knew London, but I am sure that Dickens would never have said it. 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 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. There are agriculturists, however, all over this
broad land who have entertained that supposition and acted on it--but
never twice. The sense of humor is the saving grace of the American
people.
I first made acquaintance with the Bowery as a boy through some
lithographic prints. I was interested in them, for I was looking forward
to learning to shoot, and my father had told me that there used to be
pretty good shooting at the upper end of the Bowery, though, of course,
not so good as there was farther up near the Block House, or in the wood
beyond. Besides, the pictures showed a very pretty country road with big
trees on both sides of it, and comfortable farm-houses, and, I suppose,
an inn with a swinging sign. I was disappointed at first, when I heard
it had been all built up, but I was consoled when the glories of the
real Bowery were unfolded to my youthful mind, and I heard of the
butcher-boy and his red sleigh; of the Bowery Theatre and peanut
gallery, and the gods, and Mr. Eddy, and the war-cry they made of his
name--and a glorious old war-cry it is, better than any college cries
ever invented: "_Hi_, Eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy-eddy!" of
Mose and his silk locks; of the fire-engine fights, and Big Six, and
"Wash-her-down!" of the pump at Houston Street; of what happened to Mr.
Thackeray when he talked to the tough; of many other delightful things
that made the Bowery, to my young imagination, one long avenue of
romance, mystery, and thrilling adventure. And the first time I went in
the flesh to the Bowery was to go with an elderly lady to an optician's
shop.
"And is this--Yarrow?--_This_ the stream
Of which my fancy cherished,
So faithfully, a waking dream?
An image that hath perished!
O that some minstrel's harp were near,
To utter notes of gladness,
And chase this silence from the air,
That fills my heart with sadness!"
But the study of the Bowery that I began that day has gone on with
interruption for a good many years, and I think now that I am arriving
at the point where I have some faint glimmerings of the littleness of my
knowledge of it as compared with what there is to be known. I do not
mean to say that I can begin to size the disproportion up with any
accuracy, but I think I have accomplished a good deal in getting as far
as I have.
[Illustration]
The Bowery is not a large place, for I think that, properly speaking, it
is a place rather than a street or avenue. It is an irregularly shaped
ellipse, of notable width in its widest part. It begins at Chatham
Square, which lies on the parallel of the sixth Broadway block above
City Hall, and loses its identity at the Cooper Union where Third and
Fourth Avenues begin, so that it is a scant mile in all. 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. It serves the same purpose
for the Chinese colony in Mott, Pell, and Doyers Streets, and for the
Italian swarms in Mulberry Bend, the most picturesque and interesting
slum I have ever seen, and I am an ardent collector of slums. I have
missed art galleries and palaces and theatres and cathedrals (cathedrals
particularly) in various and sundry cities, but I don't think I ever
missed a slum. Mulberry Bend is a narrow bend in Mulberry Street, a
tortuous ravine of tall tenement houses, and it is so full of people
that the throngs going and coming spread off the sidewalk nearly to the
middle of the street. There they leave a little lane for the babies to
play in. No, they never get run over. There is a perfect understanding
between the babies and the peddlers who drive their wagons in Mulberry
Bend. The crowds are in the street partly because much of the sidewalk
and all of the gutter is taken up with venders' stands, which give its
characteristic feature to Mulberry Bend. There are displayed more and
stranger wares than uptown people ever heard of. Probably the edibles
are in the majority, certainly they are the queerest part of the show.
There are trays and bins there in the Bend, containing dozens and dozens
of things that you would never guess were meant to eat if you didn't
happen to see a ham or a string of sausages or some other familiar
object among them. But the color of the Bend--and its color is its
strong point--comes from its display of wearing apparel and candy. A
lady can go out in Mulberry Bend and purchase every article of apparel,
external or private and personal, that she ever heard of, and some that
she never heard of, and she can get them of any shade or hue. If she
likes what they call "Liberty" colors--soft, neutral tones--she can get
them from the second-hand dealers whose goods have all the softest of
shades that age and exposure can give them. But if she likes, as I do,
bright, cheerful colors, she can get tints in Mulberry Bend that you
could warm your hands on. Reds, greens, and yellows preponderate, and
Nature herself would own that the Italians could give her points on
inventing green and not exert themselves to do it. The pure arsenical
tones are preferred in the Bend, and, by the bye, anybody who remembers
the days when ladies wore magenta and solferino, and wants to have those
dear old colors set his teeth on edge again, can go to the Bend and find
them there. The same dye-stuffs that are popular in the dress-goods are
equally popular in the candy, and candy is a chief product of Mulberry
Bend. It is piled up in reckless profusion on scores of stands, here,
there, and everywhere, and to call the general effect festal, would be
to speak slightingly of it. The stranger who enters Mulberry Bend and
sees the dress-goods and the candies is sure to think that the place has
been decorated to receive him. No, nobody will hurt you if you go down
there and are polite, and mind your own business, and do not step on the
babies. But if you stare about and make comments, I think those people
will be justified in suspecting that the people uptown don't always know
how to behave themselves like ladies and gentlemen, so do not bring
disgrace on your neighborhood, and do not go in a cab. You will not
bother the babies, but you will find it trying to your own nerves.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
There is a good deal of money in Mulberry Street, and some of it
overflows into the Bowery. From this street also the Baxter Street
variety of Jews find their way into the Bowery. These are the Jew
toughs, and there is no other type of Jew at all like them in all New
York's assortment of Hebrew types, which cannot be called meagre. Of the
Jewish types New York has, as the printers say, "a full case."
[Illustration]
But it is on the other side of the Bowery that there lies a world to
which the world north of Fourteenth Street is a select family party. I
could not give even a partial list of its elements. Here dwell the
Polish Jews with their back-yards full of chickens. The police raid
those back-yards with ready assiduity, but the yards are always promptly
replenished. It is the police against a religion, and the odds are
against the police. The Jew will die for it, if needs be, but his
chickens must be killed _kosher_ way and not Christian way, but that is
only the way of the Jews: the Hungarians, the Bohemians, the Anarchist
Russians, the Scandinavians of all sorts who come up from the wharfs,
the Irish, who are there, as everywhere, the Portuguese Jews, and all
the rest of them who help to form that city within a city--have they
not, all of them, ways of their own? I speak of this Babylon only to say
that here and there on its borders, and, once in a way, in its very
heart, are rows or blocks of plain brick houses, homely, decent,
respectable relics of the days when the sturdy, steady tradesfolk of New
York built here the homes that they hoped to leave to their children.
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; and they will go into the
school-readers of our grandchildren along with Benjamin Franklin and
that contemptible wretch who got to be a great banker because he picked
up a pin, as examples of what perseverance and industry can accomplish.
From what I remember I foresee that those children will hate them.
[Illustration]
I am not going to give you the addresses of the cheap restaurants where
these poor, cheerful children of adversity are now eating _goulasch_ and
_Kartoffelsalad_ instead of the spaghetti and _tripe à la mode de Caen_
of their old haunts. I do not know them, and if I did, I should not hand
them over to the mercies of the intrusive young men from the studios and
the bachelors' chambers. I wish them good digestion of their goulasch:
for those that are to climb, I wish that they may keep the generous and
faithful spirit of friendly poverty; for those that are to go on to the
end in fruitless struggle and in futile hope, I wish for them that that
end may come in some gentle and happier region lying to the westward of
that black tide that ebbs and flows by night and day along the Bowery
Way.
THE STORY OF A PATH
In one of his engaging essays Mr. John Burroughs tells of meeting an
English lady in Holyoke, Mass., who complained to him that there were no
foot-paths for her to walk on, whereupon the poet-naturalist was moved
to an eloquent expression of his grief over America's inferiority in the
foot-path line to the "mellow England" which in one brief month had won
him for her own. Now I know very little of Holyoke, Mass., of my own
knowledge. As a lecture-town I can say of it that its people are polite,
but extremely undemonstrative, and that the lecturer is expected to
furnish the refreshments. It is quite likely that the English lady was
right, and that there are no foot-paths there.
I wish to say, however, that I know the English lady. I know her--many,
many of her--and I have met her a-many times. I know the enchanted
fairyland in which her wistful memory loves to linger. Often and often
have I watched her father's wardian-case grow into "papa's hot-houses;"
the plain brick house that he leases, out Notting Hill way, swell into
"our family mansion," and the cottage that her family once occupied at
Stoke Wigglesworth change itself into "the country place that papa had
to give up because it took so much of his time to see that it was
properly kept up." And long experience in this direction enables me to
take that little remark about the foot-paths, and to derive from it a
large amount of knowledge about Holyoke and its surroundings that I
should not have had of my own getting, for I have never seen Holyoke
except by night, nor am I like to see it again.
From that brief remark I know these things about Holyoke: It is
surrounded by a beautiful country, with rolling hills and a generally
diversified landscape. There are beautiful green fields, I am sure.
There is a fine river somewhere about, and I think there must be
water-falls and a pretty little creek. The timber must be very fine, and
probably there are some superb New England elms. The roads must be good,
uncommonly good; and there must be unusual facilities for getting around
and picnicking and finding charming views and all that sort of thing.
Nor does it require much art to learn all this from that pathetic plaint
about the foot-paths. For the game of the Briton in a foreign land is
ever the same. It changes not from generation unto generation. Bid him
to the feast and set before him all your wealth of cellar and garner.
Spread before him the meat, heap up for him the fruits of the season.
Weigh down the board with every vegetable that the gardener's art can
bring to perfection in or out of its time--white-potatoes,
sweet-potatoes, lima-beans, string-beans, fresh peas, sweet-corn,
lettuce, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, musk-melons and
water-melons--all you will--no word will you hear from him till he has
looked over the whole assortment and discovered that you have not the
vegetable marrow, and that you do not raise it. Then will he break
forth and cry out for his vegetable marrow. All these things are naught
to him if he cannot have his vegetable marrow, and he will tell you
about the exceeding goodness and rarity of the vegetable marrow, until
you will figure it in your mind like unto the famous mangosteen fruit of
the Malay Peninsula, he who once eats whereof tastes never again any
other fruit of the earth, finding them all as dust and ashes by the side
of the mangosteen.
That is to say, this will happen unless you have eaten of the vegetable
marrow, and have the presence of mind to recall to the Briton's memory
the fact that it is nothing but a second-choice summer squash; after
which the meal will proceed in silence. Just so might Mr. Burroughs have
brought about a sudden change in the topic of conversation by telling
the English lady that where the American treads out a path he builds a
road by the side of it.
To tell the truth, I think that the English foot-path is something
pathetic beyond description. The better it is, the older, the better
worn, the more it speaks with a sad significance of the long established
inequalities of old-world society. It means too often the one poor,
pitiful right of a poor man, the man who must walk all his life, to go
hither and thither through the rich man's country. The lady may walk it
for pleasure if she likes, but the man who walks it because he must,
turns up a little by-path leading from it to a cottage that no industry
or thrift will make his own; and for him to aspire to a roadway to his
front-door would be a gross piece of impertinence in a man of his
station. It is the remembrance of just such right-of-way foot-paths as
the English lady's sad heart yearned after that reconciles me to a great
many hundreds of houses that have recently been built in the State of
New Jersey after designs out of books that cost all the way from
twenty-five cents to a dollar. Architecturally these are very much
inferior to the English cottager's home, and they occasionally waken
thoughts of incendiarism. But the people who live in them are people who
insist on having roads right to their front-doors, and I have heard
them do some mighty interesting talking in town-meeting about the way
those roads shall be laid and who shall do the laying.
As I have before remarked, I am quite willing to believe that Holyoke is
a pathless wilderness, in the English lady's sense. But when Mr.
Burroughs makes the generalization that there are no foot-paths in this
country, it seems to me he must be letting his boyhood get too far away
from him.
For there are foot-paths enough, certainly. 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.
[Illustration: "THROUGH THE RICH MAN'S COUNTRY"]
Mr. Burroughs--especially when he is published in the dainty little
Douglas duodecimos--is one of the authors whose books a busy man
reserves for a pocket-luxury of travel. So it was that, a belated
reader, I came across his lament over our pathlessness, some years
after my having had a hand--or a foot, as you might say--in the making
of a certain cross-lots foot-way which led me to study the windings and
turnings of the longer countryside walks until I got the idea of writing
"The Story of a Path." I am sorry to contradict Mr. Burroughs, but, if
there are no foot-paths in America, what becomes of the many good golden
hours that I have spent in well-tracked woodland ways and in narrow
foot-lanes through the wind-swept meadow grass? I cannot give these up;
I can only wish that Mr. Burroughs had been my companion in them.
A foot-path is the most human thing in inanimate nature. Even as the
print of his thumb reveals the old offender to the detectives, so the
path tells you the sort of feet that wore it. Like the human nature that
created it, it starts out to go straight when strength and determination
shape its course, and it goes crooked when weakness lays it out. Until
you begin to study them you can have no notion of the differences of
character that exist among foot-paths. One line of trodden earth seems
to you the same as another. But look! Is the path you are walking on
fairly straight from point to point, yet deflected to avoid short rises
and falls, _and is it worn to grade_? That is, does it plough a deep way
through little humps and hillocks something as a street is cut down to
grade? If you see this path before you, you maybe sure that it is made
by the heavy shuffle of workingmen's feet. A path that wavers from side
to side, especially if the turns be from one bush to another, and that
is only a light trail making an even line of wear over the inequalities
of the ground--that is a path that children make. The path made by the
business man--the man who is anxious to get to his work at one end of
the day, and anxious to get to his home at the other--is generally a
good piece of engineering. This type of man makes more paths in this
country than he does in any other. He carries his intelligence and his
energy into every act of life, and even in the half-unconscious business
of making his own private trail he generally manages to find the line of
least resistance in getting from one given point to another.
This is the story of a path:
It is called Reub Levi's Path, because Reuben Levi Dodd is supposed to
have made it, some time in 1830 or thereabout, when he built his house
on the hill. But it is much older than Reuben Levi. He probably thought
he was telling the truth when, forty years ago, he swore to having
broken the path himself twenty years before, through the Jacobus woods,
down the hill and across the flat lands that then belonged to the
Onderdoncks, and again through the Ogden woods to the county road; but
he forgot that on the bright June day when he first started to find a
convenient way through the woods and over the broad lowland fields from
his own front-door to that of his father-in-law, Evert Ogden, and then
through Mr. Ogden's patch of woods to the little town on the bank of the
Passaic--he forgot that for a little part of the way he had had the help
of a man whose feet had long before done with walking the paths of
earth.
The forest, for it was a forest then, was full of heavy underwood and
brush, and he had no choice but to dodge his way between the clumps.
But when he got out to the broad open space on the brow of the hill,
where no trees had ever grown, he found an almost tropical growth of
wild grass and azalea, with bull-brier twining over everything in every
direction. He found it worse than the dense woods.
[Illustration]
"Drat the pesky stuff," he said to himself; "ain't there no way through
it?" Then as he looked about he spied a line no broader than his hand at
the bottom, that opened clean through the bull-brier and the bushes
across the open to where the trees began again on the down-slope of the
hill. Grass was growing in it, but he knew it for an old trail.
"'Twas Pelatiah Jinks made that, I'll bet a shilling," he said to
himself, remembering the lonely old trapper who had dwelt on that
mountain in his father's time. He had once seen old man Jinks's
powder-horn, with its elaborate carving, done in the long solitary hours
when the old man sat weather-bound in his lofty hermitage.
"Jest like the old critter to make a bee-line track like that. But what
in thunder did he want to go that way across the clearing for? I'm much
obleeged to him for his trail, but it ain't headed right for town."
[Illustration]
No, it was not. But young Dodd did not remember that the trees whose
tops he saw just peeping over the hill were young things of forty years'
growth that had taken the place of a line of ninety-year-old chestnuts
that had died down from the top and been broken down by the wind shortly
after old Pelatiah died. The line that the old man had made for himself
took him straight to the one little hillock where he could look over
this tall screen and get his bearings afresh by the glint of the
Passaic's water in the woody valley below, for at no other spot along
that ridge was the Passaic visible.
Now in this one act of Reuben Levi Dodd you can see the human nature
that lies at the bottom of all path-making. He turned aside from his
straight course to walk in the easy way made by another man, and then
fetched a compass, as they used to say in the Apostle Paul's time, to
get back to his straight bearings. Old Pelatiah had a good reason for
deviating from his straight line to the town; young Dodd had none,
except that it was wiser to go two yards around than to go one yard
straight through the bull-brier. Young Dodd had a powder-horn slung from
his shoulder that morning, and the powder-horn had some carving on it,
but it was not like the carving on old Pelatiah's horn. There was a
letter R, cut with many flourishes, a letter L cut but wanting most of
its flourishes, and a letter D half finished, and crooked at that, and
without the first trace of a flourish. That was the way his powder-horn
looked that day, for that was the way it looked when he died, and his
son sold it to a dealer in antiquities.
Young Dodd and his wife found it lonely living up there on the hilltop.
They were the first who had pushed so far back from the river and the
town. Mrs. Dodd, who had an active and ambitious spirit in her, often
reproached her husband for his neglect to make their home more
accessible to her old friends in the distant town.
"If you'd take a bill-hook," she would say, "and clean up that
snake-fence path of yours a little, may be folks would climb up here to
see us once in a blue moon. It's all well enough for you with your
breeches, but how are women folks to trail their frocks through that
brush?"
Reub Levi would promise and promise, and once he did take his hook and
chop out a hundred yards or so. But things did not mend until Big Bill
Turnbull, known all over the county as the Hard Job Man, married a widow
with five children, bought a little patch of five or six acres next to
Dodd's big farm, built a log-cabin for himself and his family, and
settled down there.
Now Turnbull's log-cabin was so situated that the line of old Pelatiah's
path through the bull-brier, extended about an eighth of a mile, would
just reach the front-door. Turnbull saw this, and it was at that point
that he tapped Reub Levi's foot-path to the town. But he did his tapping
after his own fashion. He took his wife's red flannel petticoat and tied
it to a sapling on the top of the mound that the old hunter used to
climb, and then with bill-hook and axe he cut a straight swath through
the woods. He even cut down through the roots and took out the larger
stones.
"That's what you'd ought to have done long ago, Reuben Levi Dodd," said
his wife, as she watched this manifestation of energy.
"Guess I didn't lose much by waiting," Reub Levi answered, with a smile
that did not look as self-satisfied as he tried to make it. "I'd a-had
to do it myself, and now the other fellow's done it for me."