When I come home from these walks of mine, I have a vision of the
wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease
upon the civic body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and
deeper into it; and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I
plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all
for a while. But when I am actually in these leprous spots, I become
hardened, for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of human
discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a callous indifference
to that ruin, or that defect, which must so largely constitute the
charm of the picturesque. A street of tenement-houses is always more
picturesque than a street of brownstone residences, which the same
thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. The fronts of
the edifices are decorated with the iron balconies and ladders of the
fire-escapes, and have in the perspective a false air of gayety, which
is travestied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the windows
to the tall poles set between the backs of the houses, and fluttering
with drying clothes as with banners.
The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their
clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the
mothers sit nursing their babes, and the old women gossip together;
young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the
doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while
they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables, and then
resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. The place
has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love,
and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama,
with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly
effective, for then you could, he in it, and yet have the distance
on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is
to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet
fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open
doorways. It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and
beating each other in the face, and rolling each other in the gutter,
like the little savage outlaws they are. It is to see the work-worn
look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of
the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this
makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings
break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in
the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its
shipping, and the wooded heights of its western bank.
I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to
the North river, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could
give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense
of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither
shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind,
than that of all city water-fronts. Instead of pleasant homes, with
green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, huge factories and
foundries, lumber yards, breweries, slaughter-houses, and warehouses,
abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons,
disfigure the shore, and in the nearest avenue the freight trains come
and go on lines of railroads, in all the middle portion of New York.
South of it, in the business section, the poverty section, the river
region is a mere chaos of industrial and commercial strife and pauper
wretchedness. North of it there are gardened driveways following the
shore; and even at many points between, when you finally reach the
river, there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic
activities of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind up and down
the long piers, but on either side the docks are full of leisurely
canal-boats, and if you could come with me in the late afternoon, you
would see the smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from
the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell the evening meal
cooking within, while the canal-wives lounged at the gangway hatches
for a breath of the sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales
or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. All the hurry and
turmoil of the city is lost among these people, whose clumsy craft
recall the grassy inland levels remote from the metropolis, and the
slow movement of life in the quiet country ways. Some of the mothers
from the tenement-houses stroll down on the piers with their babies in
their arms, and watch their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the
sides of the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current at
the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, and never large ones,
but they silently enjoy the sport, which they probably find leisure
for in the general want of work in these hard times; if they swear a
little at their luck, now and then, it is, perhaps, no more than their
luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but sit with their legs dangling
over the water, and watch the swift tugs, or the lagging sloops
that pass, with now and then a larger sail, or a towering passenger
steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the forests of masts,
fringing either shore, and following the point of the island round
and up into the great channel called the East River. These vessels
seem as multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere from them
over the shore farther than the eye can reach. They bring the commerce
of the world to this mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the
parent of such misery, and with all its traffic abounds in idle men who
cannot find work. The ships look happy and free, in the stream, but
they are of the overworked world, too, as well as the houses; and let
them spread their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them the
sorrows of the poor.