Headlines and Picket Lines

• Chapter 1 The Penny a Hundred
• Chapter 2 Park Row Dawn
• Chapter 3 The Ten-Cent Bite
• Chapter 4 Sparks at City Hall Park
• Chapter 5 The Grandmaster of the Street
• Chapter 6 Voices in the Lodging House
• Chapter 7 A Call to the Ranks
• Chapter 8 Up in the Ivory Towers
• Chapter 9 The First Fist Raised
• Chapter 10 Brooklyn Bridges and Broken Banners
• Chapter 11 Scabs and Shadows
• Chapter 12 Printers' Ink and Picket Dust
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Strategy
• Chapter 14 Rally at New Irving Hall
• Chapter 15 A Kid Named Boots
• Chapter 16 Bribes in Polished Leather
• Chapter 17 The Silence of the Presses
• Chapter 18 Night Court and Brass Knuckles
• Chapter 19 Broadway Halts
• Chapter 20 Cracks in the Trust
• Chapter 21 The Price of Paper
• Chapter 22 Red Eyed and Unbowed
• Chapter 23 The Secret Offer
• Chapter 24 Stand at the Gates
• Chapter 25 The Full Buyback
• Chapter 26 Extra, Extra

The brass counter at the delivery window of the New York Evening World was worn down to the bare, yellow metal where forty thousand grubby hands smacked their nickels and dimes every afternoon. If you leaned your chest against it, you could smell the vinegar grease used to polish the wood rail above it and the damp, acidic reek of wood pulp fresh off the steam cylinders below. It was a smell that got into a boy’s teeth. It stayed in your spit long after you traded your last paper for a fried clam or a bowl of split-pea soup down on Mulberry Street.

Louis Baletti, whom everybody called Kid Blink on account of the left eye that didn't work and the black patch he wore tied tight around his temples with butcher’s twine, pressed his palms against that cold brass and squinted through his good right eye at the distribution clerk. The clerk was an Irishman named Jack who had three fingers missing from his left hand—souvenirs from a folding machine back in eighty-four—and a collar so stiff with dried sweat it looked like cardboard.

"You’re light, Blink," Jack said, not even looking up from his tall pine desk. He dipped a steel nib into an inkwell shaped like an ink-stained toad. "Ten cents short for a hundred. Take your eighty and get off the boards. You're blocking the line, and Dutchy behind you looks like he's about to drop his bundle or wet his trousers, one or the other."

"I ain't light, Jack," Blink said. His voice had the gravelly crack of a seventeen-year-old who spent twelve hours a day shouting into the crosswinds off the East River. He tapped the small heap of silver and copper on the zinc plate. "That’s fifty cents. Five dimes. It was fifty cents yesterday. It was fifty cents when the Maine blew up, and it was fifty cents when Dewey blew the Spaniards clear out of Manila Bay. Fifty cents gets you a hundred sheets. That’s the union of things, Jack. That’s arithmetic."

Jack finally looked up, his one good eye—greasy and dull under a green celluloid eye-shade—meeting Blink's bright grey one. "The war’s over, Kid. In case nobody yelled it down your alleyway. The Admiral’s home, the fleet’s in drydock, and the price of paper is sixty cents a hundred. You want fifty sheets, give me thirty cents. You want the hundred, dig down into them threadbare drawers of yours and fish out another dime. Or step aside. The wagons are loading for the bridge."

Behind Blink, twenty boys groaned in chorus. It wasn't an organized groan; it was the spontaneous, wheezing rattle of twenty undersized chests trapped in wool coats that had belonged to somebody’s uncle two winters ago. The air in the distribution basement was already ninety degrees, though it was barely three in the afternoon, because the boiler rooms sat right behind the paper chutes. When the presses kicked into gear, the floorboards shook like a ferry bumping the slip at Cortlandt Street, and you had to shout if you wanted to tell a fellow his cap was on fire.

"Sixty cents?" Blink didn't move. He kept his fingers splayed over his coins, shielding them from the grease on the counter. "The Herald is fifty. The Tribune is fifty. Old man Dana’s Sun is fifty."

"Then go hawk the Sun to the swells at the Astor House," Jack spat, wiping his nose with the back of his three-fingered hand. "See how many pages of church gossip and dry-goods sales you can shove off on a clerk running for the five-fifteen to Flatbush. You want the World, you pay sixty. Mr. Pulitzer has bills to pay. The cable from Cuba cost a fortune, and them four-color funny sheets don't paint theirselves. Now move, or I’ll have the watchman take your patch for a souvenir."

A boy behind Blink, smaller by two heads and wearing an oversized tweed coat with the sleeves rolled up four times to show his wrists, nudged Blink’s elbow. This was Morris, known across City Hall Park as Crazy Arbiter because he could tell you the box score of any ballgame played in the National League since 1888 without taking a breath, but couldn't remember where he’d slept the night before.

"Pay it, Blink," Morris whispered, his teeth chattering despite the damp heat. "The afternoon edition's got the trial of the trunk-murderer in Queens. If we don't catch the four o'clock crowd coming out of the Western Union building, the uptown bootblacks'll get all the coppers. My old lady needs fifteen cents for the coal-man tonight, or we're boiling cabbage over candle ends again."

Blink stared at Jack. The clerk didn't hate him; that was the worst part of it. Jack didn't care enough about any boy on Park Row to hate him. To Jack, and to the men who sat in the high, carpeted offices on the eleventh floor where the air was cooled by brass fans turning over cakes of river ice, the newsies weren't labor. They weren't even staff. They were just the last four hundred feet of the machine that started in the Canadian spruce forests and ran through the iron rollers in the basement. You poured trees and black ink into one end, and you pulled two-cent pieces out of the other. If a gear slipped, you oiled it; if a boy squeaked, you told him to clear the boards.

Slowly, Blink reached into the corner of his vest pocket. His thumb found the cold, thin edge of two nickels he’d tucked away that morning—one to pay for his bed at the Newsboys' Lodging House on Duane Street, and one

The mist off the East River never smelled like salt by the time it rolled across the cobbles of Park Row; it smelled of soaked horse dung, stale beer from the cellar dives beneath the elevated tracks, and the sweet, hot rot of garbage heaps waiting for the night carts that never quite came often enough.

It was four o’clock in the morning, and the granite façades of Newspaper Row were just beginning to chisel themselves out of the dark. To a clerk living out in the green pastures of Flatbush, this was the dead of night, a time when respectable folk turned over in their feather beds and pulled the quilts higher against the morning chill. But to the newsies, four in the morning was noon. The day had already begun with the heavy, shuddering thump of the big rotary presses underneath the street, shaking the sidewalks like an iron pulse through the soles of their broken boots.

Kid Blink stepped out of the narrow entry of the Newsboys’ Lodging House into the biting grey drizzle. His good eye took in the length of the street in a single, practiced sweep. Overhead, the towers loomed like competing cathedrals of print. There was the gilded copper dome of Pulitzer’s World, rising three hundred and fifty feet into the clouds like an arrogant thumb poked in the eye of God. Just across the asphalt stood the squat, stone battlements of the Sun, and tucked into the corner like an overdressed gambler was William Randolph Hearst’s *