Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 195, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 August 1914 — Lales of GOTHAM and other CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Lales of GOTHAM and other CITIES

There Are Many Bomb Enthusiasts in New York NEW YORK.—When In Some do as the Romans do. When In New York throw bombs. That Is the only way to keep even with the game. A New Yorker must get acclimated to bombs and bomb throwing, bomb fac-'

torles and premature bomb explosions. You may not believe this because you don’t live in New York, but let me remark right here that the center of the bomb zone hereabouts is the marble and gilt police headquarters, home of a thousand anti-bomb enthusiasts, at Centre and Broome streets, and there is no palace so exalted nor home so humble that the bomb like the useless Christmas gift, is unknown.

4 Your correspondent lives in an elevator apartment much better than he can afford on Washington Heights and the altitude was said to be too great for bombs. But it isn’t. New York apartment houses are, or should be, celebrated for the most extreme luxuries and the most atrocious crudities of civilization on the face of the twentieth century earth. One at the most highly amusing institutions of apartment houses is the purchase of ice. Ice is like chewing gum' and almond chocolate bars In Manhattan, dispensed everywhere. Some one has spoken of an “Ice trust.” I could never find this beneficent institution. If it is still struggling along It has my moral support. But all the ice I could ever locate was in the possession of certain Calabrians and Sicilians with wide grins and large earrings, who dwell in cellars and are uniformly named “Joe.” The "Joes” had a monopoly of our apartment There was Bharp rivalry between them, but it never took the form of price cutting. Then something dreadful happened.* Our superintendent—janitor Is now obsolete —went about denouncing the "Joes” as thieves and all the tenants were so wrought up that they finally consented to take ice from "Mr. John.” “Bang!” Our dreams of being outside the New York bomb zone were shattered. Considerable smoke was Issuing from the basement and scouting parties told . ns that Mr. John's department of ice was wrecked. “Bang!” This time In the middle of the night Many of the more temperamental tenants trooped to the fire escapes in pajamas and what-nots. There were in the year 1913, according to the police records, slightly more than a hundred bombs exploded In Greater New York.