Park Row

“ I had been out of the game for six months, and Park Row seemed to have survived the blow with great courage. At the Observer office they charitably gave me some books to review. As I came uptown on the subway I was reflecting on the change a few hours had made in my condition. That morning I had been an author, a novelist if you please; and now I was not even a reporter, but that most deplorable of all Grub Street figures, a hack reviewer. It was mid-afternoon, and I hadn't had any lunch yet. In a fit of sulks I went into Browne's, sat down in a corner, and ordered a chop and some shandygaff. ”

“ The parks of London have been described so very often that we must pass them with brief allusion. Their vast extent is what first strikes the American visitor with astonishment, especially those who have moulded their ideas after Boston Common, or even Central Park of New York. Hyde Park, in London, contains three hundred and ninety acres; and we took a lounge in Rotten Row at the fashionable hour, between five and six in the afternoon, when the drive was crowded with stylish equipages; some with coroneted panels and liveried footmen, just such as we see in pictures. ”

“ Shrubs have been planted in endless variety, and—when the tree trunks stand out bare and bleak in winter, and the branches are leafless—give to the walks a pleasant bordering of green. The particular glory of the Park shrubs is to be found in the rhododendrons, which in the weeks when they are in full bloom are alone worth coming to London to see. Rotten Row spreads out a narrow line of tan, bordered with a perfect blaze of colour. ”

“ It contains a sculpture-gallery, a library, green drawing-room, throne-room, grand saloon, state ball-room, picture-gallery and private apartments. ROTTEN ROW, London, England.—Rotten Row is the finest portion of Hyde Park, irrespectively of the magnificent groups of trees and expanses of grass for which English parks stand pre-eminent. The Park is surrounded by a handsome and lofty iron railing, and provided with nine carriage entrances. In the spring and summer the fashionable world rides, drives or walks through the Row ”

“ The unswerving loyalty of the main body of the Metropolitan Police, however, saved the situation, but for a couple of days troopers from Knightsbridge barracks were to be seen patrolling Rotten Row, in place of our usual dignified guardians of the peace.
One of the uses of the Park—too often a misuse—is that of a meeting ground for all kinds of demonstrations. When any body of people—men or women—wish to attract, they call out the crowd to “demonstrate,” and march to Hyde Park. ”

“ Along Fifth avenue, from the Fifty-ninth street corner to the upper end of Central Park, there is not a single house that looks reposeful and habitable. Along Park avenue—but Park avenue, for all its flash of creamy brick, is surely one of the most hideous streets in all the world! ”

“ Although the population is not dense in this neighborhood, it is evidently destined to become so, as the car shops of the O. R. & N. Company are located here, and are likely to be extended so that a great many workmen will be employed. If the suggested river bluff parkway along the east side of the river below the center of the city is carried out, this little park with a view-commanding carriage concourse in it would form a worthy terminus. ”

“ That some actually are so and yet command the admiration of people of taste is an indication of their essential qualities and fundamental differences from parks proper. Few cities have anywhere near as many ornamental squares as they should. It ls particularly desirable that a city should have several of its principal public buildings facing upon a large public square, as the new custom house in New York faces upon the Bowling Green, not occupying it as the postoffice and municipal buildings occupy the City Hall Park. ”

“ How wise that such places as Richmond, Greenwich, and such old parks in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis, are kept up and kept open, that our citizens may occasionally get out of the smoke and noise of the great Babel, and breathe all their freshness, and feel all their influence! Who does not often, in the midst of brick-and-mortar regions, summon up before his imagination this old park or forest scenery? ”

“ Considering that both sides of the boulevard would offer most excellent house frontages, it is obvious that the whole cost of such a parkway ought not to be considered as a matter of luxury, so that even if it should prove a disappointment for many years to come in the way of increasing the value of land fronting upon it to a sufficient degree to equal or more than equal its excess of cost over that of an ordinary street, no serious loss would have been incurred. ”

“ If the city can do nothing else in the way of acquiring parkways, it should at least secure the land needed for the eventual construction of this hillside drive, for in proportion to its cost it would be far more valuable than any other parkway possible to be laid out in the city, because of the views which it would command and the romantic local scenery which could be associated with it, and because it would be so characteristic and so conveniently accessible. ”

“ It is impossible to stand amid the whirl and uproar of New York to-day, and imagine men ploughing, and sowing grain, and carting hay into barns, where the City Hall now stands. The conception of nearly all the city lying below the Park, above it farms to Canal Street, beyond that clearings where men are burning brush and logs to clear away the fallow, and still farther on, towards Central Park, an unbroken wilderness, is so dim and shadowy, that we can hardly fix its outlines. ”

“ The average life of any smart colony is only five years. It will soon be as bad form to live on Park Avenue as it is now to live on Riverside Drive. The present pilgrimage is towards the East River around Sutton Place or Beekman Place. In ten years, First Avenue, which adjoins these localities, will probably be the Park Avenue of its decade. Then Campaspe's mind reverted to a street further up the river she had herself discovered, a delightfully quiet street facing a little park. ”

“ Fifth Avenue had become a nightly torrent of carriages surging upward to the fashionable quarters about the Park, where illuminated windows and outspread awnings betokened the usual routine of hospitality. ”

“ If there were no proper place without going a long distance, a mile or two miles, there would be some reason, perhaps, for entertaining this question; but when I consider the facilities which they may enjoy only the other side of the Park line, with land there cheap and easy to be had, I am astonished that any one can be willing to sacrifice the Park simply to bring them a few rods nearer Pennsylvania Avenue. ”

“ The aspects that might elsewhere have competed were honnêtes and weak, whereas Park Street was honnête and strong—strong as founded on all the moral, material, social solidities, instead of on some of them only ”

“ 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. ”

“ Perhaps you noticed an automobile at the upper corner of the park as you came. One with a white body.”
“And red running gear?” asked the young man, knitting his brows reflectively.
“Yes. I always come in that. Pierre waits for me there. He supposes me to be shopping in the department store across the square. Conceive of the bondage of the life wherein we must deceive even our chauffeurs. Good-night.”
“But it is dark now,” said Mr. Parkenstacker, “and the park is full of rude men. May I not walk———?” ”

“ THE PARKWAY, HENRY FORD AND BILLY THE BEAN MAN
I walked down the Parkway yesterday morning visualizing that splendid emptiness of sunshine as it will appear five or ten years hence, lined with art galleries, museums and libraries, shaded with growing trees, leading from the majestic pinnacle of the City Hall to the finest public estate in America. It is a long way from those open fields of splintered brick and gravel pits, where workmen are now warming their hands over bonfires, to the Peace Conference in Paris. ”

“ If the owners of the greater part of the land through which this boulevard would be carried do not think that the time has arrived for its opening, implying as it would a rise in value of the lands adjoining, with increased taxes, it nevertheless would be wise for them to unite in dedicating the necessary land to the parkway, so that at any time in the future that it might be thought desirable and profitable, its construction could be undertaken. ”

“ Only twenty years ago, Union Square was “out of town;” twenty years hence, the town will have enclosed the Central Park. Let us consider, therefore, what will at that time be satisfactory, for it is then that the design will have to be really judged.
No longer an open suburb, our ground will have around it a continuous high wall of brick, stone, and marble. The adjoining shores will be lined with commercial docks and warehouses; steamboat and ferry landings, railroad stations, hotels, theatres, factories, will be on all sides of it and above it; all which our park must be made to fit. ”

“ In the west, beyond the silhouetted structure of the Elevated and the less distinct profile of buildings on the far side of Central Park, the clouds blazed luridly with their own dread fires—a fitful, sheeted play athwart gigantic curtains, to an accompaniment of dull and intermittent grumbles. ”

“ Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway, in Brooklyn, are instances of liberal and complete boulevards, in which there is a broad central drive devoted exclusively to pleasure driving and a narrower drive on each side intended for access to adjoining private properties as well as for ordinary street traffic and separated from the middle drive by double rows of trees with promenades between them. ”

“ Slowly ascending Fifth Avenue close to the curb and on through Central Park is like no other experience. The vehicle is so low and open that all resemblance to bus or taxi is lost. Everything is seen from a new angle. ”

“ So the beautiful mystery of Central Park was not sent to a medical college nor to the Potter’s Field. The next morning Penelope accompanied Richard in his coupé, and Mrs. Louise Van Brunt, her aunt, who had in her carriage two charitable old lady friends, followed the sombre hearse in its slow journey across the bridge to Brooklyn. In a quiet graveyard on the outskirts of the city the dead girl was lowered into the earth. ”

“ It would always be pleasing in the vistas looking southwest through Park street and West Park street and through the Park squares, to have a pleasure ground with picturesque plantations for the eye to rest upon, rather than to have some crooked arrangement of private buildings. ”

“ Unless a special and intelligent effort is made to secure individuality in the improvement of each of the public squares, parks and boulevards of a city, they are liable to repeat each other too much. The West Side parks of Chicago resemble each other to a regrettable degree. Each has its little, crooked lake, its green house and flower beds, its little lawns, its curving level drives and walks, its bridges and statues, its plantations mainly of the same selection of trees crowded and slim and only partially screening out surrounding houses. ”

“ James’s Park is rarely more than in monotone, like a drawing in sepia, the wider breadths between the Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner are brighter, and there is a little stir in the air of people coming back. ”

“ Them that didn't have oil stoves brought along plenty of blankets, so as not to be upset with the cold and discomforts of sleeping outdoors. By building fires of the shade trees and huddling together in the bridle paths, and burrowing under the grass where the ground was soft enough, the likes of 5,000 head of people successfully battled against the night air in Central Park alone.
"Ye know I live in the elegant furnished apartment house called the Beersheba Flats, over against the elevated portion of the New York Central Railroad. ”

“ She gives them breathing-room in a dozen civic parks, the largest of which both Nature and Art destine to be the noblest popular pleasure-ground of the civilized world, as it is the amplest of all save the Bois de Boulogne. Central Park covers an area of 843 acres, and, though only in the fifth year of its existence, already contains twelve miles of beautifully planned and scientifically constructed carriage-road, seven miles of similar bridle-path, four sub-ways for the passage of trade-vehicles across the Park, with an aggregate length of two miles, and twenty-one miles of walk. ”

“ For anything the Board of Works or any local board has done, there will be lost to London the important right of an extended open space as large as a suburban park, and the continued opportunity for making what might be the longest, finest boulevard in Europe. ”

“ The most expensive large parks, Central Park and Prospect Park, were located without taking advantage of the magnificent natural landscapes of the rivers and bays which distinguish New York and Brooklyn. There are many similar cases. Formerly people built with the backs of their houses upon the rivers and lakes, thus not only excluding the public from continuous access to them but ruining their beauty. Where land along the banks of rivers or along the shores of a lake can, in a city, be fairly well spared from commercial uses, public squares, parks and parkways should be located upon them. ”