Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 61, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1908 — OUTING FOR NEW YORK’S POOR. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

OUTING FOR NEW YORK’S POOR.

“Cheer Up” Slugs the North River to the Tenement Dwellers. You may know the great river up and down with an intimacy determined by your occupation, your propinquity and your soul, says the New York Herald. You may know it where it is the Hudson, with headlands overlapping blue on blue, or where it is called Nbrth rßiver, because it is on the west, and is no more a river but a tide cut by a thousand keels. You may know it luxuriously from beneath the awning of a white gilt yacht, or hurriedly from the crowded deck of a ferryboat, or with the hungering thrill of the homecomer when the tired ship is warped into her pier. There are many ways to know the river, but you may never know it deeply enough to say “God made it” until you see it and feel it and breathe it from the railing of a recreation pier on a muggy summer night, backed by a couple of thousand of the people who manage somehow to be cheerful- though they will never get a right good rest till they are dead. Take a poor, sodden, pulpy disintegrating lump of human flesh, with the soul of it very still ‘and feeble inside, drag it out to a wooden place oVer the water, away from the dishes and the suds and the stench of gas and metal, blow clean, fresh air upon it, and brush its deadened nerves with a quickening bar of music. Would you believe it? The lump has come to life again, and moves and even smiles, and before the evening passes will be planning an--oth*r day’s work for to-morrow. The Pavillion is filled. seat Ground the bandstand is taken and benches by the raillrigs. Scores of people are walking arm in arm from end to end of the long, cool tunnel in the thick, hot night. Manners are as free as the air. It’s "Katie” here "Billy’’ there, and nowhere any affectation or pretence. That is worth noting, that for downright simplicity

a recreation pier on a sweltering night makes an admirable model for the world. These are working people, Into whose every pleasure a certain sadness creeps because there Is so little time between a toil and a toll, and so seldom any real rest until the end. It Is a complicated mixture of races on the pier. If there is any perceptible preponderance you would say It Is Irish. But you have no sooner reached that conclusion than Italy overwhelms you with volubility and vowels. A Hebrew family, aloof and haphas a bench close up to the music. The boy of ten and the girl two years younger detach themselves, with parental permission, and go for a promenade. Nothing could be grander than the assumption of masculine authority which the little chap assumes. He puts out his chest lifts his head and smiles upon all the world as he escorts his sister through the crush. < "I dort'd see der Rosenlobens here to-nighd,” says the mother. “I vender ”

**Vy. don’d you know, mamma?” shouts the eldest boy» “Last nlghd, when dey vas here in der preezes, dler house vas burgled, an* dey gannot afford no recreations no more.” Lamentations follow till the muslo renews, and all else Is forgotten. There are children of many races and many degrees of cleanliness. Moat of them are In rags, most of them are pale, but all are self-con-tained and bold. The tolls and perils of the water front graduate them early Into life. There Is a boy with one arm missing. You will see many like him on the west side. Such a processton of childhood along the pierl Here is a stanch, small man of nine, limping with a stone bruise, marching past like a veteran in a Grand Army parade. Another, with the wlstfullest face and the oddest covering of rags, has certainly stepped out of one of J. G. Brown’s pictures for a rest from that eternal pose. There are notably few men In the assemblage. You ask one of the uniformed guards where the men are and he jerks his head to one side toward the river front. “They're mostly up there in the saloons Jawin*,*; he explains.