WILLIE GOLDMARK
HIGH-ART CLOTHING
THE GREAT INTERNATIONAL NOVELTY CO
UNCLE PAUL’S PAWN SHOP
You Can Pawn Anything from a Shoe-string to a
Locomotive
THE PATENT HORSESHOE CO.
THE ROYAL EUROPEAN HAIR-DRESSING PARLORS
Marcel-waving Taught in Ten Lessons
Besides this, there were offices for a dozen patent medicine cures; a notary public and public stenographers; while banjo lessons, instruction in illustration, commercial advertising and fancy dancing were offered on every floor.
Higher up, on the fifth and particularly on the sixth floor, where the lofts had been transformed into dwelling-rooms and studios, a queer collection had settled and clung tenaciously. For years, oppressed by the vastness and gloom of the reverberating corridors, they had gone on living solitary lives, barely nodding to each other, as though each had a secret to bury (which indeed was often true), and they might have continued thus indefinitely, had it not been for two events—the accident of King O’Leary’s meeting Tootles, and the mystery of Dangerfield’s coming to the corner studio—two unifying events that brought the little group of human stragglers on the sixth floor into a curious fraternity that persisted for several years, and was fated to affect several destinies profoundly.