CHAPTER IIIHIS GAMES

aFor the classification of these arrests according to the court charges see Chapter VI, The Boy and the Court, p. 82.

Not only is this table extraordinarily interesting in itself, but its importance to our investigation is inestimable, because it brings out certain features of the problem with a vividness which could not be equaled in pages of discussion or narrative.

On the one hand, it is noticeable how large a proportionof the arrests are for offenses which are more or less excusable in these boys. Almost every one of their offenses is due to one of four causes: neglect on the part of the parent, the pressure of poverty, the expression of pure boyish spirits, or the attempt to play. Thievery, for instance, particularly the stealing of coal from the docks or railroad tracks, is quite often encouraged at home. “Johnnie is a good boy,” said one mother quite frankly. “He keeps the coal and wood box full nearly all the time. I don’t have to buy none.” And her attitude is typical. Shouting and singing too, and even loitering, do not seem on the face of them overwhelmingly wicked. Of course, boys sometimes choose the most impossible times and places in which to shout and sing, but is no allowance to be made for “the spirit of youth”? And as for the arrests for play, they speak for themselves. Some of these games, played when and where they are played, are unquestionably dangerous to passersby and property, while others are simply forms of gambling. But it must be remembered that the West Side boy has nowhere else to play; that his games are the games which he sees around him, and he plays them because no one has taught him anything better. The policeman, however, has no interest in the responsibility of the boys for their offenses; he is concerned merely with offenses as such, and his arrests must be determined chiefly by opportunity and by rule. All that we can ask of him is to be tolerant, broad-minded, and sympathetic—a request with which he will find it difficult enough to comply if only because of the atmosphere of hostility against him.

On the other hand, it is remarkable how seldom theboys are caught for very serious offenses.12Most of the arrests shown here are for causes which are comparatively trifling. Yet the whole neighborhood seethes with the worst kinds of criminality, and many of the boys are almost incredibly vicious. Stabbing, assault, the use of firearms, acts of immorality, do not appear in this table to an extent remotely approximating the frequency with which they occur. In other words, the police absolutely fail to cover the ground. Although a large proportion of arrests does take place, they are mostly on less important charges, and often involve any one but the young criminal whose capture is really desirable. The little sister of one boy who was “taken” expressed the position exactly when she said, “The only time Jimmy was caught was when he wasn’t doin’ anything bad.”

In this way it happens that the fact of a boy’s arrest is no clue to his character. Again and again boys “get away with” their worst crimes, secretly committed, in which they are protected from discovery by the neighborhood’s code of ethics; whereas for minor offenses, of which they are openly guilty, they are far more likely to be arrested. Some of the worst offenders may never be caught at all. And if one of them is taken, it is probably for some technical misdemeanor which the officer has used less for its own importance than as a pretext for getting the boy into court. What is the result? The policeman is lectured by the judge for being an oppressor of the poor, and the boy is discharged, though his previous record would entitle him to a severe sentence, as both boy and policeman know.

Not unnaturally, respect for the court is soon lost,and an arrest quickly comes to be treated with indifference, or is looked upon merely as a piece of bad luck, like a licking or a broken window. One boy recounted recently with amusement how he moved the judge to let him off: “I put on a solemn face and says, ‘Judge, I didn’t mean to do it; I’ll promise not to do it again,’ and a lot of stuff like that, and the judge gives me a talkin’ to and lets me go.” “Gee, that court was easy!” was the comment of another. “You can get away with anything down there except murder.” Experiences in the juvenile court are invariably related with a boyish contempt for the judges, who are looked upon either as “easy guys to work” or as “a lot of crooks” who “get theirs” out of their jobs. And so the boy comes back to the streets, and plays there more selfishly and more recklessly than ever.

His activities are not confined to the block in which he lives or even to the streets of his neighborhood. Any kind of space, from a roof or an area to a cellar or an empty basement, is utilized as an addition to the playground. But two places attract him particularly. All the year around at some time of day or night you can find him on the docks. In summer they provide a ball ground, in winter, coal for his family, and always a hiding place from the truant officer or the police. Here along the river front he bathes in the hot weather, encouraged by the city’s floating bath which anchors close by, and regardless of the fact that the water is filthy with refuse and sewage. In the stifling evenings, too, when the band plays on the recreation pier and there are lights and crowds and “somethin’ goin’ on,” he is again drawn toward the water.

Wading in Sewage Laden Water

A “Den” Under the Dock

And next to the streets and docks he loves the hallways.There is something about those dark, narrow passages which makes them seem built for gangs to meet or play or plot in. The youth of the district and his girl find other uses for them, but the boy and his playmates have marked them for their games. Neighbors who have no other place to “hang around in” may protest, but the boys play on. They dirty the floors, disturb the tenements by their noises, run into people, and if they are lying here in wait are apt to chip away the wainscoting or tear the burlap off the walls. 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. All day long an endless procession of wagons, drays, and trucks, with an occasional automobile, jolts and clatters up and down the avenue. Now and then an ambulance or undertaker’s cart arrives, drawing its group of curious youngsters to watch the casket or stretcher carried out. Drunken men are omnipresent, and drunken women are seen. Street fights are frequent, especially in the evening, and, except for police annoyance or when “guns” come into play, are generally regarded as diversions. Every crime, every villainy, every form of sexual indulgence and perversion is practiced in the district and talkedof openly. The sacredness of life itself finds no protecting influence in these blocks. There is no rest, no order, no privacy, no spaciousness, no simplicity; almost nothing that youth, the city’s everlasting hope, should have, almost everything that it should not.

A family from another state moved recently into one of these tenements. The only child, a boy of fifteen, after several tentative efforts to reconcile himself to street life, came in and announced his intention of staying in the flat in leisure time thereafter, as he was shocked and his finer feelings were hurt by what he saw of the street life around him. His mother tried to persuade him to go out, but the boy told her she had no idea what she was doing, and refused to go. He attempted to take his airings on the roof, but was ordered down by the janitor. Finally he yielded to his mother’s persuasion and went back to the street. Within three months this boy, a type of the bright, clean boyhood of our smaller towns, had become marked by dissipation and had once even come home intoxicated.

What chance has the best of boys who must spend two-thirds of his school days in such a playground? What wonder that he becomes a callous young criminal, when the very conditions of his play lead him to crime? The whole influence of such conditions on a child’s life can never be gauged. But just as apart from his traditions and background he is incomprehensible as a boy, so, as a wanton little ruffian, he is unintelligible apart from his playground. This develops his play into mischief and his mischief into crime. It educates him superficially in the worst sides of life, and makes him cynical, hard, and precocious. It takesfrom him everything that is good; almost everything that it gives him is bad. Its teachings and tendencies are not civic but anti-social, and the boy reflects them more and more. Every year he adds to a history of lawless achievement which the court, police, and institutions alike have proved powerless to prevent. And every day the Middle West Side bears witness to the truth of the saying that “a boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job.”

Itwould 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.

Spring is the season for marbles. On any clear day in March or February you may find the same scene on roadway and sidewalks of every block—a huddle of multicolored marbles in the middle of a ring, and a group of excited youngsters, shrieking, quarreling, and tumbling all over each other, just outside the circle. Instead of the time-honored chalk ring the boys often use the covers of a manhole, whose corrugated iron surface offers obstacles and therefore gives opportunity for unusual skill. Another game consists in shooting marbles to a straight line drawn along the middle of the sidewalk; thus one such game may be continued through the whole length of the block. In another the marbles are pitched against a brick wall or against the curbstone, and the boy whose marbles stop closest to a chalked mark wins the marbles of all competitors.

As the fall days grow shorter and the afternoons more crisp, bonfires become the rage. The small boy has an aptitude for finding wood at need in places where one would suppose that no fuel of any kind would be obtainable. A careless grocer leaves a barrel of waste upon the sidewalk. In five minutes’ time that barrel may be burning in the middle of the street with a group of cheering youngsters warming their hands at the blaze, or watching it from their seats on the curbstone. The grocer may berate the boys and threaten disaster to the one who lit the barrel, but he is seldom able to find the culprit. Before the barrel is completely burned some youngster produces a stick or two which he has found in an areaway or pulled from a passing wagon, and adds it to the fire. Stray newspapers, bits of excelsior, rags, and even garbage are contributed to keep the fire going, regardless of the effect on the olfactory nerves of the neighborhood. The police extinguish these fires whenever they can, but the small boy meets this contingency by posting scouts, and on the alarm of “Cheese it!” the fire is stamped out and the embers are hastily concealed. The “cop” sniffs at the smoke and looks at the boys suspiciously, but suspicions do not bother the boys—they are used to them—and when he has passed on down the street the fragments of the fire are reassembled and lighted again. On a cold evening one may see half a dozen of these bonfires flaming in different directions, each with a group of small figures playing around them. Sticks are thrust into the fire and waved in figures in the air; and among them very often circle larger and brighter spots of light which glow into a full flame when the motion ceases. These are fire pots, aningenious invention consisting of an empty tomato can with a wire loop attached to the top by which to swing it, and filled with burning wood. This amusement might seem harmless enough if it were not for the fact that these fire pots, being of small boy construction, have an unfortunate habit of slipping from the wire loop just as they are being most rapidly hurled.

On election night, until recently, the boys’ traditional right of making bonfires has been observed. These bonfires are sometimes elaborate. As early as the middle of October the youngsters begin hoarding wood for the great occasion. They pile the fuel in the rear of a tenement or in the areaway or basement of some friendly grocer, or perhaps in a vacant lot or at the rear of a factory. Frequently to save their plunder they find it necessary to post guards for the few days preceding election, and even so, bonfire material often becomes the center of a furious gang fight. A few of the stronger gangs have a settled policy of letting some other gang collect their fuel for them, and then raiding them at the last minute. The victors carry the wood back triumphantly to their own block, and the vanquished are left either to collect afresh or to make reprisal on a still weaker gang. This kind of warfare continues even while the fires are burning on election night. A gang will swoop down unawares on a rival bonfire, scatter the burning material, and retire with the unburnt pieces to their own block.13A recent election time, however, proved a gloomy one for the little West Siders. Wagons appeared in the streets, filled with fire hose and manned by firemen and police. The police scattered the boys while the firemen drenched the fires,and by 8 o’clock the streets, formerly so picturesque and so dangerous, presented a sad and sober appearance. The tenement lights shone out on heaps of blackened embers and on groups of despairing youngsters who were not even permitted to stand on the corners and contemplate the destruction of their evening’s festivities.

In the winter the shortcomings of the street as a playground are especially evident. Frost and sleet and a bitter wind give few compensations for the discomfort which they bring. Traffic, the street cleaning department, and the vagaries of the New York climate, make most ways of playing in the snow impossible. But snowballing continues, in spite of the efforts of the police to prevent it. It is open to the same objections as baseball in the street, for the freedom which is possible in the small towns or in the country cannot be tolerated in a crowded district where a snowball which misses one mark is almost certain to hit another. Moreover, owing to the facility with which these boys take to dangerous forms of sport, the practice of making snowballs with a stone or a piece of coal in the middle and soaking them in ice water is even more prevalent here than in most other localities. Of course, snowballing is forbidden and abhorred by the neighborhood, and everyone takes a hand in chastising the juvenile snowball thrower. Nevertheless, the afternoon of the first fall is sure to bring a snow fight, and the innocent passerby is likely to be involuntarily included in the game.

Marbles and bonfires and snowballs are the sports of the smaller boys exclusively, but other games which are less seasonal are played by old and young alike.“Shooting craps,” for instance, and pitching or matching pennies, are occupations which endure all the year round and are participated in by grown men as well as by boys. On a Sunday morning dozens of crap games are usually in full swing along the streets. Only two players handle the dice, but almost any number of bystanders can take part by betting amongst themselves on the throw—“fading,” as it is called. Pennies, dimes, or dollar bills, according to the prosperity of the bettor, will be thrown upon the sidewalk, for craps is one of the cheapest and most vicious forms of gambling, since there is absolutely no restriction in the betting. Perfect strangers may join in at will if the players will let them, and there are innumerable opportunities for playing with crooked dice. It is one of the chief forms of sidewalk amusements in this neighborhood.

Up above the sidewalks, on the roofs of the tenements, there is some flying of small kites, but pigeon flying is the chief sport. It provides an occupation less immediately remunerative, perhaps, than games of chance, but developed by the same unmoral tendencies which seem to turn all play in the district into vice. Some boys, through methods of accretion peculiar to this neighborhood, have a score or more of pigeons which are kept in the house, and taken up to the roof regularly every Sunday, and oftener during the summer, for exercise. The birds are tamed and carefully taught to return to their home roofs after flight, but ingenious boys have discovered many ways of luring them to alien roofs, so that now the sport of pigeon flying is as dangerously exciting as a commercial venture in the days of the pirates. Pigeon owners also train their birds to circle about the neighborhood andbring back strangers. These strangers are taken inside, fed, and accustomed to the place before they are released again. On Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings the pigeons are to be seen flying around the neighborhood, while behind the chimneys of every fourth or fifth tenement house are crouched one or two small boys armed with long sticks, occasionally giving a low peculiar whistle to attract the pigeons coming from distant roofs. The sticks have a triple use. Pigeon owners use them to force their pigeons to fly for exercise; the little pigeon thieves on the roofs have a net on the end of their sticks for catching the bird when it alights; and most pigeons are trained to remain passive at the touch of the stick so that they may be picked up easily by their owner. This training, of course, operates to the advantage of the thief as well as of the owner, and valuable birds are sometimes lured away and held for ransom.

Pigeon Flying. A Roof Game

Marbles. A Street Game

The two chief sports of the Middle West Side—baseball and boxing—are perennial. The former, played as it always is, with utter carelessness and disregard of surroundings, is theoretically intolerable, but it flourishes despite constant complaints and interference. The diamond is marked out on the roadway, the bases indicated by paving bricks, sticks, or newspapers. Frequently guards are placed at each end of the block to warn of the approach of police. One minute a game is in full swing; the next, a scout cries “Cheese it!” Balls, bats, and gloves disappear with an alacrity due to a generation of practice, and when the “cop” appears round the corner the boys will be innocently strolling down the streets. Notwithstanding these precautions, as the juvenile court recordsshow, they are constantly being caught. In a great majority of these match games too much police vigilance cannot be exercised, for a game between a dozen or more boys, of from fourteen to eighteen years of age, with a league ball, in a crowded street, with plate glass windows on either side, becomes a joke to no one but the participants. A foul ball stands innumerable chances of going through the third-story window of a tenement, or of making a bee line through the valuable plate glass window of a store on the street level, or of hitting one of the passersby. And if the hit is a fair one, it is as likely as not to land on the forehead of a restive horse, or to strike some little child on the sidewalk farther down the street. When one sees the words “Arrested for playing with a hard ball in a public street” written on a coldly impersonal record card in the children’s court one is apt to become indignant. But when you see the same hard ball being batted through a window or into a group of little children on this same public street, the matter assumes an entirely different aspect.

Clearly, from the community’s point of view, the playing of baseball in the street is rightly a penal offense. It annoys citizens, injures persons and property, and interferes with traffic. But for all that, it is not abolished, and probably under present municipal conditions never will be, simply because there is another point of view, that of the boy, and his protest against its suppression is almost equally unanswerable. The store windows are filled with a tempting array of baseball gloves and bats offered at prices as close as possible to his means, and every effort is made by responsible business men, who themselves know the lawand the need for order on the streets, to induce him to buy them. Selling the boy those bats and balls is a form of business and is perfectly legal. And the boy cannot see why, after having paid his money for them, the merchant should have all the benefit of the transaction. The game is in itself perfectly harmless; and childhood has an abiding resentment against apparently inexplicable injustice. Perhaps the small boy believes that except for the odds against him his right to make use of the street in his own way is as assured as that of anyone else. Perhaps he reflects that he too has to make sacrifices; that a broken window means usually a lost ball, and a damaged citizen, a ruined game. At any rate he continues to play, and as things are, has a fairly good case for doing so.

This neighborhood is also full of regularly organized ball teams, ranging in the age of players from ten to thirty years. Many of the large factories have teams made up of their own employes. Almost every street gang has its own team, as has almost every social club. These teams meet in regularly matched games, on the waterfront, in the various city parks, or over in New Jersey. Practically all the teams, old and young alike, play for stakes, ranging from two to five dollars a side. When they do not, they call it simply a “friendly” game. There is no organization among them; one team challenges another, and the two will decide on some place to play the game. A few of the adult teams lease Sunday grounds in New Jersey, but most of them trust to the chance of finding one. The baseball leaders of the neighborhood usually have uniforms, and to belong to a uniformed team is one of the great ambitions of the West Side boy.

Down on the waterfront the broad, smooth quays offer a tempting place for baseball, especially on Sundays and summer evenings, when they are generally bare of freight. But it has one serious drawback, that a foul ball on one side invariably goes into the river, and the players must have either several balls or a willing swimmer if the game is to continue long. One Sunday game, for instance, between two fourteen-year-old teams, played near the water, cost five balls, varying in price from 50 cents to $1.00 each. The game was played before a scrap-iron yard, the high fence of which was used as a backstop. Fifty feet to the right was the Hudson River. Within a hundred feet of second base, in the center field, a slip reached from the line of the river to the street, which was just beyond third base on the other side. Behind the sixteen-foot fence of the scrap-iron yard were a savage dog at large and a morose watchman to keep out river thieves. Thus hemmed in by water on two sides, a street car line and a row of glass windows on the third side, and a high fence, a savage dog, and a watchman on the fourth, the boys started the game. In the first inning a new dollar ball was fouled over the fence into the scrap-iron yard and the watchman refused to let the boys in to hunt for it. The game was stopped while a deputation of boys from both sides walked up to a nearby street to buy a new fifty-cent ball. The first boy up when the game was resumed batted this ball into the Hudson River, where a youthful swimmer got it, and climbing ashore down the river, made away with it. A third ball was secured, and before the game was half over this ball was batted into the river, where it lodged underneath a barge full of paving stones whichwas made fast to the dock, and could not be recovered. Then a fourth ball was produced. This lasted till the game was almost finished, though it was once batted deep into center field, where it bounced into the slip and stopped the game while it was being fished out. Finally it followed the first ball into the scrap-iron yard, and neither taunts nor pleas could move the obdurate watchman to let the boys in to find it. The game was finished with a fifth ball which was the personal property of one of the boys. On the occasion of another game in this same place two balls were batted into the scrap-iron yard and lost while the teams were warming up before the match began. A third ball was batted into the river twice but both times it was recovered. Baseball is played on the docks unmodified, but in the streets the boys make use of various adaptations, some of which dispense with the bat and in consequence lessen the dangers of the game.

Ball playing continues sporadically all the year round, and never loses popularity, but it is, of course, mainly a game for the summer. During the winter among the small boys, youths, and men alike, boxing is the all-absorbing sport. It is hard for an outsider to understand the tremendous hold which prize fighting has upon the boys in a neighborhood of this kind. Fights are of course of common occurrence, not only among children but among grown men. This in itself gives a great impetus to the study of the art of self-defense. Good fighters become known early in this district. Professional prize fighters are everywhere; and for every boy who has actually succeeded in getting into the prize ring on one or more occasions, there are a dozen who are eager and anxious for an opportunity.The various athletic clubs of the city always offer chances to boys from fourteen to sixteen years old to appear in the “preliminaries,” as the boxing contests which precede the main bout of the evening are called. A boy who gains a reputation as a street fighter and boxer will be recommended to the manager of an athletic club as a likely aspirant. He is given a chance to box in one or two rounds with another would-be prize fighter in a “preliminary.” If he makes a good showing, he is paid from five to fifteen dollars according to his ability and experience, and is given another chance. If he can continue to make favorable appearances in these preliminaries, he will soon be given a chance of taking part in a six or eight-round bout at one of the smaller athletic clubs, and from that time on he takes regular status as a prize fighter, and accordingly becomes a hero in his circle of youthful acquaintances. There are many such small prize fighters in our district, none of them over twenty-one years of age, and all earning just enough to make it possible to lead a life of indolence. If they can make ten or fifteen dollars by appearing in a ring once a week, they are quite content.

But boxing and street fighting by no means always go together on the Middle West Side. The real professional boxers of the neighborhood dissociate them in practice as well as in theory; they take their profession for what it is—a game to be played in a sportsmanlike manner—and they are usually good-natured. One of the best known prize fighters of the city, who lives on the Middle West Side, states that it is years since he was mixed up in a fight of any kind. “I boxbecause I like the game,” he said, “but I’ve no use for fighting.”

Prize Fighters in Training

Craps with Money at Stake

Another man, an exceedingly clever lightweight boxer, who has appeared several times in the ring in New York City clubs, was boxing one night with a rather crude amateur. The bout was really for the instruction of the amateur, and both boxers were going very easily by agreement. Suddenly the amateur landed an unintentionally hard blow upon the eye of his opponent, just as the latter was stepping forward. The eye became fearfully discolored and the whole side of the boxer’s face swelled. But in spite of his evident feeling that the amateur had taken an unfair advantage in striking so hard when his opponent was off his guard, the lightweight fighter laughed and submitted to treatment for the eye without losing his temper in the least, and freely accepted the apologies of the other.

This is boxing at its best, but unfortunately its tendencies are more usually toward unfairness and brutality than otherwise. Boys are taught to box early in this district. It is not uncommon to see a bout between youngsters of seven or eight being watched by a crowd of young men, who encourage the combatants by cheering every successful blow, but pay no attention to palpable fouls or obvious attempts to take a dishonest advantage. Even some of the best of the prize fighters frankly say that once in the ring the extent to which they foul is only a question of how much they can deceive the referee. And when this questionable code of ethics is passed on by these heroes and leaders of sentiment to the boys who have no referee and no thought beyond that of winning by disablingan opponent as much as possible, the sport degenerates into an unfair and tricky test of endurance. Striking with the open hand, kicking, tripping, hitting in a clinch, all these unfair practices are considered a great advantage if one can “get away with it.” The West Side youngster sees very little of the real professional boxers who, from the very nature of their somewhat strenuous employment, must keep in good condition, as a rule retire early, drink little, and do a great deal of hard gymnastic work. But of their brutalized hangers-on, the “bruisers,” who frequent the saloons and street corners and pose as real fighters, he sees a great deal; consequently, as a whole, prize fighting must be classed as one of the worst influences of the neighborhood. It is too closely allied with street fighting, and too easily turned to criminal purposes. The bully who learns to box will use his acquired knowledge as a means of enforcing his superiority on the street, and if he is beaten will have recourse to weapons or any other means of maintaining his prestige.

Baseball and boxing bring to a close the list of common outdoor games played by boys on the Middle West Side,—just ordinary games, modified by a particular environment and played in a shifting and spasmodic way which is characteristic of it. It remains to emphasize the lesson taught by their effects on boy life as they are practiced in this neighborhood.

The philosophy of the West Side youngster is practical and not speculative. Otherwise he could not fail to notice very early in his career that the world in general, from the mother who bundles him out of an overcrowded tenement in the morning, to the grown-ups in the street playground where most of his time is spent,seem to think him very much in the way. All day long this fact is borne in upon him. If a wagon nearly runs over him the driver lashes him with the whip as he passes to teach him to “watch out.” If he plays around a store door the proprietor gives him a cuff or a kick to get rid of him. If he runs into someone he is pushed into the gutter to teach him better. And if he is complained of as a nuisance the policeman whacks him with hand or club to notify him that he must play somewhere else. Moreover, everything that he does seems to be against the law. If he plays ball he is endangering property by “playing with a hard ball in a public place.” If he plays marbles or pitches pennies he is “obstructing the sidewalk,” and craps, quite apart from the fact that it is gambling, constitutes the same offense. Street fighting individually or collectively is “assault,” and a boy guilty of none of these things may perforce be “loitering.” In other words he finds that property or its representatives are the great obstacles between him and his pleasure in the streets. And in considering our problem neither the principal cause of this situation nor its results must be lost sight of.

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. More obvious, however, than this cause of a complex situation are the results of it, two of which are especially noticeable. The first is the inevitableness with which the boyaccepts—and must accept—illegal and immoral amusements as a matter of course. The spirit of youth is forced to become a criminal tendency, and sport and the rights of property are forced into antagonism. And in the second place, partly because of this, partly because their association with the toughs of the street predisposes them to imitate vice and rowdyism, the boys come to take a positive pleasure in such activities as retaliation by theft and destruction of property. Stores and basements in this district are sometimes completely abandoned owing to the stone throwing and persecution of a youthful gang which has found their occupants too strenuously hostile or defensive. Undoubtedly the street is the most inadequate of playgrounds and throws many difficulties of prevention and interruption in the path of sport. But these obstacles are from their nature provocative of contest, and sport flourishes with a Hydra-like vitality. Nothing short of impossibility will keep the boy and his game apart.

Itis frequently necessary in these chapters to consider the boy of the Middle West Side as a type; and in discussing the causes and possible solution of the conditions which have produced him it is easy to forget that what the individual boy actually is at the moment is also of very real importance. But as a matter of fact it is not the boy individually but the boy collectively that is the policeman’s bane and the district’s despair. Once on the street the boy is no longer an individual but a member of a gang; and it is with and through the gang that he justly earns a reputation which provoked an irate citizen recently to suggest that for the New York street urchin boiling in burning oil was too good a fate. The court finds him a little villain, and newspapers tell the public that he is a little desperado; but those who know him best know that he is probably worse than either court or public suppose, and that for this the development of the gang on the West Side is primarily responsible.

The formation of “sets” or “gangs” is almost a law of human nature, and boyhood one of its most constant exponents, for a boy is gregarious naturally as well as by training. And over here, where the sociable Irish-American element predominates and children rarely mention the word “home,” it is inevitable that the gang should flourish and its members try to find inits activities the rough affection, comfort, and amusement which a dirty and overcrowded tenement room has failed to give.

The West Side gang is in its origin perfectly normal. In the words of one of the boys, “De kids livin’ on de street jist naturally played together, an’ stuck together w’en anything came up about kids from any other street.” Nothing is more entirely natural and spontaneous, and it is exasperating to reflect that nothing could be a more persuasive and uplifting power in the boy’s life than the gang’s development when given proper scope and direction. Its influence is strong and immediate. The gang contains the friends to whose praise and criticism he is most keenly sensitive, its standards are his aims, and its activities his happiness. Untrammeled by the perversion of special circumstances it might encourage his latent interests, train him to obedience and loyalty, show him the method and the saving of co-operation, and teach him the beauty of self-sacrifice. Gang life at its best does so. The universal endorsement and success of the Boy Scout movement, for instance, in almost every country living under Western civilization, shows this most clearly. Association and rivalry should bring out what is best in a boy; but on the Middle West Side it almost invariably brings out what is worst. Practically, under present conditions, it is inevitable that this should be so; but with the first movement toward amelioration such a result becomes less necessary.

Boy Scouts and Soldiers

After the Battle

Take the case of a certain gang typical of this neighborhood. This gang is now several years old, but its membership is almost exactly what it was four or five years ago. Its members singled each other out fromthe throng of children in their immediate neighborhood and first made for themselves a cave between two lumber piles in a neighboring yard. All one summer they met in this “hang-out”; here they brought the “loot,” as they call the product of their marauding expeditions, threw craps, pitched pennies, played cards, smoked, told stories, and fought. But they were disturbed by early disaster in the shape of the business needs of the lumber company, which one day caused their shack to be torn down over their heads. They made their headquarters next in the empty basement of a tenement, but soon moved at the well reinforced request of the landlord. After an exiled period of meeting on the street corners, the boys conceived the idea of building their own habitation in the protection of their own homes. They began a small wooden structure in the areaway of the tenement in which the leader lived. But civil war broke out, and in one unhappy culmination the leader of the gang chased his own little brother up two flights of stairs with a hatchet. The little brother promptly “squealed,” and the projected headquarters was destroyed by parental decree.

There followed another interval of meeting on the streets, and then one of the workers in a neighboring settlement became interested. She arranged to have the boys hold meetings in the settlement once a week. They were given certain privileges in the gymnasium and game rooms also, which kept them happily occupied and away from the street influences. But the settlement was closed suddenly and the gang went back to the streets once more. Here is a case in which a gang were from the outset driven from pillar to postby the deficiencies of their surroundings as a playground, and made to feel that every man’s hand was against them. When kindness was shown to them they responded at once. And scores of other gangs, if they were given the chance, would respond in the same way.

There are two salient features of gang life in this neighborhood. Both can be easily explained and abundantly illustrated; the second alone applies equally to schoolboy gangs and to adult gangs—for bands of adult rowdies exist, too, and the semi-mythical “Gopher Gang”14is a terror to conjure with. The first of these features is the loyalty which the gang invariably shows to a single street or block. As a gang is naturally formed of boys who live in the same tenement or next door to each other, or at least in the same block, and as their chief playground is likely to be the street in front of that block, it naturally becomes a matter of convenience as well as of honor to defend that playground from the inroads of any other gang. In this way loyalty to one block becomes a principle and a basis of gang organization. But individuals are not always loyal to their home block. If a boy becomes a member of a gang on Fiftieth Street, for example, and then moves to Thirtieth Street, or even farther, he may return and continue to belong to his old gang. Similarly, a Thirtieth Street gang will number among its ranks former residents who now live in other localities. At the same time, both gangs are continually being recruited by new arrivals in the community. When a boy moves he simply uses his own discretionas to whether to join the new gang or to continue to belong to the old.

The gang is constantly increasing or decreasing its numbers. It does not necessarily include the whole street except in a very general sense. Its nucleus is to be found in probably a dozen or fifteen kindred spirits in the street. For purposes of war, or for demonstrations at election time, or on any such occasion when there is either safety or pleasure in numbers, the other boys in the street are added to this group. Thus the real Fiftieth Street gang may not number more than 20 or 25 members, but its fighting strength when pitted against the Fifty-thirds will be nearly a hundred. Again, while there may be one group of 15 or 20 boys known as “The Fiftieth Street Gang,” yet on Fiftieth Street between any two avenues will be found a dozen or more similar groups, each with a leader and a coherent social consciousness. The one among these groups which will be called the Fiftieth Street gang is likely to be so known either because it contains the boy who, for one reason or another, has become the recognized street leader, or because its members are better known or more daring than any other group, so that it will be around this particular group that all the others will rally when the occasion calls. The territorial limit of a gang is usually the length of one single cross street between two avenues. In a single week fights took place between the Fiftieth Street gang between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and the Fifty-third Street gang in the same district; between the Forty-ninth Street gang between Ninth and Tenth Avenues combined with the Forty-ninth Street gang between Tenth andEleventh Avenues, and the Forty-seventh Street gang between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Loyalty to their home block would be a good habit in boyishcamaraderieif it merely took the form of peaceable rivalry; but as gang life exists at present on the Middle West Side it becomes a chronic incentive to lawlessness. For the second salient feature of gang life is the propensity of the gang to street fighting. Personal and collective jealousies and feuds have become so habitual and endless among the boys here that the history of their gangs is little less than a record of continuous violence of every kind. No doubt the strain of the constant repression before alluded to in some measure accounts for this; but possibly it is due in general to a contact with the streets and in particular to the bad influence of the older toughs on whom they model themselves and who often attain heroic position in their eyes. The boys of gangs in the country play that they are armies, emperors, or kings that they have read of in books or heard of in stories told. But the city boys of the West Side prefer to imitate local celebrities whom they know or local deeds of fame with which they are more intimately acquainted. And the danger of this vulgarized hero worship lies in the fact that, while a country lad must imagine the surroundings and implements for imitating the deeds of story book heroes, the city boy can find on every side of him the real materials used by his models, the Gophers.

The jargon of the thief and the yeggman is common among these boys’ gangs. They talk casually of murder and robbery as though these were familiar events in their lives. They lay tentative plans for the robberyof stores or saloons with no more real intention of commission than the schoolboy football player has of actual achievement when he imagines what he would do if his team were playing Yale. They talk easily and knowingly of “turning off” various people in the neighborhood, by which they mean robbing them. They threaten each other with murder and other dire forms of assault, and undoubtedly think that they mean to carry out their threats. The first active manifestation of this state of mind consists often in carrying concealed weapons. The boy obtains a broken revolver from some place or finds or steals a good one. He will reveal this weapon to his awestruck playmates and soon come to pose as a bold, ruffianly spirit. Usually this phase passes away harmlessly enough. Few of the younger residents of this neighborhood are really armed, though most of them would have their companions believe that they are. Occasionally some youngster does manage to carry a revolver, bowie knife, or slingshot, and his subsequent career is likely to bring him very early into serious contact with the police. But however late or soon the manifestation, the gangs are permeated by the tendency to disorder and crime which is the result of criminal example. It is the old story; only the worst and most vicious form of the gang spirit has a chance of finding expression in these streets. And so gang warfare has become not the exception but the rule, and the violence and ferocity with which the small boys pursue their feuds excites the alarm of the entire neighborhood.

“There has always been more or less fighting among the gangs of boys on the streets,” a physician of longresidence recently remarked, “but they are getting worse in character every year until now it seems that they will stop at nothing. They carry knives, clubs, and even, I have heard, revolvers. Sometimes arrests are made, but they never amount to anything, for the boys are always released without punishment. If an outsider tries to interfere, ordinarily both gangs turn on him. They terrorize the neighborhood with their fights, breaking windows and injuring passersby with stones. Only recently one of these fights broke out almost in front of my house, and a score or more, most of them armed with beer bottles, were engaged in it. I got a boy by the shoulder and asked him what he was doing with the bottle. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I am just taking it to the store to get it filled.’ Then he laughed in my face and the rest of the gang burst out laughing. I could do nothing with them, and had to retire to my office.”

Sometimes fights are more or less unpremeditated, arising from chance encounters between two rival gangs; but very often they are formally arranged and generaled in approved military fashion. One evening recently a furious battle took place between two gangs of small boys numbering nearly 50 to the gang, and all apparently from eight to fifteen years old. One gang proceeded down the street from the corner at which they had assembled and met the other gang coming from the opposite direction. They stopped about 100 feet apart and formed two compact masses, screaming and shouting encouragement to their own side and insults to the enemy. Then one of the gangs moved slowly forward. Some one among their opponents threw a beer bottle into the advancing crowd, and a scene of wild riot followed.Clubs, stones, and beer bottles were hurled through the air, many of them taking effect and many of the bottles smashing on the pavement. A crowd gathered on both sides behind the combatants and windows on all sides were filled with spectators. None of the boys came into personal contact with their opponents. Most of them contented themselves with hurling missiles indiscriminately into the opposing group. In the midst of the mêlée two boys were maneuvering for over a minute, each armed with a beer bottle which he was trying to land on his opponent from a distance of not more than eight or ten feet. They ducked, dodged, and side-stepped, then finally one boy threw his bottle. The other boy dropped flat to the pavement and the bottle came so close to his body that it looked for an instant as though it had hit him. If it had, it might easily have killed him, for it was hurled with terrific force. But the boy sprang up and threw his bottle at the other youngster, who was now retreating.

Just as it was growing dark someone fired two shots from a revolver—whether loaded with blank or bullet cartridges it was of course impossible to tell—and now for the first time protest from the spectators began to rise even above the din of the fight. At the same moment from scouts in the rear guard of both armies came the watchword of the West Side, “Cheese it!” In an incredibly short space of time both gangs were rushing at top speed back toward their respective gathering places. When everything was quiet, two policemen turned the corner, walked solemnly down to the middle of the block, and returned. There were, of course, no arrests. One gang had rallied at a pointabout 100 yards to the west of the avenue, and were starting back to the battleground again when two small boys concealed in a cellarway at the corner shrieked out another warning. The gang broke up again and the next minute a discomfited policeman stepped out from a doorway where he had been concealed and came along the street.

At the corner of Ninth Avenue two men were indignantly discussing the fight. “Those boys do more to ruin property and lower real estate values around here than any other three causes,” said one of the men. “They’re having these fights continually now and they seem to grow worse all the time. Suppose that some passerby had been in the way of that revolver which was shot down the street just now. Nothing could have been done. You can’t find out who had the revolver. The police won’t try to make any arrests, and if they do, the boys are always let right out again. The insurance companies won’t insure plate glass in this neighborhood any more, and the whole place seems to be just at the mercy of these little ruffians.”

On one occasion a gang was short of bonfire material at election time. The members raided a neighboring street, took the gang there by surprise, extinguished its celebration bonfires, and carried the wood in triumph back to their own street. War was immediately declared by the despoiled, and a regular after-school campaign followed. Through an injury to one of their number the gang in an intervening street became involved, and sided with the bonfire stealers. War then became general and for a year was a constant subject for discussion among old and young in the neighborhood. The boys of the defensive gang more than heldtheir own. They descended upon the allies from the intervening street and vanquished them on their own territory. They fought with even honors in foreign territory the gang which originally started the trouble, and repelled several invasions decisively. Finally these terms were offered: The defensive gang formally notified their opponents that if they could succeed in forcing their way from the upper avenue to a Roman Catholic church about three-quarters of the way down the street, they would accept defeat. Night after night the gang thus challenged made the attempt, but never succeeded.

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