THE COLOR OF A GREAT CITY BOOKS BY THEODORE DREISER SISTER CARRIE JENNIE GERHARDT THE FINANCIER THE TITAN THE GENIUS A TRAVELER AT FORTY A HOOSIER HOLIDAY PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL THE HAND OF THE POTTER FREE AND OTHER STORIES TWELVE MEN HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF THE COLOR OF A GREAT CITY [Illustration: The City of My Dreams] THE COLOR OF A GREAT CITY THEODORE DREISER _Illustrations by_ C. B. FALLS [Illustration] BONI AND LIVERIGHT PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK _Copyright, 1923, by_ BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA First Printing, December, 1923 Second Printing, May, 1924 FOREWORD My only excuse for offering these very brief pictures of the City of New York as it was between 1900 and 1914 or ’15, or thereabout, is that they are of the very substance of the city I knew in my early adventurings in it. Also, and more particularly, they represent in part, at least, certain phases which at that time most arrested and appealed to me, and which now are fast vanishing or are no more. I refer more particularly to such studies as _The Bread-line_, _The Push-cart Man_, _The Toilers of the Tenements_, _Christmas in the Tenements_, _Whence the Song_, and _The Love Affairs of Little Italy_. For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic then than it is now. It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now: the splendor of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purely commercial area that now bears that name; the sparklingly personality-dotted Wall Street of 1890–1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is to-day. (There were argonauts then.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggary even,--I refer to the east side and the Bowery of that period--unrelieved as they were by civic betterment and social service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with the beschooled and beserviced east side of to-day. Who recalls Steve Brodies, McGurks, Doyers Street and “Chuck” Connors?