Chestnut Street

“ It is great fun to watch Chestnut street from the little balcony. On hot days, when the white sunlight fills the street with a dazzle of brightness and bands of dark shadow, it is amusing to see how all pedestrians keep to the shady southern pavements. ”

“ These stables first found a new resting place in the extension of Chestnut street on the river side of Charles street, which Tom Appleton, the Boston wit, called Horse Chestnut street, but they have gradually extended to localities farther west. In the process of evolution the wheel has now turned, and the suburban business men are deserting the street cars, and, coming to Boston in their automobiles, instead of chaises, put them up for the day in the grand garage in Park Square. ”

“ An expected star who came out in the Walnut Street Theatre could only do things which had already appeared in Chestnut Street, and when the young men saw them they said, ‘That’s a chestnut,’ and it passed into a proverb. ”

“ This power of determining the lines of a street without immediate construction of the street has allowed a widening of some of Philadelphia’s narrow business streets in a way impossible in a city of any other state. In 1870 it was determined to increase the width of Chestnut Street from 40 to 50 feet by an addition of five feet on either side. Land abutting on this street has great value and was occupied by costly buildings, and if condemnation proceedings had been instituted for acquiring the additional 10 feet the expense of the improvement would have been perhaps prohibitive. ”

“ This picture represents Chestnut Street, the principal retail business street and the avenue on which the leading banking institutions are located. The building on the right is Independence Hall, in which was declared the independence of the United States. The liberty bell is still preserved and found at the entrance of the building. The structure in the background is a banking house. MARKET STREET, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.—Perhaps no street in the world furnishes an avenue for so much business as does Market Street. ”

“ These are now attractive breathing-places for the crowded city, being named after Washington and Franklin, Logan and Rittenhouse. The east and west streets Penn named after trees and plants, while the north and south streets were numbered. The chief street of the city 161 is Chestnut Street, a narrow highway of fifty feet width, parallel to and south of Market Street. Its western end, like Walnut Street, the next one south, is a fashionable residential section, both being prolonged far west of the Schuylkill River. ”

“ Throngs of people daily pass along two of Philadelphia's most imposing highways. Broad Street spans the entire city from north to south. Chestnut Street is the Quaker City's most brilliant thoroughfare, stretching between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Those who traverse either may see the great twenty story building wherein is made and published the North American, the oldest daily newspaper on the continent. ”

“ Grand time, Christmas! No one is really a Philadelphian until he has waited for a Pine Street car on a snowy night. Please have my seat, madam, there's plenty of room on the strap. Wonder why the pavement on Chestnut Street is the slipperiest in the world? Always fall down just in front of our bank ”

“ Fashionable ladies are beginning to make their appearance in the streets, unattended by gentlemen, as it is the shopping hour, and gentlemen would be only in the way. From the door of an elegant mansion in the upper part of Chestnut street issues a graceful and beautiful girl, who is proceeding down the street toward the busier part of the city. ”

“ Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. ”

“ There were such girls of the better families who, in Chestnut Street, in the expensive shops, or on the drive, on horseback or in carriages, tossed their heads and indicated as well as human motions can that they were better-bred and knew it. ”

“ You will find it well worth while to take a stroll up Ninth street some evening. You will usually find a roasted chestnut cart at the southeast corner of Market street. The noble savor of cooking chestnuts is alone worth the effort of the walk. Then you can pass on northward, by the animal shop, where the dogs sleep uneasily in the window, agitated by the panorama outside; past the cuckoo clock shop and the old Dime Museum. As the street leads on to less exalted faubourgs you will notice that it grows more luxurious. ”

“ Market street presents a double line of business houses, from river to river. Chestnut, the fashionable promenade and locality of the finest hotels and retail stores, is invaded by business beyond Broad, and Arch street beyond Tenth; while Eighth street, even more than Chestnut the resort of shoppers, is, for many squares, built up by large and handsome retail stores. Broad street, lying between Thirteenth and Fifteenth, is the handsomest avenue in Philadel [Pg 378] phia. ”

“ Even the more ambitious residences on Chestnut and Broadway Streets are constructed rather for the comfort of the inmates than to produce an impression on the stranger. This latter is the most beautiful street in the city. ”

“ Now, as has been already remarked, Chester is not only a delightful city to walk in, a city which it is a pleasure to have any business to transact in, but its arrangement and the unstudied variety of its houses make it serviceable and economical. The shifting, broken skyline, and the gables of the houses projecting as it were in amicable rivalry into the street, are always pleasant and cheerful to behold. ”

“ Nome consisted of one narrow street, twisted between solid rows of canvas and half-erected frame buildings, its every other door that of a saloon. There were fair-looking blocks which aspired to the dizzy height of three stories, some sheathed in corrugated iron, others gleaming and galvanized. Lawyers’ signs, doctors’, surveyors’, were in the upper windows. The street was thronged with men from every land—Helen Chester heard more dialects than she could count. ”

“ So there is now "nothing to show for" that money, for the stealing of which one man was tried for his life, and another man made mayor of Chester; which would all come in capitally in a ballad, if a ballad-monger chose.
Of the famous Chester Rows, nobody has ever yet contrived to give a description intelligible to one who had not seen them. The more familiarly they are known, the more fantastic and bewildering they seem, and the less one is sure how to speak of them. Whether it is that the sidewalk goes upstairs, or the front second-story bedroom comes down into the street ”

“ Yet scarcely a hundred yards further their halberd-points again fell in line gleaming in the gaslight; for again a clatter of feet was heard on the stones, and again it proved to be only the messenger.
"Mr. Provost," he said, "the yellow West [Pg 204] Kensingtons have been holding the road by St. Luke's for twenty minutes since the capture of Pump Street. Pump Street is not two hundred yards away; they cannot be retreating down that road."
"Then they are retreating down this," said Provost Buck, with a final cheerfulness, "and by good fortune down a well-lighted road, though it twists about. ”

“ This sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country, since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret. A street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. ”

“ There are no people in London who are not appealed to by the rich; the appeals of the rich shriek from every hoarding and shout from every hustings. For it should always be remembered that the queer, abrupt ugliness of our streets and costumes are not the creation of democracy, but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected to the Embankment being disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who disfigure the street-walls with their wares are actually in the House of Lords. The peers make the country seats beautiful by making the town streets hideous. ”

“ The spirit is allured to gentle thoughts as we wander in what is still really a lane, and, turning down Stanhope Street, behold that house which the great Lord Chesterfield tells us, in one of his letters, he was 'building among the fields.' The cawing of the rooks in his gardens sustains the tone of mind, and Curzon Street, after a long, straggling, sawney course, ceasing to be a thoroughfare, and losing itself in the gardens of another palace, is quite in keeping with all the accessories. ”

“ G.K., later, under the title "The Homelessness of Jones"* showed his love for a house rather than a flat, and they gave even to their first little house "Overroads" the stamp of a real home.
[* A chapter in What's Wrong with the World.]
For a man and his wife to leave London for the country might seem to be their own affair. Not so, however, with the Chestertons. After a lapse of over thirty years I find the matter still a subject of furious controversy and indeed passion. Frances, says one school of opinion, committed a crime against the public good by removing Gilbert from Fleet Street. ”

“ It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness—of those random corners, projections, and recesses, odd domestic interspaces charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural surprises and caprices and fantasies, which offer such a delicious holiday to a vision nourished upon brown stone fronts. ”

“ Every now and then, as those frightful hours wore on, they buffeted in the darkness against living men, who struck at them and at whom they struck, with an idiot fury. When at last the grey dawn came, they found they had wandered back to the edge of the Uxbridge Road. They found that in those horrible eyeless encounters, the North Kensingtons and the Bayswaters and the West Kensingtons had again and again met and butchered each other, and they heard that Adam Wayne was barricaded in Pump Street. ”

“ Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger.
Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two stories high ”

“ The market, a long, low, wooden structure,
in the middle of the principal street, was filled
with a mass of people of all shades, from blue-
black to Saxon blonde, gabbling and gesticulating
over piles of oysters and clams and freshly caught
fish of varied hue. By ten o'clock the sun was
beating down so fiercely that the glitter of the
white, sandy streets dazzled and pained the eyes
unaccustomed to it, and Rena was glad to be
driven back to the hotel. The travelers left
together on an early afternoon train. ”

“ She runs like a bird now. Jump in—we'll take a spin and try her out on the road. I may need her before midnight.”
Nothing loth, for he knew the Green Imp and her driver and had had many a swift run on a moonlight night before in the same company, Chester took the slim roadster's other seat, watching the long green hood point the way down the driveway, past the porch where the women, in white gowns showing coolly in the light from the arc lamp at the corner of the street, called a goodbye. ”

“ There is a tide in the affairs of streets,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
but the tide for Watergate Street has ebbed away, and now flows in other and more favoured channels. Still, as we shall presently see, this Street is not behind any of its neighbours in absorbing interest. You will perceive that, like Eastgate Street, it has the Cestrian characteristic on either side,—its high-level Row. The one upon the right hand, adjoining St. Peter’s Church, is, perhaps, as good a specimen as we have now left to us of the “Rows” of the last century. ”

“ His house stood in a handsome street near the Elysee—a street which in that strong summer seemed almost as full of foliage as the park itself; a row of chestnuts shattered the sunshine, interrupted only in one place where a large cafe ran out into the street. Almost opposite to this were the white and green blinds of the great scientist’s house, an iron balcony, also painted green, running along in front of the first-floor windows. Beneath this was the entrance into a kind of court, gay with shrubs and tiles, into which the two Frenchmen passed in animated talk. ”

“ Scores of acres of glasshouses exist here. In early times, however, the famous nunnery of the Benedictines extended along the eastern side of the road here. At the Dissolution this, with other lands in the parish, fell into the possession of that “old land grabber,” as a Herts antiquary has dubbed Sir Anthony Denny. Nothing now remains of the nunnery.
Cheshunt Street contains a good many interesting examples of old domestic architecture. There is rather a curious structure here known locally as the Round House, which has been in the family of the present owner since the time of Elizabeth. ”