noon
The fashionable columns of the newspapers informed the fashionable ex-urbanated that the city was empty -- though the East Side reeked like a cattle-pen , and another million or two gasped on the hot , tin roofs under the stars , or buried their dirty faces in the parched park grass . What the press meant to say was that the wealthy section of the city within the shadow of St. Patrick 's twin white spires and north of Fifty-ninth Street was as empty and silent as an abandoned gold-mine . Which was true . Miles of elaborate , untenanted dwellings glimmered blank under the moon and stood tomb-like in barren magnificence against the blazing blue of noon . Miles of plate-glass windows , boarded , or bearing between lowered shade and dusty pane the significant parti-coloured placard warning the honest thief , stared out at the heated park or , in the cross streets , confronted each other with inert hauteur , awaiting the pleasure of their absent owners . The humidity increased ; the horses ' heads hung heavily under their ridiculously pitiful straw bonnets . When the sun was vertical nobody stirred ; when the bluish shadows began to creep out over baked sidewalks , broadening to a strip of superheated shade , a few stirred abroad in the deserted streets ; here a policeman , thin blue summer tunic open , helmet in hand , swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck ; there a white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a section of wet hose ; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where , a little later , the East Side would venture out to sit on the benches , or the great electric tourists ' busses would halt to dump out a living cargo -- perhaps only the bent figure of a woman , very shabby , very old , dragging her ancient bones along the silent splendour of Fifth Avenue , and peering about the gutters for something she never finds -- always peering , always mumbling the endless , wordless , soundless miserere of the poor .