Russell Square

“ And let not those whose eyes have been accustomed to the aristocratic gravity of Grosvenor Square and Hanover Square, the dowager barrenness and frigidity of Fitzroy Square, or the gravel walks and garden seats of the Squares of Russell and Euston, suppose that the affections of Tim Linkinwater, or the inferior lovers of this particular locality, had been awakened and kept alive by any refreshing associations with leaves however dingy, or grass, however bare and thin. The City square has no inclosure, save the lamp-post in the middle, and no grass but the weeds which spring up round its base. ”

“ The squares have a look of seclusion, of shady walks, and retired leisure, which there is nothing to rival either in Belgravia or Mayfair. It is, or was—for it is many years since the present writer has passed over their broad pavements,{14} or stood under the large, benignant, and stately shadow of the trees in Russell Square—a region apart, above fashion, a sober heart and centre of an older and steadier London, such as is not represented in the Row, and takes little part in the rabble and rout of fashion, the decent town of earlier days. ”

“ Similarly, the human but unregenerate landowners of fashionable London say, as they survey their possessions, "This Square belongs to me," "That place in the shade is Mine," while the August sun beats down on the malodorous street, and tottering paupers peer wistfully at the benches under the plane trees, and street-boys flatten their noses against the iron railings and madly yearn for cricket-pitches so smooth and green. ”

“ There is an air of quaint simplicity and old-fashioned quiet about Georgetown, refreshingly antagonistic to the bustle and tumult of most American cities, and one can, without much stretch of imagination, fancy the old loyal burghers in cocked hats, small-swords, and long, square-cut sober suits, stalking solemnly down its streets, rejoicing in the progress of the city which recalled the name of the King and the old country, or hastening down to the river’s side to hear the tidings brought from home by the Bristol bark that has just anchored in the stream. ”

“ Beside the parks and gardens, London has an infinity of squares, commons, and crescents, which are surrounded by private residences and inclosed by railings and walls—such as Trafalgar Square (public) , Bedford, Cavendish, St. George's, Grosvenor, Leicester, Soho, Belgrave, Euston, Finsbury, Fitzroy, Portman, Russell, Wellclose, Hanover, Brunswick, Eaton, Berkeley, Golden, Mecklenburg, Red Lion, Tavistock, and a great number of other squares which I do not now call to mind. ”

“ You can see for yourselves how ridiculously light the load is when you figure it down to square inches. Why, many a fat woman who picks her way across a muddy street on her French heels, exceeds the limit of the building code for pressure on the earth. ”

“ Paternoster Square has its centre packed with buildings, and for aught I know there is nothing to prevent the occupation in a similar way of the centres of Finsbury Square and Circus, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Gardens of the Temple and Gray’s Inn, of Russell and Bloomsbury Square, and, in short, of every inch of green that can be turned into money. ”

“ The Square itself, once a wide-open common where in 1683 Lord Russell was executed for a crime he did not commit, has boasted a fence since 1735, and to-day is one of the largest and best-shaded squares in London, due, no doubt, to the fines and penalties heaped upon the heads of the offender who violated the rules governing its seclusion, as is proved by a proclamation dated 1805, a facsimile of which is herewith reproduced. ”

“ Old Hardwick would never permit an Allied computer to hit the market that was not the absolute master of square roots. If Lovegear wanted to work on Pascal on his own time it was fine with the boss.
Ronald Lovegear consulted his watch. He wondered if his wife would be on time. He had told Corinne twice over the phone to bring the station wagon to meet him. But she had been so forgetful lately. It was probably the new house; six rooms to keep up without a maid was quite a chore. ”

“ The building regulations of this city do not allow a weight of more than fifteen tons per square foot on the foundations. A foolish regulation, in my estimation, based on the idea that concrete would crush under a heavier load than that; but the kind of concrete we have nowadays, thoroughly reinforced with steel, will stand a far greater pressure. ”

“ That is n’t very much when you consider the size of the building. If you could throw the finished building into the ocean, it would float, provided the doors and windows did not leak, and, what is more, fully five sixths of the building would project out of water. Oh, we have n’t reached the height limit by any means. Somebody has figured out just how tall a building could be erected on a plot 200 feet square without violating the building code. He estimated that the building would be 150 stories high, reaching 2000 feet in the air; and it would weigh 516,500 tons. ”

“ She spent most of the day shopping for week-end necessities. On an irrational last-minute impulse—perhaps an unconscious surrender to the machine age—she dug in the grocery deep freeze and brought out a couple of purple steaks. ”

“ Later in her kitchen, humming a little tune under her breath, Corinne deftly maneuvered a paring knife to transform the pumpkin into a very reasonable facsimile of a man's head. She placed the pumpkin over the tiny shaft between Pascal's box-shaped shoulders and stepped back.
She smiled at the moon-faced idiot grinning back at her. He was complete, and not bad-looking! But just before she touched the red button once and the blue button twice—which sent Pascal stumbling out to the backyard to finish weeding the circle of pansies before dinner—she wondered about the gash that was his mouth. ”

“ There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington Square, as it was when the city of New York bought it for a Potter's Field. ”

“ Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway. Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills. ”

“ All the streets run at right angles to one another, so that a short cut, the joy of the accomplished Londoner, is impossible. It is a chess-board on which the bishop’s move is unknown. Nothing diagonal can be done. The city is ruled like the page of a ledger, from top to bottom with streets, from side to side with avenues. It is all divided into squares. When you are first told this, a vision arises of the possibility of cutting across these squares from corner to corner. Not a bit of it: a square at Philadelphia means a solid block of houses, not an open space enclosed by buildings. ”

“ It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,—all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. ”

“ Washington Square we suspect of playing at life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it. We have little in common.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense urban, that the Bonnie Lassie, whose artistic deviations often take her far afield, met Barbran. ”

“ With complete confidence Corinne went into the kitchen to do the dishes. Not until she was elbow deep in suds did she recall her dreams about the octopus. She looked over her shoulder, and the curious, unwanted feeling came again.
The following afternoon—after Ronald had cancelled their Sunday drive into the country—Pascal, with constant exhortations by Ronald at the black box, succeeded in vacuum cleaning the entire living room. Ronald was ecstatic.
"Now do you understand?" he asked Corinne. "A mechanical servant! Think of it! Of course mass production may be years away, but ..." ”

“ They might want Pascal back any day. For the next week or two I shall want to devote most of my time ..."
"Pascal?"
"Yes. The machine—the computer." He smiled at her ignorance. "We usually name the expensive jobs. You see, a computer of this nature is really the heart and soul of the mechanical man we will construct."
Corinne didn't see, but in a few minutes she strolled toward the den, balancing her coffee in both hands. ”

“ She lowered her voice: "With Pascal."
But Ronald wasn't listening. He retired to his den to finish the plans for the mass production of competent mechanical men. One for every home in America.... He fell asleep with the thought.
Corinne and Pascal spent the next two weeks going through pretty much the same routine. He, methodically jolting through the household chores; she, walking aimlessly from room to room, smoking too many cigarettes. She began to think of Pascal as a boarder. ”

“ Madison Square may be regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall "French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded city where the land surface is so scarce. ”

“ At Twenty-third street, Broadway runs diagonally across Fifth avenue, touching the southwestern corner of Madison Square—not so very long since the most genteel locality in New York, but now, like Union Square, becoming occupied by hotels and business houses.
Fifth Avenue, the most splendid avenue in America, makes a beginning at Washington Square, a lovely public park embowered in trees, which was once Potters' Field, the pauper burying ground, and where one hundred thousand bodies lie buried. New York University and Dr. Hutton's Church face the square on the east. ”

“ Three fine squares alone break the monotony of all these parallelograms of streets: Washington Square, Union Square, and Madison Square.
On the north, Central Park, with its fine avenues, its hillocks, its valleys, its lakes, and its magnificent terrace over the Hudson, is a very lovely pleasure ground. It is the only place where one can see trees, turf, and flowers. New York does not possess a single garden, public or private, if one excepts the three squares I named just now.
That which strikes the visitor to New York is not the city itself, but the feverish activity that reigns there. ”

“ After this, scarcely a break in the line of dazzling shops, until we reach the vicinity of Union Square, a pretty oval park, with a noble fountain in the midst, and lofty and handsome houses all round, situated on perhaps the highest ground on this part of the island. Half a mile beyond is Madison Square, a green expanse, about which wealthy citizens are now building elegant residences of brown freestone, with some attempt at architectural display. ”

“ It was their type of house that was accepted for the neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings. ”

“ In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. ”

“ Their farthest uptown terminal was at Fourteenth Street, so they were not much help to suburbanites!
No single article, or chapter, can even attempt to encompass the complete story of Washington Square. Covering the entire period of the city's history, passing through startling changes and transformations, the scene of great happenings, the background of illustrious or curious lives,—it is probably more typical of the vertiginous development of New York than any single section. ”