By Andrew S.

As Mr. McDermott strolled passed Gotham Court on Cherry Street in the 7th Ward, he looked down the narrow alley and noticed the many clotheslines spanning the gap between buildings. He saw the garbage piles that in some places could be measured in stories. He recalled, or at least thought he did, for who was to say what memories were real or made up, his friend Pat, an artist who had lived there when the buildings were first built. As far as his memory served him, and it served him pretty well, McDermott had broken up a fight between pat and another tenant one lonely night as he was venturing home from the pub. Or did he? The memories he had all jumbled up into one long story, the story of lower Manhattan. Even if the memory wasn’t true, it was true in that it definitely happened at some point to someone. Maybe not to Mr. McDermott, although he was pretty sure, but it definitely happened one hundred times over in the course of one lifetime.

That’s how memories worked down in the 7th ward. If you could think about it and picture it in your head than it was probably true. In fact, the most truthful memories were probably the ones that were not true at all. Real memories were always exaggerated, altered, or changed; they were biased in some way. False memories were pure. There was no reason to change a memory that never really happened. It was just stated matter-of-factly. It was simple. The most accurate account of the fight that occurred between two rival fire companies one night, as they both answered the call to the fire in "The Bend", a block below Bayard, between Baxter and Mulberry streets, was about a situation that never really happened; However, It was perfectly true.

The Bend was one of those dark, dirty, rat infested alleys that was demolished in the 1890’s. It was a place where some of the poorest of the poor lived, or perhaps more appropriately, survived. The people there survived in worse than detrimental conditions among the rats, lice and fleas. There were no safety or health regulations at the time, and so well hidden were many of the back alley tenements that they escaped scrutiny from many of the city and state officials who either did not know of their existence or simply didn’t care. If was perfectly conceivable that a fire could have started at any moment due to the simple discarding of a faintly smoking ember from a cigarette or from a candle precariously placed near flammable fabrics. In reality, the fire would probably have been started by a member of one of the various gangs that roamed the streets constituting the bend; perhaps the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies or even the Bowery Boys, although the five points was a little far from their territory. That’s how McDermott remembered it anyways. No one ever really knew how the fire started. It was all speculation.

McDermott remembered that night well. He told the story as if he had actually witnessed what had happened, however, according to his wife, he had been home safe and sound that night and it had been his brother who saw the fire. Either way, McDermott told the story better than his brother and with more exciting detail. McDermott might as well have been there. According to Mr. McDermott he was walking home one night from one of the many beer gardens in the area when he heard the loud roar of the fire engines as they zoomed by a few blocks ahead. A dark cloud of smoke hung over the bend as the fire aggressively attacked and ate through the wooden skeletons of the many tenements that made up the block. The way he described the fire it could have been the great fire of 1835. "The fire was so large that it lit up an area of a fifteen-block radius. The flames were extensions of hell trying to reach heaven." Of course this was an exaggeration, one of those bending of the facts that makes history interesting, however, it correctly emphasized the severity of the fire and left no guessing as to how much damage it probably caused. In that sense McDermott’s small extension of the truth provided everyone he told with a better sense of reality, of what really happened. The press generally ignored such fires that occurred in the "slums" of lower Manhattan. If it was mentioned at all it was mentioned in passing where as the same night of the deadly and destructive fire in the bend, there was a much more tame burst of flames in one of the rich homes on 5th avenue that received a front page article and many follow-up articles. The fire on 5th was actually a small kitchen fire that spread to one of the art galleries where one or two art pieces were singed with soot. The fire in the bend took 15 lives and left hundreds people with out a home and with no possessions. It was virtually ignored by the press.

When McDermott, or his brother, arrived at the scene there were two big hook and ladders stationed in front of the engulfed building, however, the fire fighters were unable to reach the entrance that was blocked by upwards of thirty people rolling around and wrestling on the ground. The wrestling was being enacted by two of the gangs that dominated crime in the five points and nearby areas. The Shirt Tails and the Dead Rabbits were fighting for rights to the fire. In those days the fire companies would get paid based on how many fires they put out or had to stop. The fire departments each had an unofficial corresponding gang that would be paid to help "find" fires. Most of these scuffles were only between a few gang members and did not occur at the expense of a whole building. Unfortunately this fight escalated to the point where the fire fighters themselves, eager to take the job, began shouting and screaming at each other rather than attempting to end the brawl and put out the hellish flames. Eventually the smoke became to thick for any spectators to stand nearby and the crowd dispersed back to their respective houses until the air was safe to breath again.

The image of this fire left his head as quickly as it had come when McDermott turned the corner and pressed on towards the rickety old tenement that he, his family comprised of his wife and two children, and two other families, one with 5 members and the other with 6, called home. To anyone else the walk home would have been a terrifying experience, however, McDermott had braved the dangers of the five points and the bend and the surrounding areas so many times that all the criminals, pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, drunks, and crazies never bothered him. In fact, he had become accustomed to the debauchery and lechery that blossomed under the light of the moon and that chased the decent people off the streets. McDermott never noticed when these things were going on around him, he blocked it out, ignored it, did whatever he could to think positively of his situation and of the neighborhood in which he lived, however he did notice when certain elements were not there. A few nights ago he noticed that the homeless drunk that always sat at the base of the building at 474 Pearl Street, the one that he gave a few pennies to, whatever he could spare at the time, was not there one night. The man had been picked up for being intoxicated and making crude remarks to the police. McDermott never saw that man again and felt as if something from his walk home had been taken away. An experience, he might even have called it a comforting element of his nightly walk, had been removed and it affected him. He couldn’t explain why, but it just seemed natural that the old drunken immigrant would be resting there.

McDermott walked by that very building trying to remember the old man but couldn’t. He could not bring to his mind a specific picture of this man. And it wasn’t really the individual man he missed, he didn’t know the man personally of course, but it was his presence, the contribution to the atmosphere of the neighborhood that he missed. There were many drunks and homeless people in the area, however, only one at that specific corner. That corner was a sign that he was half way home and could finally rest his sagging tired eyes and exhausted limbs for a few hours before he would have to get up to deliver the news paper early in the morning. In the same way he missed the homeless man, McDermott missed, or experienced a sense of absence, from the now vacant lot where once stood the building that was burned down on the account of the gang fight. Everything was burned to the ground and now the lot was vacant. The familiar sounds of crying babies, fighting parents, old men sleeping, the sounds of life the sounds that people made, were no longer reverberating in the streets. Instead they reverberated in McDermott’s mind, in his memory.

The memory of this triggered even more images of the times he worked for one of the landlords and was called upon to make some repairs, one of the few jobs he ever had to do in this neighborhood. Virtually nothing was ever repaired. If it broke that’s the way is stayed unless the residents fixed the thing themselves or, as was the case for McDermott, when the problem was so dire that no one would move into the apartment.

He remembered opening the creaky doors to the now condemned tenement house to be smitten by a waft of dank, musty, dark, stale, contaminated and dusty air. It took him a few minutes to rid himself of the nausea he felt when he first entered. Once he regained his control of his rebelling stomach he had to adjust to the complete lack of light, for there were very few windows and where there were windows they were boarded up. The only rooms with light were those rooms that either faced the street or the courtyard in the back. Only one floor, however, that was facing that street did not have boarded up windows. The windows facing the courtyard could never be opened because of the amount of human waste and garbage that sat back there. The smell was deadly.

The only reason McDermott was working this job was because no one else would hire an Irish immigrant. Signs everywhere read, "No Irish need apply". McDermott was stuck doing menial jobs in places where no one else would go and places that no one cared about. For the job of repairing a large hole in the roof he was getting paid a total of one dollar for potentially a whole day of work. McDermott didn’t think of the job in this way, however. He was happy to be working and earning any one so that his family could eat. That was just one of the hundreds of jobs he had had that year. He was even considered lucky by many of his friends and family. McDermott had once done a favor for one of the big shots at Tammany Hall and because of it he was never out of a job, where as many Irish went weeks even months in between jobs. What he did was he gathered votes from his whole block for the Democratic Party. It was a block comprised entirely of Irish immigrants.

As he climbed the stairs in the acrid smelling tenement heading to the roof, he found himself dodging large flies, spider webs and swooping birds. On the third floor he waded threw piles of trash that came up to his knees. To make matters more difficult many of the stairwells and halls were crowded with people walking in and out and children running around, some naked some partially clothed. The people here were noticeably dirtier than in other tenements he had visited. Many of them looked sickly, either from disease or from lack of food. On the forth floor two of the rooms had been sealed off due to an outbreak of cholera. McDermott wished he could do more to help the people in this building than just fix a porous roof. The conditions he lived in, although he too lived in a tenement, were luxurious compared buildings such as this one. That was in part due to the location of his building. He was a few blocks away from the really squalid areas in the five points, just far enough it seems to live a slightly more comfortable easy life. McDermott’s street was one of only a few that had a functional sewage system and relatively clean water coming from a pump in the back courtyard. Also, his building had been built in accordance with the New Tenement House Law of 1879, just a little over a year ago, that restricted the proportion of the lot that could be built upon and mandated the elimination of "dark" rooms.

McDermott broke his concentration to look up and discover that he was now at the doorway to his building. It was three o’clock at that point, time enough to get three hours of sleep before he would get up to deliver the paper. It had taken him more time than usual to walk home tonight. To him it had seemed as if he had been walking for only a few minutes, but in reality I had take a good forty five to an hour instead of the usual fifteen to twenty minutes.

He snuck into his apartment and, tiptoeing past his cousins who were asleep on the floor in the first of three rooms, quietly made his way to his bed. The sleeping arrangements were organized by rotation. One week so and so would get the queen sized bed, almost always there were three or four people sharing that bed, so and so would take the front room where McDermott’s cousin lay at the moment, and then two or three people would take the small bed to the right of the entrance. The next week everyone would rotate. For the most part, however, beds and the best floor spots were taken up on a first come first serve basis. Because McDermott was the main provider for the entire apartment, he was usually guaranteed a bed spot. Tonight, for some reason yet to be disclosed to him, McDermott found himself alone in the bedroom with his caring wife. Once he was under the covers his wife rolled over and gave him a kiss, asking him why it took so long to get home. He told her of the memories his walk inspired and that it must of slowed his pace. She responded as she usually did, with understanding patience. He told her of the homeless man whom he didn’t see again and of the house place he passed where the fire was. He recounted his passing of the spot where he and many other men, angry at the unfairness of the draft, started a riot to call attention to their demands. He told her of everything else he had dreamt about and recalled as if it had occurred the day before.

She responded as she usually did asking, "Fitzy? Are you sure that you were at that fire? And are you sure about breaking up the fight Pat was in and about everything else? I mean you describe every detail so vividly that I’m beginning to think u did experience all that."

"Oh, I don’t know", was his response. "What does it matter anyway? I if can remember everything so clearly shouldn’t I tell it as if I was the one? Who would believe me if I told the story another way? It would be just another rumor."

"I guess you are right Fitz. And anyway, the more you tell these stories to me the more truthful they become. If it sounds real it probably is," was McDermott’s wife’s wise response.

"Exactly!’ Just after that McDermott gave in to exhaustion and feel asleep.