Baked Pears in Duane Park
William P. Chappel American
Not on view
Writing in the 1880s, one New Yorker fondly reminisced about the black women who stood in the streets tempting passersby with a baked pear "carried around in a deep-glazed earthenware dish, floating deliciously in a warm bath of home-made syrup." Despite the writer’s nostalgia, the baked pear sellers suffered the same lot as the rest of the city’s hucksters—a group largely comprised of impoverished blacks and white women and children who struggled to survive in the lowest rungs of society. The location depicted is Duane Street Park, at the intersection of Duane and Hudson, just north of the fashionable third ward.
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