy. I opened the church edifice for their lecture course which included Henry George, Father McGlyn, Thaddeus B. Wakeman, Daniel de Leon, Charles B. Spahr, and W.J. Sullivan. Sixteen years ago these men were the moving spirits in their respective lines in New York City.

The New York Presbytery was not altogether pleased by this new departure in church work; but we had the lectures first, and asked permission afterward. Most of these men filled the church to overflowing. In the case of Father McGlyn, hundreds had to be turned away.

As I sat beside Father McGlyn in the pulpit, I said, "Father, how do you stand with the Pope, these days? What is the status of the case?"

"Well, Irvine," he said, "I can best explain it by a dream that I had some time ago. I dreamed that a young priest visited me with the intention of getting me to recant. 'McGlyn,' he said, 'if you don't recant, you'll be d.a.m.ned!' And I thought for a minute or two and then gave the only answer that a man with a conscience could give: 'Well, brother, I'll be d.a.m.ned if I do!'"

I found myself drifting quietly out of old methods of church work, and attempting, at least, to apply religion to the conditions around me. Every aspect of social life was in need of remedial treatment. Of course, I did not neglect the religious teaching, but what the situation demanded was ethical teaching, and, without making any splurge about my change of view, I worked at whatever my hand found to do in that immediate neighbourhood.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Alexander Irvine.

From a sketch by Juliet Thompson]

The push-cart men and organ-grinders were terrorized by the policemen.

I hired an organ-grinder one summer afternoon to play for several hours, so that the children of the neighbourhood might have a dance on the street. It was a joy to my soul to see these little bits of half-naked humanity dancing by the hundreds on the streets and sidewalks, most of them barefooted, hatless and coatless. It was on one of these occasions that I discovered the petty graft exercised on the organ-grinders. The push-cart men all paid toll to the policeman on the beat, and the captain of the precinct winked at it. The officers of the precinct looked upon the religious leaders as "easy marks"--every one of them. The detectives of the Society for Prevention of Crime went through my parish and discovered wholesale violations of excise laws and city ordinances by the existence of bawdy-houses and the selling of liquor in prohibited hours and on Sundays. The captain of the precinct came out with a public statement that these men were liars; that the law was observed and prost.i.tution did not exist. As between Dr. Parkhurst and the captain of the precinct, the public was inclined to believe the captain.