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Updated: June 20, 2025
March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots, while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbiness which has invaded the southern border, and broken it up into lodging-houses, shops, beer-gardens, and studios.
It was the costume of a stay-at-home, and I learned afterward that he was a local professor of geography and political science the first by day, the last at night only in beer-gardens and places of resort.
Another feature of the Bowery is the immense beer-gardens with which it abounds. We refer to those of the better class, which are patronized chiefly by the German element of the city. These are immense buildings, fitted up in imitation of a garden. Some are very handsomely frescoed, and otherwise adorned. They will accommodate from four hundred to twelve hundred guests.
Life went on in an utterly careless way: the rehearsal for the day over, the company met in cafés or beer-gardens and stayed there until it was time to move, in view of the evening performance; any one who had a shilling spent it, while those who had no shillings accepted their friends' hospitality and hoped for the good time coming.
Every place of public resort pleased him: theatres, hotels, beer-gardens; but best of all the streets. He took them all in with absolute freedom and delight. Business was the watchword, the trade-mark. It buzzed everywhere, from the Battery to the Park.
And indeed these German places seem to take kindly to this part, for they rival each other in modern amusements and gauds set out to lure the light-minded. Music-halls and beer-gardens, theatres and cafés, illuminated promenades and stalls full of tempting flagons labeled "genuine eau de Cologne," are cunningly arrayed to turn away the mind from the stately antique churches and houses of Cologne.
I wonder, in this land of wine, and yet it must be so, if the beer-gardens are still filled nightly; and if it could be that I should sit at a little table there, a comely lass would, before I could ask for what everybody is presumed to want, place before me a tall glass full of amber liquid, crowned with creamy foam.
Then of beer-gardens there is literally no end, and there are nightly concerts in them. There are two brothers Hunn, each with his band, who, like the ancient Huns, have taken the city; and its gardens are given over to their unending waltzes, polkas, and opera medleys.
They did not make out its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds, four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, and the rest were devoted to amusements of the usual country-fair type. Apparently they had little attraction for country people.
The sale of liquors is enormous, and the work of destruction of body and soul that is going on is fearful. The bar-rooms, beer-gardens, restaurants, clubs, hotels, houses of ill-fame, concert-halls and dance-houses, are doing an enormous trade, and thousands are engaged in the work of poisoning themselves with drink.
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