Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish reporter goes. There
the sight-seeing cars never find their way; the hurried commuter has
not his path, nor knows of these things at all; and there that racy
character who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would rather be a
lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for to see. Up
lower Greenwich Street the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and
narrow way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the "L" overhead. He
threads his way amid seemingly chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of
barrels, crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags; roundabout many great
fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or plunging upon the
sidewalk, and attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and much of the
time in the street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too
congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his passing there.
You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then you would delight in
Greenwich Street. You could feast your highly creditable appetite for
these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs of
"wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in them. The letter press,
as you might say, of the fish reporter's walk is a noble pæan to the
earth's glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For these
princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of
sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda,
and Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried
fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of "fish products."
Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is to-day's
translation of the Garden of Eden.
Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar
for barter here. Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at all,
mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most of us,
by the war. The fish reporter is told, however, if it be summer, that
there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until fall, "when the
spoonbill start coming in." And on he goes to a great saltfish house,
where many men in salt-stained garments are running about, their arms
laden with large flat objects, of sharp and jagged edge, which resemble
dried and crackling hides of some animal curiously like a huge fish; and
numerous others of "the same" are trundling round wheelbarrow-like
trucks likewise so laden. Where stacks of these hides stand on their
tails against the walls, and goodness knows how many big boxes are,
containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, thick, cream-colored
slabs, which is fish. And where still other men, in overalls stained
like a painter's palette, are knocking off the heads of casks and
dipping out of brine still other kinds of fish for inspection.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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