Weegee: The Autobiography (Annotated)

magazine

TINTYPE

My typewriter is broken. I own no dictionary, and I never claimed that I could spell, and if Shakespeare, Balzac⁵ and Dostoyevsky⁶ could do it the hard way, in longhand, so can I. Not having been a drug addict, an alcoholic or a psycho, I don’t need a ghost writer.

I have no inhibitions, and neither has my camera. I have lived a full life and have tried everything. What may be abnormal to you is normal to me. If I had to live my life over again, I would do it all the same way . . . only more so.

Everything I write about is true . . . and I have the pictures, the checks, the memories and the scars to prove it.

I was born in Austria in 1899 and came to America when I was ten years old.

As hundreds of other men before him had done, my father left for America first to earn enough money to bring over the rest of the family. He had settled on the Lower East Side, where most of the immigrants had flocked, largely because their relatives and friends were already settled there. He struggled in one job after another, desperately trying to save up the passage money to pay our way over.

Once, we were all packed and ready to leave, but it proved to be a false alarm. The money my father had sent over turned out to be stage money. We didn’t know that he had sent it as a joke . . . the money looked real enough to us. On one side each bill said, 20. On the other side was the joker . . . on the back of what looked like gorgeous twenties, the Madison Avenue boys of 1910 had printed advertisements for everything from sewing machines to phonographs. To my mother in Austria, Father had sent a dozen of these beauties . . . two hundred and forty dollars. Overjoyed, she took them to the bank in our town of Zlothev. The bank, without a question, exchanged these throwaways for good Austrian money. Mother bought steamship tickets for the whole flock of us and still had money left over. We were ready to leave for Hamburg, where we were to go aboard, when the bank officials came after us. They had made a mistake. The money Father had sent was phony! So we had to unpack and wait until he could send real money.

Father kept on working. By this time, he had decided that he could do better as his own boss with a pushcart⁷. When the second shipment of money came to Zlothev, it was okay, and the five of us – Mother, my three brothers and yours truly, Weegee – could leave by first-class steerage.

At Ellis Island⁸, which seemed the most beautiful place in the world to me, the immigration health officers examined us closely. They especially checked our eyes. One kind man gave me a banana and an orange. I didn’t know what to do with them; I had never seen a banana or an orange in Zlothev. The man carefully peeled the banana for me. I did the eating myself. It tasted good . . . like what, I don’t know, but good. I figured that if a banana was to be peeled, so was an orange, and peeled that myself. The orange, too, tasted good.

Father was waiting to meet us. He showed the authorities enough money to convince them that we would not become public charges . . . I think it was twenty dollars . . . and then took us to our first home in New York, a rear tenement house on Pitt Street near Rivington.

The two rooms over a bakery were as hot as a furnace in hell. The rent was twelve dollars a month, but in those days who had that kind of money?

Soon my father’s pushcart came in handy as we moved to another cold-water tenement⁹, this time to Cherry and Jackson Streets, near the waterfront. We had three rooms on the fifth floor – walk up. There was one hall toilet for four families. For toilet paper, we kids tore up Hearst’s¹⁰ Journal . . . it had the best comics, the Katzenjammer Kids, Abe Kabbible, Happy Hooligan¹¹; also Arthur Brisbane¹², whose daily front page editorials hammered away at the fact that a gorilla could lick the then-champion prize fighter of the world. (Who cared?) But there was no rent to pay, for my folks became the janitors. They cleaned and scrubbed the stairs, they put out the garbage, and they fought with the tenants for the landlord’s rent money, which was never ready on time.

Many a night I was so hungry that I cried myself to sleep on an empty stomach.

That fall, like the other immigrant kids, I was put into the greenhorn class at the public school to learn English. Since I knew only Polish and German, the other kids jeered at me: Greenhorn! Greenhorn! After two years with the unclassified children, I was admitted to a regular classroom, Grade 5 A.

I liked that school. It opened up the world of books to me, that is, as soon as I had a smattering of the language. But my escape from reality, the reality of cold and hunger, really came through the books that I borrowed from the public library. Though I shared my cot with a younger brother, I always took the side against the wall. By the light of a candle burning on the windowsill, I could read far into the night.

Even in those days, I was one of the night people. We lived next door to the public school but I just couldn’t get up in the morning. When I heard the school bell ringing, I jumped out of bed, dressed quickly and dashed to class . . . no breakfast. Lunchtime, I returned home. My mother had a light, warm lunch for me and, also, a penny for a piece of candy.

I liked my teachers. I thought they were the most wonderful people I had ever seen. In my eyes, they really taught, and I was eager to learn. However, when the teacher assigned homework, I always scribbled the answers down right away, even before school was over. That way I had no homework to take with me.

I had better things to do after school. I went around selling newspapers. However, I had no luck because so few people in our neighborhood could read English. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t make a go of it. I tried my best to do like Horatio Alger¹³, who as a newsboy went from rags to riches. But I soon came to the conclusion that Horatio must have been a phony. No one could have been so pure in heart. So I stopped reading about Horatio Alger and turned to Nick Carter¹⁴. The famous detective became my new hero and, after a week as a newsboy, I switched to selling candy.

I went to the wholesale confectioners where the candy stores bought their supplies and asked for a couple of dollars of candy on credit. I got Hershey Almond Bars, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, Greenfield’s Sponge Candy, Tootsie Rolls, etc.

Thereafter, I made a profit of one to two dollars a day selling candy. I would start off making the rounds of the rag sweatshops right after school. Lucky for me, the girls, who made only five dollars a week themselves, always seemed to have a penny for a chocolate bar or a stick of chewing gum . . . at least, they were willing to buy from me. Sometimes I gave the girls candy on credit. At the end of the week they always paid up, and I could settle with the wholesalers. I made 100% profit . . . when I didn’t eat too much of the candy myself.

After the sweatshops I stationed myself at the elevated station¹⁵ at the Third Avenue L at Bowery and Grand. Often I was chased by the special cops of the elevated because the candy stands up on the platforms considered me unfair competition. But I always came back. I stayed on until I had sold out my stock, at about eight o’clock at night, and then proudly went home to hand over my money, in pennies and nickels, to my mother.

My earnings, small as they were, helped to keep the family in food and in second-hand clothes, for, except for the free rent, my father was doing poorly as a wage earner. He was very pious and would not work on the Sabbath. Therefore, it was hard for him to hold a steady job. However, as a pushcart peddler he could be his own boss. For fifty cents he could rent a pushcart from a stable, and he could also get his merchandise on credit. Before the Passover holidays, he stocked up with dishes, since each Jewish housewife needed a new set of dishes for the holidays. Carting the heavy load of dishes and even finding a good street corner was an ordeal for him. He tried so hard, but he was never a businessman at heart. (As we grew up, Father went back to the synagogue and fulfilled his lifetime ambition by becoming a rabbi, which was quite an honor for the family.)

Our rooms were freezing cold in the winter and roasting hot in the summer. To get away from the heat, we kids used to sleep on the fire escape. That was all right until it began to rain. Then back we had to go to the sweltering rooms. Waiting for us were the bedbugs. They had the last laugh and the last bite.

We had a quarter gas meter. Since most of the time we had no quarters, we used to drop in lead quarters, which were exchanged for real quarters when the collector came around. Many immigrants, when they first arrived in these tenements, used to blow out the gas light¹⁶ instead of turning off the jet, and many died that way of carbon monoxide poisoning. The neighbors cautioned us all never, never to blow out the gas flame.

If one wanted the luxury of a bath, there were the free public baths where one would get a towel and soap for two pennies and a nickel deposit for the towel. In the hot summer days, on the way home from work, I often went to the public bath on Monroe Street. The place was usually jammed with people waiting on the benches for their turns in the bathrooms. The overflow lined up outside. Because the baths shut at eight, the attendants, eager to close on time, used to double us up in the shower room. They would bang on the doors to hurry us. Normally, one could stay in about a half-hour, but before closing time we were allowed no more than ten minutes.

Friday was family day at the baths. (There were two sections: one for men, the other for women.) The families, flocking together, brought their own towels and soap. There were also the bathhouses called mikvehs, which were privately owned and charged twenty-five cents each. These baths had tubs and, also, separate days for men and women. When a boy became engaged to a girl, the girl’s father, and often the girl’s brothers, too, would take the prospective bridegroom to the mikveh and look him over, to see if he was man enough physically to raise a family.

I was fourteen years old and in Grade 7 A when I told the school principal that I was quitting school and wanted my working papers. She pleaded with me to finish public school. But I didn’t care to stretch out the agony for another year and a half. We were desperately in need, and I had to go to work, but quick.

By this time, I had had my picture taken by a street tintype¹⁷ photographer, and had been fascinated by the result. (I think I was what you might call a natural- born photographer, with hypo – the chemicals used in the darkroom – in my blood.)

That street photographer really started the wheels going around in my brain. I sent off to a Chicago mail-order house for a tintype outfit, and as soon as it came, began to take street tintypes myself.

After several months, I got my first job with a commercial photographer on Grand Street. Here, in a real studio, with a skylight, I thought that I could learn more about photography. The photographers specialized in pictures of items that were too heavy for travelling salesman to carry around, such as chandeliers, brass beds, pianos, glassware, dishes, overstuffed sofas, tables, shrouds, caskets, and even cemetery stones. The latter were photographed on location at the cemetery.

That place looked more like a morgue than a photo studio. All day long, I helped to set up the huge brass beds under the skylight. I polished the chandeliers. I stuffed the shrouds with crumpled paper to give them a life-like appearance and provide the undertakers with nice samples for their clients. Our biggest customer for casket pictures used a motto: Happiness in Every Box. Only black-and-white film was available; for the customer who wanted color photographs, there were women artists to add color tinting by hand.

The studio also photographed factory fires. Such pictures were used by the owners in filing their insurance claims. My job was to lug the heavy 8 x 10 view camera (there were no miniature cameras in those days) and the tripod, to set up the camera, and to blow the flash powder¹⁸. I would put a tube into my mouth and blow the flash