There are other points on Fifth Avenue nearly as bad as this, but not
quite, and there are long stretches of it, which, if dull, have at
least a handsome uniformity. I have said already that it is still, upon
the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode
of the best--that is the richest--people; we Americans habitually use
best in this sense. Madison Avenue stretches northwest farther than the
eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone dwellings,
as yet little invaded by business. Lexington Avenue is of the same
character, but of a humbler sort. On Second Avenue, down town, there
are large old mansions of the time when Fifth Avenue was still the home
of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are
spared by the elevated roads there are blocks of decent and comfortable
dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of
course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of our system the
same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times.
One hears a good deal about the vast emporiums which are gathering
the retail trade into themselves, and devastating the minor commerce,
but there are perhaps a score of these at most, in New York; and on
the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at least a hundred
miles of little shops, where an immense population of little dealers
levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by. Until you
actually see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude of
people taken away from productive labor and solely devoted to marketing
the things made by people who are overworked in making them.
Yet I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter into some human
relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have
already tried to give some notion of the multitude of these; and I must
say now that they add much in their infinite number and variety to such
effect of gayety as the city has. They are especially attractive at
night, when their brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to
an effect of gayety which the day will not allow.
The great stores contribute nothing to this, for they all close at six
o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor
beauty as the place has with the superfluity of signs that the minor
traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and
unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want
half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade,
and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will
permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one
thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another
it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety
of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty
in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these
huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized
and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six
or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, one would think bad
enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give any notion of the
horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of
white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?
The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem trying to shout and
shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they deface the fronts and
sides and tops of the edifices; in all the approaches to the metropolis
they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands,
and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not
shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the
electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings the
frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.
The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at
least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary
phase of the economic warfare in which our people live, for the most as
unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought
out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his
vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence
of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it
seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be
so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.