Riverside Drive

“ When we reached Riverside Drive and One Hundred and something (this was before the Drive was cut through to Dyckman Street) , the driver stopped the car beside a lonely wood, jumped out and disappeared into the wood. I shall never forget how funny it seemed to us. “Well,” laughed Mr. Harding, “he is an accommodating driver anyway!” In about ten or fifteen minutes the driver returned. “Say, George,” Mr. Harding said, “we want a hotel.” ”

“ With his pockets bulging with stogies and one glowing like a headlight in advance of him he wandered in a sort of coma up Tenth Avenue, crossed to the Riverside Drive, mounted Morningside Heights, descended again through the rustling alleys of Central Park, and found himself at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street just as the dawn was paling the electric lamps to a sickly yellow and the trees were casting strange unwonted shadows in the wrong direction. ”

“ No.—Riverside Drive, an imposing apartment house of Spanish style of architecture, situated in the most select and attractive section of that aristocratic thoroughfare, was justly renowned in the neighborhood for the size and magnificence of its suites and the ultra chic quality of its exclusive, wealthy patrons. No one ever heard of rooms being vacant; people had been on the waiting list for years and they were still waiting. Tenants never dreamed of leaving, once they had been fortunate enough to secure a lease. ”

“ But we'd been down quite a ways and was part way back, headed for Riverside Drive, and was rollin' along merry too, when all of a sudden a fruit faker's wagon looms up out of a side street unexpected, there's a bump and a crash, and there we are, with a spokeless wooden wheel draped jaunty over one mud guard, the asphalt strewed with oranges, and int'rested spectators gatherin' gleeful from all quarters.
Looks like a bad mess too. The old plug of a horse is down, kickin' the stuffin' out of the harness, and a few feet off is the huckster, huddled up in a heap like a bag of meal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The chauffeur evidently had his instructions, for I was hardly within before the machine was speeding toward the Drive. My bachelor apartments were situated on 72nd Street, just off the Park, and I knew we could not cover the distance to the Darwin home on the outskirts of Riverside Drive in less than twenty minutes, even at the rate at which we were traveling.
I had stuffed Ruth's note into my pocket as I left. Mechanically I drew it forth and tore it to shreds, flinging the scraps from the window. Letters are compromising things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A pleasure drive should extend from one end of this valley to the other. The route of this drive has not been studied. At the northern end, however, there is no apparent obstacle to reaching any of the important thoroughfares, such as Penn Avenue or Forbes Street. At the other end there is a good chance to extend a parkway down the river as a riverside drive, [27] connecting at the Glenwood bridge with a proposed boulevard thoroughfare to the down town district. ”

“ They had already explored Fifth Avenue to the lonelier reaches of the upper city, and had swung sadly down through the wooded silences of Central Park, and had wandered by way of Seventy-second Street over to Riverside Drive, and had stopped to stare pensively up at Grant's Tomb, and had swung down Broadway again, bewildered by the changes which had crept over a city altering with every altering season. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He took hold of her shoulders and drew her to him slowly. “You can smell the sea, almost.”
“Just think Billy that we are going to live here, on Riverside Drive. I’ll have to have a day at home ... Mrs. William C. Olafson, 218 Riverside Drive.... I wonder if it is all right to put the address on our visiting cards.” She took his hand and led him through the empty cleanswept rooms that no one had ever lived in. He was a big shambling man with eyes of a washed out blue deepset in a white infantile head. ”

“ Her car might have crashed into some other—into a great steel-girder truck like that that crossed the Avenue. She might even now be lying all crumpled and shattered in a tangle of wreckage.
That taunting white question-feather might be dabbled with red. The face might be upturned to any man's [Pg 8] view and every man's horror. He was almost afraid to follow farther lest his curiosity be more than sated.
His irresolution was solved for him. The stage was turning out of Fifth Avenue, to cross over to Broadway and Riverside Drive. Forbes was not done with this lane. He rose to leave the bus. ”

“ On every cross street to the right one may catch a glimpse of the beautiful Riverside Drive with the smoke from the New York Central's freight engines rising above the trees.
At Fifty-third Street the Sixth Avenue trains diverge to the left for a short distance [Pg 106] and then, turning south once more, carry the traveller through a region heavily overgrown with skeleton advertising signs of woman's apparel and table waters. If the Ninth Avenue route is selected the vista is one of tenement houses and factories. ”

“ When one speaks of Riverside he means the whole settlement that is irrigated, and to live in Riverside may mean to live in town, or it may mean a suburban residence ten miles away. In the latter locality the benefits of the country are happily combined with the luxuries of city life. Street cars run from the center of the business part of town down to the end of the settlement. It is a cheap way to view the settlement to board one of these early cars. You can see as much as any one may care to see, but of course cannot stop and examine. The whole drive is one not to be matched anywhere else. ”

“ For those who would derive comfort from inhaling the pure, fresh air of the morning or evening in a drive, on horse-back or on a bicycle, can find on the avenue and boulevard beautifully graded drives, and a variety of scenes which are ever pleasing to the eye, while the beautiful sun risings and settings, and the deep blue sky above rival in grandeur and sublimity those of far-off Italy. ”

“ There are long summer afternoons when the only movement in Riverside is the cloud of dust drifting above some cow nonchalantly marching down the main street. On week-ends, however, inhabitants of the outlying districts invade Riverside and pre-empt the floor of the town hall, where they stage night-long successions of square dances and modern steps to the strains of "good old mountain music." ”

“ To the west of Central Avenue lay the tide of social fashion culminating two miles distant in the River Drive, a wide avenue of stately private houses, situated where the Nye made a broad bend to the north, and the new district beyond the river, where the mansion of Carleton Howard, the railroad magnate, stood a pioneer among Elysian fields of real estate enterprise, sanctified by immaculate road surfaces and liberal electric light. ”

“ Everywhere in the South magnificent drives are laid out, avenues are planted with shade trees, evergreens and palms, street cars take you everywhere, and the [205] comforts of pedestrians and riders are always assured. The roads are all sprinkled, and the dust is an unknown quantity except in by-lanes and corners, where the sprinkler cannot reach. Riverside sprinkles the whole of her business streets, and her Magnolia avenue effectively and continually for about ten miles down the valley. ”

“ The only customers--or, rather, people--who unfailingly make Grant angry are those who use our driveway as a traffic circle. Several times a day a car from the east will swing into one of our driveways, making us think we have a prospect--only to swing out the other driveway and head back toward the east. Or a young fellow plummeting along the highway from the west will belatedly heed the words of Horace Greeley, and will splash gravel in all directions as he whirls into our driveway. ”

“ A medium length car with a good wheel cut-under would run down the dread Bajada as easily as through the driveways of a park! And the entire distance across Sandoval County, although a tract of desert desolation or bleak sand and hills and cactus, is an easy drive over a smooth road. In one place you go through a great cleft cut through an impeding ridge, but most of the way you can imagine yourself in a land of the earth’s beginning and where white man never was. ”

“ If Pasadena is a big garden with pretty homes scattered all through its shade and flowers, then Riverside is an immense orange grove, having one city-like street, with substantial business blocks and excellent stores, two banks, one in the Evans block, especially fine in all its architecture and arrangements, and the rest is devoted by the land-owners to raising oranges and making them pay. You will see flowers enough to overwhelm a Broadway florist, every sort of cereal, every fruit that grows, in prime condition for the table ten months out of the twelve. ”

“ Running strings of incandescent bulbs draped up into festoons every so often by equidistant arc-lights follow the course of the well-oiled driveway, which in turn follows the course of the river as truly as a path made by a canal horse. A ledge of park, narrow as a terrace, slants to the water's edge, and of summer nights lovers drag their benches into the shadow of trees and turn their backs to the lampposts and to the world. ”

“ Broad Street in Richmond is two or three times as wide as Granby Street, Norfolk's chief shopping street, and for this reason, doubtless, its traffic seems less, though I believe it is in fact greater. A fine street to look upon at night, with its long, even rows of clustered boulevard lights, and its bright windows, Broad Street in the daytime is a disappointment, because, for all its fine spaciousness, it lacks good buildings. ”

“ A drive-way, or street, forty feet in width, reserved from the northerly side of the ground purchased by the Government, serves as an approach to that front, and secures the perfect isolation of the building, with perpetual access of light and air on that side, as well as on the other sides, whatever changes may hereafter be made in the adjoining ground. ”

“ Unless there is some fine outlook to which it is desirable to lead people in carriages, as in the case of The Front, in Buffalo, or some bluff or river bank or lake or other landscape feature which cannot be viewed from carriages in adjoining streets, or unless there is a concert grove at which it is desired to provide for visitors in carriages, or unless the local park be part of a continuous chain of parks and parkways, or unless there is some other good reason, a drive is an undesirable intrusion in a local park. ”

“ By the light of the electric torch they could see the beginning of a driveway, rough and weed-grown, lined with trees of great age and bulk, and an unkempt lawn, strewn with bushes, and beyond, in an open place bare of trees and illuminated faintly by the stars, the shadow of a house, black, silent, and forbidding.
"That's it," whispered the chauffeur. "I was here before. The well is over there." ”

“ And now this chapter will conclude with an account of a very frivolous spirit indeed, for the story of the Riverside ghost must be told. Rarely does one hear of a "spook" with a sense of humour, but that quality, as expressed by a taste for practical joking, was evidently possessed by the intelligence that used to haunt the old house to which we have given the fictitious name of Riverside. Situated in one of the deep and beautiful valleys of South Wales, and belonging originally to the ancient family of Rhys, the house dates back to the time of Henry the Seventh. ”

“ Most places have too many, rather than too few, walks and drives. Small city areas rarely need a driveway entrance, not even to the back door. The back yard in Fig. 39 illustrates this point. The distance from the house to the street on the back is about ninety feet, yet there is no driveway in the place. The coal and provisions are carried in; and, although the deliverymen may complain at first, they very soon accept the inevitable. It is not worth the while to maintain a drive in such a place for the convenience of truckmen and grocers. ”

“ A few years ago the people of New York decided that they must have a new boulevard, where fast horses could be driven without running over people or upsetting the carriages of those who didn't want to drive so fast. They puzzled their heads for some time to find a suitable spot for their new driveway, and it was many months before they finally agreed upon the bank of the Harlem River which runs along the east side of the city. ”