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Over the door is written:
It's one of the rules they have for us. We don't have very many rules, though.
We can come and go when ever we want . . .we just have to behave nice. That's okay with us; it's even better than one of them fancy hotels compared to livin' on the street. We get baths with soap and hot water in bath tubs! It's 6 for a bed, 6 for breakfast (hot coffee and bread), and 6 for supper (pork and beans). They let us eat as much as we want! (For lunch we usually go to Von Werdt's.)
There are plenty of bunks here if you want to take a nap. Don't think anyone would mind. Just don't fall asleep in one of the ones with the curtains. Those and the lockers are resevered for the guys that pay 10 a night. You can also go up to the gym on the top floor if you want. There's a trapeze! A little while ago a bunch of us all pitched in and bought a pair of boxin' gloves. Some of the fellows are real good with them.
The people that run this place (I think it's the Children's Aid Society) expect us to help ourselves and get a job. If things are goin' poorly they let us stay on trust, but we have ta pay them back for it. Boy, will they be gettin' a lot of money once the strike is over with! We can save up money, too. We each get a little bank to put it in and once a month they unlock the boxes for us. Some times we bring in someone who wants to be a newsie, and the Society will give them some money to buy papes with until they can make enough to buy papes on their own.
We can go to night school if we wants, and they have Sunday night meetings for us. Their usually pretty crowded, too. "Gospel shop" as some of them call it is real fun. We do a lot of singing and stuff.
Once some guy, Jacob somethin'-or-other, came to visit. He even took pictures of us! And another guy, some writer person, wrote about us in a book. Well, meybe it wasn't this place, but it was a place just like it!
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"I tried one night, not with the best of success I confess, to photograph
the boys in their wash-room, while they were cleaning up for supper. They
were quite turbulent, to the disgust of one of their number who assumed,
unasked, the office of general manager of the show, and expressed his mortification to
me in very polite language. 'If they would only behave, sir!' he complained, 'you
could make a good picture.'
'Yes,' I said, 'but it isn't in them, I suppose.' 'No, b'gosh!' said he, lapsing suddenly from grace under the provocation, 'them kids ain't got no sense, nohow!'" |
There are four other lodgin' houses like this for boys, one above the Sun office 'n' one over on Chambers Street and even one for girls. The Society also has a bunch of schools for us to go to. There's a school for typewriting and one for dressmaking and one for laundry for the girls. Some of the girls that go there are real nice people. (I wonder why Annie doesn't go to one?) Let's see...there's also a place or two for sick kids to go (some by the sea!), and a place for crippled boys to work down on Forty-fourth Street, and a place by the sea for crippled girls. Oh, and there's also two places for us that knows how to read to go read books and stuff! Them Society people are real nice to us.
Hope you've gotten enough rest. Strikin' can be real tiresome some days, 'specially when we soak the scabs.
Back to the park.
