years, and I think now that I am arriving
at the point where I have some faint glimmerings of the littleness of my
knowledge of it as compared with what there is to be known. I do not
mean to say that I can begin to size the disproportion up with any
accuracy, but I think I have accomplished a good deal in getting as far
as I have.

[Illustration]

The Bowery is not a large place, for I think that, properly speaking, it
is a place rather than a street or avenue. It is an irregularly shaped
ellipse, of notable width in its widest part. It begins at Chatham
Square, which lies on the parallel of the sixth Broadway block above
City Hall, and loses its identity at the Cooper Union where Third and
Fourth Avenues begin, so that it is a scant mile in all. But it is the
alivest mile on the face of the earth. And it either bounds or bisects
that square mile that the statisticians say is the most densely
populated square mile on the face of the globe. This is the heart of the
New York tenement district. As the Bowery is the Broadway of the East
Side, the street of its pleasures, it would be interesting enough if it
opened up only this one densely populated district. But there is much
more to contribute to its infinite variety. It serves the same purpose
for the Chinese colony in Mott, Pell, and Doyers Streets, and for the
Italian swarms in Mulberry Bend, the most picturesque and interesting
slum I have ever seen, and I am an ardent collector of slums. I have
missed art galleries and palaces and theatres and cathedrals (cathedrals
particularly) in various and sundry cities, but I don't think I ever
missed a slum. Mulberry Bend is a narrow bend in Mulberry Street, a
tortuous ravine of tall tenement houses, and it is so full of people
that the throngs going and coming spread off the sidewalk nearly to the
middle of the street. There they leave a little lane for the babies to
play in. No, they never get run over. There is a perfect understanding
between the babies and the peddlers who drive their wagons in Mulberry
Bend. The crowds are in the street partly because much of the sidewalk
and all of the gutter is taken up with venders' stands, which give its
characteristic feature to Mulberry Bend. There are displayed more and
stranger wares than uptown people ever heard of. Probably the edibles
are in the majority, certainly they are the queerest part of the show.
There are trays and bins there in the Bend, containing dozens and dozens