Elizabeth Street

The splendor of the, to me, new dynamic, new world metropolis, its romance, its enthusiasm, its illusions, its difficulties, the immense crowds everywhere, upon Manhattan Island at least, the beautiful rivers and the bay with its world of shipping that washed its shores.

Indeed, I was never weary of walking and contemplating the great streets, not only Fifth Avenue and Broadway, but the meaner ones also, such as the Bowery, Third Avenue, Second Avenue, Elizabeth Street in the lower Italian section, and East Broadway.

And at that time even, 1894, that very different and most radically foreign plexus known as the East Side already stretched from Chatham Square, and even farther south, Brooklyn Bridge, north to 14th Street.

For want of bridges and subways, the city was not as yet so far flung, but for that reason more concentrated and almost as congested.

At that time, being interested in such types, I chose to follow this one to see what sort of a home life lay behind him.

It was not difficult.

By degrees, and much harried by the police, his cart, with only a partially depleted stock, was pushed to the lower east side in Elizabeth Street, to be exact.

Here he and his family, a wife and three or four children, occupied two dingy rooms in a typical east side tenement.

So you actually had little spots around this area, like individual blocks and even individual buildings that would have just people from one region.

Those people on Mulberry, for instance, tended to be all Neapolitans, basically from... around Naples and in the region of Campania, Elizabeth Street would tend to be the place where Sicilians would live, at least in the 1880s and 1890s before people branched out a little bit more.

And this all makes perfect sense.

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Okay, Greg, so we're back in this bustling, colorful, vibrant neighborhood, mostly along Mulberry Mott, Elizabeth Streets.

I see the streets filled with people.

I think of Moby.

Moby famously lives on, I think, Elizabeth Street or maybe Moss Street or one of those Chinatown area.

And for a time, he would just sort of be one of these J. Cole-esque celebrities who walks around... you know, people recognize him.

He enjoys that.