Arrondissement

“ Population.—Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements. Only the first twelve belonged to it previous to 1860; the others correspond to the old suburban communes then annexed. The first four arrondissements occupy the space on the right of the river, extending from the Place de la Concorde to the Bastille, and from the Seine to the line of the Grands Boulevards; the 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements lie opposite them on the left side; the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th surround the first four arrondissements on the north ”

“ The upkeep and cleansing is under the supervision of a branch of the department of public works (service technique de la voie publique et de l'éclairage) , and for this purpose the city is divided into sections, each comprising two or three arrondissements. All streets having a width of 25 ft. or more are planted with rows of trees, chestnuts and planes being chiefly used for this purpose, and in many of the wide thoroughfares there are planted strips down the middle. ”

“ Both are famous actors belonging to the Comédie Française and have visited America. The younger enjoys the greater popularity because of his jokes and the reputation he has made with his clever monologues, for the most part written as well as interpreted by himself.
[16] Paris is divided into twenty Arrondissements, or boroughs, each having its own mayor and borough hall. The 9th Arrondissement includes part of the Grand Boulevards, and the Opera House. ”

“ On the Rive Gauche, the walks at nightfall are more difficult to indicate. You can go anywhere in the three inner arrondissements, and you will not be disappointed. Walk year after year and you will begin to wonder whether you ever will follow out the oftformed resolution of returning to America to live. In the Seventh Arrondissement the region between the Quai d'Orsay and the Rue de Sèvres, the Rue des Saints-Pères and the Invalides is the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where are to be found the finest residences in Paris, far ahead of anything in the Etoile Quarter. ”

“ It is the electoral district for the chamber of deputies, each arrondissement returning one member; if the population is in excess of 100,000 it is divided into two or more constituencies. It is also a judicial district having a court of first instance. It is under the control of a sub-prefect. There are 362 arrondissements in the 87 departments. Each arrondissement has a council, with as many members as there are cantons, whose function is to subdivide among the communes their quota of the direct taxes charged to the arrondissement by the general council of the department. ”

“ Of the remains of the Haut-Rhin was formed the territory of Belfort, and the fragments of the Moselle were incorporated in the department of Meurthe, which was renamed Meurthe-et-Moselle, making the number at present eighty-seven. For a complete list of the departments see France. Each department is presided over by an officer called a prefect, appointed by the government, and assisted by a prefectorial council (conseil de préfecture) . The departments are subdivided into arrondissements, each in charge of a sub-prefect. ”

“ Aristocrats in London, of course, know nothing of a northern district of New York City called Harlem, with so many streets that a learned arithmetician would be needed to number them: a district which, at the first call of spring, becomes vocal with children on door-steps and venders of every vegetable in every language. ”

“ But The Walk Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on because we know—or, if strangers, because we do not know—that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm, unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its grateful lack of height, in its restful bit of park. ”

“ Each little suburb has its own corporation, and its own municipal government, while even its mayor and aldermen may do daily business in the large city below it.
In the city itself Pearl street is noted for its wholesale [Pg 129] trade, and for the uniform elegance of its buildings. Third street, between Main and Vine, contains the banking, brokering, and insurance offices. Fourth street is the fashionable promenade and business street. Freeman street, in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park, is also a favorite promenade. Both the East and West Ends contain many fine residences. ”

“ We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is a fair, in fact; the pavement and the roadway are crowded with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the cheap-finery stalls ”

“ Along Fifth avenue, from the Fifty-ninth street corner to the upper end of Central Park, there is not a single house that looks reposeful and habitable. Along Park avenue—but Park avenue, for all its flash of creamy brick, is surely one of the most hideous streets in all the world! ”

“ Here people live at their windows and in the doorways--the women talking from balcony to balcony, the men smoking, reading, playing at dominoes. Here too are more cafés and cabarets, open-air stalls for the sale of fried fish, and cheap restaurants for workmen and students, where, for a sum equivalent to sevenpence half-penny English, the Quartier Latin regales itself upon meats and drinks of dark and enigmatical origin. Close at hand is the Place and College of the Sorbonne--silent in the midst of noisy life, solitary in the heart of the most crowded quarter of Paris. ”

“ The best of the boulevards is that the people sitting on their sidewalks, and the heavy green trees, and the bare heads of so many of the women, make one feel how much out-of-doors he is, as no other street or city does, and what a folly it is to waste time within walls. I do not think we appreciate how much we owe to the women in Paris who go without bonnets. ”

“ It is a boulevard of the people, a rendezvous for the thrifty and the hard-working, the thoroughfare of the outcast and the unfortunate. It is sordid, but it is intensely human. It is this distinct character of Parisian thoroughfares, each one differing from its neighbor, which makes the highways and byways of the city so interesting to those who delight in walking abroad with their eyes open.
There is not a street one turns down but which is unique in itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I never saw a face at any of those windows; yet I used to go out of my way in the summer evenings to look at it, as one might go to look at a beautiful woman behind a stall in the market-place, or at a Madonna in a shop-window.
At the time about which I write, there was probably no city in Europe of which the street-scenery was so interesting as that of Paris. I have already described the Quartier Latin, joyous, fantastic, out-at-elbows; a world in itself and by itself; unlike anything else in Paris or elsewhere. ”

“ New York somewhat resembles Paris. Broadway, the principal street, has not the proud magnificence of Regent Street in London, but it approaches the rich elegance of the Parisian boulevards. In it gorgeous shops, restaurants and hotels stand in closely-built rows and an endless rumble of business traffic is concentrated. It is also the arena for the competition of feminine beauty and elegance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I love that quartier—if ever I went to Paris again I should reside there. It is quite a different world from the streets usually known to, and tenanted by the English—there, indeed, you are among the French, the fossilized remains of the old regime—the very houses have an air of desolate, yet venerable grandeur—you never pass by the white and modern mansion of a nouveau riche; all, even to the ruggedness of the pave, breathes a haughty disdain of innovation—you cross one of the numerous bridges, and you enter into another time—you are inhaling the atmosphere of a past century ”

“ And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. ”

“ The principal avenue, a regularly built, grandly proportioned street, with a railway running through its centre, climbs directly up the hill, and is terminated by a well-kept public square, or Grande Place, as the French would call it, about which the State House, City Hall, and other public buildings are ranged. ”

“ One's attention, immediately on crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, whether by the cars, by vehicle or on foot, will be controlled by the façade of the municipal building with its foreground of public space and on passing beyond this building into Washington Street, one's attention will be carried with interest to the façade of the court house which will frame the Borough Hall silhouette and dominate Borough Hall Square. ”

“ Excepting a limited district laid out on the east side, in part as far as Grand street, the entire town stood below the line of the present Chambers street, and covered an area less than one mile square. Then, as now, Broadway was its principal thoroughfare. ”

“ All these boroughs where you were born, and hope to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient magnificence,—Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea, Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms, and, if convenient, a gathering cry. ”

“ Now let your vision drop into the near foreground—into the tracery of trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in the broad-paved [30] street at your feet with the queer little openings through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel; others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black molasses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks grow a little blacker than before. ”

“ Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction! But in Brooklyn the ways are narrow, and they lead to the Heavenly City of content. Central Park: there you are—the centre of things, hemmed in by walls of pride. ”

“ If you pass along the middle of the street, you are hurried out of breath; if on one side, you must pick your way no less cautiously. Paris is a vast pile of tall and dirty alleys, of slaughter-houses and barbers’ shops—an immense suburb huddled together within the walls so close, that you cannot see the loftiness of the buildings for the narrowness of the streets, and where all that is fit to live in, and best worth looking at, is turned out upon the quays, the boulevards, and their immediate vicinity. ”

“ With the vanishing of the sunshine and shadows which all day long had been playing in and about Union Square—whose bits of green lawn, sparkling fountains, and many settees welcome the weary and heavy laden, for a little time at least, and invite rest,—came the myriad lights of the great city which follow the active day of toil and care. ”

“ The whole region of the Champs-Elysées, where we must after all at first have principally prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it, carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hôtels of another time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafés of homely, almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty ruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. ”