Teagan’s Arcade stood, and in the slow upward progress of the city
it may still stand, at that intersection of Broadway and Columbus
Avenue, where the grumbling subway and the roaring elevated meet
at Lincoln Square. It covered a block, bisected by an arcade and
rising six capacious stories in the form of an enormous H. On
Broadway, the glass front was given over to shops and offices of
all descriptions, while in the back stretches of the top stories,
artists, sculptors, students, and illustrators had their studios
alongside of mediums, dentists, curious business offices, and
derelicts of all description.
The square was a churning meeting of contending human tides. The
Italians had installed their fruit shops and their groceries; the
French their florists and their delicatessen shops; the Jews their
clothing bazaars; the Germans their jewelers and their shoe stores;
the Irish their saloons and their restaurants, while from Healy’s,
one of the most remarkable meeting-grounds in the city, they
dominated the neighborhood.
The Arcade, which had stood like a great glass barn, waiting the
inevitable stone advance of reconstruction, looked down on this
rushing stream of all nations, while occasionally from the mixed
races outside, swimming on the current of the avenue, a bit of
human débris was washed up and found its lodging. It was a bit of
the Orient--the flotsam and jetsam of Hong Kong and Singapore in
the heart of New York. It was a place where no questions were asked
and no advice permitted; where if you found a man wandering in the
long, drafty corridors you piloted him to his room and put him to
bed and did not seek to reform him in the morning. This was its
etiquette. There were the young and unafraid, who were coming up
blithely, and the old and tired, who were going down, and it was
understood that those who were bent on their own destruction should
do it in their own chosen way--a place where souls in hunger and
souls in despair met momentarily and passed.
In the whole city there was not such another incongruous gathering
of activities. There was a vast billiard-parlor and a theater;
a barber shop and shoe parlors; a telegraph station and an
ice-cream-and-candy shop, thronged at the luncheon hour with crowds
of schoolboys; there was also a millinery shop and one for fancy
goods; a clock maker, and two corner saloons. Above, in the lower
lofts, every conceivable human oddity was assembled in a sort of
mercantile crazy quilt. One read such signs as these:
WILLIE GOLDMARK
HIGH-ART CLOTHING