There is profitable oyster-dredging in several sections of the city.
Cross Thirty-fourth Street Ferry to Long Island City, which really does not smell so bad as certain of our poets would have us believe; take the car marked "Steinway," and ride for fifteen or twenty minutes out through dreary city edge, past small, unpainted manufactories, squalid tenements, dirty backyards, and sad vacant lots that serve as the last resting-place for decayed trucks and overworked wagons. Soon after passing a tumble-down windmill, which looks like an historic old relic, on a hill-top, but which was built in 1867 and tumbled down only recently, the Steinway Silk Mills will be reached (they can be distinguished by the long, low wings of the building covered with windows like a hothouse). Leave the car here and strike off to the left, down the lane which will soon be an alley, and then a hundred yards or so from the highway will be seen the first of the odd, paper-covered houses of a colony of Chinese farmers who earn their living by tilling the soil of Greater New York.
At short distances are the other huts crouching at the foot of big trees, with queer gourds hanging out in front to dry, and large unusual crocks lying about, and huge baskets, and mattings—all clearly from China; they are as different from what could be bought on the neighboring avenue as the farm and farmers themselves are different from most Long Island farms and farmers. Out in the fields, which are tilled in the Oriental way, utilizing every inch of ground clean up to the fence, and laid out with even divisions at regular intervals, like rice-fields, the farmers themselves may be seen, working with Chinese implements, their pigtails tucked up under their straw hats, while the western world wags on in its own way all around them. This is less than five miles from the glass-covered parade-ground of the Waldorf-Astoria.
They have only three houses among them, that is, there are only three of these groups of rooms, made of old boards and boxes and covered with tar paper; but no one in the neighborhood seems to know just how many Chinamen live there. The same sleeping space would hold a score or more over in Pell Street.
Being Chinamen, they grow only Chinese produce, a peculiar kind of bean and some sort of salad, and those large, artistic shaped melons, seen only in China or Chinatown, which they call something that sounds like "moncha," and which, one of them told me, bring two cents a pound from the Chinese merchants and restaurateurs of Manhattan. For my part, I was very glad to learn of these farms, for I had always been perplexed to account for the fresh salads and green vegetables, of unmistakably Chinese origin, that can be found in season in New York's Chinatown. Under an old shed near by they have their market-wagon, in which, looking inscrutable, they drive their stuff to market through Long Island City, and by way of James Slip Ferry over to Chinatown; then back to the farm again, looking inscrutable. And on Sundays, for all we know, they leave the wagon behind and go to gamble their earnings away in Mott Street, or perhaps away over in some of the well-known places of Jersey City. Then back across the two ferries to farming on dreary Monday mornings.
IV
Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up there every spring, and until quite recently so few people visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will become sophisticated, if he is still alive.
Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island.