American Colossus by H. W. Brands

Author:H. W. Brands [Brands, H. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53358-4
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2010-10-11T17:00:00+00:00

Riis’s tour led along another alley. “Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else.” The passageway snaked and dove down a flight of stairs. “You can feel your way, if you cannot see it.” The air oppressed. “What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand.” A woman passed with a pail, to be filled at the hydrant in the hall. “Hear the pump squeak! It is the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain. But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always there. The smell of it has followed you up.” Riis heard something. “Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail—what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell—Oh! a sadly familiar story—before the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.”

The Riis tour continued to “the Bend” of Mulberry Street, the most noisome of New York’s slums. Here reformers had been at work for decades, trying to enforce the housing laws; here they had consistently discovered that the laws of supply and demand trumped the statutes of mere legislators. Landlords resisted the changes, claiming the right of property to a profit. Tenants resisted, for fear of displacement by the higher rents the changes would produce. Nature, it seemed, or at any rate capitalism, conspired to populate every nook and cranny of the Bend. “Incessant raids cannot keep down the crowds that make them their home. In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, they share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash-barrels of the city.”

Capitalism had created the Bend, and it thrived within the Bend. Stalls and makeshift shops lined the alleys; a building called Bandit’s Roost sheltered a veritable immigrants’ exchange. The emporia were tiny—three feet by four, each scarcely large enough to hold the proprietor, with stock in a bucket or box or hanging from a board. One sold tobacco, another fish (“fish that never swam in American waters, or if they did, were never seen on an American fish-stand,” Riis said), still another sausages of some sort (“what they are I never had the courage to ask”). The basic rule of American capitalism, of buyer beware, applied here no less than on Wall Street.

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