River Street

“ A moment more and it is Bellevue street, with its rows of hideous whited houses. And then again it is a river, curving swiftly and grandly between its castled rocks, or a bridge of many arches in the twilight, and the lights coming out one by one in the old walled town, and the road and river travelling one knows not where, into regions just falling asleep in the quiet dusk. Or there is a holiday crowd, a moonlit ferry, steep wooded hills, and songs and laughter which echo in the streets and float across the tide. ”

“ They set out up the long reach of Water Street, their steel caulks biting deep into the pitted board-walks.
For nearly a mile the street was flanked solely by lumber-yards, small mills, and factories. Then came a strip of unimproved land, followed immediately by the wooden, ramshackle structures of Hell's Half-Mile.
In the old days every town of any size had its Hell's Half-Mile, or the equivalent. Saginaw boasted of its Catacombs; Muskegon, Alpena, Port Huron, Ludington, had their “Pens,” “White Rows,” “River Streets,” “Kilyubbin,” and so forth. ”

“ To one who knows South Street as merely a river-front street whose glory of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horsecar now ambles slowly uptown, and trucks and carts all day long are in a perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day, and peculiarly deserted and vicious by night. ”

“ But I read Aidee's books. It's a good thing to do that much.”
The observer of decades left the garrulous citizen, and went down Lower Bank Street. He noted the shapeless, indifferent mass and contour of the buildings on the river-front, the litter of the wharves, the lounging black barges beside them, the rumble of traffic on the bridge and in distant streets, the dusky, gliding river lapping the stone piers and wooden piles, and going on forever while men come and go. He thought how the stone piers would sometime waste and fall, and the Muscadine would still go on, turbid and unperturbed. ”

“ Every wanderer must come this way at least once in his life. We are the hub whence all roads go to the circumference. A ship does not go down but we hear the cry of distress, and the house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and is lost, casting its people adrift on the blind tides.
Think of some of our street names—Malabar Street, Amoy Place, Nankin Street, Pekin Street, Canton Street. ”

“ Myndert Gerrit looked longest at Middle Point, now a low table of land with water on both sides. A street—or what was to be a street—ran down its middle, from the water to where, at the mainland, it joined the great road that stretched away through the woods to the river—to the great world—to trade and life and fortune. ”

“ The water-spout which burst over the town, on the occasion alluded to, was of such immense magnitude, that the deluge of waters it discharged filled the main street in an instant from side to side, to the depth of from four to five feet. But it did not remain long here. The inclination of the street gave it motion, and away it swept with the force and impetuosity of a swollen river, carrying everything before it; and in its furious career razing no fewer than fifteen houses to their foundations. ”

“ Wouldn't some of the little people who live in that crowded part of the city to-day be surprised to know, that only a hundred years ago ponds and hills took the place of the level city streets, and that a boy could start way over east of Broadway, skate under the arch at Canal street, and then strike out across the broad Lispenard meadows straight to the North River? ”

“ But streets, storehouses, temples, theatres, will in vain be dug out if the ravenous river god is to gulp them down as soon as they are well dug out. At the present moment one street, with its pavement laid bare, with its buildings still standing on each side, leads 101 in a perilous manner into the stream. ”

“ Near the old courthouse, which rears itself so handsomely at the summit of a series of terraces leading up from the street, are a number of old sand roads which must be to-day almost as they were in the heyday of the river's glory, when the region in which the courthouse stands was the principal part of the city—the days of heavy drinking and gambling, dueling, slave markets, and steamboat races. These streets are not the streets of a city, but of a small town. ”

“ There is not even a city wall remaining from the past, nor so much as a broad outer street, delimiting what may still be noble and permanent from these hopeless suburbs. Little scraps of what were once happy and united villages still stand like islands in this flood of mean brick. For the most part they are to be distinguished no longer save by the narrowness and crookedness of their streets, [Pg 34] and when at last one comes to the inner part, where there is something of history and of meaning and of an inherited culture, one comes upon it without introduction and without grace. ”

“ In a sense the fronts are on West Street, but all original characteristics have there been bedizenedly lost, and the ancient aspect is on Weehawken Street.
These were fishermen's houses in ancient days, waterside houses; for West Street is filled-in ground, and the broad expanse of shipping space out beyond the street is made land. When these houses were built, the North River reached their doors, and, so tradition has it, fishermen actually rowed their boats and drew their shad-seines beneath this Clam Broth House. ”

“ If, led by inclination or compelled by necessity, you go into the street, you find the space between the sidewalks transformed into a miniature river. In some of the streets the pavements are more than three feet high, and pedestrians walk on them as on the tow-path of a canal, passing from one side of the torrent to the other on small wooden crossings. ”

“ All the lower portion of it abutting on to the wharf was, we are told, reclaimed from swamp and mud only a very few years ago. The street is a fine one, leading straight away from the river, curving imperceptibly to the right, and gradually ascending for about a mile, until it branches off into other streets and roads. Down at the lower end of the street most of the buildings are of brick and stone ”

“ Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street, and part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way, and, coming round, found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to which I went for a draught of the river-water, and, being filled with one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther. ”

“ The streets are broad, and some of them are paved; in some parts they are lined with trees; the long streets are almost parallel to the river, and the others intersect them at right angles. The street which goes between the two churches, is five times broader than the others, and serves as a market-place. The streets upon the whole are very dirty, because the people leave their cattle in them, during the summer nights. There are two market-places in the town, to which the country people resort twice a week. ”

“ Water street which runs about E. by N. parallel to the Scioto, is half a mile long, and contains ninety houses. It is eighty-four feet wide, and would be a fine street, had not the river floods caved in the bank in one place near the middle, almost into the centre of it. There is now a lottery on foot, to raise money for securing the bank against any further encroachments of the river. Main street, parallel to Water street, is one hundred feet wide, as is Market street which crosses both at right angles, and in which is the market-house, a neat brick building eighty feet long. ”

“ On either bank below the castle they are built down into the bed of the river, and as, in Scott’s words, the Tees here “flows in a deep trench of solid rock,” the houses by the riverside descend as much below the level of the street as they rise above it. Yet despite the stoutness and the elaboration of these buildings, the riverside streets present that appearance of misery and squalor which seems inevitable in every manufacturing town, however limited may be the field of its industry. ”

“ Riverside Drive or Park, skirting the hills fronting on the Hudson from Seventy-second Street to One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street, affords beautiful views of the river and is one of the most striking roads of which any city can boast. ”

“ The full-page illustration is from a steel engraving published in the New York Mirror in 1832, a little more than half a century ago—the artist looking towards the East River, with the Phoenix Bank on his right and the Winthrop and Wilkes homesteads on his left. A writer of same date mournfully moralizes over the "wonderful mutations and alterations within the course of a century," saying: "This is the street which contains most of the floating capital of the city; and indeed there is little specie to be found anywhere else. ”

“ The Oriental Hotel, the banks, the shipping offices, the business houses, and all the legations save only the [221] American, are clustered on or near the river in a low-lying and unattractive quarter of the town. But follow the long, dingy, squalid highway known as the New Road, a thoroughfare lined with third-rate Chinese shops and thronged with rickshaws, carriages, bicycles, motors, street-cars, and Asiatics of every religion and complexion, and you will come at length into a portion of the city as different from the mercantile district as Riverside Drive is from the Bowery. ”

“ Fleet Street is irregular in shape, the houses being nowhere in line; the courts of Whitefriars are still remaining. The Strand has all its great houses facing the river; their backs open upon a broad street, with a line of mean houses on the north side. On the south of the river there is a line of houses on the High Street, a line of houses along the river bank on either side, and another one running near Bermondsey Abbey. ”

“ The street from this point, which terminates at the Delaware River, making a total of fourteen squares, is full of wholesale houses. There are times during the day when it is packed with teams and pedestrians, presenting an interesting sight for a stranger. ”

“ Water was also carted from the river, and I helped with others to push the carts up Water-street. The steep ascent of this street in its badly paved condition made this work extremely laborious. But everybody helped and did what they could, and those who did nothing made up for deeds by words and shouted and bawled and told the others what they ought to do.
Fortunately, only one life was lost, that of a fool-hardy young man who would press forward to see the fire better—he rushed up to the High-street door and a piece of timber fell on him. ”

“ In a waterfront city the first line of growth is normally along the shore, both because additional docks and buildings opposite them start an axis of travel parallel to the waterfront, and also because the bank of a river or harbor furnishes a natural highway for the first settlersithe Strand in London being the typical first street of a waterfront city. ”

“ The Poet of the Revolution IN the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan to the Brooklyn shore ”

“ A project, widely and favorably considered in 1825, but which came to nothing, advocated the extension of Canal Street, as a canal, from river to river. The street took its name naturally from the little stream which was called a canal. When the street was filled in and improved, the stream was continued through a sewer leading from Centre Street. The locality at the foot of the street has received the local title of "Suicide Slip" because of the number of persons in recent years who have ended their lives by jumping into Hudson River at that point. ”

“ Every one should see New York because it is the largest city in the world, and because it combines the magnificence, the wonder, the beauty, the sordidness, and the shame of a great metropolis; every one should see San Francisco because it is so vivid, so alive, so golden; every one should see Washington, the clean, white splendor of which is like the embodiment of a national dream; every one should see the old gray granite city of Quebec, piled on its hill above the river like some fortified town in France ”

“ Our super-crook then heads his machine down Market street at a good pace and turns up Church street, headed for the Pioneer Mills. But he does not turn along Lincoln avenue. Instead, he shoots past the cemetery and on to the covered bridge across the Rushing river. This was a short cut to the mills, but recently the bridge has been condemned and there is no traffic on it at all. ”

“ Those which run longitudinally, or from north to south are seven, exclusive of a little one, which runs along the river, to the south of the market, and is called Water-street. The lanes which go across, and were intended to reach from the Delaware to the Skulkill, are eight in number. They do not go quite from east to west, but deviate a little from that direction. All the streets except two which are nearest to the river, run in a straight line, and make right angles at the intersections. Some are paved, others are not ”