H. C. Bunner

“ The rare old wild-birds, that you never see, nowadays, in the city squares, share with the noisy English immigrants the larger domiciles, many of which are curiously ornate, testifying to the industrious leisure of some ingenious, bird-loving shanty-dweller. The airy colony does its courting, its mating, its setting and its nursing, and all the other duties of its life, in perfect quiet and content. The ragged infants below are less wanton than your sleek farmer's boys out in the country. They are willing to leave the birds alone, because the birds leave them alone. ”

“ And if they take it into their young heads to rent a little room for themselves, near Union Square, turn it into a small and cheap palace of decorative art, and go foraging among the French table-d'hôte restaurants, dining with the newspaper men and the artists—why, Niceness at once labels them "queer—not to be trusted," and they are outlawed—but happy.
The law of the World of Laziness has its counterpart in the World of Labor. Right-minded and right-thinking poverty clings to its small, stuffy, half-lit tenement-house rooms with a steadfast devotion. ”

“ Now we have reached the Boulevard, and we will follow its well-planned course, leaving the Elevated Railway to roar and quiver down the avenue. The sun is setting. The wheels of homeward-bound bicycles whir past us, breaking the yellow light into wiry flashes. Out of the shade of a ragged rock-corner comes a strange couple—strange for the place—a gentleman with a lady on his arm—young, well dressed; the man tall and handsome, the woman slight and pretty. ”

“ The impression that this small and strange city makes upon the chance beholder is that of a wild dream of all that he has ever imagined in the way of odd sea-side shelters, boat-cabins, wharf-sheds and marine cubby-houses generally, jumbled together in confusion by a storm, and stranded here. At first the eye cannot make out separate forms in these acres of wood and tin and canvas, clothing the inequalities of the ground. ”

“ Shanties dot the landscape near and far; shanties mark the lines of graded streets north and west; but it takes only a glance to show us that here, right in front of us, lies a veritable town of shanties—an ordered aggregation of hovels that speaks of an association of interests and an identity of tastes—the two great principles that enter into the foundation of villages and cities. You know at once that something stronger than mere chance has drawn these dwellers in huts together; something more mighty than mere accident has made them live in peace and unity for years. ”

“ It is not too much to give it—this fast-passing phase or fraction of our city's growth—an hour or two of our time; for the wind blows fresh from the west, across the steely-blue river that gleams down at the bottom of the empty road-ways. ”

“ Of this class, which has no condition nor possession to characterize it beyond the fact of its laboring, there must always be found some lively-minded and restless members who are ill content to gasp out their lives in the packed cellars and garrets down the back alleys of the lower town; they yearn for freedom of movement, for light and air, for the smell of the bare earth and the sight of trees and water. ”

“ All over the rough land, dropping riverward to the west, we see, side by side with desolate old mansions, that were fashionable water-side villas in 1800, the outlying shanties, rebels in their way against the urban constraint of the town proper. They have broad fields to themselves, and are happy in a plenitude of wind and sun. Yet they are just as fond of creeping into out-of-the-way corners, and up inaccessible heights, as those in the crowded settlement. ”

“ From the station platform we catch, through the trees, a last glimpse of Shantytown. The dark roofs rise high into the golden air; the smoke of wholesome dinners trembles hazily upward; a flash of sunlight against the sky tells of an else invisible bird-house. ”

“ The rhythmic patter and shuffle of many feet, the sharp, strong, nervous vibration of men's high voices, chanting resonant Latin vocables; the beat of feet and the clear, trumpet-like tones draw nearer, still unseen, then echo down the corridors, growing fainter and sweeter; and, while our nerves yet thrill with startled pleasure, a black-robed figure bows before us, and the parish priest greets us with the easy, amiable courtesy which always sits so well on the educated Roman cleric. ”

“ But why do we linger to look at these shanties, which are not so picturesque as the party-colored groups to the north? Why? Do you see that smooth breadth of new earth on the block to the south? That was just such a populous hollow as this a fortnight ago. It is not wholly closed up yet. At the further end there is a junkman's hut, with his little barn, his stable, sty and shed, and a perfect wilderness of "truck"—boxes, barrels, baskets, stove-pipes, bottles, cart-wheels, odds and ends of furniture—the accumulations of, it may be, a dozen years of his strange traffic. ”

“ Others crowd up close to the street, utilizing the fortress-like slope as a combined wall and floor. Others mount the proud eminence of an ash-heap perhaps twenty feet high, a relic of abandoned dumping-grounds. Almost every yard of space is occupied. ”

“ The pig is a step higher than the rat in the scale of animal worth, in that he can eat the rat. On the other hand, he himself is eaten by man; and it were a nice question to discuss whether he himself regards a life as well and nobly spent that ends in "fresh country" sausages and the hasty ham-sandwich bolted at noonday by the down-town broker. But 'twere reasoning too curiously to devote such speculation to the pig. The dog is the goat's only rival as the typical animal of the colony, and the dog must be properly discussed. ”

“ Let us turn down, now, and follow the rough line of Ninth avenue and the Boulevard. The Elevated Railroad cars crash over our heads every few minutes; their oily breath vitiates the air. This is much too cityfied. ”

“ The shanty is the most wonderful instance of perfect adaptation of means to an end in the whole range of modern architecture. Nothing is prepared for it, neither ground nor material. Its builders have but an empirical knowledge of the craft they practice. They scorn a model, and they work with whatever comes to hand. ”

“ For the dislike which the poor undoubtedly bear toward the pattern habitations of too-officious benevolence there may be much reason; but, surely, the lofty contempt of a seventh floor in Baxter street for the healthful hovels of the Boulevard is a meanness of small conventionality in which unconscious envy must go for something. ”

“ A TIMID OBSERVER.The poor always love birds. This love is often the sole grace and poetry of their lives. Old-time German folk treasured the rhymes of Walter von der Vogelweide. Norman peasants, in forgotten centuries, invented a quaint and touching story to tell their children why the robin's breast is red; and ages have only nurtured this affection till it has become a fixed fondness—a sort of gentle reverence even, which has made a constant alliance between the needy of this earth and the "careless children of the air." ”

“ Here, too, are the shamefully neglected ruins of the little old Dutch Reformed Church, and its burying-ground, where lie in fragments the head-stones that, patched together by curious, and not wholly irreverent hands, show how outrageously some highly respectable people in this city are neglecting their ancestors. ”

“ They are far superior, as a class, to any tenement-house people. The women have no time to idle; their household duties occupy them; the men find something to do at night in making the house neat, or cultivating the small kitchen-garden. The children go to Sunday-school with the Fathers. The Rev. Father Schweninger has an eye to the spiritual needs of the German part of the population. ”

“ Of course, the shanty-dweller does not loaf for a living. He is a day laborer, a truckman, a junkman or a rag-picker. The last two lines of business are most numerously represented in Shanty town; but the better class of the population is found among the "truckers," or the men employed in the city as porters, messengers or drivers. They have been living in Shantytown, many of them, for twelve and fifteen years. A few have been on the ground even longer. The first comers were really squatters; later on, rent was charged and collected, and the rates have steadily risen of late years. ”

“ The four Murray Hill blocks are the very stronghold of respectability. The extreme corners are occupied by two private houses of millionaire families, one grocery and one bazaar; both the shops being among the oldest, richest, and most respectable of their kind in New York. Yet even the mad excitement of such an election as last year's cannot bring from this district a decent and proper complement of voters; while every qualified man in Shantytown walks up to the polls and deposits his vote. ”