April 5th 1911

Dear Grandfather,

It has been a long time since I last wrote to you. I have missed you very much,  most of the money I earn, and get to keep I save up to buy you a ticket to come to America, You will always be welcome. New York is beautiful, crowded but beautiful. The streets are not made of gold but they are made of cobblestone. The streets are packed with people all the time. We live in a building called a tenement. They have three rooms in each apartment. Our tenement has four floors, we live on the third floor. We found this tenement because a nice man showed us many apartments and we liked this one the most. Sadly, I do not go to school. Going to school does not get you money so I am a newsie. We have enough money to pay rent, and that is a good thing because if we do not pay rent we will get kicked out of the building.  We can afford to pay rent because we all have jobs, even Grandmother has a job. Mother is a forelady in a hat factory. She found the job easily, an old lady was the forelady for 25 years at the factory, and she wanted to retire and she gave mother a test, and Mother passed. Father and Grandmother are bakers. They wanted to help work to support the family so they have their own bakery. I am a newsie, I did and do not want to go to school. It does not sound fun. All you do is read books and have to write long essays in script. I did go to school for a week, just so I could learn to read so I can read the headlines on the newspaper every morning. Let me tell you it was not fun. we have enough money  for me to go to school, but we need the money to pay rent. I like my job, and we need to pay rent for our tenement and the bakery. At supper we talk about when we will have enough money to get you a ticket to came to America without you having to go through Ellis Island.

The tenement conditions got better over the years. For a few years there were not a lot of windows, which I found rather dreary. I have to admit, this small tenement apartment is more comfortable than a barn that is the size of a big wool rug. The tenement is not that much bigger, but we have real beds. No more one big bed of straw and hay, we have nice comfy feather beds and goose pillows. Mother and Father sleep on the bed. I sleep on pillows; 10 pillows put together to make a big mattress, and grandmother sleeps in the kitchen on a big wool rug and pillows. It took 2 years to get used to the tenement, but now it is our home. We live in 5 Points on Pell Street. You know who I live with but I will tell you any way so you do not forget. I live with your wife, my Grandmother, your daughter my Mother, and my Father. Some immigrants turn their tenement apartments into sweatshops, which are apartments that people, usually immigrants, turn into a small factory. Some people roll cigars, and others, sew trousers. We do not live in a sweatshop, but a nice clean apartment. Some people have to hire people to live with them to help them pay rent which is 20 dollars. You pay 10, the boarder pays 10. A boarder is what they call the person you hire to live with you. We do not take on boarders. Tenement conditions are nicer than they used to be. For example, a tenement inspector came once and told the old landlord (we have a new one now) the tenements needed more windows. Instead of building windows that face the outside he just made them face the hallway. They made a new law that said a lot of things needed to be changed in the tenements. I am not going to tell you all of the things that they changed because that would take a long time, but I will tell you a few things. They made more windows that face the streets and they made us get a water closet inside each apartment, and that was when our landlord quit. We got a new nicer landlord and we still have him. I have met a boy called Leonard Covello and he once said “…The cobblestones streets. The endless,  monotonous rows of tenement buildings that shut out the sky….The clanging of bells and the screeching of sirens as a fire broke out somewhere in the neighborhood….”

Jobs are very different in the Lower East Side than in Scotland. There are no farmers or feeders, but huge tall buildings with garment factories in them and pushcart peddlers selling all kinds of foods. Like I said, I am a newsie, but that does not matter much does it, because I already told you about my job. There are a lot of strikes happening with garment factories requesting better working conditions. On March 25th, 1911 one of the biggest garment factories burnt down. The factory was called The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. A shirtwaist is a tight blouse that women and girls wear. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire started on the 8th floor. The people on the 8th floor crammed into the elevator and on the fire escapes. An elevator is a machine that goes up or down if you press a certain button, and a fire escape is a platform with stairs going down to the ground, so you can get down safely if there is a fire. The people on the 10th floor were warned by phone. A phone is another machine that has two ends and you can talk to the person at the other end of the phone. So the people on the 10th floor also crammed into elevators and on fire escapes and some climbed on the roof and were led to safety by students at the university. They helped them get on the building next door by putting a ladder in between the buildings so that they can climb over. The people on the 9th floor were not warned and most of the people on the 9th floor died. In total 146 people, mostly women and young girls, died. I worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory for 3 years before I went to School or became a newsie.Working there was horrid! All the windows were boarded up and I was only 11, (in America you have to be 14 or older to work) so when the inspector came the foreman would throw me into crates and cover me in shirtwaists. Since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the conditions have gotten much better. The windows are open and there are better fire escapes and much more. I do not know all of the things that have gotten better in garment factories, because I do not work in them any more. The shirtwaist factory I worked in was very musty and stifling hot. There is a photographer called Jacob Riis and he takes a lot of pictures of the lower east side, and he took a picture of a couple of  newsies waiting for the newspaper called The Sun, I  am not in the picture though.

The food in America is very different than in Scotland. I still have cottage pie, and sometimes if I am lucky, I have smoked salmon. Me and Mother try to make scotch pies as good and yummy as you make them, but we always fail. We still make them, but when we do not like the taste, we still eat them, but we put ketchup on them so they taste better. I think we are getting better at making it. We do not have time to make gravlax. That takes days to make and we do not have something to leave it in. We do have an ice box, but that would melt because it takes days to make gravlax and one block of ice does not last three days or more (you remember that is the amount of days it takes to make gravlax). There are many new foods on the Lower East Side that I have never had before. There is this fruit called a banana; it is yellow and curved to look like a smile. At first I thought you were supposed to eat through the skin of the banana, but now I know that you peel the skin off and then eat the inside. Bananas are very good and tasty. There is also a certain type of bread, not the bread in scotland, but it is a bread called “white bread”.  People make sandwiches out of it. A sandwich is an piece of bread with some vegetable or meat in the middle and another piece of bread under that. Sandwiches are also very, very, good. In America we have three meals a day. For breakfast (we eat that in the morning) I have a roll or two and coffee. Coffee is a drink that you have in the morning to wake you up. For dinner (that is what we eat in the afternoon) we have a turkey sandwich and a small sip of water. For supper (you know that meal already because that was our only meal in Scotland) we have potato soup with meat. (We only add the meat sometimes.) Some people are peddlers, they sell food in the streets, they put all of there food in pushcarts. My favorite food to buy from peddlers are usually different kinds of tea and the canned tomatoes. Canned tomatoes are tomatoes in a can, the can makes the tomatoes inside last longer. Peddlers like to have their food at high prices if you don’t like that price you can haggle with them to pay a lower price.

I can not wait to get enough money for you to come to America. It is so lonely without you. Like I said America is not as beautiful as the big mountains in Scotland, but it is very nice and we eat much more food in America than in Scotland, but in America it is not a lot of food. I really miss you Grandfather I hope you will still be alive when or if we ever send the boat ticket to you. Sometimes I have free time to play, I usually play jacks with my friends or sometimes I just watch the boys play a game called “Spud.” My message to you is stay alive, stay healthy, let God be with you and everyone in America that is in your family and I really really really really miss the best grandfather in Scotland.

Love,

Jane Lily McRea (Sophia)

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This is a letter I wrote in our immigrant study.  I wrote this from my immigrant’s perspective and the whole grade made a letter.  I really like this letter and I hope who ever is reading this will too.