It ends with a
brand-new hotel, all red brick, and white tiling, and Louise Quinze
furniture, and sour-cream colored marble lobby, and oriental rugs
lavishly scattered under the feet of the unappreciative guest from
Kansas City. It is a street of signs, is South Clark. They vary
all the way from "Banca Italiana" done in fat, fly-specked letters
of gold, to "Sang Yuen" scrawled in Chinese red and black.
Spaghetti and chop suey and dairy lunches nestle side by side.
Here an electric sign blazons forth the tempting announcement of
lunch. Just across the way, delicately suggesting a means of
availing one's self of the invitation, is another which announces
"Loans." South Clark Street can transform a winter overcoat into
hamburger and onions so quickly that the eye can't follow the hand.
Do you gather from this that you are being taken slumming?
Not at all. For the passer-by on Clark Street varies as to color,
nationality, raiment, finger-nails, and hair-cut according to the
locality in which you find him.
At the tenement end the feminine passer-by is apt to be
shawled, swarthy, down-at-the-heel, and dragging a dark-eyed,
fretting baby in her wake. At the hotel end you will find her
blonde of hair, velvet of boot, plumed of head-gear, and prone to
have at her heels a white, woolly, pink-eyed dog.
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