New York became a temporary refuge for Perry Smith after a failed search for an Army friend in Worcester. He spent more than three months in the Broadway area, living on odd jobs and whatever meals he could manage, before federal agents arrested him at his hotel and sent him back to Kansas. The city’s anonymity offered room to disappear, but not lasting freedom.

Arrival and confinement

After leaving Worcester, where he had been arrested for vagrancy and jailed for fourteen days, Perry went to New York and took a room in a hotel on Eighth Avenue, near Forty-second Street. He later recalled that for more than three months he scarcely left the Broadway area. His limited wardrobe—jeans and boots, the Western clothes he already owned—was one reason he stayed close to that neighborhood.

Work and daily life

Perry found night work doing odd jobs at a penny arcade on Forty-second Street, next to an Automat. The Automat was where he ate when he ate. His days and nights thus narrowed to a small stretch of the city: a hotel room, the arcade, and an inexpensive place to get food. He described the neighborhood as a place where almost anything went and where he encountered more unconventional people than he had ever met.

The account gives the district a specific, crowded texture: a winter lived beneath neon lights, amid the smells of popcorn, simmering hot dogs, and orange drink. That vivid commercial setting contrasts with Perry’s restricted routine and uncertain circumstances. New York offered anonymity and work, but his stay remained precarious and geographically confined.

Arrest and departure

On a bright March morning, as Perry remembered it, two FBI agents woke him in the hotel and arrested him. He was extradited to Kansas and taken to Phillipsburg. There he received a sentence of five to ten years in the Kansas State Penitentiary for larceny, jailbreak, and car theft. The New York interlude ended not with a settled life in the city but with his removal from it and return to imprisonment.