"
It was plain talk, but it was good. They whispered afterward in the
corners about the "lack of discretion of that good man Parkhurst."
A little of that lack would go a long way toward cleaning up in New
York--did go, not so many years after Worse shocks than that were
coming from the same quarter to rattle the dry bones.
Long before that the "something that needed me" in Mulberry Street
had come. I was in a death-grapple vith my two enemies, the police
lodging-room and the Bend. The Adler Commission had proposed to
"break the back" of the latter by cutting Leonard Street through
the middle of it--an expedient that had been suggested forty years
before, when the Five Points around the corner challenged the angry
resentment of the community. But no expedient would ever cover
that case. The whole slum had to go. A bill was introduced in the
Legislature to wipe it out bodily, and in 1888, after four years
of pulling and hauling, we had spunked up enough to file maps for
the "Mulberry Bend Park." Blessed promise! And it was kept, if it
did take a prodigious lot of effort, for right there decency had
to begin, or not at all.
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