Life on the streets

In the late Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry, and ear­ly Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, because of its prox­im­i­ty to Ellis Island, one of the major land­ing sites for immi­grants, thou­sands upon thou­sands of peo­ple came to New York City. As it hap­pened, many of these peo­ple found ten­e­ment hous­ing in Man­hat­tan, around and about what is called the Low­er East Side. In fact, it was where my ances­tors first set­tled. (As a col­lege stu­dent, I found cheap hous­ing there, too) It was here the­ses immigrants—millions of them—became Americans.

For the most part these immi­grants were poor, very poor. New York City, how­ev­er, was home to fab­u­lous wealth. A con­tem­po­rary book, How the Oth­er Half Lives, doc­u­ments this dichotomy.

When I read accounts of this time, I was struck by the con­stant men­tion of mass­es of chil­dren who seemed to have lived on the streets. They were there because immi­grant fam­i­lies often had large fam­i­lies, yet lived—at best—in tiny quar­ters. There was nowhere else for the kids to go, but on the streets to play and work.

Being chil­dren, being on the street, being at work, they were often much more quick­ly assim­i­lat­ed into Amer­i­can cul­ture and soci­ety than their par­ents were. They had par­ents, but in some respects, they were very dif­fer­ent from their par­ents. Hence the title, and the sto­ry, City of Orphans.

It was also a time of mass-mar­ket­ed books for young peo­ple. Detec­tive sto­ries were quite pop­u­lar. Indeed, the work­ing title for this book was, The Boy Detec­tive.

Hav­ing become inter­est­ed in all of this, and decid­ing to write a nov­el about this time and place, I was for­tu­nate to vis­it the Ten­e­ment Muse­um in New York City. It is a fas­ci­nat­ing place, pre­serv­ing as it does, the kind of life about which I was learning.

Final­ly, if you vis­it the Low­er East Side you will find much of it very much as it was a hun­dred and some years ago.

Sim­ply put, it was hard to resist writ­ing a nov­el about this time.