Walkabout: Brooklyn, Through Rag and Bone, Part 2

Read Part 1 of this story.

Today, we are used to seeing the people who somehow manage to make a living recycling cans and bottles. We hardly notice them as they root through trash cans looking for those precious five-cent drink containers. Perhaps we even separate them out for them, and hang the cans on the fence, so they won’t disrupt the garbage.

The people who are really serious about this occupation can be seen pushing grocery carts heaped high with bags of cans, often on their way to a recycling facility, where if they have been diligent, they can make $25 or $30 a day. It’s certainly not an easy life, but as the saying goes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Their collecting cousins are the guys with an old pickup truck who roam around picking up all kinds of metal for the scrap dealer. They are experts on metal, and can tell you how much is being paid for iron, copper, brass and steel. Finding a large amount of copper is like finding the mother lode – money in the pocket.

In many cities with a lot of abandoned buildings, copper pipes don’t last long. For that matter, neither do radiators, iron pipe, or any kind of metal. My house in Troy, which had been empty for a number of years before we got it, was stripped of everything metal including the doorknobs, which were literally ripped out, leaving ragged holes in the wood. We had to replace everything.

Of course, not every metal and glass man is a thief, or a destroyer of homes. But these people have always been suspect, and their activities scorned and regarded as a public nuisance. Society has had plenty of practice feeling this way, as people who collect objects from the trash piles of civilization have been at it for hundreds of years. Before cans and copper pipe, it was rags and bones. Anything that could be picked from the trash that had any kind of resale value was treasure. The history of the rag pickers was told in Part One of this story.

In 1877, the Brooklyn Eagle interviewed one of the bone men who scoured the city looking for bones. His name was Herman Groschel, and he was approached by a reporter as he and his three dogs scoured ash piles and trash heaps across the city.

He was at Flatbush and Dean when he was interviewed. The Eagle reporter added his own prejudices and assumptions to his reporting. He described Groschel as “a seedy looking German, with tangled hair and beard,” and his dogs as “of a mongrel breed.”

Groschel told the reporter that he made his living from collecting bones. He found them everywhere, including in trash bins, ash heaps and just tossed aside. The best bones were large beef or horse shank bones, he told the man. He could get $1.30 for a barrel of these bones.

He sold them to the bone dust manufacturers, who ground them up for bone dust used in sugar refining. Bone dust or char is still used in filtering impurities out of cane sugar. It is not soluble, so it does not become a part of finished sugar.

The bone man’s dogs were trained to find bones in the middle of a deep ash pile, or anywhere else. They were invaluable to Groschel’s business. He told the reporter that all kinds of bones were collected.

The ones that couldn’t be used by the bone dust man could be sold to another bone dealer who extracted the fat from them, which was used for commercial lubrication use. He said that his best hunting grounds were the dumps where ashes were discarded, and the streets of poor neighborhoods, which didn’t have ash bins. Many people just threw their trash out into the street.

Groschel told the Eagle reporter that he used to collect rags too, but stopped after some rags exposed to smallpox infected one of his children. Fortunately, she survived. He was better off than many of his compatriots, he said. In the winter he was able to pay street urchins to find bones for him, and he became a middleman for those who brought their bones to him, which he sold to the bone dealers. He was poor, but there were those who were even poorer.

The reporter ended the story saying that almost all of the rag pickers and bone men were either German or Italian. He said they lived cheaply, often, as Greschel told the reporter, burning old boots as fuel. The smell was horrible, but it was fuel. Many of the rag and bone men, according to the reporter, had saved up tidy sums of money.

This idea that rag pickers and other trash men were doing quite well on the refuse of their betters was an urban myth. For every man who managed not to starve or die of disease, and, like Greschel, had a modest income, there were hundreds who barely survived. The Eagle reporter was correct that most of the rag pickers were immigrants, mostly southern Italians. The Italian rag pickers in Brooklyn lived in several different slum neighborhoods, but the largest and most infamous of these was in Gowanus.

Tenement owners in the city didn’t have very many rules to abide by, and most didn’t even abide by them. People were subjected to horrible living conditions, without natural light or ventilation. If one was a rag picker, his accommodations were even more horrible than usual.

Because they were picking up and washing rags for resale, they were exposed to all kinds of communicable diseases. They lived amongst dirty and damp rags, with every inch of their tenement apartments hung with damp dirty rags, with children and babies especially susceptible to disease.

Rags and other collectable refuse filled the halls and basements of the tenements. Many rag pickers lived in groups with their fellows, in order to make communal living better. They were able to gather more goods, and have their wives and children wash and dry the rags for sale.

Often entire tenement buildings were rented by rag pickers. In Gowanus, Whitwell Place, a small one block street of tenements, located between Carroll and First Place, was the center of what the papers derisively called a “rag picker’s colony.”

In 1905, the Eagle ran a story about the rag pickers of Whitwell. The entire neighborhood was poor, and immigrant. They were mostly Italian, which a few Irish tossed in. Everyone lived in tenements that lined Whitwell and the surrounding streets.

The police were always here, called for fights, robberies, and tragically, a great deal of accidents involving children. Kids in this neighborhood were often getting hit by wagons, falling off roofs, drowning in the canal, or involved in crossfires between warring factions.

The adults weren’t faring well either. Like any poor neighborhood, there was street crime, fighting, and alcoholism. There were also industrial accidents, and many of the same incidents happened to adults as those that plagued the children.

Social reformers had come here and tried to help, but most people in a Brooklyn that had never seen dire poverty believed that the poor deserved their conditions. They also had little regard for Italian immigrants whom they regarded as inferior in so many ways.

The reporting of the day echoed those prejudices. Reporters had no problem making pronouncements that the Italians liked living in squalor, and loved to fight and wallow in misery. “The rag pickers are Italians, and of the kind that are satisfied with the conditions as they exist,” the reporter for the Eagle informed his readers.

He describes a world where the rag pickers have organized to the extent that they have fooled The Man, as it were. He tells of how they have rags and trash scattered all over courtyards, fire escapes and in windows, which was illegal, even in 1905.

When the tenement authorities or the police show up at the end of the block, someone gives a shout, and all of a sudden everyone scurries to clean up. When the authorities walk through the doors, women are sweeping the fire escapes and building managers are shouting at people, telling them that if they don’t clean up, he was going to throw them out. When the authorities leave, everything comes out again.

Whether or not this really happened does not belie the fact that the conditions here were still awful. The people here knew that the authorities would come down on them, but the conditions in the buildings wouldn’t change. The reporter admitted that the plumbing on Whitwell Place was substandard. There were few indoor toilets, even though they were mandated by the Tenement Law of 1901. The outdoor privies were supposed to have been sterilized and filled in. They were not.

The toilets were not installed correctly, and the floors underneath leaked. The basement of one building had so much raw sewage in it that it could be smelled down the block. No one did anything about it. When inspectors came, they found people storing and sorting rags in the basement.

The sewage was so bad that one of the inspectors told the Eagle that he had to have a shoe shine boy clean his shoes before he could go to another neighborhood. Three inspectors had already quit rather than have this territory. Yet nothing changed. “They like it like this,” was the constant mantra.

The residents also kept animals on the premises. There were goats, chickens, rabbits, cats and dogs, even horses. One tenement building kept horses in the back yard. The horses had to be led down the halls of the house in order to get back there. Sanitation was non-existent. One inspector found goats in a top floor apartment.

This was not only unsanitary, it was illegal. The goats were removed, but they couldn’t catch many of the rabbits or chickens. The people depended on these animals for food and milk. But they had no place to put them.

The articles in the paper coincided with a public backlash against the rag pickers. There were city hall meetings, Department of Sanitation, Public Health, law and building code enforcement meetings. Most of the attention was given to breaking up the colonies of rag pickers. They wanted to tear down many of the buildings, but few were overly interested in fining or punishing those who had profited by allowing such conditions to exist. Only social reformers were concerned with the people themselves, and bettering their lives so that they didn’t have to pick rags, or live in squalor.

In 1906, fourteen rag pickers living in the general area near Whitwell Place were arrested in a sweep of the area. They were charged with violating the law by storing rags and bones and other materials in tenement houses. Bail was $100 each, a hefty sum for the day. It was the second of a series of arrests designed to close the rag pickers down.

Letters to the editor began appearing in all of the papers. One, from a minister, complained that the bells that the rag pickers had to have on their carts were interrupting his church services. Other people complained that the rag picker’s bells could be heard at all hours of the early morning, the only time the rag pickers were allowed to roam the streets. Even more people complained about the mess the rag pickers made going through their garbage.

This story does not have a definitive ending. Rag pickers eventually died out, as industry changed, and they no longer had a market. Tenement laws also changed, and the living conditions in Gowanus improved. The children of rag pickers began to move up the economic ladder, although the area retained its gritty, tough environment through the 1950s and beyond.

More and more of the Italians who grew up here moved out to other neighborhoods, leaving the buildings to new people, and most recently to young artistic urban residents who pay more for a former tenement apartment in a month, than the building cost to build.

Rag picking is still an occupation in many parts of the developing world, especially India.

There’s a big market in clothing and fabric recycling. Scrap metal is still wanted all over the world. The market for animal bones may have disappeared, but now people collect the new bones of our industrial world – the components of computers and other electronics. In the waste heaps of China, they burn electronics on open fires to extract the metals within, exposing themselves to mercury and other toxic substances. But like the rag pickers of old, it’s an honest living, and it keeps one from starving. Barely.

GMAP

(Drawing: Rag pickers in NYC, historybox.com)