The Color of a Great City

by Theodore Dreiser

And a strange, sad harbor I found it to be indeed, a nondescript and fantastic affair, sheltering a nondescript and quite fantastic throng. The thin-bodied and gray-bearded old men loitering out their last days here, and yet with a certain something about them that suggested courage or defiance, or at least a vague and errant will to live. The lean and down-at-heels and erratic-looking young men, with queer, restless, nervous eyes, and queer, restless, deceptive and nervous manners. And the chronic ne’er-do-wells, and bums even, pan-handlers, street fiddle and horn players, street singers, street cripples and beggars of one kind and another. Some of them I had even encountered in the streets in my more prosperous hours and had given them dimes, and here I encountered them again. They were all so poor, if not physically or materially at least spiritually, or so nearly all, as to make contact with them disconcerting, if not offensive. For they walked, the most of them, with an air of rundown, hopeless inadequacy that was really disturbing to look upon. All of them were garbed in clothing which was not good and yet which at all times could not be said to be absolutely ragged. Rather, in many cases it was more of an intermediate character, such as you might expect to find on a person who was out of a job but who was still struggling to keep up appearances.

You would find, for instance, those whose suits were in a fair state of preservation but whose shoes were worn or torn. Again, there were those whose hats and shoes were good but whose trousers were worn and frayed. Still others would show a good pair of trousers or a moderately satisfactory coat, but such a gleam of wretched linen or so poor and faded a tie, that one was compelled to notice it. And the mere sight of it, as they themselves seemed to realize by their furtive efforts at concealment, was sufficient to convict them of want or worse. Between these grades and conditions there were so many other little gradations, such as the inadvertently revealed edge of a cotton shirt under a somewhat superior suit, the exposed end of a rag being used for a handkerchief, the shifting edge of a false shirt front, etc., so that by degrees one was moved to either sympathy or laughter, or both.

And the nature of the life here. It was such as to preclude any reasonable classification from the point of view, say, of happiness or comfort. For all its exterior pretentiousness and inner spaciousness, it offered nothing really except two immense lounging-rooms or courts about which the various tiers or floors of rooms were built and which rose, uninterrupted, to the immense glass roofs or coverings nine stories above. There were several other large rooms—a reading-room, a smoking-room—equipped with chairs and tables, but which could only be occupied between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., and which were watched over by as surly and disagreeable a type of orderly or guard as one would find anywhere—such orderlies or guards, for instance, as a prison or an institution of charity might employ. In fact, I never encountered an institution in which a charge was made for service which seemed to me more barren of courtesy, consideration or welcome.

We were all, as I soon found, here on sufferance. During a long day that began between 9 a.m., at which hour the room you occupied had to be vacated for the day, and 5 p.m., when it might be reoccupied once more, and not before, there was nothing to do but walk the streets if one was out of work, as most of these were, or sit in one or another of these same rooms filled with these same nondescripts, who looked and emanated the depression they felt and who were too taciturn or too evasive or shy or despondent to wish to talk to anybody. And in addition, neither these nor yourself were really welcome here. For, if you remained within these lobbies during the hours of nine and five daylight, these underlings surveyed you, if at all, with looks of indifference or contempt, as who should say, “Haven’t you anything at all to do?” and most of those with whom you were in contact could not help but feel this. It was too obvious to be mistaken.

But to return to the type of person who came here to lodge. Where did they all come from? one was compelled to ask oneself. How did it happen that they were so varied as to age, vigor or the lack of it and the like? For not all were old or sick or poorly dressed. Some quite the contrary. And yet how did some of them manage to subsist, even with the aid of such a place as this? What was before them? These thoughts, somehow, would intrude themselves whether one would or no. For some of them were so utterly hopeless looking. And others (I told myself) were the natural idlers of the world, or what was left of them, men too feeble, too vagrom in thought, or too indifferent to make an earnest effort in any direction. At least there was the possibility of many such being here. Again, there were those of better mood and substance, like myself, say, who were here because of stress, and who were temporarily driven to this form of economy, wretched as it was. Others were obviously criminals or drug fiends, or those suffering from some incurable or wasting disease, who probably had little money and no strength, or very little, and who were seeking to hide themselves away here, to rest and content themselves as obscurely and as cheaply as possible. (The maximum charges for a room and a free bath in the public bathroom, the same including towels and soap, ranged from twenty-five to forty cents a day. A meal in the hotel dining-room, such as it was, was fifteen cents. I ate several there.) Pick-pockets and thugs from other cities drifted in here, and it was not difficult to pick out an occasional detective studying those who chose to stay here. For the rest, they were of the flotsam and jetsam of all metropolitan life—the old, the young, the middle-aged, the former and the latter having in the main passed the period of success without achieving anything, the others waiting and drifting, perhaps until they should come upon something better. Some of them looked to me to be men who had put up a good fight, but in vain. Life had worsted them. Others looked as though they had not put up any fight at all.

And, again, the nature of the rooms here offered (one of which I was compelled to accept), the air or illusion of cells in an institution or prison that characterized them! They were really not rooms at all, as I found, but cells partitioned or arranged in such a way as to provide the largest amount of renting space and personal supervision and espionage to the founder and manager but only a bare bed to the guest. As I have said, they were all arranged either about an inner court or the exterior walls, so as to have the advantage of interior or exterior lighting, quite as all hotels and prisons are arranged. But the size of them and the amazingly small windows through which one looked, either into one or other of these courts or onto the streets outside! They were not more than five feet in width by eight in length, and contained each a small iron bed, a single chair, and a very small closet or wardrobe where some clothing might be installed, but so little that it could hardly be called a convenience.

And, again, the walls were really not walls at all, but marble partitions set upon iron legs or jacks two feet from the floor and reaching to within three feet of the ceiling, which permitted the observation of one’s neighbor’s legs from below, if you wished to observe those conveniences, or of studying his entire chamber if you chose to climb upon your bed and look over the top. These open spaces were of course protected by iron screens, which prevented any one entering save through the door.

It is obvious that any such arrangement would preclude any sense of privacy. When you were in your cell there came to you from all parts of the building the sounds of a general activity—the shuffling of feet, the clearing of throats, the rattling of dominoes in the reading-room below, voices in complaint or conversation, walkings to and fro, the slamming of doors here, there and everywhere, and what not. Coupled with this was the fact that the atmosphere of the whole building was permeated with tobacco smoke, and tainted or permeated with breaths in all degrees of strength from that of the drunkard to that of the drug fiend or consumptive. It was as though one were living in a weird dream. You were presumed to be alone, and yet you were not, and yet you were, only there was no sense of privacy, only a sense of being separated and then neglected and irritated.

And the way these noises and this atmosphere continued into the small hours of the morning was maddening. There is something, to begin with, about poverty and squalor that is as depressing and destructive as a gas or a chemic ferment. Poverty has color and odor and radiation as strong as any gas or ferment. It speaks. It mourns, and these radiations are destructive. Hence the instinctive impulse to flee not only disease but poverty.

At ten o’clock all lights in the lobbies and halls were supposed to be put out, and they were put out. There being none in the rooms, all was dark. Before this you would hear the shuffling of this throng bedward, and the piling of chairs on tables in the lobbies for the night in order that the orderlies of the hotel might sweep afterwards. There followed a general opening and shutting of doors and the sound made by individuals here and there stirring among their effects in the dark or straightening their beds. Finally, during the small hours of the night, when peace was supposed to reign, you would hear, whether you wished to or not, your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor, even to the extent of aisles and floors distant, snoring and coughing or complaining. There were raucous demands from the irritated to “cut it out” or “turn over,” and from others return remarks as “go to hell. Who do you think you are!”—retorts, sometimes brutal, sometimes merely irritable, which, however, kept the night vocal and one awake.