Читать книгу Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms - Guido Bruno - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Baxter Street is situated in the oldest part of New York. Fifty to seventy-five years ago the houses were private homes occupied by respectable and well-to-do citizens, by merchants after whom streets and places are named today. The street is lined with shops. Clothes are displayed along the house fronts; shoes in long rows lie along the show windows; while boxes with neckties in profusion invite the lover of colors to make a selection. Business is carried on in the street. The stores are dark and seem to serve merely as workshops and store rooms. About noon I strolled down the street and took in the sights which are as confusing as the turmoil in Broad Street during the busiest hours of the Curb Market. Men with bundles on their backs and with pushcarts were constantly arriving. They offered the contents of their packages for sale. Others stood about looking at the various wares and making offers. Dickering was going on in all quarters. Things changed hands rapidly. There was one dark overcoat with a Persian lamb collar which had originally been brought in by a “Cash-clothes” man. The coat was sold to the proprietor of one of these stores and resold at once to a man who had watched the original bargaining. The same coat was thrown upon a pushcart with several other overcoats and sold “wholesale” to a third man who evidently took his purchases out of the district. In a basement I noticed an unusually tall and dignified looking man wearing a sombrero who didn’t seem to pay much attention to the buying and selling of his clerks, or were they his sons? He really looked like a Western Colonel, and I christened him at once “Colonel Baxter.” He was very friendly and accessible. He answered my many inquiries: “You see these men with the bundles and pushcarts? They have bought the stuff all over the city, and now they are disposing of it at the best prices they can get.”

“I know,” I cried, “how they get it. But please tell me what you do with it after you have bought it.”

“Come inside with me and I’ll show you,” was his answer. We descended to his basement. Piles of clothes and shoes lay on the floor, they must have been recently purchased. He opened the door and we entered a veritable workshop. Several gas arms illuminated the room which had a low ceiling. The air was thick and at least ten men and women were at work.

“Here is our laundry,” and he pointed to one corner of the room.

“All underclothes, shirts and collars, overalls and linen suits are washed and ironed here. We sell only by the dozen and to dealers uptown.”

“Over there is the tailor shop. We clean the clothes which come in, sew on the buttons, press them and make them look as good as possible. We are wholesalers only. We sell old things by the dozen just as factory owners sell new things in large quantities only. But there are many shops on Baxter Street which cater to private customers. This part of the city is frequented by “down-and-outers,” men who come from no one knows where. They stay a while; they sleep wherever they are undisturbed, they hang out in our saloons and then they disappear. These men have to buy clothes. They very rarely have money; a quarter is about the biggest sum which passes at a time through their hands.

“These people and their like from other parts of the city are the customers of our shops. A man could get a complete and very decent outfit with a couple of changes of underwear for about three dollars. He can buy a collar for a penny, a necktie from two cents to a nickel, a hat from fifteen cents or a quarter. Our shops here are cheaper than the Salvation Army ‘department stores,’ and we don’t make any pretences to be charitable or especially kind to people because we sell to them. And we have to pay for things, we don’t get them for nothing.

“Before the war, immigrants used to come down on Saturday and Sunday in great numbers and even fairly well-to-do immigrants who have been in this country several years cannot get accustomed to purchasing new things and pay us a shopping visit occasionally. In many countries in Europe the laboring classes seem to be under the impression that they must buy second-hand things to wear. They are our best customers, but they also believe that if we ask a dollar for something we really mean fifty cents, and so, therefore, we have to advance our prices fifty and seventy-five per cent, and if we get a little more than we really expected to get, the time it takes in dickering with these people is worth the money.

“Men and women in all walks of life who have met with reverses steal down to us in the darkness of the evening, afraid to be noticed by someone who might know them, and they buy their overcoats or their shoes.”

“But Colonel Baxter,” I interrupted him, “to whom do you ‘wholesale’ your own goods?”

He seemed pleased with the new name I had bestowed upon him, and explained:

“In certain parts of Sixth Avenue, of Eighth Avenue and of Ninth Avenue, there are ‘second-hand stores’ which cater to a peculiar class of customers.” These want snappy clothes, shirts with modern patterns, coats fashionably cut, but they have not the money to purchase them in the shops where such goods are sold. They sneer at cheap clothes cut roughly but made out of good material. They want to appear flashy. You see them on the street corners and in police courts. We supply these stores with their needs. We specialize in everything that they can possibly use.”

In the meantime, the open-air exchange on Baxter Street had reached its culmination, voices surged through the air like shrapnel bursting here and there creating disturbance. Everybody seemed eager to buy, eager to sell, money was exchanged in doorways, on sidewalks, bundles were tossed from pushcart to pushcart. … “Much ado about clothing.”