Mur Woof Garden Among the Cenements 
Wahat It bas Mone for Chiloren in the Riis House in Henry Street, Pew Work 
Bp Jacob A. Riis 
JOhotographs by Alice Woughton and Henry H, Saplor 
Aas has gone since I wrote to THE 
GARDEN MacGazInEe of how we had 
built a roof garden on top of the gymnasium 
that took away our children’s playground 
by filling up the yard. In many ways it has 
been the hardest of all the years we have 
lived through with our poor neighbors. 
Poverty, illness, misrepresentation, and the 
“vx hottest and hardest of all summers for those 
“who! must live*in the city’s crowds — they 
have all borne their share. But to the 
blackest cloud there is somewhere a silver 
lining if you look long enough and hard 
enough for it, and ours has been that roof 
garden. It is not a very great affair — some 
of your readers would smile at it I suppose. 
There are no palm trees and no “‘pergola,” 
just a plain roof down in a kind of well 
with tall tenements all about. Two big 
barrels close to the wall tell their own story 
of how the world is growing up toward the 
light. For they once held whiskey and 
trouble and deviltry; now they are filled with 
fresh, sweet earth and beautiful Japanese 
ivy grows out of them and clings lovingly 
to the wall of our house, spreading its soft, 
green tendrils farther and farther each season, 
undismayed by the winter’s cold. And then 
boxes and boxes on a brick parapet, with 
hardy Golden Glow, scarlet geraniums, 
California privet and even a venturesome 
Crimson Rambler. These, when winter 
comes, we dig down in the yard and cover 
them with straw, and that is how one of them 
came to be “swiped.” For the fence between 
ours and the next tenement-house yard is 
easy to scale for nimble little legs. 
It was a privet shrub, and we did n’t miss 
it till we came to set them out this spring. 
Then we did not pay much heed to our loss, 
but one day one of our kindergartners 
beckoned me over to the corner of the roof 
and pointed down in our neighbor’s yard. 
There in the twilight gloom, for the yard was 
just a hole between towering brick walls 
and the sun could not have found its way into 
it had it tried, a little space had been cleared 
in the rubbish and brick bats, and dug and 
fenced with truant lath from the building 
in the next block, with infinite toil and care. 
In it grew our shrub. Looking down from 
the roof we could read the story of it as plain 
as if it were written in print: The boy with 
the longing in his little heart for something 
beautiful which the tenement had starved all 
his days, the short cut over the fence to 
what he wanted—who has not taken the short 
cut to something he wanted, and his way so 
easy? ‘Then the eager husbandry and the 
forlorn little “garden” down there in the 
gloom. 
Did we send a policeman for him and for 
our shrub? Not we. Policemen are for 
other things in our scheme and we see as little 
of them as we can. We went around and 
scratched up an acquaintance with the lad, 
and we told him that if he would come in by 
our front door we would show him a place 
where there were ever so many more of the 
green shrubs, and flowers to boot, and that 
when we had plenty we would share them 
with him, which we certainly will. For he 
is the kind we are looking for. ‘The short cut 
is just a stage, and a brief one, when it leads 
*“So the prince rode off with Cinderella on a fiery kindergarten chair ’’ 
216 
“All through the day the children own the garden 
and carry on their play there’’ 
to our door. When first we got window 
boxes and filled them with the ivy that looks 
so pretty and is seen so far, every child in the 
block accepted it as an invitation to help him- 
self when and how he could. They never . 
touch it nowadays. ‘They like it too much. 
We didn’t have to tell them. They do it 
themselves. When this summer it became 
necessary on account of the crowd to eliminate 
the husky boys from the roof garden and we 
gave them the gym instead to romp in, they 
insisted on paying their way. Free on the 
roof was one thing; this was quite another. 
They taxed themselves two cents a week, one 
for the house, one for the club treasury, and 
they passed this resolution that “any boy 
wot shoots craps or swears, or makes a row 
in the house or is disrespectful to Mr. Smith - 
or runs with any crooks, is put out of the 
club.” They were persuaded to fine the 
offender a cent instead of expelling him, and 
it worked all right except with Sammy, who 
arose to dispute the equity of it all and to 
demand the organization of a club “where 
they don’t put a feller out fer shootin’ craps 
—wot’s craps!” 
But I was telling of the roof garden and 
what happened there. It was in the long 
vacation when it is open from early morning © 
until all the little ones in the neighborhood 
are asleep and the house closes its doors. 
All through the day the children own the gar- 
den and carry on their play there. One 
evening each week our girls’ club have an 
“at home” on the roof, and on three nights 
the boys bring their friends and smoke and 
talk. Wednesday and Friday are mothers’ 
and children’s nights. That was when they 
began it. The little ones had been telling 
stories of Cinderella and Red Riding Hood 
and Beauty and the Beast and Rebecca of 
Sunnybrook Farm, and before they them- 
selves realized that they were doing it, 
they were acting them. The dramatic 
