he slum in its
other strongholds; and no sooner was the Bend gone than the rest
surrendered. Time was up.

But it was not so easy campaigning at the start. In 1888 plans were
filed for the demolition of the block. It took four years to get a
report of what it would cost to tear it down. About once in two months
during all that time the authorities had to be prodded into a spasm of
activity, or we would probably have been yet where we were then. Once,
when I appealed to the corporation counsel to give a good reason for the
delay, I got the truth out of him without evasion.

"Well, I tell you," he said blandly, "no one here is taking any interest
in that business. That is good enough reason for you, isn't it?"

It was. That Tammany reason became the slogan of an assault upon
official incompetence and treachery that hurried things up considerably.
The property was condemned at a total cost to the city of a million and
a half, in round numbers, including the assessment of half a million for
park benefit which the property owners were quick enough, with the aid
of the politicians, to get saddled on the city at large. In 1894 the
city took possession and became the landlord of the old barracks. For a
whole year it complacently collected the rents and did nothing. When it
was shamed out of that rut, too, and the tenements were at last torn
down, the square lay as the wreckers had left it for another year,
until it became such a plague spot that, as a last resort, with a
citizen's privilege, I arraigned the municipality before the Board of
Health for maintaining a nuisance upon its premises. I can see the
shocked look of the official now, as he studied the complaint.

"But, my dear sir," he coughed diplomatically, "isn't it rather unusual?
I never heard of such a thing."

"Neither did I," I replied, "but then there never was such a thing
before."

That night, while they were debating the "unusual thing," happened the
accident to the children of which I spoke, emphasizing the charge that
the nuisance was "dangerous to life," and there was an end. In the
morning the Bend was taken in hand, and the following spring the
Mulberry Bend Park was opened.

[Illustration: The Mulberry Bend.]

I told the story of that in "The Making of an American," and how the red
tape of the comptroller's office pointed the way out, after all, with
its check for three cents that had gone astray in the purchase of a
school site. Of that sort of