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 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 Driser, with illustrations by CB Falls, first published in 1923 by Boney and Liverwright, 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 appeal 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 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 century,

and the first decade of this for instance as opposed to the purely

commercial area that now bears that name the sparklingly personality dotted Wall Street of 1890 to 1910 as contrasted with the commonplace and almost bread and butter world that it is today.

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