O.O. McIntyre
Buffalo Enquirer/September 3, 1920
New York, Sept. 3.—Thoughts while strolling around New York: Barclay street. Crowing roosters. Thick-necked poultrymen. Street urchins playing cards on top of crates. A seafaring tavern. Chairs at the curb filled with pipe smoking salts. Pictures from the Police Gazette pasted in a tobacco store window. And a wooden Indian, badly battered, out front. A few steps away is the most modern building on earth, the Woolworth tower.
Little groups strolling toward the ferries. A luxury of the ferries is a shoe shine. And then a walk around the upper deck. On the lower deck the ragged old harpist and red nose fiddler play ancient strains for vagrant pennies. A wildly dashing mail wagon bumping over the cobble stones.
Those upper deck street cars look cool. A little French girl, carrying a huge milliner’s box in one hand, and gloating over a copy of La Vie Parisienne held in the other. Lower Broadway has some queer shops. Wholesale feather houses. Lace stores. Kosher cafes. Metal stamp factories. Everybody seems in their shirt sleeves.
Union square. Hundreds of automobiles in the parking space. Gay banners floating from open air drink stands. Park bums slouching away from a policeman. Blackboards chalked with menus for luncheon. Folk come from the loft buildings with ruddy appetites. And then smoke Russian cigarettes until time to go back to work.
The long sweep of Fifth avenue seems like another world. The faint odor of perfume. An old woman wearing a fur coat begging. And it’s 90 in the shade. The glare of the traffic lights—orange, green and red. Snuff colored homes. Shuttered and ugly.
Floating lines of faces. A constant buzz of conversation. A drunken man lurching through the traffic. Then a shrill whistle and a sudden halt. The whole avenue stops. A rush of people and traffic from the side streets. Always a crowd of faces pressed to the window filled with puppies. Diners at the Waldorf looking out with bored nonchalance.
There’s a celebrated divorcee in a four wheeler on parade. And her parasol no bigger than a No. 7 cap. Tall fellow in golf tops is DeWolf Hopper coming from the links. Now for a long cold sarsparilla.
A group of diving girls at the new Hippodrome show this year have created a mild mystery. After they dive from a plank into the glass tank in full view of the audience they do not come to the surface again. One after one—perhaps 50 in all—dive and disappear in this strange manner. A young Park Row reporter decided he’d wrest the truth from Charles Dillingham, the producer, so he called him up on the telephone.
“Mr. Dillingham,” he inquired, “I want you to tell me where those diving girls go?” “Certainly,” said the producer. “It is simple. They go through a set of trap doors and across the street for a nut sundae. They are there now. Run up and join them.”
New opium dens are springing up in Chinatown. These establishments are almost ineradicable. While one proprietor is in prison his successor takes up the business and by the time he is arrested the former dealer in fumes is out and ready to go on. “Black Smoke,” as opium smoking is known to the police, is showing new life. Opium smoking and smuggling are on the increase, the authorities report, since prohibition occupies the attention of inspectors. There are more than 30 opium dens in the cellar passageways, but they are so carefully guarded that it is almost impossible to reach them. Most of the secrets are gained by police keeping opium smokers in cells until the craving causes them to break down and tell what they know.
The Archive 