During fifteen years this public-spirited owner of the property
paid all the taxes, and when the block was finally sold he made
possible the playground equipment of a near-by schoolyard. On
the other hand, the dispossessed tenants, a group of whom had to
be evicted by legal process before their houses could be torn
down, have never ceased to mourn their former estates. Only the
other day I met upon the street an old Italian harness maker, who
said that he had never succeeded so well anywhere else nor found
a place that "seemed so much like Italy."
Festivities of various sorts were held on this early playground,
always a May day celebration with its Maypole dance and its May
queen. I remember that one year that honor of being queen was
offered to the little girl who should pick up the largest number
of scraps of paper which littered all the streets and alleys. The
children that spring had been organized into a league, and each
member had been provided with a stiff piece of wire upon the
sharpened point of which stray bits of paper were impaled and
later soberly counted off into a large box in the Hull-House
alley. The little Italian girl who thus won the scepter took it
very gravely as the just reward of hard labor, and we were all so
absorbed in the desire for clean and tidy streets that we were
wholly oblivious to the incongruity of thus selecting "the queen
of love and beauty.
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