The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-03-01
A CITY OF PROVINCES.
Thousands Who Know Nothing of
the Colonies OF the Others.

There are persons in this town who have
seldom wandered beyond the little network
OF streets, about the houses in which they
live. New York is place of provinces and
some Of those whoe live here are as provincial
as the Georgia cracker who has never left
the clay OF his own country or the New En-
glander who has lived man and boy in the
same village, says New York Herald writer.
Many New Yorker knows only two or
three streets-the street in which he lives
the one Oh which he works and the street
which leads to it. The other day in an East
sdde care l saw a waitress who had never
Deen In Broadway, near as she could re-
member. She may have passed 1t on her
way from Ellis island to Fifth street, but
II she did she did not remember It. Fifth
avenue the park, the Sixth avenue shopping
districts and all such places which dear
to the Feminine heart were unknown to her.
Many family is reared within the sound
OF the bells Of the old Mott Street cathedral
Ihelr talk Is as strange, as much Of a speech
unto ITSELF as the tongue which is spoken
within hearing o. the clang of the old Bow
bells in London. There is the ghetto OF this
town, with Grand street as one of it's extreme
confines. In this string of busy little marts
is collected all which stands for luxury and
the graces Of an advanced civilization. To
the South is the other decentralization
street Hundreds are content to live there,
There little churches their theaters
ana thelr places Tor social gatherings. What
do they care whether Cleveland or Mckinley
be president? Perhaps many Of them have
never heard the name Of either man. They care
less. Some of them have never seen the
CITY nall. On clear mornings they may see
the towering buildings over in Broadway
They do not know whether the modern towers
OF Babel were raised with human hands or
whether they grew there. Down in Mulberry
bend there are hundreds who have no con-
ception OF the size Of the city in which they
live. They know Brooklyn, for to the Ital-
ians down there Brooklyn is city of the dead
in the talk Of Mulberry bend, means to die
asked an Italian If he had ever heard Of
the Harlem river, OF Staten island, and he
gravely shook his head
There is a Little Italy uptown many Of
whose inhabitants never saw the Harlem or
the sound.
Over in quaint old Chelsea village there is
many an old man and woman who has not
Ventured to the quarter of the city where
beats the red light of the tenderloin. Green
witch villagers keep the same old shops which
their fathers kept before them and are
happy. The Greater New York is a myth to
them. New. York. in their mind, is bounded
by Greenwich avenue and that crooked, per-
Verted thoroughfare, West Eleventh street
There is many a good woman that finds
that Harlem answers her every need She
lives in a fiat. She knows the janitor, the
grocer and the coal man. She makes her
purchases in One Hundred and Twenty
street. She goes to the theater there, too.
She does not go down town more than two or
three times year. Perhaps she came from
some Western city. 1t isn't unlikely that this
Harlem fat-dweller has never seen Broadway
or watched the presses work in Herald
Harlem
lies whose life begins at One Hundred and
Tenth street and ends at the Harlem river
There is in the province of F1atonia enough
to interest them. The New York which
stretches away below the utmost limits Of
Central Park has no charms for them The
Metropolitan museum of arts. the obelisk the
museum OF natural history and a hundred
other places OF interest within few minutes
ride have no charms for them.
So they bolster up their provincial pride by
ignoring the hundred in the street numbers
and form city unto themselves.
BY the way, there are some very provincial
persons in Fifth avenue. There is many a man
who lives in brown stone front who never
saw Chinatown, and to whom the Bowery is a
sealed book. AS to old New York he never
sees 1t at all There are hundreds of them
who could not find Frances tavern to save
their lives. Mulberry bend, Five Points
Paradise park, Poverty hollow HelLs Kitchen
and scores Of other places they lave never
seen.
New York Is so big a place that half its
people do not know where the other half live.