Paradise Alley Read Free Page B

going on as well. I could see it on the fringes of the crowd—the boys, runners for the volunteer fire companies, scurrying back and forth to tell their wards and their blocks who had been drafted. After a while another fringe of young men began to gather—butcher boys and apprentices, gang b’hoys and fire laddies. Their hands in their pockets, looking angry and sullen. Walking back and forth, smarting with the insult, repeating the same things over and over to each other.
    â€œThree hundred dollars! Sold for three hundred dollars, when a nigger goes for a thousand!”
    They lingered still, muttering on the edge of the crowd, as if waiting for something to happen. But it never did. The spark never came,and soon they drifted away with the rest of the crowd, looking back over their shoulders at the shuttered draft office.
    The streetcar struggles futilely down the First Avenue, the horses slipping and falling on the slick granite paving stones. Our driver curses and whips at the other teamsters with their wagon loads of dry goods and potatoes, beef and beer. They curse back, cutting across our rails until we are slowed almost to a standstill. My stomach lurches and my poor heavy head feels as if it will topple like a twelve-pound shot from my shoulders and roll up and down the aisle of the car, at peace at last. I jump down at the next corner, deciding it will be quicker to make my way to the newspaper by foot.
    The cars should operate on steam, of course, but after several spectacular crashes, the Common Council banned all locomotives south of Forty-second Street. Instead, they are unhitched from their engines at the Grand Central Station, hooked up to teams of horses, and pulled the rest of the way downtown. They make no better progress than the ambling stagecoaches or the omnibuses, or, for that matter, the dauntless pedestrians, picking their way past endless piles of steaming manure and teams of rearing horses.
    This is the way we live now, in the City of Smash and Burn, Sulphur and Blood. Nearly one million souls, packed down into the tail end of Manhattan island. Some few thousand more scattered among the villages of Haarlem and Bloomingdale, the rambling shantytowns of niggers and Irish niggers around the central park they have finally laid out above Fifty-ninth Street. A city where herds of pigs still run loose in the streets. Where stagecoach drivers race and whip each other along the avenues, and steam ferries race and collide and explode in the harbor. The population double what it was twenty years ago, and double again what it was twenty years before that. And every year, the City getting denser, louder, filthier; more noisome, more impossible to traverse.
    Presiding over it all is our upstanding Republican mayor, fuming regularly and ineffectually over each iniquity like some Italian volcano. Just beneath him sit our unspeakable aldermen and councilmen, better known as The Forty Thieves. Would that it were so. In fact, there are eighty-two. (Only New York City would take it upon itself to support a legislature of bicameral crooks.)
    And beneath them a whole vast, imponderable hive of crookedstreet commissioners and demagogues, dead-horse contractors and confidence men, hoisters and divers, shoulder-hitters and fancy men, wardheelers and kirkbuzzers and harlots. And all of them with a profit motive, all of them with an angle and a game, and an eye on the main chance. So many with their hands out, so much corruption that even if you wanted to clean it all out you could never do it, you could never even get past the first, most inconsequential layers of dirt.
    In short, it is a great town in which to be a newspaperman.

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HERBERT WILLIS ROBINSON
    I am a connoisseur of hangovers.
    To the uninitiated they may seem merely unpleasant, but to the more experienced there are both fine and subtle gradations. Wine is the worst, even a good wine. The sediment clogs the mind like grit in the