The Horror at Red Hook

wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton
and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall.  Its houses are
mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter of the middle of the
nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have
that alluring antique flavor which conventional reading leads us to
call "Dickensian."  The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma;
Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one
another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not
far distant.  It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange
cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the
monstrous organ litanies of the harbor whistles.  Here long ago a
brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets
and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the
hill.  One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim
shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches and the
evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and
there--a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of
decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space