Fifth Avenue

“ The great stream has its tributaries. To Fifth Avenue belong the side streets that feed it and in turn draw from it flavour and inspiration. To it belong Washington Square, the south side as well as the north side, and the street beyond, that today is known as West Broadway, and yesterday was South Fifth Avenue, and before that, in the remote past, was Laurens Street; and the crossing thoroughfares that constituted the French Quarter of the late seventies and early eighties ”

“ Of all the blocks in the stretch of tradition that carries the Avenue up to Fourteenth Street, the richest in interest is, naturally, that which lies immediately north of the Square. Dividing this block in two, and running respectively east and west, are Washington Mews and MacDougall Alley. When Fifth Avenue was young and addicted to stately horse-drawn turnouts, it was in these half streets that were stabled the steeds and the carriages. ”

“ Fifth Avenue is an alluring spectacle late in the afternoon of the first Saturday in June; and when the hansom-cab topped the crest of a hill, the two men could see far down the vista of the broad street. The roadway was a solid mass of vehicles in ceaseless motion; and the sidewalks were filled with humanity. To the man who was being taken to his trial the bright color and the brisk joyousness of the scene were actually painful. Of the countless men and women scattered up and down the Avenue in the glaring sunshine, how many knew him to call him by name and to take him by the hand? ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the stirring times in which we are living, it seems as if every day is a great day on the Avenue. Take a single example: The morning broke dark and threatening. Heavy clouds presaged showers. But after an hour or two they passed from the heavens, and warmth and golden sunshine came. In the course of various activities the writer made his way to points between the Battery and Fifty-ninth Street, and the means of travel employed included three journeys on top of Fifth Avenue buses. If one of the early settlers could only have seen the proud and amazing thoroughfare! ”

“ The lamplighter was usually a tall man, a character, and his position was considered an important one. Fifth Avenue north of Fifty-ninth Street remained undeveloped for years, and it was not until sometime in the seventies that my father and I finished grading upper Fifth Avenue. Sixty years ago on both sides were stone walls where there were deep depressions. There was no traffic except drovers coming down to market with cattle. There were but two main thoroughfares, Boston Post Road on the east side, and Bloomingdale Road on the west side. ”

“ And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. ”

“ That point where Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross is one of the great corners of New York. It is the one that made the profoundest impression on Arnold Bennett: "The pale-pillared, square structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty red of the Æolian Building, and the great white store on the opposite pavement." A city of amazement has been left behind. Here we are at the threshold of still another city. It is different at every hour of the day. ”

“ "Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it so straight up and down—like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered!" She seemed to guess his faint disapproval of this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face: "If you knew how I like it for just THAT—the straight-up-and-downness, and the big honest labels on everything!"
He saw his chance. "Everything may be labelled—but everybody is not." ”

“ A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and leisure. ”

“ For a decade or so Sixth Avenue was the shop paradise. Above Macy's were O'Neill's, and Simpson, Crawford and Simpson's, and Altman's, and Ehrich's, besides the countless emporiums of lesser magnitude. Macy's moved north to Greeley Square, and Gimbel's came to take its place on an adjoining corner, but the movement in bulk turned eastward at Twenty-third Street, lining the south side of that thoroughfare as far as Fifth Avenue. Some of the pioneers had ventured farther to the north, but Twenty-third Street was the centre as the nineteenth century came to a close. ”

“ But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay.
They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides. ”

“ At Twenty-third street, Broadway runs diagonally across Fifth avenue, touching the southwestern corner of Madison Square—not so very long since the most genteel locality in New York, but now, like Union Square, becoming occupied by hotels and business houses.
Fifth Avenue, the most splendid avenue in America, makes a beginning at Washington Square, a lovely public park embowered in trees, which was once Potters' Field, the pauper burying ground, and where one hundred thousand bodies lie buried. New York University and Dr. Hutton's Church face the square on the east. ”

“ Of the clubs that were on the Avenue in 1868, a contemporary chronicler wrote that nearly every one recorded the brief life of a New York aristocrat. "A lucky speculation, a sudden rise in real estate," so runs the rhetorical statement, "a new turn of the wheel-of-fortune, lifts the man who yesterday could not be trusted for his dinner, and gives him a place among men of wealth. He buys a lot on Fifth Avenue, puts up a palatial residence, outdoing all who have gone before him; sports his gay team in Central Park, carpets his sidewalk, gives two or three parties, and disappears from society. ”

“ As I look at this pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. ”

“ But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.
Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the time when Daisy Miller became a type. ”

“ But when those who dwelt on lower Fifth Avenue were still pioneers, dining out in public places meant a long and venturesome journey to the southward. The restaurants of that time—they were more generally called "eating houses,"—were almost all established in the business portions of the city. The midday dinner was the meal on which they depended for their main support. Then masculine New York left its shop or its counting house, hurried a block to the right, or a block to the left, and fell greedily on the succulent oyster, the slice of rare roast beef, or the sizzling English mutton chop. ”

“ The whole tenue in moving, of the girls, is "fling about," even in the street, but no other nation can compare to them in their exquisitely spruce, exquisitely soigné appearance, and their perfect feet and superlatively perfect boots, and short tailor dresses. To see Fifth Avenue on a bright day, morning or afternoon, is like a procession of glowing flowers passing. Minxes of fifteen with merry roving eyes, women of all ages, all as beautifully dressed as it is possible to be, swinging along to the soda-water fountain shops where you can get candy and ice cream and lovely chocolates. ”

“ Of all the monuments that have graced Madison Square that which first comes to mind is one that has gone. Twenty years ago a splendid white arch spanned the Avenue, with one pier close to the sidewalk in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the other touching the edge of the opposite Park. It was in direct line with Washington Arch seventeen blocks away. Under it, on September 30, 1898, passed the victor of Manila Bay, whose name it bore, bowing right and left to the city's riotous welcome. For months it remained there, and then disappeared. Why was the beautiful structure not made permanent? ”

“ There was a pilgrim from the Five Towns who said that Fifth Avenue was architecturally the finest street in the world. This might pass for a guest's flattery, were it not that Mr. Arnold Bennett is of a nation which does not count gracious insincerity among its vices. New York must blushingly admit the truth of his judgment.
It is not (he said) harmonious. Its beauty is made up of units of beauty related only by position. This, too, is characteristically American. Each building must have its distinctive excellence. ”

“ In the block between Ninetieth and Ninety-first Streets, on land where once the squatter gloried, is the home of the Iron Master, perhaps of all the residences in the long line of the Avenue the one most observed by the stranger within our gates. "So well have the architect and the landscape gardener co-operated," is the comment of "Fifth Avenue," "that this mansion and its surroundings have already the dignity and picturesqueness which age alone can give, although the building is of comparatively recent date. ”

“ Yet it is by no means ausgeschlossen, as the Germans say, that the pavement in front of this abode of luxury may not be seamed by huge cracks and rents that make walking after nightfall positively dangerous.
Fifth Avenue is not, to my mind, one of the most attractive city streets in the United States, but it is, perhaps, the one that makes the greatest impression of prosperity. It is eminently solid and substantial; it reeks with respectability and possibly dulness. It is a very alderman among streets. ”

“ It is quite conceivable and not at all discreditable that the wild work of Broadway and of Fifth Avenue should have led architects of sensibility to cast many longing, lingering looks behind at the decorum of the Bowling Green and Washington Square, and to sigh for a return of the times when the common street architecture of New York was sober and respectable, even if it was conventional and stupid. ”

“ The sharp rise to what was the old summit and to the modified hill of the present does not begin until Thirty-third Street is reached. But there is perceptible a grade of a kind as soon as the Avenue leaves the northern line of the Square. Today it is a slope in transition. Here and there the change has been wrought. A modern structure reaches superciliously skyward. Beside it and below it the buildings of yesterday give the impression of feeling acutely conscious of their impending doom. They know. Their race is almost run. ”

“ She hadn't thought the whole world contained so many people as she saw in New York in one day. Fifth Avenue amazed and absorbed more than it delighted her. The expressionless expressions of the women, their hand-made faces, their smart shoes, the way they wore their hair, the way they wore their clothes; the men's air of being well dressed, of having money to spend, of appearing importantly busy at any cost ”

“ It is a kind of murky drain, which, flowing between, catches the refuse from Fifth Avenue and the leavings from Broadway. To Sixth Avenue drift men who, for the first time in a Miss-spending life, are feeling the prick of a fraying collar. Even Fifth Avenue is constantly feeding it. A couturier's model gone hippy; a specialty-shop gone bankrupt; a cashier's books gone over. Its shops are second-hand, and not a few of its denizens are down on police records as sleight-of-hand. At night women too weary to be furtive turn in at its family entrances. ”