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One icy night in February 1891, firefighters responding to a call from the New York post office were told that cries could be heard coming from one of the ventilation shafts on the sidewalk. The tin vents led from an underground engine room where the fire was raging, and flames were coming up through them. When the firefighters toppled the vent, a thirteen-year-old boy scrambled out, mostly unhurt. Told that his friend was still inside, the rescuers saw what appeared to be a bundle of burning rags. They reached in and pulled out a seventeen-year-old newsboy, John Gardarino, his clothes on fire.

Gardarino was one of thousands of children on whose work the fortunes of Pulitzer and other newspaper barons rested. In cold or heat, in rain or shine, these boys stood on street corners; in front of theaters, restaurants, and clubs; in train stations; and on the docks hawking Park Row’s newspapers. In the end, for all their high-speed color presses, telegraph lines connecting all points on the globe, and other technological marvels, the newspapers needed this army of street urchins to reach their readers.

The injured teenager had made the fatal mistake of curling up in the ventilation shaft for the night. He could not face his family, in a Crosby Street tenement, because he had failed to sell all his newspapers that day—or perhaps had gambled away his earnings in a crap game. Because of his shame, he lay dying in a New York hospital.

Newsies, as boys like Gardarino were called, played a particularly prominent role in the cutthroat competition between Pulitzer’s Evening World and Hearst’s Evening Journal. Despite their names, these editions began publishing in the morning and continued all day. When the news merited “extras,” they might be on the streets every hour of the day and late into the night, numbered in bewildering fashion, and even printed on paper of different colors in order to gain a competitive edge. On any street corner, a New Yorker with a penny could buy a newspaper with news as fresh as the ink.

Since most copies of the evening papers were sold on the street, rather than delivered to homes like the morning paper, their sales depended greatly on a partnership between the headline writers and the newsies—almost like that of a playwright and an actor. The editors would craft an oversize attention-grabbing headline, and the newsies would work the street by calling it out. The right kind of headline—TINY TOT WITH PENNY CLUTCHED IN CHUBBY HAND DIES UNDER TRAM BEFORE MOTHER’S EYES—could clean out an entire run of the paper.

The Spanish-American War had been a boon for newsboys. They sold every copy of the World or Journal they could carry, even when the papers increased their press runs. Inside the Pulitzer building, however, the World’s managers desperately sought ways to comply with the publisher’s order to stem its deficit. Raising its price was out of the question, because that would be a signal of defeat in the struggle against Hearst. Cutting salaries was also out of the question. Reporters would jump to the Journal, and the unionized compositors and printers were untouchable.

The newsies became the target of choice. The World raised the wholesale price of the paper from 50 cents per 100 to 60 cents. The Journal also raised its wholesale price, but all the other newspapers did not. Trimming a dime from a newsboy’s take might not seem like much. But when this amount was spread over the paper’s vast circulation, it could make up an entire annual deficit of nearly $1 million. Pulitzer’s managers bet that the ragtag collection of immigrant children, who often didn’t even speak the same language, could hardly put up much resistance.

They were wrong.

At first, the newsies tolerated the price increase. Selling sixty papers was easy during the wartime excitement. But in 1899, when newspaper sales decreased at the end of hostilities, the newsies grew anxious. Each day as they lined up on Park Row to get their bundles, the decision of how many papers to purchase weighed on their minds. Buy