a ferry-house or else upon the abrupt water-front with river waves
slapping against the solid bulwark. Here are open, free sky, wide
horizon, the smell of the water, or else of the neighboring gas-house,
brisk breezes and sea-gulls flapping lazily. The street's progress
begins between an open lot where rival gangs of East Side boys meet to
fight, on one side, and, on the other, a great roomy lumber-yard, with
a very small brick building for an office. A dingy saloon, of course,
stands on the corner of the first so-called avenue. Away over here the
avenues have letters instead of numbers for names. Across the way--and
it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote thoroughfares the
traffic is so scarce that occasional blades of grass come up between the
cobble-stones--is a weather-boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad
mien, whose curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the
river, thinking of other days.... Some warehouses and a factory or two
are usually along here, with buzz-saws snarling; then another lettered
avenue or two and the first of the elevated railroads roars overhead.
This is now several blocks nearer the splendor of Fifth Avenue, but the
neighborhood does not look it, for here is the thick of the tenement
district, with dingy fire-escapes above, and below in the street,
bumping against everyone, thousands of city children, each of them with
at least one lung. The traffic is more crowded now, the street darker,
the air not so good. Above are numerous windows showing the subdivisions
where many families live--very comfortably and happily in numerous
cases; you could not induce them to move into the sunshine and open of
the country. Here, on the ground floor of the flat, is a grocery with
sickening fruit out in front; on one side of it a doctor's sign, on the
other an undertaker's. The window shows a three-foot coffin lined with
soiled white satin, much admired by the wise-eyed little girls.
[Illustration: Up Beekman Street. Each ... has to change in the greatest
possible hurry from block to block.]
As each of these succeeding avenues is crossed, with its rush and
roar of up-town and down-town traffic, the neighborhood is said to
be more "respectable," meaning more expensive; more of the women
on the sidewalks wear hats and paint, and there are fewer children
without shoes; private houses are becoming more frequent; babies less
frequent; there is more pretence and less spontaneity. The flats are
now apartments; they have ornate, hideous entrances, which add only
to the rent.... So on until here is Madison Avenue and a whole block
of private houses, varied only by an occasional stable, pleasant,
clean-looking little stables, preferable architecturally to the houses
in some cases. And here at last is Fifth Avenue; and it seems miles
away from the tenements, sparkling, gay, happy or pretending to be,
with streams of carefully dressed people flowing in both directions;
New York's wonderful women, New York's well-built, tight-collared young
men; shining carriages with good-looking horses and well-kept harness,
mixed with big, dirty trucks whose drivers seem unconscious of the
incongruity, but quite well aware of their own superior bumping ability.
Dodging in and out miraculously are a few bicycles.... And now when the
other side of the avenue is reached the rest is an anti-climax. Here
is the trades-people's entrance to the great impressive house on the
corner, so near that other entrance on the avenue, but so far that it
will never be reached by that white-aproned butcher-boy's family--in
this generation, at least. Beyond the conservatory is a bit of backyard,
a pathetic little New York yard, but very green and cheerful, bounded
at the rear by a high peremptory wall which seems to keep the ambitious
brownstone next door from elbowing its way up toward the avenue.
[Illustration: Under the Approach to Brooklyn Bridge.]
These next houses, however, are quite fine and impressive, too, and
they are not so alike as they seem at first; in fact, it is quite
remarkable how much individuality architects have learned of late years
to put into the eighteen or twenty feet they have to deal with. The
monotony is varied occasionally with an English basement house or a tall
wrought-iron gateway and a hood over the entrance. Here is a white
Colonial doorway with side-lights. The son of the house studied art,
perhaps, and persuaded his father to make this kind of improvement,
though the old gentleman was inclined to copy the rococo style of the
railroad president opposite.... Half-way down the block, unless a
wedding or a tea is taking place, the street is as quiet as Wall Street
on a Sunday. Behind us can be seen the streams of people flowing up and
down Fifth Avenue.
By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently come into use in
place of brownstone, and there are not only doctors' signs now, but
"Robes et Manteaux" are announced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron
balcony, merely Madame somebody. By this time also there have already
appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, "Boarders,"
or "Furnished Rooms"--modestly written on a mere slip of paper, as
though it had been deemed unnecessary to shout the words out for the
neighborhood to hear. In there, back of these lace-curtains, yellow,
though not with age, is the parlor--the boarding-house parlor--with
tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs which generally
break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses under fly-screens in
country groceries. In the place of honor hangs the crayon portrait of
the dear deceased, in an ornate frame. But most of the boarders never go
there, except to pay their bills; down in the basement dining-room is
where they congregate, you can see them now through the grated window,
at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little tailor-shop or
laundry, which is usually found in the low building back of that facing
the avenue, which latter is always a saloon unless it is a drug-store;
on the opposite corner is still another saloon--rivals very likely in
the Tammany district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a
pool-room on the floor above, as all the neighbors know, though the
local good government club cannot stop it. Here is the "family entrance"
which no family ever enters.
[Illustration: Chinatown.]
Then come more apartments and more private residences, not invariably
_passé_, more boarding-houses, many, many boarding-houses, theatrical
boarding-houses, students' boarding-houses, foreign boarding-houses;
more small business places, and so on across various mongrel avenues
until here is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally
even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. Cross these
tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the
lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the
distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are
stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and
then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river
barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end--a hot,
hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a
summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary
existence.
II
Down-town it is so different.
Down-town--"'way down-town," in the vernacular--in latitude far south
of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business
and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically
straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked,
running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning
where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow,
Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture.
Numbers would do well enough for names down here, but instead of concise
and business-like street-signs, the lamp-posts show quaint, incongruous
names, sentimental names, poetic names sometimes, because these streets
were born and not made.
[Illustration: It still remains whimsically individual and village-like.]
They were born of the needs or whims of the early population, including
cows, long before the little western city became self-conscious about
its incipient greatness, and ordered a ready-made plan for its future
growth. It was too late for the painstaking commissioners down here. One
little settlement of houses had gradually reached out toward another,
each with its own line of streets or paths, until finally they all
grew together solidly into a city, not caring whether they dovetailed
or not, and one or the other or both of the old road names stuck fast.
The Beaver's Path, leading from the Parade (which afterward became
the Bowling Green) over to the swampy inlet which by drainage became
the sheep pasture and later was named Broad Street, is still called
Beaver Street to this day. The Maiden Lane, where New York girls used
to stroll (and in still more primitive times used to do the washing)
along-side the stream which gave the street its present winding shape
and low grading, is still called Maiden Lane, though probably the only
strollers in the modern jostling crowd along this street, now the
heart of the diamond district, are the special detectives who have a
personal acquaintance with every distinguished jewellery crook in the
country, and guard "the Lane," as they call it, so carefully that not
in fifteen years has a member of the profession crossed the "dead-line"
successfully. There is Bridge Street, which no longer has any stream to
bridge; Dock Street, where there is no dock; Water Street, once upon
the river-front but now separated from the water by several blocks and
much enormously valuable real estate; and Wall Street, which now seems
to lack the wooden wall by which Governor Stuyvesant sought to keep New
Englanders out of town. His efforts were of no permanent value.
[Illustration: A Fourteenth Street Tree.]
Nowadays they seem such narrow, crowded little runways, these down-town
cross streets; so crowded that men and horses share the middle of them
together; so narrow that from the windy tops of the irregular white
cliffs which line them you must lean far over in order to see the busy
little men at the dry asphalt bottom, far below, rapidly crawling
hither and thither like excitable ants whose hill has been disturbed.
And in modern times they seem dark and gloomy, near the bottom, even
in the clear, smokeless air of Manhattan, so that lights are turned on
sometimes at mid-day, for at best the sun gets into these valleys for
only a few minutes, so high have the tall buildings grown. But they
were not narrow in those old days of the Dutch; seemed quite the right
width, no doubt, to gossip across, from one Dutch stoop to another, at
close of day, with the after-supper pipe when the chickens and children
had gone to sleep and there was nothing to interrupt the peaceful,
puffing conversation except the lazy clattering bell of an occasional
cow coming home late for milking. Nor were they gloomy in those days,
for the sun found its way unobstructed for hours at a time, when they
were lined with small low-storied houses which the family occupied
upstairs, with business below. Everyone went home for luncheon in those
days--a pleasant, simple system adhered to in this city, it is said,
until comparatively recent times by more than one family whose present
representatives require for their happiness two or three homes in
various other parts of the world in addition to their town house. This
latter does not contain a shop on the ground floor. It is situated far
up the island, at some point beyond the marsh where their forebears went
duck-shooting (now Washington Square), or in some cases even beyond
the site of the second kissing bridge, over which the Boston Post road
crossed the small stream where Seventy-seventh Street now runs.
[Illustration: Such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous shops.]
Now, being such a narrow island, none of its cross streets can be very
long, as was pointed out, even at the city's greatest breadth. The
highest cross-street number I ever found was 742 East Twelfth. But
these down-town cross streets are much shorter, even those that succeed
in getting all the way across without stopping; they are so abruptly
short that each little street has to change in the greatest possible
hurry from block to block, like vaudeville performers, in order to show
all the features of a self-respecting cross street in the business
section. Hence the sudden contrasts. For instance, down at one end of
a certain well-known business street may be seen some low houses of
sturdy red brick, beginning to look antique now with their solid walls
and visible roofs. They line an open, sunny spot, with the smell of
spices and coffee in the air. A market was situated here over a hundred
years ago, and this broad, open space still has the atmosphere of a
marketplace. The sights and smells of the water-front are here, too,
ships and stevedores unloading them, sailors lounging before dingy
drinking-places, and across the cobble-stones is a ferry-house, with
"truck" wagons on the way back to Long Island waiting for the gates
to open, the unmistakable country mud, so different from city mire,
still sticking in cakes to the spokes, notwithstanding the night spent
in town. Nothing worth remarking, perhaps, in all this, but that the
name of the street is Wall Street, and all this seems so different
from the Wall Street of a stone's-throw inland, with crowded walks,
dapper business men, creased trousers, tall, steel buildings, express
elevators, messengers dashing in and out, tickers busy, and all the
hum and suppressed excitement of the Wall Street the world knows, as
different and as suddenly different as the change that is felt in
the very air upon stepping across through the noise and shabby rush
of lower Sixth Avenue into the enchanted peace of Greenwich village,
with sparrows chirping in the wistaria vines that cover old-fashioned
balconies on streets slanting at unexpected angles.
[Illustration: A Cross Street at Madison Square.]
[Illustration: Across Twenty-fourth Street--Madison Square when the
Dewey Arch was there.]
The typical part of these down-town cross streets is, of course, that
latter part, the section more or less near Broadway, and crowded to
suffocation with great businesses in great buildings, commonly known as
hideous American sky-scrapers. This is the real down-town to most of the
men who are down there, and who are too busy thinking about what these
streets mean to each of them to-day to bother much with what the streets
were in the past, or even to notice how the modern tangle of spars and
rigging looks as seen down at the end of the street from the office
window.
Of course, all these men in the tall buildings, whether possessed
of creative genius or of intelligence enough only to run one of the
elevators, are alike Philistines to those persons who find nothing
romantic or interesting in our modern, much-maligned sky-scrapers,
which have also been called "monuments of modern materialism," and even
worse names, no doubt, because they are unprecedented and unacademic,
probably, as much as because ugly and unrestrained. To many of us,
however, shameless as it may be to confess it, these down-town streets
are fascinating enough for what they are to-day, even if they had no
past to make them all the more charming; and these erect, jubilant young
buildings, whether beautiful or not, seem quite interesting--from their
bright tops, where, far above the turmoil and confusion, Mrs. Janitor
sits sewing in the sun while the children play hide-and-seek behind
water-butts and air-shafts (there is no danger of falling off, it is a
relief to know, because the roof is walled in like a garden), down to
the dark bottom where are the safe-deposit vaults, and the trusty old
watchmen, and the oblong boxes with great fortunes in them, along-side
of wills that may cause family fights a few years later, and add to
the affluence of certain lawyers in the offices overhead. Deep down,
thirty or forty feet under the crowded sidewalk, the stokers shovel
coal under big boilers all day, and electricians do interesting tricks
with switchboards, somewhat as in the hold of a modern battle-ship.
In the many tiers of floors overhead are the men with the minds that
make these high buildings necessary and make down-town what it is, with
their dreams and schemes, their courage and imagination, their trust and
distrust in the knowledge and ignorance of other human beings which are
the means by which they bring about great successes and great failures,
and have all the fun of playing a game, with the peace of conscience
and self-satisfaction which come from hard work and manly sweat.
Here during daylight, or part of it, they are moving about, far up
on high or down near the teeming surface, in and out of the numerous
subdivisions termed offices, until finally they call the game off for
the day, go down in the express elevator, out upon the narrow little
streets, and turn north toward the upper part of the island. And each,
like a homing pigeon, finds his own division or subdivision in a long,
solid block of divisions called homes, in the part of town where run the
many rows of even, similar streets.
III
These two views across two parts of New York, the two most typical
parts, deal chiefly with what a stranger might see and feel, who came
and looked and departed. Very little has been said to show what the
cross-streets mean to those who are in the town and of it, who know the
town and like it--either because their "father's father's father" did,
or else because their work or fate has cast them upon this island and
kept them there until it no longer seems a desert island. The latter
class, indeed, when once they have learned to love the town of their
adoption, frequently become its warmest enthusiasts, even though they
may have held at one time that city contentedness could not be had
without the symmetry, softness, and repose of older civilizations,
or even that true happiness was impossible when walled in by stone and
steel from the sight and smell of green fields and running brooks.
[Illustration: Herald Square.]
He who loves New York loves its streets for what they have been and are
to him, not for what they may seem to those who do not use them. They
who know the town best become as homesick when away from it for the
straightness of the well-kept streets up-town as for the crookedness
and quaintness of the noisy thoroughfares below. The straightness, they
point out complacently, is very convenient for getting about, just as
the numbering system makes it easy for strangers. On the walk up-town
they enjoy looking down upon the expected unexpectedness of the odd
little cross streets, which twist and turn or end suddenly in blank
walls, or are crossed by passageways in mid-air, like the Bridge of
Sighs, down Franklin Street, from the Criminal Court-house to the Tombs.
But farther along in their walk they are just as fond of looking down
the perspective of the straight side streets from the central spine of
Fifth Avenue past block after block of New York homes, away down beyond
the almost-converging rows of even lamp-posts to the Hudson and the
purple Palisades of Jersey, with the glorious gleam and glow of the
sunset; while the energetic "L" trains scurry past, one after another,
trailing beautiful swirls of steam and carrying other New Yorkers to
other homes. None of this could be enjoyed if the cross streets tied
knots in themselves like those in London and some American cities. Even
outsiders appreciate these characteristic New York vistas; and nearly
every poet who comes to town discovers its symbolic incongruity afresh
and sings it to those who have enjoyed it before he was born, just as
most young writers of prose feel called upon to turn their attention the
other way and unearth the great East Side of New York.
[Illustration: As it Looks on a Wet Night--The Circle, Fifty-ninth
Street and Eighth Avenue.]
There is no such thing as a typical cross street to New Yorkers.
Individually, each thoroughfare departs as widely from the type as the
men who walk along them differ from the figure known in certain parts of
this country as the typical New Yorker. In New York there is no typical
New Yorker. These so-called similar streets, which look so much alike
to a visitor driving up Fifth Avenue, end so very differently. Some of
them, for instance, after beginning their decline toward the river and
oblivion, are redeemed to respectability, not to say exclusiveness,
again, like some of the streets in the small Twentieths running out
into what was formerly the village of Chelsea; and those who know New
York--even when standing where the Twentieth Streets are tainted with
Sixth Avenue--are cognizant of this fact, just as they are of the peace
and green campus and academic architecture of the Episcopal Theological
Seminary away over there, and of the thirty-foot lawns of London
Terrace, far down along West Twenty-third Street.
There are other residence streets which do not decline at all, but are
solidly impressive and expensive all the way over to the river, like
those from Central Park to Riverside Drive. And your old New Yorker
does not feel depressed by their conventional similarity, their lack
of individuality; he likes to think that these streets and houses no
longer seem so unbearably new as they were only a short time ago, but
in some cases are at last acquiring the atmosphere of home and getting
rid of the odor of a real-estate project. Then, of course, so many cross
streets would refuse to be classed as typical because they run through
squares or parks, or into reservoirs or other streets, or jump over
railroad tracks by means of viaducts, burrow under avenues by means of
tunnels, or end abruptly at the top of a hill on a high embankment of
interesting masonry, as at the eastern terminus of Forty-first Street--a
spot which never feels like New York at all to me.
[Illustration: Hideous high buildings.
Looking east from Central Park at night.]
Some notice should be taken also of those all-important up-town cross
streets where business has eaten out residence in streaks, as moths
devour clothes, such as broad Twenty-third Street with its famous
shops, and narrow Twenty-eighth Street, with its numerous cheap _table
d'hôtes_, each of which is the best in town; and 125th Street, which is
a Harlem combination of both. These are the streets by which surface-car
passengers are transferred all over the city. These are the streets
upon which those who have grown up with New York, if they have paid
attention to its growth as well as their own, delight to meditate.
Even comparatively young old New Yorkers can say "I remember when" of
memorable evenings in the old Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street off
Union Square, and of the days when Delmonico's had got as far up-town as
Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.