TENDERLOIN

Cartoonist Winsor McCay never ceases to amaze.  I love this particular image (despite the preposterous ethnic caricature) because its cityscape reminds me of my old neighborhood in Manhattan, which real estate agents called North Chelsea but was in fact the old Garment District and before that, in the days when Teddy Roosevelt was New York's Police Commissioner, the Tenderloin, a precinct largely devoted to sin.  It's made up mostly of late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century commercial buildings like the ones in McCay's panels, with more than a few even older townhouses.  It has become a dreamscape to me now, which McCay's image evokes precisely.

[With thanks to a delightful web site devoted to McCay's work — Meeting McCay.]