* * * * *

There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old
Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem
to run at haphazard angles each to the other--that less sooty part of
Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia. An
indescribable smack of Soho here, tired old rows of tired old houses
going down year by year before the wrecker's ax, the model tenement
rising insolently before the scar is cold.

It is that part of the Latin Quarter which is literally just that, lying
slightly to the south and slightly to the west of that odd-fellow's land
of short-haired women and long-haired men. Free love, free verse, free
thought, free speech, and freed I.W.W.'s have no place here. For three
blocks a little Italy runs riot in terms of pastry, spaghetti, and
plaster-of-Paris shops, and quite as abruptly sobers and becomes Soho
again. A Greek church squats rather broadly at the intersection of three
of these streets.

There intervened between Stella Schump's and the six-story model
tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called
home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus,
the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old
Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact,
tired old rows of tired old houses.

On a spring night that was as insinuatingly sweet as the crush of a rose
to the cheek there walked through these lowly streets of lower Manhattan
Mr. Archie Sensenbrenner, bounded on the north by a checked,
deep-visored cap; on the south by a very bulldogged and very tan pair of