It is a shabby, dismal block. Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horse-players, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts (male and female), drunks, stage widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game steerers and bottom-dealers.
On fine days you see them on the sidewalks. Old women with grotesque young get-ups and peroxided hair, parading their pooches; bewhiskered, unkempt men on the church steps, passionately studying racing scratch sheets; apoplectic dipsomaniacs airing out cheap jags; actors whose world has gone by, talking of starring roles of the past--and next season.
Here is the stage door of the once fabulous Palace, mecca for all vaudevillians. The theatre, pride of its builder, Martin Beck, was the hub of the old Keith-Orpheum Circuit, and on its stage appeared, for a quarter of a century, the top names of show business.
Around the corner is Broadway and the Great White Way.
A block to the east is prosperous Fifth Avenue, glistening in mink and pearls.
But life on Dream Street goes on, oblivious of these other worlds.
You may walk it at any hour. No one will molest you.
Maybe a panhandler will try to mooch a quarter; maybe a flea-bitten, superannuated sister in sin will make a half-hearted signal to you that she can be had. But you won't be in danger.
What goes on upstairs, in those small, old rooms, is something else. There crime and vice and con games and watering whiskey and hypoing horses are hatched.
There adultery is accepted as a fact of life.
There people who work are regarded as outlandish and queer.
But there you find no sluggers, stickups or bullies.
These are kindly folk. Violence is not in their bag of tricks.
This is, rather, a community. The members recognize the right to steal, to cheat, to beg, to scheme, to mate, and to woo weird fancies with hooch and hop.
But, no disorder, please--this is The Canyon!
Yet in the midst of this murk and muck, grew a flower.
Not a peony, not even a rose; a violet, gentle and shrinking and modest, admired and worshiped, but doomed to be crushed by the heavy hobnailed boots of the ruthless underworld and the equally pitiless protagonists of respectability.