The great stream has its tributaries.  To Fifth Avenue belong the side streets that feed it and in turn draw from it flavour and inspiration.  To it belong Washington Square, the south side as well as the north side, and the street beyond, that today is known as West Broadway, and yesterday was South Fifth Avenue, and before that, in the remote past, was Laurens Street; and the crossing thoroughfares that constituted the French Quarter of the late seventies and early eighties; and the northeastern part of Greenwich Village, that was once the “American Quarter,” and is now masquerading as a super Monmartre, with its “Vermillion Hounds,” and “Purple Pups,” and “Pirates’ Dens.”

Nor for the flavour of Bohemia is there actual need of leaving the Avenue itself.  It was more than twenty years ago that the writer, turning into Fifth Avenue at Twenty-sixth Street of a sunshiny afternoon, was confronted with an apparition, or rather with apparitions, direct from the Latin Quarter of Paris.  Three top-hatted young men were walking arm in arm.  One, of imposing stature, wore conspicuously the type of side whiskers formerly known as “Dundrearys.”  The second, of medium height, was adorned by an aggressive beard.  The third, small and slight, was smooth shaven.  A similar trio was encountered a dozen blocks farther up the Avenue, and, in the neighbourhood of the Plaza, a third trio.  It was a time when George Du Maurier’s “Trilby” was in the full swing of its great popularity, when the name of the sinister Svengali was on every lip, and certain young eccentrics found huge delight in attracting attention to themselves by parading the Avenue attired as “Taffy,” the “Laird,” and “Little Billee.”

There is a stretch of the Avenue upon which the Fifth Avenue Association frowns; which the native American avoids; and which the old-time New Yorker regards with passionate regret as he recalls the departed glories of the Union Club and the jutting brown-stone stoops of yesterday.  At the noon hour the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces.  There is shrill chatter in alien tongues and the air is laden with strange odours.  Even here Bohemia may be.  Perhaps, toiling over a machine in one of the sweat-shops of the towering buildings a true poet may be coining his dreams and aspirations and heartaches into plaintive song; another, like the Sidney Rosenfeld of a score of years ago, who, over his work in the Ghetto of the lower East Side, asked and answered: 

    “Why do I laugh?  Why do I weep? 
    I do not know; it is too deep.”

The attic, the studio, the restaurant, the cafe are the accepted symbols of Bohemia.  What reader of Henri Murger’s “Scenes de la Vie de Boheme” has ever forgotten the Cafe Momus, where the riotous behaviour of Marcel, Schaunard, Rodolphe, and Colline brought the proprietor to the verge of ruin?  Who has not in his heart a tender spot for Terre’s Tavern, in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, where the bouillebaisse came from—­the