Paradise Alley Read Free

and joking, even rocking the car on its rails, the sour smell of whiskey seeping through the windows.
    From Eighth Street down
    The men are making it
    From Eighth Street up
    The women are spending it
    And that’s the story of this great town
    From Eighth Street up and Eighth Street down—
    Today is Getting Out Day. Today is All Fools’ Day, today is Carnevale and Christmas and the Fourth of July, all rolled up in one. And all that’s needed is a match.
    All weekend I went among them as a spy. That is my job, as a reporter. Listening to them in their taverns, on their street corners and in their parlors. Posing as the out-of-town drummer, the friendly, credulous stranger. There were the usual wild oaths and threats, the drunken boasts—but something else as well. Something real, some kind of dangerous undercurrent beneath all the loose talk. Like all the blood and offal the butchers shove down in the gutters until, when it rains, everything comes bubbling up, the streets swimming in entrails and pigs’ ears, cloven hooves and horses’ teeth, and puddles of blood.
    Trouble in this town usually starts like a musket flash, sudden and unpredictable. A fight, a joke, a routine arrest. Some halfhearted protest that turns into a riot before anyone can quite understand what is happening.
    But this is different. More deliberate—even, perhaps, intentional. I don’t mean that there is some outside conspiracy, a little group of men sitting around a table in a cellar room. Those rumors have been flying for weeks now, at the Union Club, and the bar in the AstorHouse, and in the lobby of the St. Nicholas Hotel. Confederate agents have slipped over the border from Canada. Hired assassins have been brought over from Ireland, the Knights of the Golden Circle are stashing muskets in a secret basement in the Five Points, ready on a signal from Richmond to fire the town—
    The usual nonsense. The wild talk that precedes any real crisis in the City, like the seabirds swooping in off the North River ahead of a storm. No, what I mean is that they have been talking. The Other City, the Dark City, the City with Its Face Turned Away From Us. The City of Night, the City of Fire, murmuring in low, deliberate, angry voices that we can never quite make out. The workingmen in their party halls. The fire companies in their station houses, the gangsters in their subterranean hideouts. So much talk, so much plotting, bubbling slowly to the top.
    It started when the new Draft Law was announced. All able-bodied men, ages twenty to forty-five, married or single, are now eligible to be drafted by lot into Mr. Lincoln’s army, and shipped south to the war. There to be fed on wormy hardtack, and saltpork, and butchered by incompetent generals while their families try to subsist on begging and government relief. Unless— and, ah, there’s the rub!—unless they have three hundred dollars to buy themselves a substitute. An easy enough thing, for any man of means—but two years’ salary to an Irish hod-carrier from the Five Points—
    The relief that swept the City after Gettysburg faded, when the casualty lists began to trickle in. Loyal Republicans who had illuminated their windows and put up bunting to celebrate found their stoops blackened with tar the next morning, ominous crosses chalked on their doors. Then, last week, the Provost Marshal’s patrols started working their way through the Fourth Ward, demanding that men give up their names. There were fights, and arrests, brick chimneys toppling mysteriously off rooftops, just missing the Provost’s guard.
    The draft was scheduled to commence last Friday, up at the Ninth District office, on East Forty-sixth Street by the Third Avenue. Right to the end, no one thought they would really go through with it—not in this city full of Democrats and Copperheads. By the time I arrived, the mob was already filling the street, a boisterous crowd of