The Fourth Estate

At Laight and Verick Streets, in New York City of today, the traffic roars, even though on rubber wheels.  Thousands crowd the sidewalks and buildings tower into the sky, the workers in them more in numbers than would comprise a village.

When I was born and lived in the house at the corner of the two streets, everything was very different.  The houses were mostly three stories high and were dwellings, sometimes occupied by one family and sometimes by the poorer ones in each to a floor.  Horses clopped-clopped on the cobblestones all day long and when I was old enough to play ball in the street in front of my home, the drivers cussed us out for slowing up traffic.  There were no traffic signals and pedestrians crossed when and how they might, with good co-operation from the horses.

New York was, like all cities now large, first a number of neighboring villages.  In that early time each section still had much of the unity of a village.  We knew people living in the section, we shopped in the section, we usually had a church or two where the children if not the families of the section went. Many people who lived quiet lives in a section of the city seldom went out of it.  My mother was one of those home-keeping women, buying at the nearest stores, taking her airings mainly when walking to and from church, wholly ignorant of the world, the great world, spreading beyond her horizon.  Had I been a girl, she would no doubt started me out to live that kind of life, for girls, rich or poor, had with trays of hard candy.  Perfumes and face powder were kept discreetly behind glass doors on shelves, and there was a frosted glass partition at the back which had the word, “Prescriptions” lettered all across it. When the proprietor’s shadow could be seen behind this glass, busily bent over something, you knew that he was making up medicine for a doctor, and after tapping politely on the counter you waited as patiently as your temperament would permit for the all-important work to be finished before the more casual sale could go forward.

Men went out of the section to work, but practically no women could be seen abroad in the mornings, except those who had market baskets on their arms. Girls had not yet invaded a man’s world, except for an occasional factory, where very poor and what we now call the underprivileged weary put in eight to ten hours a day for wages that ran from six dollars a week upward, – but very slightly upward.  No girl of a family which could possibly manage to keep her at home but would make every sacrifice to do that.

No little girls played with us boys in the street, not even to toss a soft ball.  Sometimes they sat demurely in a little knot on the doorsteps of their homes, playing” jacks”, that game of dexterity in which small x shaped objects are thrown in the air in a certain sequence, and caught before getting down, by the skilled.  Boys scorned this game but I rather liked it and I record as one of the minor rebellions of my childhood that I defiantly played jacks with some little girls of my acquaintance and dared my fellowmen to say anything about it.  Those who dared got a small fist shaken under their noses and sometimes the same landed on that organ.  My mother, timid, and constantly urging me to be a gentleman, was horrified when news of such an act on my part leaked through to her, but when I insisted that I was merely standing up for my girl friends she had no argument, defending the female being emphatically part of the duty of a gentleman, young or old.