The lower East Side of Manhattan, a many-storied mass of tenements and workshops, where immigrants labor and sleep in their tiny crowded rooms, was once a fashionable American district. At that time Negroes dwelt near the whites as barbers, caterers, and coachmen, as laundresses and waiting-maids. But with the removal of the people whom they served, the colored men and women left also, and it is difficult to find an African face among the hundreds of thousands of Europeans south of Fourteenth Street. On Pell Street, in the Chinese quarter, there used to be two colored families on friendly terms with their neighbors, who, however, went uptown for their pleasures and their church. It is not until we reach Third Avenue and Forty-third Street that we come to the East Side Negro tenement. From this point, such houses run, a straggling line, chiefly between Second and Third Avenues, to the Bronx where the more well-to-do among the colored live. At Ninety-seventh Street, and on up to One Hundredth Street, dark faces are numerous. About six hundred and fifty Negro families live on these four streets and around the corner on Third Avenue. Occasionally they live in houses occupied by Jews or Italians. Above this section there are a number of Negro tenements in the One Hundred and Thirties, between Madison and Fifth Avenues--almost a West Side neighborhood, since it adjoins the large colored quarter to the west of Fifth Avenue. On the whole, the East Side is not often sought by the colored as a place of residence. Their important churches are in another part of the city, and every New Yorker knows the difficulty in making a way across Central Park. Yet, the neighborhood is not uncivil to them, and one rarely reads here of race friction. Doubtless this is in part owing to the smallness of the population, all of Manhattan east of Fifth Avenue containing but fourteen per cent of the apartments occupied by colored in the city; but it is partly, too, that Jews and Italians prove less belligerent tenement neighbors than Irish.