Jersey Street and Jersey Lane

Henry Cuyler Bunner edited the comic weekly Puck from a red brick building on Mulberry Street and lived out in the New Jersey countryside, and this 1896 collection moves between the two. It opens with a letter to an evening paper demanding the police clear the organ grinders off the streets. Bunner sketches the woman he imagines wrote it, then turns to his office window and the Italian families of the Jersey Street alley below. From there he walks the northern end of Manhattan as it was before the builders came, traces New York’s Bohemia back to the poets at Pfaff’s beer saloon, and crosses to the suburban countryside for a footpath with a history, a child lost on a summer night, and a letter warning a friend about moving out of town.