Editing Irving Berlin (section)

====Settling in New York City====
[[File:LES, 1910.JPG|thumb|upright=1.1|Lower East Side in 1910]]
After their arrival in New York City, the Baline family lived briefly in a basement flat on Monroe Street, and then moved to a three-room tenement at 330 [[Cherry Street (Manhattan)|Cherry Street]].<ref name=":0" /> His father, unable to find comparable work as a cantor in New York, took a job at a [[kosher]] meat market and gave Hebrew lessons on the side to support his family. He died a few years later when Irving was thirteen years old.<ref name=Whitcomb/>

With only a few years of schooling, eight-year-old Irving began helping to support his family.<ref name=NYT-obit>{{cite web |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/23/obituaries/irving-berlin-nation-s-songwriter-dies.html |title=Irving Berlin, Nation's Songwriter, Dies |website=[[The New York Times]] |date=September 23, 1989 |url-access=subscription |first1=Marilyn |last1=Berger |url-status=live |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20231228213558/https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/23/obituaries/irving-berlin-nation-s-songwriter-dies.html |archive-date= December 28, 2023 }}</ref> He became a newspaper boy, hawking ''The Evening Journal.'' One day while delivering newspapers, according to Berlin's biographer and friend, [[Alexander Woollcott]], he stopped to look at a ship departing for China and became so entranced that he did not see a swinging crane, which knocked him into the river. When he was fished out after going down for the third time, he was still holding in his clenched fist the five pennies he earned that day.<ref name=NYT-obit/><ref name=Woollcott>{{cite book| last=Woollcott| first=Alexander| title=The Story of Irving Berlin| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2ez7DAAAQBAJ&q=the+story+of+irving+berlin| publisher=Read Books Ltd|date=September 26, 2016| isbn=978-1473359604| access-date=June 5, 2020}}</ref>

His mother took a job as a [[midwife]], and three of his sisters worked wrapping cigars, common for immigrant girls. His older brother worked in a sweatshop assembling shirts. Each evening, when the family came home from their day's work, Bergreen writes, "they would deposit the coins they had earned that day into Lena's outspread apron."<ref name="Bergreen"/> {{rp|11}}

Music historian [[Philip Furia]] writes that when "Izzy" began to sell newspapers in the [[Bowery]], he was exposed to the music and sounds coming from saloons and restaurants that lined the crowded streets. Young Berlin sang some of the songs he heard while selling papers, and people would toss him some coins.  He confessed to his mother one evening that his newest ambition in life was to become a singing waiter in a saloon.<ref name=Furia-Poets>{{cite book| last=Furia| first=Philip| title=The Poets of Tin Pan Alley| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZNsc1AnOnSkC&q=the+poets+of+tin+pan+alley| publisher=Oxford Univ. Press| date=June 25, 1992| isbn=978-0198022886}}</ref>{{rp|48}} From this he stepped up to work as a [[song plugger]] and singing waiter in cafes and restaurants in the downtown areas of New York City. His first lyric, written with a café pianist, earned him a royalty of thirty-seven cents.<ref name=":1">
"The Waltzes of Irving Berlin", 1962</ref>

However, before Berlin was fourteen his meager income was still adding less than his sisters' to the family's budget, which made him feel worthless.<ref name=Woollcott/> He then decided to leave home and join the city's ragged army of other young immigrants.<ref name=Bergreen/>{{rp|15}} He lived in the Bowery, taking up residence in one of the lodging houses that sheltered the thousands of other homeless boys in the [[Lower East Side]]. Bergreen describes them as being uncharitable living quarters, "[[Dickensian]] in their meanness, filth, and insensitivity to ordinary human beings."<ref name=Bergreen/>{{rp|15}}