patois_ from
tenement windows, fire-escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls
are terrible and spongy with fungi.

By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the
Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in
the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its
intact Latin length of push-carts, clothes-lines, naked babies, drying
vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big
with child; whole families of button-hole makers, who first saw the
blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work around a single gas
flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just
as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping-down from
the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grill-work balconies,
the mouldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals, whose
feet shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden
women, their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children,
incongruous enough in Western clothing. A drafty areaway with an oblique
of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase. Show-windows of
jade and tea and Chinese porcelains.

More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked,
rheumatic fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath
elevated trains, where men, burned down to the butt end of soiled lives,
pass in and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors--a
veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race in themselves.

Allen Street, too, still more easterly and half as wide, is straddled
its entire width by the steely, long-legged skeleton of elevated
traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner shudder into silence
from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by
the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street,
reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the elevated
structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual
taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of
life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might
have been a woman leaned out as she passed to toss into one Abrahm
Kantor's apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on
little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and
causing him to pucker up.

Beneath, where, even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way