As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a picturesqueness of
their own, but it is a repulsive picturesqueness, as I have already
suggested, except at a distance. There are some differences of level,
on the avenues near the rivers, that give them an advantage of the more
central avenues, and there is now and then a break of their line by
the water, which is always good. I have noticed this particularly on
the eastern side of the city, which is also the older part, and which
has been less subject to the changes perpetually going on elsewhere,
so that First Avenue has really a finer sky-line, in many parts, than
most parts of Fifth Avenue. There are certain bits, as the artists say,
in the old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich village, which,
when I think of them, make me almost wish to take back what I have said
of the absence even of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect
of Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth street, on a mild afternoon, when their
Italian denizens are all either on the pavement or have their heads
poked out of the windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words.
But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in the quaintness,
such as you are said to find in European cities. It has undergone the
same sort of malign change here that has transformed the Italians from
the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race they mostly show
themselves here: shrewd for their advancement in the material things,
which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all
races, and fierce for their full share of the political pottage. The
Italians have a whole region of the city to themselves, and they might
feel at home in it if the filthiness of their native environment could
repatriate them.
As you pass through these streets, there is much to appeal to your pity
in the squalid aspect of the people and the place, but nothing to take
your fancy; and perhaps this is best, for I think that there is nothing
more infernal than the juggle that transmutes for the tenderest-hearted
people the misery of their fellows into something comic or poetic. Only
very rarely have I got any relief from the sheer distress which the
prevalent poverty gives; and perhaps the reader will not be able to
understand how I could find this in the sight of some chickens going
to roost on a row of carts drawn up by the street-side, near a little
hovel where some old people lived in a temporary respite from the
building about them; or from a cottage in outlying suburban fields,
with a tar-roofed shanty for a stable, and an old horse cropping the
pasturage of the enclosure, with a brood of turkeys at his heels.
But in New York you come to be glad of anything that will suggest a
sweeter and a gentler life than that which you mostly see. The life of
the poor here seemed to me symbolized in a waste and ruined field that
I came upon the other day in one of the westward avenues, which had
once been the grounds about a pleasant home. Till I saw this I did not
think any piece of our mother earth could have been made to look so
brutal and desolate amidst the habitations of men. But every spear of
grass had been torn from it; the hardened and barren soil was furrowed
like a haggard face, and it was all strewn with clubs and stones, as
if it had been a savage battleground. A few trees stood aloof from the
borders next the streets, where some courses of an ancient stone wall
rose in places above the pavement. I found the sight of it actually
depraving; it made me feel ruffianly, and I mused upon it in helpless
wonder as to the influence its ugliness must have had amidst the
structural ugliness all about it, if some wretch had turned to it in
hopes of respite.
But probably none ever does. Probably the people on the shabby streets
and avenues are no more sensible of their hideousness than the people
in the finer streets and avenues are aware of their dulness or their
frantic disproportion. I have never heard a New-Yorker speak of these
things, and I have no doubt that if my words could come to the eyes
of the average New-Yorker he would be honestly surprised that any
one should find his city so ugly as it is. As for that first lesson
of civilization which my words implicate, a civic control of the
private architecture of the place, he would shrink from it with about
as much horror as from civic control of the liquor trade. If he did
not he would still be unable to understand how the individual liberty
that suffers a man to build offensively to his neighbor or to the
public at large is not liberty, but is a barbarous tyranny, which
puts an end instantly to beauty, and extinguishes the common and the
personal rights of every one who lives near the offender or passes by
his edifice. We Americans are yet so far lost in the dark ages as to
suppose that there is freedom where the caprice of one citizen can
interfere with the comfort or pleasure of the rest.