Praed Street

“ He had been standing, at about half-past nine on the previous Sunday evening, on the pavement opposite the Express Train. There had been complaints of disorderliness in Praed Street at closing time. There had been a large number of people passing along the pavement, and the sudden surge of twenty or thirty men from the door of the public house caused a few moments confusion. He heard a lot of shouting, then saw a man fall on the pavement. A group immediately gathered round the fallen man and hid him from sight until he pushed them aside. ”

“ From the most rapt spiritualist to the man who refuses to walk under a ladder, the world is full of people who allow superstition to play an important part in their lives. In the neighbourhood of Praed Street fortune tellers and interpreters of dreams are superstition’s most popular ministers, though it may come as a surprise to many that a brass plate nailed to the door of a house in the Harrow Road advertises the existence of the British College of Astrology. ”

“ Whyland looked at it, and satisfied himself that it showed no signs of having been forced. “What about the bedroom windows?” he asked.
“Both Dad’s and mine were open at the top,” replied Ted. “But nobody could have got in through them, unless they had put up a ladder in the middle of Praed Street.”
“Even the black sailor isn’t likely to have done that,” observed Whyland sarcastically. “Well, Mr. Copperdock, the best advice I can give you is not to go about alone at night too much. I’ll have a man watch outside the premises for a bit, if that’s any comfort to you. ”

“ The April sun lit up the room with a pale radiance, lending an air of Spring even to this dignified but rather gloomy house in Westbourne Terrace.
Dr. Priestley was thus engaged when the door opened and his secretary, Harold Merefield, came into the room. There was an air of heaviness about both men, the old and the young, as though the Spring had not yet touched them, and Winter held them still in its grip. One might have guessed that some absorbing work had monopolized their energies, leaving them no leisure for anything but the utmost concentration. ”

“ The street they walked up began from the wharf with two-storied respectable buildings—the Bank, the Post-Office, the police-magistrate's residence, some dwelling houses, within palings enclosing gardens—clumps of bananas, pawpaw apple trees, a few flower beds, bushes of flaunting red poinsettia, and so forth. There were stores, public houses, meaner shanties straggling along a dusty road that lost itself in vistas of lank gum trees.
The Postmaster hoped that Mr McKeith's lady would not find the hotel too rowdy. ”

“ It was not until shortly after eight o’clock on Monday morning that Inspector Whyland, who had arrived early at the police station, received the startling intelligence that there was a dead man lying in the cellar of Number 407, Praed Street. He immediately jumped into a taxi, and was met in the door-way of the empty house by a man who introduced himself as Mr. Houlder, the builder who was carrying out certain alterations for the new tenant, Mr. ”

“ When she got out at Fig Tree Mount, he took her across the sandy street to the nearest and largest of the public houses which had 'Station Hotel' printed on it in big blue letters—a glaring, crude, zinc-roofed box with a dirty veranda that seemed a receptacle for rubbish and a lounge for kangaroo dogs, to say nothing of drunken men. The dogs took no notice of the male loungers, but started a vigorous barking at the sight of a lady. There was the usual bar at one end, the usual noise going on inside, and the usual groups of bush loafers outside. ”

“ He stood at the corner of Lisson Grove for a moment, eyeing the buses as they passed him. Through their streaming window panes he could see that they were all full, a row of dejected looking passengers standing in each one of them. There was nothing for it, he would have to walk. ”

“ The world’s cold chains have bound me;
And darker shades are on my brow,
And sadder scenes around me;{221}
In Parliament I fill my seat,
With many other noodles;
And lay my head in Jermyn Street
And sip my hock at Boodle’s.
But often when the cares of life
Have sent my temples aching,
When visions haunt me of a wife,
When duns await my waking,
When Lady Jane is in a pet,
Or Hoby in a hurry,
When Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry,—
For hours and hours I think and talk
Of each remembered hobby;
I long to lounge in Poet’s walk,
To shiver in the Lobby ”

“ He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of "George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. ”

“ These images are subject, I confess, to a soft confusion—which is somehow consecrated, none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on glancing. The very flush of the uneven bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage—I see it all as from under trees; the form of Steuben Street, which crossed our view, as steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Jacques, the Rue de la Harpe, the Rue des Grès, narrow, steep, dilapidated though they might be, were in truth the leading thoroughfares--the Boulevards, so to speak--of the Student Quartier. In most of the side alleys, however, some of which dated back as far, and farther, than the fifteenth century, there was no footway for passengers, and barely space for one wheeled vehicle at a time. A filthy gutter invariably flowed down the middle of the street. ”

“ You must know, reader, that King street is our Boulevard of fashion; and though not the handsomest street in the world, nor the widest, nor the best paved, nor the most celebrated for fine edifices, we so cherish its age and dignity that we would not for the world change its provincial name, or molest one of the hundred old tottering buildings that daily threaten a dissolution upon its pavement, or permit a wench of doubtful blood to show her head on the "north sidewalk" during promenade hours. We are, you see, curiously nice in matters of color, and we should be. ”

“ We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is a fair, in fact; the pavement and the roadway are crowded with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the cheap-finery stalls ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is the central High Street, a jumble of old half-timbered houses and staring modern red-brick buildings, and sprouted from it a series of lateral roads, lanes and alleys, dwindling in importance to the High Street tip, and each petering out into the sweet country vagueness of hedges and fields. ”

“ Each little suburb has its own corporation, and its own municipal government, while even its mayor and aldermen may do daily business in the large city below it.
In the city itself Pearl street is noted for its wholesale [Pg 129] trade, and for the uniform elegance of its buildings. Third street, between Main and Vine, contains the banking, brokering, and insurance offices. Fourth street is the fashionable promenade and business street. Freeman street, in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park, is also a favorite promenade. Both the East and West Ends contain many fine residences. ”

“ Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities beyond the sea. ”

“ But for the purposes of fiction there has never been one just like the establishment that occupied a corner at the junction of the Avenue and Fourteenth Street. It was a more limited town in those days. ”