From Sidney Kingsley’s Stage Direction

Dead End of a New York street, ending in a wharf over the East River. To the left is a high terrace and a white iron gate leading to the back of the exclusive East River Terrace Apartments. Hugging the terrace and filing up the street are a series of squalid tenement houses.

Beyond the wharf is the East River, covered by a swirling scum an inch thick. A brown river, mucky with floating refuse and offal. A hundred sew­ers vomit their guts into it. Uptown of the wharf as we float down Hell Gate, the River voices its defiant protest in fierce whirlpools and stumbling rapids, groaning. Further down, we pass under the arch of the Queensboro Bridge, spired, delicate, weblike in superstructure, powerful and brutal in the stone and steel which it plants like uncouth  giant  feet on the earth.  In its hop, skip, and jump over the River it has planted one such foot on the Island called Welfare, once the home of hospital, insane asylum, and prison, now being dismantled, an eyesore to the fastidious who have recently be­come its neighbors. And here on the shore, along the Fifties, is a strange sight. Set plumb down in the midst of slums, antique warehouses, discarded breweries, slaughterhouses, electrical works, gas tanks, loading cranes, and coal-chutes, the very wealthy have begun to establish their city residence in huge, new, palatial apartments.

The East River Terrace is one of these. Looking up this street from the vantage of the River, we see only a small portion of the back terrace and a gate; but they are enough to suggest the towering magnificence of the whole structure. The wall is of rich, heavy masonry, guarded  at the top by a row  of pikes. Beyond the pikes, shutting off the view of the squalid  street below, is a thick edging of lush green shrubbery. And beyond that, a glimpse of the tops of gaily colored sun umbrellas. Occasionally, the clink of glasses and laughter filter through the shrubs. The exposed sidewall of the tenement is whitewashed and ornamented with an elaborate, ivy covered trellis to hide its ugliness. The gateposts are crowned with brass ship lanterns, one red, one green. Through the gateway is a catwalk which leads to a floating dock, where the inhabitants of this apartment moor their boats and yachts.

Contrasting sharply with all this richness is the mis-eased street below, filthy, strewn with torn newspapers and garbage from the tenements. The tenement houses are close, dark, and crumbling. They crowd each other. Where there are curtains in the windows, they are streaked and faded; where there are none, we see through to hideous, water-stained, peeling wallpaper, and old, broken-down furniture. The fire escapes are cluttered with gutted mattresses and quilts, old clothes, breadboxes, milk bottles, a canary cage, an occasional potted plant struggling for life.

To the right is a huge, red sand hopper, standing on stilts of heavy timber several stories tall. Up the street, blocking the view, is a Caterpillar steam shovel. Beyond it, way over to the west, are the sky-scraping parallelepipeds of Radio City. An alleyway between two tenements tied together by droop­ing lines of wash gives us a distant glimpse of the mighty Empire State Build­ing, rearing its useless mooring tower a quarter of a mile into the clouds.

At the juncture of tenement house and terrace is a police callbox; at the juncture of the street and wharf is a police stanchion bearing the warning "Dead End."

The boards of the wharf are weather-beaten and deeply grained; the piles are stained green with algae to where the water licks, and brown above. A ladder nailed to the beams dips down into the river. The  sunlight  tossed from the waves dances across the piles to the musical lap of the water. Other river sounds counterpoint the orchestration: the bells and the whistles, the clink and the chug of passing boats.

A gang of boys are swimming in the sewerage at the foot of the wharf, splashing about and enjoying it immensely. Some of them wear torn bathing trunks, others are nude. Their speech is a rhythmic, shocking jargon that would put a truck driver to blush.

There are a few onlookers. A fat, greasy woman leans out a tenement window. She is peeling an orange and throwing the peels into the street. A sensitive-faced young man, in a patched, frayed shirt, open at the neck, is sitting on one of the piles. In his lap is a drawing board. Occasionally  he will work feverishly, using pencil and triangular ruler, then he will let the pencil droop, and stare out over the river with deep-set eyes, dream-laden, moody.

A tubercular-looking boy about sixteen is up near the hopper, pitching pennies to the sidewalk. There is a splash of water, a loud derisive  laugh, and up the ladder climbs a boy, lean, lithe, long-limbed, snub-nosed, his cheeks puffed with water. Reaching the top of the ladder, he leans over and squirts out the water. A yelp below. He laughs again and cries:

"Gotcha dat time!"

Two boys come running down the street toward the wharf. One, a tiny Italian with a great shock of blue-black hair, is dangling a shoe box almost as big as himself; the other, a gawky Polack, head shaven, cretinous, adenoidal, is slapping his thigh with a rolled newspaper as he runs.