Jersey Street and Jersey Lane | Page 5

I will only mention the plump widow who keeps the
lunch-room and bakery on the Houston Street corner, where the boys
go for their luncheon. It is through her that many interesting details of
personal gossip find their way into this office.
[Illustration]
Jersey Street, or at least the rear of it, seems to be given up wholly to
the Italians. The most charming tenant of Jersey Street is the lovely
Italian girl, who looks like a Jewess, whose mission in life seems to be
to hang all day long out of her window and watch the doings in the
little stone-flagged courts below her. In one of these an old man
sometimes comes out, sits him down in a shady corner, and plays on
the Italian bagpipes, which are really more painful than any hand-organ
that ever was made. After a while his wife opens hostilities with him
from her window. I suppose she is reproaching him for an idle devotion
to art, but I cannot follow the conversation, although it is quite loud
enough on both sides. But the handsome Italian girl up at the window
follows the changes of the strife with the light of the joy of battle in her
beautiful dark eyes, and I can tell from her face exactly which of the
old folk is getting the better of it.
But though the life of Jersey and Mulberry Streets may be mildly
interesting to outside spectators who happen to have a fellow-feeling of
vulgarity with the mob, the mob must find it rather monotonous. Jersey
Street is not only a blind alley, but a dead one, so far as outside life is
concerned, and Judge Phoenix and little sister see pretty much the same
old two-and-sixpence every day. The bustle and clamor of Mulberry
Bend are only a few blocks below them, but the Bend is an exclusive
slum; and Police Headquarters--the Central Office--is a block above,
but the Central Office deals only with the refinements of artistic crime,
and is not half so interesting as an ordinary police station. The priests
go by from the school below, in their black robes and tall silk hats,
always two by two, marching with brisk, business-like tread. An
occasional drunken man or woman wavers along, but generally their
faces and their conditions are both familiar. Sometimes two men hurry

by, pressing side by side. If you have seen that peculiar walk before
you know what it means. Two light steel rings link their wrists together.
The old man idly watches them until they disappear in the white marble
building on the next block. And then, of course, there is always a thin
stream of working folk going to and fro upon their business.
In spring and in fall things brighten a little. Those are the seasons of
processions and religious festivals. Almost every day then, and
sometimes half a dozen times in a day, the Judge and the baby may see
some Italian society parading through the street. Fourteen proud sons of
Italy, clad in magnificent new uniforms, bearing aloft huge silk banners,
strut magnificently in the rear of a German band of twenty-four pieces,
and a drum-corps of a dozen more. Then, too, come the religious
processions, when the little girls are taken to their first communion. Six
sturdy Italians struggle along under the weight of a mighty temple or
pavilion, all made of colored candles--not the dainty little pink trifles
with rosy shades of perforated paper, that light our old lady's
dining-table--but the great big candles of the Romish Church (a church
which, you may remember, is much affected of the mob, especially in
times of suffering, sickness, or death); mighty candles, six and eight
feet tall, and as thick as your wrist, of red and blue and green and
yellow, arranged in artistic combinations around a statue of the Virgin.
From this splendid structure silken ribbons stream in all directions, and
at the end of each ribbon is a little girl--generally a pretty little girl--in a
white dress bedecked with green bows. And each little girl leads by the
hand one smaller than herself, sometimes a toddler so tiny that you
marvel that it can walk at all. Some of the little ones are bare-headed,
but most of them wear the square head-cloth of the Italian peasant, such
as their mothers and grandmothers wore in Italy. At each side of the
girls marches an escort of proud parents, very much mixed up with the
boys of the families, who generally appear in their usual street dress,
some of them showing through it in conspicuous places. And before
and behind them are bands and drum-corps, and societies with banners,
and it is all a blare of martial music and primary colors the whole
length of