The populace of The Great White Way is not more sharply individual in its mentality than in its personality. You could not possibly mistake the types that congregate on street corners or shuttle to and fro on business bent. The stoutish, smooth-shaven, commonplace-looking young fellow who passes you with a stride is a well-known dramatic author whose latest play is in its third month at a near-by theater. The long-haired man behind him whom you notice because of his deep-set eyes, his tapering fingers and his important bearing is not the great genius that you may suppose him, but an ambitious provincial come to town to market his first comedy. Sybilla Grant, whose real name is Carrie O'Brien, and who gets eighteen dollars per week for wearing a five hundred dollar gown conspicuously in the chorus at the Casino, drives to the door of Rector's, while the most prosperous and profitable woman star in America walks quietly down Broadway, a demure little figure in a gray tailor-made gown. The old actor, with frayed linen and threadbare suit, idles about, a trifle the worse for liquor, inquiring after opportunities; the young actor flaunts along in company with a well known theatrical lawyer or a soubrette conspicuous for the fearfulness and wonderfulness of her millinery and her coiffure. Dogs you see in plenty, attached and unattached, but no children. The Great White Way is a childless path.
There are so many celebrities on Broadway that, if you are a familiar of the street, you cease to regard them with awe. Men and women whose names fill newspapers and whose pictures crowd magazines meet you at every turn. During the hour's time required for lunching I have seen in one hotel eating room Henry Arthur Jones, Charles Klein, John Kendrick Bangs, Winthrop Ames, George Ade, Paul West, Edgar Selwyn, Roy McCardell, Victor Herbert, Reginald De Koven, Raymond Hubbell, Manuel Klein, Archie Gunn, Hy. Mayer, David Warfield, Frank Keenan, Robert Hilliard, William Faversham, Wilton Lackaye, Theodore Roberts, Henry Miller, Arnold Daly, W. H. Crane, Francis Wilson, Edmund Breese, Henry Woodruff, Sam Bernard, Charles J. Ross, Daniel Frohman, Henry B. Harris, Lee Shubert, Fred W. Whitney, Charles B. Dillingham, J. W. Jacobs, Ben Roeder, David Belasco, Joseph Brooks, Marc Klaw and Abraham L. Erlanger. The gentleman who was sharing my table called attention to the gathering and remarked that if the building should tumble about our ears, the result would be temporary paralysis in theatricals.