Washington Street

“ Washington was steeped in sunset. The White House, as they passed it, glowed amid its quiet trees. Lafayette Square, with its fountains and statues, its white and pink magnolias, its strolling, chatting crowd, the fronts of the houses, the long vistas of tree-lined avenues, the street cars, the houses, the motors, all the openings and distances of the beautiful, leisurely place—they saw them rosily transfigured under a departing sun, which throughout the day had been weaving the quick spells of a southern spring.
"Jolly weather!" said Roger, looking about him. ”

“ Atlantic Avenue, along the harbour front, was created, and Washington Street, the chief business artery, was largely remade after 1866. It is probable that up to 1875, at least, there had been a larger outlay of labour, material and money, in reducing, levelling and reclaiming territory, and in straightening and widening thoroughfares1 in Boston, than had been expended for the same purposes in all the other chief cities of the United States together. Washington Street, still narrow, is perhaps the most crowded and congested thoroughfare in America. ”

“ To make a Washington street, take one marble temple or [Pg 48] public office, a dozen good houses of brick, and a dozen of wood, and fill in with sheds and fields. Some blight seems to have fallen upon the city. It is the only place we have seen which is not full of growth and vitality. I have even heard its inhabitants tell stories of nightly pig-hunts in the streets, and of the danger of tumbling over a cow on the pavement on a dark night ”

“ Wall Street, each way from the City Hall, and Broad Street as far as the eye could reach, were filled with a sea of upturned faces—silent as if statues of marble instead of living beings—as the oath was administered to their future ruler, and when Chancellor Livingston cried, "'It is done,' long live George Washington, President of the United States!" the air was immediately rent with rapturous shouts, and the roar of cannon. In the evening the city was illuminated with unparalleled splendor. Every public building was in a blaze of light. ”

“ Into it he turned, swung aboard a car as it shot groaning and clanking around the curve from Fifty-ninth Street, and settled down to brood and ponder and consider until it was time for him to swing off the car into the slimy street once more.
Silvery pools of light inlaid the dim expanse of Washington Square. ”

“ SEVENTH STREET is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. ”

“ Washington Street is really the main dividing line between the retail and wholesale parts of the city. The water front is the great wholesale section. Here there is a constant odor of leather in the air, and great heavy wagons laden with hides are continually passing to and from the wharves and stations. When we stop and consider that Boston and the neighboring cities of Brockton and Lynn are among the largest shoe-manufacturing cities in the world, then we do not wonder at the leather we see. ”

“ The beautiful elevation of Washington Street also exhibits a cluster of edifices, of finely varied architectures, from the ornamented cottage to the stately mansion. In their vicinity, the Retreat for the Insane, a noble and spacious building, rears its head, and extends its range of offices and pleasure-grounds. ”

“ GEORGE WASHINGTON, with his right arm upraised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of Union Square, forever signalling the Broadway cars to stop as they round the curve into Fourteenth Street. But the cars buzz on, heedless, as they do at the beck of a private citizen, and the great General must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that rapid transit gloria mundi. ”

“ It isn’t until you cross Washington Street that the town becomes attractive. There are some pleasant, comfortable, old-fashioned dwellings on Washington Street. Then comes Main Street, with its retail stores and principal business blocks, and after that, still traveling south, you reach the newer part of the town that is called The Hill. There are some fine residences there; Mr. Dunlop’s, for instance, which occupies a whole half block opposite the public library and the high school ”

“ 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. ”

“ The other streets run at right angles to one another. Streets and avenues are 90 ft. wide, except Washington Street, which has a width of 120 ft. An excellent system of parks—8 within the city with an aggregate area of 1311 acres, and 3 with an aggregate area of 310 acres just outside the city limits—adds to the beauty of the city, among the most attractive being the Riverside, the St Clair, the University, the Military, the Fair View, the Garfield and the Brookside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Stand on one side of the avenue and you are in the shadow of the great marble structure which houses the forces of law and order. This is the Department of Justice Building, and the corner we’re standing on is the entrance to the F.B.I.
Cross Pennsylvania Avenue and walk into 9th Street, and you are an intruder in the most publicized Skid Row of the three—they call it the Bowery here, to distinguish it from the others. As such thoroughfares go, this is pretty classy-looking. It is wide. All Washington streets are kept clean, so neither rubbish nor drunks litter the pavements—anyway not by day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who that knew old Washington can forget it? This is another Washington. But here they come! Safe from cold and wind, thanks to—I look up. From this window, on Fifteenth street, you can see Pennsylvania avenue past the Treasury building, (whose marble steps are boarded in from the advancing people,) to the Executive Mansion, glittering white through the leafless trees just beyond. Opposite is Lafayette square, the prettiest little park of its size in the United States. ”

“ Other streets, so steep as hardly to be passable, directly assault the face of the hill, mounting abruptly to Washington Street, which runs on a flat terrace at about the height of the top of the station roof, and exposes to the view of the newly arrived traveler the unpainted wooden backs of a number of frame buildings which, though they are but two or three stories high in front, reach in some cases a height of five or six stories at the rear, owing to the steepness of the hillside to which they cling. ”

“ Repeating 253 W. 4th Street over and over he boarded an uptown car on Broadway. Walking west along 4th he skirted Washington Square. The trees spread branches of brittle purple into a dovecolored sky; the largewindowed houses opposite glowed very pink, nonchalant, prosperous. The very place for a lawyer with a large conservative practice to make his residence. We’ll just see about that. He crossed Sixth Avenue and followed the street into the dingy West Side, where there was a smell of stables and the sidewalks were littered with scraps of garbage and crawling children. ”

“ But, more than any other, NW is the Tenderloin, in some ways more blatantly open than ever was New York’s infamous Satan’s Circus or Chicago’s 22nd Street.
Of all places, you would think Washington would be the last location a practical, professional prostitute would pick to pitch her camp. With so many more women than men, so many dames lonesome and far from home, on the eager upbeat for a meal, a drink or even a kind word, you’d figure mathematically, psychologically and pathologically that this would be a ghost town for the trollops. ”

“ It's at the foot of Fifth Avenue, he says, which sounds very fashionable to me, but he explains it is too far 'down town.'”
“Yes, Fifth Avenue is the great street, I understand,” said Stefan, “and my dealer's address is on Fourth, so he's in a very good neighborhood. I don't know that I should like Washington Square—it sounds so patriotic.”
“Fanatic!” laughed Mary. “Well, whether we go there or not, it's evident we must get back before October the first, and it's now September the twenty-fourth.” ”

“ Washington’s Chinatown is neither as large as Frisco’s, as colorful as New York’s, nor as odoriferous as Boston’s. You will see no ancient, pajama-clad women on its streets, and only a few young slant-eyed Sadies.
Chinatown is a mere three or four blocks on H Street, beginning in a block about 8th and extending barely to 5th. It’s almost all neon-lighted restaurants, with the shops of a few wholesale merchants and traders sandwiched in between. H is a typical wide Washington street with set-back buildings. ”

“ The L’Enfant plan seemed either forgotten or entirely too large for the National Capital. In the city of Washington not a street was lighted up to 1860 excepting Pennsylvania Avenue. Pigs roamed the principal thoroughfares. Pavements, save for a few patches here and there, were altogether lacking. An open sewer carried off common refuse, and the police and fire departments might have sufficed for a small village rather than for a nation’s capital. ”

“ William Lovering, Architect and General Builder—Begs leave to inform his friends and the public, that he has removed from the City of Washington to Gay Street, the next street above the Union Tavern in George Town, where he palns to estimate all manner of buildings, either with materials and labor, or labor only. Specimens of buildings suitable for the obtuse or acute angles of the streets in the City of Washington may be seen at his home. ”

“ Washington’s son. Here Nellie Custis, Washington’s adopted daughter, was born. A beautiful view of the river and a panorama of Washington and the north shore is seen from this point. Also here the Potomac is being dredged, making new land for Washington National Airport, to be the finest in the United States. Work will be completed in 1941.
MOUNT VERNON MEMORIAL HIGHWAY, NORTH OF LITTLE HUNTING CREEK
Passing on to Alexandria the route enters the city by Washington Street and passes directly by Christ Church, where the Washington pew may still be seen. ”

“ But a new era began; trade increased, and the city began to grow rapidly. The Continental Congress was meeting in the old city hall, which had been used by the British as a prison and was in a dilapidated condition. As Washington was to be inaugurated in New York, the people thought that city would become the seat of government, so the city hall was torn down and a new building erected on the site where the subtreasury building on Wall Street now stands. ”

“ But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours.
Now and again, in the novels of the fifties and sixties, there are glimpses of the stretch from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, but the greater Fifth Avenue, as a factor in fiction, dates from about the time when Daisy Miller became a type. ”

“ Not all girls who come to Washington come to work for the government. Not all are high school graduates. Washington draws more street-walkers, who are strictly out for business, than any other town. They set out from the nearby hills of West Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, and they are purposeful as to their objectives. Many aren’t bad-looking. So the question again arises, why didn’t they go to New York or Hollywood and try for bigger stakes where flexible morals pay off better and the field for a killing is bigger? ”

“ A drive through Chestnut Street with a hurried glance at the fine "stores," and we reached the station in time for the afternoon train to Washington.
The towns of America, with their even square blocks so regularly and precisely intersected at right angles leading to the Capitol, City Hall, or State House, whichever is the presiding genius, are apt to become wearisome in the [38] extreme. How delightedly then we compared Washington to these,—the beautiful "city of distances." ”