New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1869-05-03
THE FIRST or MAY.

THE FIRST or MAY.
New-York is the modern instance of the per-
rennial legend of the old woman who lived IN
a shoe and who had so many children she
didn't know What to do. She drives them with
curses of taxes to New-Jersey, whose waste
places they have made to blossom as tho rose.
She offers them to Brooklyn for adoption. She
entices them up the Hudson, and holds out
Staten Island as palace Beautiful. She ban
ishes them to Connecticut, where her stern
memory hardens their hearts and makes them
Hunkers She asks room for them in the Mis-
sissippi Valley, in the great Territories. on the
Pacific Slope. And still they swarm from the
broad toe of the old shoe at the Battery
to the shining buckle at High Bridge. Every
year tribes of them make mad effort Tor
room and freedom. The modern Knlcker-
booker is nomadic as a Tartar, within his lesser
Tartary-the city limits. He moves from No.
TO No. T. He moves from Second st. to Third
He moves from East Side to West, to move
again next year from West Side to East. He
wants larger house or smaller one, more
snowy or more cheap, nearer business or nearer
tho Park Or the late landlord drives him
forth with n twisted scouTge of exOrbitant
rental On Mrs. KnickeTbockeT falls the weight
of the burden. 1t is she who plods from agent
to agent for permits to see impossible houses.
1t is she who wanders up stairs and down stairs
and through the lady's chamber to find dirty
paint, and broken range, and defective water
pipes, and no closets. Ii is she who gives her
DAYS and exc her nights to continuing how the
carpet cut for room twelve feet square will
cover an area of fourteen Ii is she who must
turn a dark closet into wel-yentilated bed
room. 1t is she who, foOtsore, weary, and
disconsolate, looks around the shabby house
she is driven to engage, niurmuring, Is this
the place / long have sought and mourned be-
cause found it not
Thus bad begins but worse remains behind.
1t is not enough that every year ten thou
sand people must part with that which stands
TO them for home; it is not enough that the
house where the mother died or tue babe was
born must fall into strange hands; it is not
enough that one may never drive q nail in his
wall with the comfortable sense of possession
On the same day and in the same hour the
dawn of change which possesses these ten
thousand wretchesidrives them by one fell im-
pulse to preciptate themselves on their neigh
boris hearthstone. In the gray dawn they gather
their Lares and Penates; mercilcss carmen pile
their meagcr worldly wealth on mighty carts,
engravings at the bottom and bureaus at the
top. The garish sun shines out and shows how
poor and shabby is the household gear, or the
wckeder rain pours and makes it poorer and
shabbier. The streets are full of a melancholy
army without banners. Always the coming
tenant arrives before his predecessor has sto-
len away. Each learns the secretest econOmi-
cal lodges of the other-the patches, the broken
vases, the slip coverings that hide faded dam
ask They hate each other on the spot. The
bureau of the Capulets scrapes of the veneer
ing from the bureau of the MOntagues as they
crowd each other on the stoop. lnimical chairs
break one anOthers legs in speechless disagree
ment. The incoming table viciously despoils
the outgoing table of castor The servants
of the two houses are ready to spill blood in
tho quarrel while the small Oamins of the
street make off with such slight booty as door
mats, carving knives, boot-jacks, and band
boxes. The sun goes down on the wrath
or the woe of twice ten thousand
souls who. but that it was written that the
First of May should be Moving Day, would not
have been profane, would not have ground
the face of the poor helpers, would not have
snubbcd husband or wife, would not have made
the lives of the dear little children burden
with unheard-of crossness; who, but that it
was written That the First of May should be
Moving Day, would not, from exposure, have
contracted an innammatory rheumatism, or
been racked with cough, or laid up with a
sprancd hand, or forced to spend their sub
stance in pills and pOtions, and to stay at
oil 10 haIa n
people Indifferent as ourselves to the horrible,
people that reads with equanimity the
news of n battle which snullcd out forty thou
sand lives, or dismsses with an ejaculation the
tale of railroad accident winch kills and
mains a hundred victims, or submits without
a murmar TO the presence of bone-boiling fac
tories, or the condition of the cutters Of half
the streets, would tolerate this custom Of uni