Word: squalidity
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...stocky, stern-eyed man in a dark overcoat and hat. For an hour and a half, without a betraying sign of recognition, they scurried by subway and bus around crowded Manhattan in an old familiar technique for shaking off shadowers. Finally, under the rumbling Third Avenue elevated, on the squalid lower East Side, the FBI agents closed in, arrested both of them. In Judith's purse was a thin, flat package. It contained, said the FBI, typewritten notes abstracted from confidential U.S. documents...
...there was no direction to move but up. The music, at first a restless, syncopated blend of African dance rhythms, Negro blues, brass-band marches, and French Creole songs and dances, spent its raucous teens in brothels, cheap saloons and street parades. Armstrong came up from Jane Alley, a squalid, "back-o'-town" lane in what was then the toughest section of uptown Negro New Orleans. His parents were the nearly illiterate grandchildren of slaves, his father a worker in a turpentine factory, his mother a domestic. Never quiet, Jane Alley became a bloody ground on Saturday nights with...
Lend an Ear attempts other targets with varying aim: those squalid Latin American tourist villages where hot sex and heavy gunfire are hourly occurrences in the public square; a bandleader and his wife sweating to live up to the lurid-and contradictory-bulletins the columnists issue about them; an old-fashioned Friday afternoon dancing class, in which the Penrod motif loses out to the pretty-pretty. There are the usual-all-too-usual-dance numbers in Lend an Ear, and some pleasantly forgettable tunes...
...Beau" Nash, a sort of combination of Elsa Maxwell and Ward McAllister in his day, "made" Bath. In 1705 he found the town squalid and cramped, the famous mineral baths (started by the Romans) badly run. Worst of all, there was no place for the fashionable to dance except the bowling green, and it was frequented by swaggering armed swells who unsheathed their swords at the slightest affront to honor...
Young Negro girls sat in the shade, "engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair"; a West Indian dandy traipsed through the squalid streets, sporting a feather boa. Then a white man, wearing a police uniform, hove into view-a squat, grey-haired man whom Wilson would barely have noticed if the Englishman at his elbow had not exclaimed: "Look . . . look at Scobie . . . Our great police force...