City and Vicinity · Page Four
The Manchester Morning Courier
BV–21–001 · Special report
A Door Without an Address
A private house begins receiving callers somewhere between Elm Street and the river.
MANCHESTER, N.H.—A curious item reaches this desk from the mill district, where a private house has lately taken to receiving callers by invitation only, and where no two residents can agree on which door it uses. A clerk at the Amoskeag counting-house places the entrance hard by the mill gates. A milliner on Elm Street insists the same house opens onto her own alley. A bargeman working the towpath allows only that it fronts the river side, and would say nothing further.
No city directory carries any establishment under the name given to this reporter in confidence: The Black Veil. Yet since the first frost, black envelopes have gone out to mill clerks, attorneys, merchants, and at least one member of the evening press, each bearing an invitation to call at a door that, by every account so far collected, does not officially exist.
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The photograph accompanying this item arrived at the paper without a negative or photographer’s mark. A clerk’s hand has since annotated it three times: the earliest note places the passage near the Amoskeag works; a later hand wrote ‘off Elm’ above it; a third gives only: river side.