The House That Shadows Built (1928)

THE PENNY ARCADE 7 a few New Yorkers remember them — they were so humble, of so little consideration ! Yet that site at 46 and 48 Union Square South deserves, I think, its brass tablet. For here the gods of destiny made magic. Black muck in the bottom of a pond; and from that, by the incomprehensible legerdemain of nature, blows a water lily, the whitest thing in nature. Brown, common dirt in the bottom of a crucible; and from that oozes gold. The Penny Arcade was “over-owned.” Into it had come several men of very humble origin; mostly immigrants who landed before the Federal Government required each newcomer to possess fifty dollars in cash — on the new terms, they could never have landed at all. When they finished with the Penny Arcade and branched out from it, they were on their way to wealth and power. All succeeded beyond any reasonable dream of an immigrant boy. Most, indeed, became millionaires; and two, Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew by name, many, many times millionaires. That, perhaps, is enough to justify this story of the Penny Arcade in South Union Square; what flowed into it and what emerged. However, there is a larger justification. The partners in this merry and amusing venture — and especially Zukor — were within a few years to take the moving picture out of our poorer quarters and set it into the heart of cities; were to serve destiny as chief agents in making it the third or fourth American in