He is ambitious to get
"pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate
common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash
literature and "penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are
terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they
commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that "a bare enumeration of
the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this
book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive--hell's kitchen gang,
stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house
gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and
roasters, hell benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners,
tough kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight
howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of
the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as
babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead
infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889,
or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the
driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting
for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded
tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue.
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