Around 1900, the slang term “kid” connoted young hooligans with predilections for
Painted in August 1907, Forty-two Kids depicts a band of nude and partially clothed boys engaged in a variety of antics—swimming, diving, sunbathing, smoking, and possibly urinating—on and near a dilapidated wharf jutting out over New York City’s East River. A sharp observer of urban life, George Bellows has sketched his streetwise subjects with characteristic vigor and economy of means, and he has carefully rendered their varied ethnic backgrounds.
In turn-of-the-century slang, „kids“ referred to roaming young hooligans, who were
