Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let

you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath in, let it out out slowly and off we go.

Tonight we're relaxing with a journey back to New York City in the early 1900s,

with selections from the color of a great city by Theodore Dreyzer with illustrations by CB Falls. First published in

1923 by Boney and Liverite, New York.

Let's begin.

Forward.

My only excuse for offering these very brief pictures of the city of New York as it was

between 1900 and 1914 or 15 or thereabout, is that they are of the very substance of the city I knew

in my early adventurings in it.

Also, and more particularly,

they represent in part at least certain phases,

which at that time most arrested and appealed to me, and which now are fast vanishing,

or are no more.

I refer more particularly to such studies as the breadline, the pushcart

man, the toilers of the tenements, Christmas in the tenements, whence the song and the love affairs of little Italy.

For to begin with, the city as I see it, was more varied and arresting, and after its fashion

poetic and even idealistic then it is now.

It offered, if I may venture the opinion, greater social and financial contrasts than it does now.

The splendour of the purely social Fifth Avenue of the last decade of the last decade

...