“And that’s at box-office prices,” Irene commented. “They pay twenty-five dollars to a ticket broker sometimes to see a really popular show. I think that the thing to be in this business is a broker, not an actress. That’s where the big money is!”
“We’ll remember that when we get our theater,” Peggy said, laughing. “I’ll put aside a whole lot of seats in my name, and if the show’s a hit I’ll make a fortune on them!”
“No theater, no tickets,” Amy said dryly. “And no show either. We’d better get going now.”
The area that Peggy had decided to cover first was a section south of Fourteenth Street, and somewhat farther east than where they had been. This was an old part of town, in which the theater had once been centered even before it had moved “uptown” to Fourteenth Street. (Fourteenth Street itself is now very much downtown from the present theater district in the west Forties and Fifties.)
This old district had seen wave after wave of immigrants come from various lands. Each nation had left its mark. There were Russian stores, Rumanian restaurants, Irish bars, Jewish delicatessens, Italian grocery stores, and Spanish shops of all sorts.
“It’s like looking at a cross section of certain kinds of rocks,” Peggy said. “You know, the kinds that give you a million-year history of the earth and the kinds of life that have come and gone. Finding all these traces of different languages and peoples is sort of like geology.”
“Yes,” Amy agreed, “and you can tell pretty well which groups came to the neighborhood first and which ones followed, and which are the latest. I’d say the Irish were first, and then the Rumanians and the Russians, a lot of whom were Jewish, and finally the Puerto Ricans. Look at that store!”
She pointed to an old building with store windows lettered “Carnecería,” which is Spanish for “butcher shop.” Over the windows was a faded old signboard which the present tenants had neglected to remove. Its gilt letters, nearly illegible, read, “A. Y. Ravotsky, Inc.,” and on either side of the lettering, carved into the wood, was an Irish shamrock and harp.
“It’s like a one-stop history of New York!” Peggy said. “I’ll bet if you dug underneath it you’d find Dutch shoes and Indian arrowheads!”
A few blocks’ walk brought them to their first address. There was no sign of a theater at all. In its place was a large, squat hospital; on its cornerstone appeared the date it was built—1912.