Here’s another funny occupation. A man goes around through the sweatshop district mending shoes. If you are a sweatshop employee you generally have one pair of shoes, and of necessity they are on your feet. You can’t leave them with the cobbler when the roof springs a leak or the uppers secede from the lowers. You haven’t time to sit around his shop in your stockings.
[Pg 238]
So this itinerant cobbler hunts you up at your shop, takes off your shoes while you sew and caulks up the seams, tacks on soles and heels, and you pay him with a cheerful smile and some small change.
People who go downtown at night rarely miss seeing the man who advertises various things through an electric sign on his chest. He presses a button at intervals and a light flashes urging you to buy a cigar or a stick of gum or something else. The right thing to say, because everyone says it upon passing this individual, is, “That’s a fine thing for a grown man to be doing.”
Down the bay there is another industry most people never hear of. Enterprising venders owning their own boats meet incoming tramp freighters and sell the crews everything from a pair of mittens to a cough cure. They load their craft with most things you find in a department store and they drive fine bargains with the sailors.
Among the newly arrived immigrants a number of men manage to scrape a living by selling first lessons in English to the strangers struggling with the tongue. These lessons are in the form of simple English sentences followed by the translation in the tongue of the foreigner. Five cents will buy enough assorted conversation to last a new immigrant several weeks.
When in the course of his regular work the reporter comes upon a picturesque bit of local color, as did a writer on the New York Evening Post in going through the Italian quarter of that city, he may use it to as good advantage as the Post reporter did in the following feature story:
Under the tinsel, gilt, and colored paper shrine erected before a café in Mulberry Street, just north of the Bend, there is a picture of St. Mary of the Virgin Mount, and the devout who pass by drop their mites into the plates. The clinking of pennies, nickels, and quarters rings fair and true through the medley of sounds which rise from the crowds about the push-carts, and it is music to the ear of Michel Siniscalchi, giver of this year’s festa in honor of the saint.
A year ago they gave a festa in honor of Maria SS. di Monte Vergine, as the placards and lithographs displayed in[Pg 239] the shop windows style her, and it proved a financial failure. It costs money to give a festa—that is to say, a festa of the style and extent which are necessary in doing adequate honor to this saint. In Italy, in the villages from which the people who live about the Bend come, it is customary to have a festa in honor of the saint every year. And it seemed hard when the people who got up last year’s festa decided that they did not again wish to have to shoulder the burden of the festa’s bad debts.
At this time, when everybody else had backed down, Michel Siniscalchi, who deals in colored glass bulbs and similar decorations, stepped to the fore. He said it seemed a shame that they could not honor the saint. Indeed he was so pained by the thought that he would be willing to bear the expenses of the festa himself. He would, of course, furnish all the decorations himself, and his name would appear as president of the comitato on the banners and placards.