Green Street

“ Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? ”

“ The long wide main street of white stone, red-roofed shops with their gay wares, and the large open market square where the weekly bazaar is held, are full of life. Both street and market-place are planted with little trees, acacias and white mulberries; and the bright green foliage, the white road, the red roofs, the green shutters, the variety of costume, make an attractive scene in the blaze of the Southern sun. ”

“ The street was streaked with light and darkness. Cheap bazaars were thronged; shops filled with automatic machines of entertainment were garishly lit; there were butchers’ and greengrocers’ shops open to the air, blazing with color under electric and naphtha lamps; there were stalls in the road, barrows of artificial flowers; white kinematograph houses; terra-cotta music-halls and theaters; crimson-tiled and green-brick public-houses; swarms of human beings, talking, laughing, singing, the laughter of excited girls. ”

“ With air and light, the sunlit gravel, the green lawn between it and the outer railings—with these they are concerned, and with these only. The heavy roll of the traffic in Oxford Street, audible here, is nothing to them; the struggle for money does not touch them, they let it go by. ”

“ Here and there a few night workers walk the lonely streets, a policeman tramps his beat, the huge carts bringing the provisions for the city lumber along with sleepy carters swaddled in sacks perched high among the heaps of baskets. Here and there men with long hoses are washing down the roads. The Parks and Gardens lie bathed in peace, mysterious shadows make velvet caves sheltered by leaves. Those trees standing close to the road are lit by the electric lamps and fringe the street with vivid green. Only the flowers seem really awake, alive, in a tremendous dream city. ”

“ Indeed, until quite lately, the fairs now carried on in a closed market were held in the open street, the animals being penned up by hurdles. Bordering the green sward houses would have sprung up to cater for the wants of the farmers and drovers, and, as the town grew larger, a continuous line of street would be formed, and the grass edge would naturally be paved for cleanliness and convenience. ”

“ The houses are many of them of fine granite, and have an air of wealth and solidity unlike anything we have seen elsewhere in this country. Many of the streets are planted with trees, chiefly fine horse-chestnuts, which were in full leaf and blossom when we came away, and which harmonize beautifully with the gray color and solid handsome style of the houses. They have a fine piece of ground, like a park, in one part of the town, which, together with the houses round it, reminded me a good deal of the Green Park and the walk at the back of Arlington Street. ”

“ The lake was still lined with dark shadows behind glittering ridges of morning sunlight, and a cool breeze played across my face, coming in from the east. Over the city, the sound of a street car rumbling into motion, rising and dying away, was like the crowing of a rooster in the country. ”

“ THE TURNPIKE AT HYDE PARK CORNER, 1706.
[Pg 29]
CHAPTER II. ST. JAMES’S STREET AND PALL MALL.
“O bear me to the paths of fair Pall Mall,
Safe are thy pavements, grateful is thy smell.”
—Gay’s “Trivia.”
Can we do better, after the surfeit of bricks and mortar which we have just undergone, than relax our jaded senses and relieve our wearied eyes by loitering for a few moments in the Green Park? See! it is just across the way, and a convenient entrance helps to tempt our steps. ”

“ In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of patriots—the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the City Hall Park. ”

“ Some of the widest thoroughfares have four rows of trees planted the entire length, the branches here and there meeting overhead, forming a perfect archway, while the open street cars on the Central{93} Avenue beneath seem to carry us along through primeval bowers of luxuriant green; we can hardly believe that anything so prosaic as “iron rails” supply part of the motive power. ”

“ Although one continuous street, divided only by a cross-road, the two parts of Hurst Green are very different in appearance, and look so antagonistic that it would not be surprising to learn that the inhabitants of either will have no dealings with those of the other. ”

“ There is an Athenæum, and a State Hall, and a fashionable street,—Beacon Street, very like Piccadilly as it runs along the Green Park,—and there is the Green Park opposite to this Piccadilly, called Boston Common. Beacon Street and Boston Common are very pleasant. Excellent houses there are, and large churches, and enormous hotels; but of such things as these a man can write nothing that is worth the reading. ”

“ In our country, in Italy, in France, the street is a sort of large tavern or public garden, a village green, a meeting place, a playground and theatre, an extension of home and doorstep; here it is something which belongs to nobody, and which does not bring anyone closer to his fellows; here you do not meet with people, and things, but merely avoid them.
In our country a man thrusts his head out of the window, and he is right in the street. ”

“ They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow.
Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street. ”

“ Over yonder, where the mile-post of the old lane still stands,—in its unhonored old age become the vehicle of publishing the latest “sure cure” to the world,—a florist, whose undenominational zeal for the holiday and trade outstrips alike distinction of creed and property, has transformed the sidewalk and the ugly railroad structure into a veritable bower, spanning it with a canopy of green, under which dwell with him, in neighborly good-will, the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Gentile tailor next door. ”

“ For the benefit of those not familiar with the streets of New York, it is perhaps well to mention that Forsyth Street is a dirty thoroughfare, two streets east of the Bowery, and that it is filled for the most part with small groceries, junk shops, swill milk dispensaries, and stalls for the sale of diseased vegetables and decaying fruit, and that the inhabitants are mostly delegates from Africa, and from the Green Isle of the Sea. ”

“ There is a rift in the walls between the tall buildings at No. 55 Broadway, near Rector Street, a cemented way that is neither alley nor street. It was a green lane before New Amsterdam became New York, and for a hundred years has been called Tin Pot Alley. With the growth of [Pg 58] the city the little lane came near being crowded out, and the name, not being of proper dignity, would be forgotten but for a terra cotta tablet fixed in a building at its entrance. This was placed there by Rev. Morgan Dix, the pastor of Trinity Church. ”

“ New streets have been made, some of the principal of which are Queen Victoria Street, Southwark Street, Northumberland Avenue, Commercial Road, and the new thoroughfare from Oxford Street to Bethnal Green; many other leading thoroughfares, which had become inadequate for the increased traffic of the present day, have been widened and improved, greatly to the convenience and comfort of the public ”

“ In time the city overgrew the college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway below Trinity Church—then the fashionable promenade,—and so on to the Battery,-117- past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past where Paulding was then living. ”

“ As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist. ”

“ She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror. ”

“ Long before there was a thought of the city getting beyond the wall that hemmed in a few scattering houses, and when the Indian settlement, which afterwards became Greenwich Village, kept close to the water's edge, a line of low sand hills called the Zandtberg, stretched their curved way from where now Eighth Street crosses Broadway, ending where Varick Street meets Vandam. ”

“ They see hundreds of clerks working in lecture-halls, 139class-rooms, or College Chapel. It will be interesting for them to know that Horseferry Road is worthy of coming into the historic perspective of the Australian Army.
To begin with, it is probably the oldest road in England, certainly older than Watling Street. The Archbishop's horse ferry began when his Grace was more powerful than any of the several kings in England, and brought the traffic from one side of the Thames to the other before bridges were thought of. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, they do make use of Sixth Avenue occasionally, on their rare trips uptown. But it is in the same spirit that a country dweller would take the railway in order to get into the city on necessary business. As a matter of fact there is [Pg 282] no corner of New York more conveniently situated for transportation than this particular section of Greenwich. I came across a picturesque real estate advertisement the other day:
"If you ever decide to kill your barber and fly the country, commit the crime at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. ”

“ Sixth Avenue, indeed, has come to mean nothing more to them than a rustic bridge or a barbed-wire fence,—something to be gotten over speedily and forgotten. They even, by some alchemy of view point, seem to give it a rural air from Jefferson Market down to Fourth Street—these cool-looking, hatless young people who make their leisurely way down Washington Place or along Fourth Street. People pass them,—people in hats, coats and carrying bundles; but the Villagers do not notice them. They do not even look at them pityingly; they do not look at them at all. ”

“ In our neighborhood the physical changes of the last twenty years have been great. Since that first disturbing walk with the little girl to the rear tenement on Ludlow Street asphalt has replaced unclean, rough pavements; beautiful school buildings (some the finest in the world) have been erected; streets have been altered, and rows of houses demolished to make room for new bridges and small parks. Subway [309] tubes take the working population to scattered parts of the greater city; piers have been built for recreation purposes, and a chain of small free libraries of beautiful design. ”

“ Roger said, “I like you in brown.”
I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by, carrying people [Pg 61] to dinners. The big glistening street is like an artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. ”

“ 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. ”