“The landlady answered: ‘Oh, yes, he’s all right, the poor fellow. His wife ran away with some other man only yesterday, and he seems to take it very hard.’
“Another time I found a five-dollar gold piece in a waistcoat that I bought from a Jap in a big house on Madison Avenue. I went back with it, and told him that he had forgotten the five dollars which I found in the garment. He gave me two dollars and a half and told me that I was a damned fool. I am sure the waistcoat and the money had belonged to his master.
“If one wants to take chances, big money can be made in buying old clothes. I have an uncle—he is dead now—peace be with his soul!—who made thousands of dollars. But he was constantly mixed up with the police and had to pay graft on all hands, and lived in perpetual fear that something unfortunate would happen to him. I wouldn’t touch such business.
“He went to the Tenderloin and to the bad houses: he knew girls who were living a fast life. He would buy their clothes and their jewelry for next to nothing if they needed money to pay fines in the Night Court, or if they were driven out by the police and had to leave for another dwelling. He would sell those things, perhaps on the same day for a hundred times as much money to other girls who were flush. But the money brought no blessing to him. His son is blind and he himself died of cancer in the hospital, and he was in awful pain to the last moment.”
Again I interrupted my visitor, who seemed very generous with his time, and asked him:
“But what happens to the things on Baxter Street after you have sold them to the stores?”
“They go to the four winds,” he said, pointing characteristically with his upturned thumb. “People buy them and wear them again; dealers from uptown buy the better things and put them in their shops; there are never enough goods on the market. But why don’t you go down to Baxter Street and see for yourself?”
The Open Air Exchange on Baxter Street
Baxter Street is situated in the oldest part of New York. Fifty to seventy-five years ago the houses were private homes occupied by respectable and well-to-do citizens, by merchants after whom streets and places are named today. The street is lined with shops. Clothes are displayed along the house fronts; shoes in long rows lie along the show windows; while boxes with neckties in profusion invite the lover of colors to make a selection. Business is carried on in the street. The stores are dark and seem to serve merely as workshops and store rooms. About noon I strolled down the street and took in the sights which are as confusing as the turmoil in Broad Street during the busiest hours of the Curb Market. Men with bundles on their backs and with pushcarts were constantly arriving. They offered the contents of their packages for sale. Others stood about looking at the various wares and making offers. Dickering was going on in all quarters. Things changed hands rapidly. There was one dark overcoat with a Persian lamb collar which had originally been brought in by a “Cash-clothes” man. The coat was sold to the proprietor of one of these stores and resold at once to a man who had watched the original bargaining. The same coat was thrown upon a pushcart with several other overcoats and sold “wholesale” to a third man who evidently took his purchases out of the district. In a basement I noticed an unusually tall and dignified looking man wearing a sombrero who didn’t seem to pay much attention to the buying and selling of his clerks, or were they his sons? He really looked like a Western Colonel, and I christened him at once “Colonel Baxter.” He was very friendly and accessible. He answered my many inquiries: “You see these men with the bundles and pushcarts? They have bought the stuff all over the city, and now they are disposing of it at the best prices they can get.”
“I know,” I cried, “how they get it. But please tell me what you do with it after you have bought it.”