Brook Street

“ She took an elegant suite of apartments in Brook-street, Grosvenor-square, and having ample means at her disposal, she lived in good style, and in the due course of time contrived to get introduced into society, as it is termed—​that is, she became acquainted with people who moved in the upper circles. ”

“ Fifth Avenue is handsome, the handsomest street imaginable. It is what the streets of German cities try to be. The buildings are large, square, 'imposing,' built with the solidity of opulence. The street, as a whole, has a character and an air of achievement. "Whatever else may be doubted or denied, American civilisation has produced this." One feels rich and safe as one walks. Back in Broadway, New York dropped her mask, and began to betray herself once again. A little crowd, expressionless, intent, and volatile, before a small shop, drew me. ”

“ So they took leave of each other; and Rosalind went to bed with a bad headache, while Caspar Brooke returned home to find fault with his daughter Lesley.
CHAPTER XVII. THE WIFE OF FRANCIS TRENT.
Far away from the eminently respectable quarter of London, adorned by the habitation of families like the Brookes, the Kenyons, and the Romaines, you may find an unsavory district in Whitechapel which is known as Truefit Row. It is a street of tall and mean-looking houses, which seem to be toppling to their fall; and the pavement is strewn with garbage which is seldom cleared away. ”

“ The dormer-windows are frequent, while a few old roofs are covered with tiles. A wide, substantial walk is built through a portion of the town, stopping at no place in particular, but a favorite promenade for ungallant sailors, where they reel like drunken elephants, seven abreast, sometimes elbowing other pedestrians into the marsh. A few brick pavements have been made, but the bricks present their edges and ends uppermost as often as the flat sides, while sand-wading, in many places, is the only alternative, street-crossings being an unknown luxury. ”

“ To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material development. ”

“ He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of "George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor. ”

“ Brooklyn Bridge is today and for a long time will be the main entrance to Brooklyn. The district between the bridge and Borough Hall has become depressed and unsightly, mainly because the retail shopping business left it, and Brooklyn, unlike independent cities, had no wholesale mercantile business to take its place. No city can hope to improve and brighten itself and still neglect its front door. The Clark Street subway will have a station near lower Fulton Street. ”

“ And so it has come to pass that Brooklyn has no main street—in the sense that about every other town in the United States, big or little, has a main street. If you wish to call Fulton street, running from the historic Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city and far out into the open country a main street, you will be forced to admit that it is the ugliest main street of any town in the land: narrow, inconsequential, robbed of its light and air by a low-hanging elevated railroad almost its entire length. ”

“ Foul slums there are in the East End, of course, as there are in the West; want and misery there are, as wherever a host is gathered together to fight for food. But they are not often spectacular in kind.
Of this street there are about one hundred and fifty yards—on the same pattern all. It is not pretty to look at. A dingy little brick house twenty feet high, with three square holes to carry the windows, and an oblong hole to carry the door, is not a pleasing object; and each side of this street is formed by two or three score of such houses in a row, with one front wall in common. ”

“ Many more are the names that might be mentioned, for the street has ever been a magnet, and even those who toil in the attics of Bohemia find their way here, in the hours of leisure, to see and to be observed. Grub Street has assumed the garments of propriety, and shorn itself of its long hair, and in the prosperous, well-dressed throng that surges up and down the Fifth Avenue pavement, its denizens pass to and fro, no longer shyly, furtively, and conspicuously out of place, but with the easy assurance of those who are "to the manor born." ”

“ He was sitting indolently at his window one day, watching the daily pavement quarrel, whose actors were usually recruited from Paradise Alley across the street, when a green brougham came into the road from Tite street and drew up at the curb. From this alighted something in veil and lace and fashionable frippery—woman or angel, he guessed—and, as the crowd made way for her, she pushed open the iron gate of the tiny garden and rapped at the knocker with a gusto that rattled the windows. ”

“ There comes an hour of evening when lower Broadway, the business end of the town, is deserted. And if, having felt yourself immersed in men and the frenzy of cities all day, you stand out in the street in this sudden hush, you will hear, like a strange questioning voice from another world, the melancholy boom of a foghorn, and realise that not half a mile away are the waters of the sea, and some great liner making its slow way out to the Atlantic. After that, the lights come out up-town, and the New York of theatres and vaudevilles and restaurants begins to roar and flare. ”

“ He passed block after block of trim work-men’s houses, as still and silent as the sleepers within them, and at last he turned the horse’s head into Broad Street, the city’s great thoroughfare, that stretches from its one end to the other and cuts it evenly in two. ”

“ Life did not seem to be the same desperate venture it appears round about Broadway and Wall Street. Who can describe the settled amiability of those rows of considerable brown houses, with their heavy oak doors, their pots of daisies on the stoop, their clear window panes, and now and then the face of a benignant grandmother peeping from behind lace curtains. The secret of Brooklyn, perhaps, is contentment, and its cautious residents do not want the rest of us to know too much about it, lest we all flock over there in swarms. ”

“ When one has become acclimated to the soaring upward rush of the skyscrapers (and one quite soon loses consciousness of them, for where all buildings are huge each building becomes commonplace) , when one stops looking upward, "Down Town" New York is strangely like the "City" area of London. Walking Broadway one might easily imagine oneself in the neighbourhood of the Bank of England; Wall Street might easily be a turning out of Bishopsgate or Cannon Street. Broad Street, New York, is not so very far removed in appearance from Broad Street, London. ”

“ But as Filson Shelby and Edna Leisler went on farther down-town, Broad Street slowly changed its character. There were not so many office buildings and more retail shops; there were a few wholesale warehouses; there were even cheap flat-houses; and there were more signs of life. Children began to fill the roadway and the sidewalks. There were boys on tri-cycles, and there were Little Mothers pushing perambulators in which babies lay asleep. There were girls on roller-skates; and one of these, a tall, lanky child, had a frolicsome black poodle, which pulled her quickly along the sidewalk. ”

“ James’s Street, in their fine, imposing old houses, are taking up the question of the evening’s amusements with as much bored listlessness by the aristocrats at Brooks’s as rakish enthusiasm by the country gentlemen of Boodle’s. Signs of approaching activity are even to be observed in the stately mansions of exclusive Park Lane—a street that half the business men of London hope to be rich enough to live in some day ”

“ The passers up and down on opposite sides of Broadway are as if in different streets, and neither expect to recognize each other nor to pass from one to the other without set effort. It took a good while to make Broad and Canal Streets attractive business-streets, and to get the importers and jobbers out of Pearl Street; but the work is now done. The Bowery affords the only remaining chance of building a magnificent metropolitan thoroughfare in New York; and we anticipate the day—when Broadway will surrender its pretensions to that now modest Cheapside. ”

“ And yet why is it that Broad street seems to me more at ease, more itself, when it gets away from the tremendous cliffs of vast hotels and office mountains? Our Philadelphia streets do not care to be mere tunnels, like the canyon flumes of Manhattan. We have a lust for sun and air.
So when Broad street escapes from the shadow of its own magnificence it runs just a little wild. In its sun-swept airy stretches perhaps it abuses its freedom a little. It kicks up its heels and gets into its old clothes. Certainly as soon as one gets south of Lombard street one sees the sudden change. ”

“ It is the widest of all the streets, and is in fact a very wilderness of width. All the winds that sport about the neighbourhood seem to have their home in Bridge Street. Your hat always blows off when you turn the corner into it, and the dust and homeless straws go wandering up and down its emptiness, seeking rest in the Avon over the Clopton Bridge, but always blown back. Now Bridge Street was not always like this. In Shakespeare’s time, and until 1858, when the last of it was cleared away, a kind of island of old houses occupied part of this roadway. ”

“ When Greater New York becomes a city of 10,000,000 people, it may become the axis for magnificent public buildings both in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But Canal Street today is a locality of small business and it is premature to try to force its Brooklyn continuation into prominence as a civic center. Although Manhattan's new court house will be built on Center Street, yet the front door of Manhattan's civic center will be the City Hall Park for the-9- next thirty or forty years, and Canal Street at its best will be only the back door. ”

“ If the city should acquire for public purposes the three blocks lying between Fulton Street and Liberty Street on the west and Washington Street on the east, it could widen Washington Street to the required width of 110 feet, use the space opposite the Post Office for one of the new buildings, and design the open space near the bridge as a dignified and fitting approach to Brooklyn Bridge, corresponding to some extent to the open space partly covered by the Manhattan municipal building at the other end. ”

“ 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-respecting86 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. ”

“ At the thought of it now he thrust his watch into his pocket, pulled his hat resolutely over his brow, and started toward Main Street, meaning to turn thence toward Cross Street, now known as Broadway. On the outskirts of the town in that direction lay the wilderness, undulating away for hundreds of miles like a vast green robe with scarce a rift of human making. ”

“ Books which have a strong sense of place, and are born out of particular streets—and especially streets of an odd, rich, and well-worn flavour—are not any too frequent. Mr. Holliday's Gissingesque appreciation of the humours of landladies and all the queer fish that shoal through the backwaters of New York lodging houses makes this Broome Street neighbourhood exceedingly pleasant for the pilgrim to examine. ”

“ Above Canal street the retail stores begin to appear at intervals, and as one approaches Ninth street ladies multiply on the western pavement. From Ninth street up, the retail trade monopolizes the street, and on pleasant afternoons the pavement is filled with elegantly dressed ladies who are out shopping. At Tenth street Broadway makes a bend to the westward, and on the eastern side of the way, facing obliquely down the thoroughfare, is Grace Church and parsonage, both elegant structures. ”

“ The very sidewalks on either side of the new boulevard or avenue are as wide as was the whole of the old street which has now disappeared. And with the old street the old tenants have disappeared too. Handsome shops occupy the ground-floors, wealthy citizens live in the richly adorned apartments on the upper floors. The blousards who hived in the old street have found a nook in some other old street, or they have fled to the suburbs—the best place for them, as it is for all people of limited resources in all large towns. ”

“ People going and coming through the arches are silhouettes. Overhead it is like the grumbling of a thunder storm. Wagons going over the stones rattle tremendously, and they carry lanterns swung beneath to be lighted at night. The streets have fine names: there is Gold Street, and then Jacob Street. Frankfort Street widens out and becomes a generous thoroughfare, all in sunlight. There is a huge, gay hoarding to the right as you go down. ”