my only excuse for offering these very brief pictures of the city of new york as it was between 1900 and 1914 or ’15, or thereabout, is that they are of the very substance of the city i knew in my early adventurings in it. also, and more particularly, they represent in part, at least, certain phases which at that time most arrested and appealed to me, and which now are fast vanishing or are no more. i refer more particularly to such studies as the bread-line, the push-cart man, the toilers of the tenements, christmas in the tenements, whence the song, and the love affairs of little italy.
for, to begin with, the city, as i see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic then than it is now. it offered, if i may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social fifth avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparklingly personality-dotted wall street of 1890–1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (there were argonauts then.) the astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,—i refer to the east side and the bowery of that period—unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day. who recallsvi steve brodies, mcgurks, doyers street and “chuck” connors?
the city is larger. it has, if you will, more amazing architectural features. but has it as vivid and moving social contrasts,—as hectic and poignant and disturbing mental and social aspirations as it had then? i cannot see that it has. rather, as it seems to me, it is duller because less differentiated. there are millions and millions but what do they do? tramp aimlessly, for the most part, here and there in shoals, to see a ball game, a football game, a parade, a prize-fight, a civic betterment or automobile exhibition or to dance or dine in a hall that holds a thousand. but of that old zest that seemed to find something secret and thrilling in a thousand nooks and corners of the old city, its bowery, its waterfront, its rialto, its outlying resorts, not a trace. one cannot even persuade the younger generation, that never even knew the old city, to admit that they feel a tang of living equivalent to what they imagined once was. the truth is that it is not here. it has vanished—along with the generation that felt it.
the pictures that i offer here, however, are not, i am compelled to admit, of that more distinguished and vibrant crust, which my introduction so far would imply. indeed they are the very antithesis, i think, of all that glitter and glister that made the social life of that day so superior. its shadow, if you will, its reverse face. for being very much alone at the time, and having of necessity, as the situation stood, ample hours in which to wander here and there, without, however, sufficient financial means to divert myself in any other way, i was given for the most part to rambling in what to me werevii the strangest and most peculiar and most interesting areas i could find as contrasted with those of great wealth and to speculating at length upon the phases and the forces of life i then found so lavishly spread before me. the splendor of the, to me, new dynamic, new-world metropolis! its romance, its enthusiasm, its illusions, its difficulties! the immense crowds everywhere—upon manhattan island, at least. the beautiful rivers and the bay with its world of shipping that washed its shores. indeed, i was never weary of walking and contemplating the great streets, not only fifth avenue and broadway, but the meaner ones also, such as the bowery, third avenue, second avenue, elizabeth street in the lower italian section and east broadway. and at that time even (1894) that very different and most radically foreign plexus, known as the east side, already stretched from chatham square and even farther south—brooklyn bridge—north to fourteenth street. for want of bridges and subways the city was not, as yet, so far-flung but for that reason more concentrated and almost as congested.
yet before i was fifteen years in the city, all of the additional bridges, other than brooklyn bridge which was here when i came and which so completely served to change new york from the thing it was then to what it is now, were already in place—manhattan, williamsburg, queens borough bridges. and the subways had been built, at least in part. but before then, if anything, the great island, as i have said, was even more compact of varied and foreign groups, and one had only to wander casually and not at any great length to come upon the irish in the lower east and west sides; the syriansviii in washington street—a great mass of them; the greeks around 26th, 27th and 28th streets on the west side; the italians around mulberry bend; the bohemians in east 67th street, and the sicilians in east 116th street and thereabouts. the jews were still chiefly on the east side.
being fascinated by these varying nationalities, and their neighborhoods, i was given for the first year or two of my stay here to wandering among them, as well as along and through the various parks, the waterfronts and the bowery, and thinking, thinking, thinking on this welter of life and the difficulties and the strangeness of it. the veritable tides of people that were forever moving here—so different to the middle-west cities i had known. and the odd, or at least different, devices and trades by which they made their way—the small shops, trades, tricks even. for one thing, i was often given to wondering how so many people could manage to subsist in new york by grinding hand organs alone, or shining shoes or selling newspapers or peanuts, or fruits or vegetables from a small stand or cart.
and the veritable shoals and worlds, even, of beggars and bums and idlers and crooks in the bowery and elsewhere. indeed i was more or less dumbfounded by the numerical force of these and the far cry it was from them to the mansions in fifth avenue, the great shops in sixth avenue and twenty-third street, the world famous banking houses and personalities in wall street, the comfortable cliff-dwellers who occupied the hotels and apartment houses of the upper west side and along broadway. for being young and inexperienced and penniless, these economic differences had more significance for me then than they have since been able toix maintain. yet always and primarily fascinated by the problem of life itself, the riddle of its origin, the difficulties seemingly attending its maintenance everywhere, such a polyglot city as this was, was not only an economic problem, but a strange and mysterious picture, and i was never weary of spying out how the other fellow lived and how he made his way. and yet how many years it was, really, after i arrived here, quite all of ten, before it ever occurred to me that apart from the novel or short story, these particular scenes and my own cogitations in connection might possess merit as pictures.
and so it was that not before 1904—ten years later, really—that i was so much as troubled to sketch a single impression of all that i had seen and then only at the request of a sunday editor of a new york newspaper who was short of “small local stuff” to fill in between his more lurid features. and even at that, not more than seven or eight of all that are here assembled were at that time even roughly sketched,—the bowery mission, the waterfront, the cradle of tears, the track walker, the realization of an ideal, the log of a harbor pilot. later, however, in 1908 and ’09, finding space in a magazine of my own—the bohemian—as well as one conducted by senator watson of georgia, and bethinking me of all i had seen and how truly wonderful and colorful it really was, i began to try to do more of them, and at that time wrote at least seven or eight more—the flight of pigeons, six o’clock, the wonder of water, the men in the storm, and the men in the dark. the exact titles of all, apart from these, i have forgotten.
still later, after the opening of the world war, and because i was noting how swiftly and steadily the city was changing and old landmarks and conditions were being done away with, i thought it worth while to bringx together, not only all the scenes i had previously published or sketched, but to add some others which from time to time i had begun but never finished. among these at that time were the fire, hell’s kitchen, a wayplace of the fallen, the man on the bench. and then, several years ago, having in the meanwhile once more laid aside the material to the advantage of other matters, i decided that it was still worth while. and getting them all out and casting aside those i no longer cared for, and rewriting others of which i approved, together with new pictures of old things i had seen, i.e., bums, the michael j. powers association, a vanished summer resort, the push-cart man, the sandwich man, characters, the men in the snow, the city awakes—i finally evolved the present volume. but throughout all these latest additions i sought only to recapture the flavor and the color of that older day—nothing more. if they are anything, they are mere representations of the moods that governed me at the time that i had observed this material at first hand—not as i know the city to be now.
in certain of these pictures, as will be seen, reference is made to wages, hours and working and living conditions not now holding, or at least not to the same severe degree. this is especially true of such presentations as the men in the dark, the men in the storm, the men in the snow, six o’clock, the bread-line, (long since abolished), the toilers of the tenements, and christmas in the tenements. yet since they were decidedly true of that particular period, i prefer to leave them as originally written. they bear, i believe, the stamp of their hour.
theodore dreiser.
