South Street by Dorothy Day

In the summer of 1917, Dorothy Day was working for The Masses and spending a lot of time with Mike Gold who, besides working as a copy editor for The New York Call and writing for The Masses, drove a horse-drawn truck for the Acme Express Freight Company to support his mother. Dorothy, Mike, and their friends would wander through lower Manhattan talking, often ending up at one of the rivers.

The opening sentence rivals Henry James for its scene painting.

South Street

By Dorothy Day

The Masses, Nov.-Dec., 1917, page 26

Drawing by John Barber

South street, where the truckmen and dockmen sit around on loads of boxes and wait for a boat to come in, where men idle in the September sunlight and dream and yawn and smoke, where the horses clatter along the cobbles dragging huge heavy trucks with a noise resembling a mob of people aroused after long repression, and where the kids sit on the edge of the dock and look with wishful eyes at the water below that swirls with refuse and driftwood. Occasionally there’s a lull in the huge noise of the place and other sensations drift in waves over you until another truck wipes them out. There is a wave of soft silence, golden in the September sunlight with its autumn smell. The smells change too, with everything else, and the mellowness is replaced with a heavy foul odor from God knows what storehouse, and from the river that gulps and gulps at the docks all day long. Then there is a tiny wave of laughter from one of the many ragged boys scurrying about the edges of things, as he succeeds in fishing out a bit of driftwood. Little waves of imagination make the urchin’s every sense more poignant. There’s always the possibility of another fellow coming up behind him and pushing him into the thick water below. And there are wild chances of a bottle drifting in from the sea with a message in it from a shipwrecked crew or a submarine or something. And sunken treasure!

And perhaps waves of imagination drift over the loafers too, as they slouch and droop and rest.