Roadhouse

“ It is true that the road is one much used by traffic, and by motorists in especial, whose dust and horrid odours might well disgust any but the hardiest of wraiths; but here is the old garden-pavilion or gazebo on the wall at the fork of roads, with its quaint roof and the windows from which the people of the manor would look out upon the traffic when it was not so dusty and did not stink so much, and here are still the trunks of the magnificent elms that until recently cast a grateful shade upon the road and made the bridge-end so beautiful a scene. ”

“ Even for a motorist, however, the old house on the bend stands up to view, especially if you are on the front seat with the driver. The car swings into a straightaway, lined, perhaps, with sugar-maples and gray stone walls. Between the trunks are vistas of the green fields and far hills. But the chief vista is up the white perspective of the road, which seems to vanish directly into the front door of the solid, mouse-gray house on the bend. ”

“ We found the roads in most places worthy of the name “highways”; but on the steepest grades, where the outside of the road shelves off into space, with a drop of hundreds of feet, there are no walls or fences, not even railings, to prevent accidents. In the main, the roads are sufficiently wide to allow two cars to pass; in some places, however, the smaller car must back down to a siding to allow the Government cars, which have the right of way on the inside of the road, to pass. ”

“ We have a bumpy road in leaving the city, followed by a fine stretch of smooth, beautiful cement highway. On through rolling green country we drive, and into the suburb of Burlingame with its vine covered and rose embowered bungalows, and its houses of brown shingle and of stucco. The finer places sit far back from the road in aristocratic privacy, with big, grassy parks shaded by noble trees in front, and with the green foothills as a background. ”

“ We had not proceeded very far up the road when the car turned into a long winding driveway of gravel, bordered on either side by well kept lawns and trim trees. We could see that much through the windows of the car when the rain would cease its furious whirling against the glass for a moment. Soon we came to a stop under a wide sheltering porte-cochere, and the driver got down and opened the door ceremoniously. ”

“ Some ten minutes’ driving, up a hill or two, while lamps grow less and less frequent, and we are out of the town, rolling along a road which is as good as an ordinary English turnpike-road—passing every now and then through spots of perfect darkness, where clumps of firs overhang the road on each side, and new again looking over a broad spread of water stretching away from our feet, with a row of distant wooded slopes appearing more and more clearly as the moon slowly rises. ”

“ Even the ghastly loneliness of the long straight road ascending the pass of Smitham Bottom is no more, for little villas, with dank little dungeons of gardens, line the way, and tradesmen’s carts calling for orders compete with the motorists who shall kill and maim most travellers along the highway. ”

“ The cars drew up in a street—if street that could be called which was only a wide, cleared space, intersected by rails, with here and there a stump, and great piles of sawn logs bulking big in the moonlight, and a number of irregular clap-board, steep-roofed houses, many of them with open fronts, glaring with light and crowded with men. ”

“ For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon Marché, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! ”

“ Near the highest part of the ridge, on the easterly side of the road, stood an old, gambrel roofed, weather beaten house, its end facing the road and its front door at the side as though it, like its present owner, had turned sourly away from the world, refusing even to look out upon the highway which passed socially near it. ”

“ Once in the loft, I was going to take off as many tiles as I must to get through the roof into the garden, from there into the street, and out of the village in any direction. In the country it would most likely prove necessary to work round the village at a safe distance in order to strike a certain turnpike. Several miles along it a brook crossing the road was an indication that I should have to look out for a third-class cart track. ”

“ Down the roadway, slowly and with many checks, flowed the flood of vehicles, and passage along the pavements was hardly less deliberate, for it was the hour when locomotion is at high-tide, and from house-wall to house-wall, from shop-front to park-paling, the river-beds of men were full. ”

“ Instead of finding a thief concealed behind each bush, or a Salvator Rosa face scowling from a ruined hovel, or peeping from a jutting crag at every turn, there is an excellent turnpike-road all the way, three-fourths perfectly level, skirted with hedges, corn-fields, orchards and vineyards, populous with hamlets and villages, with labourers at work in the fields, and with crowds of peasants in gay, picturesque attire, and with healthy, cheerful, open, but manly countenances, passing along, either to or from the different market-towns. ”

“ Men and women walked the pavement, head downward, as a fly walks the ceiling. Automobiles rolled past in frantic procession, their tops toward me, their wheels miraculously clinging to the overhanging roadway. ”

“ But we have got a long way from the street where we saw the engine dashing down through the traffic, and we must come back again. All the bustle and the fuss that we have been talking of is on the roadway. What about the pavements? The pavement is often just as crowded, and though policemen don't hold up their hands to prevent people walking there, yet it is often quite a long time before you can get through, especially outside a gay shop window, where all the women want to stand and stare. ”

“ Children liberally embellished with local colour swarmed on sidewalks where ash and garbage-cans flourished in subtropical luxuriance, and disputed the roadway with the ramshackle wagons and push-carts of peddlers, horse-drawn drays, and grinding, gargantuan motor-trucks that snarled ferociously at the aliens, the frail, pretty pleasure cars from Fifth avenue. ”

“ I would take the apartment house and all its conveniences and comforts out among the farms by the aid of wires, pipes and of rapid and noiseless transportation. I would extend the blotch of human habitations called cities out in radiating lines. I would surround the city worker with the trees and grass and woods and meadows and the farmer with all the advantages of city life—I had invented Roadtown. ”

“ All along the road the prevailing feature is the Alpine-like scenery, the towering heights and the white houses nestling in the mountain side at dizzy heights. Many houses are approached from the road by steps and a narrow walk between two habitations. On the next rise the same rule prevails, and so on up to the highest point. There is seldom an attempt at a hill-side street—it would be useless, because impossible to ascend without steps. ”

“ The walk curves away a few steps earlier to go to the front door but the drive, passing on, swings in under the rear corner windows and to the kitchen steps, veers around by the carriage-house door and so loops back into itself. In this loop, and all about the bases of the dwelling and carriage-house the flowers rise in dense abundance, related to one another with clever taste and with a happy care for a procession of bloom uninterrupted throughout the season. ”

“ Walking down the long main street with its paved causeways and pebbly roadway, with its straight lines of symmetric houses, coquettish in their marble balconies and brightly-painted shutters and railings, one might fancy himself in Brock or Delft but that the roofs are flat, that the gables are not turned to the street, and that the sky is a cloudless blue. ”

“ In the glow from the electric globes on the gate posts, the blue stone driveway curved and twisted like a huge snake, winding through landscaped lawns and gardens as formal and precise as a public park. ”

“ A corn-field leads to the excavated upper end of the high street, which consists of a narrow road for carts, with foot-pavements on each side. The middle is paved with large blocks of marble, and the ruts of the wheels proclaim its antiquity, even at the time of its being overwhelmed. The foot-paths are elevated about a foot and a half from the level of the carriage-road. The houses on each side, whether shops or private buildings, have no claim to external elegance: they consist of a ground-floor only, and, with the exception of the door, have no opening toward the street. ”

“ The houses of the city are mostly large stone structures, and many have notable architectural merit, fronting thoroughfares of good width, well paved, and lighted with gas. An aspect of cleanliness and freshness pervades [Pg 138] everything. Many of the streets run up the steep hillside on which the town stands, and are flanked by broad stone steps for foot-passengers, the roadway of such streets being quite inaccessible for vehicles. The principal thoroughfare is the Strada Reale, nearly a mile long, lined with attractive stores and dwelling-houses, forming a busy and pleasant boulevard. ”

“ Each ring of the doorbell brought chattering groups to hang over the banisters, each sound of wheels on the driveway was the signal for excited faces to be pressed against the window-pane and for round eyes to try in vain to bore through the paper wrappings of mysterious bundles whisked out of sight all too soon. ”

“ Across the way—and it is easily crossed, for on some of these remote thoroughfares the traffic is so scarce that occasional blades of grass come up between the cobble-stones—is a weather-boarded and weather-beaten old house of sad mien, whose curtainless gable windows stare and stare out toward the river, thinking of other days.... ”

“ In midst of this level tract of country, where villages, and houses even, are few and far between, the wayfarer’s eye lights upon a stone pillar on the grassy selvedge of the road, a dilapidated object that looks like a milestone. ”

“ The road now becomes a noble and a wide one. On foot, and by daylight, the brick walls on either side are dreary enough; but at night they only give depth to the shadow, and the eye catches the lighted windows and the stately roofs of the houses they enclose. ”

“ The two walked together to the driveway, and shortly the mellow note of the great Panhard's horn sounded, as the automobile rounded the curve of The Bow and sped away to the north shore highway and the sheds. ”

“ Those who wish to pay a visit to a Roadtown home will come to the nearest point where the railroad crosses the Roadtown or if traveling by horse or auto where the public road crosses the Roadtown and will leave their vehicle in charge of a caretaker and have their name ’phoned in as one does at an up-to-date apartment house or hotel. If the Roadtowner is at home, the caller will then take the monorail or the roof promenade as the distance or his inclination dictates, and thus reach the door of his friend’s home. ”

“ Lilac and laburnum bushes peeped over the garden walls. The throng of traffic grew thinner, the pavement less crowded. It was past five when we drew up at a little public-house standing back from the road. ”

“ The Roadtowner’s home is his castle in the truest sense of the word, and more private, notwithstanding the close proximity to neighbors, and hence more consecrated to family life than any previous style of dwelling known.
The Roadtown will have no streets because it will need none. As it is built through the country, there will, of course, be roads as well as streets to cross. Here the monorail will run under, and the roof bridge over the roads. At such road crossings and such other places where roads are built back into the country, stables and garages will be provided. ”

“ The first cross street—little more than an alleyway between the houses—is barricaded at its farther extremity by a steep, grass-grown embankment that towers almost to the same altitude as the chimney pots of the house tops below. ”

“ Then the spectacle offered in any arriving horse-car will serve your purpose. At nearly every corner of the street up which it climbs stands an experienced suburban, who darts out upon the car, and seizes a vacant place in it. ”

“ The road is every where raised so high, that it forms a very steep declivity, with narrow pathways down to the entrance of the cottages and villages, which are most romantically situated,--some in orchards, some amidst vineyards, some in gardens, and others in recesses peeping from between the trees. ”

“ I love the by-streets of a city—the streets whose echoes are never disturbed by the heavy-laden wagons which bespeak the greatness of our manufacturing interests. Formerly the houses in such streets wore an air of sobriety and respectability, and the good housewifery which reigned within was symbolized by the bright polish of the brass door-plate, or bell-pull, or knocker. ”

“ In such a complex organism, the roadways and sidewalks are not merely spaces set apart for light, air, and traffic, but they are component parts of the wonderful machinery devoted to these purposes, and bear close relations to the dwellings which they separate and connect, and the restorative veins of which they cover as a protecting crust. ”