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Slumming in New York: From the
Waterfront to Mythic Harlem
By Robert M. Dowling
University of Illinois Press, 2007
"Under the Bridge and Beyond":
Helen Campbell on the East Side Waterfront
May 21, 2008
Manhattan's major waterfront area in the late nineteenth
century was located in the Fourth Ward, a district that
formed an apron around the Manhattan side of the
Brooklyn Bridge. In 1885, the Fourth Ward contained 30
acres of tenements that housed around 17,000 people.
The area had been awash with cheap groceries, rat pits,
and stale beer dives for years, and due to the growing
population of transient sailors, prostitute traffic thickened
exponentially; at this time in New York history, the Fourth
Ward was, as historian Timothy Gilfoyle describes it, "the
most significant and the poorest waterfront zone of
prostitution" (218). But the waterfront was also the
centerpiece of an international trade city, signifying
plurality and opacity. The vortex of sailors and
longshoremen from all parts of the globe swelling into and
out of the shops and bars along the East River was in
continuous motion. Significantly, the district appealed to
no one ethnicity, class, race, or gender. Ethnically
cohesive neighborhoods, or "ghettoes," would only emerge
when jobs and industries became associated with specific
ethnic groups--garments for the Jewish, cigars for the
Bohemians, etc. But through the 1870s and '80s, the East
Side waterfront region of New York, though perhaps mainly
Irish, was still composed of workers and unemployed
groups that largely allied themselves with trade and the
lifestyle of the wharves rather than with any particular
language, religion, or national origin.
Class divided Manhattan more than anything else through
the post-bellum period, and wealthy neighborhoods formed
a corridor down the middle of the island; the poorest
neighborhoods straddled the river banks. Luc Sante
astutely remarks in his Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old
New York that "Fifth Avenue was, after all, the farthest
one could get from either river" (50); William Dean Howells
affirms the deliberateness of the avenue's location in his
cartographic essay "New York Streets" (1896), where he
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contrasts the center of the island with its margins along

the rivers: "it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city
length-wise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which
affords the norm of style and comfort to the other
avenues on either hand . . . on the east, they lose their
genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into
apartment-houses, and then into tenement houses of
lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive
industries of the river shores are reached" (248, 249).

But rather than emphasizing class distinctions,

middle-class reformers maintained through the 1880s that
the slum was an inevitable symptom of deviant lifestyles
as opposed to group identity or even collective class
consciousness--social historian David Ward reports that
"popular indictments emphasized moral and personal
relationships rather than structural and social conditions"
(48). The underprivileged, therefore, became preeminently
associated with both geographic space and individual
interactions within that space. One all-night missionary on
Baxter Street vividly renders the culturally diverse nature
of the waterfront population in this way:

The audience was gathered from neighboring alleys,

narrow streets, saloons, dance-halls, and dives. Jews,
Gentiles, olive-skinned Italians, and almond-eyed
Chinamen, sat side by side. Sailors were in the majority.
Dissolute women, both white and black, and a few loafers
. . . A scattering of beggars and tramps sought refuge
from the wintry blast. Several boys and girls, attracted by
the singing, helped to fill the room. (Campbell Darkness
194)

Reinforcing this image during a walk along the waterfront,

the moral reformer Helen Campbell discovers "one of the
most curious features of night life in New York,--the
sidewalk restaurants" (215). In these odd venues, "no one
is turned away, and sailors, negro longshoremen,
marketmen, and stray women, come and go, and fare
alike" (215). If New York was the quintessential American
trade city, with all of its side streets and subcultures, the
waterfront was at its pitiless core the ideal location for
proving the effectiveness of immersing oneself in the
climate of poverty and moral laxity--comprehend it and the
remainder of the city would be an open book.

New York writing after the Civil War reflected the growing
popularity of the social sciences over Protestant
evangelicalism to address the issue of New York's
increasingly identifiable and morally problematic "lower"
districts. The corollary in literary history is the transition
from sentimentalism to realism, from a preoccupation with
plot-driven pathos to social concerns, material referents,
deterministic scientific theories, and unheroic character
play. Sentimental and sensational modes of representing
New York life spliced with the social sciences during
America's Gilded Age into a new mode that might be called
"moral realism," a fusion of the romantic and the pragmatic
practiced by such reform writers as Charles Loring Brace,
Helen Campbell, and Jacob Riis, a group whose explicit
aim was nothing less than to change the face of urban
America. What comes into focus in the 1880s and '90s is

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the conviction that moral systems are inherent to specific

regions, that in order for mainstream outsiders to
overcome the problem of urban representation in their
documentary-style writing, they must adopt new methods
of investigation and engage the "lower million" more
objectively on their own ground--in the streets, missions,
and tenements of New York neighborhoods that had
thrived and developed mythologies and mysteries of their
own.

Brace, Campbell, and Riis intermingled Protestant gospel

with sociology, stark melodrama with appalling statistics,
romantic characterization with interviews, and caricatured
settings with specific sites of inquiry--urban
neighborhoods that outsider audiences were encouraged
to explore for themselves. Poverty then became a
provable, tangible lifestyle that had deeply-rooted and
seemingly irreversible effects. Like the sentimental or
sensational text, characters in the new mode were
rewarded for choosing the right moral path after
experiencing a series of temptations, but the stories were
"real" and the characters could be literally sought out at a
neighborhood mission or downtown saloon. Moral realists
condemned "low class" neighborhood cultures in favor of
cultural assimilation. But rather than passively observing
their subjects, they immersed themselves in the society of
each site by exercising an inductive process of
investigative journalism.

Although outsider texts like Campbell's The Problem of the

Poor (1882) and Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890)
reflect an altruistic middle-class concern for the
inhabitants of lower Manhattan, New York society and its
urban investigators still retained their "moral
interpretations of poverty" (Ward 43). A process of
polarization was at work, regarded as both necessary and
repugnant by uptown New Yorkers. This division was
precipitated by increasingly isolated job sites, inadequate
housing, and neighborhood displacement, and reformers
mobilized to manage the crisis. The slums both emerged
and were transformed from the 1850s to the Civil War, and
by the late 1880s, the distinctive qualities of many
neighborhoods that had been singled-out by moral suasion
efforts were effectively incapacitated. If Paula Rabinowitz
theorizes that "slumming" in the 1930s was "more likely
the regulation of working people's desires than the
expression of middle-class pleasures," a practice
manifested in "ritual encounters between those whose
lives were privileged to observe, regulate, and detail the
behaviors of others" (188), the 1870s and '80s were, in
fact, the heyday of slumming as social regulation. By
1895, to give one high-profile example, the notorious Five
Points area had been, as Helen Campbell recalled, "long
ago reduced to order and decency by forces working for
good" (51).

* * *

Helen Campbell['s] reputation as a writer…culminate[d] in

a series of outsider studies on the economic polarization
and moral distinctiveness of the urban poor: The Problem
of the Poor: A Record of Quiet Work in Unquiet Places

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(1882), Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their

Problems and Their Lives (1886), and a sizable
contribution to the co-authored exposé, Darkness and
Daylight, or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1895).
Campbell attracted the attention of many literary and
political luminaries over her lifetime, including the great
feminist and realist fiction writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
who shared living quarters with her for a number of years
in California and New York City, respectively. A realist in
form if not always in spirit, well before Frank Norris,
Campbell directly compared herself to the radical French
journalist and fiction writer Emile Zola, whose impact on
the American realist movement was prodigious, and she
collected the bulk of her data for her books first-hand….

A precursor to the more celebrated "slum journalist" Jacob

Riis, Helen Campbell, again, balances on the threshold
between sentimentalism and realism in American literary
history. On the one hand, she is a persistent Protestant
moralizer, and her parabolic tales of lower-class woe come
straight from the altruistic preacher Lyman Abbott's pulpit.
On the other, she is a part of the growing literary realist
movement in the United States, one dedicated to
rendering the lower classes in a humanistic light. In
Campbell, prostitutes can be tough-willed fighters in a
terrifying urban environment rather than "scarlet whores of
Babylon," convicts can be reformers not lost souls, and
immigrants can be non-parochial. In some ways, like her
contemporary William Dean Howells, Campbell "defected"
from her middle-class foundation as a result of
"dissatisfaction with reigning genteel conventions"
(Burrows and Wallace 1179), and she did so by adopting
insider voices for outsider consumption….

Earlier on, in the 1860s and '70s, middle-class New

Yorkers had become exasperated by the lowering moral
standards on the waterfront, and expectations for reform
there were high. Always responsive to popular demand,
moral reformers soon poured into the area, but they
abruptly found themselves ill-equipped to restrain the
denizens of Water and Cherry Streets and eventually
resorted to acting out publicity stunts to keep up
appearances. The New York Times broke an incriminating
story about one group of Protestant reformers led by the
Reverend A. C. Arnold. The missionaries, as it turned out,
had been bribing dive bar owners, rat pit proprietors, and
gang members to act as if they had been "saved" by the
area's Howard Street Mission, at that time running prayer
meetings in the worst dens. One businessman caustically
referred to the carnival as "sheer humbug," and the
notorious rat pit proprietor Kit Burns laughed openly after
finding out that a local saloon and brothel owner named
John Allen was hosting evangelical prayer meetings: "I've
known Johnny Allen fourteen years and he couldn't be a
pious man if he tried ever so hard. You might as well ask
a rat to sing like a canary bird as to make a Christian out
of that chap" (qtd in Bonner 32)….

It was a desperate fraud, and Luc Sante reports that "the

actual congregants at the saloon services were almost
uniformly businessmen from other parts of town, and even

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these were less steadfast in their attendance, being

driven out of Kit Burns's, at least, by the overpowering
stench of rat and dog carcasses buried under the
bleachers" (280)….Kit Burns's rat pit prayer meetings at
273 Water Street drew a good deal of skepticism, and a
public inquiry ensued regarding both Burns and the
missionaries; but it was Burns himself that precipitated an
end to the meetings. One night after the clergymen and
ladies had over-stayed their welcome, Burns, the living
embodiment of the stereotyped waterfront insider,
announced to a group of reporters, "them fellows has been
making a pul-pit out of my rat pit and I'm going to purify it
after them." "Jim!" he yelled over to his barman, "Bring out
the vermin" (qtd in Bonner 32). Jim heartily responded by
flinging rats into the meeting while gamblers howled hymns
in grotesque mockery of the choir. Burns soon after
mandated a nightly show and referred to his sacrament as
one that "ratified" the meetings (Bonner 33). For the
police, this was the last straw. Turning a blind eye to an
illegal gambling ring that abused New York's mushrooming
rodent population was one thing, but to abuse respectable
ladies and popular clergymen in such a foul-mannered way
was quite another. Within a few weeks, they shut the
place down once and for all.

Outsider reformers on the East Side waterfront clearly

required more savvy methods of acculturation. Rather
than rent out an immoral venue for moral suasion as
Campbell's predecessors had done at Burns's and
elsewhere, a method that did little but amuse the insiders
it was designed to convert, Campbell chose to engage the
waterfront on a more personal level. She saw the
disturbing social constructions taking place on the
waterfront as an unremitting cycle of destructive behavior
that must be stopped dead in its tracks, and she rose to
this reformist challenge by working to construct a new
method of urban reform. She explains that rather than
depend on dusty deductions producing outdated
generalizations on the nature of poverty and the poor, she
would immerse herself, for better or for worse, in the
landscape and society of the slums. Thus, her matrix of
action was not the industrial school or parlor discussions
of the "low classes," but the waterfront district itself…..By
immersing herself in waterfront culture, Campbell
accumulates first-hand knowledge that would aid her and
her outsider compeers in the struggle to reform the urban
poor; looking "from within, out," she discovers a system of
morality that was to be effectively torn down. In time, she
implies, New York would experience a series of cultural
implosions, and in their wake the city would emerge a
shining moral example to the rest of the nation. One
neighborhood at a time, New York would become the city
on the hill--it would transform into the model American
community, towering and knowable.

Works Cited
Bonner, Arthur. Jerry McAuley and His Mission. Neptune,
NJ: Loizeaux Brothers, 1967.

Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History

of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999.

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Campbell, Helen with Thomas W. Byrnes and Thomas W.

Knox. Darkness and Daylight, or, Lights and Shadows of
New York Life. 1891. Hartford, Conn.: A.D. Worthington
and Co., 1895.

Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City,

Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex,
1790-1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Howells, William Dean. "New York Streets." In Impressions

and Experiences. New York: Harper and Brothers
Publishers, 1896: 245-81.

Rabinowitz, Paula. "Margaret Bourke-White's Red Coat; or,

Slumming In the 1930s." Ed. Bill Pullen. Radical Revisions:
Rereading 1930s Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois
Press: 187-207.

Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.
1991. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Ward, David. Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City,

1840-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

***

Robert M. Dowling received his Ph.D. from the City

University of New York and is an associate professor of
English at Central Connecticut State University. He has
taught graduate-level seminars on New York writing,
Eugene O'Neill, American Literary Realism, and many
other topics in American literary studies. Slumming in New
York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, his first book,
appeared this past summer; he is currently working on two
new book projects, Critical Companion to Eugene O'Neill:
A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, which will be
out next December, and a critical anthology on Eugene
O'Neill's early bohemian and radical influences. His edited
version of "The Screenews of War," a previously
unpublished short story by O'Neill, along with his
introductory essay, has just appeared in the journal
Resources for American Literary Study.

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