Jersey Street and Jersey Lane: Urban and Suburban Sketches

In the cramped neighborhoods of 1890s New York, where organ grinders compete with newsboys and immigrants from a dozen nations share stoops and sidewalks, H.C. Bunner writes with the tenderness of a naturalist observing a wild ecosystem. These are not photographs but living portraits, his characters breathe, complain, dream, and persist. The narrator moves through Mulberry Street and Jersey Street with eyes wide open, finding dignity in a shoeshine boy and blind privilege in the upper-middle-class letter writer who complains about the noise beneath her window. This is New York before it learned to be embarrassed by its own vibrancy, a city where the judge and the newsboy occupy the same cracked sidewalk. Bunner's wit is gentle but precise, his sympathy never condescending. For readers who loved The Age of Innocence or the tenement photographs of Jacob Riis, these sketches offer something rarer: the actual voice of the street.