T

Pig Iron Piled in Storage

Pig

HE most important species of pig is not packed at the stockyards. It flows, a torrent of potential railroads, bridges, sky-scrapers, steamships, automobiles, tin pans, and carpet tacks, from the fertile fire of the blastfurnaces. The stream is ceaseless, but its volume is ever-changing. And thereby hangs a well-worn tale.

The output of pig iron depends upon the demand for steel. The latter depends upon the amount of new construction undertaken. Lastly, new construction fluctuates with business prospects. Such, at least, is the conventional chain. of reasoning, leading to the conclusion that pig is the most diagnostic product of industry. One of our leading trade journals publishes from time to time a "Blast-Furnace Business Dial." The dial is graduated in accordance with the assumption that when sixty per cent of the country's blast-furnaces are in operation business conditions are normal. The index of this diagram is set to correspond with the latest monthly report of blastfurnace activity. The Department of Commerce publishes statistics of pig-iron

Economists and business wiseacres are always talking about pig. One wonders how many of them visualize clearly and correctly the commodity itself, as apart from mere rows of figures concerning it. How many of them have ever seen it made? How many know anything about the physical aspects it assumes, or realize that it is not a single product, but a large group of products, each of which serves a particular use in the versatile art of making iron and steel?

The very dictionaries are all at sea about pig iron. They would have us believe and the educated public at large probably does believe that this material is invariably cast into solid blocks, known as "pigs." As a matter of fact, less than half the total output is ever solidified at all. The commonest fate of smelted iron nowadays is to be charged by the gallon, so to speak, into charged by the gallon, so to speak, into a huge vessel called a "mixer," which, in turn, feeds it to a battery of steel furnaces. It never cools or hardens until it has been metamorphosed into steel. Solid

semicylindrical bars. Its diversity is not in its shape, but in its composition. Both solid and liquid pig irons are made in a great number of standard and special varieties in response to the manifold needs of the foundry, the puddling furnace, and the steel mill. The list includes foundry pig, malleable pig, Bessemer pig, basic pig, mottled pig, ferrosilicon pig, gray forge iron, ferromanganese, spiegeleisen, and so forth, besides the irons which foundrymen, as a rule, order by chemical formula-specifying the percentages of phosphorus, sulphur, silicon, and the like.

While pig is hardly a familiar sight to most people, the places where it is made

are

known to everybody, at least through pictures. The architecture of the modern blast-furnace is distinct and unmistakable. If, however, you suppose that this structure is as common a motif of the industrial landscape as the coal tipple and the oil derrick, you will be astonished to learn that all the blastfurnaces in this country number barely 450, and of this small number several

The Pig-Casting
Machine

According to the older method of making pig iron, the molten metal as it comes from the blast-furnace flows into sand molds laid out on the floor of the cast house. The mass of metal filling each mold is called a "pig," while the metal filling the channels connecting a number of molds is called a "sow." The newer method, herewith illustrated, saves both space and labor. The metal is poured from a ladle (seen at the left) into a series of iron molds carried on an endless chain. The molds travel slowly, and the pigs are cooled partly by the air and partly by a bath or spray of water. When they reach the upper end of the incline, they fall into cars. Three or four times as much pig iron is now cast by machine as by means of sand molds

Slag Pit at a Blast-Furnace

Blast-furnace

slag

used to be one of the commonest and most unmanageable waste products of industry. The problem of the iron smelters was to get rid of it with as little expense and trouble as possible. Like nearly all other industrial wastes of yore, it is now a source of profit. Of the 20,000,000 tons of slag produced annually at American blast-furnaces, fully sixty per cent is now sold commercially, and the time is probably near when all of it will be turned to account. It is used as road metal, railroad ballast, and concrete aggregate. Much goes into Portland cement, some into mineral wool. Paving blocks and roofing are made of it. Even the heat of the molten slag as it comes from the furnace has been used to generate steam. The picture shows one of the many ways in which slag is handled at furnace plants. Chains are laid in the pit and the slag is then run into it. After the slag has hardened the chains are pulled through it to break it up. It is then loaded into cars

are, in a majority of cases, grouped at a single plant.

The most paradoxical fact of all about blast-furnaces is that there are fewer of them in the country to-day than

Thus, despite the reduction in number, they are supplying our fortunate Nation with some thirty or forty times. as much prosperity in the shape of

W

E were discussing America and American literature over a cup of black coffee in one of the many Italian coffee-houses of the neighborhood. My friend, a bohemian. of decided literary tastes, did most of the talking, and evidently enjoyed it. With that cynicism characteristic of the East

Side intellectual-too often an indication of dreams unrealized-he reviewed many of our "best sellers," passing on from Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street" to the Great American Novel.

"In my opinion," he said, "when that novel comes to be written its background will not be Main Street, but the East Side of New York. Its central figure, furthermore, will not be a Babbitt or a

done, is but a great melting-pot, a "polyglot boarding-house," and nothing else. Why, then, shouldn't the East Side be the background for the Great American Novel when it comes to be written? Is not the East Side America?

THAT such should be the opinion of my

neighbors is strange, but not unexplainable. There is, and can be, but one America to the immigrant (just as there is one Europe to most Americans), and that is the "America” with which he has come in contact. There is no other. The American people are to most of my neighbors either Indians, whom they have never seen except in the movies, or "Americans" of their acquaintance,

Nowhere in America is congestion with its inevitable poverty, disease, and crime more pronounced, nor life with its interminable ebbs and flows more strenuous. The lower East Side (we are on the upper East Side) questions our claim to greatest congestion. Perhaps it is right. To the victor the palm when the truth is known! But the lower East Side will concede us, we hope, one honor at least -that of having the most populated block in the city, in the country. Of this we are proud. Five thousand human beings in one city street; as many as fifteen to a four-room flat; two, three, and even four hundred to a tenement intended for fifty!

colonel, but an immigrant's son, a child of the melting-pot." He sipped his coffee, puffed at his cigarette, and continued: "While Main Street is American, the East Side, with its peoples from many lands, speaking many tongues, and gradually building a civilization which, in the end, will be ours and not Europe's, is America. It is the America of to-morrow, or, if you please, America in the making. And the Great Novel, to be true to life, to outlive its author and its age, must deal with and interpret that America." He looked squarely at me, his eyes asking, Isn't it so?

with immigrants all my life, worked with them, am an immigrant myself. And I know how strictly encompassed is the outlook that shapes their opinions and controls their judgment. The great open spaces of the West, real as they may be to Westerners, are but screen pictures to New Yorkers who have lived their whole lives in the shadows of sky-scrapers. Workers living in the mining towns of Pennsylvania or West Virginia or on the farmlands of the South and West may not know, and do not know, the congested streets, the dingy tenements, and the busy sweatshops of the East Side, but to the Italian mother on Mulberry Street, imprisoned in her four-room flat, or to the overworked Jewish tailor on East Broadway there is, and can be, no America without them. Their "America" is a hodgepodge of toiling millions, tenements, crowded subways, busy sweatshops, and fenced-in playgroundsin other words, the East Side.

interesting and very entertaining. Without him and his like the coffeehouses, barber-shops, and "wine basements" of the neighborhood would not be the "intellectual" centers they are. He is the Benvenuto Cellini of Little Italy. The words of wisdom that fall from his lips are manna to ignorant minds eager for knowledge. But, though unique as a character, there is nothing unique or strange about what he says of America. In this respect he speaks the mind of his audiences. America, when all is said and

My neighborhood is on the East Side. Two hundred thousand men and women in a territory less than one square mile in size. Albany, Omaha, Spokane, Reno, Sacramento, and Richmond are but hamlets compared to this city within a city.

HEN William Kieft was Governor of Nieuw Amsterdam, a few years before Peter Stuyvesant came on the scene, old Dr. Johannes de la Montagne, founder of Nieuw Haarlem, wrote to a friend overseas that his village, now my neighborhood, had no less than "thirty male residents, mostly heads of families and freeholders." That was quite a number for those days! Later on, when the dignified Washington made love to pretty Marie Philipse (here in my neighborhood) and Nieuw Amsterdam had become New York, the modest village had grown to a fair-sized town. It remained as such until America's gates, in the decades following the Civil War, were thrown open to the breadwinners of the Old World. Then the change came. The newcomers not only dispossessed the old stock, but transformed the quiet-living American community into a noisy miniature Europe of their own.

And so is my neighborhood to-day-a miniature Europe, a little world of tenements and tenement-dwellers, in which every nation of the Old World is represented, every language spoken, every faith professed. Even the Dutch remain, just a handful of them, and their Reformed church stands, dilapidated but

useful, an alien edifice to the Jews, Catholics, and infidels surrounding it.

THE

HERE are twenty-seven nationalities in the neighborhood, including, of course, the Chinese laundrymen, the gypsy phrenologists, the Greek and Syrian storekeepers. East, along the banks of the East River, surrounding Thomas Jefferson Park, are the Italians; on Pleasant Avenue are the Poles, Austrians, and Hungarians. West, where Fifth Avenue loses its dignity but not its charm, are the Jews, sons of many lands; near them are the Turks and Spaniards. North, where "Little Italy" makes room for "Little Africa," are the Negroes, gradually moving down, much to the discomfort of the whites. South, resisting the merciless invasion of the Jews and Italians, are the Germans and Irish, remnants of a stock that once ruled this part of town. Scattered throughout the neighborhood, with limits well defined, are lesser groups-Finns, Russians, French, Swedes, Danes, Rumanians, and Jugoslavs. Here and there, like refugees in exile, are a few Americans of old stock, heroically holding their ground.

The cosmopolitan character of the

Vienna, and Naples combined"

neighborhood is evidenced, not only in the signs of many languages, the chop suey, rotisseries, and spaghetti houses, the synagogues and Catholic temples, the flags of many colors, the foreign papers on every news-stand, but in the types one meets on the streets-tall blond Nordics, olive-skinned, dark-haired Mediterraneans, long-bearded Semites and Slavs, massive Africans, East Indians, gypsies, Japs, and Chinese.

The Italians and Jews predominate, giving the neighborhood the color of the Roman Ghetto. Few people have less in common than these. They differ in language, religion, custom, and temperament. But they get along, even if now and then there is an unpleasant interchange of "kike" and "wop." Under the protecting ægis of the Irish policeman's club or of the American flag even the brotherhood of man is possible. Indeed, if that brotherhood exists anywhere, it exists here, imperfect as it may be. Our "nations" have learned the meaning and the value of co-operation. We have a "league" that functions. Jew and Gentile, white and black, French and German, Italian and Austrian, meet on common ground. There is no breaking of

bones, no boundary disputes or reparation problems. The Great War itself, with its passions and hatreds, could not disturb the peaceful equilibrium of the neighborhood. Life in that trying hour went on as usual. All fighting was done for America. In the last political campaign the Jews and the Italians joined forces. The result was the election of "the lone Progressive Congressman from the East," an American of Italian extraction, and a large vote for La Follette. If in the next campaign there should be no "third party" to unite the "nations," Tammany, always eager to serve, will do the best it can. We can always count on Tammany to maintain harmony in the household, electing Irish Senators with Jewish and Italian votes.

THE Italian, by the way, is not much

of a politician. He is too poetic for the "game." He prefers loftier pastimes. While the Irishman is organizing the ward and the Jew listens attentively to the platitudes of the soap-box orator on "Trotsky Square" (the Hyde Park of the neighborhood) the Italian is at home, enjoying the rapturous strains of "O Sole Mio." But, if not a politician, he is cer