West Side

“ A word must be said, too, as to the selection of this particular West Side district of New York City. These 80 blocks which border upon the Hudson River, between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-fourth Streets, contrast sharply with almost all other tenement neighborhoods of the city. They have as nearly homogeneous and stable a population as can be found in any part of New York. The original stock was Irish and German. In each generation the bolder spirits moved away to more prosperous parts of the city. ”

“ HIS GAMES It would be impossible to describe the thousand and one uses to which the West Side boy puts his playground. After all, the street is not such a bad place to play in if you have known nothing better; and as you tumble out of school on a fine afternoon, ready for mischief, it offers you almost anything, from a fight with your best friend to a ride on the steps of an ice wagon. But certain games and sports are so universal in this district as to deserve separate mention. ”

“ They have shaken clear both from the ill-repaired and inconvenient houses and from the district’s reputation for “toughness.” Here and there a fairly well-to-do family has been held by the ownership of a business or a house, 60 or because to be a power even in a block like one of these is more satisfying than to be second elsewhere. Others have stayed from inertia, shaking their heads over lax West Side customs, but on the whole accepting them with the acquiescence of habit; and naturally, on the level of the neighborhood, they have entered into its life and made their friends here. ”

“ Truly they have a hard life, these West Side tenement mothers, and though many fail and many despair, from first to last the majority make a brave fight of it. When one is born to the lowest rung of the ladder and lives among people who seldom aspire beyond, existence becomes a difficult matter. How can the boy’s home be attractive when there is scarcely room to turn round in it, the family is large, and when year in and year out his mother is merely a drudge? How can his mother, under such conditions, hope to make the home rival the ever-changing lure of the streets? ”

“ The tall office buildings in the lower end of town look down upon river sights and shipping with a broad expanse of blue water and green shores which a man would cross the ocean to see on the other side. The Hudson beautifies the West Side. Central Park is in my eyes the most beautiful park I ever saw. With its rocks and rolling greens, its trees and wild flowers, it forms a spot of loveliness that makes in the midst of the hot, rushing, busy city a dream of soothing repose. ”

“ But what do they care! It’s all in the day’s play; and if the janitor objects, so much the better, for he can often be included in a game of chase.
Streets, roofs, docks, hallways,—these, then, are the West Side boy’s playground, and will be for many years to come. And what a playground it is! Day and night, workdays and holidays alike, the streets are never quiet, from the half-hour before the factory whistles blow in the early morning, when throngs of men and boys are hurrying off to work, to still earlier morning hours when they echo with the footsteps of the reveler returning home. ”

“ As for you, the folk who promenade the broad sidewalks are more worth your while. There are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east—for some strange reason that has long since brought about a similar phenomenon upon Broadway and sent west side rents high above those upon the east. Fifth avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, but in the very humans who tread her pavements. The New York girl may not always be beautiful but she is rarely anything but impeccable. ”

“ The problem of waywardness among West Side girls cannot be solved by long distance methods. Their environment must be made safe and their pleasures recognized and made decent. Some of the things which enlightened criminologists recommend for women in reformatories, after they have completely succumbed to the sort of conditions which abound on the West Side, are regular school attendance with manual training and flexible courses of study; regular hours for sleep, for food, for work, and for play; plenty of nourishing food; fresh air and outdoor life; the social discipline of community 18 life. ”

“ Unless a special and intelligent effort is made to secure individuality in the improvement of each of the public squares, parks and boulevards of a city, they are liable to repeat each other too much. The West Side parks of Chicago resemble each other to a regrettable degree. Each has its little, crooked lake, its green house and flower beds, its little lawns, its curving level drives and walks, its bridges and statues, its plantations mainly of the same selection of trees crowded and slim and only partially screening out surrounding houses. ”

“ The great drawback to normal life on the Middle West Side is that it is a dual neighborhood. Tenements and industrial establishments are so inextricably mixed that the demands of the family and the needs of industry and commerce are eternally in conflict. The same streets must be used for all purposes; and one of the chief sufferers is the boy. ”

“ And, indeed, every suggestion which will tend to lessen the troubles of the Middle West Side is peculiarly needed. The whole community—from molested property owners to the most disinterested social workers—are agreed that the worst elements rule the streets and that neither police nor court authority succeed in enforcing decency and order. And the center of the problem is the boy, for in him West Side lawlessness finds its most perennial and permanent expression. ”

“ From the midst of this squalid and disjointed home life one fact emerges—that the recreation of the West Side boy lies beyond the power of the family. To look to such homes as those of this district to counteract the tremendous forces that play upon him outside is as unreasonable as it is useless. Wretched as it is, the tenement home has an influence, usually vaguely restrictive, and in a few cases wise enough and strong enough to help a boy who is “steadying down” and “getting sensible”; but this influence can rarely bear the strain of competition with the pull of the street and the gang. ”

“ Repeating 253 W. 4th Street over and over he boarded an uptown car on Broadway. Walking west along 4th he skirted Washington Square. The trees spread branches of brittle purple into a dovecolored sky; the largewindowed houses opposite glowed very pink, nonchalant, prosperous. The very place for a lawyer with a large conservative practice to make his residence. We’ll just see about that. He crossed Sixth Avenue and followed the street into the dingy West Side, where there was a smell of stables and the sidewalks were littered with scraps of garbage and crawling children. ”

“ So far the boy’s attitude is normal. Childish antagonism to arbitrary authority is natural. In any large town it extends to the police. All over New York games are played with one eye on the corner and often with a small scout or two on the watch for the “cop.” 13 But at this point two facts differentiate the Middle West Side from the rest of the city, and make its situation peculiar. ”

“ The North Side in the city of Chicago may put on airs as a residence district, and the South Side may put on airs as containing the heart of the vast business district of Chicago, but the West Side is as big as the two of them, and its population contains a large number of exceedingly rich men, who, like the rich men of the other sides, are as content with themselves for being "self-made," are just as grumpy, and with as many weaknesses. ”

“ Why would a sophisticated Timesman choose the West Side over the East? "There are many more wonderful buildings on the West Side," says Goldberger. Unfortunately not many of the buildings on the West Side have been kept up as well as the East Side. ... In terms of apartment house architecture, Central Park West is probably the best street in New York. It has all the grandeur and beauty and monumentality of Fifth Avenue and it also has the relaxed atmosphere."
There's not one West Side," he continues. "There's at least 10. Around here is one neighborhood. ”

“ Plunging in the electric cars through the river subway, and emerging in the West Side, you realise that the slums of Chicago, if not quite so tightly packed as those of New York or London, are no whit behind them in the other essentials of civilised barbarism. ”

“ The Upper West Side is composed entirely of people born in New York who want to be in society, whatever that is, and can't afford to live on Fifth Avenue. You know everybody and went to school with everybody and played in the Park with everybody, and mostly your papa is in wholesale trade and haughty about people in retail. ”

“ Across the reservoir lakes the jewelled night-zone of the West Side sparkled, reflected across the water in points of trembling flame; south, a gemmed bar of topaz light, upright against the sky, marked the Plaza; beyond, sprinkled into space like constellations dusting endless depths, the lights of the city receded far as the eye could see.
In the zenith the sky is always tinted with the strange, sinister night-glow of the metropolis, red as fire-licked smoke when fog from the bay settles, pallid as the very shadow of light when nights are clear ”

“ On the West Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly uptown, against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying his home, his church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality. ”

“ Surrounding the factories on all sides, wedged between tall, noisy buildings, standing almost alone in a block of lumber and wagon yards, or sometimes occupying entire blocks to the exclusion of everything else, they rise singly, in groups, or in rows along the streets and avenues, ugly, monotonous, of an indistinguishable sameness. Most of them face squarely up to the sidewalk, with no areaway in front, behind them narrow cement-paved courts, round which the shabby walls rear themselves, cutting off sunlight and giving to each little well of air-space the gloominess of a cañon. ”

“ RESTLESS, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. ”

“ Twelfth Avenue adjoins the Hudson River, losing itself here and there in wharves and pier-heads. Two of the piers belong to the city, one being devoted to the disposal of garbage, the other to recreation. Factories and an occasional saloon are on the inland side, but there are almost no shacks or tenements.
At first sight there are no striking features about the Middle West Side. Hand-to-mouth existence reduces living to a universal sameness which has little time or place for variety. In street after street are the same crowded and unsanitary tenements ”

“ You can see how different they are to these prim rows on the West Side!"
"Which stand for happiness, and, accordingly, more or less for dulness."
"There's a good deal of nonsense talked and written about the slums, Hartley, and they're wept and prayed and shuddered over, through lorgnettes, but, after all, you hear about as much laughing on Hester Street as you do on West End Avenue."
Hartley recalled the sounds that crept up to his little tenement room of a hot midsummer night. "And quite as much weeping." ”

“ Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. ”

“ The boy’s inner life is bleak and wretched because every normal instinct of youth, all the qualities of which future men are made, have been sapped and stunted by the gray, grim neighborhood in which even play is crime. There are ten thousand hopeless little tragedies on the Middle West Side today; and our only answer to their appeal is to call for the police.
If the school is at a disadvantage in its labors to build up character, the juvenile court is even more so. A day at court is a transient experience and soon forgotten. ”

“ Such is the average tenement home, abiding place of our West Side boy and his family. In a very large number of cases the family is a “broken” one.21
As regards ambitions and ideals, the word “home” may stand for anything from the thrifty German household with its level head for the budget to a down-at-the-heels, loose-hinged group of people who share the same abiding place, but scarcely claim the name of family. Of course, it must be remembered that this is a neighborhood from which the sturdiest, those having the lucky combination of prosperity, vigor, and ambition, have pulled away. ”

“ The desire to play is strong in her. Lack-luster resignation and pessimism are rare among the young even where poverty weighs most heavily. The girl’s buoyant spirit breaks loose at the instant of release from factory walls or from the momentary depression of family want. It bubbles forth in girls’ laughter and girls’ play, and in girls’ capricious, whimsical, egoistic moods.
The West Side girl is an independent young person. She has seen a good deal of the world. She has the early sophistication bred of a crowded, close-pressed life. ”