Jersey Street and Jersey Lane | Page 9

and
great. But deer cannot coexist with a population composed of what we
call "People of Moderate Means." It is not in the eternal fitness of
things that they should.
[Illustration]
For, as I first knew our neighborhood, it was a suburb as a physical fact
only. As a body politic, we were a part of the great city, and those
twain demons of encroachment, Taxes and Assessments, had
definitively won in their battle with both the farmers and the
country-house gentry. To the south, the farms had been wholly routed
out of existence. A few of the old family estates were kept up after a
fashion, but it was only as the officers of a defeated garrison are
allowed to take their own time about leaving their quarters. Along the
broad highway some of them lingered, keeping up a poor pretence of
disregarding new grades and levels, and of not seeing the little shanties
that squatted under their very windows, or the more offensive
habitations of a more pretentious poverty that began to range
themselves here and there in serried blocks.
[Illustration]
Poor people of moderate means! Nobody wants you, except the real
estate speculator, and he wants you only to empty your light pockets
for you, and to leave you to die of cheap plumbing in the poor little
sham of a house that he builds to suit your moderate means and his
immoderate greed. Nowhere are you welcome, except where
contractors are digging new roads and blasting rocks and filling sunken
lots with ashes and tin cans. The random goat of poverty browses on
the very confines of the scanty, small settlement of cheap gentility
where you and your neighbors--people of moderate means like

yourself--huddle together in your endless, unceasing struggle for a
home and self-respect. You know that your smug, mean little house,
tricked out with machine-made scroll-work, and insufficiently clad in
two coats of ready-mixed paint, is an eyesore to the poor old gentleman
who has sold you a corner of his father's estate to build it on. But there
it is--the whole hard business of life for the poor--for the big poor and
the little poor, and the unhappiest of all, the moderately poor. He must
sell strip after strip of the grounds his father laid out with such loving
and far-looking pride. You must buy your narrow strip from him, and
raise thereon your tawdry little house, calculating the cost of every inch
of construction in hungry anxiety of mind. And then you must sit down
in your narrow front-room to stare at the squalid shanty of the poor
man who has squatted right in your sight, on the land condemned for
the new avenue; to wish that the street might be cut through and the
unsightly hovel taken away--and then to groan in spirit as you think of
the assessment you must pay when the street is cut through.
And yet you must live, oh, people of moderate means! You have your
loves and your cares, your tastes and your ambitions, your hopes and
your fears, your griefs and your joys, just like the people whom you
envy and the people who envy you. As much as any of them, you have
the capacity for pain and for pleasure, for loving and for being loved,
that gives human beings a right to turn the leaves of the book of life
and spell out its lesson for themselves. I know this; I know it well; I
was beginning to find it out when I first came to that outpost suburb of
New York, in the trail of your weary army.
But I was a boy then, and no moderateness of earthly means could rob
me of my inheritance in the sky and the woods and the fields, in the sun
and the snow and the rain and the wind, and in every day's weather, of
which there never was any kind made that has not some delight in it to
a healthful body and heart. And on this inheritance I drew such great,
big, liberal, whacking drafts that, I declare, to this very day, some odd
silver pieces of the resultant spending-money keep turning up, now and
then, in forgotten pockets of my mind.
The field of my boyish activity was practically limited by the existing

conditions of the city's growth. With each year there was less and less
temptation to extend that field southward. The Bloomingdale Road,
with its great arching willows, its hospitable old road-houses
withdrawn from the street and hidden far down shady lanes that led
riverward--the splendid old highway retained something of its charm;
but day by day the gridiron system of streets encroached upon it, and
day by day the shanties and the cheap villas crowded in along its sides,