But if you are poor or your circumstances permit you to expend only a certain amount of money for your clothes and for your books and you despise the department store atmosphere with its alluring bargains that persecute you ever after you were weak enough to buy them, like spooks of murdered souls, then adventures galore are in store for you, especially if you live in New York. Because one day surely you will run across “that marvelous dressmaker” who charges only a couple of dollars a day, follows your ideas, creates dreams of garments, and makes dressing a pleasure for you.
And in the strangest parts of the city, like a geranium pot on the sill of a tenement house, you encounter once in a while a real book store in New York. Is not the discovery an event in our unromantic lives? Looking over the dust-covered treasures is an exploration into strange lands, and usually a talk with the proprietor himself charms us like the fairy tale of long forgotten childhood.
Second Avenue, around First Street, is the promenade of that part of the Bowery which has not yet been turned into factories and sweat shops. Here are delicatessen stores, second-hand furniture dealers, grocery shops, ice cream parlors, drug stores, moving picture theatres, with crudely painted advertising boards depicting scenes from blood-and-thunder dramas. Then there is Kettel’s Theatre, where they play Shakespeare in Yiddish. Thousands of men and women people the sidewalks and street. Roumanian, Hungarian, German and Polish with a Jewish accent are spoken here, and Yiddish, of course, the guttural sounds of which give the ear the same sensation as the eye receives from the window display of the foreign looking pickles, fancily prepared onions, and enormous strangely-shaped sausages of the stores. The women are without headgear, in underskirts, with blankets or shawls around their shoulders, their shoes unbuttoned; they have run out to buy something. Everybody on this street seems to buy or sell, talking loudly, bargaining with a passion inherited through generations. On the corner of Second Avenue and First Street is the Municipal Court, with its crowds of lawyers, of fighting, screaming and excited men and women on the doorsteps.