Now Worth street and Mission Place. in New York, there stands, like a
grim savage, the house of the Nine Nations, a dingy wooden tenement,
that for twenty years has threatened to tumble away from its more
upright neighbor, and before which the stranger wayfarer is seen to
stop and contemplate. In a neighborhood redolent of crime, there it
stands, its vices thick upon its head, exciting in the mind of the
observer its association with some dark and terrible deed. On the one
side, opens that area of misery, mud and sombre walls, called “Cow
Bay;” on the other a triangular plot, reeking with the garbage of the
miserable cellars that flank it, and in which swarms of wasting beings
seek a hiding-place, inhale pestilential air, and die. Gutters running
with seething matter; homeless outcasts sitting, besotted, on crazy
door-steps; the vicious, with savage visage, and keen, watchful eye,
loitering at the doors of filthy “groceries;” the sickly and neglected
child crawling upon the side-pave, or seeking a crust to appease its
hunger-all are found here, gasping, in rags, a breath of air by day, or
seeking a shelter, at night, in dens so abject that the world can
furnish no counterpart. And this forlorn picture of dilapidated houses,
half-clad, squabbish women, blistered-faced men, and sickly children,
the house of the Nine Nations overlooks. And yet this house, to the
disgrace of an opulent people be it said, is but the sample of an
hundred others standing in the same neighborhood.
With its basement-doors opening into its bottomless pit; with its
continual outgoing and ingoing of sooty and cruel-visaged denizens;
with its rickety old steps leading to the second story; with its
battered windows, begrimed walls, demolished shutters, clapboards
hanging at sixes and sevens-with its suspicious aspect;—there it
stands, with its distained sign over the doors of its bottomless pit.
You may read on this sign, that a gentleman from Ireland, who for
convenience’ sake we will call Mr. Krone, is licensed to sell imported
and other liquors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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