Blind alley

“ Sunless and joyless though it be, Blind Man's Alley has that which its compeers of the slums vainly yearn for. It has a pay-day. Once a year sunlight shines into the lives of its forlorn crew, past and present. In June, when the Superintendent of Out-door Poor distributes the twenty thousand dollars annually allowed the poor blind by the city, in half-hearted recognition of its failure to otherwise provide for them, Blindman's Alley takes a day off and goes to "see" Mr. ”

“ In the eternity of supreme moments time is not. Thought, too, fears to be obtrusive and stands aside.
We gained a door at last, down some blind alley out of the deafening thoroughfare. She threw herself against it and pulled me up the unlighted stairs. They shook now and then with the [Pg 127] violence of our ascent; with my free hand I tried to help myself up by the broad and greasy balustrade. There was little sound in the house. ”

“ Especially in the immediate vicinity of the business quarter, between Bridge and Quay Streets, Princess and Peter Streets, the crowded construction exceeds in places the narrowest courts of the Old Town. Here are long, narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately. ”

“ Out of one of the smaller thoroughfares lying between Holborn and the Strand, there opens a narrow alley, not more than six or seven feet across, with high buildings on each side. In the most part the ground floors consist of small shops; for the alley is not a blind one, but leads from the thoroughfare to another street, and forms, indeed, a short cut to it, pretty often used. ”

“ There is crape on the door of the Alderman's court as we pass out, and upstairs in one of the tenements preparations are making for a wake. A man lies dead in the hospital who was cut to pieces in a "can racket" in the alley on Sunday. The sway of the excise law is not extended to these back alleys. It would matter little if it were. There are secret by-ways, and some it is not held worth while to keep secret, along which the "growler" wanders at all hours and all seasons unmolested. It climbed the stairs so long and so often that day that murder resulted. ”

“ The cry was half-smothered, and followed by a gurgling sound and noise as of a scuffle in the alley.
I rushed to the window and looked out. A band of half a dozen men was struggling and pushing away from Montgomery Street into the darker end of the alley. They were nearly under the window.
“Give it to him,” said a voice.
In an instant there came a scream, so freighted with agony that it burst the bonds of gripping fingers and smothering palms that tried to close it in, and rose for the fraction of a second on the foul air of the alley. ”

“ Immediately opposite is a narrow-mouthed alley known as Shepherd's-court, an irregular cluster of human habitations, the sight and smell of which are enough on an August afternoon to make one gasp for breath. There are houses behind houses, with no rearward yard or space for privacy or decency, and one and all are in a dilapidated state from cellar to roof and quite unfit to live in. ”

“ Then the railing is reached, and the alley instead of ending has merely given itself an angular twist to the right, and extends three squares further, to a great, pale green dome, and stately entrance.
The calmly-thinking, quietly-laboring, cool and conservative world is for the nonce left behind. With the first stepping across Customhouse street, the place widens architecturally, and the atmosphere, too, seems impregnated with a sort of mental freedom, conducive to dangerous theorizing and broody reflections on the inequality of the classes. ”

“ Take a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air--God help us for pitiful mockery!--from this slit between brick walls. There are no windows in the wall on the other side; it is perfectly blank. The fire-escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it; but the rays of the sun, rising, setting, or at high noon, never do. It never shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it. ”

“ Dirt and desolation reign in the wide hallway, and danger lurks on the stairs. Rough pine boards fence off the roomy fire-places--where coal is bought by the pail at the rate of twelve dollars a ton these have no place. The arched gateway leads no longer to a shady bower on the banks of the rushing stream, inviting to day-dreams with its gentle repose, but to a dark and nameless alley, shut in by high brick walls, cheerless as the lives of those they shelter. The wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that come to this alley, echoes of the day's cares. ”

“ Addresses by STEPHEN MORE, Esq., and others." The alley is plentifully strewn with refuse and scraps of paper. Three stone steps, inset, lead to the stage door. It is a dark night, and a street lamp close to the wall throws all the light there is. A faint, confused murmur, as of distant hooting is heard. Suddenly a boy comes running, then two rough girls hurry past in the direction of the sound; and the alley is again deserted. ”

“ On the busiest thoroughfares in the city, just in the busiest part, between two of the most crowded and conservative of cross-streets, lies this alley of Latinism. One might almost pass it hurriedly, avoiding the crowds that cluster at this section of the streets, but upon turning into a narrow section, stone-paved, the place is entered, appearing to end one square distant, seeming to bar itself from the larger buildings by an aimless sort of iron affair, part railing, part posts. ”

“ I was hesitating under a street light close to a dark alley, trying to decide which would be the quickest way out, and meditating what I should do to find a policeman, when suddenly there loomed up beside me in the dark out of the depths of the alley a great tall brute of a fellow with the strangest looking yellow hair and a body that looked as if he could play football with the universe if he liked, and charged me with having come down there to visit his girl. ”

“ You may note that the faces that peer at you are faces such as one only sees elsewhere in the picture of Felicien Rops. Sometimes it is a curl-sweet little girl who greets you with a smile strangely cold. Sometimes the mouth of the alley will appear to open and will spit at you, apparently by chance. If it hits you, the alley swears at you: a deep, frightfully foreign oath. ”

“ DEATH COMES TO CAT ALLEY (p. 031)
The dead-wagon stopped at the mouth of Cat Alley. Its coming made a commotion among the children in the block, and the Chief of Police looked out of his window across the street, his attention arrested by the noise. He saw a little pine coffin carried into the alley under the arm of the driver, a shoal of ragged children trailing behind. After a while the driver carried it out again, shoved it in the wagon, where there were other boxes like it, and, slamming the door, drove off. ”

“ And the man who has projected a great burglary, perhaps a murder, steps forth from the old rickety house. He steps forth into the street and breathes a sigh of relief.
But the street also—the deserted, hushed street of the suburb, where the pure white snow of the fields grapples with the noisy city, and forcibly penetrates into it with its white streams—the street also terrifies the man when he is alone. Already night is on, but darkness is not yet to conceal him. Somewhere in the distance, before and behind, it coils itself up in the dark houses with their closed shutters ”

“ A horde of dirty children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it: it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums; this their home. From the great highway overhead, along which throbs the life-tide of two great cities, one might drop a pebble into half a dozen such alleys.
At the Cradle of the Tenement.—Doorway of an Old-Fashioned Dwelling on Cherry Hill. One yawns just across the street ”

“ The present argument was raging over the possession of a spade that had been left in the alley by the workmen who were laying a concrete pavement into the cathedral yard.
"Aw, leave 'em have it!" urged a philosophical alleyite from the top of a barrel. "Them ole avenoo kids ain't nothin'!—We could lick daylight outen 'em if we wanted to."
"Ye-e-e-s you could!" came in a chorus of jeers from the fence top, and a brown-eyed youth in a white-frilled shirt, with a blue Windsor tie knotted under his sailor collar, added imperiously, "You get too fresh down there, and I'll call the janitor!" ”

“ And a brave old woman she must be, to be able to lay her head down unconcernedly of nights the only inhabitant of a ruined, out-of-the-way alley, mysteriously undermined, and with ample excuse for being haunted, if it is not.
Strange trades are carried on in these slums, and occupations are followed which in civilised parts are never dreamt of:, except it be in exceptionally bad dreams. ”

“ One does not like even to hint at the way in which scores of poor wretches in the locality pick up a living, nor would I myself have believed it had I not been told it as a fact, by a gentleman whose veracity is unimpeachable. There is an awful little alley, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Hales's tallow factory, consisting of about twenty houses, inhabited almost entirely by folk who collect the ordure of dogs, which is used for tanning purposes. ”

“ In another moment a man tapping on the pavement with a cane passes. A blind man. And I think of a plot for a fiction story. If a terrible murder were committed in a marvelous fog that hid everything the chief of police would summon a blind man. And the blind man could track the murderer down in the fog because he alone would be able to move in the thick, obliterating mists. And so the blind man, with his cane tapping, tapping over the pavements and able by long practice to move without sight, would slowly close in on the murderer hemmed in by darkness. ”

“ But even as he is speaking, a form, tall and slight, starts out from the shadows a few paces ahead, and pauses for a flash of time under the uncertain light of the solitary street-lamp, which lamps in our aspiring villages are placed at undeterminable distances from each other, wherever one long straggling street happens to meet another, seeming to say to the night pedestrian, “you have safely traversed the impenetrable darkness thus far, behold I invite you to a continuation of the same.” ”

“ This was a congested, tenement-house vicinity, where misery and poverty pervaded most of the dingy dwellings. In wiping out the two solidly built-up blocks, Bone Alley, well known in police history for a generation, was effaced. On the west side of Willett Street, midway of the block, Bone Alley had its start and extended sixty feet into the block—a twenty-five-foot space between tall tenements, running plump into a row of houses extending horizontal with it. ”

“ Is it not remarkable that a gang of men could go to a bowling alley, nearly surrounded by houses, within sixty steps of the most public street in the city, between the hours of eleven and twelve o'clock at night, demolish the windows and break up with axes and sledges the alley, and no witnesses found to identify the men or who knew anything whatever about the perpetrators of the act? ”

“ As in Chicago, they are conducive to crime, afford dark, narrow lanes for rape, assault, robbery and the pleasanter crimes of crap shooting and soliciting.
In some Negro sections where housing is at a premium, they live in shacks in the alleys. These are some of the slums already referred to—not many, but picturesque and odoriferous. One of the best-known is an alley oddly named Temperance Court. If white people lived there it would be fashionable at premium rents; it is similar to the aristocratic Washington Mews in New York’s Greenwich Village. ”

“ Some of the backs of the Mason-street houses project, some recede, some have no windows visible, others have windows of such length and breadth as must have thrown any feeble-minded tax-gatherer when he had to receive window duty into fits. These houses really appear as if built by chance, or by a blind man who has felt his way and been satisfied with the security of his dwelling rather than its appearance. ”

“ And then there echoed through the alley loud cries of “Police! Murder! Help!” I was conscious that there was a man running through the hall and down the rickety stairs, making the building ring to the same cries. My own feelings were those of overmastering fear for my friend. He had gone on his mysterious, dangerous errand, and I felt that it was he who had been dragged into the alley, and stabbed, perhaps to death. ”

“ With what a shock did the story of yonder Madison Street alley come home to New Yorkers one morning, eight or ten years ago, when a fire that broke out after the men had gone to their work swept up those narrow stairs and burned up women and children to the number of a full half score. There were fire-escapes, yes! but so placed that they could not be reached. The firemen had to look twice before they could find the opening that passes for a thoroughfare; a stout man would never venture in. Some wonderfully heroic rescues were made at that fire by people living in the adjoining tenements. ”

“ Billy Kane closed the door behind him, went quietly down the steps to the pavement—there was still the inviolability of the house to be preserved—walked along without undue haste until far enough away to preclude the chance of any connection being established between himself and the house he had just left, and then broke into a run. There was still a chance. But it was a slim one. He knew that. The man must have gone toward either Sixth Avenue or Fifth Avenue. It was more likely Sixth Avenue; there would be more people there, more traffic, more opportunity to “lose himself.” ”