The Ball of Fire by George Randolph Chester

Vedder Court was a very drunkard among tenement groups. Its decrepit old wooden buildings, as if weak-kneed from dissipation and senile decay, leaned against each other crookedly for support, and leered down, at the sodden swarms beneath, out of broken-paned windows which gave somehow a ludicrous effect of bleared eyes. A heartless civic impulse had once burdened them with fire escapes, and these, though they were comparatively new, had already partaken of the general decay, and looked, with their motley cluttering of old bedding, and nondescript garments hung out to dry, and various utensils of the kitchen and laundry, and various unclassified junk, as if they were a sort of foul, fungoid growth which had taken root from the unspeakable uncleanliness within.

There had once been a narrow strip of curbed soil in the centre of the street, where three long-since departed trees had given the quarter its name of "Court," but this space was now as bare and dry as the asphalt surrounding it, and, as it was too small even for the purpose of children at play, a wooden bench, upon which no one ever sat, as indeed why should they, had long ago been placed on it, to become loose-jointed and weather-splintered and rotted, like all the rest of the neighbourhood.