Grafton Street

“ The shops on the principal commercial thoroughfares of Paris are tastefully constructed, and their internal arrangements, in almost every instance, appear creditable to the proprietor and convenient to his customers. Still, I do not think that Grafton Street, College Green, Dame Street, Westmoreland Street, or Sackville Street, would be disparaged by a comparison with the Parisian streets in which similar trades are pursued as those to which, in the above-mentioned places, the Dublin shops are appropriated. ”

“ Duke of Rutland, Viscount St. John, 1725-41; Marquis of Granby, 1760; Lord Bute, 1764; Zoffany, artist, 1780; C. J. Fox; Richard Glover, 1785; Byron, 1807; No. 26, Sir James Mackintosh, 1811; 41, Hon. Hedworth Lambton; 41a, Earl of Sandwich.
Grafton Street was named after the Duke of Grafton, who, with Lord Grantham, bought the site in 1735. It was first called Ducking Pond Row, and in 1767 Evans Row.
No. 4, the New Club (proprietary) , social and non-political, was established with a view to providing a club conducted with economy in administration. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the dull hazy London sunset Fopstone Road, which leads from Earl’s Court Road into Nevern Square, was quite deserted.
There is a silence and monotony in the eminently respectable thoroughfares in that particular district that, to their residents, is often very depressing. Traffic there is none save a stray hansom or a tradesman’s cart at long intervals, while street organs and even the muffin men avoid them because, unlike the poorer districts, they find no stray coppers and no customers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the Obelisk at the junction, or approximate junction, of the Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Borough, and London-roads, in pretty well every direction to the banks of the Thames, are a mass of private-looking streets—as far as the absence of shops constitutes the privacy of a street—old and half-ruinous, or modern and trim, in all of which perhaps may be found street-sellers, and in some of which are pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes. ”

“ As Grafton and Barbara and Young George went in, they saw few there whom they did not know, and among the crowd there were many who could already be counted as friends.
No gathering of this sort could be found in a city, nor in many countries outside England, where the land is loved, and lived on, by those who could centre themselves elsewhere if they chose. To the Graftons, as new-comers, the people gathered here from a radius of some miles were beginning to be known in the actualities of their lives as acquaintances in London never could be known, except those who could be called friends. ”

“ At any rate, many of the old-established firms of world-wide reputation in the City of London are directed by men who have had the ordinary education of the English leisured classes, and may be said to belong to the leisured classes themselves, inasmuch as their work is not allowed to absorb all their energies, and they live much the same lives as their neighbours who are not engaged in business. George Grafton was one of them, and Bunting would be another when his time came. ”

“ People constantly breathing the same atmosphere may notice a change in the "surroundings," but to common observers, or prying people paying occasional visits to this place, Kent Street seems ever the same—an eye-sore to public gaze, a satire on parish cleanliness and care, a disgrace to parish authorities in general, and landlords and ground landlords in particular. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Ghetto is full of life every evening, for then the workshops and factories and warehouses are closed, and the handsome youth of Whitechapel is free to amuse itself. Most of the girls work at the millinery establishments, and most of the boys at the wholesale drapery houses. The High Street is one of the most picturesque main streets of London. The little low butchers' shops, fronted by raucous stalls, the gabled houses, and the flat-faced hotels, are some of the loveliest bits of eighteenth-century domestic architecture remaining in London. And the crowd! It sweeps you from your feet ”

“ Thames Street, like its adjoining Billingsgate, is, I may remark, nearly always muddy, whatever the time of year. On rainy days, it is like a Slough of Despond. If by chance you wish to land at All Hallows or London Bridge Piers, you must first climb endless wooden and slippery steps, then wend your way carefully, past threatening cranes, and along narrow alleys between high houses, alleys blocked by heavy waggons, from which tremendous packages ascend, by rope, to top stories; alleys where there is barely room for a solitary pedestrian to wedge himself past the obstruction. ”

“ Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands. Its multitudinous population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides.
Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. ”

“ Since there could be no combined action by the men, but, on the contrary, blind obedience to the Warden, they might as well live in whatever part of the City should be the most convenient. From the absence of great houses, whether of nobles or princes, in the north of the City, one is inclined to believe that great numbers of craftsmen lived in that part, namely, between what is now called Gresham Street and London Wall. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fancy a part of New York City—Gotham, the cold, the selfish, the unneighbourly, the indifferent—in which [Pg 281] everyone knows everyone else and takes a personal interest in them too; where distances are slight and pleasant, where young men in loose shirts with rolled-up sleeves, or girls hatless and in working smocks stroll across Sixth Avenue from one square to another with as little self-consciousness as though they were meandering down Main Street to a game of tennis or the village store! ”

“ You see, then, that it matters not whether the name given to a new street be one which in itself suggests beauty, or one which suggests ugliness. In point of fact, it is generally the most pitiable little holes and corners that bear the most ambitiously beautiful names. To any one who has studied London, such a title as 'Paradise Court' conjures up a dark fetid alley, with untidy fat women gossiping in it, untidy thin women quarrelling across it, a host of haggard and shapeless children sprawling in its mud, and one or two drunken men propped against its walls. ”

“ Crossing Cherry street, Water and Front, passing directly through the heart of the densely populated Fourth Ward, long known as the home of the toughest of the "toughs" who infest the City of New York, it would be useless for us to pretend that Oliver street was anything else than just what it is—as bad as bad can be.
Not that many excellent people cannot be found within its limits. ”

“ Somehow, in thinking of the old days, I find it hard to reconcile those men and women who lived under the Knickerbocker sway with their newspapers. It is pleasanter to dwell upon the old customs, to picture Mr. Manhattan leaving the scurrilous sheet behind him when he departed from his store or counting house, and repairing with clean hands to the wife of his bosom and his family, somewhere in Greenwich Village, or Richmond Hill, or Bond Street, or the beginnings of Fifth Avenue. ”

“ How is the sense of all these innumerable aspects going to be squeezed into a pitiful couple of thousand words?...
One would like, for example, to distinguish street from street: to speak of Lord Street, say, with its inevitable air of well-groomed alertness, brisk and personable even under gloom, its rather superficial architecture pleasantly asnap, its traffic and its shops equally avoiding the dully commercial, equally achieving a confident glitter that only just falls short of a swagger. ”

“ The chief streets are of stone, are paved with stone, and have remarkably tall buildings, and so with the side streets: the sole difference being that while the principal thoroughfares contain the shops, every side street leading out of them is a more or less dirty slum, where dirty little bare-legged, ragged-tailed boys and girls play in the road or spit out of windows on the passing stranger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This Nancy trudged for hours through straight and terrible streets called avenues, with a dismal husband and a tired baby at her side. Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, then quickly across Fifth Avenue, which had nothing to do with us, and again across to Sixth Avenue ... and everywhere dirty shops, screaming children, jostling girls, rude men, trains rushing overhead, street-cars screeching and clanging. Then, at last, Seventh Avenue, where there were streets full of quiet, squalid boarding-houses, fewer screaming children, fewer dirty shops, and no trains. ”

“ What drama ever conceived in the mind of man could plumb the reeking depths of the life of the vicious among London's poor? Things may be a little better nowadays. Beyond all question, the way of the aspirant in Grub Street appears vastly smoother than in my time. It is all cut and dried now, they say--schools of journalism, literary agents, organisations of one sort and another. ”

“ The latter, whose time-honored name has foolishly been changed to Middlesex Street, is an old-clothes market, and presents one of the most extraordinary sights in London; but the trade is chiefly in [Pg 118] the hands of men, though their wives usually act as assistants and determine the quality of a garment till the masculine sense has been educated up to the proper point. Any very small, very old, and very dirty street at any point has its proportion of street-sellers, whose dark, grimy, comfortless rooms are their refuge at night. ”