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Home  »  The Battle with the Slum  »  Page 312

Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.

Page 312

 
 
The First Christmas Tree in Gotham Court.
 
  Cat Alley was my alley. It was mine by right of long acquaintance. We were neighbors for twenty years. Yet I never knew why it was called Cat Alley. There was the usual number of cats, gaunt and voracious, which foraged in its ash-barrels; but beyond the family of three-legged cats, that presented its own problem of heredity,—the kittens took it from the mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray,—there was nothing specially remarkable about them. It was not an alley, either, when it comes to that, but rather a row of four or five old tenements in a back yard that was reached