Umbertina was truly awed by the number of rich-looking signori she saw walking, riding in carriages, or descending from trolley cars. They passed cigar-store Indians, signs and posters of every sort. Pushcarts and peddlers with all kinds of wares.

Could any city be so rich and vast, she thought as she passed one splendid building after another, some colonnaded like Greek temples and adorned with marble and reclining figures in cornices; others spired, pinnacled, and strewn with finials like cathedrals; others with cast-iron facades or mansard roofs and story-high arched windows like the block-long McCreery’s Department Store. Even the elevated train that crashed over their heads had station stops fashioned like Swiss chalets.

Her head throbbed with the noise. By the time they had gone up Canal Street to Mott the scene changed. Rickety old wooden buildings of two and three stories were wedged between taller brick buildings whose fronts were festooned with the black tangles of fire escapes, over which clothing, mattresses, bedding, and people were draped. The entrances were covered with awnings, a solid line of them down the street, and the sidewalks were jammed with stands of merchandise and with rubbish cans, forcing people into the street, which was itself thronged with pushcarts, delivery wagons, peddlers with trays over their shoulders, running urchins, and dogs. Heaps of rubbish, paper, and moldering vegetables—the only green she saw–were everywhere.

“Where are the trees?” she murmured to Serafino as they inched through that inferno of bodies, her eyes heavy with the multitude of things imprinted on them.

“Not here,” he answered, “out there,” and he jerked his head with his chin pointing ahead toward imagined distances to the north.

When they crossed Prince Street the man in the bowler hat gestured around him and said, “Sicilians. The street of Sicilians.” At Mulberry he said scornfully, “This is the street of the napoletani, a bad street—full of fights and bandits.”

Thus Umbertina learned that she was in America but living in a little Italy, in streets filled with Italians arranged according to where they had come from in the old country. The children were whimpering with fatigue by the time they reached the end of Mott Street where the Calabrians lived.

The voice of the padrone cut into her thoughts. “Le Baracche,” he was saying, the Barracks. And her eyes followed to where he was pointing–to a large brick building almost at the end of Mott Street, three stories high, with windows lining the front, from which plants, mattresses, rags, and people hung. On the street level, women sat on the front stoops holding babies and working at garments piled near them; other women walked through the streets bearing bundles of fabric on their heads as Umbertina had once carried kindling wood in the old country; the sidewalk was littered with papers and refuse, and children squatted among barrels and broken-up crates to pitch stones. Between buildings there were alleys crisscrossed with clothes where the sun never penetrated, and narrow passages littered with empty bottles, garbage, and occasional tramps–sometimes a woman–lying on the stones in a drunken sleep. There were stores with long salamis and cheeses hanging in the window; old clothes were sold on the sidewalk; and even stale bread lying on dirty mattress ticking in huge wreaths and loaves, guarded by ragged old women who called out “Pane vecchio,” was sold for a penny. For the rest, the padrone would amiably point out la banca, la posta, la polizia. He spoke proudly of Nuova York, saying it already had more Italians than Rome; this was just one section of a city that stretched on and on. “The city is growing. There is work for everyone,” he said cheerfully. “The elevated railroad, the subway, the bridges, the factories. The Americans are always building and tearing down and starting again.”