id you observe what goes on there.

All night the snow fell steadily and silently, sifting into each nook
and corner and searching out every dark spot, until when the day came
it dawned upon a city mantled in spotless white, all the dirt and the
squalor and the ugliness gone out of it, and all the harsh sounds of
mean streets hushed. The storekeeper opened his door and shivered as
he thought of the job of shovelling, with the policeman and his
"notice" to hurry it up; shivered more as he heard the small boy on
the stairs with the premonitory note of trouble in his exultant yell,
and took a firmer grip on his broom. But his alarm was needless. The
boy had other feuds on hand. His gang had been feeding fat an ancient
grudge against the boys in the next block or the block beyond, waiting
for the first storm to wipe it out in snow, and the day opened with a
brisk skirmish between the opposing hosts. In the school the plans for
the campaign were perfected, and when it was out they met in the White
Garden, known to the directory as Tompkins Square, the traditional
duelling-ground of the lower East Side; and there ensued such a
battle as Homer would have loved to sing.

Full many a lad fell on the battlements that were thrown up in haste,
only to rise again and fight until a "soaker," wrung out in the gutter
and laid away to harden in the frost, caught him in the eye and sent
him to the rear, a reeling, bawling invalid, but prouder of his hurt
than any veteran of his scars, just as his gang carried the band stand
by storm and drove the Seventh-streeters from the Garden in
ignominious flight. That night the gang celebrated the victory with a
mighty bonfire, while the beaten one, viewing the celebration from
afar, nursed its bruises and its wrath, and recruited its hosts for
the morrow. And on the next night, behold! the bonfire burned in
Seventh Street and not in Eleventh. The fortunes of war are
proverbially fickle. The band stand in the Garden has been taken many
a time since the police took it by storm in battle with the mob in the
seventies, but no mob has succeeded that one to clamor for "bread or
blood." It may be that the snow-fights have been a kind of
safety-valve for the young blood to keep it from worse mischief later
on. There are worse things in the world than to let the boys have a
fling where no greater harm can befall than a bruised eye or a
strained thumb.

In the corner where the fight did not rage, and in