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loping of my uncle and the others, we come under the two bridges and down the dock-train arteries of the Columbia Street piers. Bumping into strangers as I look up, nary a pardon to be heard. Families of fifteen are jammed into third-floor windows to peer out the fetid flat for a respite of air. Some tenements holding ten or twenty rooms shoulder-to-shoulder along the streets with tenants shoulder-to-shoulder inside them. An endless stacking of shacks and rowhouses and redbrick buildings at every curve and corner. The Bridge District, heavily industrialized with the crack of tool smiths and cigar rollers, linen makers, dye makers, tie makers, and seamstresses, all singing foreigners’ songs by the open shudders. And then there are metal box makers and corrugated-cardboard-box makers and ship-container makers and warehousing units aplenty and gas companies competing for heads and police stationmen leaning back on their heels in the morning cut, suited up in their blue tunics and sidecocked caps.
    The sound of the city goes ringing in my ears all at once: the dinging of distant tugs under the bridges, the sounding off of the booming barges, the clopping of horse buggies and drays. The city’s orchestra of working-class harmonies mixing with the buzz of automobiles, the winching chains pulling up buckets on the coal wharfs, the cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo of elevated trains above and the scraping of their brakes on high. Too there is the tenor of arguments upstairs and next door, the soliloquies of the poor pierced by the soprano of the women victims sonorous in her sorrowful dispirit, ancient in their dialects and tongues. There are wild dogs tearing away at metal garbage cans on the sidewalks, footsteps on the creaking stairwells. I hear the drunken beratements of street men who it would seem yell at the paperboys, who themselves bellow from the street corners clamoring of the previous day’s headlines in the brume of the late dawn’s shuffling. Babies just able to walk and young children are playing with a long stick and a tiny ball in the street and they run shoeless most of the time, jumping over mud puddles with hardly a mother or father to be found standing over them. They play improvised games like stoopball or Kill the Carrier, a form of hurling where a child holding a stick is chased down and tackled by all the others, on the pavement no less. And spilling in their mischievous masses onto the stairwells and in front of draft horses pulling a man and a dilapidated cart, slowly scuffling through the neighborhood to get to the next at first blush of morn.
    At every street crossing it seems another elevated track appears above with long stairwells filled with travelers stomping up and down like human conveyer belts. Grocers and tobacconists stand in their doorways smoking under the shadows speckled with the lattice-light of the trellis-framed Els and somehow live among the creaking and the screeching and clicking and hammering of trolleys swooshing and grumbling by all day and night. They converse with the men who sell apples from their horse-pulled drays at the end of the sidewalks and admonish the rag-picking children who walk by shoeless and the low-placed homeless who splay their junk wares on the pavement for possible buyers. And when a train comes to a halt above, a small army of ten-year-old bootblack boys run up the station stairwells for customers exiting like a gang of brothers, though they are supposed to be competing against one another for nickels and for dimes.
    A day or so earlier a fire below the street had flames jumping from each of the sewers, blowing manholes in the air after a gas leak flooded the pressurized underground. A pre–Civil War wood-framed building had collapsed over the sidewalk and into Pierrepont Street some three months before I arrived, and lay there still untouched. Only the oncome of winter has halted the advance of weeds, now receding in the rubble. Children gamble openly