“To the East Side,” I replied.
He wondered whether I was not afraid to go there, and when I told him that I felt safer in the Ghetto at night than I should feel two blocks west of his palace, he asked whether he might accompany me.
Knowing the free and easy ways of the Ghetto I assured him a hearty welcome; so we left his home together and took the car for Houston Street and Avenue B to attend the Gulyas banquet to be given by the “Bolsover Sick and Benefit Association,” in its hall on Houston Street.
Sunday afternoon is the day on which the East Side looks its best. Its squalor is temporarily hid beneath the festal garb of the rest day; the children are still clean after their weekly scrubbing, and the mothers sit on the stoops, gossiping and watching with the Old World timidity their agile flocks playing in the middle of the street, also fairly clean in comparison with its condition on the busier work days, when the refuse of push-carts and ash cans covers it.
My millionaire host evidently found pleasure in this human mass. He saw children who seemed happier than his own; for although they had fewer pleasures, they had no governess to dog their footsteps, no maid to keep them from exertion and no fear of microbes or bacteria.
Here in the Ghetto all the unrestrained child nature asserted itself, and being children they had no thought for the morrow and having been born in America, they were boisterously happy.
My host decided that after all humanity on Houston Street is not so different from that on Fifth Avenue. The women, especially the younger ones, were gowned as fashionably although less extravagantly; pony coats being the style on Fifth Avenue were also found on Houston Street, and most of the women who paraded both streets looked very much as if they belonged to the same herd.
Hats were as expansive if not as expensive in this hemisphere of the social world as in his own; while pride and social prejudice were common properties of both.
Our entrance into the lodge room, on the fourth floor, over a Kosher restaurant, was announced by the outer guard, after which a committee came out to meet us. Then pledging us to secrecy we were escorted to places of honour at the right and left of the Grand Master of the lodge.
The small room was completely filled by over one hundred members, and after the business under discussion was finished, we were duly introduced and addresses of welcome were made by officers and prominent members.