How many years of repressed yearning may speak behind that modest
ambition!
Our own taste for amusement leads us (once luncheon dispatched; you
should taste Vesey Street's lentil soup) to the second-hand bookshops.
Our imagined castaway, condemned to live on Vesey Street for a term of
months, would never need to languish for mental stimulation. Were he
devout, there is always St. Paul's, as we have said; and were he
atheist, what a collection of Bob Ingersoll's essays greets the faring
eye! There is the customary number of copies of "The Pentecost of
Calamity"; it seems to the frequenter of second-hand bazaars as though
almost everybody who bought that lively booklet in the early days of the
war must have sold it again since the armistice. Much rarer, we saw a
copy of "Hopkins's Pond," that little volume of agreeable sketches
written so long ago by Dr. Robert T. Morris, the well-known surgeon, and
if we had not already a copy which the doctor inscribed for us we would
certainly have rescued it from this strange exile.
There are only two of the really necessary delights of life that the
Vesey Street maroon would miss. There is no movie, there are no
doughnuts. We are wondering whether in any part of this city there has
sprung up the great doughnut craze that has ravaged Philadelphia in the
past months. As soon as prohibition became a certainty, certain astute
merchants of the Quaker City devoted themselves to inoculating the
public with a taste for these humble fritters, and now they bubble gayly
in the windows of Philadelphia's most aristocratic thoroughfare. It is
really a startling sight to see Philadelphia lining up for its noonday
quota of doughnuts, and the merchants over there have devised an
ingenious method of tempting the crowd. A funnel, erected over the
frying sinkers, carries the fragrant fumes out through a transom and
gushes it into the open air, so that the sniff of doughnuts is
perceptible all down the block. There is a fortune waiting on Vesey
Street for the man who will establish a doughnut foundry, and we
solemnly pledge our own appetite and that of all our friends toward his
success.[2]
At its upper end, perhaps in memory of the vanished Astor House, Vesey
Street stirs itself into a certain magnificence, devoting its window
space to jewellery and silver-mounted books of prayer. At this window
one may regulate his watch at a clock warranted by Charles Frodsham of
84, Strand, to whose solid British accuracy we hereby pay decent
tribute. Over all this varied scene lifts the shining javelin-head of
the Woolworth Building, seen now and then in an almost disbelieved
glimpse of sublimity; and the golden Lightning of the Telephone and
Telegraph pinnacle, waving his zigzag brands in the sun.
[2] Since this was written, the lack has been supplied--on Park Row,
just above the top of Vesey Street; probably the most luxurious doughnut
shop ever conceived.