Barrio

“ What new neighborhood ever stopped on its way into the country, to hearken to the passive remonstrance of the fields, or to bow to the indignation of outraged admirers of the picturesque? Never was suburb more impervious to any faint influences of this sort, than that especial suburb which grew up between Baregrove Square and the country; removing a walk among the hedge-rows a mile off from the resident families, with a ruthless rapidity at which sufferers on all sides stared aghast. ”

“ These houses, which form the finish of the suburb, are not big, and are not prosperous; but we see one adorning itself with smoke, and we think of the dead wood coming to life again on the hearth, and of the seated workman, whose hands are rewarded with rest. And that one, although motionless, is alive with children—the breeze is scattering the laughter of their games and seems to play with it, and on the sandy ground are the crumbs of childish footsteps. ”

“ In a region where freshly-built suburbs lie ending
'Mid plots of the glum market-gardener's ground,—
Its bare, tenantless frontages gloomily blending
With grime and neglect that are rampant all round,
Runs the street, so forlorn it could not be forlorner,
Where, looking straight down a "no thoroughfare" road,
With the blaze of a new public-house at the corner,
The sad "One-horse" Householder finds his abode! ”

“ Also, oh, you rich people, to whom the squares belong, some few of whom too own private gardens actually in London, adjoining Hyde Park or Regent's Park, or saved on some great estate round the landowner's house, I think you might have a flower-show or large garden-party, once a year, for the poor of your neighbourhood, while you are in town to meet them. I have seen such things done in squares with delightful results. A whole district gathered together, old friends and new, in happy fellowship under the trees, the band playing, and the place looking its gayest. ”

“ In an ascending road, quiet and tree-shadowed, where the dwellings on either side were for the most part old and small, though here and there a brand-new edifice on a larger scale showed that the neighbourhood was undergoing change such as in our time destroys the picturesque in all London suburbs, the cheery dreamer chanced to turn his eyes upon a spot of desolation which aroused his curiosity and set his fancy at work. ”

“ But to be tucked away in a snug little flat near the towering top of a tall apartment house on a quiet cross street, looking serenely down upon the teeming town with its towers, steeples, domes, and bridges melting in the distant haze, its noise and turmoil reaching your eerie retreat only as a muffled hum, a throbbing stimulant to work by day, a sweet soporific for rest by night—this is to know the joys of true privacy and the luxury of deep sleep. ”

“ The source of gossip in a village is the corner grocery store; in a small city, what goes on about the public square; in the medium-sized city, what transpires in the leading café; in New York, Fifth Avenue and Central Park are the all-abounding sources of gossip. The Avenue has a thousand curious eyes; those on the sidewalk peering into automobiles and carriages for sensations; those being whirled along in vehicles, straining their power in the quest of salacious information among the throng beyond the curbstone. ”

“ They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the wilds of primeval forest. ”

“ From Notting Hill to Hyde Park Square
The streets have an inhuman air,
The houses— (six imposing floors;
Dark, formidable, fierce front doors;
Tall windows, sightless, sealed and blind;
Ball-room or billiard-room behind) —
Must shelter, they’re so vast and cold,
None but the ugly and the old....
Watch, as you wander hereabout,
The people who go in and out!
Sleek-bellied men in varnished hats,
Fur coats, check trousers, gleaming spats,
Flock in procession, pompous, grand,
Or drive in motors to the Strand ”

“ Besides the balconies, there are recessed galleries, old dormer-windows, fantastic little nooks and corners, tricked out with flower-pots and vines.
The glimpses of street life are always entertaining, because unconscious, while full of character. It may be a Creole court-yard, the walls draped with vines, flowers blooming in bap-hazard disarray, and a group of pretty girls sewing and chatting, and stabbing the passer-by with a charmed glance. It may be a cotton team in the street, the mules, the rollicking driver, the creaking cart. ”

“ In every direction the electricos penetrate, bearing life into the sleepy suburbs and beyond. Through leafy boulevards, up and down hill, or along the water front, they glide in straight or diagonal lines, now meandering through a tortuous web of narrow streets between high, quaint houses, with painted shutters and balconies, showing a trailing plant, or a parrot cage, or the gay-tinted garments of an inmate's washing; now emerging on a square or rotunda where stands an ancient monastery, or a church, a palace or a theatre, a fountain or an open garden planted out with trees and flower beds ”

“ I walked for some time without meeting anybody, until I came out into one of the principal streets, lined with shops and full of peasants, women, and children, but little larger than an ordinary corridor. Everything is in proportion to the streets: the doors are like windows, the shops like niches, and by glancing into them one sees all the secrets of the house—the table already spread, the babies in the cradle, the mother combing her hair, and the father changing his shirt; everything is on the street, and it does not seem like a city, but like a house containing a single great family. ”

“ In the city, even, it is oppressive; in the country it is desolate; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is ever lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet to stir the languid foliage of the sidewalk maples; the lamps are not yet lighted, to take away the gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses near; it is too late for letters, too early for a book. In town your fancy would turn to the theatres; in the country you would occupy yourself with cares of poultry or of stock: in the suburbs you can but sit upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mosquito. ”

“ In the kind of suburb that walks always with a hole in its stocking, slatternly maids pressed their bosoms against area-railings chaffing with butcher-boy or policeman—their idea of love. Where a street-organ struck up, little children gathered, dancing in the gutter. ”

“ Apartment houses—regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that—shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hack berries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. ”

“ At eventide the girls walk on the plaza, their mothers, aunts, or servants following them as closely as their shadows on a sunny afternoon. In quiet streets lovers on both sides of the river talk from a first-floor balcony to the street, or whisper through the window-bars on the ground floor. The little shops under the low arches of the arcaded streets have yellow flannel drawers for men and petticoats of many colours hanging close outside their doors, on whose steps sleep yellow dogs. ”

“ A staring, bright cleanliness is the prevailing characteristic of the neighborhood, the cement sidewalks always swept, the houses standing back in tiny squares of garden, clipped and trimmed to a precise shortness of grass and straightness of border. The sun was now broadly out and the house-fronts engarlanded with vines, their cream-colored faces spotless in fresh coats of paint, presented a line of uniform bay-windows to its ingratiating warmth. ”

“ The humble old houses that dare not scrape the sky are being duly punished for their timidity. Down they come, and in their place are shot up new tenements, quick and high as rockets. And the little old streets, so narrow and exclusive, so shy and crooked—we are making an example of them, too. ”

“ This street is surrounded by populous courts and alleys, by stirring thoroughfares, by roads full of activity and commerce; yet somehow or other, all the noise of life, all its tumult and agitation, here seem to die away to silence and repose. Few people, even amongst the poor, and the neighbourhood is a poor one, care to reside in it, while they can be lodged as cheaply close by, and more to their taste. ”

“ These were the moving streets, the beautiful residential apartments, following the modern neo-functional patterns and participational design which had completely altered the pattern of city living. The Old City still remained, of course—the slums, the tenements, the skid-rows of the metropolis—but this was the teeming heart of the city, a new home for men to live in. ”

“ Now, it has been my daily habit, since I retired from business, to lay down my book at two o'clock, and take a little out-door exercise. Miss Pillbody's school is not far from my house; the street is pretty clean for New York, and the sidewalks are tolerably dry. Therefore I select that neighborhood for my daily walk--my--my 'constitutional,' as they call it. ”

“ A long suburb of red brick houses—some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself—a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side.
Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. ”

“ 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 ”

“ At any hour of the day and night you come across them in the cafés, on the streets, loafing on the bridge or up in the castle, or returning or departing on their favorite recreation of walking-trips through the hills. Their smart peaked caps and broad corps ribbons are scenic features of the neighborhood. You wonder when they study, and how much time they ever spend in the private rooms they call their Wohnungen. ”

“ No situation could be imagined more charming without anything very picturesque or magnificent. The suburbs extend a long way beyond the old fortifications, and after driving past innumerable villas and pleasant cottages, we passed [223] under a massy square gate surmounted by a high slated roof, and rattled along a coarse lumpy pavement through streets of dirty and desolate houses, with little appearance of either wealth, comfort, or prosperity, on any side. ”

“ There is a Goethe and a Schiller, a Lessing and a Heine Street—there is even an Adalbert Stifter Street upon which I stroll with particular sympathy and reverence in my hob-nailed boots. Square stakes are visible, such as may be seen in at the corners of the raw and uncompleted streets in the suburbs where there are no corner houses. ”

“ The new suburb which has thus come into existence swiftly, yet so quietly that the building of it has not scared the nightingale I heard yesternight nor the sky-larks singing while I write, has gone far toward the realization of some aims not its own, ideals that have hitherto failed. ”

“ The dear old Quartier Latin of my time--the Quartier Latin of Balzac, of Béranger, of Henry Murger---the Quartier Latin where Franz Müller had his studio; where Messieurs Gustave; Jules, and Adrien gave their unparalleled soirées dansantes; where I first met my ex-flame Josephine--exists no longer. It has been improved off the face of the earth, and with it such a gay bizarre, improvident world of youth and folly as shall never again be met together on the banks of the Seine. ”

“ Crossing a quiet and shady court-yard, paved with stone, and frowned upon by old red brick houses, on the doors of which were painted the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small, green-baized, brass-headed-nailed door, which yielding to our gentle push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with sunken windows, and black carved wainscoting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised platform, of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen, in crimson gowns and wigs. ”

“ The neighborhood is one long since given up to fifth-rate shops, whose masters and mistresses display such enticing mottoes as "Au gagne petit!" Innumerable children swarm about, and, by some charm of the place, are not run over, but obstruct the sidewalks playing their clamorous games. ”

“ Dirty, narrow, winding streets, and houses that stand neither square or straight,—dark houses, of old, rotten wood, with high, tottering gables, and bulging stories that project one past the other, in the olden fashion. The people who pass are ugly, ugly, and I have not seen a single handsome fellow. The industry of the neighborhood is the manufacture of list-shoes. ”