It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights; where
there is a question of interest, there seems to be no question of
rights between individuals. They prey upon one another and seize
advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways for me to hope to
make the whole situation evident. The avenues to the eastward and
westward have not grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any
law of order, or in pursuance of any meditated design. They have been
pushed along given lines, in fragments, as builders saw their interest
in offering buyers a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut
or trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, and counting
upon some need of it, in the hope of extorting an unearned profit from
it. In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or
stone, and on each side of it or in front of it a structure one fourth
as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes,
not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price
the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board
fence, shutting in vacant lots, often the best lots on the street,
which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from
the building all round and beyond his property. In the meantime he
pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved
property pays, and gets some meager return for the use of his fence
by the Italian fruiterers who build their stalls into it, and by the
bill-posters who cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements,
picturing the scenes of the different plays and the persons of the
players. There are many things which unite to render the avenues
unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness
and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New-Yorkers. But
as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their
tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as
a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I
can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the
land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who most
spoils the sky-line, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in
design, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again.
Even when the owners begin to build, to improve their real estate, as
the phrase is, it is without regard to the rights of their neighbors,
or the feelings or tastes of the public, so far as the public may be
supposed to have any. This is not true of the shabbier avenues alone,
but of the finest, and of all the streets. If you will look, for
instance, at the street facing the southern limit of the Park, you
will get some notion of what I mean, and I hope you will be willing
to suffer by a little study of it. At the western end you will see a
vacant lot, with its high board fence covered with painted signs, then
a tall mass of apartment houses; then a stretch of ordinary New York
dwellings of the old commonplace brownstone sort; then a stable, and
a wooden liquor saloon at the corner. Across the next avenue there
rises far aloof the compact bulk of a series of apartment houses, which
in color and design are the pleasantest in the city, and are so far
worthy of their site. Beyond them to the eastward the buildings decline
and fall, till they sink into another two-story drinking-shop on the
corner of another avenue, where you will see the terminus of one of
the elevated roads. Beyond this avenue is the fence of a large vacant
lot, covered, as usual, with theatrical posters, and then there surges
skyward another series of apartment houses. The highest of these is
nearly fifty feet higher than its nearest neighbors, which sink again,
till you suddenly drop from their nondescript monotony to the gothic
façade of a house of a wholly different color, in its pale sandstone,
from the red of their brick fronts.
A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of theatrical posters on
its fence, and beyond this, on the corner, is a huge hotel, the most
agreeable of the three that tower above the fine square at the gate
of the Park. With our silly American weakness for something foreign,
this square is called the Plaza; I believe it is not at all like a
Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offense. An irregular space
in the centre is planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed
hacks of the public carriages droop their unhappy-heads, without the
spirit to bite the flies that trouble their dreams; and below this you
get a glimpse of the conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza.
At the eastern corner of the avenue is a costly new apartment house
of a modified gothic style, and then you come to the second of the
great hotels which give the Plaza such character as it has. It is of
a light-colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which is of
brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops abruptly in a flat
roof. On the next corner north is another hotel, which rises six or
seven stories higher yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping
a romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I seek a term
for the architectural order, but it may not be the right one. There
is no term for the disorder of what succeeds. From the summit of this
enormous acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to the
roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and then to the florist’s
and photographer’s next is another descent of three stories; on the
corner is a drinking-saloon, one story in height, with a brick front
and a wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with me; the avenue
continues northward and southward in a delirium of lines and colors, a
savage anarchy of shapes, which I should think the general experience
of the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the
dullest sense.