Jesse Lynch Williams

“ Across Broadway flashes a fire-engine, with the horses at a gallop, the earth trembling, the hatless driver leaning forward with arms out straight, and a trail of sparks and smoke behind. Another whizz, and the long ladder-wagon shoots across with firemen slinging on their flapping coats, while behind in its wake are borne many small crazed boys, who could no more keep from running than the alarm-bell45 at the engine-house could keep from ringing when the policeman turned on the circuit. And young boys are not the only ones. No more to be thrilled by this delight—it will mean to be old. ”

“ The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. ”

“ These are the ordinary unromantic streets on which live so few New Yorkers in fiction (it is so easy to put them on the Avenue or Gramercy Park or Washington Square) , but on which most of them seem to live in real life. A slice of all New York with all its layers of society and all its mixed interests may be seen in a walk along one of these typical streets which stretch across the island as straight and stiff as iron grooves and waste not an inch in their progress from one river, out into which they have gradually encroached, to the other river into which also they extend. ”

“ Because it keeps the eyes so busy, seeing all the people that pass, one block of buildings seems very much like another the first few times the new-comer takes this walk, except, of course, for conspicuous landmarks like that of the new library on the site of the late reservoir or the Arcade on the site of the old Windsor Hotel, with its ghastly memories; but after awhile all the blocks begin to seem very different; not only the one where you saw a boy on a bicycle run down and killed, or where certain well-known people live, but the blocks formerly considered monotonous. ”

“ But even here, to lure the walker on, far ahead, almost exactly in the centre of the cañon of commercial Broadway, can be seen the pure white spire of Grace Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as if purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those below that Broadway changes at last and that up there are some Christians.
But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are they all black-mustached, black-cigared merchants talking dollars; at six o'clock women and girls pour down the stairs and elevators, and out upon the street with a look of relief ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is plenty that is not at all city-like within the city walls—called limits—there is plenty of nature, but in most cases those wanting to commune with it are reminded that it is no longer within the domain of nature. The city has stretched out its hand, and the mark of the beast can usually be seen.
You can find not only rural seclusion and bucolic simplicity, but the rudeness and crudeness of the wilderness and primeval forest; indeed, even forest fires have been known in Greater New York. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And all this was once the great Broadway where not many years ago the promenaders strutted up and down in the afternoon, women in low neck and India shawls; dandies, as they were then called, in tremendous trousers with huge checks. Occasionally even now you see a few strollers here by mistake, elderly people from a distance revisiting New York after many years and bringing their families with them. "Now, children, you are on Broadway!" the fatherly smile seems to say. "Look at everything." ”

“ But the interesting thing about it is that here are seen not merely a few incongruous green patches that happen to be left between rapidly devouring suburban towns—like the fields near Woodside where the German women work—out here one rides through acre after acre of it, farm after farm, mile after mile, up hill, down hill, corn-fields, wheat-fields, stone fences, rail fences, no fences, and never a town in sight, much less anything to suggest the city, except the procession of market-wagons at certain hours, to or from College Point Ferry, and they aren't so conspicuously urban after all. ”

“ It is a matter of wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the corners; all the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe-strings and rubber faces who are thick between the corners, to whom as little heed is given as to the clatter of trucks or the wrangling of the now-blocked cable-cars, or the cursing36 truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of the iron-workers on the huge girders of that new office building across the way. ”

“ In another quarter, on a dreary, desolate waste, neither farm land, nor city, nor village, there stands an old weather-beaten hut, long, low, patched up and tumbled down, with an old soap-box for a front doorstep—all beautifully toned by time, the kind amateurs like to sketch, when found far away from home in their travels. The thing that recalls the city in this case, rather startlingly, is a rudely lettered sign, with the S's turned the wrong way, offering lots for sale in Greater New York. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cabs and carriages with diners in them go spinning by, the coachmen whip up to pass ahead of you at the street-crossing; you catch a gleam of men's shirt-bosoms within and the light fluffiness of women, with the perfume of gloves. Fewer people are left on the sidewalks now—those that are look at their watches. ”

“ It seems all wrong to be pulling down those thick walls; exposing the privacy of the inside of the house, its arrangement of rooms and fireplaces, and the occupant's taste in color and wall decorations. Two young women who take the walk up-town always look the other way when they pass this sad display; they say it's unfair to take advantage of the house. ”

“ Soon the new, beautiful University Club at Fifty-fourth Street, with the various college coats of arms on its walls, which never fail to draw attention from the out-of-town visitors on 'bus-tops, will not seem to be very far up-town, and by and by even the great, white Metropolitan will not be so much like a lonely iceberg opposite the Park entrance. I wonder if anyone knows the names of them all; there always seem to be others to learn about. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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,92 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. ”

“ A man could stand still in the middle of the broad, smooth walk and look up in the air without collecting a crowd instantaneously. You can talk to your companion and hear the reply since the welcome relief of asphalt.
50 Here can be seen hundreds of those who walk for the sake of walking, not only at this hour but all day long. In the morning, large, prosperous-looking New Yorkers with side-whiskers and well-fed bodies—and, unintentionally, such amusing expressions, sometimes—walking part way, at least, down to business, with partly read newspapers under their arms ”

“ When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tenderloin.
48 But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun ”

“ Where the avenues grow out into their teens, there are coal-yards and lumber-yards. On the warehouses and factories are great twenty-foot letters advertising soap and cereals, all of which are the best.... Farther up is the region of slaughter-houses and their smells, gas-houses and their smells.... And so on up to Riverside, and across the new bridge to the unknown wildness of Manhattan's farthest north, and Fort Washington with its breastworks, which, it is pleasing to see, are being visited and picnicked upon more often than formerly. ”

“ Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson126 to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. ”

“ 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, rapidly83 crawling hither and thither like excitable ants whose hill has been disturbed. ”

“ The sun comes up, the wonderful color tricks of the early morning are exhibited, and the morning flight of birds begins. The tide comes hurrying in, soon hiding the mud flats where the snipe were feeding. The breeze freshens up, and whitecaps, like specks, can be seen on the distant blue band of the ocean.... The sun gets hot. ”

“ Even in sky-line he could find something new almost every week or two. In a few years there will be a more or less even line—at least a gentle undulation—instead of these raw, jagged breaks that give a disquieting sense of incompletion, or else look as if a great conflagration had eaten out the rest of the buildings. ”

“ And in Chicago, bucolic as certain sections of it may be, one can spy the towers of the city for miles away, across the prairie; even when down in certain wild, murderous-looking ravines there is ever on high the appalling cloud of soft-coal smoke. ”

“ For those who do not care to prowl about for the scattered bits of interest or who prefer what Baedeker would call "a magnificent panorama," there are plenty of good points of vantage from which to see whole sections at once, such as the Statue of Liberty or the tops of high buildings, or, obviously, Brooklyn Bridge, which is so very obvious that many Manhattanese would never make use of this opportunity were it not for an occasional out-of-town visitor on their hands. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, although half of them never spend an entire day in New York City from one end of the month to the other, and half of that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters pour. ”

“ No one ought to be allowed to live in New York City—he ought to be made to live in Brooklyn—who does not go out there and look back at his town once a year. He could look at it every day and get new effects of light and color. ”