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Updated: June 15, 2025
Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising others to purchase real estate with a small, justifiable commission to himself had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the stove.
The headlong stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw material of a city men, lumber, and shingle are shot on to the not yet nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down of roads across the blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of the city's one electric light a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar of 'Let the woman have it! that stops all bidding when the one other woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in the ground' scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom, and, therefore, utterly vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and, shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G d!
"Why don't you give us some more poems like those?" He produced his business card, saying, "This is the kind of poetry that goes in America." The card described him as a "general business agent and real-estate broker."
Whence this sudden fit of gallantry?" asked the photographer, his sneer and the rasping Yiddish enunciation with which he spoke English filling me with hate "Come, Mr. Mendelson," I answered, "it's about time you cast off your grouch. Look! The sky is so beautiful, the mountains so majestic. Cheer up, old man." The real-estate man burst into a laugh.
"How did you happen to come to Marietta?" demanded the real-estate agent in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them through four spacious and airy bedrooms. "We broke down," explained Gloria. "I drove over a fire-hydrant and we had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign." The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity.
It was decided to select a dozen cities, pick out the most flagrant instances of spots which were not only an eyesore and a disgrace from a municipal standpoint, but a menace to health and meant a depreciation of real-estate value. Lynn, Massachusetts, was the initial city chosen, a number of photographs were taken, and the first of a series of "Dirty Cities" was begun in the magazine.
We ain't giving you no pointers in the real-estate business, and we don't want no suggestions about the cloak and suit business neither. We asked it you to get us two lofts on Seventeenth, Eighteenth or Nineteenth Street, the same size as here and for the same what we pay it here rent. If you can't do it let us know, that's all, and we get somebody else to do it. Y'understand?"
In particular, the rhetorical flourishes of Stubbs, the real-estate auctioneer, diverted me exceedingly, and I set him down as no other than a pupil of Robins the Londoner. Aside from the pleasure of his society, my intimacy with Long Ghost was of great service to me in other respects.
Ignoring his remark, I resumed: "It may seem a contradiction of terms, but these family reunions, these shouts of welcome, are so thrilling it makes one feel as if there was something pathetic in them." "Pathetic?" the bald-headed real-estate man asked in surprise "Mr. Levinsky is in a pathetic mood, don't you know," the photographer cut in. "Yes, pathetic," I defied him.
And then they say, 'One, two, three, again and there's neither a chicken nor an egg. That's the way all this real-estate racket will end. Mark my word, Levinsky." Bender nagged and pleaded with me without let-up. If I had had the remotest doubt of his devotion to me it would have been dispelled now.
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