New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions
Looking out of my front window I can see a great deal of all that goes
on here, in connection with this house, I mean. Through the single
narrow door under my window issue and return all those who have in
any way anything to do with it. The mailman comes very seldom. There
is a weekly life-insurance man who comes regularly, bangs on doors
and complains that some people are in but won’t answer. Ditto the gas
man. Ditto the milkman. Ditto the collector for a rug and clock house.
Many duns of many kinds who come to collect bills of all kinds and
never can “get in.” Of a morning only a half-dozen men and some six or
eight girls seem to creep wearily and unwillingly forth to work. At
night they and others, who have apparently other methods than that of
regular toil for occupying their time, return with quite a different
air. Truckmen and coalmen and Mr. Schmick arrive about the same time,
half-past five. The son of a morose malster’s clerk, who occupies the
second floor rear, back of me, arrives at six. Beer-can carrying is the
chief employment of the city cart-driver’s wife, who lives on the third
floor, the unemployed iron-worker, whose front room I rent, and the
ill-tempered woman with the three children on the fourth floor. The six
or eight girls who go out evenings after their day’s labor frequently
do not begin to drift back until after eleven, several of them not
before three or four. I have met them coming in. Queer figures slip in
and out at all times, men and women who cannot be placed by me in any
regular detail of the doings of this house. Some of them visit one or
another of several “apartments” too frequently to make their comings
and goings explicable on conventional grounds. It is a peculiar region
and house, this, with marked streaks of gayety at times, and some
very evident and frequently long-continued periods of depression and
dissatisfaction and misery.
I am hanging out of my window one evening as usual when the keenest
of all these local tragedies, in so far as this house and a home
are concerned, is enacted directly below me. One of the daughters
above-mentioned is followed down four flights of stairs and pushed out
upon the sidewalk by her irate father and a bundle of wearing apparel
thrown after her.
He is very angry and shouts: “You get out now. You can’t come back into
my house any more. Get out!”
He waves his arms dramatically. A crowd gathers. Men and women hang out
of windows or gather closely about him and the girl, while the latter,
quite young yet, perhaps fifteen, cries, and the onlookers eagerly
demand to know what the trouble is.
“She’s a street-walker, that’s what she is,” he screams. “She comes to
my house after running around all night with loafers. Let her get out
now.”
“Aw, what do you want to turn her off for?” demands a sympathetic
bystander who is evidently moved by the girl’s tears. Others voice the
same sentiment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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