Bunner Sisters

In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, whensociety applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets ofthe Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuousshop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the femininepopulation of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomed todecline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane, and the brevity ofthe sign surmounting it (merely "Bunner Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black ground) itwould have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the businesscarried on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local thatthe customers on whom its existence depended were almost congenitally aware of theexact range of "goods" to be found at Bunner Sisters'.The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private dwellingwith a brick front, green shutters on weak hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the windowabove the shop. On each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with frontsof brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patchesbehind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now a cheaplunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the knottywistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious fromthe chronic cluster of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of itscurtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not exacting intheir tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much fastidiousness as they could affordto pay for, and rather more than their landlord thought they had a right to express.These three houses fairly exemplified the general character of the street, which, as itstretched eastward, rapidly fell from shabbiness to squalor, with an increasing frequency ofprojecting sign-boards, and of swinging doors that softly shut or opened at the touch ofred-nosed men and pale little girls with broken jugs. The middle of the street was full ofirregular depressions, well adapted to retain the long swirls of dust and straw and twistedpaper that the wind drove up and down its sad untended length; and toward the end of theday, when traffic had been active, the fissured pavement formed a mosaic of coloured handbills, lids of tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins, cemented together by alayer of mud, or veiled in a powdering of dust, as the state of the weather determined.The sole refuge offered from the contemplation of this depressing waste was the sight ofthe Bunner Sisters' window. Its panes were always well-washed, and though their displayof artificial flowers, bands of scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-madepreserves, had the undefinable greyish tinge of objects long preserved in the show-case of amuseum, the window revealed a background of orderly counters and white-washed wallsin pleasant contrast to the adjoining dinginess.