The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York CityMcCabe, James Dabney
History
The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City
McCabe, James Dabney
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- History
"But the researches of him whose aspirations are circumscribed by a
shallow purse will produce different results. By Irish girls, with
unkempt hair and uncleanly physiognomy, he will be inducted into
sitting-rooms where the Venetian blinds are kept scrupulously closed,
for the double purpose of excluding flies and preventing a too close
scrutiny of the upholstery. He will have interviews with landladies of
various appearances, ages and characteristics--landladies dubious and
dingy, landladies severe and suspicious, (inflexible as to 'references
or payments in advance,') landladies calm and confiding, landladies
chatty and conciliatory,--the majority being widows. He will survey
innumerable rooms--generally under that peculiarly cheerful aspect
attendant on unmade beds and unemptied washing-basins--and, if of
sanatory principles, examine the construction of windows in order to
ascertain whether they be asphyxiative or moveable. He will find
occasion to admire how apartments may be indifferently ventilated by
half-windows, and attics constructed so that standing erect within them
is only practicable in one spot. How a three-feet-by-sixteen inches
strip of threadbare carpet, a twelve-and-a-half-cents-Chatham-square
mirror, and a disjointed chair may, in the lively imagination of
boardinghouse proprietresses, be considered _furniture_. How double,
triple, and even quintuple beds in single rooms, and closets into which
he only succeeds in effecting entrance by dint of violent compression
between the 'cot' and wall, are esteemed highly eligible accommodations
for single gentlemen. How partitions (of a purely nominal character)
may in no wise prevent the occupants of adjoining rooms from holding
conversation one with the other, becoming cognizant of neighboring
snores, or turnings in bed. He will observe that lavatory arrangements
are mostly of an imperfect description, generally comprising a frail
and rickety washing-stand--which has apparently existed for ages in a
Niagara of soapsuds, a ewer and basin of limited capacity, and a
cottony, weblike towel, about as well calculated for its purpose as a
similar sized sheet of blotting paper would be. In rooms which have not
recently submitted to the purifying brush of the white-washer, he will
notice the mortal remains of mosquitoes (not to mention more
odoriferous and objectionable insects) ornamenting ceilings and walls,
where they have encountered Destiny in the shape of slippers or boot-
soles of former occupants."
EXPERIENCE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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