By FANNIE HURST
From Cosmopolitan
On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every
Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of
seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire-escapes, curbs, stoops,
and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi.
By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the Mongolian and the
red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in the mingling, Mulberry Street,
bounded by sixteen languages, runs its intact Latin length of push-carts, clothes-lines,
naked babies, drying vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially
big with child; whole families of button-hole makers, who first saw the blue-and-gold
light of Sorrento, bent at home work around a single gas flare; pomaded barbers of a
thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by
the mere stepping-down from the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grill-work
balconies, the mouldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals, whose feet
shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden women, their white,
drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children, incongruous enough in Western
clothing. A drafty areaway with an oblique of gaslight and a black well of descending
staircase. Show-windows of jade and tea and Chinese porcelains.
More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked, rheumatic fingers, then
suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath elevated trains, where men, burned down
to the butt end of soiled lives, pass in and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging
doors--a veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race in themselves.
Allen Street, too, still more easterly and half as wide, is straddled its entire width by the
steely, long-legged skeleton of elevated traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner
shudder into silence from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter
by the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street, reaching out, can
almost touch the serrated edges of the elevated structure, and in summer the smell of its
hot rails becomes an actual taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this
horizontal of life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might have
been a woman leaned out as she passed to toss into one Abrahm Kantor's apartment a
short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him
fragrantly across the mouth and causing him to pucker up.
Beneath, where, even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a chink, and
babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street presents a sort of submarine
and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were actually moving through a sea of aqueous
shadows, faces rather bleached and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and
shrink. And then, like a shimmering background of orange-finned and copper-flanked
