Children of the Tenements   By: Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914)

[Illustration: "The Kid Was Standing Barefooted In The Passageway."]

CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS

BY

JACOB A. RIIS

Author of " The Making of an American ," " The Battle with the Slum ," " How the Other Half Lives ," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. M. RELYEA AND OTHERS

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1903

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1897, 1898, By THE CENTURY CO.

Copyright, 1903, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1903.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co. Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

I have been asked a great many times in the last dozen years if I would not write an "East side novel," and I have sometimes had much difficulty in convincing the publishers that I meant it when I said I would not. Yet the reason is plain: I cannot. I wish I could. There are some facts one can bring home much more easily than otherwise by wrapping them in fiction. But I never could invent even a small part of a plot. The story has to come to me complete before I can tell it. The stories printed in this volume came to me in the course of my work as police reporter for nearly a quarter of a century, and were printed in my paper, the Evening Sun . Some of them I published in the Century Magazine , the Churchman , and other periodicals, and they were embodied in an earlier collection under the title, "Out of Mulberry Street." Occasionally, I have used the freedom of the writer by stringing facts together to suit my own fancy. But none of the stories are invented. Nine out of ten of them are just as they came to me fresh from the life of the people, faithfully to portray which should, after all, be the aim of all fiction, as it must be its sufficient reward.

J. A. R.

CONTENTS

PAGE

The Rent Baby 1

A Story of Bleecker Street 13

The Kid hangs up His Stocking 21

The Slipper maker's Fast 28

Death comes to Cat Alley 31

A Proposal on the Elevated 35

Little Will's Message 41

Lost Children 53

Paolo's Awakening 63

The Little Dollar's Christmas Journey 78

The Kid 93

When the Letter Came 96

The Cat took the Kosher Meat 100

Nibsy's Christmas 104

In the Children's Hospital 117

Nigger Martha's Wake 126

What the Christmas Sun saw in the Tenements 133

Midwinter in New York 150

A Chip from the Maelstrom 173

Sarah Joyce's Husbands 177

Merry Christmas in the Tenements 180

Abe's Game of Jacks 222

A Little Picture 226

A Dream of the Woods 228

'Twas 'Liza's Doings 234

Heroes who Fight Fire 247

John Gavin, Misfit 284

A Heathen Baby 289

The Christening in Bottle Alley 294

In the Mulberry Street Court 299

Difficulties of a Deacon 302

Fire in the Barracks 310

War on the Goats 313

He kept His Tryst 319

Rover's Last Fight 323

How Jim went to the War 330

A Backwoods Hero 341

Jack's Sermon 347

Skippy of Scrabble Alley 357

Making a Way out of the Slum 365

CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS

THE RENT BABY