have you ever arisen at dawn or earlier in new york and watched the outpouring in the meaner side-streets or avenues? it is a wondrous thing. it seems to have so little to do with the later, showier, brisker life of the day, and yet it has so very much. it is in the main so drab or shabby-smart at best, poor copies of what you see done more efficiently later in the day. typewriter girls in almost stage or society costumes entering shabby offices; boys and men made up to look like actors and millionaires turning into the humblest institutions, where they are clerks or managers. these might be called the machinery of the city, after the elevators and street cars and wagons are excluded, the implements by which things are made to go.
take your place on williamsburg bridge some morning, for instance, at say three or four o’clock, and watch the long, the quite unbroken line of jews trundling pushcarts eastward to the great wallabout market over the bridge. a procession out of assyria or egypt or chaldea, you might suppose, biblical in quality; or, better yet, a huge chorus in some operatic dawn scene laid in paris or petrograd or here. a vast, silent mass it is, marching to the music of necessity. they are so grimy, so mechanistic, so elemental in their movements and needs. and later on you will find6 them seated or standing, with their little charcoal buckets or braziers to warm their hands and feet, in those gusty, icy streets of the east side in winter, or coatless and almost shirtless in hot weather, open-mouthed for want of air. and they are new york, too—bucharest and lemberg and odessa come to the bowery, and adding rich, dark, colorful threads to the rug or tapestry which is new york.
since these are but a portion, think of those other masses that come from the surrounding territory, north, south, east and west. the ferries—have you ever observed them in the morning? or the bridges, railway terminals, and every elevated and subway exit?
already at six and six-thirty in the morning they have begun to trickle small streams of human beings manhattan or cityward, and by seven and seven-fifteen these streams have become sizable affairs. by seven-thirty and eight they have changed into heavy, turbulent rivers, and by eight-fifteen and eight-thirty and nine they are raging torrents, no less. they overflow all the streets and avenues and every available means of conveyance. they are pouring into all available doorways, shops, factories, office-buildings—those huge affairs towering so significantly above them. here they stay all day long, causing those great hives and their adjacent streets to flush with a softness of color not indigenous to them, and then at night, between five and six, they are going again, pouring forth over the bridges and through the subways and across the ferries and out on the trains, until the last drop of them appears7 to have been exuded, and they are pocketed in some outlying side-street or village or metropolitan hall-room—and the great, turbulent night of the city is on once more.
the city awakes
and yet they continue to stream cityward,—this cityward. from all parts of the world they are pouring into new york: greeks from athens and the realms of sparta and macedonia, living six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, in one room, sleeping on the floors and dressing and eating and entertaining themselves god knows how; jews from russia, poland, hungary, the balkans, crowding the east side and the inlying sections of brooklyn, and huddling together in thick, gummy streets, singing in street crowds around ballad-mongers of the woes of their native land, seeking with a kind of divine, poetic flare a modicum of that material comfort which their natures so greatly crave, which their previous condition for at least fifteen hundred years has scarcely warranted; italians from sicily and the warmer vales of the south, crowding into great sections of their own, all hungry for a taste of new york; germans, hungarians, french, polish, swedish, armenians, all with sections of their own and all alive to the joys of the city, and how eager to live—great gold and scarlet streets throbbing with the thoughts of them!
and last but not least, the illusioned american from the middle west and the south and the northwest and the far west, crowding in and eyeing it all so eagerly, so yearningly, like the others. ah, the little, shabby, blue-light restaurants! the boarding houses in silent8 streets! the moral, hungry “homes”—how full they are of them and how hopeless! how the city sings and sings for them, and in spite of them, flaunting ever afresh its lures and beauties—a city as wonderful and fateful and ironic as life itself.
