Tenement Tales of New
York
James William
Sullivan
reviewed by Mick
Mykola Dementiuk
“Pat Murphy, boy
of eight years, whose clothes were dirty, whose hair was tousled, face smudged,
and hands blackened…” Thus begins Tenement
Tales of New York, an out-of-print book, published in 1895, and whom we
have to thank Ephemeral New York for
bringing it to our attention.
I enjoyed reading
this book of tales; it brought old New York
to my touch and grasp. Such as Slob
Murphy, the rowdy boy of New York
streets in the late 1880-90s, who injures his hand and is at death’s door as a
result. He has remorse for all the street fighting and shenanigans he’s done
over his short years and seeing a vision of his dead mother, says the Lord’s Prayer and passes away. A bit maudlin but I suppose that fits in with
the time. His friends and acquaintances sadly look upon his passing, till
someone says, " Wot's dey a-goin to do wit' his old cloze ? " Each
hungry for getting something or other to take care of them; a shrug at the dead
boy. Meanwhile his father, who is angry, but dares any police office to get at
his son’s dead body. He speaks with a typical Irish accent, reminiscent of
Charles Dickens characters, declaiming, avowing, and swearing. In a way, it
sounds like a pleasant blarney which we no longer hear in these parts. (Oh, how New York has changed…) We follow the funeral
procession to a solemn burial and what else? his father ends up dead drunk, and
life in New York goes on…
In another tale, Minnie Kelsey’s Wedding, a girl sits in
a tenement all bundled up from the chill and looking out a window. “(D)oors
slamming, children wailing, women scolding, boys hallooing, all mingling with
the endless clatter of kitchen labors.” She had arrived in the city expecting a
very different life but very quickly was trapped in its poverty and go-nowhere
existence, nothing but a factory girl working day after day at the same tedious
labor. Still, she has friends who invite her to attend a ball, and though she
isn’t sure of going she says yes. At
the ball she sees the man of her dreams. At first she intimidated when she hears
other gossiping about his fiery nature and that he has a different girl every
weekend. But alone with her the two-timing man proposes… A schmaltzy story, still
with the rest of the tales in the book it fits right in.
Cohen’s Figure is about a sewing machine
operator, a boring lackluster job, but which has been done for countless year
after year, while Luigi Barbieri
concerns a new Italian merchant at Mott Street fruit emporium, who arranges
every fruit on his stand but still can’t get any customers, just a few. “If he
could but learn to speak fluently to the Americans, like his padrone, he might
some day become a man of influence himself. He might even aspire to an East
Side grocery store, with a stock of Italian goods.” He helps a
little girl from getting run over by a truck and he himself is struck down. The
only tears someone sheds is the vague obituary "I wonder what killed off
the last one — laziness or bad whisky?"
Leather’s
Banishment is about a boy pick-pocketing a woman on the subway and
disappearing with her screaming behind him; he’s done this countless times and
will do it again. In Not Yet dreamer Ivan,
whose always dreaming of ‘castles in Spain’ reads the paper and takes the
subway each morning to work, where he labors before his sewing machine and
reads reports from Russia and Germany. At
work it’s payday and suddenly he feels cheated, being fined for a ruined jacket
collar which did didn’t do. Is outraged by the injustice but what can he do? He
sinks back into his socialist dreams of the future where the world is all right
and fair. Instead “…from the open doorways of the tenements, and falling into
the broken lines of passers- by hurrying along on the sidewalks, were
poor-looking work-people,— men, women, children.”
While in A Young Desperado a rich 7 year old boy accidentally
wanders into the poor neighborhood where the poor kids attack him. He meets
other boys; one takes him around the city, on buses and cars and tells him that
he eats about once a week. Teaches him the way of the streets...
These different
tales about immigrant life in New York City in the 1890s show that the city is
always throbbing and booming, and always one step ahead of everybody. In many
of the stories we get glimpses of what it was like among the poor folk. What
this book does is bring the street life into clear focus and vision, the
different crowds, the traffic on the street, the rubbish, the debris and the
countless other little things which were a part of living in New York, uptown,
downtown, the poor are everywhere, East Side, West Side, all around the town…so
to speak. Still, I enjoyed it very much; captures the mood of New
York and how it was so very long ago. As it is
drastically changing now it has been constantly changing on and on…
An aside: Though I very much liked reading this there is a
more recent book about New York in the early 1900s The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker A book that will certainly set your old New York imagination spinning. A grand
book!
