Teagan’s Arcade stood, and in the slow upward progress of the city it may still stand, at that intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, where the grumbling subway and the roaring elevated meet at Lincoln Square. It covered a block, bisected by an arcade and rising six capacious stories in the form of an enormous H. On Broadway, the glass front was given over to shops and offices of all descriptions, while in the back stretches of the top stories, artists, sculptors, students, and illustrators had their studios alongside of mediums, dentists, curious business offices, and derelicts of all description.

The square was a churning meeting of contending human tides. The Italians had installed their fruit shops and their groceries; the French their florists and their delicatessen shops; the Jews their clothing bazaars; the Germans their jewelers and their shoe stores; the Irish their saloons and their restaurants, while from Healy’s, one of the most remarkable meeting-grounds in the city, they dominated the neighborhood.

The Arcade, which had stood like a great glass barn, waiting the inevitable stone advance of reconstruction, looked down on this rushing stream of all nations, while occasionally from the mixed races outside, swimming on the current of the avenue, a bit of human dÉbris was washed up and found its lodging. It was a bit of the Orient—the flotsam and jetsam of Hong Kong and Singapore in the heart of New York. It was a place where no questions were asked and no advice permitted; where if you found a man wandering in the long, drafty corridors you piloted him to his room and put him to bed and did not seek to reform him in the morning. This was its etiquette. There were the young and unafraid, who were coming up blithely, and the old and tired, who were going down, and it was understood that those who were bent on their own destruction should do it in their own chosen way—a place where souls in hunger and souls in despair met momentarily and passed.

In the whole city there was not such another incongruous gathering of activities. There was a vast billiard-parlor and a theater; a barber shop and shoe parlors; a telegraph station and an ice-cream-and-candy shop, thronged at the luncheon hour with crowds of schoolboys; there was also a millinery shop and one for fancy goods; a clock maker, and two corner saloons. Above, in the lower lofts, every conceivable human oddity was assembled in a sort of mercantile crazy quilt. One read such signs as these:

WILLIE GOLDMARK
HIGH-ART CLOTHING

THE GREAT INTERNATIONAL NOVELTY CO

UNCLE PAUL’S PAWN SHOP
You Can Pawn Anything from a Shoe-string to a
Locomotive

THE PATENT HORSESHOE CO.

THE ROYAL EUROPEAN HAIR-DRESSING PARLORS
Marcel-waving Taught in Ten Lessons

Besides this, there were offices for a dozen patent medicine cures; a notary public and public stenographers; while banjo lessons, instruction in illustration, commercial advertising and fancy dancing were offered on every floor.

Higher up, on the fifth and particularly on the sixth floor, where the lofts had been transformed into dwelling-rooms and studios, a queer collection had settled and clung tenaciously. For years, oppressed by the vastness and gloom of the reverberating corridors, they had gone on living solitary lives, barely nodding to each other, as though each had a secret to bury (which indeed was often true), and they might have continued thus indefinitely, had it not been for two events—the accident of King O’Leary’s meeting Tootles, and the mystery of Dangerfield’s coming to the corner studio—two unifying events that brought the little group of human stragglers on the sixth floor into a curious fraternity that persisted for several years, and was fated to affect several destinies profoundly.