business. Colored men delivering goods and picking up orders—though none are allowed to be official stevedores. Several boy kinchin asking after prices and running them back to Wall Street with unlit cigars marinating in their mouths.
And finally, the girls of the Bowery.
Dozens of them. Scores. More females eating their midday dinners on stoops and stairwells so as to soak up the sunlight than I’d ever dare to count.
The New American Textile Manufactory, a strange iron fabrication, proved to be unlocked. The front hall was as spacious and aloof as a bank, doubtless to accommodate the molls arriving en masse at six in the morning. Its lower levels were offices, so I climbed up an equally disconcerting—but thankfully solid—set of cast-iron stairs to the second floor.
Stepping over the threshold into the manufactory proper, I took a moment to stare. Scores of women were dining in the huge room before me. It was occupied by very long aisles, large bolts of extremely cheap unprinted fabric in blues and browns and greys, tall enough ceilings to give one pause, and dozens of long tables at which the Bowery girls worked. Curled and ribboned and flounced and colorful as peacocks. Their scissors and measuring tools sat idle before them while they ate, laughing as they shared boiled peanuts and pickled radishes.
I paused just beyond the entryway. Reading conversations on their lips, as the echoing din prevented my hearing them clearly.
Many were chatting of beaus, but most were talking practical matters. That wasn’t in the least shocking. Women are required to be practical the way fish require water. What was surprising was that they were talking practicality to one another not in shuttered-off nooks filled with silver-edged portraits. Nor in the sweat-sweet kitchens of rank hovels.
But in public. In a workplace, no less.
In New York as in other cities, the fair sex falls into pretty particular categories—categories that dictate behavior the way species decides fur versus feathers. Women with enough money to be termed ladies aren’t meant to be seen in the open, not unless being put through their paces along Fifth Avenue, or tasting cordials at the Astor House, or taking the air in an open four-wheeler. And they’re not meant to be aware of mud, or sweat, or labor—so if one did start up chatting pothole repair with a gentleman friend, she’d be dosed with a headache powder and sent to sleep off the strain. Women lacking the funds to be called ladies
can talk domestic concerns over tea with thinned milk within bare walls if virtuous. If unvirtuous, they can say whatever they damn well please, as ruination doesn’t visit by degrees but rather once and forever after. And if emigrants, they can shriek what they will from street corner to street corner, as they’re already about as high in the social strata as our feral cats.
This wasn’t the same. This was healthy kates with coin in their pockets and blood in their cheeks. Discussing how they lived their lives.
Come time for the roof to be mended, ’f I don’t ask Jeremiah to fix it and no one else, I’m the biggest flat as was ever taken for a—
Did you see Kitty’s new straw bonnet, she only paid three bits, and it’s worked like a craftswoman’s showpiece, you simply must go to Bowery just north of Spring and ask for—
Don’t be a ninny, Mexico isn’t the question any longer, it’s about whether or not they’ll demand Oregon follow along in the vile trade despite its latitude, and then we’re sure enough—
Striding past the working girls and their rows of open tin dinner pails, hinges gleaming, packed with leftovers of jugged hare and cocky leeky and baked goose, I made every effort not to cast dark looks of concern at them. I’m pretty sure I was a fantastical failure.
“Can I help, sir?” came a cutting American tenor.
The foreman greeted me in the wide center aisle. He was fifty, maybe, nearly as short as I am, bald as a frog, with a
And finally, the girls of the Bowery.
Dozens of them. Scores. More females eating their midday dinners on stoops and stairwells so as to soak up the sunlight than I’d ever dare to count.
The New American Textile Manufactory, a strange iron fabrication, proved to be unlocked. The front hall was as spacious and aloof as a bank, doubtless to accommodate the molls arriving en masse at six in the morning. Its lower levels were offices, so I climbed up an equally disconcerting—but thankfully solid—set of cast-iron stairs to the second floor.
Stepping over the threshold into the manufactory proper, I took a moment to stare. Scores of women were dining in the huge room before me. It was occupied by very long aisles, large bolts of extremely cheap unprinted fabric in blues and browns and greys, tall enough ceilings to give one pause, and dozens of long tables at which the Bowery girls worked. Curled and ribboned and flounced and colorful as peacocks. Their scissors and measuring tools sat idle before them while they ate, laughing as they shared boiled peanuts and pickled radishes.
I paused just beyond the entryway. Reading conversations on their lips, as the echoing din prevented my hearing them clearly.
Many were chatting of beaus, but most were talking practical matters. That wasn’t in the least shocking. Women are required to be practical the way fish require water. What was surprising was that they were talking practicality to one another not in shuttered-off nooks filled with silver-edged portraits. Nor in the sweat-sweet kitchens of rank hovels.
But in public. In a workplace, no less.
In New York as in other cities, the fair sex falls into pretty particular categories—categories that dictate behavior the way species decides fur versus feathers. Women with enough money to be termed ladies aren’t meant to be seen in the open, not unless being put through their paces along Fifth Avenue, or tasting cordials at the Astor House, or taking the air in an open four-wheeler. And they’re not meant to be aware of mud, or sweat, or labor—so if one did start up chatting pothole repair with a gentleman friend, she’d be dosed with a headache powder and sent to sleep off the strain. Women lacking the funds to be called ladies
can talk domestic concerns over tea with thinned milk within bare walls if virtuous. If unvirtuous, they can say whatever they damn well please, as ruination doesn’t visit by degrees but rather once and forever after. And if emigrants, they can shriek what they will from street corner to street corner, as they’re already about as high in the social strata as our feral cats.
This wasn’t the same. This was healthy kates with coin in their pockets and blood in their cheeks. Discussing how they lived their lives.
Come time for the roof to be mended, ’f I don’t ask Jeremiah to fix it and no one else, I’m the biggest flat as was ever taken for a—
Did you see Kitty’s new straw bonnet, she only paid three bits, and it’s worked like a craftswoman’s showpiece, you simply must go to Bowery just north of Spring and ask for—
Don’t be a ninny, Mexico isn’t the question any longer, it’s about whether or not they’ll demand Oregon follow along in the vile trade despite its latitude, and then we’re sure enough—
Striding past the working girls and their rows of open tin dinner pails, hinges gleaming, packed with leftovers of jugged hare and cocky leeky and baked goose, I made every effort not to cast dark looks of concern at them. I’m pretty sure I was a fantastical failure.
“Can I help, sir?” came a cutting American tenor.
The foreman greeted me in the wide center aisle. He was fifty, maybe, nearly as short as I am, bald as a frog, with a
Similar Books
