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The Old Town

E-BookEPUB0 - No protectionE-Book
157 Seiten
Englisch
OTB eBook publishingerschienen am09.02.20231. Auflage
The Old Town by Jacob A. Riis is a photographic book that documents the living conditions of the poor in New York City during the late 19th century. Riis uses images and personal anecdotes to illustrate the cramped and unhealthy living conditions in the city's tenement neighborhoods. The book serves as a social critique of the urban poverty and a call for reform. Through its powerful images and compelling storytelling, The Old Town highlights the struggles of the working class and the urgent need for change in the urban environment.mehr

Produkt

KlappentextThe Old Town by Jacob A. Riis is a photographic book that documents the living conditions of the poor in New York City during the late 19th century. Riis uses images and personal anecdotes to illustrate the cramped and unhealthy living conditions in the city's tenement neighborhoods. The book serves as a social critique of the urban poverty and a call for reform. Through its powerful images and compelling storytelling, The Old Town highlights the struggles of the working class and the urgent need for change in the urban environment.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783988261458
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis0 - No protection
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum09.02.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten157 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Artikel-Nr.11052111
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


CHAPTER I


The other day, when I was busy in my garden, I heard the whir of swift wings and saw a flight of birds coming from the hills in the east. Something in the way in which they flew stirred me with a sudden thrill, and I stood up, feeling forty years younger all at once.

Blackbirds, said Mike, looking aloft, but I knew better. I watched them wistfully, with eager hope, and when they were over me and I saw their orange bills, I knew that I had not been mistaken. They were starlings, beloved friends of my boyhood, come across the seas at last after all these years, looking for me, perhaps. It seemed as if it must be so, and I dropped spade and trowel, and took up hammer and saw to make boxes for them as I used to, so that they might know I was waiting to welcome them. I am waiting now. Every day I look to see if my feathered chum is there, perched at my window. And he will come, I know. For he cannot have forgotten the good times we had in the long ago.

You see, we grew up together. Almost the earliest thing I remember is the box at my bedroom window which the first rays of the rising sun struck in spring. Then, as soon as ever the winter snows were gone and the daffodils peeped through the half-frozen crust, some morning there would be a mighty commotion in that box. Black shadows darted in and out, and a great scratching and thumping went on. And while I lay and watched with heart beating fast,-for was not here my songster playmate back with the summer and the sunlight on his burnished wing?-out he came on the peg for a sidelong peep at my window, and sat and whistled the old tune, nodding to the bare trees he knew with his brave promise that presently Jack Frost would be banished for good, and all would be right. Was he not there to prove it? And it was even so. The summer was right on his trail always.

The weeks passed, and the Old Town lay buried in a dreamy sea of blossoming elders. In field and meadow the starling was busy from early dawn till the sun was far in the west; for his young, of whom there was always a vigorous family,-and oh! the glorious blue eggs we loved to peep at before Mrs. Starling had taken them under her wing,-had a healthy appetite and required no end of grubs and worms. But whether they went to sleep early or he thought they had had enough, always when the setting sun gilded the top of the old poplar, he would come with all his friends and sing his evening song. In the very top branches, swaying with the summer wind, they would sit and whistle the clear notes in the minor key I hear yet when I am worn and tired, and that tell me that some day it will all come back, the joy and the sunshine of the young days. It was for him I turned my boyish hands to their first labor of love. I made him a house of an empty starch box, and later on, when I had learned carpentering, I built for his family a tenement of three flats that hung by my window many years after I knew it no more. I had long been absorbed in the fight with tenements made for human kind by builders with no such friendly feelings, when my father wrote that the winter storms had blown down the box and broken it, and that written inside in my boyish hand, they found these words:


This box is for starlings, but, by the great horn spoon, not for sparrows.

JACOB RIIS.



We did not like sparrows. They were cheeky tramps, good only to eat when there were enough of them. The starling was a friend.

I suppose it was the near approach of the time of his going away, with the stork and the swallow, to leave us in the grip of the long winter, that made me in desperation try to cage him once. How I could, I don t know. Boys are boys everywhere, I suppose. I made the cage with infinite toil, caught my starling, and put him in it. But when I saw him darting from side to side struggling to get out to the trees and the grass and the clouds, my heart smote me, and I tore the cage apart and threw open the window. It was many days before I could look my friend in the eye, and I was secretly afraid all winter that he would not come back. But he was a generous bird and bore no grudge. Next spring he was there earlier than ever, as if he knew.

Never have I forgotten it; it is to me as vivid as if it were yesterday, that black day when, with the instinct to kill something strong in me, I had gone out with my father s gun, and coming through the willows, met a starling on joyous wing crossing the meadow on the way to his nest. Up went the gun, and before I knew, I had shot him. I can see him folding his wings as he fell at my feet. I did not pick him up. I went home with all the sunlight gone out of the day. I have shot many living things since, more shame to me, but never one that hurt like that. I had slain my friend.

But neither have I forgotten the long peaceful twilights of summer when we drifted down the river in our boat, listening to the small talk of the mother duck with her young, and to the chattering of uncounted thousands of starlings in the reeds where they had settled for the night, settling too, as was proper, the disputes of the day before they went to sleep. If only men were always so wise. In the midst of it we would suddenly get on our feet and shout and clap our hands, and the flock would rise and rise and keep rising, farther and farther down the river, until the sky was darkened and the twilight became night, while the rush of the million wings swelled into rolling thunder. We stood open-mouthed and watched the marvellous sight, while the youngest crowded up close, half afraid.

Ah, well! they were the old days of sweet memories, and here they have come back to me on the wings of the black starling. Who brought him, or how he came, I do not know, but glad am I. And while I am waiting for him to sound his message of cheer and good-will at my window, let me try and hold fast awhile the Old Town we both loved, and from which it must be that he has come straight. Else, why should he seek me out?

Where the northernmost boundary post of the German empire, shaken by the rude blasts of the North Sea, points its black menacing finger toward the little remnant of stricken Denmark, it stood a thousand years, a lonely sentinel with its face toward the southern foe. Kings were born and buried within its portals, proud bishops ruled it, armies fought for it, and over it, but all these things had passed away. Centuries before it had bidden good-by to the pageantry of royalty and courts, and had gone to sleep with its mouldering past. And it had slept ever since save when the tramp of armies stirred uneasy dreams; but they halted no longer at its gates. The snort of the iron horse, hitched to the nineteenth century, had not yet aroused it in my day. No shriek of steam whistle, scarce a ripple from the great world without, disturbed its rest. There was, indeed, a factory in town, always spoken of as the factory, a cotton mill of impossible pretensions, grotesque in its mediæval setting, and discredited by public opinion as a kind of flying in the face of tradition and Providence at once that invited sure disaster. When disaster did come, though it took the power of two empires to bring it about,-it was an immediate result of the war of conquest waged by Germany and Austria against Denmark that drew the boundary line and built custom-houses within sight of the factory windows,-it was accepted as a judgment any one could have foretold. But even that bold intruder had never been guilty of the impropriety of whistling. The drowsy clatter of mill-wheels where blossoming lilacs dipped over garden walls into the loitering stream was the only sound of industry that broke the profound peace. The flour-mills were among the privileged traditions of the town. They had been handed down from father to son in unbroken succession since the exclusive right to grind the flour of the community had been granted to them by the early kings. No one had ever disputed that right. Perhaps it was not worth contending for; anyhow, it would have been useless. Could a clearer title to possession be imagined than that the thing had been there before any one could remember?


Where blossoming lilacs dip over garden walls.


Red-legged storks built their nests on the tiled roofs of the quaint old houses, and swallows reared their young under the broad eaves, protected like their loftier neighbors by the general good-will of the people, and by the superstition that assigned sure misfortune, even if nothing worse than a plague of boils, to whomsoever should lay profane hand upon them. In the silent halls of the old cloister, where the echo of sandalled feet on stone floors seemed always to linger,-steps of good friars long since dust in forgotten graves,-they flew in and out, and though they built two nests for one, since they were given to raising two broods in the brief summer, they did not wear their welcome out. The turnkey patiently put up an extra shelf, for, old as was he, were not the swallows tenants before him?

Ponderous whale-oil lamps swung across the streets in rusty chains that squeaked in every vagrant breeze a dismal accompaniment to the cry of the night watch. In such a setting tinderboxes and quill pens seemed quite the thing. I well remember the distrustful resentment in which old teachers held the English (steel) pens. They still clung to the goose-quill, which no one to-day would know how to cut. But the word penknife had meaning in those days. Envelopes were a still later discovery. Letters were folded and sealed with wax, and we boys collected seals as the boys of...
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