H. C. Bunner

“ Such is the daily march of the mob in Mulberry Street near the mouth of Jersey's blind alley, and such is its outrageous behavior as observed by a presumably decent person from the windows of the big red-brick building across the way.
Suddenly there is an explosion of sound under the decent person's window, and a hand-organ starts off with a jerk like a freight train on a down grade, that joggles a whole string of crashing notes. Then it gets down to work, and its harsh, high-pitched, metallic drone makes the street ring for a moment. ”

“ Of course an old foot-path in this country always serves to mark the line of a new road when the people who had worn it take to keeping horses. But there are thousands of miles of paths criss-crossing the countryside in all of our older States that will never see the dirt-cart or the stone-crusher in the lifetime of any man alive to-day. ”

“ Your friend would be no more at home at the uptown end of your little New York path than you are here in his little town; and he does not look on your ignorance of nature as sternly as you would look upon his unfamiliarity with your familiar landmarks. For his knowledge has grown upon him so naturally and unconsciously, that he hardly esteems it of any value.
But you can have no idea of the tragico-comical disadvantage at which you will find yourself placed during your first year in the country—that is, the suburban country. ”

“ He is insane, but harmless, and amusing, although rather trying to the nerves. He comes out of the house in a hurry, walks quickly up the street for twenty or thirty feet, then turns suddenly, as if he had forgotten something, and hurries back, to reappear two minutes later from the basement door, only to hasten wildly in another direction, turn back again, plunge into the basement door, emerge from the upper door, get half way down the block, forget it again, and go back to make a new combination of doors and exits. Sometimes he is ten or twenty minutes in the house at one time. ”

“ In New York it has been moved not only across that river of human intercourse that we call Broadway—a river with a tidal ebb and flow of travel and traffic—but across a wilder, stranger, and more turbulent flood called the Bowery, to a region of which the well-fed and prosperous New Yorker knows very, very little. ”

“ As I say, that is pretty near all you know of the great, marvellous, multitudinous town you live in—a city full of strange people, of strange occupations, of strange habits of life, of strange contrasts of wealth and poverty; of a new life of an indescribable crudity, and of an [Pg 181] old life that breeds to-day the very atmosphere of the historic past. Your feet have never strayed in the side paths where you might have learned something of the infinite and curious strangeness of this strange city. ”

“ Pfaff's beer-saloon as did his fresh, cool lager; and that young men, and, for the matter of that, men not so young, stole in there to listen to their contests of wit, and to wish and yearn and aspire to be of their goodly company. For the old gentleman little dreamed, as he went on his course up Broadway, that he had seen the first Bohemians of New York, and that these young men would be written about and talked about and versified about for generations to come. Unconscious of this honor he went on to Fourteenth Street to see the new square they were laying out there. ”

“ We shall never see the organ-grinder's monkey in the streets of New York again. I see him, though. He comes out and visits me where I live among the trees, whenever the weather is not too cold to permit him to travel with his master. Sometimes he comes in a bag, on chilly days; and my own babies, who seem to be born with the fellow-feeling of vulgarity with the mob, invite him in and show him how to warm his cold little black hands in front of the kitchen range. ”

“ But, whether you know it or not, that second year in the suburban house is a crisis and turning-point in your life, for it will make of you either a city man or a suburban, and it will surely save you from being, for all the rest of your days, that hideous betwixt-and-between thing, that uncanny creation of modern days of rapid transit, who fluctuates helplessly between one town and another ”

“ As more foreigners walk on the Bowery than walk on any other street in New York; and as more different nationalities are represented there than are represented in any other street in New York; and as the foreigners all say that the Bowery is the most marvellous thoroughfare in the world, I think we are justified in assuming that there is little reason to doubt that the foreigners are entirely right in the matter, especially as their opinion coincides with that of every American who has ever made even a casual attempt to size up the Bowery.
No one man can thoroughly know a great city. ”

“ The best of life in a great city is that it breeds a broad and tolerant catholicity of spirit: the best of country life is that it breeds the spirit of helpful, homely, kindly neighborliness. The suburban-dweller, who shares in both lives, is perhaps a little too ready to pride himself in having learned the lesson of the great metropolis, but the other and homelier lesson is taught so gradually and so unobtrusively, that he often learns it quite unconsciously ”

“ Why do we walk around that useless bend to-day? Because it is a path, [Pg 127] and because we walk in the way of human nature.
The life of a tree may be a hundred years or two hundred years and yet be long life. But the days of the age of a man are threescore and ten, and though some be so strong that they come to fourscore, yet the strong man [Pg 128] may be stricken down in the flower of his strength, if it be the will of the Lord. ”

“ But there it is—the whole hard business of life for the poor—for the big poor and the little poor, and the unhappiest of all, the moderately poor. He must sell strip after strip of the grounds his father laid out with such loving and far-looking pride. You must buy your narrow strip from him, and raise thereon your tawdry little house, calculating the cost of every inch of construction in hungry anxiety of mind. And then you must sit down in your narrow front-room to stare at the squalid shanty of the poor man who has squatted right in your sight, on the land condemned for the new avenue ”

“ Of those who have died, two at least have honor and literary consideration to-day; of those who lived, some have obtained celebrity, and all a reasonable measure of success. Mürger's Bohemians would have called them Philistines. But they have started a tradition that will survive from generation unto generation; a tradition of delusion so long as the glamour of poetry, romance, and adventure hang around the mysteriously attractive personality of a Bohemian. Ever since then New York has had, and always will have, the posing Bohemian and his worshippers. ”

“ But the true Bohemians, the men who have the real blood in their veins, they must seek some other meeting-place where they can pitch their never-abiding tents, and sit at their humble feasts to recount to each other, amid appreciative laughter, the tricks and devices and pitiful petty schemes for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them the game and comedy of life. ”

“ There is no such thing as liking a country life—for I take it that you mean to remove to the real suburban countryside, and not to one [Pg 178] of those abominable and abhorrent deserts of paved streets laid out at right angles, and all supplied with sewers and electric light wires and water-mains before the first lonely house escapes from the house-pattern books to tempt the city dweller out to that dreary, soulless waste which has all the modern improvements and not one tree. ”

“ He knew enough of London to know that no one human mind, no one mortal life can take in the complex intensity of a metropolis. Try to count a million, and then try to form a conception of the impossibility of learning all the ins and outs of the domicile of a [Pg 86] million men, women, and children. I have met men who thought they knew New York, but I have never met a man—except a man from a remote rural district—who thought he knew the Bowery. ”

“ He had lived among all manner of peoples. He had ridden everything ridable, shot everything shootable, climbed everything climbable, and satisfied himself, as he said, that the world was too small for any particular use. At the end of his travels he had a little of his fortune left, a vast amount of experience, the constitution of a red Indian, and a vocabulary so vast and so peculiar that it stunned and fascinated the stranger. Halford was a New York lawyer, gray, clean-shaven, and sharp of feature. ”

“ The random goat of poverty browses on the very confines of the scanty, small settlement [Pg 42] of cheap gentility where you and your neighbors—people of moderate means like yourself—huddle together in your endless, unceasing struggle for a home and self-respect. You know that your smug, mean little house, tricked out with machine-made scroll-work, and insufficiently clad in two coats of ready-mixed paint, is an eyesore to the poor old gentleman who has sold you a corner of his father's estate to build it on. ”

“ How should it be possible that you should enjoy taking up a new life, with new surroundings, new anxieties, new responsibilities, new duties, new diversions, new social connections—new conditions of every kind—after living half a lifetime in New York? It is true that, [Pg 179] being a born New Yorker, you know very little indeed of the great city you live in. You know the narrow path you tread, coming and going, from your house to your office, and from your office to your house. It follows, as closely as it may, the line of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. ”

“ This blood in her may, in some measure, account for the vigor and enthusiasm with which this old lady expressed her sense of the loss the community had sustained in the death of President Lincoln, in April of 1865.
Summoning two or three of us youngsters, and a dazed Irish maid fresh from Castle Garden and a three weeks' voyage in the steerage of an ocean steamer, she led us up to the top of the house, to one of those vast old-time garrets that might have been—and in country inns occasionally were—turned into ballrooms, with the aid of a few lights and sconces. ”

“ They are boarding-and lodging-houses now, poor enough, but proud in their respectability of the past, although the tide of ignorance, poverty, vice, filth, and misery is surging to their doors and their back-yard fences. And here, in hall bedrooms, in third-story backs and fronts, and in half-story attics, live the Bohemians of to-day, and with them those other strugglers of poverty who are destined to become "successful men" in various branches of art, literature, science, trade, or finance. Of these latter our children will speak with hushed respect, as men who rose from small beginnings ”

“ But presently your friend—for of course you have followed the trail of a friend, in choosing your new abode—your friend drops in clad likewise, and you take the children and start off for a stroll. As the pajama-feeling wears off, you become quite enthusiastic. You tell your friend that this is the life that you always wanted to lead; that a man doesn't really live in the city, but only exists ”

“ There is no class in society where the sponge, the toady, the man who is willing to receive socially without giving in return, is more quickly found out or more heartily disowned than among the genuine Bohemians. He is to them a traitor, he is one who plays the game unfairly, one who is willing to fill his belly by means to which they will not resort, lax and fantastic as is their social code. Do you know, for instance, what "Jackaling" is in New York? ”

“ But it is the alivest mile on the face of the earth. And it either bounds or bisects that square mile that the statisticians say is the most densely populated square mile on the face of the globe. This is the heart of the New York tenement district. As the Bowery is the Broadway of the East Side, the street of its pleasures, it would be interesting enough if it opened up only this one densely populated district. But there is much more to contribute to its infinite variety. ”

“ But the good old gentleman who pays the young ex-collegian's bills sometimes takes a great deal of pleasure—in his stupid, old-fashioned way—in uniting with his fellow-merchants of the Swamp or Hanover Square, to subscribe to a testimonial to some one of the best abused of these "indurated" sinners, in honor of his distinguished services in lowering some tax-rate, in suppressing some nuisance, in establishing some new municipal safeguard to life or property. ”