Union Street

“ But a few months ago, Union Square was the extreme limit of civilizaion will now find that your acquaintances are rapidly moving above Fourteenth street. Elegant and substantial houses are going up in Fifty-first street ”

“ In watching these sewing men and sewing women streaming through the Union office on Tenth Street—an office hastily improvised in an old dwelling-house in a large room, evidently formerly a bedroom, and still papered with a delicate design of white and blue stripes, and a border of garlands of rosebuds—it seemed to an onlooker that almost no economic procession could ever before have comprised elements so very catholic and various. ”

“ Union Street is one of the most imposing thoroughfares in the British Isles. From Castle Street it runs W. S. W. for nearly a mile, is 70 ft. wide, and contains the principal shops and most of the modern public buildings, all of granite. Part of the street crosses the Denburn ravine (utilized for the line of the Great North of Scotland railway) by a fine granite arch of 132 ft. ”

“ The well-versed metropolitan knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a certificate of good citizenship.
He may know all this and yet not guess how Wall Street, in the West End, appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk. What would the sophisticated sight-seer say about Union Place, off Wall Street, where my new home waited for me? He would say that it is no place at all, but a short box of an alley. ”

“ The Union, in 1855, moved from Broadway near Fourth Street into a house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. That home, which the Union occupied until fifteen or twenty years ago, was described as "a superb structure which cost three hundred thousand dollars." It was the first building erected in the city solely for club purposes. Almost to the day of its demolition, although the neighbourhood about it was changing rapidly, the old house wore an aspect of dignity. To the corner the habitués of other years seldom come today. ”

“ Union Square is reached at Fourteenth street. It is oval in form, with beautiful green turf, trees and walks, and contains a fine fountain in the centre, a colossal bronze statue of Washington on a granite pedestal, and statues of Hamilton and Lafayette. Along its northern [Pg 301] end is a wide plaza for military parades and popular assemblies. Union Square was once a fashionable residence quarter, but it is now occupied almost wholly by business. ”

“ There are porters and watermen, &c. provided by the office, who assist in removing of goods; these wearing the societies livery and badge, and having given security for their fidelity, may be trusted in case of danger. Extracted from a copy [234] of the proposals, and an abstract of the deed of settlement received at the office in October 1758.
Union square, in the Minories.
Union stairs, Wapping.
Union street, 1. King street, Westminster: 2. New Bond street.
Upholders, or Upholsterers, a fraternity incorporated by letters patent granted by King Charles I. in the year 1627. ”

“ Farther up the Avenue, on the northeast corner of Fifty-first Street, is the Union Club, which moved there after relinquishing the house it held so long at the corner of Twenty-first Street. Then, at the north-west corner of Fifty-fourth Street, is the University Club, to the mind of Mr. Arnold Bennett, the finest of all the fine buildings that line the Avenue. "The residential blocks to the north of Fifty-ninth Street," he wrote in the book that on this side of the North Atlantic was known as "Your United States," "fall short of their pretensions in beauty and interest. ”

“ There is a flux among the workers, the union officials, and the employers themselves. Among women, the more or less ephemeral character of much of their work, their frequent change of occupation, and marriage, all operate against permanency. The girl who knocked at our door that night, to invite us to our first trades union meeting, is now in a profession.
Later, when we moved to Henry Street, Minnie, who lived in the next block, enlisted our sympathy in her efforts to organize the girls in her trade. ”

“ This animation was, however, of short duration, for before the packet had whistled for the next landing, the Cove had once more settled back into slumber.
Main Street began with a shabby, unpainted school-house, and following dramatic sequence, ended abruptly in the graveyard. Two cross-streets, which had started out with laudable ideas of [p18] independence, lost courage at Main Street and sought strength in union; but the experiment was not successful, and a cow-path was the result. ”

“ St. Giles’
Union square—r s Union st., by Coach and Horses
Union street (Union pl.) —third turn to the r off Chapel Field rd. fr. St. Giles’ gates
Union terrace—l s Union st., Union pl.
Upper Market—row of houses behind upper side of Market-place
Upper walk—upper side of Market pl.
Unthank’s road—out of St. Giles’ gates to the l of the jail
Valentine street—l s Dereham rd., first st. past St. Benedict’s gates
Vauxhall street—first turn r s Chapel Field rd. fr. top of St. Giles’
Vauxhall terrace—r s Vauxhall st., op. Julian st.
Victoria place—r s top of Union st., op. Brunswick rd. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Frequent and prolonged conferences at the settlement with Minnie and Lottie, her equally [206] intelligent companion, and with many others, inevitably led to some action on our part; and long anticipating the Women’s Trades Union League, we took the initiative in organizing a union at the time of a strike in the cloak trade. The eloquence of the girl leaders, the charm of our back yard as a meeting-place, and possibly our own conviction that only through organization could wages be raised and shop conditions improved, finally prevailed, and the union was organized. ”

“ The business center of New York refused to spread. Wall Street, the financial heart of the metropolis, is only four blocks from the Battery, the City Hall three quarters of a mile. Two miles north, at Union Square and Broadway, is the center of the publishing business. A half mile farther, at Broadway and 23d, the famous "flat-iron" building and the tower of Madison Square Garden dominate the region of hotels and theaters. ”

“ And for this fresh land, the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley, the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the house had seen—tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps and rattling sabers. ”

“ The blind themselves are not so blind as those who, seeing with the physical eye, lack the eye of imagination.
Residence streets like Chase and Biddle, in the blocks near where they cross Charles Street, midway on its course between the Union Station and Mount Vernon Place, are at night, even more than by day, full of the suggestion of comfortable and settled domesticity. Their brick houses, standing wall to wall and close to the sidewalk, speak of honorable age, and, in some cases of a fine and ancient dignity. ”

“ The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the South. Southerners love it as one loves a pressed flower from a mother's bridal wreath. When the Eleventh Cavalry rode from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Winchester, Virginia, a few years since, they saw many Confederate flags, but only one Union flag, and that in the hands of a negro child. ”

“ A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt.
V
The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A majority of these early risers in the neighborhood of which I may call my "beat" carry with them unmistakable evidences of the American type. I have seen so little of that foreign element that is popularly supposed to be the real working class of the great metropolis, that I have often been inclined to doubt statistics. The ground that my morning rambles cover extends from Twenty-third Street to Washington Park, and laterally from Sixth Avenue to Broadway. ”

“ Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Take a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air--God help us for pitiful mockery!--from this slit between brick walls. There are no windows in the wall on the other side; it is perfectly blank. The fire-escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it; but the rays of the sun, rising, setting, or at high noon, never do. It never shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Uptown life seemed on its surface to be lighter, and the curse of Adam to rest more easily on the shoulders of his children.
Of Fifth Avenue this was especially true. It was not a canyon of brick and stone in those days. Trade had just begun its invasion and had gained a foothold only in the few blocks above and below Twenty-third Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”