"A boy at fourteen needs a mother or the memory of a mother as he does
at no other period of his life."--_Enoch's Diary_.


Except for its few blocks that border Washington Square, MacDougal
Street is about as squalid as any on New York's west side.

Once it was aristocratic enough for any one, but that was nearly a
century ago. Alexander Hamilton's mansion and Minetta Brook are less
than memories now. The blocks of fine brick houses that covered
Richmond Hill are given over to Italian tenements. Minetta Brook, if
it sings at all, sings among the sewers far below the dirty pavements.

But Minetta Lane still lives, a short alley that debouches on MacDougal
Street. Edgar Allan Poe once strolled on summer evenings through
Minetta Lane with his beautiful Annabel Lee. But God pity the
sweethearts to-day who must have love in its reeking precincts! It is
a lane of ugliness, now; a lane of squalor; a lane of poverty and
hopelessness spelled in terms of filth and decay.

About midway in the Lane stands a two-story, red-brick house with an
exquisite Georgian doorway. The wrought-iron handrail that borders the
crumbling stone steps is still intact. The steps usually are crowded
with dirty, quarreling children and a sore-eyed cat or two. Nobody
knows and nobody cares who built the house. Enough that it is now the
home of poverty and of ways that fear the open light of day. Just when
the decay of the old dwelling began there is none to say. But New
Yorkers of middle age recall that in their childhood the Lane already
had been claimed by the slums, with the Italian influx just beginning.