August 14, 1935-We Should've Had A Better Sense Than To Go There At All
The Washington Daily News—Wednesday—August 14,—1935
We Should’ve Had A Better Sense Than To Go There At All
By Ernie Pyle
NEW YORK CITY – No. 25 Abingdon Square isn’t there anymore, and we knew it wasn’t there, and should have had more sense than to go down there at all.
Abingdon Square is in Greenwich Village, or what used to be the village at any rate, and is at the corner of Eighth Av and 12th-st.
But we thought we must see the old place, for No. 25 Abingdon Square was synonymous with the early years of what you might call our maturity, our first years in the bid city, our very lean and hard years, the years that now seem to tingle and glow with sentimentality, and if they do, isn’t that all right, even if they didn’t seem very good years at the time?
So we went down there, even tho we should have known better.
CAN THIS BE IT?
And what do you think old No. 23 Abingdon Square looked like after nearly a decade?
Old No. 25. The dingy brown front with the “Rooms for Let” sign, and Mrs. Remington and all her damn cats all over the front stoop, and the shades torn half way off our basement room window, and the garbage can sitting out front. Old No. 25, and all the other brownstones along that side of the square, where we made friends with other people in their young, hard years. And what do you think all those houses look like now?
Well, they looked to me very much like a 15-story tan brick apartment house, with epic red awnings at the windows, and a penthouse on top, and a footman at the door, and a sidewalk running out to the curb, and a big sign saying “Abingdon Arms” or something like that.
I suppose there is a powerful big furnace now right where our basement room used to be, the room where the newspaper gang would come after work and listen to the phonograph and talk gravely about things they weren’t informed on; the dingy, dark room where the rats used to run across our faces at night and wake us up.
FOURTH FLOOR, INSIDE
And up about the fourth story, which was the top story of No. 25 Abingdon Square, and which held the little room without any windows in it where we moved later, the room where we used to try to sleep in the daytime since we worked then at night, and where we couldn’t sleep because there were no windows and consequently no air, and where the bugs wouldn’t let you sleep even if there had been windows– I suppose up there on about the fourth floor some well-to-do business man is now enjoying every comfort the “Abingdon Arms” has to offer.
And on up to the fifth floor, which would have been the roof of No. 25 Abingdon Square, where we used to climb up thru the trap door and have parties on top, and almost drive Mrs. Remington crazy because she was afraid we’d fall off– I wonder who’s living up there on the fifth floor now? Don’t tell; I don’t care.
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We stood on the sidewalk and looked at what was once No. 25 Abingdon Square until we’d had enough of it, which wasn’t very long, so then we tried old Dr. Uhfelder’s drugstore up on the corner.
DRUGS AND ERUDITION
We used to go in there every evening and listen to him talk. He was a Jekyll and Hydish man, a pure apothecary, windy and wild with a gleam in his eye, who didn’t know half the time what he was doing because he would get carried away in his own tall tales of how he had sat at Heine’s feet, and studied under Hegel and Nietzsche, and been around the world in great ships. But he was grand if he like you, and he did like us.
So we went into the drugstore, and where Dr. Uhfelder’s hodge-podge mixing table used to be behind a falling-over screen, there was a new soda fountain, with a nice looking young man behind it. We asked him if he’d ever heard of Dr. Uhfelder.
“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” he said. “But he’s gone away.” He waved his hand and the hand said “long time gone, no come back here, ever.” The young man looked directly at us. He said, “God, he’s 70 or 80 years old now.”
“Yes, I know. Thanks.”
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And so that’s the end of Abingdon Square. We should, of course, have had more sense than to go down there at all.
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