Immigrants crowded together in conditions roaches and rats would have protested had Jacob Riis.
A couple of decades later, another exploited (and, to many, invisible) group of people had Lewis Wickes Hine.
Nearly a century before YouTube or podcasts, photographers Riis and Hine exposed the squalid and dangerous conditions in which the poorest and most vulnerable people lived and worked.
Riis is most famous for his dispatches (He worked as a journalist.) from New York's Lower East Side--in particular, the Five Points area, which was believed to have the highest rates of population density, infectious diseases and murder of any urban neighborhood in the world. Before Riis' photographs were published, few in New York's--or America's--more privileged classes had any idea of how people in such areas lived.
Hine, on the other hand, roamed the country and turned his focus (no pun intended) on child laborers. Just as housing, health and safety codes were nonexistent during Riis' peak years of the 1880s and '90's, so were laws against child labor in the early 20th Century, when Hine did most of his work.
Among the laboring lads Hine documented were bicycle messengers, at least one--like the youngster in the following photo-- as young as ten years old:
In the documentation accompanying the image, he is identified only as "Western Union No. 5", working as an "extra" in Danville, Virginia. He told Hine his boss was goint to lay him off for being too young, but an older messenger admitted they were trying to have him booted because he ate into their profits.
Earle Griffith and Eddie Tahoory worked for the Dime Messenger Service in Washington, DC. They said they never knew when they would go home at night--or whether they might get a call to the red light district. "The office isn't supposed to send us" but "we go when we get the call." As if to soften the blow--for themselves, perhaps--one of them added, "not very often."
Marion Davis, 14 years old, also made runs he wasn't "supposed to do" because he was under 16: He went to the (Alabama-Coushatta) Reservation. "The boss don't care and the cops don't stop me," he explained.
Here is another Texas messenger:
Unnamed, the 15-year-old was working for the Mackay Telegraph Company in Waco. He seems almost stylish--or is he just cocky? And is that a pipe in his mouth?
Also, look at his seat angle. Did he have any children?
Speaking of style, look at the handlebars ridden by Percy Neville of Shreveport, Louisiana.
Like Marion Davis, he was working in an area where he "wasn't supposed to": the city's red-light district.
As I've mentioned in other posts, I was a bicycle messenger in Manhattan for a year.
I was so, so young then. I can say that now: Many more years have passed since I made my last delivery than I had spent in this world before I made it. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I've really made any progress since then or whether I've simply found jobs and other situations in which my quirks and flaws work for me, or are simply overlooked.
Perhaps the real reason I can say now that I was so young when I did it is that, really, I couldn't do anything else at that time in my life. Rarely could I spend more than a couple of minutes with another person, or doing nearly anything else besides riding my bike without feeling anger or sadness or both. In the space of not much more than a year, two people who were very, very dear to me had died--one suddenly, the other mercifully--and another committed suicide. The only sort of job I could work was one in which I had only momentary interactions with people who could have told me that I was "wasting" my life by doing what I was doing or that, really, it was all I could do, all I could ever do. I could satisfy people only for moments, episodically, and I simply had to do a job in which I would be remunerated for doing so.
Those--even more than my physical changes--are reasons why I couldn't do that job today, although sometimes I wish I could. I understand now how it would be too easy for me to continue with a job in which I give and receive momentary satisfactions and rewards, not think about the future and not have to think about whether or not I was at my best because, really, there was no better or worst, only getting that next package, that next document, that next slice of pizza (Yes, I delivered a couple of those!) to the whoever needed it within the next fifteen minutes--and to never, ever think about it again, or at least until someone else--or even the same person--ordered such a delivery later in the day, the following day, the following week.
In short, there was no future. And there was no past because, really, no one else cared about anything else, as long as he (most of our customers were men) got a timely delivery. It didn't matter that I was a creative genius who had not been recognized or that I was stupid enough to believe I was one and angry enough to feel that others less deserving (which included just about everybody else) were being recognized and rewarded in ways I wasn't.
If I would have changed anything about my job, I would have wanted to work at night. There was something I liked about navigating the city's byways in the dark--or by streetlights, anyway, and the shadows they and the nightlights of small offices and furnished rooms cast. Of course, had I worked at night, I probably would have been making even more of those runs to then-seedy parts of the city (or to more gilded places with their own written codes of omerta) with envelopes and small packages, all the while pretending (or telling myself) I had no idea of what was in them.
There's nothing new about that aspect of being a bicycle messenger, a job that's been around for almost as long as the bicycle itself. Back in the days of the first Bike Boom in the US (roughly from the mid-1880s until the first years of the 20th Century), night messengers delivered telegrams for telegraph offices. They also, not surprisingly, ran side errands, such as fetching cigarettes and delivering "notes". I put quotation marks around that word because nightclubs, brothels and other establishments that operated after, say, 10pm sent and received them. So they were "notes" in the same sense as some of those envelopes I found myself delivering to the same addresses over and over again.
Those messengers were, as often as not, pre-teen boys. In those days, kids were put to work practically the day after they learned how to walk. But for jobs like those of night messenger and chimney-sweeper, the boys were often recruited out of orphanages or "reform" schools. In other words, they were the ones "nobody would miss".
Jacob Riis documented them, as well as other children, women and immigrants who worked in squalid and dangerous conditions, in How The Other Half Lives. His eloquent writing and starkly, beautifully poignant photographs helped people to learn about the conditions in which people like the messenger boys lived and worked. They also were instrumental in passing legislation such as the New York law--among the first of its kind--prohibiting people under the age of 21 from working as messengers after 10 pm.
A few times I made deliveries after that hour, or before the break of dawn. Somehow I don't imagine they were co-op sales agreements or copies of professionals' credentials. I know, though, that even though I was old enough to work those hours, I was still very, very young.
As so often happens when I'm riding alone, I didn't exactly go where I'd planned. Then again, sometimes my plans aren't firm when I'm riding alone. I can't say they were today.
So...I had a vague idea I might take another ride to Point Lookout. (Can you tell it's a favorite of mine?) And, well, I took a "wrong" turn--accidentally, in a Freudian way, if you know what I mean. I found myself riding underneath an Air France plane that I could've sworn I could've touched. That meant, of course, I was even closer to JFK International Airport than the union is to management at my job. (You would really appreciate that comment if you saw what I wrote yesterday on my other blog.)
From there, I rode through a few neighborhoods that I have been to a couple of times before, and a couple of more I haven't seen in years, all of them on one side or the other of the Queens-Nassau county line. What those places had to recommend them were that they were quiet and traffic-free, which is no small virtue on a nearly perfect day for cycling.
I passed among residential areas that ranged from cookie-cutter suburban to ostentious in the way of a 1970's Lincoln Continental. I also passed by and through a couple of rather lovely parks, the Belmont racetrack, then some neighborhoods with increasingly interesting architecture, all the way to the North Shore.
Now, that wasn't the most opulent or architecturally distinctive house I saw. But I think that if I had lots of money, I'd want to live in something like that. I imagine that the rooms would be full of light undulating in waves like the water that's only about 100 feet away.
I get the feeling Arielle wouldn't mind it at all. After all, she's the one who led me here.
Some people--and bikes--like the beach. But I think Arielle really loves the light and water and waves.
Surprisingly, I saw only one other cyclist along that road that skirts Long Island Sound. However, I did see a fair number of couples--mostly middle-aged and older, though hardly looking worse for it--taking leisurely or romantic strolls. All of them smiled, waved or said "hello" to me.
I don't suspect, though, that they'd buy flowers in this place:
To be fair, that florist is nowhere near the Gatsby shoreline I reached by accident. It's in Richmond Hill: one of those places where I took a "wrong" turn. The florist is in business; I've passed it any number of times because it's not far from where I work. Whatever happens to that florist, I hope someone preserves that sign: If you remember when FTD used the "Mercury" logo in all of its ads, you're old, or at least of my generation. As you can see, that sign had neon lights on it at one time. I don't know when they were removed, but somehow I suspect that the sign is from the 1940's, or even earlier. In those days, the neighborhood was populated mainly by the children and grandchildren of Irish and German immigrants; later, second-generation Italian-Americans (including some relatives of mine) moved in, only to be replaced by the current Indian and Guyanese residents.
One of the neighborhood's most noted residents was Jacob Riis. But I doubt Gatsby ever went there, even by accident.
