The Mulberry Bend we laid by the heels; that was the worst pigsty of all, and here again let me hark back to the murder I have spoken of so often. I do not believe that there was a week in all the twenty years I had to do with the den, as a police reporter, in which I was not called to record there a stabbing or shooting affair, some act of violence. It is now five years since the Bend became a park (see illustration facing page 146), and the police reporter has not had business there once during that time; not once has a shot been fired or a knife been drawn. That is what it means to let the sunlight in and give the boys their rights in a slum like that!
IT IS FIVE YEARS SINCE THE BEND BECAME A PARK From “The Making of an American.” Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
Of this boy of the slum we shall speak together further. He is just what you let him be: good, if you give him the chance; bad, if you will have none of him. Take the home out of his life, and you handicap him forever and mortgage your own future with the heaviest of mortgages. It is since that understanding began to dawn upon us that we have seized playgrounds right and left, wherever we had the chance. I have in mind one which we got away from a corporation on the West-side—it goes a little hard with me to own that it was a church corporation, because by that time the church ought to have had better sense. It was an old burial ground where some of the old-time New Yorkers lay who, in their day, neglected their boys and gave us the heritage of the slum. I hope that they have seen their mistake: I am sure they have, and that their ears are rejoiced by the patter of little children’s feet where once there was the silence; for they are echoing the better to-morrow, those little feet.
I wish I had time to tell you the whole story of what we have learned as to that in these last ten years, but it is too long. Let it be enough to say that, wherever we have destroyed the slum that killed the home and given the children a chance, there order has moved in where violence and gang rule were before, and the police are having a vacation. We are extending that program of ours right and left. Seven years ago we had not one school playground in New York; now we have a law which says that never another public school shall be built without an outdoor playground for the children. And we have been building more than three-score new and splendid schools since then. Some of these schools have the playgrounds on the street, and some on the roof, and in the latter, last year, Mayor Low’s Board of Education put brass bands in the summer evenings during the long vacation, and invited in the neighborhood. If you have any doubts about the millennium’s coming nearer, you should have been there then. It seemed to me when I saw three thousand children dancing to the tune of “Sunday Afternoon” on top of the school that had been used so long as a kind of jail in which to lock them up for the convenience of some one who wanted to get rid of them—it seemed to me then, as if we had put on seven league boots in the race to distance the slum and the janitor. Both of them lost their grip on those children then and there, and for all time; though the janitor strove hard against fate. He tried to drive them away with a club when we were not looking; and when he was caught at that, he reported that those roof playgrounds were no good: they were too hot in summer and too cold in winter. So, it would appear, is most of the rest of the earth.