pavements out of the mud.

[Illustration: A Tammany-swept East Side Street before Colonel Waring's
Day.]

Even the colonel's broom would have been powerless to do that for "the
Bend." That was hopeless and had to go. There was no question of
children or playground involved. The worst of all the gangs, the Whyos,
had its headquarters in the darkest of its dark alleys; but it was left
to the police. We had not begun to understand that the gangs meant
something to us beyond murder and vengeance, in those days. No one
suspected that they had any such roots in the soil that they could be
killed by merely destroying the slum. The cholera was rapping on our
door, and, with the Bend there, we felt about it as a man with stolen
goods in his house must feel when the policeman comes up the street.
Back in the seventies we began discussing what ought to be done. By 1884
the first Tenement House Commission had summoned up courage to propose
that a street be cut through the bad block. In the following year a bill
was brought in to destroy it bodily, and then began the long fight that
resulted in the defeat of the slum a dozen years later.

[Illustration: The Same Street when Colonel Waring wielded the Broom.]

It was a bitter fight, in which every position of the enemy had to be
carried by assault. The enemy was the deadly official inertia that was
the outcome of political corruption born of the slum plus the
indifference of the mass of our citizens, who probably had never seen
the Bend. If I made it my own concern to the exclusion of all else, it
was only because I knew it. I had been part of it. Homeless and alone, I
had sought its shelter, not for long,--that was not to be endured,--but
long enough to taste of its poison, and I hated it. I knew that the blow
must be struck there, to kill. Looking back now over those years, I can
see that it was all as it should be. We were learning the alphabet of
our lesson then. We could have learned it in no other way so thoroughly.
Before we had been at it more than two or three years, it was no longer
a question of the Bend merely. The Small Parks law, that gave us a
million dollars a year to force light and air into the slum, to its
destruction, grew out of it. The whole sentiment which in its day,
groping blindly and angrily, had wiped out the disgrace of the Five
Points, just around the corner, crystallized and took shape in its
fight. It waited merely for the issue of that, to attack t