n. b. when i first came to new york, and for years afterward, it was a whim of the new york newspapers to dub that region on the west side which lies between thirty-sixth and forty-first streets and ninth avenue and the hudson river as hell’s kitchen. there was assumed to be operative there, shooting and killing at will, a gang of young roughs that for savagery and brutality was not to be outrivaled by any of the various savage groups of the city. disturbances, murders, riots, were assumed to be common; the residents of this area at once sullen and tempestuous. interested by the stark pictures of a slum life so often painted, i finally went to reside there for a period. what follows is from notes or brief pictures made at the time.
* * * * *
it is nine o’clock of a summer’s evening. approaching my place at this hour, suddenly i encounter a rabble issuing out of thirty-ninth street into tenth avenue. it is noisy, tempestuous, swirling. a frowsy-headed man of about thirty-eight, whose face is badly lacerated and bleeding and whose coat is torn and covered with dust, as though he had been rolling upon the ground, leads the procession. he is walking with that reckless abandon which characterizes the movements of the angry. a slatternly woman of doughy185 complexion follows at his heels. about them sways a crowd of uncombed and stribbly-haired men and women and children. in the middle of the street, directly on a line with the man whom the crowd surrounds, but, to one side and nearer the sidewalk walks another man, undersized, thickset and energetic, who seems to take a great interest in the crowd. though he keeps straight ahead, like the others, he keeps turning and looking, as though he expected a demonstration of some sort. no word is spoken by either the man or the woman, and as the curious company passes along under the variable glows of the store-lamps, shop-keepers and store-dealers come out and make humorous comments, but seem to think it not worth while to follow. i join the procession, since this now relates to my interests, and finally shake an impish, black-haired, ten-year-old girl by the arm until she looks up at me.
“what’s the matter?”
“aw, he hit him with a banister.”
“who hit him?”
“why, that man out there in the street.”
“what did he hit him for?”
“i dunno,” she replies irritably. “he wouldn’t get out of the room. they got to fightin’ in the hall.”
she moves away from me and i ply others fruitlessly, until, turning into thirty-seventh street, the green lights of the police station come into view. the object of this pilgrimage becomes apparent. i fall silent, following.
reaching the station door, the injured man and his woman attendant enter, while the thickset individual186 who walked to one side, and the curious crowd remain without.
“well?” says the sergeant within, glaring intolerantly at the twain as they push before him. the appearance of the injured man naturally takes his attention most.
“lookit me eye,” begins the wounded man, with that curious tone of injured dignity which the drunk and disorderly so frequently assume. “that—” and he interpolates a string of oaths descriptive of the man who has assaulted him “—hit me with a banister leg.”
“who hit you? where is he? what did he hit you for?” this from the sergeant in a breath. the man begins again. the woman beside him interrupts with a description of her own.
“shut up!” yells the sergeant savagely, showing his teeth. “i’ll ram me fist down your throat if you don’t. let him tell what’s the matter with him. you keep still.”
the woman, overawed by the threat, stops her tirade. the man resumes.
“he hit me with a banister leg.”
“what for?”
“it was this way, captain. i went to call on this here lady and that —— came in and wanted me to get out of the room. i——”
“what relation is this man to you?” inquires the sergeant, addressing the woman.
“nothin’,” she replies blandly.
“isn’t the other man your husband?”
hell’s kitchen
“no, he ain’t, the blank-blank-blank-blank ——”187 and you have a sweet string of oaths. “he’s a ——,” and she begins again to ardently describe the assailant. the man assists her as best he can.
“i thought so,” exclaims the officer vigorously. “now, you two get the hell out of here, and stay out, before i club you both. get on out! beat it!”
“ain’t you goin’ to lock him up?” demands the victim.
“i lock nothing,” vouchsafes the sergeant intolerantly. “clear out of here, both of you. if i catch you coming around here any more i’ll give you both six months.”
he calls an officer from the rear room and the two complainants, together with others who have ventured in, myself included, beat a sullen retreat, the crowd welcoming us on the outside. a buzz of conversation follows. war is promised. when the victim is safely down the steps he exclaims:
“all right! i ast him to arrest him. now let ’em look out. i’ll go back there, i will. yes, i will. i’ll kill the bastard, that’s what i’ll do. i’ll show him whether he’ll hit me with a banister leg, the ——,” and as he goes now, rather straight and yet rhythmically forward, his assailant, who has been opposite him all the while but in the middle of the street, keeps an equal and amusing pace.
the crowd follows and turns into thirty-ninth street, a half-block east of tenth avenue. it stops in front of an old, stale, four-story red brick tenement. some of its windows are glowing softly in the night. on the188 third floor some one is playing a flute. quiet and peace seem to reign, and yet this——
“i’ll show him whether he’ll hit me,” insists the injured man, entering the house. the woman follows, and then the short, thickset man from the street. one after another they disappear up the narrow stairs which begin at the back of the hall. some of the crowd follows, myself included.
presently, after a great deal of scuffling and hustling on the fourth floor, all return helter-skelter. they are followed by a large, comfortably-built, healthy, white-shirted irish-american, who lives up there and who has strength and courage. before him, pathetically small in size and strength, the others move, the mutilated and still protesting victim among them. apparently he has been ejected from the room in which he had been before.
“i’ll show him,” he is still boasting. “i’ll see whether he’ll hit me with a banister leg, the ——.”
“that’s all right,” says the large irishman with a brogue, pushing him gently onto the sidewalk as he does so. “go on now.”
“i’ll get even with him yet,” insists the victim.
“that’s all right. i don’t care what you do to-morrow. go on now.”
the victim turns and looks up at this new authority fixedly, as though he knew him well, scratches his head and then turns and solemnly walks away. the other man does likewise. you wonder why.
“it’s over now,” says the new authority to the crowd, and he smiles as blandly as if he had been taking189 part in an entertainment of some kind. the crowd begins to dissolve. the man who drew the banister leg or stick and who was to have been punished has also disappeared.
“but how is this?” i ask of some one. “how can he do that?”
“him?” replies an irish longshoreman who seems to wish to satisfy my curiosity. “don’t you know who that is? it’s patsy finnerty. he used to be a champeen prize-fighter. he won all the fights around here ten years ago. everybody knows him. he’s in charge over at the steamship dock now, but they won’t fight with him. if they did he wouldn’t give ’em no more work. they both work for him once in a while.”
i see it all in a blinding flash and go to my own room. how much more powerful is self-interest as typified by patsy than the police!
* * * * *
it is raining one night and i hear a voice in the room above mine, singing. it is a good voice, sweet and clear, but a little weak and faint down here.
“tyro-al, tyro-al! tyro-al, tyro-al!
ich hab dich veeder, o mine tyro-al!”
i know who lives up there by now: mr. and mrs. schmick and a little schmick girl, about ten or eleven. being courageous in this vicinity because of the simplicity of these people, the awe they have for one who holds himself rather aloof and dresses better than they, and lonely, too, i go up. in response to my knock a little fair-complexioned, heavily constructed german190 woman with gray hair and blue eyes comes to the door.
“i heard some one singing,” i say, “and i thought i would come up and ask you if i might not come in and listen. i live in the room below.”
“certainly. why, of course.” this with an upward lift of the voice. “come right in.” and although flustered and red because of what to her seems an embarrassing situation, she introduces me to her black-haired, heavy-faced husband, who is sitting at the center table with a zither before him.
“papa, here is a gentleman who wants to hear the music.”
i smile, and the old german arises, smiles and extends me a welcoming hand. he is sitting in the center of this combination sitting-room, parlor, kitchen and dining-room, his zither, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, on the table before him.
“i don’t know your name,” i say.
“schmick,” he replies.
i apologize for intruding but they both seem rather pleased. also the little daughter, who is sitting in one corner.
“were you singing?” i ask her.
“no. mamma,” she replies.
i look at the gray-haired little mother and she shows me even, white teeth in smiling at my astonishment.
“i sing but very little,” she insists, blushing red. “my woice is not so strong any more.”
“won’t you sing what you were singing just before i came in?” i ask.
191 without any of that diffidence which characterizes so many of all classes she rises and putting one hand on the shoulder of her heavy, solemn-looking husband, asks him to strike the appropriate chord, and then breaks forth into one of those plaintive folksongs of the tyrol which describes the longing of the singer for his native land.
“i have such a poor woice now,” she insists when she concludes. “when i was younger it was different.”
“poor!” i exclaim. “it’s very clear and beautiful. how old are you?”
“i will be fifty next august,” she answers.
this woman is possessed of a sympathetic and altogether lovely disposition. how can she exist in hell’s kitchen, amid grime and apparent hardness, and remain so sweet and sympathetic? in my youth and ignorance i wonder.
* * * * *
i am returning one day from a serious inspection of the small stores and shops of the neighborhood. as i near my door i am preceded up the street by three grimy coal-heavers, evidently returning from work in an immense coalyard in eleventh avenue.
“come on in and have a pint,” invites one great hulking fellow, with hands like small coal-shovels. he was, as it chanced, directly in front of my doorway.
one of his two companions needs no second invitation, but the other, a small, feeble-witted-looking individual, seems uncertain as to whether to go on or stay.
“come on! come on back and have a pint!” shouts192 the first coal-heaver. “what the hell—ain’t you no good at all? come on!”
“sure i am,” returns the other diffidently. “but i ought to be home by half-past.”
“aw, home be damned! it won’t take long to drink a pint. come on.”
“all right,” returns the other, grinning sheepishly.
they go over the way to a saloon, and i pause in my own door. presently a little girl comes down, carrying a tin pail.
“whose little girl are you?” i inquire, not recognizing her.
“mamma ain’t home to-day,” she returns quickly.
“mamma?” i reply. “why do you say that? i don’t want your mamma. i live here.”
“oh, i thought you was the insurance man,” she adds, grinning. “you look just like him.”
“aren’t you the coal man’s little girl?”
“yes.”
“well, he just went into the saloon over there.”
“huh-uh. mine’s upstairs, drunk. he must be mr. kelly,” and she goes quickly on with her bucket.
* * * * *
i am sitting in my room one night, listening to the sounds that float vaguely about this curious little unit of metropolitan life, when a dénouement in the social complications of this same coal-heaver’s life is reached. i already know him now to be a rough man, for once or twice i heard him damning his children very loudly. but i did not suspect that there were likely to be complications193 over and above the world of the purely material.
“die frau hat sich selbst umgebracht!” (“the woman has taken her life!”) i hear some one crying out in the hall, and then there is such a running and shuffling in the general hubbub. a score of tenants from the different floors are talking and gesticulating, and in the rear of the hall the door opening into the coal-heaver’s dining-room is open. my landlady, mrs. witty, is on the scene, and even while we gaze a dapper little physician of the region, in a high hat and frockcoat, comes running up the steps and enters the open door in the rear.
“the doctor! the doctor!” the word passes from one to another.
“what is it?” i ask, questioning a little girl whom i had often seen playing tag on the sidewalk below.
“she took poison,” she answers.
“who?”
“that woman in there.”
“the wife of the coal man?”
“sure.”
“what did she take it for?”
“i dunno. here comes another doctor—look!”
another young doctor is hurrying up the steps.
while we are still gaping at the opening and closing door, mrs. schmick, the little german woman who sang for me, comes out. she has evidently been laboring in the sick room and seems very much excited.
194 “is she dead?” ask a half-dozen people as she hurries upstairs for something.
“no-oh,” she answers, puckering up her mouth in her peculiar way. “she is very low, though. i must get some things,” and she hurries away.
the crowd waits, and finally some light on the difficulty begins to break.
“she wouldn’t live with him if he didn’t stop going with her,” my own landlady is saying. “i heard her say it.”
“who? who?” inquires another.
“why, that woman in fortieth street. you know her.”
“no.”
“yes, you do. she lives next door to the blacksmith’s shop, upstairs there, the woman with the two little girls.”
“her? is that why she did it?”
“sure.”
“you don’t say!”
they clatter on in this way and gradually it comes out in good order. this coal-heaver knows a widow in the next block. he is either in love with her or she is in love with him, and sometimes she comes here into thirty-ninth street to catch a glimpse of him. he has been seen with her a number of times and had been in the habit of driving his coal-wagon through fortieth street in order to catch a glimpse of her. his wife has frequently complained, of course, and there have been rows, bitter nocturnal wrangles, in which he has not come off triumphant. he has sworn and raved and195 struck his wife but he has been made to promise not to drive through fortieth street just the same. this day, however, he failed to keep this injunction. she was in fortieth street and had seen him, then had come home and in a fit of jealous rage and affectionate distemper had drunk a bottle of camphor. the husband is not home yet.
while we are still patiently awaiting him he arrives, dark, heavy, unprepared for the difficulty awaiting him, and very much astonished at the company gathered about his door.
“my wife!” he exclaims when told.
“yes, your wife.” this from several members of the company.
he hurries in, very shaken and frightened.
“what is this?” he demands as he passes the door and is confronted by serious-looking physicians. more we could not hear.
but after a time out he comes for something at the drugstore, then in again. he is in and out two or three times, and finally, before the assembled company and in explanation, wrings his hands.
“i never done nothin’ to make her do this. i never done nothin’.” he pauses, awaiting a denial, possibly, from some one, then adds: “the disgrace! i wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t for the disgrace!”
i meet mrs. schmick the next day in the hall. she has been indefatigable in her labors.
“will she die?”
“no, she gets better now.”
“is he going to behave himself?”
196 she shrugs her shoulders, lifts up her hands dubiously.
“mrs. schmick,” i ask, interestedly, her philosophy of life arresting me, “why do you work so hard? you didn’t even know her, did you?”
“ach, no. but she is sick now. she is in trouble. i would do as much for anybody.”
and this is hell’s kitchen, i recall.
* * * * *
looking out of my front window i can see a great deal of all that goes on here, in connection with this house, i mean. through the single narrow door under my window issue and return all those who have in any way anything to do with it. the mailman comes very seldom. there is a weekly life-insurance man who comes regularly, bangs on doors and complains that some people are in but won’t answer. ditto the gas man. ditto the milkman. ditto the collector for a rug and clock house. many duns of many kinds who come to collect bills of all kinds and never can “get in.” of a morning only a half-dozen men and some six or eight girls seem to creep wearily and unwillingly forth to work. at night they and others, who have apparently other methods than that of regular toil for occupying their time, return with quite a different air. truckmen and coalmen and mr. schmick arrive about the same time, half-past five. the son of a morose malster’s clerk, who occupies the second floor rear, back of me, arrives at six. beer-can carrying is the chief employment of the city cart-driver’s wife, who lives on the third floor, the unemployed iron-worker, whose front room197 i rent, and the ill-tempered woman with the three children on the fourth floor. the six or eight girls who go out evenings after their day’s labor frequently do not begin to drift back until after eleven, several of them not before three or four. i have met them coming in. queer figures slip in and out at all times, men and women who cannot be placed by me in any regular detail of the doings of this house. some of them visit one or another of several “apartments” too frequently to make their comings and goings explicable on conventional grounds. it is a peculiar region and house, this, with marked streaks of gayety at times, and some very evident and frequently long-continued periods of depression and dissatisfaction and misery.
i am hanging out of my window one evening as usual when the keenest of all these local tragedies, in so far as this house and a home are concerned, is enacted directly below me. one of the daughters above-mentioned is followed down four flights of stairs and pushed out upon the sidewalk by her irate father and a bundle of wearing apparel thrown after her.
he is very angry and shouts: “you get out now. you can’t come back into my house any more. get out!”
he waves his arms dramatically. a crowd gathers. men and women hang out of windows or gather closely about him and the girl, while the latter, quite young yet, perhaps fifteen, cries, and the onlookers eagerly demand to know what the trouble is.
198 “she’s a street-walker, that’s what she is,” he screams. “she comes to my house after running around all night with loafers. let her get out now.”
“aw, what do you want to turn her off for?” demands a sympathetic bystander who is evidently moved by the girl’s tears. others voice the same sentiment.
“you! you!” exclaims the old locksmith, who is her father, in uncontrollable rage. “you mind your own business. she is a street-walker, that’s what she is. she shall not come into my house any more.”
there is wrangling and more exclamations, and finally into the thick of the crowd comes a policeman, who tries to gather up all the phases of the story.
“you won’t take her back, eh?” he asks of the father, after using all sorts of arguments to prevent a family rupture. “all right, then, come along,” he says to the girl, and leads her around to the police station. “we’ll find some place for you, maybe, to-night anyhow.”
i heard that she did not stay at the station, after all, but what the conclusion of her career was, outside of the fact that the matter was reported to the gerry society, i never learned. but the reasons for her predicament struck me as obvious. here was too much toil, too much gloom, too much solemnity for her, the non-appreciation which the youthful heart so much abhors. elsewhere, perhaps, was light, warmth, merriment, beauty—or so she thought.
she went, she and so many others, fluttering eastward like a moth, into the heart of the great city which199 lay mostly to the east. when she returned, and with singed wings, she was no longer welcome.
* * * * *
but why they saw fit to dub it hell’s kitchen, however, i could never discover. it seemed to me a very ordinary slum neighborhood, poor and commonplace, and sharply edged by poverty, but just life and very, very human life at that.
