Transcriber’s Note
Cover created by Transcriber, using an illustration from theoriginal book, and placed in the Public Domain.
THE COLOR OF A GREAT CITY
THE COLOR OF
A GREAT CITY
THEODORE DREISER
Illustrations by
C. B. FALLS
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
Publishers :: :: New York
Copyright, 1923, by
Boni and Liveright, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
First Printing, December, 1923
Second Printing, May, 1924
v
FOREWORD
My only excuse for offering these very brief picturesof the City of New York as it was between 1900 and1914 or ’15, or thereabout, is that they are of the verysubstance of the city I knew in my early adventuringsin it. Also, and more particularly, they representin part, at least, certain phases which at that time mostarrested and appealed to me, and which now are fastvanishing or are no more. I refer more particularly tosuch studies as The Bread-line, The Push-cart Man, TheToilers of the Tenements, Christmas in the Tenements,Whence the Song, and The Love Affairs of Little Italy.
For, to begin with, the city, as I see it, was more variedand arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and evenidealistic then than it is now. It offered, if I may venturethe opinion, greater social and financial contraststhan it does now: the splendor of the purely social FifthAvenue of the last decade of the last century and thefirst decade of this, for instance, as opposed to the purelycommercial area that now bears that name; the sparklinglypersonality-dotted Wall Street of 1890–1910 ascontrasted with the commonplace and almost bread andbutter world that it is to-day. (There were argonautsthen.) The astounding areas of poverty and of beggaryeven,—I refer to the east side and the Bowery of thatperiod—unrelieved as they were by civic betterment andsocial service ventures of all kinds, as contrasted with thebeschooled and beserviced east side of to-day. Who recallsviSte