Bruton Street

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with raindrops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap; ”

“ Gerard Street was alive with gaiety and fashion—beaux and belles arriving and departing, torches flaming, harness rattling, sedans setting down or taking up their freight at every door, footmen lounging against every railing, link-boys rushing to and fro, making believe that the night was dark, though the cold crescent moon kept peeping out from amidst those black scurrying clouds and putting those resin-dropping links to shame.
Windows blazed with the light of many candles, and shadows flitted across many a blind. ”

“ Here at the opera each moment, so long as the house-lights blazed, brought its own tribute of flattery to the Titan of the Street. The men and women from whom these tributes came were the men and women whom the world envied, and cursed—and worshiped. Hamilton Burton realized, as he passed easily from box to box, chatting with this multi-millionaire and that jewelled lady, that no single figure was more often signaled out by pointing and envious fingers than his own. When he handed Mary out of her limousine the street policeman had made the passage clear before him. ”

“ When Paul Burton reached the street most of the private motors had been summoned and dispatched by the starter. He stood for a little while looking up at the stars and breathing deeply the grateful night air. The moon-mist made a shadowy lacework of the trees in the park, and the dark contours of the avenue's mansions were silhouetted beyond the lights of the Savoy and Netherland. The expenditure of so much of his emotional self always left him strangely restless, and made him crave a brief aftermath of solitude. So he sent his car away and turned down the avenue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The car was now speeding swiftly down Broadway, obstructed by no carriages, no carts, no tracks, no wagons, and no drays. Below Astor Place the sidewalks were as bare as the street itself was empty. The shades were down in the windows of the many-storied buildings which towered above the deserted thoroughfare, and the flamboyant signs made their incessant appeals in vain. ”

“ Tomorrow the old bricks will be tumbled down, the chutes will roar with their passing, and the air will be shrill with the steam drills and riveters ushering into the world the young giants that will take their places. At the northeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where the Avenue touches the Square, there is a vast edifice of surpassing ugliness. It is the Brunswick Building, on the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous as the headquarters of the Coaching Club. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These streets of London, where the poor do their marketing, are, on Saturday night, gay with light and thronged with people. Because of the next day's rest, there is, until past midnight, an open market, which invades the pavement with costers' barrows heaped with fruit, butchers' stalls, booths of incongruous articles, kitchen utensils, old tools, all the bric-à-brac of the second-hand suburban shop; vehicular traffic is suspended; all barriers are encroached upon; everyone walks in the middle of the street. ”

“ Twice in the course of the next few minutes, Brant stopped to make inquiries, for the street he sought was in a strange part of the city, a mile of more from the business section. He never before had ventured into the picturesque maze of narrow streets, far remote from the haunts of inquisitive tourists. The winding, alleylike thoroughfares were dirty, ill-lighted, and swarming with life.
When the street was found, the number corresponding to that on the envelope revealed a squat, stucco building with huge shutters, railed balcony, and a bolted door that opened into a patio. ”

“ When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. ”

“ At the end of Brett Street he became aware of being directed to the left. He submitted.
The fruiterer at the corner had put out the blazing glory of his oranges and lemons, and Brett Place was all darkness, interspersed with the misty halos of the few lamps defining its triangular shape, with a cluster of three lights on one stand in the middle. The dark forms of the man and woman glided slowly arm in arm along the walls with a loverlike and homeless aspect in the miserable night. ”

“ The true suburbs lie farther out. You have to go well beyond the Brixton Bon Marché before you can find such a place as Streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa streets of red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot complete. Those suburbs outline a new social order; with a little experience you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year street from the fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a feeling of familiarity upon the corner house, where lives the doctor or the surgeon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I hate this incorrigible little thoroughfare; this New Street. It is full of bad smells, mangy little shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is a yawning gin-palace at its south-western extremity. The odours of its eating-houses—especially of a seedy little French pension bourgeoise about half way up—are displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended in New Street are the worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are mobbed—yes, mobbed—by children in torn pinafores who never have any pocket handkerchiefs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For I am morally certain I would never have got home alone.
The queer thing is that there was no sign of trouble till we got into Oxford Street. Then I became aware that there were people on those pavements who knew all about me. I first observed it at the mouth of one of those little dark side-alleys which run up into mews and small dingy courts. I found myself being skilfully edged away from Chapman into the shadow, but I noticed it in time and butted my way back to the pavement. I couldn't make out who the people were who hustled me. ”

“ It is evident, as Broadway is traversed northward between the huge office-letting structures, reared skyward, and among them the little, narrow, crooked streets, pouring their traffic into the main stream, carrying a vast, surging mass of humanity, that the crowded-in New Yorker, deprived of lateral expansion, thus seeks needed relief by mounting upward. Fulton Street here stretches across the island from river to river, the turmoil from its conflicting streams of traffic showing the full tide of restless development in lower Broadway. Above is the white marble Park Bank and the enormous St. ”

“ One of these, heard not infrequently, was to the effect that—in London—one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in the right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which axiom is the reason that a certain child through the first six years of her life sat on certain days staring out of a window in a small, dingy room on the top floor of a slice of a house on a narrow but highly fashionable London street and looked on at the passing of motors, carriages and people in the dull afternoon grayness. ”

“ As he came around by the other side of the burned house, he saw that two boys were still lingering on the scene of the morning's excitement. They were talking vigorously, and when Burton stopped by the fence and looked in, one of the boys, recognizing a kindred interest in the drama of life, called to him:
"Did yer see the bush where the kid was found?"
"What kid?" asked Burton.
"The Sprigg baby. He was right in here among the lilac bushes and the soft little shoots had been tied together around him, so's he couldn't get away, like Moses an' the bulrushes. Right in here. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The third house from the Hunter Street corner of Brunswick Square was distinguished from its neighbour houses by a red lamp, hanging at its entrance, and beneath this lamp, about half-past seven o'clock of a misty October evening, a woman, breathless and frightened, was frantically knocking at the closed door. ”

“ Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant, inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas, each ‘villa’ as like its neighbour as one new sixpence is to another; or the Cromwell Road at any time or under any conditions. Then you will have known tedium. At Brentford, however, all is life, movement, dirt, and balmy odours from a quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. ”