By this term we refer to the street vendors of the city, who hawk their wares through the public thoroughfares. A recent number of the Cornhill Magazine, of London, contains the following interesting description of this class:
As New York is the largest city in America, we naturally find more of this class there than anywhere else. It takes a long residence in the city to become familiar with them, for they vary with the season, and their occupations change according to circumstances. In many respects New York city resembles London or Paris. And so would any other town with a million of inhabitants, surrounded by a cluster of cities, which swell the united population to almost two millions. It may well be doubted if there is a city in Europe which presents so many strong characteristics as the American metropolis. The population of Manhattan Island is a mixture of all the peoples under the sun, fearfully and wonderfully jumbled together. About one thousand foreigners a day arrive in New York from all parts of the world the year round. The resident American is always coming in contact with Spaniards, Germans, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Africans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Mexicans, Scotchmen, Canadians, Englishmen, Arabs, Prussians, Swedes, and Italians. The Frenchman is as much at home as in his native Paris; the Scotchman hears the bagpipes in the City Hall Park, and sees the shepherd's dog at the Central Park; the Chinaman can find a whole street devoted to the selling of his teas, his native idols stare him in the face as advertisements before a Yankee shop door, and all the ladies on Broadway are toying with his fans; the Irishman rules the city, and hoists his green flag upon the public buildings; the African is the most important man in the crowd, and expects soon to colonize the whites in British America, or somewhere else, while the German has his sangerbunds and his schutzenfests and lager bier, and runs a halle and a boarding haus. Great is the mystery of New York.
But to the patterers. These are that large class of people who hawk their wares upon the street, or get a living at a stand. Some of them do a thriving trade, others barely eke out a miserable existence. Take them all in all, and they are a very curious class of people, interesting to study. A large number of them are women, from the oldest gray-haired grandmother, tottering on her cane, down to the young woman of sixteen. There are numerous little girls struggling to get a living, too, from three years old upwards. The women always excite our pity, and we patronize them in preference to the men.
The women patterers are usually a very ugly-looking set. That is, they are not handsome. Most of them are Irishwomen, although we now and then see an Italian or German woman. We never saw more than two American women patterers in New York, and have no recollection of ever seeing a Jewess, a Scotch woman, or a Spanish woman. The women and girls sell flowers, newspapers, candy, toothpicks, fruit, various kinds of food, turn hand-organs, sell songs, and beg. A woman never sells cigars or tobacco, and we have never seen one crying gentlemen's neckties. There is an old woman on Nassau street, not far from the General Post-office, who sits behind a stocking stall, covered with ladies' hose and gentlemen's socks, suspenders, mittens (the women always were fond of dealing in mittens) list slippers, yarns, and such stuff. So far as we know, this woman is an exception to her sex.
Very few women patterers in New York cry their wares. There is one ancient dame in the vicinity of St. John's Park, who screeches 'straw- ab-berries' in the spring time, following it up in the summer with 'blackberrie-e-e-s.' She seldom gets above Canal street, and always stays upon the west side of Broadway. Her voice has been familiar in that section of the city for the past five years, at least, and would be sadly missed if some day she should happen to get choked with one of her own berries, and, turning black in the face, be laid out on a bier of straw ready for burial.
There is a very stout old lady who always sits by the City Hospital gate, on Broadway. She has been in that selfsame spot, ever since before 'the late war,' and how much longer we know not. She is immensely stout, and must weigh at least two hundred pounds. Rain or shine, hot or cold, there she sits, with a little stand of newspapers before her—the Tribune, World, Herald, Times, and Sun. She only sells morning papers, and leaves when they are all sold. She always has her knitting-work, or sewing with her, and can often be seen making her own garments. Now and then she grows weary, the eyes close, the head falls forward, the mouth opens, the fingers stop, (still holding on to the knitting work,) and she dreams! What are her dreams? Possibly of a happy home in a distant land, a long time ago, when she was a little girl, and had a father to bless her, and a mother to love. A brace of omnibuses come thundering down the pavement, and she awakes. If people purchase papers of her while she is asleep they drop the pennies upon her stand, and pass on. This old body has a daughter who sells newspapers at a stand directly opposite, upon the other side of the street. The daughter is not as dutiful as she ought to be, and sometimes there is a family jar upon the street, not at all to the edification of those who witness it.
One of the saddest sights in New York is that of a pale-faced, light- haired woman, middle-aged, who can frequently be seen sitting on a Broadway curbstone behind a small hand-organ, from which she grinds a plaintive tune, the notes of which are seldom heard above the thunder of the street. She always appears bareheaded, and with a small child in her lap. The little straw hat of the babe is put upon the top of the organ to catch the pennies and bits of scrip. We are glad to notice that many men remember her in passing.
City Hall Park, Printing-House Square, Bowery, and Nassau street, are the great centres for all kinds of patterers. Here women sell ice cream, lemonade, doughnuts, buns, tropical fruits, and sweetmeats. Bananas and pineapples are favorite fruits and all forms of chocolate candies are in great demand. Most of the women who attend stalls grow very stout, as they get little or no exercise. It is noticed that very few of them ever partake of the fruits or other edibles which they deal in. They always bring a lunch with them of bread and butter, cold soups, and cold tea or coffee, with occasionally a bit of meat. One evening, opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel, we saw a young woman, evidently nineteen or twenty, playing upon a violin. She was blind, and, as it was a warm, bright moonlight night, her head was bare. The countenance had a very sad, sweet expression, and the air she played was a far-away dreamy romance. We never saw her but once.
The poor little girls of New York do a wonderful number of things to get a living. They sell matches, toothpicks, cigars, songs, newspapers, flowers, etc. There is a good deal of romance published in the newspapers, about the flower-girls, which does not exist. The Evening Post once said they were as handsome as the flower-girls of Paris. If they are, the Paris flower-girls must be frightful little wretches. The flower-girls of New York cluster about St. Paul's churchyard and the Astor House, and can be found scattered up Broadway as high as Twenty- third street. They sell magnolias, hand bouquets and button-hole bouquets for gentlemen's coats. They appear on the streets with the earliest spring violets, and only disappear with 'the last rose of summer.' A rainy day is a very good one for the flowers, and they sell better than in fair weather. When the skies are lowering, man wants something to cheer him, and so he takes a tuberose and a geranium leaf, and puts it in the button-hole of his coat. The girls buy their flowers of the gardeners out in the suburbs of the city, and then manufacture their own bouquets.
Some of the little girls who patter upon the street make a tolerably good living, if they are industrious and stick to their business. Oranges and sponges sell well, and often from two to four dollars' worth are disposed of between the rising and the setting of the sun. Pattering is only profitable during business hours, which, in New York, do not commence much before 9 o'clock, and close by 5 P. M. So the patterer is a gentleman with the rest of them, and shuts up shop at the same time A. T. Stewart and H. B. Claflin do their marble and sandstone palaces. There are exceptions to this rule, as there are to all rules. Those who patter at the Battery, and in the vicinity of South Ferry, where a constant stream of people is passing back and forth far into the night, stick by their stands as long as there is any one upon the street. At midnight, when the thunder of the streets is hushed, and the moon is rolling beneath a dark cloud, the heads of old men and women can be seen nid, nid, nodding, from Bowling Green to the Battery wall. Where they go to when they close up their stalls and crawl away in the darkness, it is impossible to say.