“One hundred Forty-fourth Street between Brook and Willis Avenues was all America to us.”—Jimmy Savo, born in 1895 in the Bronx
New York City, 1848—1922
The New York City neighborhood that Gene Schermerhorn moved into as a boy in 1848 seemed like another planet when he revisited it at the end of the century.
When young Gene Schermerhorn moved to Twenty-third Street in New York City in 1848, his favorite game was to try to lasso the pigs from the farm next door as they ran squealing between the apple trees that lined muddy Sixth Avenue. In the evenings he flew kites and played baseball in front of his house with his father and uncle. But before long a new law was passed that forbade kite-flying in the street. City officials explained that it was important to keep string from getting tangled up on the new poles and wires. Then Gene’s street was paved, and after that his family had to move so his house could make way for a brick building with plate-glass windows.
The changes were almost too fast to keep up with. The cattle barn across the street turned into an apartment building. Horse-drawn carriages gave way to railroad tracks on Fourth Avenue. Then, in 1883, a new bridge over the East River connected Manhattan and Brooklyn. To prove that it was safe, circus master P. T. Barnum led a herd of elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge. The same year, electric streetlights pushed back the darkness on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, allowing children to stay out and play longer.
Games changed to fit new spaces. Back on Twenty-third Street, there had been enough room for Gene and his friends to play “how many miles,” a game in which marbles were shot across a great ring of smooth dirt in his road. But in his new neighborhood, there was only space to shoot through “a little spot of bare earth about two feet by four.”
Some young New Yorkers took advantage of the changes. An unfinished bridge could be a perfect winter sledding hill. Young people swung on wrecking balls after the construction workers went home and wrenched open fire hydrants to cool off the block in summer. Apartment windows became launching pads for matchstick airplanes and water balloons. Anything could be a baseball field; comedian George Burns remembered his: “A manhole cover was home plate, a fire hydrant was first base, second base was a lamppost and Mr. Gitletz, who used to bring a kitchen chair down to watch us play, was third base.”
THE BONE-SHAPED FUTURE
The new century changed things for animals, too. For many years keeping pets had been only for royals and wealthy people, who fed their pets table scraps. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, companies began to mass-produce cheap pet food, allowing dogs and cats to enter more middle-class families. Dog biscuits—the product of a London baker’s mistake—arrived in the United States in 1908. A businessman brought the recipe and shaped the dough into a bone, and by 1915 millions of dogs were gnawing on Milk-Bone biscuits. Soon, mass-produced dog foods were common items on American shopping lists.
In 1909 Lewis Hine photographed this game of baseball in a city alley.
Younger children began to ask for store-bought toys instead of the toys family members made for them. In its 1874 catalog, R. H. Macy’s department store advertised dolls made in thirteen different countries. One jump-rope rhyme, probably made up by a disappointed girl whose family couldn’t afford to buy a doll, went:
I won’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more
There’s a big fat policeman at the door, door, door
He’ll grab you by the collar and make you pay a dollar.
I won’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more.
There’s a big fat policeman at the door, door, door
He’ll grab you by the collar and make you pay a dollar.
I won’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more.
With no pools or lakes, children plunged into fast-moving, increasingly filthy rivers. Willie Sutton, who became a famous jewel thief, remembered that as a boy, “We swam through the raw, untreated garbage [of New York’s East River] … We dove off the cargo barges … Before I was out of my early teens I was swimming [from Brooklyn] to Manhattan and back with such ease that I was able to rescue friends of mine who couldn’t make it.”
TRAFFIC WARS
Some children waged war against cars by controlling traffic lights with mirrors that reflected the sun’s rays. “You could focus the reflection on to the red … or green,” wrote Julius Sokolsky of the Bronx. “We’d keep them there for five minutes, and see the drivers get all frustrated.”
One of New York’s first skyscrapers, completed in 1902, was the Flatiron Building, rising twenty-two stories from former pastureland at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. It’s still there.
In 1887, when Gene Schermerhorn was forty-five, he took a walk through his old neighborhood. He could barely recognize it. “It seems hard to believe that Twenty-third Street could have changed so much,” he wrote when he got home. “The rural scenes, the open spaces have vanished; and the small and quiet residences, many of them built entirely of wood, have given place to huge piles of brick and stone, and to iron and plate-glass fronts of the stores which now line the street.” Worst of all, workers had filled in Beekman’s Pond, his old swimming hole, to make Madison Avenue.
Even bigger changes lay ahead. In 1902, developers finished one of the world’s tallest buildings on the block where Gene grew up. It was a twenty-two-story skyscraper called the Flatiron Building, shaped like a giant slice of pie. In the years that followed, street after street was paved for use by automobiles. The results were tragic. In 1922, the year Gene Schermerhorn died, 477 New York children were killed by cars. That summer, fifteen hundred angry young New Yorkers marched up Fifth Avenue to rally for safer streets. But nothing could stop the automobile. Parked cars soon lined the city streets. New roads sliced through meadows and fields. One young New Yorker named Michael Gold later wrote of his neighborhood: “We defended our playground through force of arms but the Schiff Parkway was an opponent we could not defeat.”
He became an important fire department official in New York City. He remained a walker and a lover of New York’s streets, neighborhoods, and history throughout his life. Though he had no children of his own, he wrote letters about the city of his youth to his young nephew Phil so that the boy would have an idea of what New York had once been like. Gene Schermerhorn died at the age of eighty.
BUZZ OFF!
Around 1910, health officials began to suspect that the housefly was carrying infectious diseases. City children became the soldiers in an all-out war. They tried to win “swat the fly” contests and schools formed the “junior sanitary police.” In 1915, a Washington, D.C., newspaper offered twenty-five dollars to the child who could kill the most flies in two weeks. Five thousand young contestants raced around the city and mashed seven million flies. But no one outdid thirteen-year-old Layton H. Burdette. He formed a company of twenty-five friends and promised to split the reward. Together, they flattened 343,000 flies.