Some of the original wood houses of the area had brick facades added onto them and the grace of arches. The brick was worked with open designs and a pattern above the archways; or patterned cement was shaped into squat, square columns supporting a balcony-porch. Most homes were built in stucco—plain, homely, facing the street guardedly in their homeliness and knowing that they were strong enough, impenetrable enough, not to care about prettiness. At one house, a silver-painted Minerva reclined in a semi-couchant pose with her lion shield on the top of a cement pillar. Other stone walls sported cannonball ornaments of cement at intervals, or baby-bath-size cement tubs for plantings. From the homes came the sound of the sizzle of cooking, the murmur of women, the muffled tones of children.

The dwellings closer to the creek were warrens of entrances and stairways on every level, with balconies and porches and rooftop spaces. Single homes had been made into multiple dwellings by the canny addition of stairways and entrances, and cantilevered space had been achieved where there was none.

On the “better” side of the street, the side farther uphill from the creek, stone walls braced up the hillside and were often topped by shrubs that gave a certain privacy of “estate” to the homes, which were larger than those on the other side of the street, often rising to three stories of flats, but nonetheless immigrant homes. Yet they were distinctly better, if only because by their size they afforded so much room to rent out to boarders, and by their position they could look down on the houses in front of them.

But even at best, and in the good season, the Hollow at a quick glance from the street seemed drab and poor—the other side of the tracks. It was picturesque to the outsider, the American who lived uptown on an elm-lined street with wide lawns and front porches where everyone sat and swung in view of everyone else, where windows were large enough to show the rooms inside, and where backyards were wasteful with little fringes of flowerbeds but no vegetables or grapevines or fruit trees. Guinea Gulch, as the Americans called the Hollow, was to them a part of town where peddlers trundled handcarts through the streets calling out “Es-ca-ro-la! Verdura!” and where women in dark dresses with aprons around their waists and kerchiefs over their hair could be seen carrying home bundles of dandelion greens in thick loads on their heads.

It was mysterious, too, in the Hollow. The houses had the closed look of fortresses—front windows shuttered or draped, no front porch for sitting, no front yard, no opening to the stranger. It was the suspiciousness of the Old World come to the New—the still-dominant peasant mentality that no one should see the extent of a person’s fortune.

At John Street the embraces Serafino’s family exchanged with their countrymen were again full of feeling. Tears of gratitude silently streamed down Umbertina’s cheeks when Cristina Muzzi and her daughters pressed food and drink on them as the ritual feeding of long-lost paesani began.